Nature via Nurture: Genes, experience and what makes us human. Matt Ridley
to experience. They are both cause and consequence of our actions. Somehow the adherents of the ‘nurture’ side of the argument have scared themselves silly at the power and inevitability of genes, and missed the greatest lesson of all: the genes are on their side.
CHAPTER ONE The paragon of animals
Is man no more than this? Consider him well: Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume:—Ha! here’s three of us are sophisticated!—Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.
King Lear1
Similarity is the shadow of difference. Two things are similar by virtue of their difference from another; or different by virtue of one’s similarity to a third. So it is with individuals. A short man is different from a tall man, but two men seem similar if contrasted with a woman. So it is with species. A man and a woman may be very different, but by comparison with a chimpanzee, it is their similarities that strike the eye – the hairless skin, the upright stance, the prominent nose. A chimpanzee, in turn, is similar to a human being when contrasted with a dog: the face, the hands, the 32 teeth, and so on. And a dog is like a person to the extent that both are unlike a fish. Difference is the shadow of similarity.
Consider, then, the feelings of a naïve young man, as he stepped ashore in Tierra del Fuego on 18 December 1832 for his first encounter with what we would now call hunter-gatherers, or what he would call ‘man in a state of nature’. Better still, let him tell us the story:
It was without exception the most curious & interesting spectacle I ever beheld. I would not have believed how entire the difference between savage & civilized man is. It is much greater than between a wild & domesticated animal, in as much as in man there is greater power of improvement…I believe if the world was searched, no lower grade of man could be found.2
The effect on Charles Darwin was all the more shocking, because these were not the first Fuegian natives he had seen. He had shared a ship with three who had been transported to Britain, dressed in frocks and coats and taken to meet the king. To Darwin they were just as human as any other person. Yet here were their relatives, suddenly seeming so much less human. They reminded him of…well, of animals. A month later, on finding the camp site of a single Fuegian limpet hunter in an even more remote spot, he wrote in his diary: ‘We found the place where he had slept – it positively afforded no more protection than the form of a hare. How very little are the habits of such a being superior to those of an animal.’3 Suddenly, he is writing not just about difference (between civilised and savage man), but about similarity – the affinity between such a man and an animal. The Fuegian is so different from the Cambridge graduate that he begins to seem similar to an animal.
Six years after his encounter with the Fuegian natives, in the spring of 1838, Darwin visited London Zoo and there for the first time saw a great ape. It was an orang-utan named Jenny, and it was the second ape to be brought to the zoo. Its predecessor, Tommy, a chimpanzee, was exhibited at the zoo for a few months in 1835 before he died of tuberculosis. Jenny was acquired by the zoo in 1837, and like Tommy she caused a small sensation in London society. She seemed such a human animal, or was it such a beastly person? Apes posed uncomfortable questions about the distinction between people and animals, between reason and instinct. Jenny featured on the cover of the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, where the editorial reassured readers that ‘extraordinary as the Orang may be compared with its fellows of the brute creation, still in nothing does it trench upon the moral or mental provinces of man’. Queen Victoria, who saw a different orang-utan at the zoo in 1842, begged to differ. She described it as ‘frightful and painfully and disagreeably human’.4
After his first encounter with Jenny in 1838, Darwin returned to the zoo twice more a few months later. He came armed with a mouth organ, some peppermint and a sprig of verbena. Jenny seemed to appreciate all three. She seemed ‘astonished beyond measure’ at her reflection in a mirror. He wrote in his notebook: ‘Let man visit Ouran-outang in domestication…see its intelligence…and then let him boast of his proud pre-eminence…Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. More humble and I believe true to consider him created from animals.’ He was applying to animals what he had been taught to apply to geology: the uniformitarian principle that the forces shaping the landscape today are the same as those that shaped the distant past. Later that September, while reading Malthus’s essay on population, he had his sudden insight into what we now know as natural selection.
Jenny had played her part. When she took the mouth organ from him and placed it to her lips, she had helped him realise how high above the brute some animals could rise, just as the Fuegians had made him realise how low beneath civilisation some humans could sink. Was there a gap at all?
He was not the first person to think this way. Indeed, a Scottish judge, Lord Monboddo, had speculated in the 1790s that orang-utans could speak – if educated. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was only one of several Enlightenment philosophers who wondered if apes were not continuous with ‘savages’. But it was Darwin who changed the way human beings think of their own nature. Within his lifetime, he saw educated opinion come to accept that human bodies were those of just another ape modified by descent from a common ancestor.
But Darwin had less success in persuading his fellow human beings that the same argument could apply to the mind. His consistent view, from his earliest notebooks after reading David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature to his last book, about earthworms, was that there was similarity, rather than difference, between human and animal behaviour. He tried the same mirror test on his children that he had tried on Jenny. He continually speculated on the animal parallels and evolutionary origins of human emotions, gestures, motives and habits. As he stated plainly, the mind needed evolution as much as the body did.
But in this he was deserted by many of his supporters, the psychologist William James being a notable exception. Alfred Russel Wallace, for example, the co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection, argued that the human mind was too complex to be the product of natural selection. It must instead be a supernatural creation. Wallace’s reasoning was both attractive and logical. It was based on similarity and difference again. Wallace was remarkable for his time in being mostly devoid of racial prejudice. He had lived among natives of South America and South-East Asia and he thought of them as equals, morally if not always intellectually. This led him to the belief that all races of humanity had similar mental abilities, which puzzled him because it implied that in most ‘primitive’ societies, the great part of human intelligence went unused. What was the point of being able to read or do long division if you were going to spend all your life in a tropical jungle? Ergo, said Wallace, ‘some higher intelligence directed the process by which the human race was developed’.5
We now know that Wallace’s assumption was entirely right, where Darwin’s was wrong. The gap between the ‘lowest’ human and the ‘highest’ ape is enormous. Genealogically, we all descend from a very recent common ancestor who lived just 150,000 years ago, whereas the last common ancestor with a chimpanzee lived at least five million years ago. Genetically, the differences between a human being and a chimpanzee are at least ten times as numerous as those between the two most dissimilar human beings. But Wallace’s deduction from this assumption, that therefore the human mind required a different kind of explanation from the animal mind, is not warranted. Just because two animals are different does not mean they cannot also be similar.
René Descartes had decreed firmly in the seventeenth century that people were rational and animals were automata. ‘They act not from knowledge but from the disposition of their organs…Brutes not only have a smaller degree of reason than men, but are wholly lacking in it.’