The Descent of Man
June 24 2014


We are 2% Neanderthal
more or less.

Our ancestors met, befriended
fell in love;
or, to be anthropologically correct
bred.
Precocious experiments
in evolution.

Hairy babies
built like wrestlers, square-jawed leading men,
who were good with their hands
but just didn't get it.
The subtle cues
of facial expression,
the minutiae
of language arts.
Because humans
are empathetic,
Neanderthals not.

We are social creatures,

like termites
clustered in their high-rise mounds.

Who alone, will die,
stranded insects
emitting soundless cries.

I contain the past
all the life before me.
Cockroach, vole, T Rex
my Neanderthal ex,

the good breeding, the missing links.
And vying for attention, along with them

the gut, the head

the sex.

Like the gun, under my bed
the next-door neighbour's fence.
The descent of man
depends
on careful listening.


I like the subtle double-entendre of "descent" and "life before me".

The first evokes the evolutionary tree, branching upward, which we often imagine with a connotation of progress, direction, intent. Of course, this isn't at all how it works. Intelligence is not privileged; and there is no inevitable and endpoint, no clear apotheosis. Evolution is a lot more accident and knife-edge survival and starting over. (After all, the most ancient living creatures, no matter how simple they are -- like roundworms, jelly fish, sharks -- are arguably the most successful from an evolutionary point of view: so well-adapted, they have survived unchanged. We are so recent and may prove in the end to be so transient, it will take a few million years before one is entitled to say the same about us!)

But "descent" also means climbing down: the ladder, the branches, the tree. It evokes loss and diminution, a return to something simpler and more primordial. It goes both forward and back.

As with "life before me", a Janus-like expression that looks both ways at once: not just what came before, at an earlier time, but what may come after, stretching out "before me" into some hypothetical future. So the conflation of the two meanings again raises this idea of returning to the primordial: if our ancestors were voles, will our descendants be?

The "descent of man" -- that is, our continued ascent (a subjective proposition, I grant!); or, if not, at least our basic survival -- depends on that essentially human suite of genes winning out over our inner Neanderthal: the suite of genes behind our language, sociability, and powers of empathy; which are the three essential things that together make us unique in the animal world. Communication skills define us. "Listening" is the last word of the poem for a reason.

The natural question is "why just 2%"? Because a lot of those mixed babies, the ones who missed these essential human traits, didn't make it. We didn't so much defeat our Neanderthal cousins in tribal combat; our offspring just went about living more successful lives in stronger communities. So in the other 98%, the miscegenation of Sapien and Neanderthal led to an evolutionary dead-end

I know "sociability" must sound odd, coming from an unusually solitary human (me!), who inhabits the long tail of the bell-curve of human temperament. But even oddballs and eccentrics are critical ingredients of collective evolutionary success: they represent diversity, which confers resilience in the face of rapid and unexpected change. Especially when in Nature, the unexpected is exactly what we have to expect.

As to the rest of the poem, there's no gun under my bed.

And fences do make good neighbours, even among social animals. Although I'm not sure what Robert Frost really meant: was it about territory and tribe, blood and belonging, the respecting of borders; or was it about the co-operation necessary to build something together?

And I like to think I'm ruled far more by my head than my gut. Except that if the behavioural economists and psychologists are right, we have no idea about our true motivations and decision-making, and are a lot less self-aware than we believe: we only flatter ourselves to imagine we are mostly rational creatures.

I hope readers will excuse "the descent of man". Being a middle aged middle class white male -- in other words, a charter member of the reviled patriarchy -- please indulge my preference for traditional modes of expression, even if they do contravene politically correct notions of gender neutrality. Just accept that old guys are beyond redemption; and anyway, hardly worth the trouble!