Eugene Marais: Worker in a science yet unborn
Nearly 100 years ago, in a country far from the universities of Europe and America, in an internationally peripheral language and in non-serious, unscientific publications, Eugene Marais came to conclusions about life on Earth that were among the most profound scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
Eugene Marais was born in 1871 in Pretoria, then still a frontier town. By the age of 12, he was a published poet. He kept a live python and stored his pens in a human skull on his desk. By 16, he had matriculated and by 19, he was the editor of a cheeky Dutch-Afrikaans newspaper named Land en Volk.
On a farm deep in the berge (mountains), far from the scientific storm raised by Darwin’s conclusions on the origin of species or Freud’s work on the psyche, Marais would study two creatures which, on the face of it, had absolutely nothing in common: termites and baboons.
What was it, he puzzled, that made termites different from baboons? And in what ways were they similar? His conclusion to both questions, as he sat in a hut amid primates and wild mountains, went beyond even Freud: the answer was memory.
Marais began studying termites on a Rietfontein farm. On the first page of The Soul of
the White Ant, he describes this study, rather tellingly, as “an investigation into animal psychology”. He watched them flying from termitaria in their thousands after rain, the female flicking off her wings as she landed. His extensive study was to have two important conclusions, both pioneering, but virtually unnoticed by the wider scientific community of the time.
Firstly, the whole termitarium needed to be considered as a single organism whose organs had not been fused together as in a human being. The queen was the brain and womb, the workers were the mouthparts and tissue builders, the soldiers acted as white blood corpuscles and the humus gardens were the stomach. And secondly, the actions within the termitarium – and by extension, the “hive mind” – were completely instinctive. Any variation would endanger the creature’s particular, hard-won ecological niche.
Marais began writing Soul of the Ape in 1916, but never finished it. It was pieced together years later and published posthumously. His studies, however, began years earlier in a Waterberg devoid of guns, which had been confiscated from farmers after the Anglo Boer War. Conditions for getting close to a troop of wild chacma baboons – which had never heard a shot fired – were ideal.
Science requires theories and Marais devised a few of his own. Unlike termites, he suggested, chacmas – and by extension all primates – had the ability to memorise the relationship between cause and effect. They could accumulate personal memories and, importantly, could therefore vary their behaviour voluntarily.
This was not an evolutionary refinement of instinct, but another type of mind altogether, which Marais named “causal memory”. While the hive mind of termites was all instinct, the causal memory of the chacmas operated quite differently, virtually submerging the instinctive mind. But why? Here comes the good bit…
Natural selection, he said, was not so much the survival of the fittest as Darwin had insisted, but the line of least resistance. Those species best able to adapt to their specific environment survived more surely than those that didn’t. The downside, of course, was that sudden environmental change meant the destruction of specialists because instinctive memories only adapt over eons of time. The solution? Listen to Marais at his lyrical and scientific best:
“If we picture the great continent of Africa with its extreme diversity of natural conditions – its high, cold, treeless plateaus; its impenetrable tropical forests; its great river systems; its inland seas; its deserts; its rains and droughts; its sudden climatic change capable of altering the natural aspects of great tracts of country in a few years – all forming an apparently systemless chaos, and then picture its teeming masses of competing organic life, comprising more species, more numbers and of greater size than can be found on any other continent on Earth, is it not at once evident how great would be the advantage if a species could be liberated from the limiting force of hereditary memories?
“Would it not be conducive to preservation if, under such circumstances, a species could either suddenly change its habitat or meet any new natural conditions thrust upon it by means of immediate adaptation?”
What then would be the nature of the change necessary to bring this about?
“No generalising perfection of hand or foot, nor the attainment of the upright position, nor the transformation of any function in any single organ could render a species immune from the danger inherent in suddenly changing conditions.
“It is not conceivable that it could have been attained in any other way than through a modification of the brain and its functions. In other words, the attributes selected had necessarily to be psychic.”
These adaptations had allowed primates – particularly humans – to penetrate the most varied of natural environments. We became, in the words of Marais, “citizens of a larger world”. In essence, pan-niche apes.
It is hard to believe that Marais was formulating these ideas more than 100 years ago. They raise important questions for psychology and the notion of the unconscious mind and they anticipate the discoveries by Raymond Dart, Louis Leakey and others which support the thesis that the human adventure began in Africa. They also demonstrate the wisdom – later followed by work on primates by researchers such as Jane Goodall – that the only sensible way to study wild creatures is in the wilds.
But, perhaps even more importantly, Marais’ ideas were grounded in his intuition that life on this planet is an interconnected system. By the end of the 20th century, this would become a basic natural science principle – ecology.