2.

THE TAMING
OF LIFE

Nature seems to try almost everything. Over the course of billions of years it has created an unimaginable quantity of the most intricate, and sometimes distinctly odd, life-forms. In fact, in some cases, one wonders how certain creatures managed to survive competition (the peacock and sloth spring to mind), but when you study the cases in more detail, you find good explanations. Until, that is, you get to the sausage dog, or “Dachshund” (pictured below These are very cute, but they are are still half a dog high and a dog-and-a-half long, and their little legs are plainly ridiculous. So how on earth did nature select them? What was it thinking?

THE DACHSHUND. HOW COULD THIS ANIMAL POSSIBLY COMPETE WITH FOXES AND WOLVES, ETC?

We shall come to the answer to this question within a few pages, and it illustrates a bizarre consequence of civilization. It is about what memes do to genes and, therefore, we must briefly consider how genes work and how scientists study them. Let’s begin at the beginning: living creatures’ genetic codes are stored in DNA strands present inside all our cells except in the red blood cells. A creature’s genetic code is written with combinations of four chemical compounds: adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine, where each is always paired with another. We therefore speak of base pairs, and human DNA contains about 3.2 billion of these. Think of them as the letters in a cookery book that contains the recipe for a human being. Or, to be more precise, a recipe for making proteins which are the essential building blocks of life for humans.

This cookery book has approximately 20,600 chapters, which we call genes. Each gene is responsible for a specific chemical function (sometimes, however, several features or parts of a function). The sum of all these genes is what we call our genome. Our genome and our DNA is thus, in a sense, the same, but the first refers to the code (software) and the other to the molecule (hardware).

Most living being’s DNA strands are strikingly similar. For instance, depending slightly on how you calculate it, there is approximately 99% overlap between human and chimpanzee DNA, and our DNA is even approximately. 50% identical to that of a banana.

The first time we managed to sequence/decode (map the atomic sequence) of a human DNA strand was between 1990 and 2003. This project seemed enormous at the outset and involved thousands of scientists and laboratory technicians. Initially, this progressed unbelievably slowly with no end in sight, and, given the technology used in 1990, it would probably have cost $300 billion and taken generations to complete, but towards the end in 2003, the cost was approx. $ 300 million and the speed far higher. It ended up lasting 13 years and costing three billion dollars.¹⁷ Since then, both the cost and time consumption for a decoding DNA strand has reduced dramatically, and this has led to an explosion in our knowledge of the biochemistry and history of life.

There are various methods for investigating how our genes have evolved through the ages and from where they come. The two used most commonly are studying the DNA of so-called Y-chromosomes and examining the DNA of our mitochondria. Y-chromosome is found in male mammals and its DNA is never mixed with the DNA from a woman. Therefore, it shows a broken line of direct copying from the males of a species.

Similar benefits are found by examining the DNA in mitochondria. These are organelles inside each of our cells, and they have their own DNA, which is only copied from women. Interestingly, it is now assumed by most experts that these mitochondria are actually former bacteria, which are now co-habiting with the human cells – so there we have the ultimate symbiosis as described by Robert Wright.

The fact that Y-chromosome DNA is purely male and mitochondrial DNA purely female gives us an interesting tool for examining genetic history. An example: In the last chapter we saw that, according to researchers, the human population dropped to between just 2,000 and 20,000, approximately 70,000 years ago. The scientists reached that conclusion by looking at the variability of mutations in our Y-chromosomes and mitochondria.

So now we have come to the subject of mutations. All species are under constant genetic development. Such mutations may be caused by the change agents we mentioned earlier, such as oxidation, but there is much to indicate that viral infection plays a particularly important role. Unlike bacteria, viruses will routinely poke around inside animal and plant cells and certain types of them have a habit of exchanging sequences of DNA with their host cells. Genetic fragments – even some fairly large ones - can thereby spread to other species, and thus, for example, it has been observed how a major DNA sequence has been copied from snakes to gerbils. This could have happened because a virus infected first a snake and then a gerbil and brought a DNA string from one to the other.

Our own DNA’s 3.2 billion base pairs were written in the course of more than 4.4 billion years (counting from the first single-celled organisms to humans today) which, on average, means the addition of a new base pair every 17 months.

The vast majority of mutations are harmful, and the typical person may be carrying around ten deleterious mutations - new or inherited from ancestors - which can be more or less problematic. On average, there are 100 new mutations in each child, of which two or three have a real impact. That’s a problem but, in the long term, it is the rarer favourable mutations that, through natural selection are most likely to be passed on. As Robert Wright pointed out, such favourable mutations often enable some new form of co-operation between atoms, molecules, organelles, cells, organs, individuals or species.

Let’s not forget the question of how nature has selected the sausage dog (Dachshund to the owners). Can that really be an example of survival of the... fittest?

Actually, yes it can be, because it survives due to its co-operation with humans, which actually makes it mightily strong - so strong in fact that, in the US, there are approximately 100,000 registered sausage dogs but only 9.000 grey wolves (fortunately there are many more grey wolves in Canada, but still).

This brings us to an interesting fact, because the Dachshund is a direct descendent of the grey wolf and can still (presumably with some technical difficulties) breed with these. In fact, all living dog breeds descended from the grey wolf. The oldest trace we have of dogs is a discovery from 2010 of the remains of a 33,000 year-old dog in south Siberia. The following year, a skeleton of a dog was found in the Czech Republic that was estimated to be 26,000-27,000 years old. Someone may have liked this little guy, because he or she buried it with a bone from a mammoth in its mouth, which tells us, what the dog liked. In addition, we have found footprints from a child who was walking with a dog in the French Chauvet cave approximately 26,000 years ago. As for the Dachshund, we have seen precursors depicted in ancient Egypt.

All of this suggests that human beings have lived with dogs for more than 30,000 years, but how did it start? Undoubtedly, very badly. Humans have been obvious victims of wolves, and it was probably normal for a pack of wolves to stalk people and, in an example of the ultimate win-lose transaction, pick them off one-by-one when they were isolated from their companions, perhaps doing you-know-what, or when everyone was asleep.

But the relationship between man and wolf must have changed. One possibility is that people occasionally found abandoned wolf cubs and became attached to them. A more obvious possibility is that wolves learned they could gain food leftovers if they lived close to people - even without fighting with them – which may be why they settled near human settlements. The people, in turn, perhaps discovered these wolves not only kept away mice and rats, but would fend off hostile tribes and, for that matter, other wolf packs that were less co-operative. Your enemy’s enemy is your friend, as they say.

The result was that the win-lose transactions (wolf-eats-human-for-lunch) gave way to win-win transactions (wolf-keeps-guard-and-gets-food-leftovers). So this is not exactly trade as we define it, but it is certainly voluntary co-operation and it must have led to a genetic selection in favour of the wolves that were most accommodating and which, somehow along the way, learned to bark to warn off intruders (wolves don’t bark).

To test the creation of a dog out of a wild species, the Russian scientist Dmitry Belyayev decided, in 1959, to breed silver foxes to become dog-like, where he continually bred the foxes that seemed most friendly until he had some that routinely tolerated humans. After 40 years and 35 breeding generations, they were all as friendly as dogs. As a side effect of this, they also changed their appearance: his tamer foxes had lighter skin, rounder heads, somewhat smaller brains and often soft ears, and they continued to wag their tales after becoming adults, which wild foxes do not normally do. They became, in other words, dog-like and it only took 40 years to achieve this.¹⁸

Dmitry Belyayev also tried a similar experiment with rats and it worked the same way. After 60 generations bred from the same rats, he had created two populations with completely different personalities. When you entered a room where the violent ones were caged, they would scream at the visitor and hurl themselves against the bars in anger. In the room where the friendly were kept, it was completely different. These rats would calmly stick their heads through the bars of the cage to have their heads petted.

Dogs are good at interpreting our signals, whereas wild wolves and foxes are largely incapable of this, just as they are unwilling to accept instructions. It is these traits that, through symbiosis and, later, more deliberate breeding, have been developed by man: dogs are genetically modified wolves that remain puppy-like, even when they reach physical maturity. We have civilized them.

And as we did this, something else developed: increased diversity. The original grey wolf has evolved into approximately 160 sub-species of dog (so far), and this is an example of a general rule: a system based on voluntary win-win transactions will, spontaneously, create diversity. If we co-operate, we will request an ever-growing range of services from one another, and this will evolve into an expanding creative design space and wider social networks, both of which open up extra possibilities. From being enemies, the wolves became guard dogs and pets, and then perhaps hunting partners, and so on. Today, we breed dogs specialized in herding sheep, hunting foxes or birds, warding off intruders, being nice to children, fitting in a handbag, looking cute, elegant, sporty, aggressive or deliberately silly. And because of this diversity, the diversity of the products we make for dogs has also grown exponentially, from collars to food, shelters, shampoo and thousands of other examples, such as racing tracks for greyhounds (but not for sausage dogs; perhaps because of human impatience).

The same happens in nature as a whole, and the number of animal and plant species has therefore grown significantly since the first living cells came into being. One of the reasons for that is a phenomenon called character displacement, whereby differences among similar species which live within the same geographical area tends to be accentuated automatically, which drives them towards speciation.

So Robert Wright’s “co-operation under competition” creates diversity; diversity increases the creative design spaces and social design spaces and this creates new opportunities for co-operation. The reason why there are now millions of species on Earth (not counting viruses and bacteria) is that co-operation has many possible business models, and this number grows exponentially with the number of different participants co-operating. Because of this phenomenon, immense creativity can occur without it being planned centrally.

Why do many plants expend so much energy on making big, colourful flowers that smell like perfume and contain rich nectar? Why do some plants produce delicious fruits, only to drop them on the ground, where they may rot? What’s the point of a flower or a peach?

It is all marketing, of course. Plants promote themselves to bees and butterflies via their flowers or to fruit-eating animals with their fruits, because that is how their selfish genes can spread themselves. Their DNA has made these species highly adapted for co-operation with other species, and flowers were, in a sense, largely shaped by the multiple desires of butterflies and bees, just like dogs were shaped by the multiple desires of men.

NUMBER OF ANIMAL AND PLANT FAMILIES OVER GEOLOGICAL TIME. THE TREND HAS RISEN MASSIVELY BECAUSE COOPERATION CREATES DIVERSITY.¹⁹

That also explains why puppies and kittens often look so ridiculously loveable; it is because they depend on the care of their parents and now us. On the other hand, fish and other animals that are on their own from the moment their eggs hatch are, typically, simply small copies of adults, because being cute is no advantage to them. Being fast is important, though, and they normally are.

Virtually all life-forms are constantly taming some other life-forms, and man has tamed many more life-forms than wolves. At one point some people changed from having a nomadic lifestyle to forming permanent settlements, presumably so that women did not have to carry their children around for thousands of kilometres, and also to enable the storage of goods and development of better shelters. This, in turn, created the condition for agriculture, which occurred a few thousand years later.

When farming began, however, a whole series of genetic adaptations followed. When people picked up plants with seeds to take them home, the seeds that made it home were those most firmly attached to the plants - the other seeds were more likely to drop off en route. Hence began an unplanned genetic modification of the plants, under which they increased their tendency to hold on to their seeds; this also made it easier to collect these seeds before they blew away. At the same time came a selection of plants with more, and larger, seeds.

Over time, our crops changed in order to co-operate with us, to about the same extent as the wolves that became dogs. Modern corn is descended, for example, from a grass called teosinte, which still grows wild, but the two no longer resemble one another at all. Modern bananas are sterile and cannot set seed. Wheat descended from three different grass species that were crossed, and it contains alien chromosome fragments and mutations deliberately provoked by radioactive and X-ray irradiation and genetic modification by exposure to chemicals. As with bananas, you will never see wheat growing wild in nature, because it cannot survive there.

And so it goes on: all our livestock and just about everything we eat is genetically modified by us, over thousands of years, to such a high degree that, like the sausage dog, much of it could never survive without us. In fact, pretty much the only indigenous foods we eat today (as they were before the introduction of agriculture) are fish, hunting game and certain nuts and berries.

However, the story does not end there, since our ideas and memes have not only modified the genes of plants and animals around us, but also our own genes. It is quite obvious that people have developed genetically, because after our (perhaps 150) ancestors migrated from Africa, they evolved into Asians, jungle Indians, Europeans, Aborigines and Inuits and so on, all of whom look rather different. Races constitute a statistical cluster of genetic traits which US scientist and author Jared Diamond and the American Anthropological Association claim do not exist; however, assuming they do, we will note how each is highly-adapted to its environment. For example peoples who live in mountains have more blood cells and bigger lungs; those living in hot climates have darker skin and those with risk of frost bite have shorter noses.

Once people gained control of fire and began cooking, their stomachs and intestinal systems grew smaller. Their skeletons also became thinner in a process known as grazialization and their jaws shrank, which is why we now need to have our wisdom teeth extracted. Furthermore, as people developed weopens such as bows and arrows and spears, they no longer needed to fight in close combat with their prey, so their muscles grew smaller too - thus saving energy. And given that people began to live with animals, they were very often infected with diseases by them, which stimulated gene alterations that made them more resistant.

Although agriculture provided a number of practical advantages, it also resulted in some immediate drawbacks. For instance, farmed food contained less protein than the meat from hunting, and plant proteins did not have the nutritionally-optimal composition of amino acids that virtually all meat has. Second, the farmers had less food variation, which could result in a lack of vitamins and minerals and, finally, their teeth decayed. The consequence was that the first farmers were less healthy than their immediate ancestors.

MAN-MADE GENETIC MUTATION OF MAIZE (CORN). TO THE LEFT IS TEOSINTE; TO THE RIGHT IS MAIZE, WHICH HAS EVOLVED FROM TEOSINTE OVER THOUSANDS OF YEARS AND IN THE MIDDLE IS A HYBRID BETWEEN THE TWO. AS THE PICTURE SHOWS, MAN HAS MODIFIED TEOSINTE VERY SUBSTANTIALLY.²⁰

MAN-MADE MUTATIONS OF BRASSICA OLERACEA (CABBAGE, BROCCOLI, KALE, CAULIFLOWER, BRUSSELS SPROUTS, SAVOY, AND CHINESE KALE) ARE ALL PLANTS THAT MAN CULTIVATED OUT OF THE WILD CABBAGE PLANTS SHOWN TO THE LEFT. THE PARTS OF THESE CULTIVATED, DERIVATIVE PLANTS THAT WE LIKE TO EAT ARE MAINLY THE COMPLETELY- DEFORMED MUTATIONS THAT HAVE BEEN CULTIVATED BY MAN. FOR INSTANCE, THE WHITE STUFF IN A CAULIFLOWER (RIGHT) IS AN EXTREME MUTATION THAT MAN HAS DELIBERATELY CULTIVATED. MUCH OF THIS HAPPENED THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO. FOR EXAMPLE, THE BROCCOLI IS THOUGHT TO HAVE BEEN DEVELOPED BY THE ETRUSCANS LONG BEFORE THE ROMAN EMPIRE.²¹

Then their genes started to compensate. The decline in meat consumption was reflected, in particular, by a lack of vitamin D. Our access to this vitamin is a little bizarre, because we can partly get it from food, which sounds fairly normal, but also by exposure to the sun, but if you lived up north and neither got enough meat nor sun, you could get vitamin D deficiency. The genetic solution was to make the skin and hair of northerners lighter to allow greater sun exposure. In fact, studies indicate that northern Europeans had dark skin until 5,300-6,000 years ago, by which time virtually the entire population, within relatively few generations, mutated to become fair-skinned.²²

One of the key new mutations provoked by our farming culture concerned the ability to digest milk. In all mammals, including humans, it is inherently normal that the body loses its ability to digest lactose (a sugar contained in milk) after childhood. However, beginning approx. 8,000 years ago, people started keeping cows. Although, initially this was probably for their meat and hides, and later for use as draft animals, at some point someone had the idea of drinking their milk. Approximately 80 generations later, a mutation that made it possible to digest cow’s milk sugar started to spread.

This ability to digest milk created a virtuous circle, because milk endowed perhaps five times greater nutritional benefits from a cow than did its meat alone. This was reinforced as people began to breed selectively the cows that gave the most milk.

Please note that, up until this point, the idea of exploiting cow’s milk can be described as the mining of a resource. However, it became so powerful because it stimulated interpersonal transactions: if you had milking cows, you could feed many more individuals per unit area, which enabled military concentration and increased trade and division of labour. Human co-operation with cows thus stimulated human co-operation with other humans and therefore stimulated their creativity. It comes back to Robert Wright’s theory of co-operation yet again.

With the transition to agriculture came a change in our work methods. It was no longer important to be able to chase animals in the wild but advantageous to be able to work long hours in the fields or to build stone fences, houses and so on. For the same reason, there was a change in the gene known as ACTN3, which controls our muscle composition. Muscle fibres comes in two versions - one that provides explosive muscle power, as seen in sprinters, and another that lends us endurance, as required by marathon runners. All people have a combination of both muscle types, but apparently we gained a greater share of the endurance variant after the introduction of agriculture.

Agriculture has probably also changed our genes in ways that affect our mentality. We can illustrate this through some trials of a game. It is very simple:

“You will be offered some money that you have to share with someone else. You must decide in what proportions. If the other refuses his part, the deal is off and both of you get nothing.”

The outcome of this simple game has often been used by anthropologists to describe the willingness of people in various societies to co-operate voluntarily. However, it becomes more interesting in tribal communities, such as in Indonesia and South America. In an experiment in those communities, some anthropologists classified tribes based on how much they traded with outsiders - i.e. their market integration. Some traded a lot, whereas others didn’t. Then the anthropologists asked members of each tribe to play the game, wherein the amount at stake corresponded to approximately two days’ worth of income, so that it had real economic interest of the participants.²³

The results were very interesting: People behaved far more selfishly within the communities that had least trade with the outside world. Among the very isolated Machiguenga Indians in South America, the first player’s average offer was, for example, 26% and the most common offer just 15%, and in only one instance was such a low offer rejected by the other player. So the first player was typically very selfish and the second accepted that as normal.²⁴

In addition to categorizing tribes by market integration, anthropologists also made a scale reflecting the extent of division of labour in each community, and this also showed a clear correlation, so that those who were most dependent on cooperation in everyday life gave the best offer to their counterparty in the game. This is an expression of one of the most general observations of our development process: civilization and trade gives people a greater tendency to respect others. The taming process does not only involve genes, but also memes.

This has important implications for the ability to act and to create a functioning state. The economist Paul Zak has found that every 15% increase in the tendency for mutual trust among people in a society leads to an additional annual increase of GDP per capita growth of 1%, annually.²⁵ A high degree of mutual trust makes it easier for people to make voluntary transactions, and general trust among people in a society increases if they are used to make voluntary transactions.

When someone shows us clear trust, we secrete a substance called oxytocin, which makes us more confident about these people - so we reward trust with trust. In fact, it has been discovered that the inability to secrete this substance correlates with sociopathic, narcissistic and generally reckless or egocentric behaviour. Given that the development of civilization requires mutual trust , it seems likely that our genetic ability to secrete and respond to oxytocin has increased, as our civilization has evolved.²⁶

In a hunting society, where physical goods came from either prowess in hunting big game or making raids against neighbouring tribes, the most aggressive men acquired the most food and thus easier access to women. This created selection pressure for aggressiveness, fearlessness and what psychologists today call sociopathic behaviour (psychopats). A study of the warlike Yanomami Indians of the Amazon found, for example, that men who were murderers had far more children, on average, than non-killers: ²⁷

It should be mentioned that this study was done by anthropologist Napoleon Chargnon, who expected to find a romantic, peaceful tribe, but described his very first and rather shocking encounter with them as follows:

“I saw a dozen burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows! Immense wads of green tobacco were stuck between their lower teeth and lips making them look even more hideous, and strands of dark green slime dripped or hung from their nostrils-strands so long that they clung to their [chests] or drizzled down their chins. My next discovery was that there were a dozen or so vicious, underfed dogs snapping at my legs, circling me as if I were to be their next meal. I just stood there holding my notebook, helpless and pathetic. Then the stench of the decaying vegetation and filth hit me and I almost got sick.”²⁸

Chargnon discovered that approximately 40% of the Yanomami men had committed at least one murder. As he tried to map their family trees he collected their names only to be informed later, by another tribe, that they had all lied to him, since the names they had given included, for instance, “long dong”, “eagle shit”, “arsehole” and “fart breath”.

Brutality and rudeness has been ingrained in the memes and genes of primitive hunter-gatherer societies, but the transition to rural communities changed the natural criteria for success significantly. People now had to learn how to plan for the future. They needed to learn to postpone gratification and wait patiently for the fruits of their labours. They had to be good at interacting with strangers and with each other and to operate within more structured and complex social models. This meant that being genetically predisposed to peaceful co-operation was suddenly an advantage and being an uncompromising aggressor became a liability; being scary, covered with slime and calling strangers “dog fart” wasn’t very helpful in this respect. We have therefore achieved so-called “self-domestication”. Just as we domesticated and adapted plants and animals to civilization, we have actually domesticated ourselves culturally and genetically. Let’s close this chapter with two observations about our brains. As we already saw, brains grew as our ancestors evolved from ape-men to Homo sapiens, but declined since then by a size roughly equivalent to a tennis ball. The same happens when you domesticate foxes or turn wolves into dogs.²⁹ The likely reason is that the wild animals have to decide everything for themselves, whereas their domesticated cousins look to their owner for answers. The implication is that as you are tamed and learn to live co-operatively with others, you don’t need to be as smart to live smarter.

The other observation is that people’s skulls, on average, grew thicker after the invention of the stone axe, indicating that it was often used for win-lose transactions. But about 40,000 years ago, as trading was spreading, our skulls again began to thin across the globe – other than among Australian Aborigines and Native Americans on the tip of South America.³⁰ Accordingly, creativity and later civilization flourished as people began to read each other’s thoughts rather than smash in each other’s skulls.

The general conclusion from the examples in this chapter, however, is that, if you want to stimulate the creative development of a society, you must focus on facilitating voluntary win-win transactions under competition. If you do that, people will implement one good idea after another and build a growing social ecosystem. Additionally, they will - without even noticing it - develop their own ability to cooperate constructively. They will self-domesticate, in other words. This is obviously important but, as we shall see in the next chapter, co-operation under competition alone is not enough to ensure strong creativity and progress.