Could King Kong Actually…Evolve?
Let’s assume (just for fun) that you’re a biologist who actually discovers Kong, the giant ape monster and sometimes God. What next?
Well people will have lots of questions, that’s for sure.
This idea (while entire fictional) isn’t exactly impossible to imagine. Hell, scientists in the 1600's would have thought dinosaurs were entirely mythological before first discovering their remains. And Darwin would have laughed off the idea of chemosynthetic tube worms living in the deepest depths of the Pacific, far removed from any trace of sunlight. My argument here is that most of biology — real biology — seems impossible before actually observing evidence of these new, exciting forms of life.
So if we imagine that Kong, the great beast of the silver screen—spawned in the 1930’s and centerpiece of eight blockbusters — was actually a real, organic result of natural selective processes…well how can we explain this? How could Kong fit into the countless rules and regulations that make up the framework of evolutionary biology?
It gets weird.
Every creature has a story. In the eons leading up to their birth and death, a mosaic of reasons and scenarios and external pressures built up to their existence and their physiological combination of traits. That’s just Bio 101.
When we discovered dinosaurs, tube worms, or anything new to our catalogue of life, these stories start to come into place after we collect data — shape, numbers, diets, distribution, anything really that can complete this puzzle. Kong is no exception, and I want to start our investigation with possibly the most glaring bit of data we can observe. Kong is enormous.
Although, just exactly how tall King Kong stands is under debate — not even across his 80+ years of screentime, but even within the same movie. In his debut, Kong grew to 300% of his initial size between getting captured on Skull Island and climbing to the top of the Empire State Building. All this was done for creative effect (and I approve of the results) but it really throws a wrench in our data.
So let’s say Kong is on average 10 meters tall… That’s big, but is it impossible? Obviously not, we’ve got the evidence to prove it. And we’ve known mammals to reach impressive heights before Kong too — a prehistoric rhino could top 5.5 meters easily, and that was a quadruped.
When looking for an explanation for this gigantic size (and I’ve already written at length on this topic) there are two main evolutionary drivers — protection and food access. With Kong’s absolutely ridiculous scale, we’ve got to assume that either his size was a defensive trait or that his main source of food never dropped closer than 20 meters to the ground.
And gorillas do eat fruit, so this story doesn’t immediately raise any red flags.
But there’s one key piece of information we need to add to the equation — Skull Island. There’s very little data on the size of the landmass, but based on some rough schematics and the simple notion that it had remained undiscovered for much of the 20th century, we can safely assume it’s between 10 and 100 square miles. That’s being generous.
There’s a principle in ecology known as insular dwarfism, which may very well be the Achilles’ heel in decoding Kong’s evolutionary past. To put it briefly (and directly from Wikipedia):
Simply put, islands make animals smaller. There are fewer resources to share and less space to expand into; in this case, evolution favors the teensy. And yes I’m fully aware of island gigantism as well, but this refers to teensy animals that grow to be more “average” in size. Apes don’t necessarily fall into this camp.
So what the heck is going on with Kong? Two possible answers come to mind. The first is something called oceanic dispersal, where animals have been known to cross bodies of water (and populate islands) by floating on a raft of floating plants. Kong’s species would have needed an enormous raft, but I guess we can’t count this out. It would definitely explain how a monstrous animal could have found a stable habitat on a small skull-shaped island.
But the second answer seems much simpler: Kong isn’t a species at all, but just an individual. Now our story gets interesting. What if Kong didn’t evolve as part of a speciation event, but rather is an anomalous, singular animal on his own?
This would actually answer a few burning questions; mainly how Kong could exist on a small island with limited resources, or why we’ve never seen more than one Kong roaming about. The competition for resources would certainly be more stable too, plus there’s less of a need to answer every aspect of this evolutionary riddle if Kong was a freak-accident of genetics, not a true product of natural selection. So rather than thinking of Kong as the last of a given species (which happens all the time, but not without a major disturbance event), let’s consider that he’s the first. Would it be possible for a singular mutation to cause a normal ape to grow into Kong-like proportions?
Within observable limitations, of course.
Gigantism doesn’t quite work the way we normally imagine. In humans, the tallest height ever achieved was 2.72 meters, a max increase of about 58% above average. If we’re really stretching our limits, let’s compare the largest dog (1.2 meters tall) with the littlest, a full-grown chihuahua at just 9 centimeters— that’s a difference of 1300%, extreme to extreme. Now we’re getting into Kong territory.
In the same case that a species of chihuahuas could give birth randomly to a record-setting Great Dane… yes Kong could have arisen by a genetic mutation from normal gorillas.
Does it feel like we’re grasping at straws yet? Good.
The point of this post is not to prove the impossibility of Kong. What’s important here, buried behind the layers of analysis, are two things. First, that the stories of evolution fill in the gaps between the data we observe in the real world, often to amazing results.
Secondly, though, is that Kong defies so many limits set by our real world. A recent article in Vanity Fair sums up beautifully how, throughout cinema history, Kong has served as a master metaphor in cinematic storytelling:
It’s easy to see why this character has proven so enduring: as humans, an affection for giant apes seems hard-wired into our DNA, and everyone loves freaky mystery islands full of anachronistic dinosaurs and fantastical beasts.
Big creatures represent an impossibility that’s exciting to embrace. Subconsciously, even for moviegoers who could care less about classroom biology, it’s fun to try and imagine a world in which these monsters were real. How would we capture them? What would they eat?
…Where did they come from?
These are the right questions to ask, even if the answers don’t bear much fruit. And besides, it wouldn’t be much fun anyway if King Kong was a chapter in a stale biology textbook. We can learn just as much about the natural world by leaving him up on the big screen where he belongs.
