Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You: A Lively Tour Through the Dark Side of the Natural World

by Riskin, Dan

  7

  PRIDE

  Rise Up, Meat Robots

  Ever since I started writing this book, I’ve been trying to reconcile the harshness of nature with the love I experience when I spend time with Sam. The examples I’ve uncovered along the way have made it even more clear to me than ever just how horrible we creatures of nature can be, but I’ve kept my eyes open for that one exception—just one nonhuman species with compassion beyond its own DNA’s needs. If such an animal could be found, then maybe true fatherly love—something more than the DNA-driven self-interests of a dad—might exist. I looked for that exception everywhere, but writing this book, the closest I ever got was vampire bats.

  As we discussed in the chapter on sloth, vampire bats share food with unrelated members of their own species. However, this can’t be counted as selfless behavior because by participating in the food-sharing program, bats end up receiving food from other bats on the nights they fail to find food themselves. The fact that bats end up helping nonrelatives is, if anything, just an emergent phenomenon that happens when the bats act selfishly.

  Clearly vampires weren’t the selfless animals I was looking for, but if a selfless animal does exist, I figured Gerry Carter would know about it. Gerry, an undergrad during my PhD on vampire bats, helped me during fieldwork in Trinidad. He has since started a PhD of his own, focused on the food-sharing behavior of the vampire bats. He’s very smart, and he’s been working his way through experiments and literature surveys, all concerning the question of animal kindness. No one knows more about that stuff than Gerry does.

  I called Gerry up and asked him if he knew of any animal that willingly performs a behavior that helps the DNA of other animals, even though it comes at a cost to its own DNA’s survival. As I had suspected, he confirmed that he had never come across such an example. Sometimes an individual would sacrifice itself to help another individual, like the Leptothorax worker ants (from the chapter on envy) that sacrifice themselves to protect their queen. But cases like those all result in the DNA getting passed on. Gerry hadn’t seen a single example of self-sacrifice where the costs to the animal’s DNA outweighed the benefits.

  To me, that was the nail in the coffin. Animals are selfish, so pure love, with no strings attached, can’t exist out there. What I feel for Sam is just another case of an animal looking after its DNA.

  I told him a bit about this book and what his answer meant for my book’s conclusion, that my love for Sam was really nothing special. Sometimes science doesn’t give you the answer you were hoping for.

  Gerry laughed for a second, then without pausing, told me that he wholeheartedly disagreed.

  “Just because you understand the mechanism doesn’t make it imaginary. You just identified where it came from. How does that make it any less authentic? Have you ever heard Feynman talk about a flower?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, it’s the same thing.”

  I knew the Feynman thing Gerry was talking about quite well. I’d tried to use it in conversations about the value of science many times. It comes from a slightly grainy filmed interview with the brilliant Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman, who, smiling as he always seemed to be, talks about the aesthetics of science.I An artist friend, he says, has argued that a scientist can’t appreciate a flower because he takes it all apart until it becomes dull. Feynman, in his disarming New York City accent, says,

  I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more . . . I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions [by] which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery, and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

  Feynman’s view is the opposite of “Ignorance is bliss.” To him, every new understanding you have about something makes it more mysterious and wonderful. To Feynman, the questions we ask about a flower are wonderful, but there’s no reason to fear that we’ll lose that wonder if the questions are answered, because every time you learn something new, you’re rewarded with new, deeper mysteries that engage you even more. Scientists don’t get bored after learning about the world. They just keep digging deeper. And the deeper they dig, the more wonderful the mysteries get.

  I thought back to the first time I saw those vampire bats—how seeing their faces was enriched by all the scientific facts I’d read about them. So why, then, was I having the opposite reaction to information about fatherly love? Why was knowing about evolution making me think my love for Sam was less beautiful instead of more beautiful? Gerry’s argument was to consider Feynman’s ode to a flower as advice to a father. The fact that I understand the evolutionary origins of love should not have to “subtract” from its beauty. Knowing that my love for Sam comes from millions of years of evolution, if anything, should make that love more real.

  One of the things I’ve loved most about my life in science has been the quality of the friends I’ve made. It’s wonderful to spend time with smart people who challenge you and force you to question your own beliefs. I’d been plowing through scientific papers, weaving their stories together for this book, and been unable to resolve this crisis about Sam. But Gerry could instantly see the flawed assumption my crisis was based upon. Maybe he’d spent time thinking about this very problem for his research, or maybe he just understood my situation better because he’s not a dad, so he wasn’t caught up in it. Either way, I’d assumed that a father’s love could not be pure and real if it had been built by the selfish process of biological evolution. By asking me to defend that assumption, Gerry made my whole argument crumble.

  That conversation with Gerry was like flicking a switch in my brain. If a bear bites me with the teeth that were built by evolution, the pain I feel is real. By the same token, if I love my son with emotions that evolved, that love is real too.

  When I had that botfly in my head, there was a thrill the whole time. I was participating in the bloodbath of nature. I was really experiencing what it meant to be a creature on this planet. I was doing battle with a parasite, and even though it kind of sucked, it was fun. I felt like I was part of nature. And yet when I took part in the oldest tradition that life forms have, the tradition of reproducing, I somehow talked myself into believing I wasn’t part of nature anymore. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Having Sam has given me a new way of connecting to the natural world.

  There are seven deadly sins, and so far I’ve done my best to convince you that nature does a better job committing them than humans do. But I’ve only made it through six of the seven, and when it comes to pride, I think humans might actually take the trophy.

  Pride is the idea that you’re different from everyone else and that the normal rules shouldn’t apply to you. This is where humans really shine. We once believed (and some people still believe) that Earth is at the center of the universe, that a God created us separately from the animals, and that humans have souls but animals do not. Each time scientists have uncovered evidence that has chipped away at one of those theories, society has taken decades or even centuries to accept the facts. We now know that we live on a rock that floats vulnerably in space, that we’re built of molecules, and that our thoughts result from electrical impulses. If you want to feel important, those are tough pills to swallow, and humans haven’t had a very easy time letting go of their pride to accept those ideas.

  But even among those revelations, the theory of evolution seems to have been especially hard for humans to accept. With more than 150 years of scientific progress since Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, the theory
of evolution by means of natural selection still ruffles feathers. Natural selection is the only plausible explanation scientists have come up with to make sense of their observations of the natural world. In the century and a half since it was proposed, that theory has been tested over and over and over again, but no one has succeeded in proving it wrong. That’s why scientists treat it as a fact.II But despite that overwhelming avalanche of evidence, there are still millions of otherwise well-educated people who refuse to accept that evolution happens. We might be fine with the idea that the Earth goes around the sun, but society still hasn’t completed its transition to acceptance of evolution.

  Perhaps one reason that people tend to use the word natural in such a positive way is that it’s a way of helping us through that transition. Saying that nature is wonderful lets us accept that we evolved from nature without letting go of the idea that we’re special. Instead of saying we’re just lowly animals, we’ve elevated the other living things to a spiritual plane on par with godliness. It’s not such a blow to your ego to acknowledge that you evolved from nature if you tell yourself that nature is perfect.

  The truth of the matter, though, is that the creatures of Earth are playing dirty with one another, fighting over the energy necessary to make DNA copies of themselves. They’re not holy, benign creatures working together in harmony. It looks like that from a distance, just as New York looks clean from its skyline, but down at Earth’s street level the creatures are locked in a high-stakes battle. It’s a bloodbath, and we evolved in the midst of it. But however ruthless the nature we evolved in might be, I think human pride is warranted.

  We are different from the other living creatures. The normal rules don’t have to apply to us. Just because we evolved in nature doesn’t mean we can’t break new ground. In fact, human pride might be just the thing we need to save nature from us.

  The mice of Gough Island are doomed because they’re going to eat themselves out of house and home. Just think what would be possible if they could stop, realize the path they’re on, and make adjustments as a group. They can’t, though. They’re mice. Even though it would benefit all of them to back off on the meat consumption and bring their populations under control, natural selection just can’t get them there. Even though in the long term, all mice could win by taking that strategy, eating less or having fewer babies would cause conscientious mice to lose out to any mice that kept on being selfish jerks. Evolution, as a process, can’t deal with problems like that. The mice won’t be saved by their own instincts.

  But we’re not mice. Instead of pretending we are, let’s use our massive brains to come up with some solutions. Let’s stop assuming our natural instincts are the way to go and start acting intelligently. Let’s have a little pride in humanity.

  Earth’s human population hovered around 1 billion for centuries, but our numbers have been rapidly climbing ever since the Industrial Revolution. Today there are 7 billion of us. Throughout our expansion, we’ve wiped out animals and plants everywhere we’ve gone, and that decimation continues to this day. Humans have wiped out big, charismatic animals every time we’ve arrived on a new island or continent, but that doesn’t mean we need to do that to the whole planet.

  Part of the problem is that we can live our lives with no accountability for the environmental consequences of our choices. The person who uses the remote starter to warm up their SUV for forty-five minutes before driving it to work will wake up in ten years on the same planet as the person who rode a bike to work all winter. People get their benefits as individuals, but we all pay the costs together, same as the doomed mice of Gough Island.III

  The problem’s not just fossil fuel emissions either. Humans are killing rhinos, elephants, gorillas, and countless other endangered animals for no reason other than to make a few bucks. Put another way, those of us in the Western world have allowed things to get so unfair that while I stop at a Starbucks drive-through on the way home to get a fifth of my daily required calories from a sugar-filled iced drink, someone on the other side of the world is eating an endangered fruit bat because they have no other way to get the protein. That’s where acting “naturally” has gotten humans so far.

  We have a choice. One option is to keep on focusing on the short term and let the planet fend for itself against our selfish individual wants and needs. It’s not like the world would end. Sure, we won’t have pandas or tigers or blue whales anymore, but evolution will continue, just as it has after other extinctions, and in a few million years, some new group will start to fill the roles in nature vacated by the animals we know today.

  The alternative, though (am I hitting you hard enough over the head with this?), is for us to stop acting like mice and treat biodiversity as though it matters. We need to act as though nature has value beyond calories or dollars, even though our DNA doesn’t have that appreciation built in. However deadly and selfish and brutal nature may be, it’s unique, beautiful, surprising, and more valuable than words can express.

  One important step in protecting nature is to make an effort to connect with it. The experience I got from having a botfly can’t be mimicked by any human-built theme park or 3-D movie. When you see something real, for yourself, it makes a difference to the rest of your life. For me, seeing a real-life sac-winged bat changed me much more than reading about their salting behavior. You can watch all the documentaries about vampire bats you want to, but when you stick your head into their cave and let them scream at you, it’s different.

  Take a moment to think about your own experience with this. Have you ever seen a wild animal that made your jaw drop? A whale? A bear? An owl? A sea turtle? Have you ever gone snorkeling or hiking or even just watched birds at the feeder? Think about the value those experiences give you as a person. Why not make a decision to fill your life with more of those experiences? Visit parks. Spend your dollars on ecotourism in other countries. Take your friends and family members with you. Get out there and remind yourself why nature is worth preserving.

  Another great way to help protect the world is to support science. Science is how we learn what species are out there and come up with plans to preserve them. By taking pride in our intellect and letting our species push the boundaries back, we’re finding new ways to interact with nature, to protect our planet, and ultimately to protect ourselves. Some technologies, like genetic engineering, scare a lot of people because they seem so unnatural, but that might well be the best thing about them. It’s only by looking beyond what’s already been done that we can have our best hope of improving our trajectory. We have to have open minds about technology if we want to survive.

  Every plant or animal we’ve ever changed through breeding has been genetically modified. Now that we understand the molecular basis of those changes, we can make them more quickly and effectively than ever before. There’s good reason to be wary of large multinational corporations controlling the availability of foods, but there’s no reason to fear genetic engineering as a technology. Just because it feels unnatural doesn’t mean it’s bad. We have to let go of that knee-jerk assumption.

  And just as the tools of agriculture must change, so too will the scale. It might seem appealing to dream of a world where we get all our foods from nature, without big farms, but there are just too many people on Earth now for that to be a solution for everyone. With an expected population of 9 billion within the next forty years, we’re going to need agriculture to be more efficient than ever before. I know big farms might not have the appeal of small, family-run ones, but big farms can be more efficient. So if you’re going to cut down hectares and hectares of the Amazon rainforest to set up farms so people can eat, it’s far better to grow as much food per unit area as possible so that we can cut down as little as possible. The dream that there’s a natural way to live without agriculture just doesn’t work in a world of 9 billion people—at least not for all of us.

  Scientists are scrambling to find ways for our species to survive. They deserve all the support they can
get.

  Moving away from this false ideal of “natural” living would be good for sustainability, but it’s also important socially. What’s natural about gender equality? What’s natural about human rights? Nothing. A sea lion torn to shreds by a killer whale has no rights, and the female pintail duck doesn’t get to file legal proceedings against the lecherous males who attacked her. Human rights are a fundamental component of the future we’re trying to create, so let’s call them what they are—unnatural and essential.

  Rape has been part of the behavior of our species since before we were humans; we inherited it from our prehuman ancestors. Let’s leave rape behind. There’s no use for rape in the human world, and there’s no place for people who think they can justify rape because it’s natural. When a woman gives birth, let’s not force her into making difficult decisions based on some imaginary “natural” way to do so. Let’s give her the freedom to choose the experience she wants, secure in the comfort that modern medicine is there when she needs it. Let’s also make that medicine available to people around the world, so that no woman has to experience pregnancy in fear and with unnecessary pain. There is no justification for sentencing eight hundred women to death that way each day, no matter how natural that risk might be. Let’s let same-sex couples marry, not because male bats have sex with one another sometimes, but because it’s the right thing to do.

  Nature has no place in discussions of social justice. We’re humans—we evolved in nature, but we can do better than the natural order. Let’s take a little pride in the fact that we’ve invented human rights. It doesn’t matter whether they’re natural or not. We’re animals, but we don’t have to act like them.

  What I’m really advocating for is a rebellion of the human meat robots against our DNA oppressors. We’re hardwired to be selfish, to put our DNA’s needs ahead of the other people and ecosystems around us. It’s natural to care more about how hot your coffee was this morning than the fact that while you were drinking it a five-year-old girl in Tanzania died from malaria. But so long as people born in some parts of the world are doomed to hunger, poverty, and war, the progress enjoyed by the rest of us can’t take effect. Biodiversity will slip away because we just weren’t built to deal with issues of a global scale. But just because we weren’t built to do that job doesn’t mean we can’t do it.