Digging It

Archaeology is how we come to understand who we are. The traces that remain of the distant past are being obliterated across the globe — submerged behind new dams, bulldozed to make way for freeways and high-rises — and that’s a horrifying tragedy. When it’s gone, it’s gone.

Other sites that would have yielded up priceless knowledge were looted in the 19th century, before the rise of modern archaeology. The human race is heedless. Who was it who said, “What we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”?

And of course the soft bits rot. With a pitifully few exceptions, we have not a shred of evidence about what people wore 10,000 years ago. We know what kinds of meat they ate, because they left the bones scattered around. But we don’t know what they may have carved from wood — toys for their children, perhaps? — because the wood is gone. We don’t have their dances, their songs, their stories. All we have, for the most part, are

Automatic Pilot

I’ve been re-reading a couple of books by neurologist Oliver Sacks — The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars. What I get out of Sacks is an appreciation of the stunning complexity (and fragility) of the human brain.

Our brains are constantly doing tons of extremely sophisticated data processing, all without our having the slightest awareness of it. Things that seem perfectly transparent to us — looking at a coin and seeing that it’s round, for instance — are not to be taken for granted.

Ancient History

Bacteria have been around, as nearly as we can tell, for a couple of billion years. These single-celled animals reproduce asexually, by fission. That is, when a bacterium gets fat enough, it splits in two.

We can, if we like, say that the two bacteria are “new.” We might call them daughter cells. From the point of view of an individual daughter cell, however (if a bacterium can be said to have a point of view), it’s the same as it was before the split. The other daughter cell has split off from it. The other daughter cell would be thinking the same thing, of course — if bacteria could think. Each would feel that it was still the same creature it had been before the split.

One fascinating consequence of this is that the first original bacterium that assembled itself (somehow) from the primordial ooze two billion years ago is still alive.

Home Schooling

I have no kids of my own, which makes me an automatic expert on how other people should raise theirs. (Not.) This morning the topic of home-schooling came up in a private email, and I realized I have some opinions. As the day wore on, I realized my opinions were different than what I thought at first.

My first thought was, If people home-school to provide their kids a better education, then fine. I’m aware that public schools in many parts of the country are in desperate disarray.

My first thought was, If the public schools are filled with gangs and violence, again, home-schooling would be a very reasonable choice. The idea that kids have to walk through metal detectors is appalling. I wouldn’t want my kid to go there.

But I soon realized I was kidding myself. The real reason home-schooling is wrong is this: It allows the parents who are most concerned about their kids’ education, if they’re rich enough and well organized enough, to opt out of the public school system.

The kids who are left in the public schools, then, are those whose parents (a) are working desperately at menial jobs to make ends meet, and don’t have the leisure to indulge in home-schooling, or (b) don’t care enough about their kids’ education to actually do anything about it.

If home-schooling weren’t allowed, those rich, articulate, well-organized parents would damn well have an incentive to pitch in and improve the quality of the public schools, and that would benefit all kids, not just their own kids.

There’s another facet to the question: If parents’ real agenda is to keep their kids from being exposed to ideas (such as evolution) of which they disapprove, then they’re actually home-schooling in order to keep their kids ignorant. And that’s morally wrong. Parents who inflict bizarre, irrational beliefs on their children are practicing child abuse.

And yes, failing to understand that evolution is a fact is bizarre and irrational. You can choose your own opinions, but you don’t get to choose your own facts.

I hate to see kids being victimized. When rich parents opt out of the public schools, for whatever reason, it’s the poor kids who suffer the consequences.

The core concept is this: Good public education helps everybody. Lousy public education hurts everybody, not just those who end up badly educated. Home-schooling is anti-democratic. It perpetuates a class system and class oppression.

But then, so does Harvard. And I’ll bet you’d love it if your kid got into Harvard. Striving for personal advantage is human. Not even human — it’s biological. No doing away with it. So go ahead, home-school. Nature red in tooth and claw, right?

Location, Location, Location

I like knowing where I am. In many different senses. That’s why I enjoy reading books on evolution and paleoanthropology — ir helps me understand where I stand in the universe. And on psychology and cosmology too.

Current reading: The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins. Ostensibly a book about evolution, it’s about half polemic. In a chapter on grasshoppers, for instance, Dawkins gets onto the subject of race, and includes photos of Colin Powell, who is only notionally “black” (he’s no darker-skinned than George Bush). But the polemics are okay, because I agree with Dawkins on every important point. He also espouses a view of how human bipedalism arose that’s very close to my own. (Hint: Sexual selection.)

It’s always nice when someone else confirms your own rationality.

Re-reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks. Again, it’s about knowing where (or in this case, what) I am. The mental systems we take for granted sometimes go horribly wrong, but reading about that helps me both notice my systems and appreciate that they’re working smoothly.

The Fast Track

I’ve always been fascinated by human evolution — by how, against all odds, our species became what it is today. Aside from simple curiosity, I cherish the faint hope that if we know who we are, we’ll be able to figure out how do deal with it all.

One of the striking facts of human evolution is that our ancestors adopted a bipedal gait (that is, walking on our hind legs) two or three million years before our brains started to get bigger. Numerous mammals, from bears to prairie dogs, will pop up on their hind legs to have a look around — the view is better when you’re taller. But a bipedal gait is inefficient, and retooling the mammalian skeletal structure for something so inefficient is not something evolution would do, unless there was a reason.

It couldn’t have been to free our hands for carrying tools, because in those dim and distant days we weren’t carrying any tools! The working of stone into tools was millions of years in the future.

I’ve never read an explanation for the bipedal experiment in a book on paleoanthropology, but I’ve got one. As far as I know, this is entirely my original idea. It may be wrong — lacking a working time machine, we can only guess, we’ll never know for sure. But it fits the facts, and it matches my understanding of how evolution works.

Many species engage in fitness displays. The male peacock has an enormous fan of tail feathers, which serve no purpose whatever except to advertise his good genes to female peacocks (peahens, I guess you’d call them). Male moose batter themselves silly headbutting other male moose — again, for no good reason except to prove their fitness to female moose. The winner in the headbutting contest gets to pass on his genes to the next generation; the loser doesn’t. That simple fact ensures that moose headbutting will continue unabated for as long as there are moose.

So let’s picture a band of our simian ancestors. They’re sitting around in the jungle, eating papaya and picking the lice out of one another’s pelts — and one day a young male is playing around. He tries running on his hind legs, just for kicks. And a couple of the young females notice. So the next day he decides he’ll show off to the females specifically by running on his hind legs. He manages to run halfway over to the next tree before he falls. He attracts, perhaps, a mild interest among the ladies.

The next day, five of the young males are competing to see who can run the farthest on their hind legs. One of them actually makes it clear to the next tree before he falls over. He’s feted as a hero — a ceremony over which we will draw a discreet curtain, as it involves congress of body parts.

At some point, and more likely at a dozen key points along the way, random mutations will have given rise to changes in the anthropoid skeletal structure that made it easier for those who possessed the mutation to run farther or faster on their hind legs. And each mutation will have been passed on to the next generation and the next generation and the next, because in each generation the males who could best manage the awkward bipedal gait would have their choice of females. They would sire lots of babies. The males who stumbled and fell down — not so many.

Fast-forward a hundred thousand years. Our ancestors are still no smarter than their cousins the chimps, but they have a very different skeletal structure. And in every single tribe, the young males compete in foot-races.

If you think this theory is too cynical, you might want to ask a pro athlete. I don’t know any pro athletes personally, but my strong impression is that, you know, the ladies are powerfully impressed by their ability to hit a ball with a stick, throw a ball through a hoop, or whatever. It would be very surprising to meet a male pro athlete who didn’t have plenty of opportunities to sire offspring.

Being human is a lot more complicated these days than running foot-races. Once the brain gets into the act … but that’s another story, for another time.