My Book The Primate Myth Turned A Profit - Still No One Will Debate Me About It

It's gotten raves from critics and readers; that's the problem

Last week I received a P & L. For those not in the publishing industry that means a profit and loss statement.

It turns out that my book The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature turned a profit. It’s also gotten a series of rave reviews from critics and readers.

UCLA professor Jared Diamond: He expresses his views in books but won’t defend them in public.

Its idea is simple. The book does not dispute the evidence that humans are descended from apes. But it points to a mountain of new research from fields like biochemistry, genetics and neuroscience that show humans aren’t all that closely related to chimps and gorillas.

In particular, it turns out that we’re not 98.6% genetically alike to chimps as has been frequently claimed. In fact, as a definitive study published in Nature magazine last April proved, we’re at least 13.5% different — and the genetic transformation especially turns up in things like the genes that determine how our brain functions.

My book explains why this is and why we are so different. In order to survive humans evolved to be highly cooperative animals who use speech and are domesticated. In doing so, we have taken on many of the traits of other large-brained animals with many of these same attributes. These creatures — like dolphins and elephants — are pack or herd animals, and they think and behave very differently from apes.

One subject the book pays particular attention to is human sexuality. It points out that the fossil record indicates that we and our ancestors were designed to be relatively monogamous, and this has been so for roughly three hundred thousand years. In addition to that, I show that there is no record of a polygamous human society ever becoming highly functional. The chapter of the book that discusses this was adapted for a National Review cover story that ran this past February.

I have repeatedly reached out both to those who promoted the ideas that humans are simply very clever chimps and to those who think that polyamory and polygamy can work in human societies, and I’ve asked them to debate.

Well, guess what?

Last week I found out again what I’d discovered previously. I have not been able to find even one prominent person who holds these views who will debate me.

• Richard Dawkins is a noted chimp enthusiast and self-proclaimed expert on human evolution. But, when I reached out to him, his booking agent claimed that he was overscheduled and couldn’t debate me.

• Jared Diamond emailed me to say that he hadn’t written about chimps in thirty years and therefore couldn’t debate me — even if I flew out to Los Angeles to debate him on his home turf. Yet Diamond’s reputation was founded on his book The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, which claims humans aren’t much more than a souped-up chimp sub-species.

• Christopher Ryan, author of the pro-polygamy bestseller Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, won’t respond to my messages.

• Nor will University of New Mexico psychology professor and polyamory promoter Diana Santos Fleischman.

• Bondage and polyamory enthusiast Elisabeth Scheff actually wrote back to me, seemingly open to the possibility of a debate. Yet when I asked her where and when we could debate, she stopped answering my messages.

Nothing has changed. Just as human nature is a relative constant, those who believe that humans are naturally ape-like and polygamous won’t defend their ideas.

However, if you want to know the truth, you can buy my book. Readers have consistently said that it’s not only informative but a fun read. So here’s a link: https://www.amazon.com/Primate-Myth-Latest-Science-Theory/dp/B0F27ZZ9ZN