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Nonfiction Views: Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, by Marlene Zuk [1]
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Date: 2022-08-30
Back to the amazing natural world again this week, with a look at Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test: How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters, by Marlene Zuk, published on August 9th. As I said in my review back in May of David George Haskell’s Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution's Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction: “I already live on a knife-edge of awe, stunned disbelief and overwhelmed incomprehension when it comes to the natural world we inhabit.”
In this new book, let’s begin at the end (don’t worry, no plot spoilers involved). The final few pages introduce us to the sea slug:
Sea slugs are the rather more glamorous cousins of the shell-less mollusks you find in your garden. Often beautifully colored, they move sinuously through the water in oceans around the world. Two species, called sacoglossan sea slugs, were recently found to have an extraordinary ability: they can decapitate themselves, and then grow a completely new body, including the heart and digestive organs, from the head alone. The detached body does not respond in kind, and instead it moves around in presumed bewilderment for several days to months before it expires…
There it is again, that knife-edge of awe, stunned disbelief and overwhelmed incomprehension. It seems that sea slugs are vulnerable to a parasite that infects their body and disables their ability to reproduce. However, the parasite does not infect the head, and so to ensure a happier future, the sea slug just pops off the ol’ noggin and in mere weeks is again fully regrown and ready for parenthood. (And yes, the author does not miss the opportunity to quote Kipling: “If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you...”)
Our journey from beginning to this end of the book is filled with similar wonders. Its central aim is to examine the interaction between genes and environment in the evolution of the fantastic variety of animal behaviors. At the outset, Zuk shows that ‘behavior’ itself is a tricky concept. She illustrates this via a plant: the Venus Flytrap. This favorite of kids everywhere snaps two leaves together when an insect lands on its sensitive hairs, and then enjoys a meal. But it doesn’t snap shut on the first touch—that could just be a piece of debris blowing in the wind. No, it waits until a second hair is triggered within 20 seconds. And even then, it doesn’t start digesting until it receives a third signal, proof that something alive is wriggling within its jaws. Would you say that the Venus Flytrap knows how to count? One...two...twenty...three. Is that a behavior? She further notes activity of bacteria and of white blood cells that by some criteria could be defined as ‘behavior.’ The Dead Man Test of the book’s title refers to the behavioral science axiom that if a dead man can do it, it isn't behavior. Obviously, behavioral scientists haven't read much horror fiction.
In between, the book takes us through wide-ranging discussions of genetic makeup versus environment in shaping evolution, of whether or not humans are somehow too special to be lumped together with animals, and whether environment is synonymous with culture. We learn that species of bees that have more limited lives, such as feeding on only one type of plant or being less social than other species, tend to have larger brains, which seems contrary to the idea that increased complexity leads to advanced development.
We learn that domestic dogs do indeed share much genetic material with wolves, but the question of when wild wolves became tame dogs is hotly debated, with studies placing the divergence anywhere from 135,000 years ago to a mere 10,000. Fossil records and behavioral studies offer conflicting evidence.
It is in some ways a difficult book, because the subject is so full of ambiguity and complexity, with no easy conclusions to be reached. But it is also a fascinating book, both for the amazing stories of the natural world, and of the author’s charmingly droll humor throughout. And so, we end with the slugs:
Even a humble slug is capable of feats that humans cannot achieve. Those dichotomies are false whether we put humans in one category and other animals into another, or whether we allow apes, crows and octopus into the club and exclude everything else. It is also false if we try to classify our behavior as learned and theirs as instinctive. Instead, understanding how behavior evolves allows us to celebrate the entanglement of both.
Another new book I’m reading and will likely review soon takes another look at this mystery:
How the Mind Changed : A Human History of our Evolving Brain, by Joseph Jebelli. He too delves into genes and culture in trying to determine how exactly this unique human brain evolved. After all, as I often ponder, while the behavior of animals is infinitely varied and complex, there seems to be only one creature that has both the desire and the ability to try and understand why that is so and how it happened. Sea slugs may decapitate themselves to fight infection, and birds may navigate by moonlight and magnetic fields, but only one creature has the driving curiosity and ability to develop the science that reveals the how and why of disease and magnetism, or create the means to voyage to the moon.
The mysteries of existence multiply.
THIS WEEK’S NEW HARDCOVERS
Halloween comes early this week, as the odious Alex Jones inflicts his worldview on us with The Great Reset: And the War for the World (“the global elite's international conspiracy to enslave humanity and all life on the planet.”)—not to be confused with The Great Reset: Global Elites and the Permanent Lockdown, by Michael Moran, with a forward by Sebastian Gorka (“the left's sinister push to use a worldwide crisis to infuse our lives with the values of collasal [sic] statism and dystopian self-hatred”), which also is being published today, and Dinesh D'Souza expands his grifting 2000 Mules movie to book form with 2,000 Mules: They Thought We'd Never Find Out. They Were Wrong. Ugh.
Oh, but oopsie! 2,000 Mules has been recalled at the last minute for some as yet undefined ‘significant error.’ Regnery still says they will publish the book in October.
x 🚨NEW: Publisher of @DineshDSouza's book 2000 MULES has issued a FULL RECALL. I received this image from a book vendor for Walmart. The book's election fraud premise has been widely debunked.
I've asked publisher @Regnery why it issued the full recall. Will report. #Publishing pic.twitter.com/RELOFntJkp — Nancy Levine 🇺🇦 (@nancylevine) August 29, 2022
All book links in this diary are to my online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner with Hummingbird Media for ebooks and Libro.fm for audiobooks. The ebook app is admittedly not as robust as some, but it gets the job done. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month.
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