EARTHWORMS
Humans are an earthworm-dependent species. But for earthworms, no single acre of wheat, barley or corn would ever have been harvested.
The sad and pitiable people who dream of space colonies cannot grasp the simple fact that there is no soil in space. Worms cannot live on regolith, and if they’re not going, we’re not going.
At the start of the twenty-first century, at McGill University, Montreal, Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf led a team of biologists who discovered that when Mamma Rat licks and nuzzles her pups’ heads she changes the gene expression of their hippocampus.
Turns out that when mamma rat licks and nuzzles her pups’ heads and necks she stimulates the production of proteins called transcription factors, which slide down the bass and treble on the gene responsible for release of the stress hormone cortisol, so that when startled these rats are much less stressed. (I believe it was just such a laidback rat that I caught in the act of scoffing my packed lunch on the banks of the River Avon in Wiltshire earlier this year, because when the rat looked up and saw me, he didn’t bat an eyelid:
‘I’ve started without you but do join me,’ his look seemed to say. ‘I am Rat Boy, natural custodian of nuts and cheese. I’ve had a paddle in the margarine but not so you’d notice. I see you’re fond of sun-dried tomato and foccacia. From Hebden Bridge are you?’)
What they did next at McGill was switch litters. They took high-stressed, high-cortisol rat pups, and had them fostered by a nurturing, licking and nuzzling Mamma Rat. The results were mind-blowing. Not only did these foster pups have the changed gene expression and reduced cortisol release, but – and this is the really amazing thing – so did their offspring and their offspring’s offspring! It turns out, after all, that certain intense life experiences can be passed down in the chromosome from generation to generation. A terrifying thought!
Just last year, out of Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, came an astounding study of epigenetic effects in mice, likely to be true of all mammals, including ourselves. Turns out, if you take a smell that Grandpa Mouse learns to associate with fear, the first whiff of the same smell will terrify his offspring’s offspring and their offspring too! This was very much in my mind Friday before last when I was in the back of a late-night minicab that was being driven extremely recklessly. Swinging from the rear-view mirror was a very pungent pine air-freshener. But I tried to control my fear because I don’t want my grandchildren to feel edgy in a coniferous forest.
Epigenetics is non-DNA heredity. The discovery that proteins outside the gene transmit heritable traits to daughter cells has debunked the notion that we are the passive playthings of devious molecules, and put paid to the hoary old dogma about how the organism is just a gene’s way of making a copy of itself, a vehicle for ‘tyrannous replicators’ to replicate themselves. If epigenetic changes can be passed down without so much as a by-your-leave from the gene, if the all-powerful tyrant turns out to be the last to know what the organism is up to, then Selfish Gene Theory’s melodramatic language of ‘tyrant replicators’ no longer fits anything we find in the living world. Although it remains an excellent synopsis of most interactive PC/video role-play fantasy games: immortals use humans as proxies in an eternal war.
Evolutionary Psychology is the name of the craze for explaining human behaviour by what we were doing in the Stone Age.
A classic example of Evolutionary Psychology is Hurlbert and Ling’s paper Biological Components of Sex Differences In Colour Preference, which claims that the reason girls like pink and boys like blue has evolutionary roots in the Pleistocene epoch, when boys were hunters and girls were gatherers.9
For a boy, blue skies mean good hunting. Blue is the colour of the water hole where he will spear his first megatherium. For a girl, pink is the colour of ripening berries, the cranberry, the strawberry, the raspberry – try not to think about the blueberry or the whole argument falls apart.10 And because of this division of labour, evolution has hardwired girls to like pink and hardwired boys to like blue.
But neuroscientist and philosopher Raymond Tallis points out that until the late Victorian era it was the other way around. Blue for girls (think Alice In Wonderland’s dress) because of its associations with the Virgin Mary, and pink for boys because it’s ‘a pale version of ferocious red.’11 Not until 1869 do we find a character in Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women deciding to try out,
‘the new French fashion of putting blue ribbons on boy babies and pink ones on girl babies.’12
1869! Not exactly the 2 million years-ago Pleistocene Epoch, is it? But maybe this means we evolved from Victorians! Hardwired into our neural circuits, therefore, is a love of railways, iron bridges and prostitutes with a heart of gold.