Stalking Nabokov (23 page)

The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubble-like macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis (“Don’t eat me—I have already been squashed, sampled and rejected”). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird’s dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. “Natural selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.

(
SM
124–25)

If man as a species has made God in his own image, Nabokov made God or Nature in his own personal image: as a subtle cosmic and comic prankster, hiding elegant and playful surprises for the observant and curious mind. In
The Gift
the hero and narrator, Fyodor, reports that his lepidopterist father

told me about the incredible artistic wit of mimetic disguise which was not explainable by the struggle for existence (the rough haste of evolution’s unskilled forces), was too refined for the mere deceiving of accidental predators, feathered, scaled and otherwise (not very fastidious, but then not too fond of butterflies), and seemed to have been invented by some waggish artist precisely for the intelligent eyes of man.

(
Gift
122)

Nabokov was no Christian, but he did believe in his own brand of Intelligent Design, design somehow hidden for “the intelligent eyes of man” to rediscover.

In the 1940s a scientist could legitimately think that natural selection could not explain mimicry, but experimental work on the survival rates of camouflaged animals in the 1950s, and work on animal perception and cognition after that, confirmed that even elaborate mimicry could be perfectly explained by natural selection. But Nabokov’s sense of human evolution as not being explicable in terms of competition and as needing to stress imagination anticipates some recent shifts in our understanding of our distant past. While Nabokov was alive, but after he had stopped working as a scientist, modern neo-Darwinism took shape. The new insights into genes and DNA possible after Crick and Watson combined with William Hamilton’s notion of inclusive fitness: that
my
evolutionary fitness depends on the survival and reproduction of the genes not only
in me
but also in others
closely related to me
. In 1975 Richard Dawkins memorably showed the power of a gene’s-eye view of life in
The Selfish Gene
. Many who have never read the book suppose it must be about genes as selfish, but it actually explains how cooperation could arise from genes that, metaphorically, serve only their own interests. As Dawkins later wrote, he could have called his book
The Cooperative Gene
without needing to change a word.
¹

Recent work in human evolution has shown cooperation to be increasingly central to what we have become. In the 1970s and 1980s, competition was still seen as a key to the emergence of intelligence. A major driving force in intelligence, it was realized, was the ability to understand other minds, the most volatile and usually the most consequential kind of information in the environment. With chimpanzees, a highly competitive species, as a prime research focus, the idea was called the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. In the 1990s came the recognition that social
cooperation
as well as social competition could drive intelligence. In the last decade, with detailed comparative studies of chimpanzee and human development, researchers have seen the unique extent and importance of human cooperativeness as the key to the emergence of language and complex cognition and to the unique extent of human culture.

Michael Tomasello and his team have compared human and chimpanzee development more closely than anyone else. Tomasello stresses that humans have evolved a unique motivation to engage with and understand others of our kind and a unique capacity to do so. Our intense engagement with others begins at birth. Human mothers and infants have evolved so that they can and want to share their gaze while the infants suckle, unlike in any other species. Human eyes have evolved to
reveal
the direction of their attention, whereas other primate eyes have evolved to
conceal
eye direction. Human one-year-olds engage in joint attention—following others’ hands or eyes and checking to see that the others follow theirs—and in proto-declarative pointing—indicating objects or events simply for the sake of sharing attention toward them, which apes never do. They expect others to share interest, attention, and response: “This by itself is rewarding for infants— apparently in a way it is not for any other species on the planet.”
²

Why? I said that primatologists originally named the social intelligence hypothesis the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis because they assumed that the competition they observed in chimpanzees was a key driver of intelligence. But flexible cooperation requires even more intelligence than competition. To compete with others in ways apart from the purely physical usually needs little more than concealing your knowledge and intentions. To cooperate in flexible ways, you need to know in detail what the others you wish to cooperate with know and plan. You need to pay close and continuous attention to what others are seeing, feeling, and doing.

Tomasello stresses that our minds have evolved a unique capacity to understand one another because we have evolved a unique disposition to engage and cooperate with one another: somehow we have crossed a cooperation divide. We
want
to share attention and intentionality, to direct our minds toward the same things, and to share similar responses—without which art and story would be impossible. In fact, stories can be one of the richest ways of sharing intentionality with authors, with characters, and with others in the audience.

Our cooperative disposition has made us uniquely capable of social learning. All social animals can learn from others rushing from a threat or toward an opportunity. Highly social animals can cut down on information search time. Honeybees with their waggle dances and ants with their pheromone trails act as superorganisms, each individual almost like a neuron firing in an extended social brain. Bees and ants are eusocial, adapted for hypersociality, even to the point of having specialized breeders and non-breeding workers; biologists have recently begun to characterize humans, uniquely, as ultrasocial. Our cooperative disposition and our desire for joint attention and shared intentionality led to the emergence of language, probably out of gesture and mime, and ultimately to our occupying, uniquely, the cognitive niche.

As a result we therefore learn all sorts of fine-grained information from one another. We have even evolved a uniquely long childhood to help us learn. “Even in a school-less hunter-gatherer society, individuals learn more than 99 percent of fifty core skills with help from others.”
³

We not only pass on information, we actively seek it out. Why? A vast amount of research has been done in cognitive ethology and in comparative and developmental psychology to understand theory of mind, the capacity to understand other minds. It seems that only humans have evolved to become capable of understanding others not only in terms of desires and intentions, which many animals intuit, but also in terms of beliefs. By the age of five, we can realize that if another person lacks a key piece of information, they may have a wrong belief, which may then affect their desires and intentions. But that understanding of the possibility of false belief also alerts us to the possibility that
we
may not know enough, that
we
may be missing key pieces of information, that we need to seek more.

Chimpanzees are more curious than any other nonhuman animal, but humans take curiosity to a whole new level. Human curiosity, most momentously, allowed us to understand how plant cycles work, how to help them work, how to start agriculture, how to generate food surpluses. From there we could build settlements with some of the features of a beehive or an ant colony, with more scope for information search and sharing. We can send out, as it were, not food seekers laying down food trails but specialized information seekers laying down knowledge trails that then feed back into the colony. In these more complex societies, we learn not just from elders, as in hunter-gatherer societies, but from specialized teachers, from writing, from printed books, from libraries, and now the Internet. There is, I think, in Darwin’s words, “grandeur in this view of life,” in seeing sociality and social learning from their simple origins to the present.

I started that line of inquiry in answering Nabokov’s dislike for the stress on competition, on the struggle for life, in Darwinian natural selection and in showing recent developments in understanding cooperation. What about the other aspect of Nabokov’s misgivings about natural selection: his sense that play is crucial to understanding “
Homo poeticus—
without which
sapiens
could not have been evolved”? Or to put another question, which will lead to the same answers: if information has been so powerful for humans, how is it that we also spend more of our time and energy on
mis
information than any other species? Why do our libraries store not only nonfiction but also fiction and the scriptures that are considered fictive at least by most outside any given faith?

In
On the Origin of Stories
I build on the findings I have already discussed to try to answer the question, why does a species that derives so many of its advantages from mastering information have a compulsion to spend time engaged in fiction, in telling one another stories that teller and listeners know to be untrue? It’s no biological puzzle at all why we should have evolved to tell
true
stories. If we can comprehend events, if we have language, and if we are highly social animals, then, without needing to add anything else, we will tell true stories. Chimpanzees monitor each other intensely, and one chimp will bring to the attention of another the fact that this male and that female are copulating behind that tree. Humans, too, have every reason to want to know who’s doing what to whom, and with true narrative we can also point who
has
done you-know-what to whom or who has had a successful kill and where and so on.

But in a world of unsparing biological competition—which our world still is, despite the evolution of cooperation—how could a successful species afford an unflagging appetite for stories we know to be
un
true? To answer that we have to answer the question why do we expend time and resources, across cultures, epochs, classes, life stages, and intellectual levels, on music, dance, design, and stories.

I say this because it seems highly likely that the literary arts were the last of the arts to emerge. Analogues of music and dance exist in many species, in birds, in intelligent nonprimates like whales and dolphins, and in primates like gibbons and chimpanzees. Chanting and rhythmic movement and perhaps rhythmic stick or rock banging—in other words forms of proto-song, proto-dance and proto-instrumental music—are likely to stretch back a million years or more. And the earliest signs of the visual arts date back hundreds of thousands of years, with the first over-refinement of Acheulean hand axes for purely aesthetic reasons. (Some of these stone tools were made much larger or much smaller or much more symmetrical than appropriate for use, and these impractical hand axes, unlike the practical ones, show no signs of use.)
⁴
Although the matter is a very long way from being decided, a full modern language adequate for telling stories seems to date back only a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand years. Other proto-arts had probably been developing for hundreds of thousands of years before the first full-scale fictions.

In
On the Origin of Stories
I try to offer a comprehensive explanation for the arts, especially the art of fiction. Art, I argue, is a kind of high play. Play exists in many species, and the amount of play in a species correlates with its flexibility of behavior. Flexibility of behavior solves the problem of coping with unpredictable, complex circumstances, so by definition it cannot be entirely genetically programmed. A flexible behavior has to be
learned
to maximize flexibility. If a behavior is hardwired, there would be no point in exercising it in a way as expensive in energy and risk (injury, predation) as play. But if there is room for flexibility, then individuals who can improve their execution of complicated behaviors and their judgment of situations in which they are needed will fare better. This is especially the case in critical behaviors like flight or fight.

If in moments of security animals practice the behaviors that make the greatest life-and-death difference, like flight and fight, they can then perform better in moments of high urgency. For that reason play has developed in many species, especially those with the security that parental care provides: in birds and in perhaps all mammals. (And it seems highly significant that the two most common forms of play, chasing and rough-and-tumble fighting, indeed exercise exactly the skills needed for flight and fight.) The motivation to try out these behaviors has been selected for as those more inclined to practice survive more often until species after species loves play, until they have a compulsion to run, chase, twist, roll, or engage in rough-and-tumble. What we experience as the sheer fun of play overcomes the deeply rooted inclination not to expend energy if effort can be avoided.