Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [90]
“There you go!”
“Hey Dad, what’s that vine growing up into the tree? Isn’t that poison ivy?”
Let’s rehearse what we know about who we are.
We are primates, very closely related to chimps and other great apes. Our ancestors speciated from the other apes about five million years ago, and evolved in parallel lines and overlapping subspecies, emerging most clearly as hominids about two million years ago.
East Africa in this period was getting drier and drier. The forest was giving way to grassland savannahs dotted with scattered groves of trees. We evolved to adapt to that landscape: the hairlessness, the upright posture, the sweat glands, and other physical features. They all made us capable of running long distances in the open sun near the equator. We ran for a living and covered broad areas. We used to run game down by following it until it tired out, sometimes days later.
In that basically stable mode of living the generations passed, and during the many millennia that followed, the size of hominid brains evolved from about three hundred cubic millimeters to about nine hundred cubic millimeters. This is a strange fact, because everything else remained relatively stable. The implication is that the way we lived then was tremendously stimulating to the growth of the brain. Almost every aspect of hominid life has been proposed as the main driver of this growth, everything from the calculation of accurate rock throwing to the ability to dream, but certainly among the most important must have been language and social life. We talked, we got along; it’s a difficult process, requiring lots of thought. Because reproduction is crucial to any definition of evolutionary success, getting along with the group and with the opposite sex is fundamentally adaptive, and so it must be a big driver of increasing brain size. We grew so fast we can hardly fit through the birth canal these days. All that growth from trying to understand other people, the other sex, and look where we are.
ANNA WAS pleased to see Frank back in the office, brusque and grouchy though he was. He made things more interesting. A rant against oversized pickup trucks would morph into an explanation of everything in terms of yes or no, or a discussion of the social intelligence of gibbons, or an algebra of the most efficient division of labor in the lab. It was impossible to predict what he would say next. Sentences would start reasonably and then go strange, or vice versa. Anna liked that.
He did, however, seem overly impressed by game theory. “What if the numbers don’t correspond to real life?” she asked him. “What if you don’t get five points for defecting when the other person doesn’t, what if all those numbers are off, or even backward? Then it’s just another computer game, right?”
“Well—” Frank was taken aback. A rare sight. Immediately he was thinking it over. That was another thing Anna liked about him; he would really think about what she said.
Then Anna’s phone rang and she picked up.
“Charlie! Oh dovelie, how are you?”
“Screaming agony.”
“Oh babe. Did you take your pills?”
“I took them. They’re not doing a thing. I’m starting to see things in the corners of my eyes, crawlies you know? I think the itches have gotten into my brain. I’m going nuts.”
“Just hold on. It’ll take a couple of days for the steroids to have an effect. Keep taking them. Is Joe giving you a break?”
“No. He wants to wrestle.”
“Oh God don’t let him! I know the doctor said it wasn’t transmissible, but still—”
“Don’t worry. Not a fucking chance of wrestling.”
“You’re not touching him?”
“And he’s not touching me, that’s right. He’s getting pretty pissed off about it.”
“You’re putting on the plastic gloves to change him?”
“Yes yes yes yes, tortures of the damned, when I take them off the skin comes too, blood and yuck, and then I get so itchy.”
“Poor babe. Just try not to do anything.”
Then he had to chase Joe out of the kitchen. Anna hung up.
Frank looked at her. “Poison ivy?”
“Yep. He climbed into a tree that had it growing up its