Seals on a Beach

About 40 years ago, Natural History Magazine published a piece about the mating habits of elephant seals. I have never stopped thinking about it.

The information the article presented was commonplace. The male seals arrive on a special island first and stage a battle royale over beach-front. Each seal tries to control as much beach as he can. So do the seals to his left and his right. The result is a constant battle over inches of sand.

At some point, a female joins the party and mates with whichever male has control of the bit of beach she has landed on. More beach, means more mating opportunities for the males. Now pregnant, the female heads for the hillside behind the beach and gives birth. The hillside fills with females and pups.

Where the article stopped me cold was towards the end, where the author noted that the primary cause of mortality among the pups was being run over by males still fighting over beach-front. Literally, the same impulse that caused the fighting (the desire to reproduce) caused the death of offspring. It was a self-defeating machine.

Of course, it wasn’t self-defeating. If it were, it would  have disappeared long ago. That’s the beauty of natural selection. Anything still alive is the result of millions of battles for survival since the beginning of time. The losers didn’t get to spread their genes. You know who did? The winners. Look around you and meet the winners. Each squirrel, virus and watermelon is at the end of a long line of winners. It’s the only way to get born. Your ancestors had to have passed on their genes.

Evolution is driven by natural selection. In the broad scheme of things, males battle, or seduce, or in some way compete for the right to mate. The elephant seals are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. The beach battle gives the stronger a better chance of mating than the weaker seals. The stronger-seal genes are passed along to the next generation of pups. Natural Selection dusts her hands and walks away, another job well done!

But wouldn’t things be even better if, say someone blew a whistle and the males agreed to stop fighting for a designated period of time, and that way all the pups could get to the ocean and none of them would be killed by dad?

Yes. That would be better. Even for Ms. Natural Selection, more seals alive is a win. But seals lack whistles and in the grand scheme of things, more pups survive than get trampled, so still a win!

We cannot blame the seals. They have a very limited ability to think things through and organize to control their behavior for the greater good.  But what’s our excuse? I mean that as a legit question. What the hell is our excuse?

That was the thing about the article that stopped me 40 years ago. You might as well have been writing about people. We also view the death of millions as an acceptable byproduct of this or that very important venture. And don’t say we don’t because the evidence that we do is overwhelming. Every ecosystem on earth is fouled by the overflow of our beach battles.

And, I maintain, it’s for the same reason. Males compete to reproduce. Put another way, women prefer winners. But either way you want to put it, we are still playing natural selection’s game. She designed the world so that if you do what she wants (stay alive and make as many humans as possible), you are going to feel good things. That’s the only tool natural selection has to keep us all in line and making more humans. Feeling good. Feeling bad.

The seals on that beach are living out the very essence of their being. And they are trampling their young.

But they can’t control themselves.

We’re not like that!

No one likes to think that human males compete for breeding priveleges. But when we see a sexy woman on the arm of a toad we do not think that toad must be a facinating conversationalist. We all know that the woman is a prize the man won for having a great deal of money. The money is the prize the woman gets for being especially desirable. And by money, I very much mean status. Money isn’t good for much of anything else.

During the course of this blog, I’m going to ask you to see things from more than one perspective at the same time. For example, if you take a look at a penny, it can correctly be described as a unit of currency, a metal disk and a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Each of those is correct and doesn’t make any of the others less correct.

Studying the penny from each perspective leads you down different paths. If you are investigating the unit of currency, you are going to wind up at the Fed. The metal disk is going to send you down a path of metalurgy and manufacturing. The portrait of Lincoln points you towards both art and history.

I am not going to argue that every other way to look at human behavior is useless. I am going to argue that looking at human behavior from the perspective of natural selection opens some interesting paths for understanding.

I long ago came to believe, through observation, that animals are feeling and intentional. I think we all have come to this through observation and then been shamed out of our understanding by the scare word, anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is the a formal word for mistakenly assigning characteristics reserved for humans to lesser critters. We didn’t come up with this idea recently. Humans throughout history have pointed to those they wish to dominate and claimed they are better understood as lesser beings or unfeelling machines.

Well science has finally caught up. The literature is replete with papers tracing the neurobiology of insignificant critters and concluding that they have the equivalent structures and hormones through which we feel fear, love, desire and happiness. These neurologic systems in humans are well studied. But when the same systems are planted in animals, you get unfeeling cause-and-effect machines.

You may want to argue that a lamb kicking up its heels in a sunny meadow isn’t feeling happiness. It’s just experiencing the effect of a dopamine surge in a way that doesn’t feel like anything except a physical spasm that we call gamboling. I’m going to stick with happiness.

That's what those seals are likely feeling as well. A critter's only going to do something if it makes them happy and natural selection thinks seals that are happy to fight will pass on better genes than seals that just let things take care of themselves. The seals who are fighting aren't miserable trampling their young. They are feeling purpose and joy. They are fulfilling the destiny natural selection arranged for them.

So I became a vegetarian and a naturalist.

Here’s where it gets sticky. The analysis works in the other direction as well.

We evolved. We share massive amounts of DNA with most critters. We have analagous brain and body parts. But when you put all that together and call it an animal, we insist it acts out of programming. When you put all that together and call it a human, we insist that it acts out of free will. Tomato, tomato (that works better spoken). News flash. Both critters and humans have free will. Both critters and humans exercise their free will in bodies shaped wholly by natural selection.

So let's take a moment to consider how natural selection might have influenced free will.

From a lifetime spent following animals around with a camera, I came to understand three things about critters that would make them easier to photograph.

First, they all had to eat. If you know what a critter eats and you want to see the critter, hang out by the food.

Second, they are all terrified of dying. You have to learn to approach the critter in a way that doesn’t trigger them to flee. I have lots of animal-butt photos to demonstrate what a steep learning curve that is.

Third, they have an incredibly strong desire to reproduce. Salmon swimming up stream, birds migrating half the globe, male grasshoppers competing to be the guy who gets his head bit off after sex. If it’s breeding season, critters are distracted enough that you often get photos of heads!

Those three things: eat, don’t die, reproduce are the basic operating instructions for all life. If every member of a species can’t accomplish all three of those things, the species will not survive. Therefore, every species that has survived has managed to do those three things. Usually on their own.

Critters are often born unattended. They have to arrive in this world with a nervous system that runs the physical plant and makes sure the critter looks for food, wants more than anything else to reproduce, and panics at the thought of death.

We are born with exactly that nervous system.

But free will!!!

Yes. Free will. Just for a moment, think of free will as the ability to walk wherever you want. You can turn this way or that, depending on what catches your fancy. But if you want to turn and walk away from that ice cream sundae, the path feels all up-hill. You are free to hike, but it’s much easier to just drift down the hill and tuck in.

Your nervous system is shouting instructions at you. Eat. Eat. Eat. Also, fuck, fuck, fuck. Which is what women say after all the eating.

Our nervous system, which was created by natural selection to make sure we stay alive and make more humans, is providing headwinds and tailwinds. And these winds guide human behavior into recognizable channels. Channels that make us feel purpose and joy.

But of course, there’s everything else. Humans aren’t just bodies. We are capable of creating much more than other humans. We create culture and civilization. Much of which has been designed to keep our nastier impulses in check. And those nastier impulses often surround competition for the breeding priveleges.

The next installment in this blog will concern winning. We all love winning. I wonder if you can guess why.