“Yes, I see that.”
“There are a finite number of strategies that can be adopted by conspecifics in conflict, but it’s not to our purpose for me to develop a complete list of them here and now. Rather, what I’d like to do is pay another visit to Calliope to study the Awks to see the strategies evolution has brought forth among them for dealing with conflict.”
“What are Awks?”
“Awks are a sort of cross between monkeys and ostriches, if you can picture such a bizarre coupling. Originally they were birds, but they became so much at home in the trees that flight became superfluous for them. So they’re rather like ostriches in that they have stunted little wings, and they’re rather like monkeys in that they have very useful grabbing and swinging appendages like hands and tails that enable them to elude almost every sort of predator that comes after them. Unlike many species, in which the male is superfluous after impregnating the female, the male Awk must be on hand to help provide food for newborn offspring. And by the time he’s no longer need
ed as a food collector for the young, the three or four females under his care are ready to mate again. So Awks have a recognizable sort of family life.
“When two Awks come face-to-face over a luscious piece of fruit, here’s what generally happens. They glare at each other and bare their teeth and shriek. If one of them is distinctly smaller than the other, then it will probably give up rather quickly and slink away. But not always. Two out of five times (perhaps corresponding to how hungry it is), it will start bouncing up and down in a clearly threatening manner. When this happens, the other will usually back down, even if it’s larger. But again, not always. Perhaps one out of five times, it will refuse to be intimidated and will try some intimidation of its own, bouncing up and down and snapping its teeth. This will usually send the other off with its tail between its legs—but again, not always. Perhaps one time in ten, the smaller will recklessly continue to threaten the larger, and they’ll end up in a physical battle that will last twenty or thirty seconds and will result in a few minor cuts and bruises before the victor carries away the fruit.
“The strategy each Awk is following can be expressed roughly as follows. ‘If confronted by an Awk competitor, be aggressive, but back down if the other is distinctly bigger—unless you really need the resource in contention, in which case you might occasionally try being a bit more aggressive just to see if the other will back down. If the other responds by becoming more aggressive, run away, unless you really need that resource and are feeling lucky.’ Now of course I don’t mean that this strategy is something reasoned out. But if it were to be reasoned out and articulated in words, then it would be something like that. The Awks behave as though they were following a consistent strategy, roughly as I’ve described it.”
“I understand.”
“Now this sort of behavior isn’t at all unusual. Most earthly species resolve their conspecific conflicts over resources in just such a fashion. It doesn’t pay to get into a serious battle over every acorn, but it also doesn’t pay to back down over every acorn. It’s important to be predictable to a certain extent, but it’s also important not to be too predictable. For example, your opponent should know that when you start snapping your teeth at him, you’re pretty likely to attack. On the other hand, your opponent shouldn’t be able to count on your backing down just because he starts snapping his teeth at you.”
“Right.”
“Again, this sort of strategy evolves because it works—again and again, for all sorts of species, and very probably all over the universe.”
“Yes, that makes sense.”
Ishmael paused to think for a moment. “What I’m pointing out is that, if you were to take the journey you fantasized in your daydream, you’d find the same general evolutionary background everywhere, because everywhere (and not just on this planet) evolution is a process that intrinsically and invariably brings forth what works, and what works is not going to vary dramatically from one planet to the next. Wherever you go in the universe, you’ll find species going out of existence by failing but never coming into existence by failing. Wherever you go in the universe, you’ll find it never pays to fight to the death over every morsel of food.”
I closed my eyes and settled back in my chair to ponder that for a while. When I came to, I said, “You’re telling me something about the wisdom I would have found if I’d been able to take that galactic journey in fact.”
He nodded. “Yes. In a sense, the two of us are taking that journey right here, without leaving the ground. To proceed … In my initial examination of the competition strategies of Awks, I felt it best to postpone the very important element of territoriality. I’d like to catch up on that now. Humans often misunderstand animal territoriality by thinking of it in human terms. A human group will tend to start out by finding a territory for themselves—a place to call their own. They carve out a piece of real estate and say, ‘This territory is ours, and we’ll defend everything in it.’ People therefore assume that an animal is making the same sort of statement when it goes about marking a territory with its scent. This anthropomorphism leads to much confusion. This is not only because animals are incapable of this level of abstraction, but also because they know nothing about territories and have no interest in territories. To begin at the beginning, an animal never goes looking for territory as such—a place to call its own. It goes looking for food and mates, and when it finds them, it draws a circle around them that says to conspecific rivals, ‘The resources inside this circle are taken and will be defended.’ It doesn’t give a hang about the acreage itself, and if the resources in it disappeared, the animal would walk away from it without a backward glance.”
“That seems obvious enough,” I offered.
Ishmael shrugged. “Every path is plain once it’s been opened. However, having established that there is a difference, we can proceed as if it didn’t matter. For the most part, animals defending their resources act exactly as if they were defending a territory. We can begin by noting that animals don’t defend their territory against all the thousands of species that invade it—they couldn’t and they don’t need to. The only species they must defend it against is their own, for reasons we’ve already noted.
“Territoriality adds another dimension to conspecific conflict. Forty years ago the great Dutch zoologist Nikolaas Tinbergen constructed a marvelous demonstration of this, using two male sticklebacks that had built breeding nests at opposite ends of an aquarium. Tinbergen used two glass cylinders to trap the sticklebacks and move them around the aquarium. Let’s call them Red and Blue. When he brought Red and Blue together in their cylinders at the center of the tank, they reacted with equal hostility to each other. But when he moved them toward Red’s nest, their behavior began to change. Red tried to attack, and Blue tried to retreat. When he moved them to the vicinity of Blue’s nest, their roles reversed: Blue tried to attack, and Red tried to retreat. (This, by the way, also demonstrates the ‘territorial’ fallacy; the sticklebacks are clearly not contesting water.) This is the element that territoriality adds to the strategy typically followed by conspecifics in conflict: ‘If you’re the resident, attack; if you’re the intruder, withdraw.’ If you have a dog or a cat, you will have seen this strategy enacted many times in the vicinity of your home.”
“Yes—but speaking of cats and dogs raises a question about animals and territoriality. Cats and dogs will often insist on going back to an old home even after their human family has moved on to a new one.”
Ishmael nodded. “You’re absolutely right, Julie. I wasn’t thinking about domesticated animals when I made those remarks. Domesticated animals display a very human attitude toward territory, and of course this is largely what makes them domesticated. The very term to domesticate means ‘to attach or accustom to a home.’ If they’re abandoned and allowed to run wild, however, you’ll see them quickly shed this attachment-to-home as utterly unworkable for them in the feral state.”
“Yeah, I see that,” I said.
“Let’s get back to Calliope and the Awks,” Ishmael said. “As it happens, some five million years have passed since our last visit, and important climatic changes have taken place. The unbroken forest canopy that once sheltered the Awks is gone, but it didn’t disappear so quickly that the Awks were unable to adapt to the changes this brought about. What we see now is a species that lives on the ground rather than in the trees, and since they really constitute a distinct species, we should give them a new name. Let’s call them Bawks. These Bawks are no longer able to elude predators by scattering nimbly into the forest canopy the way their ancestors did. Back then it was every animal for itself, and that worked perfectly. But now they must stand together and defend themselves as a troop, and an individual that takes off on its own is very probably going to be the very one that is picked off by a predator.
“The Bawks’ ancestors ate whatever came to hand in the trees—fruits, nuts, leaves, and a wide variety of insects. They weren’t quite nimble enough to catch adult birds, but unguarded nestlings were a favored treat. As they were gradually forced down out of the trees in search of food, they continued to eat whatever came to hand, but conditions were very different on the ground. To begin with, food didn’t just fall into their hands the way it used to. And on the ground they had many more competitors for what was available. They had to become more adventurous eaters. Many of their competitors were perfectly good to eat, but they were also harder to catch, because Bawks were not nearly as nimble on the ground as they had been in the trees. The Bawks gradually developed something to compensate for their individual lack of speed, and that was the teamwork that would make them successful hunters—something their ancestors had never needed to be.
“The nature of competition among them has changed. Although individuals still compete with other individuals for resources, each individual’s overall success also depends on cooperating with other individuals to assure the success of the troop. As I’ve mentioned, Awks just scattered into the forest canopy when attacked, but Bawks aren’t fast enough on the ground to do that. They have to stand together and fight as a team. Awks were strictly individual foragers, which worked perfectly well in the trees, but Bawks, confined to the ground, have better success foraging in teams. Now we see that the state of competition isn’t primarily individual against individual but rather troop against troop. Nevertheless, although the competitive unit has changed, the strategies are the same: ‘If your troop is the resident, attack; if it’s the intruder, retreat. If neither troop is resident or intruder, follow a mixed strategy. Threaten the other troop, and if it retreats, fine. But if it threatens back, then attack sometimes and back down sometimes. Or if threatened yourselves, threaten back sometimes and retreat sometimes.’ These strategies enable troops of Bawks to live side by side without either overrunning each other or being overrun. At the same time they can compete for the resources they need without having to fight to the death for every little thing.”
“Yes, I see,” said I, bravely keeping up my end of things.
“We now leave Calliope and return five million years later. After doing a little exploring, we discover that the Bawks are still thriving, but one branch of them has evolved into a new species that we’ll call Cawks. I won’t try to theorize about what pressure prompted this evolutionary development. It should be enough for us that it has occurred. Cawks
in most ways seem closer to Bawks than Bawks did to Awks, which you’ll remember lived in trees, foraged as individuals, and scattered when attacked. Cawks are like Bawks in that they live on the ground, forage in teams, and fight shoulder to shoulder when attacked. Cawks have simply taken these tendencies a giant step forward. These are cultural beings. This means that the parents of every generation transmit to their children what they learned from their own parents, together with anything new they learn during their lifetime. What they transmit is an accumulation of material from various periods in their past. For example, every child learns that the branch of a certain tree can be stripped of leaves and used as a sort of fishing pole to gather ants from a nest. This technique dates back three or four million years. Every child learns how to cure the hide of an animal so that it can be used for strapping or clothing, and this technique is two or three million years old. Every child learns how to fabricate twine from the bark of a tree, how to start a fire, how to turn a stone into a cutting tool, how to make a spear and a spear thrower, and these techniques are all a million years old. Thousands of arts and techniques—of various ages—are transmitted from one generation to the next.
“Although the Cawks live in groups like their predecessors, the Bawks, it wouldn’t be correct to call them troops, because troops are basically the same from one to another. The Cawks live in tribes—the Jays, the Kays, the Ells, the Emms, the Enns, and so on—each very different from all the others. Each tribe has its own distinctive cultural collection that it passes on from one generation to the next, along with the various techniques I mentioned a moment ago, which are the common heritage of all Awks. The tribal heritage includes songs, stories, myths, and customs that may be tens of thousands of years old or even hundreds of thousands of years old. When we come upon them in the present moment, these are not literate peoples, and even if they were, their records wouldn’t go back tens of thousands of years. If you ask them how old these things are, they’d only be able to say that no one knows. These are things that, as far as they’re concerned, go back to the dawn of time. As far as the Jays know, they’ve literally been around forever. The same is true of the Kays, the Ells, the Emms, and all the rest.
“There are certain differences between tribe and tribe that seem rather arbitrary. One tribe likes basket-weave pots, another likes corded pots. One tribe likes weavings that are primarily black and white, another likes more colorful weavings. But there are other differences that seem much more crucial. In one tribe, lineage is reckoned through the mother; in another, it’s reckoned through the father. In one tribe, elders have a special voice in tribal affairs; in another tribe, all adults have an equal voice. One tribe operates under hereditary rule, another has a chief who rules until he’s bested in single combat. Among the Emms, your key relatives are your mother and your uncles on your mother’s side, and your father is of no special importance. Among the Ells, men and women never cohabit as husbands and wives; men live together in one longhouse, and women live together in another. One tribe practices polyandry (many husbands), another polygyny (many wives). And so on and on.
“Even more important than all these things are tribal laws, which have only one thing in common: They’re not lists of things that are prohibited but rather procedures for handling problems that inevitably arise in communal life. What do you do when someone is constantly disrupting the peace with his or her bad temper? What do you do when a spouse has been unfaithful? What do you do when someone has injured or killed another tribal member? Unlike the laws you know, Julie, these laws were never formulated by any committee. Rather, they grew up among the tribal members the way strategies for competition grew up—by a steady winnowing out of what didn’t work, of what didn’t accomplish what people wanted—over tens of thousands of years. In a very real sense, the Ells are the laws of the Ells. Or even better, the laws of each tribe represent the will of the tribe. Their laws make utter sense to them in the context of their entire culture. The laws of the Ells wouldn’t make sense to the Emms, but what difference does that make? The Emms have their own laws, which make utter sense to them, though they’re clearly very different from those of the Ells or anyone else.