6 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM VOL. 125 
be said for the training of the specialist with his rigorously channelled 
expertise, providing that his future employment asks no more of him 
than this; but there is a real place in twentieth-century science for 
the multidisciplinary scientist. 
The interrelationship of primate and human biology is intricate 
and important both pragmatically and philosophically. They stand 
in much the same relationship, for example, as political economy and 
political history, as mining engineering and petrology, as sociology 
and social anthropology. The first of each pair is concerned primarily 
with the present, and the second is involved principally with the past. 
Primate biology, though not a historical subject per se, stands in 
historical relationship to human biology. Man is a recent innovation 
of primate phylogeny with a relatively brief history as man but an 
extremely ancient one as a primate. Chimpanzees and gorillas are 
the living descendants of the same group from which man’s remote 
ancestors were drawn millions of years ago. In this regard they serve 
as genetic models for man. Their value for biomedical research de- 
pends on this close blood relationship. Other primates—the baboons, 
for instance, which, like man, are recent innovations—are too phylo- 
genetically remote to serve as genetic models. Baboons and macaques 
occupy a broadly similar ecological niche today as the primate pre- 
cursors of man occupied some fifteen million years ago. The study of 
these animals, which can be regarded as ecological models, might, 
therefore, be expected to provide valuable clues for the development 
of hypotheses concerning the roots of the human social organization. 
It is no coincidence that baboons, macaques, and chimpanzees are 
the most widely used of all nonhuman primates in biomedical and 
sociological research. 
The past of organisms is one of the determinants of their future, 
and the most fruitful place to look for man’s past is not only in ancient 
and inaccessible rocks but also in the structure and behavior of living 
primates. 
At Oxford, England, in 1864 Disraeli said: ‘The question is this: 
is man an ape or an angel? My Lord, I am on the side of the angels.’’ 
A hundred years later we are no longer interested in the answer to 
Disraeli’s rhetorical question. We do not regard it as being particu- 
larly important. Man and apes are part of one zoological order, the 
Primates, an order that also includes the monkeys and the lemurs, 
and the close relationship of these forms to man is no longer a matter 
of dispute or concern. The essential conformity of man and the 
primates in morphology, physiology, serology, and behavior is beyond 
question, and the problem now facing primate biologists is the clarifi- 
cation of the relationships within the order, with extension of knowl- 
edge in depth and breadth to include as much information on struc- 
