HOW WE BECAME US
Previously I’ve traced the steps between the one-celled creature and how it formed a skin and a nucleus, pulled in other cells, and began sensing how to function while immersed in the world. First was learning how to move through the directions and how to take in bits, sort them for food, and throw the unwanted out the back door. Any good biology book can explain the way the cell became complex, then was a worm, grew a backbone, and started up the long development of evolution, using the molecular double helix of the nucleus. Dropping some pinpoint molecules, acquiring some new and useful ones, and carrying some irrelevancies along to save energy, living beings went up the history from blob to fish to reptile to mammal and so to humans.
Far from being a little puppet made by a big fantasy in a lonesome moment, we humans are an incredibly complex assemblage of various specialized cells cooperating to create a trajectory going through the world. Each of us has one life to live, each of us has equipment for doing that, but all of it is dependent on contingencies, consistencies and happenstance. We are learning more about it as we invent technology and have new ideas.
Every cell in the body “thinks” by acquiring and transmitting data in code form. Every cell is also dependent on the management by the brain, the dashboard of the internal, the external, and the actions that connect them. Most of it is as unconscious as a microbe: the directions, taking in and throwing out, fiddling with the molecules, and moving air and blood that carry oxygen for chemical fires in the cells.
We know how two sexes have learned in order for one half-set of chromosomes to sit inside the female body with all the equipment for the cells of a new body, while the other half-set of chromosomes are reduced to a semi-nucleus with a tail and shot out into the world or, better, into a female. This is so irrepressible, so irresistible, so ecstatic, that it happens all the time. The more danger, the more likely. Females? Not so much. But males can barely wait. Any humans who aren’t like that are less likely to be reproduced.
But individuals and their molecules are not all that count. Survival is a double-decker event and the group must be as driven as the singleton. Not only must births equal or outnumber deaths, but also there must be an ecosystem in which the group can survive: enough food, shelter, and fittingness to make survival worthwhile.
It was a while before turf disagreements pitted one group against another, after a time when all they needed to defend against was predators and disasters. Each other were more dangerous. So they learned to make stones into axes with edges, crucial in parting out food or defending against big cats and bears. They developed flint knapping, even into several techniques, until there was some kind of new element: beauty. Now people created jade axes — not just knapped but also polished — with considerable symbolic beauty.
Sitting together around the fires, they attached to each other as individuals and mourned the loss of those whose living arc had come to an end. To honor them and remember them, the group began to build cairn mounds of stone and earth soon covered with grass, with a “doorway” to the interior that could mark the farthest points of the sun gyre that were the limits of the sky.
After millennia of this sort of thing, about ten thousand years ago, people noticed that the people by the sea where the food never ran out, didn’t have to move to hunt or to herd. They had invented “sedentarism, made possible by agriculture, both plant and animal. Nevertheless, crops failed and animals gave them new diseases like smallpox and anthrax. Insects and the problem of sanitation plagued all.
Living in a group meant the need for structure. Family was the basic unit, then extended family to include even the nonfertile, and then the need to pass information, ideas and stories. The pressure to keep spoken language in some form, especially in trading records through arithmetic, pressed writing on the people in the form of incised marks on clay until someone saw that ink on paper would do just as well.
Before writing was invented, the part of the individual most apparent to others had become the “portrait” above the clothes where the face — as well as ears, nose, and lingual structure — plus blood circulation in the skin, heart and lungs through the body — was an instrument of communication more eloquent than hand gestures. Only recently did we know this portrait presentation was directly linked through a third strand of the vagus nerve that connected the area directly to the brain at the top of the spine. Being able to communicate this way added empathy. The ability to feel what others are feeling by observing their faces became the means for linking people, expanding their internal “brains” into the community of known people, thinking by syncing.
Writing made it possible to expand communication beyond face-to-face and here-and-now into “speaking” over long distances and through time. The problem of different groups speaking different languages persisted. Now comes the language of math and eventually the languages of science, until some people whose experiences with instruments and concepts become so specialized that they spoke what we call “jargon,” words that are limited in meaning to those who have specialties. Youngsters and gangsters invented their own languages, partly out of the need for secrecy to shield them from the main community. This is called slang.
Slang and languages of other kinds are built on metaphor, speaking of one thing as though it were another, and this turns out to be one of the basic enablers of thought of any kind, both concrete and abstract. Without the experience of the concrete actual and the ability to speak of it in terms borrowed for application to the abstract, humans could never have gotten here. What do we know about how to do these things?
