Nature's Shift (11 page)

“This is a special occasion,” Rowland told me. “As I said before, the routine fare will be tissue-cultured meat—but the river fish are making a reasonably strong comeback in these parts. Adam's developing considerable skill with a spear, although it has to be said that the shallow pond around the house doesn't pose much of a challenge when the weather's calm. The fish are unwary—and likely to remain so for quite some time, given that Adam doesn't let very many of his targets get away.”

Adam smiled at the compliment. “Weather good today,” he observed. “Not tomorrow. Day after, big storm. So Met Office says.”

For a moment, I thought he was making a joke, but then realized that satellite-based weather-forecasting could issue reports for sparsely-inhabited regions just as easily as heavily-populated ones. There might be no weather control hereabouts, for lack of sophisticated wind-farming apparatus, but the available newsfeeds could still issue predictions for the local area.

“Don't worry,” Rowland, said, mistaking the reason for my momentary reflection. “The storms aren't excessively violent at this time of year, and the house can stand up to the most powerful hurricanes. Some day, I ought to install apparatus to steal the energy of the wind, but I haven't managed to find a gap in the schedule thus far.”

The dessert proved to be some kind of chocolate confection, very sweet and glutinous. The coffee was served very strong, in tiny cups. It was good, but not the sort of coffee over which one could linger; two mouthfuls, and it was gone, administering a sudden caffeine hit to the bloodstream. Rowland certainly made no attempt to linger over his, getting up abruptly as soon as he'd gulped it down and offering profuse apologies for having to leave me alone.

“God-work is demanding,” I conceded, graciously, refraining from raising the question of how he expected to work far into the night, given that he'd been exhausted by mid-afternoon, “especially for mere mortals. Will I see you later?”

“Not tonight,” he replied, unsurprisingly. “If you need anything, phone Adam and Eve—their apartment's on the same corridor as our bedrooms. If you want to continue exploring, feel free—but be careful you don't get lost. Stick to the corridors I've shown you, until I have time to show you the rest.”

I had no intention of trudging through any more corridors, though. In spite of the caffeine hit, I was conscious of being weary myself. It had been a long day—far longer than usual, in terms of daylight, given that the transatlantic flight had been traveling ahead of the sun, and my limbs were in need of rest. Indeed, when I thought about it, I suspected that it might have been wiser to give the coffee a miss, in order to catch up on my sleep without delay.

Rowland disappeared, after offering more apologies for not having been able to give me a more thorough introduction to the house. I found my own way back to my bedroom easily enough.

I spent a few minutes looking out of the window and admiring the dusky view. The harbor was on the northern face of the house, and my bedroom faced south, so I was looking out over the little patch of land that Rowland had called a “kitchen garden” and the still grey water of what looked from this vantage point more like a wide moat than a lagoon, toward the vast arc of mangroves on the far shore. Rowland's “plantations”—cultivated patches of varying size situated in what looked like natural clearings, by virtue of their irregular shapes and spacing—were clearly visible as a kind of patchwork, although it was impossible to make out exactly what was being grown in each one, given the distance and the twilight. Beyond that evidence of culture, however, there was nothing but a sea of green wilderness.

I knew that at least one branch of the river was in there somewhere, snaking southwards in a dozen or more substantial threads that would ultimately combine into a single powerful stream, but none of the major watercourses was distinctly visible from where I stood. In the rapidly-fading light, the regenerated forest was reminiscent of a single vast organism, within whose body the various braches of the Orinoco were flowing, as if through arteries and veins. Doubtless there would be flowers in there too—gorgeous tropical blooms of all shorts, including water-lilies more than a meter across—but there were none of those on the water surrounding the house, which looked quite still, although it had to be in complex motion, at least in the form of undercurrents. The river-water never ceased to ease its way toward the sea, even in its backwaters, and we were not quite beyond the reach of the tides. The quietness of the air and the low clouds was equally illusory; I was actually standing at the focal point of one of Mother Nature's most active regions, about as far away from domesticated England as could be.

For a moment, I regretted having left home—but only for a moment.

I went to bed, knowing that I wouldn't be able to sleep immediately, in spite of my physical fatigue, but quite prepared to lie awake and think, given that Rowland had given me far more food for thought than I'd carried with me on to the plane.

I could have taken up any number of cues or threads, of course, but one phrase that had stuck in my mind, although I hadn't reacted to it at the time, was “pseudo-symbiotic dependency on plant sexuality.” In itself, it was just standard biojargon, but what made it significant, in Rowland's mouth, was its marked deviation from the jargon that Roderick and Rosalind had popularized, whose ideological foundation-stone was the notion of “dedicated symbiotic partnership.”

In Roderick and Rosalind's world-view, the relationship between insects and flowering plants was authentic symbiosis, authentic partnership and—with all the implications that the word could carry—authentic dedication. Flowers made special provision to feed certain kinds of insects, having been designed by natural selection to do so because of the advantage gained from the transfers of pollen effected by those insects in the course of their feeding. There were, of course, countless other insect species, cousins of the obliging symbiotes, which took without providing any service in return—predators and parasites—but in the world-view of the Hive of Industry, they were a peripheral issue, mere passengers on an evolutionary bus driven and steered by the fundamental symbiotic relationship. There were other plants too, which relied on the wind to distribute their pollen, or simply did not bother, idly committing themselves to asexual reproduction or to incestuous self-pollination, but they too were sidelines and backwaters, far from the heart of the evolutionary narrative—at least in the world-view of the Hive.

During the days of the bee problem, of course, the world-view of the Hive had seemed patently obvious. There had been a moment—a moment that had stretched over decades—when it looked as if the loss of the pollinators responsible for maintaining the greater part of humankind's crop-species might precipitate an abrupt worldwide food shortage. Even Roderick the Great had not been able to prevent some temporary shortages, but he and those working in his shadow had succeeded in smoothing out the decline as well as facilitating the recovery. He had negotiated and guided the transition—and he had done it within the framework of the crucial symbiotic relationship, the crucial partnership, and the age-old dedication.

But Rowland, it seemed, saw things differently. He saw a “pseudo-symbiotic dependency” in which the insects were exploited by “plant sexuality”—fed, as even slaves were fed, but not accepted into genuine partnership.

The concept of symbiosis does not, of course, imply equality of effort or endeavor; like any kind of trade, it's a matter of exchanging a good that one party needs or desires for a different good that the other party needs or desires. In any kind of trade, there is scope for exploitation, and it's arguable that no trade is every truly free or fair, no matter what Utopian gleams may shine in the eyes of purist economists. In every commercial deal, cynics will readily tell you, one of the two parties is getting screwed. There's no earthly reason to think that things work differently in the bosom of Mother Nature.

On the other hand, it isn't always obvious which party to the deal is the one getting screwed, and the wheels of trade would spin a lot less smoothly if it weren't for the fact that, in many deals, both parties can at least delude themselves into thinking that they're coming out ahead.

One might think, on first glancing at the bee/flower relationship, that it's the bees who are getting the better part of the deal. They, after all, are the ones getting fed; all the flowers are getting out of it is sex—and orgasm-less sex at that. In the hierarchy of needs, eating comes way ahead of….well, we shouldn't call it “screwing,” having already compromised that item of metaphorical jargon within the argumentative frame, so let's call it “love.” On the other hand, as even folk wisdom has observed, it's the bees who are doing all the physical work, always busy, endlessly toiling away. And it would not be irrelevant to observe, at this point, that the worker bees who are doing the toiling appear not only to be doing it on behalf of the flowers, but also on behalf of their own queens. Worker bees get fed, but they get no love. Only queens, as seemingly idle as flowers, save for one nuptial flight per annum, produce offspring—and although the equally idle drones get to have sex as well, it's difficult to think of them as “screwers” in the economic sense, when only one drone per annum gets to do it, once and once alone, and dies immediately afterwards.

There is, of course a sociobiological logic to the hive society of bees. Because bee males are chromosomally X while bee females are XX, each female bee shares three-quarters of her genetic component with her sisters, and only fifty per cent with her mother or daughters. It therefore makes sense, from a gene's point of view, to situate itself inside a female organism that invests her effort in the multiplication of sisters rather than daughters. Viewed from that angle, a queen bee isn't really an autocratic monarch at all, but a mere instrument, operated by the workers to produce more workers—ditto for the drones. The genes stuck in the queen and the favored drone do, of course, have the evolutionary compensation of producing lots of offspring, but the fact remains that sisters are worth more, in the brutal currency of the genetic economy of bees, than other kin.

In that world-view, therefore, the worker bees aren't really toiling on behalf of their queens, but on behalf of their own Machiavellian genes—and their relationship with the flowers can be construed in the same way.

Thanks to the symbiotic exchange, the flowers get to produce more copies of their own genes, by virtue of the exchange of pollen, while the workers bees get the fuel that enables the to produce more sisters. Put that way, it look like a more equal exchange, a fairer trade--in which context it makes sense to speak in terms of “dedicated symbiotic partnerships,” much as dewy-eyed economists speak of “free trade.”

Roderick, on the other hand, saw it as “pseudo-symbiotic dependency.” Roderick thought that the apparent equality was an illusion, but that it was the bees, not the flowers, that were the ones getting screwed. Why?

Well, given that we live in a world in which ten billion people have effectively starved to death within the last hundred years, it's very easy to be acutely aware of the importance of eating, and it seems perfectly obvious that food is more important than sex, from the viewpoint of individual survival. Evolution, however, isn't very much concerned with individual survival. Evolution is all about speciation, and the cost of speciation is the routine death of millions or billions of individuals.

Dying is only one aspect of natural selection, but without death, evolution would be exceedingly slow. Death speeds things up dramatically; death is what clears out the old to make way for the new. The life of the whole ecosphere thrives on the not-quite-random deaths of individuals. From the viewpoint of evolutionary success, starvation is not an evil but a good; from the viewpoint of evolutionary success, organisms that feed other organisms—and there's no choice in the elementary fact, because every organism is inevitably prey to predators and host to parasites—do well to feed selectively, to offer their bounty to organisms that are useful to them.

The destiny of plants, fundamentally, is to be eaten; that's the logic of the situation. Cleverness, in plants, is not only invested in slowing down the process of being eaten, but also in directing and orchestrating the eating process, in the interests of the other aspect of natural selection, which is reproduction. Natural selection works, not merely because the less effective organisms die, but because the more effective ones reproduce. In the world-view of evolution, individual reproduction is just as vital as individual death. In evolutionary terms, starvation is good, and so is sex. In the context of evolution, the plant that trades its own organic substance for pollination—or the distribution of seeds—is a making a good deal, at a bargain price.

That might seem odd, given that individual plants—unlike most animals—don't actually need sex at all to reproduce. They can do it vegetatively. Primitive organisms do it all the time. Individual bacteria and algae routinely go through life reproducing asexually. But asexual reproduction, like not dying, doesn't facilitate evolution. From the viewpoint of the entire ecosphere, asexual reproduction is stagnation; what natural selection favors is genetic exchange, genetic recombination and genetic experimentation. Natural selection always favors sex.

Mother Nature loves love and death alike, as if they were siblings—non-identical twins, different in kind but equal in value. In the hierarchy of evolutionary needs, as opposed to the hierarchy of individual needs, food is cheap and sex is priceless.

From the viewpoint of evolutionary success rather than individual success, therefore—which is to say, from the viewpoint of enduring for hundreds of millions of years rather than one or a few—when the angiosperms and the insects were mounting their parallel conquest of the land, the flowers that entered into close association with specialist pollinators were the ones doing the screwing, and the insects drawn into that dependency were the ones getting screwed.