Philip Kerr: Esau

The reality was different. Almost three decades after the university had witnessed the largest mass arrest in California’s history, Berkeley had a more conservative tilt. There were still plenty of activists and pamphleteers abroad on Sproul Plaza, just outside Sather Gate, which marked the entrance to the oldest part of the campus. But in the eyes of Dr. Stella Swift, Berkeley was a small college town with all the vices and virtues of a small college town. And there was little of what was considered radical in Berkeley that would have impressed the really left-wing types she had mixed with as the only child of two of socialism’s leading lights, first in Australia and later in England. Swift’s father, Tom, professor of philosophy at Melbourne University, Australia, and then at Cambridge, was a highly influential writer and thinker, while her mother, Judith, a successful artist, was the daughter of Max Bergmann, one of the founders of the so-called Frankfurt School of Libertarian Marxism. Before going up to Oxford to take a degree in human biology. Swift had met everyone who was anyone in international socialism and, finding herself bored by her parents’ world, rejected it, just as one of the young pamphleteers she could now see on Sproul Plaza protesting American foreign policy in the Middle East might have rejected the conservative values of his own parents.

Crossing Sproul Plaza, Swift reflected that being a foreigner and, therefore, someone who was unable to vote meant that she could more easily ignore politics and concentrate on her research and teaching. It was one of the reasons she had elected to do her Ph.D. in paleoanthropology at Berkeley in the first place.

Swift spent most of her working life in the southeastern corner of the campus, in Kroeber Hall. Entering the building, she made her way up to the first floor and along to one of the lecture theatres where several dozen freshman students were already awaiting her arrival.

Placing her briefcase on the table, she regarded one of her students, an outsized jock called Todd who was making a show of reading a copy of Penthouse , with disdain.

‘What’s that you’re reading, Todd?’ said Swift, coming around the table. ‘Catching up on a little human biology? Good idea, because from what I hear, it’s your weakest subject by far.’

One of Todd’s male friends guffawed loudly and elbowed him in the ribs. Taking advantage of his momentary distraction. Swift snatched the magazine out of Todd’s banana-sized fingers and turned the pages thoughtfully.

Todd’s friend elbowed him again, almost as if he was egging him on to do something.

‘Actually,’ grinned Todd, ‘there was someone in there who reminded me of you. Dr. Swift.’

‘Is that so?’ Swift said coolly. ‘Which page?’

‘Page thirty-two.’

‘Ill say one thing for you, Todd,’ she remarked, turning the pages. ‘You’re a brave man bringing Penthouse onto this campus. I hope someone’s read you your Miranda.’

‘My what?’

‘After the U.S. Supreme Court Case that established guidelines for the protection of the arrested individual.’

‘He’s certainly arrested,’ chuckled Todd’s elbowing neighbour.

Swift found the page and gave her supposed look-alike her candid attention.

‘So?’ said Todd. ‘What do you think?’

The girl in the photo spread was tall and green-eyed with a big head of red hair. Her nose was long but distinguished, and her mouth wide and sensual. She had the same generously proportioned figure, although Swift thought her own legs were better. In spite of the pose. Swift perceived an undeniable resemblance.

‘So she reminds you of me, does she, Todd?’

‘Some.’

Swift tossed the magazine back at him and, turning back to the blackboard, found a stick of chalk and started to write in large capital letters. When she had finished, she pointed at the word on the board and said, ‘That’s what you remind me of, Todd.’

Frowning, Todd read the word aloud with some difficulty.

‘Ancathocephalus,’ he said. ‘What the hell’s that?’

‘I’m glad you asked me, Todd,’ smiled Swift. ‘Ancathocephalus is a common parasite found in fish. A spiny-headed worm with which you happen to share one unusual physical characteristic.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Its reproductive organs are much bigger than its brain.’

Todd smiled uneasily as the rest of the class started to laugh.

Swift waited for their laughter to deliver their attention. There were times when teaching was quite tribal. When, to maintain your contractual dominance, you had to accept a challenge and defeat your rival in front of the whole social group. She rather enjoyed these occasional trials of strength with young males like Todd. Confident that she had their full attention now. Swift decided to adapt the beginning of her lecture to improvise a segue from her joke about ancathocephalus.

‘Despite what Todd might believe,’ she said, ‘human sex organs do not exist in isolation. Their evolution is inextricably mixed up with the way human females give birth, the size of human brains, and our tool-making skills. And our idiosyncratic reproductive behaviour — even when it’s as unusual as the kind of sexual behaviour exhibited by Todd, which reduces less dominant males to the status of mere spectators in the whole reproductive process — is as important as our larger brains in attempting to explain the different evolutionary fate of man and apes.

‘Now, I say, ‘attempting to explain’ because the origin of modern humans. Homo sapiens, people like you and me, is a vexed question among paleoanthropologists like myself, and the evidence is, quite literally, fragmentary. These fragments might be likened to the pieces of a jigsaw, except that it’s not even as if there is only one puzzle. There are many puzzles and lots of jigsaw pieces and they’re all muddled up.

‘For instance, we don’t really have an answer to why our brains should be as big as they are, any more than we know why the human penis should be bigger than a gorilla’s. Yes, even your penis, Todd. And if the human penis is larger than a gorilla’s, why should human testes be smaller than those of a chimpanzee? Did this come about simply as a corollary of the chimpanzee’s greater reproductive activity? Or did man develop his smaller testes in order to facilitate bipedalism?’

Swift sat down on the edge of her table and shrugged.

‘There are plenty of theories, but the honest answer is that we just don’t know. No more do we really know which came first: the bipedal ape or the brainy ape. What was it about that early environment that demanded that a certain kind of ape should have a significantly expanded brain? Remember, brain size is not necessarily related to intelligence. For example, take the brain weights of two famous poets. Walt Whitman’s brain weighed just one and quarter kilos, while Byron’s brain weighed two and one-third kilos, almost twice as much. But does this mean that Byron was twice as good a poet as Whitman? Of course not.

‘And yet there would be no point in us having a brain that’s about four times as large as that of a chimpanzee if there were not significant benefits to be enjoyed from it. After all, the brain requires a great deal of energy from your body to maintain it. Despite the fact that it constitutes only two percent of your body bulk, the human brain needs an incredible twenty percent of your body’s available energy. Man’s extra brain power evolved for a reason, but quite what the reason was is frankly anyone’s guess.

‘It’s not as if the great apes were a particularly successful group of primates when you compare them with their closest relatives, the Cercopithecoids, or Old World Monkeys. Because in comparison with them, the story of apes is really one of declining diversity. The fossil record suggests that apes were already in decline by the middle Miocene period, some ten to fifteen million years ago, with monkeys more prevalent and many times more diverse.