An essay Daniel wrote relating some content in Ishmael to information in this headlined article by another author. (5/8/2012)
Paleoanthropologist John Hawks has plenty of qualifications for his statement that human evolution is not stopping–or has stopped (as I asserted in Ishmael). He is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is also Associate Chair of Anthropology, a Faculty Fellow of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and an associate member of both the Department of Zoology and the J. F. Crow Institute for the Study of Evolution. Read what he has to say here: Human Evolution Stopping? Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago, would agree with Hawks: “There is ample evidence that selection has been a major driving point in our evolution during the last 10,000 years, and there is no reason to suppose that it has stopped,” he has said. Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story In Ishmael I wrote:
(Alan:) How did man become man? I don’t know. He just did it. He did it the way birds became birds and the way that horses became horses.” (Ishmael:) “Exactly so.” “Don’t do that to me,” I told him. “Evidently you don’t understand what you just said.”“Probably not.” “I’ll try to clarify it for you. Before you were Homo you were what?” “Australopithecus.” “Good. And how did Australopithecus become Homo?” “By waiting.” “Please. You’re here to think.” “Sorry.” “Did Australopithecus become Homo by saying, ‘We know good and evil as well as the gods, so there’s no need for us to live in their hands the way rabbits and lizards do. From now on we will decide who lives and who dies on this planet, not the gods.’” “No.” “Could they have become man by saying that?” “No.” “Why not?” “Because they would have ceased to be subject to the conditions under which evolution takes place.” “Exactly. Now you can answer the question: What happens to people—to creatures in general—who live in the hands of the gods?” “Ah. Yes, I see. They evolve.” “And now you can answer the question I posed this morning: How did man become man?” “Man became man by living in the hands of the gods.” “By living the way the Bushmen of Africa live.” “That’s right.” “By living the way the Kreen-Akrore of Brazil live.” “Right again.” “Not the way Chicagoans live?” “No.” “Or Londoners?” “No.” “So now you know what happens to people who live in the hands of the gods.” “Yes. They evolve.” “Why do they evolve?” “Because they’re in a position to evolve. Because that’s where evolution takes place. Pre-man evolved into early man because he was out there competing with all the rest. Pre-man evolved into early man because he didn’t take himself out of the competition, because he was still in the place where natural selection is going on.” “You mean he was still a part of the general community of life.” “That’s right.” “And that’s why it all happened—why Australopithecus became Homo habilis and why Homo habilis became Homo erectus and why Homo erectus became Homo sapiens and why Homo sapiens became Homo sapiens sapiens.” “Yes.” “And then what happened?” “And then the Takers said, ‘We’ve had enough of living in the hands of the gods. No more natural selection for us, thanks very much.’” “And that was that.” “And that was that.” “You remember I said that to enact a story is to live so as to make it come true.” “Yes.” “According to the Taker story, creation came to an end with man.” “Yes. So?” “How would you live so as to make that come true? How would you live so as to make creation come to an end with man?” “Oof. I see what you mean. You would live the way the Takers live. We’re definitely living in a way that’s going to put an end to creation. If we go on, there will be no successor to man, no successor to chimpanzees, no successor to orangutans, no successor to gorillas—no successor to anything alive now. The whole thing is going to come to an end with us. In order to make their story come true, the Takers have to put an end to creation itself—and they’re doing a damned good job of it.”
Where Dr. Hawks and I differ is in our definition of evolution. It’s clear from the selection above that I equate it with speciation–strictly speaking an error, I’m sure. To take an example that I believe Dr. Hawks would agree with: the branch of Homo sapiens that settled the circumpolar region from eastern Siberia (Russia), across Alaska (United States), Canada, and Greenland most certainly evolved in ways that facilitated life in that region, but they did not become a new species. All people today are classified as Homo sapiens, which made its appearance some 200,000 years ago. I believe neither Dr. Hawks nor Dr. Pritchard would disagree with the statement that (even if we grant that evolution has continued (in the sense that it continued with the inhabitants of the circumpolar region), it has not produced a new species of Homo. (In the selection from Ishmael above, Ishmael says that “Homo sapiens became Homo sapiens sapiens.” If I were writing it today, I would not make this assertion. It is sometimes said that “fully modern” Homo sapiens made their appearance about 50,000 years ago; but I see no reference that suggests that “fully modern” Homo sapiens constitutes a separate species.)
People who invite me to speak on occasions like this one are usually in for a surprise, because instead of delivering whatever happens to be my current lecture (or some modification thereof), they get an altogether new creation. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they don’t get the kind of highly finished product that has been refined though a hundred repetitions. The first thing one is asked to supply is of course a title. The speech hasn’t been written–hasn’t even been pondered–but the organizers of the event have announcements to make, brochures to put together, and so on. So the title comes first. The title in this case is a grand one: The Human Future: A Problem in Design. Having THAT all taken care of, one must then begin to wonder what one is actually going to say–and hope that, in the end, the result will sounds like it has something to do with the title. Sometimes one succeeds in this, sometimes not. You’ll be the judge. Among the preoccupations of my work are anthropology, history, archeology, evolutionary biology, and sociology. This is of interest because, although I’m not a professional in any of these fields, I nonetheless seem to have succeeded in saying something useful to professionals in these fields. Design is also a preoccupation of my work, and we’ll see if I have anything useful to say to YOU about it. Everyone nowadays is more or less aware that what we see around us in the world of nature is the result of a design process called evolution. This was not always the case of course. For thousands of years in our culture, it was imagined that what we see around us was the work of a divine designer who delivered the finished product in its eternally final form in a single stroke. God not only got everything right the first time, he got it so right that it couldn’t possibly be improved on by any means. Since the nineteenth century, this antiquated perception of the world has largely disappeared. Most people now realize that the marvelous designs we see around us in the living community came about through an exacting process called natural selection. Human design–and by this I mean design BY humans, not design OF humans–is similar to evolutionary design in some ways and different in other ways. Human design is always directed toward IMPROVEMENT. Evolutionary design, on the other hand, only APPEARS to be directed toward improvement, and this confuses a lot of people. It leads them to imagine that evolution is HEADING somewhere, presumably toward the eternally final forms that God created in a single stroke. Evolutionary design in fact merely tends to eliminate the less workable and perpetuate the more workable. When we look at a seagull or a giraffe or a cheetah or a spider, we see a version of the product that’s working beautifully–because all the dysfunctional versions have been eliminated from the gene pool of that species through natural selection. If conditions change, however–and we had the leisure to watch– we’d see these apparently perfect forms begin to change in subtle ways or dramatic ways as natural selection eliminates the less workable adaptations to the new conditions and perpetuates the more workable. Design change is a reaction to pressure–and this is true of both evolutionary design and human design. In a completely stable system, there is no pressure to make design changes. Evolutionary design has nothing to do. But of course in reality there is no such thing as a completely stable system. The same is true of human design. If I were to show you a paleolithic handaxe and a mesolithic handaxe, you’d be hard put to know one from the other. In a million years, there was virtually no pressure on people to improve their stone tools–and they didn’t, at least not intentionally. During the period between the paleolithic and the mesolithic, minute, unnoticed improvements were being made, imitated, and unconsciously handed down in every generation, accumulating over the millennia to produce tools that an expert would immediately recognize as mesolithic.
Here we see three products of evolutionary design–three beetles, in fact. One useful way to see these three products is as answering three distinct but related market demands. The beetles at the right and left are both longhorns–so called, of course, because of their long antennae. Although they’re very close genetic relatives, the longhorn at the left has been shaped by natural selection to meet slightly different demands than the one at the right. The beetle in the middle (called, for obvious reasons, Plusiotis resplendens), has been shaped to meet very different needs than its relatives to right and left. The longhorn at the right would not do badly in the niche of the longhorn at the left, and vice versa, but they would probably fail in the niche of the P. resplendens.
Here we see four more products of evolutionary design–four different beaks. It hardly needs to be pointed out that these beaks answer to very different market needs. The macaw doesn’t need (and couldn’t use) the beak of the waterbird at the bottom right. Nor could the vulture or the parrot. There is no one right way to shape a beak for birds. One beak for all is a concept that literally will not fly.
Here we see three products of human design–three different types of paper clip. Clearly these also answer distinct but related market needs. People need the clips at left for small jobs, two to ten sheets of paper. The clip at right can also be used for small jobs, but it wouldn’t be one’s first choice. It’s designed for medium size jobs, ten to thirty pages. The clip in the middle, of course, is for large jobs.
Here are three more products of human design, again answering very different, though related, market needs. As we all know by now, there is no one right way to save data. One disk for all purposes is not a viable idea. . . . The response time to pressure for design change differs very significantly between evolutionary design and human design.
For obvious reasons, I’m not able to show you photos of these beaks at various stages of evolution.
Nor am I able to show you photos of these beetles at various stages of evolution. The period of time over which they developed their distinctive shapes is just too long. But because human design is capable of responding to pressure much more quickly, I can show you . . .
Two stages in the evolution of the clothespin. The wooden clothespin at the bottom has been around for a long time, and is not extinct even today–because, in fact, it’s cheap, it’s simple, and it works as well as it ever did. Where, then, did the clothespin at the top come from? It isn’t notably cheaper, and it’s notably more complex. It does possibly WORK a bit better, at least for certain jobs. If you’re hanging something out to dry that’s very thick, the pin at the bottom is likely to pop off–or break, if you try to push it down too far. But of course the pin at the top didn’t come into being because the public was screaming for a better clothespin. It came into being because it enabled some business to increase its market share.
The pressure to increase market share is the driving force of human design at this time. The question for anyone who wants to enter a new market or to increase share of market is going to be, “What can I come up with that is more attractive, cheaper, more interesting, or more efficient than what’s currently available?”
This slide shows how four makers of cigarette lighters tried to answer that question.
Here are four more. A very early model can be seen at the right. It’s not entirely clear to me how it was supposed to work. Presumably the flint is presented to the wheel through the shaft beneath it. Thumbing the wheel would produce sparks, but most of those sparks would be directed to an area well below the wick. The lighter at the left, the Ronson, represents a clear improvement, and deserved the success it enjoyed in the nineteen thirties and forties. Then a much superior design emerged, the Zippo, to the right of the Ronson. It carried more fuel, provided a wind-guard for the flame, and had a simpler and more reliable mechanism. It drove the Ronson out of the mass market–but was ultimately driven out of the mass market itself by the familiar disposable of today.
When I was a boy, you could buy a ruler like this at any hardware store. It’s a fairly laughable relic when compared to what is available in any hardware store today. The spring-retracted tape measure represented such an enormous design improvement that it drove the folding ruler into extinction, so that if you should want one today, you’d have to visit an antique store.
When I was boy, chairs of this design could be found in almost every yard in middle America. Today you can find them only in antique stores, because they’ve been driven into extinction by a far superior design.
The molded plastic chair is more comfortable, lighter, cheaper, maintenance free–and stackable. It’s no surprise that it’s supplanted every other all-purpose chair in the mass market.
In Ishmael I made the statement that we have a civilizational system that is COMPELLING us to destroy the world. This is something people understand very quickly. It seems almost self-evident. I make an additional point, that our civilizational system works very well for PRODUCTS but very poorly for PEOPLE, but I don’t really go into this very deeply in Ishmael. I’d like to use this opportunity to do so here. We’ve just had a look at why our system works well for products. In fact, it works superbly well. In just a hundred years we’ve gone from Kitty Hawk to the Moon, from the telegraph to satellite television, from clunky calculators to computers capable of billions of operations a second. Our system for products works well because it’s well understood and accepted by all that there is no one right way to make a cigarette lighter, no one right way to make a camera, no one right way to make a chair, no one right way to make ANYTHING. Products are EXPECTED to evolve and ALLOWED to evolve in much the same way that beetles and butterflies and bananas evolved, by a form of natural selection in the marketplace. The social organizations we see around us in the community of life. . .
The school . . .
The troop . . .
The flock . . .
The tribe . . .
are also products of evolution. They’ve each survived millions of years of testing by natural selection. It’s no wonder they work well for their members. They work as well as eyes work, as well as beaks work, as well as nests work, as well as hands work. But our social organization isn’t the product of natural selection. It’s a product of the Rube Goldberg school of design, a contraption cobbled together out of spare parts. In Ishmael I compared it to an early flying machine–of the type that could GET into the air (if you pushed them off a cliff) but that couldn’t STAY in the air, because they were not built in accordance with the laws of aerodynamics. The school, the troop, the flock, the tribe (to mention just a few of the social organizations that have emerged through natural selection) are stable organizations because they work well for their members. Our organizations are fairly stable, not because they work well but because we FORBID them to change. They’re stable . . .
By decree. The Constitution is the rock upon which our society is built in the United States. As we all know, that which is built on a rock is stable, because rocks are stable–unchanging, not subject to natural selection. Of course our Constitution can be changed, but you know how difficult THAT is. It’s difficult BY DESIGN. There’s that word again.
Because we desire stability, we cobble together an organization DESIGNED to resist change.
Law . . .
Justice . . .
Order, maintained by a standing army of police. People like these English workers in the General Strike of 1925 were perceived to be the enemies of order and stability–and are still so perceived today. As designers, however, we should see the matter differently. The very fact that these workers are striking should tell us that there’s something wrong with the design of their organizational system. But IN that organizational system, we don’t change the DESIGN.
We hire more troops.
We enlist and train right-thinking civilians to combat the malcontents. When I say “we,” I don’t mean to suggest that this is a 20th century phenomenon. Every age had people who threatened the stability of the organization. As today, these trouble-makers weren’t examined as signs of a design problem.
They were burned at the stake.
Or put in the stocks.
Or hanged. Nowadays, of course, there are far too many trouble-makers to be handled in these relatively primitive ways.
We have to build vast warehouses to hold all the malcontents, misfits, and criminals that are produced in our system. But we don’t perceive this to be signaling profound design flaws in the system. In general, we don’t ask ourselves, “What’s wrong with the design here?” We ask ourselves . . .
“What’s wrong with these boys? What’s wrong with these boys who, enjoying the highest standard of living the world has ever known, go to school one day ready to murder. Having gunned down as many as their schoolmates as possible, they then hoped to steal a plane and crash it into New York City. What kind of FIENDS are they? When our children start becoming murderers, we typically don’t wonder what’s wrong with the system that’s turning them INTO murderers, we wonder what’s wrong with THEM. Imagine an assembly line that out of every hundred vehicles turns out one that is horribly defective. Then imagine–instead of examining the assembly line–taking the defective vehicle out and shooting it. Then, when the next one comes along–instead of examining the assembly line–taking THAT one and shooting it. And when the next one comes along–instead of examining the assembly line–taking THAT one out and shooting it. I was amused last year when, after the Jonesboro massacre, the prosecutor of THOSE boys vowed to go after them so fiercely that he was going to SEND A MESSAGE to the youth of America. And what was the message? WE’RE NOT GOING TO PUT UP WITH THIS SORT OF THING. Understand that? We’re not just going to put up with it! We’re not going to CHANGE anything–no no, everything’s perfect the way it is. We’re just going to punish the hell out of you. And that’ll send a message. So the NEXT bunch of boys who think of massacring their schoolmates will stop and say, “Wait a second! Hey! What was that message about massacring your schoolmates? Oh, I remember now. If you massacre your schoolmates, they’re going to send you to jail for a thousand years. Or is it two thousand years? Well, I guess if it’s going to be a thousand years, we’d better not massacre our schoolmates. If it were only twenty years or fifty years, then we could go ahead. But a thousand years, wow. I can’t do a thousand years.” Was that the problem in Columbine–that these boys just had failed to get this message? Were they under the impression that they were just going to get slapped on the wrist for gunning down their classmates and blowing up a school and crashing an airplane into a city block? Did they do all that–or plan to do all that–because they had the mistaken idea that no one would mind? No, it’s perfectly clear that they were not under any illusion about the consequences of their actions. They expected NOT to survive their adventure. The question I want to leave with you as designers is this. How have we gone about nurturing children who have so little to live for and so much to hate that they’ll happily throw their lives away if they can murder 500 classmates, blow up a school, and crash an airplane into a city block? Please don’t tell me about violent video games and violent music. Instead, tell me how we’ve gone about nurturing children who WANT violent video games and violent music, who THRIVE on violent video games and violent music. In general (it can be said with reasonable justification) natural selection works on this principle, “If it doesn’t work, do it LESS.” Any gene that works against reproductive success tends to be eliminated from the gene pool–is found less and less in the gene pool until it finally disappears. Doing less of what doesn’t work is a principle that is practically instinctive to the human designer. But when it comes to our social organizations, the people of our culture follow a very different principle: If it doesn’t work, do it MORE. I almost always get a laugh with this statement. I’m not sure whether it’s the shock of recognition or if people just think I’m kidding. I’m certainly not kidding. The principle is best seen at work in the institutions dedicated to maintaining the stability of our structures and systems. It’s an anti-evolutionary principle, a principle that keeps anything new from happening. Here are some examples. If spending a billion dollars doesn’t win the war on drugs, spend two billion. If spending two billion doesn’t work, spend four. Sound familiar? If hiring a thousand cops doesn’t stop crime in your city, hire 2000. If hiring 2000 doesn’t work, hire 4000. If sentencing criminals to 10 years doesn’t work, sentence them to 20 years. If 20 years doesn’t work, sentence them to 50–to 500, a thousand! If building a thousand prisons doesn’t work, build 2000. If building 2000 doesn’t work, build 4000. If assigning two hours of homework doesn’t work, assign three. If assigning three doesn’t work, assign four. I became aware of this principle when I was the head of the mathematics department at the Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation. Someone gave me a white paper that had been put together by the National Association of Teachers of English examining the state of teaching and objectives for the future. In spite of all the themes we give them to write, they said, kids aren’t learning to how to write. So what we have to do is–guess what?–give them MORE THEMES to write. Writing 20 themes a year doesn’t work, so give them 30. And if 30 doesn’t work, give them 40. If you’re taxpayers, you’ve seen your tax bills for education escalate steadily, year after year, decade after decade, as every year the schools struggle to do more of what doesn’t work. Everyone connected to the system is completely convinced that if spending nine trillion doesn’t work, then you just need to spend ten. Naturally there were counselors at Columbine High School. But after the massacre, Janet Reno stood up and said, guess what, that we need to push for MORE COUNSELORS. Having counselors didn’t work, so NATURALLY we should have MORE of them, and if one for every hundred kids doesn’t work, then we should have two, and if two doesn’t work, then we should have three. We have an organizational system that works wonderfully well for products. But we don’t have a system that works wonderfully well for people. That’s the lesson to be learned at Jonesboro and Columbine–and at the places that are going to follow, because these two aren’t the last two, they’re just the first two. We have a system that works fabulously well for products. But the one we have for people stinks. This is the lesson we’ve got to learn–or the human future on this planet is going to be a very bleak one indeed. So this is the message I’d like to leave with you. For the sake of the human future, don’t take your designer’s hat off when you leave the office. Don’t limit your work or your thinking to the objects and physical structures that people need and want. Look at everything that’s going on here with designer’s eyes. For the sake of the human future, go after it all like designers.
In order to make young children “school ready”, the English government is now encouragingparents to place their children in school nurseries shortly after their second birthday. But there is evidence to suggest that this policy might be poorly aligned to the developmental needs of such young children and that it contravenes their underlying human nature.
In the broader history of humanity, state-funded schooling is a very recent public strategy and is only about two centuries old in England. It arose from the industrial revolution as a process to instill the population with basic literacy and numeracy skills. Until even more recently, there was never any suggestion that a school environment was the right place in which to nurture children under five years of age.
So let’s take a step back and consider whether our #humanhunter-gatherer heritage has really attuned infants towards such an environment during this very early stage of their development. Human beings are, at base, linguistic primates, born with brains that are highly “plastic”, which subsequently undergo a huge amount of development in interaction with the environment and, most importantly, other people.
Start up the jazz
The core human skills are rooted in communication. This requires a child to learn how to independently translate highly abstract thoughts into a complex combination of symbols which coalesce in spoken language. The psychologist Suzanne Zeedyk proposes that what happens between infants and carers in one-to-one interactions is a type of improvised symbolic “dance”, which she refers to as a “jazz duet”.
To be truly what psychologists call “intersubjective” — able to communicate our meanings to other people and to grasp their meanings in return — such interactions must be completely spontaneous. Each party — the child and the carer — must freely respond to the communications of the other. To give an analogy, as every jazz musician knows, in order to “jam”, you have to learn how to tune into the rhythms of others.
The way in which human beings naturally “boot” this system in early childhood is through spontaneous, play-based interaction
The way in which human beings naturally “boot” this system in early childhood is through spontaneous, play-based interaction with both peers and adults. From simple beginnings, the infant then becomes increasingly adept at effectively responding to the communications of others. The process of environmentally “booting” such an evolved system is not peculiar to human beings — it is also observed in other animals. For example, researchers have found that in young rats, free play activity builds neuronal connections in the amygdala and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, which deal with emotion regulation and social skills.
Results factories
If modern zoos rightly go to great lengths to create environments that are as natural as possible for the animals they house, why do we care so little about extending this care and consideration to our own species? Politicians in #England would appear to be focused on a futile mission to eradicate millions of years of evolution in order to subjugate #human nature to the demands of international capitalist markets.
At the genesis of this process, which resulted in the imposition of a national curriculum for schools steeped in concepts of “employability”, Margaret Thatcher bluntly stated that: “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” The steady march of this philosophy is now poised at the threshold of the nursery, with the coalition’s recent requirement for a progress report on two-year-olds, and New Labour’s previous imposition of a formal assessment for five-year-olds.
For the past 35 years, successive governments have doggedly pursued the mission of “education as production of economic capital” through a state education system that has been increasingly monitored and directed by the government watchdog Ofsted, with its focus on data generated from standard assessments such as GCSEs. While each successive government argues that it has raised achievement, this is a spurious premise.
What they have in fact done is drive teachers into programming children towards specific test responses, in order to artificially raise achievement data. The current government now wishes to extend this process into the very earliest stages of childhood.
At the same time,
other nations have made far greater recent gains in literacy performance in the mid-teenage years.
other nations have made far greater recent gains in literacy performance in the mid-teenage years. The 2009 results for the #Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s program for international student assessments found that #Shanghai China, Korea and Finland were the best performing nations in terms of literacy. There are vast cultural differences between these nations, but they do have one feature in common — a school entry age of seven. The nations directly below them, but above the UK, have a school entry age of six.
Kids in a cage?
Internationally renowned psychologist Alison Gopnik’s research shows that direct teaching at an early stage in a child’s development:
Leads children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.
Schooling infants is therefore commensurate with placing a young animal in a cage. Human beings evolved in a niche in which the requirement to learn how to engage in complex spontaneous interaction is paramount. Taking short cuts in early childhood in pursuit of processing human beings into units of human capital as quickly as possible risks the production of “damaged goods”.
The question for the English government should not be how to find funds to build more schools and put more teachers into more classrooms to deal with an increasing number of ever-younger pupils. Instead, it should be about supporting families and local communities to care for and educate young children within environments that are most appropriate to their biologically evolved needs.
“Method: The #Nature of Nature is the first of several volumes exposing #Edgar Morin’s general systems view on life and society. The present volume maintains that the #organization of all life and society necessitates the simultaneous interplay of order and disorder. All systems, physical, biological, social, political and informational, incessantly reshape part and whole through feedback, thereby generating increasingly #complex systems. For continued #evolution, these simultaneously complementary, concurrent, and antagonistic systems require a priority of love over truth, of subject over object, of Sy-bernetics over #cybernetics.”
First published in French as La Méthode, t. 1: La Nature de #la nature, 1977.
English edition Translated and Introduced by J.L. Roland Bélanger Publisher Peter Lang, 1992 ISBN 0820418781 435 pages
