Ten days 'til the Giftmas Season

Hanukkah's in its fifth day. It's true. In a week the rest of the midwinter holidays begin. Christmas strats its run in ten days. Kwanza's seven day run kicks off 12/26. Solstice this year is on December 21, when the Sun ends its apparent slide to the south at 11:47 AM here in Minneapolis.

The Season is about to begin. I make gift deliveries starting on December 6, but real gifting season runs from December 21 thru January 13, St Knut's Day! So get ready! Gifts like respect, technique, doubt, skepticism, science, process, play, exertion & tons more are on the way to all the people of the planet, nice OR naughty!

A Gift of Trains: 30+ Santas Visit Bud's Playground.

Sometimes the words have to give way for the pictures! Thanks Bud.

Shared life: When we began to change our social gifts

Our culture changed fundamentally when we started to mate for life. I haven't read any dating of this but, I'll guess mating for life started around the time of art, spirituality, language and larger groups (150-200 adult individuals or more) cooperating. I'll also guess that the true shared life is only possible when, to paraphrase Rilke, "we become the guardian of each other's solitude." 

To put this period in perspective, I'll guess it started to emerge from the large brained creature living between 200, 000 and 70,000  years ago. I think mimicry had had its effect on our brains. I think the corpus collosum was sufficiently developed and sexually dimorphous that our social needs met our phenotype needs to push us to mate-for-life scenarios. (it would be interesting to study brains of other mate-for-life creatures and compare them to us alongside our fidelity rates could make a really interesting graphic.) In short, I believe that we learned to live with another for life over an evolutionarily brief period starting about 200,000 years ago lasting to about 70,000 years ago.

I believe we learned our amazing ability to "see the world thru others eyes" during this critical period. Two solid ice ages put us in the mood to mate for life. And, why not? It's an easy way to make and care for offspring that you're "sure or pretty sure are yours." This is also the beginning of our top notch empathy skills (I wrote about empathy in May) Our shared life is our interconnected life. We become dependent and humans are no longer solely individuals. We cannot really be evaluated or judged without consideration for our place in society. 

Sharing life with others is truly a gift we must always give and give well!

Forgiveness: A gift requiring foresight

When we forgive we must be able to see into the future to a time when our anger or disappointment will subside and our friendship will again very important to us. When we forgive we must see into the mind of the other and understand the foibles, the weakness and the goodness that is in each creature of our planet. From fungi to fern, from tree to mammal, from bacteria to mole, from virus to gene, and from reptile to person: all creatures have goodness in them for life is good. 

Forgiveness: a gift when given, a gift when received. A measure of humanity.

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?

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.

Santa's Birthday Post. The gift of number.

Only 39 weeks 'til Christmas Day. 

I've reached another prime number. Its been six years since I was prime! 

When humans learned to differentiate by number we slowly became more adept at counting. At first we likely could tell the difference between one and more than one. Between few and many. Now we can accurately count up to 71 or 1,234,456,987,543,954. Number sense is a gift passed on from generation to generation. To some extent as we move along the time line of history our past piles up behind us in the form of numbers. Years ago, in the past decade, 200 years ago, 10,000 BCE. These logs or recitations of past events gave new meaning and understanding to our ancestors. We marked off the passing of time by the season and the year. 

Imagine now, when credit default swaps trade over ethernets based on complex algorithms and calculations of future market value assuming a 2.2% growth rate and 1.7% inflation. Numbers fill our life with meaning and confusion. Gifts are not always the boon they are intended to be. In fact a gift's value can change depending on our cultural needs. I'll explore this idea later when I talk about the gift of faith!

Greetings from Santa Erik

Gifts: my interesting study traipsing across eons of our shared heritage. I've learned so much about sharing and curiosity that I'm thinking I must report my findings in a quiet corner of the web. I'm hoping this blog will include selected occasional posts with my thinking about our gift economy and the magic of human social interaction.