by Daniel Quinn
“Right.”
“Again, this sort of strategy evolves because it works—again and again, for all sorts of species, and very probably all over the universe.”
“Yes, that makes sense.”
Ishmael paused to think for a moment. “What I’m pointing out is that, if you were to take the journey you fantasized in your daydream, you’d find the same general evolutionary background everywhere, because everywhere (and not just on this planet) evolution is a process that intrinsically and invariably brings forth what works, and what works is not going to vary dramatically from one planet to the next. Wherever you go in the universe, you’ll find species going out of existence by failing but never coming into existence by failing. Wherever you go in the universe, you’ll find it never pays to fight to the death over every morsel of food.”
I closed my eyes and settled back in my chair to ponder that for a while. When I came to, I said, “You’re telling me something about the wisdom I would have found if I’d been able to take that galactic journey in fact.”
He nodded. “Yes. In a sense, the two of us are taking that journey right here, without leaving the ground. To proceed … In my initial examination of the competition strategies of Awks, I felt it best to postpone the very important element of territoriality. I’d like to catch up on that now. Humans often misunderstand animal territoriality by thinking of it in human terms. A human group will tend to start out by finding a territory for themselves—a place to call their own. They carve out a piece of real estate and say, ‘This territory is ours, and we’ll defend everything in it.’ People therefore assume that an animal is making the same sort of statement when it goes about marking a territory with its scent. This anthropomorphism leads to much confusion. This is not only because animals are incapable of this level of abstraction, but also because they know nothing about territories and have no interest in territories. To begin at the beginning, an animal never goes looking for territory as such—a place to call its own. It goes looking for food and mates, and when it finds them, it draws a circle around them that says to conspecific rivals, ‘The resources inside this circle are taken and will be defended.’ It doesn’t give a hang about the acreage itself, and if the resources in it disappeared, the animal would walk away from it without a backward glance.”
“That seems obvious enough,” I offered.
Ishmael shrugged. “Every path is plain once it’s been opened. However, having established that there is a difference, we can proceed as if it didn’t matter. For the most part, animals defending their resources act exactly as if they were defending a territory. We can begin by noting that animals don’t defend their territory against all the thousands of species that invade it—they couldn’t and they don’t need to. The only species they must defend it against is their own, for reasons we’ve already noted.
“Territoriality adds another dimension to conspecific conflict. Forty years ago the great Dutch zoologist Nikolaas Tinbergen constructed a marvelous demonstration of this, using two male sticklebacks that had built breeding nests at opposite ends of an aquarium. Tinbergen used two glass cylinders to trap the sticklebacks and move them around the aquarium. Let’s call them Red and Blue. When he brought Red and Blue together in their cylinders at the center of the tank, they reacted with equal hostility to each other. But when he moved them toward Red’s nest, their behavior began to change. Red tried to attack, and Blue tried to retreat. When he moved them to the vicinity of Blue’s nest, their roles reversed: Blue tried to attack, and Red tried to retreat. (This, by the way, also demonstrates the ‘territorial’ fallacy; the sticklebacks are clearly not contesting water.) This is the element that territoriality adds to the strategy typically followed by conspecifics in conflict: ‘If you’re the resident, attack; if you’re the intruder, withdraw.’ If you have a dog or a cat, you will have seen this strategy enacted many times in the vicinity of your home.”
“Yes—but speaking of cats and dogs raises a question about animals and territoriality. Cats and dogs will often insist on going back to an old home even after their human family has moved on to a new one.”
Ishmael nodded. “You’re absolutely right, Julie. I wasn’t thinking about domesticated animals when I made those remarks. Domesticated animals display a very human attitude toward territory, and of course this is largely what makes them domesticated. The very term to domesticate means ‘to attach or accustom to a home.’ If they’re abandoned and allowed to run wild, however, you’ll see them quickly shed this attachment-to-home as utterly unworkable for them in the feral state.”
“Yeah, I see that,” I said.
“Let’s get back to Calliope and the Awks,” Ishmael said. “As it happens, some five million years have passed since our last visit, and important climatic changes have taken place. The unbroken forest canopy that once sheltered the Awks is gone, but it didn’t disappear so quickly that the Awks were unable to adapt to the changes this brought about. What we see now is a species that lives on the ground rather than in the trees, and since they really constitute a distinct species, we should give them a new name. Let’s call them Bawks. These Bawks are no longer able to elude predators by scattering nimbly into the forest canopy the way their ancestors did. Back then it was every animal for itself, and that worked perfectly. But now they must stand together and defend themselves as a troop, and an individual that takes off on its own is very probably going to be the very one that is picked off by a predator.
“The Bawks’ ancestors ate whatever came to hand in the trees—fruits, nuts, leaves, and a wide variety of insects. They weren’t quite nimble enough to catch adult birds, but unguarded nestlings were a favored treat. As they were gradually forced down out of the trees in search of food, they continued to eat whatever came to hand, but conditions were very different on the ground. To begin with, food didn’t just fall into their hands the way it used to. And on the ground they had many more competitors for what was available. They had to become more adventurous eaters. Many of their competitors were perfectly good to eat, but they were also harder to catch, because Bawks were not nearly as nimble on the ground as they had been in the trees. The Bawks gradually developed something to compensate for their individual lack of speed, and that was the teamwork that would make them successful hunters—something their ancestors had never needed to be.
“The nature of competition among them has changed. Although individuals still compete with other individuals for resources, each individual’s overall success also depends on cooperating with other individuals to assure the success of the troop. As I’ve mentioned, Awks just scattered into the forest canopy when attacked, but Bawks aren’t fast enough on the ground to do that. They have to stand together and fight as a team. Awks were strictly individual foragers, which worked perfectly well in the trees, but Bawks, confined to the ground, have better success foraging in teams. Now we see that the state of competition isn’t primarily individual against individual but rather troop against troop. Nevertheless, although the competitive unit has changed, the strategies are the same: ‘If your troop is the resident, attack; if it’s the intruder, retreat. If neither troop is resident or intruder, follow a mixed strategy. Threaten the other troop, and if it retreats, fine. But if it threatens back, then attack sometimes and back down sometimes. Or if threatened yourselves, threaten back sometimes and retreat sometimes.’ These strategies enable troops of Bawks to live side by side without either overrunning each other or being overrun. At the same time they can compete for the resources they need without having to fight to the death for every little thing.”
“Yes, I see,” said I, bravely keeping up my end of things.
“We now leave Calliope and return five million years later. After doing a little exploring, we discover that the Bawks are still thriving, but one branch of them has evolved into a new species that we’ll call Cawks. I won’t try to theorize about what pressure prompted this evolutionary development. It should be enough for us that it has occurred. Cawks
in most ways seem closer to Bawks than Bawks did to Awks, which you’ll remember lived in trees, foraged as individuals, and scattered when attacked. Cawks are like Bawks in that they live on the ground, forage in teams, and fight shoulder to shoulder when attacked. Cawks have simply taken these tendencies a giant step forward. These are cultural beings. This means that the parents of every generation transmit to their children what they learned from their own parents, together with anything new they learn during their lifetime. What they transmit is an accumulation of material from various periods in their past. For example, every child learns that the branch of a certain tree can be stripped of leaves and used as a sort of fishing pole to gather ants from a nest. This technique dates back three or four million years. Every child learns how to cure the hide of an animal so that it can be used for strapping or clothing, and this technique is two or three million years old. Every child learns how to fabricate twine from the bark of a tree, how to start a fire, how to turn a stone into a cutting tool, how to make a spear and a spear thrower, and these techniques are all a million years old. Thousands of arts and techniques—of various ages—are transmitted from one generation to the next.
“Although the Cawks live in groups like their predecessors, the Bawks, it wouldn’t be correct to call them troops, because troops are basically the same from one to another. The Cawks live in tribes—the Jays, the Kays, the Ells, the Emms, the Enns, and so on—each very different from all the others. Each tribe has its own distinctive cultural collection that it passes on from one generation to the next, along with the various techniques I mentioned a moment ago, which are the common heritage of all Awks. The tribal heritage includes songs, stories, myths, and customs that may be tens of thousands of years old or even hundreds of thousands of years old. When we come upon them in the present moment, these are not literate peoples, and even if they were, their records wouldn’t go back tens of thousands of years. If you ask them how old these things are, they’d only be able to say that no one knows. These are things that, as far as they’re concerned, go back to the dawn of time. As far as the Jays know, they’ve literally been around forever. The same is true of the Kays, the Ells, the Emms, and all the rest.
“There are certain differences between tribe and tribe that seem rather arbitrary. One tribe likes basket-weave pots, another likes corded pots. One tribe likes weavings that are primarily black and white, another likes more colorful weavings. But there are other differences that seem much more crucial. In one tribe, lineage is reckoned through the mother; in another, it’s reckoned through the father. In one tribe, elders have a special voice in tribal affairs; in another tribe, all adults have an equal voice. One tribe operates under hereditary rule, another has a chief who rules until he’s bested in single combat. Among the Emms, your key relatives are your mother and your uncles on your mother’s side, and your father is of no special importance. Among the Ells, men and women never cohabit as husbands and wives; men live together in one longhouse, and women live together in another. One tribe practices polyandry (many husbands), another polygyny (many wives). And so on and on.
“Even more important than all these things are tribal laws, which have only one thing in common: They’re not lists of things that are prohibited but rather procedures for handling problems that inevitably arise in communal life. What do you do when someone is constantly disrupting the peace with his or her bad temper? What do you do when a spouse has been unfaithful? What do you do when someone has injured or killed another tribal member? Unlike the laws you know, Julie, these laws were never formulated by any committee. Rather, they grew up among the tribal members the way strategies for competition grew up—by a steady winnowing out of what didn’t work, of what didn’t accomplish what people wanted—over tens of thousands of years. In a very real sense, the Ells are the laws of the Ells. Or even better, the laws of each tribe represent the will of the tribe. Their laws make utter sense to them in the context of their entire culture. The laws of the Ells wouldn’t make sense to the Emms, but what difference does that make? The Emms have their own laws, which make utter sense to them, though they’re clearly very different from those of the Ells or anyone else.
“It will be hard for you to imagine such a thing, but the laws of each tribe are completely sufficient for them. Because they’ve been formulated over the entire lifetime of the tribe, thousands of years, it’s almost inconceivable that some situation could arise that has never been faced before. Nothing is more important for each generation than to receive the law in its entirety. By becoming Enns or Emms, the youth of each generation are imbued with the will of the tribe. The tribal laws represent what it means to be an Ell or a Kay. These are not your laws, Julie, which are largely useless, widely ignored and despised, and forever subject to change. These are laws that do what laws are supposed to do, year after year, generation after generation, age after age.”
“Well,” I said, “that sounds great, I guess, but it also sounds sort of stagnant. To be honest.”
Ishmael nodded. “Of course I want you to be honest, Julie. Always. Remember, however, that in every case these laws represent the will of the tribe, not the will of some outsider. No one forces them to embrace these laws. No court will send them to jail if they scrap their heritage. They’re perfectly free to abandon it anytime they want to.”
“Okay.”
“Only one thing remains to be done before we quit for the day, and that is to examine competition among the Cawks. The patterns that have evolved among them are very similar to those that prevail among the Bawks. Within the tribe, what works best for every individual is to support and defend the tribe; even though each tribal member needs the same resources, his or her best way to get them is to cooperate with other tribal members. As with the Bawks, whose competition is troop against troop, competition among the Cawks is tribe against tribe. In this area we notice that a new strategy is in play in addition to the ones we’re familiar with. This might be described as a strategy of erratic retaliation: ‘Give as good as you get, but don’t be too predictable.’
“In practice, give as good as you get means that if the Emms aren’t bothering you, don’t bother them, but if the Emms do bother you, then be sure to return the favor. Don’t be too predictable means that even if the Emms aren’t bothering you, it will be no bad thing if you make a hostile move against them from time to time. They will of course retaliate, giving as good as they get, but this is just a price to be paid for letting them know that you’re there and haven’t gotten soft. Then, once the score is even between you, you can get together for a big reconciliation party to celebrate your undying friendship and do some matchmaking (because, of course, it doesn’t do to breed endlessly within a single tribe).
“Although the strategy of the ‘Erratic Retaliator’ may sound rather combative, it’s actually a peacekeeping strategy. Think of two people who are quarreling over whether to go to a movie or to a play. Instead of settling the argument with blows, they flip a coin, agreeing beforehand that they’ll go to a movie if it’s heads and to a play if it’s tails. The same purpose is served by agreeing to attack if you’re the resident and to flee if you’re the intruder. Combat is avoided if both parties follow the same strategy. Even so, if you spend a year observing the Jays, the Kays, the Ells, the Emms, the Enns, the Ohhs, and so on, what you see is that they seem to be in a state of more or less constant but very low-level warfare with each other. I don’t mean daily or even monthly warfare, though there will be border skirmishes as frequently as that. I mean that every tribe exists in a state of perpetual readiness. And once or twice a year every tribe will initiate a raid against one or more of its neighbors. To a person of your culture, this will seem puzzling. A person of your culture will want to know when the Cawks are at last going to settle their differences and learn to live in peace. And the answer is that the Cawks will settle their differences and learn to live in peace as soon as mountain sheep settle their differences and learn to live in peace and as soon as st
icklebacks settle their differences and learn to live in peace and as soon as elephant seals settle their differences and learn to live in peace. In other words, the competitive strategies practiced among the Cawks mustn’t be viewed as disorders, as character defects, as ‘problems’ to be solved, any more than the competitive strategies of white-footed mice, wolves, or elk are these things. Far from being defects to be eliminated, they are what is left over when all other strategies are eliminated. In short, they’re evolutionarily stable. They work for the Cawks. They’ve been tested for millions of years, and every other strategy tested against them has been eliminated as a failure.”
“Whew,” I said. “That sounds like a climax.”
“It is,” Ishmael said. “One last point and we’ll call it a day. Why do the Enns just retaliate to attacks from their neighbors and occasionally initiate an attack of their own? Why don’t they just go ahead and annihilate their neighbors?”
“Why would they do that?”
Ishmael shook his head. “That’s not the right question, Julie. It doesn’t matter why they’d do it. The question is, why wouldn’t it work? Or maybe it would work. Maybe it would work better than the other strategy. This time, instead of just raiding the Emms, the Jays go in there and wipe them out.”
“That changes the game entirely,” I said.
“Go on.”
“That would be like agreeing to flip a coin and then refusing to abide by the call.”
“Why is that, Julie?”
“Because Emms can’t retaliate if you wipe them out. The game is, ‘You know I’ll retaliate if you attack me, and I know you’ll retaliate if I attack you.’ But if I wipe you out, then you can’t retaliate. The game’s off.”
