Welcome, Stranger, part one. French, part one.

This is my last essay this year, but I will continue the series in 2024.

As I said in my previous essay, I have just moved to Strasbourg, France. It is a relief to be here, where life is just not as dangerous as in America. In America, there may be more guns than people. And in America, if you need a bottle of Jardiance pills for diabetes, you will have to pay $800, even if you have Medicare and supplemental insurance. In France, it will be a long time before I qualify for French health care, but even if I have to buy pills for myself, it won’t be any freaking $800.

But meanwhile, I am going through a period of adjustment. This is the inspiration for my short series, Welcome, Stranger. Today, the French language.

One problem with the French people is that they speak French. And French is a very difficult language. To people who have grown up speaking it, it is simple, and this is true for any language in the world. My granddaughter, age 5, already talks in French, not thinking about grammar or vocabulary. She just learned it from the other kids at school. She has even gotten the French snotty-sounding R, perhaps a little too much. But for older people like myself, learning a new language is difficult. I have studied French not intensely but consistently for ten years, and I can read it fairly well, and construct a few simple sentences. But a French person speaking at full speed leaves me behind in the dust. I watch Jamy Gourmaud’s Youtube videos, but even at speed 0.75 I can only understand it with the French subtitles.

In Paris, I am told (having been there as briefly as possible on my way to or from Strasbourg), the people pretend to not understand you if you try to speak French. This has led to some comedy routines such as Chef Louis and Garrison Keillor on the old Prairie Home Companion radio shows. Keillor would try to order something off of the menu, and the waiter would get angry at him: “Why did you call my mother a suitcase?” But in Strasbourg, at least, if a native English speaker is quiet, polite, and makes a sincere effort, most people are appreciative. In our suburb, Hoenheim, we are about the only Americans, and my wife and I have the reputation of being the cute little old couple who are trying to speak French.

Don’t get me wrong. French is a wonderful language. Even just to look at it is beautiful. One of the first things you will notice is the diacritical marks. Lots of them. They have two kinds of accent marks for e, one of them rising, the other falling. What is a shepherd? Il élève des moutons. They denote slight differences in pronunciation. Sometimes diacritical marks denote differences in meaning; a means he/she/it has, while à means to. A C with a cedilla means that the C, which would normally sound like a K before vowels a, o, and u, instead sounds like an S: Ça y est! And then there is the circumflex, which as far as I can tell exists only to designate that, in the past, the vowel was followed by an s or an x. In French, forest has become forêt, castle has become château, and hostel has become hôtel. Être used to be like the Spanish estar (to be). When you look at a page of French writing, the diacritical marks poke at you like the piqûres of mosquitoes. It is surely (sûrement) and extremely (extrêmement) thrilling.

And the French love their diacritical marks. Recently the French Academy, the gatekeeper of French language, decided that diacritical marks were unnecessary. But the marks are still everywhere. The French love them because they are part of what it means to be French! You will find them even at tram stops, as in these two photos: the Général DeGaulle tram stop, and the map that says you are here (vous êtes ici).

If the government tried to remove the diacritical marks from public signs, there would probably be a big strike that would shut down the tram lines. Give us back our diacritical marks! Strike is grève, where we get our word grievance.)

 I have more examples in the next essay. See you then.

My Public Apology to the Neanderthals

I have also posted a YouTube video on this subject here.

If there are any Neanderthals reading this blog, I must ask, can you possibly forgive me? I had you all wrong. My voice joined in with the scientific establishment, led by such great scholars as Chris Stringer, in claiming that Neanderthals had no culture. This is very much the image that I presented in my Encyclopedia of Evolution. Apparently we were wrong.

Of course, my dear Neanderthals, I could not believe that a hominin with a brain as large as yours could be stupid. I never said you were stupid—put down that club, I’m trying to explain myself here—but just that you used your intelligence for something other than culture. Like maybe figuring out better ways of hitting each other over the head with clubs—oops, I think I went a little too far right then. But I wrote a novel manuscript (as yet unpublished) in which the heroine was an intelligent Neanderthal woman who lived in Minnesota in the late twentieth century. I can prove that I wrote this! I have a notarized copy of the manuscript from [date]. I’ve been defending your dignity, after a fashion, for many years now. But, you gotta admit, Neanderthals left no cave paintings or artifacts that might suggest art and religion, in stark contrast to the thousands of artifacts and massive painted caves of the Cro-Magnon modern humans.

But the accuracy of the non-cultural view of Neanderthals depends to a large extent on the interpretation of a set of artifacts that are not exactly part of American discourse, not even of intellectual snobs like me—the Châtelperronian artifacts. These artifacts, found in France, date to about forty thousand years ago, right about the time that dark modern humans came up from Africa and encountered the light-skinned, red-haired Neanderthals. The artifacts were found in a deposit that appeared to be of Neanderthal origin. They included some really well-made stone tools and, most fascinating, various bones and shells with holes drilled in them, which were apparently used in necklaces. Most of us scientists preferred to believe that such decorations could not possibly be Neanderthal. We wanted to think that the deposit was actually of modern Homo sapiens origin. Or, if the deposit was from Homo neanderthalensis, we speculated that you Neanderthals stole them from modern humans, or if you made them you were just imitating modern humans.

If we could get DNA from the human bones at this site, we could maybe settle the question. Svante Pääbo has elucidated the Neanderthal genome. But apparently thirty thousand years is about the limit to get DNA from old bones. To get enough DNA from the Châtelperronian bones, it would be necessary to almost completely destroy them. But it turns out that collagen (the protein in cartilage) does not decompose as readily. It was collagen that Mary Higby Schweitzer found in 70-million-year-old T. rex bones. Geneticists Matthew Collins and Frido Welker were able to get enough collagen from the Châtelperronian bones to analyze (Science, 23 September 2016, page 1350). Previous studies have shown that human collagen is rich in the amino acid aspartate, while Neanderthal collagen is rich in asparagine. The Châtelperronian bones had asparagine-rich collagen, identifying them as Neanderthal.

Of course, errors are possible in the reasoning used above. But the most straightforward interpretation, according to Jean-Jacques Hublin, Collins’s and Welker’s collaborator, is to say that Neanderthals made the artifacts.

Please forward a link to this essay to any Neanderthals you know.

Darwin at a Class Reunion

Happy May Day! Workers of the World Unite—not for communism, but to make the world better in whatever way we can.

I have just posted a video in which I, in the persona of Charles Darwin, am briefly addressing the 40^th reunion of our high school class. Lindsay (California) High School, Class of ’75! I made the video expressly for people who were not there and who might be wondering why I would post what seems to be a personal video on my science YouTube channel. I explain the reasoning in the video, but the sound quality leaves something to be desired (echoes from the walls) so I will write a brief essay on the same subject (not a word-for-word transcript; I want to improve on my words).

I begin by asking the question, What adaptation makes humans unique? There are many adaptations that are very highly developed in humans, compared to other animals. The one that first comes to mind is intelligence. We are clearly the most intelligent animal species on the planet (sorry to those of you who still think dolphins are smarter). But what kind of intelligence? Our brains have evolved a particular kind of intelligence. We do have logical intelligence; we can apply our brains to figure out problems logically, but we have to work at it. But the kind of intelligence that comes intuitively and easily to our brains is social intelligence. In high school, I had the reputation of being very intelligent, in the logical sense, but I was surrounded by a lot of peers who had tremendous social intelligence. And I here claim that social intelligence, in which my classmates were at least as good as I was, is humankind’s greatest adaptation.

One kind of social intelligence is what I call horizontal culture: a network of interconnections among animals in which they can help each other out. You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us! This takes a lot of brain power, in order to keep track of each individual and what kind of person each one is. Humans are really, really good at this kind of intelligence. But then, so are dogs and wolves and meerkats and prairie dogs. Ever been in a wolf pack? Neither have I, but we can imagine what it is like. You mess with one of them, you mess with all of them. Humans are really good, but not unique, at having highly-developed horizontal culture.

Another kind of social intelligence is what I call vertical culture, and this is the thing that humans do perhaps better than any other animal species. We can remember—for decades—what our friends are like. Forty years can pass, and we can practically take up where we left off as if no time has passed at all! When I went to my class reunion, I had literally not seen any of those old friends for four decades. (The only ones I had contacted in the meantime were not at the reunion.) Yet there we were, filling each other in on the news of our lives, with cultural bonds undiminished over time. The memories of the time we spent in band, or in Japan during sister-city exchanges, or in Jim Kliegl’s plays, were still fresh.

Perhaps the most unique feature of human vertical culture is we remember our friends and loved ones who have died. Carolyn, who organized the reunion (thanks forever for that!), set up a little memorial for our friends who had died. Does any other species of animal do this? I have read that elephants remember their dead. If you play back a recording of a beloved elephant that has died, the other members of the herd will display actions and sounds that seem, to us, like grief. But we humans are much better at this than elephants. Our social intelligence allows us to not just remember those who have gone before but lots of things about them. And to love them forever.

Our old Spanish teacher, Jesse Guerrero, told us, regarding the invitation to join our reunion, “I needed this.” Social bonds over time are as necessary to our brains as is food and oxygen. All of us at the reunion, not just Jesse, need this. And all of the rest of the readers of this blog.

My reunion was not just enjoyable but it gave me a deep satisfaction to participate in this deeply satisfying and uniquely human experience.

Our Common Humanity

I have just a brief thought this time. It is about our common humanity. All races and cultures share a lot more things than not. While this fact should be obvious, especially to those who know the fact that all modern humans evolved from a single population that lived in Africa between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, scholars in the social sciences seem to not always be aware of it.

One theory that is important among linguists is that human languages are so different from one another that people raised in different cultures and speaking different languages cannot hope to really understand one another. But I suspect this theory (which appears to be less popular now than it was a few decades ago) is wrong, because the fundamentals of human nature had already evolved in that ancestral African population, all members of which spoke a single language. No matter how much linguistic evolution has occurred since that time, all people and all peoples have had more or less the same things to talk about. While some phrases may remain forever untranslatable from one language to others, the ideas and feelings are universal. At least, this seemed to be the impression in a hallway discussion among students a couple of decades ago. An upper middle-class white student, a working-class white-Native American student, two Indonesian Muslim women students, and a Taiwanese student discussed this idea, which they heard in a lecture given by a Francophone African professor. How could they do so if they were culturally unable to relate to one another? Of course, humans are not all alike, but there are more differences between individuals in a culture than between cultures.

I suspect that 2014 is going to be a wild year for human relationships, with a lot of strife within countries and between them. If we see another artificial government fiscal cliff in America, as we did in 2013, the thin glue of altruism may not prevent our society from fracturing. We need to repeat, and keep repeating, the truth that all humans share a psychological core of ideas and feelings, of which altruism is one of the most prevalent, especially when political and social leaders preach intolerance. We have to keep telling this to ourselves, because the people who like to emphasize the differences, and create fractures, are so much more noticeable. For every Islamist suicide bomber, there is a Malala Yousefzai; for every petty African dictator like Kenneth Mugabe, there is a Nelson Mandela; and for every bloviating Republican like Rush Limbaugh, there is a reasonable Republican like Mickey Edwards. Well, it is possible that the bad people outnumber the good, but there are still plenty of good people almost anywhere you look. And (I’m telling myself) instead of getting angry at the dividers (to whom strife is a nutrient), we need to keep in contact with the uniters.