The Ghost in the Machine (45 page)

 

 

 

 

 

XVII

 

 

A UNIQUE SPECIES

 

I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most
pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered
to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
Swift, Voyage to Brobdingnag

 

 

The Unsolicited Gift

 

 

In one of his essays, Sir Julian Huxley made a list of the characteristics
which are unique to the species man: language and conceptual thought;
the transmission of knowledge by written records; tools and machinery;
biological dominance over all other species; individual variability;
the use of the forelimb for manipulating purposes only; all-year-round
fertility; art, humour, science, religion, and so on. [1] But the most
striking feature of man from the evolutionist's point of view is not
included in the list -- nor have I read a serious discussion of it by
any other leading biologist.

 

 

It could be called 'the paradox of the unsolicited gift'; I shall try
to convey it by a parable. There was once an illiterate shopkeeper in
an Arab bazaar, called Ali, who, not being very good at doing sums, was
always cheated by his customers -- instead of cheating them, as it should
be. So he prayed every night to Allah for the present of an abacus --
that venerable contraption for adding and subtracting by pushing beads
along wires. But some malicious djin forwarded his prayers to the wrong
branch of the heavenly Mail Order Department, and so one morning, arriving
at the bazaar, Ali found his stall transformed into a multi-storey,
steel-framed building, housing the latest I.B.M. computer with instrument
panels covering all the walls, with thousands of fluorescent oscillators,
dials, magic eyes, et cetera; and an instruction book of several hundred
pages -- which, being illiterate, he could not read. However, after
days of useless fiddling with this or that dial, he flew into a rage
and started kicking a shiny, delicate panel. The shocks disturbed one
of the machine's millions of electronic circuits, and after a while Ali
discovered to his delight that if he kicked that panel, say, three times
and afterwards five times, one of the dials showed the figure eight! He
thanked Allah for having sent him such a pretty abacus, and continued
to use the machine to add up two and three -- happily unaware that it
was capable of deriving Einstein's equations in a jiffy, or predicting
the orbits of planets and stars thousands of years ahead.

 

 

Ali's children, then his grandchildren, inherited the machine
and the secret of kicking that same panel; but it took hundreds of
generations until they learued to use it even for the purpose of simple
multiplication. We ourselves are Ali's descendants, and though we have
discovered many other ways of putting the machine to work, we have still
only learned to utilise a very small fraction of the potentials of its
estimated hundred thousand million circuits. For the unsolicited gift
is of course the human brain. As for the instruction book, it is lost --
if it ever existed. Plato maintains that it did once but that is hearsay.

 

 

The comparison is less far-fetched than it may seem. Evolution, whatever
the driving force behind it, caters for the species' immediate adaptive
needs; and the emergence of novelties in anatomical structure and function
is by and large guided by these needs. It is entirely unprecedented that
evolution should provide a species with an organ
which it does not
know how to use
; a luxury organ, like Ali's computer, far exceeding
its owner's immediate, primitive needs; an organ which will take the
species millennia to learn to put to proper use -- if it ever does.

 

 

All the evidence indicates that the earliest representative of homo
sapiens -- Cro-Magnon man, who emerges on the scene some fifty to a
hundred thousand years ago -- was already endowed with a brain which in
size and shape was the same as ours. But he made hardly any use of it;
he remained a cave-dweller, and never grew out of the Stone Age. From
the point of view of his immediate needs, the explosive growth of the
neocortex overshot the mark by a time factor of astronomic magnitude. For
several tens of thousands of years, our ancestors went on manufacturing
bows and arrows and spears, while the organ which tomorrow will take us
to the moon was already there, ready for use, inside their skulls.

 

 

When we say that mental evolution is a specific characteristic of man
and absent in animals, we confuse the issue. The learning potential
of animals is automatically limited by the fact that they make full
use -- or nearly full use -- of all organs of their native equipment,
including their brains. The capacities of the computer inside the
reptilian and mammalian skull are exploited to the full, and leave no
scope for further learning. But the evolution of man's brain has so
wildly overshot man's immediate needs that he is still breathlessly
catching up with its unexploited, unexplored possibilities. The history
of science and philosophy is, from this point of view, the slow process
of
learning to actualise the brain's potentials
. The new frontiers
to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.

 

 

 

Looking in Utter Darkness . . .

 

 

But why was this process of
learning to use our brains
, in a quite
literal sense, so slow, spasmodic and beset with reverses? Here is the
crux of the problem. The answer, as suggested before, is inadequate
co-ordination between the old brain and the new brain -- the old brain
getting in the way of the new; the passionate neighing of affect-based
beliefs preventing us from listening to the voice of reason. Hence the
mess we made of our social history; but the progress of 'dispassionate'
science laboured under the same curse. We are in the naive habit of
visualising it as a steady, cumulative process, where each epoch adds
some new item to the knowledge of the past, where each generation of Ali's
descendants is learning to make better use of Allah's present, thus nicely
progressing from the magic-ridden, myth-addicted infancy of civilisation,
through the pangs of adolescence, to detached, rational maturity.

 

 

In fact, however, progress was neither steady nor continuous:

 

The philosophy of nature evolved by occasional leaps and bounds
alternating with delusional pursuits, regressions, periods of
blindness and amnesia. The great discoveries which determined its
course were sometimes the unexpected by-products of a chase after
quite different hares. At other times, the process of discovery
consisted merely in the cleaning away of the rubbish that blocked the
path. The mad clockwork of Ptolemy's epicycles was kept going for
two thousand years; and Europe knew less geometry in the fifteenth
century A.D. than in Archimedes' time.
If progress had been continuous and organic, all that we know,
for instance, about the theory of numbers, or analytical geometry,
should have been discovered within a few generations after Euclid.
For this development did not depend on technological advances or the
taming of nature: the whole corpus of mathematics is potentially
there in the ten billion neurons of the computing machine inside
the human skull. . . . The jerky and basically irrational progress
of knowledge is probably related to the fact that evolution has
endowed homo sapiens with an organ which he was unable to put to
proper use. Neurologists have estimated that even at the present
stage we are only using two or three per cent of the potentialities
of its built-in 'circuits'. [2]

 

If one takes a kind of bird's-eye view of the history of science,
the first thing that strikes one is its discontinuity. About tens of
thousands of years of human prehistory we know very little. Then, in the
sixth century B.C., we find suddenly, as if sprung from nowhere, a galaxy
of Philosophers in Miletus and Elea and Samos, discussing the origins
and evolution of the universe, searching for the ultimate principles
underlying all diversity. The Pythagoreans attempted the first grand
synthesis: they tried to weave the separate threads of mathematics, music,
astronomy and medicine into a single carpet with an austere geometrical
design. That carpet is still in the making, but its pattern was laid down
in the three centuries of the Heroic Age of Greek science. However, after
the Macedonian conquest, there followed a period of orthodoxy and decline.

 

Aristotle's categories became the grammar of existence, his animal
spirits ruled the world of physics, everything worth knowing was
already known, and everything inventable already invented. The
Heroic Age was guided by the example of Prometheus stealing the
fire of the gods; the philosophers of the Hellenistic period dwelt
in Plato's cave, drawing epicycles on the wall, their backs turned
to the daylight of reality.
After that there came a period of hibernation lasting for fifteen
centuries. During that time the march of science was not only halted,
but its direction reversed. A contemporary philosopher of science,
Dr Pyke, wrote about 'the inability of science to go backwards --
once the neutron has been discovered it remains discovered'. [3]
Does it? In the fifth century B.C. the educated classes knew that the
earth was a spherical body floating in space and spinning round its
axis; a thousand years later they thought that it was a flat disc. [4]

 

In St. Augustine's
City of God
, all the treasures of ancient Greek
learning, beauty and hope were banned, for all pagan knowledge was
'prostituted with the influence of obscene and filthy devils. Let Thales
depart with his water, Anaximenes with the air, the Stoics with their
fire, Epicurus with his atoms. . . . ' And depart they did. To fiddle
with the dials of the unsolicited gift became taboo. The revival of
learning in the twelfth century was followed by the disastrous marriage
of Aristotle's physics with the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, and
by another three centuries of sterility, stagnation and scholastic
philosophy -- 'looking', as Erasmus cried, 'in utter darkness for that
which has no existence whatsoever'.

 

 

The only periods in the whole of Western history in which there was
a truly cumulative growth of knowledge are the three great centuries
of Greece, and the last three centuries before the present. Yet the
apparatus to generate that knowledge was there all the time during the
intervening two thousand years -- and also during the thirty thousand
years or so which separate us from Altamira and Lascaux. But it was not
allowed to generate that knowledge. The affect-inspired phantasmagorias
of totem and taboo, dogma and doctrine, guilt and fear, drove back
again and again the 'filthy devils' of knowledge. For most of the time
throughout human history, the marvellous potentials of the new cortex
were only permitted to exert their powers in the service of old emotional
beliefs: in the magic-motivated paintings of the Dordogne caves; in the
translation of archerypal imagery into the language of mythology; in the
religious art of Asia or of the European Middle Ages. Reason's task was
to act as the handmaid of faith whether it was the faith of medicine-men,
theologians, scholastics, dialectical materialists, devotees of President
Mao or King Mbo-Mba. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars; it is
in the crocodile and the horse that we carry in our skulls. Of all the
uniquenesses of man this seems to be the foremost.

 

 

 

The Peaceful Primate

 

 

It is characteristic of the conventional biologist's touching optimism
that Huxley's list contains only positive, desirable properties. That
other terrible uniqueness of our species, intra-specific warfare,* is
not even mentioned in passing -- although in a separate essay in the
same volume, on 'War as a Biological Phenomenon', Huxley points out
that 'there are only two kinds of animals that habitually make war --
man and ants. Even among ants, war is mainly practised by one group,
comprising only a few species among the tens of thousands that are
known to science.' [5] In fact, however, rats, too, wage group or clan
warfare. The members of the rat clan, as those of the insect state,
do not 'know' each other individually, only by the characteristic smell
of their shared nest, hive or locality. The stranger, although of the
same species but from a different clan, is instantly recognised by his
different smell -- he 'stinks'. So he must be ferociously attacked,
and if possible killed.

 

* That is, warfare within the species, as distinct from the
inter-specific pursuit of the prey which belongs to a different
species.

 

But man and rats are exceptions. As a rule, throughout the whole
animal kingdom, fighting with intent to kill only occurs between
predator and prey. The law of the jungle sanctions only one legitimate
motive for murder, the feeding drive; but the prey must of course be
of a different species. Within the same species, powerful instinctual
safeguards prevent serious fighting between individuals or groups. These
inhibitory mechanisms -- instinct-taboos -- against killing or seriously
injuring con-specifics are as powerful in most animals as the drives
of hunger, sex or fear. The unavoidable and necessary self-assertive
tendencies among the higher social animals are thus compensated by
inhibitory mechanisms which turn fighting between sexual competitors
into a more or less symbolic duel, fought according to formal rules, but
hardly ever to a lethal finish. The contest is instantly terminated by
some specific gesture of surrender by the weaker contestant -- the dog
rolling on its back, exposing its belly and throat; the defeated stag
slinking away. Similarly, the defence of territory is assured nearly
always without bloodshed, by strictly ritualised threat-behaviour, mock
attacks and the like. Lastly, order of rank in wild animal societies,
from birds to monkeys, is established and maintained with a minimum of
bullying and fuss.