by Simon Barnes
Family feeling. That’s what it comes down to. Nothing less.
* * *
I. I suspect that is why horse people so often wear hats: traditional English cloth caps, cowboy hats, baseball caps: they allow you to drop your head and hide your eyes and so approach a horse without offering a challenge or threat. The more volatile the horse, the more important the hat.
My family and other family
The word “family” has a technical as well as an emotional meaning. This book is about the kingdom of animals. A kingdom is divided into phyla: we humans come from the phylum of chordates – backboned animals – along with birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish.I There are plenty of other phyla in the kingdom (your sexed-up garden slug belongs to the phylum of molluscs, as we have seen) and we’ll visit them all in the course of this book – while remembering that there is no absolutely fixed and for all time agreement on how many phyla there are: some say about 20, others 36 and more. Classification is not definitive: it is about agreement, and science is not conducive to agreement. It’s by disagreeing that scientists find things out. I must confess that when I was at school, I always thought that you could disagree about Finnegans Wake because that was subjective, but you couldn’t disagree about science because that was objective. Then when I was at university they tried to make me understand about TS Eliot and the objective correlative as an approach to literature, while those studying science learned that their chosen discipline was a history of abandoned orthodoxies. Classification is like trying to tidy a house full of egocentric geniuses and small children: it’s a great idea and you’ve got to keep trying, but you’re never going to succeed in any final sense of the term.
The more scientists strain to reduce the complexities of life into a single simple basic theory, the more complicated things get. It’s life that buggers it up more than anything else; it is – relatively – and I use this word with some care – straightforward to come up with universal principles in physics. But life blurs all edges and every boundary. It was a British scientist, Ernest Rutherford, who famously said: “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” There is a pride in the bare, pared-down manliness of physics: the fuzzy, effeminate, indeterminate stuff called Life is forever shifting about on you. You can’t rely on it. Even if you are as ferociously reductionist as Richard Dawkins, it is impossible to create – well, nobody has managed it yet – a fixed, firm and unshakable scheme for classifying the Animal Kingdom from top to bottom.
But I can at least tell you what it would be like if animals (and all other living things) weren’t so confusing and so inimical to hard and fast definition. This ideal-world taxonomy is all about boxes within boxes, or to go back to your library, shelves within bookcases within rooms. Below phylum we have class: we belong to the class of mammals, slugs belong to the class of gastropods, along with snails, the creatures that inhabit most of the shells you find on the beach, and some other gaudy exotics we’ll come to later. Next one down is order: we belong to the order of primates (the classification of slugs here goes slightly weird, so we’ll skip that bit). Below that, we have family. Yes, indeed. There are 13 families of primates, and the one that includes us is the hominids. This group is divided into four genera (singular, genus): gorillas, orang-utans, humans and chimpanzees. The garden slug belongs to the family of Arionidae.
There has been a lot of alteration to the classification of hominids in recent years. Genetic studies show that we can’t keep our fellow apes as far away from us as we would like. Originally, three species of great apes were listed as pongids, leaving humans refreshingly separate as hominids. But this doesn’t stack up genetically. It is now clear that there are two species of chimpanzee: chimpanzees and bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees. Both of them are more closely related to humans than they are to either gorillas or orang-utans.
Thus humans and chimps are now gathered together in the subfamily (taxonomy regularly and recklessly throws in sub- and superfamilies and other twists on the basic set of boxes or shelves) of Homininae, leaving the gorillas and orangs on their own separate branches of the family tree. Some would put our three Homininae species even closer. We have 99 per cent of our DNA in common, perhaps we should all be in the same genus: Homo sapiens, Homo troglodytes and Homo paniscus, or, if you prefer, we should rename ourselves Pan sapiens: the sapient ape. That would suggest that chimpanzees are human: or to put that another way, that we are all chimpanzees together. Meanwhile, the slug is from the genus Arion, specific name hortensis, making him/her Arion hortensis. So that’s how a scientific name works: first the genus, with a capital letter, followed by a special name for the species: the specific name, in fact. And in italics, because that’s the convention of science.
So now we can dive into the depths of this book: now the two great circles can begin turning. We’ll take turns: each chapter that deals with us vertebrates will be followed by a chapter dealing with them inverts: or to put that another way, it will deal with all the other phyla of us animals. The next chapter takes us among the spineless ones; the chapter after that brings us back to the beasts with backbones, and on and on, until we get to the end… which is to say, of course, the beginning: there being no beginning and no end…
* * *
I. Or whatever.
Below the drop-off
It’s incredibly easy to be overwhelmed by the power and beauty and wonder of our fellow vertebrates. There are thousands of ways to do it, and I’ve experienced quite a lot of them: wildebeest in the Serengeti, dolphins breaching in front of the boat, eye contact with a bear, a colony of bee-eaters, a stooping falcon, a gathering of crocodiles, a horizon-filling chorus of frogs, leaping salmons, being within touching distance of 12-foot basking sharks, watching the passeggiata in the Piazza Navona.
These are great thump-in-the-gut experiences: things that stay with you forever. With all vertebrates, we feel a sense of identification – it’s impossible not to cheer like a football supporter as the salmon goes for the top – that is perfectly complemented by a simultaneous sense of separ-ateness. These are the equal and opposite aspects of the way we understand the endlessness of all these beautiful forms. It’s when we stray further from ourselves that this sense of involvement, of gasp-making instinctive delight, is harder to find. There’s a lot to be said about a nematode worm and a termite mound, but on the whole, they don’t make you go phwoar.
The best way of transporting that sense of passionate identification into the world of invertebrates is by pulling on a mask and jumping into the sea. Not just any sea: you need coral to jump in over. Not that I’ve ever liked any actual sea very much. I throw up on boats, while all water, even salt water, has, across my life, resolutely refused to hold me up. As some people are left-handed, so some are negatively buoyant. I’m a sinker: so I’ve never felt that languorous sense of ease in water. I’ve never been weightless: I have to work quite hard not to drown. (This is just one aspect of the endlessness of forms even within a single species. We vary in our degrees of buoyancy. Had humans become an aquatic species, a specimen like me wouldn’t have survived to become an ancestor… though sinking has its advantages. I can get into deep water with a couple of flips of my fins,I while floaters must kick away like mad, so if I wanted to live by gathering food from the bottom of shallow seas, I might have survival advantages that a floater lacked. In this endless variety, and the consequent differential in survival, is to be found Darwin’s great idea and beyond that, the meaning of life.) Even in modern life, I have found sinking an advantage. That’s because my great skill of sinking has made it wonderfully easy for me to celebrate – to go phwoar at – the incredible wonders of invertebrate life.
Coral. To place your face in a mask and see this undersea world without distortion is a breathtaking experience, particularly when it is impossible to take a breath. The sight has you literally gasping. It becomes still more vivid when you kick up your heels, flip your fins and shoot – if you are also a sinker – straight down a
mong this fabulous stuff. These colonies of tiny creatures create vast sprawling edifices, an ecosystem that has been created and decorated and made glorious by the work of a billion billion inverts. We shall return to the coral reef a little later, to consider not just the coral itself, but the extraordinary and melodramatic spectacle of biodiversity associated with it. But for the moment, let us contemplate the vast structures that the coral polyps create.
I have never tried to crack the scuba thing; I have always relished that unencumbered entrance into this alien element that comes with mask, snorkel and fins. You need not trouble your head with breathing and pressure and air, and the only mechanism you have to worry about is that of your own body. So down you go, most wondrously of all, certainly most eerily, barrelling over a drop-off, where the coral wall marks the end of the shallow coral-filled seas, a vertiginous lurch towards the blackness of the benthic depths of the ocean. I followed as not-very-far as increasing chill, increasing fear and decreasing breath allowed, and then turned fin-flippingly lung-burstingly ear-poppingly up again, back to light and life and beauty and coral. That wall, that last beautiful bastion of civilisation against the terrors of the real sea, had been created entirely by invertebrates – oh brave old world that has such inverts in it. Chordate chauvinism, be gone, vertebrate jingoism, go hang: here was something to praise and glory in: here was something to try and understand: here are the invertebrates in all their beauty and variety, to seek out across the seas and across the living earth, in desert and rainforest and in back garden: in endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful: and most weird and most frightening and most alienating: and all of them, every species, every genus, every family and every phylum, at some dark level below the drop-off of human comfort, related to us, part of us as we are part of them.
* * *
I. Prosthetic, not, alas, a part of my own endless variety.
Lemurs and archbishops
To call a man “a real man” is normally intended as a compliment; to tell a woman she is “all woman” is usually intended the same way. Americans say that someone is “a real human being” and mean nothing but niceness. To be humane is an unambiguously good thing. When we practise altruism on a large scale we say we are humanitarian. To call ourselves what we are is generally a compliment, then. At least at species level. To call someone an animal is one of the direst insults in our vocabulary. We are men or women, and that is good, we are human, and that is good, we are animals – and that is bad. It is, however, true.
To call someone an ape is another insult; it is also the plain truth. We don’t use other levels of classification as insults. Get off me, you mammal! We don’t use them as compliments, either: she’s all mammal – no, that would never do. We don’t call anyone a primate, either, unless he happens to be the Archbishop of Canterbury.
But primates we all are, and there are at least 300 species of us. There is no single characteristic that defines a primate; instead there is a suite of them: forward-facing eyes, eye sockets, grasping hands, nails, fingerprints and large brains. You and I fit in there very snugly alongside gorillas and mouse lemurs. The mouse lemur weighs in at 55 grams, or a couple of ounces. Traditionally, the title of largest primate is given to gorillas; a silverback – dominant male – can weigh 250 kilos or 39 stone. But this ignores the fact that humans are primates. The heaviest primates on record are humans, who have reached an astonishing 500 kilos or 79 stone.
Dwarf and mouse lemurs form a family; there are 22 species of them. Some are no more than 5 inches long: furry little things you might take for rodents at a casual look. But they’re one of us all right: nocturnal forest-dwellers, some with complex social lives, and they have as much right to call themselves primates as you or I.
I have encountered the most beautiful of all primates – present company excepted – in the forests of Tanzania, the black and white colobus, a monkey spectacularly marked and moving with an easy grace. I have seen spider monkeys hanging by their tails in Belize: as they move through the trees with five functioning limbs they take on the truly disturbing appearance of immense arachnids. I have heard the night songs of howler monkeys that rumble through the forest, and I have heard the dawn chorus of gibbons, the wild whooping that rolls across the canopy and through the mist, making it almost physically impossible not to join in.
I have seen the baboons of Africa, the big males lounging on termite mounds with the air of a lazy man smoking a cigarette. I must confess that I have never been quite at my ease with them. One of the pleasures of being in the great parks of Africa is the absence of human beings: as near relatives, the baboons seem like intruders. They leave tracks that look dismayingly like the hands and feet of small humans, and their droppings are not dung or scats but an unapologetic turd, not unlike the ones that you and I call into being. Why is it that animal droppings are at worst unhygienic but human excrement is disgusting? When there were rows about the readiness of the Athletes’ Village at the Delhi Commonwealth Games of 2010, the reports about “human excrement” being found made it sound as if it was far more horrible than any other kind. With baboons on the African savannahs, I always feel a little like Swift and the Yahoos: as if baboons were caricatured humans beings calculated to bring out self-disgust. This is wholly irrational: humans have a lot to be ashamed of, but we have no need to be ashamed of our ancestry or our close relations.
We are not alone. We are part of the continuum, all 300 of us. Primates all: the mandrill, the angwantibo, the hairy-eared mouse lemur, the red-tailed sportive lemur, the golden-headed lion tamarin, the white-nosed bearded saki, the muriqui, the crab-eating macaque, the hoolock gibbon, the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the Archbishop of Canterbury and me. And you.
Spineless
So as you see, I have adopted the common practice of splitting the Animal Kingdom into two, in order to make the two great circles of this book: vertebrates going one way, and invertebrates going the other. The only snag is that there is no coherent group called invertebrates. It’s a bit like classifying all the books in the world as novels and non-novels. Which is exactly what a lot of people do: books are either fiction or non-fiction. That means, as I scan round my own books, that the complete poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the biography of Lucia Joyce, David Beckham’s My Side, I Ching, Wisden Almanac 1999, How to be a Bad Birdwatcher, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Birds of Belize and The Origin of Species must all be considered roughly the same thing. In fact, all they have in common is that they are not made-up stories (apart from the Beckham, perhaps).
“Invertebrates” is not a coherent taxonomic group. It’s a catch-all term for all the animals that are not part of our own group: if you’re not one of us chordates, you’re one of them inverts. Molluscs and arthropods and corals have no more in common with each other than they have with vertebrates like us. The division is just a convenient way for humans to reduce the massive and the incomprehensible and the alien and the multitudinous to a manageable form. The fact that this manageable state is an illusion doesn’t trouble us: to see slugs and ants and worms as all roughly the same thing – and therefore different from lizards and weasels and ourselves – satisfies a deep human need. We find it easier to classify life, to understand life, by adopting a succession of binary views: my family and the rest of the world: English people and all other humans; humans and all other vertebrates; vertebrates and all other members of the Animal Kingdom. There is almost a moral division here: we feel less moral responsibility for non-humans than we do for humans: less moral responsibility for slugs than we do for elephants. We squash a mosquito that is annoying us; we don’t squash a kitten, however annoying.
Most animal life is invertebrate. More than 90 per cent of all known species are invertebrates; and no doubt more than 99 per cent of the unknown species. The term invertebrates sweeps up, in its anthropocentric (or vertebrocentric) way, the most successful and numerous phylum on earth, the arthropods, which includes spiders and crabs almost as an afterthought. Most arth
ropods are insects: most living animals on the planet are insects. We talk about the Age of Amphibians and the Age of Reptiles and the Age of Dinosaurs and the Age of Mammals: in terms of numbers and diversity, it has been the Age of Insects for the past 400 million years. It makes more sense, at least in terms of numbers, at least in terms of relative success, to divide the Animal Kingdom into arthropods and non-arthropods.
Invertebrates are wildly various in every possibly way. In size alone they range from microscopic things to monsters 14 metres or damn near 50 feet long, weighing 495 kilos or damn near half a ton. This great diversification of living things began around 550 million years ago, with the Cambrian Explosion. Before that time, most of life on earth was single cells, or single cells organised into colonies. Evolution then went on fast forward, and over a period of a mere 50 million years or so, multicellular life broke out in a gloriously inexplicable fashion. Vertebrates were just one of the many possibilities that came up in this explosion, this sudden, this, in geological terms, almost instantaneous detonation of diversity. Darwin saw the suddenness of this change as a potentially serious problem for his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Its causes are still the stuff of argument and controversy, though Darwin’s position is safe.
The rest of the evolution of the Animal Kingdom has been a series of refinements and developments on this single brilliant idea of multicellular life. We vertebrates are just one of these developments: roundworms and lampshells and sponges and molluscs and arthropods are aspects of the same great notion.