After what seemed like a biblical period of rain—40 days and 40 nights—the sun at last came out, as did the lizards on the terrace of my house in France, where I luxuriated with them in the warm spring sunshine.
One of my many regrets is that I am not a naturalist, though I enjoy the casual observation of the natural world. Indeed, I can happily watch the lizards for extended periods of time: if only I knew how to interpret their behavior!
One curious thing that has happened to the lizards in the last five years is that many more of them have become melanotic, that is, dark- or black-skinned. They are now predominant in the population, and before five years ago, I did not notice any such lizards at all.
What was the reason for this relatively sudden change in the appearance of the population? Lizards are cold-blooded creatures and it is said that a dark skin allows them to warm up and retain the heat of the sun quicker and better than a lighter skin. For a change in the proportion of melanosis in the population to have occurred, however, it must not only have made them more comfortable but conferred some survival advantage upon them—at least according to the theory of natural selection—and the weather is getting warmer, not colder.
What could the advantage be, then? That predators are less attracted to them than to those of lighter skin? The melanotics are more rather than less conspicuous on the terrace, at least to the human eye. That the change in skin colour occurred pari passu with some other change that conferred a population advantage—greater fecundity, for example? If there were room for only a certain number of lizards on the terrace because of limitations in food supply, those with greater fecundity would crowd out those with lesser, other things being equal.
Here was a small mystery which I should never have the patience to unravel. Only long-term, patient, and persistent scientifically organized observation could unravel it, of a type that I have never performed, either from temperamental or moral defect.
This defect, whatever its origin or status, makes me all the more admirative of the vast accumulation of the knowledge of mankind. When on my land I observed a snake with a yellow band or collar just below its head scurry away, so that I caught sight of it for only a few seconds, I identified it as Natrix helvetica, the Swiss grass snake. By a constant accretion of careful and painstaking observation, all the habits of this creature are known—but with how much time expended, how much determination, how much intelligence! We should not take for granted knowledge that we can now so easily find, but rather render homage (in our minds) to our predecessors in constructive, or at least harmless and disinterested, curiosity.
As it happens, Natrix helvetica played a small part in what might, somewhat grandly, be called my intellectual development. In the late 1950s, my father took us on a holiday to Switzerland. He rowed one day across Lake Lugano, and we reached the far shore, where I saw, also very briefly as it scurried away, a dark snake with a yellow band around its neck. I told my father what I had seen, but he, no student of Nature, pooh-poohed it, saying that I had imagined it. I said no more, and I suppose he must have thought that I accepted his adult judgment, but in my heart—or my mind—I continued to believe that I had seen what I had seen. (It is possible, I suppose, that, snakes having such a reputation for intrinsic malevolence or dangerousness, my father was trying to reassure me, though I was not frightened in the least by what I had seen—rather exultant.) I subsequently learned that I have been right.
The episode made me skeptical of authority and taught me to rely on my own judgment. Adults did not know everything and could be mistaken. I suppose it was a personal apprehension of the motto of one of the oldest and most distinguished scientific organisations in the world, the Royal Society: Nullius in verba, On nobody’s word.
But of course, the disadvantage of belief in one’s own judgment is the development of an arrogance which, if carried far enough, can lead to a generalized skepticism of everything else, which in its own way is as credulous as complete credulity itself. In fact, the vast majority of what we know has necessarily to be taken on authority rather than on the evidence of our own eyes. Our problem is always to distinguish between real or genuine and unjustified or bogus authority, bearing in mind also that even the best authority may on occasion be mistaken.
But to return to the melanotic lizards on my terrace. I watched two of them for some time. One, the larger, appeared to be bullying the other. The bully chased his victim, appearing to bite at his tail, though never hanging on to it. The victim ran away, but not very far. The bully would appear to turn from the fray, as if no longer interested, and then return suddenly to the attack. This happened several times. Neither lizard was aware of my looming presence: I could easily have put an end to their little game, whatever it was, upon which they were so intensively and exclusively concentrated.
Was it a fight for territory, in which case why did the larger not simply chase the smaller away once and for all? Was it play? Was it a ritual of courtship? At any rate, to my surprise, it was the larger lizard that eventually left the field, while the smaller found a caterpillar about a third of its length and proceeded to eat it. At first, I thought it had bitten off more than it could chew, but in very little time it had swallowed its vast meal.
I found myself anthropomorphizing, investing the lizards with conscious purposes, as if they were enjoying themselves, or were angry, frightened, outraged, or determined. This, despite the manifest tininess of their brains. The philosopher, Thomas Nagel, wrote a famous paper, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? whose object was to show that consciousness and subjective experience could never be reduced to physical explanation, and in essence remained mysterious. I found myself asking, What Is It Like to Be a Lizard?
As I watched the lizards, an almost clichéd quotation from Shakespeare also came to insistently into my mind:
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
Are we not like the lizards, as we go about our avocations that seem so overwhelmingly important to us, unaware of some force looming over us that could brush us away without difficulty or hesitation?
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