Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (28 page)

About 80% of the different orders of mammals are armed with specialized scent glands. Gazelles have them in front of their eyes, camels on their feet and neck, sheep on their bellies, some pigs on the wrist, chamois behind the horns, pronghorns on the jaw, peccaries on the back, musk deer in front of the genitals, and goats on the tail. Water voles rub their hind feet over their flank gland and rhythmically drum them on the ground. Gerbils and woodrats rub their bellies directly on the ground, secreting their scent mark from a ventral gland. Some animals have five or six different kinds of scent glands in various places on their bodies, each conveying a different chemical proclamation. Cats spray carefully titrated amounts of urine on the drapes and upholstery, in case some presumptuous alien feline might enter the living room and curl up before the fire. Rabbits meticulously deposit
piles of feces, each pellet coated by the anal scent gland, at crossroads in the warren—like the altars of Hecate on the highways of ancient Greece.

Some animals mark others with these scents, and rats urinate on their partners’ bodies—perhaps as a sign of proprietorship over individuals as well as territories. Animals can distinguish male and female, their own group or strain from others, age, individual identity, and the sexual receptivity of females, all by odor alone.
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Scientists have begun to decipher the stock phrases of their chemical communications—maybe just “foreigners keep out: this means you,” or “single male, well-bred, wishes to meet attractive single female …,” or “for a good time, follow this scent trail.” Sometimes it seems to be something much more subtle. Animals are busy filling the olfactory communications channels with a richness and fineness of discrimination long ago lost to humans. With all our instruments, we have not yet learned how to reenter that world.

If, despite all your aromatic notices, someone invades your territory, it might be enough to make threatening gestures, or swoop down on him, or bare your teeth and growl. Clearly, claw-to-claw or talon-to-talon mortal combat each time there’s a minor jurisdictional dispute is too costly for everybody—winner and loser. It’s much better to disperse the population through bluff, deception, feints, and a vivid pantomime of what violence you will visit on the intruder should he persist in ignoring your restrained and reasonable warnings. Deterrence is the way these matters are arranged, by and large, on the planet Earth. Real violence lies at the extreme end of the spectrum of aggressive possibilities, a last resort, as Hobbes said. Nature almost always settles somewhere short of that.

To avoid misunderstandings, it’s important to have evolved unambiguous conventions not only for what constitutes aggression, but also for what constitutes submission. Typical submissive gestures in mammals are the opposite of typical aggressive gestures
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—averting the eyes so they look anywhere but at the adversary; absolute motionlessness; a kind of bowing in which the forelegs and head are lowered and the rump raised; hiding from view those body parts that are conspicuous in threat displays; and turning jugular vein or belly up, exposing vital organs to the adversary as if inviting evisceration. The pantomime is lucid: “Here is my belly, do with me as you will.” It’s followed
almost always by a magnanimous gesture from the victor.
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Different species have different hereditary conventions on what constitutes and symbolizes submission. Fighting is transformed into ritual; instead of bloody combat, there is an exchange of data.

Such aggression—most often between males of the same species in disputes over territory or females—is very different from predatory aggression, aggression against members of another species. The two modes share some features in common (baring the teeth, for example), but the one is mainly bluff and the other is in deadly earnest. They engage different parts of the brain. In rivalries of love, cats will hiss, spit, arch their backs, make their hair stand on end, raise their tails high, and dilate their pupils. (Note how many of these postures and gestures make the animal seem larger and more dangerous than it is.) They rarely do each other serious harm, though. A genetic propensity for attacking others of your species, and eliciting attacks from them, has a maladaptive side to it—even if you win every fight, you might be badly injured, or a minor cut might later become infected. Bloodless rituals and symbolic combat are far more practical.

Predatory aggression is just the opposite. Its early object is to come as close as possible to the victim before it realizes what’s up. The cat will slink an inch at a time if it must, ears slicked back, hair tightly following the contours of the body, tail lowered. It stalks in absolute silence. Then the pounce, the kill, and dinner—all done with consummate delicacy and grace. No hissing and spitting here.
Intraspe
cific aggression is almost all show, display, intimidation, coercion, stagecraft. Only rarely does it end in mortal combat.
Interspecific
aggression, that’s different. That’s business. The prey may get away, but the predator’s intent is murder. Few species systematically confuse the two modes of aggression.

Mock combat is a staple in the theater of intraspecific aggression; both parties go through the motions, but neither is seriously hurt. The deadly, needle-toothed piranha fish of South American rivers fight among themselves, or at least the males do, but never by biting: If there were biting, everyone could get hurt. Instead they push and
shove with their tail fins. They want to communicate aggression, but not to bloody the water. It’s as if the combatants walk a fine line between cowardice and murder. Most often—crowded conditions may be another story—the line is walked with astonishing precision. But, as a reminder of how fine the line is, in many species intraspecific fighting is more likely when the animals are hungry. One kind of behavior spills over into the other

The female blue heron hears the love screech of the male. There may be several males calling at once—to the wind, for all they know. She picks her heart’s desire and settles on a branch nearby. The male immediately begins to court her. The moment she indicates interest and approaches him, though, he changes his mind, becomes unpleasant, shoos her away, or even attacks her As soon as the discouraged female flies off, he screeches after her—“frantically,” according to Nikko Tinbergen, the pioneering chronicler of blue heron life. If she gives him another chance and flies back, he may very well attack her again. Gradually, though, should the female’s patience last that long, the fickle male’s grumpiness subsides and he may actually be ready to mate. He is conflicted and ambivalent. Sex and aggression are mixed up in his mind, and the confusion is so profound that, if not for the patience of the female, this species might fail to reproduce itself. If ever there was an avian candidate for psychotherapy, the male blue heron is our nominee. But a similar confusion in the minds especially of males holds for many species, including reptiles, birds, and mammals. Some of the brain’s neural circuitry for aggression seems dangerously cheek by jowl with the neural circuitry for sex. The resulting behavior is strangely familiar. But of course humans are not herons.

Often you can see the ambivalence, the tension between inhibiting and disinhibiting the aggressive machinery in the animal’s behavior. It is literally “of two minds” A fighting cockerel, whose pecks and spurs are deadly, may in the midst of a confrontation turn aside and peck at a pebble on the ground, which after a moment it drops. In human as in animal behavior this is called “displacement.” The aggressive feelings are transferred or displaced to someone or something else, so the passions can be discharged without causing real injury. The cockerel is not angry at the pebble, but the pebble is a handy as well as a safer target.

Some male tropical fish use their vivid coloration to keep other
males away, that is, to protect territories and females. The females are, however, similarly decorated. During courtship the female, if attracted to the male, dispenses with her usual indications of submissiveness or readiness for escape and signals her amorous intent by a display to the male—a display, however, which is very similar to the male’s own aggressive posture. In some species, the male becomes enraged (and probably a little confused); he responds by displaying his coloration broadside to her, beating his tail fearsomely, and charging her. But, as noted in a famous study by Konrad Lorenz, he does not actually attack her. (If he did, he would leave fewer offspring.) Instead, narrowly missing the female, he races on and attacks someone else, usually the male in charge of the next territory, who may have been minding his own business, browsing in the algae. Eventually things settle down. Our protagonist no longer attacks his neighbor or charges the female. The species continues. Here, instead of displacing aggression away from a formidable enemy to an inoffensive target, the displacement goes the other way around. This sort of redirection is widespread. Again, gestures, postures, and displays about sex are very close to those about violence. The two can get confused.

One wolf will greet another by placing its mouth around the other’s muzzle. Many other mammals do likewise. Those taming wild animals may be startled when they are at the receiving end of such a greeting. The wolf stands on its hind legs, places its forelegs on the scientist’s shoulders, and places its jaws around the scientist’s head. This is just the wolf’s way of being friendly. If you’re an animal who doesn’t know how to talk, a very clear signal is communicated: “See my teeth? Feel them? I could hurt you, I really could. But I won’t. I like you.” Once more, a very narrow line separates affection from aggression.

Chimpanzees engaged in what humans call horseplay put on a characteristic “playface” to show that their combat gymnastics are meant only as a game. Courtship displays in gulls have been described as “fear and hostility, or attack and fleeing tendencies, expressed … in a manner that denies them.”
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In cranes there’s an “appeasement ceremony” in which the male spreads his wings, exaggerates his size, raises his beak … and then, still in a threat posture, turns himself aside—presenting a vulnerable and very visibly marked part of his anatomy, perhaps the side or back of his head. The pantomime may be repeated several times and incorporate
an attack on a piece of wood or something else handy. The message being communicated is clear. “I am big and threatening, but not toward you—toward the other, the other, the other.”
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Smiling may have a similar origin. Baring one’s teeth carries the message. “I think you’re food,” or at least “Watch out for me.” But in the symbolic language of animals, this signal may be softened and altered: “Even if you
are
food, even though I’m well-equipped to eat you, you’re safe with me” All over the world, in virtually every human culture, smiling signifies affection and good fellowship (with certain nuances conveying a touch of nervousness and deference). All over the world, in nearly every human culture, in civilian as well as military life—in handshakes, high fives, salutations among mounted Sioux, hails to Caesar and heils to Hitler, upon greeting a superior officer or waving farewell—we humans offer our right hands in greeting, demonstrating while still at a safe distance that we are unarmed and therefore pose no threat. In a species given from its earliest days to clubs, knives, spears, and axes, this is information worth having.

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With occasional exceptions, animals do not seem consciously to work out what to do in a given situation and then, weighing alternatives, opt for aggression. It’s too slow a process to survive the hurly-burly of the biological world. Instead, the animal senses threat or prey, and a tenth of a second later it responds A complex set of physiological reactions begins—adrenaline pours into the bloodstream, limbs begin to flex—reactions that are ordinarily sitting there in the animal on ready standby, awaiting the release signals

In the neural architecture of mammals there is hardwired circuitry for aggression and predation. When a certain region in the brain of a solitary cat is electrically stimulated, she begins to stalk imaginary prey. Turn the current off and she stretches and licks her paws; the hallucination has vanished. Rats that do not look twice at a mouse will, when an electric current is made to pass through the appropriate parts of their brains, become crazed killers—dedicated, implacable mouse-murdering machines. The stimulated neural circuits are present for a reason; in the ordinary course of the animal’s life, they will be excited by some cue from the outside world—a motion, a smell, a sound, causing an electrical stimulation—and the brain machinery
for aggression or predation is set into motion. When given a juicy bone still covered with meat, even puppies as young as two weeks old will growl and bark. Dry dog food does not trigger the same hardwired and impassioned response. Humans have such machinery too. Sometimes a misfiring or miswired circuit can set it into motion with very little stimulus from the outside world, or even none at all.

It’s as if all of us birds and mammals—but especially the males—are walking around wearing a control panel with a set of push buttons on it. The panels are prominently displayed, easy for others to get to (or even for us to get to—so we can pump ourselves up on our own, a skill of professional athletes). When pressed, the buttons disinhibit a set of powerful, passionate, and sometimes deadly responses that are ordinarily kept under tight controls. Put this way, it may seem odd that Nature has made the buttons so easy to push, so readily available, so vulnerable to exploitation.
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A cannibalistic species of firefly simulates the color and frequency of the come-hither flashes of another, country bumpkin species of firefly. The love buttons have been pushed on the naive insects; they see visions of sultry females where there is only a gaping mouth. To lure uninterested or recalcitrant females into mating, males of many species are often ready to press buttons designed for quite different purposes,