Ten Million Aliens

by Simon Barnes

  Physiologically, physiologically. Not morally, not morally at all. I hope that’s obvious. Physiology is not the same as morality; physiology does not imply morality. We need to be clear about that before we move on any further. There is an awful lot of difference between I can and I must. Humans are capable of making personal and moral choices: if there is any discontinuity between humans and other animals, it is probably to be found here – though some primatologists suggest that morality has its origin in the responsibilities and obligations of social life and can be found in non-human societies.I

  We have the technology to control our rates of reproduction and the ability to make the consequent choices. Women can make their own decisions about sexual and reproductive availability.II

  Decisions about reproduction are crucial to the future of the human species and of the planet we live on: over-population is the biggest single problem we face.

  We can make choices, then: but that doesn’t stop us from being animals. Breasts and our preoccupation with them are at once an emblem of the human continuity with mammals and therefore with the rest of the Animal Kingdom – and at the same time, an emblem of human uniqueness. This book is mostly about continuities and connections, but I am not here to deny human uniqueness: that would be perverse. The point here is that, though we may be unique, we are certainly not separate.

  * * *

  I. See for example The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal.

  II. In Stella Gibbons’s novel Cold Comfort Farm, the heroine Flora gives advice to Meriam, the hired girl, when she asks: “ ‘Who’s to know what will happen to me when the sukebind is out in the hedges again and I feel so strange on the long summer evenings –’

  ‘Nothing will happen to you if only you use your intelligence and see that it doesn’t,’ Flora said. [Flora then explains the precautionary arts.]

  ‘’Tes wickedness! ’Tes flying in the face of nature!’ she burst out fearfully at last.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Flora. ‘Nature is all very well in her place, but she must not be allowed to make things untidy.’ ”

  Champagne lifestyle

  I used to think they cracked open a bottle of champagne every time they discovered a new species. New to science! Glorious phrase, dizzying thought. Imagine finding a creature that nobody knew about. The honour and glory of it would last you throughout all eternity. Naturally you’d open the champagne.

  But they don’t. For a start, if they did so they’d be pissed all day. And the second thing is that there isn’t really any “they”. When I was young I sort of assumed that somewhere there must be a book – a nice big fat book – that contained all the species in the world. The Book of Life: nothing less. Occasionally, very occasionally, the Book would need a few solemn alterations and then a new version, bigger, deeper and truer than anything that had gone before, would be printed in its stead. But there isn’t. There isn’t even a definitive database. There isn’t a definitive anything. There can’t be.

  Which is an even more dizzying thought. I’m a human being: that’s my dog and that’s a blackbird. Three species: what could be simpler? But it turns out that life isn’t neat and tidy at all.

  I once tried to establish a new species myself. The full story is told elsewhere.I It was a small brown bird. I and three others made an expedition into the Northwestern province of Zambia to try and make observations and recordings that would demonstrate unequivocally that this little bird was not a subspecies of the nedicky but a good species called Pearson’s cisticola. Had we found the evidence,II one of us would have submitted a paper to the Zambian Ornithological Society. That, we hoped, would be accepted by them and subsequently by other authorities until it became scientific orthodoxy. No one person, no one organisation can decide what is a species and what is not. A species is more like an idea: and like most ideas, it can be modified, changed, argued over and rejected. So what is a species? Simple: the fundamental – or at least the most bleeding obvious – expression of evolution. Only members of the same species can mate, breed and produce reproductively viable young. I can hear whitethroat singing outside: the cock is trying to attract a female whitethroat so that the two of them can get together and make more whitethroats. You can mate a horse and a donkey but the resulting mule is almost always sterile. So not the same species. The trouble is that there are exceptions all over the place. Some animals go in for parthenogenesis, or virgin birth: reproduction without assistance from a member of the same species. Then there are examples of two different species that quite possibly could produce viable young but don’t, because they never meet, being geographically separated. Conversely, two very similar species sometimes live side by side but keep separate, often sending out all kinds of strong keep-away signals to each other.III Similar-looking birds – whitethroat and lesser whitethroat, for example – will often sing markedly different songs.

  A species, then, is a good concept but it’s fuzzy round the edges. The idea of a species as a closed breeding community is OK: but suppose two populations of the same species start to behave in completely different ways and no longer have anything to do with each other? After all, that is exactly what’s happening with orcas – killer whales – in the Pacific. Are they in the process of becoming two different species? Are we witnessing the process of speciation? Hang around a few million years and we’ll have the answer.

  So how many species are there in the Animal Kingdom? The number of species already described – species that are “known to science” – is usually reckoned to be a bit above a million. It’s vague because ideas and methods of classification keep changing under the pressure of scientific examination, and also because, as I say, there is no one single definitive source and probably never can be. But it’s certain that there are many more species awaiting discovery. Put a beetle expertIV in the rainforest and he will find new species every day. How many species are there in total, then? I’m hanging on to my ten million because it’s a non-contentious number with a bit of a bang to it. But even with the million-plus we already know about, we are lost. Already that is too many to hold comfortably in our minds: the mind-curdling numbers are just one more way in which we are alienated from the rest of life on earth. The numbers of our fellow primates are disturbing enough: wait till we get to insects, wait till we get to beetles, wait till we get to weevils. We think we are creatures of soaring minds that can encompass all of space and time, but the truth is that our own group of living things on our own planet is too much for us. So let’s try to get our wheeling thoughts in some kind of order.

  * * *

  I. How to Be Wild, published by Short Books in 2007.

  II. We did, however, come up with some important information for the Zambian Bird Atlas.

  III. In scientific terms the first is allopatric speciation, the second sympatric speciation. Readers may make their own Irish jokes here.

  IV. A coleopterist: as such, closer to the concept of biodiversity than anyone else on earth.

  Allspice, ant-killer

  In Mary Tyler’s rather good novel The Accidental Tourist, Rose alphabetises her kitchen. If you want ant-killer, it’s next to the allspice. This is an unconventional method of classification, but perfectly effective. It is not without its dangers – you must be careful not to spice your ants or poison your hot-cross buns – but it’s a fully functional taxonomy.

  How do you organise your own stuff? I knew a man called Bob who loved motors. If a gardener has green fingers, he had black thumbs. His workshop looked as if anarchy had been loosed upon the world, but for him it was Order. He knew exactly where everything was: feeler gauge on the shelf up here, plug-spanner on the floor by the door, teacup on the workbench, well back. He could find what he wanted with his eyes closed, and no doubt often did. It worked brilliantly, but it was unique to him and therefore unshareable. If you wish others to use your system and to gain an advantage from it, you need an accessible logic.

  Some people sort their books by colour, which
is fine, so long as you know the colour of the book you are looking for and you don’t have too many – or you don’t need to look for a book very often. Some sort by size; most people have a special place for oversize books, like a coffee table. Some prefer a strictly personal Bob-like systemless system, in which recent still-to-be-read purchases are nearest to hand, old favourites always in the same place, and all the others are somewhere else. I used to sort my books chronologically: Homer near the start, Beowulf not long after, and Joyce at the beginning of the end, but my wife found this irritating and made me change. Now, like Rose, I alphabetise. I keep the sports books separate; I have a lot because I also write on sporting subjects for The Times. I follow the same system with the sort of natural history books you read from end to end, but I keep books of species identification separate. That works for me, and makes sense for anyone else who looks for a book in my collection.

  That’s a basic taxonomy: that is to say, the organisation of things by means of their shared characteristics. And taxonomy in the natural world is no different. It’s not right or wrong to alphabetise your kitchen; it’s not wrong to sort out living (and formerly living) things in any way you choose. But what is classification for? Ultimately we classify things so we can acquire a better understanding of the things we are categorising. So that’s systematics, and the way we systematise the natural world allows us to get a better understanding of evolution and of ecology. Ultimately, that is an understanding of continuity. Systematics reminds us that we – that is to say, every living thing – all share a history and a planet, and it tells us something of how this sharing has come about and how it works today.

  The idea of conventional systematics is to group together living and extinct species that share a common ancestor: the common ancestor being the junction between branch and twig, between twig and twiglet: so we put humans next to chimpanzees as Rose put allspice next to ant-killer. We share a common ancestor with chimps that is not shared by mandrills; we share a common ancestor with mandrills that is not shared by bushbabies, and on and on and on, to the ancestor we share with nematode worms but not with oak trees.

  Our taxonomy and systematics for the natural world are based on ancestors, not actions. Many species have evolved the same solution to life’s problems, but got there by different routes. Bats, dragonflies, bluebottles and birds all fly: but they didn’t all inherit flight from the same ancestor. They share a wing: they don’t share a genealogy. You could group together all flying creatures in an alternative taxonomy, and preliterate societies often did precisely that. In an intuitive taxonomy, a fruitbat is much more like a bird than an elephant, and a dolphin is more like a fishI than a rhinoceros. Such a system works well enough: it’s just not the one we use. We prefer a taxonomy based on evolution rather than function. Unlike Goldilocks, the taxonomy we work with is interested only in forebears.

  This can be surprising, and frequently counter-intuitive.II If you look at the skies above Britain in summer, you will see four different species of flying birds with forked tails and swept-back wings: birds beautifully evolved for fast manoeuvrable flight. It is not exactly coincidence that they have the same sort of silhouette as fighter planes: though they hunt down and kill not enemy aeroplanes but flying insects. Of these four species, swallows, house martins and sand martins are closely related, sharing a very recent common ancestor. Swifts are in a quite separate group, for all their similarities of appearance and lifestyle. They got there another way, not via a common ancestor but by means of a convergence: same solution to the same problem by a different ancestral route. Intuitively, we view swifts and swallows as birds from the same shelf, but the taxonomy of inheritance places them a fair distance apart.

  • • •

  So far so straightforward, but taxonomy and systematics have been in a state of continuous revolution ever since it began with the great Linnaeus, who published Systema Naturae in 1735 and established for all time the mechanism by which we try and understand life on earth. Of late the pace has hotted up considerably. These days we use DNA analysis to work out degrees of relatedness, when before we used observable physical characteristics. Some species we thought were very closely related turned out not to be closely related at all: it turns out that they are merely convergent. Other species thought to be far apart turn out to be close. This has been hard to adjust to even without the fish problem. There have been constant rows about human evolution and classification.

  As you organise your library of living creatures, you have to decide what shelf to put each creature on, and for that matter, in which room of the sprawling library building. We no longer operate by the intuitively satisfying notion that life divides neatly in two halves – two kingdoms – of plants and animals. Some scientists recognise – and remember these things are constantly changing – 28 kingdoms of Bacteria and five kingdoms of the unicellular life called Archaea. There is a kingdom of Protoctista, which includes the amoeba, a creature most of us met at school. I was taught that amoebae were a frightfully simple kind of animal, famous for their ability to replicate by simple fission, splitting in half. Now they have been tossed into an entirely different kingdom from us humans – though I don’t think that affects the celebration of the amoeba in “A Very Cellular Song” by Mike Heron of The Incredible String Band, great favourites of mine from my cosmic past and much loved still:

  When I need a friend I just give a wriggle

  Split right down the middle

  And when I look there’s two of me

  Both as handsome as can be

  Oh – here we go

  Slithering and squelching on…

  After the Protoctista we have separate kingdoms for fungi and for plants, which explains why gardeners, however green their fingers, are sometimes baffled by their inability to get an intuitive feeling for fungi and their needs. And after that – though there really is no after and no before, no order, no straight line and no ladder, for we are all, slithering and squelching amoebae and hard-talking hard-writing humans, viable and effective and fully evolved forms of life eminently suitable for the modern world – we get to the kingdom of Animalia: and here we shall stay.

  * * *

  I. I mean “fish”.

  II. As this “fish” business makes perfectly clear – or perfectly obscure, anyway.

  Orang orang

  Humans apart, I’ve never had much to do with apes. But an encounter with an orang-utan in Borneo has rather stayed with me. It was the eyes, you see. Or rather, the contact with the eyes. He looked at me and I looked at him. And it seemed to me that this eye contact was not without meaning. Orang means people; orang-utan means person of the forest in Bahasa Melayu, the Malay language. Malay charmingly doubles a word to indicate plural: public signs are always telling people what to do, and they do so by addressing us as orang orang. As a result, I can never hear the term orang-utan without being aware that it means a person.

  How far away from our own species can we go and still have meaningful eye contact? You can gaze all you like into the huge and brilliant compound eyes of a dragonfly without ever getting a sense of the dragonfly responding to you as a person, as a fellow orang. David Quammen has written about his attempt to establish eye contact with a spider, something I would be unwilling to try myself, though I accept that this only exposes my limitations.

  Eye contact with pet dogs is certainly meaningful: a frowning look will calm an exuberant dog, if he is basic-ally on your side to start with. In the same way, a shared look of pleasure with a dog enhances a walk or a game. I am a horseman, and I know that eye contact with a horse is not a straightforward thing: two-way communication comes mostly in the form of body language and touch. I will instinctively avoid eye contactI in any situation other than one when I need to establish (or re-establish) dominance. With a horse, more than with most other domestic animals, eye contact is a threat, not an exchange of information.

  I have frequently sought and given extravagant eye contact to baboons (who
are monkeys, not apes) in camps in Africa, where they can be inclined to be overfamiliar. A hard Paddington Bear stare will cause them to back off and allow me to feel more comfortable. I have stared at crocodiles and felt the whip of danger, at a hippo and felt its irritation, at an elephant and felt a clear exchange of views on a temporary truce: if you don’t come any closer, I won’t either. I have never felt that same sort of thing with a bird, but all the same, there is an exchange of information: I have seen you and I know that you have seen me. This matters, but it is not recognition of yourself as a person. You feel spotted: you don’t feel recognised.

  That was the strange thing about the orang-utan. It was a big old male, and so he wore that curious and deeply unsettling face-plate or flange, which made him look as if he had just eaten a sandwich and had the plate for afters. It was unsettling because of a contradiction: there was something humanlike about the face, but the plate completely denied his humanity.

  But I had a clear sense of recognition in that face – and what’s more, I felt that the orang-utan felt the same thing about me. We are both, at least to an extent, face-readers: that’s part of the way we both see the world, and it was very evident in this exchange of glances. Male orang-utans are pretty solitary: they lack the social skills and the facial expressiveness of the two chimpanzee species. All the same, an orang-utan knows what a face is and what it means. The personal taxonomy of this big male informed him that there was something of himself in me, as it was clear to me that there was something of orang-utan in myself. And that’s what non-threatening eye contact is: a recognition: an understanding that we stand on some kind of common ground.