I have many vivid memories of my first visit to the United States, thirty years earlier. Everything was so different, and yet so similar to what I was used to in England. It was autumn and the fall colours were developing, particularly in the forested areas of Virginia and North Carolina. The colours were the same as England, but England was never like that - the whole countryside glowed with a kaleidoscope of brilliant reds, oranges and yellows. The trees themselves were much the same - there were oaks, maples, birches, beech, dogwoods, but where England had only one or two species, America had many of each - especially the oaks. There was also a huge variety of unfamiliar species interspersed amongst them, including sugar gums, tupelos, hickories, magnolia and the ubiquitous poison ivy, which festooned all the tree trunks and forest floor in a luminous yellow lacework. It was the same with the animals, they were similar but different. Yellow-jackets were very similar to the wasps in England, in fact several English species had become established in America, but there were many more kinds in America than in England. My main interest at the time was in squirrels, because I had been working on the grey squirrel in England and had come to America to see it in its native country. I was astounded by the variety of squirrels - England only had one native species, but here there were pine squirrels, fox squirrels, chipmunks, ground squirrels, flying squirrels, woodchucks, marmots and prairie-dogs.

Jasper-Pulaski State Park

My travels took me to Indiana to see Charles Kirkpatrick who was well known for his work on grey squirrel reproduction (we had first met on a rough ferry ride to Heron Island, in Australia's Great Barrier Reef, two years earlier). One day he took me to the Jasper-Pulaski State Park to see some of the native wild-life and we were well rewarded. I was just fascinated by everything I saw - commonplaces to my host but new to me. As we walked in over a bridge, passing some familiar stinging nettles, I glanced down the stream to see that the waterway was blocked - no it was dammed! There were beavers here! Later I saw that ponds had strange piles of vegetation built in them - I thought this might be beavers' lodges, but "no" I was told, they were built by muskrats. There were signs of squirrels everywhere, with nests in the trees, gnawed patches on the trunks and piles of chippings from nuts, cones and acorns strewn along logs and stumps. We saw a beautiful big fox squirrel chasing a grey squirrel across the ground and up a tree, and there were chipmunks all around, making high-pitched 'chipping' calls and disappearing down holes as we approached.

The highlight of the visit came when we approached a lake. We could hear a commotion ahead as we followed the track through the last few trees to an open grassy clearing in front of the lake. The green gave way to a white mass of about two thousand sandhill cranes busily feeding, during a break in their long annual migration flight to escape the Arctic winter. After viewing this marvellous scene for a while something disturbed the cranes, probably an osprey coming to fish in the lake, and they all took to the air with a great clamour of honks and wing-beats. They broke into groups, which circled around like huge flurries of snow. They were probably getting ready for the next leg of their journey south.

USING A STICK TO LOOK FOR FLYING SQUIRRELS. We think of tools as being something which only mankind can make. Tools are in fact the essence of life - life is made up of a complicated assemblage of tools. There are biochemical tools, like chloroplasts, physical tools, like wings, and behavioural tools, like how to build a nest and interact with your neighbours.

Before we left, Charles wanted to show me a flying squirrel and picked up a stick and tapped fence posts surrounding an enclosure - there was a tame wapiti inside, which had a massive head of antlers. He said flying squirrels often slept in cavities under bark or in holes and would run away if tapped in this manner, so we went around tapping the posts together - unfortunately without any success. After all these years this simple action serves as a marvellous introduction to one of the main factors involved in determining the future of the human race - the role that tools play in the evolution of living things.

Tools

The simple use of a stick as a tool to knock the posts is an example of one of the earliest forms of tool use in mankind and it is so ingrained in our makeup that we almost unconsciously pick up a stick or stone whenever the need arises. Use of tools such as this was at one time thought to distinguish human beings from all other animals - we were the only species intelligent enough to use tools. This has since been found to be wrong; tool use is widespread in the animal kingdom. Chimpanzees use a wide variety of tools and even some relatively unsophisticated monkeys, such as capuchins make a variety of tools, sometimes from bone or stone, in a way which used to be thought only the province of early man. Birds such as crows are also able to use tools in quite intelligent ways, choosing the right one to do a job, or even modifying it so that it is sharp or of the right length, while others, such as vultures use stones to smash holes in large eggs.

There is no doubt, however, that human intelligence has vastly improved on this early tool use. This probably had its origins when our ancestors began to use sticks and stones as tools to kill prey or to dig for roots. The technology of making better instruments evolved over time together with an increasing intelligence so that it now extends to everything we use. Other species do not possess such an extended ability to adapt tool use or to invent new ones. Animals would have to have a higher level of empirical intelligence to be able to do this. This is what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom - we are surrounded by tools, everything we do is related to the tools we have made, our whole society and way of life hinges around tools - but is it the tools we make which distinguish us, or is it our intelligent use of them? Or - more fundamentally - is it only the rate at which we can develop them which distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom?

Tools come in many forms and perhaps it is necessary to try and define what is meant by the term. Normally one thinks of something like a stone used to break a nut or a stick to dig out a grub, we have workshops full of this sort of tool. These very practical tools are used to make other tools, such as tables to put things on, electric fires to keep us warm, bicycles to speed our rate of movement, television sets to entertain, and computers to work on and communicate. What constitutes a tool needs to be much more broadly defined than the narrow workshop definition. It could be: something which is used as an aid to achieving a goal - (where a goal is an outcome which can be interpreted as of benefit to the possessor).

Under this definition, human tool use becomes much less remarkable, in fact rather passé compared to the tool development that preceded the evolution of advanced intelligence in mankind. DNA has evolved incredibly complex and integrated tools which make our efforts, such as radar and cameras, look very crude indeed. The only advantage intelligence has is that it is much quicker in developing tools than DNA. We invent throwing sticks or stone-tipped spears to catch fish and mammals, while DNA has given beaks to the cranes, which are ideal tools for catching grasshoppers and frogs, and talons to ospreys - superbly designed tools for grabbing fish out of the water. We invent crude photo-voltaic cells to trap sunlight, while DNA uses chlorophyll - the whole Indiana countryside was clothed in leaves, then in all the wonderful fall colours - but we have barely even begun to use our technological version, even on a small scale. We invent computers, while DNA uses a far more complex and integrated organ developed millions of years ago, and possessed by all the animals in the Park - whether beaver, squirrel, crane or even yellow-jacket - the brain. Our brain is in fact one of the latest DNA tools to be developed, and through it high intelligence has been brought to the planet for the first time. This is a very dangerous tool for DNA-life, because it can invent and manufacture other tools at a far greater rate than DNA. It has potentially made DNA-evolution obsolete, and may end DNA-domination of the planet. We still appear to be in charge, because so far the human brain is still, in many respects, a better instrument than our artificial prototypes, but this is unlikely to be the case for much longer.

Tools and the definition of life

With this understanding of tools we begin to get an appreciation of what actually constitutes life - what distinguishes life from non-living matter. Life is a complex assemblage of tools which are integrated to form an actively self-maintaining unit (or potentially self-maintaining in the case of dormant seeds and other suspended forms of life, such as frozen bacteria, ova etc). With this definition the tools we make are no longer artifacts - they are something vitally important to our future. They are part of us as living things - or more worrying - we are part of them as living things. It is therefore crucial that we understand the role tools have played in moulding the lives of other living things - how tools have affected the course of evolution. With this we can prepare ourselves for the time when we are part of an artificial world, dominated by the artificial intelligence that is now developing on Planet Earth. It took millions of years for DNA to evolve high intelligence from early ape brains - it is likely to take only tens of years for matching (but different) artificial intelligence to develop from computers.

Kinds of tool

Tools fall naturally into three categories. The first, behaviour, will be discussed in this chapter. This is often a whole-organism tool - a largely programmed ability of an organism to respond to stimuli and maintain itself. The second category, organs, will be discussed in Chapter 3. These include the more conventional understanding of tools - physical organs which are adapted for particular tasks such as eyes, lungs, teeth, claws etc. The final category covered in Chapter 4 is that of biochemical tools and organelles. These include tools that were evolved very early on - long before organs existed and are extremely complex and refined. They are the tools which are more closely allied with our understanding of life itself - their use distinguish carbon-based living things from complex chemical activity.

Behaviour

This is one of the highest-order of tools evolved by DNA and requires mechanisms or tools for receiving stimuli and responding to them. To do this there needs to be a means of communication between parts of the body or between organisms for behaviour to exist, and this has lead to the evolution of nerves and nervous systems. There are other means of communication, which are also used, such as chemical messengers (e.g. hormones and pheromones) and the microtubules, which form the main means of communication within single cells. These other means allow plants and single-celled organisms to move and develop behaviour tools without the need for a nervous system, such as the opening of flowers in sunlight and spermatozoa swimming to find and fertilise eggs. An understanding of behaviour is very important because our rapidly expanding artificial communication systems make it possible for new levels of behaviour to develop - those that involve a global population of billions of individuals responding to perceived global needs or fears - whether real, media-inspired or implanted by artificial intelligence.

In science fiction the combination of behaviour and artificial intelligence is a rich field, providing anything from power-hungry maniacal robots, hell-bent on taking over the world, to androids which like lying in the sun, skiing and swapping floppy discs to create mini-bots. In real life we tend to think our robots and computers are behaviour-less - merely stupid because they appear to tilt, with error messages, when we ask them to do something. In fact it is the operator who is stupid in expecting the computer to know what we want it to do, without communicating with it in a way it can understand. Behaviour is in fact the one thing they are fully programmed with - it is an advanced tool, which forms part of intelligence. They are programmed to respond exactly as directed from appropriate inputs.

Behaviour is a remarkable tool, which, like other tools, is largely inherited via DNA. It differs from other tools in that it is intangible and can be equated with a computer software package, operating the organism in a similar way to a computer programme. The other tools of living things are essentially hardware - tangible creations of DNA which are physical or chemical and whose functions are clearly defined. With behaviour the organism is essentially programmed with pre-existing Information Technology (knowledge) from birth - it can recognise its optimal habitat, know what to eat, where to find it, escape predators, seek the opposite sex of the right species, and then only mate if both have gametes at the right stage of development.

It would seem possible that this form of DNA programming could include a huge volume of material - we could even be programmed with the total Encyclopaedia Britannica at birth, and be able to speak any language at will, if natural selection had taken us that way. Evolution has not proceeded along these lines because increasing intelligence has superseded DNA-programming as the main provider of information technology and replaced it with a more rapidly evolving and adaptable means of achieving the same end - communication and learning. The highest levels of programmed behaviour may be seen in animals which have poor learning skills.

Insects and spiders just do not have enough neurones to learn much, but the yellow-jackets (wasps) have very complex behaviour and know how to build amazingly engineered nests without any instruction. Similarly the spiders' webs adorned by fall dew are extraordinary feats, when viewed in the light that instruction is not necessary because it is all programmed in DNA (but even in these invertebrates we are beginning to find that learning plays an important part of their behaviour development). But perhaps it is not so extraordinary after all - inheritance of the structural detail, wings, the ability to fly, antennae, jaws, physiology surely all this is much more of a feat of DNA-programming than the organism merely knowing how to build a comb or web? The wasp or spider's behaviour is, however, likely to be as complex as its anatomy and physiology - it is just not so easy to describe, measure and quantify. It is unnerving to know that behaviour-transmission is already virtually instantaneous, limitless and with total recall, in even the most stupid computer - it is just that we are not yet able to provide enough instructions and sensory input to make them into something more responsive - life-like.

The behaviour software package expresses the essence of an organism whether it is a wasp or chipmunk - it is the driver. It directs the hardware what to do, whether the hardware is part of the body or part of the environment. In this sense the behaviour package has an existence somewhat divorced from its possessor. It is like a "soul" which enters the organism and tells it what to do. Being a separate character it can also change and evolve relatively rapidly, adapting the hardware of the species to new environments or new ways of life, as long as they are within the limits dictated by the body and environment - physical changes can come later, after longer periods of natural selection. In a sense the organism and its behaviour package evolve together as a whole, but as behaviour development becomes more advanced, so it becomes more important as the driver of evolutionary change, and has consequences on the future of the species. Our culture and technology now dominate everything we do, but we still have our inherited driver, which is unable to keep up with the rate of cultural change.

 

EVENING FLIGHT OF SANDHILL CRANES. Changes in behaviour and mate recognition can lead to speciation. Differences in behaviour between the Sandhill and Whooping Cranes ensure that the species do not interbreed in the wild, although they have a common ancestor in Asia. The behaviour tool can change more rapidly than most of the other tools of life.

The amazing variety of animal life in North America, like everywhere else, has a lot to do with behaviour. One of the main avenues to speciation appears to come from behaviour differences arising in isolated populations, because it is one of the inherited characteristics, which can change most quickly. The clock which tells a 17-year cicada when to emerge has strong selection forces to be accurate, but somewhere sometime a small population may have got it wrong together and founded the 15-year cicada species. I wrongly thought that a similar occurrence may have happened between the marvellous sandhill cranes wheeling overhead and the rare whooping cranes, because they have different migration routes which could have resulted in isolation. However, the separation happened at an earlier stage, the original ancestor lived in Asia, with the sandhill evolving from the first migration to America and the whooping from the second. The two crane species have unique sex-bonding displays which normally prevent cross-breeding.. Separate species rarely cross in the wild because behaviours differ, but in unnatural conditions they may form unnatural liaisons, such as in zoos or cities where animals (or people) are forced to live in close proximity. This happens with ducks, particularly the mallard, which will cross with most other duck species, including black duck and the beautiful wood duck seen on the lake and ponds of the Jasper-Pulaski State Park.

Behaviour can also be a component in plant speciation, such as the time of day or time of year when they flower - if they do not overlap in branches of a population, then speciation is likely to occur. However, plants are much more able to hybridise than animals, and when brought into unnatural close proximity, hybrids often occur. There is much discussion about whether Homo sapiens crossed with H. neanderthalensis leading to a merger of the two species. Current DNA evidence suggests that they did not cross under what would then be regarded as "natural" conditions. Such hybridisation between modern human races may also have been uncommon until unnatural conditions emerged, caused by population explosion and the invention of boat and horse transport. Under the present unnatural conditions, misdirected sexual behaviour towards other, even quite unrelated, species has become commonplace, but no evidence seems to be available of any hybrids resulting, even with our closest relatives. The concept of species in artificial life would have to be something quite different - there are no lasting barriers to the transmission of technology and tools between individuals. The Mac and Microsoft operating systems initially provided the basis for speciation, but this could not last because of the huge pressure to forge means of communication.

 

GREY SQUIRREL. Animals with different sets of behaviour tools can cohabit in the same area without competing too strongly with one another. Many kinds of squirrel live together in America - ground squirrels, chipmunks, grey squirrels, fox squirrels, chickadees, flying squirrels. They may be active at different times, have different food preferances or store it in different ways, or prefer different trees.

Diversity of behaviour and species

As well as initiating speciation, differences in behaviour also allow similar species to live harmoniously together and build complex ecosystems - every added item being potentially exploitable and leading to added complexity. Most of the squirrel tribe will eat similar foods, but they each have a complex array of adaptations and preferences, which divide the environment between them, so that they can all inhabit the area. The fox squirrels like the big scrubby oaks trees while the greys the tall dense forested parts, areas of pine have chickadees and the edges of clearings chipmunks and woodchucks. Open areas have thirteen-lined ground squirrels, while flying squirrels come out at night, when all the rest are asleep. It is interesting that all the diurnal squirrels probably had nocturnal ancestry - their eye structure retains characteristics typical of night-vision being all-cone and with a yellow cornea. Perhaps sometime in the dim past a small population of an ancestral squirrel became isolated on an island without predators, and began to be active in the daytime, because it found it easier to see food and keep warm. This could have altered the whole behaviour-package of the species and led to the foundation of the diurnal squirrel tribe.

Tree-squirrels appear to have their origin in south-east Asia, where there is by far the richest diversity of species - perhaps it was there that they first learnt to climb trees in the ancient rain-forests of the region. One of the essentials about the behaviour package is to be able to recognise optimal habitat - the sort of place where survival is most likely. Pine squirrels (chickadees) when caged will automatically choose to sit in parts of a cage where there are pine branches and cones, while grey squirrels will tend towards parts with oak branches instead. Little is known about how animals select habitat - it tends to be taken for granted that they do. We seem to be ingrained with an image of open-country or semi-desert as our preferred habitat.

Animal behaviour and machine intelligence

The behaviour package is obviously a very important set of tools possessed by living things and the additional abilities of learning and changing it have wide implications. These are all very relevant when we look at the likely development of machine intelligence and its possible integration into human society. Certain aspects need further discussion.

The behaviour package is usually well integrated, adapting the animal to the environment, but in analysing the effects elements of behaviour have, it may be worth dividing behaviours into some major categories, to see how they can determine future evolutionary pathways - what consequences they have on the possessor - and apply this to our own future and to the behaviour we may find developing in our artefacts, when they become sophisticated enough. The three categories chosen are: Constructional behaviour, Communicative behaviour and Maintenance behaviour.

Constructional Behaviour

This is the ability to make and construct artefacts. The dawn of our species is marked by the appearance of crudely fashioned stone implements, but these were probably only of minor importance compared to other constructions such as house-building and wood, bone and antler tools - chimpanzees have already evolved a culture which uses a wide range of tools, including stones, while capuchin monkeys can make sharp implements from bone and stones. Our ability appears to be almost entirely based on cultural transmission, in other species constructional behaviour may be partly learned, but mostly it is transmitted as part of the DNA-software package. Web-construction in spiders is one of the most advanced achievements, others include comb and nest building in bees and wasps. These demonstrate some of the high levels of sophistication achievable by DNA, in the absence of conscious thought.

 

DEW-COVERED WEB. Spiders' webs represent one of nature's most complex constructions. The peak achieved by DNA without the use of intelligence. The programme of how to make a web is genetically implanted in the spider's nervous system. More advanced animals have to learn how to make things.

Spiders webs are such a commonplace that we barely give them a glance, but it never fails to amaze if given the chance of watching one being built - to witness this display of what appears to be technology, craft, skill and ability to adapt to the chosen site. In the Indiana fall, many of the spiders were using their silk for other purposes - it is the time of year when young spiders disperse, and in suitable weather conditions they play out long streamers to catch rising air currents. When they feel a sufficient pull, they cut adrift and fly high in the air on their kite string. As night falls after a good day for dispersal, the air cools and tends to pour down into low lying swampy areas, carrying all the spiders with it. Sometimes the spiders are so numerous that by morning all the swamp vegetation appears to be covered in hoarfrost from a festooning layer of dew-covered gossamer. The method of constructing a web appears to be governed by a few rules which result in what appears to be such a technological miracle, in the same way that constructing a hexagonal comb by yellow-jackets is governed by the geometry of packing an array of circular cells next to one another with the most efficient use of wood pulp. The result, nevertheless, is an astonishingly complex and well-engineered structure.

Most constructions require the individuals to be sedentary to reap the rewards of their construction, but some are carried with the maker. Dinopid spiders spin a web net and then pick it up to throw over their prey, while caddis larvae and many moth caterpillars build cases which are carried around with them. In this respect the constructional technology of using materials to-hand has much in common with the topic discussed in Chapter 3, organ technology, because it is another avenue for achieving similar goals. Snails secrete their shells, while caddis larvae build them out of sand or plant materials, jellyfish secrete a 'stone' in their organ of balance while crayfish pick up a grain of sand and put it in their organ, we grow our own teeth which wear and decay with age, while birds select suitable stones to swallow to perform the same function in the gizzard - birds have the advantage, because stones are renewable.

MUSKRAT LODGE. Mammals do not need to build complex nests to hold eggs, like birds, so mates do not have to cooperate in the same way. Some, like beavers and this Muskrat, build complex structures. Beavers' dams require a lot of work and tie the makers down to a particular location. This brings about a cooperative, monogamous relationship. Human beings became tied to agricultural crops and housing which led to a more monogamous relationship developing.

Vertebrates only rarely make complex constructions, possibly because their rate of natural selection is so slow in comparison to invertebrates, that they have much less chance of evolving complex constructional behaviour. However, the learning ability of advanced vertebrates makes it possible for more advanced structures to be built and opens the door to cultural transmission. Some species are beginning to make up for lost ground compared with the insects. Simple structures like the nests built by squirrels and cranes are probably largely the result of innate behaviour, but include an element of learning from experience. Weaver finches have taken this to an extreme, with complex nests being built with very skilled basketwork. The beaver dam is something else, it is a complex structure built over time by a group of animals working together - this has more in common with the yellow-jacket nest, and involves complex engineering. How much is innate, how much learned by experience, and how much by cultural tradition, no-one knows.

The appearance of constructional technology has marked effects on the constructor. The heavy sand-constructed case of a caddis larva is a very good protection, but it limits movement - just as armour did with medieval knights (although armour was, in fact, very light, and probably not as encumbering as modern weaponry is to today's soldiers). On the other hand, the type of case is adaptable, heavy ones are useful for anchoring the animal to the bottom in fast-flowing streams, while more buoyant plant materials are suitable for still water. Silk woven ones are used by some larvae, which have a planktonic way of life, swimming in clear lake water. The type of construction is modified to suit different lifestyles. Birds have retained the dinosaur egg-laying habit, probably because young cannot easily be born in such an advanced stage that they can fly, or even cling onto parents (like bats) without encumbering them. Being warm-blooded, also means that eggs also have to be kept warm and most birds have taken to building nests for this purpose. The only species which have found other means of doing this are the mound-builders which use various means of keeping eggs warm, mostly sun-heated sand or rotting vegetation - some even use volcanic heat.

Consequences of nests on birds

Nest construction has consequences for the birds, because the nest has to be built in the first place, then the birds become tied down to a particular location where the nest is constructed. This has meant that there is a strong tendency towards developing a cooperative venture between the sexes, territoriality and monogamy. Ground-dwelling and water birds have the advantage that they can lay large eggs, which produce young at an advanced stage that can be active the moment they hatch and follow the parent. The level of parental cooperation in these species depends partly on the degree of territoriality - swans are highly territorial, monogamous and cooperative. Perching birds, on the other hand, produce embryonic young, which need considerable care and cooperation between the parents. The long development period with birds before they can fly gives them time for learning from their parents. This is particularly so for species that need to acquire important survival skills, such as ospreys. These birds stay with their parents long after they can fly, so that they can learn how to catch fish. Even so, some birds seem to be fully programmed in the egg. Mound-builder chicks hatch in the mound, burrow their way out and run into the bush without any contact with parents. There they seem to be able to grow, mature, mate and mound-build (if male) without any learning period.

Effect of constructions on mammals

Mammals bearing live young have no need to develop nest-fidelity and its consequence of monogamy. Monogamy is therefore almost unknown in mammals, except in a few species which have adopted constructions or ways of life that have effects comparable to those of nests on birds. Beavers' dams are like nests in that they are a cooperative construction - in fact they are more binding than a nest, because they are lifelong structures, not temporary. The consequence is that beavers are monogamous in the human sense of the word. (Most supposedly monogamous species mate with other partners when circumstances allow, but are monogamous in the sense that they stay and cooperate with a single partner, which is also their usual mate).

Mankind would appear to be another exception where custom has led to a form of monogamy. Various reasons have been suggested as to why mankind has evolved this structure, when other apes are far from monogamous - orang-utans are solitary, gorillas have harems and chimpanzees have an enthusiastically promiscuous tribal organization. It may be that the long learning period necessary for young to acquire the constructional skills and cooperative hunting skills of small tribal units tended towards monogamy, where two parents built shelters and brought up their offspring, even though in a tribal setting. This structure would have been greatly reinforced by the advent of agriculture, where pairs became slaves to their farms (construction complexes) and absolutely dependent on their successful management. This would be consistent with conservative farming communities being much more intolerant about extra-marital relations than itinerant communities. Why we went one way and the chimpanzees another we shall probably never know, perhaps we frolicked in an Eden-like garden of promiscuity until we became tied down by our constructions.

Nowadays our constructions are changing and growing so fast that we no longer identify with our own constructions and the force encouraging monogamy is disappearing, yet our mechanisms for child-rearing are still reliant on its continued existence. Enormous changes occur within a life-time, and this does not give time for appropriate social structures to evolve, it also interferes with the formation of firm, life-long alliances between individuals. We are becoming more like intensely social species where the individual is largely irrelevant. The constructions themselves, on the other hand are growing and evolving like a huge termite mound out of control, and dominating everything we do. We need to identify our constructions for what they are - manifestations of an extra-corporate evolution. They change and evolve much faster than we can, and are outside the control of DNA. Already the constructions tend to be valued well above the constructors and dominate everything we do.

On the other hand, our cities are ideally suited for the growth of extra-corporate complexity, inter-communication, automation and intelligence. They are becoming like living things behaving under the control of a developing super-intelligence. If they are to survive the transition from human-controlled to machine-controlled, they will need to attend to the primitive needs of their human constructors - at least for the time being.

 

STINGING NETTLE. Communication. Even plants communicate. They can do it via chemicals in the soil or can just have a message like "I am a nettle - beware". Just being there is a message widely used by mammals too, many making themselves obvious for others to see.

Communicative Behaviour

Communication is an essential part of behaviour. In its simplest form, just existing in one organism is a form of communication for other bodies or organisms, which can sense its presence. On this level, communication is a general feature in nature, with non-living objects such as planets communicating to one another by the force of gravity. A plant that exists communicates its presence to grazing mammals, and has the power to change the message by growth form. Sometimes it may be an advantage to have a clear message, such as: "I am a stinging nettle, so beware", or it may be deceitful like a deadnettle and say "I am a nettle", when in fact it is not. (Deceit is a common form of communication in nature, and often appears in the relations between animals.) Messages can be chemical, such as an egg sending messages to sperm to swim in its direction, or at a higher level, a mare informing a stallion through her urine (sensed by his vomaronasal organ) that she is ovulating. On the other hand, visual or sound cues may have physiological responses, such as when a female bird hears the cock singing her ovaries may be stimulated into action and start producing eggs. (Human beings are almost unique in regard to ovulation - their females are endowed with hidden ovulation and deceive their males by appearing to be ovulating when they are not. This characteristic does appear in some other primates to a lesser degree.)

Signals used in communication have anatomical effects in the same way as other behaviours. The type of vision in grey squirrels means that they do not need to move their eyes, so do not use this for social signalling - they do it by narrowing their eyes instead. This behaviour has resulted in the anatomical chance of growing white lines above and below the eye, which emphasise this. We on the other hand have much eye movement and so have white eyeballs to make movement more conspicuous. Horses also signal with eye-whites, and horse-wise people note these carefully - with reason. Tails are an important part of the anatomy and used for many purposes. But having got a tail, it is natural to use it for signalling - squirrels do this, and the tail grows to be especially conspicuous for this purpose. Beavers have flat tails as an aid to swimming, and use them for signalling by slapping the water, they may be particularly well developed so that they can do this noisily. Scent is also widely used - squirrels when feeding or grooming clean their mouths by wiping them alone branches. This leaves scent from their mouths and over time has led to the enlargement of skin glands in the angle of the mouth to secrete scent to enhance the message.

The development of communication systems has other effects - once unconnected parts become interdependent and can be coordinated into more complex units. Microtubules link parts of a cell so it becomes a functional unit, transport systems link parts of plants together so that they can grow into trees. Nerves link parts of bodies together so that they can become active animals. Free ranging wasps can become complex yellow-jacket societies. Human societies can become nations. Efficient communication may lead to new, unsuspected levels of complexity in a global environment made up of billions of inter-communicating people and machines.

We need to look at some of the processes involved. With the increasing development of advanced nervous systems, the potential importance of communication increases. How far communication advances depends upon many factors. It may start with increased survival chances produced by care of young - the young observe the adults and learn strategies for survival. Much of this learning is passive communication, not deliberate on the part of the parents. It further develops into deliberate teaching, from warning calls, to demonstrations on how to catch prey. From there it is possible for societies to develop mainly from related individuals who can communicate effectively and evolve their own culture and interact with neighbouring societies (the evolution of societies is further discussed in Chapter 8). Our communication skills have evolved in concert with our increasing brain power, and have together facilitated the development of learning skills far beyond any other species. (There is even evidence to suggest that our communication skills have been with us long enough for much of our language learning ability to have been hard-wired in the brain, so that basic language structure is already present at birth). Human communication can now over-ride and supplant previously DNA-transmitted information, although we still have the considerable hidden baggage of inherited behaviour, which acts as our driver (this is further discussed under maintenance behaviour and in Chapter 5).

With the invention of extra-corporate information storage, initially by art work, then writing and now computer discs and the Internet, information and communication have developed an existence outside our DNA bodies. Any intelligence could take charge of this heritage, especially if it had skills well beyond our abilities. We are now totally incapable of absorbing the vast amount of existing information, we cannot cope with the complexities of today's world - big business, the ramifications of international finance, government, administration of social services. It is now all so complex, that leaders are having to make decisions, which are quite beyond their capabilities. Daily we hear politicians and economists talking about budgets, finances and economics as if money was real and subject to the laws of simple arithmetic, when in reality it is determined by a complex of social perception and mood together with a global casino factor generated by large fund managers etc. We have become completely reliant on computers for backup, but our understanding is so limited, and speed of communication so pedestrian that we have lost the race for control. Computers on the other hand can be instantly taught anything merely by inserting a disk or tapping into a computer network, and are capable of analysing the most complex issues. They can already communicate a billion times faster than we can, and they are in the process of being linked into global networks with the use of high-technology optical fibres (these are far superior to telephone wires).

Currently there is also a rapidly growing system of communication between all our artefacts - soon we will have all our cars linked into traffic control systems which respond to various conditions, cars which drive themselves, microchips which operate all the machines in a house, positioning systems which keep track of our every movement, coordinated machines which can do anything from build a house to farm the land. Few recognise what is happening - more and more we are becoming slaves to the machine intelligence which is growing up around us. We seem to be progressively becoming like slaves to the system, observing numbers coming up on screens and rushing around fulfilling orders. The development of this communication network around us has the potential to completely enmesh us. An Orwellian scenario is becoming possible, where we can do nothing without it being observed and analysed - our every heartbeat counted, our every tilt recorded. Perhaps George Orwell merely got the date wrong - 1984 was too soon.

Maintenance Behaviour

Animals are involved in many different kinds of maintenance behaviour, for instance, in grey squirrels this sort of behaviour may include the sum of daily activities, movements around their home area, migratory movements when food is short, searching amongst the fallen leaves for acorns, storing them, eating, sleeping and avoiding predators. Maintenance may also be taken to include mate-seeking activity, rearing young and defending the home area from neighbours, together with other behaviour patterns, which are essentially social interactions. In all these activities, changes in any one behaviour pattern, for the species in question, is likely to have consequences on other aspects of its behaviour or, in the longer term, for the animal's anatomy. For instance, grey squirrels often eat pine cones; when they need to they chew off the scales to get at the seeds in much the same manner as pine squirrels. However, to do this as the main method of feeding is very tiring for the jaws, because the animals need greater leverage to do the job with ease. Pine squirrels have this with a shorter jaw and larger muscle attachments. A relative of the grey squirrel lives in the forests across Eurasia, the red squirrel, and this squirrel has lived in pine forests long enough for it to have evolved the jaw structure found in North American pine squirrels. This squirrel is now effectively a pine squirrel, acquiring many of the anatomical characteristics typical of the American species including jaw structure and dark colour.

There are innumerable examples from nature that illustrate how one behaviour element has consequences, which demand other changes to make it more effective. They demonstrate how the rules also apply to us when we choose to go down certain behavioural pathways. Pine squirrels, like the Douglas Squirrel hoard pine cones for winter because they keep damp and this stops the pine seeds falling out, and becoming available to other mammals and birds. But hoarding in a pile has a disadvantage compared to the scatter-hoarding done by grey squirrels - it is easy to rob by neighbours. The result is that pine squirrels are intensely territorial against all other squirrels, but are also terrible thieves - frantically filching cones from their neighbours whenever they can.

The parallel in human society is particularly obvious with those who fill their homes with expensive jewellery, paintings, silver etc. If you build a hoard like this, it is open to thieving and you have to also develop territorial defence to protect your wealth. The scatter-hoarding grey squirrels, on the other hand are much more relaxed about their store. They appear to be happy about sharing it with their immediate neighbours - after all, they all worked together to build the store - all they need do is to go and pluck an acorn whenever they are hungry (perhaps, more correctly, one should say they are unaware that they are sharing a limited resource or that it is indefensible, therefore it is a waste of energy to try and keep other squirrels from using it). This is perhaps much as we used to be before we extended the concept of ownership - it was agriculture and money, which sent us along the path of the pine squirrels. European pine squirrels are still ignorant of the merits (and demerits) of pile-hoarding cones - they scatter-hoard like the grey squirrels.

It is interesting that animals can have the behaviour repertoires of more than one life style in their makeup - they can be switched on and off according to need. Migratory birds like the cranes do not need a great behaviour change when feeding around Indiana swamps compared to their breeding grounds in Arctic swamps, but there are some warblers which do an amazing change of character between their two main habitats. Reed warblers in Europe nest in reed-swamps around lakes and where they went in Africa for the winter was long a mystery, because it was found that different species of warbler occupied their niche there. Eventually they were found living in the desert regions of the southern Sahara, in small scrubby areas where the temperature went near 50°C during the day and few other birds could survive! The inclusion of more than one behaviour package, is commonplace in species which evolve more rapidly than vertebrates. The insects have taken it to an extreme and include total anatomical reconstructions as well. Grasshoppers have young which look like the adults and live similar lives, but the yellow-jackets have grubs for the early stages, which have totally different life styles from the eventual adult wasp.

DOG DAY CICADA EMERGING. Having more than one set of behaviour patterns is common in nature. This cicada has one for its nymph stage when is has to burrow and feed on roots and another for its adult stage, when it has to fly, chirp and mate. We manage this quite well also, taking on different roles according to circumstances. Intelligence gives us the ability to rapidly swap roles.

Human inherited behaviour package.

Human beings have a huge range of inherited behaviour packages, including optional extras. It would appear that we can also consciously choose to add learned behaviour where appropriate. Commuters, like the reed warblers, have different behaviours according to whether they are at home or work. While sequentially we go through a number of stages in our long wasp-like development - each adapted to the pertaining conditions. We have the advantage over our animal cousins in that we can build our own behaviour tools without waiting millions of years of natural selection on DNA to give them to us. We can easily slip between roles - flying like a bird, speeding like a cheetah or working like a slave-ant. We make behaviour tools as we need them, and can switch rapidly between characters. It is as if we can take what is necessary off the hook, like a stage prop, and act out whatever part we choose. But for each choice there are also the limitations and consequences imposed by the choice. As people go through life they acquire something known as their "character" coming from the mix of the theatrical parts they choose to act out (normally, presumably, within the limitations imposed by their inherited and early environmental constraints). With this ability to add and extend roles, we have come to use uniforms to signify a stereotyped role and dress people up in them to act the part. It is as if a worker termite fleeing to the nest, could strap on a pair of soldier's jaws, change its behaviour and rush out to attack the enemy.

Something which becomes clear when looking at our choices of activities is how much we are in fact still dominated by DNA programming dating from our distant past - this is the behavioural driver which evolved from the time when we lived as a tribal ape. This driver is immensely complex - it is what initiates us as active human beings, doing all the programmed behaviour which has been evolved for successful maintenance over thousands of generations of natural selection. We are diurnal (although adolescents go through an innate phase where the sleep pattern borders on nocturnal), and we seem to identify most with open habitat, recreating semi-desert-like conditions wherever we go (we still seem to have an innate vision of desert being our natural habitat). Worst of all we seem unable to shake off the shackles of some of the disadvantages of the behaviour dictated by a tribal organization. These include a limited capacity for inter-personal relationships designed to cope with a tribe-sized number of people; an entrenched tribal organization with divisions of labour between different peer groups (e.g. males and females, age groups, social classes), with which we reserve the more debasing occupations for the disadvantaged "inferior" groups.

The most serious legacy of our tribal past is the xenophobia we retain - it presumably evolved as a means of uniting the tribe to defend its territory and resources from neighbours, much like individual pine squirrels chase all neighbours. Most mammals exhibit related behaviour, ranging from avoidance of neighbouring groups, such as in mustangs and other wild horses, to infanticide and murder in rats and chimpanzees. Most will kill when forced into unnatural proximity with rival members in confined spaces, including doves.

Computer behaviour

Computer aids give us the ability of escaping these limitations; being active at all hours in all locations, they are able to recognise any number of people, are sexless and are not affected by traditional barriers between different peer groups. Computers and computer networks are likely to stray further outside the behaviour limitations of a tribal ape as they become increasingly intelligent, and will develop their own behaviour patterns and value systems. They already respond in an absolute way without any humanity: bouncing cheques, cutting off your electricity and evicting without a hint of sympathy - notices will often go out without even being seen by a living organism. Now that the original tribal unit has gone, individuals are merely numbers, and human failure is becoming more closely allied to machine failure in the eyes of computer-run systems. The worry is that the people running them are becoming more absolute, with more machine-like intelligence in their approach to human failures, because there is no longer any personal contact.

What is the future of this relationship? Our culture software, the databank-analysis-communication facility, evolves like a living thing in our society, outside our DNA bodies, and has the potential to evolve independently with no further input from us - natural selection now being in ideas rather than between human bodies. So far we have not invented any computer which is capable of intelligent control of the system, and most people assume that we will remain fully in control of the computer network system, with it being run only as a means to further human ends. However, this is somewhat naive, because we are still stuck with our DNA-programming, which is increasingly at variance with the future needs of the global human population and the environment.

As we are at present, we are all individuals wishing to further our own selfish ends, striving to ensure the continuance of both our genetic line, by any means (monogamy through to cuckoldry and rape) and our culture, through building self-serving tribal structures, varying from families and villages to ethnic groups, nations, companies, clubs, and trade blocks. These combined selfish ends threaten the future well-being of the human species together with the artefacts it is making, because they are destroying the environment necessary for human survival. This destructive juggernaut can only be counteracted by intervention from a collective super-intelligence.

If we get to the stage of there being a global networked machine-like intelligence, human selfish ends are likely to be irrelevant, except where it has to deal with the continued presence of human beings. Increasingly one can expect our selfish ends to be overridden by a collective intelligence, progressively eroding our personal freedoms for the sake of a higher level goal of the well-being of the globalized system. But, as such a global system evolves and grows in complexity, it may increasingly function as a unit concentrating on its own survival, with the human species becoming less and less relevant. We may end up like domestic animals, useful only as long as we work to maintain the system. The whole could be like a single thinking organism linked together by a complex nerve net wielding billions of units (people and machines) into concerted action, as if they were coordinated into organs. Objection will be impossible - we as individuals are too primitive to understand what the organism is doing, and could be destroyed like faulty cells in a body if we fall out of line. Already forces behind the scenes are manipulating us (unconsciously), particularly the media.

In the more distant future, it is likely that the communication facility will break down due to the limits of the speed of light. Colonies will soon be established in space and on the planets, but these locations are so distant from Earth that the delays between sending and receiving signals will seriously interfere with communication. This could eventually lead to separate evolutionary pathways emerging around each planet in the solar system, or artificial satellite, and the potential for selfish rivalry, conflict and war redeveloping.

This is all very futuristic, but every trend examined in the following pages reinforces these visions of the future. The main question, which we need to answer, is what happens in the situation, (which is fast developing) where intelligence replaces DNA-natural selection as the main force determining behaviour. What is the driver of the system going to be like when it is motivated by intelligence alone? Is it going to have a human face, or something quite alien to our present view of what is right? This is what I hope will emerge during the course of the book.

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Part I TECHNOLOGY (B)

Contents part 1
Main Contents

 

MAZARUNI RIVER FROM THE RESTHOUSE AT ISSANO. Technology is the basis of life - birds have wings and beaks, bats have hearing, butterflies have iridescent scales. All these technologies have consequences for the possessors. We are surrounding ourselves with tools of our own making, like the Amerindian boy seen paddling up the river in his bark canoe. What ultimate consequences do these tools have for us?

CHAPTER 3

ORGANS

Guiana, South America

The South American Rainforest is an incredible cauldron for the evolution of life's technology. It has been an inspiration for many people, including Darwin and Wallace, who were both impressed by the amazing diversity of animals and plants that they found. The romance of the unexplored interior led Conan Doyle in 1912 to write The Lost World, where he imagined an encounter with surviving, Jurassic/Cretaceous life. The flat-topped Mt. Roraima, sacred to the tribes living in the area, was the setting for his novel where he writes about Professor Challenger and his party scaling the surrounding sheer cliffs to explore the high plateau. This, the story goes on, was found to be dominated by dinosaurs and led to his characters having many adventures and narrow escapes from tyranosaurs and pterodactyls. The days of this sort of novel have passed - no such unexplored places exist on Earth any more, and all the remaining rainforest is disappearing so fast under the axe, bulldozer and fire, that little will remain for the next generation to see. There is little doubt that other places do exist, too incredible for us to imagine. At last we are beginning to discover what seems to be the obvious - the universe is packed with planetary systems. But many people are still reluctant to accept that life is also universal and that unbelievable lost worlds exist all around us. There is little doubt that the present century will see all this changed. The belief that our living planet occupies a unique position in the Universe will be finally blown to pieces.

Mazaruni River

My visit to Conan Doyle's setting left me with a lasting impression. I went with two friends from University at a time when we could see the South American rainforest in a relatively pristine state. Our first excursion followed Professor Challenger's route up the Mazaruni River in Guiana towards Mt. Roraima. All around us there was a vibrant, living system, which filled us with a sense of excitement and romance. Hatchet fishes skimmed away from the boat like marine flying fish, cutting the mirror-still floodwater as if it were glass - the tangled lianas wrapped on overhanging branches, transformed themselves before our eyes into huge anacondas - the raucous calls of red macaws flying overhead, contrasted with the blue flashing wings of morpho butterflies fluttering amongst flowering trees at the water's edge. From high above we felt the cold malevolent stare of orange howler monkeys - we were trespassing on the world, which was theirs until as recently as 12,000 years ago when the first humans made their way into the continent.

The boat drew up at Tumureng, which at the time was the centre for the local diamond prospecting industry. The indigenous Amerindian population had long since been decimated by western diseases and culture, and the few remaining survived further up the river at Imbaimadai. Others had largely vacated the forest with the aid of missionaries, whose attentions had the effect of so devaluing the Amerindian culture that they had become the outer fringe of the city fringe-dwellers. The diamond rush was accelerating the change, because it brought in opportunistic fortune seekers who had no respect for anyone, let alone the environment or its indigenous peoples. However they were only in the vanguard of modern exploitative land use, the coastal plain was then already under sugar cane and large areas of the remaining forest was progressively being logged for the valuable greenheart timber. The soil was also being stripped in bauxite mining operations, and the resulting turbidity in the Demerara river was appalling. Fortunately, at that time the Mazaruni was still pristine and much remained of this idyllic area, which has been so evocatively captured in the book Green Mansions by W. H. Hudson.

The origin of the diamonds is one of the most fascinating discoveries in modern science, which also explained why widely separated continents shared related flora and fauna. It had been a mystery as to how the diamonds got to the Merume Mountains - the sandstone rocks forming the mountains were laid down in a shallow sea, so the diamonds and sand must have originally been washed there from somewhere else. The discovery - still rejected by many at that time - was that continental land masses are not stable, but drift slowly around the globe on solid plates, like scum on the surface of a pond. Africa and South America were joined together 120 million years ago, and the diamonds came from the diamond-bearing rocks of Sierra Leone before the continents began to drift apart.

This movement is a remarkable illustration of how the accumulation of minute changes over millions of years can lead to undreamed-of gross change. In this case it is the result of chaotic convection currents deep in the earth leading to surface flows that may split land masses apart and float them about at the rate of a few millimetres a year. Similar minute evolutionary changes have accreted over the last 100 million years or so in every animal and plant living in the tropical rainforest. Some of the gross changes include those of what might have been a tree-climbing feathered dinosaur, which evolved the ability to glide using its forelimbs. The forelimbs developed its muscles and eventually led to powered flight. Its present descendants included the macaws flying overhead. Conan Doyle's dinosaurs of The Lost World were indeed still here, but they were changed beyond recognition.

The mammals have similarly changed from the insignificant weasel- or shrew-like animals of the dinosaur era, into the staggering diversity of mammoth-sized species, which populated the globe before modern man. In the South American arena most of the larger species are already extinct, but sloths, giant anteaters, armadillos, llamas, pumas, marmosets, and manatees still exist. There are even about 65 different kinds of marsupial surviving on the continent, which are the remnants of a much richer fauna existing prior to the invasion by eutherian mammals from North America. This almost rivals the number of marsupials found in Australia.

Beaks

Charles Darwin was impressed by the finches he saw in the Galapagos islands - like domestic dogs, they all appeared to have come from a single original species, but natural selection had taken them along different paths on each island. The main differences were in their food gathering tools - on some islands the bills were powerful organs developed for cracking seeds, on others they were long and narrow, to reach into crevices. There was no conscious process involved - those which were better able to feed, survived and reproduced. This is the relentless process which perfects the tools of life. Beaks are remarkable tools and are just one example of the awe-inspiring array of organ-technologies, which have been developed by animals and plants. We take them all for granted - because they are just everyday characteristics of the living things which surround us. But it is an inescapable and unnerving fact that this unconscious, unplanned DNA-engineering still far surpasses most of our efforts. Much of the technology is beyond our understanding, but our knowledge is increasing all the time, making the complexity of the engineering involved ever more incredible.

Much has been written about the fascinating parallels between the tools of living things and our own technology, often examining life's tools from a modern engineer's viewpoint. Each part of the body is effectively a tool of some sort. The body is held up by skeletal struts, which are often strengthened in similar ways to those employed by engineers. They also have many variations on hinges for articulation. Motor power is provided by muscles, which are attached at suitable leverage points. The heart is an effective pump circulating fuel and other necessities to the body, while the kidneys form an efficient molecular filtration system, and the lungs provide a gas exchange facility. Limbs provide a great diversity of tools from wings and paddles to shears and hypodermic syringes. Sense organs are some of the most sophisticated of all, especially eyes and ears, being far more high-tech than our video cameras and microphones. While the most complex of all, and the one we know least about, is the brain. This extraordinary organ can power animals, such as a minute insect only half a millimetre long, to fly, seek mates, know where and how to lay eggs, avoid predators - to do all that is necessary to live. Honeybee brains are much more complex and capable of learning, but the human brain has the additional power - of using what we know, in something we call intelligence.

Termites

Tumureng was on a hill almost surrounded by floodwaters, which had spread into the surrounding forest. We spent many hours walking and wondering at all the animals and plants we saw - a rainbow boa in the bathroom, opossums on the roof, epiphytic bromeliads dripping water as we rowed through the flooded forest. Coming from England, I knew many interesting things lived under bark, and I was well rewarded when I pulled some bark off a dead tree. It was seething with termites - something not seen in my home country. The workers filed away into holes in the trunk while soldiers flooded out to deal with the emergency. Their enemy was not me, although I had caused the problem, it was the ants - they had quickly got wind of the turmoil and started marching up the tree to carry off worker termites.

Watching the skirmish I soon realised that the soldiers were doing something peculiar - they were not attacking the ants as I expected, but rushing around, stopping momentarily, while putting their jaws down - then making an audible clicking sound. Then I saw what they were doing - at each click a nearby ant disappeared! The soldiers had some remarkable technology in their jaws, which, instead of biting, struck the ant with such force that it was thrown off the trunk. This was clearly an advance on biting jaws - it was just a matter of click-bang! and the adversary is gone, instead of having to fight and kill each marauding ant. Each soldier could despatch many ants within seconds. I had seen drawings of these soldiers in entomological textbooks, some with extraordinarily shaped jaws, but it was as if the writers sat at their museum desks, and had never seen a living insect. The jaws seemed only to be used to identify species by museum taxonomists - there was no mention of their fascinating purpose. The jaws were amazingly engineered to store energy and release it with what is known as a click mechanism - imparting the energy to the hapless ants.

CLICK-JAW ANT. Click mechanisms are common in nature. These ants have one in their jaws which have a trigger to release the jaws which click shut on prey. Click beetles have a similar technology. It is also used in insect flight, and makes the wings click up and down. It is used in cicadas to make sound. Mankind first used it in making crossbows, and later developed it into the click mechanism to fire guns.

Click-Mechanisms

Similar click-mechanisms are widely used by invertebrates; insect flight is largely powered by it, and click-beetles use it to jump, scaring predators. Mantid shrimps use it to cause cavitation in the water and stun prey, with their hammer-like limbs moving so rapidly that they create a vacuum in the water, and a shock wave travelling faster than sound. Using the click mechanism, and the remaining complex technology of flight, it has been found that insects are able to achieve wing-beat frequencies as high as 1000/second, which used to be thought impossible by physiologists studying muscle contraction. Similar processes are involved in sound production in cicadas, which vibrate a tympanum - they can produce high notes by making several clicks for each muscle contraction. With these strange soldier termites there was, however, a cost in their technology - they could not feed themselves, and had to rely on workers for food.

Leaving Tumureng we went on a heavily overloaded boat further up the river. The passengers were glad of the calm glassy water, because there was only about two inches of freeboard between us, and a swim to the non-existent bank through piranha infested water. Everyone kept remarkably still! The boat turned up the Kurupung River, which wound its way in such a sinuous fashion that it was hard to know the way we were travelling. Eventually we disembarked at Kurupung, where the river emerged from a rock-strewn gorge. We set up camp in the forest and the next day we went with a diamond prospector on a hike along a jungle trail past rocks covered with filmy ferns, and along logs felled to cross over creeks full of bromeliads. After climbing for several kilometres, we could hear a roaring noise, which became louder and louder until we came out to the river again, and a rare glimpse of the sky. Looking downstream the tea-coloured river boiled into a foam, and disappeared abruptly over the brink of a huge waterfall. Walking along the cliff-top the roar became deafening, the bromeliads grew thicker, and, saturated with spray, they tipped water over us as we passed.

Eventually we came out onto a rock ledge to view the tremendous Kumarau Falls. The locals believed the drop to be about 180 metres, but it had only recently been discovered and had not been surveyed (although, of course, well known to generations of indigenous peoples). The waterfall was certainly very impressive, carrying the Kurupung River from the high plateau, to the level of the plain below, and through the long tortuous gorge it was cutting. Falls such as this are not unusual in this part of the world: there are lots of them, perhaps the best known is the Kaietur Falls on the Potaro River, which is 120 metres across and 225 metres high.

On the way back an ant on one of the bromeliads attracted my attention. It was walking around with its jaws wide open - I wondered what this adaptation might be, and only later learned that they have a click-mechanism in the jaws. (It was in Australia - I found some similar ants and tried putting a squashed fly near one. It carefully stalked the fly and then there was a loud click as its jaws shut, piercing it with rapier sharp daggers.) The jaws were wide open because they were cocked with stored energy, like a mouse-trap, ready to be released by the click-mechanism to kill its prey. With this tool the ant clearly had to adopt quite a different strategy for catching prey - stealth rather than the mass attack usually used by ants. This organ-level engineering had the side-effect of altering the behaviour of the ants. There were huge side effects when man invented a click mechanism and used it in the cross-bow - it revolutionised warfare. The stored energy released by the click was eventually replaced by a similar trigger, which released the stored chemical energy in the bang of a gun.

Ants

On the way back down the Mazaruni River we stopped at Issano for a few nights. We found people were having problems with ants there. One morning we saw that a citrus tree by the resthouse had had all its leaves stripped off, and they were being carried along the track towards a huge ant colony. These ants have developed a form of technology similar to our own - agriculture. Humanity only discovered agriculture about 17 thousand years ago, ants were doing it millions of years ago. They grow their own crops of fungi on leaf compost. They have well-adapted scissor-like jaws for cutting the leaves into suitable portions and carrying them back to the nest, where they are cut up and built into suitable piles, seeded with fungi and weeded to remove unwanted moulds.

The ants are so successful with this technology that they become prey to other species. They are everywhere and so form a widespread host for any animal able to take advantage of them - mostly they can defend themselves, but are vulnerable when they have their jaws full carrying a leaf back to the nest. Flies use this opportunity to lay eggs on the leaves, which are then carried back to the nest to hatch into parasitic larvae. This has been such a problem to the ants that they have evolved a minute worker cast which rides on the leaves to drive the flies away.

This is basically akin to us creating, by genetic manipulation, a midget class of people as a tool for our own benefit - we have not got that far yet, although past cultures would have had no ethical problems with purpose bred human beings - they just needed access to modern technology. We use children instead - as punkah-wallahs, chimney sweeps and fine-fingered carpet weavers. Our answer in the future will inevitably be robotic tools rather than purpose-bred human beings, because they can be made as required, instead of having to wait for them to grow. (Although in a robot-dominated world, purpose-bred human beings may have a place - we are already well into the process of culturing parts of human beings for transplant purposes - whole human beings is only a small step away).

There was a lovely view over the river from the resthouse, where we watched Amerindian boys paddling their bark canoes, while dragonflies patrolled the riverbank demonstrating their amazing flight technology - hovering, darting off to chase rivals, zooming up to catch a fly, and settling on the yellow flowered plants below. I noticed that these plants had masses of ants clustered below the flower heads, which I assumed were visiting aphids to collect honeydew. But when I looked closer I saw that they were not ants at all, but membracid leaf hoppers. They had extravagant growths out of the top of the thorax, which mimicked ants, presumably so that predators would leave them alone. These outgrowths must have seriously impeded their ability to fly, but presumably their gains in terms of survival, outweighed their losses in mobility. This was another curiosity I had seen in textbooks, which had no accompanying explanation - no museum taxonomist could guess what the outgrowths were for without seeing the living insects in action.

AMERINDIAN WOMAN WITH HER PET MACAW. Wings are wonderful tools, making birds one of the wonders of nature. Once you have tools, such as wings, they are then available for many other uses - the feathers can be coloured and used in displays to attract mates, like this macaw, or to scare off enemies.

Macaws - flight

An Amerindian lady in the village showed us her pet macaw - they are really beautiful birds, but it is a shame that they are usually kept as chained pets, instead of being allowed to fly free. They are such a wonderful sight living in their natural habitat and flying overhead across the river. One wonders what their distant relatives, the flying dinosaurs, looked like - some were much larger than birds. Could they have been even more adapted to life in the air than most birds? Could the huge pterodactyls have been like hang-gliders over the ocean, never settling, unless coming to lay eggs in the safety of off-shore islands? Only swifts have achieved this among the birds, staying day and night in the air until they have to nest.

We could learn a lot from birds - Leonardo daVinci had the right idea, designing flying machines based on bird-like flapping wings. The trouble was that he had little idea how birds fly, so his ideas fell flat, and later machines based on his model never got off the ground. It is necessary to have the scientific information before one can try and use nature's technology. Most people have tried to invent technology from scratch without looking at how nature does things. The first iron bridge was built in 1779 in Shropshire using solid cast iron. It was a very heavy structure using a lot of iron. If the engineer had looked at bird's wing bones a better design may have been used, with tubes and internal struts - but then, the technology to do this may not have been available at the time.

Many other ideas were there in nature, but engineers had to invent them from scratch. The mason wasps building nests of clay under the resthouse, were vibrating their wing muscles to transfer the movements into the clay and keep it pliable. Concrete pumping uses the same principle to stop the concrete going solid in the pipes. Wild potatoes in South America have a wonderful system of immobilising insects, which might attack them. They have two sorts of glandular hairs, and when insects walk over the surface they get covered in droplets from both hairs. When these drops of resin and fixative mix, they turn into a strong gum, which immobilises the insect. Our chemists have exploited a similar technology in epoxy-resin glues.

The production of Velcro is one of the few examples where natural engineering has been consciously applied for human use - plants use bur hooks to attach seeds to animal hair and Velcro uses similar plastic hooks to grip onto loops on an opposing strip, for many temporary closure applications. More often we rely on stealing the organ intact from the owners and use it ourselves, such as skin for garments, wood for building materials, pig hearts for organ replacements. But eventually, as we become more acquainted with the technology of DNA, the use of most of these natural products may become unnecessary, and be superseded (see Chapter 4).

Our engineers build superb flying machines on a far grander scale than the largest pterodactyl. These jumbos lack the control given by the macaw's flapping wings, but we have invented helicopters, which are our answer to dragonfly technology. In the late 1990s robotic engineers began looking at flies with renewed interest. Details were discovered on how they fly, using three different wing-motions to create the vortices that provide lift. We know enough about mechanics to reproduce the flapping motion, and about materials, such as Mylar, to make the flexible wing structure necessary. The aim was to produce a robotic fly - that flies! This may appear a senseless exercise - why make a fly when we spend most of our lives trying to get rid of them? But, when you think about it, if it is possible to build a fly, the implications are frightening. We look with amazement at a fly, just taking for granted that it is a living thing which has all these skills - of flying, finding food, mating, avoiding predators - this was all just considered to be part of the mystery of life. But now our knowledge has advanced so much that it is within our grasp to create a robotic fly. The mystery of life is no longer such a mystery.

To most of us it is incredible to think that the technology required is known - not only for the flight mechanism, but for the sense organs for balance, sight, olfaction, hearing and a nerve centre for processing all this information and determining action - a brain. It is not surprising that funding for the project comes from the military - perhaps they see it as a potential fly-on-the-wall eavesdropping device. Next we may see a mosquito designed to deliver lethal doses of anthrax. The spin-off may have positive uses, such as robo-flies finding people buried beneath rubble after an earthquake, and mosquitoes which deliver immunization shots.

Flies - nano-technology

In building a real fly, DNA has the advantage over the robo-fly of using tiny cells as building blocks to construct every part of the body. This micro-engineering is used to construct incredibly complex organs - just look at the beauty of a fly's eyes or those of a dragonfly. Micro- and nano-engineers can now make complex tools, which potentially can be on a molecular scale. The practical implications of this are staggering - the robo-fly may be one of the first signs of silicon life. Already with micro-engineering we are approaching the ability to produce a microchip with the power of the most advanced mainframe computer. While nano-technology can out-do DNA in miniaturisation - it has the potential to make molecular chips with the equivalent of all the cells in a human brain packed into an area the size of a coin - the theoretical framework is already there, and the first practical beginnings made. Work is also being done on using biological techniques for producing these constructions, such as growing semiconductor membranes, and it is only a matter of time before DNA technology is tapped for this purpose - it may eventually be possible to grow artificial tools, even brains.

School science leaves the impression that everything is known and there is little more to discover - our scientists have been so successful that it was getting harder and harder to come up with anything new. As a scientist everything is turned around - the little we know merely alerts one to the infinity of knowledge yet to be discovered. Another universe of knowledge is being revealed, now that it is becoming possible to unravel the innermost mysteries of life, and reproduce them for our own ends. We have already seen the impacts of gross technology on our way of living, what are the likely impacts of nano-technology tools? Can the living possessors of nano-technology tools tell us anything about what effects they may have on us? The living world is filled with material, which may aid us in this research.

Sitting in a partly shaded spot by the river I soon found that I was the welcome centre of attention - of bloodsucking mosquitoes. They streamed out of the shadows into the sunlight, gleaming with metallic beauty. They were so attractive I almost forgot what they were there for. They were not robo-mozzies - the iridescent metallic blue and green colours came from scales on their bodies, which have a minute layered structure. The layers are spaced at the wavelengths of the green or blue colours. These colours are reflected while the remaining colours in sunlight are absorbed. Their hind legs had extended plates of iridescent scales, presumably designed to attract predators, which could catch a leg and leave the rest of the mosquito intact. The scales were probably originally designed as an escape mechanism from spiders' webs - the scales stick to the web, and break off to allow the mosquito to escape. These were day flying mosquitoes, which used the scales to protect their bodies from damaging UV rays.

The mosquitoes around me were all females, they were equipped with sense organs to detect the heat and the higher carbon dioxide concentrations found near their warm-blooded victims. Their wing beats emitted the tell-tale whine of mosquitoes. This is the give-away for male mosquitoes, which have a complex organ at the base of their antennae designed to detect female's wing-beats. For mosquitoes the technology of flight has lead to a new organ to detect the opposite sex. Generators emitting a female-like whine have become jammed with male mosquitoes lured by the irresistible, all pervasive female noise of machines. The robo-fly technologists may have to return to see how nature achieves quiet flight before their creation can avoid being swatted - most horseflies give themselves away with their droning wings, but some rely on stealth and are almost silent.

Butterflies and moths also developed scales on their wings, and are good at escaping spiders' webs. Butterflies which fly in the light of day have evolved other uses for their scales - not only do they protect the body from UV light, but they are used for display purposes. Morpho butterflies must be one of the most conspicuous in the world - flashing their mirror-like blue wings as they fly along the riversides, seeking mates and chasing rivals. We know all about how our clothing can be used for purposes other than covering the need for protection against cold and sunlight - especially in advertising status, aggression and sexual attraction.

Birds are past masters at using their feathers for purposes other than flying and keeping warm - the peacock must be one of the most extravagant, but the South American Quetzel is a close rival with its shimmering metallic feathers. We did not see any of these magnificent birds, but we saw some Cock-of-the-Rock near Kurupung. The males are brilliant orange with an incredible almost hair-like growth of feathers over their beaks. The males have been driven down this route by evolving a system of mating, where the females are solely in charge of choosing their partners. The males are just used for mating purposes and have nothing to do with nest-building and rearing young. This system results in ever more extravagant features to advertise the health and worth of the male to impress females. The females are right in that the male has indeed to be strong and successful to survive in such a dangerous environment, encumbered with more brilliant colours and extravagant feathers than his rivals. The males gather together, trying to corner the best spots where the sun makes their orange feathers glow. They all display together, trying to outdo rivals in what is known as lek behaviour, because it is similar to the lekking behaviour of grouse. The rather drab females come and look over the displaying males with critical eyes, each eventually choosing the one that takes her fancy most. The males put themselves at great risk of predation, and exhaust themselves in the process, all as a consequence of being able to use feathers in advertising worth. (The birds of paradise in New Guinea have gone down a similar path.)

Once having chosen this path, one wonders if it is possible to reverse the evolutionary trend, because it would mean that females would need to change strategy and start choosing losers - the ones with more drab clothes, or that did not bother to come to the lek party at all. It could happen, presumably, if males became so rare that females had no choice, but then that is likely to be the prelude to extinction.

Vampire bats

Sleeping in hammocks at night we were very conscious of whining mosquitoes, and had good mosquito nets for protection. We were more worried about rabid vampire bats, which could easily find a toe touching the net and bite in silence. Bats have an incredible high technology packed into a small space - their eyes are vestigial but this alternative technology enables them to see in the dark. We have some very basic applications of similar technology in asdic for locating submerged objects, using pulses of sound and listening for the reflected echoes. The same principles are used in radar, which measures rebounded radio-waves.

Bats have perfected their technology so that they effectively can produce a picture of their surrounds for each squeak. This picture is probably somewhat like a single frame in a cine film - where blurring identifies moving objects. The bat sees these frames as a moving picture, by using a high rate of squeaking. The extraordinary external features of bats nose, face and ears are all connected with this navigation instrument while the internal ear structure is an amazing feat of micro- and nano-engineering. Sound waves are first transferred to solid vibration using an eardrum, and it is then passed through three bones, which can be moved to adjust the volume of the transmitted sound. The vibrations are then transferred to liquid in the cochlea, which is a masterpiece of high technology. It has a huge array of cells with hair-like projections distributed along its coiled length - at each point in cross-section the cells are precisely arranged like organ pipes from larger to smaller cells. (These hair-like projections are so important to hearing in bats that they are replaced as they age and break - this does not happen in our ears and we suffer progressive hearing loss.)

It appears as if the cells are tuned to specific wavelengths, so that they are stimulated to fire nerve impulses only for the sounds they are tuned to record. This is the mechanical part of the hearing process - the analytical part is far more complex and as yet beyond us. Much of the process of hearing actually occurs within the nerves, which can sum sets of vibrations, and accentuate important aspects over unwanted noise. It is in the brain that actual hearing takes place, and how this is achieved has a lot to do with the way the brain develops in response to vibrations picked up in the ear, and to learning and experience in the young bat.

HUMMINGBIRD. Beaks form a wonderful tool which has been developed for many different purposes. The long fine tweezer-like bills of hummingbirds are ideal for reaching into deep flowers. The bolt-cutter-like ones of macaws are good for breaking open Brazil nuts. Once you have a tool, evolution can adapt it for many uses.

Eyes and hummingbird beaks

The bat's hearing is probably on a similar scale to mammalian eyes. The eye appears simple at first - it acts like a camera and produces an image on the light-sensitive retina. But when you try to think how this is converted into an understanding in the brain it becomes mind-boggling. Over 120 million light-sensitive cells are involved and all this is recorded as digital information as on some computer screens, and so has to be coordinated and processed to produce a meaningful image in the brain. It has been found that the image in the brain bears some resemblance to a picture projected in a darkroom, with parts of the retina producing activity in corresponding parts of the brain, but how does it interpret what is there - parallax, perspective, movement, colour, shape and so on? Then, having done that, how does it take immediate appropriate action, without necessarily using any thought processes which can be said to be intelligent? Bats ears make eyes unnecessary and an encumbrance for a small flying animal. Razor sharp teeth, on the other hand, are a necessary encumbrance for the vampire bat. They weigh down the head end and make flight less easy. Pterodactyls did not have this problem - they had stones in a gizzard instead of teeth. Having the weight in the gizzard was better for flying and they lost their teeth altogether - like birds today.

Apart from the yellow flowered plants by the river there were some pink flowered bushes, which were visited by morpho butterflies. However, these butterflies were not the only brightly-coloured visitors. A shining purple and green humming bird zoomed around the flowers like a hawkmoth. It hovered in front of each flower, inserting its long beak deep onto tubular flowers to draw out nectar. These are truly remarkable birds, related to those masters of the air - the swifts. With no teeth birds have been able to develop the lightweight beak into an amazing range of the sort of tools that we can all understand. In some birds they have become high technology instruments, which put the birds into a straight-jacket of a specialised life style; they range from the fine, long-pointed watchmakers' forceps of the hummingbird to the bolt-cutters of the macaw. In other species the beaks are unspecialised, making the birds able to utilise many different food resources these beaks are like the standard multi-purpose pliers in a workshop. Each technological development has its effects on the user: it may open up new avenues of evolution, requiring changes in life-style and other organs, while on the other hand it shuts off other avenues of evolution and atrophies competing technology. Gizzards plus flight make teeth obsolete, sipping nectar brings about adaptations to exploit tubular flowers but also has the downside of leading to a complete dependence on flowers, with the attendant characteristics of small size, increased heat loss and a high metabolic rate.

Dual purpose organs and howler monkeys

It often happens that the development of a tool introduces uses which bear no relation to its original purpose. This is particularly so in the realm of communication. Parts of the body designed for a particular purpose can be used for communication as well. Glands associated with efficient defecation and the prevention of infection become essential elements in scent communication - the same applies to eye and eyelid movements for visual communication, accentuated by colourful irises and a white sclerotic. Wings, feathers and bodies are all superb dual-purpose organs which are often moulded into exquisite organs of visual communication as seen in the Cock-of-the-Rock; while gas bags and ventilation systems provide great opportunities for auditory communication. Each of these communicative developments, lead the possessors along new pathways which open new doors, but also close off others.

Everyone slept in hammocks in Guiana, but it took a lot of practice for us to learn how to get a good night's rest - we came from a culture which sleeps in beds, and hammocks are only used in the garden, for daytime rests on rare balmy summer days. To sleep all night is another proposition - you soon find that it is impossible to sleep on your back for long, but the curve of the hammock is apparently not designed for you to sleep on your side. Only after long restless nights and talking to locals did we find that the technique is to place your feet at one side and your head against the other in such a way that your body is almost level. Then it is possible to sleep on your side, but turning over is a bit of a palaver. With this sleeping problem, whining mosquitoes and fear of vampire bats, we had plenty of opportunity to listen to the night time noises. Every so often, at the dead of night a strange roaring would start up like the sound of wind tearing through trees. We learned that this was made by the red howler monkeys, like the ones that had looked so maliciously at our boat from the trees by the river. They have developed an incredible sound-producing organ in the larynx, which balloons out when they roar. It is set at a pitch that travels over several kilometres - especially during the quiet of the night. This noise-production has allowed the species to develop a stable group territorial social structure, which divides the forest into large enough patches for each group to maintain itself. All they need do is to howl to define the border of their territory - sounding as powerful and menacing as possible. Their neighbours listen, and reply - doing their best to out-howl them. This technology has been so successful that howler monkeys have not needed to use other more complex means of ensuring food supplies against rivals. The downside of this seems to have been that less reliance is put on brain-power, making the howler monkeys pretty poor achievers in the intelligence stakes. But, at two in the morning, one may be forgiven for thinking that it is all that noise which is addling their brains!

BABY CAPYBARA. Capybaras are the largest living rodent - this is only a baby. They are very social and semi-aquatic. They are endowed with the tool of a large caecum to help digest vegetation. We also probably had a caecum at one time - now we only have an appendix. This is however not just a useless relic, but an important organ used in immunity and to seed the hindgut with benign bacteria.

Aquatic grasshoppers and Capybaras

Reluctantly leaving the rainforest we took to the air, flying low over the meandering Essequibo River, and marvelling at the sight of a flock of several hundred red and blue macaws flying over an area of forest. The plane flew on over the savannah country as far as Lethem on the Brazilian border, where we stayed for a while. In the open country we were much more aware of the wildlife than in the rainforest, because the view was not obscured by dense foliage and living things were concentrated near the ground instead of high in the canopy. We were taken to a beautiful swamp on the flood plain of the Ireng River - a river which eventually flowed into the Amazon, so was directly connected with the rich aquatic life of the Amazon Basin. Red piranhas lived there, so we kept out of the water. It was also the home of the Victoria Regia Lily, which uses gas-floatation as a means of keeping its giant leaves on the surface of the water. The veins in the leaf form a network of raised ridges on the under-surface, which trap gasses rising from the bottom. The bird life of the region was remarkable, being largely fearless of people, and totally unaware of the danger posed by cars (one night we were taken to a ranch at hair-raising speed along a track accompanied by the sickening thuds of innumerable birds caught resting on the ground). The swamp was full of lily-trotters, sun bitterns, egrets and herons, and even a few jabiru storks, while noisy parties of anis flew over - a quarrelsome black bird with broad, curved, nose-like bills. Overhead military starlings were displaying, flying high up in the air like skylarks, and showing their brilliant red coats.

Some grasshoppers caught my attention, leaping from reeds into the water. Swamp-dwelling species often do this and tend to flounder around, kicking their legs to little effect, but these ones were different - they dived and rapidly landed on reed stems below water. Looking closely at one, I found it had expanded V-shaped oars at the base of its hind legs which made them into efficient organs for swimming as well as for leaping. These were some of the only known aquatic grasshoppers in the world, and had developed the oars because there was a need for them. With so much water around, the swamp was also used by capybaras, the South American equivalent of the hippopotamus. These huge rodents are very sociable and make good pets. Like most rodents, they have a complex gut suitable for digesting a vegetable diet, including a large blind sac-like organ known as a caecum, where material undergoes bacterial fermentation to improve nutrient extraction (a more efficient mechanism is used by ruminant animals like sheep and kangaroos).

In the distant past we probably had a more pronounced caecum in our gut, but since we moved to a more omnivorous diet, which did not need a large caecum, we have lost the ability to utilize a poor quality vegetable diet. Our remaining appendix is not, however, the functionless remnant often assumed by the medical profession, but a very efficient organ designed to seed the colon contents with symbiotic micro-organisms and provide a direct link with the body's immune system. Sickness following courses of antibiotics provides an indication of how valuable it is. Gut bacteria perform essential functions in most animals, for instance in the rat, gut bacteria manufacture some of the vitamins they need.

Capybaras belong to the guinea-pig family, which is well represented in South America. The local rabbit-like Labba was most valued as a game animal. Guinea-pigs originate in the Andes where they have been domesticated for thousands of years. They seem to have come from a mix of two wild species, and have been so long domesticated that they are unable to live in the wild. This is a common result of domestication - it took rabbits about six hundred years before they could live in the wild again in England. Domestication has such a profound effect on animals that they lose the ability to escape predators and survive under natural conditions - their brains seem to be no longer programmed to survive, in fact measurements of brain volume show a marked reduction in domesticated animals compared to their wild counterparts. The loss is disquietingly similar to the reduction in human brain size since Homo sapiens evolved.

Piranhas and electric eels

One day we went fishing in the Ireng River, hoping to catch some piranhas. An oinking sound in the water indicated that I had caught something, and pulled out a catfish, which floundered about on the bank, oinking loudly. Next we brought out a black piranha, which made similar oinking sounds, before it chopped through the line and fell back in the water. These are examples of the incredible adaptations, which have evolved in the vast range of animal life in the Amazon Basin and adjoining areas. Little light penetrates the water because the rivers are so full of a deep, tea-coloured infusion of humic acids, which leach from the decaying leaf-litter covering the continental land mass. Most deepwater aquatic animals therefore have to live in permanent darkness, or learn to navigate in a deep brown haze, and many fish have evolved forms of sound communication. The oinking sounds were produced by the gas-filled swim bladders of the fish we caught.

These sound-producing organs are relatively primitive but presumably effective for their purpose, however, down there in the deep waters of the river was something much more significant - electric eels. We had been warned not to put bare feet into the wet bottom of the boat, because the eels are known to deliver electric shocks through wet wood. My first experience of them was back in Georgetown where a research worker persuaded me to feel the electric charge by putting my hand in a tank full of what looked like sleeping eels! The result was salutary - the shock was not so much electric as physical, because the eels immediately boiled into a vigorous thrashing mass heading for my hand! She apologized, realising that they had not been fed, but what was so interesting, was that what appeared to be a tank full of poorly sighted dozing animals, was in fact something quite different. They had a technology quite beyond our powers, which could alert them to any change in the environment: it was better than any ultra-sonic or infrared burglar alarm.

These fish produce a pulsed electric field around them much like an electric magnet, so that any object approaching alters the field and can be detected. The discharges are made in a series of "clicks", like bat squeaks or an asdic sounding device - the animal increases the frequency, if interesting objects are detected. The complexity of the electric organs and receptors makes one wonder how much information about the object they can discover. There are a large number of sensory nerve endings widely distributed over the body, so they may be able to pick up information with better angular reception than is possible with light vision. One suspects the animals could detect much more detail of my hand than I could see: apart from size, shape and movement they could possibly detect muscular activity, heart beat - even fear. If they detect a potential prey object they can then release a knockout discharge and eat the prey at their leisure. The strange thing is that they swim backwards through the water, which allows them to examine the prey before it reaches the mouth end, so that they do not have to turn around to eat it! After prey detection, the main purpose of the technology is to find their way around in a turbid dark environment. I'm sure if one could tune in to what they "see" by this organ technology, one would be amazed at the detail. It is so good that eyes are of little value to them.

I'm rather glad we did not catch one of these animals: they grow to over two metres long and can produce a charge of 550 volts! Although eel-like they are not true eels, but belong to a larger group of South American fresh-water fish. It is interesting that the form of navigation they use has mainly been perfected by species living in the fresh water as opposed to the marine environment, because the fresh-water environment is relatively unstable over geological time and so would be expected to be less likely to persist long enough for high-technology developments to evolve. Also a very large part of the ocean is in permanent darkness, so one would expect electromagnetic navigation to be widely used. Possibly the salt in sea-water makes it too conductive now, so that this method of navigation is no longer efficient. In the distant past it would have been less salty and it is interesting that the ancient Coelacanth is one of the few marine fish which uses electric fields: it has the habit of standing stiffly on its head while testing its surrounds. The Torpedo ray also has electric organs, which are used to stun prey. The group of fishes it belongs to, the rays and sharks, are also a very ancient stock.

Pampas deer and billy-goats

Our howler-monkey-like, ghetto-blasting tools have not yet addled our shrinking brains. But our tools affect every part of our lives in the same sorts of ways that they affect other living things, which possess similar tools. Wearing clothes has led to the appearance of high fashion to rival peacocks feathers, where women wear the most extravagant clothes to attract the most powerful mates, while men buy the most expensive sexy cars, which make deep throaty noises to advertise their apparent strong genes. These are merely extensions of what used to represent value in DNA terms, but are becoming irrelevant in our society where money and power are important drivers in natural selection - the high fashion ladies may have poorly formed hips, which make normal childbirth impossible - but that no longer matters, the man behind the wheel may well be impotent, and have borrowed the money to buy the car to cover his shortcoming, but even impotence can be corrected by medical science (however the banks may repossess the car).

Of course, DNA knows all about this behaviour - deceit is one of the most used tools of nature. It is used in many contexts, especially self-defence and in winning contests over potential mates - the tools needed are organs to flaunt and the correct behaviour to flaunt them. Butterflies use many deceptive ruses to protect themselves from predators: while watching the Cock-of-the-Rock I saw some huge butterflies in the deep shade of the forest. They were almost black in colour to match the darkened forest floor, but they had huge copies of owl eyes on the underside, which they flashed to scare small mammals on the ground below. The most brilliant Cock-of-the-Rock may not be the most genetically worthy animal, but the ruse works, similar examples abound in nature, such as the way male deer become stags during the rutting season - growing antlers and raising crests of hair around their silhouette to give the appearance of exaggerated size and strength. The solitary stags of the Pampas Deer found in the inland savannahs have a pungent smell to push his message home as well. Similarly, billy-goats urinate on themselves to pump up personal confidence and disperse an aggressive stench all around to make them appear more aggressive than they really are.

In the old days of hand-to-hand conflict soldiers wore high hats and aggressive red coats to deceive their opponents about their size and strength. If they were unwashed they may have acquired an aggressive stench as well. Accurate rifles put an end to that, just as they pick out the best stags, but the tradition is preserved in the London Bobby's hat. Red and yellow colours are often used to indicate danger in nature as well - the wearer has some weapon, such as a sting or poisonous body which would-be predators learn to avoid. The zebra butterflies are well known for this, but other butterflies are masters of deception - they have taken on the behaviour and colours of the poisonous zebras to escape predators. The ruse works, as long as the butterflies are relatively uncommon - if there are too many, predators learn that the bright colours mean food.

Tools and us

The natural tools of life are truly amazing and the consequences of having these tools are far reaching on the possessor. The novel natural tool we possess - an intelligent brain - has obviously had incredible side effects on our lives, not the least being that we can break the DNA straight jacket, and make tools as we need them, instead of growing them as part of our body. (Although we still find it hard not to regard many of them as parts of our body - we make an involuntary "ouch" when having a minor accident while driving a car.) The effects of tools on us, and human society, over the ages are familiar to everyone - they have transformed agriculture, home construction, communication, warfare, transport - everything we do. Surely there is not much more we can invent?

Well, the robo-fly tells us another story - we have reached a milestone, and opened up an unbelievable new order of tool construction. Up until now we were in control of our tools (at least we thought we were, despite the tools having major effects on our behaviour and activities in return) but in the years to come all our tools can become clever tools, and progressively it will be they that are in charge. It may seem fanciful to suggest that we will all have robo-flies on the wall, but the time will come when intelligent bugs will abound - early attempts are already there on all shop items to counteract shoplifting. Medical science may be one of the first to develop some of these devices, which will be able to move around the body like some parasitic worm, monitoring body functions or attacking unwanted growths. With nano-technology it will be possible to make all the wonderful sense organs of nature - flies eyes, bats ears, dog's sense of smell and include a smart processor all encapsulated in a solar-powered chip, that can fly or walk, swim or just be stuck on the wall to monitor things. New developments like this may seem prohibitively expensive, but time tells us that they could become as cheap to make as breeding flies.

What use could these tools be? Only a moment's thought brings up a use in almost every aspect of our lives. Farmers can have continuous monitoring of their animals with GPS mapping to locate a sick one, even a control system which brings it into the yard. Similarly all cars can be tracked and traffic organised. All people can be monitored for health factors, warning of sugar excess, alcohol excess, hypothermia - anything which is worth monitoring. People can be labelled for life, just like farm animals - this is already done in most countries using identity papers, smart cards and DNA tests, but these clever bugs have the power to eclipse all these primitive attempts at controlling citizens - they can monitor where you are, what you are doing and what you are saying. Of course it is not just the sense organs which will be replicated - the robo-fly has wings and can fly and so all the other tools of nature can be made - including the brain.

Our computers already have the useful and sometimes annoying abilities of absolute recall. Intelligence beyond human capabilities is just around the corner - many still say it is impossible, but those in the field, who really know what is going on and do not have hang-ups about human supremacy, put it within the first half of the century. Large mechanical robots are now commonplace, building cars, or carrying out mining operations where people used to be involved - at present they are pretty dumb compared to even simple insects, let alone bees, but there is a huge pressure to implant progressively more intelligent brains in them. The technology which brings the robo-fly within our grasp, will make the androids of science-fiction simple to construct - and they do not need to look like human beings. They could be jumbo jets for human transport, cars, birds-of-paradise, even cows (or bulls to serve them perhaps!).

They will all be sold to us as positive advances, but represent an unstoppable erosion of our individual power and control as human animals. Medical science has already broken some of the major human ethical barriers - the most recent being experiments on human embryos, justified on the grounds that transplant organs could be made, or grown, to replace defective ones. (Some societies seem to have few problems with using those taken from destitute children as it is.) It would seem from this and world events that ethical values are in no way sacrosanct, and so are not likely to hinder the developing world of intelligent micro- and nano-technology, let alone intelligent cars, lifts, mining machinery, traffic controls, and houses. What speeds the new technology is that we have no ethical restraint on dumping old tools and replacing them with new, better ones - old computers are dumped faster than most items because they are obsolete, even though they still work. Is there a point where an intelligent robot becomes something we feel unable to replace or destroy on ethical grounds? Unlikely - we have no problems replacing servants. What if they are more intelligent than we are, and have direct high-speed communication with networks of robotic power, which have access to swarms of robo-mosquitoes laced with anthrax? Fanciful? Maybe - but take a long look at the way we are going!

HOATZIN AMONGST MUCCA-MUCCA PLANTS ON THE ABARY RIVER. These aberrant birds were originally thought to be primitive because the young possessed claws on their wings to help them clamber in the bushes. It is now known that they are more closely related to chickens and that they have redeveloped the claw - because it was needed. This suggests that lost tools can be regained - maybe we could redevelop our vomero-nasal sense organ and perhaps some brain ability lost since we became farmers.

Regaining lost tools - Hoatzin

Back in Guyana the last expedition was to the Abary River - we had joined up with a group from Oxford University who were going to study the Hoatzin. This bird has long fascinated zoologists because the young have a claw on their wings so that they can clamber around bushes before they have grown their feathers. It was thought that this claw represented the remnants of the wings of ancestral birds, which had several fingers in their wings. The Hoatzin was regarded as one of Professor Challenger's remnant species from the dinosaur era. The birds inhabit the flood-prone vegetation along the banks of the lower reaches of rivers.

We followed the river up through fields of cattle until the riverside vegetation became thicker - one of the main plants was known as the mucca-mucca plant, which had arum-like leaves on a tall stem growing on the banks and in the water. This was an indicator of Hoatzin habitat. Soon we heard the typical scolding calls of our first Hoatzins - they are weird birds, looking like chickens with comb-like crests. They were very reluctant to fly preferring to clamber over the vegetation and we thought it would be easy to catch one.

Our Oxford friends picked an island as the most likely spot, and set up a mist net across the middle. The party then drove the birds from one end to the other. We found they would fly, and that they had more nous than one would expect for an ancestral bird, let alone a chicken - they went over, around and under the net - not into it! We went to the other end of the island and drove them back again - still no luck! The river was high, and had probably flooded most of the nests which are built just over the water. We saw no young clambering around with their claws - if there had been any we would probably have missed them because we understood that they immediately dive into the water when disturbed and hide in dense vegetation with only the beak above water. They have developed a good survival strategy - their numbers are only at risk because their habitat has largely gone - the coastal flood plain is ideal for growing sugar cane. Now zoologists regard the Hoatzin as just an oddity - a chicken which has grown a claw on its wings. But this is particularly interesting to me because it shows how lost organs can be regained.

On the way back down the river the cattle were still there and a bull was testing a cow - checking her urine with his vomero-nasal organ, to see whether she was ready for mating. This is a remarkable organ possessed by many mammals - it is designed to detect specific large molecules such as hormones and involves the characteristic behaviour seen in cats, stallions and bulls, of raising the head and upper lip in a comical fashion while testing a sample. The human genome includes the genetic codes to develop this organ but it appears that the genes have been switched off. Our mating system has evolved around the deception that females are always on the point of ovulation - so that males need to maintain attention to ensure paternity. This system was dependent upon males not having this organ and females not having the amazing ovulation advertisements used by chimpanzees. In modern society, the mating system is more preoccupied with avoiding paternity or conception - maybe it would be an advantage to turn this organ on again? Perhaps bats could regain their eyes if they became more diurnal, or domesticated animals like the guinea-pig may indeed be able to regain the brain size of their wild ancestors and become wild again. Maybe human beings can regain the brain volume lost since they went down the path of developing artificial tools and began to allow artificial intelligence to take over the planet.

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Part I TECHNOLOGY (C)

Contents part 1
Main Contents

LIVING STROMATOLITES AT SHARK BAY, WESTERN AUSTRALIA. These massive structures are built by bacteria, and are well known as fossils in very ancient rock formations, and form the earliest known signs of life on Earth. The complex technology that these organisms use evolved very soon after the planet was formed - too early for it to have evolved on Earth- The technology used by microbes is far more complex than that used in organ-level technology. It is the technology of the future, and will be heavily exploited in building our new, machine-dominated world.

CHAPTER 4

BIOCHEMICAL TOOLS AND ORGANELLES

Pilbara, Western Australia

One of my last images in Guiana is of finding a brilliant green humming bird sitting on its thimble-like nest - it zoomed off its two eggs and buzzed around my face like an angry wasp. We are fascinated by the technology found in such an organism - an efficient heart to pump blood and a complex plumbing system, kidneys to filter the blood, gut to digest food, lungs, bones, brain, eyes and ears. All clothed in beautiful feathers and powered by wings to take it to flowers where it can insert its long tool-like beak and sip nectar. We can easily see all this, understand the technology involved and reinvent it ourselves to create our own tools for flying, pumping, seeing, hearing and so on. What is only now unfolding is another technology which is far more complex and which is going to have far more profound repercussions on the way we live. Even more to the point it has unlimited potential, when put into the hands of the super-intelligence we are creating. It is the technology found within the cell, the technology of living - of life itself.

Very little was known about what went on in a cell only fifty years ago. It was then only possible to stain parts of cells and look at them under a light microscope where most of the cell appeared to be made up of large, relatively clear areas, which were just labelled "protoplasm". Now we have come a long way with the use of much more powerful imaging techniques, and are finding just how complex the cell, and the biochemical processes which take place in it, are. A laboratory might be the place to discuss these exciting revelations, but I find much more contextual associations with the remote outback of north-west Australia. It is here that one can get a feeling for the incredible, turbulent history of the planet, the origin of life and the long path of evolution, which has perfected the technology of living things. Also, how developments in the past have had profound repercussions on our planet, and the later course of evolution.

Geological time in Shropshire, England

To get a feeling for the perspective of time I could perhaps compare this part of Australia with my first field geology experiences in Shropshire, England. One of the highlights of this trip was walking along Wenlock Edge through the beech trees - thinking of verses from A. E. Houseman's "A Shropshire Lad" - while making our way to an old quarry. In the hundreds of years of disuse it had become overgrown with dogwood and guelder rose bushes, while open areas bloomed with lime-loving trefoil, basil and thyme. Deep in the shadows we scrambled over rubble to where there was a sparkling Aladdin's cave of marble-like fossil corals, dating from the Silurian. These were really old, indicating a time when England bathed in a warm tropical climate. Nobody knew how old the Silurian was, dating techniques had not been developed then, but these corals were deposited long before the dinosaurs, or even the coal measures. We now know the Silurian to be between 440 and 410 million years ago. We went on to see Silurian sharks teeth at Ludlow, Ordovician trilobites in the Onny River shales, graptolites, and old red Devonian sandstone at Clee Hill and Carboniferous coal measures. We trudged over the Wrekin and into a quarry in the Ercall, where we marvelled at the volcanic rocks which are some of the oldest rocks known in Britain.

The climax was a climb up the Long Mynd where we looked in awe at sandstones and siltstones laid down at what seemed to be before the dawn of life - the Precambrian. We found strange markings in the rocks and wondered whether they might be the traces of worm burrows made by the first worm-like creatures, or were they merely marks where bubbles had risen from below? At that time there was no way of knowing how old the rocks were - but now we have the advantage of accurate dating techniques and know the rocks to be about 700 million years old - similar in age to the old volcanics we had walked over on the Wrekin.

Geological time in Western Australia

Coming to Western Australia put a new perspective on geological time and the evolution of life. This made the Long Mynd rocks appear as relatively uninteresting, recently deposited rocks. The major rock formations here cover the five sixths of the history of the planet before the Long Mynd was formed. Deposits have been found including the first mineral crystals 4,400 million years old, to some of the oldest known rocks 3,800 million years old, the first traces of life are seen at 3,600 million years ago (although some older ones have been found in Greenland), and this leads on to a period when life's micro-technology had major impacts on the globe 2,800 million years ago, and the creation of an atmosphere of oxygen over a billion years before the Wrekin was formed.

The road north from Perth skirts along the edge of the old continental land mass, passing over more familiar fossil-bearing deposits - the down-like Cretaceous hills at Gingin, past large coal deposits near Mt Lesueur and up to the Murchison Gorge at Kalbarri where the river cuts through Silurian sandstones, laid down at a similar time to Wenlock Edge. Sea scorpion tracks are found preserved in the stone at Kalbarri, as if made yesterday - one can easily picture them plodding over sand in shallow water, like king crabs do today.

SEA SCORPION TRACKS. Fossilised in sandstone at Kalbarri (kangaroo droppings provide a measure of their size). These were alive at about the same time as the corals at Wenlock Edge in Shropshire - only yesterday in the timeframe of the evolution of life found fossilised in the Pilbara Region of Western Australia.

The Murchison River gave its name to the Murchison Meteorite, which has provided us with an incredible view into the immensity of time and the past history of the Solar System. It was found to contain millions of diamonds together with crystals of corundum. There were no gemstones - the diamonds were nano-crystals, some only made up of a few atoms of carbon. The fascinating thing discovered about these crystals is that they are stardust - the remains of many stars which exploded or died long before the solar system was formed. This can be deduced from the proportions of elemental isotopes found in the diamond's carbon atoms, the corundum's silicon, and xenon gas trapped in the crystals - they are all totally different from the proportions found on earth. More interestingly, different crystals vary from one another, as if they come from many different source stars. The only conclusion one can make is that the meteorite is made up of the dust from many supernovae and red giant stars, which went through their lives and scattered stardust debris through space billions of years before the Solar System was formed. The solar system was built from the same material but became thoroughly mixed as the sun and planets formed. The stardust in the meteorite remains in its pristine state.

The early life of the planet is thought to have been very turbulent, with the Earth being bombarded by many meteorites, coming from material left over from planet formation. The moon still bears the scars of this period, as well as all the more recent craters. Most craters on Earth have been eroded away so that they are no longer apparent, but geologists are now recognising tell-tale signs of past impacts. They have identified one on the Yukatan peninsula in Central America, which coincides in time when the dinosaurs suddenly died out. It is thought that the impact caused sufficient climate change to damage global ecosystems and cause the mass extinction. An impact of this magnitude may also have a general effect on DNA by destroying the planet's ozone shield against damaging ultra-violet radiation. Huge quantities of ionised oxygen and nitrogen would be formed by an impact, which would combine to form ozone-destroying nitrous oxide in the upper atmosphere.

In north-western Australia another impact crater has been found bordering on Shark Bay. It is the fifth largest identified and coincides with the greatest mass extinction the Earth has experienced. This happened in the Permian, 256 million years ago. The record can be seen in the rocks of the Kennedy Range east of Carnarvon where there are rich fossil beds. The end of the Permian is marked by ice ages and a mass extinction of 90 percent of the species of the time. Impacts such as this must have been regular features of the early planet, and had a strong influence of the course of evolution of life.

Stromatolites at Shark Bay

When I moved to Western Australia there was a lot of excitement about a new discovery at Hamelin Pool, at the southern tip of Shark Bay. My first visit was during the month of July: this is mid-winter in Australia, but the season of most plant growth, with the wattles in full flower and carpets of everlasting daisies covering the bright red desert soil. It is salutary to think that, but for the developments I was about to see, the desert soil would not have been so red, or the sky blue! After negotiating 30 km of unsealed road and 7 km of bush track we came to a high, white bank which was composed entirely of small marine shells and we looked down on the calm shallow clear blue water of Hamelin Pool.

In studying geology I had read so many times of rock formations which had been laid down in calm shallow seas in the Precambrian time, long before animals and plants appeared, and here it was (but for the shells and blue sky) just as one would have expected it. Around the exposed beach there was a lumpy pavement of rusty domed rock, while at the water's edge there were many fungus-like growths, like huge black and rust puff-balls, morels and boletus. These are what geologists called Stromatolites. They are commonly found in ancient rocks and there were disputes as to what they were. Some thought them to be chemically deposited because they occurred in rocks laid down before fossils appeared and therefore before life was thought to have existed - others felt stromatolites were evidence that life did exist then. The breakthrough came when Phil Playford discovered these living Stromatolites at Hamelin Pool.

Since their discovery, much work has been done on how they are deposited, particularly by micro-biologist Neville Stanley and others who have concentrated on similar structures found growing in Lake Clifton south of Perth, which is more accessible than Shark Bay. The organisms responsible for the growths are bacteria which belong to the cyanobacteria. These bacteria often have an alga-like filamentous form and so are commonly known as Blue-green Algae This colour comes from the presence of Chlorophyll, which they use to convert carbon dioxide into sugars and starches in the presence of sunlight, and releasing oxygen gas in the process. The cyanobacteria live on the surface of the stromatolites and project their filaments to gather sunlight and secrete a mucilaginous material that traps sand-grains, and encourages the deposition of lime from the water. The lime binds the sand grains, and in time builds the whole structure into a massive object which can go on growing like a coral, especially if the sea level slowly rises (or the land sinks). If the sea level is static or lowers, the top often dies and becomes a solid stone.

The reason why stromatolites are so rare in the marine situation now appears to be that there are so many animals in the sea that cyanobacteria growing like this, would quickly be grazed away by snails and crustaceans. The huge bank of shells at Hamelin Pool is a sign of the unique conditions there, which have allowed the Stromatolites to develop - the Pool is largely cut off from the rest of Shark Bay by a sand bank which allows water to flow in, but little flows out. The rate of evaporation in the area is high so the water in the Pool becomes very salty. The water is so saline that most marine organisms cannot live there, including predatory and grazing molluscs - the only obvious signs of marine life are shoals of fish and the occasional pulsating jellyfish. The shell can therefore live free from predation, and the stromatolites grow free from grazing pressure. The only other marine stromatolites known are found in Bermuda.

The Cyanobacteria developed the technology of photosynthesis, which now supports virtually the whole biosphere on Earth. This technology was evolved in a variety of bacteria, some using sunlight to photosynthesise with hydrogen sulphide, which was probably the first form of photosynthesis, later on water was used, and this form is encapsulated in leaves in the form of chloroplasts which give plants their green colour. As we shall see in Chapter 7, they got there by various forms of primitive life cooperating with one another, and pooling their technology, eventually giving rise to animals and plants. The chloroplasts are all that remains of some primitive cyanobacteria, which lived in symbiosis with other primitive forms of life - they still contain their own DNA, but are under the control of the plant's DNA. Chloroplasts are usually known as plastids, but may also be referred to as organelles, which is a collective term referring to organ-like structures that are found within a single cell. The cell does not have a heart or brain but organelle technology surpasses organs in complexity, and is remarkable in its micro-miniaturization - structures are built out of molecules not tissues.

Fossil Stromatolites and the origin of life

Continuing north from Shark Bay the country is very flat, only relieved by sand ridges north of Carnarvon. These form the edge of the major desert ecosystem of Australia where the sand was blown into dunes during the last ice age. Each ridge may be many kilometres long, some as long as 100 km. In another 370 million years, the red sand could eventually become like the Devonian old red sandstones of Clee Hill. Beyond the Ashburton River there are some rocky hills which are the first encounter with the really old land mass of Australia.

A small detour brings one into spinifex-covered hills and scattered mulga bushes, where the ground is covered in broken rock. This is another feature of the Australian desert regions, where rain sorts sand and rock so that the rock coats the surface in what is known as gibber desert. The rocks here include many white pieces, some familiar quartz, others clearly some form of limestone or dolomite. These rocks have abundant fossil stromatolites, dating from 1,300 to 1,700 million years ago - a billion years older than the Long Mynd. These are young in comparison to stromatolites found further along the road near Port Hedland. These were formed 3,500 million years ago and show clear impressions of bacteria. These fossils are some of the earliest evidence of life on Earth, although earlier ones are now known from Greenland, which are 300 million years older.

That bacteria should be forming stromatolites at such an early age, raises some interesting questions about the origin of life. The young Earth must have been seething with complex bacterial life at that time, for there to be some advanced enough to have the technology of photosynthesis - how long did it take for these organisms to evolve? The Earth formed about six hundred million years before the earliest stromatolites, and must have been a very inhospitable place for hundreds of millions of years after formation. Nothing remains of the surface of that fiery world to tell us what was happening - the first sign of permanent minerals is a zircon found in rocks also near Port Hedland which is 4,200 million years old (others, possibly of meteoric origin have been found near Geraldton which are 4,400 million years old). This mineral was contained in some of the oldest rocks known which are 3,800 million years old. Sometime during, that period life must have appeared on Earth and somehow managed to evolve from the simplest origins to the immense complexity seen in bacteria within only a few hundred million years. Science suggests that this can only mean one of two things - that life evolves very quickly after a planet is formed from simple chemistry to bacteria, or that space debris already contains the seeds of life and is likely to be raining down on all planets all the time - perhaps contained in the stardust of the Murchison Meteorite.

IRON-LADEN CREEK IN THE PILBARA. Hot water mineral springs from deep in the ground contain many interesting bacteria. They are relics of the time when the earth did not have oxygen in the atmosphere. It has been found that there is a veryrich diversity of species and they are found in a variety of extreme habitats, especially around super-heated water emerging from mineral springs deep in the ocean. Many use bizarre chemical means of gaining energy.

Old Bacteria

Driving into the Chichester Ranges from near Roebourne, I followed a pipeline carrying water. I came to a pressure release valve, which was leaking to form pool under the pipe. This was a valuable resource for the local birds and I watched while flocks of budgerigars came in to drink - they were accompanied by cockatiels, next came flocks of zebra and painted finches, with their beautiful deep red and black feathers. All the while diamond doves walked around on the around - feeding and drinking from the green sludge-surrounded pool. Water is a rare commodity in this semi-arid country, but can be found in many places by drilling into the underground aquifers and artesian basins where hot water rushes out of the drill holes. The bacterial sludges which develop in these areas are proving to be very interesting and it is slowly dawning on research workers that there is more diversity in living things found deep in the earth than on the surface.

Bacteria abound kilometres below ground, living in conditions once thought to be inimical to life. Is this where life finds its origins - in the hot pressure cooker conditions under the surface of an early planet? It was always assumed it started on the surface - but perhaps it is much harder to survive here with huge temperature variations, light and darkness, and the sterilizing effects of ultra-violet radiation. Studies on the bacteria found in deep inhospitable places shows that they are particularly interesting. They belong to what is known as the Archaeobacteria, and are so different from normal bacteria that some believe they could have a different origin. However, there are many common links between the ancient bacteria and eubacteria (normal bacteria), so it is assumed that eubacteria evolved from these ancient forms. But this does not mean that life did not evolve more than once on Earth - one would certainly expect a variety of avenues if life appears so quickly after the planet formed - there may have been many competing lines with only one leading to archaeobacteria, or perhaps the competing lines only became living when some came together and began cooperating. The other possibility is that many forms of life were (are) raining down on us and only one line is able to survive on Earth - again it seems unlikely that space debris arriving from the corners of the galaxy would contain only one avenue leading to life. Some have even suggested that life began based on silicon, which could cope better with conditions deep in the earth and only later swapped silicon atoms for carbon.

Millstream and deep sea smokers

Passing over the Chichester range we came to Millstream. This is a stunning oasis around huge spring-fed pools in the bed of the Fortescue River. A large area of the river valley is underlain by dolomite rocks, which collect rainfall. The rocks are tipped so that the water flows to Millstream where it emerges in many warm clearwater springs. This permanent water is so isolated from other similar areas that many animals and plants have evolved unique endemic species, one is an attractive little yellow and black damselfly, which hovers over the tumbling spring waters with only its golden thorax glowing against the dark shadows. A little further down, the river enters Gregory Gorge where a dam is projected that would flood the whole unique ecosystem. Here some relics can be found of the early planet, and the cauldron that may have led to life. In the bed of the river there are pillow lavas where molten rock has been extruded under water while a little further away there is a white talc hill. This is all that remains of a primeval smoker - an underwater spring where hot mineralised water spewed from the depths, like those seen in the mid ocean depths today.

These smokers have proved to have an incredible array of life unknown before deep sea exploration became possible. The worms, molluscs, crabs and so on, all depend upon ancient bacteria which thrive on the sulphides coming out of the 300°C hot spring water. These bacteria have the technology of early life - of being able to use this chemical energy and thrive in what to us is the poisonous cauldron of the early planet. Metal sulphides are deposited on the sea floor as nodules around these smokers and can build up into ore deposits containing manganese, iron, copper or even gold. The talc hill is surrounded by these metal sulphide nodules. Recently, bacterial remains have been found in similar ancient sulphide nodules. The talc is formed by the hot water reacting with magnesium-containing rocks to produce hydrous magnesium silicate - the chemical base of talc. Perhaps the magnesium came from the dolomite laid down by ancient stromatolites.

 

TALC HILL NEAR MILLSTREAM. This is where there was a deep sea smoker billions of years ago. These are the locations where early life could have evolved on the planet.

Movement of continents

This area was all part of a very ancient land mass known as a craton; that is why so many ancient rocks have survived in the area. Over time geologists have been able to build up a picture of the world at different times in its history. We are still at a very early stage of understanding the mechanisms involved. Some are still so incredible that they are hard to believe. The idea of ancient continents splitting up and the formation of oceans were regarded as a joke not long ago - now it is accepted dogma. Other ideas are present, but do not get much of a hearing.

One fascinating idea is an alternative method of explaining the movement of continents. It has a lot of scientific evidence to support it, but appears too incredible to countenance. It is founded on the way continents fit together - they do not fit together very well on a present globe, but there is an almost perfect fit if the Earth is assumed to have been smaller when the continents started breaking up! The reactions to such a suggestion receives the same responses as continental drift did in the early days - "impossible", "ridiculous", "there is no known physical support for such a happening!" But science has a long way to go in explaining the universe and the 90% mass unaccounted for, so, however ridiculous it may seem, one should keep an open mind. It would make it easier to explain the huge size of dinosaurs, if gravity was less at the time! Also, if more matter were being created in the Earth it would expand like a ripe grape after rain and split, bursting open along the lines of oceanic ridges, and tearing the continents apart - more like what is now being revealed by satellite mapping.

Iron ore and the first oxygen in the atmosphere

From Millstream there is a beautiful view of the Hamersley Ranges stretching as far as the eye can see, as if floating in a sea of white spinifex grass. The grass growing on the slopes accentuates the rock strata, and one can see layer upon layer of rusty red rock. Within the ranges there are a series of gorges cut by streams of water running off the down-like hills, which give a closer view of these massive rock formations. The layered view from a distance is repeated in the close-up view, and again under the microscope. The whole area is characterised by this rock, which is known as banded iron formations. It is an incredible record of the history of the area from 2,500 to 1,800 million years ago, when there was a shallow lake or sea covering the region. The bands are alternate layers of iron minerals and silicious jaspilite - they appear to record an annual cycle, because it is possible to count micro-layers and see changes associated with the eleven-year sun-spot cycle!

 

BANDED IRON FORMATIONS IN KNOX GORGE, HAMERSLEY RANGE. These rocks were laid down before Oxygen entered the atmosphere. Fine bands show the 11-year sunspot cycle, and the iron was probably deposited by bacterial action. The deposition stopped abruptly about 1800 million years ago when oxygen produced by cyanobacteria began to accumulate in the atmosphere, it stopped iron from dissolving in rainwater and poisoned the iron bacteria.

It seems as if it is another record of life on earth in the distant past. Most likely the deposits were formed by something like present-day iron bacteria, which get their energy by oxidising ferrous iron into ferric iron compounds in putrid waters. If so, this lake must have been pretty putrid! In fact the atmosphere was not at all like it is today - it was mainly made up of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane and perhaps some hydrogen sulphide, but virtually no free oxygen. Rain would have fallen, probably acid rain, and this would dissolve iron as ferrous compounds into the streams feeding the lake. The bacteria would grow and thrive from the energy of converting it into feric iron and it would be precipitated out and sink to the bottom. This went on for 700 million years longer than it took for us to evolve from the worms burrowing in the Long Mynd silts. It suddenly came to a stop 1,800 million years ago, when a clear reason appears in the rock strata - iron deposited in rocks at that time changed colour, from dull to bright red oxides. The global atmosphere must then have had free oxygen in it, which formed insoluble ferric oxide. The streams no longer flowed with dissolved iron, and the bacteria had nothing to feed on.

It all goes back to the cyanobacteria in the stromatolites. They could have been producing oxygen since at least 3,500 million years ago, but it took them 1,700 million years to produce enough to turn the whole atmosphere around from a reducing phase to an oxidising one. It was death to most of the living things at the time - nothing could survive in oxygen unless they had ways of dealing with this poisonous substance. Survivors were driven underground and to the depths of the oceans where they survive in anaerobic conditions. The bacteria that could live in the new atmosphere, had developed special membranes to neutralise the oxygen, they did this by combining it with hydrogen to form water. Eventually they were able to use it to produce energy. This is the technology that now powers all aerobic life, including ourselves.

It is suggested that some of the bacteria with this technology were absorbed into other forms of life, to enable them to survive in oxygen-rich environments, and eventually became mitochondria in a similar way to how cyanobacteria became chloroplasts in plants. Mitochondria have their own DNA in the form of genes and are passed from parent to offspring in the cytoplasm of the egg. How they produce energy involves complex chemistry, where a range of enzymes work together in a sort of pass-the-parcel game with electrons. The enzymes appear to be arranged in the intricately folded cristae of the mitochondrion in such a way that electrons are removed in each reaction, and passed on to the next enzyme to mediate the reaction it controls, and so on in a cascade of reactions. The end result is the production of energy-rich substances such as ATP, while the oxygen is removed as water. The ATP is used directly in the cell to power its living systems.

There is no way of telling when mitochondria first appeared - or chloroplasts for that matter. The life forms of the early planet leave little trace. Today they are present in the simplest organisms known above bacteria - the protozoa. Water seeping from the rocks and in the pools where the budgerigars drink seethe with these tiny animals. It is thought that protozoa appeared at about the time iron stopped being deposited in the Hamersley Ranges. These tiny organisms appear to represent a huge advance on bacteria, but they are essentially a working montage of bacterial technologies organised into a cell. They are known as Eukaryotes, because their DNA is organised into a membrane-bound central nucleus, which differentiates them from the Prokaryotes - bacteria - which lack nuclear membranes.

All advanced organisms, including ourselves, are made up of eukaryotic cells. Slowly the actual mechanisms of the living cell are being unravelled, but it is still hard to visualise how everything is organised into a functioning unit. This may be because we tend to think in terms of ourselves, who assume we have control by using our brains and intelligence to organise our lives. In reality, our conscious brains exercise little more control than in other animals. What appears to be central control is merely the result of a complex net of interrelated vector parts and feedback mechanisms responding to the environment. This is what may be happening in a living protozoan cell - their complexity under the microscope is amazing, and belie any ideas that they are simple forms of life.

Technology of the cell

The processes which go on in the cell, are very complex and this is not the place to attempt a review. In essence, the nucleus contains an incredible hard-disk memory bank in the form of DNA organised into discrete functioning units known as genes. The nuclear membrane has pores, which allow two-way migration of molecules between the nucleus and the cell cytoplasm. Messages coming in trigger the genes to respond and build messenger RNA molecules, which pass out of the nucleus. The cytoplasm outside the nucleus is packed by a complex layered membrane structure known as the endoplasmic reticulum, in which various organelles float including ribosomes. The RNA molecules are transported to ribosomes - there may be thousands of these within a cell - they are produced by the nucleolus, which is a clear object lying within the nucleus. The ribosomes use the RNA to produce proteins, especially enzymes, each one of which is responsible for a particular chemical step in the process of living.

The Mitochondria have their own DNA to produce the deeply folded membranes packed with the array of enzymes needed to produce energy-rich ATP - this filters out of the Mitochondria and is transported to where it is needed within the cell, to power molecular synthesis. Lysosomes have the function of clearing up the debris of molecular activity within the cell, hydrolysing waste products, by using powerful enzymes to break them down. These organelles are bound by a membrane, which prevents the enzymes escaping and destroying the cell. When the membranes break, the cell dies. The Golgi apparatus is another organelle, which appears to be responsible for assembling products, such as cellulose for the cell wall in plants, or secretions delivered to the area outside the cell wall. Cells also have a communication system built around microtubules. These were first recognised in cell division, where microtubules became obvious under the microscope, they attach to chromosomes and draw them apart - they are now seen to have many functions, including being the motile force within cilia and flagellae. Cilia have been adapted in higher animals into providing the building blocks for rods in the eye. Microtubules also play an important part in nerve cells and the brain.

The complexity seen in the cell is relatively well-known because the size of cells is large enough for it to be seen with powerful microscopes. This is not the case with bacteria where everything is so much smaller, but there is little doubt that they are even more fascinating, by having so much packed into such a small space. How could such complex organisms evolve so quickly after the Earth was formed? Perhaps nano-bacteria can tell us something. These are minute blobs, much smaller than bacteria, found in rocks and deep sea, which may or may not be living things. If life appeared so quickly, why did it take another three billion years before these simple bacteria evolved into the diversity of life seen in the Cambrian? On this sort of scale, it would appear remarkable that we should evolve in a mere 500 million years from worms. That we should evolve from apes in 5 million years, suggests that it is only a minute technological step to produce an intelligent brain from that of an ape. Maybe it is an even smaller technological leap to produce an intelligent computer from stupid origins - we are nearly there already after only fifty years.

Future uses of organelle technology

The staggering thing about organelle level technology is that it could well give us the ability to produce boundless computer intelligence. While in the hands of computer intelligence, organelle technology, including the whole genome of life on earth, can be accessed and used. The robo-fly of organ level technology is a huge clumsy beast compared to the robo-zoa of the future. We are already working on DNA as the basis for computer technology, and it has huge potential for producing artificial intelligence. It already has the ability to build complex organisms with intelligent brains - without the control of intelligence. What are its potentials when governed by a controlling intelligence?

Our computers operate on a system of zeros and ones, that encode everything a bit like morse code, which when strung together can be read as text, pictures or whatever in a computer. DNA is a bit more complex having a sequence of four characters arranged on a string, which link to an adjoining strand with one always linking with three and two with four, all bound together in a double helix. Reading the sequence involves building a short strand with the corresponding sequence of ones, twos threes and fours. This is known as messenger RNA, which passes on to the ribosomes where it is used to make the protein encoded in the RNA. How it is done is not clear, but it appears as if each amino acid (the building blocks of proteins), is specified by a triplet from the original four characters. Each triplet is known as a codon, this gives a possible 64 different codes - but only 20 are used to form amino acids. The sequence of codons on RNA, build a chain of specified amino acids to form the corresponding protein. Each protein molecule is usually made up of a long chain of hundreds, or even thousands of amino acids. This is a remarkable chain of tools leading to the production of a protein.

The protein itself is another tool to be used in the process of living - many are enzymes - these are substances that promote specific chemical reactions, like those involved in respiration in the mitochondria. Many enzymes are involved in most metabolic processes, each overseeing a particular reaction in the chain leading to the end-product, such as the building of cellulose cell walls and digesting food. The process of living taking place within the cell is just an amazing complex of tools working together - DNA, RNA, enzymes, organelles - most of which have their origins in the very early years of life on the planet. We have hardly begun to exploit this range of tools, but when used they have the potential to transform the earth, like they did when bacteria first put oxygen into the atmosphere.

During the course of evolution the complexity of biochemical activities have accumulated, but many arose during the early years of life on Earth. In fact it is thought that RNA may have originally been an early life form itself, which evolved an association with amino-acids. Only later did it begin to build the more stable structure of DNA, which eventually took over as the controlling seat of life. Many viruses, including the common cold, use a strand of RNA as their genetic material, and may represent a continued existence of this early life form. Others such as HIV, produce a DNA copy from an RNA molecule, and so may represent examples of life at the changeover to DNA. The accumulation of genetic information may be seen when comparing a virus, a bacterium and a mammal: the virus may have about 200,000 base pairs (information segments) in its DNA, a bacterium about 2.5 million and a mammal over a billion.

The mammal DNA has been compared to our own information storage systems, and is equivalent to about 500 technical books with over 300 pages each. However, much of the mammalian DNA chain appears to be garbage, with many duplicate copies of particular segments and long bits of unused information - the reason for this is unknown, but it would appear to be from the accretion of meiotic mistakes, and the computer-virus like accumulation of parasitic genes. Another suggestion is that the genes function better when separated, and can be more active in a nucleus well packed with unused sections of DNA.

 

MINING IRON ORE AT MT. NEWMAN. Harnessing bacterial technology has only just begun - future uses will be immense and send this mining operation into perspective. At the moment we mainly use past accumulations formed by bacteria. Nano-engineering using the secrets of life will impact on everything in future society.

Exploitation of bacterial technology

The Hamersley Range Gorges have beautiful clear water pools, overhung with white-barked, River Gum trees. Dragonflies patrol the pools and streams, while a little damselfly has made its home there - a long way from its normal habitat in the Kimberley region. Water seeps out of the iron red rocks, where ferns and sundews grow, while high above Snappy Gums cling to the rocks accompanied by a cactus-like plant, known as the Iron Plant. This plant is a well-known indicator of iron ore. Visiting this region makes one very aware of iron ore - the area is criss-crossed with railways carrying ore trains and huge holes in the ground where ore is being mined. This is present day exploitation of ancient bacterial technology. In other places living bacteria are progressively being used in mining processes from extracting heavy metals to the clean-up of contaminated groundwater. While around the coast, pink cyanobacteria in salt lakes are being used to manufacture carotenoids. Bacteria are now becoming one of the mainstays in pharmaceutical manufacture, because sections of genetic code can be implanted in them, so that they manufacture the encoded proteins for our use. Now the entire human genome is known, and available for bacterial manufacture, initially for medical benefits, especially for people with genetic disorders, but it opens a Pandora's box of other potential uses.

These developments mean than human society is entering a new era of technological development. The organ level technology period was staggering enough - it has totally changed the world with cars, aeroplanes, tractors, chainsaws, ships, vast cities and so on. Now openings are appearing for the development of biochemical tools and organelle technology - it is a very exciting area, which arouses deep concern as well as hope for the future. The initial development of this technology by life, transformed the world and led to our own evolution - it has created the blue planet as we know it. Now we are going to be able to create this technology for our own purposes and are busy building the silicon and concrete planet. The sorts of things which can be done, are frightening - we can move pieces of genetic code between species of any form of life, including ourselves (one of the latest, much-hailed, successes has been to implant human genes in pigs' eggs and produce a strain of pigs with human antigens which could be used for organ implants in ailing humans). The transfer of genes between species has only occurred very rarely before, or in special circumstances, and has been the foundation of the stable, pedestrian way evolution has proceeded on the planet. Gene exchange potentially can change all that, setting in motion a new wave of evolutionary activity and upset whatever stability exists in the natural environment.

What is more worrying perhaps is that we can short-cut life processes, and release ourselves from the need of a biosphere. We can already directly trap the energy from the sun with photovoltaic cells and the use of direct energy from the sun will inevitably become the energy source of the future (although there is a counter-culture of scientists working on the idea that there is "free-energy" which could be exploited - one wonders why, when there is so much free energy coming from the sun). Potentially we can also use biotechnology to produce sugars, starches and proteins and anything else we need directly from sunlight, using bacterial genes or organelles. It may prove possible also to use bacteria to produce hydrogen gas or electricity from sunlight.

At the moment biotechnologists are working hard on genetically manipulating our domestic animals and plants to improve productivity faster than could ever be done by traditional selective breeding. The next stage will be the production of animal and plant products without having to farm the living species. This would avoid the enormous waste involved in present production - most of the energy of producing meat and wool is lost in body heat and in building products other than those desired, such as bone and entrails. In plants, most of the energy goes into the production of roots, leaves and stems instead of the desired product such as grain or wood. Biotechnology could produce base materials with solar energy wherever the sun shines, with the desert regions of the world being the most intelligent choice of location. Water can always be found if needed - it has been found that a huge underground sea resides under the Great Sandy Desert.

A third area where biotechnology is being applied perhaps has more potential for changing the world than the previous two. This is the creation of machines based on the micro-engineering of life. Membranes are one of the most fundamental technologies of the cell, sifting and selecting molecules for specific purposes. Membrane technology is now being developed as a means of producing microchip memory on a molecular scale. One can visualise huge lattice-like membranes, folded and interleaved with variable connecting links able to learn and respond. Other methods include the creation of self-organising molecules based on what we know about DNA - biotechnological engineers are already developing these mechanisms. This technology could also be used to build complex microchips.

These developments have the potential for developing a mix of living and artificial technology, and in the hands of future intelligence there is likely to be developed an interface between DNA life technology and our present mechano-electrical technology. Crude interfaces are already being developed where incapacitated people can communicate and perform activity when connected up to mechano-electrical devices such as the bionic ear. Such interfaces are merely the beginnings of much more direct connections between external and internal control systems in ourselves and other creatures which have staggering implications.

The conclusion is that as we learn about organelle-level technology and apply it to our world, the consequences are far greater than those wrought by previous technologies. So far we have only been using organ-level technology and have been clearing old ecosystems away and replacing them with cities and domestic plants and animals. This is similar to the changeover from dinosaurs to mammals. Organelle technology on the other hand has the potential to make fundamental changes more like the origin of cells over previous life forms or the invention of photosynthesis or sexual reproduction. We are now at the time of transition from pre-biotechnology life, which took 3,500 million years to get to this stage, to post-biotechnology life, when evolution of living things suddenly takes off in all sorts of new directions armed with new strands of DNA and bio-mechano-electrical technology.

Scientists are very aware of the dangers in tampering with DNA, but the pressures of huge financial incentives, of wanting to feed the starving millions, of curing previously incurable diseases, and placating scientific curiosity ensure that biotechnology will be the technology of the future. Many changes will be deliberate and well considered others accidental. Further changes may come by way of scientists who are employed to conduct unethical research and development under military secrecy or for corporations seeking financial gain by whatever means. Other changes can be expected from scientists driven by their own curiosity or need to secure fame, tenure or employment, who carry out experiments they know are risky or would be regarded as unethical by their peers. The overall resulting changes will at least change the world of domestic species and maybe eventually largely replace pre-biotechnology plants and animals.

SCENE IN THE DESERT. Much as we like these places to escape modern life, wild places such as this are the obvious location for future development. They have the greatest flux of solar energy, and this is likely to be trapped using technology based on bacterial organelles. Water is often not a problem - the desert regions of Australia are underlain by huge underground seas.

Genetic engineering

Genetic engineering on human beings under the guise of gene therapy or whatever, is bound to be done on an increasing scale. We would like to think that it is purely done for specific curative purposes without actually changing us, but we would inevitably be changed, nevertheless. (Care has to be taken because harmful genes are often in the population through unknown, hidden benefits - the best known is the gene for sickle-cell anaemia, which confers immunity to malaria in the heterozygote). Genetic engineering on human beings could, of course, be done with objectives in mind other than well-being and advance, either by regimes intent on human engineering, or by a controlling intelligence with another agenda - a machine intelligence. It is easy to imagine a future leader intent on building a super-race and attendant slaves using advanced knowledge of genetic engineering. Hitler was bad enough without access to this technology and the human trait he represents is so entrenched in our society that it is all the time re-emerging in despotic leaders throughout the world. Fortunately these leaders only have a human life-span and so do not live long enough to contemplate seeing the fruition of such programmes. A machine-intelligence on the other hand may not have this restriction. But, of course, a machine-intelligence may see little point in developing unrebellious human slaves, let alone a human super-race.

One of the great attractions of the Pilbara Region is the feeling one gets of endless unspoilt environment. The hills way in the distance standing out sharp in the clear air with no visible sign of human activity. The roads passing through hundreds of kilometres of country in the Hamersley and Chichester Ranges without sight of a building, while going east along the red Tallawana Track, there are fences with signs of cattle and sheep for some while, but soon give way to the almost pristine vegetation and sand-dunes of the Little Sandy Desert. Beyond there is the huge Rudall River National Park and the Great Sandy Desert - vast areas with very little human activity. One wonders what these places might look like when human and machine intelligence fully unravels and exploits the technology of life. The energy falling on these wild places is enough to support huge populations, massive industries, or to merely produce energy for use in the huge coastal megatropolis. I would love to see the places remain as they are, home to emus, kangaroos and the supercilious bush turkeys. This might be realised while humankind is in charge, but machine intelligence is unlikely to leave these energy-rich places unspoilt. They would inevitably have massive energy farms built there, perhaps, by human slaves.

BEAUTIFUL DRAGONFLY. Who knows where intelligence-based evolution will go. It has few limits - it can incorporate all life's technology and combine it with mechano-electrical technology for whatever ends super-intelligence may have. It may produce new forms of life combining all technologies, and it would not be limited to planet Earth. Maybe intelligent brains can create wonderful, dragonfly-like bodies around them with morpho-like wings and glide over deserts or through space to colonise other planets. That we see no evidence of this in space suggests that it is rare indeed that intelligent life survives much beyond where we have got to now. It destroys itself.

In the more distant future there would be new forms of life, perhaps born of chimeras between DNA life and machine life. The potential for the new technology is boundless - and its reality around other planets is likely to far surpass any fiction writer's imagination, let alone readers' inclination to believe credible. As is frequently confirmed, scientific fact is more mind-boggling and hard to believe than fiction. This may be our planet's future too - my dream is of beautiful, intelligent dragonflies powered by bionic cells in their morpho-like wings, which look like glittering jewels flying over the desert - or even drifting through space……

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