A POSITIVE CONCLUSION 563
did not read, write, or wonder why most stars do not change their
reladve positions while five wandering points of light and two
larger disks move through a path now called the zodiac. We need
not view Bach as a happy spinoff from the value of music in
cementing tribal cohesion, or Shakespeare as a fortunate conse-
quence of the role of myth and epic narrative in maintaining hunt-
ing bands. Most of the behavioral "traits" that sociobiologists try to
explain may never have been subject to direct natural selection at
all—and may therefore exhibit a flexibility that features crucial to
survival can never display. Should these complex consequences of
structural design even be called "traits"? Is this tendency to atomize
a behavioral repertory into a set of "things" not another example
of the same fallacy of reification that has plagued studies of intel-
ligence throughout our century?
Flexibility is the hallmark of human evolution. If humans
evolved, as I believe, by neoteny (see Chapter 4 and Gould, 1977,
pp. 352-404), then we are, in a more than metaphorical sense, per-
manent children. (In neoteny, rates of development slow down and
juvenile stages of ancestors become the adult features of
descendants.) Many central features of our anatomy link us with
fetal and juvenile stages of primates: small face, vaulted cranium
and large brain in relation to body size, unrotated big toe, foramen
magnum under the skull for correct orientation of the head in
upright posture, primary distribution of hair on head, armpits, and
pubic areas. If one picture is worth a thousand words, consider Fig.
7.1. In other mammals, exploration, play, and flexibility of behav-
ior are qualities of juveniles, only rarely of adults. We retain not
only the anatomical stamp of childhood, but its mental flexibility as
well. The idea that natural selection should have worked for flexi-
bility in human evolution is not an ad hoc notion born in hope, but
an implication of neoteny as a fundamental process in our evolu-
tion. Humans are learning animals.
In T. H. White's novel The Once and Future King, a badger
relates a parable about the origin of animals. God, he recounts,
created all animals as embryos and called each before his throne,
offering them whatever additions to their anatomy they desired.
All opted for specialized adult features—the lion for claws and
sharp teeth, the deer for antlers and hoofs. The human embryo
stepped forth last and said: