[Primate] is perhaps Wiseman's most important work. It differs from its predecessors in that his camera discovers no saving human grace among the employees of the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta. What he gives us—unfairly, according to Yerkes people—is a dismaying study of what he obviously believes to be idiot savants. Wiseman sees men and women apparently devoting their lives to tormenting our closest neighbors on the evolutionary scale, apes and monkeys, for reasons he considers inadequate.

In the first, often hilarious section, they are cast as voyeurs, peering coolly into cages, stop watches and check lists at the ready, to study the sexual behavior of their victims. "Did you record that interaction?" one of them inquires in the ineffable jargon of his craft, as male gorilla approaches female. The analogy between ape and human behavior in this realm is dubious at best, the more...