Throughout his travels to six continents as a documentary film producer, his adventures as CNN bureau chief in San Francisco, his stint as a screenwriter in L.A. (one film produced, two others sold), and his experiences as a book author (co-authoring a book with William Shatner) and magazine writer (name a national science pub), science journalist Chip Walter had plenty of opportunities to observe what we all find so fascinating: ourselves.
More specifically, our strange and puzzling and wondrous human behavior. Why, Walter wondered, are humans the only creatures to really cry… and laugh… and kiss? How did seemingly small evolutionary changes such as the big toe lead to such extraordinary things like speech and larger brains and more complex social lives? Walter, who admires science writers such as Lewis Thomas and Loren Eisely--“People who make you say wow, I never thought of that”—decided to explore these matters by writing a book, mining the scientific explanation behind it all.
“I didn’t know where it was going to lead,” says the writer who took a “very broad and interdisciplinary” approach that draws on paleontology, psychology and anthropology among others fields. The focus is on six traits that separate us from the animal world: our big toe, opposable thumbs, strangely shaped pharynx and the unique tendency to laugh, cry and kiss. While the six may seem unconnected, they are instead tightly linked, marking forks in the evolutionary road where man went one way and animals another. “It was,” says the writer, “a lot more connected than I thought.”
Publishers Weekly called Walter’s book, Thumbs Toes and Tears and Other Traits that Make Us Human, “fascinating and superbly written, while others have dubbed it “brilliant” with “something to marvel at on almost every page.” One of the book’s charms is that it is clearly a product of both the head and the heart. The author quotes both Dante and Darwin in one paragraph, includes the joke that was rated the funniest on the planet, and explains how humans are the only creatures born one year premature. As it turns out, it is the kind of book that will have readers saying, "Wow, I never thought of that.”
In a writing style that is engaging and lively—not always the case with these science writers—we learn many interesting things, among them this nugget: boys and girls cry the same amount up until age 12 and then girls cry 60% more due to an increase in lactin, that same hormone that comes into play later in life with breastfeeding. It is, says the author, a chemical and not a cultural phenomenon. We also learn that jealousy serves as a survival instinct as infants compete for their moms' attention. But as with any good writer, it’s not just what he says but how he says it. Like this, on kissing.
“In one soulful meeting of our lips we can capture all of the colliding forces that shape the core of the human condition and our personal lives—heart and mind, DNA and intellect, lust and love. This is the limbic system at work—primal, uncontrollable, emotional—run by a brew of pheromones that light up both the brain and the heart. Drawn this close together, our ancient chemical cocktails take the wheel and leave the intellect in the dust.”
The Writer’s Life
Walter, 55, father of teens Molly and Hannah, has his ‘fiction days” and “non-fiction days.” He teaches science writing at Carnegie Mellon, is currently writing a screenplay and two speeches for actor William Shatner, and is already thinking ahead to Books Four through Seven. One might be based on the epilogue in Thumbs, Toes and Tears, an intriguing look at how technology is changing our culture and of course, ultimately, us, “mystifying pieces of evolutionary work” that we are.
The John Carroll University grad was raised in Pittsburgh and went to the Bishop's Latin School, which was started by Cardinal Wright, where he tackled a rigorous curriculum that included theology and philosophy, learned three languages and wrote a composition a day.
Obviously it served him well. Yet as any good writer well knows, words can fail us. “Words, remarkable as they have been, simply are inadequate to express many of our deepest feelings,” Walter writes in the book. “This is why we not only speak to one another but kiss and cry and laugh, and dance and paint and make music.”
And write very good books that help explain it all.
For news on upcoming appearances, log onto www.chipwalter.com. Autographed copies of the book are available at Joseph Beth's Booksellers, Borders Eastside and Jay's BookStall.
Tracy Certo is editor of Pop City.
Photos:
Chip Walter
Signing his book
Chip Walter
All photographs copyright © Tracy Certo