A tail dragging romp through the swamps of the world
IT IS 30,000 years ago. A man enters a narrow cave in what is now the south of France. By the flickering light of a tallow lamp, he eases his way through to the furthest chamber. On one of the stone overhangs, he sketches in charcoal a picture of the head of a bison looming above a woman's naked body.
In 1933, Pablo Picasso creates a strikingly similar image, called Minotaur Assaulting Girl.
That two artists, separated by 30 millennia, should produce such similar work seems astonishing. But perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised. Anatomically at least, our brains differ little from those of the people who painted the walls of the Chauvet cave all those years ago. Their art, part of the "creative explosion" of that time, is further evidence that they had brains just like ours.
How did we acquire our beautiful brains? How did the savage struggle for survival produce such an extraordinary object? This is a difficult question to answer, not least because brains do not fossilise. Thanks to the latest technologies, though, we can now trace the brain's evolution in unprecedented detail, from a time before the very first nerve cells right up to the age of cave art and cubism.
Ah, cave art to Cubism. A fine start on the path to Starfleet graphics. As Buzz would say, "To infinity ... and beyond!"
THE ATLANTIC has an article worthy of your consideration, by Jamais Cascio, called "Get Smarter", wherein the author postulates that mankind has been under environmental pressure to get smarter, for a long, long time. 74,000 years ago a volcano blew up in Sumatra that made Mt. St. Helens seem like a fart in a phone-booth, and just about resulted in the extinction of h. sapiens (and neanderthalis). From this, Jamais concludesSo, that was then, and this is now, and why should you care? Jamais believesThe Mount Toba incident, although unprecedented in magnitude, was part of a broad pattern. For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner. How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neurophysiologist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence. According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language.
The process has been going on for thousands of years, but now, for the first time, we have the ability to actively guide this process.Our present century may not be quite as perilous for the human race as an ice age in the aftermath of a super-volcano eruption, but the next few decades will pose enormous hurdles that go beyond the climate crisis. The end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio- and nanotechnologies—each of these threatens us with broad disruption or even devastation. And as good as our brains have become at planning ahead, we’re still biased toward looking for near-term, simple threats. Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard for us to manage. But here’s an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.
Take a few minutes and check it out.Most people don’t realize that this process is already under way. In fact, it’s happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It’s visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity. So far, these augmentations have largely been outside of our bodies, but they’re very much part of who we are today: they’re physically separate from us, but we and they are becoming cognitively inseparable. And advances over the next few decades, driven by breakthroughs in genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, will make today’s technologies seem primitive. The nascent jargon of the field describes this as “ intelligence augmentation.” I prefer to think of it as “You+.”
A team led by Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, studied chimps living in Loango National Park in Gabon. They found that the chimps built and used five different types of tools to help them find beehives and extract honey: thin, straight sticks to probe the ground for buried nests; thick, blunt-ended pounders to break open beehive entrances; thinner lever-like enlargers to break down walls within the hive; collectors with frayed ends to dip honey from the opened hive and bark spoons to scoop it out. Various tools were often found near the same hive, suggesting that the chimps employ them in sequence (Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.04.001).We already know that chimpanzees have a solid sense of self-recognition.A few tools even appeared to have two uses, with enlargers at one end and collectors at the other. This is the first example of a non-human species constructing multipurpose tools.
No one is even suggesting that humans are evolved from the great apes. But more and more it appears that we came from a common origin. And it is becoming clear that chimpanzees, in particular, pass on gained knowledge to their offspring further developing a culture.
Give them a few hundred thousand years and they'll be chiselling stone, stacking it up and making an edifice that will confuse their own centuries later.
Regrettably, they will likely go through a phase during which the only way they will be able to explain things to themselves will be to invent a mythical higher power. Hopefully, they will grow out of that faster than their bipedal cousins have.
Education officials have been traveling the state since November to hear public comment on proposed changes to the standards' science section. Indeed, they added two public hearings and delayed the Education Board's vote until Tuesday because of the uproar over one proposed science revision: "Standard 2. Evolution and Diversity "A. Evolution is the fundamental concept underlying all of biology and is supported by multiple forms of scientific evidence. "B. Organisms are classified based on their evolutionary history. "C. Natural selection is the primary mechanism leading to evolutionary change."Which, naturally, is causing one particular body of freaks to turn themselves inside out, refuse to eat oranges and generally hold their breath until their brains achieve a state of equilibrium rarely found outside Polk County.
This three-sentence standard accurately reflects the state of science on the subject. While critics will point out certain scientists who object to the idea of evolution as science, they are a slim minority, often with religious concerns.That's pretty standard fare: Florida wingnuts are leaders when it comes to dumbing down the world around them. Columnist and mystery writer, Carl Hiaasen, points out that, that is the reason this coming decision really has no place in Florida. Not because evolutionary biology is open to question as a science, but because such sophistication is just plain out of place in Florida.
In a move that could endanger Florida's flaky backwater reputation, the state Board of Education is poised to endorse the teaching of evolution as a science.Well... good point. We are talking about hanging chad country.This is a dangerous idea -- not the presentation of Darwinism in schools, but the presentation of Florida as a place of progressive scientific thought.
Over the years the Legislature has worked tirelessly to keep our kids academically stuck in the mid-1950s. This has been achieved by overcrowding their classrooms, underpaying their teachers and letting their school buildings fall apart.
Florida's plucky refusal to embrace 21st century education is one reason that prestigious tech industries have avoided the state, allowing so many of our high-school graduates (and those who come close) to launch prosperous careers in the fast-food, bartending and service sectors of the economy.
By accepting evolution as a proven science, our top educators would be sending a loud message to the rest of the nation: Stop making fun of us.
Is that what we really want?
... several school boards in North Florida have passed resolutions opposing the teaching of evolution as fact. True, students in those same districts have produced some of the worst science scores on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, but who needs Newton or Copernicus when you've got the Corinthians?Did I promise a treat towards the end of this posting?The notion that humans descended from apes has never been popular among fundamentalists, but what of the apes themselves? Given the gory history of Homo sapiens on Earth, no self-respecting chimp or gorilla would claim a genetic connection to us.
The outcry against evolutionary instruction has been so heated that 40 members of the committee responsible for the new science standards felt compelled to sign a letter stating, ``There is no longer any valid scientific criticism of the theory of evolution.''
Caving in to groups that question the soundness of science, the letter warned, ``would not only seriously impede the education of our children but also create the image of a backward state, raising the risk of Florida's being snubbed by biotechnology companies and other science-based businesses.''
Nice try, pinheads, but there's no sin in being a slightly backward state with extremely modest expectations for its young people. That's been the guiding philosophy of our tightwad lawmakers for years, and the degree to which they've succeeded is illuminated annually in the FCAT charade.
If snubbing is to be done, Florida should be the snubber, not the snubee. Keep your elite biotech payrolls up North and out West -- we've got hundreds of thousands of low-paying, go-nowhere jobs that require little training and minimal education.
Well, no. Actually I didn't, but I'm going to give you one anyway. Having read all the above, it is now time for you to read Kevin "on Florida". I will give you a small taste of what he has to say:
Florida, where I have spent more of my thirties than I can admit even to myself, is a freewheeling and chaotic swath of superheated swamp, a large limp phallus flopping gleefully and aimlessly about in the ever-warmer waters between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean proper, as if waiting for a good reason to rally from an opioid slumber and point toward Europe. It's a mess for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that is median population rivals its average July temperature (that's in Fahrenheit) or the nature of its its chief exports, which are political corruption, windstorm damage, ecological atrocities, spam, and oranges, in that order.As they never say in the newspapers, read more.
In a nutshell, the job is to make it impossible for the wingnuts to keep using that word -- every time they do, they should get smacked upside the head and told what the correct terminology is or the conversation is over. Because, if you think about it, it's not really that unfair a demand, but I'm guessing it will drive the wingnuts to absolute distraction.Yup! That would be worth the effort.
Here's a related thought experiment. Would you rather be A or B? A is waiting in line at a movie theater. When he gets to the ticket window, he is told that as he is the 100,000th customer of the theater, he has just won $100. B is waiting in line at a different theater. The man in front of him wins $1,000 for being the 1-millionth customer of the theater. Mr. B wins $150. Amazingly, most people said that they would prefer to be A. In other words, they would rather forgo $50 in order to alleviate the feeling of regret that comes with not winning the thousand bucks. Essentially, they were willing to pay $50 for regret therapy.And loss aversion, as irrational as it can be when the outcome is as described above, may be something hardwired into our brains. Remember those capuchin monkeys?
Regret falls under a psychological effect known as loss aversion. Research shows that before we risk an investment, we need to feel assured that the potential gain is twice what the possible loss might be because a loss feels twice as bad as a gain feels good. That's weird and irrational, but it's the way it is.
... the monkeys were given additional tokens to trade for food, only to discover that the price of one of the food items had doubled. According to the law of supply and demand, the monkeys should now purchase more of the relatively cheap food and less of the relatively expensive food, and that is precisely what they did. So far, so rational. But in another trial in which the experimental conditions were manipulated in such a way that the monkeys had a choice of a 50% chance of a bonus or a 50% chance of a loss, the monkeys were twice as averse to the loss as they were motivated by the gain. Remarkable! Monkeys show the same sensitivity to changes in supply and demand and prices as people do, as well as displaying one of the most powerful effects in all of human behavior: loss aversion. It is extremely unlikely that this common trait would have evolved independently and in parallel between multiple primate species at different times and different places around the world. Instead, there is an early evolutionary origin for such preferences and biases, and these traits evolved in a common ancestor to monkeys, apes and humans and was then passed down through the generations.That would mean that our thought processes and loss aversion in humans and non-human primates dates back 10 million years.
An experiment testing the arithmetic skills of monkeys and college students revealed that when solving equations without the use of language, student performances were similar to that of the monkeys. [...]Essentially each group was looking at two sets of dots and was provided with possible options of the sum of those dots. Rather than simply count them up, both the humans and the monkeys used the same process to arrive at the correct answer - estimation.The purpose of this type of research is to understand the evolutionary origins of thought, she said.
“This particular study was designed to compare basic mathematical abilities between humans and non-human primates to determine whether they share an underlying thought process for solving addition problems,” she said.
According to Reuters, the study had 14 Duke students square off against two female macaque monkeys, Boxer and Feinstein.
The experiment required participants to add two sets of dots and choose a stimulus from two options that indicated the arithmetic sum of the two sets.
This study revealed that rather than counting or using language to solve the problems, college students performed this task using a “similar kind of fuzzy arithmetic” the monkeys did, said Cantlon.
“College students non-verbally estimated the arithmetic outcomes of the problems,” said Cantlon.
When performing the task nonverbally, both monkeys and humans typically answered within one second.
Cantlon said this finding suggests that even complex abilities such as mathematics might appear to have an evolutionary origin.Again, that would put the origins of thought back about 10 million years to a common ancestor. (I hear heads exploding).
As for the study conducted, both groups of participants were paid for their time. Students received $10, and the monkeys were rewarded with Kool-Aid, according to Reuters.Too bad Cantlon didn't use the capuchin monkeys. They would have taken the ten bucks, bought some Kool-Aid and had money left over for Jell-O and grapes.
Although tool use is known to occur in species ranging from naked mole rats [1] to owls [2], chimpanzees are the most accomplished tool users [3, 4, 5]. The modification and use of tools during hunting, however, is still considered to be a uniquely human trait among primates. Here, we report the first account of habitual tool use during vertebrate hunting by nonhumans. At the Fongoli site in Senegal, we observed ten different chimpanzees use tools to hunt prosimian prey in 22 bouts. This includes immature chimpanzees and females, members of age-sex classes not normally characterized by extensive hunting behavior. Chimpanzees made 26 different tools, and we were able to recover and analyze 12 of these. Tool construction entailed up to five steps, including trimming the tool tip to a point. Tools were used in the manner of a spear, rather than a probe or rousing tool. This new information on chimpanzee tool use has important implications for the evolution of tool use and construction for hunting in the earliest hominids, especially given our observations that females and immature chimpanzees exhibited this behavior more frequently than adult males.Evolution. The dirtiest word in the fundie vocabulary. But there is something even more significant.
Pruetz noted that male chimps never used the spears. She believes the males use their greater strength and size to grab food and kill prey more easily, so the females must come up with other methods.
