Biology

10 Apr

I hear the term B!IOL$OGY a lot these days. It’s probably one of the most popular bits of scientific parlance in steady circulation. How ironic, given that our lives are ever more defined by technological mediation. Perhaps that is the reason folk want to talk B!IOL$OGY so much; we are on the precipice of an age where virtual reality might be chipped directly into us, making our comprehension of the gap between fantasy and reality very troubled. We are peeking through the door way of an environment that will have become so toxic that we may just have to stay home and have astronaut food pumped into us at intermittent intervals, whilst we play life like war-games with our actual brains. We’ll nay be able to escape it, it’ll become of us. As we lay in bed at night, we’ll not be able to shake the image of hardcore gangbangs, social media pile ons, and khaki commandos floating along our line of vision, like spectres, keeping us horny, angry, belligerent, frightened and alert.

Yes, the more sophisticated the technologies become, the more complex our lives become, and perhaps, the more alienated and confused we get, and thus the more we start harking back to some golden age of cave art and paleo diets and women being dragged hair-long by men in Tarzan loin cloths. It’s an odd paradox; the smart phone generation are slumping into a regressive idealisation of some halcyon days where we were all fight and flesh, because we are ever-more tethered to content consumption. Living in their minds, obsessing about their bodies. The war-game addict, the gym bro, the steroid quaffer, that dude who only eats salt and beef… because bread is a noxious sugar unit promulgated by soy-boy, carb-capitalists propagandising feminisation, not a miraculous agrarian invention that helped swell the ranks of the human unit from tribes to cities.

They spend most of their time alone, consuming content about how to get a better body, taking illegal substances, filling up their freezers with cheap meat, pumping ironing angrily and joylessly, oscillating between mammoth wankathons and evangelical abstinence, creating mensuration systems for the evaluation of beauty and bodies, based on bad maths. Preparing for the new dawn. Life is about ruthless competition, men bare knuckle boxing with ocelots and whilst women watch, oozing with desire and rubbing gooseberries to their eyelids to make them look younger & more fertile, and so on and such.

Indeed, I’’ll not let the ladies off the hook; filming themselves slicing jade-green avocados and bloodless wagyu steaks, sprinkling them with pomegranate seeds like ‘jewels’ and using them to decorate dishwasher white cereal bowls within wipe-clean pebble grey kitchens. One day soon, her caveman will come home bearing a blood diamond. It will be very sparkly and pretty in the cave.

Evolutionary psychology is frequently called upon to explain the insistence on this horse-nonsense, but its part in the cultural discourse has a grand misnomer running through the length of it. It implies at the prestige of Darwinism, the concept in the material sciences that over hundreds of thousands/millions/billions of years, genetic code is altered through natural selection and reproduction, with species splitting, melding, and forming over time, in order to adapt to new environment. We came from apes. Well first we came from tubes, sea tubes, in the ocean, about 600 million years ago. Our ape ancestor came about 25 million years ago. Contrary to popular belief, we are not descended from chimps, instead, we humans, and chimps, have a common ancestor. It took about six million years, from ape to early man. Six million. Then a further 5 million from these early apes/hominids to homosapien; us. It’s all a bit of a to-do. I don’t fully grasp it; I won’t pretend to. But its objective. As hard a fact as any.

On the other hand, evolutionary psychology, however, is a theory within social studies. Or social science if you must. It is a subjective way of making sense of human behaviour. It argues that there is a personality that arises in species pertaining to their evolution, that is absolute and continues to exist as the predominating tendency, irrespective of cultural and intellectual advancements. Some go so far as to say that more-so, any attempt to challenge this ahistorical personality, through ‘social engineering’, will result in chaos. It takes the bio-chemical arguments about terrain, food, fertility, and applies them in an irreducible way to human psychology. It makes a series of logical leaps; even if our biological evolution was irreducible to our personalities (the first leap), the idea that our personalities are not impacted by our cultures (the second) is much more questionable, as is the idea that rejection of the (debatable) evolutionarily instilled tendencies will inevitably cause us suffering (the third). But its popularity, despite its intellectual vulnerability, can at least be partially explained by the fact that it rides off the coattails of Darwinism, giving itself the same lustre of intellectual respectability. In popular culture, this important demarcation is often missed, and the theories of evolutionary psychology are disseminated as though it had the factual rigour of evolutionary biology.

As well as making logical leaps, it tends to be very good at cherry picking bits of natural selection it deems relevant. If a lobster mates for life, its relevant. If a chimp society is led by males, its relevant. If a mantis chews off the head of her lover, bite by juicy bite, like an apple, whilst she fucks him, it’s not relevant. If a group of lionesses kicks the absolute fur out of a male wandering onto their turf to start some trouble, it’s not relevant. If bonobos (as equally genetically related to us as chimps) live in matriarchies where eroticism and empathy are social lubricants moreso than aggression, it’s not relevant. If a mother waterbird abandons her weakest chick in order to give the best shot to the stronger, it’s not relevant. Or perhaps it is, depending on what version of evolutionary psychology that is being pilfered that day.

Its last weakness I can see, is it misses something discernibly central about us; we are the last surviving of the human hominids (so long to Neanderthals, Homo Erectus etc); our Latin name, homosapiens, a term applied to us by taxonomists during the Enlightenment (I would assume Linnaeus but I can’t be bothered to check). It means, ‘men of wisdom’. It is an important fact, because one of the arguments anthropologists make about us is that we survived other hominids due to our adaptability, our flexibility, our diversity, our intelligence, and our capacity for technology. The idea that the survival of the fittest genetics, translates to an aggressive survival of the fittest human personality (usually along lines of hyper-competitiveness) may be an easy narrative for people to grasp and may make some aggressive, self-centred people feel better about themselves, but it does not really get to the heart of what makes us distinct as human beings, what gives us our edge.

The body becomes the symbolic site of this idea of competitive self interest; the idea of the apex of human achievement is meant to look like a muscular man or a pretty, immature woman. Irrespective of anything else, it never fails to astound me, how much emphasis people place on the human body, erecting temples of idealisation to the best modern examples – sports people, supermodels – when the best modern example of human invention tend to pale by comparison in notice (inventor of the covid vaccine or David Beckham? – put Dr Katalin Kariko and Dr Drew Weissman into Google and field 103,000 results, put the football player in and get 64, 400, 000.) Of course, there is nothing at all wrong with people taking care of themselves, enjoying looking at people they are attracted to, or seeking joy in ‘embodiment’, the feeling of having a nervous system and flesh and so-on, and sharing that with others. That’s good, wholesome stuff. But finding the human body loaded with pleasurable fruit is a bit different to idealisation, sterile, competitive ideas about perfection and social hygiene, and putting some human bodies above others in some kind of morally loaded physical hierarchy. Not just because it’s not kind, but also because it’s kinda stupid.

When I observe the techno-throb of huge metropolis like Tokyo, the reflective beauty of the Sistine Chapel or the difficult to grasp sophistication of quantum physics, I find it difficult to understand how anyone could know these things exist, and were made by man, and still think some caveman monkey jibberish could effectively describe our species-essence. But thinking about it this way makes some men and women feel more desirable; imagining themselves as ‘fine examples of physicality’. But it’s a frankly ridiculous self-conception buoyed by a futile attempt to compensate for the fragility of the ego.

If confronted by such a silly person, I’ll proffer some talking points to bug them: Did you know that if a silverback gorilla took it upon himself to bench press, he could theoretically lift 1200-1800kg? Now, I don’t know if that is the strongest gorilla, or the average gorilla. I don’t know what a female gorilla could bench. I do know that no gorilla yet has committed to an actual live test of the calculation. (because even though, comparative to us, they are more brawn than brain, they aren’t that preposterous or that hat-doffing). I also know that the strongest ever human bench press was closer to 600kg. That’s the strongest, and it pales by comparison. The strongest human male would be pulped by even a fairly weak gorilla. On the flip side, the cleverest humans have mapped the genome, explored space, the deepest oceans, invented and conducted brain surgery, and turned cocoa beans into fudge sundaes. Impressive stuff. And yet, we are similarly impressed when a clever ape, Koko, mashes a symbol on a keyboard to ask to snuggle her pet kitten. Although, bless her beautiful heart, of course.

If anything, from ape to ape to man to man, we are less strong then we were in an our misty far past, less physically impressive, but with significantly bigger brains, proportionately. Indeed, many anthropologists have argued that it wasn’t strong men and pretty women who found each other and moved shit along, but clever, resourceful, sensible men and women, who worked out how to get the most food with the least amount of effort and danger. Initially that meant more meat from bigger sources using spears, which helped grow our brain evolutionarily (but eating more steaks won’t grow your individual brain, if it needs to be said). But eventually social evolution meant farming, and huh! gasp!, carbs. Delicious, safe to consume, won’t rot quickly and get riddled with disease or stomp on your head and kill you like meat, energy dense carbs. Of course now, we have too much energy dense food in the form of hyper-processed sugars; but the answer to that is to move back to lentils and pasta, and away from cocoa pops, not to start knawing on passing badgers or clogging up your arteries with large amounts of powdered protein.

The stronger, faster, brigade won’t enjoy hearing this of course, because then they’d have to confront the fact that they are obsessing over improving their bodies because they don’t know how to confront the problems of their alienated personalities and atrophied minds. They’d prefer to sit on their podcasts and rant into teenage bedrooms, and/or the void, about how it is the highest form of being to be a man who keeps ‘their women’ in headlocks incase they get eaten by predators at bus stops, or a woman who has lots of babies but doesn’t live beyond 30; she dies off so her skin can be used for lavish clothes for male tribal elders with big pecs. Ask one of these lot why human women are one of the exceedingly rare species to have a menopause alongside some other clever, social species like apes and orcas? Watch them scratch for an answer; they won’t hit on the fact that many of those other species were, gasp matriarchal, and perhaps women getting to have a lifespan beyond reproduction is of social utility to our species. Indeed, elderwomen may have had a lot of influence in our misty past, just as they are effective, diplomatic rulers in bonobo societies, unlike their finger chewing, angry chimp patriarchal cousins.

We could do a Gareth from The Office and ask more questions to vex them like, will there ever be a boy who can swim faster than a shark? No, but I’ve known a few boys who make for better conversationalists than sharks (or Gareth for that matter - he’d be on ‘team Man = Caveman for absolute sure). Which man can outrun a cheetah; which could better scale a sharp incline than a mountain goat? Which man could flap his arms fast enough to take on after a golden eagle (it would be enjoyable to watch in in any case); which could death-poison an elephant with a single droplet of his body juice better than a jungle frog? And in another direction, no matter how beautiful Marilyn Monroe or Lady Di were, can we really say that they were as beautiful as a peacock or a tiger, a coral reef, or an arctic vista? It's contested at least; I’d say no.

I once took a visit to Cardiff Museum, because it used to have an exhibit about the history of the Celts, for whom I am, I suppose, distantly related. These were a punchy bunch; a bejewelled set of goddess-cults, who spoke in Druidic babble, slavered themselves in blue and had a good old go at fighting off every Imperialist that ever tried to take bring them to heel. They would’ve done better had they only had a good sit down and worked out some decent military strategy rather than just screaming into the fray and stubbornly flashing their arseholes at the tightly wrought Roman death units. All very apposite to my general point. In any case, after I’d wandered among the lavish jewels, gold torcs and spearheads, I got chatting to an anthropologist who was setting up a stall to give talks to local schoolchildren, placing real Celtic artefacts on his trestle table. He talked to me about the history of the Celts and the British isles, and such, which was richly interesting, yet I recall little of it. There was one thing he said though that always sticks in my head;“You know, people always think we are top of the food chain, but anthropologically speaking, in terms of our long past, we are as much prey and as we are predators,”. He smiled wryly and held up a ruddy, grey spearhead into the artificial museum light, “…but we aren’t prey anymore are we? We found a hack.” Once upon a time a human tried to fight a sabertooth to show off to the girls and got himself eviscerated; some millions of years before him, some ape picked up two bits of rock, & decided to see what would happen if he sharpened them against each other.

S/he isn’t the version of the troubled history of the mind that is on display in the aggrandisements of evolutionary psychology so popular with the testosterone brigade, as they help disseminate their vain politics on the machines that are making nerd boys in SV billions of dollars and immeasurable amounts of political clout. Indeed, it occurs to me that if what really defines the troubled greatness of our species - our ability to transcend the violence of immanence through clever advancement - those who still worship at the temple of the body, need to start see the machine better than the body it smartly professes to contain.