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The Rtd Quttn
The game shows with uncomfortable realism how we measure our own relative desirability from others ' reactions to us.
Repeated rejection causes us to lower our sights; an unbroken string of successful seductions encourages us to aim a little higher: But it is worth it to get off the Red Queen's treadmill before you drop: Chapter to
THE INTELLECTUAL
CHESS GAME
Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man: A Spirit free, to choose for my own share, What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleased to weare, I'd be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear: Or anything but that vain Animal,
Who is so proud of being rationaclass="underline"
The senses are too gross, and he'll contrive A Sixth, to contradict the other Five;
And before certain instinct, will preferr Reason, which Fifty times for one does err.
—John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
The time: 300,000 years ago: The place: the middle of the Pacific Ocean: The occasion: a conference of bottle-nosed dolphins to discuss the evolution of their own intelligence: The conference was being held over an area of about twelve square miles of ocean so that the participants could fish in between meetings; it was during the squid season: The sessions consisted of long soliloquies by invited speakers followed by a series of commentaries in Squeak, the language of Pacific bottle-noses. Squawk speakers from the Atlantic were able to hear memorized translations at night. The matter at issue was simple: Why did bottle-nosed dolphins have brains that were so much bigger than those of other animals? The bottle-nose brain was twice as large as that of many other dolphins.
The first speaker argued that it was all a matter of language: Dolphins needed big brains to enable them to hold in their heads the concepts and the grammar with which to express themselves: The ensuing commentaries were' merciless: The language theory solved nothing, said the commentators. Whales had complex language, and every dolphin knew how stupid whales were: Only the year before a group of bottle-noses had fooled an old humpback whale into attacking his best friend by sending out soliloquies about infidelity in humpback language: The second squeaker, a male, was more favorably received, for he argued that this was indeed the purpose of dolphin intelligence: to deceive: Are we not, he squeaked, the global masters of deception and manipulation? Do we not spend all our time scheming to outwit one another in the pursuit of female dolphins? Are we not the only species in which " triadic" interac-
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The Red Queen
tions among alliances of individuals are known? The third speaker replied that this was all very laudable, but why us? Why bottle-nosed dolphins? Why not sharks or porpoises? There was a dolphin in the River Ganges whose brain weighed only five hundred grams.
A bottle-nose brain weighed fifteen hundred grams. No, he replied, the answer lay plainly in the fact that of all the creatures on earth, bottle-nosed dolphins were the ones that had the most varied and flexible diet: They could eat squid or fish or . . . well, all sorts of different kinds of fish: That variety demanded flexibility, and flexibility demanded a big brain thaot could learn: The final speaker of the day was scornful of all his predecessors: If social complexity was what required intelligence, why were none of the social animals on land intelligent? The speaker had heard stories of an ape species that was almost as big-brained as dolphins; indeed, for its body size it was even bigger. It lived in bands on the African savanna and used tools and hunted meat as well as gathered plants for food: It even had language of a sort, though with none of the richness of Squeak. It did not, he squeaked drolly, eat fish.'
THE APE THAT MADE IT
Around 18 million years ago there were tens of species of ape living in Africa and many others in Asia: Over the next 15 million years most of them became extinct. A Martian zoologist who arrived in Africa about 3 million years ago would probably have concluded that the apes were bound for the trash heap of history, an outdated model of animal made obsolescent by competition with the monkeys. Even if he noticed that there was one ape, a close relative of the chimpanzee, that walked on two feet, entirely upright, he would not have predicted much of a future for it: For its size, midway between a chimpanzee and an orangutan, the upright ape, known to science now as Australopithecus
afarensis and to the world as " Lucy, "2 had a " normal " brain size: about four hundred cubic centimeters—bigger than the modern THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME
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chimp, smaller than the modern orangutan. Its posture was peculiarly humanlike, undoubtedly, but its head was not. Apart from its uncannily human legs and feet, we would not have had any trouble thinking of it as an ape. Yet over the next 3 million years the heads of its descendants exploded in size. Brain capacity doubled in the first 2 million years and almost doubled again in the next million, to reach the fourteen hundred cubic centimeters of modern people.
The heads of chimps, gorillas, and orangutans stayed roughly the same. So did the other descendant of Lucy 's species, the so-called robust australopithecines, or nutcracker people, who became specialist plant eaters.
What caused the sudden and spectacular expansion of that one ape 's head, from which so much else flowed? Why did it happen to one ape and not another? What can account for the astonishing speed, and the accelerating speed of the change? These questions may seem to have nothing to do with the subject of this book, but the answer may lie with sex. If new theories are right, the evolution of man 's big head was the result of a Red Queen sexual contest between individuals of the same gender.
On one level the evolution of big-headedness in man 's ancestors is easily explained. Those that had big heads had more young than those that did not. The young, inheriting the big heads, therefore had bigger heads than their parents ' generation. This process, moving in fits and starts, faster in some:places than in others, eventually caused the trebling of the brain capacity of man.
It could have happened no other way. But the intriguing thing is what made the big-brained people likely to have more children than the small-brained ones. After all, as a diverse array of observers from Charles Darwin to Lee Kwan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore, have noted with regret, clever people are not noticeably more prolific breeders than stupid people.
A time-traveling Martian could go back and examine the three consecutive descendants of Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo
erectus, and so-called archaic Homo sapiens. He would find a steady progression in brain size—that much we know from the fossils—
and he would be able to tell us what the clever ones were using