Running with the Pack (10 page)

I am already at that age where if I do not run, my arse will disappear. My gut will get bigger and my arse will get flatter. I've been there. Then, big shouldered and somewhat hirsute, more and more I come to resemble a gorilla. When I don't run, I regress — at least in bodily terms — to the ape I would have been if evolution had never come up with big arses. Running is what keeps me in touch with what is distinctively human in me: my big-arsed humanity.

My constant companion — wherever I turn, my arse is there — is also a reminder of just how ill designed I am for the life I lead. Human beings — or at least their recognizable big-arsed precursors — first made an appearance in the fossil record about two million years ago. Agriculture didn't make an appearance until around 10,000 years ago. For the other 1.99 million years we were hunter-gatherers. If we think of
the current span of the human race as twenty-four hours on a clock, then the modern sedentary me, the me who spends much of his day sitting and eats food grown and picked (and, in my earlier years, raised and killed) by someone else, was born no more than a few seconds before midnight.

According to Loren Cordain and colleagues, hunter-gatherer males typically expend around twenty to twenty-five kilocalories per kilogram of body weight per day in physical activity. A modern sedentary office worker typically expends less than five kilocalories per kilogram per day. If we introduce a three-kilometre walk into the office worker's day, this only ups the energy expenditure to less than nine kilocalories per kilogram per day. It is only when more vigorous forms of exercise are introduced — for example, a sixty-minute run at a pace of twelve kilometres per hour — that we start to reproduce the energy expenditure levels of our Stone Age ancestors.

We are, it goes without saying, the product of evolutionary processes. And evolution takes a long time to get things done. Even if it perhaps does not work as slowly as people used to think, 10,000 years, in evolutionary terms, is the blink of an eye. Any biological changes wrought in us in the last 10,000 years will be relatively minor. The inescapable conclusion seems to be that our modern sedentary life is one for which we have not been designed and for which, at least biologically, we are poorly equipped. It is a common misconception — pervasive and tenacious, but a misconception nonetheless — that arses are made for sitting on. It seems, instead, they are made for running. We are happiest and healthiest when we live our history, and so become what we are.

Beside me runs a living representation of this truth. We race down a steep lane that will swing around to the left and bring
us to Charles Fort. This is a star-shaped fort built in the seventeenth century on the site, like so many things in Ireland, of something far older: Ringcurran Castle. The fort was on most of our running routes and marked the lowest point in this rollercoaster of a run. The south and west of its walls — the Cockpit Bastion and the Devil's — loom over us as we round the bend, and promise us a speedy turn, at least it might have been speedy if it had not involved climbing a frighteningly steep hill to the east and the start of the long road home to Knockduff.

I have to be careful on this descent. There is a Welsh proverb:
Henaint ni ddaw ei hunan —
old age doesn't come on its own. Lately, incipient old age has been consorting with some calf issues. Down a hill this steep, there is anywhere between seven and twelve times my body weight being put on each stride, and my left calf has already gone a couple of times in the past six months (I had to buy a mountain bike to exercise the beasts during my recuperations). Armed with new running shoes and new caution, my former charge down the hill has transformed into a careful plod. At the bottom of the hill, in the shadow of the Devil's Bastion, I relax, if that's the right word, and prepare for the climb home.

Nina has the markings of a shepherd, but the massive, muscled shoulders and barrel chest of a dog bred for pulling. She is in effect the result of a great split in the wolf nation that occurred, according to current estimates, between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago (yes, current estimates are that exact). The division came about through random mutation and natural selection. No one is really sure why it happened, but probably the most plausible story looks like this. Some wolves, as a result of simple genetic variation, developed a lower flight threshold distance. That is, they were more able
than the average wolf to tolerate the proximity of these new, strange, big-arsed apes. As a result, as well as obvious dangers, they were also presented with certain opportunities that escaped their more cautious peers. These wolves started to specialize in the refuse of the apes. They became scavengers, not hunters. Some wolves learned early on that if you can't beat the big-arsed apes — and it turns out you can't — then you have to join them.

The rest is history, and a moment's thought is enough to convince us of just how incredibly successful this evolutionary strategy was: 400 million dogs on the planet compared to 400,000 wolves is pretty conclusive evidence. As a result of their new niche, dogs did undergo certain, relatively minor, phenotypic changes. Their heads became somewhat smaller in proportion to their body size: scavengers typically have smaller brains than hunters. But fundamentally the dog and the wolf are the same: 15—30,000 years is not enough time for evolution to finish its morning coffee, let alone fashion any decisive biological modifications. That is why, since 1993, wolves and dogs have been classified as the same species.

What use would a scavenger have for running — the sort of running we do together, the running of the pack? You can understand why short bursts of speed would be of use to a scavenger specializing in human refuse. Humans can be unpredictable. But what use would this mile after mile of metronomic trotting be to such a creature? But if it were no use to her kind, why does Nina love it so much? Why the blistering excitement, once we have hurried out of the door and she realizes what is happening?

You might think it is her breed. German shepherds were bred for herding, and Malamutes were bred for pulling sleds. There is a lot of running involved in both. This is true, but
this can't be all that there is to it. This love of running is indifferent to breed. Unless the dog has been ruined by its human owner — and, admittedly, that is not uncommon — it is going to want to run. It doesn't matter whether it's a greyhound or a poodle, once it knows what running is, it is going to love doing it.

The real answer is that Nina and all other dogs are built on something much older. While she is, in some small part, what the last 15—30,000 years have made her, more than that, much more, she is what the preceding millions of years made her. Yes, she is happy when I feed her; and she likes her bed in front of the fire in our draughty cottage. But Nina is happiest when she is charging up that lane in search of rabbits. Nina is still fundamentally a wolf: she is at her happiest, and she is at her best, when she is doing wolfish things.

Nina and I are both built on something much older. I may be a rational animal, but I am therefore an animal. And the animal that I am is one that was made not by the last 10,000 years but by the millions of years that preceded them. Running with this pack is the clearest possible expression of my humanity: the perfect congruence of what I am and what I am supposed to be. Along these gusty, winding, plunging country lanes, with wolves and dogs, I am returned to the formal and material cause that I am: a big-arsed ape that has been designed to run.

The thoughts that join me on my runs — my other running companions — are not always entirely serious ones. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes the thoughts that are tinged with parody are the best ones to have, not because of what they tell me but because of what they show me. This is undoubtedly true of the big-arsed-ape hypothesis.

Explanations in terms of efficient, formal and material causes are all species of historical explanation. When the emphasis is on efficient causes, the history is very recent — the fruits of the destructive efforts of Brenin, Nina and Tess are events that litter my recent history. When the focus shifts to formal and material causes the history is far less recent, and consists in the biological and cultural forces that shaped a lump of meat into something that can run distance. Nevertheless, whether recent or distant, proximal or distal, the focus is on that which has, in the past, led up to the present. That the big-arsed-ape hypothesis has an air of parody provides an important clue to just how problematic these sorts of explanations can be.

The big-arsed-ape hypothesis emerged from a game my thoughts sometimes play with themselves — the ‘I am built on something much older' game. But once you start playing that game, it's not clear why or when you should stop. When we came down from the trees, for example, it was as scavengers rather than hunters. So why think of myself as a big-arsed ape born to run any more than a shy, sly, scuttling eater of carrion left by animals that really were born to run. Before that, before we came down to earth, we were brachiators. Why should I consider myself a running ape over and above a brachiating one? Is it temporal proximity — I am closer in time to the running ape than the scavenging or brachiating ape? But if it is temporal proximity that is the key, then why am I not a couch-potato ape, an ape that has developed a keen, manipulative intelligence which it uses to get others to find its food — an ape whose large arse is really meant for sitting on? One day, I must play this ‘I am built on something much older' game to its logical culmination and see where I end up.

Even if there is a way around this problem — even if there
is a legitimate reason for privileging the hunting ape in the constitution of what I am — there is another, more general problem. The ‘I am built on something much older' game assumes that biological history can yield an unequivocal answer to the question of the sort of thing I am. But what if it yields no such thing? What if, instead, my biological history reveals me to be a confused melange of many different things, and the resulting whole only barely viable and coherent? Sometimes people have the idea that if evolution comes up with something — arses, legs, feet and so on — then whatever this is will be perfectly designed for the job at hand. This forgets that evolution is not so much life's architect as its handyman; a handyman of dubious competence and numerous mistakes who, in addition, finds himself working for a penny-pinching client. He can slap a bit of paint on here, slap a bit of paint on there. But he is never allowed to tamper significantly with the existing structure. That's the position evolution always finds itself in. The penny-pinching client is known as survival. You tamper too much with the existing structure — an extant creature — then survive is precisely what it is not going to do. The hurricane that is life is going to make short work of temporary scaffolding put in place while major structural changes are being made. The changes must always be small: gradual accretion of the minor is the game.

So, for example, evolution is presented with a fish. It used to swim happily in the ocean, but current vicissitudes of the environmental situation suggest that spending long periods of time lying camouflaged in the sand might be a good policy to adopt. So the fish lies on its side and gradually, for purposes of easy camouflaging, becomes flatter and flatter. What do you do about the eye, the one that lies buried in the mud all day? It is of no use where it is. And all things being
equal — which, in the grand evolutionary scheme of things, they hardly ever are — it would be better if the fish had two eyes it could use to watch for predators and prey. So evolution has two options. The first: develop a new eye. But that will cost you. Lots of bodily and neural resources have to be put into that strategy. The second: deploy the unused eye that you've already got. Much cheaper. And so that is what evolution did. The grotesquely twisted features of the flatfish's face are testimony to its evolutionary history and to this parsimonious solution embodied in it. The eye that used to reside on the ventral side of a fish that swam for a living now twists around and relocates to what is now the dorsal side of a fish that spends most of its time in the sand. Evolution works like this. No one ever gives it a blank slate; it can only tinker with whatever is already there.

So we have to assume that there was an arboreal creature that, presumably due to the affordances or exigencies of environmental circumstance, began to spend more and more time on hazardous, but potentially profitable, terrestrial journeys. No one really knows why this was. Some speculate that the sorts of food offered by trees — leaves, sometimes fruit — no longer provided adequate sustenance. Others argue that we simply became too big for trees to offer us adequate protection from predators. The sorts of branches that could bear our weight would also support theirs. But, for whatever reason, a niche opened up that afforded opportunities for an ape willing to travel overland. At first living on the edge of riparian woodlands, our hominin ancestors gradually expanded their range. In this gradual expansion, those of our ancestors with bigger, more powerful legs — and what good are big legs without the big arse that powers them and provides ballast — survived at greater rates than those with weaker legs and
smaller arses. And so the gene for a big arse multiplies and is passed down to us today.

But here is the snag. The big arse is still the point of connection between two essentially simian legs, on the ends of which are two essentially simian feet. Evolution is a handyman, not an architect. It has to work with what it is given. Admittedly, it has been working with the legs and feet too. They're now very different from those possessed by the ancestor we have in common with our simian cousins. But, nevertheless, evolution has to work with what it is given, and even then is not exactly perfect in its designs. We have to expect mistakes. There is no guarantee — far from it — that these simian legs and feet are going to be able to handle the stuff that this new turbocharged arse is going to get them to do. And if the simian legs and feet of some can handle it, there is no guarantee that this will be true of all of us, or even most.