Juan Luis Arsuaga: "The Moon is the difference"

If nature was the answer, what was the question? It is the quote that appears at the beginning of La respuesta (Destino), the book that has just been published by the paleontologist and co-director of Atapuerca Juan Luis Arsuaga. It is more than 500 pages where there are some answers – let's not confuse them with certainties – and above all questions that help us to fascinatingly journey through the history of evolution and to understand ourselves, humans, in comparison with the rest of the animals.

Who are we?

— Great apes and bipeds.

So great apes are in dire straits.

— We were the bomb, but it turns out we were adapted to their tropical, and the climate changed. That's why today there are almost no great apes. People think that if you're a great predator, you're at the top of the pyramid. Well, no. If you're a polar bear today, you're screwed because the ice is gone. And if you tell him to go to the savanna, he'll tell you he hunts seals.

Will they go extinct?

— Yes, we will become extinct as a biological group. Only chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans remain.

Why are they so bad?

— They have less habitat, that is the most important thing. And also because monkeys with tails are imposing themselves despite not being the largest or the most intelligent.

If it is not necessary to be great or clever, what is necessary to impose oneself?

— Be the most adapted. 

For us, the end of the ice age was key, wasn't it?

— The human population exploded because all of Europe became habitable. During the last ice age, Europe was a steppe, a terrible place where very few people lived. Climate change favored the human species because, obviously, we are not an arctic species. 

How can our DNA be 98% or 99% the same as that of apes?

— Think in bricks. All buildings are made of bricks, but with this material you can build the Sagrada Família or any bar. The difference is the blueprint, not the material. Structurally, there are structural genes and regulatory genes. Regulatory genes are the blueprint. Therefore, despite this fact, there is an abyss between a chimpanzee and a human.

What surprises you most about their behavior?

— Chimpanzees are very social compared to other animals. There is a Dutch primatologist, Frans de Waal, who wrote a very revolutionary book where he explained that the life of chimpanzees is political. They fight for power and they always do it through alliances. The strongest does not always have the power. In the case of bonobos, the females have the power, because they form alliances among themselves. 

One thing is the group and another is the tribe. Why?

— The tribe is what chimpanzees don't have. In other words, human beings have gone beyond biology and have built symbolic identities. Neither chimpanzees, nor orcas, nor dolphins have this. They live in groups in a specific territory and that is their world. But they don't have a flag and they know all the members. We have created symbolic identities with much larger territories. It's tribalism: you can be a Barça fan without knowing all the Barça supporters in the world. 

When do we begin to create these symbolic identities?

— My theory, unproven, is that it is Homo sapiens. I don't see Neanderthals with a flag. 

Are we violent by nature?

— No.

What good news.

— Now comes the bad one. Has there been any aggression here in the time we've been here?

No.

— This is unthinkable with any species. If you put a dolphin next to a group of dolphins, they attack directly. What happens to us? That because we are tribal, our main conflicts are between tribes.

But can it be said if we are good or bad by nature? Was Hobbes right or was Rousseau right?

— Everyone portrays Hobbes as the villain of the story, but what I don't like is Rousseau and his idea of the noble savage. He said we were good but private property and civilization corrupted us. And it's an idea that works, because people love to idealize the past. But I don't believe in the idyllic farmer. I believe in the city, democracy, the agora, philosophy. I believe in the polis. And you know that Rousseau personally was worse?

Why?

— I was having children with the maid and leaving them at the orphanage door.

And why do you like Hobbes?

— I think many people don't understand it. Hobbes would tell us: you think we are good by nature, right? Well, let's remove traffic lights and the Highway Code and people will kindly yield. Because, let's be honest, that's not how it works. 

So, a leviathan is needed to put order to all of this

— We are who we are, and what Hobbes says is that democratically we must create laws and transfer control to an organization that is the state. We will create a monster, yes, but a city of thousands or millions of inhabitants will be a monster. And we need someone to force us to pick up the dog's poop. Rousseau is do-gooding. 

What do you mean by that?

— Who hadn't left Paris but said that savages were benevolent, generous people without private property. And then comes Engels – and this is also interesting – who says: the fault of everything is capitalism and wealth. And he talks about savage peoples – he, imagine what he must have known about savage peoples – and says that there, since no one owned anything, they were happy. Utter naivety. With this reasoning, why are social norms needed in the economy?

What differentiates us as a species is consciousness?

— Self-awareness. A computer does not feel or suffer. Animals and humans do. They have an inner world in the sense that they do things: they feel hunger, fear... They are not machines. But what they don't have is inner vision, introspection. That is, they do not observe this inner world, they analyze it and ask themselves questions. This is what makes us unique. The self. But it is a poisoned gift.

Why?

— Because the first thing you discover is that you will die. For this 'self' thing, one must always pay a price. But it is also what allows us to build cities, make trains... The Palau de la Música and the Liceu would not exist without this self.

Do we still evolve today?

— No. Evolution is a geological scale phenomenon. That is to say, from one day to the next or from one millennium to the next. That is to say, from here... 200,000 years.

And does AI have no impact on this?

— AI will not change anything for us. The child who is born, is born the same as his grandfather. Perhaps the next interview will be conducted by an AI, or perhaps the AI will answer for me, but we are not talking in terms of evolution.

You say that evolution consists of converting energy into offspring. Do we come here to reproduce?

— Our genes do, that's why we have reproductive organs. But since we have control over our genes we can decide not to do it. 

And we can have children any month of the year... I hadn't thought it would be so incredible.

— It's just that until you compare yourself to others, you don't realize it. You have to compare yourself, and then you see that a chimpanzee's testicle is the size of two human ones. And you see that no animal can be born any month of the year. For example, deer rut in September, at the end of summer, so that the fawns are born in spring. 

Why?

— Because nature is economical. The young must grow in spring, which is when there is food, and all energy is put there.

But humans are born at any time.

— Because the primates, from which we come, live in the tropical forest, which has no seasons. That is why human sexuality is unique, because we have sex all year round. 

Do all animals have sex all year round?

— Chimpanzees yes, but only them, not them. They have a heat period every five or six years that lasts a month. And then they copulate with many males. The most dominant ones try to avoid it, but there is no way. What they are trying, in fact, is to reproduce themselves. But it is very difficult to know the father of a chimpanzee creature because they have copulated with all the males.

You say we are the erotic species.

— Since we don't have hair, we have much more sensitivity. And I also believe that the female orgasm is much superior to the male one and that it is exclusive to the human species. And I believe that this is a conquest of evolution. In other words, in a few words, I believe that females selected those that gave them more pleasure. 

What do you find most fascinating about human behavior?

— We are intelligent and ask ourselves existential questions. Is the Earth flat? Does it revolve around the Sun? Animals do not ask themselves these questions. But they also do not look at the Moon and say: what beauty. So what surprises me is that we look at the Moon and find it beautiful at the same time that a cow walks by and it doesn't interest it at all. The Moon is the difference.