Wait for Sex: More than just a moral thing.

The ecstasy of orgasm can be a powerful attraction. Many people, mostly men, crave the feeling. When we learn to wait, we learn the value of delayed gratification. We show our self-control.

Many folks imagine the suggestion we wait only works in conjunction with a religious message: we can only argue our teens should wait when we cite the Koran, the Bible, or the Torah. This is not true. We can talk openly about sex. Waiting can mean; put more time into foreplay. It can mean; come close to sex without actually consummating your passion. There is power in physical interaction even without sex.

• Waiting for sex could mean, more cuddling first.

Waiting means we believe the future will come.

If you stop to think, when we wait for something it is implicit acknowledgement that we expect the future to happen. In other words, we have an expectation of a future event. This is an awesome advance for a species to make. To have a brain big enough to imagine a future is really different. Most creatures on earth live for the moment. (Ironically, an entire industry now exists to help people live in the moment.) People, most likely when we learned to throw, learned to predict the future. This brought us into the future in more ways than one.

• Waiting, the beginning of planning.

Patience: the gift of delayed gratification

At my household we celebrate the mid-winter holiday from December 20 or 21, 'til about January 13. In America today we are already weeks into a consumer frenzy called Xmas. The third Walmart Holiday ad came in the Sunday paper this weekend. Santas across the globe are talking about their gigs starting. I take deep breaths & hope to stay calm during the next several weeks. I'm rehearsing to sing in the choir with Open Eye Figure Theatre's Holiday Pageant.

When we learned to wait, to be patient, we built several strong, new connections in our brains that serve us today in ways we are only beginning to understand. Patience is ultimately the basis of economy. A look at the word economy reveals the notion of managing a household: in other words food, shelter, & offspring or dependents. If a strong economy means the ability to eat well, live & sleep well, and bring great kids into the world then patience gives us real advantages.

Over the next few weeks I expect to write about how our ability to wait: for delicious food; the ecstasy of sex; the comfort of home; the exhilaration of games well played, art well made, songs well sung, dances well danced; or the transcendence of preforming a physical feat, has helped our brains to become better at guiding & planning fulfilling lives.

• Patience, a real gift for the holiday.

Sex: The ultimate gift of cooperation

I heard a piece recently pointing out that sex is a counter-intuitive way to procreate if an individual can reproduce asexually. If you can clone yourself endlessly why bother mating? Look at how expensive it is to have two genders. Evolutionary science wonders why sex came about. Why two genders to reproduce the genes?

Simple answer: Gene mixing. Sharing. We grow as a culture as we mix & share.

I suggest today that sex is proof that Marx was right. Humans succeed because we are so good at cooperating, not because we are so good at competing. Sure, we can battle with the best. Look at what we did to the Neanderthal. Those people were bigger brained, stronger, better adapted to inclement weather, and likely better attuned to the environment than we were and still we took them out in short order. Why? Cooperation! We based our social structure on communication, shared work, social norm enforcement, and gender equity.

The research into the advantage sex brings to gene diversity is conclusive. Sex allows strong traits of both genders to move across time together. Females can carry a crucial trait thousands of years with no consequence to the fitness of men. Then a change in environment or behavior could give that trait new value to the male of a species. In one or two generations that trait can become widespread in both genders. And, there's a case to be made for the interaction, communication, and empathy necessary to create a really good child rearing bond with another individual. Children raised by two well linked parents have tremendous advantages as they age to adults.

So sex is not an evil to be reviled, not some chore for baby making & no more, sex is nature's magic mixer. Good sex is our ticket to ongoing life. After 500 years of advances in our knowledge, I marvel at the record of science -vs- faith. Skeptics were right on the "flat earth," they were right on solar centric system, right on gravity, right on prayer, right on medicine, right on democracy, right on evolution, right on slavery, right on war, now we see they're right on socialism too! It's a sad day for the faithful, religious, and other as they realize how many of their dearly held beliefs fail.

Making & throwing stone weapons: The gift of handedness

Unlike crossing the Rubicon, crossing the corpus callosum is a two-way task. We can go back across the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain. However, too often we are lazy, we don't push the thought process to use both sides of our thinking. When we're in conversation and the language centers are humming we often allow our sensing side to languish. When we're working out or moving in performance we often get into a state of languagelessness - a place where we might say we're "in the zone." These are a result of the dualistic nature of our brains. While the motor cortex works, behind the scene, neatly controlling the left side of you body from the right side of your brain and vice versa, our limbic system which surrounds the core "brain stem is exempt from hemispheric dichotomy and the cortex, where our "conscious thoughts originate, is usually under the glamour of this cross brain odyssey. ( what the heck does that sentence mean?)

Here's my idea. Our cerebral cortex –the outer folds of our brains; the place where language, tool use, conscious thought, creative juices, style, advanced planning and many other human traits originate– is hobbled to some degree in most people's brains because of the difficulty of processing ideas, thoughts and nerve impulses across the corpus callosum. Meanwhile, down low, in the core of our brain the limbic system, a knot of brain structures we share with mammals and probably marsupials & monotremes, the crossing is less an issue. And, when we get to the R-complex, that brain stem at the top of our spinal cord, it becomes entirely about reaction.

When we learned by mimicry to fashion and throw tools, weapons and play things we used the same hands for the same tasks as the individual we were learning from. As these skills were passed along from generation to generation handedness, in most cases right-handedness, became the norm. But, even this long, long evolutionary tree can be reversed. We can become ambidextrous or, less dependent on our dominant hand by practice. I assert that by working to be more ambidextrous we can increase our brain's connection to the other side.

Vessels: The gift of increased carrying capacity.

The history of the vessel goes back to cupped hands, animal skins, bladders, hollowed out wood, formed clay and woven sacks. It probably dates at least 50,000 years. Most of what I read says advanced pottery bowls are common in the neolithic. (12-15,000 years ago.)

Our development of vessels to carry things really made a lot of new stuff possible. We could carry water if the vessel was impervious to liquid. We could haul food, firewood, seed, sick people, children, old people, animals and many other things in vessels.

From woven bags, animal bladders, hollowed out trees and hand formed pottery to today's, vessels: flash drives for your digital data, books for your stories, CD or iPods for your music, plastic bags, mesh bags, stainless steel bottles, and ceramic covered space shuttles, we haul things around in vessels!

Not all this increased carry capacity is needed but, think about the way you store and move your stuff. Imagine doing it with out vessels! We are defined, in part, by our ability to move things in vessels.

Clothing: A gift of modesty & deceit.

When did humans begin to wear clothing? Estimates seem to differ widely but, I think we can safely say it was between the dawn of the neolithic age, 11, 000-15,000 years ago and human control of fire as far back as 650,000 years. I wrote about Skin and Eccrine sweat glands: A new sensitivity & mobility. in May. Clothing is a unique human creation that provides a second skin and a cultural pallet.

Beyond protection from the elements and establishing gender differentiation, marking status, and style, clothes have become a form of communication. Clothes are a canvas for self expression and a tool to conceal or reveal the form of our flesh. We use clothes to shield our neighbors from having to look at our sex organs, to make statements about politics or economics and obscure the real shape of our bodies. We accentuate what we perceive to be our best features with clothing. We use color to express our feelings and, while these uses of this ancient tool are in the forefront today, clothes' functions: warmth; protection from insects, disease, weapons, or hazards of the surrounds, are still paramount to a garment's usefulness.

I want my clothes to fit, be stylish -after a certain fashion that may not fit within the strictures of contemporary design - and to protect me from a myriad of potential ills. When I put on the red suit, whether a full Santa costume or just a vibrant tee, I put on a form of modesty and I start to live a lie. I'm a portrayer of Santa. I am not Santa. I live as Santa 24/7 but when the reindeer go to sleep and I curl up with the paper the sad fact is I cannot fly anymore than they can. But, I can give gifts. I can tell stories of our past and point out how far we've come since our naked ancestors started using tools to increase our ability to survive into the next generation.

Now, we've come so far that our biology would perish if our tools had to all be abandoned. Most people would die without tools. If you're a regular reader of The Wisdom of Santa, you know that I chronicle gifts from our ancestors that are often tools. Physical tools are becoming less important than social tools. Look at facebook or twitter. These tools, like clothes, allow a double use. One is to polish or protect us, make look shiny, happy, or goth - ready for work, play, or relaxation. The other is to obscure us. To hide our zits, our scars, our flab or skinny exposed ribs. Clothing can make the small look large and the large small.

When protect our body from the cold or our friend from having to look at our sorry flesh, we use clothes for modesty and deceit. Our style of clothing follows our ability to control the materials we use fashion our clothes. I marvel at how far we've come just in my lifetime in fabrics to keep us warm. From amazingly scratchy, heavy wool to the softness of PolarFleece or the claustrophobic rubberized rain gear to today's Gortex. The culture uses of clothing are as important as its functions.

Food storage: 11+ Millennia of Solar Power

We've been storing food for more than eleven thousand years. Granaries over eleven thousand years old have just been uncovered in Jordan. Wow! You have to be glad that people were able to use simple technology to store food, essentially storing the sun's energy for later use. Think of all the great things it allows us to do!

Specialization, new uses for time, art, politics, housing, clothing, food cultivation, domestic animals. The list could go on and on. We owe it all to food storage. We didn't have to spend our time hunting and gathering. We could gather and save! Smooth out the slow times with the abundant. We become more social, able to accommodate larger groups, better learners. I can just imagine the advances that these ancestors made when they could store food! 

What about talking? Gifts in story.

I talked in my St Pat's Day post about Language. Now I've been learning some things about communications that lead me to think the gift of story goes back further. 

Primates of many types understand and respond to language in amazing ways. Many mammals can learn to respond to aural stimuli but some chimps gather the meaning of numerous words and are able to understand them even when they're put together in unique, new ways! Watching a chimp carry a TV out of the enclosure to the prompt, "Can you bring the TV outside?" was instructional. We know that birds understand words and learn to create unique sequences. We know that recent experiments have placed the gene for language into mice. We know that most mammals experience emotions, some as complex as human emotions. So, when are we going to let them vote?

People turned this ability for language into an entirely new thing. I can relate a story or idea to you in a few words and if you grasp the concepts behind the story, you can repeat the story without remembering or even using any of my words. If you know more than one language you most likely can translate my story. This is how human culture has created a new life form on earth. Society. Human society exists as a living organism separate from the individuals that make it up. We've created a monster be allowing a new replicator -like genes- to participate in our culture. The meme builds languages to allow for easier replication of these conceptual life forms.

Wow, we've really got it good don't we?

Dance: The movement of rhythm

I love to dance. I dance everyday. I like to dance with music playing and I like to dance in silence. I dance on foot, I dance on skates, I dance with a partner, I dance alone. The main focus of my dance is movement. I like to envision my body moving in certain way. Then I try to make it happen in real life. Sometimes I see pictures of dances in the NY times and try to imagine making those moves. Always this movement has a rhythm. A flow. Even if my dance is on;y fingers on computer keys.

Everyone should dance, everyday!

Eccrine sweat glands: A new sensitivity & mobility.

Round about 2,000,000 years ago our ancestors were moving across the landscape, out of the forests, running long distances, collecting tool material, exploiting the midday period when quadripeds soaked too much heat to be active. This meant we needed to dissipate heat ourselves. What better way than a network of two to four million eccrine sweat cells spread across the surface of our skin? By that time most of our sweat glands were on our palms and soles. They originally provided moisture for better grip when fleeing or fighting and were emotionally activated. Since we started to stand upright, exploit the midday times when most quadripeds rested our species evolved any sweat glands that activate based on heat. Now most sweat glands are used solely to dissipate heat. 

I'm amazed by simple seeming innovations to our genotype that end up providing a real advantage to us as individuals. I'm also amazed at how memotypes sometimes work to overcome innovations as in the development of antiperspirants and deodorants. 

The focused energy of light.

I had to go back and mention another gift from my old buddy Archimedes. This Greek from Syracuse is said to have developed a series of large mirrors he could position on shore overlooking an approach to the City's harbor. He was able to focus the light of the sun with these mirrors to either blind ships' tillermen or start the ships on fire. The first Death Ray(!) three centuries before Jesus.

A simple, elegant defensive solution almost no troops required to operate it. Risk of the loss of life in minimal on the part of the defenders. Low cost. I'm always awestruck by the genius of Archimedes. Sad to say a Roman soldier killed Archimedes as they overran the city despite specific orders to spare Archimedes because he was so brilliant! <|:-{(#

Empathy: The first gift of human civilization

IT has to be said as the elected "nay sayers" in Congress start to sing their chorus against any Supreme Court Justice nominee who might have empathy: our ability to see the world thru the eyes of others was the beginning of our transition from cold blooded, killers and procreators to the civilized people we are today.  Yes, empathy, the gift of being able to put yourself into the shoes of others. 

Without being able to see the world thru others eyes we never learn to communicate. We never learn to care for our children, we never learn to govern, we never learn human emotion. Many mammals have an ability for empathy but, it our finely tuned skill at being able to understand what another creature, not just another human, is experiencing that unlocked most of what distinguishes us from reptiles. Empathy allows a mother to nurture her young. Empathy makes mentoring possible. Empathy is a necessary concept behind all economic transactions. 

Please, tell your Republican Senator  your opinion of empathy. It's the foundation of our legal system. From the Ten Commandments to the Koran, to the US Constitution, the primary purpose of these instruments is to codify empathy. Listen to a Senator try and create a dichotomy with Empathy & Legal decision making on opposite sides!

(Why are the the Republicans so opposed to anyone who might display empathy? My guess is John Kyl, the junior Republican Senator from Arizona didn't think before he came up with this amazing way to criticize any potential nominee that our President proposed. 

Of the President, Kyl said, "He believes in justices that have empathy," Kyl said if Obama goes with empathetic judges who do not base their decisions on the rule of law and legal precedents but instead the factors in each case, he would try to block those picks via filibuster.

Had Senator Kyl thought first I'm sure he would have realized the key place empathy holds in our culture, our community, our government, and our civilization.)

It really makes Santa wonder: What are these leaders thinking? Who are they trying to impress? I remember talk about mainstream values and ideas. We are really getting far out of the mainstream if we take empathy, a basic, core aspect of human existence off the table for any potential Supreme Court Nominee.

The Lever: Move the World

"Give me a long enough lever and a platform to stand on, I will move the earth"
-Archimedes

When Archimedes discovered the power of the lever in the second century BCE humans had been using science and it's language, mathematics for tens of thousands of years. (Meanwhile, conceptions of God were much more recent ideas on the human memescape.) People had likely been using levers for quite some time as well but the gift Archimedes gave us, (one of many, many gifts he left for us) is the ability to calculate all the forces involved to create levers, fulcrums, pulleys, rigging, etc. to carry out the work that previously required many strong men!

Now, we use leverage and the concepts in areas beyond the strictly mechanical. In finance for example, the concept of leverage refers to the ability to attract and service debt as a growth strategy at certain phases of an entities life. Some might argue that leverage had substantial influence on the recent banking/lending crisis. We might try to understand what are the basic constituents of leverage in lending? 

In simplified form, the assets are the "weight" to be moved, liability is the "lever", equity is the "fulcrum" and cash is the force applied to one "end of the lever." Of course there are other ways to interpret the lever metaphor and finance. I suggest this one to show how the concept of lever is used in diverse situations.

Just this morning a radio commentator suggested that President Obama had leverage in dealing with Republicans and with Congress because of his popularity with the people. Political leverage is an even more abstract image for levers. What is the weight? The fulcrum? The lever?

Counting time: Joining the magic of number & life's events

Back on Santa's Birthday I talked about the magic of number. How our ability to count beyond one, two, a few and many has allowed us amazing advances. Today, in honor of my beloved's birthday I want to expand on number to the counting of time. I think this might bring us to the origin of SANTA, that bearded gift giver who came at the winter solstice to predict the return of the sun from the south after it seemed to fall almost to the horizon in some northern reaches. Those first Santas brought seeds, and that prediction. They were able to predict the return on f the sun because they had learned to count time.

Counting time seems a simple, unimportant task now but this shared skill allowed some groups of people to thrive while their contemporaries who could not count time floundered. As with all deeply rooted memes, this gift pushes evolution without directly affecting the genome, or the phenotype. It means a slowing of change in physical characteristics and advance for those skilled at manipulating abstract concepts. My goodness! What a gift. Counting time!

Rhythm & Music: Gifts of story and action

I've been thinking about music lately because I spend so much time practicing the guitar and listening to music. I used to let the music flow over me and I was inspired by the song, the lyrics, the beat, the melody. I couldn't really tell what was happening. Now that I've taken some lessons and start to understand more clearly the structure of music like the simple 8 measure verse or chorus. AABA or AABBAA or ABAB rhyming schemes and chord progressions like I IV V I or I IV V IV I now seem more obvious when I listen to the songs I like. 

Music experience like mine seems to mirror the flow of music in human evolution. We started out with simple stories, maybe told later with approving sounds of our cohorts. Or, stories told with a beating drum in the background. As musicians became more adept, tuned their instruments differently, or built new ones, stories & rhythms became more complex. 

As rhythms evolved our ability to hear them was enhanced. We could move to them more smoothly. Dance co-evolved with the rhythms. Our species grew stronger bodies, bigger brains and better prediction skills. 

Music really was a gift that keeps on giving. Finally, its only in the past hundred years that we have have widespread recording techniques so all the sounds that went down before the first sound recorders are lost forever! Those performances were written down at times but many are really lost, vibrating forever into the ether at the speed of sound but unavailable to us.

Cooked food: The miracle science of energy!

Cooked food came along shortly after we learned to control fire. An ancient gift from real scientists! We used fire to slow cook, sear, roast, broil and bake. We tried new foods. If something made us sick we stopped eating it. The scientific method even before we knew what a method was.

Our diet changed. We spent less time looking for, killing, gathering, and cultivating food. Because cooked food releases much more energy from the starch, carbs, sugars, proteins and fats we had time for lots of other activities. 

Preparing food by cooking or by other methods such as fermenting, drying, sprouting, or soaking is a such an amazing advance I wonder how it came about. If you imagine the ancestors sitting around a fire with a haunch of mammoth or a dead bird you see how simple cooking might have com to be. 

I ate at my local pub the other night, I had a tempeh reuben. This is fermented soy bean cake with sour kraut, swiss cheese on dark rye bread with a side of horseradish and thousand island dressing. The magic of these high energy foods combined in this tasty gustatory treat was enough to make my mind spin. It was delicious. 

When ever you share an evening meal with family or friends, think back to the ancestors who developed cooking. Thank them for sharing.

Music: A gift to move and soothe us

Heard a short piece today on the Science Pod from the AAAS. Music seems to have an evolutionary component and may not be "auditory cheesecake" as Stephen Pinker described. Music might be ingrained in our psyche to provide group benefit of some sort. 

Three different pieces of music were played to the Maffa people from Cameron. They were able to distinguish "happy" or "sad" music despite never having been exposed to outside music forms or influences. The researchers concluded an evolutionary component to musical understanding.

Music is a gift that can soothe our nerves, move our tushes an inform our needs. Early music may have been used to alert or describe. It may have helped tell a story or build rapport with new friends. We all make music whenever we open our mouths. You may not find your child's requests or demands for attention melodious but you're hearing music of human interaction. 

I suspect that after hundreds of thousands of years we've really refined our sense and ear for music. Listen to rap, hip hop, rock, soul, ragtime, R&B, juju, reggae, tango, waltz, rondo, no, butoh, raga, folk, calypso, or any of hundreds of other forms of music, now mixed, remixed and mashed. You will quickly hear similarities and differences. Structure, time signature, scale construction, instrumentation, rhythm and language all participate in our sharing of music.

As our species spread across the planet we turned most materials we found into food, toys, tools, garments, and musical instruments. We've learned a variety of systems to record music to share with others and to teach it to our young.

I expect to have more to say about music in the future. I had to write about it today because, after hearing the new evidence from Science, I'm sure music is vital to our brains' growth and balance.

Ancient gifts. Art: Those magic symbols.

Continuing my thoughts on gifts from the distant past. 

Art: Magic symbols that represented the animals or plants we sought for food. Or, music that recreated the sounds of the forest with special emphasis on dangerous or useful animals. Stories, told with gesture became dance. As with language, a gift that really continues to give benefits to the present day.

When cave painting are discovered in France or ocher in the Great Rift Valley of Africa we confront the symbolic use of materials from peoples who lived tens of thousands of years ago. I'm sure that all the earliest artistic urges left no permanent mark since they were most likely drawn in the sand or ashes, or marked out with rocks, twigs, branches, or leaves. 

The earliest art (by which I mean visual, musical, movement, culinary, agricultural, architectural, or wearable) is probably all lost to scholarship. But, we can surmise that growing brains of people led us to great leaps of creativity. By taking a chance on a crazy idea our ancestors dreamed, thought, or created a new way of living. Gone were the days when we could not imagine the world through the eyes of the others. This ability to see the world as if through the eyes of another put us on the path to hot fashions, really great food, the best and worst TV programs, and a diamond crusted skull from Damien Hirst.