Andy Rooney Moment

You know what I miss? El-whys. You know, those things that used to come at the end of adverbs, “-ly.” What ever happened to them? They disappeared along with the rise of fresh baked bread. (Shouldn’t that be “freshly baked bread”? Or at least, “fresh, baked bread.” But don’t they really mean that it’s freshly baked?)

The el-whys went away with the other adverbs.

“How ya feeling, today?” (Which, of course, is different from “How ya feeling today?”)

“Feeling good. Never had more sensitive fingers. Like, I can feel things before I touch them. And I’m well, thanks.”

I guess I didn’t expect to be around long enough to notice lexical shifts of that magnitude. I expected slang to come and go, but I wasn’t prepared for the disappearance of an entire part of speech. Funny, though, we all still seem to understand each other good (ha-ha), even without the adverbs.

Or the funny pronunciations. I didn’t expect words to change their pronunciation in my lifetime, either. “Parmesan,” for example. It used to be pronounced the way it’s spelled: “parm’-eh-san.” Couple decades ago it morphed into “parma-jean.” You have to pronounce that “jean” like it was French: “zhan.” As if it were some Frenchman named “Jean” who was living in Parma. It’s not a normal sound in either English or Italian. It came, I’m sure, from people trying to sound a little more worldly, so they started giving “parmesan” cachet by pronouncing it in what they thought was Italian—probably in poor imitation of the Italian parmigiano, combined with the Italian-American custom of dropping the final vowel in Italian words. Instead, it reinforces our reputation as rubes, but so be it. We aren’t called the Ugly Americans for nothing.

Heck, we often make mistakes like that. Heck, “often” is a perfect example. I’m not sure where the “t” in “often” came from, but it was never pronounced until recently. Now, though, you hear the “t” more often than not. There’s a good chance you pronounce it that way, too.

I used to joke that I could live with that, so long as they didn’t start pronouncing the “t” in “soften.” You guessed it, the “t” is creeping in there, too. An un-softening of “soft.” How droll.

It reminds me of Spanish. You know how Spanish, especially Castilian Spanish, is spoken with a pronounced lisp? That came from a whole country imitating a beloved king who spoke with a lisp. One king. A whole country. Pretty amazing.

Nice is Natural

Robert Sapolsky

Robert Sapolsky,

Just recently I heard an interview with a chronobiologist. I’d never heard the term, but as my spell-checker didn’t flag it when I wrote it, it’s obviously been around awhile. As soon as he said the word, it made intuitive sense. This was followed by your interesting piece on the effects of time on decision making. The results you outlined point to curious operations in the mind’s interior.

Lately, I’ve been engrossed with the question of free will. One biologist I ran across in my readings commented that he was waiting for “a molecular explanation of free will.” That may take some time. The longer I stare at the question, the more “free will” and “thinking” become conflated in my mind; I wonder if there’s truly thinking any more than there is truly free will? I have come to question the nature of consciousness. In the end I see consciousness as a real-time way for the vast collection of cells and organisms that any creature is to function ensemble, but that consciousness is no more the thinking part of the creature than is the computer monitor of the processor. Hal might be talking to you, but the real work is done by the CPU.

In that sense, all thinking is intuitive, whether it’s an on-the-spot reaction or a long contemplated action. If my own experience is any template, no matter how long I cogitate over something, when the answer does appear, I have no idea from where. I, obviously, have little control over the processes of rumbling through and filtering all the information that impinges on any decision. For one thing, there’s way too much information informing any decision for me to have a conscious grasp of it. Try as I might, I’ve never come up with an understanding of thinking that wasn’t reduced to a bunch of switches. Oh sure, the switches might be controlled by gauges, but, in the end, the message is either go or don’t go. I appreciate your field for trying to understand the switching processes, but it’s inevitably something one can only see from the outside; one cannot see one’s self think.

In the end I can’t figure out how any thought could arise without being run through some paradigm or algorithm which determines the outcome. If one has to choose between A and B, either there is a reason for the choice (conscious nor not) or the choice is random and, hence, without meaning. So, where does randomness come from? And “random” implies no control. So, if one either has control and makes a decision according to a paradigm or they have no control and it’s a random process, it appears that the only thing in control is the paradigm. I don’t see room for free will or thinking in that scenario. Maybe we call it “free will” because we have no idea from where it comes. How does one make a choice without applying criteria?

In any event, under that thinking, why length of time given to making a decision would alter the decision would appear to be a matter of response levels in the CPU. I.e., if a quick response is required, only certain essential parts of the CPU are brought into play; whereas if one has more time to contemplate, other algorithms and data sources can be accessed by the CPU. The shorter the required response time, the more instinctual the response would necessarily be.

Which brings us to children. There may be a Lord of the Flies aspect to children, but my experience is that children have instinctive morality. Perhaps they only have gut feeling, yet.

My untutored understanding—given, as you point out, that other animals possess empathy and altruism—is that those qualities are instinctual. I don’t see how they could be otherwise. If they were selected for, it means that they have value to the species, as the species is what controls trait survival, not the individual, right? Needless-to-say, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to think that altruism, for example, would benefit the entire species, nor would it be unreasonable that it was selected for. In fact, wouldn’t it almost have to be selected for?

In that sense, it would make altruism/empathy fairly basic traits, at that; ones that would enable a species to better survive. They would, one assumes, be the traits that would rise to the surface as spontaneous reactions to situations. Selfishness, it would seem, would require some thought, it would require other algorithms have time to be expressed.

I guess that all I’m saying is that it makes sense that spontaneous reaction would be beneficial to the most people. It’s only natural.

Steven Pinker

As to Pinker’s assertion—at least as you characterized it—that “it is the regulating forces of society, rather than human nature, that have brought a decline in human violence over the centuries”; without knowing if it is a fair characterization of his argument, it is, unfortunately, a logical fallacy. The “regulating forces of society” have nowhere from which to arise, other than human nature. What he is saying is that human nature has devised operating rules expressed In “regulating forces.” But they’re very human. It is human nature to figure out mechanisms by which society can be made to better function. I would think it, too, is a trait selected for.

Where Did Those Guys Come From?

My understanding is that the first European/American credited with visiting the Pacific Northwest was the Brit Francis Drake in 1579, followed by the Spaniard Juan de Fuca in 1592. One-hundred-and-fifty years later, Vitus Bering, a Swede working for the Russians, came down the coast (1740s). In another fifty years, 1792, on behalf of the Americans, Robert Gray became the official discoverer of the Columbia River. He would do that in May of that year.

In October of that year, William Broughton captained a ship that explored the Columbia. In a small boat, he and a party of crew members traveled a hundred miles upstream, checking out the countryside. At the very outset, while still at anchor near the mouth of the Columbia, Broughton noticed that the natives were already, not only ready to trade, but knew the value of what they were trading. The women, in particular, knew what they had of value to trade.

Heading upriver—it took them a week—they were accompanied by a fleet of canoes full of Indians who would camp nearby each night. Other large flotillas of canoes greeted them often as they went upriver, and were also ready to trade. Although they did note that the further upstream they traveled, the more unintelligible became the languages they encountered—which were unlike any other they had heard—and that the further upstream they traveled, the friendlier the natives became and the less they were interested in barter.

It’s a story oft repeated: the Italian John Cabot sailing for the British, who “discovered” Newfoundland in 1497 (five years after Columbus’s first voyage), discovered that he had been accompanied by hundreds of fishing boats. Not that they had traveled with him, but that he found them already there when he arrived. How did they do that?

I’ve always thought that Newfoundland was named by the fishermen who found it, otherwise it would have been named after a king or the like. It was already named by the time Cabot arrived. I’ll bet.

So, was Sir Francis the first European to visit the Pacific Northwest? I wouldn’t bet on that.

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.