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Deep History, Interspecies Coevolution, and the Eco-imaginary

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Exploring Animal Encounters

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ((PSAAL))

Abstract

The recent turn to deep history reveals an interrelational story of hominin emergence among myriad other living creatures, full of bodily intimacies, shared habitats, and interspecific cultural communications. This essay examines studies of coevolution, symbiosis, and mimicry expressing pervasive intersubjectivity that are increasingly acknowledged by biologists and biosemioticians. Traditional oral narratives, rituals, and early literary texts encode sedimented evolutionary histories of such relationships, preserving and continuing memories that are semiotic scaffoldings of cultural mimicry, mirroring and mapping the living world where our ancestors saw themselves in dynamic interrelation with the other animal species around them. These constitute an eco-imaginary expressing the human participation in coevolved animality that Merleau-Ponty saw as the logos of the sensible world.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 1–3.

  2. 2.

    Martin Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History: How It was Discovered and Why It Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 5–6.

  3. 3.

    Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 201–207, 212.

  4. 4.

    Philippe Descola, The Ecology of Others, trans. by Geneviève Godbout and Benjamin P. Luley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 86–87.

  5. 5.

    Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New View of Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 3; Jesper Hoffmeyer, Signs of Meaning in the Universe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 13; Nessa Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 293–297.

  6. 6.

    Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Compiled and with notes by Dominique Séglard, trans. by Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 268, 166.

  7. 7.

    Cynthia Willett, Interspecies Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 12–13.

  8. 8.

    Margulis, Symbiotic Planet, 3.

  9. 9.

    Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven, “Butterflies and Plants: A Study in Coevolution,” Evolution 18 (1964): 586, 608.

  10. 10.

    Richard Lewontin, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, Environment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 54–55, 100; Dennis Noble, The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 18, 21–22.

  11. 11.

    Noble, Music of Life, 18; Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink, A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries About the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 61–63; see also Margulis, Symbiotic Planet, 80–85.

  12. 12.

    Margulis, Symbiotic Planet, 64–68; Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 31–32; Kalevi Kull, “Adaptive Evolution Without Natural Selection,” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 112 (2014): 287–294.

  13. 13.

    Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: Penguin, 1982), 132–133, 135.

  14. 14.

    Adolf Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 122–123.

  15. 15.

    Terrence W. Deacon, “Is Semiosis One of Darwin’s ‘Several Powers’?” in Semiotics in the Wild: Essays in Honour of Kalevi Kull on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, edited and with an Introduction by Kati Lindström, Riin Magnus, Timo Maran, and Morten Tønnessen (Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2012), 71–77, 72.

  16. 16.

    Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 175–176, 252–258.

  17. 17.

    Jesper Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics: Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2008), 196–197.

  18. 18.

    Margulis, Symbiotic Planet, 11, 25–26, 33.

  19. 19.

    Noble, Music of Life, 38.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 48–49; Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics, 30; Carey, The Epigenetics Revolution, 297; Kull, “Adaptive Evolution”.

  21. 21.

    Angela E. Douglas, The Symbiotic Habit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 162–163.

  22. 22.

    Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics, 57, 94, 311.

  23. 23.

    Edmund Husserl, “Addendum XXIII of The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,” trans. Niall Keane. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 44, no. 6 (2013): 6.

  24. 24.

    Enzo Paci, The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, trans. Paul Piccone (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 96.

  25. 25.

    Annabelle Dufourcq, “Is a World Without Animals Possible?” Environmental Philosophy 11 (2014): 84.

  26. 26.

    H. Martin Schaeffer and Graeme D. Ruxton, Plant-Animal Communication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), iv–v.

  27. 27.

    Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics, 355.

  28. 28.

    Margulis, Symbiotic Planet, 65; Alphonso Lingis, “Animal Body, Inhuman Face,” in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 166; Jesper Hoffmeyer, “I Am Plural,” in Semiotics in the Wild: Essays in Honour of Kalevi Kull on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, ed. and with an Introduction by Kati Lindström, Riin Magnus, Timo Maran, and Morten Tønnessen (Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2012), 180.

  29. 29.

    Hoffmeyer, “I Am Plural,” 180.

  30. 30.

    Dufourcq, “Is a World Without Animals Possible,” 88; see also Haraway, When Species Meet, 34.

  31. 31.

    Jordi Gómez, Ascensión Ariza-Mateos, and Isabel Cacho, “Virus is a Signal for the Host Cell,” Biosemiotics 8 (2015): 483–491.

  32. 32.

    Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics, 48.

  33. 33.

    Darwin, Charles (1862) On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilised by Insects, and the Good Effects of Intercrossing (London: John Murray), 197–203; J. Ardetti, J. Elliott, I.J. Kitching, and L.T. Wasserthal, “‘Good Heavens What Insect Can Suck It’—Charles Darwin, Angraecum Sesquipedale and Xanthopan Morganii Praedicta,” Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 169 (2012): 403–432; Dave Hone, “Moth Tongues, Orchids, and Darwin—The Predictive Power of Evolution.” https://www.theguardian.com/science/lost-worlds/2013/oct/02/moth-tongues-orchids-darwin-evolution; Also see “Darwins Comet Orchid” (2008), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMVN1EWxfAU.

  34. 34.

    Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics, 50–51, 195–196.

  35. 35.

    Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns, 162, 183.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 185.

  37. 37.

    Timo Maran, “Scaffolding and Mimicry: A Semiotic View of the Evolutionary Dynamics of Mimicry Systems,” Biosemiotics 8 (2015): 213–215; Sebastiano De Bona, Janne K. Valkonen, Andrés López-Sepulcre, and Johanna Mappes, “Predator Mimicry, Not Conspicuousness, Explains the Efficacy of Butterfly Eyespots,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 282 (2015): 20150202 (https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.0202); Also see “Caterpillar Mimics Snake” (2016), https://youtube.com/watch?v=O0_cteveCQI.

  38. 38.

    Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns, 192–195.

  39. 39.

    Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 188–189.

  40. 40.

    Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns, 118, 122.

  41. 41.

    Maran, “Scaffolding and Mimicry,” 212; see also Karel Kleisner, “The Semantic Morphology of Adolf Portmann: A Starting Point for the Biosemiotics of Organic Form?” Biosemiotics 1 (2008): 207–219. For new work on mimicry that resonates with the arguments of this essay, see Roberto Marchesini, “Zoomimesis,” trans. Jeffrey Bussolini. Angelaki 21 (2016): 175–197.

  42. 42.

    Maran, “Scaffolding and Mimicry,” 211.

  43. 43.

    Portmann, Animal Forms and Patterns, 124.

  44. 44.

    Jesper Hoffmeyer, “Semiotic Scaffolding: A Unitary Principle Gluing Life and Culture Together,” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 19, no. 3 (2015): 247–251.

  45. 45.

    Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 140–151, 191–193, 151.

  46. 46.

    Hoffmeyer, “Semiotic Scaffolding,” 250–251.

  47. 47.

    Maran, “Scaffolding and Mimicry,” 212–213.

  48. 48.

    Hoffmeyer, “Semiotic Scaffolding,” 252.

  49. 49.

    Ward and Kirschvink, New History of Life, 332–333.

  50. 50.

    Lee R. Berger et al., “Homo Naledi, a New Species of the Genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa,” eLife 2015;4: e09560; see also Carol V. Ward et al. “Associated Ilium and Femur from Koobi Fora, Kenya, and Postcranial Diversity in Early Homo,” The Journal of Human Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1016/jevol.2015.01.005.

  51. 51.

    Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5–25; Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 258.

  52. 52.

    David Reich et al., “Genetic History of an Archaic Hominin Group from Denisova Cave in Siberia,” Nature 468 (2010): 1053–1060; Eugene E. Harris, Ancestors in Our Genome: The New Science of Human Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 118–135, 172–190.

  53. 53.

    Christopher S. Henshilwood, and Benoît Dubreuil, “Style, Symbolism, and Complex Technology: The Middle Stone Age in Southern South Africa,” Current Anthropology 53 (2012): 132–133.

  54. 54.

    André Leroi-Gourhan, Treasures of Prehistoric Art, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1967); Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972).

  55. 55.

    Jean Clottes and David Lewis Williams, The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998); see also Jean Clottes, The Art of the Earliest Times (Salt Lake: University of Utah Press, 2003).

  56. 56.

    Louise Westling, “Merleau-Ponty and the Eco-Literary Imaginary,” in Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, ed. Hubert Zapf (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 65–83; Annabelle Dufourcq, “The Ontological Imaginary: Dehiscence, Sorcery, and Creativity in Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy,” Filozofia 69 (2014): 708–718.

  57. 57.

    Hoffmeyer, Signs of Meaning in the Universe, 13.

  58. 58.

    K.N. Laland, J. Odling-Smee, and S. Myles, “How Culture Shaped the Human Genome: Bringing Genetics and the Humans Sciences Together,” The National Review of Genetics 11 (2010): 137–148; P.J. Richerson, R. Boyd, and J. Heinrich, “Gene-Culture Coevolution in the Age of Genomics,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 107, Suppl. 2 (2010): 8985–8992; M.W. Feldman and K.N. Laland, “Gene-Culture Coevolutionary Theory,” Trends in Ecological Evolution 5347 (1996): 453–457; T.J.H. Morgan, et al., “Experimental Evidence for the Co-evolution of Hominin Tool-Making Teaching and Language,” Nature Communications 6: 6029. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7029 (2015).

  59. 59.

    Aristotle (350 B.C.E) Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (orig. 1902) The Internet Classics Archive http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html.

  60. 60.

    Wendy Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics, and the Evolution of Culture (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2006), 19.

  61. 61.

    Patrick D. Nunn and Nicholas J. Reid, “Aboriginal Memories of Inundation of the Australian Coast Dating from More than 7,000 Years Ago,” Australian Geographer 47, no. 1 (2016): 11–47.

  62. 62.

    Douglas Deur, “A Most Sacred Place: The Significance of Crater Lake among the Indians of Southern Oregon,” The Oregon Historical Quarterly 103 (2002): 18–49.

  63. 63.

    Stephanie Dalley, “Introduction” to The Epic of Gilgamesh, in Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others, ed. and trans. by Stephanie Dalley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 39–49, 40.

  64. 64.

    Andrew George, Introduction to The Epic of Gilgamesh, ed. and trans. by Andrew George (London: Penguin, 1999) xix–xxi; Dalley, “Introduction,” 40–41.

  65. 65.

    Dalley, “Introduction,” 48–49.

  66. 66.

    Ibid., 51–52.

  67. 67.

    Louise Westling, The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 17–22; Louise Westling, The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 49–56; Stephanie Dalley, “The Natural World in Ancient Mesopotamian Literature,” in A Global History of Literature and the Environment, ed. John Parham and Louise Westling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 21–36.

  68. 68.

    Harris, Ancestors in Our Genome, 175–177.

  69. 69.

    Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 2–3; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925), ed. by J.R.R. Tolkien and E.V. Gordon (Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press), 23.

  70. 70.

    Merleau-Ponty, Nature, 166, 272–273.

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    Louise Westling

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  1. North American Department, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Dominik Ohrem

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    Matthew Calarco

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Westling, L. (2018). Deep History, Interspecies Coevolution, and the Eco-imaginary. In: Ohrem, D., Calarco, M. (eds) Exploring Animal Encounters. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92504-2_9

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