The Blind Watchmaker

  The principle of electrolocation, as it has been called, is fairly well understood at the level of physics though not, of course, at the level of what it feels like to be an electric fish. The following account applies equally to African and South American weakly electric fish: the convergence is that thorough. Current flows from the front half of the fish, out into the water in lines that curve back and return to the tail end of the fish. There are not really discrete ‘lines’ but a continuous ‘field’, an invisible cocoon of electricity surrounding the fish’s body. However, for human visualization it is easiest to think in terms of a family of curved lines leaving the fish through a series of portholes spaced along the front half of the body, all curving round in the water and diving into the fish again at the tip of its tail. The fish has what amounts to a tiny voltmeter monitoring the voltage at each ‘porthole’. If the fish is suspended in open water with no obstacles around, the lines are smooth curves. The tiny voltmeters at each porthole all register the voltage as ‘normal’ for their porthole. But if some obstacle appears in the vicinity, say a rock or an item of food, the lines of current that happen to hit the obstacle will be changed. This will change the voltage at any porthole whose current line is affected, and the appropriate voltmeter will register the fact. So in theory a computer, by comparing the pattern of voltages registered by the voltmeters at all the portholes, could calculate the pattern of obstacles around the fish. This is apparently what the fish brain does. Once again, this doesn’t have to mean that the fish are clever mathematicians. They have an apparatus that solves the necessary equations, just as our brains unconsciously solve equations every time we catch a ball.

  It is very important that the fish’s own body is kept absolutely rigid. The computer in the head couldn’t cope with the extra distortions that would be introduced if the fish’s body were bending and twisting like an ordinary fish. Electric fish have, at least twice independently, hit upon this ingenious method of navigation, but they have had to pay a price: they have had to give up the normal, highly efficient, fish method of swimming, throwing the whole body into serpentine waves. They have solved the problem by keeping the body stiff as a poker, but they have a single long fin all the way along the length of the body. Then instead of the whole body being thrown into waves, just the long fin is. The fish’s progress through the water is rather slow, but it does move, and apparently the sacrifice of fast movement is worth it: the gains in navigation seem to outweigh the losses in speed of swimming. Fascinatingly, the South American electric fish have hit upon almost exactly the same solution as the African ones, but not quite. The difference is revealing. Both groups have developed a single long fin that runs the whole length of the body, but in the African fish it runs along the back whereas in the South American fish it runs along the belly. This kind of difference in detail is very characteristic of convergent evolution, as we have seen. It is characteristic of convergent designs by human engineers too, of course.

  Although the majority of weakly electric fish, in both the African and the South American groups, give their electric discharges in discrete pulses and are called ‘pulse’ species, a minority of species in both groups do it a different way and are called ‘wave’ species. I shall not discuss the difference further. What is interesting for this chapter is that the pulse/wave split has evolved twice, independently, in the unrelated New World and Old World groups.

  One of the most bizarre examples of convergent evolution that I know concerns the so-called periodical cicadas. Before getting to the convergence, I must fill in some background information. Many insects have a rather rigid separation between a juvenile feeding stage, in which they spend most of their lives, and a relatively brief adult reproducing stage. Mayflies, for instance, spend most of their lives as underwater feeding larvae, then emerge into the air for a single day into which they cram the whole of their adult lives. We can think of the adult as analogous to the ephemeral winged seed of a plant like a sycamore, and the larva as analogous to the main plant, the difference being that sycamores make many seeds and shed them over many successive years, while a mayfly larva gives rise to only one adult right at the end of its own life. Anyway, periodical cicadas have carried the mayfly trend to an extreme. The adults live for a few weeks, but the ‘juvenile’ stage (technically ‘nymphs’ rather than larvae) lasts for 13 years (in some varieties) or 17 years (in other varieties). The adults emerge at almost exactly the same moment, having spent 13 (or 17) years cloistered underground. Cicada plagues, which occur in any given area exactly 13 (or 17) years apart, are spectacular eruptions that have led to their incorrectly being called ‘locusts’ in vernacular American speech. The varieties are known, respectively, as 13-year cicadas and 17-year cicadas.

  Now here is the really remarkable fact. It turns out that there is not just one 13-year cicada species and one 17-year species. Rather, there are three species, and each one of the three has both a 17-year and a 13-year variety or race. The division into a 13-year race and a 17-year race has been arrived at independently, no fewer than three times. It looks as though the intermediate periods of 14, 15 and 16 years have been shunned convergently, no fewer than three times. Why? We don’t know. The only suggestion anyone has come up with is that what is special about 13 and 17, as opposed to 14, 15 and 16, is that they are prime numbers. A prime number is a number that is not exactly divisible by any other number. The idea is that a race of animals that regularly erupts in plagues gains the benefit of alternately ‘swamping’ and starving its enemies, predators or parasites. And if these plagues are carefully timed to occur a prime number of years apart, it makes it that much more difficult for the enemies to synchronize their own life cycles. If the cicadas erupted every 14 years, for instance, they could be exploited by a parasite species with a 7-year life cycle. This is a bizarre idea, but no more bizarre than the phenomenon itself. We really don’t know what is special about 13 and 17 years. What matters for our purposes here is that there must be something special about those numbers, because three different species of cicada have independently converged upon them.

  Examples of convergence on a large scale occur when two or more continents are isolated from one another for a long time, and a parallel range of ‘trades’ is adopted by unrelated animals on each of the continents. By ‘trades’ I mean ways of making a living, such as burrowing for worms, digging for ants, chasing large herbivores, eating leaves up trees. A good example is the convergent evolution of a whole range of mammal trades in the separate continents of South America, Australia, and the Old World.

  These continents weren’t always separate. Because our lives are measured in decades, and even our civilizations and dynasties are measured only in centuries, we are accustomed to thinking of the map of the world, the outlines of the continents, as fixed. The theory that continents drifted about was proposed long ago by the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener, but most people laughed at him until well after the Second World War. The admitted fact that South America and Africa look a bit like separated pieces of a jigsaw puzzle was assumed to be just an amusing coincidence. In one of the most rapid and complete revolutions science has known, the formerly controversial theory of ‘continental drift’ has now become universally accepted under the name of plate tectonics. The evidence that the continents have drifted, that South America did indeed break away from Africa for instance, is now literally overwhelming, but this is not a book about geology and I shall not spell it out. For us the important point is that the timescale on which continents have drifted about is the same slow timescale on which animal lineages have evolved, and we cannot ignore continental drift if we are to understand the patterns of animal evolution on those continents.

  Up until about 100 million years ago, then, South America was joined to Africa in the east and to Antarctica in the south. Antarctica was joined to Australia, and India was joined to Africa via Madagascar. There was in fact one huge southern continent, which we now call Gondwanaland, consisting of what is now Sout
h America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Antarctica and Australia all rolled into one. There was also a single large northern continent called Laurasia consisting of what is now North America, Greenland, Europe and Asia (apart from India). North America was not connected to South America. About 100 million years ago there was a big break-up of the land masses, and the continents have been slowly moving towards their present positions ever since (they will, of course, continue to move in the future). Africa joined up with Asia via Arabia and became part of the huge continent that we now speak of as the Old World. North America drifted away from Europe, Antarctica drifted south to its present icy location. India detached itself from Africa and set off across what is now called the Indian Ocean, eventually to crunch into south Asia and raise the Himalayas. Australia drifted away from Antarctica into the open sea to become an island continent miles from anywhere else.

  It happens that the break-up of the great southern continent of Gondwanaland began during the age of the dinosaurs. When South America and Australia broke away to begin their long periods of isolation from the rest of the world, they each carried their own cargo of dinosaurs, and also of the less-prominent animals that were to become the ancestors of modern mammals. When, rather later, for reasons that are not understood and are the subject of much profitable speculation, the dinosaurs (with the exception of the group of dinosaurs that we now call birds) went extinct, they went extinct all over the world. This left a vacuum in the ‘trades’ open to land-dwelling animals. The vacuum was filled, over a period of millions of years of evolution, mostly by mammals. The interesting point for us here is that there were three independent vacuums, and they were independently filled by mammals in Australia, South America and the Old World.

  The primitive mammals that happened to be around in the three areas when the dinosaurs more or less simultaneously vacated the great life trades, were all rather small and insignificant, probably nocturnal, previously overshadowed and overpowered by the dinosaurs. They could have evolved in radically different directions in the three areas. To some extent this is what happened. There is nothing in the Old World that resembles the giant ground sloth of South America, alas now extinct. The great range of South American mammals included an extinct giant guinea-pig, the size of a modern rhinoceros but a rodent (I have to say ‘modern’ rhinoceros because the Old World fauna included a giant rhinoceros the size of a two-storey house). But although the separate continents each produced their unique mammals, the general pattern of evolution in all three areas was the same. In all three areas the mammals that happened to be around at the start fanned out in evolution, and produced a specialist for each trade which, in many cases, came to bear a remarkable resemblance to the corresponding specialist in the other two areas. Each trade, the burrowing trade, the large hunter trade, the plains-grazing trade, and so on, was the subject of independent convergent evolution in two or three separate continents. In addition to these three major sites of independent evolution, smaller islands such as Madagascar have interesting parallel stories of their own, which I shall not go into.

  Setting aside the strange egg-laying mammals of Australia — the duck-billed platypus and the spiny anteaters — modern mammals all belong to one of two great groups. These two are the marsupials (whose young are born very small and are then kept in a pouch) and the placentals (all the rest of us). The marsupials came to dominate the Australian story and the placentals the Old World, while the two groups played important roles alongside each other in South America. The South American story is complicated by the fact that it was subject to sporadic waves of invasion by mammals from North America.

  Having set the scene, we can now look at some of the trades and convergences themselves. An important trade is concerned with the exploitation of the great grasslands variously known as prairie, pampas, savannah, etc. Practitioners of this trade include horses (of which the main African species are called zebras and the desert models are called donkeys), and cattle, such as the North American bison, now hunted to near-extinction. Herbivores typically have very long guts containing various kinds of fermenting bacteria, since grass is a poor-quality food and needs a lot of digesting. Rather than break their eating up into discrete meals, they typically eat more or less continuously. Huge volumes of plant material flow through them like a river, all the day long. The animals are often very large, and they frequently go about in great herds. Each one of these big herbivores is a mountain of valuable food to any predator that can exploit it. As a consequence of this there is, as we shall see, a whole trade devoted to the difficult task of catching and killing them. These are the predators. Actually, when I say ‘a’ trade, I really mean a whole lot of ‘sub-trades’: lions, leopards, cheetahs, wild dogs and hyenas all hunt in their own specialized ways. The same kind of subdivision is found in the herbivores, and in all the other ‘trades’.

  The herbivores have keen senses with which they are continuously alert for predators, and they are usually capable of running very fast to escape them. To this end they often have long, spindly legs, and they typically run on the tips of their toes, which have become specially elongated and strengthened in evolution. The nails at the ends of these specialized toes have become large and hard, and we call them hooves. Cattle have two enlarged toes at the extremities of each leg: the familiar ‘cloven’ hooves. Horses do much the same thing except that, probably for reasons of historical accident, they run on only one toe instead of two. It is derived from what was originally the middle one of the five toes. The other toes have almost completely disappeared over evolutionary time, although they occasionally reappear in freakish ‘throwbacks’.

  Now South America, as we have seen, was isolated during the period in which horses and cattle were evolving in other parts of the world. But South America has its own great grasslands, and it evolved its own separate groups of large herbivores to exploit the resource. There were massive rhino-like Leviathans that had no connection with true rhinos. The skulls of some of the early South American herbivores suggest that they ‘invented’ the trunk independently of the true elephants. Some resembled camels, some looked like nothing on earth (today), or like weird chimeras of modern animals. The group called the litopterns are almost unbelievably similar to horses in their legs, yet they were utterly unrelated to horses. The superficial resemblance fooled a nineteenth-century Argentinian expert who thought, with pardonable national pride, that they were the ancestors of all horses in the rest of the world. In fact their resemblance to horses was superficial, and convergent. Grassland life is much the same the world over, and horses and litopterns independently evolved the same qualities to cope with the problems of grassland life. In particular, the litopterns, like the horses, lost all their toes except the middle one on each leg, which became enlarged as the bottom joint of the leg and developed a hoof. The leg of a litoptern is all but indistinguishable from the leg of a horse, yet the two animals are only distantly related.

  In Australia the large grazers and browsers are very different — kangaroos. Kangaroos have the same need to move rapidly, but they have done it in a different way. Instead of developing four-legged galloping to the high pitch of perfection that horses (and presumably litopterns) did, kangaroos have perfected a different gait: twolegged hopping with a large balancing tail. There is little point in arguing over which of these two gaits is ‘better’. They are each highly effective if the body evolves in such a way as to exploit them to the full. Horses and litopterns happened to exploit four-legged galloping, and so ended up with almost identical legs. Kangaroos happened to exploit two-legged hopping, and so ended up with their own uniquely (at least since the dinosaurs) massive hind legs and tail. Kangaroos and horses arrived at different endpoints in ‘animal space’, probably because of some accidental difference in their starting points.

  Turning now to the meat-eaters that the great grazers were running away from, we find some more fascinating convergences. In the Old World we are familiar with such large hunters as wolves, dogs,
hyenas, and the big cats — lions, tigers, leopards and cheetahs. A big cat that has only recently gone extinct is the sabre-tooth (‘tiger’), named after its colossal canine teeth which jutted down from the upper jaw in the front of what must have been a terrifying gape. Until recent times there were no true cats or dogs in Australia or the New World (pumas and jaguars are recently evolved from Old World cats). But in both those continents there were marsupial equivalents. In Australia the thylacine, or marsupial ‘wolf’ (often called the Tasmanian wolf because it survived in Tasmania for a little longer than in mainland Australia), was tragically driven extinct within living memory, slaughtered in enormous numbers as a ‘pest’ and for ‘sport’ by humans (there is a slight hope that it may still survive in remote parts of Tasmania, areas which themselves are now threatened with destruction in the interests of providing ‘employment’ for humans). It is not to be confused with the dingo, by the way, which is a true dog, introduced to Australia more recently by (aboriginal) man. A ciné film made in the 1930s of the last known thylacine, restlessly pacing its lonely zoo cage, shows an uncannily dog-like animal, its marsupial nature betrayed only by its slightly undog-like way of holding its pelvis and back legs, presumably something to do with accommodating its pouch. To any dog-lover, the contemplation of this alternative approach to the dog design, this evolutionary traveller along a parallel road separated by 100 million years, this part-familiar yet part utterly alien other-worldly dog, is a moving experience. Maybe they were pests to humans, but humans were much bigger pests to them; now there are no thylacines left and a considerable surplus of humans.