Deep Past

by Eugene Linden

  She looked at Hayden. “Are you with me?” He nodded. “OK, good,” she continued. “So at some point the real selective pressure can—key word—shift from being the smartest at adapting to the outside world to being the smartest in the group. And, because the group is now big enough and robust enough to deal with the challenges of getting food, on the one hand, the risks of shifting blood from the muscles to the brain become less onerous, and, on the other hand, the selective pressures to be the best and brightest within the group accelerate. So, ta-da!” She gestured triumphantly to some imaginary brain with her left hand. “You get runaway brain growth. That happened with us in spades, but I’d argue that it has happened to varying degrees with other animals as well.”

  Hayden spent a long time digesting what Claire had just said. “So, when you look at intelligence in terms of what it does rather than what it is, you see it as an adaptive strategy that nature might produce in varying degrees depending on the circumstances?” Claire nodded excitedly. “And,” he went on, “that would be why the highly social creatures would be more intelligent. I can see that with dolphins and humans and what I’ve read about chimps. What else?”

  “Think big,” said Claire.

  “Whales?”

  “Sure. What else?”

  “Elephants?”

  Claire didn’t say anything. She simply nodded.

  “And we’re sure those are elephant bones?”

  Claire got more cautious. “We can’t say anything with certainty at this point, but the strong odds are that they are some form of elephant ancestor. We’ll find out—that’s a huge deal in and of itself, by the way.”

  Again there was a long pause before Hayden said, “So this might be evidence of some ancient intelligent elephant?”

  “Anything’s possible at this point, but everything points to some intelligence at work.”

  “Say it turns out to be an intelligent ancient elephant; how could we know if its intelligence was similar to ours?”

  “If this does point to some ancient intelligence, elephant or otherwise, it might well be very different, but there is one strong theme in evolution that would suggest that it would be familiar to us in some way.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s called convergent evolution. Here’s an example: anteaters and pangolins have entirely different evolutionary histories, but they are shaped almost exactly alike. That’s because, over millions of years, nature optimized their snouts and strong forearms to digging for their prey underground. If there is an optimum physical shape for various physical tasks, it’s likely that nature will also converge on the optimum design for mental tasks. That’s not to say there wouldn’t be different strokes for different folks, but there likely would be basic elements of consciousness that smarter creatures would converge on.”

  “So a dolphin dealing with managing his relationships in a group might think to some degree like a chimp?”

  “That’s what I think. Because while their worlds are utterly different, there are some big similarities in the social pressures of thriving in a large group—who’s Mr. Big, who can you trust, who can you not trust, who can you fool? What you find is that they resort to a lot of the strategies we use in competing and negotiating with their peers, and that makes it possible that they might think in similar ways as well.”

  “Then, according to the world you describe, it’s got different … very different animals, but similar social pressures supercharging brain growth. In some respects, a chimp, a dolphin, an elephant, and a human would have a mix of the various types of intelligence people have identified—social, emotional, quantitative, etc.” Claire nodded. “So, help me visualize this.” Hayden thought a minute about how best to frame his question. “What’s one game that all these different creatures might play if this convergent evolution was at work?”

  It was an interesting question worthy of a serious answer. After a couple of minutes, Claire looked at Hayden. “Poker.”

  “Poker? Not chess?”

  “Yes. You can’t win at poker if you just have quantitative skills. Proof of that is that many online poker stars crash and burn when they play face-to-face. In order to win at poker, you need quantitative skills and memory, but you also need what’s called metacognition—the ability to understand and manipulate another’s beliefs—and you need emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and the ability to modify your own reactions to stress and excitement. Yes, poker.”

  “Why not chess?”

  Claire had thought about this many times. “Chess requires a type of pure intelligence, but it requires no social intelligence. You can mislead in chess, but you cannot bluff.”

  Hayden thought about that. “Poker,” he said again. “I like that!”

  ¬

  As Hayden reflected on what they had just discussed, Claire looked around the room. It was truly bizarre to be having this conversation with someone she didn’t know in a room that might have been in a tony club in London. She cautioned herself that the audition was not over. Hayden might be the intellectual soul mate she had been looking for and still not protect her research because the needs of the concession trumped his hobby. Still, he seemed genuinely engaged.

  “What you’ve said has got me thinking in about a dozen different directions,” Hayden said with a smile. He glanced at his watch. “But we’ve been talking for an hour. Maybe we should continue over dinner?”

  Once they were seated in the dining room, a waiter presented Claire with a menu. Naturally there was a steak—this was a mining concession, after all—but another choice was vegetable curry over rice, with the notation that the vegetables were from the concessions hydroponic greenhouse. She chose the curry, as did Hayden, and when the waiter appeared with both red and white wines, she chose the red, mainly because the blue-and-red coat of arms on the label of the Mascarello Barolo made it look expensive. The waiter brought salads of baby lettuce. “Grown here, hydroponic, using waste heat,” Hayden said, waving toward the west. Then he changed the topic. “Tell me a little about how you got to Kazakhstan.”

  For the next few minutes, Claire gave him a candid recounting of her career, about abandoning an earlier interest in animal intelligence for work on more easily provable abilities, and how her success in this more mundane avenue of research led Delamain to ask her to take over the Kazakh project. She then told him how Delamain had promptly fired her and told her never to darken their door again after her adventure with the bones. She knew that she was supposed to be selling herself, but in this day of web data immortality, even the most cursory due diligence on his part would turn up anything she tried to hide.

  Hayden chuckled. “I’ve been pitched by a lot of people over the years.” He laughed more and took a sip of wine. “But that may be the worst job of selling yourself that I’ve ever encountered. Seriously, though, you were willing to jeopardize your career over this?”

  Claire flushed and forced herself to count to ten. “Actually,” she said in what she hoped was a conversational voice, “I think the fact that the scientific disciplines are too hidebound and tribal to acknowledge that the study of the evolution and nature of intelligence has to be interdisciplinary doesn’t mean that I have to wait for the world to catch up.”

  “Attagirl!” Hayden said and clapped his hands. “Only people with that kind of confidence and conviction ever get anything done.” He held up a glass to toast her. Claire somewhat shyly brought up her own glass to clink. “I was just pulling your chain.”

  “Well, to tell the truth, a few days ago, when things hit rock bottom, I did briefly fantasize about becoming a real estate agent.”

  Hayden laughed again. “Glad you didn’t act on that impulse.” He smiled. “For one thing, you’d be terrible at it. I can just see you saying that the roof leaked, and the basement floods, and pointing out the termites marching across the floor.”

  Claire clapped her hands in delight. “And then when they still wanted to close, I’d say, ‘An
d then there’s the toxic mold!’”

  They ate in silence for a couple of minutes. Then Hayden said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about a lot of the same things you’re studying, but from an entirely different angle.”

  Claire looked up, curious.

  “Yeah, entirely different,” Hayden went on. “It’s along the lines of your ‘intelligence is as intelligence does’ theme. What intrigues me—a lot—is how capricious the march of civilization has been. For instance, at least some of the ancient Greek thinkers realized that the earth was round, but then civilization forgot that for eighteen hundred years. Why did it take several thousand years to invent the rolling suitcase?”

  Claire laughed.

  “Yeah,” Hayden continued, “so much was determined by accident. It seems inevitable in retrospect, but it was really set in motion by some insignificant event. Maybe intelligence is the ultimate complex, nonlinear system.”

  “If that was the case, I’d give up right now,” said Claire, “but I think that studying intelligence in an evolutionary context could tell us a lot about who we are, where we came from, and whether there are other intelligences out there. I think that’s worth pursuing.”

  “I agree,” said Hayden, “but getting back to that idea of the accidental nature of progress, here’s another aspect that intrigues me—and actually ties into your present predicament.”

  Claire had no idea where he was going, but this change of direction made her nervous.

  “Turn it around. Another aspect of the haphazard course of progress is when the collective intelligence of a group is ignored. In other words, what gets in the way of intelligence being deployed?”

  Claire got it. “Well, I mentioned that in science there’s a kind of tribal mentality that rejects anything that comes from the outside,” she said. “But what were you thinking?”

  “This may surprise you, coming from a mining guy, but one example is the way in which your country—I’m Canadian, as you may know—has for three decades ignored a huge body of science on climate change. Going back to what I was saying about the capricious nature of progress, do you think five hundred years from now, historians—if there are any—are going to look at the present era and say, ‘Oh, their scientists predicted that humanity was causing climate catastrophe and society took steps to avert it,’ or will they say, ‘What a bunch of dolts?’”

  Claire nodded, though she still couldn’t see the connection. “So, what do you think interferes with a group acting on its collective brainpower?”

  “That’s what I’m getting to. It’s very hard for a geologist to believe that there are educated people who still believe the earth is only five thousand years old, but there are. Ideology, really religion in another form, can also gum up the works. Plenty of conservatives, for instance, who might otherwise understand the threat of climate change, can’t get past the idea that the threat is exaggerated to pave the way for world government. Then there’s self-interest, which is the reason that many of my colleagues in the extractive industries aren’t going to admit that anything is a problem that might impede their livelihood.”

  Claire still didn’t get the connection. “You said this connected to my predicament, how?” she asked.

  “Right,” he said, “sorry. Several ways. In a perfect world, what would have happened is that Transteppe and the Kazakh government should have fast-tracked approval for you to study the lip in place. Had they done that, you would never have been driving that Land Cruiser off the road and cracked the array, right?”

  “Right!”

  “But that was never going to happen. So you ran afoul of the self-interest of several different parties, Transteppe—I’ve gotta admit that had Rob and Sergei gone through channels, management here would have ixnayed the project in anticipation of the Kazakh authorities, whose self-interest was also to ignore or bury this find. Then there was Delamain, whose self-interest caused them to throw you under the bus.”

  Claire marveled at the ever-growing population of people who seemed to be very good at summing up why she was screwed. “And then,” she said, picking up the thread, “there’s the fact that without Delamain I’ve become some sort of ronin researcher without affiliation, so that even if this is the greatest find in history, I face a wall of skepticism.”

  Hayden looked amused again. “I was getting to that. I’ve got to say, you’ve got a genius for helping others find cracks in your armor.”

  Claire froze, realizing what she had just said. In a quiet voice she asked, “Are you thinking of replacing me?”

  Hayden smiled with genuine warmth and put a hand on her arm. “Not for a minute! For one thing, Rob and Sergei wouldn’t stand for it, particularly Sergei.”

  The tensions of the past few weeks flooded through her. She couldn’t help it; she started sobbing quietly. Hayden tentatively started to put a comforting arm around her, but she shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m such a girl. Just give me a minute.” She dabbed her eyes and smiled. “It’s been a tough few days.” She was mortified, and the thought entered her mind that this was probably the first time anyone had ever cried in Transteppe’s VIP dining room.

  “I can well imagine.” Hayden again looked at his watch. “We’ve got to join the others, but I’m going to tell you a few things. First off, I admire that you’re willing to take a lonely path to pursue what’s important. I am serious about archaeology, but while you might have problems with credibility because your work doesn’t neatly fit in some discipline, I’ve got the opposite problem.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s not revealing any great secret to admit that I’ve made some money. That opens doors, because everyone is hoping for support in one way or another. Hell, I could make a big donation and buy ten tables at a gala and be made Man of the Year by organizations that hate mining. But that’s meaningless. Having money—and I’m not complaining, mind you—means I’m never really certain how to gauge the significance of my archaeology, for instance.”

  “At this point, I wish I had that problem.”

  Hayden chuckled. “Here’s the bottom line: whichever way things turn out, this discovery is truly exciting. I’m going to support it.” Claire’s heart leaped. “I’ve got to figure out the best way, and you’ve got to work on finding an affiliation with a credible institution, but I think I can make sure that you can pursue the analysis with fewer distractions for the next few weeks.” He scraped his chair back and started to get up. “Now, let’s go find Rob and Sergei.”

  ¬

  For Claire, the rest of the evening was a blur. She barely noticed that Rob pulled Hayden aside for a conversation. Rob said a few short sentences. Then they both subtly glanced at Sergei. As the Russian approached, she put it out of her head.

  “I heard things went well,” said Sergei. He put a warm hand on her shoulder. “I’m so glad.”

  “Yes, they went well,” said Claire. Holding his gaze she said, “Thank you.”

  Later, before she fell asleep, she realized there was something nagging at the back of her mind. Something wasn’t right back at the camp. She reviewed what had happened since she had gone back to collect her stuff. Then it came to her. Sauat. Where was Sauat? Exhausted, she reassured herself that he was around somewhere and fell asleep thinking of Sergei. She had discovered that imagining him as a windsurfer always could put a smile on her face.

  28

  Bezanov listened to the latest report from Transteppe. It was not from Sergei, but from his other, more lethal, set of eyes on the ground. The Project, of which Bezanov was just a part, though an important one, was approaching a sensitive stage, and he decided that it was better not to ask the geologist questions that might give some hint of what was up. He also thought it useful to get some ground truthing of what he had been hearing from Sergei.

  By the end of the call, the oligarch was thoroughly alarmed. The woman had gone to Astana with the head of security and returned with some Kazakh whom everyone treated wi
th great deference. Worse, a major Transteppe board member, one who represented the big Canadian interests, had shown up unexpectedly. Ostensibly, this had something to do with the archaeological find. This led to some interesting thought trains: a find that enticed a board member halfway around the world was a lot more significant than what Sergei had described—a black mark for Sergei. But, if he was being straightforward, then the find was a cover for something bigger. But what?

  Bezanov was pleased that he had had the foresight to implant someone besides Sergei at Transteppe. Until now, he had used the man to keep an eye on Sergei. Now, however, he might have use for some of the contact’s darker skills, which were considerable.

  He realized the man was waiting for further instructions. “I might need you to go active,” he said. “I’ll let you know soon.”

  After he put down the phone, Bezanov thought a bit more about the mystery woman and whatever it was that allowed her to have the highest officials at Transteppe at her beck and call. “I think I have to meet this woman,” he said to himself.

  29

  The next morning, Claire drove a Transteppe pickup to what had been her camp. She owed it to her former team to help make the transition to Benoit as smooth as possible, but she needed to make the point that it would be best for science if they continued to work together—though separately—and, most of all, she needed to let Benoit know that she was willing to collaborate. She could handle numbers one and two, she thought as she pulled into the camp. Number three was going to be a tall order.

  Once she arrived, it was clear that Benoit was not going to make it any easier. Not that he was hostile—far from it. It was his breezy sense of entitlement that put her off. He was sitting at a table in the picnic area when she drove in and gave her a laconic, friendly wave, as though it was the most natural thing in the world that he should be taking over her project. Claire pulled over and tried to get command of her temper. As she walked up the hill, she imagined Benoit wearing a polka-dot clown suit and a cap with a propeller on it, and that helped.