Our God Sensing Ability

Inspiration

A recent study by UC Davis emeritus professor Richard Coss makes the case for why Neanderthals died out while humans thrived: Neanderthals moved into Eurasia much earlier than humans, employing a thrusting spear to hunt, at a time when their prey had yet to develop a fear of 2-legged creatures.  Meanwhile, humans, for eons, developed and practiced long-distance spear throwing on the plains of Africa, where skittish animals were quite familiar with hunters.   Once they arrived in Eurasia, humans were much more successful at hunting the now easily spooked animals that lived there, compared to Neanderthals, who still needed to confront animals at close range.

But aside from the Human-Neanderthal difference, Coss’ is a mammoth insight.

What makes his theory revelatory is the connection he proposes between spear throwing and art.  Humans, using the part of the brain developed by spear throwing (hand-eye coordination, anticipatory imagination) developed artistic abilities that represented reality—thus cave paintings of wild animals.  And, this representation hints at something even more astonishing. 

Hunting would have involved 1) anticipating the arc of a spear, aimed higher than its target to account for gravity; or, 2) even more challenging, aiming at where animals would be once spears arrived at their destination;  And, 3) manipulating an animal’s path into a future meal.  When successful, humans would be rewarded with a feast.  This behavioral pattern would thus select for humans with well-developed anticipatory skills.  And, in turn, this would translate into enhanced artistic imagination: taking things (a hunter’s prey) out of its temporal context (where the animal currently is) and making it, well, art (imagining where the spear and animal will be), all using an inexplicable calculus, or ‘feeling’, the way we type letters on a keyboard without looking, or read lines of type without actually seeing every letter.

In following the implications of Coss’ theory, the next step is asking what it means for humans to anticipate:  Well, essentially, anticipating is dealing with time.  We look forward to events in the future (a feast, for example), and arrange bodily impulses (the desire for our favorite foods) in order to coordinate with an expected point in time (gathering together with others to celebrate an occasion).  This gives rise to repressing the here-and-now in favor of a timed future, which is the basis for much culture and religion.

What a basic religion teaches is that someone who successfully anticipates and plans for the future (successfully abandoning the here-and-now to throw a spear toward a future meal), will be rewarded with righteousness (a feast).  Seen as artistic metaphor, this is the wonder of a thing (animal) taken out of its earthly context (flesh and blood reality) and enjoyed at all times as art (anticipating the feast, and eating it--where both provide pleasure).

And when we let fly a spear, aimed at an imaginary future space where an animal will be, or we let our arm and hand paint an image that is surprisingly lifelike, we give our senses over to an inner calculus, a feeling.  And the more we do this successfully, the more this inner spirit awakens in us, until we suddenly become aware of what seems like assistance from outside ourselves, and we say something like “Mine hand was steadied by the grace of God."

Note: A recent study suggests that Neanderthals also made cave art.  But, the art is abstract (lines, circles, hand prints, not figurative (animals), and it is only attributed to Neanderthals because it dates so far back in time.  And even if it is Neanderthal art, it probably makes Professor Coss' case, in that it is relatively immature, compared to the human kind.

The Sherlock Holmes Test

The Key Is Prejudice

What's at the root of our downward spiraling politics?  Looking for an answer in reality that you decide on ahead of time.

Sherlock Holmes famously derided the constables at Scotland Yard for trying to fit evidence into a theory of what happened.  Holmes tried to instead let the evidence speak for itself.

An opinion columnist I happened to read recently in the local newspaper referenced the story from several years ago about how the I.R.S. during the Obama administration was caught harassing conservative political movements.  Which got me thinking..., wasn't that a phony story?  And, if so, shouldn't a respectable newspaper refuse to publish, simply because it isn't true?

And then just today I read about that phony story again, this time with a breakdown of what happened.

Republicans first asked the Inspector General to look into IRS audits of conservative organizations.  This turns up a "smoking gun", or so it seems.  ...Until the Democrats ask the Inspector General to look into all IRS audits of political organizations.  This unmasks what had been "other" organizations (those that were not conservative) as being mainly progressive.  The final tally is 115 conservative and 110 progressive, as well as a handful of non-partisan outfits.

The story about how the IRS harassed conservative groups is debunked.  The problem, of course, is that nitwits in the Republican party wanted to fit evidence to their politics, and then looked the other way when all the evidence was set forth.  So, for them, the story is still true.

Since the I.R.S. is bad, so the nitwit narrative went, we'll only ask about conservative groups, which, we hope, will produce the storyline we want.

Healing the country's politics won't happen until everyone, in searching for the truth, takes the Sherlock Holmes approach.

Is Science Always Right?

When Should We Be Sure We're Right?

I overheard a conversation the other day in which GMO food (genetically modified organisms) were challenged by one party, while the other said: "But you'll listen to the science about Global Warming!"

There've been several opinion pieces written recently about how GMOs are an open and shut case--absolutely no cause for alarm, plus they'll allow us to feed everybody.   Meanwhile, the science behind climate change is, in fact, unquestionably certain.  And yet plenty of people like me are uncomfortable with the former, but not the latter.  Why?

The answer is simple: there's value in what's worked in the past.  And I don't mean just the past year or two, I mean human experience through the years, and the world before that.

Science is a process wherein ideas are fighting for supremacy as we test them; this is how the natural world, and human history--until recently, worked too.  And just as the ablest lion should be the dominant lion, any new theory that claims that it's the new champ can't be elevated to ablest theory status without proof that it is, indeed, best.  And the benefit of the doubt goes to the current champ, not the challenger.

Which is why the idea that humans are scrambling genes in the things we eat, and so upending the gradual (evolution) and sudden (breeding for selected characteristics) process of life-better-suiting-its-environment is troubling.  Sure, initial experiments may show that there's no danger in GMO food, but the stakes are too big to get wrong.  For example, we're already contending with invasive species running amok in parts of the world where they don't belong, do we really need to mess with the interior makeup of species, too?

Meanwhile, Climate Change, like GMO food, is the challenger to the status quo.  Even if only half, instead of 99%, of our scientists said it was a dire emergency, why take a 50/50 chance with a loaded gun to the head?  And the case for disaster can easily be made: try googling 'melting permafrost' + 'global warming'; the numbers are, frankly, scary.

All of which is a peculiarly conservative perspective to have.  And I'll freely admit that when the stakes aren't high, I'm almost always willing to entertain alternatives.  For example, did humans really live in the Americas 130,000 years ago, rather than no more than around 13,000 years ago?  Here's a fascinating article that follows the evidence for 130,000 as it unfolded, and the pushback that it met.