Fickle finger
Three hundred years ago, a country with oil was generally a poor country. Oil was of little or no use – rich countries were those with fertile farms, or gold, or spices, or forests, or metal ores, or even coal. But the oil countries were as poor as, well, I was going to say church mice, but they are rich these days; I know, as poor as climate scientists. But the oil was sitting there, under the surface, or perhaps oozing out of the rocks, and it would one day make countries like Saudi Arabia as rich as televangelists.

Bit like that with humans too. Winning money in a lottery, or discovering a long-lost rich uncle, or stumbling across a gold nugget or a marketable invention, is the difference between the rich and the poor. Or being tall and skinny may not be a lot of fun when you are being teased as a child, but when you grow up it may lead to riches on a basketball court. Having sickle cell anemia genes doesn’t do a lot for you except in malaria country, where it stops you dying from malaria.

So many different chance events and properties influence the fate of people and countries, – ‘there but for the fickle finger of fate go I’ can work in both directions. The bum on the park bench and the bum in the executive suite are often separated only by luck.

Same with animal species, like, oh, I don’t know, Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes. I suppose you have all been following what seemed to be a rash of news items about chimpanzees making and using tools – stone tools and wooden spears – and proof that this has been going on for thousands of years at least, back to a time when H. sapiens also used only stone and wood tools. Also more investigations into the evolutionary sequence, with evidence the split between the two species occurred about 4 million years ago and took only about 400,000 years to complete.

And perhaps most interestingly of all, a finding that humans evolved one unique trait just one million years ago. Up until that time H. sapiens and P.troglodytes must have seemed, to any observer from another planet, very similar species indeed. But then a mutation occurred in the H.sapiens species, and this gave them a longer life span, a longer childhood, and a late reaching of sexual maturity compared to other animals. Presumably it also caused the relative hairlessness (reflecting the immaturity of the H. sapiens body).

You can imagine Pan troglodytes members looking at these new naked chimps with horror. ‘What the hell is that?’ you can hear them saying. ‘Naked, yuk’ might be the response of a female Pan. And the male Chimps could be seen nodding wisely and saying ‘well, that lot will never survive. They take too long to mature, the offspring are helpless and need looking after. And their females seem to have taken an oath of chastity until they are twelve or thirteen – they wear silver rings or something. It will never take off. Poor things. There but for the grace of god go I.’

But, just like oil, the mutation for extended childhood and longer life was to prove a hidden boon to the species that happened to get it. The rich uncle came good, because looking after your young for longer meant they bonded more, learnt more, and the longer life gave more opportunity to accumulate knowledge, and then pass it on to the young in turn.

Both groups of chimps went on in parallel making stone and wood tools for a while, but soon the revenues from the mutation began to come in for humans, and the rest, as they say, is history. The fickle finger of evolution turned us into a dominant and domineering species, and our cousins, once the dominant ape, will probably become extinct before much longer.

Funny how things turn out.

3 April 2007