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.

Play Ball

Do chimps ever play ball? Do little chimps ever play catch? How about bonobos? Orangoutangs?

We start to play ball with babies as soon as they can sit up. We don’t wait until they can crawl; we start right off rolling the ball to them, and pretty quickly they try rolling it back. Sure, there’s a lot of social interacting going on, but at the same time they’re learning the most important motor skill that separates us from the other apes: how to hit something with a rock. (Why is it important for the quarterback to be able to hit the running receiver? Because the gazelle won’t stand still.)

Chimps, of course, certainly do throw things, and some, I imagine, get fairly good at it; but nobody’s worried over at MLB or the Dominican Republic that apes are going to take over the pitcher’s mound. Hang in there, Johan Santana, your job is safe.

But when chimps load up for a war party, they don’t load up with anything. They don’t carry along a cache of rocks, and they don’t fashion any spears, as they do when they’re singly hunting bush babies. And anyway, they never throw their spears, they only poke things with them. When a troop of chimpanzees sets off to invade a neighboring territory, they do it bare-handed; portable weapons are not part of their mind set. Needless-to-say, they don’t go marching off standing up; no need.

But us slow pokes. We were willing to forgo speed, just to stand up. We were willing to abandon our ability to scamper like hell, up trees, if necessary, just to stand up. Had to be something pretty important. Had to be something that was a constant, not just an occasional pressure. See over the tall grass? Oh, come on, 24-7? Cart food to the old lady? How come she learned to stand up too? Other animals seem able to cart food to families without growing hands.

But once an ape caught on to the idea that, if you were always armed with a spear and a few rocks, a bunch of you could go almost anywhere and have a lot less fear of being eaten on the way (providing, of course, you had sufficient water, if you were human-to-be). If you were always armed and always on the ready, you’d probably eat a lot better and so would your kids. Of which you’d have more with a higher survival rate, etc. Standing up to thrust a spear doesn’t require a large advance in skills for any ape, but accurately throwing rocks required mastering a set of skills heretofore little used in any of the animal kingdom. There just aren’t a lot of stone or nut tossing carnivores out there. No one has to worry that they will be attacked by boulder-wielding gorillas. Learning that skill put us in a class by ourselves. But if you’re going to be successful, you’re going to have to cart those weapons around the whole day and be at the ready.

But it worked and consequently we were suddenly dining a whole lot better than our weaponless cousins. We began to separate ourselves from the other apes by eating larger and larger quantities of meat. Standing up to hunt made all the difference (thank God we didn’t have vegetarians back then, the debate would have snuffed us out).

Coda:

Let it be noted that randomly selected, unaltered throwing stones would have been employed by apes for millions of years before anyone hit upon shaping the stones and putting on a cutting edge; and that sharpened wooden spears would never have survived the eons between then and now. In other words, when we first see stone cutting tools, we are well into the middle of weapon/tool technology, not at the beginning.

Pop Quiz

What percentage of extinct species, any genus, have been discovered in fossilized form?

That is, of course, unknowable. So, make a guess. Two percent? Five? Ten? Twenty?

Twenty seems a bit high. Even 10% seems a bit high. Wanna go with 10 for sake of argument? How about giving you the benefit of the doubt and say 20.

Take that figure and move back a little. Move back 50,000 years. That sounds like a long time, but geologically it’s an eye-blink. Even “evolutionarily” it’s a small step. Fifty-thousand years simply don’t go very far. But from 50,000 years ago we have found fossil remains of three other tool-using, fire-managing, bipedal primates besides ourselves who were alive at the same time. Including us, that makes four. Assuming we’ve found only 20% of such critters from that time, that means there were probably another 16 or so species of tool-using primates out there fifty millennia ago.

Which also might mean that there would 16 other tool-users out there foraging around right now, if it weren’t for us. But it also brings up the question of how long did the 16 species survive? What happened to them? Why should an advanced primate go extinct? And do we remember them?

Think, for a minute, about the reports swirling around the Floresian Hobbits. It’s reported that islanders from Flores retain stories in their culture of when the “little people” lived in the forest. Those stories are being held up by some as proof of how recently H. floresiensis survived.

Oh? My culture has similar stories of little guys living in the woods. We would leave food out for them, and it would be gone in the morning. We called them “nisser” (pl.). But we went further; we also had stories of giants, who we called “trolls.” They’d live under the bridge and swipe your goats. Brave men had to go out and slay those monsters.

Are we drawing any conclusions, yet?

Let’s think once more about those Hobbits, the ones from Flores, not Tolkein. Let’s assume for a minute that the scientists are right; that this is not a dwarfed version of either us or erectus; that this is an independent species that arrived there independently. Now, surely they didn’t leave Africa and travel all the way to Flores without leaving anyone behind. In fact, there’s good reason to believe that, if they were on Flores, they were everywhere, or at the least widespread. Like the Neanderthal or erectus were widespread. Not to mention the other, as yet undiscovered “hominins” or “-inids” or whatever you’d like to call them. You can be sure they will be discovered. Not all of them, but more than we have now. The stock of upright tool-users has yet to be exhausted. (And talk to me once again about leprechauns.)

II.

Holy writ has always had it that humans are unique in the animal kingdom. In fact, in Judeo-Christian religions—the only ones I’m very familiar with—humans are no longer quite animals, but something above and beyond animal kind. We, instead, are the likeness of God on earth. We were given dominion over everything else.

Which, truth to tell, is hard to argue with. Dominion we have. We now have dominion and no leprechauns. It was a trade off.

(Was that yeti ‘nother leprechaun?)

The idea that we are unique is not only holy writ, it has been accepted academic dogma. It’s been argued that the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is small because the odds of it happening once, even here, are so small that it, conceivably, could be a rare phenomenon in a universe that otherwise might be teeming with life. It has been thought that the forces that tipped us into consciousness are so rare that it is unlikely to happen often again, if at all.

This, it turns out, is homo-centric thinking akin to thinking the earth is the center of the universe. It turns out that, instead of being unique, we are, or were, but one of a flock of tool-using bipeds. We may have been either the most intelligent or the most ruthless of the bipeds, but for whatever reason, we were the only one to survive. But for awhile we were commonplace. Yet academia has still been reluctant to understand the implications of our loss of uniqueness. So long as we are a unique species, the only one of its kind, the only one to walk upright, use tools, talk, have social rites, cook food, play the piano, etc., any other extinct creature that exhibited similar traits must be in our bloodline. This has been dogma to the extend that all tool-using bipeds are referred to as “humans” and are called our “ancestors.” Even though we know that, when modern humans first appeared on the stage, there were many groups of bipeds from which we could have evolved. We know we didn’t evolve from the Neanderthals. We know we didn’t evolve from the Hobbits. We tend to think we evolved from erectus, mainly because they were common; but just because they were common doesn’t mean they were ancestral to us; we may have shared a common ancestor. What they definitely were is predecessors to us. Science would be safer to use the term “predecessor” versus “ancestor” but that would weaken our claim to uniqueness.

The question is, can you call all bipeds “human,” even if they aren’t directly in our line? And how far back can you call direct members of our line “human”? We go all the way back to a one-celled amoeba, remember; we can’t call everything in that line “human.” The current assumption seems to be that all bipedal apes are/were descendants from one species of bipedal ape, although I don’t know that there’s anything in the fossil record that says bipedalism only occurred once among the apes. Again, I think it’s our desire for uniqueness that makes us interpret the data in favor of that argument to the very point of using language to tie all the species together. If we call all bipeds “human,” then they’re all our relatives; they’re all our ancestors. Even though they aren’t.

Which makes me feel it would clarify science a lot if it would restrict the use of the term “human” to mean modern humans only, making humans a species unto themselves. It answers the question, “If the Neanderthals were a species, what species are we?” to which the current answer is “modern humans.” They get an identity, we get a blah.

If you can’t make babies with them—and there’s no evidence we could make babies with Neanderthals or Hobbits, much less erectus—they should have, I argue, a different name. I don’t care if that hairy little, barrel chested critter over there buries his dead and makes costume jewelry, he’s not going out with my daughter.

It might then stop us from the compulsion to call Ardi and Lucy and all the other fossils who came before us our “ancestors”; because, when they call them our “ancestors,” it’s hard not to think of them in our direct line, because that’s what the language implies. Unfortunately for science, that case has yet to be made. There’s no reason at all to think that either Ardi or Lucy are ancestral to us; the most we know is that they preceded us. (Shared morphology is not enough; we shared immense morphology with the Neanderthals, yet they were not ancestral to us.)

III.

The lesson, I hope is humility. The earth is not the center of the universe. If we were made in the image of God, what about those other guys? Prototypes? Near-misses? Seconds?

To be human is, indeed, unique. Just as being a lion is unique. But as a lion is not unusual, it is a cat, people aren’t unusual, either; they’re simply part of a larger group of clever bipeds, which for want of any other term we call by their genus name “Homo”; creating the linguistic situation where all people are homos, but not all homos are people (a squares and rectangles kind of thing). Now, while this uncomfortable linguistic truth may cause certain difficulties in the larger world, it is, nonetheless, I believe, correct.

And in its way it’s comforting to know that we are not unusual. Unique maybe, but if it wasn’t going to be us, it was going to be someone else. It was destiny, not accident. Clever bipeds were once all the rage. Too bad we’re the only one left.

Still and all, it doesn’t hurt to leave a little milk out at night.

And furthermore

The National Geographic article goes on to suggest that bipedality arose from the need for males to carry food to the females, for whatever reason; an old theory that’s been battered around for a while.

Pardon me, but that’s impossible. It violates one of the laws of evolution, which is that morphological changes are only made for food. Cosmetics for sex, morphology for food. Got it? Amoebas, birds, people, bacteria, grizzly bears, beans, and sequoias, we’re all the same: food for shape; sex for color. I’m not going to change my shape just to get you food.

It also edges on another evolutionary law: evolution only goes forward; it only moves in a positive direction. I.e. evolution is always towards something, never away from anything. The savannah theory directly violates that rule. One changes evolutionary direction because a new food source is appearing, not because an old one is disappearing.

(I feel the necessity to repeat these rules here because I don’t recall seeing them elsewhere, basic as they may be.)

Another evolutionary law often mentioned here: No species can evolve quickly enough to avoid environmental collapse. This is a correlate of the above law. Another reason why the savannah theory couldn’t be.

Up a lazy river

Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry for beating this dead horse.

Today’s (10/1/09) BBC News reports, in a piece titled “Fossil finds extend human story” concerning recently released analysis of a 17 year old find named Ardipithecus ramidus, that, “Even if it is not on the direct line to us, it offers new insights into how we evolved from the common ancestor we share with chimps.”

It goes on —blah, blah—about A. ramidus’s tree climbing, walking, and running capabilities; age, 4.4 million years; location, Ethiopia; and such; and then concludes with the “Duh!” moment:

“What is surprising about the discovery is that the remains were found in a forested area. It had been thought that early human evolution was prompted by the disappearance of trees - encouraging our ancestors to walk on the ground.

“’These creatures were living and dying in a woodland habitat, not an open savannah,’ said Professor White.”

(National Geographic went even further in its news release: “If White and his team are right that Ardi [as the fossil’s known] walked upright as well as climbed trees, the environmental evidence would seem to strike the death knell for the ‘savanna hypothesis’—a long-standing notion that our ancestors first stood up in response to their move onto an open grassland environment.”)

“It’s been thought” by whom?

No Ape Shit reader would ever be surprised about a discovery such as that. We’ve been saying for decades that we grew up on the river banks and swamp lands. Being bipedal has nothing at all to do with the disappearance of any forests. Never has, never will. It’s been a blind alley since it was first conceived. It was a dumb theory to begin with that has diverted understanding of human evolution for nearly a hundred years. It’ll take the field another hundred years to fully throw away that silly belief; and, trust me, no one will ever give a nod towards A. Hardy. By God, they’re going to have to back their way into reality rather than credit anyone from the outside having any insight into the issue.

Regardless, couple this report along with the most recent analysis that the Floresian Hobbits, despite fire and tool use, weren’t even human, and I find comfort in that. It means that becoming human was not a unique and improbable outcome of a single evolutionary path, but rather the natural extension of primate evolution (it’s also recently been discovered that New World monkeys have had increase brain size since their split with the Old World monkeys). Being not unique on this planet increases the likelihood of finding us elsewhere.

You can never fly too high.

Once More with Feeling

There is a new hominid find being touted in the archaeology airwaves of late, this time a 1.8 million year old fossil from Georgia (theirs, not ours). Quoting Steve Connor in The Independent :

“The skulls, jawbones and fragments of limb bones [of this fossil] suggest that our ancient human ancestors migrated out of Africa far earlier than previously thought and spent a long evolutionary interlude in Eurasia – before moving back into Africa to complete the story of man.”

Oh, poppycock!

Once again, it has to be pointed out that just because a creature was a tool-using, fire-controlling primate, doesn’t mean it’s our ancestor. Plain and simple. It certainly doesn’t mean that our ancestors “spent a long evolutionary interlude in Eurasia – before moving back into Africa to complete the story of man.” Even should it eventually be proved that said fossil is in our direct line, it doesn’t mean that whatever creature it was didn’t live in Africa at the same time, as well. Just because we haven’t found a similar fossil in Africa, doesn’t mean that the creature didn’t live there. It only means we haven’t found such a fossil there, as yet.

Ergo Ergaster
But while we’re on the subject of Eurasian holidays for lost primates, can we ask a couple more questions?

What happened to all those guys who left Africa to live all over the Old World: the heidelburgensis, Java guy, Peking guy, floresiensis, not to mention neanderthal? There’s much discussion about the fate of the neanderthals vis-à-vis modern humans, but virtually nothing about h. erectus and his alter-egos: Java, Peking, ergaster, habilis, et al. It’s little wonder the Chinese claim that erectus/ergaster/Peking guy evolved locally into modern humans along with all the other erecti around the world. After all, what did happen to them, if they didn’t evolve into modern humans?

Still and all, while there’s little wonder about the claim, there’s little to substantiate it, as well. Furthermore, it’s hard to see how all the members of a widely dispersed species can evolve concurrently. I’m going with the theory (seemingly supported by the evidence) that modern humans only appeared once and then quickly took over the entire world.

So then, what did happen to the pre- or non-human primates that spread over the Old World. We know that they disappeared, but when? And how and why? Even though we only search for answers to those questions regarding the neanderthals, it seems as reasonable a question for the other species, as well. Certainly it’s being asked vis-à-vis the little people from Flores.

Current thinking (admittedly, this changes almost daily) is that the Flores Hobbits were not evolved from erectus, but shared a common ancestor with them. Interestingly, the claim is still out there that modern humans evolved from erectus. How that affects our relationship with the Hobbits is beyond me, but it certainly doesn’t address what happened to either erectus or Hobbit.

What I’m trying to understand is how a tool-using, fire-controlling animal, such as erectus, could simply disappear. Are we to believe that erectus died out naturally in most of its territory before modern humans arrived on the scene? It just seems so unlikely. Why do we think that primate line died out? Or was it still in place when modern humans poured out of Africa? Why would it have died out before humans got to it? What would have killed it off? If it didn’t evolve into modern humans—because that could only happen in one isolated place—did it simply die out before the arrival of modern humans? If so, why?

It appears to me that this Georgian find only adds to the number of biped primates that spread around the globe. We were only the most recent, but it’s beginning to look like we’re the last.

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.