The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  The answer, as revealed by the new science of sociobiology, is kinship. For, in the words of one of its leading exponents, Edward O. Wilson, "If the genes causing the altruism are shared by two organisms because of common descent, and if the altruistic act by one organism increases the joint contribution of these genes to the next generation, the propensity to altruism will spread through the gene pool. This occurs even though the altruist makes less ... [individual] contribution to the gene pool as the price of his altruistic act." In other words, the plural fitness of a society naturally, perhaps inevitably, transcends the singular fitness of an individual.

  Could this be behind the age-old capacity of bacteria always to produce a minority strain that, though individually inferior, can collectively resist a virus? Does it explain the progressive rise of culture, intelligence and spirit on an awakening planet?

  HUMAN EVOLUTION

  Here we are approaching the advent of man, a subject naturally of special interest to us, and for which reason I would like now to put his species - with as little prejudice as I can muster - into evolutionary perspective, showing where he appears to stand in respect to life on his planet. I say "his" planet because, for the present, the planet does seem to be his as much as anyone's - anyone's, at least, within tangible range.

  A few score million years ago the earth, being already more than 99 percent as old as it is believed to be today, probably looked substantially as it does, except that, according to geological clues, lush tropical regions like the Amazon jungle then reached well into the latitudes of Canada and Siberia, even, to some extent, Antarctica. And of course there were as yet no men around, therefore no cities, no roads, no ships ... For that matter, there were no apes on Earth either, not even monkeys or dogs or (to be precise) any of the mammals we are familiar with today, although there were plenty of others, including today's unrecognizable ancestors, many huge and fierce beasts, like a wombat as big as a hippopotamus, a long-toothed marsupial wolf, huge crocodiles and lizardlike birds, not to mention a weird variety of rodents, insect-eating shrewish opossums and leaf-eating lemurlike climbers, some of whom, little though they suspected they were very different from anybody else, actually were the ancestors of man.

  And so, ever so slowly, ten million years oozed by, and then several more million - and as the plates of Earth's crust gradually shifted, new and bigger mountains arose and stretched themselves, ocean beds heaved and humped and drained, and grasslands began to appear with different kinds of animals on them with longer legs and keener vision. Meanwhile the lemurs and tarsiers in the trees (including a breed called Proconsul) grew more monkeylike, using their snouts less and their arms and paws more as the preceptive branches imperceptibly lengthened their arms and molded their hand into an optimum thumb opposing four deft fingers. At the same time competition intensified within the diminishing jungles, making some of the monkey types risk descending to the ground, because their long-tailed cousins were taking the best food and frightening and outmaneuvering them. These longtailed acrobatic bullies were the ancestors of gibbons and siamangs, by the way, a few of whom would eventually diversify into gorillas and chimpanzees. While the timid ones who retreated to the ground were the ancestors of man.

  If we can accept this evaluation, we need have no illusions about man's checkered and humble, not to say humiliating, career as a preanthropoid ape. For these early forebears of ours did not likely have time or leisure to decide to forgo the ancient jungles and leave them because they wanted to. More likely, they were thrown out! Hairy little fellows they were, from all accounts, low-browed, fruiteating, gibbonlike and tailless, most of them apprehensive and not too bright even by animal standards. But one thing to be said for them was that they were blessed with rare adaptability, plus keen binocular vision and a tendency, when on the ground, to stand on their hind legs, the better to see over the bushes and long grass. Typically they lived in bands of a couple of dozen members, somewhat as baboons do today, and, having their remarkably dexterous hands - a gift from the tree - they naturally picked up sticks and bones and stones easily and, in the course of millions of years, learned to use them with skill, probably poking termites out of their nests, hurling rocks at game or enemies, harpooning fish, occasionally also discovering how to swim or dig or sing or eat or woo a better way - at first only instinctively or accidentally succeeding, but gradually doing the thing more reflectively and more often by means of repeated trial and error, a practice increasingly followed by thought, which led to more trials and, like as not, to better and worse errors - then again trials, a rare few of which on occasion just might, after meditation, actually result in a shift of aim into the direction of new, untried, more reachable and sometimes "better" goals...

  Meantime and betweentime the earth turned and the Milky Way churned and centuries and millenniums and meganniums passed while no one noticed these slow workings of evolution, for no individual lived long enough, and anyway no one 'had ever heard or thought of large-scale change or of progress. Yet little by little the skin of life thickened, growing an inch of granite every ten thousand years and an inch of soil every century more or less. And steadily the forebears of man grew bigger, still more adaptable and more confident of their place in the world, until, by a couple of million years ago, over most of southern Asia and Africa (then without deserts) they were not only using makeshift "tools" regularly but also learning to shape them. And it is believed they were significantly aided in this early intellectual achievement by a growing propensity for uttering grunts and chirps and babbling sounds in their throats to express their feelings, which presumably is how human language began. The fact that this particular hominid had a relatively small mouth naturally made vocalizing for him easier, for the reason a bottle resonates better than a jar. Moreover the flexibility of his lips helped him modulate the resulting purer sound, and this flexibility increased as he progressively expanded his capacity to express himself.

  LANGUAGE EVOLUTION

  By the time the last ice age arrived, some sixty thousand years ago, he had come a long way in talking, yelling, singing, humming, whispering and other modes of speech, and his vocabulary had far outstripped those of his animal cousins, no species of which (including birds, bees, dogs, chimpanzees and dolphins) has ever, so far as we know, developed any system unaided that could justifiably be termed a "language" of more than a few dozen meaningful "words." Of course there was as yet no real system of writing in the world, although this ancestor of ours liked to draw pictures and occasional geniuses among him painted with astonishing skill. Yet the very ancient arts of tracking and of making (or erasing) tracks, followed by the newer arts of devising signals, signs, tallies and monuments to be seen and understood by others, were slowly preparing the way for pictographs and eventually phonetic letters and alphabets.

  If I seem to emphasize language unduly it is only because I believe man's progressive use of words with specific (sometimes abstract) meanings that could be widely understood is what, more than any other factor, put him ahead of his competitors, equipping his mind not only to recognize but to store knowledge, the vital stock of culture through which the accomplishments of every generation could be. retained and extended by succeeding ones. The evolution of language, like most aspects of evolution, must indeed have been very slow at first, as family vocabularies gradually grew from the limited, intimate patois of brother and sister, man and wife, mother and child into general, open, tribal dialects and eventually (with the advent of writing) intertribal and national languages. Such a tendency moreover explains why the stone age's proliferation of an estimated 4000 recognized tongues on Earth, spoken by an equivalent number of more or less isolated tribes on six continents and hundreds of islands, seems to have gradually coalesced into fewer and fewer and consequently bigger and richer languages. Something like 500 distinct languages (several as different as German is from Chinese) were being used by the Indians of North America, for example, when the European settlers arrived. But inevitabl
y most of these tongues were soon either dead or dying, as English, French and Spanish with their alphabets and copious literatures (not to mention millions of speakers) took over. It must be significant that scarcely 5 percent of all the human languages have a written form, leaving the remaining 95 percent merely verbal and unrecorded, therefore headed for extinction, like organisms selectively slipping behind their stronger rivals. Languages, you see, grow and evolve much as men or animals do, though more slowly, measuring their ages in centuries rather than in years. And when they die, they do so like man and animals, usually decomposing into "dust" or mayhap a few bone fragments from which philologists later may find it next to impossible to reconstruct the shape of the original body.

  Thus our talking ancestor had something going for him that no one else on Earth had ever had - something new and strange and a little otherworldly - something abstract that could justifiably be considered mystical in that it included the power to express ideas never expressed before, yet in such wise they could clearly be understood - making possible, for the first time on Earth, the efficient and rapid dissemination of thought. It is clear that he had not planned talking any more than he had planned to evolve a hand or a brain, invent tools or domesticate animals. Actually neither he nor any of the other hominids around knew enough to imagine such developments at this stage, for these interrelated things were unheard of and, so far as anybody knows (even today), they not only had never before spread on Earth but science so far has no positive-proof they have ever existed in any other world.

  EVOLUTION OF MIND

  Quite likely the very idea of humanity was unknowable on Earth until about 25,000 years ago, for who was there to tell our anthropoid ancestor he was any different or any better than other mammals? No one had ever heard of human beings or suspected such creatures could be created. Even as late as 450 B.C., when Herodotus visited the land of Egypt, he found that the people of the Nile did not think of themselves as a species superior to animals, several kinds of whom were regarded as divine. Cats in particular were so sacred to the Egyptians that, when a house got flooded, they would save their cats before their own children, handing them prayerfully from one rescuer to another.

  Other peoples, however, noticed the animal-human difference much earlier, especially after they had learned to keep a fire going and dogs were skulking around the camp, treating the man with deference - in their doggy way calling him "master." It was perhaps the first hint of something drastically new in the world. His language had given man an authority and a superior understanding other mammals had begun to sense and respect - something qualitatively different from the shark's "superiority" over the pilot fish, which, if it really is superiority, is almost surely based more on body than mind. And, from then on, man's dominance increased rapidly.

  This dominance undoubtedly had been enhanced when man learned to hunt big game during the ice ages, for that was the period when he discovered that, no matter how big and fierce the animal being pursued, he could practically count on its making stupid mistakes, and could often even provoke these mistakes at will. Furthermore, surrounding and killing a large beast like a mammoth necessitated close coordination with one's hunting partners, which stimulated language as well as social organization, including division of labor, food sharing and marital responsibilities. Women and children inevitably got left behind during a hard and dangerous hunt, which naturally led to traditions and eventually laws about who belongs to whom.

  The sharp knives that evolved along with hunting and butchering also produced an abundance of animal skins, fur robes and sinews for tying and sewing, in turn suggesting clothes - which were probably tried first for their dramatic impact rather than just to keep warm, but which, when they finally caught on, must have incidentally aided the evolution of human hairlessness, a trend some anthropologists think was brought about most decisively by man's age-old chariness toward hairy women. At any rate, if mothers consequently averaged less hair, so perforce eventually did mankind.

  Most distinctive of all the physical features evolved by man is probably his brain, which miraculously tripled in size in less than a million years - an evolutionary event so unique and dramatic it has been widely credited with placing him in a new kingdom of life all by himself on Earth. Not least of the human brain's attributes, I notice, is that it is only one-quarter grown at birth, allowing it to be formed in large measure by the later mental experiences of the growing child. In fact recent research has disclosed that the brain's ten billion neurons grow almost explosively in a young child by swelling and shooting out a dense mesh of branches and connecting links, squirming, rotating and strewing protoplasm, while consort cells (glia) slither and spread around them, somehow helping in the learning process, while the sensitive, feathery dendrites palpitate back and forth like insects' antennas probing for responses, ever tasting and testing the congeniality of all the new channels they can reach.

  Thus the human brain is shaped by the lessons of childhood, its physical content actually molded by its cultural background, the concrete perfected by the abstract. This prolonged and unprecedented development of the brain in emerging mankind is what must have ensured that our ancestors, in order to survive, would build a family organization durable enough to protect the child for at least his first dozen years. And, not incidentally, the family was the seed that sprouted into the tribe and the tribe in turn evolved human society.

  Thus arrived the species man at the seat of power among creatures of Earth, for, almost without realizing it, he had suddenly found himself master of beasts and lord of almost all known life. And beyond living organisms, he discovered he could aspire to be king of his world on a grand scale, wielding dams and bulldozers to adapt his whole environment to his needs rather than merely adapting himself to his environment. It was a natural evolutionary process of the brain overtaking the gene that had transcended in a way never known upon this planet, and perhaps only approached in dramatic import (if then) by life's initial ferment out of "lifeless" rocks and seas.

  Man had taken his place as the organ of consciousness upon the world, giving Earth at last her mind, if not her soul, and all the concomitant wonders of willfulness, self-reflection, memory, and the imagination to articulate a new idea. It was time now he comprehended his position in the solar system and the universe. It was time, specifically, he understood his relation to himself and to all created things.

  Chapter 22

  Sixth Mystery: The Germination of Worlds

  * * *

  A NOVA is an exploding star. It is normal and, to an astrophysicist, an expectable, often predictable, climax in the life of a blazing world.

  Like the much rarer and larger explosions called supernovas, quasars and even the entire expanding universe, it is an example of the cyclic vitality of all worlds that grow, mature, ferment and germinate. This includes planets of course, and perhaps them most of all. And as I study the findings of astronomy, geology, paleontology and related sciences, I get the impression that germination normally happens only once per world. Certainly it is a crucial, if not a unique, event amid the unfolding phases of life that evolve mind, speech and spirituality. And Earth, by a seemingly extraordinary coincidence, happens to be germinating right now. Not exploding physically of course, so much as ripening mentally and spiritually, doing it perforce unevenly with severe growing pains and dangerous side effects. Indeed, after some five billion years of slow development, Earth is germinating in this very twentieth century and to some extent (depending on definition) in the centuries immediately preceding and following it, when so many fundamental developments have happened, are happening and will be happening to her.

  It is such an unbelievable coincidence to be living in the one century out of fifty million centuries when this is occurring that I have to be very much on guard lest my judgment become biased in favor of the present and the familiar. I know my opinion must be suspect. But fortunately the facts of germination are so verifiable and emphatic that in the end
they will speak for themselves, clearly singling out the explosive present from all other ages, as we shall see.

  Do you remember the numerous references in the Bible to "the time of the end" and "the latter days"? The authors of the Scriptures must have had some age in mind when they used these phrases. And a growing consensus among scholars seems to be beginning to realize that our present critical age will turn out to have precisely the qualifications suggested. This means, if you can believe it, that the days we now live in are the very "latter days" foretold of yore, and our present century, the space age and modern times none other than "the time of the end" predicted two thousand years ago - the age when the ocean has "loosed the chains of things" as Seneca foretold - germination time, the climactic budding that precedes the flowering of Earth - the period when all her vital signs are in the ascendant: population, communication, wealth, freedom, knowledge, spirit ...

  To analyze clearly what I mean, I shall now list and describe fifteen evidences of earthly germination, fifteen basic developments that have never before been experienced by Earth and, so far as anyone knows, cannot be repeated in the future.

  I. HUMAN POPULATION EXPLOSION

  As we saw last chapter, the species man a million years ago was already using tools and learning how to talk and solve such problems as how to keep a fire. His numbers were small, somewhere around 100,000 inquisitive, furry creatures living in the most fertile parts of Africa, Asia and perhaps Europe. There were so few of him that it was almost as if the present population of Iceland were strewn over a thousand times as much territory, reaching half around the world. Naturally most of them gravitated into the valleys favored with the best water and game, leaving rocky and arid regions almost empty. Yet they did not congregate into villages, for they were nomad hunters and gatherers without knowledge of agriculture or herding and, it has been calculated, something around eight square miles were required to support each person with the essentials of living.