By Gwydion M. Williams
- Vanity and Defeat in the 1970s
- Big Dominant Creatures Not Really Winners
- ‘Dead Souls’ Recovering
- Intelligent Despite Natural Selection?
- Walking Apes, Accidental Tool Users
- Could I Compare You to a Summers Day?
Vanity and Defeat in the 1970s
After World War Two ended with victory for the old Imperial powers in alliance with the Soviet Union, Western liberalism seemed on the way out. It had caused World War One. Its economics had caused the Great Slump of the 1930s. It had been much too friendly to Hitler until Hitler chose to be their enemy.
Western liberals accepted a much bigger state, more tax, more regulation, and more welfare. They hung on to the remnants of what Leninists called ‘bourgeois culture’, and for a time it was a widely supported exchange. The real bourgeois had always had doubts about capitalism. For the British upper middle class, being in ‘trade’ was bad, though conservative types of finance were seen as respectable.
For most people, the answer to 1930s failure was the Mixed Economy – correctly described as having borrowed heavily from both Fascism and the Soviet Union. But it was enormously successful economically, winning over former enemies in Japan and Italy and West Germany. It was a sharp contrast to Neoliberalism, which has increasingly lost friends.[1]
Which has failed to positively influence people even by a Neoliberal definition of ‘positive’.
In the 1970s, the system was in trouble. There was a real chance of changing the mix to something more socialist. But both the pro-Moscow Leninists and the Trotskyists fought bitterly against both Incomes Policy and Workers Control. Kept hoping for a collapse from which Instant Socialism would emerge, with themselves in command.
What actually happened was a sudden revival of belief in capitalism. One that fed into the anti-state values of 1960s radicals. People thought that ‘market forces’ might indeed produce the best results. And that the state was inherently their enemy, even though it shifted to meet most of their cultural demands.
Big Dominant Creatures Not Really Winners
Within this vast cultural shift, a false version of Darwinism played a role. Popularisers like Richard Dawkins justified it as reflecting a violently competitive natural order that had produced us.
Another part of the shift were Yuppies who accepted the selfish side of 1960s radicalism, but not the idea of wider social duties. They fancied themselves as ‘Wolves of Wall Street’. Or maybe tigers, or one of the other creatures that live by feeding off of other living creatures just as smart as they are.
Tapeworms or liver flukes would have been a better comparison for what they actually did. Markets exist as an alternative to either self-sufficiency or free distribution by the state. But the Yuppies and the later Hedge Funds simply inserted themselves into the necessary process of production, distribution, and consumption. They did nothing useful by any rational viewpoint, but had a useful chorus of well-paid economists to assert that if it made a profit, it must be the best thing to do.
In Britain, council houses and dull respectable Building Societies delivered reasonably-priced housing that builders had created. Selling council houses and turning Building Societies into banks meant some people have a very valuable asset, but many former council houses are unsellable. And young people can no longer buy a home of their own unless their parents are well-off enough to help.
An excellent public water and sewer system was privatised. But consumers were not going to consume more if the service was excellent, the way they switch to solar power as it becomes cheap. Capitalist logic was to extract billions by devious but entirely legal devices. To neglect reservoir building and let the rivers and seas fill up with under-treated sewage.
Just two of many instances of failure from trusting private corporations in what remained a Mixed Economy. And more widely, the analogy with biological history and evolution was false. What the ‘Dawkindred’ did was to leave out a large part of what the ‘natural order’ actually was, or had been:
- Four-legged creatures larger than a fox have historically been losers across the tens of millions of years of biological history. They sometimes fade out, but more often go extinct in one of the major or minor bouts of extinction. A new wave of big fierce carnivores and elephant-sized herbivores emerge from the insignificant underlings of the previous world.
- While popular biology imagines animals moving slowly but gloriously to increasing intelligence and beauty, the sad reality is that a clear majority of animal species are parasites. Seldom beautiful, and always losing whatever limited intelligence their free-living ancestors possessed.
- Even the free-living are often uninteresting. Generally not cleverer or more beautiful than similar creatures in previous biological history.
So is there something wrong with the Theory of Evolution? I’d say no, particularly since parasites and other natural horrors are even less compatible with Creationism. But I’d rather say that biological history is a jumble of separate stories, only a few of which can be fitted into a narrative of evolution towards something much like a human.
Some things that could be called Evolution had different destinations. Insect wings, flowers, or a variety of plants stepping up to be trees – you could call these advances, but not towards anything human-like. And the amazing sophistication of parasites could fairly be called Degenerate Evolution. Natural selection going against what we’d like to see happen.
Only some of Historic Biology can be fitted into a false New Right narrative. People talk of ‘Darwinism’ when they think of supposed inferiors dying. Even Darwin remarked casually that the native New Zealander (Maori) were likely to go the way of the native rat: those rats being replace by rats from Europe. But they assumed that struggles would be won by the best people: by themselves. And get confused and insulting and aggressive when it goes otherwise, as with the rise of first Japan and now China.
‘Dead Souls’ Recovering
In the 1980s and 1990s, a great range of things revived when the Soviet-influenced Mixed Economy of the West was no longer seen as an admirable example for the world to follow. When the Soviet Union was visibly failing. The path followed by China under Deng was open to the fading Moscow-centred system, along with many other options. But the Soviet reformers messed up, and many ideas that had seemed doomed made a comeback.[2]
Globally, we saw separate revivals of Shia Islam from Iran and anti-Shia extremist Sunni Islam elsewhere. Hostile to all Muslims were the hard-line Hinduism in India’s ‘cow-belt’ north. And at least two intolerant versions of Buddhism emerged: this was helped in the case of Sri Lanka by the ethnic-Hindu Marxist-influenced Tamil Tigers: they held out for complete independence and ended losing everything. Who had revived and significantly developed suicide bombing, later copied by some Muslim hard-liners.
All of these developed in parallel with the West’s New Right. They gave the Sunni Islamic side a significant boost in Afghanistan: leftists love to remind everyone that the third Rambo film ends with a salute to the ‘heroic Mujahadin’. It seems not to have occurred to the CIA etc. that those people might be just as heroic against them as they’d been against the Soviets. They’d used Afghanistan to finish off the Soviet mission for a socialist and atheist World State, but raised up new enemies fatal to the USA’s plans for corporate hegemony.
The West is the core of the error, and the part that I am part of. Given another personal history, I might have ended up as one of the Neoliberal’s intellectual boosters. Instead I stick to historic truths, and so have written a lot about their economic and historical falsehoods and mistakes. .
We are not humans because we were physically stronger than our ape relatives – even chimps have more massive bones and mightier muscles. Nor are we greedier or more aggressive: Western entertainment has a lot about marginal and violent humans, but in normal life it is not Grocers Red In Tooth and Claw. A healthy society can impose peace on itself.
Among humans, mothers can mostly trust their children to other women in their own community, and in an emergency even to strangers. Among chimps, the more powerful females sometimes snatch babies from lesser females, treat them as toys and sometimes fatally neglect them.
It is very worthwhile to give a proper narrative of how we became the creatures we are. Becoming more concerned with fairness was part of it.[3]
Intelligent Despite Natural Selection?
The first influential Theory of Evolution was Lamarck. He saw living creatures as a series of separate gene-lines that each began with primeval slime and ascended toward humans, the ultimate goal.
The term gene-line isn’t in common use, so I’ll define it. Your DNA comes from a protracted line of copies of copies of copies. Going back through ancestral apes, and before that little burrow-dwelling creatures you’d mistake for a rat if you had no specialist training in anatomy. And tens of millions of years before even the rise of the dinosaurs, hairless creatures that most of us would mistake for a lizard. Those funny sail-back creatures that most people confuse with dinosaurs were actually much closer to our own obscure ancestors. And so on and on back, beginning with protozoans. Which had arisen by one type of bacterium being absorbed and becoming mitochondria within one branch of surprising creatures called archaea.
Darwin had the first shocking idea that all existing living creatures were branching gene-lines from the very first life, which he imagined as arising in a warm little pool. More likely it was near-boiling water in an undersea vent of chemicals that would kill modern life, but the basic idea holds.
His second shocking idea was that there was no benevolent guiding hand leading life upwards. He even spoke of how a ‘devil’s chaplain’ might write a book showing all the things that showed no benevolence.
But he might have said that there is no actual malevolence either. Nor even a lust for power, which is the common cause of malevolence. None of these things existed until human greed and vanity devised them. What we find in the rest of the natural world are just a fantastic range of oddities, many impressive or beautiful or both.
One oddity were creatures he spent many years studying – barnacles. There, the female of the species dominated. Often the male was a tiny dependant: it would be equivalent to human females having their males as a being the size of a jelly baby, feeding off of her bloodstream in the way that human embryos actually do, but never growing or going free. Equipped with an elongated penis to fertilise their mistress-mate, but some species of barnacle had become self-fertilising, and the male was now a surplus creature that natural selection hadn’t got round to removing.
This example of ‘God’s Work’ should be a puzzle for Christian Creationists. If God made barnacles, then God must have much broader views on sex than they had supposed. Even way beyond what most ‘swingers’ had imagined.
But also a problem for moderates, Christian or otherwise. Barnacles are just one of many cases that contradict the common view of biological history
Naturally, that’s not the picture you get from Richard Dawkins and other boosters of the New Right vision. In their eyes, humans would not have been possible without natural selection.
I agree – but the normal products are very dull. Basic life – bacteria and their odd relatives the archaea. Beetles that outnumber all other animal species, but all of them nothing much besides being beetles. And the numerous and successful rodents are probably more evolved than us, but just to be repetitive and generally unintelligent and dull creatures.[4]
We are one product of natural selection, but a rather odd one. The lucky little exception, when many gene lines went extinct and others did nothing very interesting.
The Mona Lisa would not have been possible if oil paints had not been developed well before Leonardo made use of them. But the existence of oil paints did not mean that the creation of the Mona Lisa was inevitable. Or even likely.
Earth’s biological history was not designed to culminate in the human species. Any more than Jewish history was designed to produce Einstein, or German history was intended just to produce Mozart and Beethoven.
But it’s worse than that. Those outstanding individuals were part of a cluster of similar gifted individuals doing similar work. Apes before the emergence of Homo erectus were a branch of the primates that were in decline. Much larger than a fox, which as I mentioned earlier is a fatal dead end in the longer run. But species and whole biological families of species can die out in times of no great crisis. Without near-humans emerging as they did, the story of the apes might have ended with them being just another of many extinct families of mammals. Monkeys were doing much better.
Walking Apes, Accidental Tool Users
The human story branched off from Walking Apes. The famous Australopithecine Lucy could walk better than her ape relatives, though not as well as we can. A much better tree-climber, but trees were dwindling in her part of the world, whereas the ancestors of chimps etc. lived in places which remained dense jungle. One recent view was that the natural-selection reason for this new ape variant was a shift to eating starchy tubers, which need walking to reach and maybe arms to use a digging stick to dig up. The main thrust of Australopithecine evolution was to gain bigger teeth and stronger jaws, to better chew the tough tubers and other underground food.
Then there was an odd offshoot. Homo habilis, the ‘skilled-handed humans.’ Maybe the first to eat more meat than the standard ape – they all do a little hunting, with chimps sometimes ripping apart unfortunate monkeys without bothering to kill them first. But these skilled-handed humans didn’t get big teeth for chewing. They still ate some fruit and leaves, but reduced their teeth to be just good enough for that job, in the economical way that natural selection usually works. They probably scavenged meat that other creatures killed. They were maybe smart enough to make bags of animal skin that could carry a good supply of stones to throw at rival scavengers. One chimp in a zoo was observed to keep a supply of stones that the creature would then throw at visitors, so those ancestors of ours could certainly have thought of it.
They were definitely smart enough to make the first stone tools – stones carefully shaped to cut. They probably also had wooden tools, but the oldest surviving examples are less than half a million years old.
They are thought not to have been able to make fire. But in the hot sun of Africa, tiny strips of raw meat can be hung up for sunlight to ‘cook’. It’s still part of the African diet, with names like biltong or jerky, though much of it is smoked rather than processed just by sun and air.[5]
This early food processing would have made meat much easier to digest, explaining the odd fact that these proto-humans lost the gigantic guts that chimps and other apes still need to digest their poor-quality raw meals. Human vegetarians rely on vegetables that humans have spent thousands of years making more fit for human consumption: they probably would not have survived in the world of those skilled-handed humans.
But they were not a big success. Far fewer of their fossils have been found than those of the root-chewing Australopithecines. Who in turn were minor: fossils of extinct pigs etc. are far more common. The memorable pig-killing scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably as imaginary as the huge space station we have not yet built.
For no clear reason, these first humans then abruptly gave rise to something more formidable: Homo erectus, the walk-tall people. The first in our line confirmed to have left Africa – a minority view among experts credits a few Australopithecines with doing so. But the walk-tall people ranged across Eurasia. They even crossed water to get to some islands, though apparently lacking the deep-water crossings skills required to get to Australian, never mind the New World.
They didn’t wipe out their relatives, as many would have expected. They emerged two million years ago, while Homo habilis lasted till 1.4 million years in the past: maybe 1.2. And some experts put other species between them and both the earlier habilis and the later Homo sapiens. Regardless, all of these were rare species. An alien biologist might have classified them as an endangered species – though nothing in what we find has favoured the SF notion of benevolent intelligent aliens lending a hand.
Could I Compare You to a Summers Day?
From about 300,000 years ago, we find skeletons in Africa that are anatomically modern humans. If they could be scooped up in a time machine – not that I believe it possible, but it’s a way of thinking about them – they would attract little notice if dressed in modern clothing. Neanderthals would pass as slightly unusual and tough-looking humans, whereas older species would be clearly something else. But they may not have been quite modern mentally. Some of them got to Europe, where they probably interbred with Neanderthals, but their detailed DNA suggests no modern descendants.
From about 70,000 years ago we find signs of much more modern behaviour. And those people replaced their relatives in Eurasia, and got to both Australia and the New World.[6] They had something new, and it might have been languages that can express the full range of human thinking.
Various animals have language of a sort. Ways to tell of a specific range of facts that are worth knowing. But language can be much more than that.
The limits of some variants of human language are illustrated in one of the highly racists and inaccurate but entertaining Saunders of the River novels. One foolish lieutenant in an isolated outpost of the British empire causes great puzzlement when he tries to use signal flags to send the first four verses of Yankie Doodle as a friendly greeting to a US ship on 4th July, their grand celebration.
Incidentally, Grok vehemently denied it, and Google could find nothing. But then I tried Quora, and their ‘Poe’ found it at once.
Many animal species communicate. Even plants may signal each other. But only on a fixed number of topics. Just as you can’t say that much with signal flags.
One ship that was sending a baffling message was queried by radio. They explained that the flags had smelt of fish and had been hung out to air. Signal flags hung at random remind me somewhat of a lot of works of self-styled High Art,
To get serious again, there were probably two processes that fed into each other, somewhere in Africa. Not just an open-ended language, but also more to do with it. A shared or disputed world view about which we can talk.
Human infants keep asking ‘why’ about things that have nothing to do with their lives, comfort, or safety. Chimps or bonobos raised by humans mostly don’t: some would say never. Their minds are wholly tied to their actual lives, including genuine fondness for the humans they know. But they seem never to look beyond.
Humans look beyond. And I will not assume than Neanderthals could not do it. We don’t know they were less clever – their brain volume was larger and we keep finding extras that they could do. Maybe not as good, but also maybe just unlucky.
Regardless, we became fully modern humans by being the lucky little exception. Known biology does not justify the notion of trusting to random competition for our future.
Copyright ©Gwydion M. Williams
[1] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/the-mixed-economy-won-the-cold-war/
[2] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/the-west-fails-in-five-civilisations/the-west-fails-in-five-civilisations-2/
[3] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/20-science/20-1-more-science/rational-chimps-hobbits-and-starch-eating-humans/
[4] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/20-science/mice-more-evolved-than-humans/
[5] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/m99-topic-menus-from-long-revolution-website/20-science/20-1-more-science/cooking-made-us-human/
[6] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/past-issues/before-2018/isolated-labour-affairs-pages-before-2015/genius-and-other-mental-abnormalities/
Labour Affairs 