More Profound Things: The Living

There are many things and concepts within the collective worldviews of humanity that are considered pretty mundane. However, there’s certainly a collection of things and ideas which rise to the top in profoundness when compared and contrasted with the ordinary everyday routine. These are the sorts of profound things and concepts which keep you awake at night, pondering the Big Issues. No two people will come up with identical lists. Without further ado, here are some more of mine. 

* Human Matter Matters: We are starstuff (and Big Bang stuff too). It’s pretty profound to realise that all the elements (except hydrogen) that makes you, you, once-upon-a-time resided in the interior of a massive star(s). Does that make you ‘hot’ stuff? Of course all that makes you, you - all of the fundamental bits and pieces like electrons and quarks – can be traced back to the Big Bang. That’s even more profound, though being ‘Big Bang stuff’ is probably not as poetic as being composed of ‘starstuff’.

* Spooky Observations at a Distance: When you look up at the night sky, a) is someone or something is looking back at you, or b) is no one or nothing is looking back at you? Either scenario is profound when you think of the implications.

* We Gotta Walk-That-Walk: That we have a totally upright bipedal gait, without benefit of a balancing tail, is something totally unique and therefore somewhat anomalous in the animal kingdom, despite all the obvious disadvantages. What disadvantages? For one, obviously, it’s a lot easier to fall down when you’re standing on two legs relative to four, six, eight or more. Falling over can result in serious consequences, especially if there isn’t anyone else around to come to your aid. Secondly, going bipedal called for a radical shift in our skeletal structure as well as in related musculature and organ attachment.  A bipedal gait must therefore be not only revolutionary but really of evolutionary importance. But that profound observation leads to another anomaly. If a bipedal gait without the encumbrance of a balancing tail is such a significant improvement, why haven’t more animals undergone that shift?   

* We Face Facts: Human facial features. Say you are shown a photograph of the face of a short, bald, chubby, 30-ish white male. Say you are shown a photograph of the face of a chimpanzee; the face of a lion; an Indian elephant; a grizzly bear, a koala bear, a brown rat; a German Shepard, a wallaby, a bottlenose dolphin, a pelican, an ostrich, a cobra snake; a Nile crocodile, a green tree frog; a tuna fish, a lobster, a German cockroach; a black ant; a house fly, a huntsman spider, even a flea. Now, here you stand in a police line-up looking at five short, bald, chubby 30-ish white males, five chimpanzees, five lions, etc. etc. Match the original facial photograph with one of the five suspects! While a match is likely in the case of the human males, it’s going to be on average pure guesswork with any other species or breed of species unless the individual in question had some very unique and atypical facial feature. Now, the profound question is, why do humans have unique facial features while the rest of the animal kingdom doesn’t. How do you tend to recognise a human? First and foremost by his or her face. This is all very odd because it is so very unique, yet very profound. 

Equally as profound, not only do we have unique facial features, but racial facial features. Take four ‘passport’ photos of a Caucasian, a Negro, an Asian, and an Australian Aboriginal 30-ish something male and photoshop them so that all are exactly the same shade of grey. It would still be easy to match the face to the race. What’s profound here is that those racial facial features evolved, for reason(s) unknown, within the time a small group of Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa just roughly 50,000 years ago.

  

* Memory, Creativity and Chemistry: Like a book or an LP, like a film strip or a DVD, like a painting/photograph or a CD, like computer software or a tape recording, the human mind houses a record of events which we call memory. Unlike these other physical media every time your mind does a replay, it can value-add to that memory. You may have a memory for how make pizza, but unlike the recipe in the cookbook, you can be creative and change the recipe. All of that memory/creativity is based in chemistry, specifically neurochemistry, which, unlike all other kinds of chemistry, makes that possible. How, I don’t begin to comprehend, but it is so, and it is rather profound upon reflection.

* Our Family Tree is Kaput: All our human ancestors are extinct. Something is screwy somewhere! I mean there have been dozens of separate and apart hominoid/hominid species that separate modern Homo sapiens from our closest still living ancestors, the chimpanzees. All those in-betweens have gone extinct, for reason(s) unknown. That all would have succumbed to, whatever, seems to defy probability. Clearly many of those hominoid/hominid species shared many of our survival traits like possessing a relatively high degree of intelligence, tool making, group cooperation when hunting-gathering, etc. There’s no rational explanation offered up by paleoanthropologists that explains this. There’s not even that ‘easy’ answer of Homo (‘shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later’) sapiens being the fall ‘guy’ here. ‘Modern’ humans hadn’t of been thought up yet in anyone’s evolutionary philosophy when most of these extinctions took place.

* Not a Ghost of a Chance: It’s also pretty profound when you have every human culture and society from across all time frames believe in the reality of a phenomena that modern science rejects as pseudoscience or supernatural and paranormal nonsense, and it isn’t just life-after-death or an afterlife but an actual apparent manifestation of same. Some call them ghosts, wraiths, spirits, and phantoms – whatever. Actually I view (not that I actually have) ghosts, etc. as further evidence that we ‘exist’ in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe, but that’s another story for another time.



The Trouble with Human Evolution: Part One

When it comes to the standard model of how modern humans evolved from our primate ancestors, especially apparently the chimpanzee, you should be prepared to ask the tough questions and see if they get answered to your satisfaction. Questions like can you really go from chimpanzee stock to what makes you, the reader, you, via natural selection in 6 to 7 million years? That’s not just a little change, but a massive change and on several broad physiological, anatomical and behavioural fronts. Contrast your society, lifestyle and body-plan with that of the chimpanzee. So, if you think the standard model is unlikely, and you reject any supernatural explanation, that leaves but two alternatives, an artificial selection by ancient aliens, or we’re akin to characters in a video game – we are simulated beings.

Modern humans have evolved over the past six to seven million years a number of traits that make us, Homo sapiens, a very unique species indeed. We alone of all the mammals (as well as all invertebrates, amphibians and reptiles) have a bipedal gait. We alone of all of our primate cousins are for all practical purposes hairless. Of all the animals that are, or have ever been, we’re top of the pops with respect to brain size as a function of body size, and in terms of intelligence, king of the hill full stop. And while animals can communicate via vocalizations and body language, none can communicate the extremely wide range of practical and especially abstract concepts that we can. Last, but not least, humans are nearly unique in making and using external tools, tools unique in terms of their sophistication.

All five major traits noted above, and a lot more that’s related besides, don’t seem to be a requirement for basic survival, since other species survive and thrive without them, and in fact all these major five defining traits (and more) seem to have some actual evolutionary drawbacks, not the least of which require very serious modifications to basic primate anatomy for apparently no increase in that Darwinian phrase “survival of the fittest”. The proof of that pudding is that our ultimate primate ancestor still survives – the chimpanzee; their ultimate descendent survives – the modern human; yet all those in-betweens hominids who were presumably adapting via natural selection resulting in all those evolutionary changing improvements, went kaput – over twenty species of them. If these “survival of the fittest” evolutionary adaptations were all that crash hot and necessary, then why was their demise? Any ancestral hominoids that went extinct prior to 200,000 years ago can’t have Homo sapiens as the villain. Those 20 plus extinct hominid species aside, why aren’t many of those natural selection improvements really so crash hot for us modern humans either? Here’s the trouble with human evolution. But first consider this.

THE ROOT CAUSE & DRIVING FORCE

The current standard model of human evolution explains the ‘why’ question due to rapid and extreme shifts in climate in continental Africa over that six to seven million year period. The central problem there IMHO is why these shifts failed to drastically produce evolutionary changes in the rest of the animal populations like elephants, lions, hyenas, giraffes, zebras, wildebeests and other African landlubbers as the Dark Continent went from jungle to forest to savannah to arid deserts and back again.

Now of course environmental change is a major driving force behind biological evolution, at least when it comes to natural selection. But one has to look at the Big Picture, the entirety of the bio-realm and not just isolate one changing species and link the two and ignore all else. The environment changes and hominoids change but all the other species seemingly don’t change. That makes for an anomaly. 

One of the key phrases in evolution is that “there is a price to pay” for change – no free lunch or get out of jail card is authorized. That “no pain, no gain” price applies whether you’re dealing with natural or artificial selection. But I sometimes wonder whether one is getting a fifty-cent gain return on a dollar investment worth of pain. Consider the following. 

OUR BIPEDAL GAIT

* Is an anomaly in that human beings, alone of all the mammals, walk routinely on just two legs.

* It called for a complete redesign of our musculoskeletal system vis-à-vis our chimpanzee ancestors.

* That results in an increase in all our various painful bad back trials and tribulations.

* And it also requires a rearrangement of our internal organ attachments.

* A bipedal gait needs a harder working heart to pump blood up to our now higher upper reaches, like the head and neck, instead of mainly sideways. A bipedal gait means having to fight the better fight against gravity.

* A bipedal gait results in an increase in difficulties in maintaining an upright balance (especially as one grows older) because the centre of gravity has shifted dramatically. It’s much easier to push over a standing human than say a standing dog.

* A bipedal gait further results in a decrease in survival value due to the ever possible loss of or injury to a leg, foot, ankle, etc. Lose the use of a leg and in the wilderness, you’re nearly helpless.

* A bipedal gait has to the best of my knowledge only arisen once before, and that was in the theropod dinosaur branch, like T-Rex, etc. That was the branch that gave rise to the birds, therefore they are also bipedal, but it originated with an early, early ancestor of T-Rex. Some may argue that kangaroos and their relatives like the wallabies are bipedal, but they don’t put one leg in front of the other in a left-right-left-right-left-right fashion. They hop, which doesn’t quite put them in the same category as humans or even birds. Further, the theropod dinosaurs, the birds, and even the kangaroos all have tails to help keep their centre of balance, well, balanced. That’s cheating!!! Humans lack that support structure (a rather sad tale I’m sure), so I’ll argue that the human bipedal gait is still unique among all animals, past and present. Humans remain the one and only really bona-fide bipedal entity. Okay, a few tailless primates can ‘walk’ for brief intervals, but their normal locomotion is via their four limbs on the ground when not swinging in the trees.

C - A bipedal gait isn’t a lifestyle walk-the-walk gait that is commonly noted in cats – in fact it isn’t noted at all. Why cats? Why not cats? C is for Cat; C is for Comparison. So as a comparison, let’s take cats, who have a multitude of feline relatives (tigers, lions, etc.) and who have survived and thrived for quite some considerable time. Why cats? Firstly because I’m familiar with cats and secondly because they are an advanced multicellular relatively sophisticated mammalian species, much liken to us. Cats share a great deal with us humans apart from being warm-blooded mammals. Cats, like humans are curious, playful, tend to look after number one, are territorial, like to sleep, dream, have a good memory, show emotions, and like humans have colonized the globe – except Antarctica – either as domestics or as ferals or as wild animals, etc. But, they don’t walk-the-walk on just their two hind legs!

A LARGE HUMAN BRAIN

* Is an anomaly, along with that associated brain thingy high IQ or intelligence we have, relative to the rest of the animal kingdom, which collectively aren’t quite, by any stretch of the imagination, in Einstein’s league. Humans have the largest brain size as a function of body size in the entire animal kingdom, again, apparently both past and present. .

* A large human brain makes for an increasingly hazardous childbirth. The relatively large head of the foetus at childbirth, having to pass through the space available via the hip opening, has resulted in not just a rather painful experience for the mother (and presumably the infant too) but has often led to the premature death of a lot of said newborns and/or their mothers. Now another anomaly here is that if the human body has accommodated all the massive anatomical changes required for a bipedal lifestyle, you’d think an increase in the birth canal hip opening size would have been relatively evolutionary child’s play. 

* The human brain takes years to develop fully, nearly two decades worth in fact, leaving infants totally dependent on others for survival. Infants need care not just for a few weeks or months or seasons, but for many, many years, extending right through their teens, thus cramping the lifestyle of the parents. This length of time for brain development and associated acquiring of survival skills to fully develop is unprecedented in all other primates.

* A large human brain is a very energy-intensive organ. In fact 25% of our energy requirements are required to fuel our upstairs grey-matter wetware. That in turn puts additional pressures on hunting and/or gathering for that extra in food resources required to supply that energy need. Apparently the increase in those energy demands is what drove us to begin to hunt down and eat meat and invent cooking (to make the meat easier to digest). Well, maybe.

C - Cats, however endearing, are not a little feline version of Einstein.

A LACK OF FUR

* Is an anomaly since humans alone of nearly 200 species of our primate cousins are considered a “naked ape”.

* Our relative lack of fur makes us dependent on sweating for temperature regulation, also making us highly dependent on sources of freshwater and salt.

* Our relative lack of fur has the apparent advantage of enabling humans to become long distance endurance runners since we can continually keep cool, even while running, by sweating, yet what we are running after (prey), or from (predators), don’t sweat and therefore are quickly overcome by heat exhaustion. We get a meal, or escape from being one. Well that’s the standard scenario. I think it would have made more sense to have used our social group numbers, increasing IQ and tool making abilities to hunt and ambush game rather than running them down. As for escaping predators, perhaps we should have retained our tree climbing abilities, and if no trees were available, there are always rocks to throw and sticks to club predators with. I’m not convinced loss of fur in order to sweat in order to run marathons in order to eat or avoid being eaten are related in a cause-and-effect way. In any event running is also very energy consuming and it isn’t normally sound practice to expend more energy than you have to, especially when you don’t know where and when your next meal is coming from. And if it is advantageous for evolving hominoids to lose fur, take up sweating, take up jogging, and run to exhaustion large prey animals, then it should also be advantageous for other predators, like the lion, to do the same. But that hasn’t happened. Why not?  

* Our relative lack of fur requires the need, as a substitution, for clothing in cooler environments. Why a human, originating in and adapted to a tropical climate without need of fur, therefore without need of clothing, would migrate into cooler, even cold habitats where fur, or now a clothing substitute instead, is a near requirement, is itself an anomaly. You swap fur for clothing, but clothing in itself requires a whole lot of special skills to produce – fur doesn’t.

C – Cats, as well as their wildlife big cat cousins, do not lack a natural covering of fur. 

To be continued…

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…

Human Evolution: By Natural or Artificial Selection? Part One

If you’re reading this, I’d be 99.99% sure you’re human. That being the case, you probably are aware that humans evolved from our primate ancestors, most likely the chimpanzees, starting many eons of time ago in deep, darkest, equatorial Africa. From that point of origin, humans colonized the globe, including whatever part of Planet Earth you currently call home. That’s the be-all-and-end-all of the origin, evolution and colonization of and by the human race. Well, I think there are some flies in that ointment, especially the bit about our evolution.

We come in breeds. The proof of that pudding stares you in the face everyday as you observe the racial variety of people around you. I don’t recall anything in Genesis that explains this, so maybe God had nothing to do with this – assuming the existence of a bona-fide supernatural creator God of course in the first place – though I stand to be corrected on the lack of a Biblical explanation by appropriate authorities.

But if the Bible doesn’t explain the origin of the various breeds of humans neither does Darwin’s natural selection, in the same way that natural selection didn’t create, and doesn’t explain our dog breeds. Survival of the fittest didn’t produce the French Poodle – we did that! But who (or what) created our diversity of breeds or races?

To quell the immediate curiosity of the reader, my answer comes down solidly in favour of our evolution by ‘artificial selection’, which detracts not one jot from the Darwinian principles of evolution via natural selection. The difference between the two is that artificial selection is selection deliberately guided by intelligence; natural selection is, well natural, and not by design.

Humanity, mankind, human beings, however you label us, are collectively made up of breeds just like our own domesticated and bioengineered (artificial bred) animals (companion, farm or other) and plants (crops or garden varieties). The key words are ‘domesticated’ and ‘bioengineered’. We’ve been domesticated and bioengineered too, but we didn’t domesticate and bioengineer our own human breeds like we domesticated and bioengineered our domesticated plants and animals. Somebody or something else will take that credit.

Now I’m not really talking here about the so-called scientific phrase now substituted for creationism – ‘intelligent design’. Intelligent design has the philosophical baggage of having a supernatural creator, a God, behind the design. Alas, in the case of the human being, if God designed us from scratch; from the ground up, well He really failed Bioengineering 101. The various aches and pains and ailments we suffer because of bad biological design testify to that!

No, I’m referring here to the sort of artificial selection we humans employ when we breed dogs or cats or cattle or drought-resistant crops or whatever for our particular real (or imagined needs). I’m just turning the tables here a bit in what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. As we do, so has it been done to us! The question again is, done unto us by whom? 

To further quell the immediate curiosity of the reader, the ‘who’ collectively are the mythological gods, who aren’t really mythical, nor are they supernatural, but flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials who happen to have a special interest in, and abilities toward, genetics.

The basic premise, as expounded upon by universal cultural mythologies, is that the gods created humans, creating humans to relieve the gods of, and do the hard work instead, and to also serve the gods – and I don’t just mean by kneeling and prayer and building edifices to them. Translated, in more modern terminology, the flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials, which came upon Planet Earth many hundreds-of-thousands, perhaps millions of years ago, set up shopkeeping. Eventually known, if not loved, as the gods, these ‘gods’ genetically engineered humans from primate stock with again the ultimate goal of making the ‘gods’ life easier and more rewarding. Because of genetic similarities to our modern selves, that initial primate stock more likely as not were the chimpanzees.

One of those ‘more rewarding’ bits; one of the ‘gods’ tricks in their genetic engineering experiment, a design element designed to appeal to the ‘gods’ was to ensure humans were sexually compatible with them, and by Jove, did they ever make use of that engineered compatibility – at least if you take at face value and believe what transpired according to the mythological tales. Not suitable reading for the kiddies!

Now, the initial question is, if the overall intention of the extraterrestrial ‘gods’ is to create slaves to do the housework for the ‘gods’, and to serve the ‘gods’ (sexually or otherwise), and all you have to work with is terrestrial life (minus humanity), what sort of traits do you need to select for in order to get a life form that can build the pyramids and monumental structures that are constructed in order to serve the purpose of worshiping you? Clearly only humans can build a pyramid, so what skills or attributes do we have now that all other terrestrial life forms didn’t have then?

Two particulars stand out. One is that in order to build a pyramid, etc. one needs a free pair (or more) of appendages in order to manipulate stuff. How do you get a free pair of appendages? Well, you have got to go from a quadrupedal stance to a bipedal stance, thus freeing up two appendages (i.e. – arms). From a Darwinian point-of-view, that’s a problem. There’s a cost. Now we’re clearly bipedal. But will a bipedal posture be selected for naturally? Not usually, for again, there’s a price to be paid.

The second particular is that you need some degree of smarts! Translated, to build a pyramid you need a relatively large and complex brain. Many animals might be strong enough to build a pyramid, but they just don’t have a high enough IQ to pull it off. However, again from a Darwinian perspective, a high IQ comes at a high cost. Will high intelligence be selected for naturally?

Though there are some limited advantages to standing upright (apart from freeing up two arms to do things with like grab forbidden fruit slightly higher up in the trees)  – you can see farther; wade slightly deeper waters, in general a bipedal stance comes at a considerable cost. Two limbs now have to take up all the body weight instead of four legs (or six - if you’re a bug; or eight – if you’re a spider). If one of those two limbs fails, you’re in deep poo. However, survival is more probable if you have four (or six or eight) legs and one fails.

Further, if you’re bipedal, your centre of gravity shifts, making you way more prone to losing your balance and falling over. Also, bipedal animals tend to run slower than a quadrupedal one. Most dogs whose backbones are at my knee height or more, and cats, can easily outrun me. The same goes for alligators, even with their splayed out limbs when they’re going full tilt. The upshot of all of that is that in the animal kingdom, only birds (and their ancestors, the theropod bipedal saurischian dinosaurs) are (or were) bipedal – for fairly obvious reasons. Two of their four ‘legs’ have evolved for flying. Humans have no such fallback since we can’t flap our arms and fly.

You don’t have to be a professional zoologist or expert in anatomy to realise that any creature going from a quadrupedal gait to a bipedal one has to have a massive amount of anatomical alterations to its basic structures. Bone and muscle lengths and widths will change; there must be alterations to the various joints, nearly all muscle attachments to the bones will alter; support structures for many internal organs will need rethinking, etc. Imagine the anatomical changes you’d have to make in your dog or cat or horse for that animal to walk in the same manner you do; imagine the changes that would have to be made in your anatomy for you to walk like a dog, cat or horse. It’s a big ask of natural selection to go from quadrupedal to bipedal without some clearly defined survival advantage(s); perhaps not so much of an ask if the shift is artificial selection; guided by an intelligence using bioengineering or genetic engineering techniques.

Now various animals can, and do, for brief periods, stand upright, say prairie dogs, chipmunks, bears, etc. Some animals can be taught to briefly stand up like circus elephants. Kangaroos, wallabies and related are usually bipedal, but they hop, not walk or run. Not even our primate relations routinely walk around on two legs although many can and do so for brief periods.

I think the advantages of a bipedal way of posture and locomotion are overstated, otherwise way more animals would have evolved that posture; you’d expect our cats and dogs to not so much as sit-up and beg but stand-up and beg for special treats. Out of millions and millions of vertebrate species that have existed over the past 300 or so million years of geologic history, only a relative tiny handful have adopted the bipedal mode of lifestyle. It’s not proved to be exactly an evolutionary success story unlike the more universal backbones and rib cages and skulls all vertebrates have.

Overall, in the biological scheme of things, we’re not just a little bit more advanced in a bipedal way, we’re WAY MORE advanced. The question is, why? Again, why are humans so obviously bipedal? And if we’re not so inclined to be bipedal by natural selection, perhaps then we’ve been so evolutionary inclined by artificial selection – by the ‘gods’ to free up our upper limbs, a useful trait if the ‘gods’ put us to work.

To be continued…