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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.