“You’re speaking metaphorically?” Harding said.
“I’m talking about all the order in the natural world,” Malcolm said. “And how perhaps it can emerge fast, through crystallization. Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it’s a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.”
“Yes? Why is that?”
“Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovavate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media – it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benneton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity – our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts. Are you done?”
“Almost,” Harding said. “Hang on.”
“And believe me, it’ll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape, you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn’t require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It’s just behavior that suddenly emerges, and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. My idea was that dinosaurs – being complex creatures – might have undergone some of these behavioral changes. And that led to their extinction.”
“What, all of them?”
“It just takes a few,” Malcolm said. “Some dinosaur roots in the swamps around the inland sea, changes the water circulation, and destroys the plant ecology that twenty other species depend on. Bang! They’re gone. That causes still more dislocations. A predator dies off, and its prey grow unchecked. The ecosystem becomes unbalanced. More things go wrong. More species die. And suddenly it’s over. It could have happened that way.”
“Just behavior…”
“Yes,” Malcolm said. “Anyway, that was the idea. And I had this nice thought that we might prove it….But now it’s finished. We have to get out of here. You better tell the others.”
Thorne clicked on the radio. “Eddie? It’s Doc.”
There was no answer.
“Eddie?”
The radio crackled. And then they heard a noise that at first sounded like static. It was a moment before they realized it was a high-pitched human scream.
The High Hide
The first of the raptors hissed as it began jumping up, clattering against the high hide shaking the structure. Its claws raked against the metal, and it fell down again. Eddie was astonished at how high it jumped – the animal could leap eight feet straight up, again and again, without apparent effort. Its jumps attracted the other animals, which slowly came back to circle the hide.
Soon the hide was surrounded by leaping, snarling raptors. It swayed back and forth as the animals slammed into it, clawed for purchase, and fell back again. But more ominously, Levine saw, they were learning. Already, some of them had begun to use their clawed forearms to grip the structure, holding on while their legs got footing. One of the raptors came within a few feet of their little shelter before finally falling back. The falls never seemed to hurt the animals. They immediately leapt up, and jumped again.