The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 54

A4 Saturday, August 11, 2001 THE DAILY TELEGRAPH arts Apes do ape We're all mimics, says Maggie Gee The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist by Frans de Waal 433pp, Allen Lane, £16.99 £14.99 (plus 99p pS.p) 0870 1557222. I and ference there an animals? between essential humans Until. difrecently, "culture" seemed the last redoubt of humanness. Now, however, the Dutch-born primatologist Frans de Waal has written a brilliant, subtle and enjoyable book arguing that animals have culture too it's that humans are not cultured enough to perceive it. I started to like de Waal on page seven when he wrote, of the human tendency to divide the world into arbitrary categories: "It is the rare thinker who keeps two contradictory thoughts simultaneously in mind.

This is often precisely what is needed to get at the truth." For him, there is no conflict between "nature" and Culture defined as "knowledge and habits' other individuals, so that two groups of the same species behave differently is part of nature. De Waal spent time on the beach on the Japanese island of Koshima where a primatologist noticed, in 1950, a young female macaque monkey dubbed "'Ima" washing a sweet potato in a stream. Later Ima shifted the habit to the beach salty sea- water evidently made the potatoes taste better. The habit spread first to her playmates, then to her mother and other female relatives, a clear example of social learning within a group. It is the same story elsewhere.

Certain wild commu- Silver leaf monkeys huddling, by Christian from Wildlife Photographer of the Year: Portfolio 10 (BBC, £25) The puzzle of the flourishing finches Julia Magnet on an account of the islands that inspired Darwin's theory of evolution Grow old DISGRACE FULL LY this summer with JOHN MORTIMER The fa Dormouse A YEAR OF GROWING OLD DISGRACEFULLY 9 Laugh-out-loud funny' Daily Express 'Charming, intelligent, cheerful, mellifluous, gossipy and wise' Daily Mail Now available in paperback at OTTAKAR'S and all good bookshops Also available as a Penguin Audiobook www.penguin.co.uk flyleaf Sam Leith nities of chimpanzees demonstrate a form of highly skilled nut-cracking, where a "hammer" stone is used on an others do not. Wild chimpanzees in hale mountains on east thee shore of Lake Tanganyika clasp opposite hands in pairs as they groom each other, but another group of the same subspecies of chimpanzee living only 105 miles away never do it. De Waal thinks that, as human knowledge deepens, we shall other species which pass on distinct local behaviour whale songs, for example, have regional a dialects. This will be unsurprising to pet-owners and farmers who know the idiosyncratic variations between animals, but you have to see it in the context of the narrow conclusions about animals drawn by behaviourists (some of whom thought it was distraction' to observe actual animals at all). Many scientists still refuse to believe that non-human animals have intentions, complex emotions, or the ability to learn by imitation.

But de that an "anthroDocentrices approach to animals is more useful than what he calls Where a species recent shared evolutionary history with us, as apes do, it is wilful to refuse to understand similar behaviour by reference to our own. Before we deny animals a trait like sympathy because they cannot rise to our own moral heights, we should instead ask whether human sympathy has prosaic biological roots. The sensory apparatus that enables human beings to enjoy and appreciate music and art is very similar in other mammals and also in through his catch and wondering why he had found so many species of finches in this small, isolated place. God would surely not be so haphazard in His creation. The finches sparked Darwin's theory of evolution, but even began to form he realised that he had not labelled which islands his specimens came from.

He was crushed. Darwin moved on to mockingbirds instead, but his scientific followers would spend the next century quibbling about the finches. Such ments constitute the better part of Edward Larson's history of the Islands. Without knowing whether different species lived birds, and de Waal thinks it likely that other symmetrical creatures respond to symmetry as we do. Apes paint with pleasure and concentration; given a piece of paper with a single asymmetrically placed mark already on it, they balance it with one of their own.

And do we dismiss birds elaborate and beautifully decorated nests as nothing but automatic mating display after all, haven't human artists also painted partly to spread their genes to models and countesses? De Waal has spent a lot of time studying bonobos, the peaceable apes who are as close to us genetically as chimpanzees, but whose delicate faces, small ears and reduced brow-ridges make them look much more like humans. Bonobos have sex very frequently, much of it homosexual. Females are particularly prone to fall into a face-to-face embrace a and then, with great enjoyment, rapidly rub their genitals together. Male orang-utans suck each others' penises; male chimpanzees mount each other. Human observers, however, have often described these.

non-heterosexual acts as "pseudo-copulation or 'sham despite the excitement the animals clearly display. Thus do we comically impose "family values" on our animal relatives. Anyone who still doubts that we have much in common with apes should consider how female chimpanzees, when offered a mirror, particularly like gazing at their pink Now it is the silly season again, how many bored human office workers are just waiting for a chance to sit naked on the warm photocopier? together or were isolated on independent islands, scientists could not determine what caused transmutation. If each species was separated, ail was fine and well: the birds had adapted to distinct environments. But if species flocked together, why had they not interbred, why had the stronger species not eliminated the weaker? Adding lure to the inherent mystique of the island which after Darwin's discovery became science's holy ground this puzzle lured swarms of scientists, collectors, amateur enthusiasts and cranks.

Yet no one solved the puzzle left by the labels until 1943. The man who did was aving forsaken his lout television persona to loungeproduce two very wellreceived novels, the comedian David Baddiel is now writing his first non-fiction book. "I've been spending loads of time in the British Library researching the war," he says. grandfather a refugee and came to Britain in 1939 with my grandmother and my mother. The book is about his experiences as German refugee in the UK.

The plan was to go to the US but they were absolutely penniless. In 1940 he was interned in an Isle of Wight concentration camp along with every other German refugee. It will be unlike I've done before; historical but also very personal. He died 15 years ago and this is my tribute to him." The invitation list for last week's party celebrating Karl Miller's 70th birthday must have been a delicate thing to compile. I'm told Prof Miller and Mary-Kay Wilmers, his successor as editor of the London Review of Books, get on like rattlesnake and mongoose.

Few LRB hands are able to boast of maintaining close friendships with both. A Kennedy's robust denunciation of the Booker Prize, reported here last week, is far from uncharacteristic. Miss Kennedy's website www.al-kennedy.co.uk is filled with putdowns of her critics. In the section for her novels, she reproduces snatches of reviews, marked "Bad" or She underscores a few with the insertion of "ALK So Eamonn O'Neill is "author of the bullfighting book that few ever read. And that I refused to Tanya Dineen: "What happens when they get a psychologist to books.

God help her Tristan GarelJones: "May the good Lord keep you from a slipped Daphne Merkin: "Kind review, unfortunate second Evolution's Workshop: God and Science on the Islands by Edward Larson 320pp, Allen Lane, £20 18 (plus 99p 0870 1557222 oor visited Islands Charles the believing Darwin. He in biblical creation, as any young naturalist training for the Church should. He gathered specimens, particularly a charm of finches; he was duly impressed by the desolate scenery and the lack of mammalian life on the archipelago off Ecuador. It was only during his journey home that he started looking David Lack, who while serving in the Second World War decided that both isolation and competition allowed these similar species to live together without one subsuming another. The finches had colonised the islands and evolved into separate species; Lack added that they then migrated throughout the islands, adapting to competition with other species by finding their own ecological niches.

Some developed big bills to eat tough, larger seeds, others tiny bills to deal with the small mushy seeds that the big-bills left behind, and so on. They lived together, but were isolated by their choice of diet. and remained discrete species. Were there to be floods, natural selection could eliminate the big- as their hard seeds disappeared, and vice versa if there were drought. Lack's book Darwin's Finches memorialised the young seminary student's first observations.

Lack, as much as Darwin, created the version of evolution that we all learn at school. Larson is at his best when describing the foibles that the island inspired. At the turn of the century, there was a craze among museum curators for "living fossils' species from earlier geological eras that somehow survived, such as the giant tortoise. This prompted collectors to hunt down the almost extinct giants and cart back their corpses to Europe. Nietzschean nudists went back to nature there.

In the 1920s, the Vanderbilts cruised the islands in their York yachts on scientific expeditions: the few scientists who could be compelled to leave the luxury of the ship were disgruntled to be summoned back at six for -tie dinners complete with chamber music. last remaining member of one tortoise species has been christened Lonesome George. Recently, a group of Ecuadorian settlers protested against Unesco by lynching several endangered tortoises and barricading the Darwin Institute of Research with the cry: Kill Lonesome George!" This could be a fascinating book, not least because of Larson's thesis that the history of the Islands is the history of modern scientific ideas. He has done a prodigious amount of research, and it is a shame that he does not tell his story with the pep and clarity that it deserves. Instead, he plods through most of the material with the unvarying pace of one of his elephantine tortoises, which reptiles.

though interesting. would make infuriating guides to the islands. Death at dawn Toby Clements praises a dispassionate account of military executions Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War by Cathryn Corns John Hughes-Wilson 543pp, Cassell, £25 £23 (plus 99p 0870 1557222 1994, a petition signed by 25,000 was handed in to Downing Street calling for the pardon of 346 soldiers "shot at dawn" between 1914 and 1918. Among them was Thomas Highgate, of the Royal West Kent Regiment, who had been shot for desertion while on active service in September 1914. In late 1999, a row broke out in Shoreham, the home of the regiment, over whether to include his name on the village war memorial.

The British Legion opposed its inclusion; Shoreham's vicar supported it. In the end, Highgate's name was left off. Almost a century after the Army's last executions for desertion, the subject is still emotive. From August 1914 to October 1918, the British Army held nearly a quarter of a million courts martial. It passed 3,080 death sentences for offences set out in the Manual of Military Law, ranging from cowardice to insubordination to murder, but executed only a little over 10 per cent of these.

The Field General Courts Martial were far from perfect, and with what the authors call a they cannot hope to stand up to our modern idea of justice. Despite in-built checks on the process (junior officers gave their verdict first, so as not to be led by The admirable independent publisher Arcadia has signed up another overlooked author. Bitter Eden, set in a PoW camp during the Second World War, is the work of a blind 80-year-old South African poet and ANC soldier named Tatamkhulu Afrika. Technically, it's his second novel. When he was 18, and still known by his given name of John Charlton, he wrote a novel called Broken Earth which, thanks to the good offices of his proud mother, was published by Hutchinson.

A warehouse fire left only a handful of copies in existence. The author himself has only a photocopy and lives in considerable poverty in a shed in someone else's garden in Cape Town. Wouldn't it be nice if Bitter Eden made his fortune? executions pour encourager les autres. (Incidentally, General a descendant of the Admiral, was one of the generals called upon to confirm the sentences.) The authors consider each case in its local context. How was morale in the accused's unit? How was discipline? What sort of soldier was he? The authors warn against the use of the retrospectoscope.

They point out that while the British executed just three men in 1914, the French lost count of the number they shot. And they give great weight to the moral climate of the day. At the time, military law was thought to be more humane than civil law, where the death sentence was commonly passed. Blindfold and Alone is a grimly fascinating read. It aims to be dispassionate where others bring passion, to be rational where others are emotional.

The book is exactingly researched and closely, real argued. idea The about authors how the rank and file felt about the shell-shocked deserters or their fate, perhaps because of sketchy research resources, but they are excellent on the development of the case against the death penalty in the aftermath of the war. To date, no blanket pardon has been granted, nor is it likely to be. But the issue is still unresolved. Although Shoreham dropped Thomas Highgate from its war memorial, his name had already been carved on the memorial in Catford, south London, his home town.

cutions: military expediency a Be Observation officers in the Somme, October 1916 their seniors, and the sentence needed to be approved at three separate levels before it was finally confirmed by the Commander-inChief), the accused were not always represented at initial hearing. Most of the officers involved had a weak grasp of the complexities of the legal rules regarding evidence and intention. But what remains most contentious was the absence of a serious medical assessment of the accused. Shell shock had been recognised in Britain as early as 1915, and understanding of condition developed as the war progressed. But since the British were losing at least 2,000 men a week, the mental health of a single soldier was not going to much concern an army fighting for survival.

It is fair to say that some of those should not have pexecuted not because they were innocent (very few were) but because their medical condition had not been considered in mitigation. Even as the fatal shots were fired, the Army attempted to keep the details of the trials and executions secret from the public. It has left their motives for the executions unclear. In Shot at Dawn (1989), Julian Sykes and Julian Putkowski suggest that the Army wanted to conceal the injustices the officer class inflicted on the common soldiery. But there is evidence that the upper echelons took no pleasure in passing sentence.

Douglas Haig refused to confirm 89 per cent of the death sentences, commuting, them signed to the imprison- remaining 11 per cent with a heavy heart. "How can we ever hope to win if this plea is allowed?" he wrote, when confirming one Arthur Grove's sentence. By examining case after case, Corns and Hughes-Wilson demonstrate a more mundane explanation for the exe-.