Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Loren Eiseley and Robert Silverberg: a strange pairing?

Robert Silverberg
Downward to the Earth
an SF novel

Loren Eiseley
The Star Thrower
essays 



I found the following conversation in Downward to the Earth,  a science fiction novel by Robert Silverberg.  It is set on an alien planet which Earth had colonized and then had to leave because it was discovered that there was a sentient/intelligent race native to the planet, something that should have been obvious from the beginning.  Why it wasn't is explained in the discussion between Gunderson, once head of the Company's operation on the planet and a tourist. 

"Watson asked, 'Why don't they have a civilization, then?'

'I've just told you that they do.'

'I mean cities, machines, books--'

'They're not physically equipped for writing, for building things, for any small manipulations,' Gunderson said.  'Don't you see, they have no hands?  A race with hands makes one kind of society.  A race built like elephants makes another.'''



At about the same time I read  Downward to the Earth, I also read a collection of essays, The Star Thrower,  by Loren Eiseley--anthropologist, poet, essayist.  In one of the essays, he brought up the research findings by Dr. John Lilly about the intelligence of the porpoise.  Eiseley asked an interesting question. 

"We are forced to ask ourselves whether native intelligence in another form than man's might be as high as or even higher than his own, yet be marked by no such material monuments as man has placed on the earth."

Eiseley then proposes a thought  experiment.   We will trade in our hands for flippers and the land for the ocean, bringing with us only our intelligence.


"The result is immediately evident and quite clear.  No matter how well we communicate with our fellows through the water medium we will never build drowned empires in the coral .  .  .  Over all that region of wondrous beauty we will exercise no more control than the simplest mollusk.  Even the octopus with flexible arms will build little shelters that we cannot imitate.  Without hands we will have only the freedom to follow the untrammeled sea winds across the planet."

And later, Eiseley paraphrases Melville's commentary about the sperm whale and in which he substitutes the porpoise: "'Genius in the porpoise? Has the porpoise ever written a book, spoken  speech?  No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it.  It is proved in his pyramidal silence.' "

"If man had sacrificed his hands for flukes, the moral might run, he would still be a philosopher, but there would have been taken from him the devastating power to wreak his thought upon the body of the  world.  Instead he would have lived and wandered, like the porpoise, homeless across currents and wind and oceans, intelligent, but forever the lonely and curious observer of unknown wreckage falling the through the blue light of eternity.   This would now be a deserved penitence for man.  Perhaps such a transformation would bring him once more into that mood of childhood innocence in which he talked successfully to all things living but had no power and no urge to harm.  It is worth at last a wistful thought that someday the porpoise may talk to us and we to him.  It would break, perhaps, the long loneliness that has made man a frequent terror and abomination even to himself."


It is coincidence, of course, to find a similar topic in an SF novel and in a collection of essays.   But, finding the same topic in both made me think about it in a way that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't encountered it in two such different works.

It is a fascinating question; what would my life be if I had flippers instead of hands and feet and if I lived in the sea? 

22 comments:

  1. could intelligence have something to do with environment? hypothetically, the ability to manipulate the world around us might be related to having ten fingers and arms with hands... when fish migrated onto the land, they developed these things, eventually... porpoises may just be in a temporary state, geologically speaking, and, if the earth survives, end up pursuing such a migration and develop limbs of some sort and become another kind of intelligence... no?

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    1. Mudpuddle--interesting speculation. From what I've read, porpoises were originally land mammals who migrated into the sea and traded in their limbs for flippers. Could they reverse the process? I haven't the slightest idea, but it's something to think about. I wonder if any critters have changed environments and then later returned to their original environment.

      As for the relationship between environment and intelligence? Some evolutionists postulate that human intelligence received a big boost when humans were faced with a very serious environmental change--the onset of the ice ages. Others have speculated on the relationship of the opposable thumb and intelligence and others on language and intelligence.

      I don't know what the present consensus is.

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    2. I think that the environment needs to be challenging enough to generate the need for intelligence so it arrives as a survival plus. This doesn't mean that intelligent beings need to build civilisations or anything else for that matter. Intelligence from an evolutionary point of view is just the ability to survive and thrive in particularly difficult circumstances.

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    3. CyberKitten--I agree. The environmental challenge must be one that increased speed or strength or sensory sensitivity won't help. It should be one that planning, for example, will help overcome.

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    4. Fred: the fossil record shows both events in different species: migrating out of the water and in some cases(birds, i think) the same species returning to the water... all with altering their physiology and oxygen processing apparati for each change...

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    5. Mudpuddle--I hadn't heard that. Fascinating. A species that left the water and hen returned to it later. I wonder if any land animals that moved to water later came back on land.

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  2. I remember reading about humans and their opposing thumbs; hands are good, but opposing thumbs make "perfect" hands. If you become a porpoise, I hope you like to eat fish; I cannot stand the damn things, so I'll take some time to ponder a different option without hands.

    The Silverberg scenario sent me to thoughts about Europeans v. native Americans ever since early contact. The natives had hands, but those were insufficient. Sad.

    Now, if I were without hands I might like being a hummingbird. I would not accomplish much in the world, but I think I would enjoy myself.

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    1. R.T.--yes, the opposable thumb is something that some evolutionists point to when thinking about human intelligence.

      Yes, Native Americans had the opposable thumbs, along with language, buildings, clothing, etc. but it didn't make much difference, did it?

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  3. Well... You most definitely wouldn't be blogging about it....! [grin]

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  4. You would need to swim faster than sharks.

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    1. You just need to be smarter than them - which isn't really difficult as they're dumb as rocks.

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    2. Sharon--Yes, that would pose a problem. The link leads to an article discussing battles between sharks and dolphins and the strengths and weaknesses of both.


      http://tinyurl.com/y9qhky6w

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    3. CyberKitten--but, according to the article, they are sneaky, coming up from below when a dolphin may be busy eating.

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    4. OK. Now I'm staying out of the water for good.

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    5. Sharon--Chuckle. . .

      I don't think swimming pools or lakes pose any problems. Sharks, as far as I know, live only in salt water oceans.

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    6. You don't understand my imagination, Fred. It runs wild!!! Only showers for me from now on.

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    7. Sharon--With an imagination like that, you must lead an exhilarating life.

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  5. Yes, porpoises were originally land mammals who migrated into the sea, and there their encephalization quotient (an evolutionary increase in the complexity or relative size of the brain, involving a shift of function from noncortical parts of the brain to the cortex) rose. But it ceased to rise 10 million years ago at 0.8 the later human average. So arguably without hands, no benefit in higher intelligence. & BTW, I know Silverberg read Eisley.

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  6. Gregory--porpoises have the same encephalization quotient as do humans? I wonder about their language ability.

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  7. No they have encephalization quotient of 0.8 of humans.

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    1. Gregory, thanks for the correction. I wonder if researchers have gotten much beyond what Lilly had learned decades ago.

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