In the Summer of 2017, I happened to keep a date with Seton Lake that had been put off for many days. It was a lovely hot day and I expected the water to be just the right temperature for my rather thinly insulated body. I took only my bathing suit, some water, my Dutch Shag tobacco and a book. The paperback had been garnered from a library sale and it contained a set of essays from the 1970’s, written by the American anthropologist, Jay Gould. Scholarly to be sure but obviously written for a much wider readership.
After a soul-satisfying, spirit-bracing quarter hour in the green-glass water, I hauled out like a weary harbour seal and lay down on a Donald Duck beach towel gifted to my wife by her employer after returning from a vacation in the British Virgin Islands. I rolled a smoke and set to reading the last two essays in my book. The entire work was written from a Darwinian viewpoint of evolution and the author pondered some of the best questions and exciting theoretical answers that had been generated since the Theory of Evolution had been introduced to the science community and the world at large.
When I was literally reading the last page, a tall young man got up from a blanket where he had been sitting with a young woman and came over to sit by me. He introduced himself and we shook hands. He grasped a small book in his other hand and said that he had not seen many people reading out of doors at Seton Lake.
He chatted for some time about work, home, his woman and his overall life experience. He inquired about my own reflections in that same pond of topics. He was of German and Aboriginal mixed heritage and, in my opinion, those two gene pools had alloyed wonderfully; judging by their hybrid expression with which I was now conversing. I spoke about my own genetic omelette, which also included some German genes.
At length, the sun dipped behind the mountains to the South and the ground started to give up its easily gotten warmth to the void. People began to fidget and pack up their beach things. My new friend said he wanted to give me the book he was holding. I laughed and told him I’d just finished mine as he was crossing the thirty feet of goose droppings to approach me.
This naturally brought about a swap and we both smiled upon noticing that both books were collections of essays on anthropological themes. His was written by a well-lettered Scot, still active in the academic world and mine was penned by a well-respected American scientist. His book was thirty years newer and contained what was currently being taught in universities to those pursuing that field of study. In other words, it was the perfect companion piece to update what I had just read. My book, conversely, was the perfect background piece to help my new friend see where academic thinking on anthropology had been focused just prior to his probable time of birth.
Called serendipity, synchronicity, happy accident or coincidence, these types of events occur so frequently in my life that when they diminish, I experience a sense of having wandered off my trail. I never saw that friendly young man again but I read the book he gave me.
Just as I was enjoying the last few chapters, a friend and neighbour of mine acquired a tiny charcoal grey kitten, which he promptly named, Dunbar. This was for me like yet another bell ringing in the fog, as it turned out, for the book I was reading was The Human Story by Robin Dunbar.
First, I must praise its scientific honesty. Secondly, I praise the style in which it was written which makes it accessible to the widest possible range of readers. Third, I laud the fact that it quite rightly leaves one with a better set of questions, rather than a pocketful of answers waiting to be made obsolete by the next bright light to blaze new trails in the discipline of anthropology.
By scientific honesty, I mean to say that the author gives sets of facts drawn from known but necessarily incomplete data. These are drawn into visual graphs to underscore the thrust of his personal intuitions as to how we humans came to be what we find ourselves today. The honesty comes from his clear admission that the data is far from satisfactory in its quantity. That said, the reader who ponders Mr. Dunbar’s work is free to speculate a few new trails and this is precisely what gives rise to great discoveries in the academic disciplines.
In explanation of my second praise of the book, I will say that I noticed from childhood that short of taking the time and trouble of learning to read at least a modicum of Latin, Greek and Hebrew; that I would be barred from much information that had already been worked out by intrepid souls who went before me burning the midnight oil over their desks and tables. This has always saddened and angered me by turns. I find it sad that anyone would want to compartmentalize useful information by effectively restricting access to it via use of a language or vocabulary which is unintelligible to the larger part of one’s fellows.
I am angered by the divisions, borders and exclusions that this way of gathering, recording and dispensing knowledge generates among populations. Many a bright, inquiring mind is kept in the sandbox of intellectual childhood by such barriers rather than being encouraged to enter the ring and think a few rounds. Whether this situation is by design, a tradition or an accident matters not to me. It holds back our species progress and I believe in species loyalty.
I have recently read an illustration of what I’m talking about in Jonas Jonasson’s Swedish novel, The 100 Year Old Man Who Jumped Out The Window And Disappeared. In the book, the main character as a boy, plays with explosives with no tutelage nor instruction until he becomes an expert. Later in his life, he finds himself serving as a waiter and janitor at the Los Alamos National Lab. While handing out mugs of coffee, he overhears that they are stymied by the final phase of their atomic bomb project, which is the seemingly insurmountable problem of a safe way to detonate the bomb with accurate timing.
Our Swede walks over to the whiteboard with a marker and shows them that simply dividing the charge into two parts and positioning them correctly will yield the results that they have agonized over for weeks. We will not side-track into the morals of this example, although the Swedish author does so and quite satisfactorily, in my opinion.
Rather, I mention the vignette as an example of humanity slowly lifting its gaze from the study of its own shoelaces to peer into the close-set eyes of those who speak a strange jargon in learned tones. There ensues an awkward moment, a patronizing audience is reluctantly given and then pure astonishment and celebration erupt. If more people around the world simply knew what the hell the experts were talking about in the common speech of current languages; this happy fictitious scene would be repeated many times a day. It must be borne in mind, that the fire and tool-makers of antiquity did not have any credentials other than their human brains, dire necessity and windows of opportunity.
My third point of praise for Mr. Dunbar, that of leaving his readers with better questions rather than presuming to provide them with answers, speaks to me of intellectual honesty, which is the perfect companion seasoning to the scientific honesty he serves up. When the author of a book tells you what aspects of their own field of expertise are honestly unknown, it serves to encourage anyone with an active brain to take up the challenge and try to move human knowledge a few metres closer to truth. Conversely, when an author tells you that they definitely know something that is by its very nature unknowable, they are revealed as being a dominant child in a playground, moving the goalposts around whenever the ball doesn’t cooperate.
One thing I took away from the book that I hadn’t heard explained before, was something that Psychological Anthropologists call, Levels of Intent or LOI. A major point made by the author, was derived from a study of this. I will paraphrase what I understand the term to mean. According to tests conducted on chimps, apes, orangutans and humans; the mental ability of animals to imagine the intent of another party is limited to a factor of two in other primates but can reach as high as five in humans. Usually, a human achieves no higher than four.
For simplicity, I see these LOI as layers and shall refer to them as plies. Mr. Dunbar studied the human skulls unearthed so far from the fossil record and measured the diameter of holes in the backs through which a particular nerve bundle passed to join a specific processing centre. He also measured the size of the craniums. From that data, he calculated the point in time at which we first became physically equipped to think in this more complex manner
He presents some evidence to suggest the possibility that Cro-Magnons made this evolutionary adjustment first and thus were able to outwit, outlast and outplay the Neanderthals they encountered when they spread upward through Europe, despite the fact that Neanderthals had the larger brains. Mr. Dunbar points out that the area of a Neanderthal brain that was larger than its Cro-Magnon counterpart, was the part that processes visual information. A very practical adaptation for hunters and gatherers, whereas the enhanced mental abilities of the Cro-Magnons to think in multiple plies was perfect for organizing and managing those very activities. [My reference in this paragraph to the popular show, Survivor was intentional. (smile)]
It will be good to add here that, according to science, the size of groups able to be maintained by humans and various other types of primates, is directly proportional to their ability to think in multiple plies. According to Mr. Dunbar, monkeys and apes tend to max out at a group size of 70, while humans can successfully push that number to more than double that figure.
Provision was made by Mr. Dunbar for swarms of insects, for schools of fish, for colonies of bats, for flocks of birds and for herds of herbivores that are all able to maintain larger groups than humans can, even though they lack the same LOI score that the author attributes to us. Without stating in concrete terms that other animals are absolutely incapable of this cognitive gamesmanship, I came away from Dunbar’s book with a strong feeling that that was his own conviction. I heartily disagree and here is why.
I couldn’t help at that juncture in my reading, but to think of a mother grouse I once encountered feigning a broken wing and straggling away from her nest to draw me away. While pondering that visualization, I also remembered a coyote I’d observed while hiking one day. After following it for a hundred metres or so, it surreptitiously doubled back on its trail. Over the day, I couldn’t make out with certainty who was tracking whom or in what direction the coyote actually intended to go.
The grouse is a good example to illustrate the concept we are dealing with. Imagine I am walking through the sage one day and happen to come upon a grouse hen several metres away. She begins to drag one of her wings and to make a big show of stumbling in a direction away from her nest, which I have not at this point located. The grouse mother thinks that I am out to make an easy meal of her chicks or eggs and reasons that if I believe that she is wounded, I will certainly pursue her instead. She has just demonstrated 2-ply thinking.
Now, imagine an unseen coyote was watching this whole drama from up a slope where it has been tracking me for some time out of curiosity. If that coyote comes downhill to raid the nest because he thinks I believe the hen’s ruse, which is based upon her assumption that I was after her nest, he has just demonstrated 3-ply thinking. If I notice the coyote just prior to his descent of the slope to come raid the nest and I pretend to follow the hen, but turn quickly and land a thrown rock on his flank to protect her nest, I have just demonstrated 4-ply thinking.
We can see from this example that humans capable of 5-ply thinking, though in the minority, could keep large numbers of their fellows permanently entangled in cognitive knots. As a result, I conclude that this adaptation is a mixed blessing at best and that the majority of people may rue this ability as it is employed by the minority possessing the ability.
Of great interest and placed at the end of the book after the other concepts had been covered, was the inclusion of the fact that several of the criteria currently held by academics as separating our species from all others are tied to brain size, group size and LOI abilities. The main of these criteria are music, song, speech, written language, literature, laughter and religion. It turns out that laughter and song are considered human adaptations of grooming and are effective over larger groups, wider physical ranges and require less time in order to reap the same benefits. The maximum waking time that is spent on grooming by primates according to scholars is twenty percent. If we sing and joke as we go about our business, we accomplish several highly important objectives simultaneously.
Some other uniquely human abilities would not be possible without an LOI beyond 2. Dunbar places a rough date on the appearance of those particular aspects of human culture by pegging them to carbon-dated skulls which are deemed sufficiently large to accommodate the brain tissues, nerves and blood vessels required for processing such enhanced grooming strategies. In other words, he has mapped which craniums from what era and locations that could have possibly housed the necessary organic software, if you will.
Towards the conclusion of his wonderfully rich book, Mr. Dunbar points out that it can be shown statistically that religious individuals and communities enjoy longer, healthier lives. He also points out that the creation of a religion requires a mind capable of the 5th LOI. Some interesting facts from modern history are presented to illustrate religion by its deeds both beneficent and wicked. You the reader may then extrapolate many interesting side trails of your own unique cogitation, which I hope will yield you the fruit of personal discovery or at least the fragrance of the blossoms that grow on those rarely trodden hills.
One thing that scientists, poets and philosophers all seem to agree upon is that our penchant for inquiring into our world, our selves, our motives, our origins and the seeking of patterns and purpose therein, is a uniquely human trait and ability. With regard to religion, I am in agreement with the general longevity statistics cited above. Life is much too hard, unpredictable, contrary and counter-intuitive to be endured without something much larger than ourselves to use as a backdrop, guide and explanation.
I taught this to both of my sons, as most parents the world over have also done. One thing I did differently than is perhaps usual, was not indoctrinating them into any particular faith. While the examples set for them at home could well be described as being Christian and the tenets of that faith were discussed the most; we also discussed many other religious modes. In my own belief and experience, a person must have a code to live by and it should be the individual who chooses what they shall strive to uphold and will measure themselves against when approaching death. This to me is freedom of religion.
Freedom is a thing not unlike quicksilver. We use the terms, “freedom of speech”, “freedom of the press”, “freedom of religion” and “freedom of choice” all the time. When called upon to examine or to debate those issues within a political context, they seem to thwart our efforts to define them in a manner that is satisfactory to an entire group. We in the West uphold free speech, yet we have acquiesced to the censoring of many voices through various means ever since we had that right entrenched in a legal document. History shows scant examples of freedom being bestowed upon one human by another. You may not be given that which you already possess. But you may relinquish it in any number of ways and for any number of reasons.
Our nature has led us to continue to live in groups of ever larger concentration. We govern and manage these large groups in a variety of ways. The benefit is always that of greater overall safety and security and the drawback is a corresponding shrinkage of individual liberty and freedom. In such systems, once upon a time of smaller populations, it was feasible that a man or woman could travel to different places to find a group that most closely matched their own personal tastes and convictions as to customs, religion, rules, regulations, climate, food, culture, etc. This could be seen as the finding of one’s tribe.
In my estimation, it was the differences in those diverse places that made this social evolutionary stage of our larger human groupings work. Advances in transportation have always been required to made this possible, but at first these advances may have precipitated our notions of freedom and choice. I feel that this stage of human development has now passed, but like waiting for a long freight train at a road crossing, we don’t yet perceive that it has passed. As far as we can see in both directions, it curves like a great, segmented, graffiti-covered snake rumbling and hooting as hobos jump off and onto it by turns.
The evidence for my conviction is in the sameness that a traveller today would encounter as opposed to a traveller from several hundred years ago or more. Yes, there are still some populous destinations which stand out in stark contrast to others; but this is diminishing daily and cultural spill-over via technology is tending to homogenize all. Never before has there been so many people on the same page.
The sloppy part in our time is that the older forms that we called countries have not been dismantled nor fallen to their own ruin in their entirety as yet. We are watching it on the News at night as it happens. Historically, each version of new human social models are proffered as the adorable infant hope of our future gene pool yet the cradle is always carved from wood clear-cut on a mountain bought after a civil war with money made from slave labour in cotton fields after Indian wars, genocide, re-education and history laundering.
We can be sure that as long as we prefer to let others do our planning, that there will be aspects to what is wrought and how it is fashioned that we may not find palatable on a personal level. Power is never given away and freedom is inevitably traded for security. We are all complicit in what will become our shared fate. I have always felt that the fewer LOI we employ in our interactions with each other and the world, the happier we are and the more honourably we behave. In other words, our evolving brain appears to be sullying some of our most praiseworthy, if antique, human characteristics.
Borders are shifting anew, cities are razed and shivering men, women and children will be re-located. Oil is drilled and minerals are dug. It must be remembered that walls serve not only to keep people out but also to keep people in. Places where bicycles were once ubiquitous are choked with automobiles. Places designed for automobiles are choked with both. Jobs sent overseas from North America may now be returning. But at what rate of pay? The world turns its gaze on the USA and wonders how the Great Experiment will deal with these changes? I am of the opinion that the practising, self-appointed architects of our human dramas are 4-plies who employ a small army of 5-plies. As long as the dominant traditional money systems of this world do not change, those folks erect their chosen dreams.
It is ironic to me that amidst social rhetoric about sweeping out the old to bring in the new, the private central banking cartel fiat currency manufactured debt systems always seem to avoid a makeover. I see a logical policy of not abandoning things that work well being predictably and doggedly adhered to by the power brokers of our world. While hypocritically pushing, nudging, funding, organizing and advocating that those in their systems who pay the taxes, fight the wars and build real wealth should alter their traditions of marriage, family, gender, education, nutrition, transportation, lifestyle, religion, child rearing and work.
The few people that manage the many, in my opinion, hold the many in somewhat justified contempt but tragically, live in historically justified fear of them. Recently, a man sent me an article speaking to the oppression suffered by the people of the Baha’i Faith in Iran. It told of their burgeoning network of offshore educational facilities which germinated to compensate for the local ban on higher education for those individuals in their home country.
This was my reply, “I am sure there will be further book-burning to come in our species’ not-to-distant future; aimed at the mid-LOIs, abetted by the lower-LOIs, funded and fuelled by the inevitable paranoia of the high-LOIs. Happily, in my forecast, the very human gifts of our griots, our bards and our Keepers of the Winter Counts shall remain in our DNA to once more regain that which is lost and to surpass it with greater rapidity than any computer model is ever likely to show, like dandelion seeds falling randomly on warm wet earth. That part of life which serves to liberate and elevate has, in my opinion, a longer, nobler pedigree than that which seeks to control.”
In other words, as far as I can see, we are our own bane and salvation. Perhaps, and this is my hope, if evolution is the mechanism driving our development; we may come to a point where the difference between cleverness and wisdom is so clearly delineated that natural selection may start to favour the propagation of those areas of the human brain that foster the latter, rather than the former. Far from a dumbing down, this would be a wising-up. As all the tricks we have used to manipulate each other have proven through modern history, if something ain’t broke – don’t fix it.
This essay was written in the first few days of the Chinese Lunar Year of The Rooster in 2017. I happen to be a Fire Rooster and am held in wonderful balance by my Water Dragon wife. On that occasion of beginning my sixth circle around the sun, I penned a poem which bears some pertinence to the essay and explains why I bother to write essays.
I Am A Rooster
The buildings of Men collapse without sound
While trees of our Maker spring from the ground
The sun ever shines on both kinds of wood
Rising and setting on Evil and Good
I am a Rooster and therefore I Crow...
I keep both eyes open and aim very straight
At a place beyond Fear and well above Hate
Above the treeline on the Mountain of Life
Dwells the Imposter who hides in plain sight
I am Labuyo and that's why I Fight...
Up toward the peak is where we must strive
Past swamps, along creeks, through forests alive
With Beasts at the bottom and Angels on high
From every direction all Humans must try
I am El Gallo and that's why I Cry...
Main Trails at the Base are Busy and Safe
Conically Converging if Viewed from Space
High Trails are Legion and necessarily so
You are surmounting yourself, didn't you know?
I am Le Coq who lives in your Soul...
fin