Greasy Fingers and Evolution

I just posted a YouTube video on this topic. [https://youtu.be/lItwjRfxP7A ].

Much has been speculated and written about the evolution of human intelligence in all of its manifestations, including speech and tools. There is no reason that many of these ideas could not simultaneously be true.

One idea is that tool-making and intelligence evolved together. At first, a rudimentary form of human intelligence—the ability to envision how a rock could be made into a tool—was necessary to get the process started. Then, as stone tools, then spears and arrows and atlatls, became more sophisticated, a much higher level of intelligence was required. Even sexual selection was involved, with the idea that men invented better and better tools to impress their prospective mates.

It is impossible to think about human evolution without considering the origin of speech. Even the ability to make the sounds of which words are composed had to evolve. An evolutionary change in the larynx allowed a greater range of vowel sounds. And the evolution of dexterity of lips and tongue was necessary for consonants. Some have speculated that the ability to use the lips in speech (and for kissing) evolved from the ability of infant mammals to purse their lips around the mother’s teat.

All of this required an exponential increase in human intelligence, which was possible when more calories and nutrients were available for the growth and maintenance of the human brain. Human intelligence exploded when our ancestors began to cook their food, allowing a greater amount of nutrition to be available from the same amount of foraged or hunted food.

All true, but as I was eating greasy pieces of poulet rôti the other day, I realized yet another possible reason that human lips and tongues evolved dexterity. It is not enough to just capture and cut animals as food, or to cook them for nutrition. There is also an advantage to being able to get every last little morsel of meat from the bones of the cooked prey. An early human could get a great deal of meat from big pieces of cooked meat. But there was also an advantage to eating the little bits of meat hiding among the joints.

Those little bits of meat could provide just enough extra calories and nutrients to make a difference—slight, but significant—in production of offspring. Over time, the bits of meat and fat wasted by hominids with slightly less dexterity of lips, tongues, and teeth might give an advantage to the hominids who could glean the meat and fat more carefully. Of two tribes, both of which cooked their meat, the one with greater motor skills in their fingers and nibbling ability will get more benefit from their food than a tribe that threw a lot of perfectly good morsels of meat and fat on the bone heap.

It could also give an advantage within a group of hominids. A hominid that could say, “You done with that bone? There’s a lot of good meat and fat still on it,” might prevail over the hominid that handed the bone to him.

At least, this is what I was thinking as I ate every little bit I could get from the roast chicken. Think of that the next time you throw away a chicken leg with lots of good calories still on it.

Am I the Enemy?

The ultimate measure of success for big corporations, and little ones, and individuals, and governments, is profit. An enemy is anyone who reduces profits. And it doesn’t matter how the enemy reduces those profits. I certainly reduce the profits of corporations, and you probably do also. That makes us enemies of the corporations.

One way to reduce a corporation’s profits are for governments to force them to pay for their externalities—that is, the consequences of the harm they have been inflicting on people and the Earth. To force fossil fuel corporations to pay a carbon tax (so far, a failure); to force tobacco corporations to pay for the health effects of smoking (a partial success); to force pharmaceutical corporations to pay for the suffering that directly results from aggressive marketing of addictive drugs (a mixed record of success and failure).

But another way is for ordinary consumers to choose to buy less from corporations, choosing inexpensive and healthy alternatives. Those of us who choose this path are eating into the profitability of large corporations as surely as if they had lost a lawsuit or paid penalties.

On a recent weekend, my family and I visited the Black Forest National Park in Germany, right over the river from Alsace, where we now live. We walked around in the snow and let the kids throw snowballs. We had to drive there, in a family sized vehicle, but we only use the vehicle when there is an unavoidable reason for it. Most of the time we walk or take public transportation, which helps us avoid the parking nightmare that Strasbourg, like any city, is. Then we went home, and enjoyed the free entertainment of one another’s company and educational YouTube videos (such as mine or those of Jamy Gourmaud).

What we did not do was to go on a cruise or buy a lot of hiking equipment. The end of the day was also a perfect opportunity for us to go to a restaurant and have a family meal, but we did not do this; we went home and had leftovers which, I might add, were pretty good. We did not go out to a movie. In just these ways, we deprived corporations of about a couple of thousand euros of income. That money is not part of their income as surely as if it had been forbidden by government policy. We also had less debt, which meant that we deprived financial corporations of debt interest.

Corporations do not want us to consume less or to encourage others to do so. They do not want us to drive less, or buy smaller cars, but to buy big electric trucks. They do not want us to buy fewer of the items that have to be transported all over the continent. They do not want us to simply not smoke; they want us to vape, a market the tobacco corporations largely control. They do not want us to be healthy, but to be permanently in a state of requiring expensive medical intervention. They do not want us to reduce credit card debt, just avoid defaults.

I have a medical condition which requires prescriptions that are, for me as a French resident, free, but which in America required me to pay a thousand dollar deductible each year, and most of that money went directly to the recently-assassinated CEO of United HealthCare. I do not endorse assassination, of course. But for a million people in my situation, these charges were a billion dollar benefit to UHC. Even though my medication is now free, I do everything I can to avoid getting sicker and needing yet more medical intervention.

Any of my readers (which is not a large number) who are influenced by my enjoyment of low-impact pleasures will have a similar negative impact on corporate profits. This makes us, collectively, major enemies of the corporations. We may not be as obvious as the Marxist activists, but we are as significant.

And, I need hardly add, we are happy. To have my grandson try to throw a snowball at me, and miss, is as enjoyable as any cruise. And there is no chance whatever that I will contract the rotavirus for which cruises are famous, from the snowball.

A New English Verb: To Trump

This blog focuses mostly on evolution and science. Part of evolution is cultural evolution, and for humans the most important kind of cultural evolution may be language. I have written several essays about the evolution of language. Now it’s time for me to focus on a language issue for the current day.

For centuries, the verb to trump has meant, in card games, that the hand of cards that one person has prevails over the hand that another person has. The ace trumps the jack, for example. But since Donald Trump has entered the political scene, this word has been given a new meaning, not by the dictionaries and the people who watch over our language, but the way the word is used in everyday speech. I wish to propose a slight extension of the meaning.

It hasn’t just been since Trump entered the presidential campaign the first time in 2016. The image created by his behavior has been going on for decades. Back in the 1990s, news articles commonly presented Trump as an arrogant rich man, an image he cultivated in his television show. Even while he faced one bankruptcy after another, he promoted his image as a powerful man because of his wealth. See, for example, these Newsweek articles from thirty years ago:

·         March 4, 1990, about Trump’s collapsing real estate, casino, and airline empires, and others on May 14 and June 18.

·         A cartoon published on May 4, 1991 with Natives joking about Trump wanting to sell the island of Manhattan back to them.

Trump’s behavior has also given him the popular image as thinking himself unbridled in his approaches to women. Further Newsweek articles from thirty years ago include:

·         March 4, 1990, about Trump’s divorce woes;

·         December 24, 1990 with an article about Trump and Rowanne Brewer;

·         July 8, 1991with an article about Trump and Carla Bruni;

·         April 19, 1993 with a photo of Trump embracing Marla Maples.

But since being president the first time, Trump has used his power to squelch any and all criticism of himself.

Therefore, I suggest a new meaning to the verb “to trump”: it means to screw over. The reason is that Trump was convicted of financial felonies connected to sex, and has been accused of sexual harassment, and has said demeaning things about how much women love to have him grab them. Even in those cases where his negative image did not lead to a conviction, it is still part of his image.

Because of all of this, I suggest that the following uses of the verb to trump are useful figures of speech:

·         A big corporation can trump a smaller one.

·         A big country can trump a smaller one.

·         A man can trump a woman.

Language continues to evolve. Already, according to this article in The Atlantic, people who dislike Trump are avoiding the use of the verb. But maybe we can make it into a useful verb once again.