HOW EVOLUTION TAUGHT US TO LEAVE THE RIGHT TIP



Ever since I wrote my last column about defeating the Maves number, I've been reading about numbers in some form or other in the newspapers.

It started with the unsettling revelation that apes can count. Well, only up to nine actually, about the level that some of my students perform at on a Monday morning. The apes counted by touching bananas on a computer screen, so how that works in the jungle I'm not sure. It'd be interesting to know if Jane Goodall has ever seen the lead chimp count the bananas before sharing them around. At any rate, limiting the count to nine seems reasonable to me, because how many bananas can a person eat in one sitting.

The real interesting question is though, how come we sapient apes can do so much more, like, say, calculating a 15% tip. What evolutionary goal is served by the ability to tip waiters correctly? It's not like you're going to get killed if you're wrong, so that only good- tipping genes may survive. Some other incentive must have gotten us started toward Einsteinian math.

The other day I got my answer to that question from the Cape Town Sunday Times: our math skills come from tracking animals or "reading spoor" as we old Africa-hands call it. An Afrikaner by the name of Louis Liebenberg spent 11 years with the natives of the Kalahari to learn their tracking skills. He got to be so good that in the end he could even distinguish the spoor of the honey badger which we all know is very rare, even in the Kalahari. Liebenberg became convinced that the skill developed in tracking, led us eventually to the theory of general relativity. I have always suspected that, but at the University you keep such thoughts to yourself, if you want tenure.

No sooner had I read that article than I came across another one telling me that birds know mathematics too! It turns out that when birds wheel and swoop together as a flock, they're just following the laws of fluid dynamics. Mind you, that isn't necessarily good. At the end of a busy day when they come home tired, they still have to fly around for an hour or so, because the laws tell them to. And here is where evolution really improved things, because we humans don't waste our time that way. We just have a drink and watch TV.

Anyway, all this reading gave me a new insight into why human beings are so good with numbers. I plan to study this for a couple of years and tell you more in the new millennium. That is, if my laptop still works after Jan.1, 2000.

At Random - Adrian Korpel