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!

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?

Sports: Our bodies' are learning tools.

I've been thinking about writing on this for some time now. Some anthropologists suggest that one reason for the growth in the human brain over the past 3 million years is due in part to our physical expertise growing. As we became better stone throwers our diet could improve because we took down more creatures with our rocks. This made selection pressure to throw more accurately and, because throwing a rock at a moving target requires large amounts of brain capacity, judge the rate of speed and direction of the target, judge the force, direction, and timing of your throw, coordinate these judgements to ensure your rock intersects with the water buffalo temple or neck at a high rate of speed . . . . Our brains grew.

I've taken this idea to new extremes and argued with Mary that I need to go watch football or golf or soccer to research brain growth! While Mary doesn't buy this she is supportive of my daily workouts on rollerblades or skis, my crunches, twists, bends, and lunges. She can see not only changes in my body shape, but my mental capacity is clearly enhanced when I engage in varied activities and have a chance to increase my heart rate for an hour or more everyday.

Couple a better diet with the learning required to engage in new activities, like taking down a water buffalo, & over a few hundred generations we see clear brain growth. This same idea has scientific support on phenotypes as well. The more tuned your body, the better your posture, the stronger your muscles, the healthier your blood, the more active your mind. You can use your physical structure to build a new shape to your body (training) just as you can use your thoughts to rewire your habits. A few five minute "practice" sessions thinking about a new complicated task such as playing scales on a musical instrument will help you with that task the next time you do it physically. Just thinking about doing a thing builds the neurons in your motor cortex allowing your brain to work better the next time you do that thing!

Try it!

The Inclined plane: Great tool for many things!

I know you're all thinking the inclined plane is no big deal. Slide a block up the hill to make a pyramid. Make a wedge to keep a door closed! There is a lot more to it than that. An inclined plane allows the user to lift an object using less force than would be required to move the object directly up. The plane allows the object to rise slowly but steadily. When it was invented, about ten thousand years ago it changed the height and majesty of building we could make.

You probably know that Archimedes advanced the uses for the inclined plane by wrapping one around a cylinder and making a screw! Archimedes Screw allowed water to lifted and run through out an area by way of aqua ducts! Let's hear it for the Inclined Plane another gift to us from the smart people Before the Common Era!

A Lesson learned: Gift by example.

In the past dew days the country seems consumed with bonuses paid to about 400 executives from the derivitives trading division of AIG. American International Group is a large insurance company responsible in part for the current lack of trust on the financial markets. These bonuses, in excess of $150 million, have clearly sparked outrage from people making much less income than any of the recipients. 

Since early in 1981, leaders of our country have been facilitating the movement of large sums of cash from the poor and middle class to the rich. A combination of tax cuts, increased contracting for services, reduced oversight of markets, lessened regulatory requirements and relaxation of rules across the spectrum of governing groups has allowed the portion of our annual income that goes to the top 1% of earners to swell from a healthy seven percent to a jaw dropping 25% in 2007. Now the richest among us have raked in one half of all wealth and a quarter of our annual income. We get angry about bonuses paid to a small group of financial experts. Where was the outrage at the money wasted blowing up huge swaths of Iraq? Or the wasted billions in tax give-backs on capital gains? We weren't so mad at the money lost due to lax oversight of WorldCom, Enron, or HealthSouth.

Workers and their managers have created the wealthiest nation on earth and much like the slaves who moved the rock for the majestic buildings of Washington DC, we can marvel at its splendor, but we cannot really participate in the riches. Our country will not ultimately be judged by the gaudy fashions or ostentatious displays of consumption. Our democracy, our republic will be judged by how well we care for the least of our citizens. With homeless people crowding urban cores and foreclosures now hitting the unemployed as well as the greedy speculators workers should be angry but, not at AIG execs or the current government. We should be mad at the failed leadership of the past twentyeight years. The group of politicians and the thinkers who supported them and told us that government was the problem; that taxes were your money being taking out of your pocket; that the role of government is fighting expeditionary wars in far away lands. These people, with the best of intentions led us in the wrong direction and now I fear they are to proud to admit their mistake.

Government is good. We need a government to create a more perfect union, to build the commons, to establish justice and to ensure domestic tranquility.  Public education, public health, public markets, and public information are values to be lauded. Public science and public art create pride in peoples that transcends hard times. 

The only way to benefit from the crisis of trust in financial markets of late is to learn the lessons of evolution. Survival of the Fittest means which species works best together, not which species created the individual with the biggest house. If we learn the lesson of cooperation we can survive many perils now and in the future.

Language: The gift that redefines everything

Since we're on the  really old gifts that we humans have received from our ancestors I thought I'd take a few sentences to talk about language. 

Mary's (Mrs. Claus)  idea is that language was passed on by mothers as they cooed and tended to their babies. I think the sharing of a cooked evening meal I talked about yesterday helped language develop. Folks need a way to communicate the day's events or plan for tomorrow's. Our need to communicate on the foraging trail or in a hunt led to words/grunts/keening cries as well as much used gestures. 

As people lived in died generation after generation the growth of symbolic meaning became more standardized. Now, we can pass on the most advanced or mundane ideas with just a few keystrokes or utterances. [OMG, it's late gotta run CU L8R.]

An early gift, control of fire.

While there are many early gifts we've received from our parents, grandparents and beyond, I'm going to focus my first few posts on very early gifts that have really given us rich new ways to live on earth. Breaking and forming stone tools, the use of pigments, and accurate throwing techniques were all clearly old gifts but today's post is about Fire! With the impending spring, fire is an apt starting point to examine gifts from our past.

Residue & evidence of human's control of fire stretches back about 500,000 years. This was a very early gift passed from our ancestors to today. Across human cultures is the tradition of a cooked evening meal. Our control of fire made these cooked meals possible. Fire allows for adaptation to a wide variety of climates and weather and in cooking of food, increased access to easily digestible calories from stored items like roots, meat, & grains. 

Fire a great early gift from our ancestors!

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.