EIGHT

There’s no watchmaker

“Nowadays,” said Arsuaga, “the dog is the king of the home, although a lot of people have them castrated. It’s the only downside of being a domestic animal.”

“But being castrated without knowing you’ve been castrated, that must be amazing, mustn’t it?” I said.

It was a Saturday in late April, and the palaeontologist had asked me to meet him at noon at one of the Madrid Fairs, where there was a gathering of all kinds of pets accompanied by their owners. The dogs were the stars of the show, of course, but we also saw parrots, cats, reptiles, chinchillas, rabbits … There was a coming and going like on Noah’s Ark just before the doors closed and the flood began. People and creatures moved from side to side in search of the most comfortable spot for the crossing. Cries of panic, of warning, or of delight from different animal species were interwoven with those from the human beings, and rose up to the cavernous ceiling of the hall, bouncing off it and hurtling back down onto our heads in a shower of decibels. It wasn’t easy to make yourself heard.

“What was that?” said the palaeontologist, a little more loudly.

“I’m saying that being castrated but not being aware of it must be really great.”

This time I’d yelled so loudly that a lady who was standing nearby with a Pekinese in her arms looked at me with the same curiosity that the rest of the visitors were showing for other people’s pets.

“Why?” said Arsuaga, not noticing the woman.

“Man, it would just be such a weight off your back. Buñuel said in his memoirs that one of the things he was most grateful for as he got older was a decrease in sexual desire.”

“Oh?”

“He said that when he was a young man, whenever he arrived for a shoot in a new city, the first thing he had to arrange was who he was going to screw that night, which put him under considerable stress.”

“I didn’t know that about Buñuel, but, in any case, castration isn’t natural.”

There are plenty of natural things that make us suffer, I replied, from my own experience, to myself.

We crossed the hall, running into all types of bipeds, quadrupeds, winged creatures, mammals, egg-layers … The only creatures here with neither a pet nor an owner were us. I feared we must have looked quite odd.

“If anyone asks us what we’re doing here,” I suggested to Arsuaga, “we’ll say I’m your pet.”

The palaeontologist was preoccupied with looking for a door, which at last he found — it opened into another huge hall in which there were only dogs. The Tower of Babel that preceded it was reduced to a single language, that of barking, though still with an astonishing variety. There were dogs of all sizes, in all colours, of all breeds, of every social class.

“They must get confused with all this background noise, because dogs have really good hearing, don’t they?” I said.

“Their hearing is good, but it’s smell that’s really their thing.”

“It’s their sense of smell that’s predominant?”

“It isn’t that it’s predominant, it’s that their brain is olfactory. Their mind — and that which we call the mind is the inner representation of the outer world — is olfactory. With certain exceptions, this is the case with all mammals. For them, the world is chemistry, pure chemistry. Molecules. We, on the other hand, like all other primates, create a representation of the world in the form of images. Literally, we imagine.”

(We imagine, literally. That’s so great! I made a note.)

I shut my eyes in an attempt to give shape to the world by opening my nostrils as much as I could. But I’m olfactorily blind: I was unable to reconstruct the space, despite the variety of smells my pituitary was capable of recognising.

“Sight,” I said, “is the most invasive organ. And the most deceptive.”

“The point here, the thing you need to take away, is the idea that our brains are visual,” he said. “If a human goes blind, his or her brain doesn’t change; it remains visual. Make a note of that.”

I made a note: if you lose your sight, your brain, despite its plasticity, continues to be visual. Which means you’re fucked.

“But sight,” I insisted, “is more deceptive than smell, isn’t it?”

“It’s as though smells are more real. This takes a bit of thought. There is something fantastic about dogs, which is that they’re the most human of all animals. More human than chimpanzees, because we’ve created dogs in our own image. We are their god.”

“They were also the first animals we domesticated, weren’t they?”

“Yes, they’ve been at our sides since prehistory. We are their god, and in fact that’s how they see us. They do things that chimps don’t do. They communicate with us, for starters. We’ve taught them to talk. The wolf, which is the ancestor of all known classes of dogs, doesn’t bark — it communicates.”

“It’s true, dogs are a part of the family,” I said, remembering an old documentary. “They dream of occupying our place.”

“And when they try to do that, we have them put down. Those ones never reach adulthood, because they mustn’t dare oppose the master.”

“They may lose the battle, but they do try,” I insisted.

“If they’ve been well bred, they won’t even try. The whole thing about domestication, as you’re going to see, is a big subject. We human beings are a self-domesticated species.”

The palaeontologist stopped. He looked around with an expression that was somewhere between amazement and satisfaction, as if we were the gods of that whole assortment of dogs that seemed to be the extension of their masters, to whom they remained connected by the umbilical cord of a leash. There were some that walked very upright, defiantly, and others that stuck to their owner’s’ legs as though trying to merge with them. We discovered, at one end of the hall, a section full of special tables on which they were getting all spruced up, presumably for their beauty contests. They allowed themselves to be handled the way we do at a hairdresser’s. There were also, here and there, small commercial islands popping up, on which you could find everything you could imagine to make your pet happy: food, treats, toys, collars, leads, beds, pillows …

“Well,” said the palaeontologist, “we’re here because it’s the only way we’re going to gain an understanding of evolution and Darwinism.”

This line of reasoning seemed to me to be chasing its own tail, like a mastiff that we saw spinning crazily round and round on itself, but I said nothing. At that moment, we heard the sound of applause behind us. We turned and saw, a few metres away, a kind of farmyard where a particularly hairy dog was doing a demonstration of skill. Its owner was throwing plastic plates into the air, which the animal caught in mid-flight and returned. When it had retrieved seven or eight, it leapt into the man’s arms, from where it acknowledged its audience. It looked pleased.

“He’s really enjoying having us watching!” I exclaimed out loud.

“Do you mean he has vanity?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“I’m really not sure about that. What I do know is that if his god, which is man, is happy, then he’s happy, too. That’s his prize: that his god is happy.”

“And his god,” I pointed out, “is that chubby man throwing his plates.”

“Indeed.”

“How many breeds of dog are there?”

“I don’t know, but more and more all the time. Most of them are very recent, from the twentieth century. Before this, there were only the major branches; then they started to refine down from there.”

“Refine down?”

“Yes, they chose local breeds and started making improvements.”

At that moment, the palaeontologist turned his gaze on a dog that was, literally speaking, a wolf. Not a wolfhound, but an actual wolf. It was quite a shock to see it.

“Look,” said Arsuaga, “the dog there that looks like a wolf, it’s a Czech–Hungarian breed. Let’s go and ask about it.”

The owner, a lad of about twenty, told us it was Czechoslovakian.

“From which region?” said Arsuaga.

“I’m not sure,” said the young man.

“He doesn’t bite, does he?”

“Depends. If he doesn’t like the look of you, he’ll bare his teeth.”

The animal was standing with his tail between his legs, clinging to his owner’s thigh. From time to time, he looked up at us. He knew we were talking about him, or that was the impression I got.

“Has he ever tried to take your place as the alpha?” said Arsuaga.

“Well, not me, he hasn’t,” said the young man, “but he doesn’t trust people he doesn’t know. Me and my partner, he respects, but we always need to make it clear who’s in charge. He’s a part of our pack, as if he was a wolf, but he needs to be continually reminded that he’ll always be behind you.”

“That you’re in charge?” asked Arsuaga.

“Yes,” said the lad.

“And how’s he finding it being here today?”

“He’s nervous — you can see that, with his tail between his legs. There’s a lot of people around, a lot of dogs, and he gets a bit overwhelmed by that.”

“Is his hearing very good?” I asked.

“And his sense of smell, his smell particularly. They actually use some dogs of this breed as truffle hounds. This is a young one — he’s nine months old. He weighs twenty-five kilos now, and he’ll grow to forty-five.”

“And does he bark?”

“He does, like all dogs, but when he’s on his own, he howls.”

“He howls to bring the pack together,” Arsuaga explained.

“Right,” said the owner. “When you hear him, he’s just like a wolf. The Czechs created them for the army. They were after a German shepherd with greater endurance for physical work. They crossed them with a wolf, and got this breed. But it was a failure for the soldiers, because they’re less docile than German shepherds. But as it happened, the man who created the breed liked them, and so he kept going with them. They’re very recent, from 1955. There are quite a lot of them in Spain, but many end up abandoned because they’re complicated dogs. If you leave them on their own, they’ll destroy your house. They get very nervous when they haven’t got their owners around. They miss the pack. They’re a difficult animal. You’ve really got to give them some thought.”

“He’s a wolf through and through.”

And we continued on our way, passing between dogs of different aesthetics, different cultures, between gentlemanly little dogs, with their hair in topknots, and proletarian dogs, with their hair matted, between water-dogs and anorexic greyhounds, between dogs that looked like their owners and owners who looked like their dogs.

We continued on our way, as I was saying.

And our way was back to Paley’s watch.

“Paley,” said Arsuaga, “was that philosopher and theologian from the eighteenth century who tried to prove the existence of God with the analogy of a watch and the workings of the world. Remember?”

“I remember,” I said. “He said that if you found a stone in the middle of the countryside, you’d think it had always been there, it was a part of nature. But that if you found a watch, you’d think somebody must have left it there, because a watch can’t create itself. So just as a watch required a creator, the universe, which is more complex, must have had a watchmaker: God.”

“Right. And I said to you that all Darwin’s theories are based on proving that the watch made itself. In other words, that nature doesn’t require intelligent design. OK?”

“OK.”

“And this,” he continued, “was the great problem Darwin ran up against. An eye, to look at, couldn’t have created itself, purely because of the randomness in the combination of its different parts. There had to be some intention, something deliberate, for a system of such complexity to come about. Darwin believed in evolution. He believed that species evolved and modified over time, without the need for any ‘watchmaker,’ but he couldn’t find a way to explain it — the mechanism evaded him, he could find no reason why. In science, if you don’t have an explanation, you might as well have nothing. You can observe the sun rising in the morning and setting at night, but if you can’t provide a reason, then all you’ve got is the observation.”

“So, Darwin,” I said, trying to understand, “needed to demonstrate that species, in nature, evolved without there being a need for any purpose to exist behind that evolution.”

“Exactly. How can the perfection we see in living creatures be attained without the pre-existence of some design?”

“Well, how?”

“Darwin spent years studying the domestication of animals. He sensed that there was something in common between the production of domestic breeds of dogs and evolution, but he didn’t work out what it was until he came up with the idea of ‘unconscious selection’. No one’s ever recognised the true importance of this discovery.”

“Well, you have.”

“I wrote a short book on the subject, because it seems crucial to me. Darwin discovered that nobody in antiquity tried, as people do nowadays, to create, I don’t know, a breed of horses to compete at the racecourse, or a breed of cows that would give you lots of milk. Or a guard dog, or a homing pigeon. These things that we do nowadays are called ‘conscious selection’. All of the breeds of dog on show here today are the result of conscious selection. But in antiquity, people simply worked with whichever animal was most useful to them, and it never even occurred to them to create a particular breed. If a kind of sheep gave you a lot of wool, you’d breed more of it, and the one that didn’t, you’d put in the pot. If there was a particularly large kind of corn growing, you’d sow more of it. In other words, there isn’t that much of a leap between conscious selection, which is what we do nowadays — aimed at upgrading the breed of this or that creature — and the kind of unconscious selection that occurs in nature.”

“It doesn’t seem correct to me,” I pointed out, “to say that a farmer or a rancher’s decision to keep the sheep that gave the most wool or the kind of maize that produced the most corn was unintentional.”

“But there wasn’t a conscious intention. The Jerez vineyard dog, for example, turned out to be ideal for keeping rats out of your wine cellars, because it was small, because it could get into all the nooks and crannies. There weren’t any show days for vineyard dogs. The ones that were best at performing a certain function were allowed to reproduce, and that’s all there was to it. Domestication, when all is said and done, is the control of reproduction. Write this down: domestication consists of the control of reproduction. Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“What do we mean by a domestic species? That you control its reproduction. You decide which ones get to reproduce. You select which ones reproduce, and which ones don’t.”

“And, to a great extent, that selection was unconscious.”

“In antiquity, yes. Well, this is Darwin’s idea when it comes to nature: unconscious selection. There’s no watchmaker, no planning, no objective. No direction, no intention. The creatures that adapt best to the niche in which they find themselves survive, and they get to reproduce. All the perfection, all the beauty we see in nature is determined by death. What lies behind the harmony you see in the countryside is the Reaper with his scythe.”

“And those that perish are the ones Bataille calls the ‘accursed share’. He wrote a book with that title.”

“Call it whatever you want. A cheetah can run 90 kilometres an hour. If one of them, for whatever reason, only manages 85 kilometres an hour, it’s dead. Being a sub-90-kilometres-an-hour cheetah means being dead.”

“You do get examples of perfection, then, in each individual case.”

“Darwin’s very insistent on this point: there’s no such thing as perfection in general, only perfection in specific circumstances. Machines and living beings alike can only be judged according to their efficacy within their given sphere, in the place they occupy in the economy, in their market.”

“In their market?”

“At that time, Darwin was reading Malthus, who is the founder of demographics, and who had written the book in which he said it’s no good helping poor families because that will only mean them having more children, leading to an increase in mortality rates. Which means that if no brake is put on the population, it will snowball, while resources will grow at a slower rate. If there isn’t any control, in short, you get scarcity, you get people in destitution, and you get conflict. When Darwin read this, he said: ‘Right, many more wolves are born than can survive.’”

“Many more wolves?”

“And deer and robins and rabbits, anything you can think of. There’s a concept in ecology called ‘carrying capacity’. Essentially, each cow, or, I don’t know, each auroch, let’s say, needs five hectares of pastureland. There isn’t enough to feed any more than that — you can’t fit more cows, more deer, more lions. The first port of call when designing a nature reserve is to ask oneself: how many goats could we fit here? And, say, five thousand can fit. Write it down: carrying capacity.”

“But in nature, this regulates itself.”

“Yes, it’s regulated by death. The law of the jungle. Cheetahs that can run more than 90 kilometres an hour get to survive. There you have it, that’s the reasoning. The immense majority of goats that are born are sure to perish. Natural selection can be unforgiving.”

“The accursed share,” I insisted.

“Call it what you like,” he repeated. “Bats are simply perfect at being bats.”

“But they make for terrible moles.”

“Now you’re getting the hang of it. This is how Darwin, reading Malthus, came up with the key. Unconscious selection: they compete amongst themselves. He realised that, although everything in nature appears to be alive, in reality almost everything’s dead, because of natural selection.”

“So, no watchmaker, then.”

“There’s competition, selection, and a very slim survival rate. This goes for all species, humans included. You and your wife could have something like sixteen children, but out in nature, only two would survive.”

“Yeah, that’s crazy.”

“This is why people so often get Darwin wrong, because his discovery paved the way for so many different things. And because he took inspiration from demographics and economics, lots of people have used his work to justify the status quo. ‘Darwin says so,’ they argue.”

“Did Darwin read everything that happened to fall into his hands?”

“Everything. Look, there’s no written evidence of this, but many of us believe that Darwin’s greatest single influence was Adam Smith. Smith believes in the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. He says it functions of its own accord, that there’s no need for any intervention. That’s the basis of liberalism. The invisible hand of economics regulates everything, and leads to progress amongst nations. If left to its own devices, the economy will give rise to different specialisations: carpenters appear, and bakers, and bricklayers … A variety of different jobs will come about without any planning, because people, according to their aptitudes, will occupy a place in this complex system that is society, and society will progress just as nature progresses. There’s an economy of nature: species adapt in order to get better at a certain function, to occupy a niche. Darwin never said anything about having read Smith, but I’m sure he did so in the autumn of 1838.”

“You mentioned progress. But what do we understand progress to be?”

“With very simple forms as its starting point, life has unfolded, has undergone a process of perfection.”

“Complexity as a kind of progress?”

“Yes, on the one hand. But on the other, in Darwin’s time, there was a general feeling of optimism around. In the Victorian era, society was believed to be progressing in all different spheres, and this progress was thought to be unstoppable. There was more wealth, more comfort, improved health, increased happiness. The concept of progress was etched into English society at that time.”

“And what happens to the disadvantaged classes?”

“Progress would also reach them. There’s this overflowing euphoria. Then, come the second part of the Industrial Revolution, everything starts getting complicated. The growth of factories, mining, all the gruelling jobs … We see the rise of the urban proletariat … But in Darwin’s time, there was still this transition, with the rural poor — who’d been lorded over by a tremendously wealthy aristocracy — becoming urban, and living better lives than they had in the countryside. There’s the growth of cities … Plus, the English are gaining an empire.”

“There’s a feeling of power.”

“There’s a sensation of unstoppable progress, and this has an influence on Darwin, because he is a Victorian. In any case, Adam Smith put forward an economic model that also provided an explanation for the history of life on earth.”

“And was Darwin a social Darwinist? Did he think it was a good idea to apply the laws he’d discovered in nature to relationships between humans?”

“No, Darwin was a very good person. He was against slavery, for example. The problem isn’t the transfer of economic theory to natural law, but the other way around: when natural law gets applied to economic theory.”

At this moment, we stopped at a stand where dogs of the haute bourgeoisie were being shown. The woman judging them watched how they walked with their owners, calculated their heights, assessed the position of their legs, evaluated the shape of their ears, the length of their backs …

“Oh, look,” said the palaeontologist, “they’re doing morphological examinations of these dogs. Look how worried the owners are! It’s like they’re having to do one of those terrible tests to become a postal worker.”

“Or to become a notary,” I said.

“Or a lawyer.”

“Or a palaeontology professor,” I joked.

“That’ll do,” he said. “Have you made a note about how important the observation of domestic animals was for Darwin?”

“I think so.”

“In that case, let me buy you a beer, and then I’ll have to dash. I’m going to Communion.”

“Holy Communion?”

“Didn’t you notice I’m wearing a suit jacket?”