NINE

Super teddy bear

June marked the completion of a year since my first meeting with the palaeontologist — a year in which our cholesterol hadn’t gone up, nor had our blood pressure, and we hadn’t had a roof tile fall on our heads. Compared to the progress of the world, our lives were proceeding with no great noteworthy shocks. The partnership, in short, was working. I called him to say we should celebrate the occasion, and he agreed.

“I’m taking you to a toyshop,” he added.

After I hung up, I was a little concerned. Was he thinking of buying me a teddy bear as an anniversary present? Had he started to sense my profound Neanderthalness? If that was the case, what gift ought I to buy him?

What can a Neanderthal offer a Sapiens? He told me to meet him in a shop on Madrid’s Calle del Arenal at seven o’clock on a Saturday evening. Calle del Arenal, which is pedestrianised, joins the Puerta del Sol with the Plaza de la Ópera, two of the city’s nerve centres. The artery was teeming with people, the way a petri dish teems with microorganisms in the lab. I arrived half an hour early, as I usually do, to inspect the surroundings, and I had a peek into the establishment, which was, indeed, a toyshop, whose aesthetic evoked an English establishment in the nineteen twenties. The window displayed dozens of hyperrealist babies, but also stuffed animals and even a doll’s house.

Dolls’ houses drive me wild. The one in the window was two storeys high with an attic, and it was half-open, showing its innards: the living room, the kitchen, the bathrooms, the bedrooms … In the living room there was a group of older people drinking tea. In one of the bedrooms, a girl, who reminded me of Carroll’s Alice, was looking at herself in an oval mirror, one of those big cheval-glass types. In the attic, a butler and a cook were conversing while seated on the edge of a high bed. It looked like a peaceful world, perhaps too much so. The only addition I’d have made, on the lower floor, in the gap under the staircase, was a hanged man swinging from a beam.

Shortly afterwards, I began to wonder whether Arsuaga really had asked to meet me there, or if it had just been a dream. My suspicion grew when the agreed time came around and he hadn’t arrived. I went into a nearby bar from where I’d be able to watch the entrance of the shop, and ordered a coffee to kill time and reflect upon my mental state. Around a quarter past seven, when I was about to leave, I saw him arrive, hurrying slightly, making his way through the crowd.

“Sorry, sorry!” he said. “I’ve just driven in from the mountains. I was hiking, and I got caught up in traffic.”

I asked him what we were doing there.

He turned and gestured to the throng, and exclaimed: “Look, all this energy!”

I hate energy, I hate euphoria, I hate large crowds, but I feigned enthusiasm at that Saturday-afternoon spectacle in the middle of one of the great European metropolises.

“OK, now I’ve seen the energy,” I said, after a few moments. “Now what? What are we going to do in a toyshop?”

“There are lessons to be learned everywhere,” said the palaeontologist, with a somewhat condescending smile.

The mountain air had acted on him like a line of coke. In addition to this, he’d had a haircut that made him look like a teenager. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. He seemed particularly thin. For a moment, I found him rather loathsome, if I’m honest.

“This ebullience,” he said, not moving from where he was, “is all somatic. It’s to do with the body, even though every one of these people carries a fixed set of genes inside them. Have we talked about this already — germlines and somatic lines?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“The body is the vehicle for the genes. There are those who say that, if it came down to it, the genes would do without the body altogether if it were to their benefit, because they are selfish. It’s one way of looking at it. In the chicken/egg dichotomy: we choose the egg, but there’s an aphorism according to which the chicken is nothing but the instrument used by the egg to perpetuate itself.”

“The chicken is the shell.”

“Something like that. All of these people will die, and so will you and I, but our genes will carry on through the ages. That’s precisely what they’ve been doing since time began.”

I imagined that whole crowd dead, including the hundreds of teenagers who were going in and out of the countless bars, and the idea seemed like total carnage.

“Let’s have a look at that koala,” Arsuaga said, going over to a two-metre teddy bear next to the Church of San Ginés, with which children were having their pictures taken.

“And the toyshop?”

“Later. We’ve got time.”

We made our way between the bodies until we reached our goal.

“This is a super teddy,” he said, pointing at the monster. “The koala is, in and of itself, a teddy bear animal. We love stuffed animals because they bring out our tender side. Our genes manipulate us to bring out a protective impulse.”

“Well, this one is actually a bit scary,” I said, contemplating its size.

The palaeontologist just went on: “A protective impulse similar to that which we feel toward children of our own species. We don’t consider children a threat, do we? They aren’t part of the system: they don’t play the social game in which we adults are involved; they don’t compete. This is essential if they are to play on our unconscious emotional mechanisms, the inherited, genetic ones — our biology.”

“And that,” I ventured, “is why horror movies with children in them are always twice as terrifying: because the threat’s coming from someplace it shouldn’t.”

“A devil child is the most terrible thing there is. But what’s so interesting about teddy bears? What makes the koala so adorable?”

The koala’s owners, a Latin American couple, and the people who were standing in line to take photos of their children, were starting to give us curious looks. What were two older gentlemen doing, planted in front of this creature, in animated conversation — one of them taking notes of what the other was saying?

“I’m afraid our presence might be making them a little uncomfortable,” I said.

“Forget about other people’s discomfort,” Arsuaga scolded. “You spend your life worrying about what people will say. To start with, the koala is cuddly and soft, and its fur isn’t spiky; it’s strokable. Do you see?”

“I do.”

“It’s one great big ball. Now, we’re going to break down what it is that makes children adorable, and the characteristics they share with teddy bears. Firstly, the cuddliness. They have to be like a round ball, with barely any neck. The head is a sphere. They don’t have sharp teeth or claws.”

“The koala’s got claws.”

“But they’re retracted. Whereas a wolf in the wild has sharp teeth. Look at the koala’s face. Big eyes, short snout, and a round forehead. All the things you see in a child’s face. And what about the way children move? They’re uncoordinated, always on the verge of falling over. That lack of coordination, it’s fundamental in awakening our tender side. Plus the short arms and short legs. Add all these things together, articulate them correctly, and you’ve got a machine for bringing out the tenderness of others. The genes responsible for producing these features are working on your conduct. They are manipulating you, and they aren’t even yours.”

“Not even the same species as me,” I added, “because a puppy awakens the same emotions.”

“Exactly. This is what we’re here to talk about today, because the last time we met was at the dog show, remember?”

“Yes.”

“Why do we like dogs, why do we find wolves threatening, and why have we invented pets with familiar features?”

“I think I’m starting to see.”

“And now there’s another interesting word I want to mention, another key concept, which is the super-stimulant. Every kind of manipulation, from totalitarianism to sexual persuasion, to advertising, uses this. Children are already pretty cute as it is, but if you make a super-child, then you have fabricated a super-stimulant. If you exaggerate their features, they draw the attention more.”

“A super-koala is a koala that’s been modified to provoke more tenderness than a regular koala,” I ventured.

“Indeed. It’s an exaggerated version of a koala. Look at how trusting the children are in letting it hug them. And how, in spite of its size, they hug it without any kind of fear.”

“You’re right, but maybe we ought to go to the toyshop — they might close soon,” I encouraged him, troubled by the curiosity we were prompting among the ring of bystanders.

“Well,” said Arsuaga, ignoring my suggestion, “this applies to everything.”

“Such as?”

“A cake made with too much refined sugar and lots of fat.”

“Those calorie bombs …”

“What are those cakes? Super-stimulants. We like sugary fruits. We are programmed to eat blackberries because they’ve got glucose in them, and we like animal fats because they give us energy. As well as needing proteins, which are the building blocks of the body, we need energy, and we get energy from sugars and fats. To obtain fats out in the wild, you have to hunt a mammoth, and that takes lots of time and effort. A single cake has all the fat you would get from a mammoth.”

“And to obtain the sugar you get in a slice of cake?”

“You would need to eat every single blueberry in the Sistema Central to match the amount of energy you can get from a single slice of cake. How, then, to resist the super-stimulant that is a cake?”

“With willpower,” I replied, though this was clearly absurd.

“Biological super-stimulants,” he continued, “are common throughout the species, so that, if you want to sell something, you already know which button you need to press. And now, yes, let’s go to the toyshop before it shuts.”

Once we were inside the shop, and having explained to the manager that we weren’t a pair of dirty old men, but a palaeontologist and his student, we stood amazed at a collection of latex dolls that provided a perfect imitation of the texture of a baby’s flesh. They awoke not only tenderness but also cannibal instincts, as they looked quite ready for the oven. I asked the palaeontologist if the phrase “I could eat you all up”, which is so often used to refer to children, did deep down express a literal desire.

“My mother,” says Arsuaga, “has a story about how, not long after my older brother was born, she was served suckling pig and she said, ‘I can’t eat that.’ Maybe it reminded her of a desire to eat the baby boy — who knows? — but the truth is that babies are made to be eaten.”

“Talking about the cannibal thing, I’m reminded that at home we used to have a pair of hamsters, and at one point the female had a litter. And I remember, one day the mother seemed to be doing something strange, and I approached the cage. Turns out she was eating one of the babies. She had taken it like this, between her front legs, the way a squirrel takes an acorn, and had started with its head. I still get chills; I’ll never forget it.”

“In my house,” Arsuaga said, “it was the boys, my kids.”

“Who ate the hamster?”

“No! Who came upon the mother hamster eating her offspring in the master bedroom.”

“How appalling!”

“The genes, it’s the genes — it’s nothing personal. In reality, she wasn’t eating them, she was recycling them. When a female hamster gives birth inside a cage, she feels she’s in an unsafe situation, and the best that she can do therefore is to recycle the energy of her offspring. The litter is doomed.”

“Right.”

“But anyway,” he said, returning to the hyper-realistic dolls, “we see here the characteristics that make children so sweet and lovable. The same things we were saying about a koala bear: disproportionately big head, big eyes, chubby cheeks, no sharp corners, rounded forehead, flat nose, almost furry on top, head barely peeking out. Can you imagine a baby with an aquiline nose?”

“No.”

“And the lips, those little chops … Plus, they’ve either got no teeth, or very tiny ones. Everything’s all soft and bouncy: the little tummy, the chubby thighs … And its clumsiness — again, clumsiness really makes us go gooey inside. What’s the baby saying to us with all of this?”

“What?”

“I’m not here to compete with you. A baby is a survival machine. It’s programmed to reach adulthood. Make a note of this: we could use all the features we’ve just seen together or apart. Once you’ve got a list of features, you say to yourself: I’m going to amplify them all, or just one of them, maybe two, et cetera. And away you go, manipulating people. Let’s go into the next room — that’s where the teddies are.”

“The curious thing,” I insisted standing now in front of the teddy bear display, “is that it isn’t just the young of our own species that induce tenderness and an eagerness to protect them, but animals, too. And the same thing happens to animals with us. That’s what’s behind those cases of feral children who get raised by an animal in the wild.”

“That is exactly the point. It’s something you see in all mammals, bar none. The same infantile features recur across them all. Hence the stories on TV about a lioness adopting a newborn from another species. The lion is no zoologist, so it doesn’t know, but this newborn’s appearance awakens her protective instinct. The lion isn’t in control of this instinct. All mammals are alike in this.”

“Of course,” I said, “while a baby earthworm, on the other hand, doesn’t provoke any feeling of solidarity in us at all.”

“Look at that husky,” Arsuaga says, pointing out a nearby husky puppy, “it’s saying: ‘Adopt me.’ It’s manipulating you to make you want to adopt it.”

“It’s true!” I exclaimed, amazed.

“If you like it, I’ll get it for you.”

“What?!”

“I’m joking — don’t get your knickers in a twist. The majority of dog owners will swear to you that they didn’t choose the animal, it chose them.”

“How so?”

“You go into a pet shop, and all of the dogs start rolling around and playing cute, as a way of seducing you. They compete with one another to make you like them. And you go away with the one that’s touched you most deeply.”

“And so they choose us.”

“Indeed. All these teddy bears, if you look, have something in common. What?”

“What?”

“Their needy attitude. They all look up at you, not so much asking for help as for affection. Yes or no?”

“Yes, but that bird”, I add, gesturing toward a stuffed raven, “doesn’t look all that tender to me.”

“With birds, they do what they can. Make the beak a little rounder, for example. Me, I like the octopus over there. Look how cute it is.”

“But the octopus is an alien.”

“The octopus, in spite of its morphology and the fact it’s related to clams and oysters, has developed several features very similar to our own.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“For starters, this animal has a mind. A mind is what machines lack. It means you’ve got an inner representation of the external world. A replica. This is what we know of the world: a replica that we have inside our heads.”

“The head’s a bit like Plato’s cave: all you can detect is an echo of reality.”

“That’s one way of looking at it. What’s for sure is that no machine has a mind. This is why computers win at chess, but they lose at Parchís.”

“It’s strange how an octopus can look so like us while we’re so different in shape.”

“This is called adaptive convergence. I’ll explain it to you in detail some other time. But think, for example, of Hernán Cortés and Moctezuma. All the Aztec institutions were things the Spanish conquistador recognised: they had priests, schools, books, churches, monarchs, soldiers, generals … Cortés could understand their society perfectly well, in spite of the fact there had been no contact with it for years. The humans who arrived in the Americas fifteen thousand years before the conquistadors were mammoth hunters, and now these people were writing books, same as us. So, what can we deduce from that?”

“What?”

“That there are cultural convergences determined by the nature of our mind. There are paths that repeat. And the octopus is a good example of this. We separated from the molluscs millions of years ago, but we have converged mentally with the octopus, which has an eye that seems to be looking at you.”

“With an expression that’s human.”

“Almost. But now that the subject of convergences has come up, I’ll confess that there is a world, the world of Pokémon, that I am about to get into.”

“Did you just say you were going to get into Pokémon?”

“Yes, because from what I can make out, they’re these fantastical animals, chimeras, creatures made up by combining, I don’t know, a rabbit and a cat, which in real life is completely unfeasible. There’s an internal logic to evolution; it isn’t like anything goes. You can’t have a carnivorous rabbit. You can’t have a rabbit-cat. You also can’t have a carnivore with horns. There’s a story about the Devil appearing one day to Cuvier — he’s the father of palaeontology — and saying to him: ‘I’m the Devil and I’m going to eat you.’ Cuvier looked him up and down, and said, ‘You’ve got horns on your head and hooves on your feet, you can’t be carnivorous.’ And he turned over and went back to sleep. Because he was in bed.”

“Real tough-guy, that Cuvier.”

“Adaptive convergences exist because the number of possibilities is limited. And that makes for apparent coincidences between creatures, like the octopus and you, which look very different.”

At this point, we were approached by the shop manager, who told us they were closing.

“What a shame!” Arsuaga said. “We’ve still got dozens more teddies to look at. But that octopus really is extremely well done, isn’t it?”

The woman gave us a suspicious look. She clearly would not have believed we were a palaeontologist and his student. On our way to the exit, we stopped at a dolls’ house identical to the one in the window, and I asked the palaeontologist: “What’s missing?”

“I don’t know, what’s missing?”

“A hanged man in the gap under the stairs.”

He looked at me.

“Are you OK?”