Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (9 page)

Although we are accustomed to regarding serial monogamy as normal, our hominid ancestors may well have regarded us as deviants. Robert L. Smith, an entomologist at the University of Arizona and a leading theorist in sperm competition, suggests that human ancestors
Homo erectus
were more promiscuous. The mating systems of our closest relatives, the great apes—gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees—differ. Gorillas are sexually possessive and live in “harems” dominated by older silverbacks, and a single male dominates females and males. Orangutans are loners who occasionally come together to copulate. Chimpanzees, however, are relatively promiscuous. A female chimp in heat will develop a red and swollen pudendum and copulate with virtually every sexually active male in her troop except for her own sons.

In troops of chimpanzees, if couples go on “safari”—or disappear to be alone together in the woods—as often as not they are beaten upon their return. The group considers elopement behavior, normal for human lovers, aberrant. Whereas big gorillas have erect penises that measure just 2.5 centimeters, promiscuous chimpanzees produce more sperm than any other great ape. Humans are the second most copious sperm producers among our genetically closest primates, suggesting to sperm competition theorists that our ancestors were more promiscuous. Today we have a “mixed” mating system that resembles both the “free-loving” chimpanzee and the “patriarchal” gorilla styles. We are at the crux of two evolutionary approaches to coupling, with neither being any more “natural” than the other.

The unusual vulnerability of human infants has evolutionarily favored females who lost their putative ancestral period of visible ovulation—the estrus with the accompanying reddening that attracts chimps. Such females were more likely to interest sex-obsessed males throughout the month, increasing the chances that they would stay around for child care. Some suggest that culture itself, from poetry to painting to music, is a by-product of ancestral human females attempting to find outward expressions, and exaggerations, of male genetic fitness.

Human intellect in some sense may thus be the mental equivalent of the peacock’s tail feathers: sexual displays aimed at attracting a mate. Whatever the true story of the origin of sex, the quirks and oddities of sexual behavior show that normality is a fleeting commodity. Each new sexual species renders its ancestors obsolete as it incorporates new behaviors and new pools of mutating, recombining genes.

THE EVOLUTION OF MATING SYSTEMS knows few bounds. Among the plethora of life-forms on Earth, sex is manifested in a staggering variety of ways.

Many insects produce spermatophores: packages of sperm inserted into females or given to the female for self-insertion. Male octopuses use one arm to deposit sperm. Male anglerfish are diminutive creatures that attach themselves to the genitalia of females. Some wasps mistake orchids for females, pollinating the flowers instead of inseminating their own kind.

Then there’s the laughing hyena, which hunts in all-female packs. Hormonally masculinized, their clitorises are longer than the penises of the males. They give birth through their urethra, and the cub’s passage through the U-shaped birth canal usually kills the mother.

Even when it comes to the division of organisms into discrete genders, things aren’t black and white. Only 5 to 7 percent of plants have males and females separated into distinct organisms, in the way that most animals are. Twenty to 30 percent of plants have male and female flowers on the same organism. The majority of flowering plants, such as tulips, have both sexes in the same flower, and they mature at the same time.

People worry about tiny differences within our own human mating system—but there really is no such thing as “normal” in sexual evolution. Take the great grey slug,
Limax maximus,
whose hermaphroditic midair mating antics first attracted attention over a century ago. Meeting up on a branch or bracket fungus, the lovers kick off with a bit of tentacle foreplay. Then they close in on each other, circling in a mouth-to-tail dance that lasts up to two and a half hours.

Then, at the point of utmost passion, each slug “bungee jumps” from the tree, stopping itself short on a 38- to 46-centimeter line made of its own mucus. Swinging in midair, each slug unsheaths its penis, up to 10 centimeters long, and inserts it in the appropriate bisexual organ. After exchanging sperm, they either climb up the mucus cable whence they came or drop to the ground from the sheer orgasmic exhaustion the French call
la petite morte
 . . . the little death.

The exchanging of genes in sexually reproducing species has a long and titillating history whose variations transcend the imagination of the most dedicated pornographer. From DNA repair mechanisms in bacteria to flower images sent over the Internet, sex in its great diversity can be expected to persist beyond the demise of the human species. Or, alternatively, be involved in our evolution into new species.

CHAPTER 6

WHO IS I?

AT THE END
of the year last, in a party diverse with ethnicity and artistry, not to mention anarchists, a question was asked of me by none other than myself. Yet, as it was done in company, I credit the question as much to my companions.

You see, after I described some of my political views, mentioning the strange question of the status of the Federal Reserve as a private corporation, as well as some of the scientific anomalies surrounding the events of 9/11, I was told that my views pretty much matched those of members of the Tea Party. Now I knew I was against the neocons, but I had no idea that, according to a helpful anarchist, that made me a fledgling member of the Tea Party.

I don’t watch TV news and now find most of the alternative media as noxious as the mainstream kind. Which doesn’t leave me much of an informational safety net except for the Internet, which, as we know, is full of holes. Yet that’s where I,
insofar as I am an I,
swim in a roiling sea of glorified gossip and the occasional fresh tidbit of gleaming truthlike debris.

Of course that’s also where
Wild River Review
(where this chapter was first published) is, so it is at the very least convenient for this essay. But it also means I was inured from my status as a putative Tea Party nutcase (not to be confused with nutjob, nutbag, or nutbar). I had hardly known that I had metamorphosed in my sleep. But in case there was any doubt, an ex seconded the motion on Facebook, wondering since when had I developed an affinity for the extreme right wing.

Well, I never.

When I asked the anarchist if he thought Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame was a double agent (because his revelations had apparently been vetted by Israel, and because such an operation could be used as an excuse to shut down the Internet in the name of security), he assured me that he (Assange) could be a
triple
agent, which I found nicely to my liking. Assange could be fooling both sides.

Not to be outdone, I spent the rest of the party spicing up my conversation with the perplexing notion of the quadruple agent, a concept around which it is indeed hard to wrap one’s mind. The anarchist added that Sarah Palin, who later terrorized the country with her gunsight campaign graphics, was probably, at least financially, a creation of the neocons.

Right wing. Left wing. What?

Needless to say, I was confused. But the confusion did me good, as it allowed me to muse on some of the rarefied niceties of that perplexing morass of abstract marble from which we shape ourselves into selves. I speak of identity. I can answer where I am (on the third rock from the Sun, in the outskirts of the Milky Way), what I am (proteins and genes and bones and whatnot made from atoms common in the universe), how I am (okay), when I am (twenty-first century, etc.), and maybe even why I am (more on that later) more easily than I can tell you
who
I am.

Apparently I am not alone in this perplexing dilemma. Although it will do no justice to paraphrase the great popularizer of mysticism and expositor of world religions Alan Watts, who devoted a whole book to the subject (
The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are
), Watts gave an elegantly Hindu answer to the question: you are the universe playing a game of hide-and-seek with itself.

Basically it boils down to this: Because the universe is eternal, which can get boring, it likes to pretend that it is divided into individual parts. Some of these parts not only die, they
know
they die. This realization may get those parts worked up, but it also keeps them from being bored.

Watts pointed out that the universe doesn’t like to show off in this regard, but rather to “show on”—as a character would show up in the pages of a book, or an actor upon the world’s rotund stage. Later in his life Watts distanced himself somewhat from this Hindu metaphysics, but
The Book
still stands as a brilliant testimony to one of the simplest and most enduringly convincing ideas of cross-cultural religion: We are bits of the all, the cosmos engaged in a grand game of self-play.

Watts here and elsewhere espoused a doctrine of realistic reincarnation. He looked at his red-headed grandchildren and saw himself. He opined that all organisms “think they’re human.”

And he spoke of the need to escape from the illusion of the “skin-encapsulated ego” in order to recognize the connection in each to the infinite. Turning a noun into a verb à la Heidegger, he said that when a baby is born the universe “I’s” itself. It is the same cosmos I-ing itself in a myriad of forms. We may die, but the great game goes on. New beings are born, but they make the same discoveries. They, in a sense, “R” us.

(And I think it’s weird how in English we ask how “are” you—as if in addressing another in the second person we are somehow secretly acknowledging their multiplicity. Shouldn’t it be, how is you? Or maybe, what you be?)

Samuel Butler, novelist and neglected philosopher, is an interesting case in the exploration of multiple identity. Butler wrote of walking down the street and noticing that every person reminded him of someone else. So this guy might look most like the Earl of Sandwich, another like Jesus, a gal like Queen Victoria. We’re familiar with this syndrome from its extreme form in the asylum. Butler just entertained a light version, Watts’s naturalistic reincarnation applied to the other rather than the self, reincarnation right out on the street.

Butler experienced other disruptions of the self. His
Erewhon: Across the Range
—a utopia that combined New Zealand and northern Italy, the Maori and the English into a satiric fictional blend—was originally thought by the public to have been written by Sir Thomas More. It sold briskly until its real author was divined, and sales dropped. Still, for Butler, the experience of being taken for another was not entirely displeasing.

Butler had already played at identity by arguing with himself in the op-ed pages of
the Press
in Christchurch, New Zealand (where on February 22, 2011, there was an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale). One of Butler’s avatars (“Cellarius”) took the position that machines (of which the telegraph and train were the most advanced examples of the time, 1865) were taking over the planet, whereas another, anonymous author (writing a piece called Lucubratio Ebria, Latin for “drunken nightwork”) scathingly disagreed with Cellarius, pointing out that devices like umbrellas were extensions of our skin and that a train is only a “seven-leagued foot that five hundred may own at once.”

The author of fictions indulges in this same sane version of multiple personality syndrome; she is the outermost concentric personality who knows the true status of her characters while they, poor saps, have nary a clue, mostly, of the whimsy-driven coffee-drinking goddess controlling their fate.

Indeed, Socrates’s dialogues in Plato’s hands were arguably the earliest modern novels, as they allowed a panoply of distinct voices to transcend the limitations of isolated opinion in order to create a multipersonal philosophy beyond individual opinion. The irony here is that Plato, according to Friedrich Nietzsche in
The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music
(great title, that), had originally planned to be a dramatist, that is, a tragic playwright.

Under the influence of Socrates’s rationalism, however, Nietzsche supposedly burned all his plays as a mystical enterprise unbefitting the truth-telling agenda of the philosopher. But what the Socratic method sacrificed, according to Nietzsche, was the realization that the multipersonal realm of Attic tragedy was a sacred reenactment (a “showing on” in Watts’s lingo) of the primordial drama of human separation from the cosmos that defines us.

Euripides, also under the influence of Socrates, started it by getting rid of the chorus. A central part of the essentially spiritual ancient Greek tragedies, the chorus was not meant to be taken literally as representing people but was, instead, a manifestation of the cosmic realization that we are all one, illusorily separated from one another like raindrops glinting in the sun as they fall, unaware that their source and destination is the current of an indivisible river. Getting rid of the chorus paved the way to melodrama and soap opera, to simple representations of daily life obscuring the tragic truth dramatized by the ancients, that our separateness is life’s temporary illusion.

Butler’s deconstructions of identity, his divisions of the would-be indivisibility of individuality, also took a biological turn: is it not arbitrary to identify death as occurring at the transition from maternal butterfly to eggs? Is not the transition from egg to caterpillar, or caterpillar to chrysalis, or, most spectacularly, from pupa to winged form, equally as striking?

He argued also that as infants, we are more like other infants than ourselves as octogenarians. The arguments were of a piece, with one another and with Watts’s bombshell in
The Book
: “We” are not what we think we are, the stable identities conferred by pronouns like me, my, and mine.

Instead, in the words of the Vedic Sanskrit hymns, the
Rig Veda,
“thou art that”: We are not just within but outside our skin, like waves connected to the whole ocean. Our true identity is (to use a Butler term) extracorporaneous: It is the universe itself, glittering forth galaxies, solar systems, planets, and beings.

MY COWBOY FRIEND Bill Huth, longtime owner of the Willow Springs Raceway in California, is a devout reader (and sometimes publisher) of old texts on evolution and spirituality. Huth argues that what we call “life” is eternal, evolving, a restless “thing” of ever-changing forms. This makes each of us eternal whether we know it or not, and generally we don’t. Huth himself, now eighty-seven but once a tireless and quite accomplished conman, was accused multiple times in his earlier years of impersonating a preacher.

Once, he laughs, the police called his mother in L.A. to tell her.

“Oh no, he’s not a preacher,” she corrected them. “He’s an evangelist.”

The great literary scholar and surrealist Jorge Luis Borges was a master at revealing the subtle ways we are not who we think we are. In
Borges and I,
he writes of the “other one, the one called Borges” whom he knows “from the mail” and whose name he sees “on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary . . . but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. . . . Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.”

In
The Other,
Borges depicts himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts, stopping to sit on a bench on the bank of the Charles River. Already on the bench is a well-dressed man who seems to him familiar. The older and the younger man have a refreshingly literary conversation, touching on, among other things, the use of the doppelgänger in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. At some point the older man realizes why the younger man looks so familiar; it is his younger self whom he, at first, did not recognize.

I had the exact opposite experience when I recognized myself, not on a bench as another body but as a voice from another time. My mother had picked up me and my girlfriend Natasha Myers, a professor of anthropology at York University, at the airport and insisted we listen to an essay of mine, part of an anthology that had just been released as an audiobook. The reader, Pamela Ward, was espousing views using my exact words but in prose that ran strongly contrary to some of my current opinions critical of critical theory, epistemological relativism, abstract jargon, and postmodern academic fashion.

Not only was she confidently using French philosophy to deconstruct the notion of discrete identity, I was the source of the voice and its mannered attack on the recent positions I held so dear. I shrank in my seat. Natasha, a frequent interlocutor with whom I had espoused my current opinions, was in the backseat, laughing.

The essay in question, “The Uncut Self,” appeared in the anthology
Dazzle Gradually: Reflections on the Nature of Nature,
published by Chelsea Green. I had written a draft of it over twenty years ago for Fred Tauber of Boston University and his conference there, “Organism and the Origins of Self,” on biology and philosophy. I was under the spell of Continental philosophy in a big way, quoting Michel Foucault, thinking with Jacques Derrida, and in general making the same sort of arguments that I now objected to when Natasha made them to me, accusing me of scientism, biological reductionism, and a naive belief in reality free of social constructions.

Dazzle Gradually
comes from Emily Dickinson’s line “The truth must dazzle gradually / or every man be blind.” Well I was dazzled all right. And all would have been well had not my mother, the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, coauthor of the essay and lately taken by it in audio form, insisted on playing it loudly for Natasha in the backseat.

Natasha could no more control the volume than I could, as my mother told us to “shhh” and listen, wondering what was so funny. My laughter was more subdued. I was being schooled by my younger self.

NATASHA AND I TRY not to make a habit of arguing, but when we do, our intellectual arguments seem to follow the script from an Ian McEwan novel, with me defending the “rational male” view of classic scientific objectivity and her assuming a more “generous” view (popular today in humanities departments) that highlights the role of culture and history in creating what we naïfs consider culture-free facts.

Part of the disorienting effect of the essay is that it begins midsentence: