Save the Planet? Save the Humans!

Save the Planet! My grammar school teacher implored us before delving into epically boring instruction regarding reducing, reusing and recycling.  That was the 80s, and for more than two decades after that lesson I believed that by being green I was helping to save our beloved planet earth.  Eventually, though, I learned that it was not the earth which needed saving, it was us.

The earth, regardless of what your Sunday School teacher taught you, was not placed in the sun's orbit for humans alone.  As hard as it may be for the millions of narcissists that inhabit this planet to believe, the planet was here for billions of years before we arrived and, barring some monumental advances in technology, will be here for several billion years more after we are long gone.  Humanity poses no risk whatsoever to the survival or long term health of this planet.  We are nothing but a virus, temporarily perturbing our host, but bound to be a forgotten memory shortly after our demise.

Now, environmentalists, don't fret.  My self-centeredness may seem to come at the expense of the movement for environmentalism, but, quite the opposite, it is the best argument for preserving the natural wonder of our planet, considering that our survival as humans is 100% reliant on maintaining the environment. 

Being a pessimist at heart I realize that it is only a matter of when, not if, this planet will no longer be able to support our species.  No one wants to go back to living in the horrible pre-Industrial Revolution era, except the Amish, and that is exactly what it would take to reverse the systematic destruction of this planet being carried out by the human species.  But through changes in behavior and advances in technology we can lengthen the duration of our stay in this ecosystem before we turn it over to cockroaches and rodents.

 

Remember, the planet doesn't need saving and it was (or is) terribly ignorant and narcissistic of you to believe humans would be capable of saving it if it did.  We need saving.  We are killing ourselves (and millions of wondrous creatures at the same time) and we are the only ones who can save us from ourselves.  Don't worry about the planet.  Be Green to Save the Humans!

I'm Racist, You're Racist, Everybody's Racist!

Now, don't get all up in arms, telling me about all the black friends you have (or white, if you're black) or how your nanny was Hispanic or whatever.  By definition, the fact that you categorize people based on race, which, if you were raised in, well, the world, you do, makes you racist.  Here you have taken a thing which actually does not exist, being that the categories of races used in common vernacular are social constructs which may be easily usurped by modern convention, and utilized it to form predispositions about others based purely on appearance.

I don't mean to imply that because you're a big time racist you also actively discriminate based on race.  There are probably more than a billion racists in the world who work every day towards the elimination of race based discrimination.  This doesn't take away from the fact that they're all quite racist, even more so I'm sure, because they are so heavily involved in race related issues. 

For example, if a white woman on a bus keeps an eye on a black man sitting nearby because she fears he may snatch her iPhone, she is no more racist than he is for paying her no mind because he assumes she will sit quietly and keep to herself until her stop.  Regardless of the consequences of these inferences, the fact that they are made based almost exclusively on racial appearance makes both parties equally racist.

Right now you may be asking yourself, "If everyone is racist then why do we still have to talk about race?"

Personally, I choose not to talk about race with people who are unwilling to admit their inherent racism because that conversation is pointless.  It is only when you admit that you're racist that you will finally be able to fully comprehend how much race based discrimination still continues on in every aspect of culture and civilization.  Only then does the conversation about race have any meaning and we can finally begin the multi-generational journey towards a truly post-racial civilization. 

Either that or a compulsory globe-wide inter-breeding program. 

A Brain With A Speaker

There is one unique difference between human brains and the brains of all other animals in this small corner of the galaxy: a capability for conceptualizing the non-existent.  Using this very particular skill our species has developed culture, civilization and essentially everything that it means to be human.

But, how did this happen?  How did we make the jump from having brains that could solve puzzles to brains that could imagine puzzles for solving? 

Obviously the first place to look is the human brain.  It is visibly obvious that the brain of a human is larger, especially in the front, where the most critical thinking takes place, than the brains of our nearest primate cousins and our evolutionary ancestors.  In the time since the shared ancestor of humans and chimpanzees went extinct, the ancestors of modern humans, the hominids, have evolved with a steady rate of brain growth, each time one species making way for another with a considerable mental advantage.  Right up to the end when physically modern humans outlasted and outlived the entrenched Neanderthals of Europe, it was communication which drove the growth of the brain.

Those humans which eventually took Europe from the Neanderthals did so by developing a complex and binding cultural identity, primarily through early religion, which put up a united front against a fragmented Neanderthal population.  Language, the ability to communicate in order to form large, more complex and adaptable societies, made the process of natural selection consistent and predictably in favor of big brains plus one other physical feature: sharp tongues.

Anthropomorphism is all good fun, until somebody actually thinks that an animal with a human brain would be able to talk.  If you switched the brains of a dog and its owner neither of them would be able to say a word.  The dog brain in a human body wouldn't think in words, let alone know how to annunciate them, while the human brain in the dog's body would feel like a recently mute person, totally incapable of phonically conveying the concepts it has envisioned.  The human brain will no doubt soon realize that it takes more than a brain to be able to talk.  The human brain requires an exceptional set of tools to get across to other brains some of the thousands of ideas that flow through it every hour.

But the brain didn't ask for these tools.  The tools came first.  The nasal bark of the dog or meow of the cat severally limits the range of communication these animals are capable of, but don't fret, they're not capable of having very complex thoughts anyhow.  Without the tools for speaking, cats and dogs have never been able to develop brains big enough to form words and ideas, because, like all things evolution, the two occur in tandem.  Even today as we speak, our brains get ever so slightly larger and our mouths (or abilities to use a computer) become ever so slightly better at getting all that large brain info out.

Making the transition from being animals that used our mouths primarily for talking instead of fighting, killing, and eating, had nothing to do with communication at all.  Instead, like most great strides of evolution, it was an environmental change that became the catalyst to begin the human journey.  A large forest, saturating the plains of Eastern Africa for millions of years resulted in a boon of tree living primates which had first evolved in the earlier, more sparse forests of Africa.  There, in that epoch, a great variety of primate species evolved, filling the massive forests to their brim.  Eventually, like all good things, the party came to an end and the forest returned to its standard size.

Many of the new primate species just as quickly went extinct, quickly gobbled up by predators while roaming the plains for new habitats.  Others established dominance over the forests and eventually evolved into modern apes.  The ancestors of humans, though, managed to largely bid adieu to the forest while still surviving.  These new primates, the earliest hominids, were still adept to climbing trees, but had also learned to use their hands for other things, like pulling insects out of the ground, or cracking open large nuts, or scavenging the carcasses left behind by large predators.  This new system worked and the hominid brain was fed well, especially by protein from the marrow and brains of animals left behind by lions, tigers and bears (I know there aren't bears in Africa) that couldn't get to it with their clumsy paws.

Soon a wide variety of primates evolved living outside of the forest and newer species became less adept at climbing trees and more so at using their hands for other, more human things.  This shift completed the long transition from the traditionally quadruped mammal to the fully bipedal hominid, an animal that essentially ceased use of its hands for the purposes of locomotion.  The gait of the biped became remarkably different than that of the quadruped.  Rather then continue to hunch over, as its primate cousins had done for millennia, the hominids began to stand up straight, taking a big step towards developing a speaking brain.

The hair on top of your head is the remnant of nearly an entire body's worth of long, thick, hair sported by the first hominids.  Like their forest dwelling cousins they required the fur to protect from the overbearing African sun when the cover of trees wouldn't do the job.  It only seems logical then that those primates which left the forests to roam the plains would become much more hairier, after being exposed to that much more sun.  Yet, instead the opposite happens, hominids become less and less hairier than their cousins (even though modern humans of all types have just about the same number of hair follicles as chimpanzees) because they unwittingly begin to use another tool for fighting exposure to the sun: they stand up.

If you take your dog for a walk on a nude beach in the blazing St. Maarten sun, at the end of the walk your naked body will have been exposed to 30% of the amount of sun to which your dog was exposed.  Don't worry, you're dog will be fine because of two systems it has evolved to fight all that exposure.  The first, of course, is a body full of dark fur that absorbs most of the light's rays, leaving the dog's epidermis relatively safe.  The second is all that panting.  Dogs, like almost all mammals, don't sweat to cool down.  Instead they use their mouth to create a sort of natural radiator, regulating the temperature of the blood right at that critical point before it heads to the brain to perform its most important work.

In order for this radiator to be effective, the animal must have a sizable snout, a protruding nose that can hold a reserve of cold water, blood and mucus (slightly colder than your dog's nose) which brings down the temperature of all the blood flowing through the carotid rete, the pathway through the back of your mouth for blood headed towards the brain.  Humans, who are even stingier than radiator-bearing mammals about the temperature of the blood en route to the brain, sweat, in order to maintain our blood temperature system-wide.  Not only does sweating make a good alternative to the radiator but it also works much better.  Humans can walk exponentially further with our bipedal gait through the hot sun, without a need for water or the shade, than even our primate cousins, let alone other mammals.  It took a combination of not only the adaptability of the human brain but also the walkability of the human gait and cooling system to inhabit nearly every corner of the globe.

There the elusive connection between the choice to leave the forest and walk on two legs and the ability to speak is made.  It all comes down to sweating, which we can do because we stand upright, and allows us to use our mouths for complex communication rather than as the house for a large radiator.  Once hominids developed the physical tools to relay complex ideas it was only a matter of time until their brains became bigger and thoughts became more complex and ideas began to form about things that did not exist, or at least not yet.  It is at that moment when the mouth becomes a speaker for the brain that the brain begins to develop all sorts of new and imaginative things to broadcast.

Everything But Math Is Fiction

... and even math is, to some degree, a fiction, because we must utilize our made-up language in order to conceptualize it.  For example, π is a real thing.  Amazingly, the circumference of any circle (which is also a real thing) can be found by multiplying half the diameter by π.  But the number 3.14159 and on and on and on is complete fiction.  In fact, it is such fiction that it doesn't even accurately represent the real thing it is intended to symbolize.  Accurately representing π through language is impossible.  We can only create the idea of π rather than actually conveying its true meaning (something impossible to comprehend), and in the same way, this is the problem with all language, and consequently, all of reality.

Language and culture occur simultaneously.  While all things are not literal, in that they are not represented through language, all things are perceived in a literal fashion, through language.  For example, when someone invents something, especially something that is really popular, their concept of what has been invented will always be different than the general consensus of what has been invented.  The language that society adopts is different than the language the "inventor" envisions being used.  Part of this phenomena stems from the fact that things are not "invented", but rather evolve into being as a byproduct of the existence of the conscious mind, and the other part stems from the fact that perception and culture also evolve, and, like physical objects, they are not created by any individual, not even the person accredited with "inventing" the perceived object.

If this is hard to understand then just think of any everyday object like a bicycle.  The bicycle was not invented by any single person.  Even the archetypes of the modern bike assembled in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century were not invented by single persons.  Long before then the wheel was invented, later the ability to form wood and steel, and so on.  The only way a bicycle could have been invented by an individual was if it was assembled in a prehistoric cave somewhere, long before any of the many parts of a bicycle had previously been innovated.  Even then, after the inventor releases the bike into society, it is lo longer his own, as it will undoubtedly be subjected to a perception makeover at the behest of public demand.  Yet, at each of these junctures when an individual had been credited with inventing the bicycle, the accolade was temporary, and the general consensus of what a bicycle is evolved into something far different than what the alleged inventor's concept of a bicycle was, without implying that the two perceptions ever could have been one in the same.

Now, if it is this difficult to reach an agreement about what a physical object really is then how difficult do you think it is to reach an agreement about what really happened over the scope of our shared history?  Historical events are not objects, yet because we must resort to language in order to convey the concept of historical events, they are subjected to the same parameters as physical objects.  On top of that, because we cannot ever reference historical events, considering that only very recently has it become possible to document events with audio and video technology, like we could a bike or any other physical object, language is the only tool we have to understand historical concepts.

Therefore, we must admit that all history outside of math is fiction.  Limited by human language and subjected to cultural perceptions, history told even through first hand audio/video accounts (the physical event) does not align with the histories perceived by the involved agents or the history that will be decided by general consensus, just as the concept of a bike constructed by a mechanic doesn't align with the concept held by the individual to which it is sold.

Human beings are social animals.  All of society is culture.  All of culture is language.  All of language is fiction.  The only non-fiction that exists is math, but even math cannot be factually portrayed by fictional language.