Whodunit: What Killed Off Our Ancestors? Part One

“Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?” was one of those top-notch mystery comedies from 1978. Who killed the ancestors of modern day humans isn’t quite so funny, but it’s still a top-notch mystery. I propose one rather unconventional answer, our creator ‘gods’, the extraterrestrials.

Modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved from other primates, most probably from chimpanzee stock in Africa when DNA relationships are analysed. We have a 98% compatibility with chimpanzee DNA. However, there was a long chain of in-betweens twixt chimpanzees and modern humans, the two key transitions being a bipedal gait (Australopithecus) and tool use (Homo). The interesting things are that while all the in-betweens have gone extinct, the ancestral primate stock didn’t; the transition to modern humans was so fast that it reeks of artificial selection, not natural. Are the in-between extinctions and the extremely rapid transition to modern humans linked? 

Review: 4.5 billion to 5 million years ago.

Divide the roughly 4.5 billion year history of Planet Earth into say five million year segments. Now imagine yourself 4.5 billion years ago jumping from one segment to the next. Even given a five million year leap, would you notice much change per leap? No, you wouldn’t. You’d notice a little change, yes, but hardly anything drastic or major. That applies as you jump from segment to segment – a little change, a little more change, even a little more change as you get further and further removed from your starting point. The composition of the atmosphere slowly, ever so slowly changes; life begins and single celled critters emerge. After many, many segment leaps, these evolve simple multi-celled critters, etc. But change is so gradual that it’s hardly perceptible from one segment to the next. The exception would be when there’s been a mass extinction event, so if you jump from 70 million years ago to 65 million years ago, yes you’d notice that, oops, where are the dinosaurs? Then things settle back down again to very slow but very sure rate of change.

Now about 90 leaps of five million years each will bring you to roughly a time five million years ago. Observe carefully the landscape, atmospheric composition, and the various life forms. If you’re in Africa you just might notice the early stirrings of the hominoid branch that will ultimately lead to us. Now do that final leap. Jump that final segment. Is the resulting change major or minor? If you answered yet again ‘minor’, put on your dunce cap. That change is the most major of all the incremental five million year leaps. Now doesn’t that strike you as odd? It’s always been a relatively slight incline of change, now all of the sudden the slope skyrockets.

Review: 5 million to 500,000 years ago.

Now divide that final five million year segment into say ten parts of 500,000 years each. Perform that same incremental jump. Not all that much changes from one 500,000 year block to the next one to the next one. But that last leap from 500,000 years ago to the present – well, there’s that exponential slope again. There a huge change from that final 500,000 years ago to the present. At the start, there were no Homo sapiens. At the end, well just look around you – billions of Homo sapiens all around you.

Review: 500,000 to 50,000 years ago.

Divide that final 500,000 year block into ten segments of 50,000 years each. By the time you reach the last of those 50,000 year blocks, a lot of Homo species have come and gone, with only a couple left - Homo neanderthalensis and of course Homo sapiens, and in isolated Java, Homo floresiensis.

Review: 50,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Consider that final 50,000 year block. At the start, Homo sapiens exist, but there’s no civilization to speak of. But we do have the first of two relative sudden advances. 50,000 years ago, give or take, modern humans ‘invented’ culture. Cave art and rock paintings appear; also carved figurines; humans began to bury the dead along with grave goods.

Now divide that final 50,000 block into five parts of 10,000 years each. At the end, with only 10,000 years left to go, we now have only one hominoid species left, Homo sapiens. In just that final 10,000 year period, you’ll see the transition, in that relative short period of time, in diverse parts of the world; humans go from a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence to domestic settlements.

Review: 10,000 to 1000 years ago.

If you divide that final 10,000 year block into ten parts, then you go from civilization to a technological civilization.

Review: 1000 to 200 years ago.

Divide that final 1000 block into say five parts, and you go from a technological civilization to a high-tech civilization, and the progress is still undergoing an exponential expansion.

Okay, let’s return back to roughly 5 million or so years ago, perhaps a shade more.

Somewhere around 8 to 6 million years ago, our lineage split off from the chimpanzee lineage. Our lineage is composed of lots of links, about 20 species known so far, some direct (like your grandparents and parents); some just branches off the main and aren’t direct (like your cousins, aunts and uncles). 

Here are the starting links in that chain that we know about.

Sahelanthropus tchadensis came on the African scene about 7 to 6 million years ago. We’re not sure if this hominoid species was a parent or a cousin.

Orrorin tugenensis was slightly more recent, dating to roughly 5.8 million years ago. Again, parent or cousin isn’t clear.

Ardipithecus ramidus and Ardipithecus kadabba were known to strut their stuff 5.8 to 4.3 million years ago and are credited with being in a direct linear chain to ourselves.

Here are the next links in the chain starting with the advent of the bipedal gait.

AUSTRALOPITHECUS (hominoids with an undoubted bipedal gait) had their origins from roughly that 4 to 3 million years ago era, give or take.

*Australopithecus anamersis existed down Africa way some 4.2 to 3.8 million years ago, an apparent ancestor to Australopithecus afarensis.

*Australopithecus afarensis is well known thanks to Lucy (of “in the sky with diamonds” fame). Australopithecus afarensis were around from roughly 3.6 to 3 million years ago though it seems there’s a gap in the fossil evidence of some 200,000 years twixt Australopithecus afarensis and Australopithecus anamersis. When hominoid fossils are as few and far between as they are, such gaps aren’t surprising.

*Australopithecus bahrelghazali has been documented from about 3.5 million years before the present.

*Kenyanthropus (or Australopithecus) platyops (depending on who you talk to) was a contemporary of Australopithecus bahrelghazali and Australopithecus afarensis dated again to 3.5 million years ago.

*Australopithecus africanus: If Australopithecus afarensis faded out of the picture some 3 million years ago, they were replaced by this mob, who reigned from about 3 million to 2.5 million years ago.

*Australopithecus garhi comes upon the scene just as Australopithecus africanus fades away in turn at about 2.5 million years before today.

Our Paranthropus cousins branch off around that 2.5 million year mark. First up was Paranthropus aethiopicus at 2.5 million years ago. Now there is some dispute about names.

*Australopithecus boisei or Paranthropus boisei? Whether parent or cousin, they were around from about 2.3 to 1.4 million years ago, and thus evolved before, and went kaput after, Australopithecus robustus or Paranthropus robustus.

*Australopithecus robustus or Paranthropus robustus? What’s in a name anyway, The fact of the matter is that this African species is dated to 2 to 1.5 million years ago.

HOMO (tool makers) had their origin somewhere from 2.5 to 2 million years ago.

*Homo Rudolfensis (species akin to Homo habilis) inhabited Africa 2.5 to 1.9 million years ago.

*Homo habilis hit the scenes about 2.3 million years ago and lasted until roughly 1.6 million years ago.

*Homo ergaster: In one telling of the tale, Homo ergaster was post Homo habilis but pre Homo erectus and existed from about 2 million years ago to 1 million years ago. Other anthropologists assign the name Homo ergaster just to the African version of Homo erectus. That’s because a hominoid species was about to flee the coup!

*Homo erectus was that species that flew the African coup. It was the first such ancestor of ours to migrate out of Africa (though not all did of course). They ended up in western, eastern, and South-Eastern Asia. Fossil remains have been found in Java for example. Homo erectus survived and thrived more as an Asian species than an African one, surviving until roughly 200,000 years ago in Asia after their 2 million years ago origins in Africa, and as Homo ergaster, died out 800,000 years before their Asian equivalents.

*Homo floresiensis (Java only) was an isolated offshoot of Homo erectus who has the distinction of being our most recent ancestor to go extinct. Homo erectus did so 200,000 years ago, but that isolated community hung on until a very short 12,000 years ago. That’s nearly modern times!

*Homo heidelbergensis: Homo erectus also spawned another out-of-Africa species, Homo heidelbergensis who spread out over Europe from 700,000 to 300,000 years ago, presumably via migration from their ancestors in western Asia.  

*Homo antecessor is the Homo erectus species who colonized Europe, sometimes known as another European version of Homo heidelbergensis. Homo antecessor lived in Europe from about 1 million years ago to roughly 300,000 years ago.

*Homo rhodesiensis is the same as Homo heidelbergensis, only the African version. So, presumably Homo ergaster gave rise to Homo rhodesiensis just as the out-of-Africa version of Homo erectus gave rise to Homo heidelbergensis. Like Homo antecessor, Homo rhodesiensis hung around for only 700,000 years – 1 million years ago to 300,000 years past.

*Homo neanderthalensis, being a west Asian and European species is the obvious descendant of those other European hominoids, Homo antecessor and Homo heidelbergensis. Of all our extinct ancestors (600,000 to 35,000 years ago), Neanderthals are the most famous, but we still don’t the exact degree of interaction, even breeding (if possible) between them and the last and final species on the list – us.

*Homo sapiens (takes shape 400,000 to 200,000 years ago, but probably closer to 200,000 than 400,000, at least that’s the consensus. Another consensus is that Homo sapiens were only the second African native to migrate out of Africa after Homo erectus, some 60,000 to 50,000 years ago.

There are probably still lots of undiscovered species that form additional links and branches in the chimp – modern human chain, but the above are enough to illustrate the point. A heck of a lot of our ancestors went extinct – cause or causes unknown.

To be continued…

The Uniqueness of a Human Being: Part Two

There’s just something really special about Homo sapiens relative to all the other animal and plant life forms we share Planet Earth with. Well actually every life form is special in one way or another*, but still humans stand out from the crowd. Many people will attribute that to the alleged ‘fact’ that we were created in God’s image, although IMHO the concept of a supreme, supernatural creator being carries so much dead (philosophical baggage) weight as to have as close to zero credibility as makes no odds. Therefore, I suggest something’s screwy somewhere.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

That brings up some interesting observations. Privacy (which is not the same thing as having your own personal space or your own territory) and embarrassment seems to have no obvious evolutionary advantage. That’s obviously the case because such concepts are not shared by any other animal life form currently on Earth, and that probably equates to past animal life forms as well. Did T-Rex care about being naked before doing battle with an equally naked Triceratops? - Probably not. Did T-Rex hide behind a tree before doing a pee? – Probably not.

Question: Why do we feel the need for privacy and feel a sense of embarrassment? Where did these concepts come from if they have no obvious survival (evolutionary) advantage?

Privacy and embarrassment tends to be associated with restroom and mating activities. Yet, from firsthand observations, my cats can go to about their litter box business in full sight of me, and of each other, without the slightest qualm. When animals mate, they don’t give a tinker’s damn if the whole darn world is watching. An animal’s gotta do what an animal’s gotta do. Further, each and every animal is in a sense strutting around in their birthday suit. Do they look the slightest bit uptight about this? Hell no.

When it comes to embarrassment, if you look at things logically and objectively, the skin around your private parts isn’t any different from the skin on your face and hands, so what’s the big deal? You don’t tend to be embarrassed over your ear lobes or your knees or which toe on your foot is longest; so why, in theory should your sex organs be singled out for cultural attention, actually inattention since they tend to be covered up?

So, there are a few more bits and pieces that make humans stand apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. But, there still has got to be a logical reason why. If embarrassment is a cultural trait as it appears to be (it’s certainly not biological) how did it ever get its start?

Sense of humour: Nearly all of the higher animals play – it’s preparation for the serious work of making a living. But play itself isn’t humour. Humans of course tell jokes, make puns – we’ve all seen people laugh in a conversation when someone says something amusing -all that’s a function of our higher intellect and our language capabilities. You wouldn’t expect animals without that sort of language ability and comprehension to connect the dots and laugh. I can tell jokes to my cats for hours on end; they’ll never understand the punch lines. However, part of our sense of humour isn’t based on language. There are the physical jokes and pranks we pull. Now some animals do have the physical ability to pull practical jokes on their peers, but I’m not aware that that happens in actual fact. My cats could if they wanted to, pick up in their teeth and hide my house keys from me as their version of a feline practical joke. Cats don’t play practical jokes. Overall however, when examining the human sense of humour,                                                        I have to ask what possible link can there be with regards to a natural evolution of a sense of humour and survival-of-the-fittest?

Blood types: To the best of my knowledge, humans are pretty unique in having about twenty different blood groups or types. That makes medical blood transfusions somewhat risky unless checks are carried out beforehand for compatibility. Not every human can receive blood from every other human.  I checked with my vet, and apparently any dog can give a transfusion to any other dog; any domestic feline’s (cat’s) blood can be transfused into any other domestic feline. I suspect much the same applies throughout the animal kingdom.

Blood types might make a bit of sense if each type of human breed had their own unique type. Maybe they once did but breeding between the races has distorted and diluted that so that now all races have all types of blood. Even so, if other animals can get by with just plain blood, just one blood type, albeit a blood type unique to that species, I don’t see why humans evolved a large variety of blood types. 

Emotions: Nearly all animals show emotions, even many of the ‘lower’ invertebrates. However, though other animals can weep - shed water from their eyes (my cats are examples here), only one animal, man, actually cries apparently as a response to an emotional state. I’m not sure what the evolutionary survival-of-the-fittest bit is about crying. I mean if you’re about to be pounced on by a sabre-tooth cat, will crying make the predator feel sorry for you; put the cat off it’s game and save you? Crying might promote bonding between humans, but there’s lots of bonding in the animal kingdom without the need for tears. So, why should there be crying in response to an emotional state. It’s a mystery to me.

Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC): The number of documented cases of humans, for some totally unknown, maybe unexplainable reason, bursting into flame which quickly kills and consumes the victim, has reached such numbers as to no longer reside in the realm of the paranormal/pseudoscience. What’s really unexplainable is that, relative to humans, to the best of my knowledge, no other life form has ever been witnessed and documented as having had their demise via spontaneous combustion. SHC certainly confers no advantage vis-à-vis passing on your genes. You’ve been handed a Darwin Award through no fault of your own.

Here’s a weird one – our signs of aging. All life forms age; all complex life forms can die from old age, that’s obvious and a given (however, elementary particles, like electrons, don’t age). Humans show obvious signs of aging – greying hair (or losing our hair) and wrinkles and liver spots. It’s easy to tell a 20 year old human from a 40 year old from a 60 year old from someone 80 years old. In most of the rest of the animal kingdom, visible signs of age and aging aren’t obvious. In some life forms, the only visible sign of age is size – trees, fish, and reptiles – organisms that continue to grow throughout their lifespan. Frogs don’t seem to get wrinkles as they grow older! How do you tell a 10 year old elephant apart from a 30 year old elephant? My 12 year old cat looks identical to what it looked like as a two year old. No grey hairs; no pussy cat wrinkles. Yet a 12 year old domestic cat is getting on towards pensioner status given a human analogy. Why should evolution seemingly single us out for acquiring grey hair and wrinkles?

In conclusion, if these traits can not be adequately explained by good old fashioned Darwinian natural selection and evolution, then its back to the drawing board and proposing either a supernatural deity or accepting an explanation of artificial selection. The only real candidate for applying artificial selection to humans to would be an extraterrestrial intelligence. Exactly what their motive(s) might be in most of the above cases isn’t clear cut, but the ‘why’ in terms of Darwinian selection is equally unclear.

*All animals are unique or different in their own way. Felines can purr; bats have radar and dolphins have sonar; some animals can see into the infra-red or ultraviolet part of the EM spectrum; some animals can hear higher or lower frequencies than us humans.

The Rare Earth Hypothesis: Part Two

If the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a viable experiment and not a waste of time; if UFOs and ancient astronauts are facets that help document the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, then the very existence of an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence with technology has to be plausible in the first place. Unfortunately, it’s a long hard road to get from inorganic chemistry through to E.T. and there are many possible bottleneck hurdles that have to be overcome before the one evolves into the other. Goldilocks factors – not too this, not too that, but just right – have to be with you every step of the way. IMHO the major bottlenecks are the transition from unicellular to multicellular life and the evolutionary development and use of technology.

It’s been pointed out by others, and based on my readings I tend to have to agree, that astronomers (physical scientists) tend to be much more optimistic and supportive of the notion that advanced life forms in the Universe (extraterrestrial intelligence) are a dime-a-dozen relative to biologists (life scientists), who hedge their bets and who it must be said are presumably better qualified to pass judgments. So, taking things from a more biological perspective, what’s what?

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

There are apparently just too many planetary Goldilocks factors at play to grant the probability that complex, multicellular, animal, life is common throughout the cosmos. You need to be in a quiet part of the galaxy – no nearby supernovas, black holes to suck you in, gamma ray bursters, etc. You need a long lived stable single star. You need a gravitationally stable solar system so that planets are not gravitationally disturbed out of their orbit and either plunged into the parent star or cast out of the parent system altogether. You should have a good Jupiter(s) to absorb and/or gravitational deflect comets and asteroids that would otherwise slam into your otherwise environmentally-friendly planet causing havoc to established life forms. You need a planet that’s in a pretty circular orbit, one that doesn’t stray too close or too far from the habitable zone surrounding the parent star. The planet must have a fairly stable temperature range over geologic time periods, and so you must have an atmosphere, and thus has to be massive enough to retain an atmosphere, without being so massive that you end up with a brown dwarf - a quasi-stellar body. The axis can’t have an extreme tilt, and it would greatly assist if the planet had a large moon around it to assist its long term stability. You need some sort of plate tectonics to ensure land building and the recycling of materials. If it’s intelligence, with technology you seek, the planet can’t be a water world. The planet must have formed in a region abundant in the heavier chemical elements (oxygen, sulphur, carbon, silicon, nitrogen, various metals, etc.). When you take all those factors (and more) into account, the number of suitable abodes where simple life can slowly evolve into complex life decreases rather quickly. And there’s no guarantee that there is really any directed purpose to evolution in that evolution doesn’t require simple life to become complex life. Survival and leaving offspring is what it’s all about, and if single cell critters do that what more is needed?

One note about planetary disasters or catastrophes is that these cut both ways. They can’t be frequent enough and/or large enough to wipe out the entire biosphere in total, especially the biosphere comprised of complex life forms, but on the other hand, infrequent small disasters can spur on evolutionary change by opening up environmental niches, but depending on who or what you are, when you are, and where you are, a disaster can be a double edged sword. I mean if you’re a T-Rex sixty five million years ago, its bad news. On the other hand, without the bad news for T-Rex, we wouldn’t be here, so for us, an asteroid impact 65 million years ago turned out to be good news!

It’s also difficult to naturally transport complex life around the galaxy, unlike microbial life. If a meteor hit Earth and blasted a chunk of terra firma off towards Mars, pity the poor cockroach going along for the ride. Cockroaches are tough, but not that tough. And even if a cockroach did make it alive to the surface of, say Mars, it wouldn’t survive long.

Anyway, once you have multicellular critters that have survived and thrived in a reasonably stable part of the Universe over many generations, will they evolve intelligence? I mean finding an extraterrestrial equivalent of a trilobite is all well and good, but we want to find beings more like ourselves.

IMHO, intelligence, the ability to figure things out, has evolutionary survival value and will tend to be selected for, and thus over time, there will tend to have evolved life forms with ever higher IQ’s. Here on Earth, just about all mammals and birds, and some exceptional invertebrates (the cephalopods like squid and the octopus), have reasonable IQ’s at least when compared to bacteria, plants, insects, fish, etc. Of course just as some kinds of organisms are faster than others, or have keener senses of sight or smell or hearing, not all advanced organisms are going to end up equal in the IQ stakes. But, the fact remains, the ability to think, to figure things out, can only increase your odds of survival and leaving behind more offspring.

Finally, for SETI to succeed, for UFOs to be alien spaceships, one needs our intelligent species to develop technology, and here’s where I see bottleneck number two. The evolution of technology isn’t inevitable and has a lot of just-so factors attached.

Firstly, your home planet has got to come equipped with the right sorts of materials like oxygen and metal ores and other objects than can be turned into useful tools, and of course a suitable supply of various energy sources. That’s not a given.

Water worlds are out of the running since it’s difficult to discover and utilise fire in that sort of environment.

You can’t have all your required locomotive appendages in contact with the ground – some have to be free to manipulate objects in your environment. Birds have wings that are off the ground, but since wings aren’t good at making tools, that seems to rule out wings and birds of a feather pretty much as well

So, we’ve already ruled out dolphins and whales and the cephalopods being water based creatures, and the birds with their useless wings as far as building things is concerned, and all the four-footed walking mammals.

It might be conceivable that you can build up a technology using your mouth parts and/or using a tail to manipulate and build things, but we don’t have obvious terrestrial case studies, although you might argue that bees and wasps and termites and ants and birds can build elaborate structures using just their mouths.

It’s not all that obvious that technology actually adds all that much value towards ultimate long-term survival. Lots of technological advancements do, like controlling fire, developing agriculture, the rise of modern medicine and food technologies. But then lots of modern technological wonders, the automobile, CDs, sofas, microwave ovens, and thousands of other consumer products don’t really contribute to our overall survival – certainly cars don’t when considering the road toll! Then that brings up the fact that things technological can sometimes work in the opposite direction. Toxic this, pollutant that, nuclear the next thing; then throw in a bit of global warming; the rise of urban city living with overcrowding and in general overpopulation; chemical, biological and radiological warfare/terrorism; instruments of warfare in general, like guns; the overuse of antibiotics and the rise of antibiotic resistant germs; exposure to electromagnetic fields – well, the list of horrors or potential horrors goes on and on.

It makes for an interesting question: would mankind ultimately survive longer had technology never entered the equation, or not? It’s an unanswerable question in that 1) we can’t run the contrary as a controlled experiment, and 2) that the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and there’s probably no turning back now.

So, overall, SETI might not be able to detect our technological and communicating kin out there, and UFOs might not be alien spaceships right here, because it’s 1) hard to evolve multicellular organisms, and 2) technology isn’t inevitable and might even be counterproductive. Thus, Earth, with its multicellular critters and humanity with its technology, is quite the rare planet within the Universe – according to some.   

The main proponents of what is now called the ‘Rare Earth Hypothesis’ are the scientists Brownlee and Ward (see below), and they have certainly stirred up an astrobiological hornet’s nest with the idea. That’s good for science in the long term. The belief in an unproved but accepted scientific proposition, in this case that that there are lots of complex alien critters out there, needs to be challenged if fields of inquiry aren’t going to stagnate. However, make no mistake, it is the ‘Rare Earth Hypothesis’, not the ‘Unique Earth Hypothesis’, so religious fundamentalists who have taken this hypothesis to their hearts; who still need Planet Earth, and human beings, as some sort of religious special creation, should really not take comfort from these ideas.  The Copernicus Revolution is still alive and well.

Further reading:

Brownlee, Donald & Ward, Peter D.; Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe; Copernicus Books, New York; 2000:

Burger, William C.; Perfect Planet, Clever Species: How Unique Are We? Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York; 2003:

Morris, Simon Conway; Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans In A Lonely Universe; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; 2003:

The Rare Earth Hypothesis: Part One

If the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is a viable experiment and not a waste of time; if UFOs and ancient astronauts are facets that help document the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, then the very existence of an advanced extraterrestrial intelligence with technology has to be plausible in the first place. Unfortunately, it’s a long hard road to get from inorganic chemistry through to E.T. and there are many possible bottleneck hurdles that have to be overcome before the one evolves into the other. Goldilocks factors – not too this, not too that, but just right – have to be with you every step of the way. IMHO the major bottlenecks are the transition from unicellular to multicellular life and the evolutionary development and use of technology.

It’s been pointed out by others, and based on my readings I tend to have to agree, that astronomers (physical scientists) tend to be much more optimistic and supportive of the notion that advanced life forms in the Universe (extraterrestrial intelligence) are a dime-a-dozen relative to biologists (life scientists), who hedge their bets and who it must be said are presumably better qualified to pass judgments. So, taking things from a more biological perspective, what’s what?

For starters, our Universe is a Goldilocks Universe in that the fundamental laws, relations and principles of physics unite in such a way as to be ultimately bio-friendly. If the Universe wasn’t bio-friendly, we wouldn’t be here to comment on that. That’s not to say however, in relative contrast, that many (most) parts of the Universe aren’t overly bio-friendly. You’d be hard-pressed to survive and thrive in the depths of a stellar core, heading down a Black Hole, vacationing on the surface of a White Dwarf or in the hard vacuum of space itself.  So, overall the physics of the Universe displays the physics of a Goldilocks Universe, but actually very few addresses within an overall Goldilocks Universe are really, by our definition, Goldilocks. However, starting with bio-friendly physics, where do we go from that point? Well, physics begat inorganic chemistry. That’s step number one, and clearly that’s easy because there’s an awful lot of inorganic chemistry in our Universe.

Going from inorganic chemistry to organic chemistry isn’t difficult either. Interstellar space is full of dust and gases made up of organic chemicals; ditto many of the planets and moons within our solar system (i.e. – Titan, a moon of Saturn) have organics being part and parcel of their composition, and comets, asteroids and meteors too can contain organic compounds.

Judging by how quickly organic chemistry turned into biochemistry (the origin of life) on the early Planet Earth, it’s not difficult to generate simple proto-cellular to unicellular life forms if the conditions (adequate energy, temperatures, environments) are Goldilocks conditions.

Yet life, even microbial life, is still very, very complex (try making a microbe from scratch if you doubt it). The fact that life arose from scratch on Earth within a very, very short span of geological time after the planet formed is a bit suspect IMHO. But what if Earth were seeded by microbial life forms already in existence from space (or deliberately seeded by extraterrestrials as the Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick has proposed)? Now I realize that just puts off the origin of life question to another time(s) and place(s). However, given the vastness of the cosmos is far greater than that of our finite globe, and given that the cosmos existed for vastly longer periods of time before our sun, solar system and home planet came into existence, such additional time and space easily turns the improbable into a near certainty. And once established somewhere, then life could spread throughout that time and space, until it reached our young planet.

Earth arose billions of years after the universe and our galaxy had evolved, ample time for life to have arisen elsewhere, and seed the early Earth. This is the concept of panspermia. We know that comets, meteors, and the cosmic dust of outer space are chock-o-block full of complex organic molecules. We know that simple terrestrial life can survive the outer space environment if suitably shielded – and it doesn’t take much to do the shielding. We know that surface bits from planets/moons can be ejected into space, carry a cargo of microbes, and land on another planet, even eons later with the microbes still viable. Of course 99.999% of all such microbial life will be doomed to forever wander in space or crash onto a cold, surface of a planet with no atmosphere or water, or plunge into a star, etc. But, sheer numbers will insure that now and again some microbes will land on a hospitable abode and be fruitful and multiple and evolve. The interesting bit is that if then, then now. And thus panspermia will be happening today. Certainly some meteorites which have impacted Earth have inside them ‘organized elements’ suggestive of microbial structures – the Murchison Meteorite from Australia is one such stone. The problem is terrestrial contamination as there are often lengthy time periods between their fall and subsequent discovery. As an aside, if Fred Hoyle & Chandra Wickramasinghe are correct (and I believe they are), microbes (bacteria and viruses) impacting Earth today are largely responsible for some select or various disease epidemics and pandemics, past present, and no doubt future.

On Earth, microbes rule, OK? The biomass of all the bacteria, etc. put together easily equals the biomass of every other multicellular plant and animal added together. And microbes can live in environments where multicellular critters fear to tread and often can’t: from the coldest terrestrial environments, up to the near boiling temperatures, from deep underground to the heights of the atmosphere, from inside water-cooled nuclear reactors and the interior of rocks, to intensely saline, acidic and alkaline environments, to ecosystems where the sun never shines, like the abyssal depths.

They can even survive outer space. Bacteria survived on the surface of the Moon – on Surveyor Three. This was possibly the most significant discovery of the entire Apollo Moon program and it hardly even rated a mention. Astronauts from the Apollo 12 mission brought back to Earth parts of the unmanned Surveyor Three Lunar Lander. Terrestrial bacteria on those parts survived the lunar vacuum, solar radiations (UV, etc.), the massive temperature extremes, and lack of water and nutrients. Experiments since then in low earth orbit have confirmed that given just minimal shielding, bacteria can boldly go!

You’d be aware of how difficult it is to totally sterilize something, be it hospital equipment or a spacecraft bound for a Martian landing. They’re tough – have you ever read about a mass extinction event where a bacterial species, unlike say the multicellular dinosaurs, went poof? Microbes are easy to transport. They can be blasted off the surface of the Earth, shielded from radiation by the debris, and survive to land on another world and be fruitful and multiply. There’s little doubt that somewhere way out there, terrestrial bacteria have hitched a ride to the stars, bolding going where lots of microbes have gone before! Translated, I firmly expect that the universe is teaming with life in all sorts of places. The less than glamorous catch is that LGM is not going to stand for Little Green Men, but Little Green Microbes.

But now we come to our first and major bottleneck.

It took 0.5 billion years for the unicellular origin of life on Earth, or for microbes from space to take root on Earth, but then it then took nearly another 3.5 billion years between the appearance of that ‘simple’ single proto-cell life form and the eventual evolution and the resultant Cambrian explosion of multicellular (complex) life forms. For some reason(s), it appears to be biologically difficult to go from the simple single cell to a complex multicellular organism based on the only example we have to judge such things. Probably the overall obstacle to the early quick-smart establishment of multicellular (complex) life is that heretofore microbes (single cells) were 100% self-sufficient generalists. Complex organisms require the evolution of single cells to give up being generalists, become specialists, and work as part of a team. That degree of organization apparently takes lots of time, especially to the stage of where it can leave a large fossil presence, if it takes place at all.

Once you get to the multicellular stage, and in order to evolve further, well the trick is to survive, for the Universe is a dangerous place.

Planetary environments tend to be dangerous and rarely stable, and thus you need a lot of factors in place to ensure that even simple life even survives the long term and get the chance to evolve into multicellular life. Or, if you have evolved multicellular life, the odds are pretty good it’s going to get the Big “E” – Extinction.  I mean complex life is very vulnerable to environmental forces. A tornado probably isn’t going to bother bacteria, but it sure could tear you apart. That’s not to say bacteria can survive everything the cosmos can throw at them, but when nasties come, you stand a better chance of survival if you’re a microbe. So, in order to get to the first proto multicellular critter, and from that to us, you need a lot of Goldilocks factors operating in your favour.

To be continued…

Are We the Proverbial “It”? Part One

Every one and their great grandmother has apparently had a go at, and calculated a value for the Drake Equation (named after radio astronomer and SETI scientist Frank D. Drake). The Drake Equation estimates (guesstimates is actually more accurate) the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy that could in theory say “Hi” to us and receive our “Hello” in return by examining all the factors that are part and parcel of that scenario. Seeing as how the Universe is some 13.7 billion years old, and seeing as how the current human species has been around for only some 200,000 years (give or take), then I have to ask, is it logical to assume that we’re the proverbial “It”? Here’s my two cents worth.

Are we alone in the Universe? That’s a question that’s been asked by millions over the eons, without, to date resolution. Of course the word ‘alone’ implies alone in the sense of whether or not there exists elsewhere our rough equals, more likely as not betters. We want to get to know our neighbours across the street, not their pets, or their plants. The standard gut-feeling answer to the question usually revolves around how vast the Universe is, and surely, given the billions of stars in our galaxy and the existence of billions of galaxies each with billions of stars, etc. and the vastness of time, surely we can’t be the proverbial “It”. There’s unfortunately one slight flaw in that statistical approach. There’s a rather long chain of events that have to happen, hurdles to be jumped, in order to get from the elements of star-stuff to biological cosmic neighbours. Depending on whom you talk to, that chain can be extremely long indeed. The point is, if any one factor in that chain of causality has a very low probability of coming to pass, it matters not one jot whether or not all the other factors are extremely probable, the overall result is going to be low. If any one factor is as close to zero as makes no odds, then the overall answer will also be a close to zero as makes no odds. Certainty multiplied by certainty multiplied by certainty multiplied by certainty multiplied by zero multiplied by certainty multiplied by certainty multiplied by certainty ultimately equals zero!

Rather than give an exhaustive list of all those factors required to give us cosmic neighbours, I’ll focus on six essentials.

Firstly, one has to have the right kinds of matter and energy that can produce beings like us, and a solid surface to stand on. That’s no problem. The Universe has lots of kinds of energy on tap; stars can manufacture and disperse the required kinds of matter, like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, etc. There’s lots of solid bodies (planets) out there. That’s one vote for certainty. 

Secondly, one has to have a solid planetary body turn into a habitable world; a suitable environment for physics, chemistry, biochemistry and biology to do their evolutionary thing. Fortunately, that shouldn’t be a problem. There’s a lot of real estate out there and it comes in all sizes and flavours. While there’s only ever going to be one Planet Earth (I’ll avoid discussions of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, the notion of parallel worlds, and the Multiverse here which could argue the contrary), there has been, is, and will be, lots and lots of earth-like abodes, just letter perfect for life-as-we-know-it to survive, even thrive. If one wants to throw in life-not-as-we-know-it, there will be lots of worlds suitable for those possibilities as well. So, that’s another vote for certainty.

Thirdly, physics has to become chemistry, and chemistry has to become biology. We need biology to have had origins, or an origin, an origin(s) of life that’s an inevitable outcome of the everyday ordinary interactions between physics and chemistry. Well, many will argue that the origin of life is as nearly predictable as death and taxes, given a suitable habitat. Many will also argue that the origin of life is a fluke! In my point of view, the origin of life need only happen once, and that clearly has been a certainty – we exist and we are life. Once there’s one origin of life, the rest is just distribution. Panspermia provides the ways and means of distributing (microbial) life throughout the cosmos. So, I’ll have to cast another vote for certainty again!

Fourthly – well, now we hit the proverbial brick wall.  You and your neighbours aren’t microbes – you’re a colony of microbes. In short, you’re a multicellular life form. We seek, in the cosmos, other multicellular life forms, on the grounds that the odds that a microbe or unicellular life form isn’t going to prove to be much of a companion or drinking buddy is a near given. So, we need to get from unicellular to multicellular, and therein lays the rub. And it’s here that we have to rely for guidance on a sample of one – Earth. Note: It’s dangerous to extrapolate from a sample of one, but what choice do we have? 

There’s no ecological niche on Earth occupied by multicellular critters that’s not also occupied by unicellular critters (microbes). The reverse isn’t true. You may think the world is totally dominated by multicellular critters – you, your partner, your family, your pets, your garden, your food, all the life you see around you is multicellular. There’s millions of species of insects – all multicellular. What’s more common than bugs? Yet, if you did a biological census, even in your home and your garden, you’d find that apparently common multicellular life forms are out-common-ed, vastly outnumbered, by unicellular life forms by a ratio of trillions to one. What you don’t see does matter!

So, are multicellular critters an evolutionary certainty? Is there anything a ‘colony’ of 2 or 20 or 200 or 2000 cells can accomplish or fill a previously unfilled ecological niche that one cell can’t? And by the way, that 2 or 20 or 200 or 2000 stage has got to be selected for before one can get to the two million and two billion colony stage. Well, clearly the transition happened here, albeit it took some three billion years to seriously kick-start the process, so it’s hardly some inevitable ‘law of nature’. I mean taking some three billion years to get to a colony of cells from a single cell doesn’t inspire confidence that the process is easy, necessary or inevitable. Anyway, it did happen here, so it’s obviously possible. I just don’t see it as a super-evolutionary development that confers immediate survival-of-the-fittest advantage. Of course a colony of two cells might be harder to eat than one cell, but at that level, ‘food’ tends to be absorbed at the molecular level. In any event, microbes can easily attack and ‘eat’ multicellular critters, causing sickness, death and decay. We’re ultimately food for the microbes and the proof of that pudding is how we spend small fortunes keeping them at bay. But, eventually, though you might win the battles against the microbes, you’ll lose the last one, and thus the war.

Another factor that argues against multicellular organisms being a universally common feature of the Universe is that it is also a lot harder to transport around the Universe by natural means – that concept of panspermia – multicellular critters. I mean getting a microbe from Earth to Mars is one thing. Getting a cockroach there is a whole different scenario.   

Multicellular development; its probability, can’t be zero since we’re multicellular, but, on balance, I can’t assign a high probability to the transition between unicellular and multicellular life on every habitable planet, every time. This one is nearing zero!

Fifthly, as noted earlier, you don’t want to interact with your neighbour’s multicellular pets or multicellular garden plants, but your neighbours. What do you have in common with your neighbours that you don’t have in common with your neighbour’s pet or garden plants? Intelligence (even if you probably think your neighbours are a few cents short of a dollar!).

The issue now is whether, having evolved to a multicellular stage, will one develop some higher brain function? Is there any further evolutionary advantage towards increasing one’s intelligence? By going back to our sample of one, if Earth is any guide, the answer is roughly ‘not likely’. There are millions of multicellular species that have existed, and do exist, on Planet Earth. There are apparently only a very few species that have evolved something beyond the minimum level of brain power required for their day-to-day survival. That doesn’t inspire confidence that intelligence has inevitable value as a means of survival.

By far and away, most multicellular critters just operate on pure instinct and don’t (can’t) stop to figure things out (far less stop to smell and appreciate the roses) - but, there are an admittedly few exceptions.  Many wild birds would put our everyday companion animals to shame in the IQ department. I mean I love my cats, but little Einstein’s they’re not. Whales and dolphins have also been credited with being in the higher IQ bracket; ditto our close primate cousins. In the invertebrate kingdom, the octopus is pretty smart – by invertebrate standards (and then some if one is honest). However, on balance, most multicellular critters put their evolutionary strategies into something other than higher brain function. Take my cats. Is it to their survival advantage to ‘figure things out’ or to be just a bit faster afoot, hear just a bit better, see ever more clearly? Nearly all organisms put their survival abilities into something other than pure brain-power. Clearly brain-power has survival-of-the-fittest attributes. But, it’s not the only game in town, and therefore doesn’t have what I’d call evolutionary ‘certainty’.  However, it would be illogical to say that developing intelligence, the ability to figure things out, isn’t valuable and doesn’t have survival value, it’s just that if you were to list all the multicellular animal species on Planet Earth, very few would have an IQ of even one (the human average is 100). So, let’s say intelligence is somewhere between certainty and highly improbable.

Next, let’s assume your intelligent neighbours are fairly far away and the usual means of keeping in touch is by phone (or email). That introduces one additional complication; it’s not enough to just be intelligent. You need to have technology. Then, and only then, will the ‘are we alone?’ question be answered to our absolute satisfaction. We need technology if we are to find extraterrestrial intelligence(s); and/or extraterrestrial intelligence(s) will need technology to find us. One or both of us has to have invented engineering to a somewhat sophisticated level - maybe rocket ships, maybe radio telescopes, but something technological is required. There’s also a hidden assumption here – you actually want to seek out new civilizations. It matters not if you have all the required technology but care not to use it for the purpose of answering that question – ‘are you alone in the Universe?’ I’ll assume here that if you have intelligence, and it’s been able to construct technology, then part of your intelligence is devoted to be a curious critter who wants to know and find out things – so that’s a certainty of one. But what’s the level of certainty of developing technology in the first place? Rather poor judging from those terrestrial species that have some reasonable smarts to their credit. There’s the human species of course, and though while we’re not quite a sample of one, it’s pretty close. There are documentary observations of some animals (primates mainly) not so much making, but making use of existing ‘tools’ to assist in their survival. Alas, most intelligent species lack the anatomy and/or the right environment to manipulate objects. In the case of dolphins and whales, their ocean environment stymies any way and means of constructing things and making use of fire, for example. So, developing technology has to be rated, judging from our terrestrial sampling, as rather low. 

Technology is also a double-edged sword. The use of technology has had obvious survival value for the human species. You wouldn’t be hard-pressed to come up with dozens of technological inventions that have enabled us to survive longer and thrive better. But, out technological genie is out of the bottle, and unless you’re a hermit, you will have noted by now that technology can also reduce our quality of life, and no doubt you wouldn’t be equally hard-pressed to cite dozens of examples. Which leads nicely into the last consideration. 

To be continued…

A Hairy Issue for Humans

The amount of your hair from the neck up is different from your hair (what little there is of it) from the neck down. There are sexual differences with respect to hair between the human male and female as well both from the neck up and from the neck down. The curious part is that neither neck up or neck down or sexual differences tend to have close parallels with nearly all the rest of the terrestrial mammalian kingdom, mammals we presumably naturally evolved from. The 64 cent question is why?

Humans vs. Mammals: Humans tend to have way less body covering usually termed hair and/or fur relative to other mammals, our size or below, including our primate ancestors. That our first uniqueness. Why is that? Now apparently our lack of fur, why we lost the fur we presumably once had way back once upon a very remote time ago, was because we developed sweat glands to regulate heat, which, IMHO was a retrograde development.

Fur is a good regulator whether retaining or allowing body heat to escape. Some animals, like cats, shed some fur as the warmer weather approaches, though it thickens again as winter approaches. Sweat glands are only a cooling mechanism. That’s okay. But be that as it may, the ‘why’ question now becomes one of explaining why humans alone out of all our primate cousins developed sweat glands thus contributing to the evolutionary loss of our fur. You’d think what’s good for the human is also good for the gorilla, chimpanzee, gibbon, orang-utan, etc. So, why were humans and humans alone selected to be ‘the naked ape’? Was it a normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design?

Neck Up / Neck Down – Distribution: For the human species, there’s an obvious dichotomy between the amounts of hair we have from the neck up relative to the neck down. But any breed of cat, or dog say will tend to be just as furry neck up as neck down. Why do we have a neck up / neck down division to our relative hairiness? Was it normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design?

Neck Up / Neck Down - Haircuts: From the neck up, humans tend to need to have the occasional trim or haircut, or shave. But, humans, like the rest of the mammals, don’t need haircuts from the neck down. To b honest, the rest of the mammals don’t need haircuts from the neck up either, unlike humans. Why is that? Why do humans need haircuts? Was it normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design?

Sexual Differentiation: Hairiness or furriness has no obvious sexual differentiation in nearly all the rest of the mammals. You can’t normally tell the sex of a mammal by the amount of fur it has. Male cats of any particular breed will have as much hair on their bodies as their female counterparts, although male lions have manes that lionesses don’t have. Still, lions and lionesses apart, that sexual distinction is part and parcel of the human species. In humans, males tend to be way more the hairier in terms of overall body covering. Males also tend to have far more hair on the front of the face – beards and moustaches. But that’s not always true on top. When it comes to hairiness, there’s not only a neck up / neck down division but a differential between the sexes. Why is that so? Was it normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design?

Natural Pattern Baldness: I need start here by making a distinction between thinning hair which a goodly percentage of human males and females experience as they age, and baldness. Some human males, percentages increasing with ever increasing age, tend to lose, for reasons apart from disease, stress, chemotherapy, etc., more of their hair up top – the common occurrence called male pattern baldness or partial baldness or massive thinning of the hair on top. But whether to a greater or lesser degree, there’s not an inevitability of hair thinning and total loss of hair up top with age in human males. That alone suggests that aging isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of the condition.

Human females, though to a far lesser extent, will also tend to exhibit hair thinning (as opposed to total baldness), again, percentages going up as one’s age goes up and up. On balance however, you see far, far fewer females than males with bald spots relative to gradual hair thinning.  

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that I’ve got a lot less hair up top today than I had in my teens. That applied to my father and equally as well to my father’s father. The question is why is baldness an unfortunate fact of life for some since baldness isn’t a fact of life for all human males; it certainly isn’t as much of an issue for the female of the species (another of those sexual differentiations noted above). Baldness certainly isn’t a fact of life for most hairy or furry species (another human vs. animal data point to be added to the above), like our companion animals, be they cats or dogs, mice or rats, rabbits or guinea pigs, ferrets or alpacas. However, the thinning of the hair isn’t quite uniquely confined to humans. Some primates, but only a relatively few species, show some progressive thinning of their scalp hair following their version of puberty.

So baldness tends to be fairly obviously a sex-linked genetically transmitted condition that arose as the result of some genetic mutation in an ancestral primate and/or human male multi-thousands upon thousands of years ago, way before the start of written history. But lots of questions arise. Why balding on just the top of the head; why not, especially with inevitable aging, the entire head (and face)? Why not the entire body’s covering of hair? Humans have so little fur that the thinning and loss of the rest of it shouldn’t matter really. [There are medical conditions that do involve total facial, even in extreme cases total body hair loss, but they aren’t related to normal hair thinning and baldness.]

If hair thinning and eventually baldness (in some individuals) confers no evolutionary advantage or disadvantage why is there nothing similar in any other non-primate mammalian species? Actually there might be an evolutionary advantage in that genetically linked hair thinning and eventual baldness presumably started with one mutation in a statistical sample of just one individual (perhaps even one of our ancestral primate cousins) which has now spread to include a reasonable minority of adult males (or majority of adult males, even females if you count just hair thinning and those over 60 or so). However, why did that original mutation spread as it obviously did? What could that evolutionary advantage actually be? And if there is an evolutionary advantage, why isn’t the condition more widespread throughout mammalian species? For the moment, those questions stump me. Was it normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design?

Spots / Stripes / Plain: Humans, from the neck up, have a single natural hair colour. Human hair tends to be blonde, red, brown or black (I’ll ignore grey/white since that’s an aging issue). So here we have one species, four different hair colourations. Mammals of any one species tend to be one of two colour patterns, neither of which has a parallel akin to the human condition. Either all members of a species are just one plain colour and only that colour; polar bears are white; brown bears are brown (the very rare condition of acquiring the genetic mutation and ending up an albino is a separate issue), or else all members are multi-coloured with spots, stripes; often an irregular pattern. All humans, one species, aren’t all the same with respect to hair colour like brown bears – some humans are blonde, or black or red-haired. Now I’m aware that there are black cats and white cats and grey cats too; my next door neighbour has two dogs of the same breed, one cream and one black. Then there’s the normal grey mouse and the (laboratory) white mouse. But cats and dogs and similar mammalian companion animals have been bred or ‘created’ by humans via artificial selection criteria. While the grey mouse is probably natural, the white mouse again has been ‘created’ for laboratory use. Tigers have stripes; leopards have spots; calico cats tend to be multi-coloured with an irregular symmetry. Humans have neither stripes, spots nor an irregular colouration pattern. Why are humans different from other mammals when it comes to the general rule of one species – one hair colour, or one species - multi-coloured fur patterns? Was it normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design?

But the biggest anomaly of all is what natural environmental changes – triggers – survival-of-the-fittest scenarios transpired that could account for all these differences between the human mammal and the rest of the mammals blessed with fur? It’s not an advantage one would think to need a haircut; the amount of relative hairiness between males and females, including baldness, is great enough to require an explanation, but I can’t think of one; and there would appear to be no advantage in humans coming in four basic hair colours, yet no combinations of those. It is all very strange.

Summary: Non-human mammals our size or less are way more covered in hair or fur than humans. Non-human mammals show no sexual differentiation in their hairiness or furriness. Nearly all non-human mammals show no neck up/neck down differentiation with respect to hair covering. Non-human mammals don’t need haircuts. Non-human mammals don’t go bald though some primates exhibit hair thinning. So what’s up with humans? Were all these anomalies just normal natural selection, an evolutionary fluke or by design? And if by design; whose design? And what was their ultimate purpose? It’s a hairy issue! 

How Come Civilization? Why Creation? Part One

Modern human beings went from a relatively simple hunter-gatherer existence over a rather long-term, in fact quite lengthy time frame, then, in a rather all-of-a-sudden time frame, we settled down and acquired what we’d all accept as living as a collective civilization or as civilized societies. Why did the transition happen and so suddenly after such a long incubation period. What makes us unique? Was it just good old Mother Nature, or was there a special guiding hand – or tentacle or claw as the case may be perhaps.

Modern humans (Homo sapiens) existed as an uncultured, uncivilized nomadic entity for most of humanity’s time on Earth. Then whoosh, within an incredible short period of time, apart from isolated pockets, our nomadic days were over and we settled down to a civilized and cultured existence, which continues right through to this 21^st Century. But there’s something very odd about that. Why did it take so long? Why then did the transition happen so quickly? Why do mythologies throughout the world tend to credit the gods for this transition when we all know the polytheistic gods don’t exist?

Modern humans, Homo sapiens (Latin for ‘wise man’ or ‘knowing man’) have existed as a separate species, originating in Africa, with all associated anatomical and related mental faculties in tact, for about 200,000 to 400,000 years. All modern behavioural characteristics have been evident in the fossil and archaeological records from about 50,000 years ago, like Palaeolithic cave art and the practice of burying the dead. 

Human culture or civilization blossomed not in the heart of Africa where modern humans evolved, but in the Middle East. Why not Africa? I would have thought that at first glance Africa was a more environmentally habitat than the Middle East. There was ample enough time, yet apart from ancient Egypt, Africa isn’t associated with early civilizations. Perhaps that’s just an historical mystery that’s bound to remain a mystery.

The earliest origin of what we’d call settlement civilization happened roughly 10,000 years ago, though the first real city-states didn’t come into their own, like Mesopotamia, Egypt’s Nile Valley and the Indus Valleys until about 6000 years ago. So, for most of our time on Earth, we were hunter-gatherers going wherever the flow took us. If civilization and established communities and domestication over plants and animals were such a good idea, why did it take so long for the ‘eureka’ moment to strike? If you have an hour to complete a maths exam with one question, ‘how much is 2 + 2?’, and you only figured it out after 50 minutes, then you hardly qualify as an Einstein. Well we figured out civilization 50 minutes after the one hour time limit start button was pushed, but to add to the mystery, at 49 minutes into the test, we still hadn’t a clue. It’s almost as if we received some outside help at nearly the last minute - but outside help from whom? 

According to mythologies around the world, the gods gave the gifts of culture and civilization to ancient human societies.

The Near East: There are various divine bringers of culture associated with Near East mythology. These divine gods were credited with cultural advancements, such as the development of agriculture and animal husbandry as well as the creation of sophisticated urban culture. Various myths suggested that cultural accomplishments were gifts from the gods.

The Egyptians: As a scribe of the gods, the ibis-headed god known as Thoth was viewed by the Egyptians as the inventor of all spoken and written languages.

The Greeks: The Greek goddess Demeter taught humankind agriculture. The Greek goddess Athena taught the Greeks how to cook and sew. Along with fire, the Greek god Prometheus gave people the mechanical arts, sciences, and wisdom.

China: At the centre of the world lay China, the ‘middle kingdom’ which was ruled by gods. These gods created China’s inhabitants and taught them arts and skills. The first heavenly rulers also provided their subjects with technologies essential to life. Each invention – such as cooking, writing, medicine, the wheel, the fishing net and the plow – was credited to a specific deity. The Chinese god Shennong invented the plow and taught people how to farm.

Africa: A cultural hero brings to a group of people the skills necessary for survival. Like in many cultures throughout the world, the cultural hero in African lore is a mythological figure who brings monumental change to his people, through invention and discovery. Gifts brought by these heroes were often the knowledge needed to farm, hunt, and build.

The gods are also the law givers. An obvious case in point is the monotheistic God and His Ten Commandments.

The gods gave humans all these things but we all know there are no gods (including God) so that must mean that humans came up with all these things all by themselves. But if that’s the case why doesn’t human history record this in the same way that history records Edison (for example) with lots of inventions instead of attributing human inventions, human culture, and human civilization to nonexistent gods? That makes no real sense at all.

However, while the gods might not be real, the ‘gods’ could be – ‘gods’ cleverly disguised as gods, but ultimately revealed as extraterrestrials. Extraterrestrials would just about automatically qualify as deities to primitive earthlings who had no concept of life on other planets.

Now all the extraterrestrial ‘gods’ really needed to do was just give us our first kindergarten lessons and that alone would have kick-started us on our way, eventually to land up on the Moon, hunting and gathering those rocks to take back to Earth. It’s like the child attending school. In the beginning the child is spoon-fed all knowledge, but pretty soon the ability to find things out by him (or her) self kicks in.  

The question is, what’s so special about us that we and we alone as a terrestrial species have actually reached out and touched the Moon? Homo sapiens alone as a terrestrial species have advanced intelligence, technology, and overall that nebulous concept called civilization. The evolution of technology isn’t inevitable and has a lot of just-so factors attached; ditto civilization. I’ve speculated that the latter two were kick-started by the ‘gods’, the extraterrestrials. What about our intelligence? Might our intellectual abilities ultimately prove to be another gift from the ‘gods’?

IMHO, intelligence, the ability to figure things out, has evolutionary survival value and will tend to be selected for, and thus over time, there will tend to have evolved life forms with ever higher IQ’s. Here on Earth, just about all mammals and birds, and some exceptional invertebrates (the cephalopods like squid and the octopus), have reasonable IQ’s at least when compared to bacteria, plants, insects, fish, etc. Of course just as some kinds of organisms are faster than others, or have keener senses of sight or smell or hearing, not all advanced organisms are going to end up equal in the IQ stakes. But, the fact remains, the ability to think, to figure things out, can only increase your odds of survival and leaving behind more offspring.

However, if the evolution of intelligence were the be-all-and-end-all to ensuring survival and being fruitful and multiplying, then your everyday household moggy would be catching mice through pure intellectual genius and setting down mousetraps – and the mice avoiding the cat by figuring out what the cat was planning!

No, there are many evolutionary pathways to success and survival and reproducing. In the case of the moggy, evolving faster reflexes, being able to run faster for longer durations, evolving ever more acute hearing and vision – well that’s probably going to ultimately catch more mice than pure brainpower.

So, yes, intelligence will be selected for, but that trait is in serious competition with other traits in terms of ensuring that you live long and prosper. Just like there are many roles or occupations humans play and work at in society, not all roles or occupations are equal in ensuring success and longevity, yet maximizing whatever abilities you have at least give you the maximum odds that whatever role or occupation you have will ensure you have the maximum chance of living long and living in prosperity. 

However, we’re not just slightly ahead in the IQ stakes, but proverbial light-years ahead. We’d be hard-pressed to imagine any other terrestrial species remotely accomplishing through sheer brain-power alone something akin to the most primitive of our cave art or even picking up and chucking rocks at an enemy.

In the time since the arrival of the ‘modern’ human, Homo sapiens, all our other primate relations, the great apes and monkeys, etc. haven’t moved one centimetre  closer to reaching the Moon, or for that matter, any of the other hundreds of thousands of ‘advanced’ or complex life forms currently inhabiting Planet Earth.

If Homo sapiens vanished off the face of the Earth today, what odds would you give that our closest evolutionary cousins, the chimps and/or baboons and/or gorillas and/or any of the old or new world monkeys would be the next terrestrial species to land on the Moon, however far into the future you’d care to speculate?

So we have puzzlement over why, of all the creatures on Earth, do Homo sapiens have not only the highest IQ, but relative to the next in line – well it’s not even a close contest. It’s sort of like pitting the professional baseball major league New York Yankees against a little league baseball team. Both play baseball, but the relative skills are again light-years apart.

Might I suggest that the ‘gods’, from the get-go, deliberately assisted by bioengineering or genetically engineering our advanced IQ levels? Our intelligence was indeed yet another gift from the ‘gods’.  It should come as no surprise that when it comes to creation myths, the gods created humans. I’d just replace the word ‘created’ with the phrase ‘assisted Mother Nature’s natural selection process by their artificial selection of various traits in selected primates’. The end product of the ‘gods’ bioengineering was humanity with all its glorious top of the pops intellect.

To be continued…