The Science of Discworld II

children. We not only care for our own children, which is entirely to be expected biologically, but for other people’s children, too; indeed for other humankind’s children (we often find foreign-looking children more attractive than our own); indeed for the children of all land vertebrate species . We coo over lambs, fawns, newly hatched turtles, even tadpoles!
    Our sibling species, chimpanzees, are far more realistic. They too prefer baby animals. They prefer them for food, being more tender. (Humans also have a liking for lamb, calf, piglet, duckling … We can coo over them and eat them.) After the kind of warfare now well documented between chimpanzee groups, the victors will kill and eat the young of the vanquished. Male lions will kill the young of prides they take over, and eating the corpses is not unusual. Many mammalian females will eat their young if both are starving, and will frequently ‘re-process’ the first litter in this manner anyway.
    No, it’s very clear that we are the odd men out. Odd Men indeed. We do have mental circuits to delight in, and protect, our own babies, so that the later Mickey Mouse converged on the outline of a three-year-old toddler, as did E.T. It is no wonder that so many people paid his phone bill. But we also go daft about cuddly juveniles of far too many other kinds. Biologically, this is very odd.
    A by-product of our finding other species’ babies so attractive has clearly been the domestication of dogs, cats, goats, horses, elephants, hawks, chickens, cattle … These symbioses have given immense pleasure to billions of people, and to their animals, and have contributed greatly to our nutrition. Those who feel that we have exploited the animals unfairly should consider the alternatives for the animals, in the wild, where nearly all of them are eaten alive as babies, without even the benefit of a quick death.
    Agriculture can perhaps be attributed to our other propensity, storytelling: the seed becoming the plant has served as an image for so many new words and thoughts, metaphors, new understandings of nature. And the wealth generated by agriculture permitted people to afford princes and philosophers, peasants 3 and popes. The cultural capital has grown as we have passed our knowledge on to succeeding generations. But it’s more comfortable to enjoy that culture if there are a couple of warehouses full of barley for beer, wheat in the fields and cows in the meadows.
    We have very recently made the whole business of symbiosis with plants and animals much more technical – those controversial ‘genetically modified organisms’ – and we have lost a lot by taking our animal helpers out of the system, especially dogs and horses, and replacing them with machinery.
    We could not have predicted what the animal and plant symbioses did for us, for our extelligence, and we don’t know what losing them will do. Events like that explode on us as the bicycle ride that is extelligence careers down this long technical hill, and can have totally unexpected effects.
    Yes, the Ford Model T made motoring affordable to many more people – but a socially much more important change was that it gave privacy in comfort for the first time, so that a large proportion of the next generation was sired on the upholstery of the car’s back seat. Similarly, the dog coming in as a symbiont meant that we could hunt more successfully. Then, as a guard dog, it meant that private farms could be protected, and there was help with rounding up the animals and keeping away predators, including human ones. Lapdogs probably affected our sexual courtesies, particularly in eighteenth-century France, and dog and cat shows have stirred our upper-middle classes with, in modern England, the lower aristocracy.
    Think for a moment about what we’ve done to dogs and cats. More than horses and cows, they grow up in our families. We play with them, like we play with our own children, and the play often involves our own children. As with our own children, this interaction begetsminds in our pets. Even human children don’t do much good on the mind front if they don’t play. And Jack found, and showed Ian, that even invertebrates, bright invertebrates like mantis shrimps, can acquire minds if they’re involved in play activities. We described in Figments of Reality how this happens. Let’s just note here that we have uplifted 4 our symbionts