Archive for the ‘Darwin’ Category
on civilisation, savages, clothing, sex and bonobos
I’m a great admirer of Charles Darwin. I’ve read On the Origin of Species three times now. I’ve read his Voyage of the Beagle, and a number of biographies – Darwin, by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Janet Browne’s two-volume work, Charles Darwin, Voyaging, and Charles Darwin, the Power of Place, as well as Rebecca Stott’s Darwin and the Barnacle and David Quammen’s The Kiwi’s Egg: Charles Darwin and Natural Selection. Not that I’m showing off or anything…. I also have a copy of The Indelible Stamp – four volumes in one, the Voyage, the Origin, the Descent, and the Expression of the Emotions. I’m currently about a third of the way through The Descent of Man, but…
In spite of all that I know about this driven, timid, well-born, sensitive, fatherly, loyal, reclusive, internationally-connected, obsessive genius, his revolutionary impact on biological science, and the Victorian-era context of his life, I still find myself wincing at his regular use of the word ‘savage’ to refer to certain types of human, especially in The Descent. It is of course, a very much discarded term today, and I’m quite aware that I wouldn’t have winced had I been reading the book in the late 19th century.
So I’ve been thinking about what exactly made certain humans ‘savages’ in the minds of your typical Victorian gentleman. And to me, the primary feature of the ‘savage’ was clothing, or the lack thereof.
Think of clothing in upper-class Victorian society. Top hats, frock coats, or great-coats in winter, waistcoats and ties or cravats, stiff-collared shirts, high-waisted trousers, sometimes with suspenders, and of course a good solid pair of boots. Certainly their clothing had to be of a quality that distinguished them from their servants, of which Darwin had many over the years.
And then, I almost forgot, there also existed another, generally lower class of Victorian, known mostly as ladies, though courser terms were sometimes used. Their clothing was more layered and complex, involving corsets and crinolines, petticoats, bustles, bows, furbelows and lace trimmings, and finished off with jewellery of various kinds – necklaces, brooches, medallions and such, all of which required servants for dressing and maintenance. Surprisingly enough, these ladies and gentlemen sometimes produced children, which generally required something like an archaeological excavation on the part of the male. Then again, a more plausible explanation is that these children were carried to upper class couples by storks.
So, imagine how shocked some of these more adventurous, voyaging gentlemen would have been on encountering the inhabitants of darkest Africa, Tierra del Fuego, Australia, New Zealand, and the many scattered islands of the Pacific and elsewhere, and finding that their inhabitants were almost as unclothed as – animals! Wild animals, even.
I haven’t done much voyaging and exploring outside of books. When I first learned of native Americans I pictured many feathers, in head-dresses and skirt-like garments, with muscular bodies naked apart from dots and dashes of paint, or woad or whatever. I also pictured – and saw on our TV screen – skilled horse-riders, bow-and-arrow sharp-shooters, strong and silent types, with cool, unsmiling expressions. They never seemed to have anything to smile about, to be sure.
It was also clear that these various peoples had their own languages, rituals, and skills, tools and inventions adapted to survival and thriving in an environment they’d become familiar with over thousands of years. In his Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin describes the Aboriginal people he encounters in Australia:
They were all partly clothed, and several could speak a little English: their countenances were good-humoured and pleasant, and they appeared far from being such utterly degraded beings as they have usually been represented. In their own arts they are admirable. A cap being fixed at 30 yards distance, they transfixed it with a spear, delivered by the throwing-stick with the rapidity of an arrow from the bow of a practiced archer. In tracking animals or men they show most wonderful sagacity; and I heard several of their remarks which manifested considerable acuteness. They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take the trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them. On the whole they appear to me to stand some degrees higher in the scale of civilisation than the Fuegians.
Of course Darwin couldn’t help but make comparisons with his own ‘civilisation’. Some could speak English and make astute observations, but they were a bit weak on housing and land cultivation. He presumably wasn’t aware that when the first fleet of convicts and guards tried to cultivate the land at Sidney Cove they were seriously unsuccessful, the soils being nowhere near as fertile as those in England, and totally unsuitable for English-style crops. Only the arrival of the Second Fleet, and a slow general understanding that they needed to adapt to vastly different environmental conditions, prevented catastrophic loss of life. Nor did he recognise that the semi-nomadic lifestyle of Australia’s native population was an intelligent and hard-earned adaptation to local conditions over tens of thousands of years.
So, Darwin described these natives as ‘partly clothed’. What does this mean? The earliest photographic images were taken decades after the beginning of white settlement, but women were generally depicted bare-breasted, unlike the highly civilised women of today, and men’s genitalia were hidden under pouches tied with strings. Was this always the case, before civilised whities caught a glimpse? We’ll never know. It does seem that the taste for decoration, expressed largely in clothing by my culture, was also a part of native cultures, through face and body painting, especially for ceremonial occasions.
And with all this near-nakedness, what about sex? Well, it’d be way too time-consuming and effortful to look into the sex lives of all the peoples that Darwin and the Victorians would deem to be savages, so why not focus on the land that recently came to be known as Australia? Well, unsurprisingly, given the vastness of the continent, the huge variety of its landscapes and environments, the large number of language and cultural groups living in isolation from each other, the story is one of diversity and complexity – not a free-for-all, but not standard Victorian monogamy either.
It’s been claimed, and I think proven, by anthropologists and historians that Australia has been inhabited for some 50,000 years by these native peoples. What wouldn’t we give to travel back all those years to see what those early arrivals were up to. For that matter, what was human life like in the region of Kent 50,000 years ago? Presumably colder than down south, with very different megafauna to deal with. And the reason why things changed so much in the north, in Europe, especially in the last five to ten thousand years, is explained, at least partly, by books such as Who we are and how we got here, by David Reich, and The WEIRDest people in the world: How the west became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, by Joseph Henrich. Waves of interaction, often brutal, from the east, brought not only rape and pillage, but new weaponry and skills, technology and tactics – and whole new approaches to culture, with, in the last thousand years or more, eastern Confucian patriarchy and middle eastern Islamic patriarchy reinforcing western Catholic patriarchy, forces which women, at least in the last century or so, have just begun to fight off.
And so to bonobos, those fabulous but insufficiently appreciated close relatives of ours, unhampered by clothing or religion, unjudged by puritanical ideologies, unwed but far from unloved. Judged by human standards, bonobos are paedophiles, sluts, studs, poofs, lezzos, straights, queers, nymphos, ambisexuals and all the rest, yet the only threat to their community is humanity….
What more needs to be said?
References
Charles Darwin, The voyage of the Beagle
Charles Darwin, The descent of man
Nietzsche and Darwin and science and philosophy
When I was young, living in Elizabeth, a newly-built working-class town north of Adelaide in South Australia, I was able to avail myself of books of all kinds on our home shelves – novels, histories, encyclopaedias and the like. It was only much later that I had cause to wonder – where did all these books come from? I don’t think my father ever read a book in his life (he later, after my mother left him, told me I need only read one book – the Bible). My mother read very few. I had two older siblings – two and three years older – but surely all these books didn’t come from them.
Among them were a few works of philosophy which I skimmed my way through, puzzled and occasionally impressed, I think mostly by the author’s chutzpah. His name was Friedrich Nietzsche, and the titles were Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist. Much of the writing involved seemingly pithy little aphorisms – sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes confusing, and occasionally liberating for an anti-authoritarian adolescent, as I most definitely was at the time. In The Antichrist, for example, Nietzsche got stuck into ‘Saint Paul’, which tickled my fancy in spite of my not knowing much about Nietzsche’s target. The naughtiness of it all was quite a thrill to me.
So my none-too-reliable guess is that I was fifteen or sixteen when this skimming took place, but it certainly stuck in my mind. Meanwhile I continued my reading, particularly from the library close by, from which, often on the recommendations of my older brother’s university friends, I borrowed and read pretty well the whole oeuvre of Thomas Hardy, as well as other 19th century Brits – Dickens, the Brontes, Austen, George Eliot, and writers we’d studied at school – George Orwell, Albert Camus, and, from Camus, the Roads to Freedom trilogy of Jean-Paul Sartre. All this would’ve been in those mid-teen years, the couple of years after I’d left school due to being smacked in the face by the headmaster, for no good reason.
So all of this is preliminary. Years later, I happened to read something very scathing that Nietzsche had written about George Eliot, surely one of the best novelists of the Victorian era. On looking into the matter I learned that he had never read Eliot and was responding simply to a remark made about her by someone he knew. Oh dear. Whatever opinion I had of Nietzsche was definitely dented.
So, flash further forward, and after being apprised, over the years, of some misogynistic remarks by Nietzsche, my interest in him was pretty well dead. That is, until a recent conversation with an intelligent female friend caused me to try reappraising my reappraisal. I checked my admirably voluminous bookshelves (I’m not even sure where all those books came from either) and found I had two Nietzsche paperbacks with my name written on the inside cover over 40 years ago – Thus spake Zarathustra and a two-in-one volume, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner. I’m pretty sure I never read this second book all those years ago, but for my sins I’ve just read The birth of tragedy. I found it more or less completely incomprehensible, and somehow irrelevant.
So I’ll present a comparison, odorous though it might be. The birth of tragedy was Nietzsche’s first published book, in 1872, when he was in his twenties and a very youthful professor in Ancient Greek philology. As it happens I’m now reading another book, published in 1871, on a very different topic – Charles Darwin’s The descent of man. Darwin never obtained a professorship, but he did okay for himself, being a scion of the aristocracy, and, to be fair, an indefatigable researcher. Clearly, both authors felt strongly that they had an important message to impart to the world. So let me quote from both authors.
First, a more or less random passage from Nietzsche’s The birth of tragedy – and, to be fair, this is, by all accounts, far from his best work, and he himself dismissed it in his later years. Yet I feel its esoteric nature is fairly typical:
In song and in dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing. His very gestures express enchantment. Just as the animals now talk, and the earth yields milk and honey, supernatural sounds emanate from him, too: he feels himself a god, he himself now walks about enchanted, in ecstasy, like the gods he saw walking in his dreams. He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: in these paroxysms of intoxication the artistic power of all nature reveals itself to the highest gratification of the primordial unity. The noblest clay, the most costly marble, man, is here kneaded out and cut, and to the sound of the chisel strokes of the Dionysian world-artist rings out the cry of the Eleusinian mysteries: “Do you prostrate yourselves, millions? Do you sense your Maker, world?” [the quote is from Schiller].
F Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner, translated by Walter Kaufmann, 1967, pp 37-38
So, the above passage was written, or published when Nietzsche was about 27 years old. The next passage was from a book published in 1871, when Darwin was 62, and very much an established ‘natural philosopher’, revered and reviled world-wide.
The feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements. No being could experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately high level. Nevertheless, we see some distant approach to this state of mind in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feelings. The behaviour of a dog when returning to his master after an absence, and, as I may add, of a monkey to his beloved keeper, is widely different from that towards their fellows. In the latter case the transports of joy appear to be somewhat less and the sense of equality is shewn in every action. Professor Braubach goes so far as to maintain that a dog looks on his master as on a god. The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agencies, then in fetishism, polytheism, and ultimately in monotheism, would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various superstitions and customs.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: in J D Watson, ed. Darwin, the indelible stamp: four essential volumes in one, 2005, pp 679-680
I’ve excluded the notes from the Darwin extract, but just about every page of his book is annotated with references to contemporary writers and analysts of various species, their behaviours, anatomies and so on. The extract from Nietzsche is of course a translation, so that carries problems, which I haven’t the nous to explore. It could be argued that Nietzsche’s extract is ‘philosophical’ while Darwin’s is ‘scientific’, which certainly tempts me to try to explain, or at least explore, the difference. I remember, from my philosophical readings of the eighties, one philosopher, it might’ve been Max Black, arguing that most analyses of ‘problems’, whether within ourselves or in the world, start as philosophy and end as science – to put it a bit crudely. In that respect I think of Kant’s phenomena/noumena distinction, which I’m sure seemed incredibly insightful at the time, and I recall being quite impressed with it as a young person. We experience everything through our senses, but how do we know they’re reliable? We can’t check with others, as they have the same sensory equipment as ourselves – equally unreliable – or reliable. The ‘noumenal’ world is supposedly inaccessible to us all, if it exists. What has happened since Kant’s time is a much greater access to the phenomenal world, from the 13 to 14 billion-year old universe, to quarks, neutrinos and such. And nobody’s talking much about noumena, if they ever were. Scientists now would surely say that Kant’s noumenal world is, and always, was, unprovable. Nice try, Manny. And yet it does raise interesting questions about individual perception and reality.
Another interesting point I would make about Darwin/Nietzsche is that, though their subject matter could hardly be more different, at the time they would both be considered philosophers – at a stretch. In 1867, William Thompson, aka Lord Kelvin, and Peter Tait, published Treatise on Natural Philosophy, essentially treating of what was known about physics at the time. The modern term ‘scientist’ was only just coming into general use towards the end of the 19th century. In the 1880s Nietzsche published a book bearing the English title The Gay Science (the German title was Die frohliche Wissenschaft), which is regarded (by Wikipedia) as one of his more positive books (nout to do with logical positivism), promoting science and skepticism, but I think it’s safe to say that there’s no science at all in The Birth of Tragedy. You might say that he was still weaning himself from Greek philology at this time, and expatiating on his personal response to ancient Greek drama.
Anyway, the point I wanted to make with these two extracts was that they have so little in common with each other. Their preoccupations were poles apart. Darwin’s work was rooted in the world of solid academic and upper-middle class connections, and the gathering of data, whereas Nietzsche is all flightiness and abstract conjecture. I must admit I found little of the bite and the dismissiveness in The Birth of Tragedy that haunt my memories of reading Nietzsche, probably because it was his first published work, but I also found nothing that inclines me to read more of his stuff. And yet, there’s The case of Wagner, which I’ve heard is a demolition job of the notorious anti-semite, though there’s a related work, Nietzsche contra Wagner, published shortly afterwards, that really does the job.
So I was planning to do a more close analysis of the above-quoted passages, but it all seems a bit much. Darwin’s material speaks for itself, I think. It took humans a long time to get to the stage of careful and objective analysis of their environment, in terms of time and space, structural complexity, wave-molecular interactions, life from non-life and so on, and we’re still learning, and discovering. Nietzsche’s work, though this may not be the best example, is more poetic and personal, and considering his fate, it’s hard not to sympathise. Nietzsche, I note, seems very quotable (you can find dozens of quotes from him online), as he was very fond of trying to capture something deep and meaningful in a sentence. Darwin is pretty well the exact opposite, yet surely his influence has been greater. However, in spite of The Birth of Tragedy, I’m prepared to give poor Friedrich another go, kind-hearted soul that I am.
The Gay Science perhaps…
References
Friedrich Nietzsche, The birth of tragedy and The case of Wagner, trans Walter Kaufman 1967.
Charles Darwin, The descent of man [sic], 1871
Animals r us, but also…
kinds of trunks
The video world that we now seem suddenly steeped in – I write from the perspective of someone who was almost 40 when the internet suddenly swept over us – has its pluses and minuses of course, and one definite plus for me is cute and often fascinating vids of non-human creatures doing smart stuff. I try not to get addicted, but it’s tough. I’m especially interested in ‘exotic’ creatures, which for me is anything I can’t encounter in my local park-lands or zoo. These videos bring such exotica into the living rooms of people like me, who worry about the time, effort and money involved in getting into the next suburb never mind darkest America or the hinterlands of Tunbridge Wells.
So I’m reading – slowly and savouringly, if that’s a word – Carl Safina’s Beyond Words, the first few pages of which – about elephants – literally brought tears to my eyes. Such exquisitely elegant and sensitive things – and that’s just the trunk.
Getting further into this inspiring book, it’s not just about elephants and other creatures whose superlative sensitivities, when brought more forcibly to our attention, are both exciting and mildly intimidating, it’s about the endless ways that complex lives can be lived. It even makes me think of the sudden surge in ‘AI’ over just the past few years, and where it will be in a few generations, as it adapts to ever more complex and challenging conditions. It ain’t going away.
But to return to conscious beings – assuming that AI hasn’t achieved consciousness quite yet – it wasn’t long ago that we preferred to believe we humans were the only ones. Safina looks at the issue early on in his book. It’s taken a long time for us to accept that we’re animals (millions, if not billions, refuse this label), and even those who have mostly believe that we’re massively exceptional, and consciousness, inter alia, is a thing that sets us apart. But what, exactly is consciousness? The neurologist Christof Koch calls it ‘the thing that feels like something’ [Safina, p21]. This subtle definition is certainly worth pondering. It doesn’t require language, it seems to me – language being another item we use to claim exceptionalism – even though we humans can name that thing – fear, anger, boredom, love, fatigue, hunger, pain etc – of which we are conscious. A hungry dog feels hungry. She’s conscious of her hunger, and that consciousness will make her start pestering her owner who’s late in feeding her.
These feelings are all in the mind. It follows that anything with a mind has consciousness. And yet we lose consciousness, when deeply asleep or under anaesthetic. Do we then lose our minds? A strange kind of thought experiment came to me recently when I noticed, without much originality, that upon waking up, it was somewhere between 6 and 7 in the morning, whereas the last time I was aware of myself it was around midnight. During that time I was ‘dead to the world’ as they say. My mind had ceased to exist. If someone had crept into my room during those hours, and gently slit my throat, would there be any real difference to my state?
Of course we know that deep sleep, or unconsciousness, isn’t the same as death, and some of us know a thing or two about REM and the three phases of non-REM sleep, but we don’t know it from experience. What we experience is the same – mostly nothingness. Non-experience. We know, because we have learned, that in those death-like states we still breathe, and blood is still pumped through our bodies. Our mind, though, has gone. We’ve ‘lost’ consciousness. It’s really quite bizarre.
Even so, it’s as common as life. Every animal sleeps, after all. Every animal loses consciousness, so every animal has a consciousness to lose. Fish sleep too, without closing their eyes, as they don’t have eye-shutters like we do. So do birds, insects, crustaceans, worms. They all lose, or greatly reduce, consciousness, so they all have consciousness to lose and recover. They all have experiences to be conscious of and learn from.
So what about plants? I mean, how low can you go? Most scientists today would agree that plant consciousness isn’t a thing, but the boundaries are certainly shifting. Early on in Daniel Dennett’s Kinds of minds he considers the development of consciousness in humans. A human’s life starts when she (or it?) becomes a fertilised egg – that’s to say, one single cell, known as a zygote. Just to confuse us, it’s also known as a diploid cell, as it contains the genetic material from two parents. Let’s accept that zygotes don’t have minds. What about blastulae? They’s mostly undifferentiated globs of cells which – well without getting into details, there’s no mind at this stage, so let’s go on to the foetal stage which starts at around eight weeks, and lasts until birth. That’s a lot of development, and presumably consciousness is one of the things that starts developing at this time, if not before…
Of course it all has to do with neural or brain development in animals. Yet many mysteries remain. Safina tells this story:
A thirty-year-old man named Roger lost about 95% of his cortex due to a brain infection. Roger can’t remember the decade before the infection, can’t taste or smell, and has great difficulty forming new memories. Yet he knows who he is, recognises himself in a mirror and in photographs, and generally acts normal around people. He can use humour and can feel embarrassed. All with a brain that does not resemble a human brain.
So it seems it doesn’t take as much as we think to make us conscious. And of course other consciousnesses, or minds, or even ways of living, can be just as impressively adaptive. Charles Darwin, in the feverish years after his Beagle adventure, was proudly intrigued by the subject, as his notebooks show:
It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another… People often talk of the wonderful event of intellectual Man appearing – the appearance of insects with other senses is more wonderful… Who with the face of the earth covered with the most beautiful savannahs & forests dare to say that intellectuality is only aim in this world…
Needless to say, Darwin was far more circumspect on these matters in his published work. Yet on the subject of plants he surely would’ve been chuffed to learn that, though they have no nervous system, they produce the same chemicals – including serotonin, dopamine and glutamate – essential for neurotransmission in animals like us (Safina, p23).
None of this should surprise us, I suppose, as we’ve come to learn that all life is connected. We have a relationship with every other living being on this planet, which we could trace, if we had all the time in the world…
References
Carl Safina, Beyond words: what animals think and feel, 2016
Daniel Dennett, Kinds of minds: towards an understanding of consciousness, 1996
Janet Browne, Charles Darwin, voyaging, 1995