Or is it? Bacteria, complex cells, multicellular organisms and societies may
be the four major transitions in evolution that we know about. But I believe we
are now embarking on a fifth major transition. Homo sapiens is slowly
evolving into something akin to a superorganism, a highly-structured global
society in which the lives of everyone on the planet will become so
interdependent that they may grow and develop with a common purpose. It may take
centuries to fully evolve, this global creature, but there is no question that
it will—only what it will ultimately be like.

Of course, most people simply call the process globalisation. But that word
no longer seems adequate to convey the profundity of what is happening. It may
be a good shorthand for merging markets, the spread of Nike and the rise of the
mega-corporation. But global interdependence is not just about hot money and
brands sloshing between nations. Nor is it all bad.

Far from it. Environmentalists may not like it when the World Trade
Organization declares that we will eat endangered sea turtle with our shrimp.
But telling people across the globe not to eat endangered animals is also an act
of globalisation. So is watching a Hollywood film or the World Cup or organising
a summit to set targets for carbon dioxide emissions. When a tagged loggerhead
turtle paddles from Mexico to Japan, her satellite beeper confirms what we
already knew—that only global action will save our planet.

No—globalisation of one sort or another is both necessary and
inevitable. The question we should be concentrating on is what we can do to
influence the outcome.

Step one, I believe, is to take on board the notion that we are not going
global in the narrow economic sense so much as evolving into my superorganism.
This helps because it means we can assess what this global transformation might
mean from the biology that both shaped and emerged from earlier evolutionary
transitions. My superorganism will be created according to the same evolutionary
principles of competition and cooperation that spawned societies, bodies, cells
and life itself. The change we face is radical but resembles those that have
gone before.

Single creature

To qualify as an organism, for instance, your internal parts must be
differentiated and yet only work in harmony. Division of labour is something any
organism has: your hand doesn’t do what your foot does. Globally, we are already
approaching this stage as workers in the Philippines make shoes for British feet
and telephone answering services sweep round the globe with the Sun. We are well
on the road to producing what we need at the level of the entire species rather
than at the level of nations or smaller groups.

Another qualification for being an organism is owning and maintaining a
system to ward off disease. But here, too, there are signs that humanity is
already acting as though it were a single creature. The global vaccination
campaigns run by the WHO and UNICEF can be viewed as the early stages of a
species-wide immune system.

Elsewhere, the UN Population Fund and the UN Women’s Program hope to give
women everywhere control over their bodies and fertility. That means different
populations of our species are influencing how other populations grow far more
benignly than wars ever did.

Then there is our global nervous system. Nerve nets of information
potentially link all humanity—the first time in almost four billion years
of life that this has happened to any species. What’s more, these nerve nets
work in real time, which is how our primate emotions evolved to work. When your
daughter in Beijing bursts into tears, you can e-mail her while she still
remembers what the fuss is about. Even heads of global corporations share
emotions in the fury and exhilaration of the merger, hugging each other by
e-mail like chimpanzees patrolling their territories.

And yet it would be a mistake to see information technology as the ultimate
driver of the move towards a global superorganism because the real pressure for
change comes from inside—from our primate social instincts.

As a primatologist, I watch ring-tailed lemurs communicating with their
children and I’m very aware how much the core of my own social self goes right
back to the common ancestor with lemurs. The purpose of our primate desires for
dominance, love, kinship or support hasn’t changed because of the global nerve
net, only the ways in which we express those social instincts.

It’s still too early to predict how these instincts will shape the
superorganism. The cooperation our ancestors were programmed for was largely
with close kin and individuals likely to reciprocate—not with total
strangers on the other side of the planet. In its ancestral form, altruism may
just about have extended to one’s own social group. No animal ever did anything
just for the good of its species.

But humans are much less predictable in this respect. A student I teach at
Princeton may dutifully repeat this hard-headed creed in an exam. The next day,
she may go out and collect for Oxfam, or campaign for whales, sea turtles, and
ring-tailed lemurs. Or get a job with WWF, UNICEF, even WTO, to nudge the world
in the directions she thinks right. No animal ever did it before, but we do.
Sometimes. The power of complex language and the ideas that flow from it free us
to define our social group however we like—and to develop a foresight
about the consequences of human action, even at species level.

For all these reasons, the human superorganism may have the chance to evolve
like no other creature—by design, not nature’s blind complexity. But that
design will require some sacrifices. Nationalism and religious fanaticism, those
twin enemies of cooperation, for starters. Perhaps a little environmental and
cultural diversity, though not as much as we’ll lose if we continue on our
present course.

And money will have to be channelled to the global agencies we will need to
maintain the species and keep the mega-corporations in check. But then, consider
the human body. Up to 20 per cent of your energy goes to keeping your brain
going. How ever did that happen? That’s a tax.

Ancient primate morality tells us to love and respect our own family group.
To survive on Earth in 2000 and beyond, we must think and act as a global
species. Human interdependence grew with our species’ history and now gallops
forward to engulf the biosphere. As some Sanskrit words written more than three
thousand years ago put it: Vasudhev kutumbkum (the world is all a
family). Information technology, the newborn power of the turn of this
millennium, at last gives us the capacity to act on those teachings.

Gaia is not our mother. She could be our daughter.

This is a book to read in the bath, retell in the common room, and then
slap straight into course readings for students. Thomas Bass shares with
his readers the privilege of conversations in which he had the leisure to
think of all the questions you might like to ask. Equally important, his
eminent interviewees had the opportunity to correct the drafts and rephrase
their replies to say exactly what they wanted. The result has the liveliness
of talk, and the precision of the best science journalism.

Whom do you want to converse with? Luc Montagnier on the HIV virus or
Jonathan Mann on the crusade against AIDS? Sarah Hrdy on the sexual and
sociobiological revolution in primate studies, Richard Dawkins on the genesis
of biological complexity or Norman Packard on complexity and chaos? Bert
Sackmann on nerve membrane channels, James Black on billion-dollar drugs
or Etienne-Emile Baulieu on the abortion pill? Thomas Lambo on traditional
psychiatry in Africa, or Farouk El-Baz on the chemistry and ethics of burrowing
into a buried Pharaonic boat tomb? Or, finally, with Marie-Claire King,
whose political concern with breast cancer, the kidnapped children of Argentina,
and the diversity of humanity itself, inspires her genetic analyses?

The choice is biased towards health and physiology, towards women and
women’s concerns, towards the effects of modern science on the Third World,
not towards some representative selection of disciplines or Nobel Prize
winners. Bass does have an agenda – to uncover the interrelation of science,
ethics, politics and the changes that new discoveries are bringing to us
all. Fortunately, he does not pursue his agenda with pompous generalities:
he merely shows how these concerns intertwine in each scientist’s own life.

Science at this level immediately transcends traditional disciplines.
Evolutionary theory ranges from Hrdy’s female langur monkeys, who do not
cooperate to resist infanticidal males, through Packard’s computer modelling
of the stock market, to Dawkins’s religious intensity in arguing against
the existence of purpose in nature. Molecular physiology suddenly opens
questions of how the mind works, of abortion, of whether beta-blockers improve
the performance of concert pianists. Bass writes: ‘In chaos theory, as Norman
Packard explains it, information equals surprise, and the more information
you have, the more surprised you are. This has been my overarching principle
in shaping this book; to maximize surprise.’

In this galaxy, one person does stand apart: Farouk El-Baz, with his
concern that the Pharaoh’s boat should stay buried. (Known as solar boats,
these vessels were put in the ground to provide transport in the afterlife.)
He puts his case on both scientific and nationalistic grounds. As we invent
more remote sensing techniques, future generations may learn much more if
we leave this treasure for them to probe instead of ripping it out now
to place in some museum. Nationally, Egypt should guard its treasures, above
or below ground – archaeology has been classically imperialist. El-Baz is
grappling here with the intersection of science and history: the unique
case, which can be illuminated, destroyed or both by our attempts at analysis.
Others are also at this junction, such as Mann with his recognition of AIDS
as the Black Death of the modern age, driving us to recognise the globalisation
of human society. Marie-Claire King’s study of mitochondrial DNA is relevant
not only to the origin of our species, but also to the eight-year-old Argentinian
girl, kidnapped at 23 months, who walked straight into the room in her grandparents’
home where she had slept as a baby and asked for her doll. Bass’s book could
become a text not just for showing new relations between disciplines, or
between science and ethics, but of science itself as a link between individual
and general understanding.

Finally, Bass tried to interview the creators, the breakers of paradigms.
Do we learn from this book what kind of people shake science into moving
ahead? I think not – only that they are all courageous, which we knew before.
Otherwise, they have the human range of emotions. Pugnaciousness – James
Black: ‘I’m not giving any more interviews. You’re the last.’ Aud-aciousness
– Sarah Hrdy: ‘I like playing poker.’ Rivalry and collegiality – Luc Montagnier:
‘Now Robert Gallo and I are getting along quite well. We respect each other.
This often happens to people who have fought a lot. We were friends to
begin with and we have ended by being friends again.’

And creative, generous joy – Bert Sakmann: ‘We were very happy! Erwin
(Neher) and I and two very dedicated postdoctoral students from Australia
and France worked like hell. Fred Sigworth, an electrical engineer from
Yale, did all the electronics. He built one electrical apparatus after another
making it easier to read signals. We worked day and night . . . Erwin’s
and my labs were adjacent and we had no doors. We were just yelling ‘I have
a new configuration!’ ‘

Bass: ‘With two Germans, an American, a Frenchman and an Australian
in your lab, what language did you speak?’

Sakmann: ‘English.’

Bass: ‘But with occasional exclamations in German and French?’ Sakmann:
‘Yes, ‘Help!’

Alison Jolly is in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology,
Princeton University.

Primate Visions is ostensibly about women primatologists, but it takes
a devious route. Donna Haraway’s theme is the disintegration of the male
white imperialist view of nature. She begins with Carl Akeley and Teddy
Roosevelt parading across Africa, followed by a train of more-or-less faithful
wives and bearers, and ends with the multisexed, multicoloured science fiction
of Octavia Butler.

Carl Akeley marshalled armies of taxidermists, painters, botanists,
porters and hunters to create the African dioramas of the American Museum
of Natural History. The dioramas are works of art, not of nature, says Haraway,
made of the skins and horns of dead animals in a painted cave. But Akeley
still has his hand on the nape of the visitor’s neck, forcing you to see
his vision of Africa as the only true reality.

By the late 1980s, Haraway’s primatologists study female primates as
more fundamental to their troops’ reproductive economy than the males. We
emphasise individuals’ strategies of friendship or aggression, breaking
down even categori sation by sex. We spend much energy on conservation,
not pure science. Conservation means understanding the viewpoints of colleagues,
politicians and villagers in our host countries, who will determine the
survival of their monkeys, apes and lemurs. We are trying to keep our wild
relatives afloat in a current that sets inexorably towards the future.

All this is true. But Haraway still gets us primatologists wrong. This
is an ambitious book. Haraway does not just try to describe changing fashions
in science, or external influences. She says that studying creatures as
much like us as wild primates is a matter of personal vision. She analyses
field primatology as though it were science fiction. Fragmented views of
baboon or lemur need never rejoin, any more than you would try to reconcile
Warhol with Canaletto. Haraway does not accept the effort of science to
discover, not merely create.

Of course scientists argue. Of course we are delighted to poke holes
in others’ imperfect arguments. But to take just one example from Primate
Visions, Jeanne Altman overturned established views by doing good science
by the established rules, not just by separate pleading. Even if primatology
arrives at some theory of uncertainty, in which the observer’s viewpoint
is an explicit factor in his or her conclusions, that can take on the status
of scientific theory only when the observers agree how they may communicate
their positions to build up a cohe rent whole.

Primate Visions is written in armour-plated post-modern feminist jargon.
I can see no intellectual excuse for this, but I can see a social reason,
if post-modern feminists need to preserve their group identity as the American
Amish do by speaking a dialect of Middle High German. Perhaps Haraway is
so defensive because she senses that the scientists she treats with such
care and close reading are going to reject her.

Margaretta, you have tried so hard to educate me about post-modernism
and I am not sure it has worked. Haraway also once tried to make it clear
to me. She explained it as seeing the world as a mirror-glass skyscraper,
which reflects a kaleidoscope of sky and other buildings and the observer’s
eyes, and which changes its reflection as soon as the observer shifts her
own standing place. Maybe so. But some of us still believe that if enough
scientists stand in different places, and on each others’ shoulders, we’ll
get past the games with mirrors to describe the building itself. But perhaps
she is only writing about us and for you.

Alison

Dear Alison

I like your rhetoric of dangerous acrobatics and noble collective effort
in the prusuit of truth. But it can only underline Haraway’s central point
that science, like anything else, is embodied in narrative. Haraway’s attempy
to reveal the narrative resources of myth and doctrine which inform the
discourses of primatoloty is about showing science as social, and, because
of that, deeply politically interested. It is about deconstructing that
Western humabist ideal of the scientist, with its masculinist and liberal
humanist split between subject and object, Man and Nature, its pretentions
to purity and disinterest in the name of reason.

When you oppose the scientist to the artist, the attempy to discover
against the desire to create, you misunderstand the essence of Haraway’s
project. Far from proposing that all scientific findings are entirely relative
or individual, she shows instead the wider social consensus that shape the
scientific and the scientist. Whether or not particular discoveries are
true, or true to the best of our understanding at the time, they are ideologically
constituted.

It is ironic that you are cited in Primate Visions as one of the biologists
who is more aware of the social context in which you make your ‘discoveries’
of lemur life, and you have always wound your field trips around with ‘stories’.
I can vouch for how many times your have sighed over the ‘romance’ of the
rainforest.

Haraway is the noble one, in her attempt to scale the ideological walls
within which Western science is ensconced. Her history of primatology shows
how deeply embeded each scientist’s work is in the political structures
of gender, race and class. The National Geographic’s hugely popular photo
of the chimpanzee’s hand tentatively reaching to touch the hand of Jane
Goodall becomes an icon for the reunion between Man and Nature. haraway
analyses it as filled with mystical promise in a world threatened by nuclear
and ecological destruction. She also sees it as offering profound racial
reassurance for the white West, at the moment of decolonisation in Africa.
Her point is that only a white woman’s hands, with their signification of
healing, civilised and accepting, could have represented that touch. You
tell me that Jane Goodall now works with local African observers prehaps
more than any other primatologist, but Haraway’s point is what the public
myth of Jane Goodall represents, how scientific discovery is itself constructed.
Discourse as well as objective discovery determines what can be known

Haraway’s downfall lies not in misunderstanding scientific projects,
but in her evident failure to make her case in terms that will really unsettle
scientists. But by putting into the foreground her own discursive influences
and political allegiances, she inflates the book with endless abstractions.
What we need are more concrete case studies, for the dake of feminists,
scientists and everybody who likes a riproaring argument.

Margaretta

Alison Jolly is a biologist at Princeton University; her daughter Margaretta
Jolly is cultural editor for Seven Days, London.