Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys

By Rob Dunn and E. O. Wilson

Biologists and laypeople alike have repeatedly claimed victory over life. A thousand years ago we thought we knew almost everything; a hundred years ago, too. But even today, Rob Dunn argues, discoveries we can't yet imagine still await.

In a series of vivid portraits of single-minded scientists, Dunn traces the history of human discovery, from the establishment of classification in the eighteenth century to today's attempts to find life in space. The narrative telescopes from a scientist's attempt to find one single thing (a rare ant-emulating beetle species) to another scientist's attempt to find everything in a small patch of jungle in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. With poetry and humor, Dunn reminds readers how tough and exhilarating it is to study the natural world, and why it matters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 6, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061979743

Book preview

Part I

Beginnings

1. What We All Used to Know

Just a few tens of thousands of years ago, we all lived in Africa. For most of human history and prehistory, we lived in small, illiterate communities. We began in the savannas where we foraged and hunted. We collected the animals and plants and named what we found. Slowly at first, some individuals or communities left on foot, following game or chance, or maybe just fleeing other people. They traveled along routes about which we continue to speculate. With time, they forgot where they had been. They carried no record of their past with them, beyond what survived in myth. Any story or name not mentioned in a lifetime disappeared.

Every year the front line of villages moved farther out. It was a slow wave of bodies and livelihoods. Individuals in that front line found, with each move, new animals, new plants, and more generally, new life. Collectively, humanity revealed pieces of the story of life. Because nothing was written and languages, as we spread, diverged, each discovery was local, each lesson learned repeatedly. Communities landed on the new landscape like a reader landing on a random page in a book. They found themselves surrounded by but a few paragraphs of something much larger. They set about translating those paragraphs. In each place, on each page, people would have to give names not only to all the wild beasts, but also to the plants, the fungi, the beetles, and the ants, and anything else that was to be used, avoided, or simply discussed. On these organisms and their new names they hung knowledge, stories, and belief.

That was the first great wave of discovery. It is a forgotten part of our scientific story. Long before Columbus or Magellan, much of the world had been found. Seldom do we consider what those first great explorers in small, fire-lit communities understood of Earth.

While drinking an espresso and reading People magazine, it is hard to imagine our kin ever ate shoots and leaves, that they ever knew most of the animals and plants by name.* We look out now and see pigeons. We see the nameless green of the trees, and of the unclassifiable weeds among the sidewalk cracks. Insects bat at our screens and we swat them without partiality. We imagine now that the natives (of no relation to us) were ignorant or at least simple, but a few generations ago, we were those people. We all lived in small communities, hunted, and foraged. We shat in the woods.

Clear views of how we once lived and what we once knew are illusive. History has left us potsherds and ruins, but little in the way of records of the knowledge our ancestors had of the species around them. Contemporary communities where people gather and hunt or even farm can, however, be models of parts of the past. In many such communities, people still record little, know mostly what they have heard and remember, and name new things they find. As long as we are careful to remember that they are also, in important ways, different from ancient communities, we can use these contemporary communities to understand aspects of how life might have been in the past. In these communities, we can find something of who we once were. Having a measure of what we once were and knew is necessary if we are to understand how far we have come and how far we might go.

One could go almost anywhere in the world to find communities of people living off the land in ways that require traditional oral knowledge of the species around them, knowledge our ancestors would have needed. I started in Cavinas, Bolivia. The road to Cavinas is long and in most places not a road at all, but instead a river or a footpath. To get to Cavinas our first big step would be to get to Riberalta, the biggest city in the northern Bolivian Amazon.*

To get to Riberalta, my wife Monica and I flew to Santa Cruz, Bolivia. From Santa Cruz, we took a bus to Trinidad, a sleepy town at the southern edge of Bolivia’s great, flooded Amazonian savannas. From Trinidad, we took the long bus north. We were traveling in what was to be the dry season, but the water had not yet drained out of the land. The floods still clung to grasses, forest and, as would soon be relevant, to the roads.

The going was slow. A bus ride that was to take one day took several. Mosquitoes flew in the windows, fed on us, and flew back out. The heat came in and stayed. Day came and was replaced by night, once, twice, and then a third time. For several days, the bus passed through what remains largely unbroken forest and savanna, a landscape populated with a billion insects, a dozen primate species, caimans, anacondas, and the occasional forlorn cow. During that journey, the bus made a single planned stop (in a one-hut town majestically named Sheraton). Of course, that excludes the stops for flat tires, broken axles (fixed with rope), and a six-hour period during which the driver of the bus tried to get it unstuck by hitching it to horses, cows, and then, all at once, a truck, two horses, and a cow. We suffered the same things that ailed the early Western explorers: bad food, bad transport, long days, and—let’s face it—our own lack of fortitude. In retrospect, the trip was a kind of earned joy. During those days though, it was nearly all miserable.

As we rode into Riberalta, the roadsides turned from forest to agriculture, to the point where we could almost have been driving through any Midwestern farmland—but Riberalta is not Iowa. Despite the cows and crops, it is isolated, tropical, and wild. Seen from above, Riberalta is a kind of settled island, surrounded by forest and water. To its north is the Madre de Dios River, which bends and bows its way back up to the Andes. To the east of Riberalta is the Beni River, which meets the Madre de Dios at the edge of town. The Beni River drains the long, flat, seasonally flooded plains of Bolivia, on which a large civilization once rose and, somewhat mysteriously, fell. The rest of the surroundings are forest, punctuated by small fields, pastures, savannas, and more rivers (all draining into the Madre de Dios River, which itself drains into the mouth of the Amazon some two thousand miles away). Within the city are small houses, many of which are still roofed with thatch, and a single city block with paved streets. On that paved block are most of the town’s two-story houses, all owned at one time or another by rubber barons, Brazil nut barons, or the odd mayor. Each night the wealthy of Riberalta (a relative kind of wealth) get into their cars or onto their motorcycles and circle the single plaza, cruising. The poorer, motorless masses look on, faces powdered with the ever-present ether of ancient red dust winnowed from the mountains by time.

When we arrived, we took motorcycle taxis to a hotel at the edge of town run by a woman named Doña Rosa. Our backpacks still on our backs, we had to flex our stomach muscles to keep from tipping backward with the weight of our books, shoes, and clothes at each bump in the road. At the hotel, we moved into a first-floor room beside the Beni River, unpacked our things, and proceeded to sleep for the first day and a half. We would stay here, our home base, off and on over the next several years.

Our room had its drawbacks. It was close enough to the neighbor’s house for us to hear them fighting, close enough to the street to hear the bread boy’s horn each morning, and close enough to the kitchen to go to sleep to the washing of pans. But it was also so close to the Beni River that we woke up the first night, and each subsequent one, to hear the brown water tumbling by beside us. We dreamed of rivers. Rivers, like the Beni, carried the first Amazonians around the forests. Rivers flooded the lands where agriculture emerged. It was the rivers in which the debris of the Amazon’s forests steeped. The rivers saw it all and carried it with them—the wild cries of animals or the fragments of words, the residues of dozens of languages being spoken on the banks as people went to the water to wash, to fish, or even just to admire the reflection of their moon.

We needed to go upstream, to see what was farther in, beyond the roads. We needed to go upstream to get to Cavinas. Upstream, from the perspective of the people of Riberalta, the forests are populated more densely by myth than by humans. There, the Indians still live in the old way, Doña Rosa’s Croatian husband told us. Some of them can turn into jaguars, so we should be careful if we go. The scientist in me is annoyed by stories about man-jaguars, yet there is undeniable mystery left in the deep forest, mystery enough to lure me farther in. Science requires skepticism, and yet discovery, more often than not, requires a temporary relaxation of that skepticism. To discover something, you first have to believe it is possible. I wanted to see what lurked between the far-off trees, where a little bird seemed to call out my name.*

One floor above us, in the same hotel, lived Sarah Osterhoudt, then working for the New York Botanical Garden. Sarah introduced us to the Confederation of Indigenous People of Bolivia (CIDOB). The members of CIDOB wanted someone to go and work in the indigenous communities deep in the forest to document local knowledge. Within a few weeks, we were packing our bags to make a trip to Cavinas, a Cavineño community southwest of Riberalta, to document the inhabitants’ use of medicinal plants, bring in some school supplies, and understand what a community so far from the road, so far from anything but the forest and the river, knew of the world.

We imagined ourselves brave explorers, but the land of the Cavineño had been visited by scientists as early as 1900.* We brought a nice tent and some of our favorite foods. Still, we could not escape the feeling that far from the main road, there was something left to learn.

We chartered a small plane from Riberalta to fly the three of us and a local guide to Cavinas. The plane was old. Nervous about the age, but more specifically about the dangling bits of metal below the engine, I asked the pilot how the plane was doing. Great, he offered, we bought it from the Summer Linguistics Institute and we haven’t had to do anything to it since. That seemed well enough, except that, as Monica yelled to me over the sound of the motor, the Summer Linguistics Institute got kicked out of Bolivia twenty years ago. Too late. We were off, a thirty-year-old clunker of a plane, our four-person team, the pilot, and a small parrot that sat above the front passenger’s seat and looked at us as we rose above its kin.

Words fail in describing the low flight over the Amazon to Cavinas. It was most like snorkeling slowly over trees. The shades of green seemed infinitely varied, with no two the same and each shade bearing meaning and life. In northern Bolivia, the forest stretches for many hundreds of miles in every direction but east, where one finds the boundary of Bolivia and Brazil, and efficient Brazilian timber harvesting. Flashes of color emerged and, as we neared, turned into macaws, flowers, and fruits. Below us were the Beni River and its ancient oxbows, grown up in sweeping, verdant swaths of lighter and darker green. As we began to land, the colors grew even brighter and more surreal. As we came closer and closer to the trees, we could see termite mounds. We saw them with more and more detail until it became clear they were on what was to be our runway.

We landed awkwardly, bouncing as the landing gear connected with the cement-hard termite mounds. I had barely enough time to wonder what kind of termites they were before the door opened. The community had come out to meet our plane. Our guide quickly jumped out of the plane and walked in the opposite direction. We were left standing by the still-turning propellers, looking at two long lines of families, many people half dressed, farmers in hand-me-down suits with the zippers missing, babies clinging to mothers. We walked toward the lines and said hello. One man greeted us and offered us a handshake. The shake was followed by a back slap, a handshake, a back slap, and another handshake. We struggled to learn this local greeting as quickly as possible and shook and patted each adult who came forward, one by one, until we reached the end of the rows and watched the plane take off, leaving us in the middle of the Amazon, without a guide.

We would not know it until much later, but our arrival had been entirely unannounced; everyone had simply heard the airplane and run to the landing strip. One of those who had greeted us was a local emissary of the navy. (After a series of losses of territory through unsuccessful wars, Bolivia is now landlocked, but the navy, now more humble, persists.)* He asked us what we were doing in Cavinas. Monica explained that she had come to learn about the people’s treatment of illness and their access to health care. The emissary scowled to indicate his incredulousness. Sarah explained that she had come to study local knowledge of plants. A more worried scowl. I explained that I had come to study ants, at which point the emissary turned and left. If this was the revolutionary commission, he had nothing to worry about. As the emissary walked away, we looked around at the community gathered before us. We had arrived.

How or when humans first migrated into the New World tens of thousands of years ago from places more like Alaska than the Amazon basin remains contentious. New genetic analyses suggest that migration proceeded in two separate stages: an initial buildup of populations in what are now Alaska and northwestern Canada followed by the migration south of a small number of individuals, perhaps just a few hundred, as recently as sixteen thousand years ago.¹ On the controversial front lines of anthropology, even so timid an assertion invites hate mail. But regardless of just when and how, we know that humans arrived and upon arrival, some individuals continued to move.

The migration from the Bering Strait to the Andes and Amazon is thought to have taken hundreds of generations, but it could have easily been much quicker. We imagine our ancestors as slow and plodding. Yet they, like us, would have occasionally felt the need to keep walking, to see what was over one hill and then the next, telling the kids the whole while, We’re almost there.

Many things changed as humans migrated south from the cold north. Walk among the conifer forests of the Arctic Circle and you will find just one or two species of ants, only a dozen kinds of trees, and cold, modest, flowers. The indigenous people of those places, like the people who kept moving, know or knew these ants and trees and the local birds and mammals well, as there are relatively few to know. As humans migrated farther south, they would have to learn many more species. The average acre of Amazonian forest hosts hundreds of tree species. Within walking distance of a house are hundreds of bird species. To try to name even just the obvious or important plants and animals of a tropical forest is to attempt to write a very large book without a pen. It is to build out of language and memory an encyclopedia of life—biased, no doubt, toward the useful and common—but potentially enormous all the same. Where the people of the Arctic Circle distinguish the parts and habits of reindeer or caribou, the native Amazonians had to distinguish hundreds of species of plants, even if only to label them as good, bad, or deadly.

Naming species is not big science. It is like mapmaking or dictionary work and, on its own, of relatively little use. But it is the first step. It is the first thing children do as they lay hold of their surroundings. It is the simplest measure of the world. It is analogous to finding and naming the planets and the stars. Once named, it is another matter altogether to set the stars and planets, the moons and other bodies in motion relative to each other, but it is the beginning. Every culture known names species, then groups them, and then builds them into knowledge and stories. Naming, and the learning associated with it, is part of what makes us human. The closest of our primate kin can name just a few species. Researchers have shown that vervet monkeys respond differently to calls that seem to indicate different predators. They look down for snake, up for eagle, and run into the trees for holy shit, leopard.² Many species call out more general aspects of the world, whether danger, or I’m so sexy, but we are the only ones who can (or would want to), say black-capped chickadee, or to call out the name of the more rare but ever observant protist, Kamera lens.

In addition to the names themselves, we might guess that traditional peoples, in naming plants and animals, also knew or know about their uses. By learning from locals, anthropologists have sought to identify the most useful plants and animals. They have sought to learn how much local peoples know, how much they can know, and what of that knowledge can be put to use.

In Cavinas, whatever the old ways were, they were lost long ago. Missionaries had settled with the Cavineño in Cavinas by the end of the eighteenth century. The missionaries used the Cavineño to help them extract the cinchona bark used to treat malaria. Missionaries sold cinchona, which was abundant around Cavinas, for export to Europe. Then, in about 1869, with the rivers of the Bolivian Amazon still left unfinished on maps, an American geographer reported rubber in Cavinas.

Rubber would change life dramatically for all those who happened to live near where it grew. The demand for rubber in Europe and North America dragged indigenous people out of their houses and down clay paths to trees. At those trees, the people would make rows of angled cuts in the bark to drain the trees of their latex. Each morning they placed a bucket below the cuts. Each afternoon, they returned to the buckets to collect the pooling, white gold. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that by 1900 every rubber tree in the Bolivian Amazon was discovered and tapped. If Cavinas was like other communities where rubber was discovered, it is safe to assume that for a while every man and most women of Cavinas went to the forest every morning and every night to tap the rubber trees, collect the latex, burn it, ball it and drag it to the shore for transport.* The sap of trees, drawn to protect delicate European feet from the rain, burned the fingers of men and women in the Amazon and often worked them to death.³

Rubber boomed and then it busted. For a while after the rubber bust, life may have returned to something like it used to be. Now, however, there was a demand for Western goods and therefore a need for money. Matches, oil, and frying pans had been discovered. It was hard to go back to the old days. Then the cycle began again. Brazil nuts, from trees that also happen to be abundant around Cavinas, became popular in North American Christmas bowls. It was enough to send the Cavineños back out to the woods. They hauled Brazil nuts in exchange for pennies. Daily life turned on distant whimsy.

We had no way of knowing whether, after the two hundred years that Cavinas had been adrift on the tides of the Western economy, there was any traditional knowledge left of the forest, any knowledge codified in the native language and not supplanted by Western culture and tradition.

Cavinas, as we found it, was a small village of mud and palm-thatch houses. The land around the houses had been cleared, and perhaps with the help of fire, left as grassland. Around each house there was a circle of bare ground, swept daily, where the children, pigs, and pet monkeys played. (While we lived in Cavinas, a pet capuchin monkey took to riding a pig around town, pulling its ears left and right to guide it.) The houses were mostly of palm: palm sides, palm-thatch roofs, palm hammocks, palm seats. Commercial society turned up in the form of a metal pot, a box of matches, and oil in every house. Most else was found or made from forest products, grown, or killed. Surrounding the village is forest. It was a landscape tangled with footpaths worn deep by use. It was, at least in terms of our own quest, an auspicious place, a place where people might still, despite everything, name, know, and understand the biota around them. If anywhere, we thought, then here.

Because we were unannounced, it was not immediately clear where in town we would sleep, how we would get food, or, really, what we would do at all. Our guide had returned from whereabouts unknown and was negotiating in Cavineño for what was either a place for us to sleep or—our own Cavineño still nonexistent—a way to take all our things and drop us off with the navy. Fortunately, it was the former. We were given a small space in the radio room, a house at the center of the village whose sole inhabitant was a CB radio that broadcast day and night, almost without stop, in Cavineño. We put up a tent inside the small room (the windows had no screens) and settled in.

With time, negotiation, and explanations for why we did not really want to eat monkey, however tasty, we made a deal with a family in town to cook for us, hired guides to show us local plants and animals and began the work we had come to do. Because the oldest people in the community spoke only Cavineño, we began working with a translator. The children were our greatest help in translating. At least they seemed to be, until we realized we had spent several days saying penis instead of eat.

Each morning we went out to learn with a local expert. To our deep pleasure, there was much to see. We went out with several such men, but came to depend on one, Felipe, who was most willing to be our guide. Felipe had some plants he wanted to look for anyway (miracle sex plants, we would later learn, that were very popular and therefore hard to find nearby), so it was useful for him to walk along. Felipe pointed to plants as we walked and indicated their uses. One by one, Felipe named the plants of his world, calling aloud a kind of dictionary. In the area closest to the community, nearly all plants we encountered were used by Felipe. Some of the plants had Spanish names (which is to say, borrowed relatively recently), but most had names that were either apparently Cavineño or borrowed from other indigenous languages we did not yet know.

Where Felipe identified things quickly, by eye, we had to collect them. We whined about the lack of fruits and flowers (the characteristics we needed to see, thanks to a penchant of Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy, for identifying plants based on their sex parts) and we wrote and wrote and wrote. Felipe did not use the fruit and flowers for identification. He looked at the bark. He looked at the leaves and the shape of the trunk. He even looked at the holes caused by beetles in the leaves and the marks left on the leaves by viruses. Because tropical beetles and plant viruses often specialize on single plant species, even their tracks could be used to read the land and species. Felipe’s method was practical, honed by ancestors who did not have the luxury of field guides. Our ability to identify plants relied on Sarah’s curiosity, but Felipe’s depended on his need to find food and medicine, to eat and survive.

On these trips, I began to ask about insects. I focused on ants, which I had some chance of identifying in the field and which, in other indigenous groups, are very often named, studied, and mythologized. Among the Kayapo, an indigenous group in neighboring Brazil, more than eighty different ant species have names and many have uses.⁴ I hoped ants might provide a measure of the broader knowledge of the Cavineños about their world. If individuals know about ants, they might know about other insects. However, if they do not know about ants, a group that’s obvious and easy to find, people are unlikely to know about beetles and other tropical insects, which are both far harder to find and far more diverse. One by one, I would hold ants up by a leg or two to Felipe. Many ant species simply did not have names or elicited inconsistent or vague and seemingly improvisational names. Felipe might call one, big, black ant that stings hard, at which point I would let it go.

In walking with Felipe, I found what I would later learn was a new species of ant (neither Felipe nor Western science had a name for it), which the entomologist Bill Mackay would later name Camponotus dunni. Many more of the species I turned up still have yet to be named, but were probably also new. Much was unknown here and it seemed, at least in terms of the ants, unknown to Felipe as well. Of the few hundred ant species around Cavinas, Felipe had names for perhaps forty, about the same number that non indigenous peoples of more urban parts of the Amazon can name. It was, no doubt, more than the average scientist not specializing in ants might name, but not astounding. Either the Cavineño had chosen not to name the ants, or the names had been lost to time. They did, it would later turn out, know about bees, but for the insects at large, the ants were probably more representative. The bugs may have called to each other beyond the edge of the village, or even in the thatch roofs of houses, but the Cavineño did not call back. There were simply too many species to know them all, even though many might be useful. The big ones, the tasty ones, and the bothersome ones were named and the rest, however many they might be, were left to chase one another in the dark.

Felipe’s world was, in his day-to-day actions, centered on Felipe, the Cavineños and what could be seen, perceived, and noticed locally. Life circled Felipe. The animals and plants were there to eat.* The species named by other cultures—cultures less directly influenced by missionaries—suggest similar, if sometimes more rich views of the diversity of the biological world. The Kayapo, for example, imagine the world to be like a beehive divided into parallel plains that are suspended just like the layers of the universe. Most of the Kayapo live on a middle plain, but they once all lived on a higher plain, above the sky until they all fell. It is the campfires of those who did not fall that light the stars and the moon. Below the Kayapo, on the lowest plain, where the lights of the stars and moon do not reach, is the level of the worthless men, the non-Kayapo, and the termites that are in alliance with all that is worthless and weak. Maybe the Cavineño moon, too, was once a campfire, but it is now for them just a mystery like much in the world beyond Cavinas—a world inaudible over the calls of the katydids and the sounds of billions of termites cutting dead leaves and carrying them back to their fat and sedentary queen.⁵

By the end of our time in Cavinas, Sarah had collected more than a hundred species of plants. The vast majority of them had local, and in most cases Cavineño, names, and many of them also had uses, whether for house materials, medicine, or just to make strings on which to tie pet beetles for children. The Cavineño knowledge of plants suggests that a great deal of traditional knowledge is still around. Even without comparing

Reviews for Every Living Thing

[kaitanya64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is a readable retracing of the classification of life from the Enlightenment to the present. The author does not attempt to be exhaustive, but focuses on crucial characters and controversies that have led to major revisions in the way we view the world. Dunn makes a compelling case that how we classify and organize living organisms is crucial to understanding our attitude toward our environment and our place in the universe. Enjoyable, understandable for the average educated reader. I once considered becoming a biologist, and this book reminded me why.

[satyridae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book, which looks at scientists through the ages, many of whom are more than a little bit dotty. Especially Linnaeus, of course. I learned a lot about archaea and nanobacteria (or maybe nanons, the jury's still out on the ultimate nomenclature), but mostly this book is about hubris, about the depth and breadth of our ignorance, and about those visionaries clutching guttering candles in the dark. Dunn is humorous without being snarky, respectful without being obsequious, and a damn fine writer. He points out with a certain degree of asperity how, in science, it seems true that whatever everyone knows for certain is sure to be proven false later. Highly recommended for anyone interested in life itself, in all its mysterious and magnificent forms, of which we may be the least interesting after all.

[circeus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

More than anything, this is a book about the thirst for knowledge, about the indomitable desire to know more, about the insatiable curiosity that drives the most passionate scientists. Not so much a story of life as a series of stories of scientists. Vaguely obsessed, not entirely normal, they could have walked right out of The Big Bang Theory, and yet just like the TBBT characters, they are lovable and you can't help rooting for them. Dunn tells us about scientists with all their hubris and flaw, and all their simultaneous passion, in a style that adds a healthy dose of irony and a deadpan delivery that turns what could seem like boring stories of ants and beetle into hilarious snapshots of life.Of particular amusement to me, as someone who lives with Asperger's syndrome, were repeated moments by Dunn where he wonders about how it is possible for someone to become so incredibly obsessed with small things to the exclusion of all others. I had to constantly repress the need to figuratively grab the man by the lapels and shake him until his teeth fell out.