Graham Bell, an English biologist working in Montreal, has THE ENIGMA
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dubbed this traditional theory the "Vicar of Bray " hypothesis after a fictional sixteenth-century cleric who was quick to adapt to the prevailing religious winds, switching between Protestant and Catholic rites as the ruling monarch changed. Like the flexible vic-ar, sexual animals are said to be adaptable and quick to change. The Vicar of Bray orthodoxy survived for almost a century; it still survives in biology textbooks. The precise moment when it was first questioned is hard to pin down for sure. There were doubts as far back as the 1920s. Only gradually did it dawn on modern biologists that the Weismann logic was profoundly flawed. It seems to treat evolution as some kind of imperative, as if evolving were what species exist to do—as if evolving were a goal imposed on existence.'
This is, of course, nonsense. Evolution is something that happens to organisms. It is a directionless process that sometimes makes an animal 's descendants more complicated, sometimes simpler, and sometimes changes them not at alclass="underline" We are so steeped in notions of progress and self-improvement that we find it strangely hard to accept this. But nobody has told the coelacanth, a fish that lives off Madagascar and looks exactly like its ancestors of 300
million years ago, that it has broken some law by not "evolving. "
The notion that evolution simply cannot go fast enough, and its corollary that a coelacanth is a failure because it did not become a human being, is easily refuted. As Darwin noticed, mankind has intervened dramatically to speed up evolution, producing hundreds of breeds of dogs, from chihuahuas to St. Bernards, in an evolutionary eye blink: That alone is evidence that evolution was not going as fast as it could. Indeed, the coelacanth, far from being a flop, is rather a success: It has stayed the same—a design that persists without innovation, like a Volkswagen beetle. Evolving is not a goal but a means to solving a problem.
Nonetheless, Weismann 's followers, and especially Sir Ronald Fisher and Hermann Muller, could escape the teleology trap by arguing that evolution, if not preordained, was at least essential.
Asexual species were at a disadvantage and would fail in competition with sexual species. By incorporating the concept of the gene
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Tbt Red Queen
into Weismann 's argument, Fisher 's book in 1930 8 and Muller's in 19329 laid out a seemingly watertight argument for the advantages of sex, and Muller even went as far as to declare the problem emphatically solved by the new science of genetics. Sexual species shared their newly invented genes among all individuals; asexual ones did not. So sexual species were like groups of inventors pool-ing their resources. If one man invented a steam erigine and another a railway, then the two could come together. Asexual ones behaved like groups of jealous inventors who never shared their knowledge, so that steam locomotives were used on roads and horses dragged carts along railways.
In 1965, James Crow and Motoo Kimura modernized the Fisher-Muller logic by demonstrating with mathematical models how rare mutations could come together in sexual species but not in asexual ones. The sexual species does not have to wait for two rare events in the same individual but can combine them from different individuals: This, they said, would grant the sexual species an advantage over the asexual ones as long as there were at least one thousand individuals in the sexual ones. All was hunky-dory. Sex was explained, as an aid to evolution, and modern mathematics was adding new precision. The case could be considered closed.'°
MANKIND'S GREATEST RIVAL IS MANKIND
So it might have remained were it not for a voluminous and influential publication by a Scottish biologist named V. C. Wynne Edwards that had appeared a few years before, in 1962. Wynne Edwards did biology an enormous service by exposing a gigantic fallacy that had systematically infected the very heart of evolutionary theory since Darwin 's day. He exposed the fallacy not to demolish it but because he believed it to be true and important. But in so doing he made it explicit for the first time."
The fallacy persists in the way many laymen speak of evolution. We talk blithely among ourselves about evolution being a question of the "survival of the species. " We imply that species THE ENIGMA
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compete with each other, that Darwin 's "struggle for existence " is between dinosaurs and mammals, or between rabbits and foxes, or between men and neanderthals. We borrow the imagery of nation-states and football teams: Germany against France, the home team against its rivals.
Charles Darwin, too, slipped occasionally into this way of thinking: The very subtitle of On the Origin of Species refers to the
" preservation of favored races.' But his main focus was on the individual, not the species. Every creature differs from every other; some survive or thrive more readily than others and leave more young behind; if those changes are heritable, gradual change is inevitable. Darwin 's ideas were later fused with the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, who had proved that heritable features came in dis-crete packages, which became known as genes, forming a theory that was able to explain how new mutations in genes spread through a whole species.
But there lay buried beneath this theory an unexamined dichotomy. When the fittest are struggling to survive, with whom are they competing? With other members of their species or with members of other species?
A gazelle on the African savanna is trying not to be eaten by cheetahs, but it is also trying to outrun other gazelles when a cheetah attacks. What matters to the gazelle is being faster than other gazelles, not being faster than cheetahs. (There is an old story of a philosopher who runs when a bear charges him and his friend: "It's no good, you 'll never outrun a bear, " says the logical friend: "I don't have to, " replies the philosopher: " I only have to outrun you. ") In the same way, psychologists sometimes wonder why people are endowed with the ability to learn the part of Ham-let or understand calculus when neither skill was of much use to mankind in the primitive conditions where his intellect was shaped.
Einstein would probably have been as hopeless as anybody in working out how to catch a woolly rhinoceros: Nicholas Humphrey, a Cambridge psychologist, was the first to see clearly the solution to this puzzle: We use our intellects not to solve practical problems but to outwit each other: Deceiving people, detecting deceit, under-
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The Red Queen
standing people 's motives, manipulating people—these are what the intellect is used for. So what matters is not how clever and crafty you are but how much more clever and craftier you are than other people. The value of intellect is infinite. Selection within the species is always going to be more important than selection between the species."
Now this may seem a false dichotomy. After all, the best thing an individual animal can do for its species is to survive and breed. Often, however, the two imperatives will be in conflict. Suppose the individual is a tigress whose territory has recently been invaded by another tigress. Does she welcome the intruder and discuss how best they can cohabit the territory, sharing prey? No, she fights her to the death, which from the point of view of the species is unhelpful. Or suppose the individual is an eaglet of a rare species anxiously watched by conservationists in its nest. Eaglets often kill their younger brothers and sisters in the nest. Good for the individual, bad for the species.
Throughout the world of animals, individuals are fighting individuals, whether of the same species or of another. And indeed, the closest competitor a creature is ever likely to meet is a member of its own species. Natural selection is not going to pick genes that help gazelles survive as a species but hurt the chances of individuals—because such genes will be wiped out long before they can show their benefits. Species are not fighting species as nations battle other nations.