“Eva” by Peter Dickinson

This book was loaned to me by a friend, who asked for my opinion of it. Sometimes this means my “scientific” opinion, since I am a scientist. I earned a Master of Science in Chemistry in 1973.

My academic degree is no particular help in evaluating this book, but I have relevant informal experience. I’m married to an ecologist well versed in evolution, who taught an undergraduate course called “Animal and Human”. That course focused on the research of Jane Goodall and other primatologists. Our home bookshelf includes works by Goodall, Frans de Waal and others. I particularly like de Waal’s Good Natured – the origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals.

Back to the book… Eva is a 13 year old girl who suffers devastating physical injuries in an auto accident. Her (less damaged) brain is transplanted into the body of a young female chimpanzee. (No, I don’t think will happen in my lifetime, despite rapid advances in neuroscience.) Against all odds, Eva survives, the first (and only) member of a new life form. Everything about Eva is novel and much is unexpected – to her, her family and the doctors and scientists who made her treatment possible.

Eva turns out to be more chimpanzee than human. She feels more at home in a chimpanzee colony called “the pool” than with her parents or school friends. Their habitat destroyed by human overpopulation, all surviving chimps live in “the pool”, a zoo-like urban setting where chimps face one of three fates. Some are sold to corporations or universities for research. Others are kept in a zoo, for the (paying) public to see and appreciate them. The luckiest ones live mostly undisturbed in a private compound, observed (remotely) by scientists who want to understand their biology and behavior. Even that is not a “good” or “natural” life for a chimpanzee, and they have lost skills, including the ability to forage for food. Eva, the daughter of one of the scientists, played with chimps as a child and felt positive towards them. This helps her survive the shock of “waking up” in a chimpanzee body.

Eva wants a more natural setting for herself and the other chimps, and, against the odds and at great risk, she gets it. A chimp colony is established (in Madagascar). Eva attempts re-teach chimps “wild” life skills and to import a few human behaviors into the colony (tying knots, for example). She breeds only with chimps she considers intelligent and socially cooperative. She dies (of old age) hoping “her” chimp descendants will thrive in the future at a time when humans seem doomed. 

My opinion? Highly entertaining. Dystopian fiction, however, is not a genre I like. It can be cynical and broadly antisocial (imho). Is Eva anti-science? Borderline. If you’re looking for “bad” scientists, you can find them. I don’t consider this a trivial issue. Not while climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers show up in my own community. If we reject science across the board, we humans are doomed, and may destroy other species as well.

This book was published in 1989.  Peter Dickinson died in 2015. It is categorized as Young Adult fiction. Dickinson doesn’t talk down to his readers. If anything marks it as YA oriented, it’s the emphasis on plot (over character, setting or reflection) and the brisk pace. One category of YA is “dystopian YA fiction”. Eva might qualify. The future world depicted is overcrowded, polluted and gloomy.

If someone wants to critique the portrayal of chimps in Eva, I suggest they check the publication dates of the books mentioned above to see what information was available to Dickenson when he wrote Eva. I think, overall, that he did a good job. 

Jane Goodall wrote Reason for Hope in 1999. She is now 87 years old. You can check her out at www.news.janegoodall.org. She still has hope.  

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“Empty Planet – The Shock of Global Population Decline” by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson

Published 2019 by Crown Publishing, 240 pages plus footnotes and index.

This book (found at my public library) took me entirely by surprise, and caused me to look on climate change (and certain other social problems) differently, and with somewhat more optimism.

The authors discuss a future drop in human population, NOT (as has often been predicted) due to climate related calamity, but due to changes in human reproductive behavior. These changes comprise the “demographic transition”, defined in Chapter One, entitled “A Brief History of Population”. For eons, the human race simply struggled to survive. Following the retreat of the last Ice Age, agriculture allowed population to increase through a series of stages, beginning with high birth rate coupled with high death rate, moving through periods of imbalance and ending (in “developed” societies) with low birth rate, long life and low death rate. Bricker and Ibbitson believe the entire global population will arrive at the latter pattern within the next two or three generations. Hence, human population with stabilize relatively soon, and then continue to fall slowly.

Having grown up reading The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth, I was startled by this book and read it very carefully. I’ve asked the opinion of friends and even my favorite demographer (a relative), and I eagerly await their responses.

Actually, I heard the warning call of this change a few years ago. In 2015, China reversed its “one child policy”. I was VERY surprised, and failed to recognize the significance of the change. Come to think of it, 25 years ago I heard a Russian woman described as a “hero mother” because she had TWO children. I didn’t understand what was behind this.

What do demographers measure, in addition to absolute population? Birth rate is crucial. How many babies does each woman have? “Replacement” is pegged at 2.1, to allow for the fact that not all children survive to become parents. At this point, it all starts to feel personal. I had two babies. So did my parents. But their parents had a total of 10 surviving children! What changed? American families left the farm. (The post World War II baby boom, in case you are wondering, was an aberration.)

Bricker and Ibbitson attribute falling birth rates to the education and subsequent increased employment of women, and to urbanization. They consider these changes unlikely to be reversed.

I think Empty Planet went to press just before the flareup of immigration as a “hot button” topic in the US. It would help if people on both sides of the issue would settle down and read this book! Immigrants and refugees are not identical. Most people, most of the time, prefer to live where they were born.

What do Bricker and Ibbitson project for the future? Both are Canadian, and their other collaborative publication (The Big Shift, 2013) deals with Canadian politics and culture. They expect the future big winners (nations able to maintain their populations and to innovate) to be Canada, the African states and (maybe) the United States. “WHAT?!” you squawk. Better read the book!

At some point, an entirely new concept is introduced – the post national state. I’m still trying to get a grip on it.