Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

If you’re living in a group, it will help neither them nor you if you set about eating your fellows. You may be a ruthless, implacable predator, but you must also be a pushover for your relatives and neighbors. So all of you may suffuse your outer membranes with a chemical that serves for species recognition. When you taste this molecule emanating from another microbe, you become very affable. “Friend,” the chemical says. “Sister.” Other chemicals carry different information. Some bacteria routinely produce their own chemical warfare agents, antibiotics that are harmless to themselves and others of their own strain, but deadly to bacteria of different strains, foreigners. A delicate balance has evolved between hostility to the outside group and cooperation with the inside group. Them and us. The first intimations of xenophobia and ethnocentrism evolved early.

Big carnivores enjoy their work. (One-celled carnivores may also.) They don’t hunt because they have an academic knowledge of nutrition: They hunt, it seems, because hunting is a delight; because stalking, chasing, maiming, killing, dismembering, and eating are the pleasures of life; because the urge to do so is irresistible. Fat cats and lazy dogs, stuffed with hors d’oeuvres, their gustatory needs provided for, nevertheless sometimes heed an ancient call, and the urban pet owner finds a dead mouse or pigeon proudly laid at her feet. The machinery is hardwired; the computer is preprogrammed. An appropriate stimulus can set it off. Its hunting proclivities finding no other outlet, the dog fetches a stick or a Frisbee, and the cat swats at a cobweb or pounces on a ball of wool.

Even so formidable and elegant an example of hardwiring as a cat hunting a rat, though, depends a great deal on past experience. In a set of classic experiments, the psychologist Z. Y. Kuo⁶ showed that almost all kittens who witness their mother killing and eating a rodent eventually do so themselves. However, when kittens are raised in the same cage with a rat, never seeing any other rat, and never seeing a cat kill a rat, then they almost never kill rats themselves. When kittens have a rat for a littermate and also witness their mothers killing rats outside the cage, about half of them learn to kill—but they tend to kill only the kinds of rat they had seen their mothers kill, and not the kinds that they grew up with. Finally, when kittens are given an electric shock each time they see a rat, they soon learn not to kill rats—indeed, to run in terror from them.

So even such basic hardwiring as the predation program in cats is malleable. Of course humans are not cats. But we might be tempted nevertheless to guess that childhood experience, education and culture can do much to mitigate even deep inborn proclivities.

Starting with the early microbes, the behavioral machinery for hunting and escaping, and for altering these inclinations according to experience, were developing. Predators slowly evolved into larger, faster, and smarter models, with new options (for example, feinting). Potential prey likewise evolved larger, faster, and smarter models with other options (for example, “playing dead”)—because those who didn’t were more often eaten. Many strategies were devised; the successful ones were retained: protective camouflage, body armor, ink or sprayed noxious liquids to cover an escape, poisonous stings, and exploiting niches where there were as yet no predators—a shallow hole in the ocean floor, perhaps, or a sanctuary in a seashell, or a homestead on an untenanted island or continent. Another strategy was simply to produce so many progeny that at least some survive. Again, no potential prey plans such adaptations; it’s just that after a while the only prey left are the ones who act as if they had planned it all out. No matter how fine your intentions, how benign and contemplative your inclinations, if you’re potential prey you’re forced by natural selection into adopting countermeasures.

By around 600 million years ago, many multicellular animals started walling themselves in, surrounding their soft bodies with shells and carapaces, learning to do small-scale civil engineering, building defenses out of silicate and carbonate rock. Lifestyles of clams, oysters, crabs, lobsters, and many other armored animals, some now extinct, developed then. Since, with rare exceptions, soft parts of dead animals decompose quickly and hard parts or their imprints survive longer—sometimes even long enough to be noticed by paleontologists hundreds of millions of years in the future—the evolution of body armor made these distant creatures knowable to their remote collateral relatives.