The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution (28 page)

But if we did, we’d probably be thought somewhat unhinged and therefore avoided. People who come up to you and start talking about trains are usually regarded as occupying a station on the autism spectrum—a personality trait in which people have trouble responding to social norms.

Comments to strangers that veer away from the conventional how-are-you tactic, yet that are deemed socially acceptable, might be based on a shared sense of identity. For example, if I walk around the streets of the fine city of Norwich while wearing my beanie and scarf emblazoned with the noble emblem and colors of Norwich City Football Club, I am likely to be accosted by another fan, and we’d start a conversation about the ups and downs of our favorite soccer team—and this is a complete stranger, a person with whom I might not have had any other interaction whatsoever. A shared sense of identity sometimes transcends individual recognition. If I wore the same garb in Ipswich, however, I might get beaten up.

Going back to the how-are-you gambit, one might ask in addition why it is considered rude, or at the very least eccentric, if we receive any answer more complicated than a simple affirmation that yes, we’re just fine, thank you. In which case, one might ask, why ask the how-are-you question in the first place? Because the question has nothing
to do with speech or language at all—its function is to engender social grooming.

Most of the time we don’t stop to think about how conventional and ritualized the bulk of human social interaction really is. Language serves to punctuate that interaction, rather than to inform it. That’s why it’s slightly shocking (and funny) to learn of the habit of a former colleague who, when exhorted by staff in a restaurant or hotel to “have a nice day,” would reply, with commanding hauteur—“I have
other plans
.” The polite, formalized inquiries we make after peoples’ health (or, if in England, to pass some comment about the weather) are no different from the occasions in which dogs stop to sniff each other’s bottoms, or baboons stop to pick lice out of each other’s fur. Each in its way gathers information about the health of the (for want of a better word) interlocutor.

Most of the rest of what people talk about is gossip about things that happened to themselves and other people: about what she said to him, what he said to her, who did what to whom, what happened next and what it all cost, with many pauses to appreciate the social ups and downs involved: the shame and the schadenfreude. Not that some people don’t want to talk about other things: C. S. Lewis, the longtime friend and colleague of the philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien, once (rather cruelly) remarked that the friends of the relatively uneducated Mrs. Tolkien were the kind of people whose general conversation was “almost wholly narrative.”
⁶
Oh, the irony—this from the doyen of Icelandic sagas. Gossip is, on the face of it, banal. So why do we find it so compelling? As Mozart remarked to his patrons (at least according to playwright Peter Shaffer, in his play
Amadeus
), who wouldn’t rather talk with their hairdresser than Hercules? Who, when they should really be doing their homework, or writing this book, wouldn’t rather log into Facebook to see what their friends are chatting about? Getting interested in abstract, nonnarrative matters requires a special degree of effort. Gossip, on the other hand, is something we can just fall into and instinctively enjoy.

I think it’s fair to say that our love for gossip goes beyond face-to-face interaction, chats on the telephone, and social networks. Most of what people read or hear about in the news or in popular dramas and soap operas (all of which are functionally interchangeable) is social grooming, although at one remove. Think about the human element in any news story you might hear, or read about, or watch on TV, particularly
if aimed at a popular audience. Such tales are often about the minor doings of “celebrities”—that is, people who are familiar to us from other contexts, and with whom we identify although we do not know them personally. News grades into “reality” TV, which grades into soap opera. It’s all about catastrophe, disaster, human tolls, shock, disgrace, or humiliation—the Shame, and the Schadenfreude. Stories that help one recalibrate one’s own position in society. The only thing worse than being talked about, said Oscar Wilde, is
not
being talked about.

How very crow-like we all are.

Does human gossip differ qualitatively, in terms of its elaboration of structure, from that of other animals? To be sure, humans can compose, relate, and understand stories of highly elaborate construction. By this I mean that human stories contain many layers of meaning and action and still remain intelligible to the listener. One can just about follow a sentence such as “Alice thought Bob had told Carol about Donald’s invoice to Erica for the work that Fred had done for George,” for example, even though it contains four nested stories.

1. Alice thought

2.   Bob had told Carol about

3.       Donald’s invoice to Erica for

4.             the work that Fred had done for George.

This nesting is related to what Robin Dunbar calls “intentionality.” This relies on our ability to conceive of the mental states of others, but we rely on language to organize it. The sentence above contains four “orders” of intentionality, and Dunbar suggests that human beings are capable of understanding at most six levels of intentionality without having to write everything down or having it explained.

The problem we run into, once again, is that of comparison between species that have very different outlooks on life. Although Dunbar discusses research suggesting that some apes might be capable of third-order intentionality, results can only ever remain that—suggestive. It is hard enough getting into the mind of another animal without having to find reliable ways of discerning whether it is thinking of what another animal is thinking about a third animal, and so on. The question, then, remains open—it is possible that many animals are capable of thinking in this way. And given that most people will not be called upon to understand sentences as complex as this in most situations,
one could easily say that there is no functional, real-world difference between the complexities of discourse between animals and between humans.

If language isn’t uniquely human, either in its function or its complexity, what about
writing
, the recording of language in symbolic form outside the body, such that it can be preserved and disseminated far more widely than spoken language ever can? Because of writing, we no longer have to learn everything anew in each generation, or rely on oral tradition that disseminates slowly, is prone to error, and can be conveyed to only a few people at once.

Isn’t writing—and, by extension, the power of writing to address many people at once—the key to the current domination of the earth by humans? Well, perhaps. Except that many animals use such extracorporeal forms of communication, and many of these animals have little in the way of language, and perhaps less of brains. One thinks of the pheromone trails of ants, or the urine trails of voles—and these are just two examples of extracorporeal communication and reporting that we know about.

A more philosophical problem is recognizing as
representational
any signs or actions made by other creatures. How do we know that the architecture of termite nests isn’t random, but a purposeful inscription of their history? This idea might seem outrageous, but a current problem in anthropology is learning how to recognize whether scrawls made by early humans were just inchoate doodles or deliberate records left by inquiring minds.
⁷
And if such things are hard to judge for members of our own species, we can have little hope that we might recognize, still less decipher, any form of extracorporeal communication left by other animals.

I contend, however, that at least some extracorporeal forms of communication are just that—representational—in that they contain particular meanings that are there to be interpreted by others of the same species once the author has left the scene. The example is, however, personal and anecdotal—because I have personal experience of it on a daily basis—and that is the intensely odoriferous imagination of dogs and the ability of dogs to leave messages to be interpreted by other dogs without direct dog-to-dog contact.

Most days when I take my dogs out walking, it’s not the exercise they seem to crave, but the social stimulation. An invitation to go for a walk is greeted with intense excitement—much barking, wagging of
tails, and general jumping up and down—but a gentle amble of less than two miles leaves them completely exhausted. It’s the social stimulation, I think, that saps them—not the actual physical exercise. Every few steps we stop so that the dogs can sniff what seem to them to be interesting blades of grass, lampposts, walls, tree stumps, and so on. They sniff with the deliberation of master wine tasters, and, sometimes, mark the site with small urine samples of their own. To me, the human observer, it looks just as if they are sampling the status updates of other dogs on their doggy social network—let’s call it SniffBook—and perhaps leaving their own comments. We humans have a very poor sense of smell compared with that of dogs, so we cannot appreciate the refinement, the nuance, the bouquet—the
meaning
—of the scents the dogs are exchanging, but given what we know about gossip in general, and the importance of social networks, we can have a good guess. The dogs are trading information about who’s who, who’s been around, who has said what to whom, and, perhaps most of all,
their state of health
. We humans do it through vision, language, and sound—dogs do it through smell. The modality is different, but the end result is just the same.

I live on the very picturesque coast of north Norfolk in England, which is great dog-walking country. Being proverbially flat, it’s perfect for an easy ramble. The beaches are vast and deserted; the skies are enormous and dramatic. One morning my wife had arranged to meet with two friends for a walk, and she asked me to drive her and our dogs to a cliff-top rendezvous, whence they’d make their own way home. Her friends were there, waiting, with their own dogs, as we arrived. As I drove away, I was much taken by the scene in the rearview mirror. A meter and a half above ground level, the humans were talking animatedly with one another, mouths moving, hands waving—a meter below that, the dogs were greeting one another with equal enthusiasm, with much sniffing of bottoms and wagging of tails. Without being distracted by the words uttered by the humans, it seemed to me that the behavior of humans and dogs was all but identical irrespective of the mode of communication. I felt like the animals at the end of George Orwell’s
Animal Farm
, peering through the window as the pigs and the farmers feast convivially inside, looking first at the pigs, and then at the farmers, and at the pigs again, and finally not being able to decide who was who.

11
:
The Way We Think

So much for bipedality. So much for large brains, technology, intelligence, and language. There might—just might—be one ability, one trait, that marks us out as special. We human beings, surely, differ from other animals in that we are conscious.
¹
That is, we are aware of our actions and their consequences, having the ability to imagine ourselves as participants in the drama of our own lives, and how our lives interact with those of others.

I find the term “consciousness” rather vague, and so the effort to understand it is as challenging as trying to nail jelly to the ceiling. I prefer “self-awareness,” the meaning of which is self-explanatory: that we have a sense of “self,” as if we are a whole, cohesive entity, inhabiting a body. In this book I use the term “sentience” rather than “self-awareness,” because it is shorter and more elegant, but my meaning is precisely the same. A sentient being will be aware of itself as a character in the drama of its life, and thus aware of the consequences of its actions on others, and to some extent of the internal mental states of the other characters. Psychologists might say that sentient beings have “a theory of mind.”

Art, religion, even science, spring directly from this sense of self. Sentience brings along with it the crushing realization of the brevity of life, the inevitability of death, and through that, a desire to investigate and explain the human condition.

The poet John Keats knew all about this, perhaps better than anyone. As a young apothecary in early nineteenth-century England, the business of disease, debilitation, disfigurement, and death was part of his daily round. He saw his relatives and friends sicken and die young, mainly from tuberculosis, to which he, too, eventually succumbed. The transience of life was well expressed in his epitaph: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Yet in a desperately short life—he died
before he was twenty-six—he created arguably the greatest poetry ever written in English.

In his great poem
Ode to a Nightingale
(written in May 1819), he contrasts the pain of a mortal doomed to muse on his lot, with the joy of the nightingale, living ever for the moment and therefore not doomed to death, a concept that would mean nothing to the insentient.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

What thou among the leaves has never known,

The weariness, the fever and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies,

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs;

Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

But sentience—the luxury of self-knowledge—is in fact not unique to humans, and its presence in other animals can be tested and verified. Clayton and her colleagues have shown that crows modify their behavior in predictable ways depending on the identity, number, and attitudes of other crows in the vicinity.
²