Recap for new readers:
I wrote a long (~60k words) Motte post and am releasing it serially, one chapter per week. This is chapter four. Chapter one can be found here.
Has it really already been a month? Thanks for coming along so far. Things are about to get very exciting.
Also note: Just edited to change the chapter title from "Cloud Forest" to "Almost Human" since test readers and our first commenter here keep suggesting to me that I'm not being clear enough that we are still talking about non-human ancestors from millions of years ago.
0104 - Almost Human
Now that our lenses are properly constructed we may observe the emergence of the human race. In this chapter we're going to stick with a species which we’d recognize as primates, perhaps comparable to the last common ancestor between Earth’s humans and chimpanzees. Not yet humans! Let's just call them apes.
These apes develop on a large island shaped pretty similarly to the sea-mount of the shellfish. A broad, low base, tapering up to a relatively high and narrow peak. This island happens to be in a region where rainfall is scarce. The entire island is forested; thinly and sparsely on its lower slopes, but with increasing density as altitude is gained. The mid-section benefits from being high enough to catch many of the regular marine layers (fog) that roll in, which provide enough water to support a thriving and diverse ecosystem. The highest reaches of the island get watered most consistently of all, and there do the trees give forth abundance in such profusion as to make life pleasant indeed for any who can hold the territory. While crude subsistence is possible on the lower slopes, about once a generation a tide high enough to cover the area rears up and washes away any apes unfortunate enough to be caught on the low ground.
The apes arrange themselves up and down the slopes more or less as would be expected by anyone who is familiar with chapter two's shellfish. Higher genetic quality individuals at the top, dregs down below. But we have a few key differences here.
Compared to the female shellfish, female apes are almost counterintuïtively non-selective. At least, not in the way we’d expect. Believe it or not, they don’t bother much with choosing good males for mating. Instead, their instinct is simply to go where the fruit is best and most abundant, and nonchalantly allow themselves to be mounted by whichever males happen to be around, who are necessarily high-quality by dint of their ability to hold such territory against other males. This strategy is almost glorious in its simplicity. Instead of spending lots of time and energy evaluating potential mates — never mind the sheer impracticality of mutating the complex ability to do so — all females have to worry about is taking the best fruit they can find and leave to the males the vicious business of sorting each other into worthy and unworthy.
Meanwhile, unlike the solitary male shellfish, male apes have worked out something devastatingly important: the biggest, strongest male there is will get his tail absolutely handed to him by a somewhat smaller male and his two buddies so long as they work together. Very rapidly it becomes clear that winning isn’t about being the biggest or the most threatening any more. It’s about convincing others to support you, maintaining their loyalty, and doing all of this under the nose of whoever’s currently holding the territory you want before they notice what you’re up to and tear you to shreds with their own allies. These are political apes.
And so the basic social unit of the ape is the troop. One male, typically powerful enough in his own right to inspire deference and loyalty, but also gifted with the social instincts to capitalize upon that, successfully assembles a ruling coalition. He is rewarded with, shall we say, 70% of the mating opportunities with females in his domain. Pretty much all this guy does is have sex and maintain his social position. His closest allies are collectively rewarded with perhaps 25% of the mating opportunities which, to be clear, still means multiple females per ally. The remainder of the troop is made up of males who don’t care to challenge the existing administration and know that, if they’re patient and just a little bit lucky, they’ll occasionally get the chance to make a pass at the remaining 5% of available mates. This is still a better deal than getting exiled downslope to drown in the next high tide, or summary execution for conspiring against the leader.
It is imperative to comprehend that females are not part of the troop. They range from grove to grove as they please. If and when a current ruling coalition of males is bloodily uprooted and replaced by interlopers, the nearby females don’t care, to the extent that they notice at all. If anything it’s a blessing for them: their infants will now be sired by males who are, quite evidently, superior to those who were in charge before.
In the same vein, when an incoming conquering coalition establishes itself, it might kill off the previous males, but wouldn’t harm the females any more than it would damage any other natural resource; any more than it would destroy the fruit trees themselves. Securing access to females is the whole point of coalition-building in the first place! Male apes are also substantially larger than females for this reason. Size doesn’t help so much in obtaining food, but males must engage in violent physical combat with each other in a way in which females simply don't have any interest.
Something strange comes about now, perhaps for the first time in the history of Tidus. While brawn is still very much necessary — for none will throw his lot in with a weakling — brains become arguably as important. Prior to this point, intelligence was a mixed enough blessing as to be maladaptive in most cases.
Consider the humble shellfish. A baby shellfish might be born with a larger, more powerful, more complex neural network than any that has come before, but running that system costs extra calories. If it costs more marginal calories than it enables the shellfish to gain, it’s not a beneficial mutation at all! It’s an impairment. A slightly-better ability to model its species’ social dynamics avails it not in the face of the buff cousin who’s on his way over to cast our brainy crustacean into the depths. Sort of like that early unicellular organism who could do nothing but watch its blind cousin eat all the food. A smarter shellfish is generally a worse shellfish.
Ah, but not so with the apes. Every functional male wants to be a coalition leader, or at least wants the perks that come with the position. But to become a leader requires the ability to model not just the near-future, but the minds of potential allies and enemies, and especially how those minds will interact with each other. What do I mean? Check this out.
"If I ask my buddy to ask his buddy to team up with me, will he do it? Will his other friend rat me out to the current ruler of the roost? Or even if he doesn’t, will he tell his best friend about the idea? If so, will that guy give our scheme away? Or might he want to join? And even if that part works, what about those other guys who look like they might be forming their own coalition? Will they let us do the heavy lifting, then attack us while we’re still weak? And what if my friend is only pretending to support me, but actually intends to betray me and take the top position for himself?" (Sounding human yet? The aptly-named 'reality' shows are substantially about this and they enthrall us for a reason.)
Gaining and keeping the top position is a tall order indeed. Mutations related to the capacity for social modeling and manipulation pile up quickly as all contenders are in a perpetual arms race with each other.
At some point tradeoffs related to physical fitness might even become viable. An ape who doesn’t have that special something which makes others amenable to the idea of supporting him as leader may yet be a skillful enough kingmaker so as to surf the incoming and outgoing administrations, orchestrating the changeover from behind the scenes, always second in command and enjoying the reproductive access that comes with the position. His children might do even better, developing instincts to always keep their own hands clean. And their offspring will mate with the offspring of the leaders they supported such that some end up with the best of both worlds. So on and on, toward the more-perfect ape atop his mountain.
A shellfish’s neural network probably accounts for a negligible portion of its daily caloric expenditure. But as the average intelligence of the apes continues to radically accelerate, their brains start eating up five, ten, even fifteen percent of their overall caloric expenditure. This would be an absurd amount for almost any other kind of animal, but social games are if nothing else complex, and every single slight advantage in the ability to engage in this sort of thought is almost certainly worth its weight in the fruited vales of the upper island, where the question is less “Are there enough calories?” than it is “Who controls them?” And control is achieved by political machinations.
New mental faculties are being built one atop the other in a way paralleled by the physical development of the ape brain. At the very bottom of the stack is a shockingly-simple system comparable to that found in the shellfish. In fact it is as self-aware as the average shellfish; which is to say, not particularly if at all. Still it is the root of the mind inasmuch as there is any such thing.
Over time additional systems have accreted around this kernel. Some to interpret sensory input, some to track comparative status, some to maintain a hard-coded library of stimuli and appropriate responses (Smell a certain pheromone? Time to mate. Hear a certain sound? Flatten yourself against the ground. See a snake? Back away. etc.). As well, there are many layers which have no particular purpose per se but to mediate between higher and lower layers. The brain and the mind grow more and more sophisticated, but ultimately all is fed back into that unseeing, unknowing kernel. Like the processor of a computer, it has no idea what’s going on at higher layers. Music? Games? Home video of a loved one? All for higher layers to parse, break down, and pass on useful results. All incomprehensible to the processor, which dumbly accepts the input it’s given and blindly, slavishly, acts as it’s programmed to do — as evidently benefited its ancestors, given that it exists.
So far we’ve described the core of the mind as well as what is sometimes called the ‘reptile-’ or ‘hind-brain’ above it. But such sophisticated animals as apes start growing amazing additional layers and bolting them atop what has come before. Greater visual acuity, propensity to attribute agency to events in their environment, and, of course, social perception and manipulation above all. (Though let’s note that the lower layers do continue to evolve over time to better-interface with and support those around them: it’s not as though there’s a literal 1:1 lizard brain inside the larger brain of the ape.)
At some point a faculty has developed which is capable of taking in huge amounts of information, modeling it internally, simulating possible futures, and plotting a favorable course further into time. It knows to whom it should kiss up, whom it should snub, and whom to avoid pissing off, that it might get what it wants — that sweet, sweet, reproductive advantage. This is all well and good, and the apes we’ve discussed up until this point mostly have this faculty.
But then the really game-breaking development occurs. Atop this already-incredibly-sophisticated mind forms a whole extra layer. This new layer has one job, which is to fabricate narratives which explain why the previous layer isn’t being self-serving, isn’t being cruel, isn’t being Machiavellian (even though it of course is, and must be, else it and those like it will cease to exist).
See here: One thing to competently plot the downfall of the current leader. Another thing entirely to be able to do that without knowing you’re doing so, and to be able to look anyone in the eye and swear that you have no such ambitions. And mean it. And if you suddenly start grooming that strong-lookin’ fella over there, it’s not because some hidden part of your mind has calculated that he’s the key to reproductive advantage. It’s because you like him! You’ve always liked him.
Haven’t you?
These primates can coördinate; can plan and execute with each other without even realizing they’re doing so. (Now that's what I call a killer ape.) Let not the left hand know what the right is doing. Let the ambitious ape have a million and one wholly-honest justifications for his underhanded, opportunistic kicking of his low-status former ally while he’s down. Let him do any number of things that simply feel right even if all his explanations as to why are more-or-less transparent excuses. After all, it’s for the best that he doesn’t look at them too closely in the first place.
One ape probably develops this before anyone else has. Before long most of the females in his region are pregnant with his children. Not long after that, most of the rival troops have been replaced with those led by his descendants. Not long after that, the final males who don’t think this way find themselves camping out along the rocky shores of the island, staring uncomprehendingly at an impossibly-high incoming wall of sheer water.
(Females almost never end up in such a position unless they're old or exceptionally unattractive. Why in the world would they? They have a very important job to do — gestating and tending to the young — but they already know how to do it and there’s not much room for improvement, nor therefore selection pressure. In fact, almost none of the advances in the male sphere are directly relevant to them. To the degree that females are getting smarter, it’s because their male children are advantaged by having mothers with those mental components, that they might be passed along. This means that the females do tag along for the ride during the males’ meteoric mental ascent for the most part, even if for now it’s mainly incidental to their lives.)
Successful troops expand and divide. Each ruling coalition is ephemeral, and is likely to be supplanted in the near future by some younger, hungrier group of males, or even by some lieutenant of the current ruler who’s decided he’s tired of playing second fiddle. And once that coalition has seized control of its little valley and the next valley over for good measure, well, it has a difficult time maintaining the group cohesion required to hold on to both.
Larger troops can field more males to attack and defend against rival troops. In that sense, a larger group size is better. But tracking all those social relationships (and their second, etc.-order interactions) is incredibly difficult work for even the smartest ape. Beyond, say, a few dozen males, bonds cannot be effectively maintained and the integrity of the troop breaks down. Such a weakened troop is easy prey for a smaller but better-coördinated competitor, just as a solo big powerful male is easy prey for some smaller but organized contenders. Any troop (or individual, whose adaptation might propagate throughout his troop) which solves this problem in a scalable manner would be as successful as the first which learned to lie to themselves.
Regrettably, none of these apes ever does solve the problem. By the time one of their distant descendants manages to, it is barely recognizable as even belonging to the same phylogenetic group. The thing has lost most of its hair. It walks upright, and would have a terrible time attempting to swing from tree to tree. It’s much less physically-formidable than its progenitors — not even able to rend its enemies limb from limb with its bare hands!
Yet when it shows back up in the long-forgotten ancestral vale with a thousand or so friends at its back, it recognizes the ape troop there not as competition, but as an occasionally-convenient source of bush meat.
Some astonishing development has clearly taken place, but not in the cloud forest. Whatever else can be said, one thing is for sure: This story isn’t anything close to over.
For this chapter's coda we'll take a quick look at how things play out among some of Tidus’s big cats, comparable to our lions.
In some ways the picture is similar to that of the apes. There are clusters of females for the taking, and males — usually brothers — form coalitions to compete with each other for access to them. And males are again larger than females, and even grow thick neck hair for protection during combat with their own kind.
But in other ways the picture is very different. Tidan lionesses have their own bands of sisters and cousins, and these compete with each other for territory. These female bands (prides) go out of their way to cater to powerful males for a couple of reasons.
For one, the substantially-larger males are useful when taking down the biggest game, even if lions generally prefer to lie about and eat the kills of their lionesses most of the time, conserving their energy for their other purpose.
You see, when a new coalition of lions supplants the previous one, the first thing it does is eat all the extant cubs. This makes perfect sense as they have no use for the progeny of other males, and also because a lioness raising cubs is not fertile for impregnation with their own cubs.
We might expect the females to be extremely upset about this, but the most that can typically be said is that they prefer that it not happen too often. They are heavy-investors, after all, and have a sharply-limited number of reproductive windows. Most of the time they prefer that their cubs don’t get eaten by new males, and so take care to maintain the health and fitness of their current males such that they can fight off interlopers.
But suppose that the interlopers are powerful enough to defeat the prior males anyway? Do the females get upset with them for eating the cubs?
Well... on some level they surely cannot enjoy listening to those crunching sounds. But on a practical level, they usually seem to get over this almost immediately and in fact go into a state of intense aroused fertility — 'heat' — to more quickly conceive the cubs of these newer, obviously-superior males.
This is easy to understand. Suppose that there had been two types of female: one which gets upset with the new males and refuses to mate with them, and another which doesn’t mind as much and quickly offers herself to the conquerors. The latter will out-reproduce the former in short order, and this will again be selected for in every generation. In a sense females are even in a sort of genetic race with each other to enjoy being conquered and their children eaten.
In wrapping up, I wish to be as fair to these females as I can, and note that the situation isn’t entirely one-sided. There are tradeoffs involved and at times defending a cub from new males can be a viable strategy. Sometimes it's even deployed! But in keeping with the general ethos of this book, let us not miss the forest for the trees.
Next week: Chapter 05: Women and Men
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Notes -
Hello! I have just rewritten the Kzinti, where the males are smart and the females are dumb breeding machines!
Ah well, you gave me a laugh at least.
Not at all, and not what I said. The females are, in this phase, about as smart as the males. They just have less pressure to use those smarts — for the time being. Sit tight!
Actually your reaction is kind of humorously on-brand for the chapter, if I'm reading it right. Did you detect, here, the edges of an idea which might hurt your social status were you to accept it?
It may help to remember that I'm describing a last common ancestor (LCA) which would map to something like 6-7 MYA, not modern humans. And, having studied this fairly intensively, the situation I'm describing is pretty much the current best mainstream academic hypothesis as to how they behaved. (If you'd like to know more, probably start with asking an LLM and it can direct you to where all of this is in the literature.)
Partly this is inferred from observing modern chimps, gorillas, and so on, and working backward. No strict harem system where one guy gets all the sex, but coalitional, with close allies also getting substantial preferential mating access. And, most interestingly to me, lack of female identification with the coalition in question. Instead, females ranging where they please and associating with the local males until moving on. But now I'm just repeating myself.
Point being that there's plenty of time for the situation to change between then and now, which is rather the topic of next week's chapter.
But laughter is good medicine.
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