CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Jack opened the square white containers and set them out on the coffee table. Kate tore the wrappers off the plastic knives and forks.

“I wish I’d had the chance to read A Brief History of Evil,” she said as she stabbed a pot sticker with a plastic fork. “Maybe you can fill me in.”

As she dipped a pot sticker in a cup of sauce and then took a big bite, Jack took a few pieces of shrimp tempura.

“Well, at this point it wouldn’t do you a whole lot of good. You’re well past that book and into needing to know about my next one.”

“What’s it going to be called?”

“A Long History of Evil.”

Kate paused a moment at such a chilling title. “So is it about evil down through the ages?” she asked before putting the other half of the pot sticker in her mouth.

He watched her a moment, apparently considering how to explain it. “You and I both want the world we live in to be a civilized place, a safe place of law and order. We want to live our lives in peace and for corruption to be stopped.”

“What’s wrong with that? I think most people would want the same thing.”

“What’s wrong with it, is that despite how much most people would like it to be that way, that doesn’t always fit with man’s fundamental nature.”

Kate shrugged as she chewed. “There are times when things go wrong, and times when the world is doing better. I get it.”

Jack made a face. “No, I don’t think you do, not in a complete way, a way that makes the connections from historic eras all the way down to the Scavenger Hunt site and guy who killed your brother. That’s what the new book is about.”

That was too inclusive to make any sense to her. “So what are the connections you’re talking about?”

“There are long eras when good is on the ascendancy, times of enlightenment when knowledge is expanding and lives are getting better. Then there are the opposite kind of times, when hard-won enlightenment fades as forces gather to bring darkness in around mankind. Those times are grim and life is harsh.

“There is great power behind the movement of these historical periods, so they endure for thousands of years.”

“So that’s what your new book is about?” Kate asked. “The history of mankind going through these long periods of good and bad times?”

“No,” Jack said. “It’s about the hidden force behind that pendulum, what drives it, what makes it tick.”

Kate didn’t follow what he meant. “So, the book is going to be about … what?”

When Jack finished a shrimp, he waved the tail for emphasis. “Basically, it’s the story of how the mechanism of murder drives historical trends.”

“So it’s a history book? The history of murderers and the part they played in the world during different times?”

“Not exactly. You’re thinking in terms of result, while I’m talking about causation.” He frowned up at the ceiling as he appeared to consider where to begin.

“It’s not about the people who murder,” he finally said, “but about why they murder.”

“My brother used to call those kinds of people the devil.”

“There is no devil,” Jack said. “We are the devil. The devil is us.”

Kate paused. “What are you talking about?”

“What do a serial killer; a man who murders his children and wife because he finds responsibilities intolerable; an armed robber who shoots a store clerk; a nurse who murders elderly patients; a dictator who orders tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of people to be executed; a guy who shoots his neighbor over a boundary dispute; a gang member who shoots a member of another race for an initiation; government officials who cause countless deaths because they want to protect a pharmaceutical industry; people who are making a product that they know is resulting in deaths; a terrorist who opens up with a machine gun, slaughtering women and children; a man who kills another man in a bar fight; a motorist who in a rage shoots a woman for cutting him off; a wife who poisons her husband with antifreeze for his life-insurance money; and a twelve-year-old girl on social media encouraging another girl to kill herself … all have in common?”

“Jeez,” Kate said, staring at him, transfixed, fork in hand. “I guess they all involve people being killed, but the causes of those killings are wildly different.”

“It only seems that way. In order to understand why, first you need to understand that humans—Homo sapiens—have virtually identical DNA. A small group of chimps has more genetic diversity than all the billions of people alive today.”

Kate frowned as she put one of the throw pillows behind her back for support. “How can that be?”

“It came about because of several pivotal periods in our history, history that can be traced back through both our DNA and our mitochondrial DNA.”

Kate swallowed a bite of pot sticker as she held up a finger to stop him. “What’s mitochondrial DNA?”

“Prehistoric organelles within all our cells. The cell provides a protective environment for them. Mitochondria create ATP—molecular energy—at a cellular level, so the relationship is symbiotic. Without them, we couldn’t have developed into who and what we are today. Chinese philosophy has always called this life force ‘chi,’ but it’s simply a chemical reaction that provides energy to cells.

“Over hundreds of thousands of years, those organelles lost much of their own DNA material because living within the protection of the host cell it was no longer needed. While our cells have something like twenty to twenty-five thousand DNA gene pairs, mitochondrial DNA contains only thirty-seven genes.

“Only the mother’s mitochondrial DNA can be passed down to her offspring, so through it we can trace the female side of humans back through history.”

“Okay,” Kate said, trying to be patient, “what does that have to do with lack of genetic diversity?”

“All of our mitochondrial DNA—the female side of our ancestors—can be traced back through mutation rates to roughly about two hundred thousand years ago, to the time of the skeletal remains of a female pre-human known as Lucy. She—or those like her—passed on their mitochondrial DNA to all of us. They were the female component of our ancestors.

“That mitochondrial DNA evidence shows that there have been several critical times in our history when the ancestors of humans nearly became extinct.

“For example, roughly seventy thousand years ago, the eruption of Toba, on Sumatra in Indonesia, put nearly three thousand times as much ash into the atmosphere as Mount Saint Helens. It dimmed the sun for six years, leading to the complete disruption of the environment and all living species.

“It’s estimated that the pre-human population of the world fell to perhaps no more than two thousand individuals. Inbreeding of this small population narrowed genetic diversity.

“Then, about sixty thousand years ago, a male, a product of this natural selection of survival of the fittest, gave this relatively stable pre-human female DNA a mutation of the Y chromosome that started the rapid cascade of human evolution.

“Somewhere between twenty and forty thousand years ago, it’s believed that this human population fell to as few as twelve hundred individuals. But these were now human individuals. They were like us.”

“Wow,” Kate said, trying to imagine such a world, “so at one time there were hardly more than a thousand people?”

Jack flourished a shrimp for emphasis. “Yes, but that dramatically overstates the reality of the situation. It was actually much more dire than it sounds. Remember, out of that total were those too young and too old to breed. With such small total populations, there may have been no more than forty breeding pairs—for the entire human race.

“We were an endangered species on the brink of extinction.

“But even that overstates the grim reality. It wasn’t like what we think of today, where a couple comes together for whatever reason, and there were forty pairs of people, forty couples reproducing. That’s not the way it would have been.

“This would have been a very hostile world of primitive groups struggling for survival, much like a wolf pack. In such a near-extinction period, where only the most cunning, the most brutal survived, the dominant male would have controlled most of the females for breeding rights. It is only those few males, or perhaps even one, who was the father of all future people.”

“So how does this handful of males, or even a single male, become dominant?” Kate asked. “What did they do to win the females?”

“Now you’ve reached the central connection to everything.

“You see, to compete for scarce resources, and to compete for breeding rights, males benefited by killing off their competition—both to maintain breeding dominance and as a source of food. There was no benefit to allowing other males to exist to threaten what meager food was available, or to vie for the small number of breeding-age females. Killing also produced a food source for the dominant male and his breeding females so that they would live to produce his offspring.

“Killing became an essential component of the genetic makeup.

“So, these few males with a genetic mutation for murder had a survival advantage. They murdered their competition. Whatever the total population might have been, most would have been females, with these few males exerting their breeding rights.

“For those few males, killing was the prime means of survival. It was in fact their key survival advantage. Their dominance through murder took them to the top of the food chain. They passed that genetic trait on to their offspring.

“Those few offspring interbred, helping to hardwire that genetic makeup into our DNA, resulting in the lack of genetic diversity we see today.

“It is often said that the people alive today are the descendants of this single mitochondrial Eve, or more likely a very small number of these inbred pre-human females at the time of a population bottleneck, with the unique mutation of DNA introduced by one of those dominant males that bred with her. Their descendants started the rapid cascade of human evolution and population growth that came of their genetically superior offspring.

“We are all descendants of this primitive king, this primitive killer. He was father to all of us.

“In other words, we are all the children of these same few breeding pairs, this homogeneous ancestral population, these same few dominant killers. Lucy’s mitochondrial DNA, our first mother, combined with the Y chromosome of that dominant male, our first father, made us who we are today.

“We all—white, black, Asian, whatever—are descendants of that handful of human ancestors. We all carry the same basic structure of their DNA. We are all them.

“And murder is baked into our DNA.”