Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Even in the fossil remains of the earliest lifeforms, there is unmistakable evidence of communal living arrangements and mutual cooperation. We humans have been able to design effective cultures that for hundreds of thousands of years have fostered one set of inborn characteristics and discouraged another. From brain anatomy, human behavior, personal introspection, the annals of recorded history, the fossil record, DNA sequencing, and the behavior of our closest relatives, a clear lesson emerges: There is more than one side to human nature. If our greater intelligence is the hallmark of our species, then we should use it as all the other beings use their distinctive advantages—to help ensure that their offspring prosper and their heredity is passed on. It is our business to understand that some predilections we bear as remnants of our evolutionary history, when coupled with our intelligence—especially with intelligence in the subordinate role—might threaten our future. Our intelligence is imperfect, surely, and newly arisen; the ease with which it can be sweet-talked, overwhelmed, or subverted by other hardwired propensities—sometimes themselves disguised as the cool light of reason—is worrisome. But if intelligence is our only edge, we must learn to use it better, to sharpen it, to understand its limitations and deficiencies—to use it as cats use stealth, as walking sticks use camouflage, to make it the tool of our survival.

ON IMPERMANENCE

Death, like a hidden Tiger, lies in wait to slay the unsuspecting.

ASHVAGHOSHA,

Saundaranandakavya,

ca. A.D. 1165³⁸

* Similar examples occur in other species. The playful and intelligent sea otter regularly dives to the ocean floor, retrieves hard-shelled mussels and an appropriate stone, swims to the surface, floats on its back, and then cracks open the mussels using the stone as an anvil. Some birds drop bivalves on rocks to crack them open Egyptian vultures and black-breasted buzzards drop stones from altitude on the large eggs of emus and ostriches in order to dine on the contents.⁸

In an apocryphal story,⁹ the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus is said to have been killed when a vulture (or eagle) dropped a heavy stone (or a turtle accounts differ) on his bald head, which it perhaps mistook for the egg of a flightless bird.* Although in the Okorobiko Mountains in Guinea, chimps use large sticks to perforate the mounds; the escaping termites are then gathered up by the handful. Other chimp societies in Guinea are ignorant of this practice, although it is also employed by chimp groups in nearby Cameroon and Gabon.¹⁴* Most of the increase in our brain size and the improvements in our brain architecture occurred very quickly—in only the last few million years. There might be some bugs still to be worked out.

Chapter 21

SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS

Already have I once been a boy and a girl, and

a bush and a bird, and a silent fish in the sea.

EMPEDOCLES

Purifications¹

The evolutionary process has made the Earth brim over with life. There are beings that walk, jump, hop, fly, glide, float, slither, burrow, stride on the water’s surface, canter, waddle, brachiate, swim, tumble, and patiently wait. Damsel flies molt, deciduous trees bud, great cats stalk, antelopes take fright, birds chatter, nematodes worry a grain of humus, perfect insect imitations of leaves and twigs rest incognito on a branch, earthworms entwine themselves in passionate bisexual embrace, algae and fungi are comfortable roommates in the lichen partnership, great whales sing their plaintive songs as they traverse the world ocean, willows suck moisture from unseen underground aquifers, and a universe of microbes swarms in every thimbleful of muck. There is hardly a clod of soil, a drop of water, a breath of air that is not teeming with life. It fills every nook and cranny of our planet’s surface. There are bacteria in the upper air, jumping spiders at the tops of the highest mountains, sulfur-metabolizing worms in the deep ocean trenches, and heat-loving microbes kilometers below the surface of the land. Almost all these beings are in intimate contact. They eat and drink one another, breathe each other’s waste gases, inhabit one another’s bodies, disguise themselves to look like one another, construct intricate networks of mutual cooperation, and gratuitously fiddle with each other’s genetic instructions. They have generated a web of mutual dependence and interaction that embraces the planet.