You are, apparently, unique.
You come from the only species on earth that employs what is known as ‘cultural evolution’ as a strategy for getting ahead. This is the concept that only we evolve knowledge, ideas and discoveries from generation to generation cumulatively. In short, we build on and improve on what earlier generations have done, whereas the humble mole, for example, just bumbles from trap to trap for eternity. If they had cultural evolution, you would at some stage have had a conversation that began:
‘Mum. You know Dad didn’t come back last night, and we heard a clang? Shall we go and have a quick look for him?’
Yesterday, I had good reason to question this understanding. Exactly two years after paying for it, and delayed seven times across twenty months and through torrential rain (once), snow and ice (once), Trevor (once), David (once) and Covid (three times), we finally got to play our day of golf at Celtic Manor in South Wales. The results shouldn’t necessarily detain us now, and neither should the bizarre habit of the clubhouse staff to only bring you lunch if you have ordered in on the App, and through a QR code that our phones were too old to read. So much so, that they were able to send three different members of staff who, apparently, did nothing other than tell people like us that they weren’t prepared to take an order.
No, what should detain us is the behaviour of the carrion crows on the Roman Road course, and the squirrels on the Montgomery.
With respect to the former, they have not only worked out that unattended golf carts probably contain food, but that they are never more likely to do so than on the 10th green, where the golfers have just cleaned out the halfway hut of burgers, chips and sandwiches, and where they have to leave their kit some way from the green. ‘No point,’ they muse, ‘us hanging around the first hole, were golfers are all keen and clean, or the eighth, where they have run out of food altogether. Still less the last few holes where they are down to tepid water only. No, we need to be right here, right in the centre of action.’ Over the generation, a few crows have built a very nice living out of it.
And the squirrels? A family group of them have worked out over the mists of time that looking cute leads to food, and that looking cute in an already beautiful place leads to even more food. Thus, you find yourself on the thirteenth tee, just after one of the most beautiful holes in world golf, and there, all around the tee box, are squirrels sitting up on their hind-quarters looking both appealing and hungry. It didn’t work with us- we had wolfed the lot earlier- but it obviously passes the risk-reward test that nature imposes on all species at some stage. It doesn’t stop there. Because the squirrels have learned about cuteness, and passed it on through the generations, the buzzards have learned that the thirteenth hole on the Montgomery is a good place to nest with an intensity not seen anywhere else in South Wales.
This latter information could be a result of apex predator trophic cascade, but I can see we are getting a little ahead of ourselves.
So there you have it. Animal species merrily accumulating wisdom across the generations whilst, back here in human land, a group of people with names like Boris, Matt, Gavin and Priti proving exactly the opposite.
As David Attenborough once said: ‘Real success can only come if there is a change in our societies and in our economics and in our politics.
Even the squirrels get that.
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