In 1973 the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology was given to three men. Two of them had been on different sides of the Nazi divide in pre-World War II Germany. Karl von Frisch had suffered at the hands of Nazi students because he was never able to prove that he was not one-eighth Jewish. He survived only because he was a world authority on bees at a time when Germany was suffering a virus that threatened its bee population, and badly needed his help to bolster food production. Konrad Lorenz, on the other hand, had fully subscribed to the prevailing Nazi ideology about ‘degeneration’ among the German-Jewish population and willingly taken part in various highly dubious experiments, particularly in Poland. He was captured as a Russian prisoner toward the end of the war and not released until 1948. Subsequently he apologised for his prewar and wartime activities, apologies that were accepted by colleagues, the most important of whom was the third in the trio to share the Nobel Prize in 1973. This was Nikolaas Tinbergen, a Dutchman, who spent the war in a hostage camp in danger of being shot in reprisal for the activities of the Dutch underground. If Tinbergen accepted Lorenz’s apologies, he must have been convinced they were genuine.1 The award of the prize was recognition for a relatively new discipline in which each man had been a founding father: ethology, the study of animal behaviour with a strong comparative element. Ethologists are interested in animal behaviour for what that might reveal about instinct, and what, if anything, separates man from all other forms of life.
Tinbergen’s classic work, carried out since the war (and after he had moved from Leiden to Oxford), elaborated on Lorenz’s ideas of ‘fixed action patterns’ and ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ (IRMs). Experimenting with the male three-spined stickleback, Tinbergen showed the crucial importance of why at times the fish stood on its head to display its red belly to the female: this stimulated a mating response. Similarly, he showed the significance of the red spot on a herring gull’s bill: it elicited begging from a chick.2 It was later shown that such IRMs were more complicated, but the elegance of Tinbergen’s experiments caught the imagination of scientists and public alike. John Bowlby’s research on maternal attachment drew inspiration from this ethological work, which also helped stimulate a great burst of fieldwork with animals phylogenetically closer to man than the insects, birds, and fish examined by the three Nobel Prize winners. This fieldwork concentrated on mammals and primates.
Since 1959, when Mary Leakey discovered Zinj, the Leakeys had made several other significant discoveries at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The most important of these was that three hominids had existed at the same time – Australopithecus boisei, Homo erectus (Louis now conceded that Zinj was actually an especially large form of Peking Man), and a new find, dating from the early 1960s, which they had named Homo habilis, ‘Handy Man,’ because he was found associated with slightly more advanced stone tools. Mary Leakey, in her scientific volume entitled Olduvai Gorge, analysed 37,000 Olduvai artefacts, including twenty hominid remains, 20,000 animal remains, and many stone tools.3 All this revealed Olduvai as an early, primitive culture with Homo erectus giving way to Homo habilis with more refined but still very primitive tools, and many species of extinct animals (such as hippos).
An American author and playwright, Robert Ardrey, drew yet more attention to Olduvai, and Africa. In a series of books, African Genesis (1961), The Territorial Imperative (1967), and The Social Contract (1970), Ardrey did much to familiarise the idea that all animals – from lions and baboons to lizards and jackdaws – had territories, which varied in size from a few feet for lizards to a hundred miles for wolf packs, and which they would go to extreme lengths to defend. He also drew attention to the rankings in animal societies and to the idea that there are a wide variety of sexual arrangements, even among primates, which, he thought, effectively demolished Freud’s ideas (‘Freud lived too soon,’ Ardrey wrote). In popularising the idea that man originated in Africa, Ardrey also emphasised his own belief that Homo sapiens is emotionally a wild animal who is domesticating himself only with difficulty. He thought that man was originally an ape of the forest, who was defeated by the other great apes and forced into the bush: Australopithecus robustus, a vegetarian, evolved into A. africanus, a carnivore, who then, as Homo sapiens (or even earlier), evolved the use of tools – for which Ardrey preferred the word weapons. For Ardrey, mankind could only survive and prosper so long as he never forgot he was at heart a wild animal.4 The fieldwork that lay at the heart of Ardrey’s book helped establish the idea that, contrary to the view prevailing before the war, humanity originated not in Asia but in Africa and that, by and large, it emerged only once, somewhere along the Rift Valley, rather than several times in different places. A sense of urgency was added to this reorientation, because ethological research, besides showing that animals could be studied in the wild, also confirmed that in many cases numbers were dwindling. Ethology, therefore, became a contributor to the ecological movement.
Far and away the most influential people in persuading the wider public that ethology was valuable were three extraordinary women in Africa, whose imaginative and brave forays into the bush proved remarkably successful. These were Joy Adamson, who worked with lions in Kenya, Jane Goodall, who investigated chimpanzees at Gombe Stream, in Tanzania, and Dian Fossey, who spent several years working with gorillas in Uganda.
The Adamsons – Joy and George – were old Africa hands since before World War II, and friends of the Leakeys (George Adamson had been a locust control officer and a gold prospector in Kenya since 1929). Joy, of Austrian birth, was ‘an often-married, egotistical, wilful and at times unstable woman of great energy and originality.’5 In 1956, near where they lived, a lion had attacked and eaten a local boy. With others, George Adamson set off in pursuit of the man-eater, which by custom had to be killed because, having been ‘rewarded,’ it would certainly return. A female lion was found, and duly shot. However, three very young cubs were discovered nearby, still with film over their eyes, and were raised by the Adamsons. Two were eventually acquired by a zoo, while the Adamsons kept the other, the ‘plainest,’ named after an equally plain relative, Elsa.6 Thus began the Adamsons’ observations of lion behavior. These were hardly systematic in, say, a laboratory sense, but the closeness of the relationship between human and animal was nonetheless new and enabled certain insights into mammal behavior that would otherwise not have been made. For example, ‘Elsa’s most remarkable demonstration of understanding and restraint occurred when she knocked over a buffalo in the Ura and was efficiently drowning it. While her blood was still up, Nuru, a Muslim, rushed down to cut the animal’s throat before it died so that he and other Africans could eat some of the meat. For a second Elsa turned on him, but suddenly realised he had come to share, not steal, her kill.’7
In 1958, for a variety of reasons, one of which was Elsa’s growing strength and uncontrollability (she had at one stage taken Joy’s head in her mouth), the lioness was reintroduced into the wild. This, a dangerous exercise for her, was completed successfully, but on several occasions thereafter she reappeared, accompanied by her new family, and for the most part behaved in a docile, friendly manner. It was now that Joy Adamson conceived the series of three books that were to make her famous: Born Free (1959), Living Free (1960), and Forever Free (1961).8 The many photographs of apparently friendly lions had just as much impact as the text, if not more so, helping the book to sell more than five million copies in a dozen languages, not to mention a major movie and several documentaries. Joy had originally taken on the cubs because they were ‘orphans,’ and, in the 1950s, maternal deprivation in humans was, as we have seen, an important issue in the wake of war. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Joy and/or George continued to live close to lions, exploring in an informal but unique way their real nature. They were criticised for ‘ruining’ lions, making them less lionlike because they were friendly to humans, but between them the Adamsons were able to show that, fierce and wild as lions undoubtedly are, their violence is not completely programmed, by no means 100 percent instinctive; they at least appear to be capable of affection or respect or familiarity, and the needs of their stomach are not always paramount. tell Hughes, Britain’s poet laureate, had this to say in reviewing Born Free: ‘That a lioness, one of the great moody aggressors, should be brought to display such qualities as Elsa’s, is a step not so much in the education of lions as in the civilisation of man’*9
Jane Goodall, like Dian Fossey after her, was a protégé of Louis Leakey. Apart from his other talents, Leakey was a great womaniser, who had affairs with a number of female assistants. Goodall had approached Leakey as early as 1959, the year of Zinj, begging to work for/with him. When he met her, Leakey noted that Goodall was very knowledgeable about animals, and so was born a project that had been simmering at the back of his mind for some time. He knew of a community of chimpanzees at Gombe Stream, near Kigoma on the shore of Lake Tanganyika. Leakey’s thinking was simple: Africa had a very rich ape population; man had evolved from the apes; and so the more we discovered about them, the more we were likely to understand how mankind – humanity – had evolved. Leakey thought Goodall suitable because, while she was knowledgeable, she wasn’t too academic, and her mind wasn’t ‘cluttered by theory.’ Not that there was much theory at the time – ethology was a new subject – but Goodall loved her assignment, and both her official reports and her popular account, In the Shadow of Man, published in 1971, managed to be both scientifically important and moving at the same time.10
Goodall found that it took the chimpanzees some months to accept her, but once they did she was able to get close enough to observe their behavior in the wild and to distinguish one chimpanzee from another. This simple insight proved extremely important. She was later criticised by other, more academically grounded scientists for giving her chimps names – David Greybeard, Flo, Flint, Flame, Goliath – instead of more neutral numbers, and for reading motives into chimp actions, but these were lame criticisms when set against the richness of her material.11 Her first significant observation occurred when she saw a chimp insert a thin stick into a termite mound in order to catch termites that attached themselves to the stick – the chimp then raised the stick to its lips. Now here was a chimp using a tool, hitherto understood to be the hallmark of humanity. As the months passed, the social/communal life of these primates also began to reveal itself. Most notable was the hierarchy of males and the occasional displays of aggression that brought about this ranking, which by and large determined sexual privilege in the troupe, but not necessarily priority in food gathering. But Goodall also recorded that much of the aggressive displays were just that – displays – and that once the less dominant male had made deferential or submissive gestures, the dominant animal would pat his rival in what appeared to be a gesture of reassurance. Goodall also observed mother-offspring behavior, the importance of social grooming (picking unwanted matter out of each other’s fur), and what appeared to be familial feeling. Young chimpanzees who for some reason lost their mothers shrivelled physically and/or became nervous – what we would call neurotic; and brothers, though they often fought with or were indifferent to each other, sometimes ran to one another for comfort and reassurance. Controversially, she thought that chimps had a rudimentary sense of self and that children learned much behavior from their mothers. In one celebrated instance, she observed a mother with diarrhoea wipe herself with a handful of leaves; immediately, her two-year-old infant did the same although his bottom was clean.12
Dian Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist related her observations and experiences on the Rwanda/Zaire/Uganda border in the 1970s, and concerned one species of mountain gorilla, Gorilla gorilla berengei. While much more impressive physically than the chimpanzee, this primate was and remains the most threatened in terms of numbers. Rwanda is one of the most densely populated African countries, and the gorilla population had by then been falling by an average of 3 percent a year for more than twenty years, to the point where not much more than 250 were left. Fossey’s work was therefore as much a part of ecology as biology.13
Fossey documented in shocking detail the vicious work of poachers, who sometimes kidnapped animals for zoos and sometimes killed them, cutting off their heads and hands in a primitive ritual. This aspect of her book, when it was published in 1983, shocked the world, stimulating action to conserve the dwindling numbers of an animal that, despite its fierce appearance and ‘King Kong’ reputation, the other part of her argument showed to be unfairly maligned. Fossey found that she was able to habituate herself to at least some of the gorilla groups near her research station, Karisoke, in the volcanic Parc des Virungas. The crucial element here was that she had learned what she called ‘belch vocalisations,’ a soft, deep, purr, ‘naoom, naoom,’ which resembled a stomach rumbling. These sounds, she found, which express contentment in gorillas, announced her presence and set the animals at ease to the point where, eventually, she could sit among them, exchanging sounds and observing close up. She found that gorillas had a family structure much closer to that of humans than did chimpanzees. They lived in relatively stable groups of about ten individuals. ‘A typical group contains: one silverback, a sexually mature male over the age of fifteen years, who is the group’s undisputed leader and weighs roughly 375 pounds, or about twice the size of a female; one blackback, a sexually immature male between eight and thirteen years weighing some 250 pounds; three to four sexually mature females over eight years, each about 200 pounds, who are ordinarily bonded to the dominant silverback for life; and, lastly, from three to six immature members, those under eight years…. The prolonged period of association of the young with their parents, peers, and siblings offers the gorilla a unique and secure type of familial organisation bonded by strong kin ties. As the male and female offspring approach sexual maturity they often leave their natal groups. The dispersal of mating individuals is perhaps an evolved pattern to reduce the effects of inbreeding, though it seems that maturing individuals are more likely to migrate when there are no breeding opportunities within the group into which they are born.’14
Fossey found that different gorillas had very different characters, and that they used some seven different sounds – including alarm calls, pig-grunts when travelling, rebuttals to other sounds, and disciplinary enforcements between adults and young. Unfortunately, Dian Fossey was unable to further her studies; at the end of 1985 she too, like the Adamsons, was murdered. Her black tracker and her white research assistant were both accused, though the charges against her tracker were dropped. Fearful of not receiving a fair trial, the white assistant fled the country, later to be convicted in his absence.15 In the short run, Fossey’s battle against poaching was more important than her ethological observations, as her death shows. But only in the short run. For example, her sensitive description of the gorilla Icarus’s response to the death of another, Marchesa, raised profound questions about gorilla ‘grief and the nonhuman understanding of death. In many ways, the evolutionary psychology of gorillas is even more enlightening than that of chimpanzees.
George Schaller, director of the Wildlife Conservation Division of the New York Zoological Society, made it his life’s work to study some of the ecologically threatened large animals of the world, in the hope that this would contribute to their survival. In a long career, he spent time studying pandas, tigers, deer, and gorillas but his most celebrated study, published in 1972, was The Serengeti Lion.16 This book, which also included sections on the cheetah, leopard, wild dogs, and hyenas, took up where the Adamsons left off, in that Schaller was much more systematic and scientific in his approach – he counted the number of lions, the times of the day they hunted, the number of times they copulated, and the number of trees they marked out as their territory.17 While this did not make his book an enthralling read, his overall picture of the delicate balance in Africa between predator and prey had a marked effect on the ecological movement. He showed that far from harming other wildlife (as was then thought), predators were actually good influences, weeding out the weaker vessels among their prey, keeping the herds healthy and alert. He also made the point that although lions were not as close to man as chimpanzees or gorillas were in phylogenetic terms, they were quite close in ecological terms to, say, Australopithecus. He argued that lions’ hunting techniques were far more likely to resemble early man’s, and his own studies, he said, showed that lions could hunt efficiently in prides without any sophisticated vocalisation or language. He did not therefore think that language in man necessarily evolved to cope with hunting, as other scholars believed.18
The final study in this great scientific safari on the Kenya/Tanzania/Uganda border was Ian Douglas-Hamilton’s investigation of elephants. A student of Nikolaas Tinbergen at Oxford, Douglas-Hamilton had originally wanted to study lions but was told that George Schaller had got there first. Douglas-Hamilton’s study, published as Among the Elephants in 1975, was a cross between the Adamson-Goodall-Fossey approach and Schaller’s more distanced research, mainly because elephants are far harder to habituate to in the wild.19 He observed that elephants keep to family and kinship units and appear to show affection to other family members, which extends to a characteristic trunk-to-mouth gesture. Although he would never have been so anthropomorphic as to say this was ‘kissing,’ it is hard to know how else to describe it. Several family units make up kinship units. At times of abundant food supply, after the rains, elephants come together in massive 200-strong herds, whereas in drought they break up into smaller family groupings. Elephants show an extraordinary amount of interest in dead elephants – offspring will remain alongside the body of a dead mother for days, and a herd will sometimes dismember the carcass of an erstwhile colleague. Douglas-Hamilton’s research meticulously catalogued which elephant stood next to which, and showed that there were clearly long-term ‘friendships.’20 As with the other big mammals of Africa, Douglas-Hamilton observed great individuality among elephants.
Much farther north than Olduvai, but still part of the Rift, the great valley splits into two: one part of the Y extends northeast into the Gulf of Aden, whereas the other heads northwest along the Red Sea. The area between the two arms of the Y is known as the Afar Triangle and is part of Ethiopia.
To begin with, the sites in Afar had been excavated by the Leakeys, especially Louis’s son, Richard. They had dug there by invitation of Emperor Haile Selassie, who was himself interested in the origins of humankind and, on a state visit to Kenya in 1966, had met Louis Leakey and encouraged him to come north. Early digs consolidated the picture emerging farther south but were overshadowed by a discovery made by a rival French-American team. The guiding spirit of this team was Maurice Taieb, a geologist, who made the Afar Triangle his speciality (it was geologically unique). He called in a palaeontologist he had met elsewhere in Ethiopia, Don Johanson, a graduate student at Chicago University. Taieb had found an area, named Hadar, which he regarded as very fruitful – it was several thousand square kilometres in size and very rich in fossils. An expedition society was formed, which initially had the Leakeys as members. What happened on that expedition, and subsequently, became one of the most controversial incidents in palaeontology.
In November 1974, four miles from his camp, Johanson spotted a fragment of an arm bone sticking out of a slope. At first he thought it belonged to a monkey, but ‘it lacked the monkey’s distinguishing bony flange.’21 His eye fell on another bony fragment higher up the slope – then a lower jaw, ribs, some vertebrae. He had in fact found the most complete hominid skeleton yet discovered, about 40 percent of the entire structure, and from the shape of the pelvic bone, almost certainly female. That night, back at camp, the team celebrated with beer and roast goat, and Johanson played the Beatles song ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ over and over again. Famously, and unscientifically, the skeleton, officially recorded as AL 288–1, became known as ‘Lucy.’22 The unparalleled importance of Lucy at the time was the fact that her anatomy indicated she had walked upright and could be precisely dated as being between 3.1 and 3.2 million years old. Her skull was not complete, but there was enough of it for Johanson to say that it was in the ape-size range. Her molar teeth were human-like, but the front molars were not bicuspids like ours.
Haile Selassie was overthrown in September 1974 in a coup which resulted in a Marxist military dictatorship in Ethiopia. This made work difficult, but Johanson managed to return and in 1975 made a yet further extraordinary discovery: a ‘first family’ of thirteen individuals – males, females, adults, juveniles, children, some two hundred fossils at one site, Site 333, as it became known. And in the following year, 1976, together with the French archaeologist Hélène Roche, he found simple basalt tools, dating back to 2.5 million years. This all meant a complete revision of humankind’s origins. Tool-making was much older than anyone imagined, as was upright walking. And it was clearly something indulged in first by Australopithecus, not the Homo genus.
Further finds in Hadar were prevented by another deterioration in the political situation in Ethiopia (another military coup in Addis Ababa). During this interregnum the southern end of the Rift Valley came back into the spotlight. In the mid-1970s Mary Leakey had been working in Laetoli, a site thirty miles from Olduvai, an area of sandstone gullies that cut into a plateau, very different from the gorge. She had been going there for many years and had recently found two jaws dating from 3.6 to 3.8 million years ago. In the last week of July 1976 she was joined by four other scientists, among them Andrew Hill and Kay Behrensmeyer. The newcomers, in high spirits, were all taken on a tour of the site on the morning after their arrival, and an elephant-dung fight broke out. Ducking into a flat gully to look for ammunition, Hill and Behrensmeyer came across a hard layer of volcanic ash – in which, as they suddenly noticed, there were elephant footprints. They dropped to their knees for a closer look, and then called the others. These were not fresh prints, but fossilised, and scattered near the elephant tracks were those of buffalos, giraffes, and birds. There were even a few ancient raindrops. What must have happened was that a spurt of volcanic ash, given off by a nearby mountain, had settled and then been rained upon, turning it into a form of cement. While this ‘cement’ was wet, animals walked across it, then another layer of ash was deposited on the top. Over the centuries, the top layer had weathered away to reveal the fossil footprints. It was an unusual find, but Mary Leakey told everyone to look out for hominid footprints – that would certainly make news. They searched all through August, but not until one day in September did they find some prints that looked hominid, with signs of a big toe. There were two sets, one much larger than the other, and they stretched for eighteen feet across the ancient ‘cement.’ In February 1978 Mary Leakey felt confident enough to announce the discovery. What was especially interesting was that the volcanic ash was dated to 3.7 million years ago, slightly earlier than the Ethiopian sites. From the pattern of indentations, some experts thought that whoever this hominid was, he did not walk upright all the time. So was this the period when man first began to walk upright?23
The answer did not come from Mary Leakey. The Laetoli bones and jaws had been given to Tim White, an American palaeontologist, whose job it was to describe them meticulously. However, White, a difficult man, fell out with both Richard and Mary Leakey. Worse, from the Leakey point of view, he subsequently teamed up with Don Johanson, and this pair proceeded to examine and analyse all the fossils from Laetoli and Hadar, all those aged between 3 and 4 million years old. They revealed their conclusions in 1979 in Science, claiming that what they had was a single species of hominid that was different to, and the ancestor of, many others.24 This species, which they named Australopithecus afarensis, they said was fully bipedal and showed marked sexual dimorphism (the males were much bigger than the females), though even the males were no more than four feet six. Their brains were in the chimpanzee range and their faces pronounced, like the apes; their teeth were halfway between those of the apes and humans. Most controversially, Johanson and White claimed that A. afarensis was the ancestor of both the Australopithecus and the Homo genus, ‘which therefore must have diverged some time after three million years ago.’25
At the beginning it had been Johanson and White’s intention to include Mary Leakey as a coauthor, but Mary was unhappy with the label Australopithecus being attached to the fossils she had discovered. The convention in science is for the discoverer to have the first ‘say’ in publishing the fossils that he or she finds, and to name them. After that, of course, other scientists are free to agree or disagree. By including Mary’s discoveries in their paper, Johanson and White were not only breaking with tradition; they knew by then that they were specifically going against her own interpretation. But they were anxious to claim for A. afarensis the tide of common ancestor of almost all known hominid fossils and so went ahead anyway. This caused a bitter feud that has never healed.26
Beyond the personal dimension, however, A. afarensis has provoked much rethinking.27 At the time it was given its name, the predominant view was that bipedalism and tool using were related: early man walked on two feet so as to free his hands for tools. But according to Johanson and White, early man was bipedal at least half a million years before tool using came in. The latest thinking puts bipedalism alongside a period of drying in Africa, when the forest retreated and open savannah grasslands spread. In such an environment, upright walking would have offered certain selective advantages – upright early man would have been faster, his body would have cooled more quickly, and he could have roamed over greater distances, with his hands free to carry food home, or back to his offspring. So although the bitterness was personally unpleasant, it did provoke useful new ideas about man’s origins.28
Since the discovery of the helical structure of DNA in 1953, the next theoretical advance had come in 1961, when Francis Crick and Sidney Brenner in Cambridge had shown that the amino acids that make up the proteins of life are actually coded by a triplet of base pairs on DNA strands. That is, of the four bases – (a)denine, (c)ytosine, (g)uanine, and (t)hymine – three, in certain arrangements, such as CGT or ATG, code for specific acids. But more practical advances involved two ways of manipulating DNA that proved integral to the process of what became known as genetic engineering. The first was cloning, the second, gene sequencing.
In November 1972 Stanley Cohen heard a lecture in Hawaii delivered by Herbert Boyer, a microbiologist from the University of California at San Francisco. Boyer’s lecture was about certain substances known as ‘restriction enzymes.’ These were substances which, when they came across a certain pattern of DNA bases, cut them in two. For example, every time they came across a T(hymine) followed by an A(denine), one restriction enzyme (of which there are several) would sever the DNA at that point. However, as Boyer told the meeting, restriction enzymes did more than this. When they cut, they did not form a blunt end, with both strands of the double helix stopping at the same point; instead they formed jagged or steplike ends, one part jutting out, slightly longer than the other. Because of this, the ends were what scientists labelled ‘sticky,’ in that the flaps attracted complementary bases.29 At the time he attended Boyer’s lecture, Cohen was himself working on plasmids, microscopic loops of DNA that lurk outside a bacterium’s chromosome and reproduce independently. As Cohen took in what Boyer was saying, he saw an immediate – and revolutionary – link to his own work. Because plasmids were loops, if they were cut with one of Boyer’s restriction enzymes, they would become like broken rings, the two broken ends being mirror images of each other. Therefore, strips of DNA from other animals, and it didn’t matter which (a lion, say, or an insect), if inserted into the bacterium with ‘split rings,’ would be taken up. The significance of Cohen’s idea lay in the fact that the plasmid replicated itself many times in each cell, and the bacterium divided every twenty minutes. With this form of replication and division, more than a million copies of the spliced DNA could be created within a day.30
After the lecture, Cohen sought out Boyer. As Walter Bodmer and Robin McKie tell the story, in their history of the genome project, the two microbiologists adjourned to a delicatessen near Waikiki Beach and, over corned beef sandwiches, agreed on a collaboration that bore its first fruits in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November 1973, when they announced the first report of successful cloning. From now on there was enough DNA to experiment with.31
The next step – important both practically and theoretically – was to explore the sequence of bases in the DNA molecule. Sequencing was necessary because if biologists were to discover which genes governed which aspects of functioning, the exact order needed to be understood. Fred Sanger in Cambridge, England, and Walter Gilbert in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard), both discovered methods of doing this, and both received a Nobel Prize for their efforts. But Sanger’s method was identified first and is the more widely used.* Earlier, Sanger had developed a way of identifying the amino acids that make up proteins, and this had earned him his first Nobel, when he discovered the structure of insulin. But that method was far too slow to work with DNA, which is a very long molecule. Moreover, it is made up from only four subunits (A, C, G, and T), so long sequences would need to be understood before they could be related to properties. His breakthrough was the creative use of chemicals called dideoxy, otherwise known as chain terminators.’32 These are in fact imperfect forms of adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine; when mixed with DNA polymerase, the DNA-copying enzyme, they form sequences, but incompletely – in fact they stop, are terminated, at either A, C, G, or T.33 As a result they form DNA of varying lengths, each time stopping at the same base. Imagine, for the sake of argument, a strip of DNA that reads: CGTAGCATCGCTGAG. This, treated with adenine (A) terminators would produce strips in which growth stops at positions 4, 7, and 15, whereas the thymine (T) terminator would produce strips where growth stops at 3, 8, and 12, and so on. The technique actually to separate out these different strands consisted of placing the DNA in a tray of special gel, in which an electrical field had been applied to opposite ends. DNA, being negatively charged, is attracted to the positive pole, with the smaller fragments pulled faster than the larger ones, meaning that the strands eventually separate out, according to size. The DNA is then stained, and the sequence can be read. The technique was announced in Nature on 24 February 1977, and it was from that moment, coming on top of the cloning experiments, that genetic engineering may be said to have begun.34
Just over a year later, on 24 August 1978, Genentech, founded by Boyer and a young venture capitalist called Robert Swanson, announced that it had produced human insulin by this method – gene sequencing and cloning – and that it had concluded a deal with Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant, for the mass manufacture of the substance. Two years later, in October 1980, when Genentech offered 1,100,000 of its shares for sale to the public, another phase in the microbiological revolution was born: offered at $35 a share, the stock immediately jumped to $89, and Boyer, who had invested just $500 in the company in early 1974, saw the value of his 925,000 shares leap to more than $80 million. No physicist was ever worth so much.35
Compared with the electron and other fundamental particles, the gene had taken some time to be isolated and broken down into its component parts. But as with physics, the experimental and theoretical work went in tandem.
Beginning in the 1970s a new form of literature began to appear. It grew out of Robert Ardrey’s works but was more ambitious. These were books of biology but with a distinct philosophical edge. However, they were not written by journalists, or dramatists, as Ardrey was, or Gordon Rattray Taylor was, in The Biological Time Bomb, or by scientific popularisers, as Desmond Morris was essentially in The Naked Ape, but by the leading scientists themselves. These books each contained a fair amount of complex biology, but they had wider ambitions too.
The first appeared in 1970 in French and a year later in English. Its author was Jacques Monod, part of a three-man team that had won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for uncovering the mechanism by which genetic material synthesises protein. In Chance and Necessity, Monod sought to use the latest biology, since Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix, to define life, and in considering what life itself is, went on to consider the implications that might have for ethics, politics, and philosophy. The book is almost certainly more impressive now, at the end of the century and with the benefit of hindsight, than when it was first published (it was republished by Penguin in 1997). This is because Monod’s thinking foreshadowed many of the ideas promulgated by biologists and philosophers who are now much better known than Monod, authors like E. O. Wilson, Stephen J. Gould, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett.
Although a biologist, Monod’s underlying insight was that life is essentially a physical and even mathematical phenomenon. His initial purpose was to show how entities in the universe can ‘transcend’ the laws of that universe while nevertheless obeying them. Or, as he put it, evolution does not confer ‘the obligation’ to exist but it does confer ‘the right’ to exist. For Monod, two of the great intellectual successes of the twentieth century, the free market and the transistor, share an important characteristic with life itself: amplification. The rules allow for the constituent parts to spontaneously – naturally – produce more of whatever system they are part of. On this reasoning there is nothing in principle unique about life.
In the technical part of his book, Monod showed how proteins and nucleic acids, the two components which all life is made from, spontaneously adopt certain three-dimensional forms, and that it is these three-dimensional forms which predetermine so much else. It is this spontaneous assembly that, for Monod, is the most important element of life. These substances, he says, are characterised by physical – and therefore mathematical – properties. ‘Great thinkers, Einstein among them, have often … wondered at the fact that mathematical entities created by man can so faithfully represent nature even though they owe nothing to experience.’ Again Monod implies that there is nothing especially ‘wonder’-ful about this – life is just as much about mathematics and physics as it is about biology. (This foreshadowed work we shall be considering in the last chapter.)
He went on to argue that evolution can only take place at all because of the ability of nucleic acids to reproduce themselves exactly, and this therefore means that only accident can produce mutations. In that sense, the universe was and is accidental (statistical and, therefore, again mathematical). This too, he felt, had profound implications. To begin with, evolution did not apply only to living things: adaptation is another expression of time, no less than another function of the second law of thermodynamics. Living things, as isolated, self-contained energetic systems, seem to operate against entropy, except that it is inconceivable for evolution – being a function of time – to go backwards. This implies that life, being an essentially physical phenomenon, is temporary: different life forms will battle against each other until a greater disorder takes over again.
No less controversially, but a good deal less apocalyptically, and anticipating the work of E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and others, Monod felt that ideas, culture, and language are survival devices, that there is survival value in myth (he avoided use of the term religion), but that they will in time be replaced. (He thought Christianity and Judaism more ‘primitive’ religions in this sense than, say, Hinduism, and implied that the latter would outlast Judaeo-Christianity.) And he felt that the scientific approach, as epitomised in the theory of evolution, which is a ‘blind’ process, not leading to any teleological conclusion, is the most ‘objective’ view of the world, in that it does not involve any one set of individuals having greater access to the truth than any other group. In this sense he thought that science disproves and replaces such ideas as animism, Bergson’s vitalism, and above all Marxism, which presents itself as a scientific theory of the history of society. Monod therefore saw science not simply as a way of approaching the world, but as an ethical stance, from which other institutions of society could only benefit.
Not that he was blind to the problems such an attitude brought with it. ‘Modern societies, woven together by science, living from its products, have become as dependent upon it as an addict on his drug. They owe their material wherewithal to this fundamental ethic upon which knowledge is based, and their moral weakness to those value-systems, devastated by knowledge itself, to which they still try to refer. The contradiction is deadly. It is what is digging the pit we see opening under our feet. The ethic of knowledge that created the modern world is the only ethic compatible with it, the only one capable, once understood and accepted, of guiding its evolution.’36
Monod’s vision was broad, his tone tentative, as befitted someone new to philosophy, feeling his way and not trained in the discipline. His vision of ‘objective knowledge’ largely ignored the work of Thomas Kuhn and would come under sustained attack from philosophers in the years that followed. But not all the biologists who came after Monod were as humble. Two other books published in the mid-1970s were much more aggressive in making the link between genes, social organisation, and human nature.
In Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), the Harvard zoologist Edward O. Wilson intended to show the extent to which social behavior – in all animals, including man – is governed by biology, by genes.37 Widely read in every field of biology, and a world authority on insects, Wilson demonstrated that all manner of social behavior in insects, birds, fish, and mammals could be accounted for either by the requirements of the organism’s relationship to its environment or to some strictly biological factor – such as smell – which was clearly determined by genetics. He showed how territoriality, for example, was related to food requirements, and how population was related not only to food availability but to sexual behavior, itself in turn linked to dominance patterns. He surveyed the copious evidence for birdsong, which showed that birds inherit a ‘skeleton’ of their songs but are able to learn a limited ‘dialect’ if moved.38 He showed the importance of bombykol, a chemical substance that, in the male silkworm, stimulates the search for females, making the silkworm, according to Wilson, little more than ‘a sexual guided missile.’39 As little as one molecule of the substance is enough to set the silkworm off, he says, which shows how evolution might happen: a minute change in either bombykol or the receptor structure – equally fragile – could be enough to provoke a population of individuals sexually isolated from the parental stock. Wilson surveyed many of the works referred to earlier in this chapter – on gorillas, chimpanzees, lions, and elephants – as well as the studies of Australopithecus, and produced at the end of his book very contentious tables claiming to show how human societies, and human behavior, evolved. This produced a hierarchy with countries like the United States, Britain, and India at the top, Hawaii and New Guinea in the middle, and aborigines and Eskimos at the bottom.40
Wilson’s arguments were rejected by critics as oversimple, racist (he was from America’s South), and philosophically dubious; they called into question the entire concept of free will. A more technical area of controversy, but very important philosophically, related to his discussion of altruism and group selection. If evolution operated in the classical way (upon individuals), critics asked, how did altruism arise, in which one individual put another’s interests before its own? How did group selection take place at all? And here the second book published in the mid-1970s provided a clearer answer. Perhaps surprisingly for nonbiologists, The Selfish Gene contained a fair amount of elementary mathematics.41
Its author, Richard Dawkins from Oxford, imagined in one of his crucial passages a bird population made up entirely of either hawks or doves. Hawks always fight but doves always back down. Now enters the mathematics. Dawkins attaches relative – and entirely arbitrary – values to various encounters. For example, the winner in a contest between two doves scores 50 but pays a penalty of – 10 for a long staring ritual, meaning he scores 40 in all. The loser is penalised —10 for also wasting time and staring. On average therefore any one dove, in competition with other doves, can expect to win half and lose half of his contests, so the average payoff is half the difference between +40 and – 10, which is +15.42 Now assume a mutant, a hawk. He never backs down so wins every fight, at 50 a time. He enjoys a big advantage over doves whose average payoff is only +15. In such a world, there is a clear advantage to being a hawk. But now hawk genes spread through the population, and soon all fights will be hawk fights, where the winner scores +50 but the loser is so seriously injured that he scores —100. If a hawk wins half and loses half of his fights, the average payoff of all hawk fights is halfway between +50 and —100, which is —25. If, amid such society, a dove mutant arises, he loses all his fights but never gets injured, so his average payoff is o. This may not sound much, but it beats —25. Dove genes should now start to spread. Looking at the arithmetic in this way, communities of birds would eventually arrive at an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) in which 5/12 are doves and 7/12 are hawks. When this point is reached, the payoff for hawks and doves is the same, and selection does not favour either of them. The point about this admittedly simple example is to show that a group of birds can take on a certain character while selection is taking place on an individual level.
Now Dawkins moves on to a slightly more complex example. This time he asks us to assume that he is an animal who has found a clump of eight mushrooms – food. To these he attaches a value of +6 units each (again, these units are entirely arbitrary). He writes, ‘The mushrooms are so big I could eat only three of them. Should I inform anybody else about my find, by giving the “food call”? Who is within earshot? Brother B (his relatedness to me is ½ [i.e., he shares half my genes]), cousin C (relatedness to me = ⅛), and D (no particular relation: his relatedness to me is some small number which can be treated as zero for practical purposes). The net benefit score to me if I keep quiet about my find will be +6 for each of the three mushrooms I eat, that is +18 in all. My net benefit score if I give the food call needs a bit of figuring. The eight mushrooms will be shared equally between the four of us. The payoff to me from the two that I shall eat will be the full +6 units each, that is +12 in all. But I shall also get some payoff when my brother and cousin eat their two mushrooms each, because of our shared genes. The actual score comes to (1 × 12) + (½ × 12) + (⅛ × 12) + (0 × 12) = 19½. The corresponding net benefit for the selfish behavior was +18: it is a close-run thing, but the verdict is clear. I should give the food call; altruism on my part would in this case pay my selfish genes.’43 Dawkins’s overriding point is that we must think of the central unit of evolution and natural selection as the gene: the gene, the replicating unit, is ‘concerned’ to see itself survive and thrive, and once we understand this, everything else falls into place: kinship patterns and behaviour in insects, birds, mammals, and humans are explained; altruism becomes sensible, as do the relations of non-kin groups (such as races) to one another.
Dawkins’s argument, eloquently made, and Wilson’s, together sparked a resurgence in Darwinian thinking that characterised the last quarter of the century. One remaining aspect of Dawkins’s and Wilson’s arguments is the link to Tom Wolfe, Christopher Lasch, John Rawls, and economics. They are yet another example of the way knowledge began to come together toward the end of the century. Wolfe’s book The Me Decades, Lasch’s Culture of Narcissim, and The Selfish Gene all reflect an emphasis on individuation and selfishness. They were quite different books, with ostensibly different aims, but the selfish theme common to them all was remarkable. The link to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice is that his ‘original position’ and ‘veil of ignorance’ describe what is essentially the very opposite of the position the selfish gene is in: no one knows their inheritance, and only by not knowing, Rawls is saying, can we ever hope to arrive at a true system of fairness, a way of living life together with selfishness taken out. In Rawls’s original position there are by definition no hawks or doves and no relatives. Rawls’s system is all too well aware of Dawkins-type arguments and seeks to circumvent them. Daniel Bell had drawn attention to the cultural contradictions of capitalism; Rawls’s ideas threw up some contradictions of Darwinism. Dawkins’s ideas also show certain similarities to the market system. This arises partly from the way he attaches values to the outcomes of behavior, but though simplifications, these outcomes – gains and losses – are real enough. The situation of hawks and doves, for example, is mirrored to an extent in price-fixing agreements in humans. It is in the best interests of garage owners (say) to fix the price of petrol at one (relatively) stable price; in that way all garage owners benefit. However, the temptation always exists for a wayward ‘hawk’ to drop his prices for a very heavy quick profit. Of course, other garage owners would soon follow suit, until the situation again stabilised and, perhaps, price fixing is reestablished. Many democracies have laws against this sort of behavior being carried too far, but that does not cancel out the fact that in some respects evolution shares a lot of features with market economics.