Manual Dexterity and Other Mexicans

From rawstory.com, 10/9/13

"Scientists claim that big toes and thumbs evolved in parallel"

“New research from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute indicates that, contrary to current belief, early hominids developed finger dexterity before they became bipedal. The long-standing theory that bipedalism “freed up” the proto-human hand for using tools has been overturned by brain imaging and fossil evidence that indicates that the quadruped brains possess the same potential for manual dexterity as human.”

“‘In early quadruped hominids, finger control and tool use were feasible, while an independent adaptation involving the use of the big toe for functions like balance and walking occurred with bipedality,’ the authors wrote.”

•••

If you’ve read this blog with any regularity, you’re aware of my theory that humans descended from the trees to go hunting. The study mentioned above supports that contention. Mainly, it supports the observation that our ape and simian cousins also have finger dexterity; but it’s fairly obvious that one has to have said dexterity in order to wield weapons, which both us and chimps do. My ignorance was that I wasn’t aware that the field thought finger dexterity came after bipedalism; I’d never heard that. My question would be, having observed other primates, from where did that idea arise? It’s not self-evident.

Ah, the mysteries of science.

Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers

The following is an open letter to Michael White, author of Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers. An entertaining read but incredibly poorly edited. It's as if no one had any idea what commas are for.

“…The fact that, in general, only the best-adapted member of a species will survive to reproductive age.”pg. 118, Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers, Michael White.

Dear Michael,

My son thoughtfully turned me onto your book and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it. I do quibble about the style sheet used to inform your punctuation, but it’s a minor point.

A somewhat larger point is illustrated by the sentence reprinted above, the one about “best-adapted members,” which itself illustrates a common misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. As written, the sentence implies that natural selection is done at the individual level, the same error the social Darwinists make (and, frankly, most people).

The reality is that individual survival has little or nothing to do with natural selection. In general, most members of a species survive until reproductive age as one mounts the evolutionary chain. Those species designed with massive infant-death rates—frogs, say—are designed with the scatter-shot effect in mind: those who survive do so because of sheer luck, the predator didn’t find them; one has enough offspring so that who gets eaten is immaterial. By the time one gets to, say, zebras or people, most offspring are expected to survive.

Natural selection is done at the genomic level. What it says is that, on average, individuals who possess mutation X have a better reproductive rate than those who don’t possess it. It’s concerned about the overall average, not the success of any particular individual. For example, an individual might have a mutation which would allow the possessors, on average, a longer life span; but that individual might have only one offspring before being dispatched by misfortune. Nonetheless, thanks to that one offspring, the mutation could be spread throughout the species, even though it gave no benefit to the individual in whom the mutation occurred.

The confusion appears to be a conflation of pecking order and natural selection. It’s fairly understandable that, observing natural pecking orders, one thinks that the selecting done to achieve that order is the same selecting that determines the direction of evolutionary change or dominance. They are unrelated, but, unfortunately, most people equate the two, as the quoted sentence illustrates.

Pecking orders evolved, not to insure that the best genes get together, but rather to maintain order within the species. Not only did pecking orders evolve, so did infidelity, which insures that, despite pecking orders, the gene pool will continue to be thoroughly mixed. It’s the mixing which is important, not the dominance.

Thanks for your time,

Johan Mathiesen
Portland, OR

Dept. of Further Amplification: Grazing

Awhile back (June 7, 2013) in a post entitled “Man the Grazer,” I discussed findings about hominin dietary change 3.5 mya. I critiqued an article which said:

“The most significant findings indicate that human ancestors expanded their menu 3.5 million years ago, adding tropical grasses and sedges characteristic of a savannah-like environment to the typical ape-like diet of leaves and fruits from trees and shrubs of a forest environment.”

It should be pointed out that the author of the article, not the author of the study, said that. The study’s author, Thure Edward Cerling of the University of Utah, said:

“‘We don't know exactly what they ate. We don't know if they were pure herbivores or carnivores, if they were eating fish [which leave a tooth signal that looks like grass-eating], if they were eating insects, or if they were eating mixes of all of these.’”

The article’s author went on to clarify:

“He says this because the isotope method used in the new studies cannot distinguish what parts of grasses and sedges human ancestors ate – leaves, stems, seeds and/or underground elements of the plants such as roots or rhizomes. The method also cannot determine when human ancestors began getting much of their grass indirectly by eating grass-eating insects or meat from grazing animals.”

My critique centered on the probability of hominins eating grasses directly versus indirectly. I was concerned about the statement that we had added grasses and sedges to our diet.

Well, maybe Cerling didn’t say that; maybe it was the writer’s interpretation. I couldn’t find the research that was being discussed; but I did find other Cerling work, although it only discussed diets of large herbivores, not primates.

Better yet, though, I wrote him an email with my concerns and he wrote a quick reply. He wrote: “In our paper(s) we decided to present the data and make no interpretations as to the relative contributions of different food sources,” which is quite different from what the media presented. Although not finding his original paper makes it impossible to fairly compare, nonetheless, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

If for no other reason than his replies made me think even more that he is on the right track. He wrote: “…Early hominins (6 to 4 Ma) had a C3-based diet (and were likely in the forest, even if a narrow forest), by 3.5 Ma they clearly were obtaining non-forest resources.” “Obtaining non-forest resources” is light-years away from “adding tropical grasses and sedges characteristic of a savannah-like environment to the typical ape-like diet of leaves and fruits”; much less, “we… make no interpretations as to the relative contributions of different food sources.”

Cerling expanded that concept even more significantly: “The earliest hominins, whose diet was purely C3-based, could have lived only in the forest (including a riparian forest).” Except for the interpretation of what foods we were eating back then, the data fit perfectly with my pet theories, thank you very much; and they are contrary to conventional wisdom. While it’s not even mentioned, much less stressed in the article or, as far as I can tell, the research, Cerling’s data completely negate the standard line that we left the trees and stood up because the forest was disappearing underneath us. Cerling fairly conclusively demonstrates that, while we stood up 6.5 mya, we didn’t leave the forest cover until 3,5 mya; which fits perfectly with the contention that it was food source opportunity which drew us out of the trees and not their disappearance. It turns out, we didn’t even leave the forest for three million years.

Cerling’s evidence does not determine what humans ate way back when, it only determines where the food came from. The important information here is the food source, not the food type; where the food comes from, not what the food is.

The truth is, it’s hard to change one’s eco-niche. The mere disappearance of an eco-niche is not enough to cause a change in a species’ niche. Usually, the dependent species will shrink with the disappearing niche or simply disappear. As the forest shrank, so did our niche; and, it turns out, we didn’t adapt out of our niche but rather shrank with it and didn’t emerge for another three million years. And three million years is enough time for our species to get thoroughly accustomed to hunting to where we could start venturing out onto the savannah where the bigger herds lived. Makes perfect sense. That scenario is simple and direct: hunters following the game. The competing theory of our continually changing our diet, accepting and then abandoning food sources as we moved through different environments, is complex to the point of unlikelihood. If we stood up to go hunting, we would have done it right where we were, and it would have taken us time to invade new territories, but at least we’d have a way to eat once we got there. If we were constantly having to find new ways to eat, it would have taken us a lot longer, I would imagine. And why would we invade a new eco-niche if there wasn’t already there a food resource we were accustomed to using? In fact, how could we? Could we have metabolized the food available on the savannah well enough to support our needs? Wouldn’t we have had to spend all day searching for food just like the other grass-eaters? Wouldn’t we have been at great danger far out on the velde eating grasses, if we couldn’t escape by running and had no weapons with which to defend ourselves? On the other hand, if we were out in the open hunting, we would have been a match for anything. Lions even. Which scenario is more likely?

It was one thing for us to let meat-eating take such a prominent place in our diet, but we were already meat-eaters before we split from the chimps; all we did was shift our emphasis; we didn’t adopt whole new food sources; but it would be an completely different matter for us to have adopted entirely new food sources—in this case grasses and sedges—only to abandon them later on. That’s asking an awful lot; and apparently that theory is promulgated by people who have a bias towards thinking humans started out as vegetarians. It is a religious argument, not a scientific one. Many people want humans to be natural vegetarians so they interpret data accordingly. Unfortunately, they make big mistakes. Like interpreting the appearance of non-forest foods in our diet to mean that we took up eating grass. That’s a stretch. It’s much more likely that we were simply continuing our hunting ways and following the game into the open.

The bottom line is that data bolster the argument that we left the trees to go hunting. It says that, when we climbed down from the trees, we didn’t leave the forest, that we kept eating food grown in the forest. It says that we didn’t starting eating food grown in the open until 3.5 mya. I can live with that.

Yet even diet isn’t the entire picture. The question of where one lives is not cut and dried. “Living” usually comprises two locations: where one feeds and where one sleeps. For predators bringing food back to the nest, where one raises one’s young is the same as where one sleeps. Predator young are raised away from the hunting grounds in a protected location. When hominins began harvesting the open grasslands, they could well have kept their camps/lairs in the forest. Most likely, they were close to water; there would be no particular need to leave the water’s edge just because one had taken up hunting the savannahs.

I’m not alone; hence, Cerling’s suggestion that humans may have evolved in a “riparian forest,” which accords with the contention that, when we left the trees we 1) began to live in semi-permanent camps as do all predators; and 2) those camps were likely down by the river.

That’s what I like about the theory: it’s clean, simple, direct, and the data all fit. Hoo-boy, what more could one ask?

Free Will Versus Instinct

Believing in free will is akin to believing in god, except that I can understand god, while free will eludes me. Where I get lost is at the beginning; I can’t see a difference between free will and any other kind of will. Will meaning “choice,” not, say, the “will to succeed.” But choice. How are there two kinds of choice? Either one has a choice or one doesn’t. If one has a choice, one has the option of making said choice. One is always equally free to choose either of two options. The consequences may be radically different, but one is always free to make the choice. There isn’t, though, room for but one kind of choice; if there’s another, I haven’t run across it yet.

The term “free choice,” though, implies that there are at least two kinds of choice, right? Free and not free. The implication is that there are fundamentally different kinds of choices available, one which one is compelled to make, and another which one is free to choose anyway he or she likes. We tend to think of this latter kind of choice as, if not uniquely human, then confined to the larger animals. Primates, maybe. Don’t know about dolphins. The implication is that this kind of choice appeared somewhere along the evolutionary line; that prior to the appearance of such kind of choice, there was only instinct, which, everyone agrees, is no choice at all. We pride ourselves on not being instinctual, on being able to think for ourselves, to make good and bad decisions.

We are, perhaps, a bit prideful.

The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that it’s unexplained from whence this new manner of thinking comes. And how it works differently from other manners of choice. How there can be two methods of making choices has not been approached by the philosophers, much less by the neuroscientists. It seems mixed up with the notion of consciousness and self-consciousness; the difference between them isn’t clear either.

Fundamentally, the simplest living organism possible has to be able to find food, recognize it as distinct from non-food, and decide to process it. At its most basic level, finding and recognizing food is akin to deciding to process it. Still, the organism has to know how to position its body in order to process the food it has found. It has to have a sense of where its body is and where it isn’t, and it has to have a sense of how to move its body to another place. Conscious or self-conscious? You can call it what you will; regardless, it has to be conscious of itself and its surroundings in order to survive. Every living thing has the same requirement. Every.

So, how does this little, primitive, one-celled critter go about processing the signals it receives from its environment; and how does it communicate within itself? Chemistry and electricity, right? Nothing but. Chemical signals and electric currents transmit all the information the cell needs. What’s more, when two cells decided to get together and become a multi-celled critter, they retained the same methods of communication: chemicals and electricity. In fact, no matter how many cells clump together to make no matter how big a critter—a redwood or a whale—the communication channels never change: chemistry, electricity.

It’s not that these were the best channels available to living things out of which to build communications platforms, it’s that they’re the only channels available. Gravity, for example, doesn’t work well as a communications devise. Yet messages can only be sent using the materials at hand. Chemicals make good triggers; electricity is fast.

But as we noted, once that one-celled critter found something to eat, its triggers said “eat,” and the processing process began. The choice to eat was automatic. But it was a choice; theoretically, the critter could eat or not eat.

How the critter made the choice to eat was because it operated with an algorithm (paradigm/software/criteria) that said when triggers X, Y, and Z fire, swallow that puppy.

As the critters (I call them “critters” to lump together all living things, animal or vegetable) get larger and competition appears and predators appear, the algorithms become more and more complex. They evolve. Yet, the mechanisms of communication between the various cells and the ruling algorithms remain the same: chemistry and electricity. Even when you get to people, the only way the various parts of the body communicate with each other is through chemical signals and electrical charges. There is, fortunately or unfortunately, nothing that Mother Nature can add to the mix.

Needless-to-say, when sex was invented, the algorithms became hopelessly complex. Understandably so, though, given the kinds and complexity of sense and response organs. Choice and decisions, necessarily, must be made virtually instantaneously, especially as mobility and predation increase. The algorithms have to be acted upon sans debate.

In the end, all living things possess the same three things: sensors, output terminals, and CPUs. They can read the environment; they can interact with the environment; and they have a pile of software to work out the details and coordinate things. The bacterium has these. You have these. The bacterium uses those three capacities to find and consume food; we do too. (We also use them to facilitate DNA mixing.) In both the bacterium and us, all the interior communication is done by the same chemical/electrical routes; nothing new has been added to the mix. The signals that make the dog’s mouth move when it barks or our mouths move when we speak, are made and processed the same way. Neither us nor the dog, of course, is aware of the millions of interactions required for every bark, every word. What could awareness of that even be like? (Zen masters and LSD aficionados?)

As you can imagine, this has profound implications as to where another form of choice could come from. So far, we can only envision a mechanical, albeit highly complex, method of functioning. Essentially, we have only instinct at this point in the discussion; there is no place for anything else. Even thought, no matter how complex and self-reflexive it seems, has, at this juncture, only a mechanistic explanation, an instinctual explanation. No other explanation—other than God—has been put forward. Where would thought come from if not from a complex function of our CPUs? How is my song any less instinct that that of the nightingale?

In the end, it appears we don’t even have a definition for “will,” much less “free will.” (We carry this problem with us when we think about computers; we worry about when they’re going to be able to spontaneously write and install their own software without wondering where the computer’s existing software would generate that idea within itself; we think that at some point “will” will arrive as if the computers will be touched by the finger of god and become alive; and that being alive will be a fundamental change for the computer. We speak of the “singularity” as if a magical transformation will appear at a point in the future when machines become “alive.” We have faith that we can create life by software, if not by electro-chemistry.)

Ah, people; we’re so cocksure.

The Carbon Age

Mathias has lent me a book, The Carbon Age, by Eric Roston detailing the role of carbon in—well—the Universe. On page 48, Roston lists five things to remember about evolution, including: “only populations evolve; individuals adapt,” and “evolution has no goal.”

Ah ha! Someone tell that to the paleoanthropologists. It was a startling revelation to read those words as I’d begun to think I was crying in the wilderness. I’ve most often termed it that “DNA evolves not individuals,” but I believe we’re saying the same thing. And aimless evolution insures that one can’t evolve to escape danger. Thank you, Mr. Roston.

Mr. Roston didn’t use my favorite encapsulation that “evolution follows opportunity, not necessity,” but he well could have. In any event, it’s an unequivocal statement of the reason why people couldn’t have abandoned the trees because of the trees’ disappearance. That’s a goal: “We have to learn to stand up because the forest is going away,” (or its concomitant error, “Us fish should learn to walk on land to avoid predators”). As Roston points out, it couldn’t have happened. Those are side benefits to the effects of natural selection, not the intent. You can be quite sure that what drove us to the ground and fish to terra firma was food, pure and simple.

If I understand what I’m told, what distinguishes our ancestors from the pans is bipedality. We maybe didn’t give up our arboreal ways completely at first, but we right away began walking upright. For what we know, we didn’t have a period when we were knuckle-walking out on the velde, having abandoned the trees, but not yet taken to standing up straight. (How would we tell?) We never seemed to have went through a baboon period; we walked out of the forest upright.

That being the case, then abandoning the trees went hand-in-hand with walking upright. That fact uncouples bipedalism from the fate of the forest. If bipedalism first appeared in a savanna-like environment, it doesn’t mean that the environment was the cause of the bipedalism. Not to mention that it’s not agreed as to what kind of environment bipedalism first occurred in.

Ergo, I repeat, any theory of human evolution that doesn’t account for our letting go of the branches is no theory at all; and that “forgoing the forest because it was disappearing” is a circular argument. Fail.

carbon atom: examiner.com

On the Waterfront

Past Horizons, June 8, 2013

“Beachcombing for early humans in Africa”

In the middle of an African desert, with no water to be found for miles, scattered shells, fishing harpoons, fossilized plants and stone tools reveal signs of life from the water’s edge of another era.

The article goes on to talk in general about the state of early hominid archaeology in East Africa and about previously moister conditions, etc.; the idea being that, if you find old shorelines, you stand a better chance of finding old fossils and artifacts.

Sorry, but it’s time for another “Well, duh!” Where else would you expect to find evidence of early humans? Besides caves? (As if scads of early humans populated all the caves from Ethiopia to South Africa. How the hell many caves were there?)

It’s telling, though, that despite the nearly universal finding of fossils from shoreline conditions (barring caves, which are always located near water), early humans are invariably depicted as savannah-living creatures. Whoever wrote this article, for example, was able to calmly write about the human relationship to wetter conditions without ever once making the connection between the conditions and the sites where she was finding the fossils and artifacts.

Okay, I’m no scientist. I know nothing about foot bones or ear bones and I have no opinion about which hominins were capable of what. I rest all my scientific expertise on one statistics of sociology course a half-century ago. What better credentials than that, eh? But that statistics course said: if it looks like a duck, squawks like a duck, and swims like a duck, odds are it’s a duck. I believe that. It’s not proof that it’s a duck, but it has the likelihood of being a duck, fair enough?

So, if one consistently finds evidence of early humans in close proximity to what were, at the time, bodies of water, one can assume a high probability of a causal relationship between them. It’s not likely that the water came to the people.

Just saying…

Man the Grazer

Popular Archaeology
June 2013, Cover Stories, Daily News

"Diet Change After 3.5 Million Years Ago a Gamechanger for Human Ancestors, Say Scientists"

The most significant findings indicate that human ancestors expanded their menu 3.5 million years ago, adding tropical grasses and sedges characteristic of a savannah-like environment to the typical ape-like diet of leaves and fruits from trees and shrubs of a forest environment. This, suggests the scientists, may have set the stage for our modern diet of grains, grasses, and meat and dairy from grazing animals.

"We don't know exactly what they ate. We don't know if they were pure herbivores or carnivores, if they were eating fish [which leave a tooth signal that looks like grass-eating], if they were eating insects or if they were eating mixes of all of these."

He says this because the isotope method used in the new studies cannot distinguish what parts of grasses and sedges human ancestors ate – leaves, stems, seeds and/or underground elements of the plants such as roots or rhizomes. The method also cannot determine when human ancestors began getting much of their grass indirectly by eating grass-eating insects or meat from grazing animals.

May I leap in before this goes any further? Take that opening sentence; it says that early humans added “tropical grasses and sedges characteristic of a savannah-like environment to the typical ape-like diet of leaves and fruits from trees and shrubs of a forest environment.”

That seems pretty unambiguous. It implies we typically ate leaves and fruits before adding grasses and sedges. I didn’t know that we were leaf eaters prior to diverging from our fellow simians—I thought it was primarily, nuts; fruits; and small game, like insects—but I’m a little dubious about us moving over to include the grasses and sedges. To begin with, can one tell the difference between grasses and sedges in the diet of proto-humans, or do they both have the same signature? As they stand, sedges provide a very minimal addition to the human diet in any culture, so it’s hard to imagine that they were once very popular but then died out.

I’d also question the signature difference between what parts of the grass were eaten, a difference we can't yet discern. The way the sentence is written, it’s implied that grasses were used much like a cow would, the entire plant eaten, as if we suddenly had become a grazing animal, only to abandon the practice later on. That, too, doesn’t seem likely to me. It doesn’t seem likely that we began to use any but the seed heads from grasses; and even those, it’s easier to imagine that we started to consume grain after we’d domesticated herding animals and tended to have stockpiles of grain on hand that we might, in desperation, try eating in times of privation. Most importantly, it’s easier to imagine grain consumption after the advent of cooking, as it’s nutritionally much more accessible to us after it has been cooked.

All in all, it seems unlikely that humans ever were large consumers of sedges and grass blades any more than they are now. That doesn’t mean that their data are wrong, though. Instead, the answer lies in a succeeding paragraph, where it added, that their analytical “method… cannot determine when human ancestors began getting much of their grass indirectly by eating grass-eating insects or meat from grazing animals.”

Well, okay then. Is it likely that people were harvesting grass eaters 3.5 million years ago? You can bet your bottom dollar on that. It’s a hell of a lot more likely that we were hunting grazing animals 3.5 mya than we were doing the grazing ourselves. A hell of a lot more.

I’ve seen this error made before with precisely the same kind of evidence, evidence that our diet of grasses and sedges increased, but in that case, too, they couldn’t tell whether it came from direct or indirect consumption. For some reason, primarily related to our own obsession with fad diets and the heavy PC status of vegetarianism and veganism among the young creatives, etc., the nod is always given to a vegetarian interpretation of our probable early diet history, despite evidence to the contrary.

The profession of archaeology, also, poorly interprets early dietary data because they’ve yet to understand how early it was that hunting tools, including stones, were used by our ancestors, millions of years prior to the first flaked stone tool; nor do they recognize the strong probability that standing up to carry hunting tools and game was the only reason we stood up in the first place. Much of that error comes, of course, from the impossible assumption that it was a dwindling forest cover that drove us to bipedalism. As any reader of this blog is well aware, evolution only goes towards a goal, not away from a danger. If we stood up, it was because we were harvesting a new food source that required us to stand up; and I can guarantee you that a diet of grasses and sedges does not require one to stand up.

Stand up to hunt? Sure, the chimps do it all the time. They just don’t do it enough to make a habit of us, like we do. And if I were you, I wouldn’t give them any ideas.

The good news is that we now have evidence for hunting going back 3.5 million years. You can be sure it goes back twice that far, but this is a good leap in that direction.

Mud-Skippers

Australian mud-skippers; I saw them last night on a rerun of the BBC series, “Planet Earth.” They’re slimy little fish whose eyes recede totally into their body when they blink rather than simply drag a film of flesh over them, like we do. They roll around in the mud frequently to keep their skin moist, because it’s through their moist skin that they breath; dries out and they’re goners. As the program pointed out (narrated by Oprah Winfrey), this skipper behavior is probably pretty much how the first fish exited the ocean.

What they neglected to point out was the very different motivations those two kinds of fish had for starting the scramble out of the water. According to the BBC, the mud-skippers ventured onto land for food, the microorganisms found in the mudflats. According to paleontologists, the first fish departed for protection from the perils of the deep. Regular readers of this blog (I know you’re not out there) will be aware that I’ve long argued that the first fish left for food, as well. I’ve even argued that it couldn’t be the other way around. This BBC show doesn’t validate my claims, but it sure bolsters them.

Just saying…

But it does seem one of those instances where the paleontologists make their pronouncements without a clue as to how the world currently works. Bones, blood types, and DNA will only tell one so much; eventually one has to go out and smell the roses and make sure they’re still real. My argument is that a fish out of water is a hungry fish, not a scared fish.

Savanna Confessions

Red Colobus Monkey

So maybe I was wrong. Sort of.

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of the savannista hypothesis, despite its considerable popularity within the profession, primarily because it doesn’t account for demographics. It flies in the face of our current demographics. I begrudgingly accepted that early hominins harvested the grasslands, but I was skeptical of the disappearing forest as catalyst for their abandoning the protection of the trees. It appeared crystal clear to me that something had to draw the people down from the trees; they couldn’t have been forced out; evolution doesn’t work that way. It was also fairly evident that that something was meat, and that the protection was weaponry. Quite why meat suddenly became important for an isolated group of simians, I hadn’t worked out.

Nonetheless, most people in the profession still insisted that the disappearance of the forest and the simultaneous emergence of hominins couldn’t have been coincidental. Furthermore, hominins were beginning to harvest the grasslands; they were certainly eating small ungulates and vertebrates, as well as turtles. Given our demographics, it is unquestionable that at some point humans moved to the waterside, but that’s another question; they first have to get out of the trees.

The problems with leaving the trees, of course, is that it’s, exceedingly difficult to change ones eco-niche. As a rule, when an eco-system disappears, all components of the system disappear, as well, plants and animals. That humans didn’t disappear when the forest disappeared says that, self-evidently, their food source didn’t disappear along with the forest; which in turn implies that their food source wasn’t entirely dependent on the forest.

Stepping back a minute and looking at the pre-split simian, back when chimpanzees and hominins were a single species, and considering that today’s chimps are regular hunters who fashion their own spears and considering that humans are currently hunters, it’s most likely that the pre-split simian was also a hunter who fashioned his/her own weapons/tools. And that simian was already spending considerable time on the ground. That being the case, when the simian species split into two groups—a necessary condition for species development—possibly by the growth of intervening grasslands, it could well be that one of the two groups was caught in an island forest that was slowly disappearing under it. For many, if not most, of the inhabitants of that eco-system, it meant their disappearance, as well.

These chumans (chimps becoming humans), though, had a diet which included meat. Their main meat, if current chimps are any indication, was probably monkeys of one sort or another; although chimps are known to eat as many as thirty-five different vertebrate species, which includes small antelope. One can imagine that, as the forest disappeared, not only did the plant matter on which the chumans depended disappear, so did the monkeys. Fortunately, though, small ungulates didn’t disappear. In fact, with the spread of the grasslands, so would many types of antelope spread. It might have been fairly easy for the chumans to switch to an antelope versus a monkey dominated diet. And, if the plant material which the chumans were accustomed to eating began to get scarce, it could well be that those chumans who we better at and relied more on meat for their diet, out-paced those still dependent on forest products. In such circumstances, a species could change the ratio of its diet fairly quickly without changing its basic dietary needs. And by such a process, chumans, by now hominins, could have adapted fairly quickly to a disappearing forest. Concomitantly, it also meant that the newly minted hominins would have to spend all their time on the ground if they were going to be successful antelope hunters.

Okay, I’ll give you that. That’s a likely scenario which covers the savannista basics. It gets people out on the prairies. It does, per force, get them out on the prairies as hunters. I’m sure the defensive value of spears wasn’t lost on these early ancestors of ours, as well. What this undoubtedly starts is the human habit of tracking down animals over long distances, killing them, and transporting the meat back to the main group/tribe/family. Given that one’s hands are occupied with either weapons or kill, it behooved one to stand up as straight and as efficiently as possible; and those that did so easily were rewarded with successful hunts. Natural selection will select for upright bipedalism, as it did.

In defense of my original argument, that evolution is governed by opportunity, not necessity, still holds true. The hominins weren’t forced out of the dwindling forest, they were enticed out by by a new abundance of game, a shift from monkey to antelope. If there is a significant problem with this scenario, it’s that our shift towards obligate bipedalism occurred some three million years before the thinning of the forest, but who’s counting? And we shouldn’t forget that the hominins had no idea the forest was thinning; they were simply out hunting like they’d always done.

But this hunting scenario has other requirements. I would argue that, by adopting hunting as a regular part of our alimentary scheme, we were forced to adopt other regular practices of predatory animals, among them the establishing of temporary dens, lairs, or nests where the young are raised until old enough to participate in the hunt or other harvest. I would argue that, from the time we left the trees, we made those lairs down by the water (if for no other reason than we were reluctant to give up the trees until the last minute and that the last trees in the grassland cleaved close to the waterways), and we haven’t moved from there since. Sure, we covered immense territories in our hunting forays, but when we came back home, it was always down by the stream, on the edge of the swamp. That would account for our current demographics.

So, how does that hypothesis fit? Have I left anybody out?

Scavenging the Web

I ran across the following while hunting for hominin scavenging hypotheses on the Web. I have no idea who Blumenschine and Cavallo are or what book this quote is taken from, nor do I want to represent it a view endorsed by most scavenger hypothesis proponents; but I thought it typical of the fantasy world inhabited by advocates of the scavenger hypothesis:

“The earliest hominids probably scavenged and took small prey with their hands, as chimpanzees and baboons do. Only their next step was unique: they began to use tools to butcher large carcasses that nonhuman primates cannot exploit. The difficulty of this leap (to the use of tools to butcher) belies the charge that scavenging offers no challenge that might select for human qualities. . . Scavenging is not at all easy for a slow, small, dull-toothed primate. To locate scavengeable carcasses before others did, we had to learn how to interpret the diverse cues to the presence of a carcass in riparian woodlands. They include the labored, low-level, early-morning, beeline flight of a single vulture toward a kill; vultures perched in mid-canopy rather than at the crown of a tree, where they nest; appendages of a concealed leopard or of its kill dangling from a branch; and tufts of ungulate hair or fresh claw marks at the base of a leopards favorite feeding tree. At night, the loud 'laughing' of hyenas at a fresh kill, the panicked braying of a zebra being attacked, the grunting of a frightened wildebeest---all serve notice of where to find an abandoned carcass when morning comes." (p. 94-95, Blumenschine and Cavallo, 1992)

Starting off with a bang: “The earliest hominids probably scavenged and took small prey with their hands, as chimpanzees and baboons do.” This is the foundation their argument, equating early hominin behavior with that of chimpanzees and baboons. Fair enough. Except that in Stanford’s paper which I cited last post, “The Predatory Behavior and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees,” the author states, “wild chimpanzees (particularly the males who do most of the hunting) show little interest in dead animals.” Okay, so much for the scavenging chimps. Unfortunately, of course, since B&C start by presenting this as fact, all the rest of their conclusions follow from this erroneous statement. Did they just not know what chimps eat, or did they ignore it and make up chimp behavior to suit their theory; because that’s, effectively, what happened?

They continued with the following assertion: “The difficulty of this leap (to the use of tools to butcher) belies the charge that scavenging offers no challenge that might select for human qualities.” Since they haven’t proved that hominins were scavenging, the statement makes no sense. It’s a non sequitur. Simply because people used tools to butcher is no proof that they scavenged the animals they butchered, much less that it was selected for. They don’t appear to realize that, if scavenging were selected for in human evolution at such a late date, we’d still be scavengers.

The authors did have a flash of reason when they observed, “Scavenging is not at all easy for a slow, small, dull-toothed primate.” Forget about unarmed. So, why would we do it? It’s doubtful we could scavenge enough food to compensate for the energy expended to get it. Scavenging is easy for hyenas and vultures; they’d clean everything up long before slow us got to the carcass, even if we wanted to eat the meat.

The authors finished with a fanciful flurry of heightened imagination; for a minute they thought they were writers:

“To locate scavengeable carcasses before others did, we had to learn how to interpret the diverse cues to the presence of a carcass in riparian woodlands. They include the labored, low-level, early-morning, beeline flight of a single vulture toward a kill; vultures perched in mid-canopy rather than at the crown of a tree, where they nest; appendages of a concealed leopard or of its kill dangling from a branch; and tufts of ungulate hair or fresh claw marks at the base of a leopards favorite feeding tree. At night, the loud 'laughing' of hyenas at a fresh kill, the panicked braying of a zebra being attacked, the grunting of a frightened wildebeest—all serve notice of where to find an abandoned carcass when morning comes.”

Pay attention to the phrase “riparian woodland”: “woodland down by the river,” another cogent, if unintentional observation by the authors. Other than that, they didn’t appear to think much beyond their thesaurus. Or they haven’t spent much time looking at vultures. I’d challenge them to spend a day on foot out in, say, the John Day country of eastern Oregon and try and find one carcass with enough meat on it for them to get a reasonable bite or two. Hell, just find any old carcass, meat on the bones or not. Roadkill doesn’t count; stay to the backcountry. Go ahead, follow all the vultures you want. And in the early morning light, try and find where the coyotes were last night. Did you hear the roar of a mountain lion? Track it down and see if it killed anything.

The authors are, alas, delusional and woefully inexperienced. We are exceptionally poorly equipped to be scavengers. We are not so poorly equipped to be hunters; we’re good at throwing things. The odds of us finding game to kill are much greater than the odds of finding a leftover carcass. If you’ve ever been deer hunting, try and remember the number of dead deer you’ve seen (that weren’t shot) compared to the number of lives ones you’ve seen. In my experience, the ratio is probably bigger than 1:100. Our blunted sense of smell alone would rule us out for scavenging.

Me thinks a major stumbling block to understanding stone tools, is that paleo-anthropolgists tend to think of the first stone tools as butchering tools: hand-axes and scrapers; that’s why they place so much weight on early flaked tools which were, largely just that. They ignore the virtual certainty that the first stone tools were nothing more than the stones themselves, unprocessed. And not just for cracking open marrow bones or turtle shells, but for tossing at prey. There’s a reason why we developed a throwing shoulder early after descending; and there’s a reason why ball games are so universally important. Kill a seagull by pitching a baseball at him? You bet. A trick like that can stand between you and starvation, or at least a good meal. I imagine we came down from the trees as primarily spear-chuckers, but I’ll bet we added rocks to our arsenal early on.

No matter how common it is, it’s always a bit unsettling to find academic authors making such basic mistakes. Hopefully, some of their colleagues raised the same flags I did.

There’s always hope, right?

Dining With the Chimps

Somehow I got caught up in a debate about scavengers. It began with critiquing a recent article suggesting that early hominins ate grasses (see last post). In response to a Facebook post on the matter, a friend replied that she thought early people were scavengers. She led me to a paper by Craig Stanford, an anthropologist from USC, “The Predatory Behavior and Ecology of Wild Chimpanzees” (no date), that had some provocative information in it. If you thought chimps were meat eaters before, this paper makes it shockingly clear how much meat they eat:

“At Gombe, we now know that chimpanzees may kill and eat more than 150 small and medium sized animals such as monkeys, wild pigs and small antelopes each year.…

“The amount of meat eaten, even though it composed a small percentage of the chimpanzee diet, is substantial. I estimate that in some years, the 45 chimpanzees of the main study community at Gombe kill and consume more than 1500 pounds of prey animals of all species.”

I was under the impression that they primarily ate bush babies (Galagos) but Stanford asserts,

“Although chimpanzees have been recorded to eat more than 35 types of vertebrate animals (Uehara 1997), the most important vertebrate prey species in their diet is the red colobus monkey.”

Thirty-five types of vertebrates? Once again, I am astounded. These guys are bigger hunters than I thought. I do know that they count leopards among their prey. Yup, leopards. Their prey.

Killing by chimps is anything but incidental. Stanford observes:

“Jane Goodall has noted that the Gombe chimpanzees tend to go on ‘hunting crazes,’ during which they would hunt almost daily and kill large numbers of monkeys and other prey (Goodall 1986).”

He went on to assert,

“Chimpanzees may be among the most important predators on certain prey species in the African ecosystems where they live.”

Nonetheless, he still maintains a distance from meat-eating humans. He opines, “Since neither humans or chimpanzees are truly carnivorous —most traditional human societies eat a diet made up mostly of plant foods —we are considered omnivores”; a claim which is disputed somewhat. There are people who classify humans among the carnivores, but it’s indisputable that we’ve always had a large herbivorious component to our diet. The notion that “most traditional human societies eat a diet made up mostly of plant foods” is somewhat disingenuous. That depends largely on what one means by “traditional society,” a term he does not define. There are, in the main, two kinds of societies one might call “traditional.” There are those traditional elements of all modern societies, all of which are post-agrarian revolution and, hence, much more dependent on plant matter than a traditional hunter-gatherer society. Those pre-agricultural societies that survived into the modern age did so because they lived on marginal lands and don’t necessarily represent the norm for pre-agrarian societies. Nonetheless, it’s hard to imagine claiming the Inuit, for example, “eat a diet made up mostly of plant foods.” So, while it’s true that we’re omnivores; it’s by no means established that pre-agrarian societies ate, primarily, plant food. It’s those kinds of unwarranted assumptions that cloud one’s interpretation of data. The assumption makes it more likely that we had a vegetarian past, something the PC (politically correct) world would dearly love to be true. The brutal truth is, we certainly were as significant predators as chimps, and we certainly became more so once we were upright.

The author asked the question:

“Many researchers now believe that the carcasses of large mammals were an important source of meat for early hominids once they had stone tools to use for removing the flesh from the carcass (Bunn and Kroll 1986). But the evidence for stone tool use dates to only 2.5 million years ago. For the 3 or so million years of human evolution prior to that time, did our ancestors eat meat?”

Classic blunder. It’s not “evidence for stone tool use,” it’s evidence for flaked-stone tool use. All the difference in the world. By not mentioning the inevitable millions of years of un-shaped tool use that we must have had, he leaves the impression that we didn’t start using stone tools until we miraculously learned how to shape them. If we hadn’t already been using stone tools before we learned to shape them, how did we ever come up with the idea? It makes the question, “For the 3 or so million years of human evolution prior to that time, did our ancestors eat meat?” sounding like he didn’t read what he’d just written. Does he think we would have given up eating meat for those intervening years? Surely, he doesn’t. It’s an unfortunate slip of logic.

And it obviates the idea that we could have ever been scavengers. I know of no instance where a species turned from predator to scavenger, not to mention back again. That would be stunning, unprecedented. In the end, scavenging turned out to be one funny idea.

News Flash: Scientists Survive on Poppycock

ScienceDaily
Dec. 14, 2012

“Scientists 'Surprised' to Discover Very Early Ancestors Survived On Tropical Plants, New Study Suggests”

“Researchers involved in a new study led by Oxford University have found that between three million and 3.5 million years ago, the diet of our very early ancestors in central Africa is likely to have consisted mainly of tropical grasses and sedges. The findings are published in the early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

Frankly, I was skeptical. I just couldn’t imagine early humans grazing on grasses. Nor could I imagine that our ancestors would have given up meat so quickly after learning how to be upright and hunt with weapons. I could see them sharing their diet with vegetable matter, but grasses seemed unlikely.

The study authors, I guess, also thought that eating grasses directly was unlikely, for the article continued:

“The authors argue that it is unlikely that the hominins would have eaten the leaves of the tropical grasses as they would have been too abrasive and tough to break down and digest. Instead, they suggest that these early hominins may have relied on the roots, corms and bulbs at the base of the plant.”

That mollified me some but I was still skeptical. Which corms and roots and bulbs are we talking about? From grasses and sedges? Really?

Then comes the clinker:

“Professor Lee-Thorp said: ‘Based on our carbon isotope data, we can't exclude the possibility that the hominins' diets may have included animals that in turn ate the tropical grasses. But as neither humans nor other primates have diets rich in animal food, and of course the hominins are not equipped as carnivores are with sharp teeth, we can assume that they ate the tropical grasses and the sedges directly.’”

Did they really say that? One has to presume they did. Humans don’t have a diet rich in animal food? What supermarket do the authors shop in?

Needless-to-say, the authors are basing their argument on the commonly held, if probably erroneous, assumption that because “hominins are not equipped as carnivores are with sharp teeth,” they couldn’t bring down game. What the hell were they doing with the rocks and spears they were carrying around? The more reasonable assumption is that, indeed, our early ancestors were eating game, not grasses.

Think for a minute, Professor Lee-Thorpe, what’s the likelihood of people surviving out on the treeless plains eating only roots and corms with no means of protection and no ability to run away and nothing to climb? Zilch. The only reason humans could survive out on the plains was that they were top predators. They were killers.

You’re misinterpreting your data, sir.

Fuel On the Fire

Science on NBCnews.com

“Sorry, vegans: Eating meat and cooking food made us human: High caloric intake enabled brains of our prehuman ancestors to grow dramatically”

By Christopher Wanjek

“The new studies demonstrate, respectively, that it would have been biologically implausible for humans to evolve such a large brain on a raw, vegan diet and that meat-eating was a crucial element of human evolution at least 1 million years before the dawn of humankind.”

The last part of this statement reflects the paleo-anemia reported upon earlier. The first part, the implausibility, is from a study at the University of Rio de Janeiro. Wanjek combined the two results for an appraisal of the findings.

I find it interesting that these reports consistently come out, yet there is so much resistance to the hypothesis that people stood up to carry weapons (and, subsequently, food).

The article also reports:  “Humans have exceptionally large, neuron-rich brains for our body size, while gorillas — three times more massive than humans — have smaller brains and three times fewer neurons. Why?

“The answer, it seems, is the gorillas' raw, vegan diet (devoid of animal protein), which requires hours upon hours of eating only plants to provide enough calories to support their mass.”

I know, I know; everyone wants to be a gentle vegetarian like, say, Hitler, but the truth is, it’s ruthless meat eaters like the Dali Lama who have led the species out of the jungle.

The good news is, we’re pretty sure, now, that the first restaurant was a barbecue hut.

Once More With Feeling

Hear me out; I may be onto something.

Maybe it’s all a matter of semantics, of word choice.

The problem is in the phrase “natural selection”; it implies choice. In people’s minds it implies that the selecting being done is being done by the individual members of the species, and that it’s that selecting which affects the direction of evolution; i.e. successful females get together with successful males (of whatever species), and they breed successful offspring which informs the direction of their evolution.

No. There are two way to make selections: one is by choice; and the other is by attrition. Natural selection is of the second variety: those who are left standing at the end are those who are chosen. We think of natural selection as of the first kind, but in truth, it’s of the second.

Natural selection happens at the species, not the individual, level. Natural selection doesn’t care how successful any individual is; it only cares whether or not the individual’s genes give rise to successful generations. It only cares what the individual contributes to the gene pool, not its individual success. All those pecking orders and strict animal hierarchies have nothing to do with mating the best specimens; they’re simply ways of A) insuring the shuffling of genes, and B) maintaining social order within the species.

It is not in a species’ interest to keep only its best specimens alive; it’s best interests are to keep as many of its members alive as possible.

Ergo, the only natural selection being done is a matter of success: either a mutation has it or it doesn’t. And really, that’s no selection at all; it’s dumb luck.

•

Think of it this way. Igor the cowherd was on the bottom rung of the ladder. He wasn’t the brightest of candles, was prone to disease, and spent a lot of his life alone with his cows in the mountains. This was a very, very long time ago. Before they’d brought those cows to Europe; they were still hanging around the Caucasus. Igor also had a penchant for barley beer and didn’t look much to the future.

Igor hooked up with Priscilla who was, perhaps, a little slow on the uptake and had trouble walking in a straight line, but she was happy enough with the lone cowherd. Their life would not be remarkable; they brought three children into the world before Igor was kicked in the head by a cow and killed. Alas. The only thing unusual was a small mutation in Igor’s constitution. Everyone at the time was lactose intolerant. That’s the usual human condition; it takes living with cows and drinking their milk for millennia before chance provides a lactose-tolerance mutation. Wouldn’t you know it, that mutation happened to Igor.

It didn’t, of course, help Igor—he was kicked to death at a young age—but two of his three children inherited the gene. It didn’t make a big difference in their life, either, though they did tolerate dairy products better than their kin. It wasn’t a huge change, but, considering their livelihood, it would eventually have a big impact on their culture. Those children who inherited the new gene did a little better than their neighbors. It was a useful gene and it slowly got passed around to most everyone in the tribe. Those who had it had a better survival rate than those who didn’t.

The king’s family? They never got the gene and were wiped out some years later in a coup. Alas.

And that’s how natural selection works. No one ever selected Igor’s family to be the hope of the future, other than chance. No one even noticed that it was Igor’s descendants who changed their people forever. Who would have imagined? No one, and no one did.

Is That You, Grandma?

Popular Archaeology, Tue, Oct 23, 2012
“Was Grandmothering a Key to Human Evolution?”
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/september-2012/article/was-grandmothering-a-key-to-human-evolution
“Kristen Hawkes, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah and senior author of the new study published Oct. 24 by the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.”

[Start here. Yo, you.]

It’s a sweet, if slightly myopic, study.

Let me get my disclaimers out of the way. I’m a grandparent. I live with a grandmother. I’m all in favor of grandmothers. I think grandmothers rule the world.

That being said, let’s give a big shout-out for grandfathers.

Kristen Hawkes, it appears, would like to give the credit to grandmothers; and I’m more than willing to giver them all the credit they deserve, but I suspect both sexes had a role in Ms Hawke’s findings.

PA said: “Hawkes, University of Utah anthropologist James O'Connell and UCLA anthropologist Nicholas Blurton Jones formally proposed the grandmother hypothesis in 1997, and it has been debated ever since. Once major criticism was that it lacked a mathematical underpinning – something the new study sought to provide.” They summarized Hawkes proposal as “a famous theory that humans evolved longer adult lifespans than apes because grandmothers helped feed their grandchildren.”

Which begs the question: What were the grandfathers doing? Whittling spears?

The authors came to their conclusions “when they lived with Tanzania's Hazda hunter-gatherer people and watched older women spend their days collecting tubers and other foods for their grandchildren. Except for humans, all other primates and mammals collect their own food after weaning.”

Photo: Martin Shoeller

They never do say what the grandfathers were doing. (Let’s see, the Hazda are hunter-gatherers. The authors observed the women gathering. Do you suppose the men could have been out hunting?)

Hawkes is on to something, but she doesn’t know quite what. In this study they haven’t done research on observable realities but were instead working on creating computer simulations that would verify their assumptions. To no one’s surprise, they succeeded. They mathematically described a possibility and then tweaked it until it worked, demonstrating that possibility could have happened. I have no doubt they’re right.

But what they’re attributing to grandmothers, I’d attribute to structural changes in human society. It wasn’t, simply, that grandmother’s were feeding weaned children and extending their dependence on others for sustenance. The answer lies in what Hawkes herself said: “The [apes] that began to exploit resources little kids couldn't handle, opened this window for grandmothering and eventually evolved into humans."

The operatives words here are “little kids couldn't handle.” What was it about the food these humans were eating that, unlike all other primates, the kids needed adults to gather it for them? Hawkes, et al, don’t broach that question. Primates aren’t unusual in being able to self-feed immediately after weaning, most mammals are similarly equipped. As a rule, once you can reach the fruit, grass, leaves, nuts, by yourself, you’re on your own. Why we should be different, apparently, was of no concern to the authors.

The exceptions are predators like lions and tigers, and bears, oh my. And us. But if you’re reading Ms Hawkes, you’d never know that. As far as Ms Hawkes is concerned, food stops at tubers and roots; although why weaned children would need adults to provide them with said tubers and roots when they are perfectly capable of getting them themselves is never explained. Because the food in question, the food that the “little kids couldn't handle,” was meat. Everything else they could manage just fine, thank you. Meat, though, they had to be ready to go out after. Just like those Hazda grandfathers who are ignored and are nowhere to be found, they’re out hunting what the kids can’t handle. “Leave the little ones home with the women; we’ll go on a walk-about.”

Yes, yes, grandmothers are important in human society and have been forever; but no more so than the rest of the fabric. Grandmothers only became important when we had settled down into predators’ camps, when we had the luxury of community. It wasn't just the grandmothers who raised the little children, it was the whole village. Grandmothers became important when we had the luxury of having them at all. Grandmothers became important when we started bringing food home and sharing it rather than every person for themselves. If grandma had to climb that tree for dinner, tough titties. Grandmothers (and fathers) are a luxury of a meat-eating society. If it wasn’t for that, we’d never have come together around the campfire; we’d still be out grubbing for tubers and roots. It was no vegetarian what captured fire.

I repeat: The driving force behind humans becoming humans was meat. Pure and simple, meat. Nothing but meat. No tubers, no roots, no sweet berries, no saturated nuts. Nope. Meat. Betcha hamburger.

Step Lively, You Gorillas

Photo: tom2001

BBC 9/29/12

“Great apes, such as gorillas, chimps and bonobos, are running out of places to live, say scientists.

“They have recorded a dramatic decline in the amount of habitat suitable for great apes, according to the first such survey across the African continent.”

Oh come on, how can that be? Why should declining habitat bother them? I have it from very good sources that when ones habitat disappears, one adapts to the new situation. We did that when the forest dried up from under us, we learned to walk to the next patch of berries. That’s what the paleoanthropologists tell you. If it was easy enough for us, how come it’s so difficult for gorillas? How come they don’t just learn to walk away like we did? Dumb gorillas.

A Hunting We Will Go

Bad day at the office.

Well, there you go. I didn’t even know there was controversy about humans hunting. Why else would we stand up? Today’s (9/24/12) headline in The Guardian: “Humans hunted for meat 2 million years ago. Evidence from ancient butchery site in Tanzania shows early man was capable of ambushing herds up to 1.6 million years earlier than previously thought.”

But wait, wait. We’ve been shaping tools for 2.5 million years. What did they think we were using those tools for? Making boats?

Scavengers? Humans? You’ve got to be kidding, right? Why would the top predator in the world be a scavenger? Not that they’d turn down luck, but if you’re trying to make it by chasing down road kill, I don’t think you’re going to make it to the top of the food chain. Are the chimps scavengers? No. Who came up with that scenario?

And making tools. All we know is that by 2.5 mya people were shaping rocks into scrapers and blades and hand-axes. The question becomes, of course, how long had they been using stones as tools before they hit upon shaping them? Not to mention, did they even begin with stone tools? Chimps go after their game with spears they fashion themselves out of wood. It’s reasonable to think that, when we split from the chimps, we were doing the same. It’s reasonable to think that we kept on making wooden spears until we figured out how to make and affix stone points to them.

It’s not unreasonable to think that, perhaps, what caused the split between us and the chimps was a predilection for hunting on our part. It’s not difficult to see that a shift from occasional hunting (chimps) to habitual hunting (us) could lead to obligate bipedalism (us). We know we were using tools when we split from the chimps. We were probably better at it than they were. At the very least, human tool use goes back six million years. Has to be.

Anyone who says otherwise is itching for a fight.

Hello, anybody home?

I just ran across this from April 16, 2012, smithsonianmag.com

“A New Aquatic Ape Theory.” It’s the frustration of being the tree falling in the forest, that no one is hearing. The gist of the article is covering a paper published in 2009 by Richard Wrangham of Harvard where, it appears, he proposed that “shallow aquatic habitats allowed hominids to thrive in savannas, enabling our ancestors to move from tropical forests to open grasslands.

“About 2.5 million to 1.4 million years ago, when the genus Homo emerged, Africa became drier. During certain seasons, already dry savannas became even more arid, making it difficult for hominids to find adequate food. But Wrangham’s team argues that even in this inhospitable environment there were oases: wetlands and lake shores. In these aquatic habitats, water lilies, cattails, herbs and other plants would have had edible, nutritious underground parts—roots and tubers—that would have been available year-round. These ‘fallback’ foods would have gotten hominids through the lean times.”

Readers of this blog and AAT chat sites from long before that know that I proposed this theory perhaps twenty-five years ago or better. You just have to go back to early posts on this blog to see those very arguments. In fact, I’d fairly recently written an update that I wasn't going to post to the blog because I’d already said it; but because parts of it are rather fun reading, anyway, I thought that posting in light of Wrangham’s report might be worthwhile.

Wrangham, if you’re not familiar with him (I’m not), achieved notoriety recently for theories propounded in a book Catching Fire (which I have not read) that suggest that cooking was an early advancer of our physical development. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would have been any question about that, but, apparently, there was. In any event, Wrangham cemented it in people’s minds that barbecue changed our entire being, not just what we had on Saturday night. Richard, it appears, isn’t afraid to advance the obvious as the solution. I’m only hoping he came up with the idea long before 2009. Not the fire bit, the living by water bit; because only a fool—and there a lot of the out there—would deny that we already are a semiaquatic animal. Only a fool.

I never quite finished this, but it's close enough for folk music. I was rushed. Without further ado, the long, boring “Why I’m Not a Savannista Anymore.”


Confessions of a Lay Person

I am confused. I am a lay person and I don’t “do” science. I do have an avocational interest in evolution, human evolution in particular, and I try to make sense of what I glean from the popular media.

Which is okay. This is an exciting time for all science, but human evolutionary science has been thrown for a loop these past years with new discoveries and understandings appearing, like phantoms out of the jungle, at an astounding rate. It’s been fun to watch. From Ardi to the Denisovans, a lot of old paradigms have seriously cracked.

But, I gotta tell you, there are some things which don’t add up. Can I borrow your time in the hopes that someone will have an answer for me, be able to tie together these few loose ends? I’m sure that, if I’d paid more attention in Biology 101, I wouldn’t have to ask these questions.

Admittedly, garnering my information from the media warps the knowledge stream considerably, but it is what it is. Maybe it’s all a matter of poor communication.

Might as well begin by pointing out what my problems are, and then we’ll try and figure out how I got here. Let me begin by stating three positions I’ve heard:

—Fish/aquatic life moved from the sea to the land to avoid predators;

—Proto-people descended from the trees and began to walk upright in response to thinning forests;

—And a question posed recently in The New Yorker, is there an evolutionary basis for altruism?

Those are the basics; the details can get a little complex. We have to look at how I perceive what I’ve absorbed from the media.

It’s my understanding that all life on Earth issues from a primitive, self-replicating molecule or string of molecules that had to have come with an equally primitive set of operating instructions including how to find and recognize building (eating) materials and how to reproduce. That’s at the very minimum. Those operating instructions would be the precursors to DNA. How those operating instructions could have grown into long strands of DNA is, as yet, unanswered; or if it has been answered, I haven’t seen it. Once again, the precarious nature of the popular press.

Regardless of how they got there, it’s my understanding that DNA can only change through mutations, which are caused regularly but randomly throughout the chain by exterior forces. That may be a false presumption, but it’s the one I’ve been given. Ask me not about combinatorial DNA.

At that, then, I have a creature who can find food, knows how to reproduce, and whose instructions can only be changed arbitrarily. One would have to presume that any change in instructions would be most likely disastrous, if not neutral, and that ones that were beneficial would be few and far between. On the other hand, those with the beneficial mutation would eventually replace those without. Math alone will do that.

This, of course, is predicated on the assumption that, if nothing else, life wants to live. Wherever that drive comes from, once it’s established, it apparently goes to any lengths to perpetuate itself. That seems to be the basic set of instructions that all life has: go forth and multiply. Nothing more; nothing less. My understanding is that’s it. There are no more instructions; from then on everything is left to chance. And has been since the beginning.

And that’s where the trouble lies. That’s where I lose my way.

Here’s how I see chance. A man goes to the casino. He hits the jackpot; he wins a million dollars. He needed that million dollars; his home was about to be foreclosed and the bank wanted their car back. Did he win the million dollars because he was lucky, or because he needed the money? My understanding is that he was lucky. I mean, the result was great: he got what he needed, the weight was lifted off his back. But did his need for money help him win the jackpot? When you, look at someone who has won the jackpot, do you think, gee, he/she sure must have needed that money?

Let’s go back to that fish wanting to get onshore. If a fish were to move onshore to avoid predators, how would that happen? How many evolutionary steps would it take for a fish to evolve into a land animal? How many mutations? Just to escape that predator? How would moving out of the water a little bit and then a little bit more over hundreds-of-thousands, if not millions of years, ever escape one from a predator? If there weren’t any use in being just a little bit out of the water, how would that trait be passed on? Would it be waiting for a multiplier mutation to allow the fish to pop out of the water even further? But if the popping out were useless at that point, would multipliers keep piling up randomly until one day the fish could walk out of the water and survive the predators? If that were the case, wouldn’t it happen to all aquatic life, predators too? I’m having trouble picturing all this. A waiting for Godot fish, waiting till it can miraculously walk on land and escape the nemesis of the deep. It seems that the odds of that randomly happening would be zilch.

It seems much more likely to me that a shore-dwelling fish might find that the land vegetation growing near the shore provided good food, a vegetarian fish. Let’s say that fish really became dependent on the abundant land vegetation that happened to droop or fall into the stream. Let’s presume that any little mutation that helped that fish acquire more of that plant would be spread throughout the species. Let’s presume that staying out of the water as long as possible meant getting the most food. Let’s presume that any mutation that allowed the fish to stay out of the water longer would be passed on to the entire species. In that way, little by little a fish could find itself out of the water happily munching on ferns or lichens or small English crumpets. Of course, being out of the water would have its side benefits, no more predators; but that would probably be balanced by having to get used to the weather. The tipping point, I think, wouldn’t be safety, it would be food.

Follow me this far? Because the implication is that, if mutations are ruled by chance, then evolution is ruled by chance. If evolution is ruled by chance, then there’s no march, no direction to evolution. It means that evolution is governed by opportunity, not by the result. The fish evolved out of the water because it could find better food, there was an opportunity to evolve in that direction should the chance arise. Even though at first the fish slowly moving out of the water wouldn’t be any safer from any predators, so that wouldn’t have provided any incentive; but the increased food supply would incrementally keep getting better and provide enough value to the species that such traits would be saved. The fish didn’t evolve to live outside the water because it was safer, even though that was the result. After an extinction event we don’t get an explosion of species because there are all those niches needing to be filled (or that it would be a good idea to fill); we get the explosion because all those niches are empty.

It seems to me that’s the same problem with the second position: that people took to the ground because the trees were thinning. Once again, I have trouble seeing how that would work. If the previous paragraph is true and evolution is governed by opportunity, not by the result, then we have to ask what opportunities enticed the forest dwellers onto the land? Not forced them, enticed them?

Moreover, where did they get the time? Remember that at this time, 2 1/2 million years or so ago, our ancestors were little more than chimpanzees; we’d made the split, but we hadn’t progressed very far. We had no “culture” to protect us at that time; we suffered the same natural laws as any other animal. That’s where the time comes in.

Again, I’m no scientist and I don’t know how these things work; I’ve got to trust that I can winnow through what I read and hear. I hear a lot about global warming. I hear a lot about species going extinct. By the thousands. All over the world because their habitats are disappearing. I hear some habitats are merely shifting and that some animals/plants can accommodate the move. They arrive earlier in the year or don’t migrate anymore. Mostly, though, I hear the habitats are destroyed or there’s no corridor between remaining remnants. Then I hear that species die. Funny, you’d think I’d hear of species adapting. That’s what we’re to believe proto-people did. If those folks could learn how to walk upright out on the savannah, why can’t the polar bear head into the woods? Why can one species adapt and the others fail? What made us unique?

For every other species, they appear to go extinct rather than adapt because environmental conditions change much more rapidly than evolutionary adaptation. The general rule seems to be that, if a habitat disappears from underneath a species, that species will disappear. If someone could point to a bunch of species contradicting that rule, let me know. Heck, even one would be interesting.

Perhaps people are the one.

Perhaps they’re not.

There are alternative scenarios. People could have been drawn out of the trees. There may have been opportunities presented to them which rewarded standing up on two feet, regardless of what the forest was doing. It’s another case of not looking at the results but, instead, look for the cause, look for the opportunity. The assumption is that people were forced out of the trees (but the chimps weren’t?) and then learned to adapt to their new surroundings by learning to walk upright. One can only surmise that, after the thinning of the forest but before the adaptation of upright walking, when they were still only adapted to climbing trees, they must have been easy pickings. Unless, of course, it didn’t happen that way.

Truthfully, this is where I get stuck. If it didn’t happen that way, how could it have happened? And if it did happen that way, where’s the evidence?

Lacking evidence, I’ve made up my own scenario. I don’t think anyone left the trees because they had to. I think they left the trees because they found more/better food while standing up. Once again, I’m relying on the understanding that any successful mutation has to benefit the entire species, and that it would take innumerable mutations to change from a tree-dwelling to a terrestrial creature, and that each mutation along the way would have to be immediately beneficial else it would disappear or remain neutral. It’s like the fish and the food, each step towards upright walking would have to be beneficial, not just the end result (as if there were an “end result” beyond the current status). Something beneficial is going to have to happen each step of the way towards bipedalism; one can’t keep slowly standing up in hopes there will be a payoff when you get up straight; there has to be benefit in each mutation. And benefit, we remember from the beginning of those self-replicating molecules, can only be in one of two forms: it either helps with food gathering or reproduction; nothing else matters.

I figure it’s not sex. I doubt that people stood up because sex was better that way or that we had more kids that way; on the contrary, it appears that standing up made birth more difficult. There had to have been some powerful incentive to stand up if it made reproduction so difficult. The only other permissible incentive is food. (With the usual caveat that, if you can think of another incentive, give me a shake.) For some reason, standing up allowed us to eat better. Whatever the reason, it pretty much has to be related to our ability to find food. It probably had nothing to do with a thinning forest. Evolution doesn’t go away from anything, it only goes towards something, right? A species can only evolve in the direction chance and opportunity permit.

So, what would entice an ape out of the trees to permanently hang out on the ground? What food would have been available to us as bipeds that wasn’t available to us as knuckle walkers? The chimps and gorillas seem to survive just fine living in both worlds. Why did we give up the trees, they didn’t? We were lucky, eventually our posture allowed us to take over the entire world, but, surely, that’s not why we stood up. We could only have stood up to eat better; taking over the world was pure luck.

How, though, would bipedalism help us eat better?

I’ve heard theories. I’ve heard that, perhaps, standing up offered a smaller target to the sun so we didn’t overheat while out on the savannah hunting. Hmm? I have visions of hunters trekking across the plains, leaning towards the sun so that it only shines on the tops of their heads. As the day stretches on, they become almost parallel to the ground. I don’t think so. Nope.

I’ve heard that, maybe, we stood up to see over the tall grasses either to spot game or predators. Maybe. And at the same time we were willing to give up any ability to run fast or climb out of harm’s way? How did we ever survive? How come no other animal successfully did this? How come every other animal learned to stand up, check out the surroundings, and then get down on all fours and run like hell? How come we were willing to give up our chance to escape just to peak above the grass? How come there’s not a race of bipedal prairie dogs?

I’ve heard that it’s possible we took to standing up to carry food to our families. Again, us and nobody else? Look around you, don’t most of the larger animals carry food to their young? Such as, virtually all of them? Mammals, indeed, have it built in; but even after the young have stopped suckling, the parents generally spend a long time bringing solid food to their offspring. None has seen it advisable to stand up to do so. None. Does that not give you pause to wonder how it could have happened to humans? Did we/do we spend so much time carting food around that it was worthwhile to stand up and do it permanently? Doesn’t seem like it.

Other reasons? Wading around after clams and seaweed? All day? Not likely. We may well have taken to scavenging the shoreline and the swamps, but I doubt we’d have given up the safety of the trees just to do it.

Well, what then?

A change in diet?

A change in diet? How on earth could a change in diet make one want to stand up? There is the fruit-picking theory, that we stood up to gather fruit and nuts. But, really, if you’re going after fruit and nuts, wouldn’t it be better to stay in the trees? How would standing up help one gain access to more/better fruit? You’d give up climbing the trees for standing on the ground and throwing sticks? Really? I don’t think it was fruit and nuts that got us standing up. I don’t.

I think it was meat.

Let’s step back a minute and delve more into popular science: hello NOVA. In the past decades we’ve learned that humans are not the only tool users. Not even the only primate tool users. In fact, all apes are known to use tools of one sort or another. The chimpanzees, we’ve learned, not only go fishing for termites with long twigs, they’re perfectly capable of sharpening a stick with their teeth and going after bush babies, a lesser primate, using the stick as a thrusting spear. That was a shock. Furthermore, they’re not above heaving rocks at an enemy, albeit, underhand.

It could be that chimps acquired this habit after the split with humans, but it’s more likely that the progenitor of both species was already using such tools better than six million years ago. Fast forward to the first known shaped-stone tool use among humans, something like 2 1/2 million years ago. That gives humans 3 1/3 million years to progress from tooth-sharpened sticks and tossed rocks to hand-axes. (If these numbers aren’t exactly to your liking, fill in those of your choice; you have the basic concept.)

Why, you may ask, did this pre-split chimp-human (chuman?) take up sharpening sticks in the first place? You might as well ask, why weren’t they satisfied with termites and bananas? What’s so special about meat? Other than it’s concentrated food. Have you ever noticed how much more time a zebra spends eating than a lion does? I have. Out here on the veldt (not really) I notice the lions spend most of the day lazing around while the zebras are eating every chance they get. Such as when they’re not being chased by lions. It’s the meat. Vegetarians simply have to spend a lot more time crunching away just to get the same food energy that a carnivore does. A lot more.

I’ll tell you what I think happened. I think the split between us and the chimps happened because we really got into meat eating. I think that, before the split, like chimps today, we only used tools occasionally. When we decided to go after bush babies, we would find a stick, sharpen it, and go after them, only to abandon the stick after the hunt. Next hunt, new stick.

But one chimp developed a habit, it sharpened a sick and held on to it. No particular reason, he just liked to sharpen sticks and hold onto them. As a side effect, when a bush baby hole popped into view, he was at the ready; consequently, he ate better than his neighbors. He passed that spear-holding trait onto his kids and his grandkids and they ate and prospered better than any of the others in their tribe. Eventually, everybody was sharpening and hanging onto sticks. Suddenly, the whole tribe was eating better than anyone else in the forest. Eventually, holding a spear at the ready became habitual; those who did it more, prospered more. Slowly, those who were better at handling their spears prospered more than those who were clumsy. Likewise, those who became better at throwing stones were also able to eat better, and, if they had a few stones always at hand, so much the better. The drift towards habitually carrying tools had begun. We were separating from the chimps. That’s how I see it, anyway.

Eventually, of course, successfully carrying tools (i.e. weapons) at all times meant that we inexorably switched from habitual to obligatory bipedalism. There was no way back; we were upright.

Huh? How does that sound? Doesn’t that make more sense than peeping over the grass or carrying rodents back to the kids, not to mention lessening the chance of sunstroke. Could it have taken us 3 1/2 million years to stand up and shape hand tools? Seems fast to me, but could be, we were clever. We do know that something got us to stand up and make hand axes by 2 1/2 million years ago, and we know it had to do with food, and we’re pretty sure it didn’t have to do with pancakes. I’d go with meat and weapons.

If that theory is correct, that habitual tool-carrying led to obligate bipedalism, it throws new light on the ability of our ancestors to expand their hunting range. They might still camp in the forest, but they could now contemplate ranging out after bigger game. Twenty or thirty Australopithecines armed with rocks and spears would be formidable even for a pride of lions. Fifty or sixty together could take over about anything.

That’s it. That how I see we came down out of the trees. Admittedly, it’s a wild guess, but it sounds good, no?

A bonus point is that, if our ancestors still liked to hang around trees even after they learned to walk; it makes it easier to imagine that a branch of that family, us, liked to hang around, not only the woods, but down by the water. We were the guys who learned how to sail and eat seafood. We prospered. We now live all over the world, provided it has potable water and is close to navigable water. Even the farmers and the herders live near water; we’ve never gotten over that.

Now, about that altruism. The New Yorker asks if its an inheritable trait? They meant it in a good way.

A problem I have with altruism being an inheritable trait is that altruism is a value judgement, not a scientific measurement. It’s akin to asking, is being a good farmer an inheritable trait? Is there a genetic basis for good farming?

Intellectually, altruism assumes free will, something for which we don’t have clear evidence. The core definition of “altruism,” if I have it right, is doing good for another at personal cost to oneself. This presumes we’re in  control of our thoughts and actions, another case of something that might or might not be true. It’s not clear that consciousness, no matter how advanced, is anything more than a monitoring and transmission station. It’s very fast and it gives us the illusion we’re doing the thinking for operational purposes, but I’m not sure we know how that’s done. My guess is that thinking is done at the cellular level or below and is primarily a matter of counting switches, yeses and nos. It’s why we can ponder some problems forever without making up our minds or why we can “instinctively” jump in front of a train to save someone. In neither case is our consciousness making the decision, it’s only transmitting data. I think if we had to think about thinking, we’d be frozen in our tracks.

Let’s go back, then, to that pre-cellular creature and its mutations. We’ve already determined two things: one, that mutations can only be adopted if they improve either feeding or reproduction; and two, successful mutations have to benefit the entire species in order to survive. The process, it would appear, means that the operating package that each member of a species gets gives instructions that propel the organism one way or another simply by checking the situation against its given template. If the monitoring station sends the propitious signals, go for it. No thinking necessary, just compare to the template. That system would work all the way up to us. We never really think, we just do what our sub-engine—oh heck, let’s just call it a subconscious—decides.

How Come It’s So Fucking Hard to Talk to Believers?

Gregory Koukl

If you go to Christian apologetics Websites, you’ll find long, tedious refutations of atheism, just like you’ll find long, tedious anti-Christian screeds on atheist Websites. Because I agree with the atheists, I can’t find much, besides their strident attitude, to disagree with; but when I hit the Christian sites I find I can’t read but a few paragraphs before I’m boiling over at the inaccuracies. And the inaccuracies are most often of the same variety: misstatements of the atheist position. The favorite tactic is to set up a straw dog, knock it down, and congratulate ones self on ones brilliance.

Let me give you this bit of reasoning from Gregory Koukl on the Website Stand to Reason, in an essay called “Evolution Can’t Explain Morality.” He’s explaining what he perceives as the “naturalist” argument for altruistic morality:

“So, in abbreviated form, the reasoning goes like this: I ought to be unselfish because it is better for the group, which is better for the species, which is better for me. So why ought I be unselfish? Because it is better for me. But looking at what is better for me, is selfishness. So all of this so-called description of where morality comes from, gets reduced to this ludicrous statement: I morally ought to be unselfish so that I can be more thoroughly selfish….

“Since morality is prescriptive, not descriptive, and if it is normative…, it talks about how we ought to behave…”

Which is great and nice and tight. Except that the reasoning doesn’t go like that and morality is not prescriptive. Small problems.

Who does Mr. Koukl think prescribes this morality? Isn’t morality more like language: it’s how we do behave, not how we “should” behave? Doesn’t the prescriptive nature of morality come from one person wishing to impose their views on another? It appears as if Mr. Koukl is arguing that because there has to be someone prescribing morality—otherwise we wouldn’t have it—there has to be a god to do the prescribing. If only morality were prescriptive and not a construct of humanity.

But as usual, such apologetics arguments are really admissions that the arguer has no clue what she/he is talking about. They always start with unproven assumptions and carry on from there. That’s the kind of thinking that leads one to think the Ten Commandments are the word of God. No, really, it does.

As to whether or not we should act unselfish, again it’s misstating the situation. It’s not that we should act unselfish, it’s that we do. It’s not that we ought to behave unselfishly, it’s that selfish people tend to not reproduce so well. The species can’t afford to have a slug of selfish people around; it just kills them off early and has them lead miserable, neurotic lives that leave them with weak sperm counts or whatever. In the long run it rewards peaceful cooperative communities, which is why violence has continued to go down in the world for at least 40,000 years: Mother Nature goes on weeding out the violent.

So, all-in-all, we have been unselfish in our lives, beginning with our family and friends and slowly spreading out from there. We’re doing pretty well at not killing our neighbors; and pretty soon we’ll maybe stop killing the folks on the other side of the border, as well. I have hopes. Most everyone wants to reign in corporate power and utilize the resources for the benefit of the entire species. I think we’ll work towards that next. It’s not going to be easy and it will be brutal; but not so bad as we thought and we’ll win. If it’s good for the species, the species will win; and when the species wins, we all win. The species doesn’t care if you’re selfish; it just won’t let you reproduce well. And that’s why the Enlightenment has spread so quickly: people who have slipped the yoke of religious isolationism have done better than those who haven’t: Sweden-Nigeria, for example.

Richard Deem

The second instance comes from a fellow named Richard Deem who runs a Website called, I believe, Evidence for God. You’d think it would be a pretty short site, but he goes on forever. I couldn’t get much past the paragraph quoted below (“Atheists are left with…”), so I wrote him the following:

If you're going to argue against atheism, at least use their real arguments. Don't imagine arguments and then argue against them. The following quote from you is off the charts. It's an incorrect characterization of atheism. No wonder why you strayed. You didn't understand it. No atheist is going to deny the possibility of God, only the probability of God. Big difference. Anything imaginable is possible; not everything that is imagined is probable. God is highly improbable; that's all we're saying. And that's just a statistical fact.

[Richard’s argument.]

“Atheists are left with a dilemma, since their worldview requires that all things that begin to exist must have a cause. So, logic requires the admission that the universe had a cause. Virtually all atheists say that this cause was some natural phenomenon. It is also possible that the cause of the universe was a supernatural intelligence (i.e., God). However, there is no direct observational evidence for either belief. Those who are ‘strong atheists’ (not working out in the gym, but having a belief that no god exists) have just violated one of the main rules of atheism - that all beliefs are based upon observational evidence. So, any atheist who denies the possible existence of God violates his own worldview.”

To Richard’s credit, he responded to my note:

“Johan,

“Please provide the data behind your claim that ‘God is highly improbable.’ Where are your statistics?”

I gave him my statistics. I replied with this:

It's the statistics of fantasy. Any fantasy can be true in some universe, but to rank statistically, you need a body of data. You have to have a sample of at least one. Without a sample, it's in the realm of fantasy. And an unnecessary one, at that. Every religion is a myth system that has nothing to do with observable reality. None of them explain anything. Now, religions do have a lot of functions in society, don't get me wrong, but it's not in the realm of explaining how the universe works. Religions have no idea about that. Myths aren't reality. They're very influential, but they aren't real. So, the chance of any fiction being real approaches zero in this universe and to be statistically probable would require multiverses and still wouldn't explain observable reality in this universe. In other words, God has the same statistical chance of existing as does Bugs Bunny or J. Alfred Prufrock.

(The next two paragraphs were not in the original letter.)

Let me talk about math for a little bit, because I’m abysmal at it. Nonetheless, if I have faith in anything, it’s math. I have faith in it primarily for two reasons: A) no matter how many times I look at it, 2+2=4; and B) my television works. Now, I don’t understand the connection between 2+2 and my television, but I do know that, if all the numbers don’t line up properly, my television won’t work. I know they can figure out the numbers so accurately that they can put a car on the surface of Mars; so I’ve got good faith that when they tell me the universe is 13.7 billion light-years across, I believe them. I have faith they’re telling me the truth. I have not personally done the math myself, but I have faith that it’s being done correctly.

Ergo, what happened prior to the Big Bang is a mathematical question, at this point, and the math isn’t pointing to any god. The math, right now, is pointing to multiverses which makes a lot more sense. If you were to plot a curve of our understanding of our place in the universe, it would show an exponential expanding of that understanding, from being in the center of the world, to being on a planet around which the sky revolved, to being part of a solar system, to being part of a universe. Logically, it makes sense that there’s something beyond the universe; turns out it wasn’t God but rather more universes. In other words, the math has never pointed towards God. The math never points to a deus ex machina.

(Back to the letter.)

So, yeah, God has an infinitely small possibility of existing, at least in a form any religion on Earth would recognize as God. Which is why I said to not defeat us atheists by positing an argument we don't use. It means you didn't understand the argument or were deliberately misstating it to win your point.

Sam Harris

Pardon me here for nattering on. I was looking for an image of Mr. Deem to accompany this post when I ran across the following statement where he’s critiquing Sam Harris:

“The fact that Harris himself acknowledges that he cannot live up to his own moral values calls into question whether ‘science can determine human values’ in any meaningful way.”

That’s the sort of statement that makes me question the education they’re handing out at Mr. Deem’s alma mater, California State University of Los Angeles. Richard is saying that, because people don’t necessarily follow their moral prescripts, that those prescripts couldn’t have come from evolution? Richard, science isn’t in the business of determining moral codes; science is in the business of learning where moral codes come from. Who does or doesn’t follow a moral code has no influence on where that code comes from. That’s fairly elementary logic. Given that there’s absolutely no observational hint that there’s any sort of god functioning in our world, it makes sense that morality is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Logically, it can be no other way.

The last quote from Deem showed up in paragraph four of his essay, so you can see why I never get beyond the beginnings of apologetics polemics. It’s hard to want to read further when confronted early on with such basic errors. See why I worry about his education?