Neoteny is not confined to man. It is also a characteristic of several kinds of domestic animals, especially dogs: Some dogs are sexually mature when they are still stuck in an early phase of wolf development: They have short snouts, floppy ears, and the sort of behavior that wolf pups show—retrieving for example: Other, such as sheepdogs, are stuck at a different phase: longer snouts, half-cocked ears, and chasing: Still others, such as German shep-herds, have the full range of wolf hunting and attacking behaviors plus long snouts and cocked ears:'
But whereas dogs are truly neotenic, breeding at a young age and looking like wolf puppies, humans are peculiar: They look like infant apes, true, but they breed at an advanced age. The combination of a slow change in the shape of their head and a long period of youthfulness means that as adults they have astonishingly large brains for an ape: Indeed, the mechanism by which ape-men turned into men was clearly a genetic switch that simply slowed the developmental clock: Stephen Jay Gould argues that rather than seek an adaptive explanation of features like language, perhaps we should simply regard them as 'accidental, ' though useful, by-products of neoteny 's achievement of large brain size: If something as spectacular as language can be the product of simply a large brain plus culture, then there need be no specific explanation of why larger brains are required because their advantages are obvious!'
The argument is based on a false premise. As Chomsky and others have amply demonstrated, language is one of the most highly designed capabilities imaginable, and far from being a by-product of a big brain, it is a mechanism with a very specific pattern that develops in children without instruction: It also has obvious evolutionary advantages, as a moment 's reflection will reveal: Without, for example, the trick of recursion (subordinate phrases) it becomes impossible to tell even the simplest story. In the words of Steve Pinker and Paul Bloom, 'It makes a big difference whether a far-off region is reached by taking the trail that is in front of the large tree or the trail that the large tree is in front of: It makes a difference whether that region has animals that you can eat or animals that can eat you: ' Recursion could easily have helped a Pleis-THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME
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tocene man survive or breed: Language, conclude Pinker and Bloom,
' is a design imposed on neural circuitry as a response to evolutionary pressure: '28 It is not the whirring by- product of the mental machine:
The neoteny argument does have one advantage: It shows a possible reason why apes and baboons did not follow man down the path to ever bigger brains: It is possible that the neoteny mutation simply never arose in our primate cousins: Or, more intriguingly, as I shall explain later, the mutation may have arisen but never had a reason to spread.
GOSSIP'S GRIP
Those outside anthropology had never paid much obeisance to man the toolmaker or any other explanation for intelligence. For most people, the advantages of intelligence were obvious: It led to more learning and less instinct, which meant that behavior could be more flexible, which was rewarded by evolution: We have already seen how shot full of holes this argument is. Learning is a burden on the individual, in place of flexible instincts, and the two are not opposites in any case. Mankind is not the learning ape, he is the clever ape with more instincts and more open to experience. Not having seen this flaw in the logic, the disciplines that considered such matters, especially philosophy, always showed a strange lack of curiosity in the whole question of intelligence: Philosophers assume that intelligence and consciousness have obvious advantages and get on with the serious debate about what consciousness is: Before the 1970s there was
So the force with which the question was suddenly put in 1975 by two zoologists working independently had an enormous impact. Richard Alexander of the University of Michigan was one: In the tradition of the Red Queen, he expressed skepticism about whether what Charles Darwin had called ' the hostile forces of
nature' were a sufficiently challenging adversary for an intelligent mind. The point is that the challenges presented by stone tools or tubers are mostly predictable ones. Generation after generation of chipping a tool off a block of stone or knowing where to look for tubers calls for the same level of skill each time: With experience each gets easier. It is rather like learning to ride a bicycle; once you know how to do it, it comes naturally: Indeed, it becomes ' unconscious, ' as if conscious effort were simply not needed every time.
Likewise,
It was logic like this that led Alexander to propose that the key feature of the human environment that rewarded intelligence was the presence of other human beings: Generation after generation, if your lineage is getting more intelligent, so is theirs. However fast you run, you stay in the same place relative to them.
Humans became ecologically dominant by virtue of their technical skills, and that made humans the only enemy of humans (apart from parasites). 'Only humans themselves could provide the necessary challenge to explain their own evolution, ' wrote Alexander:'
True enough, but Scottish midges and African elephants are
' ecologically dominant' in the sense that they outnumber or out-rank all potential enemies, yet neither has seen the need to develop the ability to understand the theory of relativity: In any case, where is the evidence that Lucy was ecologically dominant? By all accounts her species was an insignificant part of the fauna of the dry, wooded savanna where she lived.'°
Independently, Nicholas Humphrey, a young Cambridge zoologist, came to a conclusion similar to Alexander 's. Humphrey began an essay on the topic with the story of how Henry Ford once THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME
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asked his representatives to find out which parts of the Model-T
