Tag Archives: evolution

Relating to the evolution of homo sapiens

Galactic Time

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How old is your dog in galactic years? I mean, we have dog years and cat years for expressing time in the context of human lifetimes. Why not go big?

Many of our time units derive from astronomical cycles. The day is based on Earth rotation. The month hails from the lunar orbit (loosely…forcing an integer number into a year). The year, of course, clocks an orbit around the sun. After that, our ten-finger fetish creates decades, centuries, and millennia. Isn’t it interesting that no such convenient names are available for timescales longer than written human history? If that isn’t diagnostic of myopia, I’m not sure what is! Deep time is obsolete, to the modern. It’s like saying only the thin film of oil on top of the ocean holds any interest.

But back to the main thread, two other prominent astronomical timescales relevant to Earth arise once peering deeper into time. The first is precession. The Earth’s axis is tilted approximately 23.5° to the orbital plane, currently pointing darned close to Polaris (will be even closer in 2100, within half-a-degree). But the axis itself rotates around the line perpendicular to the orbital plane, tracing a loop on the starry sky with a period of about 26,000 years. Half-a-cycle from now, Vega will be the “north star,” albeit not nearly as close as Polaris gets (enjoy this golden age in the north!).

The other natural scale is the period of the solar system’s orbit around the galactic center, as the stars comprising the galaxy swirl under the grip of gravity. The period is about 225 million years.

Let’s cast significant developments in terms of these longer astronomical periods. It isn’t the first time I’ve made temporal analogs, and the reason I come back to it now is that it’s super-important to attain a grip on timescales that really matter. Otherwise, our culture’s extreme emphasis on the recent imposes a hyper-hyper-hyper myopia on us, keeping us utterly ignorant on the ecological front.

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Dumb Geniuses

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From Archives New Zealand (Wikimedia Commons).

A new video from Ze Frank is out, this time about Geckos. True to form, Frank masterfully illustrates ze genius of other life forms. One amazingly-intricate evolutionary adaptation after another leaves us grasping to make sense of the various superpowers manifesting in the living world. If Ze Frank’s videos don’t leave your mouth agape, there might be something wrong with your jawe (the anatomical feature best suited for expressing awe). I admire his skilled and unabashed use of anthropomorphism to imbue these characters with personality and desire. He’s not wrong, and our culture could use a great deal more appreciation for the shared engagement of all Life.

Now, it does pain me to see the torture that animals are subjected to in laboratory environments just so that we might attempt a deeper understanding. Admittedly, part of my sense of amazement is enhanced by partial scientific understanding of the phenomena. Yet, it would still be possible to put superpowers on display without the clinical Nazi part. As is true for so many things in modernity, the act of scraping some veneer of “good stuff” leaves devastation in its wake. It’s seldom worth it, in the full analysis.

But the main point of this post is to reconcile the genius of microbes, fungi, plants and animals (of which we are part) with their obvious “dumb” qualities as well. To wit: a spider can weave an elaborate web I’d have no hope of replicating, yet when stuck in a sink will repeatedly try—and fail—to climb the steepest wall. Clinging to spider webs for a moment (they’re like that), birds also weave nests using spider webs and other bits of fluff, moss, twigs, spit, and many other seemingly random elements. I know I couldn’t pull it off, even allowed unlimited spit. But a bird in a garage with the door wide-open can exhaust himself trying to fly into the ceiling, never realizing he can fly right out the enormous opening. A honeybee has many jobs in her lifetime: rearing; feeding; storing food; cleaning and maintaining the hive; patrolling and defending; foraging and finding new nest sites—communicating by both dances and chemicals. Yet trying to escape a house, she will bump into a window until she dies—never “getting” the whole glass concept. In the opposite direction, ants innovate in their foraging strategies so that they find ways into (and back out of) a house that would never occur to us—often repeatedly outwitting us as we try to block one route or anther. But their brains are tiny, and they’re not even on social media.

I could go on, of course, but the idea should be clear enough. What I want to briefly explore is this contrast between genius and dumb-as-a-brick (a recent post explored human dumbness). How are both true at once, and how might we, as humans, be both different and basically the same?

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The Genius of Survival

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Photo by Meldy Tameng (Wikimedia Commons).

By accident, my wife and I stumbled onto the convention of calling essentially every living being a genius. It started as a joke about our cat, because obviously—in our human-supremacist culture—superlative traits like genius can only be applied to humans! Soon enough, this practice migrated to squirrels, newts, baby birds, ants—and even plants, fungi, and microbes. I no longer think of it as a joke.

I’ve utilized this framing in other posts by noting that every one of these beings knows how to do things we haven’t the foggiest clue how to do ourselves—or how, in detail, they manage it. I’ll get to the nuanced nature of the word “know” in a bit. But for now we can at least admit that the world is overflowing with phenomena we haven’t even registered, let alone understood. Typically, we just scratch the surface at best.

What I’ll do here is explore the relative genius of Life as compared to the normal use of the term, in the way of cognitive prowess. Let the games begin!

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What is Life?

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By Conselleria de Medi Ambient, from Wikimedia Commons.

No doubt about it: Life is truly amazing. I mean, the things it gets up to far exceed our imaginations! (Just watch a few dozen Ze Frank “True Facts” videos to scratch the surface.) It hardly seems necessary to invest in a post to elucidate what constitutes Life, when a small child will correctly identify instances almost every time. Living beings demonstrate awareness about their surroundings, taking actions broadly in service of goals to thrive and reproduce. An amoeba marks itself as alive because we witness its purposeful mobility to secure food and evade danger.

Yet, living beings are undeniably made of atoms—atoms that do not appear in any close investigation to operate outside the usual rules of physics. Our sensation of awareness, experience of color perception, etc. seems so far removed from physics that the intractable connection is obvious to neither child nor adult. How could this awareness (what we label “consciousness”) possibly arise out of inanimate particles obeying physics without some “special sauce” unavailable to mere “machines” like computers or robots? It seems prima facie absurd, so it requires an unusual suspension of disbelief to submit to the baffling prospect.

How is it even possible, though, that inanimate matter can constitute Life? In a word: feedback. Life is feedback. The sun is of huge importance to Life, but we would not say that it is alive itself even though it actively engages with the universe and is a critical contributor to living beings on Earth. It’s continuance as a star is not contingent on these interactions. No feedback loop makes fusion in the core care what happens in Las Vegas. As an aside, I resist dividing lines and include the Sun (and everything else) in a living whole: just try doing without it!

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Rivulets of Life

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Rivulets; photo by Tom Murphy: CC-BY-NC.

I spend probably too much of my time (and now yours) trying to work out the apparent differences between animate and inanimate arrangements of atoms. In practice it’s not at all hard to tell one from the other, even if a mass spectrometer would confirm that all the same atoms comprise the collections. Children easily differentiate one from the other. Isn’t that definitive?

In a similar vein, it’s not hard to tell a star from a brown dwarf, even though they have essentially identical compositions. The one having more than 8% the mass of our sun will ignite fusion and light up, while the one not “tall enough to go on the ride” will continue sulking as a dim, warm lump.

It’s not hard to tell the difference in behavior between a piece of paper fluttering to the floor and the exact same piece wadded tightly and dropping straight down. A clear sheet of glass or ice becomes an opaque white powder simply by crushing it thoroughly. A log looks and acts much differently before and after burning, even though no atoms were created or destroyed—most are dispersed as invisible gas. Arrangement matters.

But I want to poke a little deeper and identify an arrangement that we would never call animate, yet displays many of the hallmarks of Life. This is my clumsy attempt at doing so. The purpose is not to find an exact match in this example, because that’s impossible: identifying flaws is easy sport. Rather, this exercise provides a window that might allow our crippled imaginations to dimly grasp how Life might develop behaviors that appear purposeful in the context of evolutionary feedback. So, instead of focusing on imperfections, the challenge is: are you able to make out the shape beyond the distracting foreground fog? What new insights does this perspective offer? How might you build upon it and make it even better?

This is the first in a two-part series on what constitutes Life, as far as I can gather.

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Nursery Rhymes

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Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Image by Loren Elkin from Pixabay

We all appreciate that human individuals progress through stages of cognitive development on the way to adulthood. A toddler is simply not equipped to run a country (hold your quips): the brain hasn’t fully developed. Infants love the game of peek-a-boo precisely because they have not yet cemented the idea of object permanence. Language capability improves over many years—decades, actually. Brains are not “fully” developed until the late twenties (yet assert mastery starting in the teen years).

But, what does “fully” developed mean? It means significant further development in structure or capability is not to be expected. Does it mean that brains reach some theoretical ultimate capability—no more improvements possible—or do they maybe stop short of perfection? Why would evolution produce anything substantially better than what provides sufficient selective advantage in an ecological context, in simultaneous consideration of all other organism attributes and the biodiverse and social environments in which they operate? The tangled difficulty of that sentence barely hints at the immense contextual complexity involved.

So, every last one of us ceases brain development well short of some notional limit. Does that stopping point cross the threshold of being able to master all knowledge or understanding about Life, the Universe, and Everything? Of course not. Evidence abounds. So, we will never comprehend it all, given our limited meat-brains.

All this echoes things I’ve said before. What’s new in this post is what I hope will be a helpful analogy to how adults present ideas to children possessing less-developed brains—thus the Nursery Rhyme title. Since adult human brains also stop short of “full” development, how might we expect our imperfect brains to interact with what we can’t fully understand? We encounter this conundrum all the time in giving “sufficient” accounts to children that are effective, even if they must be over-simplified or distorted to get the point across. So, how would a hypothetical species possessing far more wisdom explain the incomprehensible to us, as if we were children to them?

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MM #6: Accidental Tourists

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This is the sixth of 18 installments in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous disease afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode makes the point that humans were not inevitable as a culmination of evolution. We are not the purpose or goal of the Earth or universe.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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MM #4: Evolution

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This is the fourth of about 17 in the Metastatic Modernity video series (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous episode afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode addresses the more subtle and under-appreciated aspects of evolution, which acts on the whole community of life in full ecological context.

As is the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

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Humans: the Movie

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What follows is a story involving a movie watched by animals. The pacing of the movie to be described might seem like a very odd choice, but it simply mirrors the pacing of human life on the planet. A vivid visual imagination on your part will help to bring the story to life. So, put on your creative cap and let’s dive in!

Picture a small-town movie theater on a street so quiet and unimposing that the surrounding prairie and forest sidle right up to the back of the theater. The marquee advertises a feature film called The Human Saga.

As the afternoon shadows lengthen, a trickle of woodland creatures start to emerge from the forest, mosey up to the theater, pay for tickets, and go in. You notice rabbits, a fox, a group of turkeys, a band of raccoons, some stoats, newts, a skunk (who will be lucky enough to sit next to it?), a hoppy group of frogs, some chittering squirrels, a family of porcupines, a pair of doves, an ancient looking tortoise, a doe and her two fawns, and even a mama bear with cubs. They and many others have all come to absorb a tale of what these humans are all about. It’s a long movie: almost three hours chronicling the almost 3 million years of humans on Earth. But it’s fine: no one is in a big hurry.

The animals amicably settle into their seats, enjoying candy, popcorn, and a hot dog here and there. They’re relaxed, but wide-eyed with excitement for this special treat.

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Distilled Disintegration

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Photo by Nigel Brown; licensed under Creative Commons

My adult life has run on two diverging tracks. On one, I played science. The other track branched off at age 34—twenty years ago this month—when I started teaching a class on Energy and the Environment. I was eager to piece together our likely energy future: how we would beat climate change and leave fossil fuels in the dust. Against my wishes, this fork presented unexpected turns that took a long time to sink in. The two tracks eventually became too divergent to keep a foot on each. At this stage, I can’t seem to muster the denial it would take to disregard what I have learned so that I might return to the more blissful play-time track.

Much of my writing in the last few years has tried to capture why I have become convinced that modernity can’t last, likely to begin disintegrating in the near-term. In this post, I attempt to distill core elements informing this sense. My apologies if this seems like a rehash. For what it’s worth, the packaging exercise is something that helps me address the question I constantly ask myself: what part of this might I have wrong? It’s a way to take stock.

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