animals hidden within the sculpture

“Because all our governance is based on male bonding, and male bonding on at best a low-powered rumbling of aggression, accompanied by the hallucinatory visions which keep that aggression alive, we are constantly in danger of seeing our communities revert at intervals into the horrible agonic semblance of a troop of baboons. Baboons, moreover, with their finger on the button that can fire off an H-bomb.”

‘Bipedalism was not always a rare form of locomotion. Creatures like Hadro-saurus and Tyrannosaurus walked everywhere on two legs.’

‘Can anyone believe that natural selection cursed the Galapagos tortoises with those excruciatingly cumbersome shells on land, where there were no predators around the threaten them? It is much easier to think of them as grounded turtles.’

‘The whales are ‘very likely’ to be a sister group of the hippopotamus. (And the hippopotamus is related to the pig).’

‘The domestic pig has little or no functional hair but some of its wild relatives, like boars and warthogs, have retained their pelage. Or perhaps, rather than retaining it, the re-acquired it.’

‘The rhinoceros is a perissodactyl related to the horse and the tapir; the hippopotamus is an artiodactyl related to camels, cattle, sheep and giraffes.’

‘The idea that mouth-breathing is an aquatic adaption is supported by the fact that terrestrial birds are nose- breathers whereas diving birds are mouth-breathers. The walrus, one of the very few mammals with a descended larynx, is also a mouth-breather.’

‘Examples are dolphins adopting the same outline as fish, or insectivores from the different continents separately evolving similar silhouettes, with powerful front limbs and long narrow tapering snouts. But the Arctic fox and the Arctic hare and the others have converged in respect of one single trait only.
This conclusion is generally accepted. Nobody argues that it is invalid on the grounds that not all creatures with white pelage are necessarily Arctic or ex-Arctic. There are white egrets and which cockatoos, white horses and white cattle. And it is not rejected on the ground that some residents of polar regions - like the penguins - have not turned white.

It is not difficult to see the possibility of an analogy between the evolution of whiteness in an Arctic environment, and the loss of body hair in an aquatic environment. Nearly all extant naked mammals are in some degree aquatic. The exception are the naked Somalian mole rat which never comes to the surface; the group of animals which used to be known as pachyderms; and humans. It is true that by no means all aquatic mammals are naked.’

‘‘Pachyderm’ (from the Greek ‘thick-skinned’) was a word used by zoologists in the last century to refer to a group of animals which seemed to them to fall naturally into a sub-set of mammals; it included such animals as the elephant, the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros and the walrus.’

‘Some pachyderms - walrus, dugong, hippopotamus, and so on - are still wholly or predominately aquatic. The tapir lives in a riverine habitat and the babirusa is a marsh dweller. The terrestrial ones like the rhino and the elephant take every available opportunity to wallow in water or plaster their hides with mud, as if their skins were still uncomfortable ill-adapted to constant exposure to sun and air.’

‘A bison is nearly eight times as big as a pig but has kept its thick protective coat.’

‘‘If AAT were true, we would be more streamlined.’ More streamlined than what?’

‘Baby under water, mole rat underground. Apart from the pachyderms, the only naturally naked land mammals are Homo sapiens and the naked Somalian mole rat.’

‘The carefree pachyderms are the aquatic ones. The walrus in water is as lithe and graceful as a ballerina. The hippopotamus paces the bed of the river as lightly as a moon-walking astronaut.’

“Dear Sir,

Am returning fur coat as I have no use for it after all; kindly exchange for 1 pr. earlobes and 14 lbs. subcutaneous fat. The corrugator muscles arrived safely and are satisfactory, but both the brain and the penis are 3 sizes too small for present needs, please replace. I could also use a nose, if you have any in stock. And oblige, yrs., N. Ape.”

“It would make it that much harder to delude ourselves that humanity’s ancestors, alone in the animal kingdom, lost their hair by wandering out into the sunshine.”

“A naked woman, wrote William Blake, is the work of God. It has proved surprisingly difficult to account for this phenomenon as the work of natural selection.”

“In short, the fossil record is perfectly compatible with the supposition that at some time between eight and six million years ago, at the north end of the Rift Valley where the most ancient hominid remains have been found, one section of the l.c.a. population found itself living in a watery environment and—whether by choice or under duress—began to adapt to a semi-aquatic existence.”

“The more you think about it, the more impossible it becomes to believe that hunting man discarded his fur to enable himself to become cooler, and at the same time developed a layer of fat, the only possible effect of which would be to make him warmer”.

“Most surviving mammalian orders include species which took to the water, and then evolved specific adaptations for aquatic life. One of the few orders which is generally believed to include no such species is the Primates - to which man belongs. The aquatic theory postulates that one primate did follow that well-trodden path. This primate was the ape that was immediately ancestral to man.”

“Walking on two legs does not seem by any means a difficult trick to perform when you belong to a species that has been practicing it for a few million years. Unless, that is, you are fourteen months old and have just tumbled down for the 65th time; or unless you have broken a leg, and not having three to fall back on, are reduced to hopping or hobbling with a stick; or unless you are drunk, or suffering from back ache, or growing old.”

“Nobody has suggested that they turned into mermen and mermaids. They would have been water-adapted apes in the same sense that an otter is a water-adapted mustelid.”