But the menstruant, having the most direct connection with the lunar cycle, would surely have been the first to know; she had motive, method, and opportunity to be the originator of lunar notation.
—Judy Grahn2
Imagine a group of goggle-eyed, newly arrived intergalactic ethologists sitting in a concealed blind somewhere in the Great Rift Valley in Pleistocene Africa. Their assignment: Observe and record the habits of the diverse animals roaming around all about them. At the moment, all the ethologists have trained their binoculars on the edge of a clearing. One of them has spotted a band of stealthy Homo sapiens huddling low, trying not to attract the attention of unwanted carnivores. The odd-looking predators appear to be stalking a large herd of wildebeest.
The visitors could not be faulted for bursting out laughing at these puny, presumptuous big-game hunters. The alien observers could clearly see that the arsenal with which each Homo sapiens was naturally endowed—speed, strength, and killing appendages—was ludicrously inadequate to his mission. But the ethologists’ laughter soon fades, and they begin exchanging quizzical looks. These resolute hunters exhibit surprising pluck. The naked bipeds obviously have a trick up their metaphorical sleeve.
The visitors could not have known that bolstering the confidence of these early Homo sapiens was an invisible weapon so deadly that it would make the vaunted predations of Tyrannosaurus rex pale in comparison. The new armament: a consciously constructed, expansive sense of time hereafter referred to as “deeptime.” A human hunter’s ability to learn from the past and mentally pole-vault himself into the future allowed him to sharpen his sense of deeptime into a formidable piercing stiletto called “foresight.” From the moment he hafted this deadly lance-tip to the shaft of his crude spear, a collective shudder rippled through the animal kingdom. No flora or fauna inhabiting the forest, savanna, or sea would ever be safe again. Learning to fear and avoid him became a life-and-death imperative for all the other animals whenever he appeared in their neighborhood.
Only human hunters could predict that elephants would migrate through a specific pass two months hence. Only Homo sapiens could methodically prepare an ambush to attack an animal that none of them had yet seen, heard, or smelled. Some creatures, ranging from spiders to beavers, also exhibit similar types of behavior, but they, with very rare exceptions, depend on instinct, whereas human actions are almost always based on deliberate plans rooted in experience.*
But here was the strange part. Homo sapiens was the first predator who did not kill primarily to feed himself. He risked life and limb for Gyna sapiens—first for sex, then for love, and still later for intimacy. And then he killed for his children—first because he was afraid to die, and then because he loved them for who they were. But that’s getting ahead of the story. Before he usurped the crown of King of the Beasts, and before these changes in his psychic programming fully matured, Gyna sapiens had to rush to assist him.
To obtain the iron she needed to maintain her vigor and increase the intelligence of her children, Gyna sapiens had sent an ill-prepared Homo sapiens on an errand fraught with danger. It would be up to her to armor him with a wonder weapon more potent than slashing claws, more destructive than snap-crackle jaws, and far more powerful than leonine strength. What Homo sapiens failed to appreciate then, and has refused to acknowledge since, is that his fearsome hunting skill was a gift from Gyna sapiens. He never thanked her for the considerable sacrifice she made so that her species could acquire its precious expanded sense of time. As has happened so often throughout our history, Homo sapiens would later brag that foresight was entirely his idea.*
Gyna sapiens, however, has nursed little outrage regarding this slight. The radical reprogramming of her reproductive cycle was the key that led her to an increased sense of time. Once she made the leap into the future, she would teach this invaluable lesson to her men, so that they had a better chance of procuring for her what she found difficult to obtain. Her gift, for which she paid dearly, returned to her and her offspring incalculable dividends in the long run. Both sexes benefited, and the knowledge of deeptime made the difference. As the novelist Samuel Butler once remarked, “A hen is an egg’s clever strategy to create another egg.”
Leaping out of the zoological record is the inexplicable fact that, among the myriad species that have inhabited the earth, we are the only one that has ever acquired a sense of deeptime. Why? If in the contest for survival the acquisition of foresight by humans became Nature’s most effective weapon of mass destruction, why didn’t this trait erupt all across the mammalian spectrum? Where are the horse seers? Why can’t one make a fortnight appointment with a dog? Why don’t lions plan what they will do next Tuesday? No other creatures wear watches because, for even a single animal species, to learn how to tell time was an exceptional evolutionary development.
The trajectory of evolution appears to travel from the simple to the complex. The arrival of each new phylum introduced creatures sporting a more intricate brain, eye, or mode of movement than the earlier versions. Yet, looked at in another way, the entire history of life on this planet could be conceived as a striving by life-forms to attain an ever-greater appreciation of the vectors of space and time.
It must be a given that, to appreciate a dimension of either space or time, an organism must have the requisite nervous apparatus with which to recognize it. Plants, among evolution’s earliest experiments, do not possess a nervous system, so it would be fair to argue that plants are not sentient and do not appreciate their extension in space or time.† They could be said to represent the “point” of Euclidean space—a point having no extensions in space.
Simple one-celled animalcules move toward nutrient stimuli and away from noxious ones. Although they live in three-dimensional worlds, it is as if they lived their existence on a clothesline. A paramecium or an amoeba resembles the line of Euclidean geometry, representing only the vector of length.
Planaria, belonging to the phylum of flatworms, is the first creature manifesting a bulbous bifurcated area in the forward part of its primitive nervous system. The presence of this exaggerated right-left symmetry most likely signifies that a planaria is aware that it moves from side to side as well as to and fro. Its existence can be likened to the square, a geometrical figure possessed of height and length but no depth.
With the evolution of vertebrates, the first cerebellum appeared. And this component of increasingly complex nervous systems provided its owner with an awareness that it existed in a three-dimensional world. Any animal with a cerebellum “knows” that space extends in the three directions of height, length, and depth. Early vertebrates can be thought of as resembling the Euclidean solid form, the sphere.
What is missing from the existence of these life-forms is any appreciation that they exist in any moment of time other than the present. Frogs, fish, and geckos cannot easily hold past events in their memory and have virtually no ability to predict the future. They are condemned to live out their existence trapped in the thin slice of the ever-present now.
With the arrival of the first mammals, a new element entered the animal world. Mammalian nervous systems contained a specialized receptacle called a memory capable of recalling past events that no longer existed.* For the first time, a living form could re-create what had happened within its mind. The heavy hand of brute instinct began to lift. The arrival of a primitive memory allowed the first mammals to learn from past mistakes and react to their environment in a flexible way that depended on their remembering who their friends and enemies were.
The addition of the duration of the past into the mental functioning of animals paved the way for mind to enter the world. An animal that can remember the past is “mindful.” Lizards may be alert, but they do not possess the qualia of mindfulness.
With the evolution of animals that had the biggest and most complicated brains, such as elephants, dolphins, and higher primates, a new concept known as self-awareness appeared in the world. Self-awareness means that a
n animal is aware it is aware; and that it has a distinct sense of self. A monkey placed in front of a mirror never grasps that the monkey it sees on the other side of the glass is none other than me, because it doesn’t possess a sense of “self.” A chimpanzee, however, will, after a time, realize that its mirror image is actually a mere representation of itself and will begin to make faces and examine parts of its body.*
Primates can use the past to predict what may happen in the future, but their ability to “plan”—that is, to choose a course of action in a duration of time that hasn’t happened yet—is extremely limited. Humans, on the other hand, are the only animal that knows that the sun will extinguish in ten billion years. Elephants may never forget, but no other creature is as easily capable of making forays into the dimension of the future as a human. We know that we exist in a reality bounded by the three vectors of space (length, height, and depth) and the three durations of time (past, present, and future).
Our solitary occupation of the land of the future is due to the formidable obstacles Natural Selection would have had to overcome before a life-form could appreciate time in all its fullness. To have created even one deeptime animal was a near miracle. To comprehend why we are the only animal to have crossed this critical threshold, let me conjure a fantasy. Disclaimer: I do not intend to impute purposeful intent to the natural processes of evolution but, rather, will use the artifice of poetic license to simplify and enliven the story of how humans became astute at telling time.
Let us imagine that, on one fine morning somewhere around five million years ago, Mother Nature stretched, yawned, and began Her morning perambulations. Feeling in a particularly artistic mood, She padded about drinking Her morning coffee. Suddenly, a novel notion struck Her. She wondered whether She could create a creature that could anticipate the future.
Ever since She introduced mammals, She had been occupied primarily with perfecting a more specialized paw or a tougher hide. Having discarded the ponderous dinosaurs as too unwieldy, She had introduced a whole new class of birds and mammals, about which She was quite proud. Still, despite Her obvious successes, She itched to pull off one more feat of evolutionary virtuosity.
She began to toy with an outrageous idea—a new “software” program vastly increasing a mammal’s memory capacity, along with new neurocircuits that could recall past experiences and use them to solve present problems by anticipating events that might transpire in the future. She sat down at her drawing board and began to doodle on a scratch pad the minimum requirements in order to begin. Let us put ourselves in Her place and imagine that we are Mother Nature in Her workshop. Which animal would you choose to begin Her daring experiment? What intermediate steps would you envision necessary to execute such an audacious plan?
The first stumbling block would be the necessity to build an outlandishly massive brain, and brains, you were aware, are exceedingly expensive organs to maintain. Also, a complex reorganization of the brain would have to occur while the putative creature you were trying to design continued to compete with the others—an extremely delicate and dangerous operation. Reconfiguring the brain would require setting aside existing areas upon which to experiment, and older areas would have to be hastily rewired to perform double duty.
Then there would remain the seemingly insurmountable problem of coaxing your new changeling into leaving the safety and familiarity of the present to venture forth and explore purely mental locales that did not really exist, except in an ephemeral past and an even more tentative future. No other animal had ever been similarly rewired, because the job had been too complex.
You are convinced, however, that a creature capable of planning would swiftly gain dominion over all the others. So you press ahead. Let us assume you begin your survey in the continent of Africa and its surrounding seas. You scan the waters, rain forests, savannas, and mountainsides on the lookout for a suitable animal with which to begin. Since rapidly enlarging a brain will be the most fundamental aspect of your plan, you would prefer an animal already equipped with a large brain. You quickly narrow your choice to the four most intelligent mammals: dolphins, whales, elephants, and primates. You are tempted to use one of the first two, but eliminate them because they lack an indispensable appendage.
Imagine a fishing boat out at sea, a tackle box perched precariously on its transom. The boat pitches, the box falls overboard, and, weighed down by an assortment of lead sinkers, it descends slowly toward the bottom. The falling object attracts the attention of a pod of nearby dolphins (or whales) that circle it excitedly. Possessed of a sophisticated means of communication, the dolphins whistle and click back and forth. Able to understand dolphinese, you eavesdrop on their speculations as to what this strange object in their midst is all about. After the container settles on the sea floor, they inspect it more carefully, nudging it repeatedly with their bottle-nosed snouts. But no matter how curious they are or how clever might be their guesses, dolphins and whales can never discover the nature of the tackle box’s contents. With flippers for forelimbs, they lack the means to open the box.
After consideration, you also eliminate elephants. They are very smart and possess capacious memories. Their six-foot-long trunks contain over one hundred thousand muscles, enabling them to perform intricate tasks.
You reject pachyderms because you favor the animal you have endowed with an even more versatile appendage than the elephant’s trunk: Primates possess two hands, and each one sports an opposable thumb accompanied by four delicate fingers that allows them to grasp and pick objects apart effectively. You surmise that the constant feedback between hand and brain, and brain and hand, will greatly facilitate your task of reconfiguring the brain’s circuits.
Once having settled on the order of primates, you begin gradually to increase the size of the brain of one line that someone else will later name “hominids.” At first you inflate the brain of these primates relatively slowly, but as you grow more confident, you rapidly enlarge it over a short period in one species of the hominid family. At the same time, you have encouraged this one primate to walk upright so that its hands are free for other uses. You lavish your attention over the one that walks proudly upright. About 150,000 years ago, you zero in on one small band of these big-brained bipedal primates who are living along the shores of Lake Victoria in Eastern Africa.
Now you begin to plan your experiment in earnest, anticipating the problems to come. As you rapidly increase the size of your chosen primate’s brain, you must also identify a periodic feature of the primate’s life cycle and greatly exaggerate it. This modification will serve to attract the hominid’s attention to its recurring physiological clock. You must make the event dramatic enough so that the primate could not possibly fail to notice it—only something terrifying, yet magical, will do.
Then, somewhere in the landscape, you must identify an event that repeats at precise regular intervals. The external event’s periodicity would have to be spaced just right. If the episodes are too close together, it would be useless to teach an animal the majestic secret of time; too far apart, and it would tax your experimental subject’s newly evolving memory. The final steps of your experiment will be most challenging: entraining the inner, physiological timer you created with the outer, naturally occurring clock you selected. All the while, you must energetically twiddle the dials on the immensely complicated new neurocircuitry you had to install hastily in the brain of this creature.
In the past when you created something new, you had cleverly grafted it onto something old. For example, rather than make a bird’s wing from scratch, you started with a reptile’s forelimb and modified it. You planned to construct deeptime upon the foundation of an earlier time-related instinct of primates. Circadian rhythms are involuntary timepieces ticking away deep in the neuro-innards of virtually all complex species. The majority of these timers regulate breeding.
For instance, once a year, gray whales swim nearly half the circumference of the earth to congregate and breed in one sma
ll lagoon in the Sea of Cortés. Millions of delicate monarch butterflies cover thousands of miles, and then camouflage a preferred grove of trees in northern Mexico for the same purpose. Leks, rookeries, and otherwise isolated, barren, windswept beaches periodically teem with life, lust, and conflict driven by circadian rhythms’ uncompromising commands. Carefully timed to maximize a species’ survival, the congruent peaking of male rut and female lust at the moment of the female’s ovulation ensures that conception has the best chance to occur. Depending on the species’ average length of gestation, these seasonal corybantic convocations occur so that subsequent births arrive in the month optimal for mothers to nurture their young—usually, when the bounties of summer allow for easy pickings.
Unfortunately, you observe with consternation that the primate you selected does not come equipped with a circadian rhythm that you deem suitable for your intricate experiment. Primates never migrate vast distances to mate, nor do they have preferred breeding grounds conducive to mass assemblies. Instead of a sexual cycle coordinated with the planetary seasons, as is the case with many birds and large mammals, female primates’ estrus cycles vary considerably from species to species, and rarely do the females instinctively coordinate their estrus.
Plagued with self-doubts, you reconsider your choice of the bipedal primate and resurvey the entire primate order. You briefly consider choosing the ring-tailed lemur of Madagascar because the females all ovulate in synchrony. But you immediately reject the idea, forced to admit to yourself that the lemurs’ lack of intelligence, stemming from their relatively small brain, would be a disadvantageous starting point for you to try to achieve your ultimate goal of a really smart, time-aware primate.
You note that, each day, primates awaken, stretch, yawn, and begin their daily search for food. Intermittently, they eat, rest, nap, groom, fight, play, search for more food, and then sleep again. It would appear, observing this pattern, that little else occupies their brain—except when they periodically engage in breeding behaviors. In the majority of species, courting and mating are punctuated highlights that break the monotony of an animal’s otherwise repetitive daily grind.
Sex, Time, and Power Page 21
