“The beast,” Louis said. “I’ve seen it. I’ve looked in its eyes.”
Earl nodded. “Yes, and what a disturbing sight it is, eh? At our roots, animals, nothing but animals. Beasts. We crawled from the immortal slime of creation with the will to kill and that will is still upon us. Upright animals with savage instincts and an inheritance of acquired, barbaric characteristics. We can write poetry and make music, build cities and microcomputers and send probes to Mars, but in our hearts, our black beating little hearts, still Miocene apes and pithecanthropoid hunters. Love, hate, greed, want, violence, war. Love is a romanticized adaptation of the breeding/brooding impulse. Materialism is simply an expression of the animal instinct to covet. Nationalism, our flag-waving patriotism, nothing more than the ancient animal drive to maintain and defend a territory and war… yes, even war, nothing but an overblown, exaggeration of the territorial impulse to raid, to kill, to take what belongs to another and make it our own.”
What Louis wanted to know was: what activated this monstrous gene? What set this regression, this primordial memory—or whatever you wanted to call it—into action? “What was the mechanism, Earl? What was the machine or influence that set it all free and on such a massive scale? Just overpopulation? Stress?”
“We’ll never really know, Louis. Anymore than any other herd animal will know. It’s inside us, though, my friend. These impulses, this sadism, it’s inborn and inbred. We’re the product of our ancestors. No more, no less. Why do people murder each other? Why do they kill their own children? Their neighbors? Their wives? Why do they allow genocide to happen? Why do they lynch people of a different skin color? Why do they hate those with more or with less than them or with different religious affiliations? The beast, Louis, the beast inside. The imperatives to descend into our prehistory, into our savage past, are locked up in all of us.
“How many times have you read that somebody killed another and they really weren’t sure why? The Devil made me do it… except, we all carry the devil inside of us. Our animal past is why. We all have terrible buried impulses, but most of us don’t act upon them. But now and again, a select few or even a mob does. It’s a combination of our brutal heredity acting in accordance with deep-seated, repressed wants and desires. That’s what you’re seeing here: all the awful, dirty, hateful, and twisted things growing in the underbelly of this world, this town, in its collective mind, have been unleashed. All the terrible things festering inside these people have been released. It was genetically preordained, I suppose. The conditions were right and it just happened. That’s no answer. Not really. But the potential was there and has been in every human population since we evolved from a lesser primate. God help us, but the world is now a great living laboratory of the human condition and the mechanics of violence, primal instinct, purge and atavism. The evil is here, Louis, and the evil is us. We made the Devil in our own image.”
“But what about the animals, Earl?”
“Animals?”
Louis swallowed thickly as he told Earl about the police station. The dogs there. How they had died fighting men or fighting with them.
“Hmm, interesting.” Earl considered it. “Well, there’s only one logical explanation. Hormones.”
“Hormones?”
Earl nodded. “Yes, hormones, pheromones. It was long thought that pheromones were the province of insects. Not so. Recent biochemical studies tell a different story. All species have them. Most are species-specific, but certain kinds can be read by other species. There are aggregation pheromones which function to herd species in defense against predators or for mating purposes. Primer pheromones which trigger behavioral changes in reaction to environment. Releaser or attractant pheromones which attract mates for miles. Territorial pheromones which are carried in the urine to mark territorial boundaries or lairs or to warn off intruders. Sex pheromones which indicate the female is ready for breeding. All sorts of chemical signatures. And then there are alarm pheromones which alert a species when one of their own is under attack. Studies have shown that these pheromones, in mammals, trigger the fight or flee instinct. They make animals quite aggressive. A harmless tomcat becomes a beast. Prey animals will tend to flee, predators will generally fight. Those primitives out there—that’s a kind word for them—must be letting off alarm pheromones of absolute aggression and the dogs are responding in kind. It’s a chemical thing. The dogs cannot help themselves. They fight. If directed against a common enemy, they fight with our primitives. Lacking the same, they fight against them.”
Louis hated Earl at that moment. He was reducing man to a laboratory rat. Maybe that’s all any species was, a victim of their own chemistry, but he still hated it. It was so… dehumanizing.
“The regression, Earl. Can it be stopped?”
Earl didn’t even attempt to answer that one. “Have you ever heard of a man named Raymond Dart?”
Louis told him he hadn’t.
“Raymond Dart was an Australian anthropologist and comparative anatomist. A true giant in the field. In 1924 he discovered the fossil remains of Australopithecus in a South African limestone quarry. In time, he also discovered more fossils of this extinct hominid, along with great heaps of fossilized bones that were the prey of the Australopithecine. He also discovered crude weapons such as clubs made from antelope bones and knives fashioned from jawbones, as well as heaps of animal bones and baboon skulls which bore the marks of death blows from these very weapons. As did the skulls of other Australopithecines. Evidence that was supported by forensic experts who examined the remains. The dawn of organized murder, Louis! A quarter of a million years before man! From this Dart theorized that we evolved not from a gentle vegetarian ape as established paleoanthropology would have it, but from a savage, predatory ape with a lust for killing. It was called the “Killer Ape” theory. He perpetuated it in his paper, ‘The Predatory Transition from Man to Ape.’ In the paper he said and I quote verbatim: ‘The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices or their substitutes in formalized religions and with world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophiliac practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator—this predacious habit, this mark of Cain—that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora.’ Well, don’t you see, Louis? Don’t you grasp it?”
Louis was way too tired for thinking, for anything this heavy. “We evolved from a killer ape, I guess. Not that I’m really surprised.”
“Yes, basically,” Earl said, very excited to be lecturing once again. “The innate depravity of our species comes directly from the killer ape. Civilization is only an attractive cloak, for beneath we are murderous beasts. We are territorial, aggressive, and murderous. To our species and every other, this is why we wage war, this is the foundation of mass murder, serial killings, genocide, and our instinctive cruelty. We are killers. Listen to me, Louis. Dart further suggested that we did not evolve intelligence and then turn to killing, we evolved intelligence because we turned to killing. At some point, our ancestors branched off from their non-aggressive cousins. These early hominids became predatory probably because of the scarcity of food and probably by imitating other predators as primitives will do. We learned to stand erect to hunt, to give chase to our prey. Hands free to grip and tear, but lacking teeth or claws, we developed weapons. Crude imitations from bone, rock, wood. Ah, now the use of weapons entails great coordination, thus our nervous systems were challenged and our brains enlarged. The development of hunting tactics enlarged our brains still further. We are men today, Louis, because our ancestors were killers. As Robert Ardrey said in African Genesis, man had not fathered the weapon, the weapon fathered man.”