Evolution

Competition versus Collaboration: Time to Evolve from the Dog Eat Dog World of Darwinism (Part 1)

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“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle. “

Dr. Francis Crick ~ Nobel prize-winning co-discoverer of the DNA double helix.

Happy New Year! I sincerely hope 2023 will be filled with hope, health, abundance and joy for you.

I haven’t written in almost a year, I spent most of the last twelve months in crisis management mode, one of the toughest of my life in many ways. Thankfully, among the relentless traumatic personal challenges there were a few uplifting moments. I had to dig deep. My energy tanks were laid to waste.

I have a painted wooden plaque on my office wall that reads: Every day may not be good, but there’s good in every day. I find it’s just as relevant for weeks, months and years!

But like negotiating any deep valley that feels interminably arduous; seemingly beyond your physical, emotional and mental capabilities and endurance, if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep climbing, no matter how slowly, you will eventually clear the valley and reach a low level peak.

When you reach more and more accessible peaks, they eventually lead to a sky-touching peak. Your personal Everest. It’s what you do when you find yourself in a valley that determines how high the next peaks could be.

I like to think I’m entering what Dr. Benjamin Hardy terms a ‘post-traumatic growth’ state.

I thought I would kick-start my blog this year with a profound subject that has implications for all of us: the origin and meaning of life.

I hear you, am I really going there?!

I suspect ‘evolution’ will prove to be a thorny issue, but that’s no reason to shy away from it. This subject is a multi-disciplinary minefield; encompassing anthropology, archaeology, cosmology, evolutionary biology, philosophy, psychology, theology and quantum mechanics.

I suspect it will engender more questions than it answers, but asking the right questions and opening minds to a bigger discussion is a good starting point.

I never believed the literal story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. To me, its power is allegorical. And it really annoyed me that Eve got the blame for Man’s fall from Grace!

However, Darwin’s theory of evolution never sat right with me either. What did I know, a mere slip of a girl being taught science… I must admit though, many of the boys in our school displayed definite ape-like qualities…

It just seems so random (if you’ll excuse the pun) that human beings and indeed – all of life– is the result of a chance event that happened millennia ago, as conventional science suggests. Dr. Francis Crick surmised that the eloquence of life’s building blocks has to be the result of something more than a lucky quirk of nature.

Not believing in either explanation left a gaping hole in my mind as to the origins of Homo sapiens, aka Anatomical Modern Humans (AMHs). Scientists broadly agree that we originated around 200-300 thousand years ago. Cro-Magnon Man was the previous term. There are no discernible genetic differences between AMH’s and humans alive today.

After reading on the subject I’ve come to a personal subjective conclusion that Creation and Evolution are likely one and the same thing. All of nature, (including us), is unfolding in a myriad of glorious mysterious ways.

Homo sapiens are the only species who can consciously evolve. We can regulate our biology and have awareness (to varying degrees) of our emotional states and intuition. This knowledge alone empowers us to make positive changes and healthy progress in our lives. But, as I can attest, knowing and doing are two different things.

We can choose how to react in a given moment, and have the capacity to access deep states of intuition; something animals do instinctively through external environmental triggers.

We already have some of the answers needed to solve many global issues, but short-term selfish interests and lack of international co-operation have so far impeded the rapid progress needed.

The world is changing faster than we have been culturally conditioned to accept – in just one generation – and the challenges are set to exponentially increase if we don’t get a handle on the damage we are doing to the environment. No one alive has witnessed the cyclic convergence of climate, economy, conflict, geopolitics and health to the extent that we are currently experiencing.  No one can dispute that we are living in a time of extremes.

As Einstein so eruditely pointed out, we cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it in the first place. It’s time to ‘upgrade our story’ and therefore our level of consciousness.  

Our fundamental beliefs about who we are, how we got here and how to make the best of our lives underpin our individual and collective behaviour. A re-writing of the human story is long overdue…

Re-examining human origins to better navigate an uncertain future

It will become glaringly obvious that I’m not a fan of scientific materialism or reductionist thinking. I’m more of a Panpsychism kind of girl, erring towards matter from consciousness and the Holographic Universe theory.

I believe that clinging blindly to Darwin’s theory of evolution will not cut the mustard if we are to survive and thrive beyond this precarious, liminal time for our species.  

Darwin is still gospel in mainstream scientific circles, and continues to be taught in school to my children’s generation. How would we view, I wonder, in this day and age, groups of people who still used a horse and cart to get from one place to another instead of using a car, train or bus? It would certainly expose them to derision. Yet this is what we are doing by doggedly clinging to Darwinism.

This series of posts is all about exploring new scientific data and establishing a more nuanced, honest and helpful story of our origins and capabilities that will better serve our collective future.

It’s not about debunking Darwin’s theory as more updating and modifying the knowledge that we have. Darwin did the best he could with the technology and observational skills at his disposal during his era. He was a brilliant man. Darwinian Theory should be regarded as a stepping stone rather than a religious doctrine. After all, Darwin had no knowledge of DNA…

Sacrilege I hear you say!

I didn’t set out to be deliberately iconoclastic, merely to search for the truth. Free-thinking is an underrated skill that is not well represented in the current educational curriculum. We tend to indoctrinate rather than empower creativity and curiosity.

Much of the reading I’ve done around evolution has challenged my own previously indoctrinated world view. But on reflection, what I’ve read makes total sense. I’m open to a new narrative on evolution.

Why shouldn’t we question and explore an unproven theory that has in mainstream quarters been falsely accepted as unequivocal truth?

Darwin himself doubted that his theory might not be enough to explain the complexity of life.

Darwin’s acolytes cherry picked the parts of his theory that they wanted to believe, and speculation was taught as fact. Various institutions and the people that supported them held his work as sacrosanct, and attempted to make Darwin’s work into something he himself never intended it to be. They employed his theory for purposes he never foresaw or intended.

“If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications” – the hallmark of evolution – “my theory would absolutely break down.”

Charles Darwin ~ Origin of Species 1859

Darwin himself in his twilight years moved away from academic Darwinism. He began to focus instead on the evolution of love, altruism and the genetic roots of human kindness over survival and struggle. He also gave credit to Jean Baptise Lamarck and his concept of the environment as the driving force in evolution.

Alfred Russell Wallace deserves more credit than history bestowed on him – as Darwin became the poster boy for Natural Selection and the theory of evolution. In his book, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, published in 1870, Wallace makes the following observation: “Natural Selection would only have endowed savage man with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one very little inferior to that of the philosopher.”

In other words, our species is over-endowed!

Among Darwin’s detractors it wasn’t just the church who opposed Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, scientists who were Darwin’s peers and in the century and a half preceding have also disagreed with his findings.

Their voices also deserve to be heard:

“Darwin’s theory is not inductive-not based on a series of acknowledged facts pointing to a general conclusion.” ~

Adam Sedgwick (1785 – 1873), Cambridge University – British Geologist and one of the founders of modern geology.

“There are…absolutely no facts either in the records of geology, or in the history of the past, or in the experience of the present, that can be referred to as proving evolution, or the development of one species from another by selection of any kind whatever.”

Louis Agassiz (1807 – 1873) Harvard University – American Geologist

“The theory suffers from grave defects, which are becoming more and more apparent as time advances. It can no longer square with practical scientific knowledge, nor does it suffice for our theoretical grasp of the facts… No one can demonstrate that the limits of a species have ever been passed. These are the rubicons which evolutionists cannot cross… Darwin ransacked other spheres of practical research work for ideas… But his whole resulting scheme remains, to this day, foreign to scientifically established zoology, since actual changes of species by such means are still unknown.”

Albert Fleischmann (1862 – 1942) University of Erlangen – German Zoologist

“Evolution became in a sense a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to ‘bend’ their observations to fit with it.”

H.S. Lipson (1910 – 1991) University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology – British Phycist

“Evolution is the backbone of biology and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on unproven theory. Is it then a science or a faith? Belief in the theory of evolution is thus exactly parallel to belief in special creation. Both are concepts which the believers know to be true, but neither, up to the present, has been capable of proof.” ~

Leonard Harrison Matthews (1901 – 1986) Cambridge University – British Zoologist

“The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from materials therein. I am at a loss to understand biologists’ widespread compulsion to deny what seems to me to be obvious.”

Sir Fred Hoyle (1915 – 2001) Cambridge University – British Astronomer, formed the theory of Stellar Nucleosynthesis

“Ultimately the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more or less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century. The truth is that despite the prestige of evolutionary theory and the tremendous intellectual effort towards reducing living systems to the confines of Darwinian thought, nature refuses to be imprisoned. In the final analysis we still know very little about how new forms of life arise. The ‘mystery of mysteries’ – the origin of new beings on earth – is still largely as enigmatic as when Darwin set sail on the Beagle.”

Michael Denton (1943-) British Biochemist, Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture

“But how do you get from nothing to such an elaborate something if evolution must proceed through a long sequence of intermediate stages, each favoured by natural selection? You can’t fly with two percent of a wing or gain much protection from an iota’s similarity with a potentially concealing piece of vegetation. How, in other words, can natural selection explain the incipient stages of structures that can only be used (as we now observe them) in much more elaborated form?”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002) Harvard University – American Paleontologist and Evolutionary Biologist

“The point, however, is that the doctrine of evolution has swept the world, not on the strength of its scientific merits, but precisely in its capacity as a Gnostic myth. It affirms, in effect, that living beings create themselves, which is, in essence, a metaphysical claim… Thus, in the final analysis, evolutionism is in truth a metaphysical doctrine decked out in scientific garb.”

Wolfgang Smith (1930-) American Mathematician and Physicist

“The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonised reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident is zero.”

Ilya Prigogne (1917 – 2003) Belgian Physical Chemist and Nobel prize winner

“All of us who study the origin of life find that the more we look into it, the more we feel that it is too complex to have evolved anywhere.”

Harold Urey (1831 – 1981) Nobel Prize-winning Chemist

Mathematicians have calculated that the probability for the existence of a common DNA molecule is one in a centillion, (or 1 with 600 zeros after it).

Mathematical challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution from the Hoover Institute:

Dissent from Darwin is an online declaration signed by 1,371 esteemed scientists from around the world (as of July 2015), in essence saying that as far as they are concerned the mystery of our origins is not yet solved.

Maybe the reason debates and discussion around evolutionary theory can be highly contentious and controversial is because the theory has deep moral, social, and religious implications, as well as being presented as scientific fact even though conflicting issues have yet to be resolved.

Darwin’s theory of evolution appeared to fit what he saw happening for one life form in one specific part of the world (the finches of the Galapagos Islands), he tried to generalise the theory to apply to all life everywhere, including humankind.

While the connections between ancient primates and modern humans on the evolutionary family tree are thought to exist, they have never been proven as fact – they are inferred and speculative connections up to this point in time.

No fossils that reflect an unbroken evolutionary journey from primates to more human-like beings have been discovered!

“Within the period of human history we do not know of a single instance of the transformation of one species into another.” ~ .

Thomas Morgan (winner of 1933 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine & author of Evolution and Adaptation)

Morgan’s findings should serve as a warning of wholeheartedly embracing the theory of human evolution.

New scientific evidence is suggesting that certain physical features – including our eyes, our advanced nervous systems, and our brains – were already functional when anatomical modern humans (AMHs) arose around two hundred thousand years ago casts doubt on Darwin’s theory as it pertains to humankind.

The strange thing is that Darwin himself acknowledged the irony in the lack of physical evidence to support his theory. This could be explained in one of two ways: Either the geologists were interpreting the history of the earth incorrectly, or he himself had made an error in his interpreted observations that became the foundation of his theory.

Again, in Darwin’s own words from Origin of Species:

“Why does not every collection of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the gradation and mutation of the forms of life? We meet with no such evidence, and this is the most obvious and forcible of the many objections which may be urged against my theory.”

Charles Darwin

Mutation of the FOXP2 gene

Saturday, February 28th 1953 was an important day for modern science. James Watson and Francis Crick announced to their colleagues over lunch in a Cambridge pub, “We have discovered the secret of life.” They had just discovered the double helix pattern of the DNA molecule – nature’s code for life.

Our DNA exists in every cell of our body, in structures that are called chromosomes. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes in our cells. Each chromosome is made of smaller, precise physical markers called genes. These are our physical blueprints.

The Human Genome Project revealed that we have around 23,000 genes, roughly the same number as a worm and a fruit fly. This finding floored scientists, who expected the number to be more like 100,000. Since then genetic mapping has revealed that we share 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, 50 percent with a fruit fly, 80 percent with a cow, and 90 percent with a common house cat. It begged the question, if we have so much in common genetically with other creatures, then why are we so different from them?

The answer being that a single gene can be activated in different ways, and to different degrees, to do different things. In other words, it’s how our genes are activated, or expressed.

In 2009 a study was published in the journal Nature regarding the mutation of the FOXP2 gene, which is linked to our ability to form complex speech and language.  The FOXP2 gene is found in both humans and chimpanzees, yet there is something in the way the FOXP2 gene expresses in humans that enables us to communicate in sophisticated forms of language.

According to Wolfgang Enard of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology the mutation of this gene “happened in the same time frame when modern humans evolved.”

The speed and precision of the mutations in FOXP2, occurring in just the right two places in the DNA code is an example of the kind of change that does not lend itself to the theory of evolution as we currently understand it. Science cannot tell us what caused the change.

How do we account for what appears to be more of a spontaneous evolution?

The mystery of Human Chromosome 2 (HC2)

When scientists compared our chromosomes to our nearest primate relatives they discovered that chimpanzees have 48 chromosomes, compared with the 46 found in humans, which seemed to suggest humans were missing two chromosomes.

Advanced DNA sequencing technology has highlighted what wasn’t obvious before: that our missing DNA isn’t missing at all. The ‘missing’ DNA has always been present, however it has been modified and arranged to show that the second largest chromosome in the human body (HC2), actually contains smaller ‘missing’ chromosomes found in the chimp genome.

At some point in the past, for reasons that remain unknown and controversial, two separate chimp chromosomes got combined into a single larger chromosome that is our human chromosome 2.

This discovery revealed a deeper mystery. According to this scientific article the fusion did not occur! This would suggest some form of intentionality in our evolution.

To me a directed mutation makes the most sense, which acknowledges that some force or intelligence contributed towards the precision, timing and refining of the mutations that make us who we are. It opens what scientists have dubbed a ‘Pandora’s Box of possibilities’. The box has been opened by science, and the contents cannot be stuffed back in…

The Directed Mutation idea takes us into the realm of fields and unseen forces and an unseen intelligence that scientific materialism has been unwilling to consider. This premise can be explored in the mysterious realm of Quantum Mechanics. I’ll be exploring that further in the next post. Another theory being considered is the Stoned Ape Hypothesis.

Irreducible complexity

The profound depth and complexity of life would not have been something that Darwin, Lamarck, or British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace would have had had the ability to know, no scientist in the late 1800s nor early 1900s could have.

Irreducible complexity means that if any portion of a system stops working, the entire system fails. Could the human cell be the single most complex piece of machinery ever to exist?

There are a myriad of processes that are happening at any given moment in a cell, and when you consider the human body contains around 50 trillion cells, and this cellular structure works in harmony to enable us to go about our lives, it is all the more remarkable. The DNA of life is based upon order and structure and the sharing of information that tell our cells what to do and when to do it. In Nature this kind of order is viewed as a sign of intelligence.

A more in-depth article on irreducible complexity.

Darwinism has inculcated the ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude into society, which explains why it is currently so toxic. Our social, cultural and economic systems have been built on unhealthy and shaky foundations over the last 150 years. It has lead to scientific materialism, the belief that we are just machines, as are animals, and the world is a non-living entity, entirely at our disposal. It is devoid of a reverence for life.

The Darwinian story of our origins speaks to our lower selves: we are random accidents and have no purpose or meaning other than a biological collection of matter that can only survive if we dominate others. This is the message being taught to impressionable children, when their foundational beliefs are being formed.

We see this principle at work in politics, economics and conflict in individuals and groups determined to reach power and hold onto it at all costs. Power over others and for its own sake and to cause suffering. These destructive human traits are given credence by Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism.

Talk about expressing our ‘selfish genes’! We live in the dysfunctional paradigm of scientific materialism.

The philosopher Herbert Spenser developed social Darwinism, and is also credited with the term survival of the fittest. The tragic implications of his theory enabled the Holocaust – the improving of humanity, the purifying of the race by winnowing out perceived genetic weakness and inferiors. Taken to its fullest application Darwinian theory underpinned the state sanctioned science and violence of Nazi Germany.

Moving from scientific materialism and the age of self-indulgence to a more harmonious way of being can help us usher in the age of self-responsibility. British scientist Timothy Lenton has described how, despite the sun warming by 25 percent since life on earth began around 3.8 billion years ago, our planet has somehow managed to regulate its climate and buffer that huge disparity. Lenton further suggested that evolutionary traits that benefit the system as a whole tend to be reinforced, while those that harm or destabilise the environment in an unfavourable way are restrained.

It is thought that the population of Earth will peak at around 10.4 billion people in the 2080s (along with the resulting needs for land, water, food and resources), and will thereafter decline. What is not commonly known perhaps, is that birth rates and fertility have been falling steadily since 1962 as measured by the UN. The rate of decline is much more steep currently.

World Bank statistics show that global fertility rates have dropped 57% since 1960 to below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman to sustain the population. Twenty seven countries now have fewer people than they did in 2010. Fifty nations are expecting declines to continue through 2050. The main concern on the fertility front is related to sperm concentrations, which have dropped from an average of 99 million/ml in 1970 to 47 million/ml in 2011 and are now around 40 million/ml, where conception is considered a rare occurrence.

This is not surprising considering the levels of stress, sedentary lifestyles, toxins in foods and environmental pollutants (such as forever chemicals PFAS) that we are exposed to. These toxins accumulate in our organs. Classed as anti-androgens, they can lower testosterone and the quality of sperm and eggs.

If scientific materialism’s days aren’t numbered then ours certainly are. A path towards Holism and more holistic lifestyles would benefit society immeasurably. And it all starts with our basal paradigm, the story of who we are.

Until next time!

“If an organism acquires a mutation that causes it to behave in an anti-Gaian’ manner, its spread will be restricted in that it will be at an evolutionary disadvantage.”

Timothy Lenton

Birth of a Nation: How did Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness Come About?

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“Still I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain (what I consider the most enviable of all titles) the character of an honest man.”

George Washington to Alexander Hamilton on August 28, 1788

The world collectively held its breath as the election for the 46th President of the United States of America was held during November, and has subsequently been rumbling on over the entire month. For interminable days it seemed to hang on a knife edge, and now, thankfully, Joe Biden has unequivocably emerged as the victor. But the election has been embroiled in quite a circus…

During such times of upheaval and turmoil around the world it’s essential that we have a grown-up in the White House rather than a self-inflated, messianic enfant terrible.

Trump has thrown multiple tantrums about how unfair democracy is, and has behaved like a desperate despot wanting to cling to power at any cost. It’s damaging not just for America, (being the beacon of freedom and democracy that it is in the world), but also for global democracy, when the perceived leader of the free world acts like some third-world, tin-pot dictator by refusing (until recently), to collaborate with the incoming administration for the good of the nation.

What kind of example is that?

Trump’s antics over the last four years have brought the Office of President into disrepute. His legacy is a litany of lies and ‘fake news’ accusations, the desecration of values, the demolition of decency, the destruction of integrity, willful ignorance around environmental issues, mishandling of the pandemic and the spread of division, hate, racial tensions and the complete polarisation of a nation.

The man (and I hope someday woman), serves the office, not the reverse!

There is still a way to go before the vote is certified and thankfully the unnecessary and baseless legal challenges from the incumbent president have been thrown out. His apparent denial of the facts and manner of departure will further test America’s democracy.

“The Constitution was designed not to give us rights but to prevent government from taking our rights.”

Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights

Biden strikes me as a man of competence, common-sense, caring and humility – a breath of fresh air to Trump’s insouciant attitude toward responsibility, and his unrepentant vanity and hubris.

America, and (like ripples travelling across a pond) to a lesser extent the world, is reeling from the onslaught of an egomaniac and chancer tyrant. The fact that more people have voted in the 2020 election, (close to 150 million people) than at any other time in its 244 year history as the United States of America speaks volumes.

Balance must be restored – now the scales can start tipping towards the safer mid-point. How much damage has been done remains to be seen, and Biden is right to suggest that the nation needs to heal.

The fact that sanity has prevailed is in no small measure due to the principles and values that the Founding Fathers employed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. These documents are sacred and integral to the founding of the United States of America. They are the bedrock and cornerstone of America’s power and prosperity.

But the severance of the colonies from George III’s distant rule was far from smooth. After the dust had settled from the Revolutionary War, a handful of men courageously saw a vision of what their nation could become.

The founding of the United States has been an incredible experiment in the evolution of human civilisation.

With its isolated geopolitical borders the United States of America was free from outside interference once they had eliminated servitude to the British monarchy. Inspired by the sheer unlimited potential and opportunities for a better life, a wave of immigration seeded the nation with a diverse population – an ideal cultural petri dish for the growth of the New World.

By looking to the microcosm of America we can apply the knowledge, wisdom and learning of human civilisation and evolution to the macrocosm – the world at large.

The only pre-existing cultural personality in the newly formed United States of America was that of the native Indian populations, it was still early days for the first generations of settlers, but their spirit of adventure, innovation and discovery has certainly permeated down through the centuries.

Unlike the more established nations across Europe, (where citizens were limited by their highly stratified caste-like society and hierarchy of power, usually predicated by blood lineage), America was a blank canvas for her citizens, where, on paper at least, all men were created equal; endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  

In the United States Declaration of Independence, for instance, it was stated with great clarity by the originators that the rights of man stem from the divinity of their creation, and thus was established the principle of spirituality. However they differentiated this from religion by saying that citizens are to be free from the establishment of any religion. The founders were aware that religion divides and is based on secular power, whereas, spirituality unites and has no worldly organization.”

Dr. David R Hawkins

Sadly, these lofty ideals have not always proved the lived experience for many with darker skins, those of the ‘fairer sex’ or other minority groups. There is plenty of unfinished business, hence still, even in the 21st century, the #BlackLivesMatter movement was deemed necessary to attain a fairer, more egalitarian society. But the values are at least enshrined in its founding, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and therefore inextricable from the nation’s cultural and social evolution.  

The values and courage of the Founding Fathers

The Deistic Enlightenment philosophy that was sweeping through 1700s Europe, as espoused by its leading philosophers such as John Locke, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (whose raptures of ‘free’ noble savages intrigued many), resonated with Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

“These men (who signed the Declaration) were the most idealistic and determined among the colonists. While the conservatives of the day argued that America should remain a colony of England forever, these liberal radicals believed in both individual liberty and societal obligations.”

Thom Hartmann

Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Hancock and the other 56 delegates who signed the Declaration of Independence did so knowing that they would pilloried, ostracised, suffer financial hardship, ruin and possibly death. This act was no tea party!

Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull c. 1819

When they wrote: ‘We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes, our Sacred Honor’ they were legally marking themselves as traitors, knowing the penalty for treason was death. Patrick Henry’s passionate statement, “Give me liberty or give me death!” was not merely hyperbole. When Benjamin Franklin said to his fellow revolutionaries, “We must all hang together or we shall most assuredly hang separately,” he was speaking literally.

John Hancock was the wealthiest of the American revolutionaries, with a net worth of around $750,000 in today’s dollars. Another wealthy signatory, Thomas Nelson of Virginia, had his lands and home seized by the British and died penniless at the age of 50. Hartmann purports that 9 of the 56 signers lost their lives in the war and 17 lost their homes and fortunes.

Hartmann further explains: “While many of the conservative Tory families still have considerable wealth and power (in Canada and England), not a single founder’s family persists today as a wealthy or politically dominant entity.”

It was inevitable that cynical attacks would be made on their characters in the years since the founding of the nation. They were not perfect human beings; their personalities contained flaws and contradictions like the rest of us – however, their hearts were in the right place. It’s worth remembering that this enlightened band of brothers stood up to what was then the greatest power in the world – the British Empire.

Their Deist beliefs meant that the Declaration of Independence encapsulated Natural Law: the notion that ordinary humans could be equal sovereign citizens who endow government with authority, instead of the other way around.

The tenets of Natural Law

In 1661 English philosopher Thomas Hobbes published his work, Leviathan, which attempted to codify Natural Law into 9 principles:

  1. Seek peace first, use war as a last resort.
  2. Be willing to offer the same freedom to others as to oneself.
  3. Keep your agreements.
  4. Practice gratitude.
  5. Accommodate your own needs to the laws of the community.
  6. As appropriate, forgive those who repent.
  7. In the case of revenge, focus not on the great evil of the past but the greater good to follow.
  8. Never declare hatred of another.
  9. Acknowledge the equality of others.

John Locke sought to hold governments accountable to these principles. In his Two Treatises of Government which was initially published anonymously in 1689 he suggested that if a ruler went against these natural laws and failed to protect ‘life, liberty and property’ the populace could justifiably overthrow a government. It happened in France in 1789, and heads rolled as a consequence…

One could argue that Brexit has removed some of our rights and liberties.

Jefferson used Locke’s arguments when he crafted the Declaration of Independence. But the Enlightenment philosophers were not the only influence on the Founding Fathers. Locke and Rousseau got their ideas from the Native’s New World.

Quite a circle of serendipity…

The ideals of human perfection existed in Europe since the golden age of Greece, but the idea of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness never actualised from an abstract concept to reality in Socrates’ world of form.

The first reports of the ways and customs of the native peoples of the Americas showed the concepts of democracy and balance of power were well established in these cultures at least 400 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Some say as early as 1100, but there are accounts from the 1400s to 1500s of  six tribes that lived in what is now the northeastern United States, Southern Ontario and Quebec, a people who came together to form what was known as the Iroquois Confederacy.

The Iroquois Confederacy

Hiawatha was instructed by an elder named Two-Rivers to negotiate peace between the warring tribes. He proposed a League of Peace and Power to bring the tribes together. The result of this historic gathering bore the League of Haudenosaunee, meaning ‘people of the long house’.

“Every human longs for peace and love.”

Hiawatha

The confederacy was comprised of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca tribes, later accepting the Tuscaroras who migrated from the Carolinas. Through this confederacy, six diverse nations managed to live in relative peace and harmony through a remarkable political system that was the forerunner to the United States Constitution.

Seneca – Chief Red Jacket of the Iroquois League

There are many similarities between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Constitution: namely the devolvement of power in the federal system – just as tribes maintained autonomy in regard to local issues.

A mutual-defense pack provided a strong multi-tribe nation to protect against their enemies. It conserved lives, energy and resources that would otherwise have been spent in waging war with each other. The confederacy also employed a sophisticated system of checks and balances between three governmental branches.

The Iroquois Nation of colonial America believed in freedom of expression, provided that expression caused no harm.

Whereas Western civilisation was more guilt orientated, tribal culture was more shame-orientated – a strong identification within the community motivated individuals to avoid transgressions that might bring shame on them and their clan.

“Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.”

George Washington

The influence of Native American culture was profound and far-reaching on the early colonists, particularly those who grew up in the New World rather than England. The colonists adopted indigenous customs such as bathing, not considered a healthy practice across much of Europe at the time.

In Iroquois tribal society authority flowed from the ground up, not from the top down.  

Thomas Jefferson was deeply influenced by Native American wisdom, as his father Peter was a cartographer. They would go off on excursions together and Peter and would have meetings at their home in Virginia with the Cherokee chief Ontassete which young Tom possibly witnessed.

Franklin, Adams and Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence in 1776 by Jean-Leon Gerome

Why the Fourth of July?

The 4th July is an auspicious date indeed. It is known that on the 4th July 1776, the Continental Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence that had been largely drafted by Thomas Jefferson.

However, some 32 years prior on the 4th July 1744, an important meeting took place that was also fundamental to the founding of the United States of America. A charismatic chief from the Iroquois Nation, Canassatego, met with the the English colonists to forge an alliance between the colonists and the Iroquois against the French.

He spoke of unity:

“Our wise forefathers established union and amity between the Five Nations. This has made us formidable. This has given us great weight and authority with our neighboring nations. We are a powerful confederacy and, by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire much strength and power; therefore, whatever befalls you, don’t fall out with one another.”    

Benjamin Franklin, present at the meeting relayed a powerful example that Canassatego demonstrated to the colonists, describing how the chief held up an arrow and easily snapped it in two. He then lashed together twelve arrows, (one for every one of 12 colonies represented at the meeting), and even the strongest man in the room could not break them.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Great Seal of the United States, designed in 1782 by Charles Thomson, depicts an eagle clutching thirteen arrows in his claws.

Obverse Great Seal

And it has a certain poetic justice that the President is referred to as the Commander-in-Chief!

In 1751 Franklin began his campaign for a federal union, writing: “It would be a very strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages, and yet a like union should be impractical for ten or a dozen English colonies.” Aside from his jibe at ‘ignorant savages’, Franklin expressed admiration for Iroquois political practise. And thus, a new republic was created based on Native tribal wisdom.   

It’s disappointing but not altogether surprising, that information explaining the role of Native American culture on the founding of the United States was repressed until the seventies.

Soundtrack to the film 1492 – Conquest of paradise by Vangelis

How about this for a tragic and sobering statistic:

When Christopher Colombus discovered the New World in 1492 it was estimated there were around 6 million Native Americans living across the continent. Some argue there were many more, upwards of 20 million. But the white settlers brought with them a host of big city ‘plagues’ that were new to them, such as smallpox, measles and syphilis. The native population had no immunity to these diseases. In addition to the ravages of disease, other factors compounded their fate; warfare, forced migration, outright slaughter and a massive white land grab. By 1900 the Native American population had been reduced to around 250,000 souls.  

“You can’t justify the whole conquest and subjugation and destruction of Indian populations if there are things of value in the people you are destroying.”

Donald Grinde

The forgotten Founding Mothers

Although Franklin and the Founding Fathers acknowledged the contributions of the Iroquois Nation, they left out the specific role of tribal women in America’s Constitution. Maybe this was a step too far, and would not have been accepted at the time. Too often women’s role in history is brushed under the carpet or concealed. We should not overlook the importance and influence of the Council of Grandmothers.  

In Iroquois culture the Earth, plants and land were perceived as feminine in character – older women were responsible for the basics of life – growing and preparing food, birthing and nurturing children and the domestic work of the community.

This work was of value and the men recognised and appreciated the women’s fundamental power. A far cry from the underrated role of modern mothers. It was in everyone’s interest for the clan to be successful.

The clan was usually headed up by an older woman. Property and land was collectively owned by the clans and enough food grown to feed all of their members. It was a broadly egalitarian society and the Iroquois men understood the need for men and women to achieve unity and work together in balance and harmony.

True political power was in the hands of the grandmothers, who possessed the authority to select a chief and also to impeach him for wrongdoing or incompetence. The original impeachers!

The women even made the final decision about whether or not to go to war. When women were past childbearing age they became clan mothers and would often accompany war parties. They could be just as ruthless as men with enemy tribes outside the confederacy, especially when it involved the abduction of clan children. Maternal instincts can be as brutal as they are nurturing when required!

It seems that the clan mothers may have inspired the early 19th American feminists, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who had contact with and learnt from Iroquois women.

Mother Earth and Father Sky came out of balance as patriarchy retained all the power in Western civilisation. The disconnection from the sacred feminine enabled the plundering of Earth’s resources, and put us out of touch with the natural world.

As usual, Marina’s lyrics are spot on:

“The world has never yet seen a truly virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at the source.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The pursuit of happiness (as defined by the Iroquois Confederacy), was held in balance as long as citizens did not cause harm to others. One could argue that the pursuit of happiness has taken on a darker, materialistic slant in so much as corporate greed is running rampant with no regard for the consequence to human life and the planet. But that’s a subject for a new post!

In the meantime, even with all the turbulence and turmoil around us, as much as you can – be happy!

Facing an Uncertain Future in the Age of Humans – Part 2

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“Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad, or an economist.”
~ Sir David Attenborough

So far 2020 seems to be throwing everything but the kitchen sink at us… Humanity is lurching from surviving environmental paroxysms to coping with germ warfare!

Since I last posted the Coronavirus has become a serious global health threat, possibly a pandemic, if infection rates continue to grow and the mortality rate increases. Risk of death rises with age, diabetes and heart disease. 

The hubris of Homo sapiens

There is no doubt that our species has achieved some truly amazing feats.

But we have made many mistakes too, some with serious ramifications. Man’s innate curiosity led him to explore his surroundings and then spread further afield until he covered the planet in his search for a better life for his ‘tribe’.

But the current hegemony of Homo sapiens will be short lived, in evolutionary terms, if we don’t have the humility and hindsight to take responsibility for how we got here.

“It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then.”
~ David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

We must now harness the creative and critical thinking edge that the Cognitive Revolution birthed, and that catapulted us into the Anthropocene, to figure out how we can repair much of the destruction left in our wake; now that we have woken up to the fact that it threatens our survival.

One could argue that our rise to the Age of Humans is ‘progress’, a necessary evolution, but such progress comes with responsibilities. We cannot accept a continuing  attitude that the end justifies the means. Unless we curb and alter our progress it will prove to be the road to perdition for Homo sapiens.

Homo sapiens means ‘wise man’, but for a species credited with such erudition we have certainly demonstrated ignorance in equal measure…

O, it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
Isabella (Act 2, Scene 2)
~ William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

The four horsemen of the apocalypse could prove to be greed, arrogance, apathy and indifference.

As well as conveying the beauty, awe and wonder of Earth in his latest programme, Seven Worlds, One Planet, Sir David Attenborough repeated the ongoing message of habitat destruction and climate change.

Despite the Coronavirus, the fact remains that climate change is the single biggest threat to all life on Earth in the Age of Humans.

Biodiversity and sustainability

At the launch of the spectacular Netflix nature programme Our Planet, Sir David Attenborough gave a clear message: we must find a way to survive that does not entail decimating the natural world, because biodiversity equals stability.

SUSTAINABILITY should be our new watch word, a global standard that helps to protect biodiversity in the interest future generations.

If we managed two mass extinctions as hunter-gatherers, (the decimation of two continent’s mega-fauna with just hand tools), imagine what damage we can inflict now, thousands of years later, with efficient machines in this industrial and technological age?

Rapid, wholesale destruction of rainforests by agribusiness for short term profit over long term ecological stability is crazy, and should not be allowed to continue unabated.

We cannot continue to bludgeon our way through our planet’s natural resources with no regard for the consequences.

Over the last year I have phased out processed food from our diet (apart from the odd treat), and I look carefully at the ingredients and buy brands like Nairn’s that only use sustainable palm oil.

This passage from Sapiens illustrates how Homo sapiens have evolved too quickly, thus creating massive environmental problems for ourselves and the planet:

Genus Homo’s position in the food chain was, until quite recently, solidly in the middle. For millions of years, humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only 400,000 years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis, and only in the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo Sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain.

That spectacular leap from the middle to the top had enormous consequences. Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to co-operate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered.

In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana-republic dictator.  Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.

~ Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens)

On our way to the top of the food chain humans domesticated fire, gaining control of a powerful, obedient and potentially limitless force. Unlike other animals, humans could decide when and where to ignite a flame and use it for numerous tasks. Our use of fire was not limited by our physical form, structure or strength. A child with a fire stick could burn down an entire forest.

Metaphorically, this seems like exactly what our still relatively ‘young’ species has done to the planet!

The Cognitive Revolution

The Cognitive Revolution was probably the defining moment in humanity’s evolution thus far – the ability of our species to communicate, to gossip, to develop ever larger social structures, to organise ourselves, collaborate and plan and imagine outcomes. It was the beginning of creativity and storytelling.

No other creature on Earth has developed this mental capacity.

Creation of Man by Michelangelo

We lived for millennia in a similar fashion to our closest genetic cousins, chimpanzees; who survive still in small hierarchical communities lead by an alpha male, having to intervene in squabbles when necessary, and deal with challenges to his authority from younger males who would usurp him, along with his right to sire many of the infants in his group and continue his blood line.

The atmosphere can be aggressive at times, but it is permeated with playfulness, loving mothers, friendships and sub groups that garner support by giving and receiving favours such as picking out fleas and grooming.

You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours… It’s a well known fact in psychology that people respond in kind.

What is the American president but the alpha male of the United States, if not the world? Or for that matter, the Pope is the alpha male of the Catholic Church.

Current political favours and manoeuvrings aren’t so far removed from our ancestral chimp roots, just more sophisticated.

Image by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Brutality is cloaked by bullies in suits: corruption, corporate malfeasance and brainwashing in the media and all the machinations of imperfect democracies.

What is democracy but millions of people choosing to believe in certain imagined realities?

Feminism

Female chimpanzees are not able to look at and study the example of the more balanced and loved-up societies of Bonobos, which are run by their more emancipated female relatives, and translate that learning into more freedom and peace for themselves in their own environments.

But the rise of feminism in human society arose from women’s collective desire for a fairer, more meaningful and egalitarian life. It is, of course, an ongoing challenge in a patriarchal society.

Such dramatic changes in behaviour do not occur in the animal kingdom unless environmental pressures or mutations in DNA initiate them.

But since the Cognitive Revolution humans have been able to change their thoughts and pass on new ideas and behaviours to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change.

This ability to transform our social structures, the nature of interpersonal relations and our economic activities is a beacon of hope that we can collectively adapt our social behaviours in relation to conservation, waste management, consumption, future innovation and living more cleanly in respect to climate change.

Environmental pressure is certainly driving our continued evolution!

Our species’ nascent curiosity all those thousands of years ago made us think and ask: what would it be like to sail to another land?

The diverse cultures that we are part of and can experience through travelling could not have grown without a curiosity about the world and our place in it.

The temples and pyramids we have built, the gods we have worshipped, the land we have tilled and shaped, the art and music we have expressed (even from the days of cave men) has all been possible because of the Cognitive Revolution.

The freedom to think and act gave us power, and we’re still learning how to wield it.

Sophisticated language and the ability to create ‘imagined realities’ meant that humans could go from living in small groups to creating cities and empires, religions and ideologies, law and order. We could co-operate on hitherto unknown scales.

Money was, and is, the most universally successful creation that mankind invented. Even two people who are born in different geographical locations, and diametrically opposed in their beliefs, their lifestyles and outlooks will both use money in their everyday lives. It is humanity’s common denominator – as is nature and our home planet, Earth.

How do you get millions of people to act in a certain way? It comes down to common goals and shared beliefs. We are individuals, but still able to work together for perceived mutual benefit.

We may be able to disagree on one or two issues, but have many other overriding positive connections that outweigh any disagreements. That is the beauty of freedom of speech and social interaction. The challenges occur when we can’t overcome our differences or agree on a particular imagined reality.

Brexit springs to mind!

Once Homo sapiens started telling stories we never stopped. We evolved our capacity to craft and learn from stories. Myths and stories are the glue of our social connections.

Our physical evolution may have continued at the normal glacial pace, but our imagination raced ahead, enabling us to build networks of mass co-operation.

Social media amplifies this ability to a truly staggering global level.

All the leaders in history have used stories to their advantage, and the best ones used them for the good of humanity. We still tell and read stories that were written years, decades and centuries ago, because we continue to find value and entertainment in them.

Now it is time to tell the most important story in modern history, the one that’s uncomfortable and sometimes frightening to hear, about how we are destroying our planet.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” ~ Albert Einstein

Dystopian climate disaster movies that have been portrayed on the silver screen are now becoming an all too frequent reality in different areas of the planet.

A few months ago the ex-governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, issued dire warnings about the consequences of climate change to business and continued investment in fossil fuels.

“Fully half of British emissions, it was recently calculated, come from inefficiencies in construction, discarded and unused food, electronics, and clothing; two-thirds of American energy is wasted; globally, according to one paper, we are subsidizing the fossil fuel business to the tune of $5 trillion each year. None of that has to continue.”
~ David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

It’s one thing to hear that elephants, tigers, lions, bees, dolphins and whales are going extinct, and that the earth is becoming uninhabitable, and quite another to experience an unthinkable reality that moves us emotionally into action.

Big Think on global warming.

Whether driven by love or fear, we need lots of new stories about climate change, biodiversity, mass extinctions, pollution and human disease to be told in different ways to different audiences.

It’s our only chance of making such rapid changes to create a paradigm shift on how we have contributed to the problems facing humanity and how we can solve them. It no longer serves us to be insatiable consumers of natural resources, our fictional realities now need to focus on being the protectors, custodians and lovers of our dwindling abundance.

Conservation

International co-operation is key. Leaders of nations need to come together and set aside large areas of land and sea as protected from human activity, purely for conservation. Nature has shown she can recover if we give her a helping hand.

Sir David Attenborough used the example of a group of islands in south east Asia as an example. Massive over fishing depleted the waters and the coral reefs significantly declined.

The screen filled with eerie images of thousands of giant jellyfish undulating below the surface – the consequence of there being no fish. This is what awaits us beneath the ocean if we continue in that vein. However, this group of islands was declared a national marine park, and within a decade it had recovered most of its biodiversity.

Sir David stated that a third of coastal seas on our planet should be protected as marine parks in this way, so that they can recover from over fishing.

The wasteland of Chernobyl is another example of nature recovering free from human interference:

Sir David Attenborough with some solutions:

The giant Australian marsupial Diprotodon became extinct because it couldn’t adjust in time to develop a fear of humans, who duly massacred them all.

The irony is, nature is now forcing us to adapt to ourselves…

Spiritual evolution

There is no one single historical antecedent to the Anthropocene.

What we call ‘history’ is us recording and looking back at our fictions and imaginations and the outcomes our actions shaped.  This elusive, mysterious quality of mind was the driving force behind our evolution.

To me, the logical next step in our evolution is that of the spirit – the unseen.

Moving from being a person that purely experiences the world through just their five senses, to being multi-sensory beings; developing awareness of our inner motivations, emotions and behaviour, being comfortable with stillness, the oneness of all that is, developing empathy, gratitude, a loving nature and a love for nature, becoming highly intuitive and learning to transcend our evolutionary animal inheritance from our chimpanzee days – the ego.

I feel strongly that healing the planet will be achieved with more insight and awareness, and more rapidly, if we can first take responsibility for ourselves and care for each other.

World domination never succeeded (at least for very long), on an individual level, national or empirical level. Just look at Hitler, Stalin and countless other despots, egomaniacs and repressive regimes.

Collectively we influence each other and the planet, to the extent that the consequences of our actions are magnified and compounded in the Age of Humans.

If we all adopted the attitude of asking  what serves all of life, rather than what just serves humanity, or purely what serves me, where could we be?

In today’s world, amid efforts to combat a myriad of crises of climate, politics, medicine, and socioeconomics, we are in a constant state of emergency…

Which leads to forced adaptation rather than evolution.

But in order to evolve to our highest potential, individually and as a species, we must access and cultivate the innate and largely unexplored capabilities already within us.

~ Steve Farrell, Worldwide Executive Director – Humanity’s Team

We don’t have to become monks, saints, or even permanently altruistic beings, we can still follow our dreams and aspirations, enjoy our lives; but with an increased awareness of the impact of our actions.

We each have more power than we think.

A profound solution – Consciousness creates reality:

I heard a beautiful explanation of intuition by Gary Zukav, he said that it is the voice of the non-physical world. Cognition could be exponentially more powerful when we are aligned with a higher purpose and the non physical part of ourselves – the soul.

To give future souls a chance at evolving we must preserve the physical stage upon which they can do so – planet Earth.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
~ William Shakespeare (from All the World’s a Stage speech) As You Like It

Facing an Uncertain Future in the Age of Humans – Part 1

/ ginnyburges / 2 Comments
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” ~ Albert Einstein

What with all the global turbulence of late I got to thinking: What is our evolutionary destiny as a species?

It’s a difficult and provocative question to ask, let alone to answer!

But we must ask it, if we are to understand where we are now and where we are heading. If we don’t, how can we create a happier, more bountiful and sustainable existence not just for ourselves, but for all creation, than we have thus far?

In my small slithers of time I have been reading Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant book, Sapiens. I’m only half way through, but am finding it compelling and sobering reading.

I’m expanding on my interest in Anthropology as part of my research for my next novel, (a corporate conspiracy thriller), but it’s also insightful for a blog post or two!

The challenges of the Anthropocene

Scientists have named the new epoch of our planet the Anthropocene – the age of humans.

Human activity has impacted the face of the planet and its animal inhabitants to such a degree that we now largely hold the fate of the entire planet’s biodiversity in our hands. A scary fact, considering our past record!

There is little that we have failed to plunder or indirectly affect and use for our advantage over aeons of our species’ existence. We should heed Einstein’s advice and ruminate extensively on the challenges and opportunities of this new human epoch.

According to Sir David Attenborough we are now experiencing the 6th wave of mass extinction on our planet, and (I’m sorry to go all ‘doomsday’), unless we radically alter our trajectory it could be the precursor to the extinction of Homo sapiens. We are the masters of our fate, one way or another.

We face untold misery unless we rapidly develop a global awareness of what’s happening and how we can adjust our behaviour to avoid cataclysm. Otherwise, as scientists continue to tell us, we will reap a bitter and devastating harvest…

This has been painfully demonstrated with the destruction of the Amazon and as this article in The Guardian points out, deforestation damage goes far beyond the Amazon.

The world has watched in horror at the devastating, unprecedented bushfires that are continuing to ravage Australia.

In addition to the devastating stories there have also been uplifting stories of heroism, altruism and love.

This article highlights visually the conditions that have exacerbated the fires in Australia.

It is thought close to a BILLION animals have perished in the bushfires: koalas, kangaroos, flying foxes and other precious wildlife. If like me, you feel devastated by this and wish to do something to help in addition to prayer, you can donate to Australia’s Wildlife Emergency fund on the WIRES website.

It has been heartbreaking to see the level of suffering. And yet, Australia’s impotent PM, Scott Morrison, is an outright climate change denier and has demonstrated a dire lack of leadership to his nation. More also needs to be done to heed the advice of the indigenous aboriginal population.

My grandfather grew up in a mining town just beyond the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. I have happy memories of the time I was there. I just want to sit and weep when I read of the impact of these fires.

Morrison is not the only leader to have failed miserably in his responsibility – Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro should be put on trial for his role in the Amazon’s destruction – and by default the global impact it is having.

“If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we are only unbuilding those alliances—recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too.”
~ David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

To better understand the immense challenges and opportunities of the Anthropocene we should take a peek into the distant past – through millennia, into the history of Homo sapiens.

The red hand print in the cave at Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, imprinted c. 30,000 years ago.

The history of Homo sapiens

It’s an incredible history, peppered with highs and lows, successes and failures, but mainly it highlights the ingenuity, imagination and endless march of Homo sapiens to become the dominant species on planet Earth.

For better or worse, we have arrived at the Anthropocene – a precarious point in our evolution.

This timeline (plus a few of my own additions), is laid out in Sapiens.

Timeline in years before the present:

4.5 billion – Formation of planet Earth.

3.8 billion – Emergence of organisms, the beginning of biology.

66 million – Extinction of the dinosaurs.

6 million – The last common grandmother of humans and chimpanzees.

2.5 million – Evolution of the genus Homo in Africa. First stone tools.

2 million – Humans spread from Africa to Eurasia. Evolution of different human species.

500,000 – Neanderthals evolve in Europe and the Middle East.

300,000 – Daily use of fire by Homo erectus, Neandertals and the forefathers of Homo sapiens. Some scholars advocate the link between cooking food and the shortening of the human intestinal tract and the growth of the brain.

200,000 – Homo sapiens evolves in East Africa.

70,000 – The Cognitive Revolution. Emergence of fictive language and imagination. Sapiens spread out of Africa.

50,000 – Extinction of Homo sloensis and Homo erectus

45,000 – Sapiens settle Australia. Extinction of Australian mega-fauna. Extinction of Homo denisova. Up to 6% of the DNA of Melaniesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan DNA.

30,000 – Extinction of Neandertals. In 2010 the Neandertal genome was mapped, and scientists discovered that 4% of the DNA of modern populations of Homo sapiens in the Middle East and Europe is Neandertal DNA.

16,000 – Sapiens settle America. Extinction of American mega-fauna.

13,000 – Extinction of Homo floresiensis.

12,000 – The Agricultural Revolution. Domestication of plants and animals. Permanent settlements. Sapiens now the only surviving human species in the genus Homo.

11,500 – Göbekli Tepe built by hunter-gatherer communities in Turkey.

5,000 – First kingdoms, script and money. Polytheistic religions.

4,500 – Stonehenge is built in southern England.

4,250 – First Empire – the Akkadian Empire of Sargon.

4,000 – The beginning of Hinduism in India.

2,500 – Invention of coinage – a universal money. The Persian Empire – a universal political order ‘for the benefit of all humans’. Buddhism in India – a universal truth ‘to liberate all beings from suffering’.

2,300 – The ancient library is built in Alexandria.

2,000 – Han Empire in China. Roman Empire in the Mediterranean. Christianity.

1,400 – Islam

500 – The Scientific Revolution. Humankind acknowledges its ignorance and begins to acquire unprecedented power. Europeans begin to conquer America and the oceans. The entire planet becomes a single historical arena. The rise of capitalism.

200 – The Industrial Revolution. Family and community are replaced by state and market. Massive extinction of plants and animals.

133 – The American legal system grants companies status as ‘legal entities’ or ‘corporate personhood’ as if they were flesh blood beings. Companies are the main players in the economic arena. Yet they only exist as ‘imagined realities’.

The Present – The Age of Humans (The Anthropocene). Humans transcend the boundaries of planet Earth. Nuclear weapons threaten the survival of humankind. Organisms are increasingly shaped by intelligent design rather than natural selection.

The future – Intelligent design becomes the basic principle of life? The development of Artificial Intelligence? Homo sapiens either extinct or replaced by superhumans?

The paradox of evolutionary success

Based on the latest scientific warnings and reports, it seems we are faced with a stark choice: adapt or die.

According to Charles Darwin the premise underlying all evolution is how a species adapts genetically and behaviourally to its environment over vast expanses of time to ensure its continued existence. Herbert Spencer summarised this theory as ‘survival of the fittest’.

But the situation humanity currently faces couldn’t be more critical. According to scientists we don’t have millennia, we have just decades to solve a crisis of our own making; arising it seems, from the activities of our evolutionary success…

Image by Rob Curran on Unsplash

Our current limited measure of evolutionary success is the number of DNA copies of a species. And being as humans (Homo sapiens) account for 96% of the mass of mammals living on the planet, I’d say, based solely on that criteria, we made it big.

We took our domesticated plants and animals with us too. Behind Homo sapiens, cattle, pigs and sheep are the second, third and fourth most widespread large mammals. 70% of the birds alive today are domesticated poultry.

It’s estimated there are some 25 billion chickens around the globe!

As far as plant life goes, wheat crops represent the largest landmass, covering over 220 million hectares.  Our dependence on wheat, a cereal food containing gluten and lectins, two substances that are natural destroyers of gut health, and by default overall health, has been compounding for 7,000 years, when humans began farming in the Levant (Middle East).

The Agricultural Revolution

Gradually our diets switched from diverse forager staples like nuts, seeds, fruits, and vegetables such as mushrooms and meats like rabbit, deer and mammoth (who disappeared around the same time as Neanderthals), to a reliance on a narrower range of less nutritious crops such as wheat, rice and potatoes.

Image by Evi Radauscher on Unsplash

As our progression from foragers to farmers occurred over several thousand years, so our populations expanded in line with an increased intake of calories. It wasn’t a utopia though; we had to maintain and protect crops through climate cycles and raids from other tribes. We became vulnerable. We had all our eggs in one basket.

By the time humans had achieved significant population growth through complex agricultural societies, it was too late to go back to our hunter-gatherer way of life – it simply could not sustain the new structure of radically bigger communities.

What started out as a way of filling our stomachs more efficiently thousands of years ago somehow morphed into a beast that now controls us.

Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”
~ Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens)

Our species’ evolutionary success has come at a high price, with mass extinctions in marine, plant and animal life.

Homo sapiens have destroyed much of their natural capital: 50% of the world’s rainforest and coral reefs are gone, over fishing has depleted our oceans and hundreds of tons of plastic waste is killing marine life and polluting our oceans.

Polar bear and plastic cone – image by Andrea Bohl on Pixaby

Many fish are going into the human food chain full of harmful toxins such as PCBs, mercury and other heavy metals. Our water supplies are saturated with chlorine and fluoride and our air quality is full of persistent organic pollutants (POPs).

Also, the process of biomagnification has a serious impact on human health.

Some time ago I read a recent news story about a new world record for the time and depth of a submersible at the bottom of the Mariana Trench (the deepest place on Earth). Among some wonderful new discoveries of deep sea species there was a more depressing sighting of a plastic bag on the sea bed – seven miles down!

Given the mess we’re collectively in, is it not timely to measure and define evolutionary success outside of the narrow criteria of survival and reproduction?

We have not considered quality of life and diversity on our climb to world domination. Especially not for plant life, the animal kingdom or our domesticated livestock, and not in many cases, for large human populations around the world.

The profits and growth obtained from earth’s natural resources are finite. We cannot eat, drink or breathe money.

“Even though we now have a decent picture of the planet’s climatological past, never in the earth’s entire recorded history has there been warming at anything like this speed- by one estimate, around ten times faster than at any point in the last 66 million years. Every year, the average American emits enough carbon to melt 10,000 tons of ice in the Antarctic ice sheets- enough to add 10,000 cubic meters of water to the ocean. Every minute, each of us adds five gallons.”
~ David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

In part two I’ll cover the Cognitive Revolution, biodiversity and some solutions. I’ll aim to be more upbeat, but the facts are the facts, no matter how much we might wish they were otherwise.