The Magic of Reality (5 page)

And, just to finish off this little thought, frogs are much more distant cousins of all mammals. All mammals have approximately the same number of letter differences from a frog (about 140), for the simple reason that they are all
exactly
equally close cousins: all mammals share a more recent ancestor with each other (about 180 million years ago) than they do with the frog (about 340 million years ago).

But of course not all humans are the same as all other humans, and not all baboons are the same as all other baboons and not all mice are the same as all other mice. We could compare your genes with mine, letter by letter. And the result? We’d turn out to have even more letters in
common
than either of us does with a chimpanzee. But we’d still find some letters that are different. Not many, and there’s no particular reason to single out the FoxP2 gene. But if you counted up the number of letters all humans share in all our genes, it would be more than any of us shares with a chimpanzee. And you share more letters with your cousin than you share with me. And you share even more letters with your mother and your father, and (if you have one) with your sister or brother. In fact, you can work out how closely related any two people are to each other by counting the number of DNA letters they share. It’s an interesting count to make, and it is something we are probably going to hear more about in the future. For example, the police will be able to track somebody down if they have the DNA ‘fingerprint’ of his brother.

Some genes are recognizably the same (with minor differences) in all mammals. Counting the number of letter differences in such genes is useful for working out how closely related different mammal species are. Other genes are useful for working out more distant relationships, for example between vertebrates and worms. Other genes again are useful for working out relationships within a species – say, for working out how closely related you are to me. In case you are interested, if you happen to come from England, our most recent shared ancestor probably lived only a few centuries back. If you happen to be a native Tasmanian or a native American we’d have to go back some tens of thousands of years to find a shared ancestor. If you happen to be a !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert, we might have to go back even further.

What is a fact beyond all doubt is that we share an ancestor with every other species of animal and plant on the planet. We know this because some genes are recognizably the same genes in all living creatures, including animals, plants and bacteria. And, above all, the genetic code itself – the dictionary by which all genes are translated – is the same across all living creatures that have ever been looked at. We are all cousins. Your family tree includes not just obvious cousins like chimpanzees and monkeys but also mice, buffaloes, iguanas, wallabies, snails, dandelions, golden eagles, mushrooms, whales, wombats and bacteria. All are our cousins. Every last one of them. Isn’t that a far more wonderful thought than any myth? And the most wonderful thing of all is that we know for certain it is literally true.

THERE ARE LOTS
of myths that attempt to explain why particular kinds of animals are the way that they are – myths that ‘explain’ things like why leopards have spots, and why rabbits have white tails. But there don’t seem to be many myths about the sheer range and variety of different kinds of animals. I can find nothing akin to the Jewish myth of the Tower of Babel, which accounts for the great variety of languages. Once upon a time, according to this myth, all the people in the world spoke the same language. They could therefore work harmoniously together to build a great tower, which they hoped would reach the sky. God noticed this and took a very dim view of everybody being able to understand everybody else. Whatever might they get up to next, if they could talk to each other and work together? So he decided to ‘confound their language’ so that ‘they may not understand one another’s speech’. This, the myth tells us, is why there are so many different languages, and why, when people try to talk to people from another tribe or country, their speech often sounds like meaningless babble. Oddly enough, there is no connection between the word ‘babble’ and the Tower of Babel.

I was hoping to find a similar myth about the great diversity of animals, because there is a resemblance between language evolution and animal evolution, as we shall see. But there doesn’t seem to be any myth that specifically tackles the sheer
number
of
different kinds
of animals. This is surprising, because there is indirect evidence that tribal peoples can be well aware of the fact there are many different kinds of animals. In the 1920s a now famous German scientist called Ernst Mayr did a pioneering study of the birds of the New Guinea highlands. He compiled a list of 137 species, then discovered, to his amazement, that the local Papuan tribesmen had separate names for 136 of them.

Back to the myths. The Hopi tribe of North America had a goddess called Spider Woman. In their creation myth she teamed up with Tawa the sun god, and they sang the First Magic Song as a duet. This song brought the Earth, and life, into being. Spider Woman then took the threads of Tawa’s thoughts and wove them into solid form, creating fish, birds, and all other animals.

Other North American tribes, the Pueblo and Navajo peoples, have a myth of life that is a tiny bit like the idea of evolution: life emerges from the Earth like a sprouting plant growing up through a sequence of stages. The insects climbed from their world, the First or Red World, up into the Second World, the Blue World, where the birds lived. The Second World then became too crowded, so the birds and insects flew up into the Third or Yellow World, where the people and other mammals lived. The Yellow World in turn became crowded and food became scarce, so they all, insects, birds
and
everybody, went up to the Fourth World, the Black and White World of day and night. Here the gods had already created cleverer people who knew how to farm the Fourth World and who taught the newcomers how to do it too.

The Jewish creation myth comes closer to doing justice to diversity, but it doesn’t really attempt to explain it. Actually, the Jewish holy book has two different creation myths, as we saw in the previous chapter. In the first one, the Jewish god created everything in six days. On the fifth day he created fish, whales and all sea creatures, and the birds of the air. On the sixth day he made the rest of the land animals, including man. The language of the myth pays some attention to the number and variety of living creatures – for example, ‘God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind,’ and made every ‘beast of the earth’ and ‘every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind’. But why was there such variety? We are not told.

In the second myth we get some hint that the god might have thought his first man needed a variety of companions. Adam, the first man, is created alone and placed in the beautiful oasis garden. But then the god realized that ‘It is not good that the man should be alone’ and he therefore ‘formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them’.

Why are there
really
so many different kinds of animals?

Adam’s task of naming all the animals was a tough one – tougher than the ancient Hebrews could possibly have realized. It’s been estimated that about 2 million species have so far been given scientific names, and even these are just a small fraction of the number of species yet to be named.

How do we even decide whether two animals belong in the same species or in two different species? Where animals reproduce sexually, we can come up with a sort of definition. Animals belong to different species if they don’t breed together. There are borderline cases like horses and donkeys, which can breed together but produce offspring (called mules or hinnies) that are infertile – that is, that cannot have offspring themselves. We therefore place a horse and a donkey in different species. More obviously, horses and dogs belong to different species because they don’t even try to interbreed, and couldn’t produce offspring if they did, even infertile ones. But spaniels and poodles belong to the same species because they happily interbreed, and the puppies that they produce are fertile.

Every scientific name of an animal or plant consists of two Latin words, usually printed in
italics
. The first word refers to the ‘genus’ or group of species and the second to the individual species within the genus.
Homo sapiens
(‘wise man’) and
Elephas maximus
(‘very big elephant’) are examples. Every species is a member of a genus.
Homo
is a genus. So is
Elephas
. The lion is
Panthera leo
and the genus
Panthera
also includes
Panthera tigris
(tiger),
Panthera pardus
(leopard
or ‘panther’) and
Panthera onca
(jaguar).
Homo sapiens
is the only surviving species of our genus, but fossils have been given names like
Homo erectus
and
Homo habilis
. Other human-like fossils are sufficiently different from
Homo
to be placed in a different genus, for example
Australopithecus africanus
and
Australopithecus afarensis
(nothing to do with Australia, by the way: australo- just means ‘southern’, which is where Australia’s name also comes from).

Each genus belongs to a
family
, usually printed in ordinary ‘roman’ type with a capital initial. Cats (including lions, leopards, cheetahs, lynxes and lots of smaller cats) make up the family Felidae. Every family belongs to an
order
. Cats, dogs, bears, weasels and hyenas belong to different families within the order Carnivora. Monkeys, apes (including us) and lemurs all belong to different families within the order Primates. And every order belongs to a class. All mammals are in the class Mammalia.

Can you see the shape of a tree developing in your mind as you read this description of the sequence of groupings? It is a family tree: a tree with many branches, each branch having sub-branches, and each sub-branch having sub-sub-branches. The tips of the twigs are species. The other groupings – class, order, family, genus – are the branches and sub-branches. The whole tree is all of life on Earth.

Think about why trees have so many twigs. Branches branch. When we have enough branches of branches of branches, the total number of twigs can be very large. That’s what happens in evolution. Charles Darwin himself drew a branching tree as the only picture in his most famous book,
On
the Origin of Species
. He sketched an early version in one of his notebooks some years earlier. At the top of the page he wrote a mysterious little message to himself: ‘I think’. What do you think he meant? Maybe he started to write a sentence and one of his children interrupted him so he never finished it. Maybe he found it easier to represent quickly what he was thinking in this diagram than in words. Perhaps we shall never know. There is other handwriting on the page, but it is hard to decipher. It is tantalizing to read the actual notes of a great scientist, written on a particular day and never meant for publication.

The following isn’t exactly how the tree of animals branched, but it gives you an idea of the principle. Imagine an ancestral species splitting into two species. If each of those then splits into two, that makes four. If each of them splits into two, that makes eight, and so on through 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 … You can see that, if you carry on doubling up, it doesn’t take long to get up into the millions of species. That probably makes sense to you, but you may be wondering why a species should split. Well, it’s for pretty much the same reason as human languages split, so let’s pause to think about that for a moment.

Pulling apart: how languages, and species, divide

Although the legend of the Tower of Babel is, of course, not really true, it does raise the interesting question of why there are so many different languages.

Just as some species are more similar than others and are
placed
in the same family, so there are also families of languages. Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French and many European languages and dialects such as Romansch, Galician, Occitan and Catalan are all pretty similar to each other; together they’re called ‘Romance’ languages. The name actually comes from their common origin in Latin, the language of Rome, not from any association with romance, but let’s use an expression of love as our example. Depending on which country you are in, you might declare your feelings in one of the following ways: ‘Ti amo’, ‘Amote’, ‘T’aimi’ or ‘Je t’aime’. In Latin it would be ‘Te amo’ – exactly like modern Spanish.

To swear your love to someone in Kenya, Tanzania or Uganda you could say, in Swahili, ‘Nakupenda’. A bit further south, in Mozambique, Zambia, or Malawi where I was brought up, you might say, in the Chinyanja language, ‘Ndimakukonda’. In other so-called Bantu languages in southern Africa you might say ‘Ndinokuda’, ‘Ndiyakuthanda’ or, to a Zulu, ‘Ngiyakuthanda’. This Bantu family of languages is quite distinct from the Romance family of languages, and both are distinct from the Germanic family which includes Dutch, German and the Scandinavian languages. See how we use the word ‘family’ for languages, just as we do for species (the cat family, the dog family) and also, of course, for our own families (the Jones family, the Robinson family, the Dawkins family).

It isn’t hard to work out how families of related languages arise over the centuries. Listen to the way you and your friends speak to each other, and compare it to the way
your
grandparents speak. Their speech is only slightly different and you can easily understand them, but they are only two generations away. Now imagine talking, not to your grandparents but to your 25-greats-grandparents. If you happen to be English, that might take you back to the late fourteenth century – the lifetime of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote descriptions like this:

He was a lord ful fat and in good poynt
;

His eyen stepe, and rollynge in his heed
,

That stemed as a forneys of a leed
;

His bootes souple, his hors in greet estaat
.

Now certeinly he was a fair prelaat
;

He was nat pale as a forpyned goost
.

A fat swan loved he best of any roost
.

His palfrey was as broun as is a berye
.

Well, it is recognizably English, isn’t it? But I bet you’d have a hard time understanding it if you heard it spoken. And if it was any more different you’d probably consider it a separate language, as different as Spanish is from Italian.

So, the language in any one place changes century by century. We could say it ‘drifts’ into something different. Now add the fact that people speaking the same language in different places don’t often have the opportunity to hear each other (or at least they didn’t before telephones and radios were invented); and the fact that language drifts in different directions in different places. This applies to the way it is spoken as well as to the words themselves: think how different
English
sounds in a Scottish, Welsh, Geordie, Cornish, Australian or American accent. And Scottish people can easily distinguish an Edinburgh accent from a Glasgow accent or a Hebridean accent. Over time, both the way the language is spoken and the words used become characteristic of a region; when two ways of speaking a language have drifted sufficiently far apart, we call them different ‘dialects’.

After enough centuries of drift, different regional dialects eventually become so different that people in one region can no longer understand people in another. At this point we call them separate languages. That is what happened when German and Dutch drifted, in separate directions, from a now extinct ancestral language. It is what happened when French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese independently drifted away from Latin in separate parts of Europe. You can draw a family tree of languages, with ‘cousins’ like French, Portuguese and Italian on neighbouring ‘branches’ and ancestors like Latin further down the tree – just as Darwin did with species.

Like languages, species change over time and over distance. Before we look at
why
this happens, we need to see
how
they do it. For species, the equivalent of words is DNA – the genetic information every living thing carries inside it that determines how it is made, as we saw in Chapter 2. When individuals reproduce sexually, they mix their DNA. And when members of one local population migrate into another local population and introduce their genes into it by mating with individuals of the population they have just joined, we call this ‘gene flow’.

The equivalent of, say, Italian and French drifting apart is that the DNA of two separated populations of a species becomes less and less alike over time. Their DNA becomes less and less able to work together to make babies. Horses and donkeys can mate with each other, but horse DNA has drifted so far from donkey DNA that the two can no longer understand each other. Or rather, they can mix well enough – the two ‘DNA dialects’ can understand each other well enough – to make a living creature, a mule, but not well enough to make one that can reproduce itself: mules, as we saw earlier, are sterile.