Ecological Intelligence (6 page)

The next step in our evolution has to be regarded as one of the great cognitive milestones in our history—the beginnings of sophisticated art. Prior to as little as 40,000 years ago, no rock art or engravings of any aesthetic significance, whether on bone or stone, are known to exist. It is as if from one level of capability to another, human creativity took a quantum leap. The signature and skill of an artist hitherto unknown suddenly emerged. The great sand faces of the Earth became the diaries of human experience as well as the mirrors of the human soul. Modern man had arrived.

So this is who we are—
Homo sapiens sapiens
—the sole survivors of at least eighteen species of bipedal ancestors. We are privileged. Creative and clever? Yes. Doubly wise? I doubt it.

CULTURAL EVOLUTION

T
he human animal traveled the world. Equipped with a brain that was primed to seek and to explore, we had no choice. The search for food and new hunting grounds made sure of that until, close on the heels of the last ice age ten thousand years ago and with the Earth’s temperatures warming again, one of Nature’s most fortuitous genetic accidents occurred. It stopped our nomadic ancestors in their tracks. By some great fluke, or perhaps the result of a hitherto unknown temperature-dependent bacterial alliance with wild grasses, a wind-scattered wild wheat with fourteen chromosomes crossed with a natural goat grass of the same chromosome number. The result was a fertile twenty-eight-chromosome hybrid called emmer. The seeds of this edible hybrid were still light enough to be wind-borne but then a second accident occurred when emmer crossed with another goat grass, producing a still larger hybrid with forty-two chromosomes. This hybrid is the cereal called bread wheat,
Triticum vulgare
, the staple diet of millions of people today.

Prior to this, the order of the day was to collect grass seeds and to bring them home, but suddenly, in an exotic, symbiotic relationship beautifully described by scientist and philosopher J. Bronowski, “man and a plant came together.” A grain had developed that was too heavy for wind dispersal and that had to be cultivated by a species that understood the behavior of flowering plants and grasses. By accident or coincidence, the coalition of natural grasses to form cereals accelerated. Barley,
Hordeum vulgare
, sprang up in the Middle East, followed by maize,
Zea mays
, in the American tropics 7,000 years ago. Nearly two thousand years later, rice,
Oryza sativa
, cropped up in Thailand and China, while in Africa sorghum,
Sorghum bicolor
, and the millets,
Pennisetum glaucum
and
Eleusine corocana
, began seeding themselves. At last, the hominids were able to take off their nomadic shoes and stay put for a while. Planting, cultivating, harvesting, and the domesticating and interbreeding of animals signaled another quantum jump in the evolution of human culture. It added a dimension to the definition of home. It gave us the time and the luxury to reflect upon matters beyond our immediate survival. It was the beginning of surplus and of specialization, a time not only to tell tales, but to embellish them. Personal lives became stories, stories became legends, legends became myths, and our myths became our dreams.

If the traditional agricultural practices of Africa, India, and the Far East are anything to go by, it should not surprise us to learn that women were the first agriculturists. Who else would have intuited better the significance of fertility, pregnancy, and cultivation? Who other than the traditional gatherers of the plains would have recognized the potential of a new food source when it presented itself?

Agriculture has been important in our history but it came with a price. Cultivation is synonymous with growth and therein lies the shadow or the dark side of this evolutionary event. It is called expansionism. Staying in one place led to an unprecedented growth in local populations. This meant a need for more food. More food meant competition for more land and it is not difficult to see the link between land, territory, colonization, and the means of getting it—politics and war. Cultivation took on a new dimension—the cultivation of words, wealth, and weapons.

There was no turning back, but it had its positive side. Human language took on another form. Through exquisite, painstaking art, including our earliest scribbled signs and symbols, our agricultural ancestors wrote themselves into the record book. No longer restricted to body signals and to speech, language in its written form allowed the human animal to record, to think in words, and to read between the lines. From rock faces to papyrus and paper, the files of human history became indelible and, as every poet will tell you, ink and blood are the same thing.

W
ith the onset of agriculture and the interweaving seasons of bread and wine, cultivation became a multifaceted metaphor for the human narrative—the seasons of birth, death, and rebirth. It reinforced in us the Neanderthal notion of continuity and an afterlife, for these relatives were the first hominids to add to the graves of their dead something for an afterlife—flowers, food, and sea urchins.

Continuity and the notions of deities, gods, and God represent profound leaps in the evolution of human culture. Let the histories of the world’s great religious philosophies speak for themselves. Accompanied by laws that would later be engraved on stones, scrolls, and in leatherbound creeds, it is a history of the human quest for a greater understanding of the creation and of its creator. Visible gods became an invisible God. Animism was replaced by theism, which in turn has been challenged by humanism and the supremacy of human rights. God moved from being outside us to being inside and then to being everywhere. Some say that He left and others that He will come back again. All things considered, the idea—or for some the conviction—of life everlasting appears to be deeply embedded in the human psyche, for, as the poet Czeslaw Milosz reminds us, “it has accompanied man in his wanderings through time. It has always been larger and deeper than religious or philosophical creeds which expressed only one of its forms.”

Because of the meaning that is derived from them, the significance of the world’s religions should be neither negated nor underestimated. They are far more than mere codes of conduct or moral philosophies.
Ligare
, the Latin word which means “to connect” or “to bind” and from which the word
religion
is derived, plays no small role in the survival of a species that knows its ultimate fate. Continuity, connection, transformation, and transmutation are the hallmarks of evolution, are they not? Everything in life changes its skin…even the gods. Does it really matter that someone else’s cosmology or notion of God might look a little different from yours or mine? How different that could be is reflected in these lines of a poem by Howard Nelson. The poem is called “Elephant Thoughts.”

Afterwards one of us asked

There is at least one philosophical problem in which all thinking people are interested, wrote historian and philosopher Bryan Magee. “It is the problem of cosmology; the problem of understanding the world—including ourselves, and our knowledge as part of the world. All science is cosmology,” he said.

LOOKING BACK

T
he dinosaurs might be gone but they are not forgotten, for the Earth, it would seem, does not forget her children. Their signatures, along with those of our mammalian predecessors, are not only written in our genes but they can also be found in the anatomy and chemistry of the human brain. Their imprint, as we shall see, is still wet and very much with us.

In the 1960s, in a fascinating yet sobering analysis of the evolution of the brain, Paul Maclean introduced the notion of the human brain as an organ that has retained its reptilian and paleomammalian origins. The human brain, he said, is a triune brain. In other words, the human animal, to this day, operates with three “brains”—a reptilian brain, an early mammalian one, and a neomammalian, or human, one. According to Maclean, each of these brains has its own memory, motor functions, intelligence, and its own sense of time and space. The boundaries between the three levels of brain functioning are obviously not as rigid as the diagram portrays, but in the light of an ecological intelligence the concept is both useful and important.

The reptilian brain of crocodiles, lizards, and snakes, including the extinct dinosaurs, has changed little in its 180- to 220-million-year history. Its anatomy consists chiefly of a brain stem and other nuclei responsible for the rhythm of the heart, breathing, coordinating fight and flight responses, and for the interpretation of perceptual stimuli, such as sounds, movement, and particularly that of olfaction—the ancient sense of smell. Although our sense of smell compared with our other senses appears to have lost the survival significance that it still holds for our reptilian and mammalian cousins (elephants can smell water more than eighteen miles away), these other reptilian nuclei remain intact and functional in the brains of the human animal. And yet our sense of smell, in spite of its lack of potency, is nevertheless an important one.Odors and fragrances of all sorts, from wax crayons, pencil shavings, peanut butter sandwiches, eggs, and bacon, body scents, and perfumes to the smell of the first rains are powerful reminders of one’s culture, one’s community and even one’s identity.

A
s we compare the evolution and behavior of the living creatures on our planet, it is important that we remember that the game we are playing is a shared one. It is called survival. In this light, when we snootily describe the behavior of reptiles and other creatures as being instinctive with a tendency to be automatic, we would do well to acknowledge our own brain stem behavior. Yes, it is likely that crocodiles are unemotional, but we too are capable of cold-blooded indifference. Yes, reptiles do tend to be opportunistic with little or no cognitive appreciation of the present, the future, or of past events, but we, too, have an eye for the gap. “I want it all, and I want it now” is the brain stem speaking. We, too, are territorially and materially acquisitive, often getting what we want by acts of intimidation and threat displays, otherwise known as bullying and blackmail.

Yes, reptiles are naturally prejudiced in favor of brain stem drives, but they are anything but unintelligent. Take the modern Nile crocodile of tropical Africa, Asia, and Australia,
Crocodylus niloticus
, for example. It has been on Earth at least fifty times longer than we have, outliving countless species that have come and gone during their remarkable tenure. These creatures can remain underwater for up to forty-five minutes, and with their short, mobile earflaps acting like volume controls, their hearing is better than any other reptile. They continue to grow throughout their lives, and an adult crocodile, by utilizing the accumulated fat in its long tail, is capable of going with-out food for up to two years. What is more, it can determine the sex of its oviparous (egg-born) offspring according to the depth at which the female lays her eggs in the sand. Males are born from the shallower and therefore warmer levels of the conical-shaped hole in which the crocodile lays her eggs, females from the deeper levels. What kind of intelligence accounts for these extraordinary capacities? There is a crocodile in me and it shows itself in my drives, my impulsiveness, my compulsions, my deceptiveness, and my guile. Consciousness and intelligence, as we shall see, are not to be confused.

Although the Earth’s earliest known mammals, such as the mouse-like climber
Eomaia scansoria
, made their appearance about seven cosmic months ago (125 million years), it was the onset of the Tertiary epoch, 65 million years ago, that coincided with the rapid emergence of what Maclean calls the second brain—the convoluting brain of the warm-blooded class Mammalia. Called the paleomammalian brain, this new and larger structure gave its owners a more sophisticated range of motor functions, emotions, memory, and a sense of place, but everything “id”—everything impulsive—about its reptilian origins, came along with it. The main characteristic of this new brain was a consolidation of the widespread connections between the autonomic centers for body homeostasis, such as hunger/satiety and sleep/ wakefulness, and those of smell, sight, and taste. But there was more.The other anatomical changes included a fairly well-defined positioning of the hypothalamus—the hormone-primed seat of the emotions associated with aggression, flight, anticipation, passivity, and caregiving. It also included the significant consolidation of the links between those delicate neurological structures and chemicals associated with learning and the retention of memory. This new brain became associated with important changes in animal socialization. It became part and parcel not only of the socially significant differentiation of audiovocal calls into those of alarm, contact, comfort, separation, and sexual communication, but to an increase in the sophistication of cooperative care for the young as well. On top of that, this new brain heralded what is arguably the most outstanding behavioral difference between reptiles and mammals—the capacity for play.