Published: 15 October 2020
Last updated: 5 March 2024
WHEN SHE WAS YOUNG, Ramona Koval trained in science. But the experiments - the patience and methodical repetition required – were not for her. She prefers going straight to conclusions.
In her latest book, A Letter to Layla, the Melbourne author, journalist and broadcaster has done just that - interviewed some of the world’s most pre-eminent scientists, sought their conclusions (broadly, about the remarkable evolution and capabilities of our species and what our next evolution could hold) and given them to her readers in accessible English in a narrative peppered with her own observations and insights.
Charging along, sometimes even laugh-out-loud funny, it’s a triumph of form into which she seems to squeeze her entire understanding of the world. Or at least, everything that has not been squeezed into her previous books on everything from Jewish cooking, to literary interviews, to her own family history, with a few novels thrown in.
She was babysitter to her granddaughter Layla, now five, during much of the writing and her thinking was: “I’m not going to live forever. I’m your Booba and this is what I’ve learnt about the world. I can’t protect you from everything, but I can teach you how the world works and what you might expect as you grow up.”
Layla was her sounding board. I realised that I had this Homo Sapiens here. I was reading about how babies point, but chimps don’t and I thought ‘Oh I wonder what you can do’ and I’d point, and in due course, Layla would point and ask why.
Layla was her sounding board, “standing in for the whole of her generation”. She was also useful: “Suddenly I realised that I had this Homo Sapiens here. I was reading about how babies point, but chimps don’t and I thought ‘Oh I wonder what you can do’ and I’d point, and in due course, Layla would point and ask why. All of this stuff, it works. We are great big vacuum cleaners of curiosity.”
Most of us are connected to 130 or 140 other people in our everyday lives, says Koval. But in this time of crisis (climate change and the pandemic), we need to step out of our milieu, away from “too much attachment to who we are, and what our tribe is on about” and collaborate, and that might begin with understanding and respecting human achievements and abilities.
“From a Jewish perspective, what comes to mind are the words of “Im ain ani li mi li” (If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?)
“Never before have humans been so dominant over the earth, yet so vulnerable. How might understanding how we evolved, what differentiates us from the other apes - our huge and curious brains - lead to solutions for the situation in which we find ourselves?”
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It took her a long time, she says, to formulate this question, which was inspired by a BBC podcast on the earth’s core. “It has a core of iron, then molten iron around it, then rocks until the top. Then it turns out that if we if hadn’t had the molten core, we wouldn’t have a magnetic force around us, and if we didn’t have that magnetic force, we would be bombarded by cosmic rays from the rest of the universe and if that was the case, there would be nothing alive, we wouldn’t have been able to continue. Human beings found all this out.
“How did they do it, and what experiments were we doing in the 18thc? We were using the gift of our incredible brains…. So why was I interested in core of the earth, I’m interested in the core of what it means to be human. If you look at some of the things we’ve invented, we are sending missions now to Mars, telescopes to the outer reaches of the solar system and are getting photos back. We’ve made some massive co-operative efforts… like the Large Hadron Collider on the border of France and Switzerland. I wanted to tell this story.”
Science aside, in each interview Koval found out something unexpected about the human condition. Arriving at the home of Pennsylvania State University’s Professor Pat Shipman, a world expert on Neanderthals - who worked out that the difference between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals started with Homo Sapiens’ domestication of dogs which helped with hunting, protecting the catch and alerting us to danger - she found the scientist and her husband obsessed with fear about their cat Zelda, building a protective fence around their home to keep coyotes out.
“Later, when Pat Shipman’s husband dies after a long life together, [came the realisation that] there’s nothing we can do to keep out things we are fearful of. We can’t build a fence around us forever or keep out that sadness.”
In Georgia, atop a mountain with the Director General of the Georgian National Museum, paleo-anthropologist Professor David Lordkipanidze, the discoverer of five 1.8 million-year-old homo erectus skulls, she found herself having an unlikely and unscientific conversation about his belief that it was the soul that that makes us fully human.
At the home of Pennsylvania State University’s Professor Pat Shipman, a world expert on Neanderthals, she found the scientist and her husband obsessed with fear about their cat Zelda, building a protective fence around their home to keep coyotes out.
And, regarding the worn-out skull of a very old man with only one tooth, she felt she was present at dawning of compassion, with the “bones of the dead whispering to us of love”. Without someone feeding and caring for him, he could not have survived.
The University of New England Emeritus Professor Iain Davidson, a world expert on the origins of language, charmed her when he told her he was “always happy to peddle my nonsense… I always found that the greatest challenge of retirement is relevance,” while University of Louisiana Professor of Biology Daniel Povanelli said that while chimps could hear and see like us, they can’t and don’t try make sense of the world like we do. They do not ask why.
In a second section of the book, Koval goes on a different quest, meeting up with futurists. Like many of us, she is sceptical – but then again, she was once sceptical about the use of touch screens and is old enough to remember a time before computers. So the jury is out. Anything is possible.
She speaks to post-humanists who aspire to upload their brains to a computer and cryonicists who hope to return to future life if their frozen preserved brains are thawed. But who, she asks, will still value these brains a century later enough to bring them to life? She is bemused when, with her “unfrozen head”, she interviews Aubrey de Gre, an English biomedical gerontologist and leader of the anti-aging movement, about persufflation (a process which helps in the freezing of the human head).
De Grey’s search for “curing old age”, which he viewed as a disease, was inspired by his love for his older wife, Adelaide Carpenter. Koval finds his “technological optimism” invigorating until she discovers that he is divorcing Mrs Carpenter to marry a younger fiancée. “I tried not to show my disappointment, looking down at my feet as the romantic image of his love, so strong that he was prepared to defeat death for it, seemed to flicker and then die on the sparkling pool tiles before us.”
Like the people she interviews, Koval tells a revealing story about herself and her grandchildren. For them, she has patience. “Of course, the other grandchildren all came up to me, ‘Are you going to do a letter to Eden, to Jessie?’ I covered myself explicitly by writing about each of the six in the text, and all my books have been dedicated to them. They join the list as soon as they arrive…”
A Letter to Layla: Travels to Our Deep Past and Near Future, by Ramona Koval, is published by Text Rrp $34.99
