Our ‘inner-life’ has a stronger resemblance to our ‘outer reality’ than Nature’s genes have to their outer reality (organisms); so much so that our imaginations even spill over this presumed inner-outer divide as overt ‘playfulness’. Is this why we become easily ‘attached’ to our thoughts? And why we humans, as a species, cannot be trusted to merely ‘think our way’ to a workable understanding of the uncompromised Creative Intelligence that is the living world around us? The thinking mind alone cannot teach us to respect a co-evolved ecosystem’s right to self-determination, because a degree of insight is also needed for us to see, in natural selection’s four-step creative pathway, the corresponding pathway to humanity’s own ‘co-evolving concepts’ (hence the lower case rendering of ‘natural selection’). In fact, only a deliberate practice of direct insight can make it clear that what goes on ‘in our heads’ is not real in the same sense as it’s behaviourally ‘outered’ results will become (fast, slow, widely consequential or not) only after being introduced into the minutely co-adaptive space we call ‘the world’.1
A long tradition of dharma practice teaches us that it’s just this attachment to the inner re-construction we might call ‘self’ which leads us to see our otherwise loosely wandering and untested thoughts as fore-sight. And, while we happily concede that ‘natural selection’ is empty of foresight (once again, lower case), in Reality the human intellect, grasping at its own ‘nature’, is not encountering any ‘thing’; it is simply choosing to see a well-defined ‘individual’, and allowing a connection to ‘others’ only in similarly discrete terms. So, having made this choice, how can the thinking mind recognise what seems to be a boundlessly interconnected Nature as another, far from inferior, Intelligence in its own right? How can it see Nature Selecting?19 (Of course this thought-ful interpretation, like all form-ulations of Wholeness, makes just as much sense when it’s turned on its head: natural selection and human selection can both seem quite ‘lower case’ when you’re not trying too hard to reify them. Am I doing that now? Time for a pause then.) [short pause . . . ]
This is the first time I’ve properly dealt with this human ‘inner-geography-compromise’ idea on this website (though it played a big part in my 2019 book, Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice.20), and I hope you can now see how it might explain, from the ground up so to speak, why my posts here have been oriented to both science and dharma equally: it’s because our self knowledge cannot be scaled up to the species level without knowing this Emptiness of foresight at the personal level. But then I offer you this justification in leu of an apology (don’t become attached to it, I’m not): if we do begin to look at who we are collectively, in these humans as a non-coadapted species terms, we might also find a new way to understand, and talk about, our personal beings in terms of Natural History.
Are we ready now for a brand-new finish for our origin story?
Our earliest forebears, let’s say those who could think better than a chimp, were a standup branch of mankind (in Latin: Homo erectus) that appeared about two million years ago, at the beginning of what we call the Great Ice Age (actually a long series of smaller ice-ages); and while their fair-weather cousins (also upright by the way) lost ground in these glacial times, erectus not only survived but thrived on account of they could throw wooden spears and carve with stone axes to get a meaty living from the big herds of animals that grazed on the cold dry grassy steppes. They did this unfailingly through more than a dozen fifty-thousand-year glacial periods! It also helped of course that, although they did quite well for themselves during the first two or three interglacial warm spells, spearing or scavenging smaller and faster meat and eating roots and berries as a supplement, some of them got smart enough to modify (kind of) these pre-glacial landscape reversions (‘only’ lasting about twenty-thousand to thirty-thousand years) by recreating their less ‘contested’ glacial steppe conditions; that is they learned to control and spread what all other species flee from: fire. (Fire-hardening their spear points and cooked their meat were convenient and tenderised/tasty bonuses.) Erectus was one of humankind’s better success stories. So far.
But Erectus’ brain had to be bigger than a Chimp’s, because room was needed in there to ‘covertly practise’ the skills for sharpening stones by chipping both faces, and for coordinating with friends the least deadly ways to kill a Mammoth. The need for ‘executive control’ in a brain, by which we mean consciously considering our goals and the ways to satisfy them before act-ually following through, is common enough in some other species—not only chimpanzees but elephants and even ravens; but the goals of shaping stone axes and wood structures (with the stone axes) in such detail for later use, and of controlling fire; these internal manipulations must have required a little more grey matter than ‘pealing’ a leaf so the midrib can be used to ‘fish’ for termites (chimps do this), or poking ‘sharpened’ twigs into tree-bark to extract grubs (even crows do that).21 The only thing Erectus couldn’t do that we, their latest descendants, can do (all too well, we may hear some ‘doomists’ saying), was connect their isolated imaginings into a further progression of erectus culture. And they couldn’t do this for one-and-a-half million years. (Wooden spears, stone blades, and narrow strips of rawhide seem to have remained unconnected ‘ideas’ until four-hundred-thousand years ago.)
So why did things begin to shift radically during the second to last ice age?
Pretty much all of pre-history affirms that the evolution of brains and tools beyond what’s needed for an already fully coadapted (i.e. ecologically stable) body is just not ‘allowed’ by a Natural Selection that discourages innovative behaviour in times of high diversity (i.e. Harmony-of-Nature times, when competitive-exclusion rules). But, during this most recent rapid cycling of cold/dry ice ages and warm/wet interglacials we’re looking at here, Erectus’ somewhat expanded brain and simple tools, together with a non-speaking teacher’s need to rely on extensive and inefficient gesturing , seem to have been the perfect set-up for a virtuous spiral towards symbolic language once anatomical conditions reached a certain tipping point (Erectus‘ jaw was not structured to make more than a few simple sounds). So why did this tipping point take so long to arrive? Maybe, when you think about how Nature’s co-adaptive ‘relaxing’ towards a maximally diverse stability works, a better question is why would it happen at all? Do words and pictures even make sense without the runaway evolution of both social and physical culture? Maybe the jaw structure that allowed for versatile sound production even arose for a reason completely unrelated to speech (like mimicry?), but I think it’s fair to say that, once even rudimentary speech and symbolic thinking became possible, this was the needed linking factor that allowed our predecessor’s limited graspings at ‘executive control’ to quickly (in evolutionary terms) become ‘world domination’ by their descendants.
The appearance of petroglyphs on the walls and ceilings of caves about fifty or sixty thousand years ago seems rather abrupt (relative to the previous two million years), and it’s likely that this visual symbology coincided with the evolution of language, beginning perhaps not much more than a hundred and fifty thousand years earlier. And then really, what chance would our more distant, and entrenched, erectus ancestors’ lower stone-age strategies have against the kind of competition they got from even their slightly more abstract cousins, who began to split off about five-hundred thousand years ago from the main family ? (That’s five interglacial periods back, and in such times the larger steppes would be cut up into smaller geographic pockets allowing smaller hominin populations to be sheltered from ‘genetic dilution’.)
Homos neanderthalensis, heidelbergensis, and our direct sapiens ancestors were end products of this experiment in symbolic thinking—of ‘reinventing Creative Intelligence’. But it also didn’t help Erectus, I suppose, that these smaller and sporadically isolated populations were still interbreeding very occasionally, whenever they got the chance, because what this means for a tool user is unique in the animal kingdom [WonkPauseBreakthrough-1.2]: When non-genetic body-extensions (aka tools) can be shared between genetically diverging groups, the old evolutionary ‘language’ of sexual selection no longer serves its ‘racial discrimination’ purpose of fostering physical speciation. (also see: Milford Wolpoff’s multiregional hypothesis).22 The erectus ‘branch’ disappeared from, or was in the end absorbed by, the human evolutionary ‘vine’, along with all other proto-branches, when H. sapiens’ versatile chatterings (and pictorial mediations) began doing the job of speci-fying our wholly unprecedented physical structures and (now mostly cultural) behaviours.
What’s the difference between how we see the ‘the world’ and how Homo erectus saw it? Or, for that matter, how does any other brain that accommodates executive control but not speech see ‘the world’ even today? But [another pause] shouldn’t our ‘watcher’ here, who we’re assuming has the power to see between worlds, look first at what our big brains mean by ‘the world’? Might this not be just someone’s best effort to expand that ‘inner geography’ which our erectus ancestors’ smaller brains, attending much closer to direct and immediate experience, could (and chimps and ravens still can) do without?
If the creative function of language is to link up our otherwise limited ‘graspings at executive control’ into larger and larger conceptualisations, then this is clearly the only way to experience ‘a world’; and this experience, being neither direct and immediate, nor wandering (wondering?) far away from the direct and immediate, simply does not exist for non-human brains; or even for human brains that have not yet learned to speak; or, by all accounts, for those which have with practice re-learned how to experience directly and immediately. I’m sure Homo erectus experienced the touch and smell of the grass they trod upon at least as deeply as we enjoy the grass we mow today ( ‘at least’ is a considered understatement here); but even as these not-quite-humans reflexively scanned the movement of that high flying mist, as the gravid shape hastened towards them (pretty much everything must be a being for those who are just being) over those distant snow-covered peaks, exciting expectation of a change perhaps in what only we would bother to call ‘the weather’; and later, when they felt soft flakes brush and melt on their upturned faces, then in their wordless this-is-what-I-am minds I expect they felt no need whatsoever for ‘a world’.
Our inner geography is of our own making; and with their proprietorial appetite for making stuff (up), our newly constituted ‘thinking minds’ hungrily find ways to justify, condemn, or ignore the very animal instincts that shape our hungers. Our thinking minds find ways to justify [WonkPauseBreakthrough-1.3]: a ‘territoriality’ that is no longer appropriate for a non-coevolving species; they also find ways to justify animal instincts for ‘rape’ as a weapon of war, and to condemn animal instincts for ‘gender-bending’ (claiming it’s an insult to family values) when in reality [WonkPauseBreakthrough-1.4]: the ‘offspring’ that will have the strongest effect on our futures no longer come out of our bodies, but out of our minds. Of course I’m referring here to ideas, implements, and institutions, because the biological children these influence need not be our own. Closer to ‘home’ yet, our thinking minds (as revealed by Gautama Buddha’s breakthrough twenty-six-hundred years ago and as I’ve tried to explain in WonkPauseBreakthrough-1.0) also find ways to ignore what the body is always and immediately and directly experiencing, preferring to ruminate on its seductive or frightening in-directions of past experience. A thinking mind really really does not like to just go silent and let us experience experience.
The human mind’s busi-ness then is a phantasm of subtle-body wanderings—seemingly in our control but more often running amok, seemingly whole but necessarily incomplete—and yet, surprisingly (which is the hallmark of creativity in all cases) we Homo sapiens, unlike our rugged steppe-strolling, axe wielding, erectus forebears, can out-compete all other species. It hardly seems likely that this is just a result of that fifty-or-so-percent quantitative difference in our capacity to ‘think ahead’; there is also the representative difference of being able to use short words or symbols to connect long thoughts into endless chains and branches. The qualitative difference in our capacity to think ahead will always be a matter of conjecture I suppose; but just knowing that this concatenation of thoughts can be done at all makes a world of difference, because a represented ‘world’ makes the quality of human knowing a double-edged sword when, as I’ve argued here, the human mind (though still capable of surprising us when it pauses to allow for this “evolutionary hallmark”) is a creative compromise.
A qualitative difference indeed: in a phantasmagorical ‘inner world’ that’s utterly convincing, it may be hard for some of us to get ‘out’ again.
The moral of this story is we can’t adequately appreciate what it means to be Human in the Natural World without understanding ourselves in these fundamental eco-evolutionary terms. For, just as the Cambrian Explosion of species diversity didn’t erupt out of the promiscuous, but adaptively stalled, Precambrian scum until formal sexual selection evolved—with its adaptively ‘irrelevant’ traits of sexual attraction—just so, the technological explosion, and its implications for that earlier (and until lately ongoing) diversification, couldn’t have happened until adaptively irrelevant language ‘specification’ allowed it to erupt into its full diversification out of the far more sporadic and circumscribed executive control in our distant ancestors’ wordless and unworldly heads.
Even at the Homo erectus level of ‘executive control’, or for that matter the chimpanzee’s or the crow’s level, we can see the incipient stage of cultural creativity. And it is an incipient compromise as well on that far more distant ‘first step into genetic creativity’. Executive control in any mind is the first step in a compromised cultural ‘evolution’, which Homo sapiens completed with the fourth step—language specification—in order to create at genetic Nature’s level.
In questioning conclusion, and painful honesty, I have always had very little hope that this Extremophile Choice hypothesis will be taken seriously enough to influence what the governments we elect (especially at the higher levels) will do about the climate-ecocide crisis we’ve caused; or even that it will at least inspire policy-maker’s imaginations enough to address the crisis in time, or with the deeply resolved action it calls for. But sometimes it’s not hope that’s called for; rather, it’s more and better questions. Can the small and irresolute measures we put in place now postpone the worst? Or at least can they postpone it long enough for our growing cohort of insight-meditation ‘pausers’ to infuse—with deeply-grounded confidence, understanding, and resolute ‘right collective action’—the parties we elect and the policies they put in place? https://www.extremophilechoice.com/about-extremophile-choice/
Do you recall this Wonk’s Pause series began with a Green Party meeting? I sincerely did not intend at that time for a document about human evolution to devolve into a political argument, but here we are. And maybe I should have seen it coming, because our honest explorers’ pauses must serve, like all truly evolutionary steps into the unknown, the very unworldly Wholeness which feeds into and upon our “inner geographies”. And since the “world” Mankind has built on this emotional-cognitive ground, as a cultural proxy for Nature’s original coevolving ecosystems, includes politics, I think we need to go there next. In fact the service I ultimately hope to perform in these explorations is to help us see that, since politics and democracy are foundational to the ‘world’ we have lived in from the start—specifically, the human need for politics and democracy are not only “animal instincts that shape our hungers”, but here our thinking minds have also found an extraordinary patchwork of constructive, disruptive or crippling ways to justify, condemn, or ignore the hunger—then I propose these questions I’m asking here might provide an entirely new foundation for a much needed reinvention of politics that many confused and frightened people are calling for now; at this democratically collapsed moment in history.
Indeed, here we are. And I’ve reconciled the direction this ‘inner journey’ has taken—all the way back to political meetings—in two ways.
1) Of course any truly evolutionary process must lead to an end that can’t be fully known beforehand: evolution is “surprise”, as I have in fact warned both you, my reader, and myself, earlier.
2) Arguments only “devolve” when they start going over the same territory, again and again; but I think now there’s something entirely new showing up here, don’t you?
Anyway, I hope you will feel ready for still another post (introducing WonkPauseBreakthrough-2.0), which we’ll call: A Wonk’s Pause-3 (how Democracy might be reinvented with a better understanding of Humans and Nature) coming up . . . after at least one more very long pause.
***
Notes and Citations:
1) Just to be clear, in case I’ve lost you here: on the human four-step creative pathway this adaptively qualifying ‘outer world’ is physically and socially cultural, while on genetic evolution’s four-step creative pathway it is ecological.
19) Notice that the term ‘thought behaviour’ does not have to imply the fundamental involvement of body activity—subtle or otherwise—that I prefer; it need only refer to thinking as something we ‘do’ in a metaphorical sense because either way it’s apparent from this anatomy (see what I did there?) of the creative process as a four-step algorithm that our ‘inner’ thoughts cannot be so easily distinguished from their outwardly reconstituted actions as DNA is from the organisms it transcribes.
20) Please scroll down to the epub, kindle, or pdf versions as these are more up-to-date. See: https://www.extremophilechoice.com/extremophile-publishing/
21) Cameron Buckner, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, argues in an article published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research that a wide range of animal species exhibit so-called “executive control” when it comes to making decisions, consciously considering their goals and ways to satisfy those goals before acting. He acknowledges that language is required for some sophisticated forms of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. But bolstered by a review of previously published research, Buckner concludes that a wide variety of animals — elephants, chimpanzees, ravens and lions, among others — engage in rational decision-making. “These data suggest that not only do some animals have a subjective take on the suitability of the option they are evaluating for their goal, they possess a subjective, internal signal regarding their confidence in this take that can be deployed to select amongst different options,” he wrote. — Source: University of Houston November 1, 2017
22) “Multiregional evolution is a model to account for the pattern of human evolution in the Pleistocene. The underlying hypothesis is that a worldwide network of genic exchanges, between evolving human populations that continually divide and reticulate, provides a frame of population interconnections that allows both species-wide evolutionary change and local distinctions and differentiation.” Am J Phys Anthropol 112: 129±136, 2000. Milford Wolpoff’s contribution to this model was to point out that, since technology can be transferred from one population to another, therefore any human populations that did not interbreed could not become separate species, because genetic differences would send even randomly disadvantaged populations on the path to extinction. I’ve claimed this as my “WonkPauseBreathrough-1.2” only because I happened upon the idea a few years before he and his colleagues expressed it in print. Their printed words of course (which I haven’t actually seen because the ‘news’ came to me through an article by Stephen J. Gould in Natural History Magazine; and I failed to save or find elsewhere) have an advantage over my unrecorded thoughts. So… according to the one species one niche rule, that we’re applying here to cognitive ‘evolution’, my claim to an identical ‘conception’ must go ‘extinct’.
