leavers and takers.

Leavers and Takers in the novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, refers to primates and civilized people respectively. Charles A. Weiss, does a great job describing the difference between the two, in his brief take on Ishmael (http://www.mobar.org/journal/1997/mayjun/prezpage.htm).
He says "The premise of the Leaver story is that man belongs to the world. Right from the beginning, everything that ever lived belonged to the world — and that's how things came to be this way in the Leaver culture. The single cell creatures that swarm in the ancient ocean belonged to the world, and because they did, everything that followed came into being. Those club-finned fish off shore of the continents belonged to the world and because they did, the amphibians eventually came into being; and because the amphibians belonged to the world, the reptiles eventually came into being; and because the reptiles belonged to the world, the mammals eventually came into being; and because the mammals belonged to the world, the primates came into being; and eventually man as we know him today came into being. That is the way the Leavers lived for three million years — as if they belonged to the world. Under this premise, creation goes on forever. Each species has the opportunity to evolve to whatever state possible. Our culture, the Taker's view as to how things came to be this way, provides the rationalization for what appears to be the inexorable destruction of the community of life, including the devastation of the rain forest, the deterioration of the ozone layer, the pollution of the oceans and the disappearance of dozens of species of life every day."

I couldn't find any better words to explain this. We, the takers, want to find the reason behind everything. We have the brain capacity to do this. The primates didn't have the ability to research the history and discover the fossils and find the missing link, and map out the Earth from 4 billion years ago until now. In our Evolution class we were discussion the origins of life, and we were discussing how old the Earth earth really is and our teacher was trying to put it into an analogy that we can all understand. He, Professor McKeon, gave the example of taking a road trip that starts at California and ends at the top og the empire state building. This was very interesting because he along the way listed the important events that took place in the world. I think this was a great way for him to get his point across. His point was that the Earth is waaayyy older than us, and that the amount of humans have been on this planet is nothing compared to the age of Earth. In his analogy, middle of the empire state building is when humans came into being, and the last 3/4 of the bell tower, of the empire state building represents the last 20 years, which is how old we actually are.
Humans have been on this planet for not that long, but we made a huge impact on the development, and the shape of this world now. Some are positive but mostly we concentrate on the negative effects that the humans caused in the environment. Primates didn't care about what happens in the world and whether the water supply was depleting, all they cared about was saving themselves from predators. We concentrate on ourselves a lot but we do focus on the environment as a whole, because we want our future generations to survive.