Lascaux Redux:
The Origin of Sub-species
by Reppy Toppenish

The horse in the cave at Lascaux.

What’s Been Going On
A species, briefly, is a group of related organisms capable of interbreeding. Loose such groups for some millions of years on a planet in this binomial universe and you get the panoply of bloody behavior that morbidly intrigued Hobbes and endlessly fascinated Darwin: the on-going conflict known as "the survival of the fittest."

Let’s give our hypothetical planet a name. How about "Arret"?

Things hum along on Arret. Some species get fitter and thrive, some get unfitter and disappear. Eventually, for reasons still far from clear, creatures arise who think, speak, and make tools. "Fitness" comes to include cleverness. Them with the most smarts not only fuck more, they live to fuck again another day.

Soon enough, you get civilization after civilization built partly on the new cleverness and partly on the new cleverness as applied to tool-making (think the hominid in 2001: A Space Odyssey jubilantly throwing the jawbone murder-weapon into the air).

Generations pass. Civilizations rise and fall, rise and fall. Cleverness compounds itself and slowly constructs an expanding range of labor-saving tools, and then finds ways to make tools that construct other tools really fast. This comes to be called "mass production," and "improving the standard of living."

Previously, every civilization had only a tiny leisure class, built on the back-breaking, short-lived labor of masses of workers. With time enough and wealth, some members of those tiny leisure classes had, through the millennia, sought out the singularly gifted ("artists") and with money encouraged them to exercise their creative gifts (sculpture, painting, music, theater, literature). While the machines of war kept the civilization safe, the profits of greed kept it (at least a small part of it) beautiful.

So things went for a good long time. All the while it was the fittest who survived and sought other fittests with whom to reproduce and thus rear more fittest children. For millennia such was the way of the world.

This "success" repeated over time and in many places resulted in the establishment of Ruling Class Behavior: "We have the money and the power; the fact that we have it means we are the best, the smartest; therefore, it is appropriate for us to make all necessary decisions and rules."

This system, lately known as "social Darwinism," proved effective all over Arret in a wide variety of governing structures. On the surface of this culture or that, one might see aristocracy, or oligarchy, or theocracy, or dictatorship, or democracy, or socialism, or communism. But the hidden foundation was always power-hungry, greedy, elitist Ruling Class Behavior based on the real Golden Rule: Those who have the gold make the rules.

Old Adam and Old Eve, fresh from the jungle, expelled from Paradise, faced (they felt) a brutal, violent world. Cleverly applying jungle rules and slowly becoming highly skilled at improvising on the fly, A & E time and again carried the day.

Which finally got us to Capitalism, and then our very own Late Capitalism, the crown of Darwinist economic and social creation.

What’s Going On Now
In the busy, busy centuries spent constructing this arena of competitive exploitation, the wealth not only spread but, as the exploiters are fond of saying, even trickled down. A new class appeared. If not exactly a new leisure class, it was a class with new leisure. Over several generations starting in the late nineteenth century, more and more children were reared and educated extensively by more and more parents who were less and less driven by the need to win at any cost.

Which led finally to the intra-species schism visible today.

On one side we have the tense old frightened, greedy, man-the-ramparts, batten-the-hatches Adams bolstered by their ever-complicit Eves. Wealth makes might, and might makes right. Get more. Keep more. The sky may not fall today, but in our privileged wisdom we know it will surely fall tomorrow. Call them criers.

On the other side, the creative ones, the players, those who seem, against all odds and all expectation, to think and act as if the earth, as given, is paradise enou. Or, if not quite enou, surely with a little compassionate and careful attention to it and each other, we can make it so. Call them singers.

The criers, with their endless monies, fill the media with, well, their cries of alarm. The sky IS falling. As ever, on the backs of the exploited, they fill their own coffers and tithe truly only to the world’s armies, meanwhile keeping just about everybody in a constant state of paranoid tension

The singers, with their endless hopeful energy, well, they sing, don’t they? In the old media, the old art-forms, and in the new, songs of joyful, celebratory clevernesses the likes of which we haven’t really seen often since somebody thought to paint a breath-taking, magical horse in a smoky cave in central France twenty or thirty thousand years ago. Toys beget toys. Games beget games. Old art in new wondrous bottles.

Now we come to the difficult little evolutionary twist this bizarre development puts on the old Darwinian question: Who ya gonna fuck?

In the behavioral split just describe, are we not in fact seeing the arisal and arrival of a sub-species? One whose members, you may be sure, are as little interested in having sex with Old Adam/Old Eve or their obedient, replicate children, as Old Adam and Eve are in having sex with the gentle geeks, the weirdos, the hackers, the pixel-crazed mad singers of technologies new and old.

The question, probably the only significant question at this point, then becomes: Will Old Adam and his minions, in some spasm of anger and fear (for which after all he in his history is well-known) destroy us all (he, remember, has the weapons ready to do it at any momnet), or will his greedful hoarding instinct hold him back from that abyss long enough for his neo-mutant children to take over?

Ancient, long-forgotten resonances may be stirring, activating, possibly, long-forgotten strategies. We have, after all, been through this before. How many Cro-Magnons chose not to have sex with Neanderthals? And choosing not to, what did they then do? Among other things that we don’t know about, they created us.