The editorial is refreshingly non-PC. It certainly seemed to imply that there was a lot of strife going on in the 1970's. There's a lot of that sort of thing happening now, but it doesn't seem to me like it feels the same now as it would have seemed them. Some of the conflicts the author mentions are still going strong today (middle east stuff, North vs. South Korea) whereas other ones have run their course (Ireland, Vietnam). The actual editorial was about how none of these conflicts are racial even though they were constantly being described in that way. He says they are religious, not racial. These days this seems like a pretty obvious statement, but perhaps things were presented differently back then.

I was particularly intrigued by the claim that while chimpanzees are significantly more intelligent than dogs, they are incapable of even the beginnings of speech. On the other hand, dogs are far less intelligent but some highly educated dogs have vocabularies of 300-400 words. The author claimed this was due to dogs being specifically bred, over 200,000 generations, to be useful to humans while chimpanzees have not been bred by humans at all. I guess a way to test this claim would be to try to teach speech to some wolves. If wolves are incapable of the beginnings of speech then it must be the human breeding that accounts for this difference.

The author also claimed that some birds migrate by looking at the stars. I'm skeptical of this. I have always heard that they migrate using magnetic-sensing capabilities in their noses which allow them to have an internal compass.

The editorial was continued onto the back pages of the issue. When I saw the final cover it was advertising travel to America. I thought that was funny and actually looked for a url to see what they would have on a site about tourism in America (it's a pretty big place). It took me a moment to remember that this issue was from 1970 and was unlikely to have any urls in it.