The Smartest Animals

Here's yet another list of the supposedly most intelligent nonhuman animals, or at least a selection of them:

11 of the World's Smartest Animals

How is intelligence defined for purposes of this kind of categorization? The article focuses on what scientists have discovered about any given animal’s "self-awareness, self-control, and memory, all of which influence how well a creature processes information and solves problems."

The list intrigues me partly because of a couple of unexpected creatures highlighted alongside the obvious ones. I expected to see animals such as chimpanzees, bonobos, dolphins, raccoons, pigs, elephants, and octopuses, plus birds such as ravens and parrots. But pigeons? Horses? And why don't dogs make the cut? Unlike chimps, they understand what we mean when we point to an object, probably because they've evolved for millennia to live with humans.

Raccoons might be prime candidates for evolving to replace us if we went extinct. Their forepaws, which they use like hands, could give them a technological edge over such potential rivals as pigs or dolphins, which lack manipulative appendages. Incidentally, bears are also good at breaking into locked spaces and opening receptacles such as coolers. The most intelligent animals on the list, chimpanzees and bonobos (formerly known as pigmy chimps) have small, threatened populations, whereas raccoons presently thrive in great numbers in many human-dominated environments. I also like the idea of an octopus-dominated world, though. Granted, their reign would be confined to the aquatic realm, but imagine if they evolved to overcome their main disadvantages, their short lifespans and solitary nature. An octopus species that mutated to survive for many years after procreating instead of dying as soon as they reproduce could pass on accumulated knowledge to their young, a process that might encourage development of social bonds. Has any SF author written about a mainly watery planet with octopus-like inhabitants as the dominant sapient species?

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Telepaths and Language

One panel I attended at this year's RavenCon was about communicating with aliens. I brought up the question of whether a telepathic species would have a spoken language or the concept of words at all, which was then discussed at some length.

Touch telepaths such as Vulcans don't count. A society could hardly exist if people had be touching each other to share feelings or thoughts, so Vulcans naturally have a language. I'm thinking of a species whose members would communicate by short-range thought transmission, needing to be in each other's physical presence or at most within line-of-sight. In my opinion, they would have no evolutionary reason to develop language. They wouldn't need words, let alone speech, because they would form mental images of whatever they're "talking" about. Somebody on the panel raised the issue of what kind of environment would cause them to evolve telepathy as their chief mode of communication. It would have to be a world where both hearing and vision would be unreliable for that purpose.

Stipulating such an unusual environment, why would they develop words? People wouldn't even have names; they would identify each other by mental images of the person they're "speaking" to or about. If they eventually encountered interstellar travelers from Earth, the telepaths would probably consider our mind-blindness a pitiable handicap.

In order to develop science and technology, however, this species would have to invent language sooner or later, if only a written one. A society beyond the hunter-gatherer level requires keeping records, communicating at a distance, and transmitting information to future generations. One panelist suggested a universal mental "cloud" all members of the species could tap into, like a worldwide telepathic mainframe. Such a phenomenon, though, would go far beyond the short-range, person-to-person telepathy I'm considering. A species such as the latter couldn't create what we'd think of as civilization without writing or the equivalent. That step would be harder than simply inventing the alphabet would have been in our world. In a society without spoken language or even the concept of speech and words, the invention of written or electronic communication might require a genius on the level of the creator of algebra or calculus in Earth history.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

A Taste for Blood

This week I donated blood, and as usual in that situation, I thought about vampires. (Doesn't everybody?) If vampires have razor-sharp teeth that painlessly produce tiny incisions in the skin, maybe with anesthetic in their saliva like vampire bats, they wouldn't need to leave conspicuous twin fang marks that the donor has to cover with a scarf. (Vampire bats, by the way, make incisions, not punctures.) The puncture produced by the blood donation needle, at least in my experience, is so minute that it's hardly noticeable after the bleeding stops. Usually it has almost disappeared by the next day. The procedure typically extracts a unit of blood in less than ten minutes. Afterward, the donor isn't prostrated from blood loss; the worst I ever feel is thirsty and slightly tired for a couple of hours at most. So much for the dramatic image of a victim languishing on the verge of imminent death.

That's if the vampire takes only "as much as would fill a wineglass," like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Count Saint-Germain. He's a supernatural vampire, though. For those creatures, we can postulate that they're really nourished more by the life-essence than by the physical components of blood, so they don't need to ingest a large volume of it. Likewise, the absurd movie scenes in which a vampire grabs a victim, bites his her or neck for a couple of minutes, and leaves a body completely drained of blood could be handwaved as magic. No awkward questions as to where all that liquid fits into the monster's body. But suppose vampires evolve naturally and have to conform to the limits of biology? As the vampire Dr. Weyland in Suzy McKee Charnas's THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY rhetorically asks, "How would nature design a vampire?"

How do vampire bats cope with a diet high in protein and minerals but not much else, including a potentially toxic level of iron? This article explains how vampire bats' digestion and physiology have adapted to make them the only mammals able to survive entirely on blood:

Why Do Vampire Bats Have a Taste for Blood?

For one thing, they live in symbiosis with gut microbes that synthesize nutrients not found in their restricted diets. They have other fascinating adaptations for their predatory lifestyle as well, including anticoagulants as well as painkillers in their saliva and the heat-seeking ability to perceive infrared radiation marking hot spots on the bodies of their prey. We could give our naturally evolved humanoid vampires these traits. My own fictional vampires get their bulk nourishment from animal blood and milk rather than feeding heavily on human donors, whose life-energy they need to remain healthy. Still, I fudge the total amount they require with discreet handwavium. Weyland in Charnas's novel gets "good mileage per calorie," and I tacitly assume any natural vampire would have to operate that way.

Unfortunately, in real life vampire bats suffer from an inconvenient drawback as models for romantic haunters of the night. So much blood volume consists of water that the bat has to consume half its own weight to ingest enough calories to support life. Then, of course, it has to get rid of that excess liquid just to reduce its weight enough to be able to fly. Therefore, during and after feeding the bat urinates copiously. Not glamorous at all, alas. So the writer inventing a naturally evolved humanoid vampire typically avoids discussing that problem. (In THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY, the blood-heavy bat's plight is mentioned, but that unsavory topic isn't covered in the explanation of how Weyland feeds and digests.)

I'm currently reading a Japanese novel titled IRINA THE VAMPIRE COSMONAUT, set in an alternate-world version of the 1960s space race. Members of Irina's species have fangs, rely mainly on milk for nourishment, have superhuman senses of smell but can't taste most foods, are sensitive to sunlight but not destroyed by it, lead a nocturnal lifestyle, and can endure cold better than humans but are more vulnerable to heat. They drink blood on ritual occasions but don't seem to require it for survival.

The ways authors rationalize science-fiction vampires fascinate me. Some striking examples include, besides THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY, George R. R. Martin's FEVRE DREAM, Jacqueline Lichtenberg's THOSE OF MY BLOOD, Octavia Butler's FLEDGING, and S. M. Stirling's Shadowspawn trilogy (A TAINT IN THE BLOOD and two sequels). I analyze these and many other works in that subgenre in my nonfiction book DIFFERENT BLOOD: THE VAMPIRE AS ALIEN.

Different Blood

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Female of the Species

I've just read a recent book called BITCH: ON THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES, by British zoologist and documentary filmmaker Lucy Cooke. It's a fascinating survey of the long-neglected status of females in biologists' studies of the animal kingdom—or should that be "queendom"? (Unfortunately, I'd be embarrassed to recommend it aloud by the title, a word I've ever spoken only in connection with dog breeding.) As the author describes the state of the field until recent decades, zoologists regarded males as the unquestioned drivers of evolutionary change, with females dismissed as "passive" and boring. She takes on the mission of demonstrating how wrong those scientists were.

She begins at the microscopic level, with gametes, revealing errors in the image of the female's egg as passively floating around waiting to be penetrated by one of the active sperm cells. In fact, the ovum has ways of controlling which sperm will be allowed to fertilize it. Chapter One, "The Anarchy of Sex: What Is a Female?" covers the development of the embryo, what determines its sex, and many examples of ambiguous sex among animals. Cooke goes on in subsequent chapters to explore the "mysteries of mate choice," in which females are much more active than had been assumed in the past, the assertiveness and competitiveness of females of various species, female-dominated animal social groups, how mating patterns can be a competition between male and female, sexual behavior in supposedly monogamous species, nonreproductive sexual encounters, the complicated nature of maternal behaviors, females who devour their mates, "primate politics," parthenogenesis, and the vital importance of older females in the societies of animals such as elephants and orcas. The final chapter, "Beyond the Binary," discusses intersex phenomena, animal homosexuality, and creatures who change sex. Some species can switch back and forth, and one fish is known to change sex up to twenty times in a day for optimal reproductive efficiency. Dedicated science-fiction readers will be reminded of Le Guin's aliens in THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS and the chieri in Bradley's Darkover series.

In 1981, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (yes, that's the correct spelling), whom Cooke often cites, published a book on a similar theme, THE WOMAN THAT NEVER EVOLVED. Her study, however, focuses more narrowly on primate and human females. Like Cooke after her, Hrdy's work emphasizes the masculine bias that led over a century of scientists to concentrate overwhelmingly on male animals' biology and behavior, treating females as mere footnotes to the main story. It's a bit mind-boggling that a wide-ranging study published in 2022 still has to start by clearing away that tangle of underbrush. Anyway, Cooke's entertaining and informative book illustrates that we don't have to seek very far on our own planet to find creatures whose biology and behavior may seem as alien as those of many fictional extraterrestrials.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Bird Brains

Research published in the journal SCIENCE in 2020 raises the possibility that crows have mental abilities formerly thought of as restricted to our species and other higher primates:

Crows Are Self-Aware

It's been known for a while that corvids (crows, ravens, jays, etc.), like monkeys and apes, use tools and recognize faces. These birds bring gifts to people they like and never forget people who injure or offend them. Experiments show, however, that they also apparently think about their own thoughts. A brain structure called the pallium, performing the same function as the cerebral cortex in mammals, holds densely packed neurons in greater quantity than in even some much larger animals such as elephants. This arrangement makes up for the smaller body and brain size of birds. The firing of neurons in the crows' brains during the experiment described in the article suggests that crows think about problems in somewhat the same way we do.

Parrots are highly intelligent, too. They don't just "parrot" human speech but often utter words in the proper context, such as asking for what they want or saying "Hello" when people arrive but not when they leave. As the famous African Grey named Alex demonstrated, parrots can work with numbers, too. They also pass some intelligence tests on the same level as five-year-old children:

Parrots Pass Classic Test of Intelligence

Here's a Wikipedia article on bird intelligence:

Bird Intelligence

For me, one exciting implication of these facts is that we now realize an animal doesn't require a large brain to be intelligent. Sapient aliens on other planets wouldn't have to resemble us in size or shape. Imagine a world dominated by brainy birds. With wings instead of arms, birds have limitations on their ability to use tools. What if they evolved with six limbs, though, like all the higher animals in the manga series A CENTAUR'S LIFE? Birds on a planet where the standard higher-life-form body plan includes six limbs rather than four could have legs, wings, and hands. Thus they could develop a civilization with material artifacts recognizable to us as products of higher intellect.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Human Domestication

Here's a cartoon, funny in a slightly warped way, about the alleged negative consequences of Homo sapiens domesticating ourselves in the course of our evolution:

Yappy Lapdog Phase

Of course, the complainer's argument can be countered by the observation that tall, attractive people skilled at slaying lions aren't best suited to our present-day milieu. Contrary to popular belief, "survival of the fittest" doesn't necessarily (or even frequently) mean the dominance of the individual or group that can win a physical fight. "Fitness" refers to optimal adaptation to one's environment. For a social species such as ours, that environment is composed in large part of other people.

An article on human "domestication," with comparisons to the differences in personality between chimpanzees and bonobos:

How Humans Domesticated Themselves

In short, chimps are the more aggressive of the two species. Bonobos (formerly known as "pygmy chimpanzees") base their social structure more on peaceful interactions, often sexual. Not that regular chimps don't display cooperative, affectionate behavior, of course, but bonobos may be thought of as the more "domesticated" primates. While male bonobos can be aggressive, the females tend to keep them in check, an appealing example of gender balance among our closest animal relatives. The "friendliest male bonobos" are likelier to succeed than those who make enemies through aggressive dominance and have to stay on guard all the time, not to mention facing the disapproval of the females—a primate analogy to the concept of women's role in "civilizing" men, as in the nineteenth-century American West, maybe?

An anthropologist quoted in the article applies this premise to a variety of species (even plants, which cooperate with insects to spread pollen), including our own: "When you look back in nature and see when a species or group of species underwent a major transition or succeeded in a new way, friendliness or an increase in cooperation are typically part of that story." The article doesn't gloss over the dark side of human community-building, however. One method of enhancing cohesion within a group, sadly, is to capitalize on suspicion of other people from different groups. To overcome this inbuilt tendency to prejudice, we need to resist the temptation to "dehumanize" others who differ from ourselves.

Reverting to the cartoon character's complaint about humanity devolving from lion-slayers to accountants, consider Andy Dufresne, a banker, the unjustly condemned protagonist of Stephen King's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" (filmed as SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION): Andy isn't physically suited to fighting off the bullies and sexual predators among his fellow inmates (although he makes a valiant effort and sometimes succeeds). But his intelligence, quick wit, and financial expertise enable him to make himself indispensable to the guards and the warden, thus ensuring his survival and relative safety in the jungle-like environment of the prison.

Even before modern Homo sapiens evolved, evidence shows that some hominids took care of physically disabled members of their tribe, a clear indication that ever since we began to "domesticate" ourselves, attributes other than lion-slaying prowess have been valued.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Tyranny of Now

The November/December issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER contains an article by psychologist Stuart Vyse titled "COVID-19 and the Tyranny of Now." The phrase refers to our tendency to choose immediate rewards over potential future benefits. Our instincts drive us in that direction, since we evolved in environments where basing choices on short-term results made sense. There was little point in worrying about one's health in old age when one might get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger long before reaching that stage of life. Vyse's article summarizes this tendency as, "Smaller rewards in the present are chosen over larger ones in the future." Understandably, our first impulse is to go for the immediate, visible reward instead of the hypothetical future one that may or may not become reality. That's why people living in high-risk situations tend to heavily discount the future; if a young man in a dangerous neighborhood frequently sees friends and neighbors getting shot, the wisdom of long-term planning may not seem obvious to him. In the context of his physical and social enviroment, that choice makes sense.

Vyse reflects on climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic as two current high-profile examples. We have immediate experience of the inconveniences and hardships of changing our lifestyles to minimize the effects of those two phenomena. The potential rewards of self-denial, on the other hand—a return to being able to lead "normal" lives without catching the disease, a cleaner and more stable environment—exist in a future we have to take on faith. In connection with the pandemic, the fact that any effect of precautions or lack thereof shows up weeks (at least) after we change our actions makes it harder for us to judge the value of restricting our behavior. Another factor is that a drop in cases as a result of lockdowns can lead to the tempting but irrational response, "What we've been doing has worked, so now we can stop doing it" (my summary of Vyse's analysis). In short, delays are difficult. We have to make a deliberate, analytical effort to resist immediate impulses and embrace long-term gain. As Vyse quotes from an anonymous source, "If the hangover came first, nobody would drink."

Here's an article explaining this phenomenon in terms of a struggle between the logical and emotional parts of the brain:

Why Your Brain Prioritizes Instant Gratification

"The researchers concluded that impulsive choices happen when the emotional part of our brains triumphs over the logical one." The dopamine surge can be hard for the rational brain to resist. The article explores some methods for training oneself to forgo immediate pleasures in favor of later, larger gains, such as managing one's environment to avoid temptation.

This Wikipedia article goes into great detail about the neurological, cognitive, and psychological aspects of delayed gratification:

Delayed Gratification

It devotes a section to the famous Stanford marshmallow experiments of the 1960s and 70s, in which preschoolers were promised two marshmallows if they could resist eating a single marshmallow for a certain time span. Children who succeeded devised strategies to distract themselves or to imagine the tempting treat as something less appetizing. Interestingly, this article reports that, according to some studies, 10% more women than men have the capacity to delay gratification. It also mentions that the ability to exercise that kind of self-control may weaken in old age. "Declines in self-regulation and impulse control in old age predict corresponding declines in reward-delaying strategies...."

It's easy to think of a different reason why some elderly people may abandon the "rational" course of postponing rewards. The choice not to delay gratification may result from a perfectly sensible cost-benefit calculation, rather than surrender to the "emotional brain." In the absence of a diagnosed medical condition that poses an immediate, specific danger, if you're over 90 do you really care whether too much ice cream might make you gain weight or too much steak increase your cholesterol?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Self-Aware Cells?

The September-October issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER reviewed a book called THE FIRST MINDS: CATERPILLARS, 'KARYOTES, AND CONSCIOUSNESS, by Arthur S. Reber. Although I haven't read the book, only the long, detailed review essay, it sounds intriguing. Reber addresses the "problem of consciousness"—how did it originate from non-sentient matter? how is this seemingly immaterial phenomenon related to the material body?—from the simplest organisms up. He proposes that even single-celled organisms have agency, subjectivity, and sentience. He maintains that from the beginning of evolution, even the most "primitive" life-form must have been "sensitive to its immediate surroundings and to its own internal states." The review paraphrases his view as asserting that "to understand consciousness we must look first at the single-celled organism rather than. . . the human brain."

But sentience is customarily distinguished from "perception and thought." Does Reber claim that a one-celled life-form is self-aware, our usual meaning of "conscious"? The reviewer asks, "Is Reber really asserting that a unicellular organism has a mind?" Apparently so. Reber also seems to assume that amoebae can feel pain. What about plants? Reber remains agnostic on this question, pointing out that sentience wouldn't bestow any clear evolutionary advantage on a creature that can't move. As time-lapse nature photography demonstrates, though, many plants do move, just too slowly for us to notice in real time. (Some of the "weed" bushes in our yard, I think, do grow almost fast enough to be observed by the naked eye.)

Going even further, he suggests that the individual cells in our bodies are not simply alive but sentient. The reviewer asks, "Do we harbor an entire universe of minds?" Reber would answer in the affirmative, again apparently defining "mind" and "consciousness" very broadly. This concept reminds me of Madeleine L'Engle's A WIND IN THE DOOR, in which the characters become infinitestimally small to enter the body of Meg's critically ill little brother, Charles Wallace. They meet a community of farandolae, sub-microscopic creatures dwelling inside the mitochondria within one of Charles Wallace's cells. To a farandola, cells are worlds, and Charles Wallace's body is a galaxy. Much more recently, an ongoing manga series currently in print, CELLS AT WORK, portrays the internal organs and processes of the human body from the viewpoints of blood cells and other cells, each an individual character. Presently, the protagonist red and white cells have been involuntarily moved, by transfusion, from their original body to a new one. They have to cope with new (and worse) working conditions and learn to cooperate with the body's veteran cells. This is a fun, fascinating series, conveying biological facts in an informative and entertaining way, as accurately as possible considering the premise of humanoid, intelligent cells, who seem to survive a lot longer than white and red blood cells actually live.

The reviewer in SKEPTICAL INQUIRER discusses the obvious problem with Reber's hypothesis, that a blood cell or an amoeba is obviously not a human brain, and the emergence of the more complex structures and functions can't be equated with or explained by their simpler predecessors. According to the article, Reber doesn't manage to solve the problem of mind, which has baffled philosophers and scientists for millennia, but the reviewer still recommends his book as "a worthwhile contribution to the literature on consciousness."

The notion of conscious or even sentient cells is intriguing to contemplate but, if accepted with full seriousness, would paralyze our ability to carry on with daily life. Could we kill disease germs or even surgically excise cancers? If a tumor were self-aware, would it consider its right to life preempted by ours? The mind boggles.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Sex Lives of Animals

I've been rereading DR. TATIANA'S SEX ADVICE TO ALL CREATION, by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson. As the title implies, the book is formatted like an advice-to-the-lovelorn column, with each inquiring letter from a perplexed organism used as the springboard for discussion of similar behavior in a wide range of species. The lively explorations of often bizarre sexual customs are supported by twenty-four pages of notes and an extensive bibliography. Not only are the descriptions entertaining in themselves, they delve into the reasons why evolution produced such behaviors and how they promote the survival of the species. The mating habits of "lower" animals could spark fascinatingly strange ideas for alien biology.

Suppose sentient species on other worlds shared some of those bizarre (to us) customs. If the male typically gets eaten during copulation and contentedly accepts this fate in order to nourish his beloved and their children, maybe a network of rituals would grow up around the process of his offering himself to be consumed. Maybe males would compete to become plump and nutritious. Imagine an intelligent species in which the newly hatched infants always eat their mother's body, as with some spiders. Their society would have to include a caste of caretakers and educators to bring up the young. Almost nobody would have a living mother, and the rare female who selfishly refused to let herself be devoured would be ostracized. Maybe a females' rights movement would develop an artificial infant food source to liberate mothers from inevitable death, so they could lead long, productive lives. Hive insects such as bees, of course, are dominated by females with few males, whose function is limited to mating, but among the females only the queen breeds. Terry Pratchett's Nac Mac Feegle, diminutive but bellicose fairy folk, live in a similar colony, except that the queen (or "kelda") is the only female, married to one of the males and sister-in-law or mother to all the rest.

There's a marine worm that can change its sex repeatedly throughout its lifetime. The switch depends on the size and sex of the worm's partner. When a pair stays together long-term, both eventually become hermaphrodites. Ursula Le Guin's LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS features a world where people shift between male and female depending on the random chance of which sex their current mate happens to become that month. The difference from the transsexual marine worm is that Le Guin's aliens revert to neuter for most of each month. She devised this reproductive system as a thought experiment on how a society without sex differences would work. A few Earth creatures start out as females and later transform into males; the Martians in Heinlein's RED PLANET and STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND have this kind of life cycle. One category of organisms, slime molds and green algae among them, may have hundreds of sexes. That doesn't mean five hundred of them need to get together to produce offspring. It means each sex cell is genetically distinct from the other kinds, and there are rules as to which can pair up. The social functions of reproduction and parenting would look very different in a slime mold society from the way they work in ours. In the more conventional male and female pairings we're familiar with, imagine an intelligent species reproductively similar to seahorses, in which the male gestates and gives "birth" to the young. Or suppose we were like certain bats whose males as well as females secrete milk to feed their offspring. Either of those species would probably have a society where females, not being biologically tied down to child care, could enjoy much more independence than in traditional Earth cultures. What about a world of women who reproduce by parthenogenesis, as some animals are capable of doing? All-female societies reproducing parthenogenetically have often appeared in science fiction, such as the world of Whileaway in Joanna Russ's THE FEMALE MAN and the post-apocalyptic setting of Suzy McKee Charnas's MOTHERLINES.

Here's a page that gives an overview of numerous examples of odd animal reproductive behavior, with lots of links:

The Sex Lives of Animals

Nonhuman animals have been found to engage in just about any unusual or "perverted" human sexual practice you can think of, including bestiality (copulating with a member of an unrelated species) and necrophilia. Those two habits, as the article points out, must be simply mistakes in evolutionary terms, since they can't result in reproduction. According to DR. TATIANA'S SEX ADVICE, however, the most deviant sexual custom of all, judging by its rarity is—monogamy.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Life Not as We Know It

One episode of the BBC series PLANET EARTH: BLUE PLANET II highlights denizens of the ocean depths that thrive independently of energy from the sun. They rely on energy from other sources, and some have no need of oxygen.

Some live in methane-rich environments known as "cold seeps" or "cold vents":

Cold Seeps

These spots aren't "cold" in the absolute sense, just less hot than the hot vents referenced below. Bacteria, mussels, and tube worms live happily in the methane or hydrogen sulfide of these ecosystems. Some individual tube worms have been estimated to survive for 250 years in such locations. If similar life-forms developed on other planets in environments like these, in the absence of competition from oxygen-dependent and sunlight-dependent creatures, and eventually became intelligent, a lifespan of that length would allow them plenty of time to learn and pass on their learning to future generations.

Other organisms have evolved in the volcanically active areas around hydrothermal vents, where water can reach temperatures of several hundred degrees Fahrenheit:

Hydrothermal Vents

Like inhabitants of cold vents, life-forms in hydrothermal vents also depend on chemosynthetic bacteria for food. Crustaceans, tube worms and other types of worms, gastropods such as snails, and even eels are among some of the creatures that populate these locations. It's believed that life on Earth may have originated in an environment like this. Again, on a planet where this kind of environment dominated, we can imagine that hyrdrothermal-vent species might evolve sentience and intelligence.

So living creatures can exist right here on our planet in conditions that would be lethal to most Earth species. The quest for extraterrestrial life needn't confine itself to oxygen-rich environments. Moreover, we don't have to expect advanced beings to conform to the familiar humanoid shape. In Heinlein's HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL, the teenage narrator describes the villain, an invader from a distant solar system. He's puzzled that these decidedly inhuman-looking aliens can survive in Terran environmental conditions, until he reminds himself that spiders resemble us much less, yet they live in our houses. We don't have to search beyond Earth's ecological systems to find bizarrely alien creatures.

The Wikipedia articles include some color photos of those exotic organisms. Take a look.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Animal Minds

I recently read two books by ethologist Frans de Waal, ARE WE SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW HOW SMART ANIMALS ARE? and MAMA'S LAST HUG, respectively about animal cognition and emotion. ("Ethology" means the study of animal behavior.) They're very lively as well as informative, drawing upon a lot of the author's personal experiences. De Waal makes a sharp distinction between emotions and feelings. He defines feelings as internal mental phenomena we can’t know unless the individual describes them to us. Emotions, on the other hand, are observable in the form of biological changes that can be described and measured. Through unbiased observation of nonhuman animals, he maintains, we can't avoid noticing that they have emotions similar to ours. Therefore, it's not a stretch to believe they have inner lives and consciousness analogous to ours. If we assume certain reactions by our human peers mean those people are experiencing the same internal states we experience when we react that way, it's at least a reasonable provisional hypothesis that the same assumption can be applied to other creatures. We're often reluctant to make that assumption because it challenges the idea of human uniqueness.

Part of ARE WE SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW HOW SMART ANIMALS ARE? surveys the history of the study of animal intelligence. During the reign of behaviorism, the majority of scientists took it for granted that learning occurred the same way in all organisms, so nothing was lost by restricting most experimentation to easy-to-handle subjects, e.g. rats and pigeons. Why bother with difficult animals such as primates if there was no essential difference in the workings of their brains? Ethologists nowadays recognize that animal learning and cognition is inextricably linked to the particular species' methods of perceiving the world and interacting with other animals. There is also an increased willingness to accept that animals have desires, intentions, and goals, that they remember past events (not just in a rote learning, stimulus-response way), modify their behavior on the basis of those memories, and plan for the future. Parrots don't "parrot," for example; they use the words they know in appropriate contexts. Some of them demonstrate counting ability and recognition of numbers. Visually oriented species, including some birds, recognize faces as readily as we do.

De Waal objects to the preoccupation with comparing animal cognition to human capacities, as if nature conformed to the old model of a "Great Chain of Being," a linear ladder of species with us at the top. He considers it more realistic and productive to study each species as important and interesting in its own right, with its own techniques for dealing with its environment and other creatures. Why try to measure another species' intelligence by investigating how closely it corresponds to ours, when that other species experiences the world through biology and social structures different from ours? As he puts it, he emphasizes "evolutionary continuity" rather than the "traditional dualisms." The useful comparison isn't between human and animal intelligence, but "between one animal species—ours—and a vast array of others." Most scientists in the past thought only a few nonhuman animals had self-consciousness, on the basis of the "mirror test" (whether they show evidence of recognizing their own reflections as themselves). Quite a few other species have been admitted to the club now that researchers have realized it doesn't make sense to test such diverse creatures as elephants, dogs, birds, and dolphins in the same way as primates. "Theory of mind"—the awareness of what others know or don't know (useful in trying to hide food from others who might want to take it, for instance)—has been demonstrated in a wide variety of animals, some of which catch on quicker than human toddlers. Ethologists have also discovered that many behaviors previously attributed solely to "instinct" depend on experience, learning, and planning.

In MAMA'S LAST HUG, De Waal explores animal (especially primate) politics and society, whether any emotions are unique to Homo sapiens, empathy and sympathy, animals' sense of fairness, and the questions of free will and the meaning of "sentience."

It's fascinating to read about the many different creatures whose intelligence, emotional life, and social skills far exceed what previous generations of scientists believed possible. The octopus, for example, probably the most intelligent vertebrate, has "brains" in each of its tentacles, so that a severed arm can continue to move on its own for a while and even seek food. Contemplating the "vast array" of creatures on Earth is a great resource for inventing extraterrestrial beings who are more than humanoids in special-effects makeup. If we met aliens on an extra-solar planet, how would we judge whether they were intelligent in the same sense we are? If aliens landed here, would they realize we're intelligent, or would they view our cities the way we regard termite mounds and beehives?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Reflections on Alien Visitors

The November-December issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER contains three articles about UFOs and extraterrestrials.

"UFO Identification Process," by Joe Nickell and James McGaha, offers an overview of the many different phenomena that can be mistaken for alien spaceships. The authors provide a list of common "UFOs" with their most likely explanations, broken down into multiple categories with several items under each. For instance, they cite five different classifications, with examples, under "Daylight Objects/Lights" and five under "Nocturnal Lights/Objects." It's interesting to discover how many common objects and events can fool the untrained observer and even some trained observers such as pilots. This kind of material could enhance the realism of a story about a UFO sighting. If a character rules out all the typical sources of mistaken identification, his or her conclusion that an actual spaceship has appeared will seem more credible.

Eric Wojciechowski, in "UFOs: Humanoid Aliens? Why So Varied?", advances the position that the widely varied descriptions of alleged alien visitors, diverse in appearance yet strangely all anthropomorphic, make a "psychological explanation" for the reported contacts more likely than "an alien intelligence interacting with human beings." Where the previous article evaluates sightings of apparent flying objects, this one deals with "close encounters" reported by people who claim to have actually seen extraterrestrials. The author maintains that the odds are overwhelmingly against the probability that diverse intelligent species have visited Earth, that almost all of them happen to be humanoid, and that they've managed to remain hidden from mainstream attention yet have revealed themselves to random individuals. He places heavy emphasis on the "anthropomorphic yet varied" factor. Although I don't believe the alleged alien encounters actually happened (not that I've made a formal study of the topic, but those I've read about look like attempts at writing science fiction by people who know very little about SF), I don't find this author's arguments totally convincing. Diversity rather than uniformity could just as well be offered as an argument FOR the truth of the reports, suggesting that they're not merely imitations of other witnesses' accounts. Also, I can easily think of explanations for the phenomena he considers unlikely. An interstellar organization composed of multiple species from various planets might be observing us, for instance, and the reason we meet only humanoids is that humanoid species are assigned to observe worlds inhabited by races similar to themselves. The reason they're often glimpsed, yet no solid proof of their presence has turned up, might be that they want to observe us without interfering but don't mind being noticed, like Jane Goodall with the chimpanzees.

Biologist David Zeigler's ingenious article, "Those Supposed Aliens Might Be Worms," speculates on what life-forms might turn out to be most common on other planets and answers (you guessed it) "worms." He considers intelligent humanoids highly unlikely and the popular expectation of such to be a case of a "limited line of imagination." Whereas the humanoid body shape has evolved only once on our planet (all the examples we know of being closely related), wormlike creatures have developed independently multiple times and inhabit almost every available ecosystem. He lists eight different categories of worms, and this catalog isn't exhaustive.

If we found worms of some type on another planet, what are the chances of their being intelligent? It's hard to imagine them with any kind of material technology in the absence of hands, tentacles, or other manipulative organs. But are such organs essential to the evolution of intelligence as we know it? It's widely believed that dolphins have near-human intelligence, and they don't possess manipulative appendages.

Tangentially, speaking of imagination, a two-page essay in this issue titled "Why We're Susceptible to Fake News—and How to Defend Against It," by one of the magazine's editors, conflates confirmation bias and the tendency to rationalize away evidence that might disprove one's entrenched beliefs with the mind-set of childhood make-believe scenarios. According to two psychologists quoted in the essay, Mark Whitmore and Eve Whitmore (there's no mention of whether they're related to each other), childhood beliefs absorbed from one's parents are said to be reinforced "as rationalization piles on top of rationalization over the years." This unfortunate outcome is allegedly made worse by the supposed fact that "Children's learning about make-believe and mastery of it becomes the basis for more complex forms of self-deception and illusion into adulthood." Parents unwittingly teach children "that sometimes it's okay to make believe things are true, even though they know they are not." It's hard to read this egregious misconception about the nature and value of imagination without screaming in outrage. From a fairly early age, children know the difference between fantasy "pretend play" and lies. Furthermore, fans of fantasy and other kinds of speculative fiction are less vulnerable to "self-deception" in relation to their preferred reading material than fans of "realistic" fiction. Readers of novels about extravagant success or exotic romance may indulge in (usually harmless) daydreams about the prospects of such events happening in their own lives. Fans of stories about supernatural beings, alternate worlds, distant planets, or the remote future aren't likely to expect to encounter such things firsthand. In AN EXPERIMENT IN CRITICISM, C. S. Lewis labels this kind of reading "disinterested castle-building" as distinct from the normal "egoistic castle-building" of imagining one's real-life self in the position of the hero or heroine of a "realistic" novel and the pathological version of the latter, where the subject obsessively fantasizes about becoming a millionaire or winning the ideal romantic partner without making the slightest real-life effort to achieve those goals. The authorities quoted in that SKEPTICAL INQUIRER article seem to compare all fantasy play to the third category.

One more item of interest: The Romance Reviews website is holding a month-long promotional event throughout November. I'll be giving away a PDF of my story collection DAME ONYX TREASURES (fantasy and paranormal romance):

The Romance Reviews

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Wonders of Jellyfish

If possible, pick up a copy of the October NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and contemplate the dazzling photos in the article on jellyfish. Typical jellyfish (not all of which are related to each other; the general name is popularly applied to different groups of creatures) have a complicated life cycle. The adult stage, the parachute-like shape with tentacles that we're most familiar with, is called a medusa. Medusae reproduce sexually, releasing eggs and sperm into the water. The larval stage, known as planula, anchors itself on a rock or the sea bottom, where it becomes a polyp. Polyps reproduce asexually, budding off multiple clones called ephyra, which grow into new medusae.

The highly toxic Portuguese man-of-war illustrates a transitional phase between a colony of separate organisms and their union into a larger, more complex creature. What looks like an individual is "technically a colony that developed from the same embryo."

The oral arms—the tendrils that sweep food into the mouth—of some jellyfish have mouths on the streamers themselves, a feature that sounds like a model for a Lovecraftian eldritch monster.

One species has a unique, almost unbelievable ability to revert to the polyp stage and start life over when confronted by environmental stress such as near-starvation or severe injury, sort of like reincarnation. By producing clones of itself that become medusae, which in turn transform back into polyps, and repeating the cycle, it effectively never dies (at least from "natural causes") or grows old.

The Immortal Jellyfish

Understanding this process of "cell recycling," called "transdifferentiation," could make a vital contribution to stem cell research.

If an intelligent species with an alternating sexual-asexual and mobile-stationary life cycle existed on some alien planet, it would surely have a social structure very different from ours, especially if it followed the jellyfish pattern of producing myriads of offspring with every instance of sexual reproduction. Of course, such alien sapient beings couldn't be jellyfish as we know them, which have no brains. It's also hard to imagine an r-selected species, one that engenders huge numbers of fast-maturing young in hopes that some may survive, evolving intelligence. It wouldn't have the long childhood and parental care that we assume to be essential to intelligence as we know it. What about intelligence not-as-we-know-it, though? Could animals similar to jellyfish, given some sort of neural network, develop a hive mind? After all, in one phase of their life cycle, they're clones, so they might conceivably have a shared consciousness. Genetically identical "immortal jellyfish" have been discovered in widely scattered parts of the Earth. Might similar organisms on another planet belong to a worldwide group mind? If so, what would they think of us as solitary individuals?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Biology Marches On

I'm currently reading, little by little, a book by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (best known for THE SELFISH GENE), THE ANCESTOR'S TALE: A PILGRIMAGE TO THE DAWN OF LIFE. He structures the book by analogy with THE CANTERBURY TALES, with "pilgrims" joining the procession at various rendezvous points, backward from the most recent progenitors of humanity to the origin of life on Earth. At each "rendezvous," he introduces our "concestor" at that juncture, a coinage for "common ancestor." For instance, we meet the common ancestor of all known hominids, of hominids and other primates, of primates and other mammals, etc. One fascinating revelation of this book, for me, is how the classification of life on Earth has changed since my time in public school. In the 1950s and 60s, biology classes taught us to divide all creatures into two kingdoms, animals and plants. Bacteria, amoebae, and fungi got pigeonholed with plants, while protozoa qualified as animals. Today, biological science recognizes up to six kingdoms: Animals, Plants, Fungi, Protista, Archaea/Archaebacteria, and Bacteria/Eubacteria). Amazingly, according to Dawkins, fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants! Here we see an example of the trope "Science Marches On" (i.e., it's always possible for yesterday's established theories to be revised or replaced).

Similarly, during our elementary and high-school years (shortly after dinosaurs roamed the Earth), all humanity consisted of three races, then called Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. The song we learned in Sunday school about God's love for "all the little children" classifies them into "red and yellow, black and white." The three-race system of categories lumped "red" (Native Americans) in with the Mongoloid (Asian) ethnicities, not unreasonable considering the probable Asian origins of the original inhabitants of the Americas. If Inuits had been mentioned, they would probably have been included with the Mongoloid groups. Polynesians and other Pacific Islanders weren't brought up at all, much less Australian Aborigines and the Ainu of Japan. Aside from the fact that "race" in the old-fashioned sense is no longer considered a valid scientific category anyway, the ethnic divisions of Earth's population are more complicated than we were taught as children. A popular-culture example of unquestioning acceptance of the three-race system appears in James Michener's TALES OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC. (It's not quite explicit in the movie, although "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" makes the implications clear enough.) When Nellie discovers that her French suitor has fathered illegitimate children by a Polynesian woman, she's appalled because, in her Southern world-view, there are only three races—white, Oriental, and Negro. Polynesians obviously don't belong to either of the first two, so they must be the third. (She uses the other N-word, however.)

Theories of the ancestry and origins of humanity have changed radically in recent decades, with new fossil discoveries and cutting-edge technology for detailed DNA studies of population movements. The film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY looks charmingly naive nowadays, with its dramatic scene based on the simplistic, now-abandoned assumption that our development into sapient beings sprang from our learning how to make weapons in order to kill things. (Elaine Morgan, in THE DESCENT OF WOMAN, labels this anthropological construct the "Tarzanist" theory.)

Coincidentally, I'm now rereading a duology by Rose Estes, TROLL-TAKEN and TROLL-QUEST. This fabulous urban fantasy (published in the 1990s) portrays the creatures we call "trolls" as descendants of Homo erectus, driven underground by the worldwide dominance of Homo sapiens. One of my favorite contemporary vampire series, S. M. Stirling's Shadowspawn trilogy (A TAINT IN THE BLOOD and sequels), postulates that his vampire-werewolf-sorcerer subspecies split off from "normal" humanity during a long period of isolation in the last Ice Age (a motif borrowed from Jack Williamson's classic DARKER THAN YOU THINK and updated with allusions to modern genetics and quantum mechanics). As reported in recent news, many scientists now believe that other hominids such as Neanderthals and the "hobbits" probably coexisted with and may have interbred with Homo sapiens. Keeping informed on latest developments in biology and anthropology can help authors create realistic, believable alien species.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Purpose of Pain

This title doesn't refer to the metaphysical question of why suffering exists. (My favorite book on that topic is THE PROBLEM OF PAIN, by C. S. Lewis.) I'm talking about the biological and evolutionary reason for the sensation of pain. That subject comes to mind because, with age, I've started collecting a variety of physical aches and pains, none of them disabling yet (thank goodness) but cumulatively annoying. Are we biologically fated to put up with this nuisance, which in many cases can escalate to the level of extreme distress? Of course, I know why it evolved. Without that warning signal, we wouldn't notice when our bodies are being damaged. People born with congenital insensitivity to pain tend to hurt themselves a lot and often die prematurely. But does the process have to work as harshly as it does? Why can't the pain stop when the cause of the damage has been discovered and addressed? Instead, it may hang around throughout the healing stage. Also, some people suffer for years without any definite cause being identified. And women, at least, are stuck with some pains that seem completely pointless, as in severe menstrual cramps and the contractions of the advanced phase of childbirth. Why couldn't labor signs consist of mild cramps that get only closer together, not more intense, as the moment of delivery approaches?

Organisms too "primitive" to have brains with which to be aware of discomfort nevertheless recoil from hazardous stimuli. A robot could theoretically be programmed to avoid potential damage without consciousness. Why can't our nervous systems be programmed that efficiently? Yes, we need a warning device. But does it have to inflict discomfort or agony? Couldn't we experience a mild zap, like static electricity, which would recur every minute or so until we fixed the problem? Why didn't we evolve the ability to turn off pain as soon as we've found the source and started fixing the problem? Wouldn't it be nice to have a control panel in the brain with a "red alert" button we could switch off after acknowledging it?

The obvious catch is that if the damage signal didn't cause extreme distress, we might ignore it. Most of us know people who act as if powering through sickness or injury makes them tough guys (or gals). A highly rational being such as a Vulcan would respond appropriately to pain stimuli and wouldn't abuse the ability to suppress it at will. If we can't possess the rationality and control over autonomic body functions that Vulcans enjoy, couldn't we at least have some less agonizing system? Maybe if we ignored damage signals for too long, we could abruptly lose the use of some minor appendage or function, to jolt us into taking action. I'd accept that alternative over severe cramps or stabbing pains. For instance, this relatively mild but annoying chronic ache in the arms from shoulder tendinitis. I adjust positions for sleeping and computer use, conscientiously perform recommended exercises, avoid muscle strain, and apply ice to the affected areas. What more does it want from me? Why isn't there a handy diagnostic screen where I can check the status of the condition and respond accordingly? In some respects, the design of the human body leaves a bit to be desired.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Annihilation

Last week, I watched the rather strange SF movie ANNIHILATION. (Spoilers ahead.) An anomalous phenomenon of unknown origin, labeled the Shimmer, has mysteriously appeared in the vicinity of an isolated lighthouse. Natural laws don't seem to work normally within its area of influence, and investigators sent into the zone don't return, with one exception (the protagonist's husband, who doesn't seem to remember anything, doesn't act like himself, and falls into a coma soon after his reappearance). Furthermore, the Shimmer is expanding. The protagonist, a professor of biology, enters the zone with an all-female team of scientists and emerges alone, four months later by outside reckoning but only a couple of weeks in her subjective time. Near the end, she's attacked by an amorphous entity that takes on humanoid form, at one point becoming a double of the heroine herself.

When debriefed after her return, the protagonist speculates that the Shimmer doesn't "want" anything and may not have even been aware of her presence. During her combat with it, maybe it was only mirroring her actions. At the conclusion, when she reunites with her husband, Kane (who has regained consciousness), she asks whether he's really Kane. He replies, "I don't think so." The film leaves open the possibility that she may be a doppelganger, too, rather than her original self.

We never learn whether the Shimmer has an extraterrestrial origin or has emerged from a rupture or portal between our reality and some other dimensional plane—or spontaneously evolved on the spot. And, as mentioned above, we don't find out what its purpose is, if there's any consciousness behind it at all. While it's realistic to leave these questions unanswered, since the characters have no plausible way of discovering the truth (maybe the scientists on the project will eventually be able to get some information out of "Kane"?), I felt unsatisfied, as I usually do with a story that doesn't have a definite resolution. I want to know what or who the alien intelligence (if any) is, where it comes from, and why.

Considering the random mutations of animal and plant DNA within the Shimmer, maybe the life-form at its center (if there is one) has only the "purpose" of evolving and reproducing, with no more conscious motivation than bacteria. It spreads, proliferates, generates copies of itself, and strives to maximize its exploitation of the environment by expanding its area of control. If, as the protagonist believes, it doesn't "want" anything, blind reproduction may be its sole "motive" for invading our world. It may be an example of the adage that a hen is simply an egg's way of making another egg, or as Heinlein puts it, a zygote is a gamete's device for making other gametes. The Shimmer life-form's only chance of evolving into a stable, more advanced phase may be to duplicate the human models with which it comes into contact.

This film raises the perennial science-fictional question of identity. If the doppelganger created by the Shimmer has absorbed the "real" person's memories and obliterated the original, is the doppelganger now "really" the person? One thinks of Dr. McCoy's qualms about the transporter on STAR TREK. If each transporter event essentially disassembles the traveler at the point of origin and reconstructs him or her at the destination, has the "real" person been replaced by a succession of duplicates? In the original film of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, the pod people sometimes talk as if they've absorbed the selfhood of the people they replace, as when they try to convince the protagonist that he'll be happier if he surrenders to the inevitable. In ANNIHILATION, does the doppelganger of Kane represent the first stage in an alien project to replace humanity, or is he/it merely a random byproduct of the "annihilation" of the original man?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Sapient Hibernators?

Recently on Quora someone asked why human beings can't stay awake for a week straight and then sleep for the same amount of time, instead of alternating sleep and awake time every day. The most convincing answer is that we evolved to live in harmony with the alternation of light and darkness. We are diurnal mammals, and our (roughly) 24-hour circadian rhythm harmonizes with daily changes in sunlight levels, making us active by day and at rest by night. We need that period of dormancy every night for our brains to repair ongoing wear-and-tear and process the events of the previous day. Not all animals function the same way, of course. Some are nocturnal. Cats sleep in short stretches throughout the day, with a lot of activity around dawn and dusk (crepuscular). Dolphins, some other aquatic mammals, and some birds sleep with only half of their brains at a time, so one brain hemisphere is always awake.

It occurred to me to wonder what our lives would be like if we hibernated. I would be happy to sleep through the dreary, cold stretch from January 2 through the third week of March, when the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts convenes in Orlando. Aside from skipping the worst of winter, I could gorge on goodies over the holidays, then painlessly burn off the fat while asleep. I've read only one story featuring a sapient species that hibernates, Melanie Tem's unique vampire novel, DESMODUS. Her non-supernatural vampires are essentially humanoid, intelligent vampire bats. The females, the dominant sex, are the only ones who hibernate through the winter. The males migrate. With access to human culture's modern technology, they drive south every year in a convoy of huge trucks, in which the sleeping females and the young (cared for communally) are safely ensconced. How would their clan manage if they all had to hibernate, though? Wouldn't they be overly vulnerable?

Risks of vampire-slayers finding their dens and slaying them while dormant might be minimized if Desmodus had a metabolism like that of bears, which don't really "hibernate" in the strictest sense, Instead, they enter a state of torpor from which they can wake up quickly and easily if the need arises. In true hibernators, heartbeat and respiration slow drastically, and body temperatures decrease to the level of the surrounding environment. Arctic ground squirrels may even reduce their abdominal temperatures below freezing.

Could a hibernating species develop an advanced technological civilization? What would happen to their machines and infrastructure during prolonged periods of universal dormancy, with nobody available to perform upkeep and maintenance? Maybe a hibernating intelligent race might be limited to preindustrial technology. If we discovered such a race on a distant planet, we could supply them with machines and technicians to care for the equipment, but the natives would remain dependent on us for those resources. Of course, such a species might instead take their cultural evolution in a completely different direction from ours and produce a civilization that doesn't rely heavily on physical technology—biologically based, perhaps. It's hard to imagine, however, how they could achieve space flight, so I visualize their being confined to their home planet when we meet them.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Human Domestication

Here's a new article on the hypothesis that the human species may have domesticated itself:

How Humans Maybe Domesticated Themselves

"Tameness" (which the article loosely equates with "domestication," although they aren't quite the same thing) is here defined as "a reduction in reactive aggression — the fly-off-the-handle temperament that makes an animal bare its teeth at the slightest challenge." By this standard, we are fairly tame. "We might show great capacity for premeditated aggression, but we don’t attack every stranger we encounter. Sometime in the last 200,000 years, humans began weeding out people with an overdose of reactive aggression" (as theorized by Richard Wrangham, a Harvard University primatologist). Did we discover being nice to each other produced better results for the group as a whole? (Go figure.) Early humans, as they developed more complex social skills, may have joined forces to throw bullies out of the tribe.

Domestication tends to have visible effects on body structure as well as personality, e.g. changes in head shape, ears, tails, and coloration. For example, we can see obvious differences between the physical traits of dogs and wolves. The foxes in the famous Russian fur-farm taming experiment evolved over multiple generations to look more puppy-dog-like. Correspondingly, modern human beings look more "domestic" than Neanderthals. Becoming tamer may also have contributed to the development of language. It's known that domesticated songbirds have more complex songs than wild birds. Also, it makes sense (I suppose) that if people get along together rather than fighting a lot, they have a greater frequency of peaceful interactions in which to evolve a complex language. The article notes that at least one other primate species, bonobos, may have tamed itself, since they are notoriously less violent among themselves than their closest relatives, chimpanzees.

Recently, it has been theorized that dogs and cats effectively domesticated themselves, dogs by hanging around garbage dumps to scavenge food, cats by prowling into our granaries to hunt the rodents that devoured the grain. Animals innately less fearful of or aggressive toward people, a little more willing to accept human approach and touch, would have become better nourished and produced more offspring. Eventually, we invited those tamer animals into our homes. That scenario sounds more plausible than the earlier notion that human beings picked up stray cubs to bring home and raise, despite how much I enjoyed similar scenes of animal taming in the "Clan of the Cave Bear" series.

The "human self-domestication" possibility fits in with Jacqueline's post this week about reason developing as an adaptation to life in social groups. I much prefer this hypothesis over the concept popular in the 1960s, that we developed intelligence through the invention of weapons for killing and hunting, as proposed in the bestselling works of Robert Ardrey (AFRICAN GENESIS) and Desmond Morris (THE NAKED APE). Now that we know chimpanzees make tools, kill for meat, and wage "war" against bands of rival males, the "man the mighty hunter" origin of our species looks far less plausible. The self-domestication myth (in the sense of an origin story, not necessarily untrue) certainly strikes me as both more appealing and more plausible than the simplistic origin myth imagined in the prehistoric segment of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, where the alien monolith sparks hominid intelligence by showing the ape-men how to make weapons.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Self-Improvement

Suppose you could wave a magic wand and make changes in the design of the human body? What would you fix? Some items on my wish list:

Alter the muscle connections in the torso to accommodate our bipedal posture, thereby alleviating or preventing backaches, organ prolapses, and hernias. (This one isn't original with me.)

Put an upper limit on the intensity of pain. Make it just annoying enough to draw attention to sickness or damage, not enough to really hurt, about the level of a mild cramp. (Assuming people will have the sense not to ignore the signals.)

Synchronize the onset of puberty between the sexes, so the girls don't become young adults while the boys are still kids. If you're worried about increased premarital sex and teen pregnancy, adjust the females upward instead of the males downward.

Turn us into marsupials. Seriously, wouldn't it be easier to give birth to a half-formed fetus and carry it in a secure pouch, like an advanced version of a kangaroo?

Failing that, reduce labor to mild cramps (like pain in general, see above) and painless pushing. Also in the area of reproduction, it would be nice if human females in the first trimester of pregnancy could re-absorb the fetus at will, like rabbits.

And can't we arrange for women to reach orgasm as easily and automatically as the typical young man?

For men, move the prostate gland so it doesn't wrap around the urethra, an arrangement that causes much inconvenience in later years.

Hack the brains of newborn babies so they sleep through the hours of darkness instead of needing to be fed every couple of hours by night as well as by day. Also, how about making human toddlers as easy to toilet-train as kittens? Those two changes would go a long way toward relieving the exhaustion and stress of infant care.

Repair the immune-system glitches that cause allergies and autoimmune diseases in many people.

Currently, the average person's metabolism works the opposite of the way most of us would prefer. Let's have any excess calories not required for daily energy needs excreted instead of stored as fat. That would be a radical change. From an evolutionary viewpoint, the tendency to hang onto fat is a feature, not a bug; it increases our chance of surviving a famine—not a typical hazard in contemporary North America.

If we aspire to superpowers, we could request vision like that of eagles, hearing like that of bats, the speed of cheetahs, and the proportional strength of ants. I'm thinking more of fixes that would make life as we currently live it easier, though. Each of those alterations would involve related changes we might not like, unless we switch from the realm of evolution to outright magic.

Any other suggestions to improve the human blueprint?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Early Hominids in America

Scientists have conjectured that a prehistoric site in San Diego County may prove relatives of early humans entered North America 130,000 years ago, at least 100,000 years earlier than commonly believed:

First Americans May Have Been Neanderthals

Researchers have been working on this discovery since the early 1990s. The ambiguous evidence meets with skepticism. Are the mastodon bones found at the dig evidence of human or prehuman hunters in the New World at that remote period? If so, they might not have been modern humans (Homo sapiens). They might be older members of the genus Homo such as Neanderthals or Denisovans (a distinct subspecies discovered in Siberia).

The idea of other kinds of human-like people sharing the world with us—Neanderthals, Denisovans, the Indonesian "hobbits" (Homo florensiensis)—fires the imagination. It would be like having aliens among us. An SF explanation of orcs, elves, and dwarves might be developed by postulating that those creatures were independently evolved humanoid species or subspecies. Suppose some of them lingered into historical times as the truth behind the myths? Or remnants of their kind live secretly in isolated wilderness areas to this day?

Personally, I'm holding out for the possibility that survivors of hypothetical early hominids in California form the basis of the Bigfoot legend. Why shouldn't a small breeding population of such a species continue to hide in the depths of old-growth forests? After all, mountain gorillas were discovered and identified as a separate species only in the early 20th century, and only about 800 are estimated to exist in the wild. Why couldn't other types of supposedly extinct primates have survived?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt