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| Dolphins helping fishermen catch mullet |
A few posts back, I
discussed the phenomenon called “endosymbiosis”
by Dr. Lynn Margulis, who posited a cellular evolution based on ‘cooperation’
rather than simple ‘competition’ between viral or bacterial infection and host
cell. This co-evolutionary behaviour runs counter to the traditional route of
natural selection and contradicts the ruthless selfishness of Neo-Darwinian
thinking. Such an evolving relationship between two different species of life,
living together in a very close affinity of mutual benefit is, in fact, common
in nature.
Co-evolution (and
cooperation by default) is now an established theme in the biology of
virus-host relationships. Relationships span from the complex interaction
between arboviruses and their vector mosquitoes to the one between the
malaria-causing plasmodium and humans or the hantavirus and the deer mouse. Virologist,
Frank Ryan states that “today...every monkey, baboon, chimpanzee and gorilla is
carrying at least ten different species of symbiotic viruses.”
Russian biologists,
Andrei Famintsyn and Konstantine Merezhkovskii invented the term
“symbiogenesis” to explain the fantastic synthesis of new living organisms from
symbiotic unions. Citing the evolution of mitochondria and the chloroplast
within a primitive host cell to form the more complex eukaryotic cell (as
originally theorized by Lynn Margulis), Ryan noted that, “it would be hard to
imagine how the step by step gradualism of natural selection could have
resulted in this brazenly passionate intercourse of life!”
A new science is
emerging that recognizes a far more intelligent (and cooperative means)
evolution, aptly described by Margulis, "through the long-lasting intimacy
of strangers." The fusion of symbiosis followed by natural selection leads
to increasingly complex levels of individuality, Margulis suggested. She
contended that evolution proceeds through cooperation, not competition:
"Life did not take over the globe by combat,
but by
Examples of such networking, including interspecies cooperation,
mutualism and altruism abound in Nature.
In Africa birds called
ox-peckers perch on the backs of large animals such as giraffes and cattle, and
remove insects. The ox-peckers also warn of approaching danger through their
cries and disturbed flight. Defenseless fish live
unharmed amid the stinging tentacles of jellyfish, and birds such as the
wheatear may nest in rabbit burrows. Many flowering plants are
pollinated by insects, flitting from flower to flower for their nectar. Some
flowers are shaped to suit a particular insect. Seeds are distributed
by animals. Birds eat fleshy seeds and transport them. The burrs on plants such
as burdock have hooks that may catch on to fur and feathers.
Enter the dolphin… Perhaps one of the best examples of interspecies
cooperation (or mutualism and altruism). In 2008 Aubrey Manning (Emeritus
Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University) wrote in the Daily Mail
of a female dolphin who selflessly saved a beached mother whale and her calf
off Mahia Beach in New Zealand. The bottlenose dolphins off Laguna in Brazil
have developed a cooperative relationship with the local fishermen…
"Through highly
synchronized behavior with humans, cooperative dolphins in Laguna drive mullet
schools towards a line of fishermen and 'signal,' via stereotyped head slaps or
tail slaps, when and where fishermen should throw their nets," wrote lead
author Fabio Daura-Jorge of the Federal University of Santa Catarina. The
cooperation is helpful to both parties, he said.
New research has
found that one local group of about 20 dolphins works with the fishermen, while
other local dolphins don't cooperate, finding other sources of food. A study
published in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters found that the
most helpful ones are also particularly cooperative and social with each other.
About 200 local artisanal
fishermen are almost entirely reliant on the dolphins for catching their
fish," Daura-Jorge wrote. The fishermen only fish with the assistance of
cooperative dolphins, recognized and named.
The cooperation behavior may
be passed down from mother dolphin to her calves through social learning,
reflecting how the trait is passed down by the fishermen: Elders in the
community teach the younger fishermen how to work with the dolphins.
We tend to exclude the rest
of animal and plant life from exhibiting the highest form of intelligence: that
of cooperation and altruism. Many of us—if we even accept the existence of true
altruism—consider it an exclusively human quality. This is a hubristic remnant
of a “conquest” mentality in which humanity identifies itself as separate from
Nature. It blinds us from a reality that lies right before us. We cannot see
what we don’t look for; we can’t know what we don’t believe.
We rely on science to answer
questions we already “know” the answers to, because we have lost a sense of
Unity. And as Goethe said of conventional scientists, “Whatever you cannot
calculate, you do not think is real.”
Richard Tarnas, author of The
Passion of the Western Mind posits that the evolution of the Western mind
has been driven by a “heroic impulse to forge an autonomous rational human
self—a transforming self—by separating it from the primordial unity with
nature.” Tarnas suggests that it began four millennia ago, with the great patriarchal
nomadic conquests in the Mediterranean. Conquests that embraced “the repression
of undifferentiated unitary consciousness and the participation mystique with nature; a denial of the anima mundi, of the soul of the world,
of the community of being, of the all-pervading, of mystery and ambiguity, of
imagination, emotion, instinct, body, nature, woman.”
Goethe and others
like him believed that the human mind is ultimately the organ of the world’s
own process of self-revelation. In this view, Nature is not a separate,
independent self-contained reality to be ‘objectively’ examined by humanity
from without; rather, its unfolding truth emerges only with the active
participation of the human mind. It is something that comes into being through
the very act of human cognition.
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