This was a quick, one draft comment to a buddy’s Facebook post that linked to a fascinating essay in Aeon by Mark Rowlands entitled “The Kindness of Beasts” . Subtitled “Dogs rescue their friends and elephants care for injured kin – humans have no monopoly on moral behavior”, it set off a discussion on animal morality, and this was my bit.
I think that there’s a Darwinian basis for morality in animals, as with us. Not that it makes it any less moral. It’s just that, in the long run, such behavior worked to a genetic advantage. As with acts of extreme animal violence with no other purpose than killing. It stems from a behavior that is genetically advantageous, as with us. And if not, it’ll tend to be culled out of our behavior patterns eventually. There has been a trend toward what we think of as moral or humane behavior and away from what we think of immoral or amoral inhumane behavior with time. If there were no genetic advantage in that, it probably would not have happened. The fact that among some mammals–like dogs, elephants and people–the young must be nurtured and taught how to be adults only builds an automatic altruism into the species–though, as with many other apes and felines, the maternal altruism exists side by side with an adult male’s performing infanticide. Much altruistic behavior among social apes is based upon defending infants from other males. You can still see traces of that among humans. So that is altruism and morality that is definitively connected to genetic advantage. I don’t mean strictly a Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene thing here, but “genetic advantage” in a much broader sense–including genes, culture, family, etc. People throwing themselves on grenades or Russian partisans fighting Nazis to the death all come under the same idea. And social animals like dogs or elephants probably developed what we think of as morally altruistic behavior over time as well, if only because it is part of the web of behaviors that make social structures possible. Out of all that basis for morality and altruism can rise acts of apparently pure altruism, like the dog rescuing the other dog.
There are relapses and failures, too. Good gets stomped by evil pretty regularly. But it seems that over the long term, goodness has a benefit over rottenness and after many, many generations, there is more altruism and less rottenness. At least until things change, and there’s an advantage to being rotten again. But it seems like in the long term, the advantage goes to those more altruistic than those not. Among humans, the world is a much less murderous and violent place than it was a century, or even a half century ago. Death rates from war and homicide are way down globally and have been steadily. You could say the same thing about dogs…a look at a dog park is a display of just how non-violent that species has become. Watching dogs interact in a dog park is to see a swirl of small acts of morality, something unimaginable were you to put one hundred feral dogs together. There would be much more fighting, much more aggression. To survive with people dogs had to learn to be really nice to each other, dogs that are not genetically related at all. Same with people, actually.
Incidentally, there was a smilodon–a saber tooth cat–skeleton found somewhere ages ago that had a severely damaged hip. So damaged that the cat was left permanently crippled and quite incapable of hunting. The cat lived for years after it was incapacitated. Smilodons were social animals, living, it is believed, in lion-like packs, and the only thing the paleontologists could figure was that this individual was being fed by the others. Food would have been brought to it. I never read about this again, or if some alternative explanation was later offered. But at the time it showed a degree of altruism that you would never have expected from a wild animal, though the concept, as we can see from this article, has expanded broadly since then.
Probably the purest examples of altruism are among the social insects–thus altruism need not be based on morality at all. We ourselves probably engage in all sorts of amoral (not immoral, but amoral) altruistic behavior all the time without giving it a second thought, or even a thought at all. Perhaps societies are built on tiny, daily acts of amoral altruism, which make the genuinely moral acts of altruism something special.
(Facebook comment to a post comparing “dogmatic Darwinists” to “dogmatic Christians”.)
Rejecting natural selection, though, is like rejecting gravity. The Origin of Species didn’t create a dogma like Das Kapital, there are no Darwinists like there are Marxists, with Darwinist historians and Darwinist semioticians and Darwinist musicologists like there is Marxist history, Marxist semiotics and Marxist musicology. But there are a myriad takes within the vast realm of biology on Darwin’s theories, all of which deviate in some way from the original without being condemned as heretical. But it’s no wonder–Darwin wrote over a century and a half ago and genetics was yet unknown, and genetics, it turns out, is the actual mechanism that propels his theory of natural selection. That Darwin was able to describe natural selection without knowledge of genetics is astounding, but it is genetics that has enabled his theory to be as valid now as when he wrote it nearly two centuries ago. You cannot say the same about Marx, but you will find many academics whose entire intellectual framework and careers are based on the idea that Marx was correct, because Marxism is a dogma in which Marxist economic theory has to be correct, by definition. Yet I have never met (nor read) anyone who dogmatically guarded Darwin’s theories as a Marxist will guard Marx’s analysis, because science has expanded far beyond what Darwin himself wrote about. There simply is no Darwinian dogma, not in the way that people compare it to Christian or Marxist dogma. Natural selection is not a political or philosophical debate, Darwin’s theory is simply about how life is recreated in conjunction with external stimuli. That is basically it.
Wow, just read another article about the end of the polar ice cap. It’s amazing to think that the Arctic Ocean is fast becoming navigable. It’s not an if anymore, but a when. Almost daily there are reports in the news and articles in the press about warming air and warming seas. This article in the Atlantic, Huge Waves in the Arctic Demonstrate Ice Loss—and Aggravate It, explains how enormous waves in the arctic ocean, formed in the newly open water and stirred by the increasing winds that come with open water, melt the ice cap even more, creating more open water, more winds, then more open water, more winds, more open water…. It’s a process we can actually see, in real time. It’s nothing like the invisible CO2 build up, or the incremental (if inexorable) temperature rises. These are just great oceanic swells in an open ocean. Beautiful blue water for miles. Broken bits of icebergs floating, melting. The waves slosh and wash and crash against the ice pack, wearing it down, breaking it up, melting it away. White ice becomes beautiful blue water. Inclement weather kicks up wind, as inclement weather does, just like winds kick up on a real unfrozen ocean, an ocean you can’t walk on this side of Jesus, an ocean that won’t freeze you in solid, trapped, doomed. An ocean that a hard shelled boat, not necessarily an icebreaker even, just not too flimsy, can move through, transporting goods or people or resources along the Northern Sea Route.
That’s what they call the open water which lies year round along the Siberian Arctic coast, the Northern Sea Route. Freighters ply the route now, from Europe to the Far East, where once they crossed the Indian Ocean. It’s a third less distance (and no pirates). There’s no dust, they say, and no smog. The water is a deep blue and the ice floating by a range of gorgeous pastels. New sea life, abhorring a vacuum, has moved in, or begun staying year round. It’s a brand new world. The ancient arctic creatures cling to shore. The arctic foxes lose their snow white sheen. On shore the mosquitos and black flies are in clouds thicker than ever. Roads and villages disappear into liquefying permafrost, and great holes appear, unexplained. Travel overland is treacherous. Offshore, though, a few miles beyond the land, the water is blue and the going smooth and lovely and profitable.
But thinking beyond, two or three decades from now, merchant ships will no longer be hugging the Siberian coast like ancient galleys followed the Mediterranean coast, terrified of storms. Entire new trade routes will open up, intercontinental routes. Perhaps within a generation, and definitely within two, you could travel from Chicago in the middle of North America to Novosibirsk in the middle of Asia on a seagoing vessel. You’d leave Chicago and sail though various Great Lakes and up the St. Lawrence and into the Atlantic between Labrador and Greenland. A larger vessel then would continue on a northeasterly course, rounding Greenland and heading toward Siberia by passing north of Iceland and south of Svalbard. A smaller vessel, though, could slip west into a blue water passage through Nunavut (née Northwest Territories) that leads to other passages between the islands in the Canadian Arctic and follow the fishing fleets and tramp steamers and cruise ships past Ellesmere Island and into the open Arctic Ocean. What a sight that will be, a grand vista of the deepest blue. Dolphins, new to these waters, will splash along side. Whales will loll and spout. The ocean waters, free of year round ice and warmed and lit by the sun, will explode with plankton, krill and pelagic fish. The glorious summer light never turns to darkness over the entire trans-oceanic trek, and perhaps your ship will take you over the Pole itself, where northward turns instantly southward. Then on the far side of the Arctic Ocean you’ll enter the Kara Sea, within sight of Siberia, then continue into the narrow gulf that is the largest riverine estuary in the world, hundreds of miles long, beginning in tundra and ending deep in the taiga. There you’d enter the mouth of the Ob River and fresh water. The final leg is southbound up the Ob, surrounded by the vast Siberian forests that fade after a thousand miles into endless, treeless steppe. The nights lengthen, the moon and stars reappear. Finally, after two thousand miles on the river you dock at the sprawling metropolis of Novosibirsk. A journey entirely by water from the center of one immense continent into the center of an even more immense continent by way of an ocean that was once icebound and impassable.
This isn’t a possible future. It’s not science fiction. It is the future. And while we dread the environmental catastrophe that accompanies it, the mass extinctions and desertification and struggles for water towards the equator, there are young entrepreneurs right now in Siberia and Greenland and struggling Inuit communities dreaming about all of this. Dreaming of new ports and new cities and new trade routes. A few of these dreamers will die fabulously wealthy old men, and their walls will be adorned with pictures of polar bears and igloos and glaciers and icebergs, and they’ll tell their grandkids stories of the old days, when you could walk all the way to the North Pole. Their grandkids will look across all that blue water and not believe a word of it.
Mudslide at Oso, Washington, March 29, 2014. 43 dead.
The site of a fresh mudslide from a distance always looks so cleanly cut, as if a shovel dug into the wet ground and simply lifted the hillside away and dropped it gently a couple hundred feet down. Grass and shrubs and even small trees are often left in place. Come by in a few weeks, after the rains have stopped and the sun is out and you can see wild flowers in all their colors where people and houses used to be. Sometimes the people and houses are still there, after the survivors had given up hope of ever digging them out again. The old hillside becomes their tomb, and the flowers just make it pretty.
Another view of the Oso slide….mud everywhere.
Once you recognize the shape you can see mudslides all over the place in southern California, recent ones and old ones. They’re not uncommon. In fact they’re usually so small as to even be newsworthy. Someone loses a backyard and the people below get their pool filled it. It doesn’t even have to rain for those, a broken water pipe will do it. Even a sprinkler left on during a vacation. But it’s rain that really gets the ground moving. Hillsides become soaked, the soil becomes mud, and mud being heavier than dry soil, eventually, at a certain point, that ground begins to slide downward, and continues to slide until a new center of gravity is found and the movement ceases. One of the amazing things about mud is how the water holds the dirt together into a mass while at the same time makes that mass easy to move. An entire hillside, thousands and thousands of tons of dirt, can suddenly move as if by command in one piece, holding its composition and even keeping its topsoil in place. With all our engineering prowess and computer modelling we can’t do that. We can’t make a hillside move in such an orderly fashion down a hillside in one piece, and in a matter of seconds. We can start avalanches and rock slides, sure, those are easy. We can blow a mountain to kingdom come to get at what’s inside. But we can’t just make a whole hillside shift downward a few hundred feet without disturbing the flowers. That’s a matter for rain and gravity and fluid mechanics.
Mudslide at Oso. The grin.
Mass wasting is the technical term, gravity making shit fall down. Rocks falling down all the time in California. Our mountains and hills are very young and haven’t been worn down smooth yet by erosion, and besides that a lot of the material is made up of fragile sedimentary rock that breaks up and falls back down easily. Quake, rain, flash flood, high winds, fire zone…everything comes down out in Southern California. If you ever drive along the base of the mountains in Pasadena, say, you come across these enormous catch basins designed to capture all the stuff that begins falling down in heavy rain…including boulders that weigh hundreds of tons. Those things used to roll for miles, trashing everything in their paths. I love this state, always exciting.
The effects, as in Oso, Washington, can be horrific. Sometimes merely destructive. In 1995 there was a very impressive mudslide above the village of La Conchita, between Ventura and Santa Barbara. For months afterward the 101 there was covered with a thin layer of mud, and if you looked up at the bluffs you could see a classic view of a hillside dropped down a couple hundred feet and resting atop what had been a street.
For a while afterward houses stood with their insides protruding through their front windows. Just imagine how much mud could make a house do that. Down the other end of the street the mud had buried houses completely. Then in 2005 the hillside came down again but much more quickly and took out more streets and houses. Ten people died in their homes. A whole family was entombed in one, save for the father, who had stepped out to go to the store. He spent days walking the streets calling out the names of his children. No one knew what to say. When I saw the news of that mudslide in Washington, saw the scar where the hillside had been, and the hillside now where the houses had been, I thought of that man again, looking for his children.
La Conchita mudslide, 1995
On the back slope of the ridge I live on here in LA you can see another old slide. There’s a big concrete wall holding it back off Riverside Drive. I remember sitting at a gas station years ago and wondering what the hell that big slab was there for and then saw the shape of an old mudslide. It was like a miniature version of that hillside in La Conchita, scooped out of the ridge and deposited fifty or sixty feet below. I asked a few other people if they saw anything there. They said no. I guess you have to know what to look for.
Once the scar is grown over again and green, it doesn’t look so menacing. You have to stare hard to realize what you’re seeing. Once you do see it, though, you can never miss it again. You can, in your mind’s eye, take the piece of the hillside that is now below it and pick it up and put it back where it was and see what a perfect fit it makes. But there it is, at the foot of the ridge. I can’t imagine that this slide buried anything. Some ground squirrels, maybe, a few tarantulas. Some California poppies. Some of the snow birds wintering on the street there (we call that stretch the Riverside Riviera) might have found their beat up vans engulfed in a foot or two of mud. But I don’t think there were any structures there. Somewhere down there on Riverside Drive was an old gay bar, but I don’t know where exactly. Some of the older guys from the neighborhood–all gone now–told me stories about the place. A total dive, they said, a wreck. Every winter they had to open the back door so the water coming off the hill could flow through the bar and out the front door and onto Riverside Drive. Some winters the place would be full of mud. It was a popular place, though. But that bar, whatever it was called, is long gone. From what I was told–and this is just hearsay–the place was condemned as a hazard because the ground behind it was unstable. So maybe it was where the hillside came down. But I have no idea what happened to it. Perhaps the patrons just got tired of muddy shoes.
Anyway, they’re talking about another El Nino rainy season next year, which we desperately need, so more of these ugly gaping smiles where hillsides used to be will appear throughout Southern California. Especially in burn areas. Next summer well after the rains (should they come) you should be able to see them. By the following spring, after a few rains again and the grasses turn the hillsides green, they’ll really stand out, big brown scars where green slopes should be, and below them, mustard and lupine and poppies waving in the breeze, yellow and purple and red. Pretty.
Mudslides have been one of the prime shapers of our topography here in southern California. Mudslides on the hillsides, debris flows down the mountains, earthquakes and floods. You don’t like the lay of the land now, just wait till the next big rain. Something’s bound to give. Just don’t be there when it does.
A team of scientists working in Kenya says it has unearthed the oldest tools ever discovered, dating back 3.3 million years ago. The stone flake tools are 700,000 years older than the earliest known stone tools, predating modern humans by 500,000 years and “suggesting that our ancestors were crafting tools several hundred thousand years before our genus Homo arrived on the scene,” according to Science magazine.
The thing is, though, that there might not be a link from these incredibly ancient tools to me typing on a computer, since these are 700K years older than the earliest tool use we see in our predecessors:
The gap between these tools and the previous oldest known is so long — 700,000 years — suggests that whomever made these newly discovered tools could have died with the knowledge, and stone tools were “reinvented” again hundreds of thousands of years later.
These tools apparently belong to another species of hominids that went extinct (there were dozens of hominid variations that didn’t make it), and one of our own predecessors had to rediscover tool use half a million years later and passed it on, eventually, to us. These tools–rocks flaked into clearly shaped cutters and scrapers, and the rocks used to flake them into those shapes–are physical evidence of a culture. It was a primitive culture, to be sure, but one more sophisticated than even the most clever band of chimpanzees today, a culture that could turn carefully selected rocks into specifically shaped tools, and then could pass that knowledge onto the next generation. This was learned behavior, not instinctive. The site was essentially a work shop, a factory, a place where over three million years ago hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of stone tools were created. The small area was littered with them, and so far they’ve collected more than 130 of these artifacts. We don’t know if everyone would pitch in and make their own implements, or if there was one or two individuals who specialized in tool manufacture. We don’t know how long this went on for, or just how widespread this technology was. We don’t know anything, except the age of these tools–they can be dated at 3.3 million years, using paleo magnetic techniques–and how they were created, by flaking (or “knapping”), smashing a stone against another to create specific shapes, the ultimate in early paleolithic technology. But we have no way of knowing who it was that made them. Without a pre-human skull, an Australopithecine, maybe, someone like “Lucy”, we can only guess. Hopefully some day the right bones will be found in the right place.
Until then, though, these worked stone implements will just haunt us, a mystery, a race of apes that could have been us, but didn’t make it. Eventually at some point around three million years ago there was just one survivor, scraping at bones with one of these tools, and then he died–by disease or age or a leopard–and a future civilization died with him. It’s sad to think about, as the finality of extinction always is. All that evolution coming to an end. Of course had they not died out, I would not be typing this, and you would not be reading this. We would not be here. We are descended from that next tool making culture half a million years later. That is where we trace our genetic and cultural roots from. The failure of those three million year old tool makers was an opening for the line of australopithecines that eventually became homo habilis and then homo ergaster and then homo erectus and finally us, the billions and billions of homo sapiens, in all our tool making glory. But we will probably share their fate, eventually, with one last homo sapien taking the very last human genome with him, and this glorious little human experiment will be done.
Just read a fantastic article, Deep Think, in Orion magazine on the intelligence of the octopus. A favorite topic of mine, and I’ve long been of the opinion (which I doubtless picked up from someone else) that were it not for their extremely short lifespans the octopus would have achieved far greater cultural development. Right now they live from six months to, on the extreme outside, five years. Considering how much longer they’ve been around (cephalopods go back half a billion years, octopus at least 250 million), imagine their development had they just lived longer. Admittedly there are far fewer evolutionary pressures on marine instead of terrestrial environments but still given that brain size, a lifespan equal to our own would have led to all kinds of possibilities–some species already exhibit tool use and their color changing skin has a built in capacity for language (social squid communicate that way). Alas, sex kills them. A neutered octopus lives a long time. Thankfully all we have to go is eat right.
When I was at UCSB in the mid-seventies, I had a buddy majoring in marine biology. In the lab there was an octopus in one tank. Across the aisle was another tank full of shellfish. The shellfish began disappearing, every morning there were fewer. Turns out the octopus was leaving its tank every night, slipping down to the floor, crossing the aisle, climbing up onto the opposite counter, slipping into the tank, dining on shellfish, then returning to its own tank. A brick or two atop the cover of the tank ended the midnight meals, but not before me and everyone in that marine biology lab were given extraordinary insight into the ocular and problem solving capabilities of the octopus. And that is something that has stuck with me ever since.
When I go to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach and look at the octopus and think, the octopus is looking back at me and thinking. It’s like staring at a raven and thinking that he is staring back at me and thinking. Advanced animal intelligences are almost creepy to think about. But ravens have no thumbs. Octopuses mate and die. So we rule the world, for now anyway. But corvus (ravens, crows et al) have been around for about the same time as hominids (humans, chimps, gorillas) and are still evolving intellectually. Humans no doubt increase the pressures that allow the smarter among them to thrive and propagate and pass on their genes. Who knows where natural selection will take the raven. It can’t help but get smarter. Remember that the human brain increased in size by 300% in two million years. There is no reason this could not happen among corvids. Indeed, it might be happening now. With octopus, whose brains are by the largest among invertebrates (some of which have no brain at all, actually), they are still awaiting the mutation that lengthens the life span. Until then we have these fabulously intelligent creatures whose stored memories and knowledge are gone forever after just a couple years. A raven in captivity can live forty or fifty years. In the wild ten to fifteen. But the rare raven that lives thirty or forty years in the wild will pass on information it has learned–tool making, signals, facts, skills–just as the stereotypical old wise men do among people (though probably even more importantly it’s been old wise women). This is especially vital on land, where evolutionary pressures are extreme. Species come and go on land at a much faster rate than in the sea. Modern humans survived alone among dozens of human species and sub-species because we thought so much and learned so much and could pass on so much information. Crows and ravens continue to expand their range for the same reason. Alas, the octopus gets little benefit from this as it simply dies too soon. There are no twenty or thirty year old octopuses passing on a lifetime of skills and knowledge and tool making. But imagine there were. Imagine one hundred million years of octopus culture.
Evolution in the sea is different than on land, though, it is much more forgiving, and species and genera of species can last a long, long time. In the sea, culture is not a survival skill. And life itself is nowhere near as apocalyptic. Asteroids and ice ages and volcanism and drought have devastated the land far more often than anything similar in the sea. No matter how catastrophic conditions become on land, some marine species inevitably survive. (Of the dozen longest surviving species in a list making the rounds on the internet, only one, an ant, is terrestrial.) Many of those surviving species will be cephalopods, which have survived everything, including the Permian extinction. About one third of cephalopod species are octopuses. So unless multi-cellular life itself were annihilated, the octopus will in all likelihood continue to be here. But culture, for an octopus, would be a luxury. It’s not a Darwinian necessity. For homo sapiens culture has meant survival. Yet probably not even that will save us in the long run. Terrestrial species have little staying power, and mammals even less. Primate species even less than most mammals, and all the species of homo–we’re the last remaining, homo sapien sapien–are like matches in the wind. We shine brightly for an evolutionary moment and then disappear. Museums are full of our various skulls.
Something will catch up with homo sapien sapien too (we are, after all, the dead end of an entire evolutionary branch of primate evolution) and humans will be long gone and the octopus and in its many species and innate intelligence will still be evolving. And if, somehow, a few hox genes messed up and somehow enabled an octopus to develop that could live a long time–perhaps by something as simple (if biologically unlikely) as delaying reproduction for twenty or thirty years–then it is inevitable that such a long lived octopus with its astonishing capacity to learn and mimic would learn something from another octopus, and in turn another would learn from it. Learned behavior passed on. Language–by color cells and gesture–would inevitably develop. Brain and culture, interlocked, would both begin to evolve and expand rapidly. Look at the results in us. There have been 125,000 generations of human beings in a little under three million years, and all our civilization and all our technology and all our language, down to you reading this essay in digital form, is the result. The octopus’ time might still be to come, a hundred million years from now. I wonder if they’ll know we were ever here.
Darwin Awards are funny. But the whole survival of the fittest idea–that the dumb die out preserving the species–makes no sense. The people who, in natural selection terms, deserve the Darwin awards are, in the narrowest sense, people like me, who have no children. My brother had kids, so most of the same genes passed on to me will probably continue via my brother through his kids, though as he had only boys that limits the long term chances for that. Women do the heavy lifting in the genome. They are who you see evidence of a long way back down the line. We can see Mitochondrial Eve, but the Adam that rang her paleolithic bells was just some long forgotten stud. (Or just one sperm cell, actually. If men only knew how inconsequential we truly are in the grand Darwinian scheme of things.)
Darwinian success is actually counter-intuitive. The people commonly thought of as failures–poor, a lot of kids–are actually, in a Darwinian sense, the winners. The rich with a lot of kids are winners too, but no more so than the poor. In terms of passing on genes, intelligence has little to do with it on an individual basis. This is the Richard Dawkins way of looking at it. Selfish genes, etc. However, some say that any of us who help the viability of our genes–sisters who help raise the nieces and nephews, for example–are also succeeding in that they are helping to pass on the genes that she and her sister both received from their parents (though this is only half true for half sisters). The classic example being workers ants in an ant colony, where all work to ensure that the queen can keep passing on the genes. Some expand on this further by stating that anyone who helps assure that others can pass on the species’ genes–obstetricians, pediatricians, farmers, etc–are also contributing. But by any scale, those late middle aged childless males who spend a Saturday afternoon writing bloated Facebook posts instead of doing anything even remotely useful deserve a Darwin Award. And that’s funny.
This is strictly in Darwinian terms, however. Dawkins also came up with the whole meme idea (or was the first to write about it in a way that caught on), so anyone writing posts like this is, in meme terms, successfully passing on his memes–provided people read it, believe it, and pass on one of these ideas themselves. In fact, increasing one’s social media presence is, in meme terms, the same as a male having children by many different women. The more kinds of social media you establish a presence in, the more likely your memes will be passed on in the greater culture. Your Klout score is a measure of your memetic fertility. And a meme can be an idea, a style, a catch phrase, anything that can be passed onto others who pass onto others. A couple guys told me they began wearing blazers because I did, which meant I scored, memetically. Karl Marx and Jesus were meme superstars. On a single meme level, the guy who first said waasssuuuuppppp was also a memetic superstar. As is Kim Kardashian, or her ass anyway.
Unlike natural selection, however, I don’t believe they have yet found evidence of the actual process that passes a meme from one brain to another. Darwin was proven correct by genetics. They’re still looking for the meme equivalent. Right now it’s just a theory in search of a mechanism. They may never find one, and centuries from now this whole meme idea will sound ridiculous, and Richard Dawkins will get a Darwin Award. Darwin won’t, he had ten kids. You can’t spend all your time theorizing.
Felis catus. Better yet Felis silvestrus catus. What scientists, in their more formal moments, call house cats. And lately, scientists have been studying cats and coming up with some interesting conclusions. In fact, I just read a piece on Vox.com: What research says about cats: they’re selfish, unfeeling, environmentally harmful creatures. And like any article that implies anything non-cute about cats, it caused a furor. It certainly did in the comments on Facebook after I posted it. But I think that article is pretty dead on. Cats do kill zillions of birds a year and do vastly more damage than the human hunters do on wild bird populations. And parasitologists are concerned about the effects of the parasite toxoplasma gondii, even if The Atlantic article cited pushes it a bit. (And not to creep anyone out, but parasites may have behavioral effects on us that we’ve only begun to glimmer.)
But I was most fascinated with the studies cited on a pet cat’s attachment to its owner. Or lack of attachment, actually. There is affection, but not attachment. Say everyday you come home and your cat jumps up on the couch and sits on your lap and purrs away. Then tomorrow you leave the country for a year, subletting your pad with cat to somebody. It takes a week or two, but eventually your tenant will come home from work every night and your cat will jump up on the couch and sit in her lap and purr away. Same level of affection. Same attachment. Same everything. After a year you come home. Your tenant is there on the couch, your cat in her lap. Does your cat leap out of her lap and run up to you, a long lost friend, like a dog? No, your cat ignores you at best. Or else it hides. Sit down on the couch and your cat might get up and sit in your lap and purr away. It might sit on your tenant’s lap. It might go back and forth. If it’s what we call a friendly cat it will sit in anyone’s lap on the couch, purring away. It’ll finally settle on your lap alone when your tenant is gone and there is no other handy lap on the couch. The cat is affectionate, yes, but there is no emotional attachment. Not like in dogs, not like in people. Your cat will not miss you if you die. It would miss your nice, comfortable lap. Your dog, on the other hand, would miss you. If you fell into a coma, your cat would seek out another lap. A dog might wait by your bed forever.
The human-cat emotional bond is strictly one-sided. We become deeply attached to them. They find us convenient. I’ve spent most of my life with pet cats, all but a couple years. I like cats. It never seemed to me that they have all that much use for us. Humans keep cats because cats have learned to exploit our instincts and weaknesses. They’re of very little use to most of us now since we don’t use them to catch rodents. In fact anyone who’s ever discovered that they and a neighbor each have the same adoring cat as a pet–with two names even–has realized just how loyal a cat is. We’re conveniences. Whoever feeds them, gives them a warm, safe place to sleep, some property and pant legs it can scent mark as it own, and doesn’t annoy them too much, well they’ll hang around. If a cat can have two families doing it, all the better. The cat doesn’t give a damn what you call it as long as you feed it.
Incidentally, the tiny dogs you see around, especially the ones sitting quietly in purses, also exploit our weaknesses. They look cute and tiny, they get table scraps. Pieces of steak while Rex outdoors guarding the house gets kibble. Unlike cats, though, we have genetically engineered them that way (in the old fashioned way, like Mendel’s peas). Kept their size and appearance developmentally stalled so even full grown they look like puppies and we just melt. Paedomorphosis they call that. The retention of juvenile traits even with adulthood. We have deliberately created dogs that look like puppies their whole lives because we love the feelings that puppies bring out in us. We turned wolves into yappy, squirmy little puppies. People love puppies.
But we didn’t do that with cats. Because cats, although breeding has mellowed them somewhat and perhaps made them a bit more “affectionate”, are highly resistant to genetic change like that. It can be done, to a degree. But not even the most selectively bred cat will look like a kitten in adulthood. Feline growth rates are simply not very flexible, indeed they change very little. A typical house cat looks pretty much identical to an African wildcat even after seven or eight thousand years of domestication. A tiger and a house cat look fundamentally alike, to the point where mothers at zoos tell their little children to look at the big kitty. Tigers look like giant cats. Even the most extreme examples of feline evolution–the cheetah for instance–are immediately identifiable as cats. Indeed, the “first cat” proailurus from about 25 million years ago looks remarkably like an ocelot or jaguarundi today. So the feline template was set at the beginning and has proven adaptable with very little dramatic change. There are three basic sizes (large, small and smaller), though unlike dogs you cannot breed a large cat into small cat or vice versa. If you have ever been to a pet show with dogs in one hall and cats the other, the dogs vary to almost unimaginable degrees–the Saint Bernard and the chihuahua are both descended from wolves (and can interbreed with each other and with wolves) while cats are remarkably similar–flat faces and hairlessness being the extremes. Cats simply don’t change much, in shape or behavior. Only in size to a very minimal degree. The Maine coon cat is enormous by house cat standards, but it pales in comparison to the size range seen among dogs. And while interbreeding is possible between many cats species, like between wolves and dogs or wolves and coyotes, it does not happen in the wild. Cat behavior does not allow for it. Behaviorally and genetically, they are set in their ways, and have been for 25 million years.
It may be that human behavior was easier to modify than a cat’s. Instead of turning a wolf into a puppy, a hominid was turned into a subservient cat loving homo sapien. When that first cat–proailurus–appeared 25 million years ago anything vaguely human had yet to evolve. Felines were fairly set in their ways by the time hominids appeared maybe eight million years ago. The genetic malleability of hominids resulted in more variation than among cats and in a third of the timespan. We change faster. We may not be as changeable as a dog is in body shape and appearance (though we can be radically dimorphic, with very large males and much smaller females, among other differences), but then we show incredible variation in behavior. Our cognitive skills make us infinitely more adaptable behaviorally than probably any species ever. If cats and humans first came together maybe ten thousand years ago because we attracted mice and rats, had warm fires on cold nights and found kittens adorable, then odds are the one who was going to adapt more to the other was the humans. Because we can. Unlike cats, our minds are incredibly adaptable and our behavior easily modified.
If you want to see just how this human behavior has been modified go to one of your higher end pet stores and look at all these things that people buy for their cats. And then look at all the things people buy to get rid of cat urine odor. Human beings are incredibly flexible mentally, live a long time, are highly social and since the beginnings of agriculture have preferred permanent places to live with plenty of warmth on cold nights. Plus we attract rodents. Pretty ideal set up for a cat. Given the chance, our cats will come and go as they please, and we’re hardwired to think of their behavior when they are with us as affection. A dog, on the other hand, will dramatically alter its behavior to live with people. Feral dogs behave much more differently from domestic dogs than feral cats do from domestic cats (though feral cats will not sleep eighteen hours a day). Feral dogs are scary, even deadly. Domesticated dogs are obedient and even protective. We shape dogs to us far more than they do us. There is always some give on both sides (people with dogs do adjust a bit to a canine lifestyle), but people with cats wind up doing far more for their cats than vice versa. Every husband has heard that he is bothering the cat. Cat food commercials–even cat litter commercials–are aimed our concerns about are finicky cat. People often will not even try to train or discipline a cat. People are convinced, for some reason, that cats can’t be disciplined at all. Dogs, yes, children, yes, but the cat gets away with just about anything. Why is that? The sight of adults in a grocery store carefully selecting the cans of food their cat will eat (“he doesn’t like salmon”) has always struck me as a little ridiculous. And somehow, most amazingly of all, they have us doing it with little complaint. There is some hard wiring in people that cats take advantage of. Think of that next time you find yourself calling your cat’s name and being utterly ignored. And when she begins crying and you jump up to feed her. People do that with babies too. In fact I sometimes wonder if the declining birth rate and increase in pet cats are related. Have cats taken advantage of our nurturing instincts to such a degree that they have us in permanent state of being parents to an infant, a time in which the urge to make another baby is repressed?
Even weirder, there’s a video racing about social media of a tyke–a boy maybe three years old–who’s crying next to a very angry cat. Obviously the cat just slashed the boy. The tyke then takes a swing at the cat. The cat leaps up and goes right for the child’s face, claws out, ready to shred. The kid, terrified, topples backward off the bed trying to protect his eyes. The response of viewers is nearly 100% in favor of the cat. The cat aroused greater parental feelings than the three year old boy. Imagine the exact same situation with a small dog. The kid, just nipped by the dog, takes a swing at it. The dog leaps at his face, teeth bared, knocks him off the bed and continues the attack. Viewers would have been horrified. They would too by the sight of, say, a six year old brother attacking the child, slapping him in the face, knocking him off the bed. And an adult doing so would have brought universal outrage and demands for the adult’s immediate arrest and confinement.
Only the cat is seen as the victim there. Only the cat is seen as being absolutely correct in its actions. Only versus the cat would the child–a three year old child at that–be accused of abuse. Of deserving what he got. And only a cat, a large adult, most likely a male, would be discussed in the diminutive–the kitty–in the comments. An attacking adult dog would not be called a puppy. An attacking brother would not be called a li’l kid. An attacking adult male would not be called daddy. Only the cat, big and mean as it was, is still be a kitty.
That is weird, people. There is something wrong with you. You should not applaud that cat for trying to claw out a three year old’s eyes. You should not. You should be horrified. But all you see is an angry kitty and a big mean three year old child. Something has altered one of humanity’s deepest instincts. Cats have somehow turned you against your very own children to protect them, cats. Talk about Darwin Awards.
Many of you are angry right now reading this. Angry that I even suggested that this is a problem. But preferring to raise and care for another species over your own is a classic parasite technique. Even protecting members of that species against your own offspring (the vessels of your DNA) is a classic sign of parasitical behavior modification. You can find it among some ants. Among some species of birds. And among humans, apparently. Cat lovers have been altered.
The first time I ever read a book on parasitism (think it was Parasite Rex by Carl Zimmer) I immediately began looking at our cats askance. I’d still feed them and pet them and clean the damn litter box, but I’d ask myself why I was doing it. And you know, I think it’s going to come out one of these days that we’re being had. Had by a damn cat. They’ve worked themselves into our cerebral cortex so deeply that we think cleaning cat boxes is normal. I overheard a friend at a bar recently talking about cats. Cat people, he said, don’t know that their houses smell and everything is covered with cat hair. We don’t. We notice human hair, and certainly notice when someone stunk up the bathroom. We leave books of matches atop the toilet. No one leaves books of matches near the litter box. That we tolerate. But then the human gastrointestinal tract isn’t full of pheromones. Indeed, there’s no surer way to kill a date. But cat urine is a pheromone cocktail. Is that why we don’t mind it so much? Are we vulnerable? I also suspect we notice that strong male cat smell more when it’s not our cat. When a neighbor cat has sprayed the porch, it is pungent and offensive. Is your own cat’s smell as pungent? If not, why not? It would contain the exact same chemical mix that makes that makes stray male urine so goddamn rank. But I wonder if perhaps we just don’t smell it as much. That we don’t smell it because we’ve been programmed, essentially, not to. My friend who pointed out that all cat lover’s houses smell…well, he hasn’t been programmed. He doesn’t like cats.
When I posted the kernel of this post on Facebook a couple weeks ago I got the angriest responses to any post I’d ever written. There was some really intense anger. Any criticism of cats whatsoever was not tolerated. My cat loves me, many people said. I love my cat, others said. It was all love, love, love. The problem with you, somebody else said, was that you don’t know how to love. The responses were sometimes ludicrously visceral, and nearly all involved the word love. You can criticize children and you will not get anywhere near the level of outrage that you will get by denying that cats love us in return. You can make ugly baby jokes and you will not get the instant anger you can get by criticizing cats. It’s not a lasting anger. It dissipates quickly. But it is instant and uncompromising. I can’t figure out why that is. What is it that makes people so instantaneously defensive about cats? Why are cat people so passionate about cats? Why is it that people will do almost anything for cats? They are just animals. They aren’t especially bright–squirrels are smarter–and they don’t guard our children or scare off prowlers. They don’t rescue the drowning or guide the blind. A cat will not die defending you. Cats do virtually nothing of use to human beings, certainly not since we used them to kill the rats and mice raiding our grain stores. And yet many of you just grew angry reading that. I don’t know why that is, but I suspect it’s something we don’t understand quite yet. Something parasitical perhaps, or something chemical, or maybe that hard wired behavior I suspect cats have exploited. That whatever it is that makes people so bizarrely nuts about felis silvestrus catus.
Anyway, it’s time to feed the cat.
A cat killing a bird in a magnificent wall painting from the tomb of Nebamun, Thebes, Egypt, 18th dynasty, ca. 1400-1350 BCE.
Just got back from the Antelope Valley. We drove out to Littlerock on the Pearblossom Highway for a date shake at Charlie Brown Farms. It was a perfect day for a drive, hot as hell and crystal clear, and the air in the desert was so dry it was enervating. Sweat evaporated off the skin instantly, giving the illusion of a chill, and we touched fingers and jumped at the static spark. The sky was a perfect blue, the wind promising fire, and off in the distance the Grapevine burned, a billow of smoke, a brushfire burning over itself, dying. The 14 is such a gorgeous run, all that maddening geology, layer upon layer, millions of years of time bent into ridiculous angles. There’s one layer that must be ten, even fifteen feet thick of rounded rock and rough gravel cemented into conglomerate. Sandstone above and below. Even whizzing past at 75 mph I was awestruck at the violence in it, the tale of an atmospheric river of Amazonian proportions that one wet winter millions of years ago filled this long dead river valley thirty feet deep in land scoured roughly off the surrounding hills. If anything had lived in that river before, it was dead then, gone, washed away or buried. The debris and stones and hilltop soils remained, and were buried by sand left as the river, renewed, coursed its lazy way above, shifting with the season and laying down sand in fractions of inches. It hardened into sandstone that, like its equal below, trapped the layer of rough conglomerate. More layers–sandstone, shales, some lesser flood debris–are laid down slowly overhead, hundreds of feet thick, and eventually the pressure compresses our thirty feet of flood debris into its current compacted ten. It’s cemented now, like a badly mixed concrete, full of rocks that tumble out in the rain. But even from down here on the highway it’s an impressive sight, one year’s worth of sedimentation, one rainy season really, perhaps even just a few day’s worth, compacted into ten or fifteen rough feet, between who knows how many centuries of hardened sand above and below it. Uplift and seismic pressure–the San Andreas Fault is just behind these Sierra Pelona Mountains that we’ve been driving through–have left the tale of this deluge in a sheer rock wall a hundred feet above us. Nothing sits still in California, nothing stays in place a billion years as in Australia. There are perfect fossil beaches in the Australian outback billions of years old, while an hour north of Los Angeles there is bottomland a few million years old that is now high in the Sierra Pelona with the hawks and circling vultures. I drove past, quietly awestruck, and as the rock disappeared in the rearview mirror I thought about the atmospheric rivers to come, and alluvial plains full of homes on streets full of water.
When I was a kid, back in the Plastic Age, every kid had gotten a plastic bag full of little plastic dinosaurs. The wife and I still have plastic dinosaurs. Nice ones from the Natural History museum, and a collection of the old fashioned mono-color (an angry pink T Rex, a passive blue stegosaurus) that came in a wooden box we picked up at a yard sale. We wanted the box, we said, but we probably wanted the plastic dinosaurs. We keep them now, along with a collection of little Matchbox car knockoffs that we found in another box we bought (for the box, this time), for children and grandchildren, though our friends have remained mostly sterile, barren or child loathing, I’m never quite sure. So both the swarm of monocolored dinosaurs and the fleet of tiny cars sit unplayed with. But when I was a kid, the packages of plastic dinosaurs included the occasional post-asteroid apocalypse critters (we didn’t know about the asteroid back then, though, the reptilian mega beasts still died slowly and sadly like in Fantasia). I specifically remember a big bird and weird glyptodont.
Mythical Gastornis, eating critter whole.
The bird was a Gastornis, that we had envisioned ripping smaller beasts to pieces with its enormous beak, and I was a little disappointed to see last week that is was (according to news reports) a giant Vegan bird that once roamed the Arctic, assaulting trees and Eocene shrubbery.
Real Gastornis, nibbling on a cycad.
I think ours was yellow, though, and looked meaner than a Vegan, and besides there were no Vegans in the 1960’s, just fruitarians. But it was still cool to see Gastornis going briefly viral, sent aloft by mildly confused Vegans, one of whom explained that we shouldn’t eat chicken because it was the closest living relative to a T Rex.
It looked like a huge armadillo, the size of a Volkswagen, and ours was mono-colored, though what color I can’t remember, and about the same size in plastic as the gastornis and looked kind of weird silly cute gnarly. It also looked exactly like an armadillo. I knew quite a bit about it, because I had read and re-read the How and Why Book of Prehistoric Mammals which I had read on yet another of the family’s cross country sojourns, just as I had read and re-read the How and Why Book of Dinosaurs on an early trip coast to coast. (We moved a lot.) As kids went, I was an expert on things prehistoric. Anyway, it turns out that scientists have recently retrieved DNA from a 12,000 year old glyptodont dug up somewhere. Perhaps it was slaughtered and devoured by ancestors of my Sioux wife, who had spread across the Americas with their fancy Clovis pointed spears driving mega fauna into extinction, leaving us with nothing but the bison, elk, moose and the avocados that giant sloths used to eat. All the elephants, camels, giant armadillos, giant sloths all went into the campfire barbeque. But paleontologists had no idea of what, exactly, a glyptodont was. Then after investigating the fossil’s DNA, it turns out that the glyptodont was a giant armadillo, more giant than today’s so-called giant armadillo. No mere Texas roadkill our glyptodont, it’d be like running your pickup into a bison. But oddly enough, the glyptodont is not especially close, genetically, to todays roadkill armadillos, but rather to the dinky little fairy armadillo
Pink Fairy armadillo.
found throughout the Argentine pampas, and is about as unglyptodont an armadillo as you can imagine. Still, you can’t argue with DNA, which must drive paleontologists crazy, out there in the cold and wind and dirt prying out rocks with hammers looking for ancient bones. Every bone they dig up and tease out of its rock matrix with dental drills means hundreds of hours of work in the field and lab. Then in half an hour some pasty geneticist with a man bun tells you exactly what the thing was, a gigantic cousin of the pink fairy armadillo, and you can’t argue back. Pink fairy? Really? It’s bad enough your terrifying carnivorous avis was a herbivore, no more dangerous than a huge chicken, but now your mega armadillo was, deep down genetically, just a squeaky tiny armadillo. Fool with a couple hox genes, the heterochrony (sort of the rate of developmental change, like how we grow from fetus to adult, and how fast, and how much) switches from peramorphosis (keeps growing until huge, like a Great Dane, or me) to paedomorphosis (aka neoteny, becoming adult while still retaining juvenile characteristics, like those yappy little dogs in ladies’ purses). In an evolutionary instant your truck killing glyptodont is something you can slip into your pocket (in fact I once saw a pink fairy armadillo slipped into a pocket, where it felt instantly asleep).
All these dinosaurs, glyptodonts and even giant Vegan birds were once the work of hard drinking, hard living, hard travelling men who battled the elements and hostile natives to stock museums with visions of immense and terrifying beasts. Heroes like Edward Drinker Cope and Roy Chapman Andrews, who were feted at parties full of adoring ladies and Teddy Roosevelt would call them friends. Now it’s some geneticist schmuck with a pocket protector and a show on PBS. I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was a kid, they were heroes, they were all over public television in big macho documentaries, manly men in cowboy hats, beards, long hair blowing in the wind, holding up a huge thigh bone like a barbel and saying long Latin names like it was the most natural thing in the world. Beautiful grad students puttered abound in the dirt at their feet. At night there’d be beer drinking and loud laughter around a fire. Now that was science. Today it is long sequences of A’s and C’s and G’s and T’s. Not that genetics isn’t incredibly fascinating, it is. But where is the romance? A glyptodont lumbers along a lakeshore where Barstow is now. Some day it will be small and plastic and bright blue. And then it will be a sequence of A, C, G and T. Somewhere between the two my imagination watches it, wondering.
Brick's Science 