The Human Animal (1994–…): Season 1, Episode 5 - The Immortal Genes - full transcript
No species on Earth has such a huge parental task as the human animal.
But when do we first become aware of the intensity
of our parental feelings?
We love our children of course, but sometimes it takes
a traumatic incident to bring home to us
just how much we love them.
It's little wonder really that we should feel so strongly,
because biologically, they represent our immortality.
Few moments in life crystallise with such clarity, the strength
of the emotional attachment that exists between parent and
offspring, as when a child goes missing at a big event.
Somewhere among a vast crowd of 30,000 people at a country fair
desperate parents had become separated from their children.
Horrors flash through their minds. Injury, kidnap or worse.
Nothing seems too outlandish.
The body language of distress is everywhere. A mother nervously
clasps her face. An unconscious act of self comfort. If there's
nobody else to caress us or embrace us, we do it to ourselves.
The relief of reunion is overwhelming. As with many animal species,
human parents would willingly risk their lives
for their children.
And these parents have just experienced a protective passion
within themselves
so powerful, that it's left them deeply shocked. Now only tight embraces
and loving caresses can help them back to a more relaxed
quietly loving condition.
The first day at school is almost as bad.
Here, the separation is not accidental. Society demands it and both
parent and child have been anticipating it. For both of them
it feels wrong, unnatural and yet they know it has to happen.
For some, the ordeal is almost more than they can bear.
Our animal relatives would find the threat of such a separation
a terrifying prospect. Any young ape or monkey would panic
at the prospect of being distanced from its parental protection
in this way. And the young human feels much the same.
It takes a patient, loving parent to provide convincing reassurance
that all will be well.
The boy's movements are reminiscent of a caged animal,
anxious to escape. At last, the father guides the child over the threshold
and into the new phase of its life cycle.
And this is what they're missing.
All the tender moments they enjoy spending together when embraces,
hugs take them back to the earliest days of their relationship.
The joyful times of close physical contact when, through the
body language of soft smiling facial expression, casual relaxed
gesture and gentle contact, the parent signals to the child,
I am here to protect you. And the child signals back,
I feel safe. At the end of every school day when parents come
to collect their children,
one's reminded once again of the strength of the parental bond.
But why do we devote so much time and energy to raising
our young? Our species has the heaviest parental burden of
any animal on earth.
Why are we so selfless when dealing with our children?
To find the answer, we must begin at the beginning. At birth itself.
Other animals
give birth very easily.
We do not. If we look at the old-fashioned way of delivering
a baby, several facts stand out. The posture of the mother,
her anxiety, and the clinical strangeness of the room accentuated
by bright lighting that all serve to destroy the intimacy
of the moment.
The newborn baby lies screaming on a table. Out of touch with
its mother's body, wildly grasping the air as if trying to
make contact with her.
For months inside her womb, it's been wrapped snugly by her body.
Now all that physical intimacy has been lost.
The natural reaction at this point would be
to put the baby into the embrace of its mother's arms,
but here in Russia,
in St. Petersburg,
it is instead offered the embrace of swaddling clothes.
Bound and encased until it looks like a little Russian doll.
This close binding does of course stop it crying
because it's reminiscent of the
tight enfolding of the walls of the womb.
But it also isolates the baby from any intimacy with its mother.
Swaddling of this kind has been
practiced for thousands of years and has always
succeeded in quietening the infant because of the firm sense
of bodily security it gives.
The mother
herself is also isolated not only from her baby but also
from her family. They, for reasons of strict hygiene are not permitted
to enter the maternity hospital for seven days.
The mother must endure the drama of the birth without their
familiar faces to reassure her.
From now on the mothers may only see their babies briefly
for breastfeeding when they are wheeled around the hospital on
a trolley like so many tiny human skittles.
Eventually when the mother is ready to go home, her baby is gift-wrapped
for the brief presentation ceremony. After the clinical atmosphere
of the hospital, the sentimental use of pink for a girl,
or in this case blue for a boy, seems strangely incongruous.
When the father sees his child for the first time,
he must then start to make his bond with the child.
Neither he, nor his wife
have been given the chance to develop a true
intimacy with her offspring.
This old-fashioned approach to giving birth is far more widespread
even today than most people imagine.
In sharp contrast, a return to a much more natural process is now favoured.
Birth in familiar surroundings, in the company of loved ones,
is found to be far more relaxing. This mood of relaxation
prevents her brain from flooding her body with special chemicals
that would slow up the birth. Watched by her daughter and
helped by her husband and a midwife,
she gives birth with comparative ease.
When the moment of delivery arrives, the natural position
for the human female is not lying on her back working against gravity,
but standing or squatting to use gravity to help
the baby emerge.
This is the posture employed by tribal societies all over
the world.
And again, it makes the birth much easier.
Once the baby's been born,
it's not immediately whisked away, but kept in direct contact
with the mother's body. Again ensuring a mood that is as calm
and relaxed as possible. Delivered naturally in this way,
the baby doesn't start screaming in panic.
It lies quietly against its mother's flesh.
The emotional bond between mother and infant is already beginning
to form and the baby, completely at ease, is already beginning
to practice a few gentle kicking and stretching movements.
For some mothers, this type of home birth is the ideal solution.
But others may feel more relaxed in a hospital context,
with all its advanced medical equipment on standby.
Whichever scenario makes them feel most at ease will be the best.
Newborn babies love to explore the exciting world in which
they now find themselves.
Providing the protective figure of the mother is close at hand,
they'll happily swim in warm water,
sticking out their tongues to prevent swallowing and beating
bravely with their stubby arms and legs while they stare
intently at the strange sights
they see before them. When their swimming ability was discovered
back in the 1930s.
It was explained away as nothing more than an automatic return
to the womb. But it's more than that.
The swimming baby actively suppresses its breathing.
This didn't happen in the womb because the baby had not then started
to use its lungs. Also, the swimming baby shows better coordination
of movement in the water than it does on dry land at this age.
And as this behaviour of only 10 days shows, the human
infant can swim before it can crawl. This automatic swimming
ability lasts for several months after birth. It then begins
to decline, to be replaced later by learned swimming.
Swimming isn't the only surprising ability of the newborn human.
Thanks to the research of a psychologist on the island of Crete,
we now know that the human baby is capable of imitation
just 15 minutes after being born.
When he makes a particular gesture or facial expression the
baby watches closely, and then copies him.
He makes a movement with his hand.
The baby's hand performs the same action.
Now he tries a completely different kind of action,
slowly sticking out his tongue. The baby fixates him with its eyes,
registers what he's doing, and after a pause for its newly
active brain to take it all in, then does the same.
Until this was filmed, many experts refused to believe that
such responsiveness was possible in the newborn, but it's
here for all to see. Every baby stays wide awake during this
first hour after birth, before dropping off into a deep slumber,
and it's during this time that it normally makes visual contact
with its mother. A crucial moment in the formation of the
parent-offspring bond.
For most people it's the arrival of the first born that marks
the moment when they begin to question the whole business
of human parental care and the human life cycle.
For me, it arrived a bit earlier, when I found myself acting as the
foster mother for a young chimpanzee like this one.
In no time at all,
the little chimp was reacting to me exactly as though I was its mother
and I found myself experiencing very strong parental feelings
towards the animal itself.
I became fascinated by the similarities between the baby
chimp and a human baby.
And also by the differences. The key difference was that the
little chimp was able to cling onto my coat very firmly.
Much more so than a human baby.
In the wild, chimpanzees can walk or run or climb without
worrying too much about the safety of their clinging offspring.
But human parents have to employ all kinds of carrying devices
to make sure that their babies can be safely transported
as they go about their business.
This baby is being rocked to and fro. Another human speciality
performed in the same way all over the world.
If a baby feels ill at ease, it sounds the human alarm call.
It starts to cry. The parent responds by rocking the baby
back and forth. An intuitive reaction performed at roughly
heartbeat speed in every culture.
The human baby, if it's not held against the mother's body
as she walks along, finds that the comforting movements
it knew inside the womb are missing, and it's this that sets off
the crying, which then needs the rocking to calm it.
The heartbeat speed of this rocking action suggests that
the rhythmic sounds heard by the fetus inside the womb have
a lasting effect.
In hospitals, there are sometimes too many babies being looked
after, for each one to be cuddled and rocked individually.
The solution is to place a crying baby in a mechanically
operated cot that rocks with precisely the right motions
ingeniously recreated here with swaying movements that mimic
the locomotion of a pregnant woman.
This soon calms the infant and lulls it off to sleep. As with
ordinary rocking, the mechanical rocking rhythm
that's most effective, is one that copies heartbeat speed. Roughly
72 beats per minute, which spells peace and security.
For both mother and baby, breastfeeding is more than just a milk supply.
It's also a time of great intimacy.
There's close eye contact during these moments, and the baby's
vision is fine-tuned to focusing at this distance from its
mother's face.
It's an amazing fact that after only 45 hours of close contact
following birth,
the infant is capable of identifying its mother solely by
her personal scent, and the mother also unconsciously learns
the individual scent of her own baby. In the old-fashioned
hospital, where strict routine demands that babies are fed
only at set times, and with the minimum of body contact,
the mothers have to postpone the moments
of intimacy until they're allowed to take their babies home.
Fortunately, babies and mothers are resilient, and the loving
bond will probably survive this severe discipline reasonably well.
But nobody knows just how much emotional damage is
done by these unnatural restraints.
One of the great advantages of personal freedom where breastfeeding
is concerned, is the possibility of feeding on demand,
rather than by a strict schedule. The female breast and the baby's
stomach are both designed for unrestricted demand feeding
and both suffer
if a rigid time schedule is imposed. As time goes on, if nature
is allowed to take its course, the milk supply will be regulated
by the baby.
During these early
intimate moments,
there's obviously much more going on between mother and baby
than mere feeding.
The sensitivity of the female nipples ensures that a deep
sensual pleasure is derived from this activity, aiding the
attachment process and creating a bond that sets the seal
on years of intense love.
Before there was baby food,
human babies were weaned by mouth feeding.
This is rare today, but among the Maori of New Zealand,
the baby is still given solids that have been masticated
by its grandmother and then passed with a feeding kiss into
its own mouth. And this incidentally reveals to us the origin
of adult kissing.
What is it that makes the human infant
so appealing? Careful tests have shown that we adults have
an automatic inborn response to the basic pattern of the
baby face. And that we can't help feeling protective
whenever we see big eyes, a large forehead, a button nose and
rounded cheeks. If we watch the young face growing up
we can see how these baby features are gradually lost
as the time for personal independence comes closer.
In the world of cartoons, animators too have exploited the
appeal of the babyface. Here at Warner Brothers
Animation Studios in Los Angeles,
this famous character illustrates the point extremely well.
His head is a combination of rabbit features and babyface features.
The rabbit features are the long ears, the whiskers
and the back teeth. The baby face features are the domed head,
large eyes
with big pupils, the soft jaw line, the chubby cheeks,
the tiny nose and above all the flattened face.
It's this magic combination that gives Bugs Bunny his special appeal.
So powerful are these babyface signals, that we respond
to them even in our pet animals.
These dogs have been selectively bred over the centuries
to make them more and more babylike.
The faces have been flattened, their eyes enlarged,
their bodies made more rounded and their coats softer to the touch.
The result is a perfect child substitute whenever, for whatever reason,
a human infant is absent. These pets weigh the same
as babies and are held like babies.
The interactions with these dogs contain many of the elements
of ordinary maternal care, and the intensity of the loving
involved is similar.
And when these owners talk to their dogs,
even the high-pitched voice is the same.
Observations of babies have revealed
that in one particular way,
they're strongly sexist.
From birth, they prefer a high-pitched female voice to a deeper male voice.
And it's intriguing that
many fathers intuitively fight against this by adopting an
unnaturally higher pitch when talking to their babies.
There's a strong parental compulsion to chatter to babies.
This is the babbling stage when babies all over the world
are experimenting with the same kind of sounds. The development
of speech from these early sounds has been captured here in
a video sequence that shows in one child the two-year process
reduced to a single minute.
This unfolding of speech is an inborn character
of our species, common to every one of us regardless of the
particular tongue that we learn to speak.
Learning a language is only one of the
social skills
we must master. With our parents when they're very young,
we're often allowed through their love for us
to have our own way.
When we first encounter other children of our own age,
the situation suddenly changes. Everyone wants his or her own way.
And if there's a special toy that can't be shared,
mayhem can ensue.
Competition is more ancient than cooperation in the evolution
of our species, and this soon becomes evident in the toddler's playground.
For the loser, there remains the comfort of a momentary
return to the security of early infant behaviour.
As a way of introducing order into playground chaos,
adults impose rules, like picking your team for organised games.
Being favoured as a teammate is a signal of social status
and group acceptance. If there's an odd number,
someone gets left out.
Although this may seem trivial to us, to the boy concerned,
it's a moment of acute rejection and is hard to bear.
Human beings are social animals
for whom one of the worst punishments is isolation.
Another of the hard lessons to be learned during childhood.
Left to their own devices, the growing children soon start
to experiment with their bodies, finding out what is possible
with balance and rhythm.
In its own good time, the human urge for cooperation starts
to enter the scene. The children themselves amicably organise
their games, as here in rural China, where these children play
the traditional game of elastics.
Genuinely helpful acts occur, of a kind that are rarely
observed in the young of other species, but are remarkably
common at this stage of human development. Soon a new process appears.
Systematic learning.
In our species, sexual maturity is delayed for a full decade
while we program our complex brains with an astonishing mass
of information using a remarkable variety of techniques.
Our passage through childhood is punctuated by special events.
The ritual of blowing out the candles on a birthday cake
proves our vitality, and shows our complete control over
the flames representing the forces of nature.
When young birds become adult, they lose their
juvenile plumage and adopt adult colours. When young humans
become adult, the boys grow broader shoulders. The girls wider hips.
But in addition to these biological changes,
different cultures all over the world have added their own echoes of
these changes. Special rites of passage, in which ceremonies
take place to demonstrate a shift from one level to another.
And very often there are symbolic steps, which the young
people go up rising to a higher level in their life cycle.
One of the essential features of this type of ceremony
is that the children must perform on their own?
There's no parental hand to guide them. Society is making
a takeover bid for them. Weaning them slightly away from
the family, and more into the body of the tribe.
They're becoming individual members of society who must now
stand up for themselves. Now it's society, and not the parent,
that feeds the young. Although, because they're socializing
the young, most rites of passage are communal affairs like this one,
some are more private and personal.
In rural Italy, this boy is coming of age. His grandparents have split a sapling
in two and pass him through it, as though he's being born
a second time. To emphasize this symbolism,
he must strip naked like a newborn.
Once he's been passed through the birth passage of the split tree,
it's carefully bound up again so that it will continue
to grow.
Now, tree and boy will mature together.
The strangeness of the act will leave its mark on the boy's
memory, and impress upon him that he's now reached a new phase
in his life cycle.
His body will grow like the trunk of the tree into strength
and maturity.
These rituals, these rites of passage take many forms.
Each society has its own rules and its own procedures.
Precisely what they are is not especially important, But they must be
there to add a sense of shared status.
These are essentially acts of tribal induction
when public uniformity momentarily takes over from
privately developing individuality.
Special salutes, emblems, badges and regalia all help
to mark the occasion as one of social significance. And the symbolism
of the occasion is marked by a symbolic leap, away from childhood,
and towards adulthood.
On a more personal scale, there are minor rites of passage
that go almost unnoticed. With the arrival of puberty the
body undergoes changes that inevitably and automatically
alter the social status of those approaching adulthood.
The boy's first shave, or buying the girls first bra may seem
trivial events to the outside world, but not to those involved.
For them,
this is a moment of biological maturing that's more profound
than any of the more artificial rituals imposed by society.
Eager to move on to the next phase in the life cycle,
these events are often premature.
The boy's chin doesn't need shaving and the girl's breasts
hardly need support. But these facts are ignored in the rush
towards active sexuality.
Each society is fully aware that the next generation
will want to change things. If only because of the creative energy
of our species. The older generation welcomes a little change,
but not too much. Not enough to destroy the old order that
they have worked hard to establish and maintain.
Over and over again
they impose ceremonial conformity on the young.
With the use of music and dramatically staged ritual they
attempt to endow the old order with an aesthetic appeal that
reinforces its authority. Some of these young adults will rebel,
but many more will be sufficiently impressed by these
occasions to want to continue the status quo.
The success of any society depends to a large extent,
on the balance it manages to achieve between innovation and tradition in each new generation.
The problem with cultural indoctrination
is that it can exploit the inherent tribalism of the young,
and direct them towards activities that may sometimes be
more destructive than creative. The willingness of the young
to follow group discipline can lead almost anywhere.
The susceptibility to group attachment inherent in the maturing
young can be turned into loyalty that's constructively inventive,
or, with almost equal ease, into loyalty
that's potentially violent.
Good afternoon, gentlemen, take your seats.
These particular children have been trained as expert killers.
There's a vacant blankness on their faces. The complete absence
of any sense of joyful childhood.
And this 13 year old boy has already gunned down his first adult enemy.
An achievement for which he's congratulated incongruously
with a motherly hug.
Wherever there's the possibility of the need for military
support, the usual familiar devices, bands and marching and
smart uniforms are employed to add glamour to the enrollment
of the young in the status games of the old. The synchrony
of the marching helps to synchronize the moods and minds
of these adults. And the rhythmic beating of the drums impinges
directly on their physiology, as if it's an echo of their
excited heart beats. Everyone enjoys a parade, and almost unnoticed,
the enjoyment tightens the social bonds and reinforces
the local cultural traditions.
Despite all the attempts of tribal elders to mould the young
in their own image, the creative spirit fights back.
Time and again the young rebel, sometimes despairingly, sometimes joyfully.
The childlike nature of our species can only take just so
much conformity and uniformity before it demands a new toy,
a new direction, even If eventually after an exciting period
of innovation, the rebels themselves become as predictable
as their forebears.
As youth comes to an end, and family life beckons society
stages one more ceremony of indoctrination. This time into
adulthood itself.
Womanhood demands a display of healthy skin, shining hair
and firm breasts. The universal signals of female health and fecundity.
The young adults are carefully prepared for the event
with all the specialized trappings of their particular culture.
These trappings vary in detail, but they all play
the same role. That of emphasizing that these individuals
are now available for pairing up and for setting up their
own family units.
Yesterday's children are about to become tomorrow's adults.
In the years that follow, the human animal is at the peak
of its physical condition. Couples are now preoccupied with
establishing a pair bond, a family territory and producing
offspring of their own.
So vital is this stage, that we're loathe to see it pass.
When we arrive in our forties,
we attempt for the first time to slow down the life cycle.
We suddenly take an interest in partners who are much younger
than we are. For some, this is a phase of harmless fantasy.
For others,
it can lead to a full-blown midlife crisis.
This is essentially a phenomenon of advanced Western society
where the human life cycle has been increasingly extended
creating a gap between the young parental phase and the older
grandparental phase.
This gap has to be filled with activities that delude the
middle-aged into thinking that they're younger than they really are.
Into denying the aging process.
This 85 year old has just completed a full marathon run of
26 miles. And fills us with admiration because he gives the
rest of us the hope that the aging process can be defeated.
Everywhere the elderly refuse to accept that their bodies
are in a state of physical decline, and continue with the
activities of their youth. But although avoided in public,
the subject of mortality now becomes a private preoccupation.
It may sound like a harsh question,
but why do human beings live for so very long?
Why is it that we live on past our reproductive age?
Biologically it doesn't make much sense. But it does make sense in a very
special way, because unlike other species, the human animal
has such a huge parental burden, that a child not only needs
parents, but also grandparents and the grand parental role
has been important in our species for probably a million years.
Biologically, human beings are unique in having what we
might call a serial litter. The young arrive year after year.
So that human parents can face the problem of caring for
whole batch of children of different ages all at once.
For this, they do need as much help as they can get.
And this is where the grandparents can be of enormous assistance.
They can teach the young the old traditions of their culture.
They can even teach the subtleties of Italian gesticulation.
They can sit quietly with their grandchildren acting as family guardians.
Playing their part in the protection of the offspring
that contain their genetic material. In this way active
grandparents, far from being useless, become an essential part
of human reproductive success and much loved in the process.
But I wonder whether there's an additional deeper reason
for this extraordinary devotion to our offspring. In my exploration
of the human life cycle,
I'm reminded of one peculiar quality of the human animal.
Other animals live in the present, but we can contemplate
the future.
That means that we can also contemplate our death and as
we grow older this becomes a rather frightening prospect.
So we have to protect ourselves in some way against it.
And the way we do this is to conceive of an afterlife.
To make it as attractive as possible,
we decorate our tombs and there's an Etruscan tomb here which
illustrates this perfectly.
All over the walls of this tomb, artists have depicted with great accuracy everyday objects.
There's a coil of rope here, a knife, a pickaxe, a drinking vessel
a belt of some kind hung up on a realistically depicted nail.
The reason that they've done this so carefully is in
order to make this tomb feel like home.
This is a replica of an Etruscan house. So that the bodies
lying in here can enjoy an eternal life as pleasant as the
one they knew before. It gave them an afterlife that they
could understand.
We have no scientific evidence either for or against the
existence of an afterlife. For those who gain comfort from
the idea, it acts as a valuable de-stressing device and all
around the world religious
organisations are present to supply this comfort.
In this role, religion plays an important function, but it
can go too far.
If it suggests that people must put up with a miserable existence
in this life in order to enjoy the next one, then it's become
a confidence trick. And if it goes further and says that rival
religions are wicked, then it's strayed into the wasteful
world of Holy Wars and sectarian violence. When this happens
many people seek other answers.
In recent times, the human urge to defeat death has taken
on a new dimension. Here in a cryonics facility in Southern
California, the containers behind me hold 10 bodies
each of them at a temperature of minus 196 degrees Centigrade.
They're suspended in liquid nitrogen. And there they will stay
until perhaps one day they can be revived.
Now the people who've had themselves treated in this way
hold the perhaps slender hope but nevertheless
a real hope that one day they can come back,
but these people are hoping to return not in another place,
but at another time. For some people the only way to treat
the subject of death is with cheerful celebration.
In Mexico, the annual Day of the Dead is looked upon
as a joyful reunion with departed friends and loved ones.
By giving them this lively fiesta,
it's felt that they'll join in the fun,
if only in spirit. It's believed that the souls of the dead
can be led by a trail of petals into the houses to participate
in the feasting. This gives the living the hope that they'll
be able to enjoy a similar
happy occasion in their afterlife. But for me, as a zoologist,
the only guaranteed form of afterlife is through our genes.
Through our children, our offspring who carry our genetic material.
That's the real immortality. Through our immortal genes.
To our genes,
we individuals and our children and their children are merely
temporary containers. With each generation passing on the
baton of life.
As parents, caring for our offspring, we do our best to ensure
that there's no break in this amazing evolutionary journey.
But when do we first become aware of the intensity
of our parental feelings?
We love our children of course, but sometimes it takes
a traumatic incident to bring home to us
just how much we love them.
It's little wonder really that we should feel so strongly,
because biologically, they represent our immortality.
Few moments in life crystallise with such clarity, the strength
of the emotional attachment that exists between parent and
offspring, as when a child goes missing at a big event.
Somewhere among a vast crowd of 30,000 people at a country fair
desperate parents had become separated from their children.
Horrors flash through their minds. Injury, kidnap or worse.
Nothing seems too outlandish.
The body language of distress is everywhere. A mother nervously
clasps her face. An unconscious act of self comfort. If there's
nobody else to caress us or embrace us, we do it to ourselves.
The relief of reunion is overwhelming. As with many animal species,
human parents would willingly risk their lives
for their children.
And these parents have just experienced a protective passion
within themselves
so powerful, that it's left them deeply shocked. Now only tight embraces
and loving caresses can help them back to a more relaxed
quietly loving condition.
The first day at school is almost as bad.
Here, the separation is not accidental. Society demands it and both
parent and child have been anticipating it. For both of them
it feels wrong, unnatural and yet they know it has to happen.
For some, the ordeal is almost more than they can bear.
Our animal relatives would find the threat of such a separation
a terrifying prospect. Any young ape or monkey would panic
at the prospect of being distanced from its parental protection
in this way. And the young human feels much the same.
It takes a patient, loving parent to provide convincing reassurance
that all will be well.
The boy's movements are reminiscent of a caged animal,
anxious to escape. At last, the father guides the child over the threshold
and into the new phase of its life cycle.
And this is what they're missing.
All the tender moments they enjoy spending together when embraces,
hugs take them back to the earliest days of their relationship.
The joyful times of close physical contact when, through the
body language of soft smiling facial expression, casual relaxed
gesture and gentle contact, the parent signals to the child,
I am here to protect you. And the child signals back,
I feel safe. At the end of every school day when parents come
to collect their children,
one's reminded once again of the strength of the parental bond.
But why do we devote so much time and energy to raising
our young? Our species has the heaviest parental burden of
any animal on earth.
Why are we so selfless when dealing with our children?
To find the answer, we must begin at the beginning. At birth itself.
Other animals
give birth very easily.
We do not. If we look at the old-fashioned way of delivering
a baby, several facts stand out. The posture of the mother,
her anxiety, and the clinical strangeness of the room accentuated
by bright lighting that all serve to destroy the intimacy
of the moment.
The newborn baby lies screaming on a table. Out of touch with
its mother's body, wildly grasping the air as if trying to
make contact with her.
For months inside her womb, it's been wrapped snugly by her body.
Now all that physical intimacy has been lost.
The natural reaction at this point would be
to put the baby into the embrace of its mother's arms,
but here in Russia,
in St. Petersburg,
it is instead offered the embrace of swaddling clothes.
Bound and encased until it looks like a little Russian doll.
This close binding does of course stop it crying
because it's reminiscent of the
tight enfolding of the walls of the womb.
But it also isolates the baby from any intimacy with its mother.
Swaddling of this kind has been
practiced for thousands of years and has always
succeeded in quietening the infant because of the firm sense
of bodily security it gives.
The mother
herself is also isolated not only from her baby but also
from her family. They, for reasons of strict hygiene are not permitted
to enter the maternity hospital for seven days.
The mother must endure the drama of the birth without their
familiar faces to reassure her.
From now on the mothers may only see their babies briefly
for breastfeeding when they are wheeled around the hospital on
a trolley like so many tiny human skittles.
Eventually when the mother is ready to go home, her baby is gift-wrapped
for the brief presentation ceremony. After the clinical atmosphere
of the hospital, the sentimental use of pink for a girl,
or in this case blue for a boy, seems strangely incongruous.
When the father sees his child for the first time,
he must then start to make his bond with the child.
Neither he, nor his wife
have been given the chance to develop a true
intimacy with her offspring.
This old-fashioned approach to giving birth is far more widespread
even today than most people imagine.
In sharp contrast, a return to a much more natural process is now favoured.
Birth in familiar surroundings, in the company of loved ones,
is found to be far more relaxing. This mood of relaxation
prevents her brain from flooding her body with special chemicals
that would slow up the birth. Watched by her daughter and
helped by her husband and a midwife,
she gives birth with comparative ease.
When the moment of delivery arrives, the natural position
for the human female is not lying on her back working against gravity,
but standing or squatting to use gravity to help
the baby emerge.
This is the posture employed by tribal societies all over
the world.
And again, it makes the birth much easier.
Once the baby's been born,
it's not immediately whisked away, but kept in direct contact
with the mother's body. Again ensuring a mood that is as calm
and relaxed as possible. Delivered naturally in this way,
the baby doesn't start screaming in panic.
It lies quietly against its mother's flesh.
The emotional bond between mother and infant is already beginning
to form and the baby, completely at ease, is already beginning
to practice a few gentle kicking and stretching movements.
For some mothers, this type of home birth is the ideal solution.
But others may feel more relaxed in a hospital context,
with all its advanced medical equipment on standby.
Whichever scenario makes them feel most at ease will be the best.
Newborn babies love to explore the exciting world in which
they now find themselves.
Providing the protective figure of the mother is close at hand,
they'll happily swim in warm water,
sticking out their tongues to prevent swallowing and beating
bravely with their stubby arms and legs while they stare
intently at the strange sights
they see before them. When their swimming ability was discovered
back in the 1930s.
It was explained away as nothing more than an automatic return
to the womb. But it's more than that.
The swimming baby actively suppresses its breathing.
This didn't happen in the womb because the baby had not then started
to use its lungs. Also, the swimming baby shows better coordination
of movement in the water than it does on dry land at this age.
And as this behaviour of only 10 days shows, the human
infant can swim before it can crawl. This automatic swimming
ability lasts for several months after birth. It then begins
to decline, to be replaced later by learned swimming.
Swimming isn't the only surprising ability of the newborn human.
Thanks to the research of a psychologist on the island of Crete,
we now know that the human baby is capable of imitation
just 15 minutes after being born.
When he makes a particular gesture or facial expression the
baby watches closely, and then copies him.
He makes a movement with his hand.
The baby's hand performs the same action.
Now he tries a completely different kind of action,
slowly sticking out his tongue. The baby fixates him with its eyes,
registers what he's doing, and after a pause for its newly
active brain to take it all in, then does the same.
Until this was filmed, many experts refused to believe that
such responsiveness was possible in the newborn, but it's
here for all to see. Every baby stays wide awake during this
first hour after birth, before dropping off into a deep slumber,
and it's during this time that it normally makes visual contact
with its mother. A crucial moment in the formation of the
parent-offspring bond.
For most people it's the arrival of the first born that marks
the moment when they begin to question the whole business
of human parental care and the human life cycle.
For me, it arrived a bit earlier, when I found myself acting as the
foster mother for a young chimpanzee like this one.
In no time at all,
the little chimp was reacting to me exactly as though I was its mother
and I found myself experiencing very strong parental feelings
towards the animal itself.
I became fascinated by the similarities between the baby
chimp and a human baby.
And also by the differences. The key difference was that the
little chimp was able to cling onto my coat very firmly.
Much more so than a human baby.
In the wild, chimpanzees can walk or run or climb without
worrying too much about the safety of their clinging offspring.
But human parents have to employ all kinds of carrying devices
to make sure that their babies can be safely transported
as they go about their business.
This baby is being rocked to and fro. Another human speciality
performed in the same way all over the world.
If a baby feels ill at ease, it sounds the human alarm call.
It starts to cry. The parent responds by rocking the baby
back and forth. An intuitive reaction performed at roughly
heartbeat speed in every culture.
The human baby, if it's not held against the mother's body
as she walks along, finds that the comforting movements
it knew inside the womb are missing, and it's this that sets off
the crying, which then needs the rocking to calm it.
The heartbeat speed of this rocking action suggests that
the rhythmic sounds heard by the fetus inside the womb have
a lasting effect.
In hospitals, there are sometimes too many babies being looked
after, for each one to be cuddled and rocked individually.
The solution is to place a crying baby in a mechanically
operated cot that rocks with precisely the right motions
ingeniously recreated here with swaying movements that mimic
the locomotion of a pregnant woman.
This soon calms the infant and lulls it off to sleep. As with
ordinary rocking, the mechanical rocking rhythm
that's most effective, is one that copies heartbeat speed. Roughly
72 beats per minute, which spells peace and security.
For both mother and baby, breastfeeding is more than just a milk supply.
It's also a time of great intimacy.
There's close eye contact during these moments, and the baby's
vision is fine-tuned to focusing at this distance from its
mother's face.
It's an amazing fact that after only 45 hours of close contact
following birth,
the infant is capable of identifying its mother solely by
her personal scent, and the mother also unconsciously learns
the individual scent of her own baby. In the old-fashioned
hospital, where strict routine demands that babies are fed
only at set times, and with the minimum of body contact,
the mothers have to postpone the moments
of intimacy until they're allowed to take their babies home.
Fortunately, babies and mothers are resilient, and the loving
bond will probably survive this severe discipline reasonably well.
But nobody knows just how much emotional damage is
done by these unnatural restraints.
One of the great advantages of personal freedom where breastfeeding
is concerned, is the possibility of feeding on demand,
rather than by a strict schedule. The female breast and the baby's
stomach are both designed for unrestricted demand feeding
and both suffer
if a rigid time schedule is imposed. As time goes on, if nature
is allowed to take its course, the milk supply will be regulated
by the baby.
During these early
intimate moments,
there's obviously much more going on between mother and baby
than mere feeding.
The sensitivity of the female nipples ensures that a deep
sensual pleasure is derived from this activity, aiding the
attachment process and creating a bond that sets the seal
on years of intense love.
Before there was baby food,
human babies were weaned by mouth feeding.
This is rare today, but among the Maori of New Zealand,
the baby is still given solids that have been masticated
by its grandmother and then passed with a feeding kiss into
its own mouth. And this incidentally reveals to us the origin
of adult kissing.
What is it that makes the human infant
so appealing? Careful tests have shown that we adults have
an automatic inborn response to the basic pattern of the
baby face. And that we can't help feeling protective
whenever we see big eyes, a large forehead, a button nose and
rounded cheeks. If we watch the young face growing up
we can see how these baby features are gradually lost
as the time for personal independence comes closer.
In the world of cartoons, animators too have exploited the
appeal of the babyface. Here at Warner Brothers
Animation Studios in Los Angeles,
this famous character illustrates the point extremely well.
His head is a combination of rabbit features and babyface features.
The rabbit features are the long ears, the whiskers
and the back teeth. The baby face features are the domed head,
large eyes
with big pupils, the soft jaw line, the chubby cheeks,
the tiny nose and above all the flattened face.
It's this magic combination that gives Bugs Bunny his special appeal.
So powerful are these babyface signals, that we respond
to them even in our pet animals.
These dogs have been selectively bred over the centuries
to make them more and more babylike.
The faces have been flattened, their eyes enlarged,
their bodies made more rounded and their coats softer to the touch.
The result is a perfect child substitute whenever, for whatever reason,
a human infant is absent. These pets weigh the same
as babies and are held like babies.
The interactions with these dogs contain many of the elements
of ordinary maternal care, and the intensity of the loving
involved is similar.
And when these owners talk to their dogs,
even the high-pitched voice is the same.
Observations of babies have revealed
that in one particular way,
they're strongly sexist.
From birth, they prefer a high-pitched female voice to a deeper male voice.
And it's intriguing that
many fathers intuitively fight against this by adopting an
unnaturally higher pitch when talking to their babies.
There's a strong parental compulsion to chatter to babies.
This is the babbling stage when babies all over the world
are experimenting with the same kind of sounds. The development
of speech from these early sounds has been captured here in
a video sequence that shows in one child the two-year process
reduced to a single minute.
This unfolding of speech is an inborn character
of our species, common to every one of us regardless of the
particular tongue that we learn to speak.
Learning a language is only one of the
social skills
we must master. With our parents when they're very young,
we're often allowed through their love for us
to have our own way.
When we first encounter other children of our own age,
the situation suddenly changes. Everyone wants his or her own way.
And if there's a special toy that can't be shared,
mayhem can ensue.
Competition is more ancient than cooperation in the evolution
of our species, and this soon becomes evident in the toddler's playground.
For the loser, there remains the comfort of a momentary
return to the security of early infant behaviour.
As a way of introducing order into playground chaos,
adults impose rules, like picking your team for organised games.
Being favoured as a teammate is a signal of social status
and group acceptance. If there's an odd number,
someone gets left out.
Although this may seem trivial to us, to the boy concerned,
it's a moment of acute rejection and is hard to bear.
Human beings are social animals
for whom one of the worst punishments is isolation.
Another of the hard lessons to be learned during childhood.
Left to their own devices, the growing children soon start
to experiment with their bodies, finding out what is possible
with balance and rhythm.
In its own good time, the human urge for cooperation starts
to enter the scene. The children themselves amicably organise
their games, as here in rural China, where these children play
the traditional game of elastics.
Genuinely helpful acts occur, of a kind that are rarely
observed in the young of other species, but are remarkably
common at this stage of human development. Soon a new process appears.
Systematic learning.
In our species, sexual maturity is delayed for a full decade
while we program our complex brains with an astonishing mass
of information using a remarkable variety of techniques.
Our passage through childhood is punctuated by special events.
The ritual of blowing out the candles on a birthday cake
proves our vitality, and shows our complete control over
the flames representing the forces of nature.
When young birds become adult, they lose their
juvenile plumage and adopt adult colours. When young humans
become adult, the boys grow broader shoulders. The girls wider hips.
But in addition to these biological changes,
different cultures all over the world have added their own echoes of
these changes. Special rites of passage, in which ceremonies
take place to demonstrate a shift from one level to another.
And very often there are symbolic steps, which the young
people go up rising to a higher level in their life cycle.
One of the essential features of this type of ceremony
is that the children must perform on their own?
There's no parental hand to guide them. Society is making
a takeover bid for them. Weaning them slightly away from
the family, and more into the body of the tribe.
They're becoming individual members of society who must now
stand up for themselves. Now it's society, and not the parent,
that feeds the young. Although, because they're socializing
the young, most rites of passage are communal affairs like this one,
some are more private and personal.
In rural Italy, this boy is coming of age. His grandparents have split a sapling
in two and pass him through it, as though he's being born
a second time. To emphasize this symbolism,
he must strip naked like a newborn.
Once he's been passed through the birth passage of the split tree,
it's carefully bound up again so that it will continue
to grow.
Now, tree and boy will mature together.
The strangeness of the act will leave its mark on the boy's
memory, and impress upon him that he's now reached a new phase
in his life cycle.
His body will grow like the trunk of the tree into strength
and maturity.
These rituals, these rites of passage take many forms.
Each society has its own rules and its own procedures.
Precisely what they are is not especially important, But they must be
there to add a sense of shared status.
These are essentially acts of tribal induction
when public uniformity momentarily takes over from
privately developing individuality.
Special salutes, emblems, badges and regalia all help
to mark the occasion as one of social significance. And the symbolism
of the occasion is marked by a symbolic leap, away from childhood,
and towards adulthood.
On a more personal scale, there are minor rites of passage
that go almost unnoticed. With the arrival of puberty the
body undergoes changes that inevitably and automatically
alter the social status of those approaching adulthood.
The boy's first shave, or buying the girls first bra may seem
trivial events to the outside world, but not to those involved.
For them,
this is a moment of biological maturing that's more profound
than any of the more artificial rituals imposed by society.
Eager to move on to the next phase in the life cycle,
these events are often premature.
The boy's chin doesn't need shaving and the girl's breasts
hardly need support. But these facts are ignored in the rush
towards active sexuality.
Each society is fully aware that the next generation
will want to change things. If only because of the creative energy
of our species. The older generation welcomes a little change,
but not too much. Not enough to destroy the old order that
they have worked hard to establish and maintain.
Over and over again
they impose ceremonial conformity on the young.
With the use of music and dramatically staged ritual they
attempt to endow the old order with an aesthetic appeal that
reinforces its authority. Some of these young adults will rebel,
but many more will be sufficiently impressed by these
occasions to want to continue the status quo.
The success of any society depends to a large extent,
on the balance it manages to achieve between innovation and tradition in each new generation.
The problem with cultural indoctrination
is that it can exploit the inherent tribalism of the young,
and direct them towards activities that may sometimes be
more destructive than creative. The willingness of the young
to follow group discipline can lead almost anywhere.
The susceptibility to group attachment inherent in the maturing
young can be turned into loyalty that's constructively inventive,
or, with almost equal ease, into loyalty
that's potentially violent.
Good afternoon, gentlemen, take your seats.
These particular children have been trained as expert killers.
There's a vacant blankness on their faces. The complete absence
of any sense of joyful childhood.
And this 13 year old boy has already gunned down his first adult enemy.
An achievement for which he's congratulated incongruously
with a motherly hug.
Wherever there's the possibility of the need for military
support, the usual familiar devices, bands and marching and
smart uniforms are employed to add glamour to the enrollment
of the young in the status games of the old. The synchrony
of the marching helps to synchronize the moods and minds
of these adults. And the rhythmic beating of the drums impinges
directly on their physiology, as if it's an echo of their
excited heart beats. Everyone enjoys a parade, and almost unnoticed,
the enjoyment tightens the social bonds and reinforces
the local cultural traditions.
Despite all the attempts of tribal elders to mould the young
in their own image, the creative spirit fights back.
Time and again the young rebel, sometimes despairingly, sometimes joyfully.
The childlike nature of our species can only take just so
much conformity and uniformity before it demands a new toy,
a new direction, even If eventually after an exciting period
of innovation, the rebels themselves become as predictable
as their forebears.
As youth comes to an end, and family life beckons society
stages one more ceremony of indoctrination. This time into
adulthood itself.
Womanhood demands a display of healthy skin, shining hair
and firm breasts. The universal signals of female health and fecundity.
The young adults are carefully prepared for the event
with all the specialized trappings of their particular culture.
These trappings vary in detail, but they all play
the same role. That of emphasizing that these individuals
are now available for pairing up and for setting up their
own family units.
Yesterday's children are about to become tomorrow's adults.
In the years that follow, the human animal is at the peak
of its physical condition. Couples are now preoccupied with
establishing a pair bond, a family territory and producing
offspring of their own.
So vital is this stage, that we're loathe to see it pass.
When we arrive in our forties,
we attempt for the first time to slow down the life cycle.
We suddenly take an interest in partners who are much younger
than we are. For some, this is a phase of harmless fantasy.
For others,
it can lead to a full-blown midlife crisis.
This is essentially a phenomenon of advanced Western society
where the human life cycle has been increasingly extended
creating a gap between the young parental phase and the older
grandparental phase.
This gap has to be filled with activities that delude the
middle-aged into thinking that they're younger than they really are.
Into denying the aging process.
This 85 year old has just completed a full marathon run of
26 miles. And fills us with admiration because he gives the
rest of us the hope that the aging process can be defeated.
Everywhere the elderly refuse to accept that their bodies
are in a state of physical decline, and continue with the
activities of their youth. But although avoided in public,
the subject of mortality now becomes a private preoccupation.
It may sound like a harsh question,
but why do human beings live for so very long?
Why is it that we live on past our reproductive age?
Biologically it doesn't make much sense. But it does make sense in a very
special way, because unlike other species, the human animal
has such a huge parental burden, that a child not only needs
parents, but also grandparents and the grand parental role
has been important in our species for probably a million years.
Biologically, human beings are unique in having what we
might call a serial litter. The young arrive year after year.
So that human parents can face the problem of caring for
whole batch of children of different ages all at once.
For this, they do need as much help as they can get.
And this is where the grandparents can be of enormous assistance.
They can teach the young the old traditions of their culture.
They can even teach the subtleties of Italian gesticulation.
They can sit quietly with their grandchildren acting as family guardians.
Playing their part in the protection of the offspring
that contain their genetic material. In this way active
grandparents, far from being useless, become an essential part
of human reproductive success and much loved in the process.
But I wonder whether there's an additional deeper reason
for this extraordinary devotion to our offspring. In my exploration
of the human life cycle,
I'm reminded of one peculiar quality of the human animal.
Other animals live in the present, but we can contemplate
the future.
That means that we can also contemplate our death and as
we grow older this becomes a rather frightening prospect.
So we have to protect ourselves in some way against it.
And the way we do this is to conceive of an afterlife.
To make it as attractive as possible,
we decorate our tombs and there's an Etruscan tomb here which
illustrates this perfectly.
All over the walls of this tomb, artists have depicted with great accuracy everyday objects.
There's a coil of rope here, a knife, a pickaxe, a drinking vessel
a belt of some kind hung up on a realistically depicted nail.
The reason that they've done this so carefully is in
order to make this tomb feel like home.
This is a replica of an Etruscan house. So that the bodies
lying in here can enjoy an eternal life as pleasant as the
one they knew before. It gave them an afterlife that they
could understand.
We have no scientific evidence either for or against the
existence of an afterlife. For those who gain comfort from
the idea, it acts as a valuable de-stressing device and all
around the world religious
organisations are present to supply this comfort.
In this role, religion plays an important function, but it
can go too far.
If it suggests that people must put up with a miserable existence
in this life in order to enjoy the next one, then it's become
a confidence trick. And if it goes further and says that rival
religions are wicked, then it's strayed into the wasteful
world of Holy Wars and sectarian violence. When this happens
many people seek other answers.
In recent times, the human urge to defeat death has taken
on a new dimension. Here in a cryonics facility in Southern
California, the containers behind me hold 10 bodies
each of them at a temperature of minus 196 degrees Centigrade.
They're suspended in liquid nitrogen. And there they will stay
until perhaps one day they can be revived.
Now the people who've had themselves treated in this way
hold the perhaps slender hope but nevertheless
a real hope that one day they can come back,
but these people are hoping to return not in another place,
but at another time. For some people the only way to treat
the subject of death is with cheerful celebration.
In Mexico, the annual Day of the Dead is looked upon
as a joyful reunion with departed friends and loved ones.
By giving them this lively fiesta,
it's felt that they'll join in the fun,
if only in spirit. It's believed that the souls of the dead
can be led by a trail of petals into the houses to participate
in the feasting. This gives the living the hope that they'll
be able to enjoy a similar
happy occasion in their afterlife. But for me, as a zoologist,
the only guaranteed form of afterlife is through our genes.
Through our children, our offspring who carry our genetic material.
That's the real immortality. Through our immortal genes.
To our genes,
we individuals and our children and their children are merely
temporary containers. With each generation passing on the
baton of life.
As parents, caring for our offspring, we do our best to ensure
that there's no break in this amazing evolutionary journey.