Re: OT: Spiked Article/Atheists and EcoChristians

Richard Burke wrote:

Since the basis of this discussion seems to be to do with culture rather
than biology (if I understand Jane's assertion correctly), I thought
some of you might be interested in this:

<http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20080009134248data_trunc_sys.shtml>

It's the latest piece of evidence (though by no means the first) of
cultural transmission in chimps - social learning, in other words. There
is also powerful evidence of this in bottle-nose dolphins.

However, per the link Francis provided us, their imitative capacity is
sharply limited, the animal only being able to learn so much by imitation.
I.e., the imitation is incomplete, only partially successful -- the rest
each individual has to work out on its own. (alas I'm at home and don't
have the more useful .pdf reader I have at work where I can copy snippets
of .pdf files).

To say the least this dramatically cripples the learning process.


I'm not saying it's the *equivalent* of human cultural behaviour, but it
does tend to suggest that similar processes may be at work in a slow and
rudimentary way. It pegs chimp behaviour at somewhere around the level
of a three or four year old human. (Bottle-nose dolphins would rank
substantially higher.)

The UC Davis paper pegs Chimps at the imitative capcity of a 2 year old.


This still gives you all plenty of room for continuing argument, I know!
But please do bear in mind that it took *modern* humans (homo sapiens
sapiens) as much as 50,000 years to go from stone tools to the first
forms of agriculture.

Until 10,000 years ago it probably wasn't even a possibility.

The climatic swings in the Pleistocene were huge, rapid and frequent -
probably a major driver of our cultural adaptability.

And sure enough, almost as soon as the climate stabilized -- agriculture
appeared.

Our cultural status today is built on past
achievements, and it builds exponentially. But that means that the slope
we are now trumpeting as being so steep was in fact very shallow until
comparatively recently (i.e., last 10,000 years or so).

Not per the work on human evolution I've cited before, the genetic changes
were accelerating long before, no doubt due to the difficulties of coping
with the rapid and frequent Pleistocene climate swings.

Humans are *very* special evolutionarily. Like Jane has maintained, we ARE
unique, and not just unique like any other species, but something as
different from the rest of the animals on the earth as dog is from an
insect or an insect from an amoeba.

Some numbers from the article Francis cites give as 10% the fraction of a
humans energy budget that has to go to just supporting the brain. This is
as much as 10 times what most animals have to use. It is an extraordinary
metabolic load, which explains why most animals are no smarter than they
are. They are exactly as smart as they need to be to survive. More brain is
just a too expensive luxury, and possibly a liability. Put a human in an
environment where there's insufficient mental stimulation of any kind - and
he goes mad. One more reason I tend to doubt the existence of too much
intelligence in dolphins. Oh, they may be quite bright as animals go

And let us not forget, we almost *didn't* make it. All of earths present
teeming billions are descended from a population of perhaps somewhat less
than 10,000 (give or take a little).

You earlier wondered why we don't see evidence of other technological
civilizations if life is as common as the raw numbers suggest.

Life itself is probably quite common. But stromatolites don't build space
probes, and even if it doesn't take a double planet system like the
earth-moon to get life out of the oceans the odd concatenation of events
that produced an animal with free hands, no claws or teeth or powerful and
then put it through an evolutionary pressure cooker where the only thing
that could evolve fast enough AND was useful in surviving whatever climate
was being thrown at was a brain and rapid, accurate, imitative learning
giving us culture and social networking.

Remember, its not just individual achievement that drives human
civilization, its the absolutely unique ability to record and learn from
those records and build still greater complexity and adaptability of an
entire culture of ever more -- and ever more distantly related --
individuals.

It almost didn't happen here. I rather suspect that given the huge number
of evolutionary events that had to happen in the right sequence to get to
H. Sapiens, including the climatic (in more then one way, I had to get that
in) roller coaster of the Pleistocene [and why the hell can I get
"Pleistocene" spelled right every time and need the damned spell checker
for the much more common words over and damned over?) to push our homonid
ancestors over the hump into H. Sapiens.

I suspect herbivores are common, and quite recognizable (where life has
moved onto land) and of course carnivores to prey on them, and plants to
provide the base of the food chain. And flying critters. And burrowing
ones.

Those niches have been filled over and over and over again.

But an animal capable of cooperation in large groups of distantly related
individuals capable of extremely rapid and extremely precise imitative
learning capable of building tools and structures of such complexity it
absolutely requires the cooperation and talents of tens of thousands of
those individuals over many years?

It's happened once in 650 million years of life on land.

Barely.

So why can we know humans are really, really special?

Because those probes aren't out there. Because after over thirty years of
searching, we can't find, in any direction, even a hint of anomalous radio
emissions from any likely star (us humans here on earth put out more radio
frequency energy than the sun or any similar star, so anyone out there
inside that expanding wave front could spot us based on that alone).

Further, life on earth appeared pretty much just as soon as it was
physically possible for life to form anywhere in the universe. Then life
moved on land as soon as the last oxygen sinks had exhausted their capacity
to keep oxygen levels from rising.

Then it took something like half a billion years before we, barely
surviving, showed up on the scene.

The odds against a creature like us are long, very long.

Which is why its so quiet out there in the starry deep.

elf

Thus we are demonstrably unique.



.

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