Hunting For an Answer

While prowling the Net recently I came across the site of a fellow from Eugene, OR who has devoted himself to debunking The Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT). We corresponded a couple times until he quit responding.

Now, it’s curious enough to devote yourself to being against something rather than for something, but why AAT? What did it ever do to him to cause him such determination?

Well, that aside, I wrote him my usual question of “when did humans take to living at the water’s edge”? And cited our inordinate amount of water consumption as an anomaly that needed explaining. As is usual with savannistas, they can’t bring themselves to use the word “demographics.” I try to get them to say it out loud: “dem-oh-graficks.” No luck.

Jim dismissed human water consumption, saying it was the same as other mammals and then cited our industrial, agricultural, and transportation uses for pumping up our apparent consumption. When I cried foul on his arguments, he stopped writing.

I’ve had other savannistas allege human water consumption to be the same as other mammals, which I find exceedingly difficult to understand. Not that statement, I understand what they’re saying; but how could they possibly make such a statement and then expect us to stick around for the rest of the argument? Mammals? Let’s see, we’ve got whales and kangaroo mice and wolves and door mice and howler monkeys and bears and otters and beavers and zebras and elephants and hippos… Whew, can I stop now? They all have the same water requirements? Did anybody look? Did they think about it?

So, either they thought about it or they didn’t. If they didn’t think about it, they should have; and they have no business being in the business if they haven’t thought about it. Or they thought about it and came to a completely erroneous conclusion, only means they shouldn’t be in the business if they can’t think any better than that.

Did I make myself clear?

Likewise, it felt silly pointing out to Jim that I was talking about personal water consumption, not industrial/agricultural uses. Could he have figured that out from context? Well, if you think all mammals drink the same amount of water (per pound of animal, of course), you might have trouble with the rest of it. Jim has a religious focus on debunking AAT that I was unable to shake.

As you know, I’m not an advocate of AAT, but I do advocate that the problems raised by AAT be addressed.

I have come recently to an understanding about my argument with the savannistas. Perhaps part of the problem is semantics, how we’re using language. The savannistas claim that early man, when he descended from the trees, moved onto the savannas. My problem has always been, when did we then move to the waterhole? That’s where my discussions with paleoanthropologists breaks down; they are unable to conceive of humans in demographic terms. They don’t know what it means when I ask that question.

I think part of the problem lies in what we mean when we say “to live.” And perhaps that comes from comparing us with our cousins, the chimps, etc. It’s my understanding that the other great apes do not have regular camps, but move around as a group within their prescribed territory. Resting places may vary from night to night. Babies born are carried along with the tribe.

This, of course, is very different from most predators (all?). Predators have dens, lairs, where their young are born and raised until ready to join the hunt. The same den will be used for years off and on. The den will be as close to the hunting ground as possible yet be out of harm’s way. When I ask, where does that predator live? I’m asking where does it make its home?

What I’ve ignored in my arguments was the difference between nest site and hunting territory. Or at least I haven’t made this distinction clear. I’m full well ready to concede that, once we came down from the trees, we were hunters; that’s why we came down. But once we we down, we were no longer omnivores, we were becoming carnivores. We were adopting the manner of predators: one doesn’t take ones young on the hunt; one brings food back.

My contention is that place to where the food was brought back was by the waterhole. Ergo, we live there today and drink a hell of a lot of water.

In the end, that argument is dismissed but never rebutted. It’s going to be long after my death when someone in the field has a eureka moment and shouts, “I got it; we’ve always lived where we live, ever since we came down from the trees. How simple. Why did no one think of this before?”

Sorry I’m going to miss it.

Well, Duh

First, an apology of sorts.

For decades I thought bipedalism was connected to our aquatic addiction, although I could never quite find a convincing argument. I figured eventually someone would figure that out, too. Until it became obvious that it was tools, not water, that was crucial in getting us to stand up permanently. I was wrong about that connection and I apologize.

But it doesn’t affect the reality of us as the Aquatic Ape. It doesn’t change our demographics or our addictions. It simply brings into focus the question of when we moved to the water’s edge? It still looks like it must have happened long before we became human.

*

I am perpetually amazed at the thinking patterns of academics. Does graduate school simply drive critical thinking underground? Is lack of vision synonymous with conservatism?

The headline (Discovery News 8/12/10) : “Tool Use by Early Humans Started Much Earlier: Small-brained ancestors used stone tools to whack into large animals some 800,000 years earlier than previously thought.”

Oh yeah? Thought by whom? Those damned academics again.

So, what are they saying? They’re saying that the oldest stone tools they’ve found are 2.6 million years old and that they’ve now found cut marks dating back 3.4 million years, hence the 800,000 year difference. They’re saying “our human ancestors were using stone tools and eating meat from large animals nearly a million years earlier than previously thought.” What that is saying is that the people doing the thinking were thinking that the 2.6 mya tools they have were evidence of earliest tool use by primates. This is where I worry that they failed their logic exams. Or their statistics exams. If one finds a stone tool, knowing nothing else about it except its age, what are the odds of that stone tool being among the first of its kind ever made?Approaching zero, right? What are the odds of that tool being from the heyday of its production? Approaching 100%, eh (bell curves and all)? How long do you suspect tools of that design were in production? Hundreds of thousands of years? Millions of years? Whatever the number, you can be pretty sure that whatever tools made those marks were around for a million years or better by the time we see evidence of them.

But it’s further apparent by the quotations that academia is still confused as to why people/primates stood up in the first place. They really don’t have a clue, even though it’s another case of those confounded trees obscuring the view of the forest. It’s as if they have no idea what drives evolution.

What drives evolution? Food. And to a lesser extent sex. Basically, it’s morphology for food, ornamentation for sex. Animals will change their basic shapes in a quest for food, but they’re willing to grow stupidly long feathers to get laid. You don’t stand up because you think it’s pretty; you stand up because you can eat better.

Eat what better?

Doesn’t make any difference (although we’ll get more into that in a bit). If standing up won’t feed you better, you won’t do it. If it will, you will. Standing up to eat, of course, is fairly common. Squirrels do it, bears do it, gazelles do it, even educated fleas do it. But none of them give up the ability to get down on all fours (forget the fleas) and run like hell, should the occasion demand it. How come only primates (and we don’t know how many times) gave up speed to stand up permanently? How come we were willing to be lion fodder just so we could stand up all the time? What was so great about standing up? How could we get more to eat by being lion lunch all the time, not just when feeding?

Well, you’ve got to hand it to us. It’s the hands, silly, it’s the hands. It’s the primates’ hands that guaranteed that eventually one of them would become us. Or many of them would. Hands certainly evolved for climbing trees and manipulating food products, and they could well have forced our brains to become bigger in the process of keeping track of the minutia of separately movable digits. And once we had hands, it was probably inevitable that someone was going to start using those hands to hold tools. It’s certainly common among primates. And a tool is anything that helps you get more/better food. Chimps use tools; bonobos use tools. Neither of them is an upright, obligate walker, but they both clearly use tools, so it’s reasonable to assume that protohumans began using tools before they were upright, too.

If you look at what chimps use for tools, though, you’ll realize that none of them would survive recognizable as tools. Sticks to tease out termites would be just sticks. Stones used to break open nuts would be just stones. Teeth-sharpened spears to stab bush babies would quickly turn to dust. Chimpanzees have undoubtedly been using such tools for millions upon millions of years, yet no one has ever claimed discovery of a stash of chimp tools of any age anywhere. We wouldn’t recognize a chimp tool, if we saw it.

Nor the average early hominin tool. We wouldn’t recognize a hominin tool until we could see a manufactured edge, preferably one that has travelled.

Hands lead to tools; tools lead to upright walking. Tools say that you can be foolishly slow, slow as a sloth, provided you’ve got a good weapon at hand. And if there are a bunch of you.

When did we start throwing stones? Chimps will certainly throw things, but not, to my knowledge, as a weapon (and underhanded, if I understand correctly); not in the sense of their spears being conscious weapons. Perhaps it’s a question more of offense versus defense. We start teaching babies, as yet unable to walk, to catch a rolling ball. Do chimps ever play catch?

It’s important to realize, though, that not only wouldn’t we recognize the first tools primates used, but that the period of primitive tool use (“primitive” here meaning “unrecognizable”) must have stretched back prior to recognizable tool use by multiple millions of years, if the length of time shaped-stones stayed unchanged is any indication. Indeed, logic says its stretches back as far as the first upright hominin. (And there’s always the question of how long the transition takes/took from scrambling to genuine, obligate bipedalism.)

One thing is certainly true: brains didn’t become big in anticipation; they could only have grown as an adaptation to circumstantial pressures and possibilities. Something had to be directly driving the creation of a bigger brain; it couldn’t have happened simply because it was fun. A brain doesn’t grown to meet anticipated demands, but rather in response to immediate opportunities. There is no chicken/egg debate over which came first, big brains or tools: tools, hands down (pun intended). Nor is there any debate over which came first, tools or bipedalism: tools, no choice. There is absolutely no reason slow, weak, toothless (as in big, ripping teeth), clawless, flightless apes such ourselves would give up the only defense we had—climbing trees—unless we had an equalizer. We had an equalizer. Forget carrying food for your family, forget seeing above the grasses, forget sweating theories and standing up naked with a patch on our heads. But that spear and that rock? Don’t leave home without them.

Or your friends. Ever wonder why dogs are so smart? Maybe it’s because they hunt in packs with their friends/family. Those animals which have better communication undoubtedly eat better. And tell me, which pack hunting animals are dumb? Orcas? Don’t think so. Jackals? Huh-uh. Lions? Doubt it.

Understanding how tool use led to bipedalism and big brains doesn’t explain the human addiction to water and our choice of proximity to water for nesting grounds. We undoubtedly left Africa some 100,000 ya savvy with water. We already knew how to sail and how to fish by that time. We had added aquatic food to our diet by then. (The Flores Hobbits may have taken to sailing much earlier than us.) In any case, you can be sure that the humans who spread out from Africa 100 millennia ago were already hairless, sweaty folk who drank a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day we find the gene(s) responsible for our liquid addiction, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out when that addiction began, as well.

And it wouldn’t be surprising to find out that the addiction is what separates us from the other hominins. (Already I worry that somewhere in the depths of the jungle a group of chimps has taken up fishing.)

*********

While we’re on the topic of surprising news about the obvious, let me comment on a report from the BBC website on August 24, 2010: “Space is the final frontier for evolution, study claim”

No, not outer space, elbow room. The report contends that “new research identifies the availability of ‘living space’, rather than competition, as being of key importance for evolution.”

Okay, I accept the reason I’ll never be taken seriously is that you can never say, “Well, duh!” in an academic journal. For years I’ve been stressing the maxim that evolution is guided by opportunity, not necessity. Admittedly, I did no research, as these people did, to prove my point. I used the old-fashioned approach: I thought about it. I’m not even going to say I did well in my logic class at the U, because I didn’t. The logic I used was pretty elementary. First I looked at the current situation of climate change and species die-off. Nobody, it seems, is saying, not to worry about the polar bears, they’ll just evolve, like our ancestors did when the forests disappeared and they were forced to walk upright. Once I’d made that connection, it was easy to see that A) animals don’t evolve quickly enough to accommodate a quickly evolving climate; and B) thinning forests could not have been the impetus for our ancestors to take to the ground. Impossible. No way. Couldn’t happen.

One of the primary problems with the standard model is the “lion lunch conundrum.” (Or “eagle lunch conundrum,” or…) How did we avoid being lunch for a predator in the interval between standing on our own two feet and acquiring tools/weapons? One solution is to not have the interval. If one assumes that acquiring weapons opened up new opportunities that led to bipedalism, the gap then becomes the reverse: between acquiring tools and standing on our feet. You can be assured we still did get picked off, but weapons leveled the playing field: we could pick them off, too.

What concerns me is the quote from the opposition, as it were. As the BBC reports it, “Professor Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, US, told BBC News he ‘found the patterns interesting, but the interpretation problematic’.

“He explained: ‘To give one example, if the reptiles had not been competitively superior to the mammals during the Mesozoic (era), then why did the mammals only expand after the large reptiles went extinct at the end of the Mesozoic?
“‘And in general, what is the impetus to occupy new portions of ecological space if not to avoid competition with the species in the space already occupied?’”

Mt. Stearns has a decidedly curious interpretation of the facts. He makes it seem like there was a battle between reptiles and mammals, as if Godzilla and King Kong were going at it in the first rumble in the jungle. How many times, offhand, have you seen inter-species combat which was territorial in nature rather than one side looking at the other as lunch? When has anyone caught on film the fierce war waged between bears and blue jays for control of the huckleberry fields? I have a feeling something was awry in my childhood education, as I seem to have missed those documentaries. Has Mr. Stearns forgotten the fact that reptiles appeared on earth a hundred million years prior to the first mammal? A hundred million years is a long time to fill up all available eco-niches. What’s amazing is that mammals appeared at all given the reptiles’ dominion.

Mr. Stearns is apparently unaware of or has forgotten (which is troubling, considering his profession) that basic evolutionary axiom: that a species cannot evolve into occupied space. It’s a corollary of the rule that evolution is driven by opportunity, not necessity. This is the sort of stuff that should be taught day-one in evolutionary science, so it’s disturbing that a practitioner in the field should not be aware of it. What sort of fight is he envisioning? If not hand-to-hand (paw-to-paw, paw-to-hoof) combat, then fighting for resource dominance? We’re back to the bears and the blue jays.
There are no “necessities” in the living world. There is no necessity for life on this planet. Most planets in our experience have no life on them; it’s obviously not a necessity for any given celestial object. It only arises where it can, not where it has to, and that distinction maintains itself forever. You do what you can, not what you have to to survive. If there’s a gap between need and ability, you die.

The second portion of Stearns’ argument, “what is the impetus to occupy new portions of ecological space if not to avoid competition with the species in the space already occupied?” makes it sound like one evolves to avoid danger, which is impossible. It again implies direct inter-species competition, which is not seen in nature. The lion and the vulture do not fight with each other over the spoils of a kill, they fight among themselves. The vulture doesn’t evolve with the hopes of knocking off the lion as king of the kill. It doesn’t even evolve to outpace the jackals. It evolves to be a better vulture than its neighbor.

And we didn’t evolve a bipedal life because chimpanzees were taking over the forests. Instead, becoming bipedal opened up previously nonexistent eco-niches: that of armed primates.

One wonders what sort of competition Mr. Stearns envisioned took place between the reptiles and the mammals after the die-off of the dinosaurs? Reptiles didn’t disappear during the Great Extinction, even in Connecticut there are lizards to this day. In Mr. Stearns’ view, it would seem, that the reptiles suddenly lost their competitive punch, or how else to explain that they couldn’t simply outmaneuver the mammals again, if that’s what they did they first time? Why did they loose their “competitive superiority,” as he put it? Unless, of course, they never had competitive superiority to begin with. Unless it was a case of first come, first serve, which is appears to have been.

To reiterate, the Basic Rule and its corollaries are:

Evolution is driven by opportunity, not necessity.
1. Evolution can not outrun ecological change
2. Evolution can not fill an occupied eco-niche

Accept neither wooden nickels nor excuses.

Christians Aren't Perfect Just Forgiven

[Bumper sticker, late 20th century.]

A position oft expressed goes: if there is no god, there is no meaning or direction to life and consequently one can behave however one wishes. It’s said so often and so matter-of-factly, that in most discussions about morality and its origins, that position is virtually a given. It is, one can safely say, the official American political opinion. There may be more enlightened countries around the globe, but if you want to get elected in the United States, you’d better adhere to the principle that morality is directed from above.

Which means, of course, that our country is run by arrogant fools and liars, but that’s another story.

The problems, though, go beyond electioneering. The curse of monotheism has been to create a race of zombies willing to do anything the power structure asks of it, including killing people who are in its way, for one reason or another. It’s not just a theoretical discussion, we have here. The pervasive claws of monotheism scratch at the tiniest corners of our society. They leave no mouse unscathed. The great bulk of our prison population, for example, is not a mass of murderers and mayhem, but of people there for cultural differences, not crimes. We criminalize many things in our society which in and of themselves are not crimes; consequently, the overwhelming majority of people in prison in this country are there for drug offenses, and drug choice is strictly controlled by religious content. They are not arrested for the effect the drug has upon them or society, but merely upon its illegality. One can safely say that all drug offenders in this country are there because of the illegal nature of their product, and not because of anything their product caused people to do. Almost all crime related to drug use is caused by the illegal nature of the drug—and this goes for any illegal drug—and not its pharmacological action. In and of itself it’s rarely a criminal issue and almost as rarely a societal one, other than one man’s meat being another’s poison. But as soon as one starts declaring, simply because they can, that another man’s meat is illegal, all hell breaks loose.

You’ll note that prohibition of alcohol—known in the Muslim world as the “Christian diversion”—lasted only a few years, while the prohibition of other drugs continues in this country to this day. At the rate we’re going, we’ll humanize our laws only slightly before Singapore. (You’ll note that Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico have decriminalized personal drug use across the board, following the European examples of Portugal, Holland, Switzerland, and on.) But one thing you can be sure of about Americans, we might have the last band in the parade, but it sure as hell will be the loudest.

But I digress.

Nonetheless, the claim of religious origins for morality is so ingrained in our culture that even humanists worry sometimes that there might be a “god” gene in there somewhere that necessitates religion; and they often have trouble knowing where everyday, drugstore morality could come from. As if it were a great mystery. How do we know how to be good, unless someone tells us how? Besides our moms and dads, of course.

Well, OK. Bears and wolves and lions and tigers have no religion, right? They can’t possibly “know God” in any meaningful sense. There’s nothing stopping the top-dog lion, as it were, from killing all his rivals, right?

Except that there is. For the most part, lions and tigers and wolves and bears don’t kill their rivals. Certainly nothing at the rate that humans do. When it comes to killing their own kind, we are the masters.

So, what’s stopping them? The religious response would be that God has programmed the animals to behave as they do. It’s all part of the great design. The humanist response is deceptively similar and simple: animal behavior is innate and was worked out through evolution. In either scenario, the animal has no choice. But here is where the problem gets sticky. The assumption is made that humans are fundamentally different from all other animals; and that because we intellectually realize that we can make choices, we assume that our behavior is governed by that ability and not by innate patterning. It’s that belief which dictates the academic stricture to not anthropomorphize, assuming that we are fundamentally isolated from all other species.

Needless-to-say, the assumptions don’t survive scrutiny.

The fundamental problem with a religious origin for morality is the question of what happened pre-religion? What happened when we were a “mere” animal like all the others? Were we naught but wanton killing machines (not that we aren’t now)? Did we only propagate by rape? How did we manage to not eat all our children, if we didn’t know right from wrong? Or, did the desire to eat ones children only come with the epiphany of right and wrong? I realize that these question edge upon the absurd, but they point to the complications of equating religion with morality (or is that vice-versa?).

On the other hand, you can be pretty sure that tool use predated religion (I don’t think chimps have religion), and it’s hard to know how tool (read “weapon”) use affected the balance of environmental forces. It’s hard to know at this remove how sudden, vast increases in weapon power affected killing rates, but it’s equally hard to imagine that it was negligible. Once it’s easy to kill a buffalo, it’s easy to kill a rival. Perhaps religion evolved as a counterweight to big, sharp rocks, something to curb our wanton tendencies. But my best guess is that religion was invented to fill the gap between practical information and wondering where the hell this all came from. Religion as a byproduct of self-reflection. Its use in society is much more complicated than that, but I believe that is its genesis.

Morality, on the other hand, existed prior to cognition. Morality is inherent in all animals. Probably all plants, too, for that matter, but I can’t vouch for that. But there’s no question each species is governed by its own set of rules as to what it can and can’t do. Mainly eat. And most of the time it excludes ones own species (except for guppies and sometimes other competitors’ children). It only makes sense that each species has evolved with a strict code of cooperation which insures the maximum survival of ones species; to be otherwise would be inherently impossible. Deviation from those rules, one could argue, is impossible; at least not until self-reflection surfaces. One can argue that evil only exists because we can think of it. Prior to thought, it was impossible for evil to exist; it is a strictly human construct.

But the rise of self-reflection didn’t eliminate the power of inherent intra-species rules, i.e. morality. Simply because one was suddenly capable of thinking that, “Gee, I could kill my nasty neighbor,” doesn’t mean that they would automatically do so. Surely, even from the very beginning of cognition there were deeply felt urges compelling one to specific behaviors. What one should and shouldn’t do existed long before anyone gave it any thought. All thinking did was give us the power to do what we shouldn’t.

And we’ve been arguing about it ever since. Needless-to-say, this entire argument is arcane to anyone who believes we were created in situ, as such, by God; and offhand I don’t know of any way of getting through to people like that. If you believe we were all plunked down here, fully formed, 6000 years ago, there’s nothing I can say that will alter any argument we might have.

Yet even a belief in evolution doesn’t prevent some people from thinking that evolution itself is divinely inspired and that the recognition of morality was programmed to coincide with the recognition of self.

The answer to which is: well, yeah, maybe, but I wouldn’t bank on it quite yet; and at the very least it doesn’t answer but only postpones and confuses the issue. After all, if you don’t have a personal god, you don’t have much of a god at all. If all a god does is set the rules and the ball in motion with a Big Bang, what kind of god is that? If the god doesn’t care about life on earth because it’s such a minuscule part of the universal story, how is that a god? And if the god really does care about what you do here on earth, how believable is that?

Once one has accepted evolution and the tenants of observational science, the question of god’s existence becomes moot. But the question of from whence morality is not moot and is open to all manner of interpretation. To begin with, it’s essentially tautological to say it’s inherent. The question then becomes, how do inherent moralities play out in the confusion of self-reflection? Certainly, religions step in early on as arbiters of what’s right and wrong, but they forever remain a gloss over our inherent natures. We know what’s right and wrong without anyone telling us. If you don’t believe me, ask any little kid. (After that ask any teenage girl.)

As we’ve already noted, without self-reflection it’s impossible for a member of a species to act contrary to the species’ rules, as it were. The underlying compulsion, however you want to look at it, is to get along.

And that compulsion does not go away simply because we become self-reflective and capable of acting contrary to our compulsions. Our compulsion is to cooperate and get along, but the confusion of self-reflection, especially when poorly understood, allows us to act contrary to our best interests, sometimes with disastrous results. The compulsion to cooperate and get along drives all of our behavior from fundamentals, such as speech and mannerisms, to cultural overlays, such as style and religion; and it’s not hard to twist a desire to conform into a tool dividing us from them. Once you corner the market on good, you can commit all sorts of evil in its name.

Which brings us to the sanctity of religion.

Let me observe that there is no such thing as a religious war. No god has ever told anyone to go kill anyone else. It has never happened. All decisions to kill people are made by people for people reasons: i.e. control/power. The reasons may be couched in religion and the combatants might think they’re going out there for the defense of religion, but someone always knows its a bunch of hooey and that they’re doing it for them. The person pulling the strings always knows it’s poppycock.

So why does religion get a free pass? Why does it get sanctified, if all it does it turn people into meat puppets?

Because it does it so well.

It does it so well that lots of people can’t imagine life without it. In fact, they’d rather kill than go without it. In fact, they’re often willing to kill you, even if all you want is to go without it.

Maybe now it’s getting clearer why monotheism was so important. Someone had to take control of the incredible power of religion. To leave morality scattered in the hands of multiple gods was not good for war. Better to have only one. Much easier.

The bottom line, of course, has always been the Golden Rule. The Ten Commandments are rather useless, being primarily concerned with religious power, and totally hit-and-miss with their few practical suggestions. You shouldn’t commit murder, that’s for sure (that’s number 6), and you shouldn’t commit adultery, steal, lie, nor—God forbid—even covet your neighbor’s riding lawn mower (that’s number 10), but apparently, if you’re not married, it’s perfectly all right to rape your neighbor’s wife, so long as you don’t covet her. It’s a fine distinction.

In any event, it’s easy to see where one’s natural urges, when it comes to right and wrong, are more reliable than religious prescription. The Golden Rule is ten times safer than the Ten Commandments. Trust me. Yet it doesn’t even make the list. Why is it not on the list? Because it’s not good for manipulation. It’s hard to convince people that they should make war on another people because they so much want war brought upon themselves. It’s a hard sell. On the other hand, with the current list, all you have to have is someone worshipping another god (or none at all) and your first commandment is to do something about it. You get to think of what to do. What do you think you should do to someone who violates the first rule in the list of “the ten most important rules”? Remember, this is six places above murder. What should you do, if a whole nation thumbs their nose at your god? (Actually, God doesn’t leave the choice of what to do about those nose-thumbers to you. He says kills them. Read Deuteronomy, if you’d like more of the same.)

You can see how important it becomes to have that god and protect its sanctity above all else. The blind compulsion to follow is the most potent organizing tool a society has. It’s inherent.

The real question then becomes, if it’s inherent, how do some people escape it? From whence rationalism and the Enlightenment? Are not rationalism and enlightenment as much a product of self-reflection as evil? Or for that matter, good itself? How does one escape the compulsion to follow the crowd?

Beats me, but it’s the great divide in the human race. Forget about race, religion, sex, country of origin. The great human divide is whether or not you’re able to give yourself over to someone else’s direction. Are you able to let someone else make your ethical decisions for you? If you are, you’re simply following the ancient necessity to fit in with the “the species”; it’s where you’re safe. How are people willing and able to abandon that security and make those decisions for themselves? For that matter, how does one get to the position of making those decisions for other people? Certainly, the clues lie in self-reflection. Eventually climbing the holy hierarchy, one comes to the realization that moral decisions are made by people, not holy writ. If you’re honest, you’ll eventually get to the point where you realize that the voices in your head are the product of your own imagination, not the outside voice of God.

But it’s not an easy realization to have or live with. Every person who realizes that morality is both an individual responsibility and a species necessity, has to make their own moral choices. They cannot rely on exterior authority. Guidance, yes, but authority, no. In the end, all moral decisions are personal. One can only make them for oneself.

Which is why that bumper sticker is so scary. Indeed, Christians can be absolved of their sins. They can have them washed away by the blood of Christ. Which means anything done in the name of God can be forgiven. War, torture, excommunication, burning at the stake; they’re all okay in the eyes of the Lord. And in the eyes of his believers. The people who run religions know that. They know they use their flock as canon fodder, if not just milk cows. They know that if you believe that the majority of the people believe a particular brand of religion, there’s good chance you’ll believe it too, unexamined.

The “unexamined” part is important. One constant of all religions is the requirement to believe in the absurd, because once you’ve accepted the impossible, nothing any longer is. Any realistic appraisal of any religion will immediately point up its absurdity, so it’s crucial that believers do so blindly. The choice, when the church has been able, is to kill people who examine their religion. No religion can withstand objective scrutiny, so it’s necessary to require believers to accept the absurd; to believe that God really is directing them when they speak in tongues. In any other instance, having voices in your head is a sign of insanity, but not if you claim that voice is that of God. That argument gets a special pass.

So, if you’re a Christian, you’re forgiven of your sins while the rest of us have to behave properly or suffer guilt. You, thank God, can avoid the suffering of guilt by simply believing you are forgiven for your sins. Sort of takes away the incentive not to commit them, doesn’t it. It’s nice to have a free pass.

In the end, it’s religions which encourage people to act barbaric, while non-believers are responsible for their own behavior. One understands that religious people behave morally by accident, not by conscious thought. The job of religion is not to make sure that people act properly, except in the sense of following its own special codes. The job of religion is to make sure people follow its authority. Monotheism in particular has little social value beyond population control. (You might, for example, think of the control aspects of charity versus insuring a decent standard of living for all. Charity is so much more powerful than developing self-reliance.)

We will quit this diatribe here. It’s a lonely diatribe, anyway.

But let me leave you with the admonition to be responsible. Don’t hand you soul to anyone else. Only you can prevent forest fires.

Chimps at the Water Hole

Last night’s (June 23, 2009) NOVA, “Ape Genius,” opened with a group of chimps having a “pool party” (their words) in the wilds of Africa. There they were, dropping from branches into the water, splashing everywhere, behaving like, well, kids at the beach having a grand old time.

You won’t, of course, find much about that in print, because it hasn’t reached the general knowledge base yet, but it’s there in living color. Chimps like to play in the water. At least some of them do.

NOVA went on to show chimps making and sharpening spears to hunt bush babies, a small arboreal primate, as well as understanding and following fairly complicated English instructions. The gist of the show was that we share more traits than we’d like to admit with the other apes.

It began by explaining the human bias towards thinking that many characteristics, such as tool making, are uniquely human as coming from a feeling that people have been blessed by the hand of God, so to speak, making them a separate beast from the other apes, which, the narrator promulgated, was not the truth. Easy for him to say, yet the show continued to speak of the differences between humans and apes rather than between humans and the other apes: a small but significant distinction. For even the most humble of observers it’s difficult to say “other apes,” because couched within that phrase is the admission that we, too, are one of them. (Something, frankly, which bothers me when I see us all driving cars down the road: should apes be doing this, I wonder?)

The show questioned why people ended up the way we did versus how the other apes ended up, but it didn’t look at the broader implications of these discoveries towards evolution in general; it only looked at the relationships between humans and chimps and bonobos. Certainly, chimps and bonobos inhabit different strata of the forest and eat probably slightly different, if similar, diets; and it’s well known that the two species have quite different social structures and behaviors. “Ape Genius” tried to make a case for humans developing differently than other apes because of certain social traits which we have, such as being able to squelch our emotions, rather than seeing those social traits as part of a larger complex of behaviors. Significantly, they didn’t discuss the implications of chimp behavior at the water hole, which is frivolous and interactive, nor did they make any connection between bipedalism and human behavior. It could well be that the forces which inclined us to be bipedal were the same forces that inclined us to be socially cooperative. And it’s plausible that both those traits were picked up at the water hole. (If I were you, I’d keep watching those chimps at the water hole. If they start liking frogs and tubers, who knows how far it could go. Couple million years, they might stand up and sing.)

NOVA also failed to stress the ubiquity of tool-making beyond humans, chimps, and bonobos; but if we have three extant primates making tools, the implications for primates of the past is enlightening. For one thing, it means that tool-making is not a uniquely human characteristic; so that any tool-making fossil from the past is not necessarily in our line any more than is your local bonobo.

But watching those spear-chucking chimps made me rethink early hunting strategies and what sort of weapons would be effective in the open country; and I’m starting to think that a pack of Austrolopithicines armed with sharpened spears might be a formidable foe. They might not be fast of foot out there in the open, but they were clever and, probably, cooperative. This hunting with the dogs thing is starting to make a lot of sense. One thing us “higher” apes are good at is learning from observation. I can see our ancestors watching how pack carnivores work and imitating their cooperative methods. I can see how, when they found themselves hunting the same prey, that the primates would start mimicking and running along with the dogs, as it were. I can picture the dogs looking to each other and asking, “Who let the people out”? And I can see after a successful hunt, right from the get-go the tiny little A-piths tossing the dogs their share: A) it avoids a nasty fight; and B) it insures cooperation next time they find themselves hunting together.

We might have been tough guys out there on the veld. Provided, of course, we had enough to drink.

Mr. Wrangham’s Excellent Conjecture

Richard Wrangham is about to publish a book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, where (according to New York Times author Claudia Dreifus) he suggests that cooking was an essential ingredient in our rise above our fellow primates, largely by reducing the amount of time spend chewing our food up. He compared our primal diet to that of chimps which, he says in an interview with Ms Dreifus, they’d have to “masticate for a full hour.” By cooking one could cram the same food down ones gullet in a few minutes, leaving one, presumably, more time to work on ones sonnets and Pythagorean theorems.

Done.

I haven’t read Wrangham’s manuscript, but I have read the NY Times interview plus another article on his proposal and am prepared to make a few observations.

The first of which being it is an excellent observation and undoubtedly one with a lot of merit. Unquestionably, cooking took hold for some reason. Whether or not cooked food is “more nutritious” and “healthier,” than uncooked food is certainly open to debate and shouldn’t be accepted prima facie (although cooking definitely makes some foods palatable, which could otherwise be deadly), but that cooking makes food quicker to eat is undoubtedly true, although that may not have played as great a role in its adoption as flavor. If Wrangham displays any major fault with his theory, it’s that he’s too much in love with it, a common problem with theories; I suffer it myself.

Another fault is comparing us to chimps too keenly. Unquestionably, we’re closely related to them and their cousins the bonobos, but we’re likewise a lot different. No one would confuse the two of us walking down the street. And while we may share a distant ancestor, we long ago took different paths; occupied different parts of the forest; and, evidently, ate a different diet; something Wrangham has yet to fully grasp, even after trying to mimic the chimp diet when he was living in Tanzania in 1972. It’s true, we’re both omnivores, but that doesn’t mean we eat the same things; and trying to figure out what a chimp eats won’t necessarily lead you to what proto-people ate two or three million years ago. Especially if you don’t know where those proto-people lived, an issue about which Wrangham is confused. (We won’t get into Wrangham’s being primarily a vegetarian, which casts serious doubt on his understanding of both nutrition and evolution. I should mention here that I had a wife once who tried to emulate the diet of her goats, under reasoning not too different from Wrangham’s, but was dissuaded after the first mouthful of barbed grass heads stuck in her throat for hours.)

Wrangham bases much of his argument on assumptions about human fire use from 1.8 million years ago, a somewhat earlier date for fire use than is generally agreed upon, but not so early as to be improbable. What becomes questionable is to what uses fire was put at that early time and how often was it available. The only sources I’ve found estimating when people were first capable of “making” fire pegs that date between 9,000 and 15,000 years ago, which seems impossibly recent to me. It’s hard for me to believe lightning could be a reliable source of fire, particularly for people traversing the northern reaches at the edge of glaciers, but it’s certainly likely that people were able to control fire long before they could create it. Still, it’s hard to imagine that accidental fire would ever be common or ubiquitous. One can only imagine that for eons people clustered around fires when they had one, but that for most people most of the time there was no artificial warmth; and when someone decided to try cooking something other than a hunk of meat is not determined. In any event, people were upright creatures millions of years before they captured fire, and they were, apparently, already on a superior road to the chimps by the time they stood up for good, long before they started cooking anything. Cooking was a great technological leap and a great time-saver, but it probably didn’t affect our basic nutritional intake, at least at first. Certainly, as some products lend themselves more conveniently to cooking, they tend to become emphasized, but I can only presume that cooking didn’t initially affect food choice. The bottom line, though, is that we have and had our own dietary preferences which are distinguished from what other apes eat and most likely always have been. It’s likely that those early dietary differentials are part of what propelled us on the path we found ourselves; not to mention that those diety preferences probably caused us to becaome upright, as well.

Wrangham drops other bon mots into his conversation which are clearly either inaccurate or unknown. When he states that “the austrolopithicines, the predecessors of our prehuman ancestors, lived in savannahs with dry uplands,” he’s making both errors and assumptions. When the austrolopithicines first descended from the branches, there were no savannas where they were. True, they showed up by the time fire was captured, but they certainly weren’t where any prehumans lived. The austrolopithicines weren’t able to change their habitat, just because their world was drying out around them. Fortunately for them, they lived in a micro-environment along river banks and around marshes and swamps that may have been reduced in size, but never disappeared. When the savannas appeared they could forage, scavenge, and hunt them without actually living in them; provided, of course, that they’d developed weapons and a way to carry water.

Wrangham, likewise, makes several assumptions about how having fires changed our socialization, such as fires providing a stabilizing hearth around which people would then cluster. “This was clearly a very different system from wandering around chimpanzee-style, sleeping wherever you wanted, always able to leave a group if there was any kind of social conflict,” he claims; ignoring that most animals, I’ll bet chimps included, have regular bedding spots (not to mention birthing spots) that aren’t chosen so devil-may-carefully as Wrangham would suggest. Offhand, despite a myth of wandering animals and people, everything has a home territory, every bird has its branch. Even albatrosses.

And while it may be a minor point, there’s no guarantee that austrolopithicines were our ancestors any more than the species h. habilis was, which he also claims as a “distant ancestor.” If an ancestor is a person in ones direct line, then there is no assurance that either austrolopithicines or habilis were our ancestors. We may all have shared another as yet undiscovered ancestor. Someday we might have tests that can determine the relationship of those old fossils to ourselves, but in the meantime we’re going to have to go on the assumption that those old species were relatives, but not necessarily ancestors. We can safely assume that the majority of fossil primate species, bipedal ones included, have yet to be discovered and may never be. Just because a species that shares many of our traits was common at an earlier time doesn’t mean that it is in our direct line.

One also has to wonder about Wrangham’s general life experiences when he makes a statement like, “They [h. habilis] certainly made hammers from stones, which they may have used to tenderize [meat]. We know that sparks fly when you hammer stone. It’s reasonable to imagine that our ancestors ate food warmed by the fires they ignited when they prepared their meat.”

No it’s not. It’s not reasonable at all. It’s a prime example of being in love with ones own theory; once you’re in love, anything is possible. Even if it’s not. Nobody whacking away at a wet piece of meat with a rock is going to send off sparks that are going to catch that meat on fire. Or anything else laying nearby, either. Ain’t gonna happen. If it happened once in the entire history of humanity, I’d be amazed, but to depend on it as a way to get ones cooking fire going? The danger of stretching ones argument like that is that it casts doubt on the rest of ones propositions.

Such as trying to emulate chimps’ eating patterns. He wanted to eat just like a chimp but “in the end… never did the full experiment.” He did allow, though, that “there were times when I went off without eating in the mornings and tried living off whatever I found. It left me extremely hungry.” He relays this, as if it was a valid contribution to the discussion; that it was a valid experiment from which he got a significant result: he was hungry. Aside from the aforementioned problem that we don’t share a diet with chimps, here was an untrained, naive city boy trying to live off what he could find to eat, despite not knowing beans about what’s edible or not in the landscape. And then he has the balls to imply that his hunger was akin to what all “prehumans” would have experienced.

Not likely. And remind me not to go hunting with this guy.

A couple other suppositions surrounding fire test the credulity of the most humble among us:

One was that early cooks would place carcasses in front of advancing wildfires in order to have them cooked as the fire passed over; which surely explains the high hazardous duty pay that habilis cooks earned. Not to mention an attrition rate higher than kamikaze pilots. This supposition, even though burned bones can be analyzed to see whether it was a cooking or a wildfire that charred them, as cooking fires reach much higher temperatures than wildfires. In other words, not only would such a method of cooking be absurdly dangerous, it wouldn’t provide a superior, or necessarily even adequate, result. Trust me, our ancestors survived to become us because they were clever, not foolhardy.

Another amazing suggestion is that people lost their fur/hair in front of the fire, the hair being no longer necessary to keep one warm. It immediately makes me picture the cowboys coming in from the range after riding herd, gathering round the camp fire, taking off their clothes… Sure, we’ve all seen Brokeback Mountain. We know all about campfires and long, lonely nights. Heck, every campfire I’ve ever been at, everyone has taken off their clothes. Your fires, too, I imagine. All that notwithstanding, wouldn’t we expect people who’d lost their hair from sitting in front of a fire to have gotten bald chests and hairy backs? Why hair on the tops of ones heads, for God’s sake? How about to keep from getting sunburned?

That’s what’s meant about the dangers of falling in love with ones own theory. The seduction to explain everything is too great.

It’s too bad, because the origins of cooking are obscure, yet obviously crucial to human development. The relationship between cooking and farming has yet to be explored in any detail. Did we cook anything other than meat prior to the adoption of farming? Was cooking a catalyst for farming? It’s an intriguing question which Wrangham is right to approach. Hopefully, the next person to look at the subject will be more grounded.