The following essay was published in the journal of Swiss RE Germany in 1998
In the beginning was the Risk
Evolution: a matter of life and death
What was paradise really like? When asked, most people immediately think
of Eden, those cosy gardens where Mother Nature would serenely dispense
her gifts and love all her creatures as much as Michael Jackson loves
his fans; a land of milk and honey where manna falls from heaven. Apologies
for having to disappoint so early on, but the real Garden of Eden was
anything but tranquil and cosy. In fact, it was something like the Serengeti
without the safari hotels and the land rovers. Jokes aside, the first
traces of humanity were indeed found close to what is now the Serengeti
National Park. So it's worthwhile taking a look at the Serengeti to see
what life must have been like in Paradise. As we can see, Attenborough's
savannah is hardly a world of peace and harmony for its inhabitants. In
fact, the animals live in a state of perpetual fear. Gnus, giraffes and
gazelles are easily startled. There's no such thing as tranquil grazing:
they just have time to take a mouthful of grass before raising their heads
again to check that the coast is still clear. These creatures can't even
relax while they are asleep, for a large minority of the Serengeti's creatures
refuse to become vegetarian. As the American author P.J. O'Rourke says:
"If you resist the temptation to ideologise about nature, you soon
see what an anxiety-ridden life most of the animals there lead."
It is usual these days to regard nature as a place of harmony that is
threatened only by evil-minded humans. In fact evolution has never been
blessed with moral enlightenment; it is designed to be mercilessly efficient,
and only a few succeed - either by skill or good fortune - in escaping
the perils that lurk around every corner. Raised in the zoo, the European
hare can reach the grand old age of twelve. Its average life expectancy
in the wild is scarcely twelve months, and that's not including fatalities
that can be ascribed to the hunter's gun. Over half of wild boars die
within the first five months of their lives. And as for the poor female
cod, the chance of a baby fish popping out of one of the seven million
eggs she has laid is less than 0.1 per cent, the remainder of her produce
serving as food for diverse marine life. Even the king of the jungle cannot
give its offspring any guarantee of survival: only around one third of
lion cubs survive to adult age.
For nature, "normal" does not mean equilibrium, but the break between catastrophes. Evolution is characterised by a string of disasters which bring death and destruction to flora and fauna alike. Global crises have left their mark on the earth. In the past, fire, frost, floods and storms have caused great upheavals in the biosphere, and they continue to do so. Then there are the climatic shifts and geological events that have a longterm effect on the earth and its environment, such as the gradual emergence of an oxygen-based atmosphere, the ice ages, continental drift, or erupting volcanoes that can darken our skies for decades on end. On five separate occasions, evolution has witnessed the global destruction of the animal and plant world resulting in the loss of 99 per cent of species that ever lived on the earth. As the American author Stephen Budiansky once said, "Nature is a lottery; in fact it's even worse than a lottery because this particular lottery company can always decide that it simply doesn't want to payout." Nature doesn't just have cycles, it has its dead-ends too. For millions of years, vast quantities of plant material built up as a result of photosynthesis being such a successful process. Its waste product, oxygen, poisoned the earth until the arrival of oxygen-breathing creatures opened up a new dimension in life. Nature provides no guarantee that what is here today will still be here tomorrow. There is no masterplan and no big objective. "Nature does not have an equilibrium," writes evolutionary scientist Josef H. Reichholf. It would be crazy to expect ecological systems to remain as they are. The current state of things is nothing more than the launch pad for the next one. Often it is just mankind's benchmark of time that gives us an impression of stability. To us, the toing-and-froing on an anthill seems chaotic whereas an ancient oak forest looks so stable. But viewed over thousands of years, the forest too is in a state of perpetual motion.
Were there any such thing as equilibrium in nature, there would have been no evolution, for progress and development are dependent on certain imbalances. Where there's equilibium, things stay the same. And that applies equally to a species which, if the whole of evolution were crammed into a single calendar year, appeared on the scene around 15 minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve: Homo sapiens.
Evolution means emancipation
It is said that animals and plants occupy ecological niches, the idea being that every creature has a definite role and a fixed place within a particular habitat, and that this creature will adapt itself to its biotope as best it can. Indeed, many creatures are dependent on quite specific environmental conditions. The panda, for instance, cannot survive without its bamboo forests in the mountains. That said, other species choose a quite different strategy. In the course of their evolution, such creatures have succeeded in freeing themselves from the dictates of their environment, becoming ever more indepenent. What, for instance, does the blackbird's habitat look like? Although some of them fly south for the winter, some spend the whole year in northern climes.
Some of them nest in dark woods while others choose to raise their young in the guttering of houses or in letter boxes. Many a male blackbird is equally at home singing his song from an aerial as from the top of a tree. The idea of the ecological niche no longer applies to blackbirds, as they have succeeded in exploiting such a wide range of environmental opportunities. The cockroach, the house mouse, the brown rat, man himself, along with numerous other creatures, have claimed the whole world as their niche. Versatility and mobility emancipate animals from nature's whims and the ties of a fixed habitat. Unlike plants, they can detach themselves from the local confines of the environment. They can then move from an environment of shortage to one of abundance, come out of the cold and into the warm, quit a solitary existence and become one of the pack, exit an arid place for one where water is plentiful. Rooted to their respective spot, plants are degraded into food for the mobile fauna.
Rather than adapting themselves to the conditions of a specific oceanic region, grey whales have become life's eternal commuters. Part of the year, they frequent the waters of the North Sea where their staple diet, krill, is in abundance, before swimming to the warm albeit barren waters of the southern lagoons to raise their young. Year after year, they swim from the Mexican coast to the Bering Sea and back. By the time a grey whale reaches forty, i.e. midlife, it has clocked up mileage equivalent to the distance between the earth and the moon. But the price of emancipation is high for these enlightened creatures, involving as it does enormous physical effort, extreme risk and, often, early death. Tortoises grow so old because they adopt a phlegmatic approach to life. Conversely, being as free as a bird involves living life at top speed. Birds need twice as much energy for their metabolism as mammals.
So, breaking free from one's normal environment is not for the faint-hearted. Anyone wishing to do so must feel at home in a variety of habitats and be able to cope with the unexpected. "Fear is the price we have to pay for our mobility," wrote the author Hans Kudsuz. "Plants and stones know no fear." Evolution is all about exploiting opportunity. The imbalance between shortage and abundance is life's driving force. And in order to progress, we need to become more emancipated from our environment, not more adapted to it. Throughout the earth's history, some species or other has always been prepared to take an enormous risk in order to thrust forward in the evolution of living things. The first fish that struggled onto the beach on its fins must have found the dry landscape as uninhabitable as the moon's. And it can be assumed that the first prehistoric bird that leapt from a tree had a pretty rough landing. As today's astronauts stride through space, they are very likely obeying evolution's secret call to take life into pastures new. They are planting the seed of the blue planet in space. Some people satisfy their desire for light by lying on sunbeds, eat designer food from the laboratory or reproduce with the help of sperm banks and invitro fertilisation. This too could well be an evolutionary emancipation strategy which implores us to free ourselves from our environment. All told, man has been trying for centuries - with varying degrees of success - to escape from nature's inhospitality. The first fire, the first boat, the first telephone broke natural barriers. And the short-sighted among us would have died out long ago had spectacles not been invented. Perhaps the biggest and most significant emancipatory step away from nature occurred as early as in the Neolithic Age.
Tired of searching for herbs and chasing after bison, hunters and gatherers decided to cultivate grasses in order to produce grain and to domesticate animals; it was probably quite a dangerous thing catching live animals. But this initial highly risky step was to provide future generations with a relatively safe source of food.
Homo sapiens. Homo riscantus
Many paleoanthropologists claim that our forefathers must have been scavengers. With their primitive tools and - in comparison to hoofed animals - slow locomotion, hominids in the African savannah were never going to be great hunters. So, they roamed the grassy plains on the lookout for vultures, usually the first creatures to notice that death was creeping up on some animal or other. The vultures' swooping down was the sign for the opportunist hunters to run as fast as they could towards the feeding ground. Often, however, packs of hyenas or a lion too lazy to hunt for itself would be first on the scene. If the lion had killed its prey itself, the scavengers would know that it would need around twenty minutes to recover from the exertion. This was their chance to steal the prey from under the nose of the enraged lion. At lightning speed, their body chemistry would switch to full risk: adrenal glands would begin releasing adrenaline and cortisol; fat cells would start to secrete large amounts of sugar; pulse rates would increase to 150 beats per minute, and blood pressure rise in order to provide muscles with the necessary energy. In moments as perilous as these, processes such as sex drive, digestion and bone growth would come to an almost complete standstill, the intestines hardly supplied with blood at all. The hunters would ensure that their lungs were pumped full of oxygen by taking fast, deep breaths.
Once the ancient hunters had chased the beast away from its prey with sticks, stones and aggressive cries, they would be overcome with a feeling of bliss; a sense of elation would flood through them. This was their bodies rewarding their efforts with doses of the happiness hormone endorphin. There's no greater feeling than when shock subsides. And we are still experiencing such emotional rollercoasters today, for example when we travel at speed on the motorway, hit the winning penalty into the back of the net, or shrink back into a seat at the cinema as Spielberg's dinosaurs pass before our eyes. For our ancient ancestors, getting hold of meat - that vital source of food - was a hazardous business; many thousands of years would go by until the first hamburger bar would appear along the roadside. As we can see, the slight primates with the large brain became tuned to risk at an early stage of their development. Long before modern man, Homo sapiens, saw the light of day, his ancient cousins had already risked everything in vain; they became extinct. Our ancient ancestors left the African savannah on three different occasions with the aim of conquering the world. They failed on two of these. Perhaps the scavengers let themselves be tempted ever further away from their East African homelands by roaming herds. Perhaps they left because the population density began to rise and illness and disease started to spread. Reichholf considers the risk of infection as being the decisive "push factor". He writes, "Roaming is in our blood; but when we say that, we hardly ever stop to think just how literally it should be taken." If we had never had to stay one step ahead of diseases such as malaria and sleeping sickness, perhaps it would never have been necessary to move to the more inhospitable northern climes.
Homo erectus arrived in East Asia around one million years ago, only to be forced back by a worsening climate during the interglacial periods. Neanderthal Man had to confront similar challenges too, around 200,000 years ago. But he was bigger, already had a much larger brain than Homo erectus and was around for some 180,000 years, surviving two ice ages and interglacial periods in the process. It was not until the third attempt around 70,000 years ago that lasting success was achieved (for the time being, at least). For the climate changed yet again; it became moist and humid in the East African paradise - a pleasant environment for the tsetse fly responsible for transmitting the highly dangerous sleeping sickness. The by then virtually hairless Homo sapiens was the ideal victim for the insect, which succeeded in driving our forefathers northwards and, ultimately, around the entire globe.
Who dares wins - usually
In the year 1271, a young Venetian merchant by the name of Marco Polo journeyed to the Far East. When he returned, many people considered his stories to be fairy tales; the pious narrow-mindedness of the Middle Ages was not in the least open to new horizons. But 200 years later, one of the book's readers set out on a sea journey into the unknown. Accompanying him on his expedition were Marco Polo's works, carefully adorned with numerous comments and remarks. His name was Christopher Columbus.
The urge to expand coupled with a willingness to take risks had turned Homo sapiens into the most successful biomodel in world history. These factors were also the driving force behind our cultural evolution. It was men like Polo and Columbus who elected to go beyond the geographical and intellectual frontiers of their time. The Africa explorer Barth, the explorer of the polar seas Bering, the Pacific traveller Bougainville and many others risked everything in order to explore new horizons. And the 20th century has seen spacemen such as Yuri Gagarin or Neil Armstrong breach even the frontiers of our planet. It was discoveries in the field of technology that initially paved the way towards exploring the world and space as we know it; the sailing ship Santa Maria in which Columbus reached the coast of America; Captain Cook's chronometer; the Apollo 11 lunar module. Pushing forward into new dimensions was usually preceded by a scientific breakthrough.
Harvard professor J.H. Parry writes: "A technological approach to
science, that is, an exceptional ability to find practical applications
for the latest findings is the main attribute that has served to set Western
civilisation - originally a European civilisation - apart from other great
civilised societies. The unprecedented power generated in this way ultimately
led Europe from a state of world exploration to one of world domination,
thus creating the world of yesteryear - ruled largely by Europeans - and
the world of today, in which European technology and European forms of
government (albeit sometimes implemented for the sole purpose of escaping
European rule) are the order of the day almost everywhere."
A passionate desire for fame and fortune along with an obsessive need
to spread the Christian faith were the forces that spurred on the world's
great travellers during the 15th and early 16th centuries. This golden
age of discovery was ~o last but fifty years. In this short time, Vasco
da Gama discovered the sea route to India, Columbus discovered America
and Magellan circumnavigated the world.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, it was cometition among the colonial powers and the desire for new adventures which drove many a daring pioneer through jungle and desert. Hard on the heels of the pioneers were the conquerors. It was soldiers, missionaries, traders, mining engineers and plantation farmers who brought gold, spices and other exotic pleasures to Europe. In return, the conquered lands were left with death and suffering.
During colonial times, the European population grew twice as fast as any other people on the earth. To this day, Europeans continue to set the scene in regions of the earth many thousands of kilometres away from their home continent; one only has to think of Australia, America and even the easternmost regions of Asia (there are European Russians living beyond the Amur river).
A willingness to take risks and a thirst for action were the attributes which secured global domination for the Portuguese, the Spanish and the English for hundreds of years. Other cultures were held back by their own taboos and conservative traditions, and were beaten into submission by the resolute colonialists and the diseases these imported. It would be many decades before they summoned up the necessary strength to oppose their foreign rulers. But many of yesterday's third-world countries are among today's big winners as they compete aggressively in the global marketplace. Up-and-coming Asian nations such as Taiwan, South Korea or Singapore are seizing the opportunities offered by global trade and are conquering the markets of their former colonial masters. Average incomes in East Asia rose by more then seven per cent between 1985 and 1995, compared with just two per cent in the industrialised nations over the same period. In the last thirty years, per capita incomes in South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia increased by factors of ten, five and four respectively. The economic slump currently being experienced by the Asian nations shows that success is not without its risk. But it is true that the world's most depressing poorhouses - countries like North Korea or Tanzania - are run by governments that have striven to avoid risk at all cost by isolating themselves from the whims of the world market.
The maxims "Who dares wins" and "Fortune favours the brave" apply equally to inventors, colonialists, entrepreneurs, shareholders, military strategists, revolutionaries, sportsmen and lovers. It's a question of "nothing ventured, nothing gained."
In his search for America's psycho-social foundations, the author Gert
Raeithel settled on the famous slogan from the pioneering age: "Go
West!". According to Raeithel, the world's biggest economic power
has always been driven by an invisible force that aims to "satisfy
the nation's desire to be 'up and away' and goes hand-in-hand with a sense
of enjoyment at the prospect of fear. Fear is actively sought, overcome,
and what is left is a feeling of greatness and uniqueness."
In other words, the Americans are successful because they love risk.
No risk, no fun
There is nothing like growing up, leaving home and getting your own pad in the big city or even in a foreign country. It is, typically, young males who blaze this trail (although an increasing number of young females are prepared to take risks as well). This is the case with other species too. A young Anubis baboon is raised in the bosom of his maternal family. Surrounded by relatives and friends, he feels as safe and sound as a young lad growing up in the Cornish countryside. But, quite suddenly, he starts to get itchy feet. He is seized with a thirst for adventure and wanderlust. To hell with all the good manners, the caring community (the boring dump), and that qualmish feeling in the stomach standing in the way of the big 'breakout'. The young baboon leaves home and looks for another clan, where, he soon learns, life is hard, much harder than in mother's old community. As a newcomer, the rookie baboon is an underdog sitting at the end of the pecking order. He is on his own and must put up with all manner of bullying and suppression. But he stays nonetheless, helped by his determination to achieve a better position. It isn't difficult to make evolutionary sense of this behaviour: if all baboons were to stay in the family fold to mate, they would eventually all be closely related and soon begin to experience the negative effects of inbreeding. In the ape world, this problem is solved by the adolescents of one sex changing fold at the appropriate time. With some species it's the males, with others the females. How should we deal with evolution's angry young things? Many cultures organise their members by generation. For instance, the Masai have their "young warrior" caste who attain prestige by performing daredevil acts. Some tribal communities stage trials of valour in which young members must put their courage to the test, for instance by clearing a section of ancient forest, stealing cattle from another tribe, killing a wild animal or putting the men of a neigbouring village to shame by playing an evil trick on them. Taking such risks gives the adolescents an identity: to go beyond the bounds of safety is to become master of one's own existence. According to ethnologist Georg Elwert, "This pattern appears with such consistency throughout such widely differing cultures that you would almost think it were a universal anthropological truth."
Alas, there is no place for young savages in the civilised societies of our industrial nations. Today's urban Indian learns about life in the schoolroom or the lecture hall, before spending a life pushing a pen as an office chief. Lacking any real danger and adventure, some resort to subway-train surfing, speeding or hooliganism.
Society's older members too have problems with this evolutionary legacy that demands a physical response to a stress situation.
We are, by nature, poorly equipped to remain seated for hours on end, a practice that only became common this century. What is the office worker supposed to do when he is bawled out by his boss? He cannot challenge him to a duel, and slinking out of the office with his tail between his legs is hardly the way to further his career. Although his body is in a state of alarm, he has no means by which to respond to these strong physical impulses. He has no choice but to grin and bear it. "Sports pitches and arenas are our modern-day hunting grounds," writes author Michael Gleich in his work 'Mobility'. He goes on: "Our leisure time gives us the chance to reclaim the things our sedentary existence takes from us." As the week in the office comes to an end, 23.8 million hobby sportsmen and women in Germany alone get down to the real business of letting off steam. Mountain bikers career down the steepest of Alpine slopes, as free climbers cling to mountain faces like flies to a wall; the heavens above are dotted with hang-gliders and paragliders. Things aren't much different down in the valley either, where rubber-dinghy crews pit their strength against the perils of white water, and bikers bank into hairpin bends while travelling at lightning speed. And let us not forget the kings of the thrill, the bungee jumpers, who are prepared to throw themselves off the nearest bridge attached to a length of rubber! It's no surprise, then, that most hospitals are full to capacity at the weekends. The evolutionary urge to take risks and push things to the limit evidently runs deep, civilisation being but scant cladding to hide this primal need within us all. The more the collective risk is whittled down, the greater the desire for personal risk becomes. This is not to say that today's dare-devil bungee jumper does not feel threatened, just that his fears come from other sources. He lives in constant dread of electrosmog and formaldehyde, illegal immigrants and monetary union, the greenhouse effect and globalisation.
He demands zero risk from all the perils associated with modern technology, then books himself on a three-week trekking holiday to the jungle inhabited by Papua New Guinea's last cannibals.
This fixation with risk is no longer a male domain, and hasn't been for some time. Earlier, it was said that behind every adventurer was a sedentary woman. In 1790 the wife of a French explorer wrote: "It's a woman's job to stay put; but you men, you're just like the Kalmuks, wandering around from place to place in search of God knows what." The accepted distribution of roles between the sexes is changing. Today, women are playing a major role everywhere, from the depths of the ocean to the outer reaches of space. So, this willingness to take a risk or two - the universal anthropological truth mentioned earlier - has reached womankind.
The other side of the coin:
the benefits of avoiding risks
There is no ideal path in nature. While some of life's species have got where they are today by being venturesome, others have passed evolution's fitness test by displaying assets such as inertia and risk aversion. Firmly rooted in the sand, marram grass defies the wind; snails and tortoises have been waging the war of survival successfully for many thousands of years; spiders lie motionless in their webs in wait of the mobile fly; and the sloth sleeps for 20 hours a day and is not exactly a picture of athleticism in its waking hours either.
Moving around in slow motion makes sloths invisible to their enemies - evidently a recipe for success in the tropical rainforests, as the humble animal makes up almost a quarter of the organic mass (the total weight) of mammals in some regions of South America. This strategy of sluggishness can provoke some people. "I've never seen anything as useless as a sloth," cursed the Spanish explorer Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes in 1526. But everything has its counterpart: the world does not belong to the quick and the daring alone; the languid and the careful have a role to playas well. Even more lethargic than the sloth are those reptiles that rely on the sun's warmth for their energy. In 1927, the zoologist Elton wrote: "All cold-blooded animals spend an inordinate amount of time doing nothing at all."
They do this for good reason, for resting assures them a long life. Frankfurt biologist Roland Prinzinger has done plenty of research into the inner clock of the animal world and has come to the conclusion that "no animal ever does more than it has to." Prinzinger compared the life span and energy balance of hundreds of animals. It emerged that the amount of energy turnover per gram of body weight was practically identical in all species. The sole difference is that the flame of life burns bright but for a short duration in some animals, while in others, that flame is weaker but burns for longer. The busy humming bird dies early while the torpid tortoise lives to a ripe old age. No tortoise ever died of a heart attack.
Were we to apply Prinzinger's principle to human beings, all labourers, sportsmen and stressed-out managers would burn up their life's energy quickly and pay the price with an early death. Wealthy idlers and self-satisfied bureaucrats, on the other hand, would live to a ripe old age. Evolutionary scientist Steven Jay Gould vehemently opposes the idea that there has been a progressive trend towards ever higher and more emancipated life forms throughout the history of the earth. He has taken up the cudgels for those conservative organisms that have lived unchanged but perfectly happy for millions of years. And judging by their number and organic mass, such primitive single-celled organisms still rule the world today. "Bacteria have the upperhand over us human beings." says Gould. "We are but a single species that has been around for no more than a few hundred thousand years. Bacteria have produced many thousands of different species and have been doing just fine for around 3.5 billion years." He disputes that there has ever been a trend in evolution. But has it all been down to chance alone?
In the history of our civilisation, fortune hasn't always favoured the brave. Despite all its dynamism and aggression, Genghis Khan's Mongolian empire did not survive. Tucked away peacefully in the valleys of the Alps, little Switzerland has never invaded anyone, never had any colonies and has always been pleased with itself. Despite, or perhaps even because of this, Switzerland went on to become one of the world's most successful countries; its people living in peace, happiness and prosperity. Are perhaps the days of courage and adventure over? Are we turning into mega-brained creatures who do little else than sit at home, confronting life's risks on the computer alone? According to Frankfurt sports doctor Ernst Kipphard: "There is a considerable risk that our children are becoming a generation of softies and homebirds. "Eltern", the German magazine for parents, claims that today only one child in ten is able to do a chin-up, while the ratio was reversed just twenty years ago. The little ones are simply spending too much time in front of the television or playing computer games. Is adventure only to be found on the screen today? What is there left for a latter-day Columbus to discover? The Cortez of today would surely not be admired as a conqueror by modern-day Europeans, but held in contempt for genocide. And rightly so, for boldness is not an end in itself. For all the fun risk can bring, the end result is important. No one needs colonialists like Cortez, but the world still needs brave discoverers, inventors, entrepreneurs, scientists and artists. These people can conquer worlds, even today. In fact a latter-day Columbus would have the whole universe at his feet!
A person who avoids all risk becomes a risk in his own right - a risk both to himself and to society. As Gustav Heinemann, the former German president, once said: "In an everchanging world, only those who are prepared to change will stand the test of time; those who refuse to change will ultimately lose the very thing they are trying to hold on to."
Copyright © 1996-2011 Dirk Maxeiner and Michael Miersch.
All rights reserved.
