Despite Scientific Advances, Man Is Still 'Super-Ape', Hooton Says

In spite of all his scientific achievements, man is "still a super-ape: savage, predatory, acquisitive, primarily interested in himself," according to Earnest A. Hooton, professor of Anthropology.

Speaking in Cleveland on Saturday he argued that the only answer to our problem is "salvation through biology." Improvement can only be achieved by applying to man himself the breeding methods that he has devised for his domestic animals.

Instead of millions spent on atomic research, we should make an investment in a study of heredity.

We could begin "desperately and belatedly, to study an animal, not merely his behavior, and hope that we shall have a long enough respite from the animal's suicidal ferocity to enable us to replace him with a really intelligent creature."

The anthropologist spoke before an audience of 1,700 including many leading scientists, engineers, and industrialists at the diamond jubilee gathering of the Case Institute of Technology, whose theme is "The Atomic Age--A Challenge to Free Men." Hooton dissented from the enthusiasm of the scientific reports in saying that the incidental benefits of atomic energy did not balance the destructive power of atomic weapons.

His associates took a much more optimistic view in praising men's ingenuity in inventing automatic machines. Dr. Claude E. Shannon of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, said that automatic computers had been devised that "could play a tolerably good game of checkers, translate crudely from one language to another and learn from experience as higher animals do." He reported that John Von Newman, mathematician of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J. had built an abstract model machine that could reproduce itself.

This would threaten man's supremacy over the machine but not his artistic talents. "One of these machines," Shannon stated, "will collect parts from its environment and assemble them to produce a second machine of the same type, which then starts collecting parts to construct a third machine and so ad infinitum!"