Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [11]
“Every species is good in its own niche” when it comes to navigation, says David Uttal. “We’re not at the top of some evolutionary ladder.” This probably goes without saying, given that a Chinook salmon can swim a thousand miles upstream to the place it was born just by following its nose, whereas a human often struggles to find a car in a parking lot after ten minutes in a grocery store. “But what we have that no other species has is culture. We can share information, and that gives us an amazing flexibility.”
That’s where mapmaking comes in. When humans take information from mental maps and put it down on paper (or a cave wall or clay tablet), the game is fundamentally changed. Sure, a honeybee can share geographic information with his hive by doing a little dance, but according to Karl von Frisch, who won a Nobel Prize for translating the bee dance, it has only three components: the direction of the food source relative to the sun, its distance, and its quality. The maps we make for other humans are much more versatile. The same map of southern Africa that I used as a kid to imagine Tarzan-style adventures could be used by an environmentalist to study land use, a tourist to plan a safari, or a military strategist to plan a coup or invasion. It has thousands of potential routes on it, not just one.
There are plenty of possible ways you could express to others the geographical information in your mental map: a written description, gestures, song lyrics, puppet theater. But maps turn out to be an enormously intuitive, compact, and compelling way to communicate that information. To emphasize that they’re not “innate” seems to stop just short of saying that maps are an accident, the product of dozens of arbitrary cultural decisions. I think that misses the point. Just because maps aren’t innate doesn’t mean that they’re not optimal, or even inevitable.
Cast your mind back, for a moment, to the middle of the last century. Today, orbital imagery is everywhere and we take it for granted, but before the space race began, no Earthling had ever seen our home planet from high above—that is, from the viewpoint of a large-area map. If you look at science-fiction movies and comics from that era, you’ll see that the Earth is almost always depicted like the Universal logo or a schoolroom globe: without any cloud cover at all. We had no idea what we looked like from outside ourselves! As a species, we were the equivalent of Dave Chappelle’s famous comedy sketch character: the blind Klansman who doesn’t know he’s black.
But when John Glenn became the first man to orbit the earth in 1962, he looked down in surprise and told the Bermuda tracking station, “I can see the whole state of Florida just laid out like a map.”* Think about what that says about the fidelity of maps: seeing the real thing for the first time, the first thing that occurred to Glenn was to compare it to its map representation. In that one sentence, he validated that maps had been getting something fundamentally right about Florida for centuries. That makes me think that we shortchange maps by calling them mere cultural conventions. Sure, some of the specifics that we take for granted might be arbitrary—the angle of view, dotted lines for roads, blue ink for water, and so on—but not the fact that we as a species rely heavily on pictorial representations of the surface of our world. They’re critical to the way we think. If maps didn’t exist, it would be necessary