The Thinking, Walking Biped, part one. Pascal Picq and Human Evolution

This essay begins a series about the importance of walking in human evolution and history.

Cogito, ergo sum, said Pascal, or someone. I think, therefore I am. In French it would be je pense, donc je suis. But one French writer, an anthropologist named Pascal Picq, has changed this a little. He says, je marche, donc je pense. I walk, therefore I think. He has made the case that we are not just bipeds who think, but we think because we are bipeds. He attributes the evolution of human intelligence not just to the fact we are bipeds, but because we are bipeds who can walk and run for long distances, with outstanding endurance not found in other mammal species. Maybe this is obvious to you, but I’d never thought of it until I read Picq’s book La Marche.

Picq overviewed the history of scientific explanations for why humans walk upright. This has always been somewhat of an enigma. Quadrupeds can run a lot faster than we can. Anthropologists have come up with all kinds of advantages that bipedalism conferred on our ancestors, such as being able to look out over the vegetation to see either danger or opportunity, or to use our forelegs as arms that can carry things such as food and kids and weapons. Long distance migration is what evolution has favored in our species: even old people can walk long distances unless they have health problems or are injured (I do it nearly every day), and there are a lot more elderly marathon runners than elderly speed sprinters.

While these things are all true, Picq has added another: bipedalism has altered the evolution of our minds. Bipedalism (as in Australopithecus) preceded intelligence (as in Homo), and here are some reasons why.

Humans are superb wanderers and have been so throughout our evolutionary history. National Geographic writer Paul Salopek is retracing, on foot, the epic journey of humankind from our African genesis to the end of the journey in South America. Other mammals run faster, but do not migrate as far as humans have. Starting about a hundred thousand years ago, prehistoric humans spread from Africa to every continent except Antarctica. These migrations set up an advantage for intelligence, because our ancestors had to decide whether to migrate (that is, is migration worth the cost of leaving home), and then how to get someplace and know that the new place was where we wanted to stay. This required superb observation and memory of the environment and ability to analyze opportunities. This was true on the short scale (we want to go this way, but there is a river, and we have to figure out how to cross it, which may involve turning around and going back the way we came) and the long scale (we want to get to that hill, from which we can see into the distance and plan what to do next, if anything). Homo sapiens was apparently better than this than Homo neanderthalensis. Our intelligent ancestors also had to think ahead about, and remember, the migration routes and habits of their prey. Neanderthals killed mastodons; humans planned ahead about where the mastodons would be before trying to kill them.

In all these ways, our thinking evolved as a series of logical steps. That is, it required reasoning ability. A primitive (or modern) philosopher or scientist will try out ideas to see if they work, then come up with a backup plan if it doesn’t. This, Picq speculates, uses a similar mental network to figuring out where to go and how to get there on foot.

On top of all that, walking and running makes us feel good and releases us from stress. Picq said he got some of his best ideas while walking. I have the same experience. And perhaps the best example is Charles Darwin, whose “walking path” at Down House was where he got, and perfected, his major ideas. He did not get them sitting at his desk. Many famous composers, as well as other scholars, carried writing equipment with them. I have heard that Beethoven and Dvořák wrote musical ideas as they walked (see a later essay on this topic). Today, we have cell phones on which the thinking walker can record ideas.

According to Picq, what science and philosophy needs more of is people who walk and think, rather than sit at desks and read what other people have written.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 5. The Old Burrill House

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

 

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth (all reviewed earlier); The Book of Ruth (reviewed in my religion blog); The Old Burrill House (reviewed here); The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (all reviewed in my religion blog later).

This story uses a premise that shows up in a lot of speculative fiction, and Rice employs it at least as well as other examples I have seen: shifting time lines that intersect and allow characters to move between them, from one century to another.

Kent is a graduate student in botany in the 1980s. His experiment is in a greenhouse that has been built into an old house, left to the university, that used to belong to Burrill, a prominent botanist. The house is falling apart, but still has rooms used for storage upstairs from the greenhouse. Kent sees light coming from one of the abandoned rooms, and slips in to investigate. He sees a beautiful woman bathing. He then tries to slip back out, but the portal has closed and he is trapped in the 1890s in a room with Burrill’s daughter Imelda. Kent slips out of the house and comes back to the university, to enroll as one of Burrill’s graduate students. One problem is that, living almost a century later, he knows a lot more science than did Burrill, a fact he must hide.

Imelda falls in love with Kent. Kent has to conceal his knowledge of the shifting timelines, only it turns out Imelda has seen the greenhouse that does not yet exist. Are they both crazy? What is Burrill to do when his daughter wishes to marry Kent? Kent decides to stay in the past with Imelda, but then Imelda gets sick with a bacterial disease that he can cure if he goes back into the future and steals antibiotics. I’ll let you read about whether he succeeds.

Rice writes from the knowledge base of a science teacher. Antibiotics are often made from fungi. They are not magic chemicals. They serve a purpose for the fungi: they kill the bacteria with which the fungi must compete for food. Even in his fiction, Rice is a science teacher.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 3. Bleeding Earth

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle (both reviewed earlier); Bleeding Earth (reviewed here); The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

Robb is an environmentalist who works at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a federal agency which is friendly to farmers, not to the environment. Robb meets DoAnna, who owns a large farm and does everything environmentally wrong. But she knows it and asks Robb for advice. He gives her more advice (such as “Get rid of your cows”) than she wants. But he nearly convinces her to be an eco-farmer until she catches him trespassing on her land to get runoff water samples to identify her farm as a major source of pollution. They had just started to be friends…

Robb loses his job even before DoAnna files a complaint about his trespassing. Depressed and sleepy, he parks his car at a rest stop and falls asleep. He awakens during a severe dust storm and finds DoAnna has prepared him a picnic lunch. She is now convinced he is right—our farms are blowing away in the wind—and she hires him as a full-time advisor on how to make her farm into an eco-farm. They soon become lovers.

Running an eco-farm turns out to be nightmarishly difficult, especially the way Robb and DoAnna do it. The project (raising hemp) fails. They have to start over—but how? They blame each other for what has happened. A summer storm brings on a mud-fight, which leaves them laughing and loving once again.

This story is of particular interest to readers interested in science who may not realize how difficult it is to turn a conventional, pesticide-and-herbicide farm into a “green” farm. It also shows the NRCS is caught in a delicate spot: they have to enforce environmental laws without alienating farms whose cooperation with conservation programs is, after all, voluntary. If being “eco-friendly” were easy, all farmers would have done it already. Rice, far from being a raging environmentalist, seems to understand this.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 2. Haunted Castle

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly (reviewed earlier); The Haunted Castle (reviewed here); Bleeding Earth; The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

This story begins, “Arjana worked in the only place at Joyworld Moscow where you did not have to smile: The Haunted Castle.” Arjana and Zef were two Albanian teenagers from a village destroyed by the Serbs. Arjana couldn’t smile because of what she saw, especially the face of the smiling, ruthless Serbian soldier who chased her and Zef but could not find them. When they sneak onto a train going to Moscow, they find a shipment of costumes for Joyworld, and decide the best place to hide is faraway but in plain sight. Zef played a cowboy at a fake frontier town (Russians were killing Siberians at the same time white Americans were killing Natives). Arjana worked the ticket counter of Haunted Castle, a train that wound through fake graveyards and dangling ghosts. But the soldier found Zef and shot him dead; the visitors thought it was part of an act. Other visitors thought it was part of the act when the soldier found Arjana and tried to rape her. (“The fake blood looks so real!”) But a small and silent act of heroism saves Arjana.

One thing I found very interesting about this story was that Arjana’s ability to play dead was an adaptation to danger. Animal adaptations to escape from danger are as varied as the animals themselves.

An evolutionary puzzle is, why do people so intensely hate those in other racial or cultural groups? An evolutionary argument can be made for why individuals or groups, in competition with one another, would hate each other. But the intensity of hatred seems too much for biology or evolution to explain. It is almost enough to make one believe in Satan.

The Mystery of Joan of Arc

I have been reading Mark Twain’s book (a free online version) about Joan of Arc. As in Connecticut Yankee, Twain presented Joan of Arc as an eyewitness account. According to the legend, Jeanne d’Arc was a sweet and holy little girl in Domremy in eastern France. She seemed to be utterly perfect, as well as beautiful, like Mary Poppins only very humble. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, she became a military heroine. Nobody who knew her, friends or family, could understand why this happened. She claimed that several saints, and the archangel Michael, had told her that she was the one to rescue France from English rule and to crown the Dauphin, the prince, to be the king of France. And somehow, despite numerous setbacks, she got even her opponents to believe and support her and follow her as she went to see the Dauphin. She had no military training, had never killed anything or anyone with a sword or spear. Like most country children, she could ride a horse. She claimed she would, personally, lead the French army to victory over the English.

At that time, the French army was totally demoralized, and simply accepted the English rulership that had been imposed since the battle of Agincourt. To oppose the English would be suicidal, they thought. But Joan convinced them God would support the French victory.

And the French won against the English army that was gathered at Orleans. Joan was only seventeen years old when the Dauphin, now king, made her the general of the French armies. Almost immediately afterwards, her church enemies had her burned at the stake on what the church now considers trumped-up charges. Almost immediately after this, her case was reconsidered and she was sanctified. She is now one of the great legends of history.

 

 

This photo is from a church in Strasbourg, France.
 

Great uncertainty will always remain about what really happened. Alternative interpretations of the Joan of Arc legend have been presented. Some have claimed that she was mentally unstable, which means she imagined the little voices in her head, or that she had Menière’s disease (an affliction of the inner ear) which means she actually heard sounds but they were not voices. James Phillips and colleagues say that all claims of medical or psychiatric disorders of St. Joan are unconvincing. The claim that she was actually not a simple country girl but was a bastard daughter of the previous king does not explain how she could have, despite weakness and youth, led armies to victory. If indeed she did convince the Dauphin that she was his bastard sister, why would he have let her lead the army instead of doing it himself? The claim that she was a witch substitutes one incredible explanation for another.

Maybe she was crazy, and this made her able to speak her message with utter sincerity and without hesitation. The disillusioned French might have been waiting for just such a person to appear on the scene. The human mind is not a logic machine. Under the right conditions—and nobody can predict exactly what these might be—even the best human minds can believe anything. Among the right conditions are that the human brain’s built in bullshit-detector has to get fooled, something that only a truly and sincerely crazy person can do.

I, like thousands of others, will make my pilgrimage to her birthplace Domremy-la-Pucelle (pucelle means virgin) and walk in the garden where she is supposed to have had her first visions. I will wander and wonder. Domremy is only a two and a half hour drive from where I now live, much closer than Paris. I will wait until my grandchildren are a little older and can appreciate history a little better. If I have any new insights at that time, I will let you know.

Perhaps the strangest thing of all—and one I have not heard reported before—is that this story, of the seventeen-year-old girl leading an army to victory, has happened at least twice and possibly three times or more in history. I will complete this thought in a subsequent essay.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 1. When Pigs Fly

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

 

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly (reviewed here); The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth; The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

The first story, When Pigs Fly, is about an American woman (Wendy) who wandered away from her Muslim heritage (she was Wafa before). Then one day, God appeared in the sky. Only, unlike Rice’s novel Glass Cathedral it was Al-lah, not the Christian God. God said he was going to kill reprobate former Muslims, but He was going to give Wafa an extra chance, since, He said, He just likes her. His only rule is to stay away from pork and pork products. Could salvation be so easy?

Wafa rejoins the mosque in which she grew up, in Oklahoma, and thinks she is obeying Al-lah. She has even dedicated her life to making the world better, by getting a college degree in biology. But in her biotechnology class she discovers that pig genes have been sliced into the DNA of almost all crop plants, and that she and all her fellow Muslims have been eating pork without realizing it. So, God killed all of them.

The question for my religious readers (explored in my other blog) is, would God ever do anything like this? But in this science blog, I point out that genetic engineering is already being used to insert genes into agricultural products. We hardly know what we eat. Rice does not get into the details, but it is very unlikely that you are getting genes in your food that you do not know about, because the biotechnology (even with the clever new CRISPR technology) still moves one gene at a time. No way can you get a half-pig half-vegetable. But you can get a vegetable that is 0.0001% pig, and for some people that is just too much.

Plantation Odyssey, a Short Novel by Stan Rice, part three. Payback Time!

When Odysseus returned to his mansion on the island of Ithaca in Homer’s Odyssey, he found it besieged by the leading men of Ithaca, each of whom wanted Penelope to choose him as her husband. Penelope, besides being disgusted by them, still believed Odysseus would return. Then he did. Then what? Just what you would expect from a two-thousand year old story: Odysseus kills all of the men and reunites with Penelope. And this is what happens in Stan Rice’s novel Plantation Odyssey as well.

 

The local plantation owners (or former owners, as the Union army had displaced them) who lived around the plantation where Penelope (Penny) and Ulysses had been slaves insisted that Penny would choose one of them as her husband and therefore as the owner of the estate. They thought she would choose the one with the best barbecue. Then Ulysses returns disguised as her former servant Minerva (Minnie).  It is so difficult for Ulysses to keep his disguise as Minnie a secret. Minnie just happens to know as much botany as the lost Ulysses did. S/he and Penny put poisonous mushrooms in the barbecue. While the men are sick from toadstool poison, Minnie (who has turned back into Ulysses) kills all of them, including the one decent white man, whom they offered a chance to live but he stayed with his social peers.

Rice’s motivation in this short novel is very clear. He is fantasizing about payback for oppression. Rice is not Black, but (as indicated by his science book Forgotten Landscapes, he is Cherokee, and his science book reflects a clear anger at what whites have done to Native Americans. He apparently identifies with Blacks as well in this novel.

Rice seems to encourage people of color to be resentful of whites. While some readers might think this is not helpful, in this time in which racial tensions are flaring, I agree with the author that the resentment of people of color against white suppression throughout history and even today is justified and has a place in modern literature. We need to hold the white race accountable for what we have done in the past. Donald Trump’s blasts against Juneteenth and Harriet Tubman show that conservatives would still like to suppress white America’s admission of slavery in our history.

I very much doubt that Rice’s novel, even though it celebrates violence against slave owners in the Civil War, will lead to any violence, or even protests, on the part of Blacks which would not have occurred anyway.