Mother Nature Is Trying to Kill You by Dan Riskin Ph.d. Read Free Book Online Page B

it’s possible that my science-based perspective has robbed me of a little happiness, but I decided long ago to keep my experience of the world rooted as firmly in reality as possible. That said, though, I can’t help wondering what it would be like just to love Sam without that background conversation about meat robots playing in my head. It’s almost enough to make me envious of those parents who don’t think about evolution at all.
    Almost.
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    I . A doula is a nonmedical person who assists before, during, and after labor and childbirth, acting as an experienced resource for the family. To me, the biggest benefit of having a doula was just having someone there the whole time saying, “This is normal.”
    II . Claire Riskin was my father’s father’s sister. Roughly one-sixteenth of Sam’s DNA is the same as hers.
    III . Theft is really a type of parasitism, since (as you’ll remember from two chapters ago) parasitism describes any relationship between two organisms in which one gets a benefit (the parasite) and the other pays a cost (the host). In the case of parasitism by theft, biologists use the word kleptoparasitism, and talk about animals that are kleptoparasites of other animals. You might recognize the prefix klepto- from the word kleptomania, the disorder that causes people to steal pathologically.
    IV . This frog mating cuddle is called amplexus, which is Latin for “embrace.”
    V . That said, though, the disguised male still frequently gets hit on by other males (some of whom, confusingly, are also disguised as females: it’s like an elaborate Shakespearean play out there).





7
PRIDE
Rise Up, Meat Robots
    Ever since I started writing this book, I’ve been trying to reconcile the harshness of nature with the love I experience when I spend time with Sam. The examples I’ve uncovered along the way have made it even more clear to me than ever just how horrible we creatures of nature can be, but I’ve kept my eyes open for that one exception—just one nonhuman species with compassion beyond its own DNA’s needs. If such an animal could be found, then maybe true fatherly love—something more than the DNA-driven self-interests of a dad—might exist. I looked for that exception everywhere, but writing this book, the closest I ever got was vampire bats.
    As we discussed in the chapter on sloth, vampire bats share food with unrelated members of their own species. However, this can’t be counted as selfless behavior because by participating inthe food-sharing program, bats end up receiving food from other bats on the nights they fail to find food themselves. The fact that bats end up helping nonrelatives is, if anything, just an emergent phenomenon that happens when the bats act selfishly.
    Clearly vampires weren’t the selfless animals I was looking for, but if a selfless animal does exist, I figured Gerry Carter would know about it. Gerry, an undergrad during my PhD on vampire bats, helped me during fieldwork in Trinidad. He has since started a PhD of his own, focused on the food-sharing behavior of the vampire bats. He’s very smart, and he’s been working his way through experiments and literature surveys, all concerning the question of animal kindness. No one knows more about that stuff than Gerry does.
    I called Gerry up and asked him if he knew of any animal that willingly performs a behavior that helps the DNA of other animals, even though it comes at a cost to its own DNA’s survival. As I had suspected, he confirmed that he had never come across such an example. Sometimes an individual would sacrifice itself to help another individual, like the Leptothorax worker ants (from the chapter on envy) that sacrifice themselves to protect their queen. But cases like those all result in the DNA getting passed on. Gerry hadn’t seen a single example of self-sacrifice where the costs to the animal’s DNA outweighed the benefits.
    To me, that was the nail in the coffin. Animals are selfish,