Human origins - humble beginnings

In order to dominate you must first be humbled. Have you ever wondered why humans are the dominant species on this planet? It wasn't always so. Nature, God, whoever or whatever did not choose us as the lucky recepients of superior genes, destined for greatness from the very beginning. No, it wasn't that simple. Throughout history, species that we recognize as being part of our direct lineage, struggled, barely avoiding extinction. Humans now dominate because we didn't before.

Our priviledged species descended from pauper ancestors. No matter how far back one looks, it's true. Some 63 million years ago dinosaurs dominated the planet, while our nearest ancestor was a tiny little shrew-like mammal, whose daily routine consisted of dodging the teeth of small dinos, and the feet of stomping big ones. Then, the asteroid hit and dinosaurs went extinct. Our turn, right? Nope. Next to dominate were species of giant flightless birds, and eventually other mammals got bigger and stronger, so they took over...but still not us, not our type of mammal, the hominids. And so it would be up until about 2 million years ago, when one of our pauper ancestors Homo Habilis (below) finally decided it was enough, and began to turn the tide.

By 2 million years ago, hominids were finally climbing the ladder of status in the animal kingdom. There were 3 recognized species. The first, A. Boisei, was a large herbivore that lounged all day, eating a specialized diet of bamboo-type plants which were everywhere, who's main concern was which female from his harem he should mount next. The second was A. Robustus, and as the name suggests, it was another strong hominid, that had it pretty good back then. The third species was H. Habilis. They were smaller, scrawnier, chronic bad-hair-day sufferers, who could never find enough food because they could not survive on Boisei's bamboo diet, and would often lose the best fruits and plants to the bigger A. Robustus. Yup, total losers, and wouldn't you know it, they were our direct link, and not the other two.

In desperation, H. Habilis had to supplement its vegiterian diet with other sources, including insects and meat. Meat was hard to come by since H. Habilis was too small to actually bring down an animal of any considereble size, and too slow to capture the little critters, which meant scavanging was the way to go. But, after a carcass was picked clean by the large land predators, then the vultures, all that was left for H. Habilis were the bones. He would hopelessly gnaw at the bone he couldn't possibly puncture with his pathetic humanesque teeth, and when finally frustrated, like any one of us would, he'd slam the bone up against the floor or a rock...again and again. Then, seeing the bone crack, he'd realize that a rock breaks bone, so he'd pick up a bigger rock (his first tool) and keep smashing, exposing the marrow...a souce of protein and other nutrients not as abundant in a vegetarian diet. Over time, the large amounts of protein H. Habilis gets from an omnivore diet leads to the development of increasingly larger brains, and this pathetic lineage finally turns the table on evolution, and begins its final leg of the journey towards dominance.

Today we Homo Sapiens dominate, but that in itself is dangerous because we've become too cozy and soft, a luxury not available to our direct evolutionary ancestor H. Habilis that got us here. We've lost respect for the earth and other species, and history seems to suggest that we are due for a humbling, whether it be cosmic impact, earthly disasters or plagues…or, perhaps we'll wise up and become humble voluntarily, change our ways and spare ourselves from calamity, as we did before.

Einstein's Fountain of Youth

I've often wondered why people from equatorial regions often times appear more youthful when compared to populations considerably north or south of them. I guess it could be any number of things...an easy going lifestyle, healthier food, nicer climate, genetics...but maybe it's not. Maybe it's a matter of E=mc2.

Einstein's theory of relativity presents the notion that the faster one travels, the slower the time for them passes. Experience of time is relative, and the closer you approach the speed of light, your experience of time becomes inceasingly sluggish. At the speed of light, time stops. Go any faster, and you'll actually go backwards in time, so the theory goes. Sounds like science-fiction but apparently the theory still holds water in the scientific community. So, in practical terms what does this mean to the rest of us who lack a means of travelling at the speed of light? Well, pilots and astronauts, having spent some time traveling at speeds of 3000 to 40,000 km/h, have actually slowed their own experience of time by small fractions of a second. The more hours they log at such speeds, the younger they'll actually be than they would have been had they stayed on earth and not flown. The difference is miniscule though, because even the most experienced pilots and astronauts are actually flying only a small portion of the time, in terms of their life as a whole.

You don't need to be a hot shot fighter pilot or an astronaut to take advantage of this phenomenon though. Even standing still, you are traveling at enourmous speeds every second of your life. As the earth races around its orbit it's taking us with it at about 105,000 km/h. Similarly, our solar system is racing through the galaxy, and our galaxy through the universe. We are all getting the benefits of this speed collectively, and that's why we don't notice it. The challenge then becomes getting additional time-slowing benefits that are not available to others on this planet equally. As mentioned before, this can be achieved with airplanes, space vehicles and fast cars to a lesser extent (I wonder if that's why mid-life crisis sufferers often purchase sporty racers to make them feel young again?). Lesser still are the benefits of running and other similar excercises, due to miniscule speeds involved, but in principle they make a difference (plus the added benefits of a fitter body).

This brings me back to the equator issue. In addition to orbiting the sun, the earth also rotates on its axis. At the equator, the speed of this spin is about 1600 km/h, and decreases steadily as we move out towards the poles, where it's virtually 0 km/h. Think about it. The earth's circumference is about 40,000km at the equator, and it needs to rotate around itself in 24 hours, thus a speed of about 1600km/h. Anywhere north or south of the equator, the circumference and speed are thus less. Now, bare in mind the earth is doing this 24/7, and it's been doing it for a long time, certainly for our entire existance. If you consider the difference in speed traveled in one lifetime at the equator, would it not make a difference in terms of keeping one younger than their non-equatorial counterparts? I think it might play a role.

The Bible - Peeling Back the Layers

Why, why, why, do some supposedly normal, educated people still take the words of the Bible, or any religious text for that matter, so literally? I’m not going to name names but I’m looking your way Biblelands, USA. Allow me to usher you out of the, I want to say stone-age, but from what I know of the Neandertal* culture and belief system, they were far less gullible...THE EARTH WAS NOT CREATED IN 7 DAYS!

As any school child knows, stories, fables, nursery rhymes and the like are a great way to educate. Within the context of a simple story you weave a lesson about life that the child can take with them. That’s essentially what the Bible is, a collection of writings structured in such a way as to educate the masses about our origins, morals, life’s lessons and all sorts of information, in a simplified manner that all walks of life can take something from. I mean c’mon, as long a book as the Bible is, it’s actually quite short considering the magnitude of the topics it covers. That’s what makes it so ingenious. It’s a book about everything…the ultimate anti-Seinfeld if you will. Just compare it to modern-day educational literature where everything is fragmented, requiring a different set of rules and theories for each different topic. In order to explain anything, we need to break it up into manageable chunks of information, and even after doing that, the works are lengthy. That is what makes the Bible such a great book, and it’s unfortunate that people have misused it for so long, everything from justifying ridiculous wars to propagating ignorance. Let me do my little part to help.

I see the Bible as a book with multiple layers of information and interpretation, 3 layers by my count, those being:

1. The “silly fool, we didn’t mean that literally” layer, LITERAL for short
2. SYMBOLIC, and
3. ENCODED

Some take everything in the bible literally, which centuries ago when we knew very little about the world is somewhat understandable, but today, less excusable. Firstly, the 7-days of creation are symbolic. It doesn’t mean seven 24 hour periods as we know them today, but rather 7 somewhat distinct periods, of various lengths, when significant events (from a human-centric perspective of course) of the earth’s history took place, covering everything from the creation of our solar system to the birth of mankind. Yes, greatly generalized and presented in a way to make it understandable to the uneducated masses, but based on facts none the less. Other examples of literal interpretations converted to symbolic include:

“Days” means anything from billions, millions or even fewer number of years depending on what was created that particular day. This is similar to using the term “eras” when delineating geologic, social and other time periods of unequal length, but exhibiting a particular set of common characteristics that set them apart from other “eras”.

Let there be light...and God separated the darkness from the light, means our Sun’s hydrogen furnace ignites and begins to burn and shine light upon the not-quite-complete spheres orbiting around it, one of which is our planet Earth. As the Earth forms into a solid sphere it rotates on its axis, creating night and day (appx 4.6 billion years ago).

On the second day, God created a dome and separated the waters, meaning, the planet wide ocean begins to evaporate, creating clouds that will rain down, and a rudimentary atmosphere is created.

On the third day God called for dry land to appear, followed by vegetation. Well, geologic evidence clearly shows that vulcanic eruptions on the ocean floors formed bulges in the earth's crust, pushing it up, until dry land finally appeared out of the oceans. Once dry land appeared vegetation followed, sustained by the carbon rich atmosphere at the time. The carbon-dioxide was released by the vulcanic eruptions, while the plants exhailed oxygen, a necessity for the animal life that is to follow.

In the days to follow, God first made aquatic creatures, then land animals, and finally humans. This totally fits in with fossil evidence, except what the Bible calls days, you must simply understand are millions of years. Animal life did begin in the oceans, and humans are one of the newest species on this planet today, thus the 7th day is symbolic of our late arrival to this planet relative to other species. Despite this, it's amazing how many people still take the term "day" to mean a 24 hour period. One such nutcase claimed to be a real scientist who's theory I came across at http://www.answersingenesis.org. Even now in 2005, he claimed that scientific evidence shows that everything on earth was created in one week, as we know it today. I had a good laugh reading it, but it's sad when you really think about it. On top of all this is the whole Adam and Eve thing. Taken literally, that would make us all quite inbred, so I could see why this notion is so popular in the south, where they still teach creationism in schools, instead of evolution. The actual number of Adams and Eves is several thousand...the number of modern-human individuals from whom we all descended.

If you needed any more proof that the Bible should not be taken literally, just look at Jesus. It's common knowledge that He always used parables to spread his message. Yes, his stories were amusing to the people, but they were not the real message, but rather symbolic vessels of the true message.

Deeper still, beyond the symbolic layer, exists a substantially more puzzling third that I’ll call the encoded layer. I believe Leonardo Da Vinci suspected it, and Isaac Newton was secretly obsessed by it...the idea that the Bible contained deeply encoded information about events of not only the past and present, but even the future. With the invention of the computer, putting this to the test became possible. According to Michael Drosnin’s book, the Bible Code, such experiments have yielded clear evidence of encoded information within the Bible. The technique used involved writing out the contents of the Bible in the original language (Aramaic), and eliminating spaces and punctuation. At certain skip sequences (e.g. taking every 567th letter) one begins to find startlingly detailed information. For example, Rabin’s assassination is well documented, including the date and the assassin’s name, all encoded together, as were numerous other events that were tested for. Critics initially argued that virtually any work, provided it was long enough would, statistically speaking, likely yield similar information. In response to this argument, tests were conducted on other popular literature and revealed no evidence of encoded information, yet the Bible continued to hit the mark.

So, how deep should we be looking into the Bible? Well, maybe the third layer is something to leave to the experts for the time being, but certainly we should help our slower brothers and sisters overcome the first layer, and all its problems. Now, I’m not coming at you from some extreme leftist, atheist, seed-of-Satan viewpoint. I’m what you might call a seasonal religious practitioner, also known as Roman Catholic, whose lifetime mass attendance record stands at a slightly above average 4.35 visits per year...Christmas and Easter being the mandatory 2, with some mix of wedding, communion, confirmation, baptism, funeral, and if need be, the occasional Saints Day substitution for the other 2.35 times. That being said, I believe in God and the need for spirituality in ones life. I believe that Jesus, be he an immaculately conceived son of God or just another human being conceived out of wedlock, through his teachings, actions, and influence was one of the best things to ever happen to humanity. I also doubt that he intended for me to be a mindless, passage-reciting zombie, who was never to touch himself or a woman (other than a wife solely for procreation purposes), and I’m pretty sure he didn’t intend that for all of you either, because how would that really make us any different than those Taliban freaks!?!

* Yes, that’s the correct spelling of Neandertal, there is no “h”. It was named after the original place of discovery Neander Valley in Germany. “Tal” means valley in German, thus Neandertal.

By the way, you can listen to great discussions on this issue at http://podcasts.yahoo.com/series?c=e&s=56200effeaaf322de1f933f85cc00c9e&es=1&rs=1. Look through the archived shows for Catholics on evolution, intelligent design, etc.

Patriotism in the World of Sports

On Sunday December 4th, 2005 the Davis Cup, tennis' world cup, was won by Croatia. The runner-up nation was Slovakia. Is tennis so obscure a sport that the bigger nations could not be bothered with it? Well, no. Not exactly. The US and Russia for example, have multiple top-10 players according to world rankings, yet they lose team competitions to smaller nations all the time. They also have to beg their star players to participate, and even when they get their best players to represent the nation, they underachieve. The exact opposite is true for smaller nations. Players see it as an honour rather than a hassle, and elevate their level of play significantly. Just look at Ivan Ljubicic (CRO), a perennial 2nd rounder in Grandslam tournaments, yet a Davis Cup record-breaker. When the prize consists of a million $, he gets whipped by guys like Roddick and Agassi, but put national pride on the line, and he beats them both in one weekend. These results suggest an inverse relationship between the level of patriotism and the size of a nation, as seen in the graph above. The only notable outlier on the chart is Italy, which has somehow maintained its high-level of patriotism, despite its relatively large size. It must be something in the pasta sauce.

Above right: Ivo Karlovic, Mario Ancic and Ivan Ljubicic of Croatia...Davis Cup Champs!
World Tennis Rankings (Nations): http://www.daviscup.com/ranking/current.asp
World Tennis Rankings (Individuals): http://www.atptennis.com/en/players/entrysystem/

Going Ape Over Nipples!

This story is just bizzare. The world renowned Koko the sign-language-speaking gorilla has gotten the Gorilla Foundation into some legal trouble. You see, Koko has a major nipple fetish and repeatedly asks female caretakers to expose their bosoms. Koko's former caretaker granted such requests in order to establish a bond with the gorilla, and apparently Koko's begun asking new caretakers for the same. When 2 other women refused to bare themselves at Koko's request, they were fired. A lawsuit ensued, and an out-of-court settlement reached.

Nice try Koko, it's about time you learned an important lesson in life...if you want something, you've got to get it yourself. If you want to see nipples, you don't just ask to see them, you reach in and go for the strap. If the response is a slap on the cheek, you don't need to know sign-language to interpret that. Oh, did I mention that Koko is a female gorilla?! What can I say, girls know how to party.