The rest is history, and a moment’s thought is enough to convince us of just how incredibly successful this evolutionary strategy was: 400 million dogs on the planet compared to 400,000 wolves is pretty conclusive evidence. As a result of their new niche, dogs did undergo certain, relatively minor, phenotypic changes. Their heads became somewhat smaller in proportion to their body size: scavengers typically have smaller brains than hunters. But fundamentally the dog and the wolf are the same: 15—30,000 years is not enough time for evolution to finish its morning coffee, let alone fashion any decisive biological modifications. That is why, since 1993, wolves and dogs have been classified as the same species.
What use would a scavenger have for running — the sort of running we do together, the running of the pack? You can understand why short bursts of speed would be of use to a scavenger specializing in human refuse. Humans can be unpredictable. But what use would this mile after mile of metronomic trotting be to such a creature? But if it were no use to her kind, why does Nina love it so much? Why the blistering excitement, once we have hurried out of the door and she realizes what is happening?
You might think it is her breed. German shepherds were bred for herding, and Malamutes were bred for pulling sleds. There is a lot of running involved in both. This is true, but this can’t be all that there is to it. This love of running is indifferent to breed. Unless the dog has been ruined by its human owner — and, admittedly, that is not uncommon — it is going to want to run. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a greyhound or a poodle, once it knows what running is, it is going to love doing it.
The real answer is that Nina and all other dogs are built on something much older. While she is, in some small part, what the last 15—30,000 years have made her, more than that, much more, she is what the preceding millions of years made her. Yes, she is happy when I feed her; and she likes her bed in front of the fire in our draughty cottage. But Nina is happiest when she is charging up that lane in search of rabbits. Nina is still fundamentally a wolf: she is at her happiest, and she is at her best, when she is doing wolfish things.
Nina and I are both built on something much older. I may be a rational animal, but I am therefore an animal. And the animal that I am is one that was made not by the last 10,000 years but by the millions of years that preceded them. Running with this pack is the clearest possible expression of my humanity: the perfect congruence of what I am and what I am supposed to be. Along these gusty, winding, plunging country lanes, with wolves and dogs, I am returned to the formal and material cause that I am: a big-arsed ape that has been designed to run.
The thoughts that join me on my runs — my other running companions — are not always entirely serious ones. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes the thoughts that are tinged with parody are the best ones to have, not because of what they tell me but because of what they show me. This is undoubtedly true of the big-arsed-ape hypothesis.
Explanations in terms of efficient, formal and material causes are all species of historical explanation. When the emphasis is on efficient causes, the history is very recent — the fruits of the destructive efforts of Brenin, Nina and Tess are events that litter my recent history. When the focus shifts to formal and material causes the history is far less recent, and consists in the biological and cultural forces that shaped a lump of meat into something that can run distance. Nevertheless, whether recent or distant, proximal or distal, the focus is on that which has, in the past, led up to the present. That the big-arsed-ape hypothesis has an air of parody provides an important clue to just how problematic these sorts of explanations can be.
The big-arsed-ape hypothesis emerged from a game my thoughts sometimes play with themselves — the ‘I am built on something much older’ game. But once you start playing that game, it’s not clear why or when you should stop. When we came down from the trees, for example, it was as scavengers rather than hunters. So why think of myself as a big-arsed ape born to run any more than a shy, sly, scuttling eater of carrion left by animals that really were born to run. Before that, before we came down to earth, we were brachiators. Why should I consider myself a running ape over and above a brachiating one? Is it temporal proximity — I am closer in time to the running ape than the scavenging or brachiating ape? But if it is temporal proximity that is the key, then why am I not a couch-potato ape, an ape that has developed a keen, manipulative intelligence which it uses to get others to find its food — an ape whose large arse is really meant for sitting on? One day, I must play this ‘I am built on something much older’ game to its logical culmination and see where I end up.
Even if there is a way around this problem — even if there is a legitimate reason for privileging the hunting ape in the constitution of what I am — there is another, more general problem. The ‘I am built on something much older’ game assumes that biological history can yield an unequivocal answer to the question of the sort of thing I am. But what if it yields no such thing? What if, instead, my biological history reveals me to be a confused melange of many different things, and the resulting whole only barely viable and coherent? Sometimes people have the idea that if evolution comes up with something — arses, legs, feet and so on — then whatever this is will be perfectly designed for the job at hand. This forgets that evolution is not so much life’s architect as its handyman; a handyman of dubious competence and numerous mistakes who, in addition, finds himself working for a penny-pinching client. He can slap a bit of paint on here, slap a bit of paint on there. But he is never allowed to tamper significantly with the existing structure. That’s the position evolution always finds itself in. The penny-pinching client is known as survival. You tamper too much with the existing structure — an extant creature — then survive is precisely what it is not going to do. The hurricane that is life is going to make short work of temporary scaffolding put in place while major structural changes are being made. The changes must always be small: gradual accretion of the minor is the game.
So, for example, evolution is presented with a fish. It used to swim happily in the ocean, but current vicissitudes of the environmental situation suggest that spending long periods of time lying camouflaged in the sand might be a good policy to adopt. So the fish lies on its side and gradually, for purposes of easy camouflaging, becomes flatter and flatter. What do you do about the eye, the one that lies buried in the mud all day? It is of no use where it is. And all things being equal — which, in the grand evolutionary scheme of things, they hardly ever are — it would be better if the fish had two eyes it could use to watch for predators and prey. So evolution has two options. The first: develop a new eye. But that will cost you. Lots of bodily and neural resources have to be put into that strategy. The second: deploy the unused eye that you’ve already got. Much cheaper. And so that is what evolution did. The grotesquely twisted features of the flatfish’s face are testimony to its evolutionary history and to this parsimonious solution embodied in it. The eye that used to reside on the ventral side of a fish that swam for a living now twists around and relocates to what is now the dorsal side of a fish that spends most of its time in the sand. Evolution works like this. No one ever gives it a blank slate; it can only tinker with whatever is already there.
So we have to assume that there was an arboreal creature that, presumably due to the affordances or exigencies of environmental circumstance, began to spend more and more time on hazardous, but potentially profitable, terrestrial journeys. No one really knows why this was. Some speculate that the sorts of food offered by trees — leaves, sometimes fruit — no longer provided adequate sustenance. Others argue that we simply became too big for trees to offer us adequate protection from predators. The sorts of branches that could bear our weight would also support theirs. But, for whatever reason, a niche opened up that afforded opportunities for an ape willing to travel overland. At first living on the edge of riparian woodlands, our hominin ancestors gradually expanded their range. In this gradual expansion, those of our ancestors with bi
gger, more powerful legs — and what good are big legs without the big arse that powers them and provides ballast — survived at greater rates than those with weaker legs and smaller arses. And so the gene for a big arse multiplies and is passed down to us today.
But here is the snag. The big arse is still the point of connection between two essentially simian legs, on the ends of which are two essentially simian feet. Evolution is a handyman, not an architect. It has to work with what it is given. Admittedly, it has been working with the legs and feet too. They’re now very different from those possessed by the ancestor we have in common with our simian cousins. But, nevertheless, evolution has to work with what it is given, and even then is not exactly perfect in its designs. We have to expect mistakes. There is no guarantee — far from it — that these simian legs and feet are going to be able to handle the stuff that this new turbocharged arse is going to get them to do. And if the simian legs and feet of some can handle it, there is no guarantee that this will be true of all of us, or even most.
In the end, the big-arsed-ape-that-was-born-to-run hypothesis is motivated by a kind of faith — a faith in evolution to have come up with a perfect solution to a cost-benefit problem presented to it by a tight-fisted client. That is a lot to ask of anything, especially a blind biological process. Over time, evolution does tend to get things more or less right. But this big-arsed-running-on-simian-legs-and-feet thing is just so new, comparatively speaking. It’s not like hearts, lungs and blood. Evolution has had plenty of time to iron out the problems with those. These things take time, and I would be rather surprised if evolution has had enough time to comprehensively troubleshoot the problems with the strategy it used to produce humans. It may be that we are fractured creatures, even on the biological level. Were we born to run? From an appropriately distanced evolutionary perspective, we may have been born to do many things, not all of them, perhaps, entirely consistent. It may be that we are all mongrels, every living thing.
The fourth, and for Aristotle the most important, explanation of anything is its final cause: its why. The formal cause of something tells you what it is. The material cause tells you what it is made from. The efficient cause tells you what made or produced it. The remaining cause — what Aristotle called the final cause — tells you why it was made. The final cause of anything is its why. The final cause is the purpose of the activity, the reason why the activity is performed.
It may seem that I have already explained the final cause of running. I run to save my house and possessions from the jaws of one then two then three marauding canines. That certainly seems like the purpose of my run. My pack, and their destructive proclivities, provides the impetus for my running — they are its efficient cause. And then the purpose of the run is to mellow them out sufficiently to abstain from eating the few things I still actually possess. The final cause of my running is based on my desire to safeguard my remaining possessions. If I didn’t care about these possessions — for example, if I didn’t care whether or not Brenin chews holes in the sofa (happened), or whether Tess chews through the power cord of an almost new TV (happened, thankfully it wasn’t plugged in at the time), and if I didn’t care whether or not Nina chews a hole through a partition wall big enough for her to walk through (happened, though I’m not entirely sure there was enough evidence to pin it on Nina acting in isolation — she was simply the one caught red-handed), then the proclivities of the pack would provide no reason for me to run.
This, however, describes only the final cause of my running, not the final cause of running itself. If this is the final cause of my running, others will have different final causes for their runs. After all, how many people run in order to persuade a pack of wolves and dogs to spare their possessions? Some people will run for the sake of their health, others to relieve the stresses of the office or perhaps even the family, others because they like the company it affords, and yet others because they like competing and accruing medals in the races they enter. And even when we restrict the focus to me, the particular final cause I cited will be operative only during a certain portion of my life. None of these reasons are the final cause of running — only of my running at a given time, your running at a given time, and so on.
As I pass Charles Fort, I turn left up a steep hill. This involves a couple of hundred yards of tough climb. I slog grimly onwards and upwards in the shadow of the Devil’s Bastion. But this is nothing. I turn right, and head downhill again, past a farmhouse and some cottages, using the decline to stretch and loosen my muscles. I could have continued on up the hill, it would have soon levelled off, and I would have been left with a relatively easy mile or so home. On some days, if I am ill, I might take advantage of that. I continue on with the descent and at the bottom of the hill we turn left then right, and now I come to a grim but favourite part. I have been anticipating this since Charles Fort; the adrenalin started to course through me back then. We are at the foot of a hill that stretches away into the distance, and it is frighteningly steep; standing here at the bottom it looks more like a wall than a hill. My goal is to run up this hill, as fast as I possibly can. I must not stop, I must not falter: I must not even slow. If I do, the run has been a failure. It’s an impossible goal — but sometimes they are the best.
I am looking straight down at my feet. If I raise my head, I feel like I will topple backwards. The hill starts off steep and then gets steeper. If I see any of this, if I see how far I have to go, if I see how long this pain will last, I know I will stop. My legs — driving, pumping — are on fire. My lungs feel as if they are turning themselves inside out trying to get the oxygen they need to combat the lactic burn. Keep going. Get to the next pothole, then the next. And then, finally: the hardest part of all. I’m reaching the top, the gradient is starting to level off: job done! No, the hard part is to keep going now, keep driving those legs as the lactic fire spreads outwards and is eventually replaced by a pervasive numb deadness; keep driving those legs as my lungs start to work again. Here is when the nausea kicks in, and it’s worse than anything that has gone before. Sometimes — not often, but more than enough — I’ll throw up; but I’ll try to keep running as I do so. Finally, the nausea flooding my system is replaced with warm triumph. I roar, the pack bounces around me. And then, slowly, the gentle rhythm of the run takes over once more.
The days when this sort of endeavour might have actually had a point are long gone. I no longer play the sort of sports for which this torture might help. The most obvious facet of this ascent is its sheer pointlessness. I could jog up the hill; I could even walk — the pack wouldn’t mind. But I charge up the hill. Here, although I did not understand it at the time, is a clue to the final cause of running — the real purpose not of my running, not of yours, but of running in general. It is not that there is a difference in kind between the charge up the hill and the rest of the run. It is just that in the charge up the hill the final cause of running is made particularly graphic. I was initially pushed into running by the jaws of one, then two, then three efficient causes. But the running I was pushed into has a final cause — a why — of its own.
On that hill, dying, gasping for breath, in mute lactic agony — at that precise moment in time, there was nothing in the world I would rather be doing. I ran that hill for one reason only: to run it. And that is a clue to the final cause of running. You and I may run for many reasons, but the purpose — the final cause — of running is always the same. At its best, and at its purest, the purpose of running is simply to run. Running is a member of the class of human activities that carry their purpose within themselves. The purpose of running is intrinsic to it. That, I would one day realize, is important.
4
American Dreams
2007
There is the whoosh of the cars on one side of us, and the slap and whir of the garden sprinklers on the other. Every run has its heartbeat. I am running with Nina and Tess through the early morning suburban streets of Miami. I left Alabama with Brenin twelve years ago.
The intervening time has seen us run the green fields and plunging lanes of southern Ireland, the muddy woodlands of Wimbledon Common, the barren-as-boulders hills of the Pembrokeshire high country and then, finally, the sunset-golden beaches and fields of purple lavender — the way I shall always remember Languedoc. Brenin, my old friend, is gone now. His bones are buried in a sandy copse, beneath a ghost of stone that stands on the delta of the River Orb. After a long detour, for me at least, this is a return of sorts. A few days ago, we all moved to Miami. Poor old Nina and Tess, they have become old and they’re not really capable of these runs any more. I’ve been in denial about this, but it ends here. Today is the last time I shall ever run with them. From now on, it will just be gentle walks. A little more than a year later they will both be dead. Tess went first, in the land of her father, victim of the same sort of cancer that claimed him. Nina went three weeks later, victim, I still think, of a broken heart.
This is the first run of my second life in the US. I cast my mind back to the last run of my first life here. That was a run of sadness: a run of times that had gone and would never come again. That was a run of fear: a run of times as yet unknown. I would soon, in a few short days, be putting Brenin on a plane to Ireland, and quarantine, but at that moment he floated along beside me as we ran through the early morning streets of Tuscaloosa. I was twenty-four when I moved there, fresh out of Oxford, and starting my first real job. I began Oxford-style. I went to work in blazer and flannels. I ended up grunge: T-shirt, shorts, flip-flops and a ponytail. I did not anticipate my first job turning into a seven-year party, but sometimes things have a funny way of turning out — it’s one of life’s most endearing features. After seven years, over a hundred rugby games, thousands of tequila shooters and more 25¢ longneck beers than I could number, I was ready to leave Alabama. When I had arrived there, I was younger than many of my students. So it was perhaps not particularly surprising that I had found my way into the university’s student rugby team, and the rather surreal subculture that surrounded it. But before I knew it I was thirty-one. I was too old, and the party had moved on. There is only so long you can turn up at student parties — even student rugby parties — without it getting first a little sad and then a little creepy. I suspected I had already transgressed the borders of sad, and wanted to get the hell out of Dodge before I crossed over into creepy. No one comes back from creepy.
Running with the Pack Page 8
