The Russell Stannard Questions: Life

The following questions (Q) are taken verbatim from those poised by Russell Stannard in his 2010 book The End of Discovery [are we approaching the boundaries of the knowable?]; Oxford University Press, Oxford. I consider these typical of the sorts of modern Big Questions that are part and parcel of the philosophy of modern science, especially physical science.

My answers are based mainly with the thought of our being in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe that has been constructed by one or more Supreme Programmers. However, some of the answers apply regardless of what the nature of our ultimate reality is.

Q. Why is the universe life-friendly?

A. The universe is both bio-friendly and not bio-friendly. 99.999% (add a few more 9’s here) of the cosmic environment is decidedly bio-unfriendly and would snuff you out so quick-smart you wouldn’t know what hit you. Of course the cosmos is also bio-friendly otherwise you wouldn’t be here reading this. If you reject a supernatural explanation, that leaves coincidence, a multiverse, or software. Coincidence is stretching things since there are just so many dials that have to be set to a very narrow range. The multiverse appeals to probability statistics – think of those millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters one of whom will type “Hamlet” word-for-word – eventually. That leaves software, or in other words a Supreme Programmer programing our universe in a bio-friendly way. 

Q. Is there extraterrestrial life, and if so, how do we humans stand in comparison as regards intellectual capacity?

A. Given the vastness of the cosmos, and the sheer number of galaxies in the observable cosmos, and the numbers of stars per galaxy with associated solar systems and the number of planets per solar system not to mention possible rogue/orphan planets and how interstellar cosmic organic chemistry associated with life is, well, cosmic, etc., you would have to be pretty brave to bet the family farm arguing Planet Earth being the proverbial cosmic IT when it comes to life. Even going up the chain from the origin of life ‘living’ molecules to unicellular life to multicellular life to intelligent life to technologically advanced life forms and advocating extreme difficulty in getting from one step to the next step on up the line, there must be – if you’re a betting person – millions of advanced extraterrestrial civilizations throughout the cosmos and a goodly number in our galaxy too. Further, we humans are the new boys on the block, so the odds are that any other extraterrestrial intelligences will have been around way longer that we have, and thus have evolved greater intellectual capacity that we have yet achieved. However, the interesting bit is that once intelligence is achieved, natural selection gives way to artificial selection, and part of that artificial selection might ultimately be the transition from biological intelligence to artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence which will further evolve via artificial selection as machine intelligence designs ever better machine intelligences.



Natural History: Some Even More Random Rambling

Sometimes you have a new thought, an idea, or eureka moment, but it’s not gutsy enough to expand into a reasonable length article or essay. So, here’s a potpourri of thoughts too good not to record, but with not enough meat available to flesh out. 

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* We’ve all read and heard about how we consume way more salt than is necessary and that too much salt can cause high blood pressure and heart attacks and associated nasty conditions. What is never mentioned in all these health warnings about salt is the feedback mechanism that restores the proper balance. It’s akin to how many bars will put out free salted peanuts or salted chips for the customers. It’s not out of the pure kindness of the bartender. If you take in a lot of salt you get, surprise, thirsty. And so the bar makes up for the ‘free’ peanuts and chips by selling more drinks to quench the thirst you build up by eating all that ‘free’ salty stuff. In other words, if you over indulge in the salt, you’ll drink more fluids because you get extra thirsty, and the additional liquids will, when filtered through the kidneys, take the unnecessary salt with it (salty urine) and the proper balance is restored. So, if we consume way more salt than is necessary, we probably drink way more fluids as well. 

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* I think most of us would agree that a reasonable definition of free will is the ability to voluntarily and consciously choose between two (or more) courses of action. You make a decision by your own free will that’s generated by your internal conscious self with no external influences, like someone, even Mother Nature, holding a gun to your head! However…

What if you view an optical illusion, an apparent reality of which there are numerous classic examples available? Initially you have two choices. You can convince yourself that what you are seeing is indeed reality (wrong choice) or you can convince yourself that what you’re seeing is not reality (right choice). But that’s mission impossible.

You know – you are consciously aware – that what you are looking at is an illusion and not reality. Can you now, of your own free will, take that course of action that will actually convince yourself that what you are looking at is an illusion and not reality? You know it’s an illusion, but can you convince yourself of that fact? Try as you might, no matter what, you will still see that apparent reality – the illusion – even though you know it’s just an illusion. Your brain is fooled and your mind can’t do a damn thing about it. Your free will cannot free yourself from seeing the illusion. You cannot negate that illusionary effect of your own free will even though you know it is not reality.

Now some optical illusions give you the apparent free will to view the illusion as this thing or that thing (like the classic two faces or one vase), but you can’t sustain that. You will shift perspective between the two illusionary options quite against what your own free will dictates. Further, you don’t have the free will third option of seeing neither of the two illusionary options.  

In a somewhat similar vein, watching one of the season three episodes of “Through the Wormhole”, part of that episode, exploring the subconscious, showed the experiment of a test subject who was fitted with a pair of camera-glasses that showed him an image of a test dummy dressed the same as the test subject. The test subject was fully aware of this. The test subject was then conditioned by being stroked with a rod while at the same time viewing the test dummy being stroked. Then, the test dummy was suddenly violently assaulted, and of course the test subject reacted as if he were being assaulted and not the dummy. Even when the test subject was told that the dummy was going to be assaulted, he was aware of this in his conscious mind, he still couldn’t help himself via his subconscious reacting as if he were being assaulted instead of the dummy. 

In short, your conscious mind cannot override or overturn your subconscious, free will be damned.

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* Despite the very popular but self-promotional conception, human beings are the least rational species on this planet. Any other animal that acts irrationally, say via a genetic defect or disease or the equivalent of dementia, is a dead animal. I have yet to witness any animal acting in any way, shape, manner or form that wasn’t rational for either its own survival or the survival of its genes, its community or its kind. I most certainly cannot say the same about the human species.

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* Here’s a wicked thought experiment. Create two clones of yourself. Raise them to maturity. Then, remove their brains and toss them away (this is just a thought experiment and so morals and ethics can be bypassed). Now have your brain removed (and toss your body away). Have one hemisphere transplanted into one clone; the other hemisphere transplanted into the second clone. While the two hemispheres of your brain have slightly different emphasis in terms of functionality, you can function as a reasonable whole with just one hemisphere. Now the question arises, will you be self-aware in two bodies at the exact same time? You could accomplish twice as much and be totally aware of the totality!

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* Humans and cycles go hand in glove. Though most are artificial constructions and therefore rather phoney, cycles are important to humans and human society. The Day-Night cycle is of the most prime importance, and it is a natural cycle. Humans put a lot of stock in the seven day week cycle, which is an artificial construct, and to a lesser extent the month (also a phoney cycle even if ever so loosely based on the lunar cycle). The year is a natural cycle (in terms of the seasons) and probably of greatest significance next to the day and week cycles. Decades and centuries rank fairly low in importance and are artificial constructs in any event. The millennia are only important when the calendar changes over from say 1999 to 2000 (though the new millennia actually began in 2001) and 1000 year cycles lie outside of the human lifespan in any event. And that should be pretty much it – except for some ancient societies who had cycles of apparent importance so long that predated the very existence of those societies (and concluded well after those societies went extinct), like the Mayan long count (recall that famous doomsday date of 21 December 2012). Other societies measure ongoing cycles of creation-destruction in such lengthy periods that they really have no imminent impact on the societies propagating them. When societies have cycles of significance that are of no immediate significance, then you have an anomaly and you have got to wonder where hence gave that particular cyclic concept.

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* Try as I might, I could never teach my cats the barest and most basic rudiments of algebra or even those boneheaded elementary mathematics of arithmetic that elementary schoolkids master. I could never get my cats to understand and appreciate the ancient Egyptian cat cults and goddesses. Even the concept of biological evolution – the how and why cats evolved into cats and the ancestry of my cats would be so much triple-Dutch to them. Their wetware, neurochemistry, etc. just isn’t up to this. Sunshine gives them warmth – that they understand but not how the sun shines.

Now, the upshot of that is, despite the human arrogance that our minds can comprehend everything part and parcel of life, the Universe and everything, perhaps we just can’t through absolutely no fault of our own. Maybe human brains, in the here and now, are not capable of figuring all things out, like the meaning of quantum physics, and the theory of everything (TOE) which is basically a theory of quantum gravity and coming to terms with what exactly is dark matter and dark energy and answering all those other questions that have gone without resolution for thousands of years.  

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* You probably think of yourself as one singular organism. The expression “me, myself and I” are all singular. Yet, you know perfectly well that you are really a colony of billions of organisms (cells) working in more often as not the case in total harmony. Yet, as things turn out, you play host to billions and billions more microbes. Nine out of ten of the microbes that make you up aren’t really a part of you at all, like say those bacteria that survive and thrive in your mouth. So, are you an organism, a colony of organisms or an environment for organisms? I’m quite astounded to learn that 90% of me isn’t me! So perhaps our real purpose in life is to serve as hosts for the greater multitudes. The needs of the many [microbes] outweigh the needs of the one [Human].

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* In the simulated universe scenario I (and many others) have suggested we exist inside a computer as a software program or subroutine within a larger software program. The un-stated assumption is that the Supreme Programmer was of flesh-and-blood (terrestrial or extraterrestrial). But why make that assumption? Why not suggest that the Supreme Programmer was/is an Artificial Intelligence in its own right just being creative. Silicon –and-steel (artificial) intelligence is a logical evolutionary successor to flesh-and-blood (natural) intelligence and is likely to not only evolve far more rapidly (Moore’s Law) than human evolution ever did but have an overall longevity vastly in extent of ours.



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…

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 Mythology of the Cat: Part Two

I’ve previously had a go at trying to figure out how a wild animal with minimal contact with humans might view their world, especially when humans are a part of it even if the animal doesn’t know it. I concluded that no matter what, the animal; in my previous essay the case of a possum, while having a worldview would never get the particulars correct. But what about a domestic animal who interacts with us day-in-and-day-out? What’s their worldview and is it any better than that of a wild animal?

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

I’ve never gotten the impression that a cat ponders anything at anytime but practical matters that have a direct bearing on it in the here and right now. An obvious example is that any cat always finds itself on the wrong side of a door, and you are expected to correct that state of affairs as often as is necessary – which is very often indeed. No wonder people install cat flaps! Anyway, things like philosophy and religion and the arts and mathematics and anything abstract not only isn’t considered and immediately dismissed, the cat probably can’t even conceive of such things in order for them to be dismissed as of no relevance to the cat’s worldview. There’s no creativity in their little grey cells whatever. I very much doubt whether any cat has pondered whether or not it has free will. My cats don’t respond to cat art, like the pictures of cats on calendars. Music sooths the savage beast but with one minor exception all my cats have been oblivious to whatever type of music CD I’m playing, be it classical or jazz, country & western or film scores; vocal or instrumental. That one exception is that I once had a cat that would react to whistling within a song that emanated from the speakers. Still, cats probably therefore never have to endure that annoying experience of having an irritating song play endlessly, over and over and over again inside their head! 

If the cats were of a human frame of mind, they might conceive of something like: In the beginning the great cat deity, lets name it Bastet (also spelled Bast, Baast, Ubasti and Baset) after the ancient Egyptian cat goddess, created not only the domestic feline, but all that’s part and parcel of their world. In the beginning Bastet created the ever pristine litter box; the ever full food and water bowls, and lots of birds and mice for felines to chase, catch and snack on. That’s of course according to the mythology of the cat, if the cat had a human’s imagination.  Well actually, not. No cat has imagined any self-contained mythology about the origin and evolution of cats.  If cats have a worldview mythology outside of the concepts of self and now, then it probably centres on what strange companions humans are. And I’m 99% sure that while such human activities might be fascinating, they are equally incomprehensible.

Translated, whatever mythology our domestic feline companions come up with that explains to their satisfaction their worldview, it will bear little resemblance to actual human activities on behalf of the animal, like the concept of money to pay for the goods and services it receives. The cats have no conception of livestock (slaughtered as pet food), of biological evolution (that provided the birds and mice and the abilities of the cat to chase, catch and snack on them), of the infrastructure that gets them their fresh water (and other goodies) that ends up as the end product in their water bowls, etc.

So while I have no idea what worldview mythology my cats have (and they probably aren’t the exact same – each cat’s worldview will be in part unique) it’s wrong.

However, we can speculate; take scenarios that are part and parcel of their world, natural or otherwise, and try to figure out how they see and interpret things through their eyes.

So what goes through a cat’s mind when it’s not immediately concerned with me; now – when it’s not in immediate need of catering to various biological requirements and functions? The cat is just sitting, wide awake, alert, observing, but what is it thinking? Does it have to be deep in thought at all? Probably not I suspect. In fact, it’s more likely as not they are observing just for the sake of observing – always on the lookout for something to chase and eat (that’s probably just hardwired into their brain), or for something that might chase and eat them.

I mean my cats are interested in birds; I’m interested in birds too – but for totally different reasons. On the other hand, my cats are interested in a clean litter box, but what goes through their minds when every time they go to the litter box it’s pristine, even though it wasn’t in that condition a little while back for obvious reasons? Do they associate that ‘it wasn’t then but now it is pristine’ phenomenon with a cat deity or with me or neither?  Cat food appears on demand in bowls they eat out of, yet they have no comprehension of the chain of events between manufacture, distribution, the need for money to purchase, transport, open and pour into those bowls that food. So how do they account for the food that somehow magically appears before them? Do they have a food bowl mythology? Or, perhaps it is a phenomena that just is, and they think no more about it than a fish ponders the nature of the water it swims in. For some reason I find it very hard to picture my cats deep in thought wondering about all those whys and wherefores associated with the food they consume.

Well we have some idea what a cat’s worldview mythology is (me; now), and isn’t (nothing that’s abstract) but you, the owner, aren’t an abstraction. How do you fit in to your animal’s mythology?

Cats must have a field day with respect to inventing a mythology that accounts for the strange habits of those creatures they share their environment with – humans. For example, my cats see me getting dressed every morning – I’m putting on the fur. Since cats don’t need to dress, this behaviour must be really weird to them. Ditto making the bed or washing the dishes. The cats must be totally freaked out by my habit of deliberately getting wet via a daily shower or bath. What activity could repulse a cat more than that? Yuck! How do cats explain the dwelling they reside in along with all the stuff it contains? I know where it all comes from, but how do they account for it all? Do they even bother to try to account for it? Part of that all is my personal computer (PC). They see me typing away on this PC but I’m sure they have no comprehension of what this PC device is or why I’m pecking away on it instead of paying attention to them. When I go out of the house, shopping say or off to the club for a few cold beers, do they wonder where and why? Do they worry that I might not come back, because if I don’t they will find themselves in a pretty pickle. Or, is the fact I’m away of no interest and no consequence and causes no speculation? Since they don’t seem agitated when I leave, I suspect they have no comprehension of the possibility that I might not return, being hit by the proverbial bus instead.

So, do my cats develop a point of view, a worldview mythology to account for birds (a natural part of their environment), litter boxes (not so natural), and PC’s (totally unnatural)?  I suspect they don’t. These things just are and don’t require any mythological interpretation to otherwise explain them.

Cats like to lie and stretch out in and soak up the warmth of the Sun. How do they account for sunshine and this warmth since presumably they know nothing of stellar astrophysics, nuclear fusion, photons, etc.? Might it be, if it be at all, that our cats conclude that in the beginning that great cat deity Bastet created the Sun to give pleasure and warmth to them, but, Bastet hides the Sun at regular intervals (at night) so as not to totally spoil us cats? Probably not I suspect. The warmth of the Sun probably just is (like the water is to the fish) – in fact they might not even make the connection between the Sun, sunshine, and the warmth that gives them. 

Conclusions & Summary: So what is a domestic cat’s worldview mythology? Well, if the cat could speak, it might say something like this: “It’s all about me; it’s all about now; everything else just is and if it doesn’t affect me now, it’s not relevant.” The more I think about it, the more I draw a parallel between a cat being an eternal toddler (me; now; everything else just is, albeit interesting and worthy of exploring), but at least without the temper tantrums!

The Mythology of the Cat: Part One

I’ve previously had a go at trying to figure out how a wild animal with minimal contact with humans might view their world, especially when humans are a part of it even if the animal doesn’t know it. I concluded that no matter what, the animal; in my previous essay the case of a possum, while having a worldview would never get the particulars correct. But what about a domestic animal who interacts with us day-in-and-day-out? What’s their worldview and is it any better than that of a wild animal?

Most of the lesser complex animals, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, and reptiles probably have a worldview along the lines of ‘it just is’ and accept whatever comes along – go with the flow. But once you consider the relatively higher and more complex animals, like birds and mammals, then brain complexity becomes such that to a greater or lesser degree, intelligence and the ability to think and figure things out has to be taken into consideration.

For those of you who have companion animals, or even those of you who have just watched animals at a distance, you may have wondered how those animals view and perhaps even think about life, the universe and everything. That is, each animal must have some sort of personal worldview; a perspective or point of view probably forever beyond our understanding – usually but not always.

I’m picking on cats in this particular case because I’ve owned cats nearly all my life. This essay could just as easily have been dogs or horses or some other domesticated mammal.

So what are cats? Can we identify with them? Can they identify with us? Well, domesticated cats are playful; curious; adaptable; selfish; they dream; they like variety though they can also be creatures of habit; they can ‘think’ things through and make decisions; they have a vocal language and a body language; they display emotions; they have memory and therefore somewhat a sense of history; they have the same sensory apparatus as we have; they have their own likes and dislikes whether it be food; a place to sleep, where they want or don’t want to be scratched or rubbed or petted; and, in short each cat has their own very unique personality. Cats are certainly very self-centred, perhaps a bit more so than typical adult humans, but certainly akin to human infants and toddlers whose worldview is very self-centred with a near 24/7 gimmie, gimmie, gimmie; I want, I want, I want. Cats, at least those intersecting with humans have a gimmie/I want aspect to them, and like infants/toddlers the ‘pester’ factor can often reach extremes. In short, cats really seem to be mini albeit furry versions of humans, especially infants/toddlers. But, how close might that version really be?   

For starters, and perhaps like all animals, the cat probably has a worldview something akin to it being the centre of things – the be-all-and-end-all – and that the entire environment the cat finds itself in is there to provide for all the cat’s requirements. From the domestic cat’s point of view, the world owes it a living! How else could the cat view things? One’s self perceptions tend to revolve around ‘I am the centre of the universe’ because you are most intimately bound up in your worldview with yourself and not as intimately with anything else. Therefore, anything else, in a self-centred worldview must be subservient. Of course the cat often finds out the hard way that parts of that external reality have differing opinions. That never seems to shift the cat’s worldview however that it is ‘top dog’* and deserves all the best that comes its way – which might not be all the ‘best’ that nature could provide but the cat doesn’t know that.  

Cats certainly have no comprehension, perhaps like toddlers, of being in the way, underfoot, in danger of being trodden on or sat upon, while helping themselves to whatever piece of household geography suits their fancy. One could conclude from their selfish (from our point of view) behaviour, their worldview must be one of ‘supreme being’ and ‘rank has its privileges’, and such a worldview will persist at least until such time as their tail gets stepped on or they get tossed out of the easy chair! They still probably see themselves as supreme beings – it’s their worldview of you that’s now somewhat changed. 

The average head of the household and cat owner is probably somewhat of the opinion or has the rationale that ‘I pay the bills, therefore I call the shots and what I say goes’! Cats can probably understand ‘head of the household’ in that in cat society, as in all animal societies, all cats are not equal – there is a hierarchy and one cat alone will be ‘top dog’ as it were. But there’s nothing in a cat’s worldview that corresponds to money or bills or economics or finance. Everything is a free lunch, be it sunshine or the electric/gas/wood heater you, the owner, pay for. Even if the cat goes outside and catches and eats a mouse, it’s still as free a lunch as far as the cat is concerned as the food you put in its food bowl. So that bit about ‘I’m the boss because I pay the bills’ has no meaning or significance to the cat since the concept of ‘bills’ is foreign.

Cats have no mythology about shopping. The post Xmas sales and weekly specials at the supermarket are alien concepts. So is that nearly supreme abstraction to humans – time. Birthdays are a non-event with no realization when they occur and with no relevance in any event. Ditto all those other special points in time like holidays we humans are obsessed with. Cats don’t make a habit of staying up late on New Years Eve. It’s of no consequence. Weekends are no different than weekdays.

Equally the cat has apparently no worldview of tomorrow or of the future (though it has a memory of the past). It doesn’t save for a rainy day. I’ve never observed a cat hide away a few of its dry cat food pellets for a future emergency or a midnight snack. A cat is very ‘now’ oriented. A cat probably has no concept of death, far less an afterlife. I’ve always tended to have two cats at a time on the theoretical grounds they have companionship when I’m not around. As such, one cat will finally get to go to that great ‘litter box in the sky’ and as such the surviving cat (for a while at least) will be without its companion feline ‘friend’. I’ve never noticed however any real change in the behaviour of the surviving cat. The demise and removal of the other animal has apparently all the relevance of my tossing an empty can into the recycling bin. Now if I tossed out the cat’s favourite easy chair that would probably cause more of a reaction!

It’s difficult to teach a cat anything that isn’t already hardwired into its little grey cells. I mean you don’t tend to have guard cats, seeing-eye cats, or cats that sit up, stop on command at the corner, beg, and play fetch, etc. when their human owners say so. The cat’s worldview is quite foreign to such concepts, though there’s little difference between a cat’s IQ and a dog’s IQ. Maybe that’s why the saying ‘dogs have masters; cats have slaves’!

So those are several significant differences between the worldview mythologies of the cat relative to humans (or even dogs, who, are well known to ‘grieve’ upon the death of a fellow companion dog or of their owner. If I died, my cat’s loyalty would shift quick-smart to the next human who fed it). 

I noted above that cats dream and why not. I judge this because often when they are sound asleep I frequently notice their paws and mouths twitching as if in response to something going on inside their head. I assume it’s not some abstraction that occupies this assumed dream state. It’s probably related to visions of chasing and eating fat mice and plump flightless birds! There’s no way of telling for sure, but that’s what I suspect. If they dream, they dream practical cat-related things.

To be continued…

*The standing observation or joke is that a dog thinks to itself that ‘my human feeds me and plays with me and looks after me, therefore he must be a god’. The cat thinks to itself that ‘my human feeds me and plays with me and looks after me, therefore I must be a god!’ There’s an awful lot of relevance in that observation IMHO.

The Mythology of the Possum

For those of you who have companion animals, or even those of you who have just watched animals at a distance, you may have wondered how those animals view and perhaps even think about life, the universe and everything. That is, each animal, if they have any intelligence at all, must have some sort of personal worldview mythology; a perspective or point of view (POV) probably, even usually, but not always forever beyond our understanding since we can try to walk a mile in their paws by using our intelligence as a guide.

Most of the lesser complex animals, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, and reptiles probably have a worldview along the lines of ‘it just is’ and accept whatever comes along – go with the flow. But once you consider the relatively higher and more complex animals, like birds and mammals, then brain complexity becomes such that to a greater or lesser degree, intelligence and the ability to think and figure things out has to be taken into consideration.

Humans maybe top of the pops when it comes to smarts and figuring things out, but that doesn’t mean that every non-human life form has the IQ of a microbe. I strongly suspect that birds and mammals develop a personal worldview mythology that explains to their satisfaction all that they see and experience daily.

Further, for all such animals that develop a direct or indirect relationship with humans they must additionally evolve a personal mythology that’s understandable within their larger worldview that puts us in their Big Picture. That mythology, their POV is going to be grossly incorrect of course, but they don’t know that. They, in all honesty can not comprehend the sum total of those experiences they share directly with human activity and so to some degree or other they develop a mythological worldview that somehow explains what humans do within their own context. However, sometimes humans feature only indirectly and so their POV doesn’t actually involve humans in any shape, manner or form.

So the purpose of this little essay is to illustrate those animals (i.e. – birds and mammals) that interact directly or indirectly with humans (in a good, indifferent, bad or god-awful way) have a somewhat human-centred mythology even if they aren’t aware of it. Taking one specific animal as an example, consider the following tale of the possum.

I have a possum that visits my back courtyard overnight. I know that because I often see its poo; actually I once saw it silhouetted against the backdrop of a lighted window of a house opposite mine. Presumably the possum hasn’t spotted me; it being a creature of the night and I being a creature of the day. Now presumably the possum hunts around at night, foraging for food. It’s been an usually long and bitterly cold Australian winter here in the nation’s capital, Canberra, so, in empathy for a fellow life-form who has a far tougher life than I, I took to leaving out for it in the early evening an apple. In the morning following, it was gone – the apple that is. Now I, as an intelligent human, know all the facts of the matter. I buy an apple; I leave out the apple; the possum finds the apple and eats it. However, I can’t help but wonder, from the perspective of the possum, what does it make of this nightly gift of an apple, an apple that appears where there is no apple tree for miles around?  

Some assumptions are in order. I assume the possum has some intelligence, an IQ, an ability to think and wonder and ponder. When something out of the ordinary occurs, it makes an impression. Translated, the sun comes up and the sun sets – nothing out of the ordinary. I doubt if the possum much ponders this fact of life. The tree it lives in exists day in and day out – nothing much to think about there. It’s warm in the summer; cold in the winter; some days it rains; most days it doesn’t rain. But that daily apple hasn’t been part and parcel of its worldview mythology – until now.

So, something new, beneficial but unexpected comes into play. Does the possum put it down to good luck, good fortune, clean living, being in the right place at the right time, or does it think deeper than that?

Now an apple appears for the first time on the ground it forages over – unusual but strange things happen. An apple appears on that same spot of ground every evening – the same spot without benefit of an apple tree. That’s not in keeping with the ordinary expectations and experiences of our possum. Because this is not something natural and ordinary within the possum’s worldview, then this has to be something extraordinary; this is something magical; this is something paranormal; this is something supernatural. Perhaps there is a supernatural Possum Deity that looks after possums in times of need, like in the wintertime when food in general and apples in particular are few and far between.

And so our possum perhaps develops this idea of something bigger than the natural world it’s used to. The possum perhaps develops a possum mythology of a Possum Deity that looks after all possums, like itself. It has to be ‘all possums’ since I’ll assume our possum has no comprehension of good possums vs. bad possums with only the former getting rewarded with an unaccounted for apple (possum manna from heaven).

But perhaps it’s seen me from the seclusion of its tree put down the apple, in which case maybe I’m the Great Possum Deity. If it sees other humans are they deities too, even if not possum deities?

Since this regularly occurring apple appears in roughly the same geographical spot night after night, might our hungry possum attribute something extraordinary to this patch of (my) backyard, (its) courtyard turf? Might that patch of ground in fact, in our possum’s worldview mythology, become our possum’s Sacred Site?  

Now the possum’s perspective won’t be one based around language and it won’t be able to communicate its worldview mythology to other possums. Rather its perceptions will be based on its five senses, most prominently vision in all likelihood. It could imagine, visualise in its mind, some super-sized (Santa Claus type deity) possum delivering apples without having words for ‘apple’ or ‘possum’ or ‘deity’ or ‘gift giver’ or even ‘human’. It wouldn’t have words for ground or ‘Sacred Site’, rather a mental image that this patch of ground is extra-special. Such an image, as opposed to the words we would use, wouldn’t be out of the question. I’m sure our possum could visualize another possum (even without knowing the word ‘possum’) even if there was no other actual possum in visual range or otherwise present in the vicinity.

Okay, you know and I know there’s no Possum Deity, nothing mysterious or supernatural is going on, there is no Sacred Site. I know what’s going on – some farmer, hundreds of miles away sells their crop of apples to some company who hires a distributor who trucks them to Canberra and they end up in that company’s local supermarkets. You know that, and I know that, but we can’t expect the possum to know that. If this possum communicates with fellow possums (not that it can), it is not going to relate a story of a compassionate human buying an apple a day and leaving it out to be devoured by possums, far less have knowledge of that far away farmer, company, distributor, truck, supermarket, and all the infrastructure that implies, etc.

It would be fascinating to converse with that possum and find out exactly what its current worldview mythology is, even though that’s beyond our means. But, I’d bet that whatever it is, it’s wrong! Still, let’s walk a mile in its paws and try to view things like it would. That much we can do. I’ve tried to do so, but the odds are I’m wrong oo. There’s no real meeting of the minds here. Even if I came face-to-face with the possum, I couldn’t converse with it; I couldn’t convince it that its POV was wrong.

However, just like each possum has their own unique worldview mythology, so too does each and every human have a unique perspective on life, the universe and everything. The difference is that in most cases we can communicate that perspective to others of our species.

The point now is if our companion mammals have a flawed POV of their worldview mythology, one that we know is wrong, but they don’t, one that may or may not incorporate humans; do we humans have in turn a flawed POV when it comes to our worldview mythologies? The parallels between mammals (like our possum) and humans and those collective worldview mythologies we all have might suggest that we too have some flawed perceptions about life, the universe and everything that need further and continued exploration and elaboration. In that broader context, perhaps we can also have empathy with possums inasmuch as we too might have flawed worldview mythologies in the eyes of entities superior to us.

Crop Circles: The Julia Set Near Stonehenge: July 1996

While crop circles have been reported from around the world, in the main they tend to be associated with the English countryside in the warmer months when crops are high and agricultural graffiti artists can strut their stuff. Just who these ‘artists’ are hasn’t been proven in any sort of scientific (or legal) court, but just like we all know ‘the butler did it’, well it’s obvious the whodunit here is from the same species as the butler. We have to believe that, because if the butler didn’t do it, we got a major mystery on our collective hands that most of us would rather not acknowledge. Here’s part of the reason the butler didn’t do it.

Apart from a few deluded New Age hippy types, everyone just knows that crop circles are human made hoaxes. That’s despite all the obvious logistical problems in creating perfect, yet massive geometric patterns in near total darkness. That’s despite the fact that hardly anyone has ever been caught in the act. That’s despite the fact that sometimes the overnight weather was wet with rain (this is England after all). Still, what else could they be? But even one exception breaks the ‘everyone knows it’s a hoax’ rule. Consider the 1996 Julia Set.

Most crop circles are discovered in the morning by farmers or farm hands that are up early and out and about to start their day’s work in the field(s), though some discoveries are by motorists, passers-by, sometimes pilots. Still, the discoveries tend to be made sooner in the day rather than later in the day. 900 foot crop circle formations are rather hard to miss, even from the ground, and some are way bigger than that.

Translated, that suggests that this agricultural graffiti was constructed and produced overnight, under cover of darkness, the obvious implication being human hoaxers operating in the dark thus avoiding detection.

Despite the fact there are massive problems with that theory – it’s like trying to make then assemble a one thousand piece jigsaw puzzle using just starlight and complete it perfectly in a few hours; no flashlights allowed giving your position away. What isn’t reported to the police isn’t of concern to the hoaxer(s). Still, you’d have to have a few screws loose, tramping around in a muddy field in the dark of night, carting around all sorts of equipment, planks and rollers and ropes for hours on end, just to produce something for which you can’t ever receive public recognition for – least you get paid a visit by the police for trespassing and willful criminal damage.

Let’s accept the universally accepted basic logic anyway. Crop circles are human hoaxes. But could a hoaxer(s) do a crop circle pattern or formation in broad daylight, of a size demanding many hours of labour, with eyewitnesses around, and escape detection?  Or could a massive crop circle avoid being seen in broad daylight in a heavily trafficked area? I suggest that’s highly unlikely on both counts.

It’s late afternoon on a sunny English summer Sunday – July 7^th 1996 to be exact. The location, a farmer’s (identity known) field within a stone’s throw of a major tourist attraction – Stonehenge (you may have heard of it). A major highway, the A303 separates the field from the Stonehenge site - Lots of motorists passing by. Security guards are present at Stonehenge 24/7 as tourists aren’t allowed anymore to wander within the standing stones. Stonehenge is strictly a look from the outside and don’t touch attraction now.

There’s usually a lot of aerial traffic too – lots of private planes operating out of nearby Thruxton Airport, often giving tourists an aerial view of Stonehenge. Now one such pilot (identity known) with one passenger taking off out of Exeter, passing over Stonehenge late that Sunday afternoon, while glancing downwards, sees nothing out of the ordinary. That same pilot, on the return flight, again passing over Stonehenge just 45 minutes later, sees a massive centipede-like geometric pattern (a Julia Set fractal pattern) comprising 149* individual circles (ranging from 50 feet to 14 inches in diameter) spanning 915 feet in length tip-to-tail and 500 feet in width in the farmer’s field, well within the view of passing motorists and the Stonehenge security guards (and tourists). 

Needless to say, prior to the pilot’s return flight and his subsequent sighting, nobody (tourists, motorists, farm hands, security guards) saw a thing. That suggests that, in broad daylight, the entire Julia Set complex was constructed in actually less than 45 minutes. That’s unaltered by a few motorists, over a decade later, who have claimed to have seen at that time and place a strange mist. Whether they did or didn’t isn’t relevant to the basic facts that human hoaxers aren’t in the running as culprits in this specific crop circle episode.

But if they (hoaxers) are, in the running, how did the hoaxers do it? One person (identity known) has claimed that he along with two other people created the Julia Set complex in under three hours early that Sunday morning while it was still dark. One notes by the way that security guards are present at Stonehenge around the clock, so clearly the hoaxers, if they really existed, didn’t use any lighting. That further suggests that this massive formation went unnoticed and unseen in broad daylight for nearly 12 hours within sight of the top tourist attraction in England and a major motorway! Check out the photographs on the WWW and tell me how they done it! Could you and any two of your friends produce that complex geometric formation in darkness in less than three hours? It’s yet another case of someone claiming to be a bank robber for the publicity because that’s easier than actually being a bank robber which results in not only getting publicity but a prison sentence as well. The other alternative is that this person has so flown his anti-crop circle flag up the flagpole and publicly saluted it that he can’t back down now, no matter what!

Over 14,000 tourists visited the Julia Set formation before the farmer had to do what farmers do and harvest what was left of his crop; there are lots of photographs available in post 1996 crop circle books and on the Internet that verify the proximity of the Julia Set to Stonehenge with the A303 Motorway bisecting. It’s easy to plug in something like “Julia Set” plus “Stonehenge” into Google’s search engines, like Google Web and Google Images and judge for yourself the bona fides.

Now I don’t know how the Julia Set near Stonehenge in July of 1996 was created; or what intelligence created it. I am (along with those New Age hippy types and other open minded people) convinced the intelligence wasn’t human. I’ll just leave it at that.

*Some sources originally gave the set as containing 151 individual circles, not 149, but 149 is the correct number.

Humans Have the Intelligence; Animals Have the Smarts: Part Two

There’s no question that of all species on Planet Earth, modern humans, Homo sapiens, are top of the pops when it comes to intelligence (IQ). All other species, however close they might be in evolutionary terms to modern humans, pale in comparison. BUT, and there’s always a BUT, animals are way smarter, which raises questions about our actual relationship to them. Here I give numerous examples where animals are top of the pops when it comes to pure smarts.

Humans have the highest IQ; but animals have vastly more commonsense. How so? Let’s consider various settings, starting with one we all share – time and space.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

PHYSICAL ACTIONS

Good vs. Evil: Animals are neither good nor evil – those are human inventions or concepts. There are no animal equivalents of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There’s no point in saying “good doggie” or “bad pussy cat” since they have no concept of “good” or “bad”. They may have learned what is and is not acceptable behaviour (what does and does not piss you off) but they do not understand why. While not every human transforms from good to evil and back again, and again, every human, unlike an animal, is theoretically capable of having a dual good/evil personality. Individuals’ aside, when looking at any large sample of humans, the dual nature becomes obvious.

Revenge & Justice: No animal deliberately plots and executes revengeful actions or has hidden agendas. What you see is what you get. Animals don’t fly planes into skyscrapers. Animals couldn’t even conceive of such a scenario in their wildest dreams. Humans on the other hand – need I say more?

Law & Order: All animal societies have some sort of internal regulation system which almost seems to be ingrained or hardwired. Such regulation usually doesn’t go much beyond the parents keeping the cubs in line and ensuring they don’t put themselves in harms way. Humans on the other hand have formalized their regulation of themselves to such an extreme degree that comparing the regulation of human society to say self-regulation of massive ant, termite or bee colony societies (which does just fine without cops and lawyers), is comparing not so much apples and oranges as the simplicity of a single electron with the complexity of the global weather system. How is it that an animal society can regulate itself without the need for a massive judicial infrastructure and requirement for highly specialized legal eagles and law enforcers?

Killing #1: Animals kill only as necessary for their own survival, both in defence as well as obtaining food for themselves and perhaps offspring. Humans kill out of sheer sadistic pleasure, for so-called ‘sport’, often just because they can. My cats, if they wanted to, kill garden snails – the weight of one paw would do it. However, snails are not food and pose no threat to them, so it’s live and let live. That’s unlike many humans who if they see a snail, a snail doing no harm to them or anything else, just delight in stomping on them – an 80 kg human vs. an 8 gm snail is no contest. Now that’s if the snail is lucky. All too often the sadistic human will just step on the animal lightly enough to crack the shell, leaving the snail helpless to either dry out in the sun or be at the mercy of the ants. It’s a very sad state of affairs that such examples can be expanded on by many orders of magnitude over a very wide range of species. 

Killing #2: If an animal wants to kill a human it has to get up close and personal. The reverse isn’t of necessity true. I wonder how brave our so-called ‘sportsmen’ hunters would be if the animals they hunted could shoot back. The concept of ‘sport’ is about equal contests and the same rules for all. Hunting animals therefore is not sport and it is high time the glorification of sport was divorced from hunting, which is anything but a glorious activity. The exception might be if the hunter is putting food on the table, but again, that’s not a ‘sport’.

Creativity & Technology #1: Some animals can be creative and ‘manufacture’ and use ‘technology’ like animals that pull off twigs and fashion them to stick into termite mounds in order to pull out a termite snack, or making use of materials to build a nest. But that ‘technology’ never backfires and bites them on the bum. Humans invent cars, but we have a road toll. We have electricity and accidents happen. We construct nuclear plants then have to worry about terrorism. We have created computers, and thus evolved the inevitable computer hacker and the computer virus. We manufacture all sorts of synthetic chemicals then wonder what to do with the toxic waste (actually we don’t wonder at all what to do with it – we dump it in the sea or the air since the solution to pollution is dilution).  

Creativity & Technology #2: Animals get along quite nicely thank you very much without Facebook, Twitter, iPads, email, mobile phones, Internet message boards, text-messaging, etc. Any human being, especially under the age of 40, and really, really especially under the age of 20, deprived of such technology becomes a basket case in nanoseconds! Attention to all those who feel the need to SMS 24/7: freedom is not being tied to your mobile phone; in contact with the rest of the world 24/7! Once upon a time, not all that long ago, human civilization (including teenagers therein) survived and thrived via communications that depended on smoke signals, semaphore flags and the pony express. If you really needed fast, there was the overland telegraph! It’s gotten to the point, maybe way beyond it already, that technology controls us; we are slaves to our own creations.

Domination: Humans Rule, OK? Left to itself, Mother Nature finds its own non-static, ever changing balance, in good times and bad times. Animals clearly affect that balance and in turn are affected by it. However, no animal species seeks to call the shots and exert ultimate control over that balance – no species except one of course, and no prizes for guessing what that species is. Humans decide, via some sort of divine right the fate and makeup of Earth’s ecosystems; what lives, what dies, in what ratios, what the landscape will be like, ever manipulating to find that balance that best suits us, which is going to be as far removed from a natural balance as it is possible to get. Take any human dominated environmental landscape. Remove the human element. Will that environmental landscape or ecosystem remain as is, as humans made it, or undergo a radical shift back to Mother Nature’s balance? Look no further than the typical backyard ecosystem/garden. It wouldn’t take long before natural change would render it unrecognizable if neglected by the garden’s occupants. If humans went poof, Earth would soon (in relatively minor geological time frames) become equally as unrecognizable as that household garden, or rather as recognizable as it was before humans came along with delusions of grandeur.

To be continued…