Another Life Michael VineyAs summer fades, the roads have emptied eastwards and the strand is washed clean of tyre-marks and barbecue ashes. I emerge from the acre's leafy lair, prepared to engage with my species.
An outing through the mountains to Galway delivers me to the Eyre Square shopping centre (or "center", as now seems more appropriate). Here, to the drone of indecipherable rap music, I find myself people-watching, as entranced as any old Aran fisherman inspecting the tourists on Kilronan quay.
After so many years of living remotely, my daily world stocked with a few comfortable faces, an encounter with strange fellow-humans, en masse, has an almost biological fascination. I am not talking about the newer ethnic enrichment of Galway's already well-hybridised human heritage.
The fresh importations of skin-colour, hair-style, deportment, the swirl of exotic cottons, merely dramatise the differences already there. One can be thoroughly Irish and still look wildly improbable.
The shifting parade offers monstrous foreheads, elasticated necks, brazenly rotund bellies; shaven Giacometti pin-heads and shrink-wrapped de Kooning bosoms; even Picasso's unlikely realignment of eyes. Sheer youth offers some defence against the grosser variations of maturity, and the toddling human young have a frail, dazed beauty. But even without the excesses of distorted features and postures, the variation of humanity is awe-inspiring. What other mammal species not only boasts unique fingerprints, but an appearance so individual that the doppelgänger is a sinister spawn of myth? In his recent updating of Darwin, Almost Like a Whale (1999), Prof Steve Jones insisted that "compared to other primates, humans are not very diverse, most variants are rare, and most people - and most places - are much the same. Chimpanzees are three times more distinct from each other than men, with 50 times as much divergence among separate populations." One might have to be another chimpanzee to find this immediately believable. In books by primate-watchers (mostly patient women), the difficulty of telling their subjects apart is a constant theme. Shirley Strum, in Almost Human: A Journey Into The World of Baboons, described the value of differences in tails: "Crooked tails, chopped-off tails, tails in the shape of letters of the alphabet, bushy tails and skinny tails - the variety of subtle differences was astounding." Even so, distinguishing the females from one another "took intense concentration and a game of comparison and elimination that would end up consuming weeks". In a world of headlong human hybridisation and multi-cultural blending, there seems less and less to intrigue the scientist in variation of homo sapiens skin-colour and body-shape, still less in the details of physiognomy: those weird noses, mouths, eyes and ears!
The survival of people through child-bearing age who would naturally have died from cold, hunger, accident and disease has grossly multiplied both human numbers and the endless permutations of DNA that shape our faces. As Prof Jones puts it: "Our variation under nature is such that we have a great ability to tell ourselves apart." In the age of science that revelled in classification, there were many attempts to sort the variety of people. The late Stephen Jay Gould restored some justice to the memory of the 18th century Dutchman Petrus Camper, who arrived at the idea of a "facial angle" as a way of comparing the skulls of different races and nationalities. He was mainly intrigued by the notions of perfect beauty as expressed in ancient Greek sculpture and he arrived at the angle of 100 degrees from the horizontal as the ideal slant of face from the eyebrows to the chin. His skull measurements were among the beginnings of physical anthropology, but they were also used later in "scientific" but essentially racist classifications that left "superior" Europeans ranked above Orientals and Africans.
Charles Darwin was intrigued by the origins of beauty. He granted that "a great number of male animals, as all our most gorgeous birds . . . and a host of coloured butterflies, have been rendered beautiful for beauty's sake: but this has been effected through sexual selection, that is, by the more beautiful males having been continually preferred by the females, and not for the delight of man". In evolutionary theory, function and adaptive significance come first.
But even here, appearances may not be all they seem. Biologists were long baffled by the function of the human chin, a structure missing in the great apes. Then they realised that the chin is neither for taking things on, nor for catching drips of custard, but merely a consequence of differential growth rates in the upper and lower margins of the jaw.