Bruce Chatwin's evolutionary biology

I started reading The Songlines in the belief that it was a travel book. And it is, and for a while that's all it is — Bruce Chatwin's book, published in 1987, is primarily about his time in the Australian desert with Aborigines and the people who work with them.

But about a third of the way in, it starts getting evolutionary, with a sudden digression to recall a visit to Konrad Lorenz in 1974 (I think he was interviewing Lorenz for the Sunday Times.). Chatwin goes to Lorenz's family home in Altenberg, just outside Vienna (a place I have visited in its current incarnation as the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research; I don't think it's appearance has changed much).

The memory is triggered when Chatwin sees an Aborigine act out the travels of the Lizard Ancestor, reminding him of Lorenz's own ability to mimic the animals he studied. For anyone wonkish about animal behaviour, this chapter is worth the price of admission alone. But it is also a jumping off point, from where Chatwin goes into Lorenz's ideas about aggression in and human animal nature. From then on the book is increasingly devoted to Chatwin's own ideas about human evolution.

Chatwin was not a complete amateur in this regard. In the mid 1960s, he abandoned a job as an auctioneer at Sotheby's and went off to do a PhD in archaeology at Edinburgh, which e also dropped out of after two years. There's lots in The Songlines about his visits to important palaeoanthropological sites, especially in South Africa, where he spends time with Raymond Dart and Elisabeth Vrba. He also planned a sort-of-academic book about nomads that he never completed, and large sections of Songlines is given over to fragments from those notebooks, along with quotes, reminiscence, anecdote, and so on (much of which teeters on the verge of outrageous padding).

Chatwin's big idea about human evolution is that predators — or The Beast, as he calls it — provided the selection pressure that made our species smart and social. Out on the savannah, he thinks, the carnivores, especially big cats such as Dinofelis, were so menacing that it was adapt-or-die, and in our case adaptation meant becoming human.

Chatwin runs this idea past Lorenz: "[He] tugged at his beard, gave me a searching look and said, ironically or not I'll ever know:
'What you have just said is totally new'."

I say: baboons*.

Chatwin's ideas about The Beast led him to believe that the violence in our natures arose not for competing with each other, but for defending ourselves against predators. And his travels among nomads lead him to believe that settlements, institutions, states and so on pervert our natures so as to bring out the worst in us. That is to say, he thinks that humanity's natural and good state is to be like Bruce Chatwin.

There's nothing wrong with this just-so-storifying, and he's far from the first or last person to come up with a scientific hypothesis that's comfortingly close to his own temperament. I don't think Chatwin's ideas on human evolution have aged very well —if I had to sum up what evolution has done to human behaviour, I'd say it has made us better at cooperating with members of our own group, the better to compete with members of other groups. (See for example, to pick a couple of examples off the top of my head, the work of Sam Bowles and Robin Dunbar.) And humans seem the most likely culprits for the extinction of Dinofelis, and a host of other large vertebrates, not least in Australia. But this isn't a paper, and he's not an academic, so he doesn't have to meet the standards of academia. (Rather, he shows what you can get away with if you've got a fine prose style and the intellectual confidence that goes with being posh.)

I think Chatwin's 1977 travel book, In Patagonia is more successful, but I'm glad I read the Songlines, particularly for its descriptions (the accuracy of which I'm not qualified to judge) of how songlines work, and how Aboriginal Australians use them. Between the lines, there's also much that speaks to more orthodox ideas about human nature in how these groups coexist with one another, even though they are potential competitors for resources.

And one notebook fragment touched a nerve with me. A much-cited Bedouin proverb goes: "I against my brother, my brothers and me against my cousins, then my cousins and I against strangers." This is often, and correctly, given as an illustration of how people instinctively grasp kin selection.

But Chatwin's version adds another line: I against my brother, I and my brother against our cousin, I my brother and cousin against the neighbours, all of us against the foreigner.

What made me so happy about this is that it shows that social distance and genetic distance are equivalent, because they are both a measure of shared interests, and so influence the benefits of cooperation versus competition. Ideas about social distance are a theme of my reputation book, and one that no doubt/I hope I'll be developing here in future posts

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*That is, a smart-but-not-that-smart level of group solidarity and some nasty canines seem quite adequate for dealing with large carnivores.

Recommend a blog, win a book

When you write a book, the publisher sends you a questionnaire asking about promotional opportunities, on which you write down all your big-name author friends who will big-up your work, and all your TV-presenter buddies who will have you on their show.

I'm filling out the questionnaire for my forthcoming book, 'People Will Talk: The Science of Reputation' at present, and it's looking blank. So I'm hoping that someone reading this can recommend blogs to send a promotional copy.

The book is rooted in evolutionary biology, and branches out into all kinds of other stuff - online society, international relations, social networks, animal behaviour, social psychology, economics.

So what I'm looking for is tips on the top places on evo psych, (behavioural) economics, social networks (and capital), animal behaviour, business and brand-building, and so on - almost anywhere at the boundary of the social and natural sciences - who might be interested in the book and might want to review it.

I'd like to reward the person who sends the best recommendation(s) - based on how well they match the book, and how much I like the writing - with a copy of the book, which should be out in the autumn. I'll even sign it if you like, thus slightly lowering its resale value. A couple of rules for entrants:

1. I don't know you. If I do, please do send your recommendations, but either you can buy a copy, or I'll give you one anyway. You're not getting the prize.

2. I haven't heard of the site you mention. You'll have to take my word on this one. I'm not a big blog reader, but I think I'm aware of most of the big ones in evolution. I also know a few of the economics ones (crookedtimber.org and Marginal Revolution). Besides revealing promotional opportunities, I'm hoping that this exercise will broaden my mind.

Please leave suggestions as comments, or tweet me: @gentraso. (I'm not online every day, so don't be cross if I don't respond immediately.)

Oh dear

This is the juiciest literary-backstabbing story since the whole Oxford poetry professorship doo-dah.

April 15: the LRB Blog quotes a TLS diary story on an Amazon reviewer variously nicknamed 'Historian' and 'orlando-birkbeck'. This reviewer has written a spate of glowing reviews of Orlando Figes' books about Russian history, and has rubbished similar books by other authors, plus one that beat a book of Figes' to a prize.

April 17: It was Figes' missus!

April 23: Figes 'fesses!

Bursts and Brsts

Albert Laszlo Barabasi, one of the leading lights of network theory and research, has a new popular book out soon. It's called 'Bursts'. One of the blurb quotes on the webpage says that it looks at networks in time, in contrast to his earlier 'Linked', which looked at them in space. Sounds a bit like the Tipping Point, or possibly Phil Ball's Critical Mass. (I've read none of the books mentioned in this paragraph.)

To promote the book/allow readers to 'be part of a unique experiment', Barabasi has set up a game type thing at brsts.com. (Anyone else more inclined to read that as 'breasts' than 'bursts'? Oh.)

After registering, you can adopt a word of the text. You do this by perusing an online copy of the book where words that are taken are in orange and words that aren't are in green. You pick a green word, and then that word, along with every other word that's taken thus far, is revealed to you. I went to the chapter titled 'Deadly Quarrels and Power Laws', as the title reflects my current and past interests, and clicked on 'Technica'. Lucky old me.

You can get points by inviting your friends to sign up, or by guessing concealed words. This last is staggeringly easy, at least for words where some other known words are nearby, as the game gives you an anagram of the word in question.

If you get lots of points, you might get a free book. The current leader has 50,000 points, 40,000 more than second place, and has guessed early 8,000 words. I have 318, and am unlikely to rack up many more, so I guess I'll either be buying a copy, or trying to blag a review copy from somewhere.

A quick toot on my own trumpet

Library Journal has just named ITBOAH as one of the best science books of 2006. Picket your local college or public library now, demanding that they buy at least one copy.

My new £16,000 habit

Winter finally came to London today, with a couple of inches of snow falling overnight. It was a nice surprise to wake up to. And not before time: we were hiking in the Peak District over new year, and you barely needed a coat, it was so warm (although the waterproof properties of goretex did come in handy, I admit). Woodland birds were singing, the odd tree was in blossom, and a friend in London has seen bumble bees in her garden. Anyway, enjoy the winter walking before the flood waters rise to engulf us all.

While in Derbyshire, we happened upon the excellent Hawkridge books in Castleton. They have a huge collection nature books, especially ornithology, and also good sections on climbing, mountaineering, etc.

In particular, they major in the Collin's New Naturalist series. This was set up during the second world war by, among others, Julian Huxley (who also popularized the use of allometry, thus earning himself a cameo in ITBOAH), with the intention of educating laypeople about the natural world.

Recently, the books have become collectors' items. The 100th in the series, 'Woodlands' by the legendary Oliver Rackham was published recently. There have also been other off-series monographs, so a complete set numbers around 120 books. The extremely nice man at Hawkridge told us that a set recently went at auction for £16,000 (about $32,000). The Woodlands book also exists in a limited edition, leather-bound version that is already changing hands for hundreds of pounds, apparently. The two rarest, nos. 70 Orkney and 71 Warblers (both from 1985) thanks to their extremely short print runs, are worth thousands. There's an extremely nice article about the whole thing here.

The NN clearly owe their value to a perfect storm of British male nerdiness - we, and especially amateur naturalists, love collecting, making lists, getting the complete set. So something that appeals to both naturalists and book collectors is bound to do well. They are also lovely books, with instantly recognizable covers.

Anyway,I'm not given to impulse purchases (although I'm quite partial to Nonesuch Explorer recordings on vinyl), but Hawkridge had a first edition of NN number 3, London's Natural History by Richard Fitter (with pictures by Eric Hosking, published in 1945 that they were selling for only £8. As a Londonist, this was clearly too good to miss, even though I had to carry it for several more days' walking. Only 102 (they're up to 103 now) to go.