Thousand Yard Stare

For roughly 190,000 years as we spread ourselves across the planet, the elements of our diet that were difficult to come by were sugars, salt and fats.  When we did find them it was important to take maximum advantage of the opportunity. These days we can provide ourselves with endless amounts of these but we have not lost our “hard wired” instinct to take maximum advantage of the opportunity to consume them when we have the chance.

Indeed the craving for these things has a much longer history than just the span of Homo sapiens so it is no surprise that we find it very difficult to restrict our consumption of these things…

I feel like some chocolate… Since I prefer the very dark chocolate with next to no sugar (I haven’t checked) I presume that would be the fats coming into play.

Predicting the future is an amusing diversion with a long tradition. It can also be a bit frustrating because certain things which you would like to see, are going to happen after you have ceased investing in your own biological maintenance.

A very important trick is not to bother giving a time frame to the vision. I know it robs the game of a lot of the fun but it also gets in the way of contemplating the vision itself.

Some random thoughts on the matter…

Cars: Sitting in the car at the traffic lights, listening to the roar of the engines as the cars take their turns you realise that, at some point, we are going to have the cars, but not the roar. Electric motors are either silent or perhaps they whine a little, but they don’t roar. The dominant sound will become the road noise – the sound of the flexing of rubber and its impact with the tarmac.

Roads: Much further in the future , surely we will fly rather than hop in the car. We were “promised” flying cars when I was a child but the energy and control required were much greater than were appreciated at the time. Still, eventually I expect us to get there. The thing that intrigues me is the implications for the road system. There is a huge amount of real estate lying beneath tarmac. When it is all converted into green space it will be a Good Thing.

Mars: I’d like us to go to Mars. The radiation is a problem though. It is not an original thought but, what about caves? Mars is not short of cliff faces. Can’t we start out by putting our accommodation where there are many metres of rock overhead?

Food: Homo sapiens is constructed as an omnivore. That is unquestionably the natural way of things. I think though that if you offered folks something that was indistinguishable from beef (for instance) but had never been part of a functioning cow, they would take it with some relief. Tissue culture should eventually be capable of giving us this option. The sooner the better.

This blog, like most, does not cite references and there is no review process. So, like most blogs, it is almost useless blather. Almost. It’s only functions are that it just might contain a point of view that you haven’t encountered before or that it might be written in an entertaining style. There is not a lot of point in reading only material which is perfectly aligned with your current point of view. It gives a feeling of security and belonging but it reduces your mental agility and adaptability. I am about to tell you where my politics lie. This will immediately categorise me for those of haven’t already worked them out and anything I might have to say will be filtered through their opinion of those politics… That is an interesting phenomenon. All I can say is that good ideas have often sprung from people whose other ideas were without value. You never know what you might think of if you press on. If anything I say stimulates an interest, then you can chase up people who actually know what they are talking about on the subject. For example, I was going to write something on the “right to bear arms” at one point, but I went to Wikipedia and saw my points all covered in much greater detail by experts. I won’t make that mistake again; everything I discuss will be in the same boat so research will simply remove the desire to write at all. Best to keep the mind untrammelled by confusing wisdom.

I have spoken earlier about our ancestors and their habits. An entire field of biology addresses the nature of selection as it acts in such groups. This is the root of politics. We are all acting in the best interests of our own DNA, but sometimes its best interest lie in what is best for our group. This is the foundation of our political balance between left wing and right wing. The right wing inclining towards the individual, the left towards the group. A billion years or so of evolution equips most individuals with the inclination to act in their own interests. At least 200,000 years or so of natural selection acting on individuals acting as part of a group, encourages the individual to consider whether their best interests may be served by taking the interests of others into account. To me the result is obvious, the centre is the place to be. You act in your own interests all the time, a billion years will not be denied; but from time to time you take actions which will benefit the group so as to benefit yourself in due course. We exist in a society. If we watch it collapse then we will “be standing alone and naked in the middle of the plains of Africa”. Not a reassuring place to be.

To be plain then, many of my political positions would label me as a right winger. But before they claim me I can lay out many others which would have me shunned as a foul socialist…

I am a swinging voter.

I pay my taxes reasonably happily in the full knowledge that some will be wasted and that the war against this wastage is perpetual.

I know a portion of my taxes are spent on supporting some people who simply do not have the willpower to support themselves but could. I see this as a tragedy in their lives but I will not cut off that money and see others, who cannot support themselves but would if they could, suffer. I expect some of my money to be spent encouraging those who could support themselves to do so. That too is perpetual.

I am frequently appalled by what I consider to be the foolishness of the extreme right and the extreme left. I consider that they both have the same failing, neither understand people and their fundamental motivations. (Of course, my piece of arrogance is that I fancy I know better than they do.) If our basic nature springs from our hunter-gatherer forebears, then the rest is nurture. For the first few years of their lives children absorb the reality that surrounds them like a sponge – without filtering. It is very difficult for people to transcend the things that are learnt at that time.

It is very difficult to reason someone out of something that they weren’t reasoned into in the first place. (That comment’s not original. Swift apparently. Damn, and I was determined not to do any research)

What follows is my opinion of why people are the way they are and my technique for understanding how they might react to a situation. I have found that it makes a great many otherwise incomprehensible human reactions seem unsurprising.

Homo sapiens appeared about 200,000 years ago. For the following 190,000 years we pursued a certain strategy for survival. We are here because that strategy worked and it is deeply wired into our brains. If territorial spread and raw numbers are defined as success, then we are very successful. Our DNA must be very satisfied. We evolved in Africa and in our ancestral home there are many forces at work which restrict our numbers. Once we left Africa, we left behind those forces and, like most “weeds”, we had the potential to grow in numbers without restraint. For 190,000 years our strategy looked like this.

A group of 10 to 30 people move into an uninhabited area, frequently following shorelines, and exploit the resources. The wildlife have never seen Homo sapiens and are easy prey. When the group finally has to wander further afield for prey, they decide to move to the area where prey is still plentiful. As soon as anyone in the group disagrees with the chosen site, the group splits.

That’s it. The implications of that lifestyle make us what we are today. Using that as the model, many insights can be gleaned about the behaviour of Homo sapiens. As our current style of living is only a very recent adaptation, I believe that only very small changes have occurred in the way we operate. Our instincts are those that served us well for those 190,000 years. Our instincts are the patterns of behaviour that were most likely to lead to successful passing on of our genes for the vast sweep of time until about 10,000 years ago.

Here’s an example. We are all familiar with the suggestion that it is in our nature to explore. Few would dispute this, but why is it so? For 190,000 years, exploration brought great rewards. Most importantly, there would be fresh game unfamiliar with humans and their nature. We don’t look like most other predators. They could leave behind the competition from the growing bands of Homo sapiens in their wake. They could leave behind any pollution they had created by their own presence and any disease they may have encountered. They could leave behind any disease that had entered their own group. So a great many problems could be addressed by simply picking up and moving on. The advantages were so great that they became instinctive. That is, anyone who had the inclination to “move on”, to explore, was much more likely to survive.

Why did I say the groups were 10 to 30? Well, I just pulled those numbers out of my head. But let’s chew them over. Imagine it is 100,000 years ago and you are standing naked and alone on a plain in Africa. You would be quite vulnerable. Among the most vulnerable mammals standing on the plain in fact. Tasty. Now imagine you are standing with your tribe of 10, 20 or 30 people and that the tribe has the usual profile of such groups. Some are hunters with spears and simple axes. Your group is now the most dangerous thing on the plain. A pride of lions or pack of hunting dogs would think long and hard before attacking. It is in the nature of Homo sapiens to be capable of vindictiveness. If a pride took one of our young we just might decide to say, make killing an adult lion a rite of passage to adulthood (it’s been done), or simply decide that the entire pride has to go and hunt down every last one. It is an aspect of self-defense. Rage and vindictiveness are our “motivation”. We are very dangerous.

So why not groups of 1,000? We were hunter-gatherers. If 1,000 hunter-gatherers move into a valley, they’d be falling over one another immediately. We can readily imagine that such a group would break up rapidly and disperse over more territory. Only when agriculture appeared did these rules begin to change.

There is another aspect to this. If we were discussing another species, it would not be valid to opine in the absence of data. But, while emphasising that these are just my opinions, it is “us” we are talking about. Not another species. How big does a group have to get before you know that you are disconnected from some of them? At what point do friends become acquaintances? We are wired to cope with a society of a certain size, and that size is the size of a group best adapted for exploiting fresh terrain as hunter-gatherers. For most people, special coping techniques are required to deal with communicating with groups above a certain size. Some folks simply close their eyes. Some address “the front row” or “the back row”. These techniques are designed to reduce the size of the group that the mind has to cope with to a natural size.

If you use this model to analyse human behaviour, it leads to an obvious line of thought. Does the belief that a certain behaviour is instinctive make it ok? Well, no. We are not living in those societies any more. Adaptations must be made. The more our circumstances diverge from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the more our intellect must override our instincts to keep society functioning. The more our laws can allow people to obey their natural instincts though, the more successful those laws are likely to be.

I think there is a disconnection between what the US voter thinks the President, any President, can do and what he is capable of politically. They like to feel that their President is powerful and they assume that this means he is like the Mikado; he only needs to think that something should be done and it is done. It is a failure to pay attention during their civics lessons at school I suppose. There are other arms of government that have to formulate and approve legislation.The voters voted for them as well. If the Congress and the Senate are not persuaded that it is in their electoral interests to support the President than he becomes largely toothless.

In short, whether you like it or not, Obama is sure to be doing what he can, and “what he can” is exactly what the voters made possible for him.

It has just occurred to me that the latest Dr Who series may be using the same plot device that was brilliantly used by the Star Trek franchise to “reset” their world so that future programs didn’t have to be consistent with all the old stuff.

In Dr Who the “crack in the wall” has messed about with time so that the people on Earth have forgotten everything they ever knew about the Daleks who have returned bigger, better and now in a range of friendly colours… like iPods… only they want to rule the Universe… possibly also like iPods.

It is no longer an acceptable shorthand to refer to the period between the fall of the Roman Empire in the west and the rise of Charlemagne, as the Dark Ages. That is, it is only acceptable as long as you make it clear that you are well aware that life went on in the west and that… stuff happened. There was comparatively little writing; the buildings constructed were much simpler, more transient and smaller and the quantity and sophistication of the pottery was enormously reduced. Oh! and the roads! Not only were no more roads of the Roman type constructed but those in existence were not maintained. There was still a lot of people going about their daily lives though, as the remnants of the Roman world decayed about them.

The problem here is the word “Dark”. Some people don’t like it. It sounds negative, prejudicial. With the Renaissance and the reacquaintance of the West with its Classical past, it was clear to the people in the 15th century that the Romans and Greeks had been able to do things that they would like to do. They were the ones who first referred to the Dark Ages. In the last hundred years or so we have begun to get a much better picture of what happened during the Dark Ages and so, well, they aren’t so Dark.

As you might have guessed, I am reluctant to let the phrase go. Can’t we just agree that we don’t mean anything nasty by it? The issue I guess, is that people are quite twitchy about making value judgments about different cultures. It could be argued that the removal of the exploitative Roman regime and the reversion to an agrarian economy was a Good Thing. It is easy to imagine being a high ranking person living in a Roman villa with plentiful food, reading material and a bathhouse but it is more sobering to imagine being a slave working in a tin mine in Wales until you die very young. However, I can’t help but feel that the collective happiness may have been greater in Britain in 250 AD than it was in 550 AD.

The Grey Ages perhaps?

There are new episodes of Foyle’s War! (Series 7)

It is something of a novelty to watch a series about an incorruptible policeman who can be relied upon to do the right thing always. Our society has given way to easy cynicism concerning the motives of any of the people who enter public service. This cynicism is no longer a matter of prudence, it is a destructive nihilism that can prevent good people from doing good things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foyle’s_War

And for those in Australia:

http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/drama/crime