SEX
In On Human Nature, sociobiologist EO Wilson argues that while sex equality legislation may be laudable, such laws go against the grain of human nature. Laid down over millions of years of natural selection, our gendered psychologies are simply not amenable to PC diktat. Sorry, ladies, but that’s just the way things are:
Even with identical education for men and women and equal access to all professions, men are likely to maintain disproportionate representation in political life, business and science. Many would fail to participate fully in the equally important, formative aspects of child rearing.51
What woman would be allowed to get away with logic like this? These two sentences simply cancel each other out. If men are failing to do their share of childcare, then how can there be ‘equal access to all professions’ for women? Who are these sex-neutral aliens from the planet Neptune bringing up the kids? Has Wilson had a positive sighting of Francis Crick’s space aliens? Men have been on an undeclared childcare and housework strike for years, and this has damaged women’s chances. (Imagine the ironing that EO Wilson could have usefully done instead of writing On Human Nature.)
Notice how EO Wilson is unable to follow the logical entailments of his own thought-experiment. If the starting premise of Wilson’s scenario is an imaginary society in which women have ‘equal access to all professions’ then the only way men could possibly enjoy ‘disproportionate representation in politics, business and science’ would be through breaking the law by leaving their toddlers unattended. Wilson’s fantasy society would presumably have a legal system, courts and jails, and if ‘failure to participate fully in the formative aspects of child-rearing’ were a civil offence then it would be impossible for men to continue to exert a disproportionate dominance of all the top jobs.
Of course, if there were free creches for all, then these men would not have to go to jail. But free creches for all could only be paid for by scrapping male-dominated asset-stripping jobs in the financial sector. After all, you cannot afford to have the City of London and social justice.
Wilson describes political life, business, and science as if they were fixed things in the world like the nitrogen cycle. But again, if the starting point of his thought-experiment is an equal world then political life, business and science would be utterly transformed, so much so as to beg the questions:
Whose political life?
Which businesses?
What type of science?
When it comes to taking care of business, EO Wilson seems to envisage women failing to make a go of managing their local Hogs & Hooters or Spearmint Rhino. He pictures an over-promoted woman editor explaining falling sales figures to the board of Guns N Ammo. If the all-female board of a nuclear weapons silo makes regrettable overtures to the peaceniks sitting outside the fence, then there’s something wrong with the XX chromosomes, because there’s nothing wrong with a nuclear weapons facility.
In fact, nukes make a good barium meal to test EO Wilson’s proposition. Everyone from CND to Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists agrees that women oppose the existence of nuclear weapons more strongly than men.52 How fares the politics, business and science of nuclear weapons when half the members of every parliament are women?
Allowing women equal access to the British government, I suggest, would change the defence policy of every political party in Britain except the Greens. (Yes, the SNP want to get rid of Trident nuclear submarines, but they also want to stay in NATO, the nuclear-armed tanks on the UN’s lawn).
What about science? Science was, you recall, the third of his triple-whammy against the doomed naïveté of sexual equality. Once again, EO Wilson talks about science as if it were some kind of free standing thing, operating a neutral process of natural selection in its remorseless weeding of enfeebled XX chromosomes from the academy.
But science does not stand outside of society. Take the Royal Society, for example, that ‘fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists and […] the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.’ In the 1600s, the Royal Society was set up on these lines:
‘What is feminine [...] [shall] be excluded from the Society’s philosophy,’ wrote founder member Henry Oldenburg in a letter to Robert Boyle, pledging that the Royal Society would ‘raise a manly philosophy’. This was off the back of Bacon talking about how the new science promised to usher in: ‘a truly masculine birth of time.’ For centuries the Royal Society has held true to Oldenburg’s vision. Not until 1945 did it admit its first woman. And in 2014 just one in twenty Royal Society research fellowships went to women.
But for EO Wilson, even if the Royal Society had been set up as a ladies science college, with a remit that what is masculine should be excluded from the Society’s philosophy, men would still be winning nineteen out of twenty research fellowships. Male and female inequality is in our genes, he says. Stop trying to explain it away with wishful thinking. It’s who we are. It’s what we do. And why is it what we do? Because it is what we have always done. Right from when we first came down from the trees. Except the latest science suggests otherwise. Far from being an invention of the last few decades, sexual equality now looks to have been the rule in prehistory, at least until the advent of sedentary agriculture.
In May 2015, the journal Science published a groundbreaking paper, arguing that ‘increased sex egalitarianism in human evolutionary history may have had a transformative effect on human social organisation.’53
The paper was written by a team of anthropologists who studied two contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, the Agta in the Philippines and the Mbendjele Yaka in the Congo, and found the social organisation of each tallied with their computer model of what happens when the sexes have an equal say in where they live. When men make the decision on their own, you have tight hubs of closely related sibs, but when men and women have an equal say in where to live you find settlement spread over a wider geographical area – ‘I’m not living near your family. I don’t want your mum sticking her nose in’. This leads to a broader social and genetic array, which has knock-on effects:
‘[S]exual equality may have proved an evolutionary advantage for early human societies,’ writes ace Guardian science correspondent Hannah Devlin in an interview with the paper’s authors, ‘as it would have fostered wide-ranging social networks and closer cooperation between unrelated individuals.’54
This may also have led to the sharing and spread of technological innovations. But, of course, that’s man stuff.
One of the emerging themes in evolutionary biology is that the environment plays a far larger role in natural selection than was previously thought.
The direct action of the environment’s central role in speciation can be seen in how something very large – the formation of the Grand Canyon – led to something very small – a new species of antelope squirrel.
While not as old as the hills, antelope squirrels are older than the Grand Canyon, which formed three million years ago. Three million years and one day ago, a single species of antelope squirrel gamboled on opposite sides of a finger-width fissure in the ground. When fault yawned into canyon, two halves of the antelope squirrel population found themselves looking at each other across a chasm. Perhaps only poetry could heal the rift in their hearts.
What once we had, now is lost,
Sundered by forces primeval.
The chasm between us will never be crossed
Not even by Evil Keneaval.
Two distinct species of antelope squirrel, white-tailed and Harris, live on either side of the Grand Canyon. The speciation had nothing to do with survival of the fittest, nothing to do with any competitive advantage in having a white tail or in being called Harris. All it took to make a new species was the sudden opening up of a great big hole in the ground.
The Hawaiian Bobtail Squid lives in the coastal waters not just of Hawaii, but throughout the Southern Indo-Pacific as far down as Australia. Every evening, the nocturnal bobtail squid hoovers bioluminescent bacteria called vibrio into its light organ. All night long, the brightly glowing vibrio act as the squid’s camouflage. How can bright lights be camouflage? Sharks and other predators are looking for the shadow cast by the squid. Light sensors on the squid’s mantle measure how much moonlight in coming down, the bobtail squid projects from its light organ the same intensity of light, perfectly matching the light below to the light above. What the shark sees looks like a single uninterrupted moonbeam. It’s like an Invisibility Cloak.
If the moon goes behind a cloud the bobtail squid dims its lights. If there’s a storm with thunder and lightning, the bobtail squid can actually flash its lights to mimic the lightning. It’s an incredibly responsive organism. Although that said it was a very long night for any bobtail squid unlucky enough to be in Sydney Harbour on the night that Jean-Michel Jarre played an open-air gig.
SQUID: What’s that noise? Is it a Beluga whale? Those flashing lights? Old-timer, can you tell us?
OLD-TIMER: Last time I heard that sound the entire shoal was wiped out. All except me.
SQUID: It is a typhoon? An electrical strom?
OLD-TIMER: Worse. It’s ambient-electro concept synth with a live laser display.
SQUID: Can you remember the lighting cues?
OLD-TIMER: All I remember is when it gets to the diddlydeedee bit, that’s when the laser harp comes out.
SQUID: Laser harp?
OLD-TIMER: Yeah, that’s when he shoots revolving neon beams of red, gold and green into the night sky. That laser harp blew our cover, the sharks zoomed in and I found myself swimming through the blood of the shoal. Oh look! There’s a pod of bottlenose dolphins to starboard. We’re done for! It’s happening again!
SQUID: Steady as she goes, Old-timer, I’ve got an idea. If we all swim in a corkscrew dive we’ll mimic the revolving beams. Here comes the diddlydeedee bit. Stand by for corkscrew dive. On my command… Now! Corkscrew dive! Corkscrew dive! Outstanding! Here it comes again. Eyes to me, and… Cobra roll! Demonic knot! Wraparound corkscrew! Butterfly inversion! Inline twist! Sea serpent loop! Double dip and double up!
OLD-TIMER: The dolphins are swimming away!!! Squid-vibrio symbiosis give techno synth licks!
New species originate from tiny, isolated, unstable populations of struggling misfits at the ecological fringes (Mayr, 1964). The gene pools of tiny isolated populations are inherently unstable (Tattersall, 2003). When the going gets unstable, the unstable get going (Billy Ocean, 1986). One day, geospheric churn fells the fittest and among the misfits’ suite of mutations is the must-have adaptation that propels them centre-stage. But it is only through their long apprenticeship of being least fit in the old habitat that they become fittest in the new. Therefore instead of survival of the fittest, it is more accurate to describe speciation as survival of the misfits (Newman, 2015).
Misfits generate new species. The fittest never do. Well-fitted populations have stodgy gene pools in which any and all mutations are quickly annulled. Trouble is, you’re only as fit as your last habitat. The fittest fit too well, that’s their problem. Pigs in clover they may be, but what happens when that clover starts to move uphill or gets too chewy to eat? Change the scene and they’re gone. Stable, well-fitted, unwieldy, large populations can’t respond quickly to sudden ecological change. Tiny, unstable populations can.
If all successful species today were once tiny populations of struggling misfits, might this explain the lack of intermediate species in the fossil record? If so Misfit Theory plugs the biggest gap in Darwinism.
When Misfit Theory is discussed at international science conferences, however, speaker after speaker denounces the theory on the ground that misfits are just a sub-set of specialists, and specialists lose out to generalists in times of shock, such as a sudden ecological cataclysm.
Generalists are any population of what you might call spread-betters. Not so exquisitely adapted to any one particular niche, the generalist is for that very reason better able to adapt to a new and unpredictable. A slow loris, say, while not particularly expert at peeling lychees, climbing trees or prising open a nut – can make a pretty good fist of all three when she has to.
Specialists, by contrast, are exquisitely adapted to that particular habitat the flood just swept away. A specialist might be a hammer orchid evolved to be pollinated exclusively by those thynnid wasps that are now being shovelled out of storm drains and swimming pool pump filters fifty miles away.
In defence of Misfit Theory, I’d say that misfits are topical specialists. By sheer fluke, yesterday’s liability becomes today’s must-have adaptation. Consider the woolly mammoth. They were already woolly long before the temperature plunged, back when wooliness was a mutation they could have done without – especially in the summer months. The Ice Age selected the woolly mammoths, while the cotton-lycra mammoth perished in the snow.
Can we see Misfit Theory at work as a cultural force in human society? I believe we can. In the last decade the major environmental victories, for example, have not come from political mainstream, but from marginalised, misfit groups on the edges like Reclaim The Power.
They came to most people’s attention, I guess, in 2009 with their seminal action Climate Camp In The City, which was a precursor of Occupy Wall Street. Climate Camp in the City occupied Bishopsgate, where they set up pop-up tents, compost loos, a farmers’ market and raised beds growing brassica and runner beans, and it was brilliant because there you are, right in the heart of the City of London, and suddenly you’ve got all these drug-fuelled anarchists bent on social destruction looking out their office windows… at a future with a future.
From there, Reclaim The Power went on to do actions against Kingsnorth and West Burton coal-fired power-stations, followed by an attempt to shut down Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station (which led to the unmasking of a vast network of police spies involved in sexual exploitation). These actions produced a straight-up political victory: no new coal-fired power stations in the UK.
As George Monbiot says, ‘Social change comes not from the centre but from the margin.’
Is there is an analogy here with the proliferation of genetic novelty in marginal populations rather than among dominant species?
‘Very small populations are much more genetically unstable than large ones,’ writes Ian Tattersall, ‘and they provide optimal conditions for incorporating the randomly arising genetic novelties that furnish the very basis of evolutionary change.’55
Hanging on to this insight certainly makes me feel less despondent when I’m one of only three people who’ve turned up at a community centre on a wet Tuesday for a direct action training workshop. On such occasions, I look around the room and say:
‘Yes, we’ve got the system right where we want it!’
Symbiogenesis is the idea that new species originate through symbiosis. To put it another way, new species come about when different species come together.
In The Origin of the Nucleus (1905) Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowski speculated that the first cell with a nucleus was formed when ‘micrococci invaded a bacterium [and] lived as symbionts.’
Mereschkowski’s views fell out of favour for most of the twentieth century, but in the twenty-first century, Scientific American described his hypothesis as ‘tantalizingly close’ to recent discoveries of how the first multicellular organisms evolved from free-floating archaea and bacteria.
In The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look At Evolution, Lynn Margulis argues that more species originate from symbiogenesis than from random mutation:
‘No species existed before bacteria merged to form larger cells including ancestors of plants and animals… Symbiogenesis brings together unlike individuals to make large, more complex entities […] Life did not take over the globe by combat but by networking.’
Organelles, the subunits of a cell, may once have been free-floating organisms of their own, which swallowed one another. Among our organelles, mitochondria have their own DNA and RNA and still reproduce in their own fashion – just in case their human host turns out to be a mere flash in the pan.
Margulis showed symbiogenesis at work in everything from translucent seaweed mats on the shores of Brittany, France to mixotricha paradoxa in the guts of termites in Darwin, Australia. But it took the wreck of a few submarines to clinch Margulis and Mereschkowski’s symbiogenesis hypothesis.
In 2014, shards of yellow submarine were found floating on the South Pacific, north-east of New Zealand. The shattered debris was the wreckage of deep-sea submersible Nereus, which imploded 6 miles down in the Kermadec Trench, its rivets popped by 16,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. (Walking around on earth we are under 15 pounds per square inch of pressure – unless you’ve just been chucked when it doubles by the hour.)
Before buckling under pressure, ROVs (remotely-operated vehicles) like the Nereus take cross-sections of deep-sea hydrothermal vents. These cross-sections reveal distinct layers of bacterial and archaeal life in separate temperature zones up and down the inside of each smoker spire.56 From these cross-sections has come a story of the origin of species, close to Mereschkowski’s vision. And it goes like this.
Life as we know it started when a deep-sea chimney snapped in half about two billion years ago. Smoker spires are too hot for seawater organisms to survive, and the ocean too chilly for chimney-dwelling hyperthemophiliacs. But snap the chimney and seawater flows into the smoker spire, hyperthermophiles gush out into the ocean, the extremists find a common mean. Symbiosis begins.
If that smoker spire never broke then nanoarchea equitans (which likes 70°C seawater) might not have met the bacterium ignicoccus hospitalis (which likes 90°C in the spire) and then where would we be? For their symbiotic dance may have led to the first ever nucleated cell.
Nanoarchea equitans is the smallest organism ever to have its genome sequenced. This sequencing revealed its H3 protein to be a dead ringer for the H3 in histone. Histone is the protein spindle in the nucleus of our cells that tightly spools up two metres of DNA. To find H3 floating free at a hydrothermal vent supports the notion that each human cell is a jar of prehistoric pond-dipping.
I like this story but I wonder whether the idea that everything starts with smoke stacks and furnaces only seems natural because of the Industrial Revolution.
What could be more fitting for a Briton than a vision of life that starts with a row of chimneys, just like Coronation Street?