Zoobiquity (3 page)

We started with a survey of how philosophers and scientists through the centuries have positioned our species among our fellow creatures. Clearly, for as long as humans have been able to ponder it, we’ve been of two minds about the apparent fact that we
are
animals. Judging by the written record going back at least as far as Plato, our ancestors acknowledged the obvious similarities between us and the so-called lesser creatures. Plato mused, “Man is the plumeless genus of bipeds; birds are the plumed.” At the same time, people have long wanted to preserve a definition of humanity that kept us on a higher plane.

With
The Origin of Species
, Charles Darwin gave us a new (and, to many, unnerving) way to conceive of ourselves in relation to animals—positing that man and beast exist as different branches of the same tree rather than on different sides of a schism. Scholars of all stripes weighed in on whether and how humans were related to apes and other species.

In the mid-twentieth century, this debate was reignited by
The Naked Ape
. With studied objectivity, Desmond Morris, a zoologist and former curator of mammals at the London Zoo, described human feeding, sleeping, fighting, and parenting the way a biologist would document animal behavior in the field.

At about the time Morris was pointing out how similar we are to apes, two pioneering primatologists were documenting the many ways
apes
act like
us
. Jane Goodall was among the first to observe wild chimpanzees using tools and engaging in a type of organized warfare. For nearly twenty years, Dian Fossey lived near a group of gorillas in Rwanda, studying their vocalizations and social organization. Fossey’s and Goodall’s authoritative writings and memorable media appearances about the apes’ distinct personalities and extended family relationships fed a growing public interest in human-ape crossover even as the two women advanced serious scientific knowledge.

Subsequently, many scholars attempted to demystify contemporary human life by studying animals and evolutionary biology. Two clashing powerhouses were the Harvard-based polymaths Edward O. Wilson and the late Stephen Jay Gould.

Wilson rocked academia and the wider public discourse in 1975 with the publication of
Sociobiology
. Inspired by his extensive research on ants, Wilson connected social behavior in animals to evolutionary forces,
including natural selection. When extended to human societies, this suggested that our genes outline many aspects of our nature and behavior. But Wilson’s theories were introduced in a particularly inhospitable climate. A mere three decades after eugenic theories were used to justify genocide, the world was not ready to hear that any aspects of human nature might be genetically predetermined. And as the civil rights and feminist movements were gearing up to dismantle centuries of racial, gender, and economic discrimination, public opinion would simply not tolerate theories with even a faint suggestion that “biology is destiny.” Furthermore, with the scientific revolutions of molecular biology and genome mapping a decade and a half in the future, Wilson didn’t yet have access to the high-tech tools that would ultimately back up many of his theories.

Wilson was harshly branded by some of his academic colleagues as a racist, sexist “determinist.” One of his main detractors was Gould, a prominent paleontologist, geologist, and historian of science (who also happened to be one of my advisers on the undergraduate thesis I wrote about Darwin’s influence on public perceptions of physical deformity). In books such as
The Panda’s Thumb
, Gould argued that the subtleties of the human condition cannot be understood solely through natural selection. He cautioned readers that an overly genetic explanation of human behavior could reinforce regressive social agendas. His views matched the academic climate of the 1970s and ’80s—the same era in which New Historicists were reinterpreting literature and deconstructionists dismantling Western civilization courses.

It was during this fertile period that Richard Dawkins published such provocative books as
The Selfish Gene
and
The Blind Watchmaker
. Dawkins characterized evolution as an unsentimental process, a self-interested and unceasing race among rival genes. Criticized, like Wilson, for having overstated the dominance of genetics over culture, Dawkins, an Oxford professor, nonetheless continues to probe the biological basis of human behavior, including its role in religion and belief in God. In a later work,
The Ancestor’s Tale
, Dawkins explored the concept of a unified biology, identifying the shared ancestry across species—among them hippos, jellyfish, and single-celled organisms.

In 2005,
Nature
published a study that redefined the conversation: the human genome is 98.6 percent similar to that of chimpanzees. That single statistic inspired many people, and not only scientists, to reconsider
what defines us as humans. Now, instead of trying to prove the
existence
of a connection between animals and humans, the race is on to explore the depth and breadth of this enormous overlap.

The challenge has led scientists to explore far beyond great apes. Biologists are rapidly uncovering ancient genetic similarities that link diverse species—mammals, reptiles, birds, and even insects. The discovery is astonishing: nearly identical clusters of genes have been passed down for billions of years, from cell to cell and organism to organism. These remarkably unchanged gene groups code for similar structures and even similar reflexes across species. In other words, a common genetic “blueprint” instructed the embryos of Shamu, Secretariat, and Kate Middleton to grow different, yet homologous, limbs: steering flippers, thundering hooves, and regal, waving arms.
Deep homology
is the term coined by biologists Sean B. Carroll, Neil Shubin, and Cliff Tabin to describe these genetic kernels we share with nearly all creatures. Deep homology explains how genes taken from a sighted mouse and placed into a blind fruit fly cause the insect to grow structurally accurate fly eyes. And it is a deep homology that genetically connects keen, light-responsive vision in a hawk to photosensitivity in green algae. Deep homology traces our molecular lineage to our most ancient common ancestors. It proves that all living organisms, including plants, are long-lost relatives.

Today, the specific nature/nurture controversy that so dominated the academic scene in the 1980s is something of a historical footnote. Advances in molecular biology, genetics, and neuroscience have shifted the debate away from
whether
there’s a genetic basis for behavior and toward a more nuanced conversation about how genes, culture, and environment
interact
. This has given rise to a burgeoning new field called “epigenetics.” Among other things, epigenetics considers how infection, toxins, food, other organisms, and even cultural practices can turn genes on and off to alter an animal’s development.

Think about what that means. Evolution doesn’t just happen over huge numbers of generations or millions of years. It can happen to you or me, or any animal, within our own lifetimes. Amazingly, epigenetic changes to our DNA mean that the genes we pass on to our children can differ from the ones we inherited. Epigenetics and deep homology are two sides of the evolutionary coin. Epigenetics helps explain rapid evolutionary changes and highlights the role environments can play in genetic
health. Deep homology reminds us of our ancient origins and the glacial pace at which much evolutionary change occurs.

This stunning new perspective has started to change many fields, including biology, medicine, and psychology. When it was published in 2008,
Your Inner Fish
—Neil Shubin’s illuminating journey through our shared anatomy with ancient life forms—ignited excitement about the power of comparative biology to inspire new ideas in modern medicine. Shubin, a paleontologist and biologist at the University of Chicago, joins Randolph Nesse, George Williams, Peter Gluckman, and Stephen Stearns in advancing a new field of evolutionary medicine in their books
Why We Get Sick, The Principles of Evolutionary Medicine
, and
Evolution in Health and Disease
. Other influential scientists who’ve blazed trails through the shared terrain of human and animal biology include Sean B. Carroll (
Endless Forms Most Beautiful
), Jared Diamond (
The Third Chimpanzee
), Steven Pinker (
The Blank Slate
), Frans de Waal (
Our Inner Ape
), Robert Sapolsky (
A Primate’s Memoir
), and Jerry Coyne (
Why Evolution Is True
), to name just a few.

Interest in the mental life of animals, dismissed for many years as too speculative and an exercise in anthropomorphizing, has gained greater acceptance, too. Books by Temple Grandin (
Animals Make Us Human
and
Animals in Translation
), Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (
When Elephants Weep
), Marc Bekoff (
The Emotional Lives of Animals
), and Alexandra Horowitz (
Inside of a Dog
) have demonstrated animal cognition and behavior that resemble what we might call foresight, regret, shame, guilt, revenge, and love.

Yet, while inspiring and illuminating, their books left me wanting a concrete way I could use their insights to improve my work as a physician. I wanted to break down the wall between physicians, veterinarians, and evolutionary biologists because together we are uniquely situated to explore the animal-human overlap where it matters most urgently—in the effort to heal our patients.

What had captivated me as a physician, what launched me on a journey that reshaped my entire approach to medicine, was a simple idea: to distill these decades of evolutionary research together with the collective wisdom of animal caregivers into a form both my patients and I could use within the four walls of my examining room.

Kathryn and I had found, practically without exception, an animal correlate to every human disease we could think of—from “Jurassic cancer”
to “diseases of civilization.” What we lacked was a name for this new fusion of veterinary, human, and evolutionary medicine.

Finding nothing in the literature, we decided to come up with our own: “zoobiquity.” From the Greek for “animal,”
zo
, and the Latin for “everywhere,”
ubique
, “zoobiquity” joins two cultures (Greek and Latin), just as we are joining the “cultures” of human and animal medicine.

Zoobiquity looks to animals, and the doctors who care for them, for answers to humankind’s pressing concerns. It peers back into our deep past—pausing but not stopping at great apes or even primates on the evolutionary timeline. It opens our minds to the common illnesses and shared vulnerabilities of the mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, insects, and even the bacteria with whom we evolved and share Earth.

Engineers already seek inspiration from the natural world, a field called biomimetics. Wings and fins inspire designers to create vehicles that float and fly more efficiently.
Cockroaches helped solve the pressing problem of how to keep a robot stable as it climbs over uneven terrain, after researchers copied the insect’s double-tripod legs and produced a machine that rarely tips over and can right itself when it does. Termites, mosquitoes, toucans, glowworms, and moths are just a few of the animals with superpower-like adaptations that scientists are trying to bring to a human market.

Now it’s medicine’s turn. I was in the right place at the right time to put takotsubo together with capture myopathy. (You’ll find more on this finding in
Chapter 6
, “Scared to Death.”) Zoobiquity encourages similar interdisciplinary experiences for other physicians. And this field-merging approach could have other important benefits. If studies funded by the National Institutes of Health expanded the boundaries of their inquiry by adding the simple question “Do animals get ______?” the benefits of scientific investigation could be vastly amplified.

A comparative approach could extend far beyond the walls of a human or veterinary hospital. It could help aspiring businessmen or middle school girls navigate complex hierarchies—by exposing similar challenges within a school of salmon or a herd of bighorn sheep. It points out the overlaps in the ways animals protect and defend their territories—and how and why we humans create borders, castes, kingdoms, and prisons. It dangles the possibility that human parenting could be informed by a greater knowledge of how our animal cousins solve issues of child care, sibling rivalry, and infertility.

Of course, human beings are unique as a species. Contained in our mere 1.4 percent genetic difference from chimpanzees are the physical, cognitive, and emotional features responsible for Mozart, the Mars rover, and the study of molecular biology itself. But the magnificent glare of this crucial but tiny percentage blinds us to our 98.6 percent sameness. Zoobiquity encourages us to look away, for a moment, from the obvious yet narrow range of differences and embrace the many enormous similarities.

Sadly, Spitzbuben the tamarin later died—not, I hasten to add, because of my attempt to befriend her. After her necropsy (the term for an animal autopsy), I took a slide of some of her heart cells to one of the most respected cardiac pathologists in the country, a colleague of mine at UCLA, Michael Fishbein.

As we peered through Fishbein’s microscope, I noted how the damaged heart muscle cells seemed ensnared and strangled by the surrounding tissue. I felt a jolt of dreadful recognition as I spotted familiar-looking pink and purple shapes illuminated in the glaring white circle of the microscope’s frame. Although the abnormal cardiac cells belonged to a furry, tailed tree dweller, they were essentially identical to human heart cells with the disease.

But this was more than a cellular display of our common ancestry with animals. The patterns illustrated a simple fact well known to veterinarians but unknown or ignored by modern physicians. Animals and humans share a vulnerability to the same infections, illnesses, and injuries.

As he had done so many times before with human heart specimens, Fishbein studied the slide carefully before he spoke. “Cardiomyopathy,” I recall him observing. “Could be viral—looks just like a human’s.”