At 10:25 18/05/2005 -0400, you wrote:
Keith Hudson:My response:
- "Now that even language differences between man and other primates, such as bonobo chimpanzees, are not so sharp as thought hitherto, what is emerging as probably our only unique characteristic as a species is man's ability to trade."
Hmmm. Trade may be important, but so is language. It may be a matter of degree, but our command of, and ability to use, language is far greater than that of any other primate group. We not only use language to communicate locally (apparently Chimps and Bonobos also do that to some extent) but also globally and intergenerationally. We not only communicate verbally, but also musically and artistically. Perhaps other species do that too, but not nearly as well as we do.
Yes, indeed. As in my reply to Pete Vincent, I think that the vast extension of human language, and trade, and future-appreciation and a lot else came about in that period of about two million years before homo sapiens finally emerged when the frontal lobes of the brain expanded enormously -- one example of what biologists call "runaway mutation".
I wonder about species other than primates. When I was a student in my early twenties, I spent my summers working on the log booms in upcoast British Columbia. There was a continuous din coming from ravens in the nearby woods. They were very adept at playing tricks on us. If someone left his lunch unguarded near a boom shack, a couple of ravens would try to distract us, while another would sneak in behind us and steal the lunch. It didn't take us long to catch on, but I'd suggest that what the ravens were demonstrating was the ability to hatch plots and carry them out cooperatively. It must have begun with one telling the others "Hey guys, see that lunch down there? Here's how we get it." I also saw several other examples of coordinated group behaviour that must have depended on conscious communication, but I won't go into that for the moment. My general conclusion was that the din coming from the woods was not just random meaningless noise. It was communication.
On my dog walk yesterday afternoon, waiting for my dog to do what she had to do, I stood listening to a nearby blackbird. Unlike the usual early morning full-blooded, vigorous bird song: "I am here, still alive and guarding my territory" which lasts for several minutes this was a short call. And then I heard another short call from a blackbird about 300 yards away (further than the territorial boundary, I imagine). And then my blackbird sang again very shortly -- and the other seemed to "respond" again. Listening as carefully as I could, each song seemed to be saying something slightly different. And then yet another blackbird from much further away up in the woods on the hillside behind me seemed to be responding to "my" blackbird during the pauses. Whether the hillside blackbird was responding to my blackbird or to yet another one much further away which I couldn't hear, I don't know. But I feel fairly certain that, at this time of the day, this was not a territorial contest. They would be all well fed and contented by then. This was a recreational conversazione I am sure.
This sort of observation would have been laughed out of court only, say 20 years ago, but biologists are now finding more evidence of primitive language in many sepcies. And, in the case of birds, scientists are already discovering that they have considerable problem-solving abilities, such a selecting twigs or wire of exactly the right shape or size to get at food.
During Easter I built a dovecote and I have a couple of fantails in residence now. I have not tried to train them in any way at all -- I simply feed them at their dovecote every evening. But yesterday I forgot to feed them and they both did something they have never done before -- they flew to my front door and sat on the railing. I am certain that they were waiting for me to emerge with my can of corn. Which I did, of course, and they then flew to the dovecote. Bird-brained? Maybe, but there's more brain there than we have hitherto given them credit for.
Perhaps trading over long distances is something that is unique to us as a species. However, another argument is now emerging that is far more sinister. It is that, among all species, we are uniquely destructive. We not only have a longstanding track record of being very destructive of our environment, we destroy that environment to the point of making it uninhabitable. This is the argument that Jared Diamond presents us with in "Collapse" and Ronald Wright in his very pointed "A Short History of Progress". Yet we not only have the capacity to destroy our existing environment, we also have the capacity to move onto a new one. Following this argument, the transition from hunting and gathering to farming may not have happened because farming represented an easier way of life. It may have happened because the species that could be hunted had been destroyed. Perhaps people moved into towns and cities because agricultural lands, being denuded by overuse, could no longer sustain them. However, once a large number of people were off the land, it was able to rebound and provide the surplus that, for a time, could support the cities.
I don't think a biologist would agree with you. Any lifeform, whether a virus, fruit flies or predators, will exploit the available environment as far as possible. The only thing that will check this expoitation are other factors in the environment and other competitive species. I think the only difference in our case is that because we are so much cleverer (mainly due to our large frontal lobes, unfortunately!) we can be be even more destructive than any other species.
In the cities, we've continued to move into new environments, but essentially artificial ones we've created, like the industrial environment of manufacturing age, the services environment and most recently the high technology environment. All of this has moved us from localism to globalism and the ability to support huge populations. However, what we may not be giving sufficient attention to is the finite nature of the resources we have to work with. While our numbers and capabilities have grown enormously over the millenia, the resources that this island in space was endowed with have been greatly reduced since we started using them up - essentially destroying them - a very long time ago. And we are now running out of some that are critical to our continuity.
It does make on wonder where we go next. A couple of high points of my life have been spending a month in the seedier parts of two very large cities, Moscow with a population of about 14 million and Sao Paulo with a population of about 20 million. Both cities had grown very rapidly, Moscow largely because of the need for a huge bureaucracy to operate the command and control economy of the Soviet system and Sao Paulo largely because of the mechanization of the huge plantations of the Brazilian countryside. When I was in Moscow in 1995, the need for a huge bureaucracy had evaporated with the Soviet system and the quality and morality of life were in severe decline. Sao Paulo in 1997 was different. The quality of life was not high but its morality still was; people had a very strong sense of looking after each other. They had brought that with them from the countryside. Yet given the precariousness of so huge a population with so little to sustain it, one really had to wonder how long things could continue as they were. Gangs and mafias had already formed around the drug trade, and shootouts with the police were commonplace.
The logical course to take is not to repeat the mistakes of the past, but it seems that another characteristic that defines us as a species is that we are unable to do that.
Unfortunately, this is true. The world population is far too vast, and the segment of the population in the developed countries that understands the dangers is far too small.
Keith
Ed
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Keith Hudson
- To: [email protected]
- Sent: Wednesday, May 18, 2005 3:01 AM
- Subject: [Futurework] Man's two worlds
- 736. Man's two worlds
- Now that even language differences between man and other primates, such as bonobo chimpanzees, are not so sharp as thought hitherto, what is emerging as probably our only unique characteristic as a species is man's ability to trade. Evidence of the trading of ornaments and pigments between normally antagonistic scavenger/hunter-gatherer groups of early man goes back to at least 65,000 BC. Future discovery of early sites by archaeologists will probably push this date back even further.
- Trading between groups probably arose because of the need for genetic intermixing, in order to avoid excessive concentration of harmful genes in any one group.
- In the case of the other primates it is normally the case that the young post-puberty males leave the group and become mature adults in small bachelor gangs. These bachelors then break their way forcibly into other groups in order to be chosen by the females and thus have sex. This phenomemon is called matrilocalism -- that is, the females stay in the group in which they were born and were raised.
- In the case of man, the opposite applies. We are a patrilocal spcies. In almost all societies yet observed, with very few exceptions in unusual circumstances, it is the females who leave their family or their group in order to find their future spouse. This has even emerged today in developed countries where, since the legal equalisation of women, no longer oppressed as in previous agricultural times, girls are now forging ahead of boys at school and university in order to find better jobs and more chance of finding husbands who offer the economic security needed to raise children.
- But back to trading: Why should man have developed this behaviour while the other primates didn't? It is my guess that, with larger brains -- more precisely, larger frontal lobes -- man was more adventurous and capable of fending for himself in the open savannahs of Africa with very few trees available to be climbed for safety when attacked by predators. However, because this was a more dangerous habitat than his predecessors' existence on the margins of the rain forests, then even bachelor groups would have found this too dangerous.
- But if a mutation occurred in some groups where the post-puberty girls were more inclined to wander then these wandering girl-groups, being physically smaller and less strong than bachelor males would have been in greater peril. Unless, instead, they were directly exchanged between groups when the groups met occasionally at territorial boundaries! But what would have happened if there had been -- as one would normally expect -- a sexual imbalance between the sexes of the two groups? It is not too much to speculate that other prized goods would have been used as a "balance of trade" between two groups.
- We can still see the original direct linkage between sex and trade in the form of dowries which still obtains in many more "primitive" societies, such as in the agricultural areas of Asia, Africa and South America. Indeed, it is not too much to suppose that the surge of young Saudi Arabian suicide bombers flowing into Iraq is primarily caused because millions of young males in Saudi Arabia are totally without jobs and cannot ever save enough money to buy themselves a wife. Thus they are easily manipulated into believing that their plight is due to other causes.
- Man, unlike all other primates, lives in two worlds it appears. Firstly, there is the usual bitter antagonism between adjacent groups, each defending its territory and mode of economic survival. This survives today in the form of modern nation-states, each with its own armed forces, and each with a strictly defined territorial boundary. At the same time, the culture of trading still runs strong by which the goodies of one country can be exchanged for the goodies of another.
- Yet the temptation to take the goodies of another country by force is always present. So we have paradoxical behaviours going on between nation-states with wars very frequent between those without nuclear bombs. On the one hand, politicians -- often urged on by their "military-industrial complex" (to use the phrase of President Eisenhower) -- constantly make aggressive noises against politicians in other nations. On the other hand, many other inhabitatns are quietly trading across their territorial boundaries.
- Thus, at one and the same time, we have the US Congress and the US Treasury Secretary making aggressive noises about China while tens of thousands of American firms are investing and setting up operations in China, and --so far -- hundreds of Chinese firms are investing and setting up operations in the US. And, be it noted, half the "Chinese" profits that Congress is shouting about -- at the expense of America, they suppose -- are, in fact, profits of American firms in China!
- I'm minded of this when reading an account of a CNN broadcast in China on the occasion of the Global Forum of the world's largest and most powerful firms meeting in Beijing and hosted by the American magazine Fortune. This is an entirely different scene from that in the Senate where some Congressmen are going apoplectic about the Chinese and wanting to raise tariffs against Chinese-made goods even though ordinary Americans will have to pay more!
- It 's a curious world -- and a dual one as between the militant nation-state and the trading corporations. Which will win? Without a doubt, the traders will win. Developed nation-states, becoming increasingly top-heavy with bureaucrats and too expensive armaments, are all now going bankrupt and cannot support their inhabitants with the care and welfare that have been promised. (Nor can developed countries recruit enough young men into their full-time armies these days.) Nation-states will not collapse totally, of course, but they are atrophying badly at the moment and have hardly a promising future unless they develop new and less costly methods of governance.
- Whereas, among commercial corporations, where bankruptcy is the norm for those that can't cut it, the more successful and adept will continue to survive. And they are interested in the ordinary customer just as much as, if not more than, governments are interested in the voter -- that is, roughly half their people at the present time, but reducing year by year. And corporations are interested in all potential customers in order to maximise profits. Unfortunately, not all potential customers can afford the goodies on offer because nation-states so arrange their taxation schedules so that the poorest always pay a higher rate of tax than the rich, and the very richest, of course, can get away tax-free by employing cleverer accountants and lawyers than governments can afford.
- Keith Hudson
- <<<<
- CHINA RISING
- Beijing -- Following BBC's Question Time program on China, CNN's celebrated senior journalist Jim Clancy hosted a roundtable discussion about China's role in the world called "CNN Connects China Rising" Tuesday in Beijing.
- The program featured a panel of distinguished speakers and a live studio audience of 120 people, including some of the chiefs of global businesses, heads of state, and leading thinkers, currently gathering in Beijing for the on-going Fortune Global Forum.
- "By airing the program, CNN deepens its commitment to examining China's movements on the world stage, its impact on Asian and neighboring countries," said Rena Golden, senior vice-president of CNN International.
- On the panel were heads of brand-name companies like Irwin Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm, Luc Vandevelde, chairman of Carrefour, Peggy Yu, founder of Dangdang.com, the largest on-line bookstore, and Li Shan, CEO of the Bank of China International Holdings. Clay Chandler, Fortune Magazine Senior Writer, Robert Friedman, International Editor of Fortune Magazine, Han Sung-Joo, Professor of Korea University, and Wu Jianmin, President of the China Foreign Affairs University also attended the roundtable discussion.
- Participants debated on various subjects, ranging from China's economic growth to China's foreign relations. Panelists agreed that China's rise means more gain for the world, rather than fear. Their consensus coincided with the result of an on-line poll by the CNN.com. Answering the question of "Does the world have more to gain or more to fear from the emergence of China as an economicpower?" 69 percent of voters voted for "more to gain" while 31 percent voted for "more to fear" at CNN's website, according to Clancy.
- With China set to become the world's largest economy by mid-century, and with its international influence on the rise, CNN is airing a unique week of live and special features from Beijing, named "Eye on China".From May 14 to 22, "Eye on China" will give CNN audiences in more than 200 countries and regions a comprehensive look inside China, one of the world's fastest growing economies. The coverage will focus on China's swiftly evolving role in global politics and business, and the impact of the country's rapid modernization on its people and culture.
- "A team of award-winning journalists have traveled from the United States and Hong Kong to join Beijing-based correspondents for the week of "Eye on China" coverage, which aims to give our viewers a greater understanding of the many complex issues facing modern China," said Golden.
- Xinhuanet -- 17 May 2005
- >>>>
- Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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