HIPPOCAMPUS
The hippocampus is the bit of the brain that’s used for (among other things) navigation, path finding, orientation, and sense of direction. A famous study of London cab drivers found that the hippocampus is larger in them than it is in the rest of us. The same study also found that there’s another part of London cabbies’ brains – the amygdala – that’s slightly smaller than it is in the rest of the population. I submitted a paper to the science journal Nature arguing that this part of the brain is where a positive attitude towards multiculturalism is located.
Archaeologists and anthropologists appear at last to have reached a consensus about what Stonehenge was for. It’s now thought that Stonehenge was a hospital. Turns out the reason for dragging all that bluestone from Preseli Hills to Salisbury Plain was because of the healing properties in its dolerite and rhyolite. Paleopathology corroborates this hypothesis. A 2009 dig near the henge excavated the bones of the Amesbury archer, who is thought to have traveled all the way from Switzerland for treatment on a badly damaged knee. What has really clinched the argument that Stonehenge was a prehistoric NHS is radiocarbon dating, which has been able to pinpoint not just that the Amesbury archer arrived at Stonehenge in 2300 BC, but also that he wasn’t actually seen by a doctor until 2275 BC.
I wish more people knew the story of Stonehenge General. If they did we’d have a bluestone rampart against the idea that human evolution stops once you have hospitals. ‘We stopped natural selection,’ David Attenborough told the Radio Times in 2013, ‘as soon as we started being able to rear 90-95% of our babies that are born. We are the only species to have put a halt on natural selection of our own free will.’
Now with great respect, some trepidation and no credentials to back me up save for a single name check in the thanks and acknowledgements section of one solitary paper published this year in science journal Nature, I am now going to disagree with one of the world’s great naturalists, David Attenborough.19
Consider the earthworm. If an earthworm is born into a soil with a pH made less acidic by its worm ancestors, such that weak or sickly newborns that would never have survived the hard scrabble soil of yesteryear now live, does that spell the end of earthworm evolution? Is life too soft for earthworms now that the pH balance of the soil gives them a better start in life? Are the old Earthworms telling the Young ‘Un:
OLD EARTHWORM: You’ve had it too easy. You don’t know what it was like. When I was born there was a car battery lying in that flowerbed. There were small boys here in this back garden too pulling me in half. You couldn’t hack it, gel. You’d be six feet under.
YOUNG ’UN: We are six feet under, Dad.
OLD EARTHWORM: You’d be pushing up the daisies.
YOUNG ’UN: We are pushing up the daisies, Dad.
OLD EARTHWORM: I mean, you’d be in a grave.
YOUNG ’UN: Living the dream.
If you find yourself unfit for your local habitat, then instead of letting natural selection pick you off, you engineer the ecosystem. [See Niche Construction Theory]. But don’t flatter yourself that by so doing you have somehow opted out of evolution. Earthworms can alter the pH balance of soil all right, but they can’t blunt the blackbird’s sharp eye. For all their hard work, earthworms barely dent the vast field effect of selection pressures, the hundred thousand shocks that flesh is heir to.
Lichen and moss weather rocks and create soil, making life cushier for subsequent generations of lichen and moss. Does that stop lichen evolution? Is that it for moss? Should they have stuck it out the old way?
Or consider the Texas leaf-cutter ant, Atta texana. Secretion from Texas leaf-cutters’ huge poison glands kill virtually all bacteria and fungi dead, thus bequeathing even the most delicate ant offspring increased fitness and survival prospects. By doing this, Texas leaf-cutter ants display more not less random mutation. The more variety in the ants that survive to sexual maturity the richer and more diverse the population. So making things cushier for ants far from applying a brake to evolution, widens the scope of natural selection.
Same with us: our hospitals broaden and deepen the human gene pool. And if the wards could just get a decent infestation of Texas leaf-cutter ants, then goodnight E-coli and MRSA!
The idea that hospital maternity wards have put the brake on evolution has a pedigree. (I stress that the following views are very far from David Attenborough’s.) The nadir of this thinking came not in the 30s, for all its famous panic about degeneration, but in the 1960s in the work of WD Hamilton.
A generation or two after the modern evolutionary synthesis fused Mendelian genetics with Darwinian selection, WD Hamilton helped develop the gene’s eye view of evolution, adding his own Selfish Herd Theory. Famously his work on what he called gene selfishness was popularised in Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene.
Now, where you and I mourn hospital closures, what Bill Hamilton mourned was hospital openings, because every new hospital was another nail in the coffin of the human race:
‘By our acceptance of the Mephistophelean gifts of modern medicine,’ he wrote in his 1985 paper The Hospitals Are Coming, ‘we are visiting on our descendants a disaster equivalent to an asteroid impact [...] A century and a half ago sickly infants died, but now almost any breathing human matter can be perfused and kept alive.’
The unnatural preservation of those he calls ‘the ugly and the sickly’ is like an asteroid impact in the terrible burden it imposes on those he calls ‘the beautiful and the healthy’.
A century and a half ago, poor children in Britain died – as they die now in the Global South – simply because they couldn’t get anywhere near clean water, coal fires, regular meals and proper medicine. To survive even to the age of nine probably required more wit, strength, courage and stamina than most of us will ever draw on in decades.
Nor was it just the children of the poor who died. A century and a half ago, Darwin and Wallace buried three children between them. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie died. ‘A counterpart of his father save that he was handsome,’ Willie Wallace Lincoln died not because of defective genes but because of the proximity of the White House to the malarial Potomac River, which the Union troops encamped nearby used as a latrine.
It is instructive how the concept of an outside world – an army, a war, an open sewer beside a malarial swamp – totally escapes Hamilton, as it does so many of the proponents of genocentric theory, with their fantasy scenarios of immortal genes ‘sealed off from the outside world.’ Nothing daunted, Hamilton extends his formidable grasp of history into pre-history. Healthcare, he decides, is a modern error quite outside the ancient path of human evolution. Recent findings in paleopathology, however, do not support his tough talking.
In 2009, the journal Anthropological Science published a paper about a 3500 – 3800 year-old Vietnamese burial site called Man Bac, 15 miles inland from the Gulf of Tonkin.20 Among the dozen bodies lay one known as Burial 9, whose skeleton shows he suffered from Klippel-Feil syndrome. Paralysed from the waist down, with little use of his arms and restricted neck movement, he would have needed lifelong help to feed and clean himself. In the Man Bac burial site he is buried with equal status to the other dead males of the tribe. No-one in the tribe saw Burial 9 as just ‘any breathing matter to be perfused and kept alive’.
‘The provision of healthcare,’ says one of the Man Bac paper’s authors, ‘may therefore reflect one of the most fundamental aspects of [human] culture.’
What if we go back further? What about 10,000 years ago?
In Calabria, Italy, archaeologists unearthed a 10,000 year-old skeleton known as Romito 2, who had acromesomelic dysplasia. According to Nature, Romito 2 is not only the earliest known case of dwarfism in the human record, but also ‘provides evidence of care in the Upper Paleolithic.’ But I don’t think Romito’s bones point to evidence of care, so much as evidence of consensus decision-taking in the Upper Paleolithic. Romito 2’s height was about 110 cm, so he couldn’t run as fast as his tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers, when fleeing predators, hunting prey or simply traveling from one bivvy to another. Romito’s tribe must have made a collective decision to change their ways so he could keep up. Perhaps they did this from a sense that the tribe couldn’t be who they were without him there too. Perhaps because of emotional ties. Or possibly for reasons to do with technique, innovation, and invention. Here’s my theory...
I believe Romito was, if not the human who invented language, then the Italian who taught the Italians Italian. Romito’s elbows were fused which limited the mobility of his arms. Now for an Italian, not being able to gesticulate wildly counts as a speech impediment.21 Pre-Romito Upper Paleolithic Calabrese would have been limited to the odd cazzo and fa vangool with a lot of extravagant arm action. Romito, meanwhile, takes the sow’s ear of stunted expletives and turns it into the sexy silk purse of:
Non lo sai tu che la nostra anima e composta di armonia! 22 This may explain why every bone in Romito’s body appears to have been smashed into tiny pieces shortly before his death. No-one likes a smarty pants.
Fitness simply means fit for your local environment, and if that environment includes healthcare then you fit. If you are born with acromesomelic dysplasia into a Calabrian tribe who value both you and the virtue of solidarity – you fit. Your inclusion increases the fitnesses of the tribe. This is also true even if the ‘tribe’ in question happens to be the United States of America in the mid-twentieth century.
In his unprecedented four terms of office, 32nd President of the United States of America, Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved his tribe from its dustbowl depression just in time to save the world from fascism by winning the Second World War. According to biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, FDR achieved all this not in spite of, but because of the poliomyelitis which left his legs as paralysed as those of Burial 9.23 She argues that the polio he contracted in 1921 when he was 39 on Campobello Island, New Brunswick, not only broadened and deepened him as a human being, but crucially gave his long White House tenure a crucial blessing in disguise: the rare gift of isolation.
In the days before disability ramps and accessibility statutes, it was a palaver for even the most powerful human being on earth to hit the supper circuit. FDR had a cast-iron excuse for not attending all those Washington functions by which corporations have captured every other White House incumbent. The trade associations, business councils, and banking institutes weren’t able to have a quiet word in his ear, or lay a confiding hand on his arm. FDR was the only president who ever got to choose who he hung out with. Uniquely, his downtime was his own.
And so after an evening spent in his White House ground floor study, arranging his stamp collection, mixing cocktails for old friends, or shagging the exiled Princess Martha of Norway, next morning he picked up where he left off with his genial socialism. Sitting up in bed with his breakfast tray on his lap, he pondered:
‘What shall I do today? Why I do believe I’ll propose that no American citizen ought to have a net income of more than $25,000 dollars a year. Then I’ll set up a Civilian Conservation Corp to create one million full-time conservation jobs for 18-25 years olds. For in times of economic hardship, environmental degradation is a luxury we can’t afford.’
FDR’s Works Progress Administration fostered the same mutual aid we see preserved in the Man Bac burial site, south of Hanoi. This ethic is sometimes lost sight of, however. After I did a gig in North Carolina, I was listening to a late-night radio phone-in show when a woman called up and said:
‘I got all these Vietnamese moved into my neighbourhood. I don’t like it. Too many of ‘em. All these Vietnamese coming over here all a’ time. How would they feel – how would they feel if a whole bunch of Americans just decided to move into Vietnam?’
After the Human Genome Project was given $3 billion dollars funding, science journals came out with startling pronouncements that the Human Genome Project was on the cusp of identifying hundreds of thousands of previously undiscovered human genes, including a jealousy gene, a getting into debt gene, a low-voter turn out gene, and a homelessness gene.
The homelessness gene was supposed to be late onset. This worried a lot of people. You might not know you were a carrier until late middle-age. You could be living in the suburban stockbroker belt, never knowing when it might strike.
TREVOR HOWARD: Darling, I can’t help noticing that you’ve been collecting a lot of cardboard boxes lately.
CELIA JOHNSON: Yes, well they look so cosy, especially with winter coming on, don’t you know? Silly really, here we are in a six-bedroom mansion, and we’ve just had a marvelous supper.
TREVOR: And washed down with a rather nice claret. I think I’m going to help myself to a little more.
CELIA: Come near my bottle I’ll feckin’ snap your bleedin’ neck like a twig! Aarrgh unghh! I’ll fucking kill you, aaguggghh I got a knife! Sorry darling, I don’t know what came over me.
TREVOR: I hope you don’t mind me mentioning this, darling, but I can’t help noticing that you appear to have lost one of your front teeth.
CELIA: Oh, you noticed. That’s very sweet of you. It’s silly really. I was in the village and I decided to pop into the chemists on the High Street for my methadone scrip. Now usually I drink it there and then, but Mrs Frobisher, the Pharmacist, is the most frightful chatterbox, and it was such a lovely day so I took the little paper cup outside. Now I don’t if you know Mad Angus, I’m standing on the pavement and he says I owe him my methadone. Well, I say to him, quite how do you figure that one out, Mad Angus? Pray tell. And he said that last week he’d give me his bottle of meths. And I said to him, it hurts a girl’s pride to have to remind you of this fact, Mad Angus, but what you’re forgetting, it seems to me, is that I gave you a blowjob for that meths. To which he replied, No, you gave me the blowjob for those almost brand-new trainers I found on the dead feller.
Ah, I thought, he’s got me there! But I suspect cussedness got the better of me, and I necked the methadone, we fell to blows and hence the tooth, or lack thereof.
Of course, what the Human Genome Project actually discovered is that there are in fact only around 25,000 human genes all told, and that no single gene exists that codes for behaviour one-to-one in that reductive, simplistic way in which everyone was talking about at the turn of the century. But by then it was too late. The voodoo mythology had entered the language. Do you have the hard-work gene? The go-getter gene?