Darwin identifies three kinds of development: species, variants, and monsters.24 All three are hopelessly compromised and confused. When you look at two very similar organisms, are you looking at one species or more than one? Let’s say you decide you’re looking at just one: you must then decide, are you looking at a species and its variant? Which one is the species, and which is the variant? (Different biologists will give different answers, and the problem was compounded in Darwin’s day by the lack of DNA evidence.)25 As Darwin puts it, “species of all kinds are only well-marked and permanent varieties.”26 We may dispense with the idea of “permanence,” since evolution itself depends upon impermanence. Then there is the idea of a species being “well-marked.” This is a matter of degree, which is why Darwin uses the word “well.” Some marks are more different than others. Suppose you decide you’re looking at variants. Fair enough. Are you sure? Are the enlarged ears of chomps an example of monstrosity or an actual variation? Variation contaminates the idea of speciation, and monstrosity contaminates the idea of variation. All “adaptations” are at some previous point “exaptations”—uses of features for some novel, unintended purpose.27 As Dawkins memorably declares, “We [humans] are modified worms swimming on our backs.”28 Insects and mammal bodies have a deep inner similarity: both possess Hox genes that code for segmentation. 29 All the way down, it’s mutation, mutation, mutation.
The text of the organism is neither beautiful nor useful in any unified, lasting sense: “Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain [the] similarity in pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.”30 Organisms are palimpsests of additions, deletions, and rewritings, held together mostly by inertia.31 Although moles, horses, porpoises, bats, and humans share similar-looking limbs, some strange protoplasm did not strive toward hands, wings, legs, flippers, and fins.32 What about heterochrony—organs developing at non-normal times?33 What about rudimentary limbs, such as male nipples?34 If we keep thinking this way, Gnosticism might sound tempting: Creation exhibits the horrible accidents of a bungling god. Yet not even God is to blame: “Can we suppose that the formation of rudimentary teeth, which are subsequently absorbed, can be of any service to the rapidly growing embryonic calf by the excretion of precious phosphate of lime? When a man’s fingers have been amputated, imperfect nails sometimes appear on the stumps.”35 Abstract infinity would be easier than this.
Marx, Freud, and Darwin describe processes taking place behind our backs. We can’t see evolution, or the secret of the commodity form, or the unconscious. What Freud says about the unconscious is exactly what Darwin says about the evolving organism. The metaphor is writing. For Freud, the unconscious is like a “mystic writing pad,” a children’s toy that can be written on and erased: when you lift up the paper, you see a waxy surface, on which is inscribed everything ever written on the pad.36 Life forms consist of layer upon archaeological layer of information. Behavior is also a picture of the past: habits that once had some function tend to persist, as Darwin notes in his fascinating exploration of the nonhuman origins of human expressions.37 In their relative isolation, some ecosystems are records of prior times—think of Australian marsupials and monotremes such as the duck-billed platypus.38
Evolution jumbles bodies like a dream jumbles words and images. There is no negation in the unconscious and none in evolution. Things don’t disappear; they become vestigial or mutate. Swim bladders in fish evolved into lungs in land animals.39 They were not the “cause” of lungs, nor are they somehow analogous to them. In the language of literary analysis, swim bladders are not metaphorical or even metonymical. Metonymy means describing something by its causes or effects—a cigarette becomes a “smoke.” How can a lung be a metonymy for a swim bladder? They are related yet unrelated—in no sense does a swim bladder “mean” or even “imply” lungs. Perfection is not on the menu: “If we admire the several ingenious contrivances, by which the flowers of the orchis and of many other plants are fertilised through insect agency, can we consider as equally perfect the elaboration by our fir-trees of dense clouds of pollen, in order that a few granules may be wafted by a chance breeze on to the ovules?”40 Bees die when they sting, which is hardly pragmatic.41
Even monstrosity is problematic. A monster is something seen by someone (from the Latin monstrare, meaning to show).42 Monstrosity is in the eye of the beholder. If there is anything monstrous in evolution, it’s the uncertainty in the system at any and every point.43 Amazingly, the contamination of variation, speciation, and so on is the reason why evolution works at all. Contamination is functional.44 Darwin’s world is about coexistence but not about harmony. It’s like language. For meaning to happen, language must be noisy, messy, fuzzy, grainy, vague, and slippery. Evolution consists of incremental quantitative changes, not qualitative ones.45 Biodiversity is good, because it means lots of fuzziness.46 Darwin’s Earth, then, manifests variety and continuity, but not some harmony of the one in the many, or of harmony in discord (concordia discors).47
All organisms are monsters insofar as they are chimeras, made from pieces of other creatures.48 The strange stranger is strange to herself, or himself, or itself. Organs that evolved for one purpose can serve another. Living beings are not adapted to their environments, if by “adapted” we mean something like the idea of a round peg fitting a round hole. As we found in Chapter 1, a vulture’s head, “beautifully adapted” (as described on television) for poking into piles of filth, was probably not bald for that reason. Young turkeys don’t go sticking their heads into piles of filth.49 There is no Natural hierarchy to which we should submit.
Mutant beings could be “so linked to [the species] by intermediate gradations” that no naturalist would feel comfortable classifying them as separate species.50 But throwing in the towel and saying, “Oh well, there’s nothing there” isn’t a valid response either. We can’t say for sure that there are specific entities out there. Yet you can surely tell the difference between a hawk and a daffodil. Now add the variable of gaps in the historical record. Say you didn’t know what the “intermediate links” actually were, in a specific case. You would have to infer them by analogy—either they exist now but “somewhere else,” or they existed “formerly.” “And here,” says Darwin, “a wide door for the entry of doubt and conjecture is opened.”51 It’s like those doors in the De Chirico paintings in Chapter 1. They beckon sinisterly with present absence—or is it absent presence? Are the blanks in the Book of Nature absolute blankness or empty spaces where something used to be?
At the basis of “life” there is DNA, and it has no specific flavor. There is no chimp-flavored, no human-flavored DNA; we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimps and 35 percent with daffodils.52 Some DNA is “junk DNA,” a free-riding, harmless parasite that doesn’t get “expressed” in a phenotype at all.53 At the DNA level, it becomes impossible to decide which sequence is “genuine” and which is a viral insertion: there is no DNA-FLAVORED DNA. Moreover, there is no life-flavored DNA. Evolution theory deconstructs “life” itself. “Life” is a word for some self-replicating macromolecules and their transport systems. But for “life” to start, there had to be a “pre-living life”: otherwise, there would be an infinite regress or sudden creation from nothing. The movement that commences “life” is to be found within matter itself.54
“Life” may have arisen from RNA, the macromolecule that eventually became instrumental in translating DNA information to proteins. Sol Spiegelman’s groundbreaking experiments solved the chicken-and-egg dilemma that DNA required ribosomes, which required DNA. In “RNA World,” self-replicating molecules generated macromolecules like viruses, “parasites” without hosts.55 For instance, consider viroids such as the Potato Spindle Tuber Viroid: these very ancient beings consist of a circle of RNA code. About ten times smaller than a virus, they probably began in RNA World. Nowadays they affect the transcription rather than translation parts of the host’s reproductive machinery.
Th
ere’s something slightly sizeist about viewing life as squishy, palpable substances, as if all life forms shared our kinds of tissue. This prejudice breaks down at high resolutions. Viruses are large crystals. The common cold virus is a short string of code packaged as a twenty-sided crystal; it tells DNA to make copies of itself. Is the rhinovirus “alive”? If you say yes, you ought to consider a computer virus alive. RNA-based beings such as viruses require hosts in order to replicate. Some of these macromolecules could have been swept up in the self-replication processes of a silicate. Ironically, silicon reproduction might predate organic (carbon-based) reproduction: “your great-great ... grandmother was a robot!”56 There is no life as such, however much we believe in slimy protoplasm. Viral code doesn’t contain instructions for building an “organism.” Instead, the code resembles a sentence that says something like, “There is a derivation of me in system x” (system x being a certain configuration of enzymes). Viruses are structurally incomplete. Like Coleridge’s Life-in-Death, they are neither alive nor nonalive in a commonsensical way.57
At the University of California at Davis, Evolution 101 courses commence with a study of algorithms: repeated sets of mechanical calculations. All the way down to the sub-DNA level, evolution is a set of algorithmic processes. That’s the disturbing thing about “animals”—at bottom they are vegetables. (Movie monsters such as zombies tend to resemble animated plants.) Our prejudice about vegetables is that they are beings that do only one thing—grow. The trouble with vegetable growth is that it consists of sets of algorithms—iterated functions, often producing fractal shapes like the Cantor set, tending toward infinity while resting in the palm of your hand. Consider The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, a beautifully illustrated text readily available online.58 Instead of illustrating plants, you can generate algorithms that would assemble them when you hit the Return key. Doesn’t this mean that plants as such are an algorithmic process? This is why plant scientists now model plant growth using software like the authors developed. If you can write an algorithm that produces a rose by plotting a set of equations, surely the thing itself is a map of its genome, a three-dimensional expression of the algorithm’s unfolding?
In the first chapter, we saw how time-lapse photography disturbs a Natural view of life forms. Furthermore, life forms are already time-lapse images. This is a strange and wonderful way to look at flowers. You could see daffodils as pictures of how an algorithm has manifested in “phase space,” the space that plots all the states of the flower as a system. At the base of the daffodil, where it joins the stem, you see traces of how the flower looked when it started to spread upward and outward. You’re looking at the daffodil’s past, as well as at the past development of the flower as a species (as stated earlier). Think of the rings of a tree. Your face is a map of everything that happened to it. Thinking this way spookily undermines Nature from every angle and on every time scale. The ecological thought eats through the life–nonlife distinction. We can abandon all variations of Romantic vitalism—that is, believing in a vital spark separate from the material organization of life forms. Material organization turns out to be sets of formal relationships, not squishy stuff.
LET HE WHO IS WITHOUT “SIM” CAST THE FIRST STONE
Evolution isn’t all about competing for scarce resources. Brilliant colors and dramatic displays in insects, birds, and mammals have to do with sexual selection. Strange strangers evolve intricate and gorgeous ways of attracting a mate. For Alfred Russel Wallace, who developed a theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin, sexual selection seemed too arbitrary. He wanted “animal” displays to be a code for health.59 The trouble is, one code is as good as another, so we risk an infinite regress if we don’t accept some degree of nonutilitarian gorgeousness in sexual selection. Why choose an iridescent tail if one with purple spots would “cost” as much to produce? Healthiness is in the eye of the beholder, after all.
Darwin’s enumeration of sexual display is almost comically vast. It builds toward his conclusion that racial difference has nothing to do with climate adaptation or “fitness,” but instead with sheer aesthetic preference. Being quick and dirty, mutation is random with respect to current need, as we saw in Chapter 1. It would be very cumbersome for DNA code to carry a picture of the “environment” inside itself. Natural selection can’t touch phenomena that are “neither useful nor injurious.”60 There is no reason for my skin color and reddish facial hair, except that someone thought it looked okay—at any rate, these features didn’t put her off. As my daughter remarked, “Your bristles are completely useless. All they do is irritate me.”
Let’s just spell out what this means so that it’s incredibly clear: there is no biological race as such. Biological race is a racist concept. When white supremacists talk about their “race” being threatened with “extinction,” they are not describing reality. The Descent of Man undermines racist theories of skin color—for instance, those of Louis Agassiz, the biologist who promoted those unsettling racial terms such as “Caucasian.” If there is no species as such, there can be no race as such.
Darwin records birds displaying their feathers in the following terms: they do so “to excite, attract, or fascinate the females”; their display is meant to “charm” and is “glittering,” “superb, though to our eyes, grotesque,” “splendid,” and “beautiful”; the feathers have “beautiful ocelli [eye-like patterns],” and they are “remarkable,” “wonderful objects,” with the “most elegant patterns,” “brilliantly coloured.”61 Concerning the ornamented wing feathers of the Argus pheasant, he writes, “these feathers are quite hidden on all ordinary occasions, but are fully displayed, together with the long secondary feathers, when they are all expanded together so as to form the great fan or shield.”62 Darwin continues:Many will declare that it is utterly incredible that a female bird should be able to appreciate fine shading and exquisite patterns. It is undoubtedly a marvellous fact that she should possess this almost human degree of taste. He who thinks that he can safely gauge the discrimination and taste of the lower animals may deny that the female Argus pheasant can appreciate such refined beauty; but he will then be compelled to admit that the extraordinary attitudes assumed by the male during the act of courtship, by which the wonderful beauty of his plumage is fully displayed, are purposeless.63
In other words, you’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t.
Behavior and display go beyond sheer survival. Chimps paint and do rain dances. Perhaps nonhumans are capable of aesthetic contemplation, enjoying things for no reason. This possibility is far more profound than questions such as “Can animals feel things?” or “Can animals think?” It’s a philosophical commonplace that nonhumans can’t introspect, or self-reflect, so their suffering can’t be taken as seriously as human suffering. Let’s find out. Can nonhumans self-reflect? Some recent studies have answered “Yes,” providing evidence based on states such as uncertainty and hesitation, which is good news for dark ecology.64 Can humans self-reflect? Is self-reflection important when it comes to suffering? The Descent of Man is crystal clear: nonhumans can reason and imagine; they have a sense of beauty and wonder.65 Darwin describes the mental contortions people go through to buttress disbelief in nonhuman cognition. A hundred and fifty years later, the latest cognitive science claims can still be found to have their roots in Darwin, and more besides: “birds appear to have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have. This is shewn by our enjoyment of the singing of birds, and by our women ... decking their heads with borrowed plumes.... In man, however ... the sense of beauty is manifestly a far more complex feeling, and is associated with various intellectual ideas.”66 By “far more,” Darwin implies that differences between humans and nonhumans are matters not of quality, but of quantity, “of degree and not of kind.”67
Do nonhumans possess language? Yes. How about imagination? Check. Reason? Copy that. A sense of mind? No doubt.68 Can they use tools? Indeed. Do they display improved skills and learning o
ver time? Absolutely. Can nonhumans feel compassion? Of course. Do they have a sense of humor? Why not? How about wonder? Yes. Choice? Also yes. Humans are fairly uniquely good at throwing and sweating: not much of a portfolio. 69 Read Darwin on female insects: “when we see many males pursuing the same female, we can hardly believe that the pairing is left to blind chance—that the female exerts no choice, and is not influenced by the gorgeous odours or other ornaments with which the male is decorated.”70 If butterflies have the capacity to make a choice, then surely it’s game over for rigid distinctions between humans and nonhumans?
If it walks like a mind and quacks like a mind, why not call it one? The Turing Test for artificial intelligence (AI) suggests that subjectivity might be a performance.71 The test pits a human against a nonhuman (say, some software), both hidden from view. If an interviewer can’t distinguish between them in a reasonable time—if she can’t figure out which one, if any, is the machine (or nonhuman)—then for all intents and purposes, the being is a person. Yet it would be more economical to say, employing our “less than” view, “Since I can’t distinguish between your answers and what I think of as the answers of a person, you are someone I would have difficulty not characterizing as a person. In short, you are not a nonperson.” Doesn’t this mean that humans are strictly not nonpersons? Look at it the other way around. It’s likely that AI will be a strange stranger: “we will have a very hard time deciding when and if we are dealing with an AI program, or just a ‘weird’ program.”72 Doesn’t this mean that we already have a hard time distinguishing ourselves as “naturally” cognizant and not just “weird”? Instead of figuring out whether it’s true to say, “Programs are as competent as us,” we might be better off asserting, “We are as incompetent as programs.” We could categorize life forms according to weakness and vulnerability, rather than strength and mastery, and thus build platforms for finding solidarity in our shared incompetence.
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