Jared Diamond - The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

One evening at our campsite, Ardy walked with his drinking cup up to our jerrycans. As usual, we had two cans: a blue one for water, and a red one for kerosene for our pressure lamp. To my horror, I watched Ardy pour from the red jerry can and raise the cup to his lips. Remembering an awful moment during a mountaineering expedition when I had taken a sip of kerosene by mistake and spent all the next day coughing it back up, I screamed to Ardy to stop. But he raised his hand and said calmly, 'No problem, Jared. I have kung-fu grade eight.

Ardy explained that kung-fu gave him strength, which he and his fellow kung-fu masters tested each month by drinking a cup of kerosene. Without kung-fu, of course, kerosene would make a weaker person sick. Heaven forbid that I, Jared, for instance, should try it. But it did him, Ardy, no harm, because he had kung-fu. He calmly retired to his tent to sip his kerosene and emerged the next morning, happy and healthy as usual.

I cannot believe that kerosene did Ardy no harm. I wish that he could have found a less damaging way to make periodic tests of his preparedness. But for him and his kung-fu associates, it served as an indicator of their strength and their advanced level of kung-fu. Only a really robust person could get through that test. Kerosene drinking illustrates the handicap theory of toxic chemical use, in a form as startlingly repellent to us as our cigarettes and alcohol horrified Ardy. In my last example, I shall generalize my theory further by extending its application to the past—in this case, to the civilization of Mayan Indians that flourished in Central America one or two thousand years ago. Archaeologists have been fascinated by Mayan success at creating an advanced society in the middle of tropical rainforest. Many Mayan achievements, such as their calendar, writing, astronomical knowledge, and agricultural practices, are now understood to varying degrees. However, archaeologists were long puzzled by slender tubes of unknown purpose that they kept finding in Mayan excavations.

The tubes' function finally became clear with the discovery of painted vases showing scenes of the tubes' use: to administer intoxicating enemas. The vases depict a high-status figure, evidently a priest or a prince, receiving a ceremonial enema in the presence of other people. The enema tube is shown as connected to a bag of a frothy beer-like beverage—probably containing either alcohol or hallucinogens or both, as suggested by practices of other Indian groups. Many Central and South

American Indian tribes formerly practised similar ritual enemas when first encountered by European explorers, and some still do so today. The substances known to be administered range from alcohol (made by fermenting agave sap or a tree bark) to tobacco, peyote, LSD derivatives, and mushroom-derived hallucinogens. Thus, the ritual enema is similar to our consumption of intoxicants by mouth, but there are four reasons why an enema constitutes a more effective and valid indicator of strength than does drinking.

Firstly, it is possible to relapse into solitary drinking and thus to lose all opportunity for signalling one's high status to others. However, it is more difficult for a solitary person to administer the same beverage to himself or herself unassisted as an enema. An enema encourages one to enlist associates and thereby automatically creates an occasion for self-advertisement. Secondly, more strength is required to handle alcohol as an enema than as a drink, since the alcohol goes directly into the intestine and thence to the bloodstream, and it is not first diluted with food in the stomach. Thirdly, drugs absorbed from the small intestine after ingestion by mouth pass first to the liver, where many drugs are detoxified before they can reach the brain and other sensitive organs. But drugs absorbed from the rectum after an enema bypass the liver. Finally, nausea may limit one's intake of drinks but not of enemas. Hence an enema seems to me a more convincing advertisement of superiority than are our whisky advertisements. I recommend this concept to an ambitious public relations firm competing for the account of one of the large distilleries. Let's now step back and summarize the perspective on chemical abuse that I have suggested. Although frequent self-destruction by chemicals may be unique to humans, I see it as fitting into a broad pattern of animal behaviour and thus as having innumerable animal precedents. All animals have had to evolve signals for quickly communicating messages to other animals. If the signals were ones that any individual animal could master or acquire, they would lend themselves to rampant cheating and hence to disbelief. To be valid and believable, a signal must be one that guarantees the honesty of the signaller, by entailing a cost, risk, or burden that only superior individuals can afford. Many animal signals that would otherwise strike us as counterproductive—such as stotting by gazelles, or costly structures and risky displays with which males court females—can be understood in this light.

It seems to me that this perspective has contributed to the evolution not only of human art, already discussed in Chapter Nine, but also of human chemical abuse as discussed in this chapter. Both art and chemical abuse are widespread human hallmarks characteristic of most known human societies. Both beg explanation, since it is not immediately obvious why they promote our survival through natural selection, or why they help us acquire mates through sexual selection. I argued in Chapter Nine that art often serves as a valid indicator of an individual's superiority or status, since art requires skill to create and requires status or wealth to acquire. But those individuals perceived by their fellows as enjoying status thereby acquire enhanced access to resources and mates. I have argued in this chapter that humans seek status through many other costly displays besides art, and that some of those displays (like jumping from towers, fast driving, and chemical abuse) are surprisingly dangerous. The former costly displays advertise status or wealth; the latter, dangerous ones advertise that the displaying individual can master even such risks and hence must be superior. I do not claim, though, that this perspective affords a total understanding of art or chemical abuse. As I mentioned in Chapter Nine in connection with art, complex patterns of behaviour acquire a life of their own, go far beyond their original purpose (if there ever was just a single purpose), and may even originally have served multiple functions. Just as art is now motivated far more by pleasure than by need for advertisement, chemical abuse too is now clearly much more than an advertisement. It is also a way to get past inhibitions, drown sorrows, or just enjoy a good-tasting drink.

I also do not deny that, even from an evolutionary perspective, there remains a basic difference between human abuse of chemicals and its animal precedents. Stotting, long tails, and all the animal precedents that I described involve costs, but those forms of behaviour persist because the costs are outweighed by the benefits. A stotting gazelle loses a possible head start in a chase, but gains by decreasing the likelihood that a lion will embark on a serious chase at all. A long-tailed male bird is encumbered in finding food or escaping predators, but those survival disadvantages imposed by natural selection are more than compensated by mating advantages gained through sexual selection. The net balance is more rather than fewer offspring to pass on the male's genes. These animal traits only appear to be self-destructive; they are actually self-promoting. In the case of our chemical abuse, though, the costs outweigh the benefits. Drug addicts and drunkards not only lead shorter lives, but they lose rather than gain attractiveness in the eyes of potential mates and lose the ability to care for children. These traits do not persist because of hidden advantages outweighing costs; they persist mainly because they are chemically addicting. Thus, on balance, they are self-destructive, not self-promoting, patterns of behaviour. While gazelles may occasionally miscalculate in stotting, they do not commit suicide through addiction to the excitement of stotting. In that respect, our self-destructive abuse of chemicals diverged from its animal precursors to become truly a human hallmark.