An absoulutely fascinating look at the origins of present day human behavior through the eyes of an emerging science. The study of Darwinian anthropology and psychology are so commonplace now and filled with contradictory perspectives, that is refreshing to see the courage and logic of where much of it began. After thirty years, this work has yet to be outdone.

It has been said that Copernicus' treatises on the actual heliocentric nature of the solar system were written more for the friends of his on his unique level of understanding and education. They were more or less accidentally leaked to the Catholic Church years later; hence the unexpected nature of their reaction. The historian of science Giorgio de Santillana wrote in THE CRIME OF GALILEO that it was the European academic community (owing its legitimacy to proving inaccurate Aristotlian interpretations of astronomy to be correct) and not the Catholic Church, that gave Galileo the most resistance. And it was they who were instrumental in politically influencing the Church itself in its damnation of his theories. Darwin's book ORIGIN OF SPECIES was said to have been scoffed at before all but disappearing... before becoming the focal point of the intellectual wars in Europe and America in the latter half of the 19th century. And Einstein was a postal clerk for years before his theory of relativity was taken seriously.

All of this, combined with Schoepenhauer's theory about the three stages of an emerging truth (first it is ignored, second, it is violently opposed, third, it is accepted as self evident), serve to me as explanation as to why this book, THE IMPERIAL ANIMAL by Tiger and Fox, was not only met with disdain by a number of sociologists and cultural anthropologists upon publication, but has never been previously reviewed on AMAZON.COM and is not referred to among psychoanalytical or sociopolitical minded intellectuals or even everyday people and the Media during the course of any given day. And yet, in much the same way Freud and Jung made words like "ego", "unconscious", "introvert", and "sibling rivalry" a part of the everyday language of people who say they don't even believe in the social relevance of psychology, this one book is responsible for us looking at the prehistoric world of man and thinking, now with a flipness that makes references both colloquial and unconsious, that it has something to teach us about who we are in the here and now.

This book is considered a classic amongst anthropologists and the equivalent of the life-altering books and theories I've mentioned above to Evolutionary psychologists. It may be singlehandedly responsible for people using anaolgies of prehistoric times to explain the inclinations and dilemmas of modern man, in all aspects. Listen to the writers themselves as they talk about the climate in which they wrote this book thirty years ago in the introduction wriiten in 1998:

"We could mention several areas in which our scorned ideas of 1971 have become commonplaces of today's academic and public dialogue. Tiger's term 'male bonding' seems to have passed into the language much as 'inferiority complex' did... It heartens us, for instance, that on opening almost any serious health book today we come across passages like this: 'Even if we are not 100 percent sure that a high fiber diet helps prevent most of the diseases listed, common sense directs us to eat in a manner more closely resembling that of our ancestors, who were rarely bothered by these problems (William Manahan, M.D., "Eat For Health", 1988).'...This splendid advice is attributed to 'common sense'. All we can say is that today's common sense is yesterday's ridiculous theories."

Tiger and Fox as sociobiological thinkers make clear that an overwhelmingly significant portion of all interpersonal and cultural human behavior stems from biological imperatives. We are, as the end result of our biology, destined to have a language of behavioral traits established in us that create much of what is called culture. And though it definitively is not created by culture, it actually is the biggest impact ON culture in all its permutations throughout time and around the world. It is what they call the "biogrammar" of human kind. It is borne via the million or so years of evolution that brought us to a refined state of hunter-based society in the jungle savannahs around the world, and then combined with the alterations of and additions to that paradigm with the birth of agricultural society- which lead to civlization as we know it.

The book is profoundly humbling and disheartening. It attacks and obliterates the cultural hubris regarding the uniqueness of mankind that you would not know exists as the foundation of your psyche until they reveal it, regardless of your philosophical or theological views. Even the enlightened evolutionary/biochemical view that turns out to be a contradiction in the minds of most laypeople like me- that we share most of the same genetic material with apes and other primates but none of the behavioral implications of that scientific fact- is blown apart in just a look at the essential nature of all political systems:

"These are some of the features of baboon and macque social structure... whatever the details of the system, certain underlying processes are obvious despite the diversity of surface structures, and can be easily summarized.

-the system is based on hierarchy and competiton for status...

-the males dominate the political system, and the older males dominate the younger.

-females can be influential in sending males up the status ladder, and their long term relationships to one another are critical for the stability of the system...

-cooperation among males is essential; coalitions of bonded males act as units in the dominance system.

-the whole structure is held together by the attractiveness of the dominants and the attention that is constantly paid them.

-Because of this, charismatic individuals can upset the the hierarchical structure, and by the same token, retain power."

What they show to be the aspects of the basic social environment of the baboon, are also, *at the very least*, the running themes of the past several centuries of western history.

Using superlatives to describe this book is pointless. Its impact and influence speaks for itself- in fact our culture as it is today speaks for it. It has the power to shake the foundations of your faith in absolutely everything, which cannot be put into words. But with this idea of the "biogram" and the biogrammatical language of humankind being a fact to be worked with, the way aviators work with the fact of gravity or Oscar Petrson works with the 88 unchangeable keys of the piano... Its power to illuminate and encourage is equally as strong.

It is pretty amazing.

Equal to the analysis of human behavior and ethics as presented in "An Historian's Approach to Religion" by Arnold Toynbee. Grabs the rational mind and feeds it with information about why our current society causes so much internal stress in our daily life.

Lionel Tiger is one of many people who pose no real threat to feminism but who wind up on the feminist "enemy's list" anyway.

In his 1969 book "Men in Groups", Tiger popularized the concept of "male bonding", and his studies of gender behavior in Israeli kibbutzim also raised some feminist ire.

In this more recent book, however, he notes the decline of males in terms of economics, reproduction, and morale and attributes it to the "pill". His explanation is convoluted and riveted in the observation that the "pill" enables females to have complete control of reproduction. Both partners are aware if the male is using a condom, but with the advent of the pill and intrauterine devices, only the female is aware of the likelihood of conception.

While one would expect these developments to have a significant impact on mating (if one naively assumes that the female partner ALWAYS has a zone of privacy large enough to keep such things secret), they hardly seem relevant to or adequate explanation for the near-complete disenfranchisement of males that Tiger alludes to, in virtually all industrial societies, even those with less advanced birth control methods. This disenfranchisement includes male declines (relative to females) in employment, educational attainment, and real wages; disengagement from their offspring; and the prevalence of male-bashing.

Interestingly enough, while Tiger expresses some inward trouble with male-bashing, he has no hesitation in quoting male-bashing sources approvingly to support his points. His bibliography is replete with articles titled with such endearing epithets as "Are Men Necessary?" and he expresses the wish that someone would republish Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics".

Tiger compares the women's revolution to the Marxist revolution and he goes off on the wrong track by deciding that the women's revolution is "different" somehow. Communists rebel over the means of production; women rebel over the means of reproduction. Tiger spends too much time sniffing bedroom sheets to allow it to occur to him that the causes of women making war on men in the name of feminism are the same as those that were behind the Communist revolution: envy and treachery.

Because the fact is that Tiger is not an anti-feminist. The ire that he raises among feminists stems from his occasional willingness to stray from the party line and to notice the real world behaving differently from the model suggested in feminist ant farms, as well as his willingness to consider human behavior in terms of evolutionary inheritance. He occasionally asks some tough questions of the feminists, but he asks them as innocuously as a timid student approaching a bombastic professor. This Tiger doesn't deliver the raw meat. His questions all boil down to the same thing: "What's to become of the males?"

And you get the idea that Tiger's mildly-expressed interest in saving the males is largely for preservationist reasons - the same reasons that might be advanced to save the spotted owl. He has no real sense that men have value other than as curiosities, and he's careful NOT to urge that males be saved at the expense of the matriarchal status quo.

Males are actually not fully human in Tiger's eyes. He has bought into the doctrine of the mutant Y chromosome and the oft-repeated notion that "basic" humanity is represented by the female structure.

And if he quietly bemoans what is going on today, he still wouldn't change a thing. He acknowledges that children are at increased risk in the presence of step-parents, but homosexual parents raising children (by nature, a step-parent arrangement) suits him fine.

The huge growth in the phenomenon of the single mother would appear to be a principal cause of isolating men from their offspring, but he spends much of this book singing paeans to single mothers. The world is overpopulated, in Tiger's eyes, when he wishes to defend the decision of women to pursue careers at the expense of childbirth and underpopulated when he wishes to praise the fertility of single mothers. By the way, if homosexual parenting and single motherhood raise some moral hackles, Tiger doesn't care. He has the soul of an intellectualoid, and he just CAN'T STAND moralizing.

The traditional system of men working for a family income and women wiving in exchange for support from that income SEEMED to work with less stress than imposed today, but Tiger certainly doesn't suggesting returning to it. Because, you see, women are not only more human than men but have economic skills that men might not have and he wouldn't dream of restricting them.

Why does he think this? Well, as an anthropologist, he notices the acquisitive behavior of single mothers as well as networking abilities of women in the West African marketplace and is suitably impressed. Yet the coiner of the concept of "male bonding" sternly calls for the breakup of male-only private clubs (whose existence would themselves suggest a male facility for networking, if he didn't choose to look at THESE networks through female-jaundiced glasses) because he finds them harmful to the legitimate career aspirations of women.

Couldn't women use their vaunted economic skills to form their own exclusive networks? Of course, Tiger SHOULD be well aware that they do just that and that these networks, unlike the male ones, have the blessing of the law and of society. It's the same old story: male advantages are described in terms of "oppression"; female advantages are described in terms of innate ability.

Tiger's solutions at the end of the book are puerile and don't amount to anything other than "Can't we get along?" He brings, not even a knife, but a sponge to the gunfight. His response to the degradation of males and (he acknowledges the possibility) the literal phasing out of the male population is as depressing as are the conditions that he describes. It all leads to the depressing conclusion that before men are able to convince women of the fallacies behind the concept of male inferiority, they will first have to convince themselves.

Over the past century, and especially in the past three decades, the feminist movement has intensively lobbied to secure women's reproductive rights. That battle has been won, but not simply due to political changes. Lionel Tiger argues in "The Decline of Males" that the key reasons were technological: medically safe abortion and contraception (primarily the pill). These technologies allowed women exclusively, and independently of their husbands, to control their reproduction. Contraception controlled pregnancy, and, should it not, women could solely chose whether or not to bring the pregnancy to term.

Although most would agree that these technologies have empowered women by offering them more life options, the larger social and personal effects on men, and on the relations between the sexes, have been largely ill-considered. These reproductive technologies, Tiger argues, have set the sexes on an uncharted, and perhaps dangerous, course. Reproductive power is no longer shared, albeit unconsciously, via the evolved desires and aversions of each sex. Today reproduction is controlled consciously and almost exclusively by women.

So while women were gaining their own reproductive control, men were losing theirs. What reproductive rights do men have left today? Virtually none. Consider the following scenarios. If a man's partner becomes pregnant, and he wishes to have the child, but she doesn't, he has no legal recourse to prevent an abortion. If, on the other hand, he wants her to terminate the pregnancy, he cannot compel her to have an abortion. Further, he will be legally responsible for child support for a child he would not have chosen to have. If she is on the pill, and he wishes to have a child, there is no legal recourse available to him to compel her to stop taking the pill. Divorce courts still favor granting custody of children to mothers and child support payments to fathers. The idea that reproduction and parenting is a decision jointly made by both partners is an outdated romantic illusion. Examined more closely, it is clear that the consent of woman is always a prerequisite. The consent of the man is often superfluous.

In addition, the resources that husbands traditionally have been able to contribute to reproduction and marriage -- financial support, protection, and socialization of their children -- have been supplanted, and sometimes replaced, by what Tiger terms government "bureaugamy" (women's dependency on the government, or the "government-as-husband"). What women historically relied on husbands to provide, now the state often antes up: child care, welfare, education, police protection, affirmative action and divorce laws that that favor women, ambiguous sexual harassment codes that leave the determination of whether an infraction occurred to the interpretation of a particular woman (not necessarily a "reasonable woman"), etc. While medical reproductive technology has had the effect of marginalizing men reproductively, the state's "bureaugamy" has marginalized the importance of men's marital and parental contributions. Women are often encouraged to live independently (as evidenced by the feminist slogan: "A woman needs a man about as much as fish needs a bicycle"). The bureaugamy supports the superfluousness of husbands by assuring a woman that it will provide what historically a husband did -- with government help she can live independently and generally without fear of hunger, lack of shelter, attack, or lack of socialization and education of her children.

The consequences of women's reproductive control, combined with feminist inspired "bureaugamy," may already be felt. Tiger notes that one-third of births in industrialized societies are now to single mothers. The average female income is growing while average male income is declining. The majority of college undergraduates, 55%, are women. While female college enrollment continues to increase, male enrollment is decreasing. Divorce rates are the highest recorded in history.

As the value of male contributions to reproduction, marriage and parenting have diminished, so too has the general level of male status in society. Warren Farrell noted in his book "Why Men Are the Way They Are" that our perception of men has been transformed in a few decades from one in which "Father Knows Best" to "Daddy Molests." The male cultural icons of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s were independent, powerful, and respected men, who were also generally respectful and gentlemanly toward women. Today, the movie of the week is typically about a woman victimized by a male: her boss or father, her current (or ex) boyfriend or husband, or by a maniacial serial rapist or murderer.

The feminist movement has spearheaded the cultural acceptance of the routine disrespect of men. Instead of equitably quashing and discouraging misandry and working toward true mutual understanding and respect between the sexes, the feminist movement has succeeded in cheerleading a misandry that palpably permeates the culture. Jokes, television commercials, magazine advertisements and even greeting cards often put down men in a way that would be condemned as sexist if directed toward women. As men become less needed as fathers and husbands, they are increasingly disrespected by women. Ironically, by reducing men's general status vis a vis women, women find to their disappointment fewer available men who can meet their high expectations for a potential husband and father of her children.

Tiger's concern is that by "fooling Mother Nature" via the reproductive technologies of contraception and abortion we have unwittingly headed into uncharted, and perhaps dangerous, territory. Our species has not evolved psychological adaptations to deal with modern reproductive technology -- what evolutionary psychologists call an "evolutionary mismatch." There is now a disconnect between our ancestral and current environments. As a sexy and technologically smart primate, we have learned to take the goodies (sex) an unlink it from its evolutionary purpose (reproduction and parenting). The long term social and emotional consequences of this mismatch are unknown, but is it clear that one of the effects, the "decline of males," has already begun.

Yet most men today are about as cognizant of their increasing inequality as women in the 1950s were conscious of their limited life choices. Men need some consciousness raising of their own. Unfortunately, they are so predisposed to protect women, and protect what feminists say women's interests are, that men ignore their own interests as a group to their own peril. On a social level, several nascent men's movements have sputtered, and then sadly faded. Apparently men's instincts to protect women (or at least protect their own personal reputation as a protector of women), are generally greater than their inclination to protect themselves.

On a more personal level, when a man finds himself unable to provide more income than a woman can obtain via welfare (or that she can provide through her own career), when he cannot cause or prevent an abortion, when he is ordered to financially support a child that he never wanted (or even one that is not genetically his own), when he is not granted equal custody or parental authority for his children after a divorce, when he loses a job, promotion or a work contract to a less qualified woman due to affirmative action policies, when women of his own socioeconomic class reject him because they prefer a partner who has a higher status, he is feels, at best, confused. He knows something is askance with feminist rhetoric about "equality," but he may have difficulty articulating it. Men today are befuddled -- they don't understand how equality for women came to result in sexual, reproductive, parental and legal inequality and a disrespect for men.

Although Tiger's book contains a great deal of valuable information, it is rather poorly presented. It is written with a prose that awkwardly combines the style of a social commentary with a smattering of too lightly sketched evolutionary psychology theory, personal observations, social history, exemplars from contemporary cultures, and some repetitive statistics. Chapter titles and section headings are nondescriptive. Some of Tiger's assertions are based solely on his opinion -- others have solid scientific backing. But it is often difficult to distinguish between the two. It would have helpful if Tiger had organized the book more as a clear, progressive and logically structured argument.

Most egregiously, Tiger seems to have missed some of the most important works in the men's studies field, such as Warren Farrell's books, including Why Men are the Way they Are, The Myth of Male Power, and Women Can't Hear what Men Don't Say. This is a serious oversight -- not only are Farrell's important works ignored in the text, they are not listed in his chapter notes and references. Many of Tiger's own arguments have previously been p

Several decades ago Lionel Tiger gave us Men in Groups. This was followed by The Imperial Animal (with Robin Fox). Now, The Decline of Males. This is a superb book on a subject that seems to continually confuse the US press, government, and institutions as well as much of its population. Professor Tiger's clear thinking and discussion of issues throughout the book are to be commended. What emerges is that males and females are equally important, that their lives intertwine in ways that are essential for both, and that focus on one gender (e.g., feminism, masculinism) simply distorts issues more than it clarifies. Hardy congratulations!!!!