“So the world was made for Man, and Man—What was Man supposed to do with the world?”
“He was supposed to rule it. It was given to him to rule.”
“But, oddly enough, the world wasn’t ready for him to rule, was it. Man was ready-made to rule the world but the world wasn’t readymade for him to rule it.”
“No, that’s true. I never noticed that in particular.”
“So what did Man have to do to make the world ready to rule?”
“He had to subdue it, conquer it.”
“That’s right. And he’s still at it, isn’t he. So, this is the Taker vision: The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it.”
“Yes.”
“What we’re looking for now, Jared, is the Leaver vision or the animist vision. Before we leave here today, you’ll have that, I promise you.”
Strategies: stable and otherwise
“I want you to understand that what I’m calling the Law of Life was not in any sense imprinted in the community of life by divine action. God or the gods didn’t give their creatures ‘good instincts’ that I’m now calling collectively the Law of Life. It didn’t happen that way. To posit such an action would be unparsimonious, a violation of Occam’s razor. You understand what I mean by that, don’t you?”
“Yes. You’re saying the Law of Life doesn’t have to be explained as a system of divine intervention any more than the laws of thermodynamics have to be explained as a system of divine intervention.”
“That’s right. A biologist would probably say that what I’m calling the Law of Life is just a collection of evolutionarily stable strategies—the universal set of such strategies, in fact. Do you know what an evolutionarily stable strategy is?”
“Madam,” I said, “I am a classicist, not a biologist. In school, I read Homer in the Greek and Cicero in the Latin. I can give you a discourse on Plato’s proof of the immortality of the soul—and a damned good one it is, too, if you accept his premises. But I haven’t the least idea what an evolutionarily stable strategy is.”
“All right. Let’s break it down into parts. A strategy in this context is just a behavioral policy. For example, yesterday I mentioned a behavioral policy that’s followed by lactating she-goats: ‘Suckle your own and no other.’ This is evolutionarily stable for goats because it can’t be improved on by any alternative strategy. For example, it could happen that some goats might follow a strategy of refusing to nurse any kids at all, including their own. But this will definitely have the effect of reducing their representation in the gene pool, so refusal to nurse will tend to disappear from the species. Similarly, some goats might follow a strategy of indiscriminate nursing—suckling any kid that comes along. But because this shortchanges their own kids, this too will have the effect of reducing their representation in the gene pool, so indiscriminate nursing will also tend to disappear. The only strategy that will not tend to disappear is ‘Suckle your own and no other.’ That’s why this particular strategy is evolutionarily stable: The normal process of evolution, natural selection, doesn’t eliminate it.”
“I understand. This is the Law of Life for goats not because God decided goats should behave this way but because, in any mix of strategies, goats that suckle only their own will tend to be better represented in the gene pool than any others. It’s actually a very elegant concept.”
“Science does occasionally produce an elegant concept,” she said with an mildly ironic smile. “I’m sure you understand that what is stable and unstable for one species isn’t necessarily stable and unstable for another species. For example, many birds are indiscriminate nursers. They’ll feed any chick that turns up in their nest, including chicks of other species.”
“Thus giving aid and comfort to the merry cuckoo,” I said, rewarding B’s surprised look with a mildly ironic smile of my own. “We classicists aren’t total ignoramuses,” I informed her. “The fool warns King Lear, ‘You know, Nuncle, the hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long it had its head bit
off by its young.’”
“I’m glad to know that classicists aren’t total ignoramuses, Jared,” B said, giving me a smile so sweetly benevolent that, for one terrifying moment, I actually had to struggle to keep from grabbing her. Noticing nothing, she went on.
“I know you’ve heard Charles mention a colleague known as Ishmael. Though he didn’t use this terminology, Ishmael identified a set of strategies that appear to be evolutionarily stable for all species. He called this set of strategies the Law of Limited Competition, which he expressed this way: ‘You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food.’ In the miscalled ‘natural’ community (meaning the nonhuman community), you’ll find competitors killing each other when the opportunity presents itself, but you won’t find them creating opportunities to kill each other. You won’t find them hunting each other the way they hunt their prey; to do so would not be evolutionarily stable. Hyenas just don’t have the energy to hunt lions—calories gained by eliminating these competitors wouldn’t equal the calories spent in eliminating them—and attacking lions is not exactly a risk-free venture. In the same way, in the ‘natural’ community, you won’t find competitors destroying their competitors’ food—the payoff just isn’t big enough to make it worthwhile.”
“What would be the motive for destroying your competitors’ food?”
“If you destroy your competitors’ food, you destroy your competitors, Jared. Suppose, for example, that you’re a bird species that favors foods A, B, C, D, E, and F. Another bird species favors foods D, E, F, G, H, and I. That means you compete with them for foods D, E, and F. By destroying foods G, H, and I (which you don’t care for yourself), you can strike an important blow against them.”
“But won’t they just compete all the harder for foods D, E, and F?”
“Of course. That’s why you need the third strategy. You want to deny them access to foods D, E, and F. That way your competitors will be totally out of luck. You’ll be denying them access to half the foods they favor and destroying the other half.”
“But as you say, this doesn’t happen.”
“It doesn’t happen in the nonhuman community, but this isn’t to say that it cant happen. To say that it doesn’t happen is to say that it isn’t found, and it isn’t found because it’s self-eliminating. Do you see what I mean? It doesn’t happen that goats refuse to nurse their young, but that isn’t because such behavior is impossible. There surely have been goats that refuse to nurse, but you seldom or never come across them, because their offspring die and they lose their representation in the gene pool.”
“I see that,” I said.
“It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or rather it has happened one time, in one human culture—ours. That’s what our agricultural revolution is all about. That’s the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That’s what makes it totalitarian.”
My mind reeled for a bit over this. It took me a while to figure out what it was reeling over. Finally I said, “Look, the subject here is evolutionarily stable strategies, right?”