Communication Media

G-FMBF5NWNX5 Understanding the most widely used communication media, and their respective effects on human culture, is an important part of understanding why we behave the way we do.  By communication, I mean transmission of information, not physical transport.  In my earlier posts, I described how all higher order animals, including our ancestors, use vocalization and body English to convey information between individuals and with other species.  Canines and a few others can even smile to convey their feelings.

Hominids took the vocalization further and developed a modest language capability by about one million years ago, with a vocabulary beyond anything previously evolved.  In this manner, speaking face-to-face, singing together and body English/facial expressions became the initial and only set of communications media our hominid ancestors used until relatively recently.  Representational art, e.g., body painting and cave drawings, appeared somewhere around 50,000 years ago.  More importantly, writing was introduced no later than 4,000 years ago in Egypt, Mesopotamia and possibly in the Indus river delta. 

Writing was the beginning of a series of new media put to work by our clever species.  For simplicity, I’m going to discuss six primary media introductions during the last 4,000 years, and their effects on human affairs. 

1.     Writing - using various physical media – introduced about 4,000 years ago.

2.     Telegraph - “What hath God wrought?”, test message sent from the Supreme Court chambers in DC, over a fledgling commercial carrier, to Samuel Morse’s partner in Baltimore, May 24, 1844

3.     Photography – Starting with Daguerreotype photos which became widespread in the US and Europe during the 1840s

4.     Radio - wireless telegraphy became widespread on ocean-going vessels in the first decade of the 20^th Century.  Audio broadcasting (AM radio) became widespread in industrialized countries in the 1920s.

5.     Television - broadcast TV over the airwaves was introduced in a few cities in Europe and America starting in the late 1920s, but rapidly expanding in the late 1940s and 50s.

6.     Internet - developed under US government contract in the 1970s, it rapidly spread to most of the planet in the 1990s.

Note:  Much of what I have absorbed from a layman’s perspective about communication media started with the works of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Professor of Communications at Toronto University.  I can personally recommend two of his many works:

·       Mechanical Bride- 1951

·       Understanding Media - 1964

Writing from about 5,300 years ago was quickly adopted by governing authorities and the elites for its obvious ability to convey unambiguous messages of considerable length across time and distance.  Kings and queens wanted their names carved in stone; merchants needed records of their transactions, and so on.  However, the masses of humanity, even in cities, for the most part remained illiterate until the middle of the 19^th Century Anno Domini. 

Nevertheless, writing immediately was put to work in building and sustaining large city states and empires.  It seems that agriculture begat towns and cities, which needed and invented writing to enable large political entities.  Notice the Mesoamericans independently developed writing under exactly the same circumstances.  Later, books made of ink on parchment or papyrus were used to codify religious works like the Torah.  Having the doctrine in written form enabled widely dispersed Jewish religious communities to remain true to their Covenant.  Weekly synagogues provide the perfect venue for a literate teacher to read from the book, so the illiterate audience can be familiar with the law.  Until relatively recently, however, writing as a means of conveying information to large numbers of people was limited by its need to be printed on a physical layer.

Telegraph – widespread in America and Europe by the late 1840s, the first reliable transatlantic cable went into operation in 1866.  Information that previously took 10 days to cross the Atlantic now took only a few minutes using Morse code.  With dispatches moving at near light speed, newspapers around the world took on a new feeling of realism.  None of us were there at the time, but the feeling must have been profound, giving the average literate citizen a sense of the coming global village.

Photography – After 1840, for the first time in history, it was possible to quickly make a high-definition, reproducible image of any visible scene.  Ancient stone sculptures, particularly by the Romans, produced a similar degree of realism, also some painters of the second millennium AD, but each rendition took so much time, and they were limited to very small numbers for the elites of society.  After photography hit the scene, newspapers began reproducing photographs in their daily papers, replacing the earlier artist’s renditions.  It’s no accident that telegraphy and photography emerged during the Industrial Revolution, which in turn emerged as a direct result of the Enlightenment.

While still-picture photography lives on in a big way with our modern digital cameras, it’s spin offs of motion pictures and video (with sound) as communications media cannot be ignored.  Presently, motion pictures (including video) are primarily delivered via television channels or movie theaters, with some DVDs thrown in.  Penetration of streaming video into the Internet medium has already begun.  More on this below.

Radio – Wireless telegraphy began shortly after the turn of the 20^th Century, primarily used by marine transportation.  By the 1920s, audio broadcasts became widespread in industrialized countries.  Radio receivers became a standard fixture in homes with electricity.  Politicians could now speak to millions of voters, merchants could advertise their wares to mass audiences.  People in these countries rapidly became accustomed to receiving their entertainment in their living rooms instead of the local tavern.  Radio newscasts began to supplant newsreels (in theaters) and newspapers as the preferred source for daily news.  McLuhan describes radio as a “hot” medium, meaning it is concentrated in a single human sense – hearing, same as the telephone in this regard.  McLuhan maintains people are affected differently, with more immediacy, by hot media.  Some believe there would not have been a Roaring Twenties without the influence of radio and the telephone.  Today, radio still has a foothold in automobiles, but that’s about it.  Cellphones, which are two-way radios, are gradually replacing land lines for telephony services.  Cellphones become smartphones and smart watches, bringing in email, texting, Internet access, even two-way voice and video conversations.  You can wear Dick Tracy's 2-way wrist radio.

Television started in Europe in the 1930s and became widespread in America in the early 1950s.  Other countries quickly followed, until by the 1990s there was scarcely a country left on the planet whose citizens did not have ready access to satellite television.  Because of my age, I clearly remember this particular media revolution.  As a young boy, I recall sitting next to the family radio that occupied a prominent place in the living room of our home.  This was before transistors, so radios were fairly large.  My evening entertainment consisted of listening aptly to various dramatic serials like the Phantom and the Whistler.  When my favorite programs were not on, you could find me running around the neighborhood after dark with my friends, climbing fences and getting into mild forms of mischief.

When TV arrived, there were only a few in the neighborhood, so all the youngsters gathered at key homes to watch TV together.  Unlike the solitary radio experience, these were more like a party, with the typical fare consisted of wrestling and roller derby for the kids and game shows like Beat the Clock and What’s My Line for the adults.  TV proved to be a much bigger draw than radio.  By the end of the 1950s, not only did every home have TV, but most people spent considerably more time every day viewing TV than they previously did listening to the radio, when that was all they had. 

By the 1960s, microwave stations extended network television feed to even the most remote parts of America, spreading a kind of New York/Los Angeles brand of culture to places where it previously did not reach.  Before network TV came, some parts of the South did not celebrate Independence Day.  Before network TV came to rural New Mexico, the most popular athletic pastime for young people was riding bucking broncos, not baseball and football.  At every turn, we see how TV has affected our way of life and helped spread American culture around the world.  Even election campaigns are different than they were in the days when newspapers and radio were king.

McLuhan describes television as a “cool” medium, meaning its impact is diffused over two senses, vision and hearing.  I’m not sure I can pinpoint exactly how that plays out, but it is obvious TV is much more effective at conveying information than radio or newspapers ever were.  It grabs your attention with its immediacy.  The video camera is merciless and shows every fault in a person’s appearance and deportment.  After 60 years, TV has become ubiquitous and holds no more surprises.  The global village is clearly apparent in living rooms all over the planet.

Internet – The Internet and its world wide web became widespread in the early 1990s.  The primary driver was the rapid adoption of personal computers.  Standard browsers are the universal client.  I recall in the 1980s we used floppy discs to transmit data from one PC to another, before network technology and Internet Protocol provided the needed connectivity between PCs and servers.  The use of physical media to load software and other information onto PCs has mostly been eliminated.

You could say TV was simply radio with moving pictures.  However, the combination of personal computers and the Internet is fundamentally different.  There is nothing like the client-server model in any of the previous new media introductions throughout history.  Unlike broadcast radio and TV, the Internet is interactive.  Telephony is interactive too, but limited to that one aural sense.  The Internet provides combined two-way voice and video conversation, plus myriad other services. 

The global village that was born with the telegraph has now reached full-fledged status.  There is a portal into this village, accessible by approximately half of the households on the planet.  The concept of cyberspace is widely understood and used by a large portion of the human race.  People routinely engage in near-real time, two-way communication with others around the planet, often with people they don’t know.  Millions of discussion forums and other cyberspace communities have sprung up like mushrooms. 

The Internet has opened the door to a huge increase in the sheer volume of information the average connected person has access to and consumes.  Likewise, the quality of information available to the human race has rapidly increased.  Consider Google’s mission to bring the entire world’s accumulated knowledge to the average person’s fingertips.  Amazingly, in just a few years Google and its competitors succeeded, at least for a respectable portion of that noble goal.  Premier educational institutions like MIT and others are sharing classroom instruction materials and live video lectures with the world, online free of charge.

Because the Internet is still relatively new, its growth and evolution are still unfolding.  Its effect on humanity is not yet fully realized, but it’s fair to say the 21^st Century will see a massive penetration of computers and networks into every aspect of our lives.  From simple things like refrigerators with IP addresses to designer malware and cyber warfare.  Already, government institutions and commercial enterprises around the world have adopted computer and Internet technologies wholesale. 

In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the transformation of typical businesses from paper and printer-based information systems to almost total computerization.  Modern enterprises still have printers and copy machines in their offices, but they are starting to gather dust.  Most people in public life now communicate with emails and PowerPoint presentations.  More and more meetings are virtual.  Currently, these virtual meetings are merely telephone calls with still pictures added, but increasingly live video is being added.  The objective is: voice, video and data, all delivered in one Internet Protocol session, sometimes called unified communication and collaboration (UCC).

The new Information Age has also greatly enlarged the proportion of society employed full time as information workers, i.e., little manual labor involved.  Even older touch-labor jobs in agriculture, manufacturing and services are increasingly being conducted with a richer set of information inputs – what to plant and where, how much water and fertilizer to apply, materials in the supply chain, market demand forecasts, and numerically controlled milling machines - the list is endless.  Action-prompting information that used to come straight from a human brain into a pair of hands, now often comes over a network from a database, which in turn is maintained by humans using keyboards.

New collaboration techniques include “total immersion” rooms with special lighting, video cameras, speakers and microphones, where one side of the meeting table has chairs and the other side is an array of high definition TV screens.  The effect is uncanny; one quickly forgets or suppresses the fact that people appearing on the screens are not physically present.  Beyond that, most visual input to the senses comes via flat screen monitors.  Soon enough, most flat screens will be replaced by virtual reality visors, sort of like surrround-sound for your vision.   That's why Facebook bought Oculus.  They want their patrons to access their service in this manner.  Classic paradigm shift.

Voice recognition is another technology spawned by personal computing.  In the future, we can expect most computers, both servers and client devices, to carry on natural language conversations with us, as depicted by Hal 9000 in the movie 2001.  The concept of a personal computer will take on a whole new meaning.  People will form relationships with their computers that begin to replace relationships with other humans.  Some people will undoubtedly retreat into their little cells - talking to, working with and playing with computers instead of people. 

Can we adapt to these latest changes in communication media, or will we all fall into some kind of dysfunctional malaise, like a bunch of compulsive gamers?  I’m confident the human race will adapt, since those who fall prey to dysfunctional modes will be marginalized, suffer adverse consequences such as reduced income and be less likely to reproduce, natural selection at work.  However, society must be ready to deal with those who cannot adapt and not be surprised or confused about the resulting phenomena.

In any event, this New Century of ours promises to be a game changer for the human race, meaning the dawn of the 22^nd Century will see a very different society, one we would barely recognize or be comfortable in.  The Internet and associated computer technologies will transform human affairs in ways we cannot completely foresee.  Hang on to your hats and keep your eye on the ball, because it will be a fast and bumpy ride. 

The older communications media are not completely fading away.  The telegraph and its Morse code may be almost gone, newspapers and printed magazines are fading from the scene, but radio and especially television hang on, popular as ever.  Already, TV has begun to move to Internet Protocol, becoming increasingly interactive and delivered “on-demand”, similar to other Internet services.  New flat-screen TVs have this capability built in.

As more and more of our communication needs are served by electronic media, we can expect a modest reaction – a renewed emphasis on the value of face-to-face conversation.  The original set of communications capabilities our ancestors developed a million years ago, in-person talking and making music together are still with us.  Because our species have evolved around them, no amount of new technology can replace them or make them obsolete.  I fully expect new countercultures to reject consumerism and modern technology in favor of a simple lifestyle, balanced with a few essential modern devices, sort of like the Mennonites do.

In summary, the 21^st Century promises to be a Golden Age of art and science for that portion of the human race fortunate to live in developed societies.  Nevertheless, many surprises are in store for us, good, bad and indifferent.  I have a feeling our rapidly advancing communications capabilities will be heavily involved in many of those surprises.

PS:  Last night I watched a portion of the 2013 Motion Picture Academy Awards, aka “the Oscars”.  The total television audience was estimated at one billion viewers worldwide.  For a relatively small industry, the motion picture business (mostly centered in Los Angeles) has a huge cultural influence on the human race, way out of proportion to its size.  The people who make movies are acutely aware of that.

Modern Civilization

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In previous posts, I described from my point of view, the series of events from creation of the universe, up to the current Holocene era on Earth, i.e., the last 12,000 years since the ice sheets retreated to their mountain homes.  Before I begin to address in future posts topical matters of current interest, I need to account for the rapid growth of human culture and technology during the Holocene.  From Neolithic hunter-gatherer to sophisticated urban dweller in the space of a few thousand years.  Biological evolution of the human organism moves fast, but not that fast.  The following is a quick review of when, how and why civilizations arose and the challenges they present to a species that was mostly as wild as Tarzan only 12,000 years ago.

Let’s start with when civilizations arose on Earth, a highly controversial topic.  The oldest known large towns or cities date from about 6,000 years ago.  Recently however, the Indian Navy, using side-scanning radar, located some obvious underwater ruins in the Gulf of Kutch that could be an early site of the city-state of Dwarka, home of the legendary Lord Krishna.  Sea levels were 100 feet lower than they are now about 11,000 years ago.  

I believe irrigation agriculture began in river deltas much earlier than we realize, before the most recent (Wisconson-Wurm) ice sheets retreated.  Ruins of the associated large towns were obliterated as sea levels rose.  Agricultural practices and the culture of town life survived these displacements and are represented in the earliest known Mesopotamian cities, dating from about 6,000 years ago.  Ancient Sumerian texts suggest their agriculture technology came from “the east”, perhaps referring to the Indus river delta.

Homo sapiens have been roaming the Earth for about 200,000 years, 70,000 of those years outside of Africa, starting on the Indian subcontinent.  For at least the last 10,000 years or so, substantial numbers of humans have we been living in built-up environments, in close proximity to thousands of other humans they don’t know.  This radical shift from living on the open range with your friends and relatives, to a mild form of confinement with strangers, has had profound effects on human mental life and behavior; a kind of “snake pit” effect, after the movie by that name.

Cultural anthropologists, starting in the Nineteenth Century, have closely studied the remaining societies on Earth which have not yet been heavily affected by modern civilization.  Although primitive humans had their own full plate of social ills, especially thievery and blood feuds, people living in modern towns and cities developed a whole new set of physical and mental illnesses virtually unknown to primitive people.  

If one is well integrated into a modern, smoothly functioning, high-tech society, one might say it was a good tradeoff.  No more periods of hunger, fear of attack from enemies and constant suffering from parasites and pathogens.  A pretty fair deal in exchange for a few minor neuroses, although calling them few and minor may be exaggerations.  

If on the other hand, one is an economic refugee living in a Third World shantytown; one gets the worst of both primitive and modern existence: hunger, disease, parasites, plus all the pressures of living with strangers in an overcrowded, dangerous and polluted neighborhood.

Either way, living in a modern, high-tech society has its difficulties.  From an evolutionary standpoint, Homo sapiens is still a wild animal, whose behavior is heavily influenced by instinct.  The essence of civilization is our ability to suppress those instincts, through conditioning and will power, in order to maintain social order.  This is the social contract Rousseau, Locke and others described.  

On the open range, primitive peoples greeted strangers with suspicion and occasional violence.  On main street, people pass by strangers, even unaccompanied women, with no more than a second look.  In a multitude of ways, people are forced by circumstances and social pressure to act out behaviors almost unknown to their Neolithic forbearers and sometimes contrary to our basic instincts.  Fortunately, our species is relatively generalized, resilient and able to subsist on many different kinds of foodstuffs, in many different environments.  Like the cockroach, crow, rat and dog, we are eminently adaptable - survivors. 

 

More disruptive cultural changes are yet to come, no doubt at an accelerated rate, but in the meantime it’s worthwhile to consider this rapid urbanization when examining causes and effects of everything from common neuroses and depression, to mass murderers, child molesters and hate mongers.  Among these aberrant behaviors are compulsive disorders, where sane people act in ways that damage their health or safety, usually, but not always, in exchange for a short term dose of pleasure.  Think of the seven deadly sins - smoking, drinking, gambling, shooting drugs, chasing women, etc.

In future posts, I’ll examine the causes and mechanics of these compulsive behaviors, but in the meantime, suffice it to say Homo sapiens has arrived, ready or not.  More than half of today’s humans live in the relative ease of modern civilization, compared to our primitive forbearers.  For us collectively, the world is there for the taking, the future is ours for the making.  

Did we get here by a series of accidents?  Perhaps, however, I subscribe to philosopher GWF Hegel’s proposition - that the potential for today’s human existence was inherent in the very beginning of creation, and definitely inherent in the spark of life that began on Earth a billion years ago.  For Hegel, the Idea of a sentient life-form existed as potential in the beginning and has progressively been realized, until modern times, when through human minds, the Idea has become aware of itself.

How humans differ from other animals

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In my last post, I described the evolution of hominids from apes to modern humans.  By evolutionary standards, these adaptations were rapid and eventually produced the new species, Homo sapiens, with many similarities to apes and all other animals.  Everything we think of as uniquely human is also found in other higher order animals.  Prototypical examples of reasoning, verbal communication and toolmaking can be found in other species to a lesser degree.  

People commonly believe that cats and dogs, for example, can’t think and don’t reason like humans.  However, anyone who has closely observed animals can plainly see that is not correct.  Their brains work in the same fashion as ours - taking in and evaluating sensory data, recognizing patterns and matching them against their memories of similar patterns and past consequences.  Humans have the same 5 or 6 senses, the only difference being the size and sophistication of our brains.  The physical and capability differences between humans and other animals are simply a matter of degree, not kind.  

What then makes us unique?  Since we are without a doubt the crown of creation on Earth at this time, there must be something unique that enables us to dominate all life on the planet.  Physically, all the hominids were fundamentally different from other animals by combining bipedal locomotion, forearms with grasping hands, social organization and an omnivorous diet.  This winning combination resulted in the two additional distinctions between hominids, especially modern humans, and the rest of the animal kingdom:  toolmaking and language.  Even the great apes don't come close, Only hominids are bipedal, and all of them are extinct (that we know of) except H. sapiens.

Apes and some birds use sticks to prise grubs from deadwood.  Otters use stones to crack open shellfish.  Great apes often throw sticks and stones as primitive weapons.  Many animals build nests, dig dens and otherwise create fairly sophisticated artificial environments for shelter and subsistence; consider the lowly beaver and his dams.  

Hominids, however, took toolmaking to a whole new level.  The earliest stone tools found so far are stone hand choppers, several million years old.  At about 1.8 million years ago, I believe, some of the hominids began fashioning wooden spears by cutting off and sharpening a branch of the right tree.  The same with semi-sophisticated wooden clubs.  Stone cuts wood quite nicely. The beginning of culture.

Before this watershed event, hominids probably competed in Africa with baboons and other omnivorous, terrestrial apes, feeding on whatever they could gather or kill at the edge of the savannah, but retreating to their trees or cliffs at night.  Baboons have vicious teeth and in their groups can defend themselves quite well.  It’s fair to assume the earliest hominids that ran on two legs, about 4 million years ago, also primarily used their teeth and thrown rocks, against enemies and small game.  

After hominids began making and using the first portable, reusable weapons, their whole world changed.  They created them to catch and kill big game that was everywhere around them.  Foraging for carrion also became more practical because an organized band of adult hominids, armed with spears, could fend off other scavengers and even some apex predators - strength in numbers.  Their evolutionary strategy involved a trade-off:  tooth and nail in exchange for bipedalism and grasping forearms wielding weapons.  

After the widespread use of wooden spears and clubs, about 1.8 million years ago, evolution kicked in and hominid dentition and faces began to change – optimized for vision, diminished nose in favor of ears, mouth parts optimized for eating a varied diet, less need for fighting. Hominids became the only animals that carried their tools, food and water with them, probably in simple rucksacks made of animal skins.  It seems significant that at about this time, H. erectus broke out of Africa, expanding their range across the lower latitudes of Asia.  When you chase migrating herds for a living, those herds will eventually take you far away from your homeland in east Africa.

To put this into perspective, imagine a small band of hominids chasing down the weakest member of a herd of ungulates, cornering it and dispatching it with multiple spear thrusts.  Because they are bipedal, they are superb long distance runners, chasing prey the same as packs of wild canines do. Next they butcher it with their handy stone choppers, which they carry with them on hunting excursions.  Dismembering a large animal with your bare hands and teeth is not possible.  They had become dependent on the use of tools.  The earliest tools may have been made at the site of a kill, but not all kills happen conveniently close to the right kind of rocks.

Because the hominids were social animals, they left their children, and some adults, behind at their encampments, while the other adults chased their prey for many miles across the savannah.  Being bipedal with grasping forearms, it’s fair to imagine the hunters dismembering their prey into right-sized pieces, packing them into simple rucksacks made from animal skins, and toting the meat, tools and weapons across the plains back to their waiting families.

These circumstances favored the evolution of larger brains, especially those parts involved in complex thinking and language.  Conducting organized hunting expeditions and gathering preferred plant foods is more efficient to the extent verbal instructions can be memorized and shared among individuals.  As the hominid toolkit gradually became more sophisticated, the techniques for making the tools were more readily passed down from one generation to the next through the use of language.  The “monkey see, monkey do” approach works well enough, but augmenting the learning experience with language greatly expands its efficiency and scope.  

By the time hominids began making fire with friction tools; about 1 million years ago, language was part and parcel of human life, I believe.  The use of verbal communication by animals is instinctive.  True, animals learn the finer points from their parents or social group, but the innate capability for verbal communication and drive to use it is deeply ingrained in the genes.  One can observe this in human children under the age of 3.  They clearly exhibit an intense, drive to talk and learn the words they hear other humans speak.  Baby talk is their way of saying, “I can do it too”.

This unique combination of toolmaking and language arts produced a complex cultural component of human life.  By culture, we mean the accumulated information, aside from instinct, that is passed on to each new generation.  Other animals do this too, e.g., mother cats teaching their kits how to hunt prey, but without language and big brains, there is only so much information that can be conveyed.  With language and big brains, Paleolithic hominids were able to accumulate and pass on a growing store of knowledge about how to find and process food, how to build shelters and how to defend the band against predators, including other hominids.

At time passed, growth in the cultural component of human life accelerated.  By 130,000 years before present, hominids were decorating and burying their dead.  By 40,000 years before present, anatomically modern humans were creating representative art on cave walls.  Although no one is sure, its stands to reason singing was adopted much earlier, as a means of expressing shared emotions such as a successful hunt or death of a prominent member of the band.

At the present, our Homo sapiens species is completely adapted to advanced toolmaking and complex language arts.  We could not survive as an apex predator without them.  The instinctive desire to acquire a vocabulary and communicate with other members of our social groups is very strong, as anyone who has raised young children can attest.

Now that Homo sapiens can think and communicate with other humans across long distances and time spans, our minds have grown to an immensely expanded scope compared to even the smartest dog, orca or chimp.  All higher order animals think, but always about very mundane subjects, immediate needs and memories.  At this point, only people create representative art, have religious tendencies and wonder about the wider universe.  Humankind’s expanded form of mind has arrived and has taken on a life of its own for, during the lifespan of the person it is part of.  Collectively, through communication media, our culture lives on, transcending the individual mind.  Every human generation has to relearn much of this accumulated knowledge.

What is meant by mind?  It is not the same as the brain, which is the organ that contains and sustains the mind.  Instead, the living brain creates a form of cyberspace, a separate entity, within which lies a rich set of accumulated information content, i.e., memories, patterns, habits, etc.  Also operating within this space are our instincts, which are directly connected to the brain, not separate.  Add to this an individual's freedom to listen to her/his conscience then choose to act or not, and you have a complete model of the mind and its consciousness.  All Psychology begins with such a model, and this is the one I favor.  I concede that ultimately our minds are both a direct function of our brains and separate entities free to make their own decisions.  For as JP Sartre put it, we are condemned to freedom, constantly choosing what to think about and how to behave.

I’ll have more to say in later posts about the phenomenology of the mind (as in GWF Hegel’s Phanominologie des Geistes), especially compulsive behavior, after I study the subject more thoroughly.

Rise of the hominids

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Protozoans, primitive animals, first appeared on our planet about 600 million years ago, according to the fossil record.  After the miracle of plant life, particularly photosynthetic forms, animal life is more of a reaction, a kind of spontaneous combustion.  Some plant forms evolved to became parasitic on other plant species, primitive analogs of strangler figs and English ivy.  Subsistence is much easier if one can simply prey on your neighbors, and in earliest warm oceans, life ran riot, a truly target rich environment.  In short order, some parasitic species developed locomotion, enabling them to eat more and reproduce more successfully. 

Evolution took care of the rest.  Within a couple hundred million years, plants and insects covered the previously barren land.  With all that plant life converting sunlight, water and soil into edible hydrocarbons, animals proliferated, converting plant hydrocarbons into energy, water and ash.  

Given the proliferation of plant eaters, it was just a matter of time before some animals evolved into carnivores, subsisting off the flesh of their neighbors.  Animal flesh contains far more digestible carbohydrates and proteins than plant food.  Carnivores can devote more body mass to muscle, tooth and nail, than can the lowly herbivore.  Such is the chain of life - each transaction is a tragic end for one living thing and sustenance for another. 

Some of these carnivores evolved into social animals.  By social, I mean possessing the instincts to form groups of individuals, not from the same nuclear family, living together permanently or semi-permanently and working together for the common good.  Coyotes and wolves are examples.  Coyotes are solitary animals that live together in nuclear families, but separately as adults.  Wolves live together in permanent packs of related and unrelated individuals.  

By 200 million years ago, a natural hierarchy of lifeforms had settled in, a continuous food chain that led from the apex predators down to the lowest plant life.  For some species in some environments, instinctive social organization worked best, for other species, solitary existence remained less risky and more productive.  Consider the medium sized Theropod dinosaurs of the Cretaceous age.  They were carnivores, probably warm-blooded.  Some paleontologists believe they lived and hunted in packs like modern-day wolves.  Because they were bipedal, they had the use of their forearms and 3-fingered hands.  Over time, as they evolved, their brains grew larger, possibly as an adaptation to enhance their social hunting skills.  A few paleontologists have gone so far as to propose these “Velociraptor” animals were on their way to making tools and starting fires.  Unfortunately, the mass extinctions at the K-T boundary eliminated most Theropods, leaving only the birds to continue the line.

This hierarchical pattern of dog eat dog continued, interrupted by the mass extinction of all terrestrial animals larger than 25 kilograms approximately 65 million years ago, but returning with the rise of mammals and birds.  There is nothing to indicate that life was very different for the mammalian apex predators of the late Tertiary period, than it was for the Theropod dinosaurs of the mid Cretaceous period 100 million years earlier.  

Somewhere around 5 million years ago a new genus, Homo, predecessors of modern humans, came into this relatively settled existence.  Because they were bi-pedal, carnivorous and social, these Hominid species, as they are called, gradually improved their tool making abilities well beyond their primate ancestors.  Living on the savannah, they preyed on large ungulates and carrion of same.  They encamped in sheltered spots, near food and water, but only for short stays of a few days or weeks at most.   

Their tool making abilities were aimed at the obvious – sharpened sticks for killing game, gourds for carrying water, stone choppers for butchering the carcasses and simple rucksacks for carrying the meat back to their camps for sharing with the women with children and old folks who depended on the hunters.  Of these supposed artifacts, only stone choppers remain as archeological evidence.  About a million years ago, some of these hominids made a giant leap forward in their tool making – fire. 

It’s highly likely they picked up on the uses for fire from their natural surroundings.  Lightning-started fires are common on the savannah.  The great leap came with the techniques needed to start fire.  Simple friction tools made of wood can be used to start a fire.  Once learned and passed on to successive generations, it changed everything.  With fire, you can roast meat, thereby sanitizing it and make it more digestible.  With fire, many tubers that were previously inedible became rich sources of hydrocarbons and other nutrients.  Most importantly, with fire and furs, hominids could thrive in seasonably cold climates.

Throughout this 5-million-year long period, the brains of the hominid grew larger, gradually in the beginning and faster during the last million years, especially the cerebral cortex and parts of the brain involving speech and abstract thinking.  No other species in the history of life on earth has grown its brain as quickly and as large as the hominids.  The combination of living in groups and a growing repertory of toolmaking skills transformed the Homo genus into the crown of creation, capable of living almost anywhere on earth and dominating all other species.

Changing climate conditions allowed several hominid species to break out of Africa as early as 1.8 million years ago.  Several other hominid species followed.  Meanwhile, about 200,000 years ago, the first modern humans, Homo sapiens appeared in Africa, obviously descended from an earlier Homo species.  By 125,000 years ago, modern humans had expanded their range to the Levant in the Near East.  By 40,000 years ago they reached Australia and Europe and the rest of Asia.  Everywhere they went; this superior species proceeded to replace the hominids that had arrived earlier.  One can imagine the brutal competition for food sources, with the smarter modern humans killing their less sophisticated competitors, and in some cases, breeding with them as their slaves.

All of the advanced capabilities we identify in modern humans are present to a lesser degree in other animals and particularly evident among our hominid predecessors.  The biggest advances we can claim for Homo are tool making (technology) and language.  With our ever larger brains and increasingly sophisticated language skills, hominids became increasingly aware of their own mental state and that of others, thereby giving rise to complex communications.

Mammalian brain size is limited by the ability of newborns to pass through their mother’s birth canal.  Among hominids, the obvious workaround is a much longer period of childhood growth.  The human cranium continues growing into the late teens.  The biological strategy at work here is the largest brain possible and an extended period of knowledge transfer from adults to children, unmatched by any other species, past or present. 

The result of this evolution is a human mental life that far exceeds that of all our predecessors.  All animals think, the more advanced species use verbal communication, some even use tools.  Human simply have more of these capabilities, far more.  We are different by degrees, not by kind, and our capabilities developed gradually.  Our hominid ancestors and their relatives had a rich mental life, but to a lesser degree than modern humans.  This evolutionary refinement of the brain, and the mind it contains, continues unabated.

So what does this mean, how should we describe our human mental condition, our minds?  It probably all began when our hominid ancestors evolved over several million years, from body posture, augmented with corresponding grunts and cries, to an actual language, with a vocabulary growing from dozens of words to hundreds that could be combined in various ways to convey thoughts, metal impressions, to other members of the social group.  It’s fair to say the typical early hominid vocabulary was originally confined to daily life, nouns for the animals they chased, verbs for the typical actions they undertook, prepositions for timing and causal relations, even place names for their encampments and home territories.  It’s also fair to conclude that singing and beating on pieces of wood, i.e., music, was part and parcel of their daily life and a clear extension of their proto-language.  By a million years before present, these essential precursors of human mental life were in place. 

Imagine a band of 25 Homo erectus individuals in this timeframe, 800,000 years before present.  They are living in a temporary encampment, near running water and timber, every few days preying on large herds of nearby big game, competing with the big cats, bears and wolves for the same food source.  Unrelated hominid bands operating nearby would be considered either enemies or prey.

Because these hominids are omnivores, some of the band, including most females and juveniles, forage daily for fruit, nuts and tubers.  Unlike their less evolved hominid ancestors, they have tools for starting campfires with deadwood - to cook food, including the otherwise useless tubers, to keep warm and light the night.  Every evening, the whole band gathers around one or more of these campfires.  They eat and engage in some discussion, the nature of which is limited only by their brain’s gradually evolving language capability and a vocabulary of no more than a few hundred words.  By comparison, the average modern human in the street has a working vocabulary of at least 1500 words and in some cases many times that.

Although primitive by modern standards, these hominids already exhibit a key characteristic of the human mind - the sharing of complex ideas among the social group.  Lions, which also live in social groups, have simple verbal and non-verbal expressions to convey commands, complaints, etc. between each other, but only certain Paleolithic hominids, among all animals at that time, were able to conduct a verbal dialog about concepts, possibilities and events, past and future. 

If we could eavesdrop on our little hominid band and their discussions, as they gathered around the campfire after a successful hunt, we would consider them to be mentally challenged compared to moderns.  Their behavior would be distinctly uncivilized, with much verbal quarreling and domestic violence.  Nevertheless, they were on a path that would eventually lead to the mental life of modern humans, that rich inner life we are so familiar with.

About 10,000 years before present, Neolithic humans in Western Asia, began to cultivate croplands and domesticate animals for food on a much larger scale than previously.  Earlier Paleolithic peoples also herded wild animals and harvested wild crops, but Neolithic peoples selectively bred their plants and animals for maximum productivity and ease of use. 

These new methods of cultivation and husbandry produced two typical cultures.  The first were pastoralists who drove large herds of domesticated ungulates from pasture to pasture, as the seasons changed.  The second were agriculturalists who began intensively planting cereal grains and other food crops in riverine flood plains.  People who were skilled at making fire and armed with stone implements could burn off brush in the late dry season and plant their grains right after the wet season.   

The agriculturists also kept domestic animals, but on a smaller scale using surplus produce and by-products.  What distinguished the agriculturalists was their need to live in semi-permanent settlements close to their cultivated food plots.  These settlements were populated by related and unrelated individuals working for a common purpose, but their communities were larger in size than previous and contemporary bands of hunter-gatherers.

In places most suited for agriculture, such as large river deltas at the temperate latitudes, these agricultural activities and the associated human settlements became increasingly sophisticated and prosperous.  Irrigation agriculture produced large crop surpluses, enough to support people engaged in vocations other than the usual herding animals and tending crops.  By 7,000 years before present, the first large towns were established in lower Mesopotamia - inhabited by merchants, tradesmen, priests and soldiers, a true civilization.

Consider how far hominids have evolved in the 5 million years since they left the forest and began running around on two legs, killing other animals with wooden spears for their dinner.  Gradually, their bodies, and especially their brains, evolved to take advantage of their ecological niche.  They became the dominant predator in savannah environments throughout the Old World.  Their use of fire resulted in physical adaptation to a diet of cooked food.  Modern humans cannot easily subsist on uncooked foodstuffs.  Hominid brains grew larger and better adapted to an enhanced social life, with its organized hunting, toolmaking and language arts.  With the advent of irrigation agriculture, their cultural development took off at an even higher pace, outstripping their physical evolution.  

We humans are a generalized species, adaptable to diverse environments.  Recently in our evolutionary history, we left behind our hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence, moving into permanent agricultural and urban settlements and a very different daily existence.  This rapid shift and our struggle to adapt, has put stress on our bodies and minds, giving rise to a host of problems and aberrant behaviors, which we will address in future posts here.  Meanwhile, next is a short essay on the key characteristics that differentiate modern humans from all other animals.

The origins of life

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Consider the difference between a living organism and any other form of matter.  Unlike inorganic matter, organisms move, grow and reproduce.  Nothing else in the material world behaves this way.  A completely different realm of existence came into being when life first began.  

In the beginning, each living thing consisted of one cell.  Over time, lifeforms reproduced, evolved and expanded to every corner of the planet.  But how did they begin?  Animal life, which came later, can be described as a form of combustion, but photosynthetic bacteria is most difficult to explain, absorbing energy from the sun and using it to chemically transform air and water into hydrocarbons - advanced technology of sorts, within a single cell.

In time, some of these organisms evolved into lifeforms consisting of colonies of cells, working together for a common purpose, but with specialization for locomotion, feeding, fighting, etc.  Yet, each cell in the colony is very much like the simplest bacteria and algae, a world unto itself.  Even today, after several centuries of scientific investigation, humans know very little about how cells in higher order lifeforms behave internally and when interacting with one another. 

Gradually, biology and medical science are revealing these secrets.  Each new revelation opens up even more mysteries, similar to the ongoing exploration of sub-atomic particles.  The ultimate mystery of how life began on our planet still evades us.  Scientists, with their materialist perspectives, would like to think it began spontaneously, when the right combination of heat, water and raw materials are present. 

I prefer a simpler proposition – life came from outer space, riding on comets that impacted the Earth after it cooled to the point where these lifeforms could thrive.  Its possible these infected comets came from a previous warm, wet planet that was destroyed in a sudden, cataclysmic event, perhaps a massive collision.  The planet is broken up and the pieces scattered at high speed, its oceans instantly turned into ice by the cold of outer space.  Most of the lifeforms are extinguished, but some of the simplest forms are preserved in ice or salt.  How can living things remain dormant for millions of years while these balls of ice travel from their cataclysmic origin to our own solar system?  Consider the documented phenomenon of bacteria trapped in salt beds on Earth for hundreds of millions of years, yet still viable in a Petri dish.

Imagine these frozen balls of ice and dust, impregnated with a soup of single-celled organisms hurled out of this previous planet’s ocean at high-speed, fast-frozen in space.  Their life force is suspended but not extinguished by the extreme cold.  At this primitive level of life, heat kills, cold preserves.  

These infected balls of ice are mixed in with a huge cloud of other balls of ice surrounding our solar system.  Occasionally they fall out of the cloud and rush around the Sun as comets, sometimes crashing into our solar system’s planets.  A big enough comet, crashing into a warm ocean, would not burn up all the little passengers.  Some of them would survive, float to the surface and start reproducing in the hot sunlight and rich atmosphere of CO2.  In this scenario, both Mars and Earth were seeded with life, Mars perhaps at an earlier date.  We are not sure yet how far life evolved on Mars, but I predict we will find out soon enough, now that our robots have begun roaming the red planet.

But this explanation is incomplete.  Even if you accept my layman’s theory of how life got here from somewhere else, the question remains, how did it begin originally?  Who or what created it?  We don’t know and will never know for sure, but I prefer the intelligent design explanation.  The human race is collectively never satisfied with not knowing, they will invariably substitute an explanation of some kind, rational or otherwise. 

For my part, I believe the same divine creator who initiated the big bang and all that came before it, also created the seeds of life and impregnated the material of the new universe with them.  The uniqueness of life and its ability to evolve into higher forms is too clever, too purposeful to have been an accidental happening like spontaneous combustion or crystal growth.

 

No other explanation seems rational.  Once you accept the big bang and all that followed in the material universe as probably the creation of a divine being, it’s an easy mental step to accept the spark of life as intentionally created to make the universe complete.  Life adds the next dimension to the material universe - higher order organisms with ability to appreciate it and ponder these fundamental questions.  

Since this divine being is obviously alive, it makes sense they would want to create mortal lifeforms “in his own image” to inhabit the universe.  What began as a single-cell bacteria already contained the potential for intelligent life.  George Hegel referred to this spark of life as the world spirit, Welt Geist.  Single cell life includes a brilliant, built-in facility for evolution.  Once H. sapiens arrived on the scene in Africa, with our language skills, the Welt Geist became aware of itself.  Intelligent design.

 

Here on Earth, humans are the crown of creation.  Clearly, we evolved from animals, but in the course of evolving and adapting to our surroundings, we took certain animal faculties to a new higher level.  We can think, dream, imagine, speculate and perceive the universe through our ever more sophisticated instruments.  Humans have evolved to the point where we have an elaborate mental life, far beyond what is necessary to sustain our physical existence.  What is the nature of this mental life?  Is it purely a manifestation of the physical organism that sustains it, or is there more going on inside our minds?  

As the philosopher GWF Hegel expressed it - What is the Phenomenology of the Spirit?  If the nature of life is mysterious and controversial, the nature of mental life is even more so.  I prefer to think of mind as another category of being, beyond matter and lifeforms, and a suitable topic for my next post. 

In the beginning

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Astronomers and Astrophysicists have powerful instruments at their disposal for peering out into the universe.  They have drawn some very clever conclusions from their observations.  A less fuzzy model of our universe is emerging - how it was shaped, its dynamic motion; and by deduction, how old it is. 

 

Philosophers understand best how the universe holds many more secrets, more than we can imagine.  Humans have only scratched the surface of what exists.  Many scientists may not quite see it that way.  Nevertheless, scientific progress will continue unabated far into the future, barring a natural catastrophe affecting the entire planet.  Already astrophysicists have described the big bang that marked the beginning of existence as we know it, an existence with space, time, matter and energy.  Before this genesis, one can imagine an earlier existence.  If so, it may have been very different from the one we are familiar with.  

When the big bang theory entered the public consciousness several decades ago, it was at first difficult to grasp how all the vast amount of matter could possibly fit into one single point of time and place.  Impossible, it seemed to the average person.  But as the astronomers and astrophysicists gathered more information from their instruments, we began to see the enormous black holes in space, where gravity has sucked in millions of suns.  

It is entirely possible the mass of a million stars has collapsed into a single point in time and space, a point so small and so dense, all of our customary laws of physics are not operative.  One can imagine these singularities are not all that different from what existed at instant of the big bang.  Do black holes ever suddenly reverse direction and blow up, like some miniature big bang?  Perhaps quasars are the result of two or more super-massive black holes colliding and triggering an explosive stream of energy in two directions along the same axis.  What in creation is going on there?

Following this line of reasoning, one can readily accept the big bang theory.  I’m not sure the follow on sequence is only 14.5 billion earth years old.  There may be some surprises there, but by any measure the universe is very old.  All the while, physical processes have been combining matter into stars, triggering extreme releases of energy and transmuted material elements across space and time.  This process of converting lighter elements into energy and heavier elements is still underway and appears to have a long way to go.  

Recently the Pope in Rome wrote to a group of distinguished astrophysicists and encouraged them to continue studying the nature of the big bang, but instructed them to not speculate on what came before it.  In this respect, philosophy is superior to science and religion, unbounded by any preconceptions or dogmas.  Cosmology is first and foremost a branch of metaphysics.  Scientific inquiry into the beginning is relatively recent and is ultimately guided by the philosophers.

So that brings us to our little corner of the universe, our solar system - our sun and its attendance planets, asteroids, comets and other orbiting debris.  Astronomers have a much better understanding of these nearest celestial bodies.  They believe our solar system and our planet to be approximately 4.5 billion earth years old.  Most of the large bodies have been probed by our instruments, in the case of Mars, extensively.  What are they most looking for?  Signs of life, of course.  

For most of these 4.5 billion years, our planet was way too hot and violent to support any form of life.  After about 3.5 billion years had passed, our planet cooled and stabilized.  It became hospitable to living things.  Imagine a sterile environment, akin to a huge Petri dish, with all the right ingredients of heat, water and material elements.  Into that environment came a spark of life, a little single celled organism, possibly blue-green algae, ready to reproduce.  How did that happen?  Such is the subject for our next post, on life.

Introduction

G-FMBF5NWNX5 As I transition to old age retirement and a life of contemplation, its good to start writing down the fruits of my years of discovery and analysis.  Young people have creative energy, ambition and the ability to think outside the box.  Old people, on the other hand, have an unparalleled ability to connect the dots and make sense of their accumulated experiences.

My scope is broad, all of existence for all of time, past and future, with a focus on living things.  But my real passion is the story of the human race, from when the first hominids sharpened sticks and ventured onto the savannah to catch their dinner - all the way up to the present and beyond.

The central question of our present condition is not why we are here, but rather why do we behave the way we do.  We are a curious mixture of genius and folly and a very worthwhile subject of inquiry.  More to follow - Z

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