#i think with his primate mobility | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

journeytothewestresearch · 3 years ago

Text

Story Idea: The REAL Reason Sun Wukong is Expelled from Subodhi’s School

Last updated: 05-24-2022

https://journeytothewestresearch.com/2022/05/15/story-idea-the-real-reason-sun-wukong-is-expelled-from-subodhis-school/

Sun Wukong is kicked out of Patriarch Subodhi‘s (Xuputi zushi, 須菩提祖師) school in chapter two of Journey to the West (Xiyouji, 西遊記, 1592) for showing off his transformation skills to his less-accomplished religious brothers. Upon their request, he changes into a perfect pine tree that’s completely indistinguishable from a real one. The subsequent applause greatly disturbs the Master, who reprimands and expels the Monkey King under the pretense of saving his life from those who would harm him to learn his heavenly secrets (Wu & Yu, 2012, vol. 1, pp. 123-125). [1]

This event is a turning point in Sun’s life, for he transitions from an inward pursuit of spiritual cultivation to an external quest for power, ending with an attempt to unseat the Jade Emperor (Yuhuang shangdi, 玉皇上帝). This ultimately leads to the Buddha imprisoning the seditious primate beneath Five Elements Mountain and punishing him to a hellish diet for 600 plus years.

Here, I would like to prepose a different reason, one that makes more sense and better aligns with some of my previous story ideas.

I. The story so far

Last year I posted a story prompt to reddit to inspire writers looking for a Xianxia (仙俠, “immortal hero”) plot. It serves as a good summation of my past ideas:

The novel briefly mentions that Sun Wukong lives for ten years in the mountain home of the Buddho-Daoist sage Master Subodhi. The first seven are spent as a junior Daoist monk doing menial tasks and learning basic religious or life skills. However, the last three years are spent as a close disciple of Subodhi, learning elixir arts, magic, and combat skills. The novel glosses over his early cultivation in order to jump directly into the action. But imagine a Xianxia story focusing on those three years.

Drama with fellow disciples could arise from Monkey’s supernatural aptitude for quickly learning and mastering a skill. After all, it only takes him three years to go from a mere stone monkey to a powerful immortal capable of going toe-to-toe with gods and demons with millennia of cultivation and combat experience. Think of the resulting battles between our hero and his jealous senior religious brothers and sisters frustrated with his great progress.

In addition, given Sun’s demonstrated knowledge in boxing, weapons, and troop movement, I came up with the story idea that Subodhi’s school is the training ground for an immortal monastic army akin to the famous Shaolin temple. Shaolin was mobilized by the Chinese government during the 16th-century to battle pirates attacking the coast. Records indicate that one historical Shaolin monk was made the leader, and he was later forced to singlehandedly defend himself against eight individuals vying for his position. Likewise, I imagine heaven calls up Subodhi’s army to battle some demonic evil, and Monkey might quickly rise through the ranks. This would naturally lead to more tension with his fellow disciples, causing him to defend his position. All of these challenges, plus any action seen by the monastic army in heavenly battles, would explain how Sun Wukong became such a seasoned fighter in such a short time.

Plus, there is the added bonus of Subodhi’s army being called upon to fight Sun during his rebellion against heaven. He might have far surpassed his religious brothers and sisters in skill at this point.

II. Additions

In chapter one, Subodhi is shown to have 12 generation names (zibei, 字輩) used to name the students of his religious lineage, three of which were historically used by Daoism. [2]

Guang (廣)

Da (大)

Zhi (智)

Hui (慧)

Zhen (真)

Ru (如)

Xing (性)

Hai (海)

Ying (穎)

Wu (悟)

Yuan (圓)

Jue (覺) (Wu & Yu, 2012, p. 115).

Monkey is part of the tenth generation (Wu & Yu, 2012, p. 115). This means that all of Subodhi’s students taken in around the same time would all have Wu (悟) in their name. Perhaps Sun trains with his fellow Wu cohort but quickly moves on to older generations as his skill rapidly progresses.

This leads me to my next point. Above, I mentioned that Subodhi’s army might be called to bear against Monkey during his rebellion. But wouldn’t they recognize him? This feeds into a common question asked around the internet:

Why doesn’t Wukong run into any fellow disciples on the journey?

Well, the simple answer is that this isn’t important to the plot. But I’ve considered two ideas to work around this miniscule plot hole: One, his younger religious brothers are likely still studying under the Master. And two, the older generations⁠—the ones serving in the monastic army⁠—probably don’t know what Monkey looks like because advanced disciples, within the present story, are made to wear a host of fierce, multi-colored masks (fig. 1) as a way to forsake their identity and subsume the self into deep spiritual and martial cultivation. They would represent the negative thoughts and emotions that keep humans trapped in the illusionary world of Saṃsāra and chained to the wheel of rebirth. Perhaps the face becomes more human and peaceful-looking as the students progress through their training.

Fig. 1 – “Monk in dharmapala mask performs a mystery dance of Tantric Tibetan Buddhism on Cham Dance Festival” (larger version). Photo by Oleg Ivanov. Image found here.

Also, in my version of the story universe, all immortals and deities attain a halo upon achieving divine status. Here, for example, is a photomanipulation of a haloed Sun Wukong by Elijah McTaggart and myself. Take note of the fiery aureola engulfing the halo. This will come into play shortly (fig. 2). I imagine that these halos/aureolas respectively spin and shine brighter when a divinity’s spiritual power is used.

Fig. 2 – The Monkey King with a halo (larger version). As seen on deviantart. Based on my original photomanipulation.

III. Why he is really kicked out

The reason I’ve devised is connected to one of the aforementioned fights between Monkey and his older religious brothers or sisters. Perhaps Sun is attacked by multiple powerful assailants at once (just like the historical Shaolin monk), and when they start to overwhelm him, his anger ignites his halo, which begins to furiously spin and produce a radiant splendor. Instantly, he takes on a titanic cosmic form, growing 100,000 feet (30,480 m) tall and stomping on his assailants. At the same time, his docile-looking mask cracks and reverts to it’s original, fierce form. This, combined with a fiery aureola, gives him the appearance of a giant Dharmapala (Ch: Fahu, 法護), a wrathful “Protector of the Dharma” (Buddhist Law) (fig. 3) (Buswell & Lopez, 2014, pp. 249-250). This display of raw, untamed spiritual power frightens his older religious brethren. Subodhi himself is also taken aback as Monkey exhibits a great, fiery anger, while also manifesting advanced cultivation techniques that haven’t even been taught to him yet⁠—a testament to his great spiritual intelligence. The Master fears that this rage, combined with Monkey’s demonstrated talent for exponential spiritual growth and perhaps a problem with controlling this power (given Sun’s short years of study), will lead him down the path to villainy.

This brings us back to the pine tree incident. Perhaps the fight causes Subodhi to uncharacteristically allow Monkey a chance to visit his generational cohort. And when Sun acquiesces to their requests to see his transformation powers, the Master uses this as an opportunity to expel his student.

Fig. 3 – A modern thangka of the Six-Armed Mahakala dharmapala (larger version). Image found here.

IV. My thoughts

I like this idea because it foreshadows Sun’s cosmic transformations throughout the novel (ch. 3, 6, 61, and 97). It also foreshadows his later mischief throughout the cosmos and eventual rebellion.

Update: 05-16-22

I imagine Master Subodhi’s mask-wearing monastic army would have an ominous feel to them just like the stylized Persian “immortals” from the film 300 (2006) (fig. 4).

Fig. 4 – The Persian Immortals from 300 (2006) (larger version).

Update: 05-20-22

On second thought, a better mask would emulate the six paths of reincarnation in Buddhist cosmology:

deva

asura (sometimes called “demi-god” or “titan”)

human

animal

hungry ghost

hell

As before, each would indicate the level of a disciple’s spiritual attainment. Perhaps Master Subodhi’s army would have different units of each category, each one being more powerful than the last.

Update: 05-24-22

Some readers might question why I’ve included so many Buddhist elements if Master Subodhi is a Daoist immortal. While this is true, I choose instead to refer to him as a “Buddho-Daoist Sage” as he preaches aspects of both religions in his lectures:

With words so florid and eloquent That gold lotus sprang from the ground. The doctrine of three vehicles he subtly rehearsed, Including even the laws’ minutest tittle. The yak-tail waved slowly and spouted elegance: His thunderous voice moved e’en the Ninth Heaven. For a while he lectured on Dao; For a while he spoke on Chan– To harmonize the Three Parties is a natural thing. One word’s elucidation filled with truth Points to the birthless showing nature’s mystery (Wu & Yu, 2012, p. 122) (emphasis mine).

He even advocates for his students to become Buddhas. For example, the poem that Subodhi uses to reveal the secret of immortality to Monkey ends with: “When that’s done, be a Buddha or immortal at will!” (Wu & Yu, 2012, p. 120).

It’s also important to remember that Master Subodhi is based on Subhuti, a historical disciple of the Buddha.

Notes:

1) I quote the scene of his expulsion below:

“You, Wukong, come over here! I ask you what sort of exhibition were you putting on, changing into a pine tree? This ability you now possess, is it just for showing off to people? Suppose you saw someone with this ability. Wouldn’t you ask him at once how he acquired it? So when others see that you are in possession of it, they’ll come begging. If you’re afraid to refuse them, you will give away the secret; if you don’t, they may hurt you. You are actually placing your life in grave jeopardy.” “I beseech the master to forgive me,” Wukong said, kowtowing. “I won’t condemn you,” said the Patriarch, “but you must leave this place.” When Wukong heard this, tears fell from his eyes. “Where am I to go, Teacher?” he asked. “From wherever you came,” the Patriarch said, “you should go back there.” “I came from the East Purvavideha Continent,” Wukong said, his memory jolted by the Patriarch, “from the Water-Curtain Cave of the Flower-Fruit Mountain in the Aolai Country.” “Go back there quickly and save your life,” the Patriarch said. “You cannot possibly remain here!” “Allow me to inform my esteemed teacher,” said Wukong, properly penitent, “I have been away from home for twenty years, and I certainly long to see my subjects and followers of bygone days again. But I keep thinking that my master’s profound kindness to me has not yet been repaid. I, therefore, dare not leave.” “There’s nothing to be repaid,” said the Patriarch. “See that you don’t get into trouble and involve me: that’s all I ask.” Seeing that there was no other alternative, Wukong had to bow to the Patriarch and take leave of the congregation. “Once you leave,” the Patriarch said, “you’re bound to end up evildoing. I don’t care what kind of villainy and violence you engage in, but I forbid you ever to mention that you are my disciple. For if you but utter half the word, I’ll know about it; you can be assured, wretched monkey, that you’ll be skinned alive. I will break all your bones and banish your soul to the Place of Ninefold Darkness [Jiuyou zhi chu, 九幽之處], from which you will not be released even after ten thousand afflictions!” “I will never dare mention my master,” said Wukong. “I’ll say that I’ve learned this all by myself.” Having thanked the Patriarch, Wukong turned away, made the magic sign, pulled himself up, and performed the cloud-somersault (Wu & Yu, 2012, pp. 124-125).

2. Ter Haar (2021) provides a list of such generational names:

Table 1. The use affiliation characters by People of the Way

Dao 道 (Huzhou, Jiaxing, Taizhou, Suzhou) (13 cases) – The Way Zhi 智 (Huzhou, Jiaxing) (6 cases) – Wisdom Yuan 圓 (Huzhou, Jiaxing, Taizhou) (5 cases) – Complete Pu 普 (Taicang, Taizhou, Huating) (4 cases) – Universal Miao 妙 (Deqing, Jiaxing) (3 cases) – Wondrous Jue 覺 (Huating) (1 case) – Awareness (p. 39)

Sources:

Buswell, R. E., & Lopez, D. S. (2014). The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Princeton University Press.

Ter Haar, B. (2021). The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History. Netherlands: Brill.

Wu, C. & Yu, A. C. (2012). The Journey to the West (Vol. 1). Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

#Sun Wukong #Monkey King #Subodhi #Master Puti #Journey to the West #JTTW #Lego Monkie Kid #Buddhism #Taoism #Daoism #why Sun Wukong is expelled #why the Monkey King is expelled

49 notes · View notes

profspruce · 2 years ago

Note

Hi! This my first ask ever, and I wanted to know, which Pokemon live in Philadelphia?

Thanks for the ask! I would love to answer this question!

Philadelphia is a city rich with history and culture. Much like other metropolitan areas whatever Pokémon would be found here need to be accustomed to the hustle and bustle of city life. However, that's not to say that there are no surrounding natural areas. In fact, as rich as the city is with culture, there is a plethora of wildlife in the marshes and farm fields just outside the city that can support a huge diversity of wildlife. The forest types outside the city are generally Northern Mixed Hardwood forests and Appalachian Oak Forests. Together with the multiple freshwater marshes, rivers, ponds, and grasslands, there truly are few limitations as to what species may be present!

Grass - Grookey

As the birthplace for many rock, jazz, R & B, and Hip Hop artists, Philadelphia has roots in music that run very, very deep. I think it's a safe bet that as a Pokémon that utilizes its natural sense of rhythm to attack but also nourish surrounding plant life, Grookey would be incredibly well adapted for life in the city. Considering its mobility and primate-like appearance I believe it is also adapted to be able to survive in the surrounding forests. Also, drumsticks used by musicians are commonly made from species like maple, oak, and hickory. These species are known as hardwood trees and because of their lack of non-supportive cells compared to softwood trees like pine, they are a lot stronger and slower growing than softwood trees. Thus, not only would Grookey have the "groove" necessary for life in Philly, but it would also have access to the best material to make its drumstick with!

Fire - Fennekin

To be honest it was difficult to find the right fire Pokémon for Philadelphia. There are a lot of factors to consider when trying to hypothesize how Pokémon may best be suited to their native environment. Frankly, it was a bit of a process of elimination, but I think this makes the most sense. Fennekin is based off of the fennec fox, which is a fox species native to Northern Africa. Although Philadelphia is nowhere near as warm as Northern Africa, the surrounding environment is home to both the Red Fox and the Gray Fox. Foxes are opportunistic predators, meaning they are not the least bit picky when it comes to their next meal. As there is a ton of wildlife diversity surrounding Philadelphia and in the rest of Pennsylvania, I think its characteristics based off of species in the fox family (vulpes) will allow Fennekin to thrive well in this area. Furthermore, Fennekin is constantly grooming itself and is always concerned with its appearance. This sense of fashion and self-image would come as an adaptation in a city so rich with culture!

Water - Mudkip

In the Heart Gold and Soul Silver Pokédex entries, Mudkip is said to "rest by covering itself in mud at the bottom of a river." With the Delaware River a big part of the Pennsylvania landscape, and with the many marshes and wetlands in the surrounding area, I think Mudkip would be well adapted for life in Philadelphia. Several other Pokédex entries say that it uses the fin on its head as a sort of radar to determine what is taking place around it. This may be useful in a busy city to help narrow its concentration and focus where there can be a lot going on at once. Furthermore, as I was concerned about its amphibian-like physiology, I was concerned at how necessary it was this Pokémon be close to water. However as I looked more into it, this Pokémon doesn't appear to require it be constantly submerged in water like the common mudpuppy (Necturus maculosus) which it is based off of. It is perfectly content being out of the water for prolonged periods of time.

I hope I answered your question! If you would like to know about the early route species or anything else just let me know and I can make an addition!

Thank you for reaching out!

#Pokemon #pokemon biology #pokemon in our biomes #native pokemon #prof spruce #pokemon ecology #pokemon headcannon

14 notes · View notes

samuel-de-champagne-problems · 3 years ago

Note

in the dark !!!

word count— 1.1 k

Spencer Reid x Gender Neutral Reader

(Sorry if this looks funky I’m on mobile)

***

If you could think of three words to describe Spencer, they would be nervous, smart and careful. Oh, so careful. Everything that Spencer does is with an abundance of caution and care. He’s gentle and sensitive and is probably the most emotionally mature man you know.

Which is why you feel bad for being upset that he hasn’t tried to kiss you yet. You’ve made a deal with yourself, let Spencer take the lead. Not for some patriarchal bullshit says the man has to be the one to take the lead. No, none of that. You decided, with yourself, that letting Spencer be the one to make the first move would give him the less likely chance of him running away. It’s not that you’re terrifying or intimidating. It’s like you said, Spencer is nothing, but a careful man.

So it’s not entirely your fault when you sit there in the dark, so close to Spencer that you can feel his bony hip on your ribcage. He’s arms are wrapped around you, holding you so close that you smell the essential oils he wears as cologne. You wear them too, switching the grapefruit and bergamot oils that didn’t give Spencer headache like perfumes did. His breathing is labored, yet steady. He’s a constant fixture in your life, and you desperately want to show him how much he matters to you, how much you adore him.

The only light comes from the very old television that sits tucked away in Spencer’s living room. The screen flashes in combinations of grays, whites, and blacks. You couldn’t say exactly what was happening in the show, you’re too caught up in the pressure of Spencer’s hands against your upper arm and his breathing on your neck. He’s never been this close to you before, and you’ll be damned if you never get to feel loved like this again.

“Enjoying the show?” you ask, attempting to regain your focus on it as well.

“It’s good—interesting,” Spencer says, his answer uncharacteristically short, “I honestly couldn’t tell you the name of the main character. I guess it’s a little hard to concentrate,” he explains, bravely nuzzling his head into your neck.

Your heart stops. Literally, actually, figuratively stops. Spencer seems to have that effect on you with his soft cardigans, soft hands and even softer soul.

“Why,” you venture, hoping that all those tacky romance novels weren’t just read in vain, “tell me goose,” you say, hearing Spencer groan at the name

“Because, I can’t stop thinking about kissing you,” Spencer professes, sounding breathless and terrified.

“Really, goose,” you say, unsure if you’ll ever be able to call him anything but a sweet pet name again, “I’m ready when you are. There’s no rush. I’ll wait forever for you,” you tell him, gently rubbing your hand against his arm to pacify the nervousness that seems to radiate off his body.

“Kissing is so strange,” Spencer starts, getting into the tone of voice that tells you he’s preparing for an infodump, “well according to Scientific American, in the 1960s, British zoologist Desmond Morris speculated that kissing evolved from behavior exhibited by monkeys. Primate mothers would chew food for their young and then feed them, mouth-to-mouth and with their lips puckered. Scientists believe that this later developed into a way to comfort hungry children, and then eventually to show love and affection. Through evolution, kissing evolved, too” Spencer tells you, getting quiet after he finishes. Perhaps waiting for you to kiss him or tell him a fact of your own.

“Well, love,” you start, propping yourself on your elbow, “if kissing is science, don’t all good scientists carry out experiments?”

“Yes, Y/N, Spencer says” licking his lips absentmindedly, making you love him even more, “that’s true,”

“So, tell me Dr. Reid, are you a good scientist?” you ask him, “Will you let me help you with this experiment?” you ask, your lips hovering above his, waiting for his okay to lock your lips to his forever.

“Yes,” Spencer says, like it’s the scariest thing he’s ever done, but the moment he’s been waiting for all his life.

And with that you lean in, finally kissing Spencer. It’s beautiful, yet messy. You always knew that he’s lips would be soft and plush. He’s constantly licking them, like he’s asking for you to do nothing all day, but kiss him. He silently accepts your mouth, and encourages your affection with whimpers and moans.

His lips part from yours, and he uses that moment to look deep into your eyes, searching for something. You want to call out and tell him that what he could find is your soul. You want to tell him to take it, it’s been his for a long time already, but before the words can leave your lips, his mouth is on you again.

You’re lucky your boyfriend is a genius, he picks up on things quickly and kissing you is no exception. Your hands are in his hair, feeling his soft curls in between your fingers. It’s soft and tickles your palms. He’s cupping your face, like you’re a delicate piece of glass. You find this funny, because between the two of you, Spencer is the precious thing.

Kissing him is soft and slow, languid and passionate. You can forget your name doing it and not care to ever remember it. You encourage him, taking a break from his lips to leave wet kisses along his collarbone and jawline. It’s a crime to not kiss him there, he’s too beautiful for his own good.

Finally, you rest your forehead against Spencer’s, breathing him in, drinking him in, savoring the moment. The television flickers, long forgotten, but neither of your care. All that matters in that moment is Spencer’s lips that explore the canvas of your neck, begging you let him love you.

#blurbs #spencer reid #spencer reid blurb

80 notes · View notes

peppini · 3 years ago

Text

Meet Wreck: (yes his name is wreck lol)

Here’s another concept sketch for a potential oddworld OC based off of the Chinese folk tale character monkey king. But he’d essentially be from a primate like race. Although I know the inspiration had Chinese origins I was thinking his people would be like the Picts.

He’s also gonna potentially be the main character in the next mobile game I’m working on when I finished with my dating sim.

He’s essentially a rebellious Asshole trickster who plays the bass and goes around causing trouble and disrupting and undermining authority. I was thinking his story could Revolve around him doing tasks and odd jobs trying to pay off his debt to Mickey, and he uses his bass guitar as a weapon to hit people with. His mom is a priestess and his dad is dead. He always feels bad about not becoming the man his mother wanted him to be but through his experiences in industrial society he finds himself finally understanding the lessons his mom was trying to teach him all his life. He also finds out who his dad is later on too.

Here’s the inspo:

Im also debating whether or not to give him horns

#oddworld #oddworldfanart #oddworld ocs #my oc #monkey king #oddtumblr

18 notes · View notes

wolfliving · 3 years ago

Text

The Pointiest Urban Paths

MIT NEWS OFFICE

FOR RELEASE: MONDAY, OCT. 18,

Contact: Sarah McDonnell, MIT News Office E: [email protected] T: 617-460-9583

How the brain navigates cities

We seem to be wired to calculate not the shortest path but the “pointiest” one, facing us toward our destination as much as possible.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Everyone knows the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. However, when you’re walking along city streets, a straight line may not be possible. How do you decide which way to go?

A new MIT study suggests that our brains are actually not optimized to calculate the so-called “shortest path” when navigating on foot. Based on a dataset of more than 14,000 people going about their daily lives, the MIT team found that instead, pedestrians appear to choose paths that seem to point most directly toward their destination, even if those routes end up being longer. They call this the “pointiest path.”

This strategy, known as vector-based navigation, has also been seen in studies of animals, from insects to primates. The MIT team suggests vector-based navigation, which requires less brainpower than actually calculating the shortest route, may have evolved to let the brain devote more power to other tasks.

“There appears to be a tradeoff that allows computational power in our brain to be used for other things — 30,000 years ago, to avoid a lion, or now, to avoid a perilious SUV,” says Carlo Ratti, a professor of urban technologies in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and director of the Senseable City Laboratory. “Vector-based navigation does not produce the shortest path, but it’s close enough to the shortest path, and it’s very simple to compute it.”

Ratti is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Computational Science. Christian Bongiorno, an associate professor at Université Paris-Saclay and a member of MIT’s Senseable City Laboratory, is the study’s lead author. Joshua Tenenbaum, a professor of computational cognitive science at MIT and a member of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is also an author of the paper. A preprint version of this study was posted to arXiv earlier this year.

Vector-based navigation

Twenty years ago, while a graduate student at Cambridge University, Ratti walked the route between his residential college and his departmental office nearly every day. One day, he realized that he was actually taking two different routes — one on to the way to the office and a slightly different one on the way back.

“Surely one route was more efficient than the other, but I had drifted into adapting two, one for each direction,” Ratti says. “I was consistently inconsistent, a small but frustrating realization for a student devoting his life to rational thinking.”

At the Senseable City Laboratory, one of Ratti’s research interests is using large datasets from mobile devices to study how people behave in urban environments. Several years ago, the lab acquired a dataset of anonymized GPS signals from cell phones of pedestrians as they walked through Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, over a period of one year. Ratti thought that these data, which included more than 550,000 paths taken by more than 14,000 people, could help to answer the question of how people choose their routes when navigating a city on foot.

The research team’s analysis of the data showed that instead of choosing the shortest routes, pedestrians chose routes that were slightly longer but minimized their angular deviation from the destination. That is, they choose paths that allow them to more directly face their endpoint as they start the route, even if a path that began by heading more to the left or right might actually end up being shorter.

“Instead of calculating minimal distances, we found that the most predictive model was not one that found the shortest path, but instead one that tried to minimize angular displacement — pointing directly toward the destination as much as possible, even if traveling at larger angles would actually be more efficient,” says Paolo Santi, a principal research scientist in the Senseable City Lab and at the Italian National Research Council, and a corresponding author of the paper. “We have proposed to call this the pointiest path.”

This was true for pedestrians in Boston and Cambridge, which have a convoluted network of streets, and in San Francisco, which has a grid-style street layout. In both cities, the researchers also observed that people tended to choose different routes when making a round trip between two destinations, just as Ratti did back in his graduate school days.

“When we make decisions based on angle to destination, the street network will lead you to an asymmetrical path,” Ratti says. “Based on thousands of walkers, it is very clear that I am not the only one: Human beings are not optimal navigators.”

Moving around in the world

Studies of animal behavior and brain activity, particularly in the hippocampus, have also suggested that the brain’s navigation strategies are based on calculating vectors. This type of navigation is very different from the computer algorithms used by your smartphone or GPS device, which can calculate the shortest route between any two points nearly flawlessly, based on the maps stored in their memory.

Without access to those kinds of maps, the animal brain has had to come up with alternative strategies to navigate between locations, Tenenbaum says.

“You can’t have a detailed, distance-based map downloaded into the brain, so how else are you going to do it? The more natural thing might be use information that’s more available to us from our experience,” he says. “Thinking in terms of points of reference, landmarks, and angles is a very natural way to build algorithms for mapping and navigating space based on what you learn from your own experience moving around in the world.”

“As smartphone and portable electronics increasingly couple human and artificial intelligence, it is becoming increasingly important to better understand the computational mechanisms used by our brain and how they relate to those used by machines,” Ratti says.

The research was funded by MIT Senseable City Lab Consortium; MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines; the National Science Foundation; the MISTI/MITOR fund; and the Compagnia di San Paolo.

###

Written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office

The DOI number for this paper will be 10.1038/s43588-021-00130-y.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-021-00130-y

3 notes · View notes

brightingales · 5 years ago

Text

I have a feeling that this fic may be polarizing, but whatever ;)

Written for @happyjarryholidays . Prompt: Green: Nature, Growth, Envy...

Summary: James builds a nursery for Isaac.

They agree to take things slowly.

It’s for James’s benefit, as much as his own, but Harry can’t help but notice how every meeting between the two of them has been carefully constructed to make Harry feel as comfortable as possible. Their dates are only even held in public places – The Bean, The Hutch, The Dog – with Harry acutely aware of the eyes watching them, waiting to step in should James put so much of a toe out of line. Conversation topics have been selected beforehand and James always seems to be sticking to a safe script of questions to ask Harry. They talk about films (always a shared love, even if their tastes remain wildly different), music, the food, their families… James even asks him about the football season and how well Harry’s team is doing. He’s making a real effort, and it shows.

Harry can’t decide if he’s annoyed or oddly charmed by James’s insistence that they date to a formula. He almost feels like they’re a courting couple in a Restoration romance like in the novels that James hides under the bed. They can’t go anywhere without a chaperone. They can’t stay out past eleven pm. They can’t touch bare skin above the wrist… It’s frustrating, and frankly upsetting, to Harry who genuinely meant it when he said, ‘I want things to go back to the way they were between us.’ But James has always been feet-first when it comes to Harry, and the restraint he is showing now only proves how much he wants to repair the damage he wrought.

So, they date – outside and in the open so that anyone can intervene the moment Harry feels even the slightest bit uncomfortable. He doesn’t. He might be mad, but he doesn’t.

It takes him a few weeks to persuade James to take him back to the flat. James eventually relents but makes a big show of ensuring that either Marnie or Romeo is there. Harry makes an equally big show of saying how much he misses being home and how he wants to be alone with James and how it’s funny that James is being so cautious with him when Harry is a big boy who can make his own decisions.

“It’s not just you though – is it?” James says quietly, hiding his ashamed eyes in his wine glass.

He’s got a point. There’s Isaac to think of now.

While Harry would never push James into something that he is uncomfortable with, he also knows that James’s self-deprecating nature will probably make him think that he’s made way less progress with his therapist than Harry knows he has. And Harry knows – because he and James talk about it. ‘My therapist says’ is one of those safe topics of conversation, though Harry can see James’s internal wince every time he says it. So, Harry encourages him as best he can without making it seem like he’s pushing too hard to force their relationship back on track. He texts James every day so that he knows Harry is thinking of him. He sends pictures of Isaac being cute so that James feels like part of his life too. He makes sure that James knows that the reason Harry schedules their dates so early in the day is so that they can spend as much of their time together. Each action is a crack in James’s armour, a balm on the wound, a look filled with hope.

Harry has made his choice. It’s James – it will always be James. Now James just needs to make his.

He’s a bit surprised when James asks him around one afternoon. The flat has become their after-date sanctuary and James very rarely asks him to meet there.

“I’ve got something to show you,” James explains.

Romeo and Marnie are there, of course, but when James leads him through the flat and towards the stairs, they do not follow. Instead, they hold hot mugs of coffee to their lips and smile at him through the steam.

He doesn’t dare hope that James is leading him back to their bedroom – that they’ll finally be able to shut the world out and just be with one another again. But James passes the door and reaches instead for the handle of the spare room.

The first thing Harry notices is the smell of wet paint. The windows are thrown wide open, but the acidic tinge is still lingering in the air. The walls are painted a soothing colour of mint green – the same shade as the walls of the corridor. Green is James’s favourite colour, so this is hardly surprising, but it looks to Harry that he’s just used leftover paint rather than choosing something new. Whatever James has done – it was done in a hurry.

Breathing through the paint fumes, Harry turns his attention to the furniture. If he had any doubts about this room and what its purpose is, they are quickly dispelled.

Taking pride-of-place in the middle of the room is a beautiful, white crib.

Harry’s brain takes a moment to process what is going on around him. In the corner of the room is a large dresser. A baby changing station is set up on top of it and Harry just knows that if he were to open the drawers, he would find many sets of miniature clothes all waiting to be put onto Isaac’s squirmy little body. In another corner, there are shelves of books and small knick-knacks that must have taken ages to collect. And pushed against the side of the room is a big squishy sofa with a soft fleece thrown over.

Harry goes to the crib. Above it hangs a mobile of different brightly coloured shapes. Most of these things that Harry has seen before (indeed the one that hangs over Isaac’s crime in his room at his dad’s place) are quite cheesy and tacky – with smiling cartoon characters made of obnoxiously coloured plastic. But James has managed to find a baby’s mobile that wouldn’t look out of place in one of those modern art galleries that James was always threatening to take him to. It looks like the sort of thing a parent who expects their child to become an architect would buy. Harry wonders if James had a similar motive when he bought it and his heart leaps at the idea that James might have thought about Isaac’s future and his own place in it.

Obviously, he has. Why else would he have made this nursery?

While the mobile is structural and classy, there is one cartoon animal to be found. Tucked inside the crib is a cuddly-toy lemur.

James must see Harry staring at it because he nervously coughs and says, “I remember you saying that some baby lemurs had been born at Chester zoon. I had planned to take you to go and see them on a weekend out, but then, everything happened… and I…”

He steps forward from where he’s been standing aside letting Harry explore the room, and fishes the toy out of the crib, holding it against his chest. The gesture makes James look so small and lost and vulnerable that Harry doesn’t know how he could ever have doubted his love for this man.

“I thought,” James continues, “that Isaac might inherit your love for small primates. I went up to the zoo on my own, and got this for him from the gift-shop.”

“James, this is… I don’t know what to say…” Harry can’t quite get his voice above a whisper.

“You don’t like it?”

“No. James, I love it!”

Looking at the way James is clutching the toy lemur to his chest makes him feel oddly envious. He wants to be the one that James is holding like that. So, he carefully takes the toy from him, takes James’s hands, and winds them around his own waist. More than anything that has happened today, standing here in a nursery that the man he loves has built for his son, finally being back in James’s arms is the thing that makes him feel most at home.

There’s so much to talk about, so after a few moments of simply standing together, swaying slightly with the force of their own heartbeats, Harry manoeuvres them so that they sink down onto the comfy sofa. Except, after a moment or two, Harry realises that it’s not quite as comfortable as he had expected. He sifts around a bit trying to find a position where he can both wrap himself around James and not have part of the sofa sticking into his back.

James notices his discomfort; “Sofa-beds are never as comfortable as the real thing; I’m sorry.”

“This is a sofa-bed?”

It’s James’s turn to shit around now, turning himself so that he can look Harry directly in the eye.

“I know I destroyed any trust that there was between us. And I still can’t quite believe that you’re willing to give us another chance. I don’t want you to ever feel like you are unsafe with me, but I know I have no right to ask you to trust me like that again. So, the sofa bed is here. If you want to stay over then you have this place, this space, just for you. And Isaac of course.”

Harry chooses his next words carefully.

“I know that you don’t think that you have made enough progress. But I can already see just how much you have grown.” He cups James’s face in his palms. “You’ve made space for me and Isaac in your life and you’ve tried so hard to make sure that we’re both comfortable and safe. I love you, James.”

“I love you too,” James replies. “I just don’t know if I can trust myself again.”

“That’s ok – I’ve got enough trust for the both of us. For the three of us, even.”

He leans up slightly so that he can press a small kiss to James’s lips. When he pulls back, James’s green eyes shine with tears. And underneath that – hope.

#jarry #fanfic #i feel like that gif of a guy trying to patch a massive hole in the wall with duct tape...

29 notes · View notes

papatonyinsandiego · 6 years ago

Text

Non-Verbal Communication, Part Two: Distancing Mechanisms and External Validation

Part One Can Be Found Here...

Pretty Privilege

In the gay Leather/Kink/Fetish community, just as in any other culture or subculture, there are the “👍 WINNERS! 👍” and the ….losers…

Are we all sick of that? I sure am. My experience is that 100% of gay kinky men are done with being judged on externals that we have no control over.

It’s a primate-ape fact of life that desirable features make us more fuckworthy. They can also be a trap. I want to talk about it from the other side. Pretty Privilege DOES exist in our Tribe. I have made use of it myself.

Back when I was young, virile and FINALLY getting a lot of approval from men, I attended a lot of five-star, crowded “elite” parties, both clothed and naked. It felt GREAT to be “New Meat” and highly-desirable.

If the gloriously beautiful men around me were bitchy and insecure, then I guessed I would try that on for a while. I got way too good at it. I am ashamed of my behavior back then. A lot of the virtuous acts that I have performed since those days are my atonement for how I fell into bad behaviors for a while.

After a while, though, I noticed something odd. The vast majority of men in my life had no interest in who was inside the pretty exterior. I realized that I was just a mobile dildo to that crowd.

In fact, I got picked-on if I stepped out of bounds in some way. It was like trying to balance on a tightrope of other peoples’ expectations. Fall off, and you would never get back on. It was conditional approval.

The clincher for me occurred after a big fuck-party, when I showed up at Sunday brunch in a Hawaiian shirt, flip-flops and shorts. My brunch companions refused to eat with me, unless I changed back into full black leather. That was the last time that I associated with them, and with that subculture. I happily stepped into a much, much slower lane.

At age 25, I gave up using my privilege at others’ disadvantage. I chose a different path of seeking real and useful wisdom.

Assertions And Declarations

I assert that I am more than what you can see.

There are depths to me that are worth knowing.

I am an amalgam of many flavors, good and bad.

I am not just a single, obvious musical note. I am a symphony.

I assert the same about YOU. There is majesty, worth, and a valuable contribution to the world inside all of us. I take that attitude with me wherever I go, treating everyone as my favorite brother or sister. I am rarely disappointed.

External Validation

Being given approval of any kind is delightful, so we work hard to get more of it. We can spend thousands of hours every year, pumping up bigger and bigger muscles. We can have our teeth straightened and whitened, along with hair-removal and spray-tanning, $3,000 leather outfits, and darkening that gray beard.

We may have experiences of all of those attributes and many more. They can bring on flattering and pleasurable reactions, and allow us to “win” on some level.

No matter what, sooner or later, the crash arrives. Age, sudden disasters, infirmity and gravity work against our following the same path forever. That’s when we will be needing the emotional growth that we may have allowed to dwindle while we were otherwise occupied.

To this day, I still go to the gym several times a week, but I ALSO work on my social skills, and provide value to my circle of true friends. My biggest struggle is with humility. I’m still trying to figure that one out, and I am open to suggestions.

Distancing Mechanisms

The other side of that same coin has to do with keeping others at arm’s length. Let’s start with WHY we would want to protect ourselves from others.

We are all born perfect, trusting and uninhibited. We learn to be otherwise, when we receive wounds along the way:

• “NO, STUPID! The OTHER way!” “People think that I’m stupid?”

• “Don’t talk to me, ugly! Take those big ears somewhere else!” “What’s wrong with my ears?”

• I’ll give you something to cry about!” “It’s bad for me to cry?”

These wounds cause us to make decisions that we hang on to, long after they have become obsolete. We may use ever-growing musculature to keep others at a distance. Or five layers of leather. Or whatever else helps us to keep possibly stressful interactions at arms’ length.

Those same predicaments can also create new, pleasurable possibilities, but we have to be OPEN to that idea in the first place.

Cynicism protects our tender hearts, but it can also prevent us from noticing when the Real Breakthrough Opportunity shows up.

One decision that I still struggle with can be expressed as “I’m not going to let you reject me. I reject you FIRST!” That’s on a very deep, early level, but I am not being driven by it so much any more, now that I consciously recognize it. Eventually. I no longer feel that my foot is nailed to the floor, while I go around and around the same problem, doomed to repeat it. Therapy helped.

I now laugh about my flaws as a personal foible. At that point, I clean up my mess: “Oh, there I go again. Sorry. I am glad that I caught myself. My anger does not belong to you. I’m not doing that any more. Let’s start over.”

Attitude Queens with a Capital “A”

So when you see that gorgeous man who seems to have everydamnthing going for him, moving through the crowd with a fixed look on his face that says “Don’t bother me,” spare him some loving sympathy. He is just as damaged as you are, despite external appearances. He’s just expressing it in his own way.

He’s lonely too. He is misunderstood. He struggles with finding unconditional love and deep friendship, just like anyone.

If I see somebody who is broadcasting on that channel, I get right past his defenses, 99% of the time. I do it by treating him as a good-hearted man, with value as a possible friend. Like any human being, he is starved for honest respect and affection.

Our Brains React Differently With Objects of Desire

Recent MRI-scan tests have shown that our mental processes change radically when we meet a politician, a celebrity, or a porn actor. We put them on a mental pedestal. Star-Fuckers, World’s Biggest Fans and Celebrity Stalkers can be a real chore for someone who just wants to walk down the street unmolested.

Think of the porn actor who is making some extra money as a go-go dancer on an elevated box at a big dance-party. He has drunks pawing at him like he was a piece of meat. They are making his privates very public. No matter how much he can rationalize this (”It’s all part part of the J-O-B”), he can also get pretty tired of it. Feigning enthusiasm can be a tedious chore.

That's why I always do one, specific behavior with every go-go dancer: I bring him some ca$h to stuff into his shorts, but I only do it in the area between his hip and his dick. I am not going for the gold. I smile in an honest, happy way, look him in the eye, and tap my cheek with two fingers. He smooches me on the cheek, and throws his arms around me with honest pleasure. I take that chance to express some honest compliments about his dancing, and then we disengage affectionately.

I gave him a Warm Fuzzy - A moment of sweet, honest human interaction. As a result, I am loved and respected by that man, forever afterward. I looked for the good in him.

The Calendar-Signing Party

I attended an event that turned out to be well-stocked with extremely handsome, muscular men. They were in town to promote a charity calendar, and I was politely interested in knowing more.

After about an hour, a man came up to me. He was the husband of the calendar’s creator, and he was curious to know more about me. He had watched me speak to every one of the calendar models, and had noticed that they all dropped their shields around me in seconds, and were at their ease. They didn't feel the need to be “on” with me. They all hugged me, as their own idea. I almost never ask for hugs. I prefer to earn them.

I get a lot of hugs.

The Bottom Line

The point that I am belaboring is that we can rise above our easy and obvious biases. We can choose to let go of physical external appearance as a point of reference. Those are just what we can see. If we open up our own hearts to the possibility that somebody is a good man, then he may pleasantly surprise us.

I am VERY rarely disappointed.

36 notes · View notes

reflektormag · 6 years ago

Photo

Gorillaz return with 40-minute synth-funk and pop odyssey, ‘The Now Now’

Daniel Lester

June 30, 2018

After a year of relentless touring, everybody's favorite animated bunch has unleashed a brand new studio effort in the form of "The Now Now",a 40-minute synth-funk and pop odyssey that serves as a follow-up to 2017's comeback album "Humanz". A lot has changed in the timespan between the two albums, mainly the shift in the band's leadership as Murdoc Niccals, the infamous bass player and mastermind of Gorillaz got arrested at the start of 2018. Taking over is the band's blue-haired frontman 2D who saw fit to try a different approach with this new album, marking a complete shift from the guest-heavy, and futuristic "Humanz". Of course, in true Gorillaz fashion, this new phase for the band comes with a few surprises of its own, namely the new bassist of the group Ace. Infamous for being the leader of the notorious Gangreen Gang, criminals who were on numerous occasions apprehended by the ever-so-loveable Powerpuff Girls. Ace seems to have settled down and is the replacement for Murdoc, and his presence can definitely be felt in this new record.

"The Now Now" is the polar opposite of Gorillaz' previous effort in nearly every way. Firstly, there are only 3 guest appearances on this album. The first single "Humility", a summer bop tune full of warm synthesizers and lyrics talking about isolation, features warm guitar licks by none other than the jazz legend George Benson. This unlikely collaboration results in a song that may surprise many Gorillaz fans, who expect the band's "dark pop" sound found on the majority of their releases. The second, and final song, to feature any guests is "Hollywood", that contains spoken lines by Chicago house veteran Jamie Principle, and of course, Snoop Dogg. The song itself features quite heavy and bassy instrumentation that perfectly contrasts 2D's moody voice when delivering the refrain about Hollywood and jealousy. The instrumentation becomes even wackier and ear-grabbing beneath Snoop Dogg's lines as he raps, contrary to 2D's criticism of jealousy "I put the cake on the plate/Jealousy and me?/Oh, we're making a date". The only weak point for the song is Jamie Principle, with his corny lines about Hollywood being his mistress, sounding like an out-of-place 80's hype-man, who turned up for the wrong performance.

If there is one word that one could think of when listening to this album it would be "warm". This is mostly due to the highly synthetic and bassy production, courtesy of Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford, the producer behind the latest album of another beloved British primate collective, the Arctic Monkeys. 2D's melancholic croons over the songs "Sorcererz" and "Fire Flies" give the impression that they could have been part of a dystopian Stevie Wonder compilation. Gorillaz are a band that is known for their enticing instrumentals that pull inspiration from many styles, but one key part of their recipe is the simplistic, yet highly memorable basslines. All the bass-playing on this album is reinforced by a filtered, 70s synth bass sound that further contributes to the "warmness" of "The Now Now". However, they are not as memorable as on previous releases, which brings us to the biggest drawback of this record; the lack of memorable tunes. "Tranz" sounds like songs that one would find in a 2000s rock playlist, hinting at Mando Diao and The Killers, rather than Gorillaz. While one of the more memorable songs it certainly doesn't feel like a Gorillaz song. Other songs on this album also feel like they would have fit better on certain Damon Albarn's projects, the long-time collaborator and mentor of the band. "Magic City" sounds like a long-lost Blur B-side, while "One Percent" could have fit snuggly onto Damon's 2014 solo effort "Everyday Robots". If there is one song that one could say ruins the entire experience and flow of the album, it would have to be the snoozer "Idaho". The song's opening features an acoustic guitar that sounds like it's setting the mood for Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian's vocals, rather than the Gorillaz' Damon Albarn-sounding frontman. The chorus also sounds like a throwback to Albarn's solo material. The song "Kansas" is also incredibly moody and forgettable, despite its impressively bouncy instrumentation.

While many tunes may not be "attention-demanding", the instrumental song "Lake Zurich" is certainly a welcome break from the breezy, warm compositions that occupy most of the album's runtime. "Souk Eye", the latin-influenced closer brings something newer to the table and is a solid way to finish off a sleepy, melancholic album like "The Now Now".

This is not the mainstream Gorillaz-fan album and seems like it would please only hardcore fans. While not bad or mediocre necessarily, it does lack the usual punch, innovation, and catchiness of a Gorillaz record, and seems to be more applicable to late night drive-playlist, rather than for a consistent experience for people who enjoy interesting songwriting, unique instrumentation and dystopian-sounding bangers and genre-defying tunes.

Best songs: Humility, Sorcererz, Fire Flies, Lake Zurich

#reviews #gorillaz #daniellester

3 notes · View notes

brainstatic · 7 years ago

Link

OK, this genre of pearl-clutching about college kids not being racist enough is overdone enough as it is, but this article by noted blowhard Jonathan Haidt is too much. I have to rant about this piece of shit.

What is happening to our country, and our universities? It sometimes seems that everything is coming apart.

This is a complaint found in every generation in every civilization on the planet. We have written records of ancient Greeks and Romans making this exact same whine.

Anyway, then there’s a brief summary of cosmology 101 because we’re in for the biggest historical stretch ever.

I’d like you to consider an idea that I’ll call “the fine-tuned liberal democracy.” It begins by looking backward a few million generations and tracing our ancestry, from tree-dwelling apes to land-dwelling apes, to upright-walking apes, whose hands were freed up for tool use, to larger-brained hominids who made weapons as well as tools, and then finally to homo sapiens, who painted cave walls and painted their faces and danced around campfires and worshipped gods and murdered each other in large numbers.

But enough about the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Here is the fine-tuned liberal democracy hypothesis: as tribal primates, human beings are unsuited for life in large, diverse secular democracies, unless you get certain settings finely adjusted to make possible the development of stable political life. This seems to be what the Founding Fathers believed.

I’m not sure the slave-owners were as committed to diverse and secular democracy as you think.

Thankfully, our Founders were good psychologists. They knew that we are not angels; they knew that we are tribal creatures.

Yet they completely failed to anticipate hyper-partisanship, an oversight that will be remembered as the one that caused America’s downfall.

So what did the Founders do? They built in safeguards against runaway factionalism, such as the division of powers among the three branches, and an elaborate series of checks and balances.

No, they were not concerned with factionalism, they were afraid of three things: tyrants, unqualified demagogues, and leaders beholden to foreign powers. Bang up jobs guys.

What would Jefferson say if he were to take a tour of America’s most prestigious universities in 2017?

Thomas Jefferson owned people and didn’t know what bacteria is, who gives a shit.

Why do we hate and fear each other so much more than we used to as recently as the early 1990s? The political scientist Sam Abrams and I wrote an essay in 2015, listing ten causes. I won’t describe them all, but I’ll give you a unifying idea, another metaphor from physics: keep your eye on the balance between centrifugal and centripetal forces. Imagine three kids making a human chain with their arms, and one kid has his free hand wrapped around a pole. The kids start running around in a circle, around the pole, faster and faster. The centrifugal force increases. That’s the force pulling outward as the human centrifuge speeds up. But at the same time, the kids strengthen their grip. That’s the centripetal force, pulling them inward along the chain of their arms. Eventually the centrifugal force exceeds the centripetal force and their hands slip. The chain breaks. This, I believe, is what is happening to our country. I’ll briefly mention five of the trends that Abrams and I identified, all of which can be seen as increasing centrifugal forces or weakening centripetal forces.

This is the metaphor that underpins the rest of the article. It’s admittedly interesting, too bad he applies it in the most asinine ways possible.

External enemies: Fighting and winning two world wars, followed by the Cold War, had an enormous unifying effect.

We put Japanese people in camps and spent the 50s afraid our neighbors could be communist spies, but sure, unifying, right.

The Vietnam War was different, but in general, war is the strongest known centripetal force.

War brings people together except for that one time it tore the country apart. Also all the other times.

Immigration and diversity: This one is complicated and politically fraught. Let me be clear that I think immigration and diversity are good things, overall.

I smell a “but” coming.

The economists seem to agree that immigration brings large economic benefits. The complete dominance of America in Nobel prizes, music, and the arts, and now the technology sector, would not have happened if we had not been open to immigrants.

So we agree immigrants are the only ones doing the things which future generations will remember us fondly for.

But

There it is.

as a social psychologist, I must point out that immigration and diversity have many sociological effects, some of which are negative.

This is from someone who just implied the World Wars had no meaningful negative side effects and Vietnam was just a big oopsie.

The political scientist Robert Putnam found this in a paper titled “E Pluribus Unum,” in which he followed his data to a conclusion he clearly did not relish: “In the short run, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”

That’s questionable, but notice how it specifies “in the short run.” What does Putnam have to say about the long run? Let’s take a quote from the abstract from that very link: “In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits.” Weird that Haidt left that part out, he’s so committed to diversity.

I repeat that diversity has many good effects too, and I am grateful that America took in my grandparents from Russia and Poland, and my wife’s parents from Korea. But Putnam’s findings make it clear that those who want more diversity should be even more attentive to strengthening centripetal forces.

And yet you left out that Putnam agrees with you.

The final two causes I will mention are likely to arouse the most disagreement, because these are the two where I blame specific parties, specific sides. They are: the Republicans in Washington, and the Left on campus. Both have strengthened the centrifugal forces that are now tearing us apart.

Haidt sees too equivalent forces at work: the party that dominates every lever of government, makes all laws, controls the presidency and all executive departments, and the majority of state governments. On the other side, there’s a 19-year-old Oberlin student who wrote about safe spaces for the school newspaper.

The more radical Republican Party: When the Democrats ran the House of Representatives for almost all of six decades, before 1995, they did not treat the Republican minority particularly well.

Those six decades included long periods where Dixiecrats voted with Republicans more often than with their own party, giving Republicans a functional majority. There were also the so-called “Rockefeller Republicans”, socially liberal Republicans named after their de fact leader, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. They voted with Democrats a good chunk of the time. This blended partisan makeup sort of kills his whole belief in the permanent partisanship of American politics, so I don’t expect him to mention it, if he knows about it at all. I don’t know how Democrats mistreated Republicans during this period, maybe by almost impeaching their profoundly criminal president?

The new identity politics of the Left: Jonathan Rauch offers a simple definition of identity politics: a “political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest.” Rauch then adds: “In America, this sort of mobilization is not new, unusual, unAmerican, illegitimate, nefarious, or particularly leftwing.” This definition makes it easy for us to identify two kinds of identity politics: the good kind is that which, in the long run, is a centripetal force. The bad kind is that which, in the long run, is a centrifugal force.

Yes, I’m sure Haidt does find it quite easy to separate the civil rights movements he likes and those he doesn’t like. I’m going to predict the ones he likes are the ones led by dead people who aren’t here to make him uncomfortable. I predict the I Have A Dream speech will make an appearance.

When slavery was written into the Constitution, it set us up for the greatest explosion of our history. It was a necessary explosion, but we didn’t manage the healing process well in the Reconstruction era. When Jim Crow was written into Southern laws, it led to another period of necessary explosions, in the 1960s.

While I would contest that racial strife happened in fits and bursts, and not in a long continuous stream, I appreciate that Haidt acknowledges the thing that torpedoes his first billion paragraphs about the Founders’ commitment to peace and justice.

Martin Luther King’s rhetoric made it clear that this was a campaign to create conditions that would allow national reconciliation. He drew on the moral resources of the American civil religion to activate our shared identity and values: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note.” And: “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

Called it.

Of course, some people saw the civil rights movement as divisive, or centrifugal.

“Some people” meaning the FBI and the guy who shot him.

But what happens when young people study intersectionality? In some majors, it’s woven into many courses. Students memorize diagrams showing matrices of privilege and oppression.

That has never happened.

Intersectionality is like NATO for social-justice activists.

I have no words.

Can you imagine a culture that is more antithetical to the mission of a university? Can you believe that many universities offer dozens of courses that promote this way of thinking? Some are even requiring that all students take such a course.

I’m only in my first year of grad school for linguistics but I can tell you that it’s literally impossible without an understanding of intersectionality.

Anyway, the rest of the article is just rephrasing the first parts, and then he plugs his website called “The Heterodox Academy” (it means “unconventional.”) Being unconventional or contrarian is like being rich: if you have to tell people you are, you’re probably not. The purported goal of this website is to challenge “conventional thinking” that became conventional supposedly without evidence. The ones listed in their FAQ are:

Humans are a blank slate, and “human nature” does not exist.

No one has believed this since the 60s, so you can triumphantly cross that one off your list.

All differences between human groups are caused by differential treatment of those groups, or by differential media portrayals of group members.

Groups? What groups? Like, theater nerds, history buffs, professional bowlers? Oh you mean races, your goal is to promote race science, got it.

Social stereotypes do not correspond to any real differences.

In case it wasn’t clear this was about racism.

In conclusion, Johnathan Haidt is racist buffoon and the only injustice at work is that he was ever given respect in the first place.

#johnathan haidt #i haidt this asshole

66 notes · View notes

riverofhistory · 6 years ago

Text

Episode 7: First Rank

Image credit: Biswarup Ganguly, under CC BY 3.0.

The following is the transcript for the seventh episode of On the River of History.

For the link to the actual podcast, go here. (Beginning with Part 1)

Part 1

Greetings everyone and welcome to episode 7 of On the River of History. I’m your host, Joan Turmelle, historian in residence.

When the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné (perhaps more familiar under his Latinized name, Carolus Linnaeus) took up the self-motivated task of classifying all of the then known organisms on the Earth, he placed humanity in an order he called Primates, meaning “first rank”. This gave the implication of a grand position in the system of nature, or Systema Naturae, which was the Latin title of his work. It was Linnaeus who gave the world our species name, Homo sapiens, and the 10th Edition of his book was recognized by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature in 1999 as the starting point of the official scientific naming system for animal life. Thus, our species name, and the group name Primates, is here to stay. Humanity was not alone in Linnaeus’ mammalian order, for they shared space with 32 other animals, including monkeys and lemurs (as well as bats). To Linnaeus, primates were united by cutting fore-teeth, solitary tusks on each side of the jaw, two pectoral teats, four feet (of which two are hands), usually flattened oval nails, and a diet of fruits and sometimes ‘animal food’. When critics questioned him for the sheer audacity of grouping the species that begat Shakespeare and Louis the 14th with the likes of lower animals such as baboons and capuchins, Linnaeus returned with a very basic retort:

But I seek from you and from the whole world a generic difference between man and simian that follows from the principles of Natural History. I absolutely know of none. If only someone might tell me a single one! If I would have called man a simian or vice versa, I would have brought together all the theologians against me. Perhaps I ought to have by virtue of the law of the discipline.

In the 260 years since the name Primates was coined, the work of countless biologists, paleontologists, and anthropologists has confirmed our relationship to these other, furrier creatures. While the outline and structure of the primate group has changed (for one, we don’t include bats anymore, they’re not close relatives at all), the basic idea behind it remains the same. Primates all share a suite of traits, including opposable thumbs for ease at collecting food or branches, forward facing eyes that allow stereoscopic or 3D vision, a large braincase compared to the size of the body, flattened nails rather than sharp claws, among others. This group is also united by genetics, and DNA sequencing has allowed us to better understand how all the different members of the group are related to each other. And, of course, the fossil record has supplied us with an ever-growing catalog of great remains, from the earliest primates to the rise of humans. Even though we’ve just spent the last episode bringing the history of the world up to 2.58 million years ago, we need to backtrack, so I can tell you the story of the primates and of the first peoples.

We return to the recovering world of the Paleocene Epoch, 63 million years ago, following the great mass extinction what wiped out 75% of all life on Earth. The planet is covered by tropical forests. By this point, primates were represented, like most of the other placental mammal groups, by small, scurrying animals that sought refuge in trees or along the ground. The closest relatives of these were the plesiadapiforms, who resembled squirrels or treeshrews, with long snouts, clawed digits, and continuously-growing incisor teeth. We know that this group wasn’t ancestral to the primates because most members of the group lack premolar or canine teeth, which are features that all primates share. Plesiadapiforms took the niches that modern primates as well as rodents share today, so when those groups had evolved by the end of the epoch, 57 million years ago, they couldn’t compete with them and died out.

True primates were established somewhere in southern Asia (the earliest fossils have been found there) alongside their euarchontoglire relatives the rodents, rabbits, treeshrews, and colugos. Soon after, they diverged into two lineages. One of these is the strepsirrhines or the wet-nosed primates, because they retain a rhinarium: the wet and leathery tip of the snout that you often find in dogs, cats, and many other mammals. This group is represented today by the lemurs of Madagascar, the lorises of southern Asia, and the galagos or bushbabies of Africa. However, in the Paleocene and Eocene, their range extended much more than this: after having evolved in Asia, they spread out in opposite directions, with some members going to Europe, others crossing into North America, and some extending south into Africa. As the world was still warm, wet, and forested, these primates thrived as they feasted on insects and other small invertebrates. It was around 54 million years ago that the lemurs arrived in Madagascar from Africa, possibly by rafts of floating vegetation that ran off the east African coast following a storm. It sounds ridiculous, but considering recent footage of tsunamis and how they transport large quantities of debris, it is not improbable. Following the cooling of the planet after the Eocene and the shrinking of the tropical forests, most of the strepsirrhines died out across Africa and Asia (and all of them perished in North America and Europe), leaving only the ancestors of the living species today.

The other great lineage of primates to emerge was the haplorrhines, or the dry-nosed primates: because they lost their rhinarium and their snout in place of a smooth and naked nose above a separate upper lip sported on a flattened face. They also developed a change in their skull morphology where the eye-socket became covered by a thin layer of bone along the backside. This is in contrast with lemurs and their relatives who only have a thin bone called a postorbital bar that borders the eye at its side: other mammals lack this altogether. Like the strepsirrhines, haplorrhines originated in Asia and spread out from there, this time colonizing Europe and Africa only. The earliest members of the group resembled tarsiers, which are small, large-eyed, nocturnal, insectivorous primates that reside in the rainforests of southeast Asia, though in the past they were very common, ranging as far as China. Incidentally, the tarsier lineage makes up one of two descent groups from the common ancestor of the haplorrhines, the other being the anthropoids or monkeys.

Monkeys developed many distinct traits from the other haplorrhines, and their group split from the tarsier line roughly 40 million years ago in Asia. Whereas their common ancestor (as well as the common ancestor of all primates) sported sensory whiskers along the front of the snout, monkeys lost that trait as they developed their eyesight to sport full-color vision. This proved to be a beneficial adaptation, as monkeys began to rely on colorful fruits as a major food source instead of insects, though they also seem to have eaten seeds and nuts as well. There were also key changes to the reproductive system: monkeys reduced their number of nipples down to one pair and their penis was no longer mainly attached to the body and instead hung down. Over time, monkeys grew larger in size and expanded into Africa, where one lineage eventually colonized South America by 25 million years ago, perhaps by the same process that could have delivered the caviomorph rodents (a floating raft of vegetation). These were the platyrrhines, who have earned the common name “new world monkeys”, and include capuchins, marmosets, howlers, and squirrel monkeys. These monkeys are distinguished by a flattened nose with nostrils that stick out sideways, whereas other monkeys have a more curved nose with downward-facing nostrils. Most iconic is the prehensile tail that many platyrrhines use like a fifth limb for grasping onto tree-branches: no other primates have this trait.

Back in the “Old World”, the other lineage of monkeys, the catarrhines, were facing environmental pressures in Eurasia as the climate began to cool, and it was around the start of the Oligocene that they mostly died out there. In Africa, however, they were thriving, and they diversified into a few groups. These monkeys mostly ate leaves and fruits, and they were very adept climbers in the trees. Eventually, the climate started warming again during the Miocene around 20-17 million years ago and many catarrhines returned to Eurasia as far as southeast Asia. Earlier in Africa, roughly 28 million years ago, one lineage of monkeys started growing in size as they broadened their chests and increased their brain case. Their tail vertebrate reduced in number until no visible tail was present at all. The joints of their shoulders, also, were more relaxed and mobile than their ancestors, meaning that they could move their arms much more freely around their body. This gave them the ability to brachiate, or hang from tree branches by their arms and swing across the trees. These were the first hominoids: the apes.

When we think about human evolution, we often think about the concept of “human nature” and what traits and behaviors stem from our common ancestry with the other primates. Perhaps put more philosophically, what does it mean to be human? This subject has spawned some of the biggest discussions and debates in the history of our species, and this very curiosity seems to have deep roots, with many world societies across time devoting time to this. If we want to talk about the fundamental characteristics of the human species and what unites and distinguishes us from our relatives, we have to look at this topic holistically. It is not enough to simply tackle this subject from a purely genetic or cultural or environmental standpoint: all of these fields, and more, have to be taken into consideration. This is because there is not one shared aspect of all societies or any one gene that makes us human, all of these factors are working together, intimately, to shape our species. Anthropologist Elizabeth Brumfiel has made a valuable point about this: human biology, human psychology, and human behavior are all context dependent. This enormous biological and behavioral flexibility—the ability to adopt different physiological, perceptual, and behavioral repertoires—has enabled humans to survive across the extremes of climate and habitat, from the frozen tundra to the burning desert. Our environment has shaped our being, and our being has shaped the environment. There is a lot of argument between anthropologists and other researchers about this, so it is important to keep that in mind as we move forward. The more we learn, the more our understanding shifts or changes altogether. I might even return to this podcast many years from now and say “wow, we had this all wrong!”

Part 2

As a whole, primates have a larger brain case to body ratio than most other mammals, save for groups like elephants, toothed whales, pack-hunting canids, and hyenas. Bigger brains have often been hypothesized by biologists as tying closely to problem-solving, or how organisms acquire the resources they need in a challenging environment. Incidentally, these mammalian lineages are all social species, living in community groups of many individuals, and this too has been tied to large brains that allow for the processing needed for large group-living (though this correlation is controversial in that neuroscience – the study of the brain – is still uncovering new information). Primates are K-selected species and thus bare only a handful (sometimes just one) offspring that they spent much of their time nurturing, which includes educating the young on how to survive and interact with others. As such, primate childhood is remarkably longer than most mammals. While a young mouse or shrew may spend around 21-25 days with its mother, a chimpanzee can spend 9 years alongside its mother, and even then still remain nearby since, being primates, chimps live in large family groups. Alone, a primate is a vulnerable animal, lacking any means of defending itself from predators, save for a sharp bite or a powerful swing of the arm. But because primates live together, they can rely on each other for backup. When a group moves, one or two members may be on the lookout for dangers, while the others remain close by. When something is spotted, the primate can call and alert the others to the threat, and everyone can get to safety in the trees or even fight back if necessary. These behaviors are not universal among all primates, but they’re common enough throughout several lineages to give assurance that our distant ancestors could have had them too.

But what about uniquely human traits? What made our ancestors stand out from the other primates? That is a bit tricky to say, because since the dawn of scientific study, people gave many answers of varying quality. For many, humanity is special because of theological explanations: we were made special and separate from the animal kingdom, or even the natural world, by a divine force. However, such reasons are not appropriate here because supernatural matters are just that, outside of nature. Even if there was something supernatural about the world, we couldn’t use science to learn about it because scientific methods are based on and apply to natural principles. Not to mention the fact that all supernatural belief systems today are often tied to specific cultural practices and biases that are themselves products of the people who made them, and therefore not applicable to humanity as a whole.

For more naturalistic arguments, people have provided specific traits of the human body or specific behaviors that humans engage in that other organisms just don’t. Yet, on closer inspection, what we often think is human is actually present (if not common) among other animals. The use of tools was commonly applied to the humans, until it was learned that chimpanzees and other species use tools as well. In 1860s England two naturalists, Thomas Henry Huxley and Sir Richard Owen, sparked a grand debate. Owen argued that humans were unique among primates in having a specific part of the brain called the hippocampus minor (what we now call the calvar avis) that no other ape or monkey has. Huxley argued on the contrary, and it was later revealed that other primates indeed share this same feature of the brain, and that Owen has purposely suppressed that information for ideological reasons. In a significantly older (and more humorous) example, when asked “what is a man”, the Greek philosopher Plato simply stated that man is a featherless biped. This made sense, considering that birds walk solely on their hindlimbs but have feathers, while humans do not. However, this quickly backfired when a contemporary philosopher Diogenes presented a chicken with all its feathers plucked out and proclaimed, “here is Plato’s man”. If we want to understand human uniqueness, we need to do better. And, over the years, there has been enough insight to give us a good picture of our origins and how humans stood out among their cousins.

To begin our coverage of human evolution, let’s return to the story of primates. After evolving in Africa, apes were able to extend their range, and between 18 and 10 million years ago, apes ranged across Africa, Europe, and Asia. They had been among the most common and diverse of primates during that time, even out-competing many of the other monkeys that shared the world with them. The environment during this period was perfect for these primates. Lush tropical forests covered many parts of Africa and Eurasia, full of fruits and leaves. Over a hundred different types developed, well-suited to the humid forests. There was Dryopithecus: very similar to living chimpanzees, though it walked on the palms of its hands rather than on the knuckles. Little Pliobates: looking like one of the southeast Asian gibbons, but the structure of its arms prevented the kind of brachiation that gibbons do. Sivapithecus: with a curved face that reveals its close relationship to the ancestors of orangutans. And then, perhaps most spectacular of all, was Gigantopithecus. Paleontologists have only found a series of jaws and teeth, but these alone have told us so much. These were the largest apes that ever lived, reaching a standing height of perhaps 10 feet, but subsisting on little more than fruit and bamboo.

But then, following the massive environmental changes that occurred around the close of the Miocene epoch around 6 million years ago, the comfortable lands of the apes began to disappear. The tropical, humid forests that they relied on receded and in their place were extensive grasslands and a series of open-woodlands. Most of the apes could not adapt to this new world and they died out throughout their range. With their various niches available, the monkeys that previously occupied only minor roles in their ecosystems could now diversify into a great menagerie of forms. Some became folivores, and changed the anatomy of their guts to better process leaves – descendants of these include the colobus monkeys and langurs. Others developed cheek-pouches for storing food like fruits, nuts, and seeds – these include the macaques and guenons. Some members of the latter group left their arboreal existence for a more terrestrial lifestyle in the grasslands, reducing their tails and becoming quadrupedal, evolving into baboons.

The apes that did survive this extinction event went on to occupy specialized positions in the remaining tropical forests of central Africa and southern Asia, evolving into the first gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, and chimps. There was one other ape that managed to flourish in the new environments. Around 12-7 million years ago, two lineages of apes split apart from each other: one line developed into the genus Pan, which survives today as the bonobo and the chimpanzee; the other developed into the ancestors of humans. These hominins (meaning “of the tribe of humans” in Latin) would have looked very different from any chimpanzee as they had acquired many traits that made them distinct from their closest relatives.

The open-woodland habitats that hominins first inhabited would have offered abundant resources as far as food is concerned. This environment would undergo dry and wet seasons, meaning that a few months could mean the difference between full bellies and starvation. No doubt this would have been a scary place, especially with predatory animals like big cats, hyenas, and large eagles able to see their prey clearer (without dense jungle in the way). In these types of ecosystems, it helps to be a generalist (able to adjust to most living conditions). Indeed, many researchers have come to understand that the ancestral human body is the most generalized of all apes. The earliest hominin fossils add support to this. They include members of three genera: Sahelanthropus (7.43-6.38 million years ago), Orrorin (6.14-5.2 million years ago), and Ardipithecus (6.7-4.26 million years ago). With the little evidence they left behind, we can see apes with relatively unspecialized body plans. For example, the bones of Ardipithecus’ hand reveal a simple palmate walking pattern and the ability to grasp tree branches, not unlike the apes of earlier times. However, these apes show a number of distinct features that showcase their relationship to the ancestors of humans. Many features of their skeletons – the position of the foramen magnum (the hole where the spine attaches) at the base of the skull, the shape of the pelvis and limbs, the firm heel of the foot – demonstrate that these apes were already utilizing bipedal locomotion.

All apes are capable of walking on their hindlimbs, but humans are unique in that they are habitually bipedal (walking on two legs all of the time). Why? In these mosaic environments, a generalized body plan allowed for hominins to use both bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion in order to survive. Some of these hominins may have expanded their range outward onto the grasslands where there was less competition from others, and there they could find more food or at least other woodlands to travel to. It helps to see where you are going, as grasslands are often covered with tall, dense grasses and have large carnivores lurking about. And in a hot and dry environment, the need to move efficiently and conserve energy is critical (humans use 75% less energy moving upright than a chimpanzee uses on all fours). Perhaps this is why hominins became fully bipedal. We still cannot be sure about the intricacies of this transition – there are other hypotheses – but the fossil evidence tells us that this change did occur over a long period. You may have heard of the aquatic ape hypothesis: that hominins developed bipedality (among other features) in an aquatic environment. This is a bit of a fringe idea, not supported by most researchers and is actually contradicted by other geologic, environmental, and physiological data.

Africa continued to dry up, and the open-woodland forests started shrinking, only to be replaced by more savanna. The fossil record indicates that an evolutionary radiation of hominins (among other African faunas) occurred during this time, able to adapt to the over-expanding grasslands: these were the australopithecines: the name is a combination of Latin and Greek words meaning “southern apes”. A number of species developed between 4.02-2.2 million years ago all across eastern and southern Africa, each with its own unique characteristics and, certainly, its own behaviors.

One of the most recognized of this group was Praeanthropus afarensis which lived between 3.89-2.9 million years ago, made famous by a number of widely-publicized finds over the last few decades. For example, there is the Ethiopian specimen found by American anthropologist Donald Johanson and his team in 1973. The find was remarkable: roughly 40% of its bones were located – this doesn’t sound like much, but it was one of the better finds of early hominins during those years. They nicknamed the find Lucy, inspired by the party they threw following its discovery, during which the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was playing on a loop. Since that time, hundreds of remains have been unearthed, including individuals of many age ranges: males, females, young and old. What these finds reveal was a savannah- and open woodland- living hominin that used its sharp canine teeth to strip away the hardened coverings of stems, fruits, and vegetables to get at the goods inside. A set of preserved footprints from 3.6 million years ago has been attributed to this species and shows three afarensis: two differently-sized individuals moving side-by-side and a third that seems to have been stepping inside the tracks of the larger one in the front. Given that the footprints were preserved in volcanic ash from a nearby eruption of the Sadiman mountain, and seeing how the smaller tracks show an aberrant movement compared to its companion, it seems that these afarensis individuals were escaping the eruption, perhaps with the larger individual pulling the smaller one along. Regardless of just why and by whom the tracks were made, they reveal that Praeanthropus afarensis was walking bipedally with a fully upright stance than earlier hominins.

Emerging a little later at 3.3-1.9 million years ago was Australopithecus africanus, from southern Africa. This species was, incidentally, the earliest of the australopithecines found (in 1924), and lent valuable evidence for its describer, Raymond Dart, that the human lineage emerged in Africa and not Asia as had been the convention. Like the Lucy specimen, we’ve found many more fossils from this species. The face was slightly flatter than afarensis, and the skull was a little bulkier, indicating a shift towards even tougher plant foods than its predecessors. One fossil skull from a young 2- or 3-year old individual, dubbed the Taung Child after the town where it was found (and the fossil that Raymond Dart studied. incidentally), bears puncture marks inside its eye-sockets and around its skull. These are tell-tale signs of the work done by an eagle, predatory birds that often hunt and kill primates today.

There was one great lineage of australopithecines, the genus Paranthropus (which lived 2.73 million to 870,000 years ago), that specialized their diet towards grasses. Their jaws and teeth became enlarged and they sported a large sagittal crest on top of their skulls that supported the powerful chewing muscles needed to process these plants. Overall, their skulls were more robust than other australopithecines and given their heavily grass-based diet, they could very well have sported enormous guts – though, we lack many fossils beyond the skull to test that idea. In essence, these were grazing hominins – the horses and cattle of the australopithecines, though a more apt comparison may be with gorillas, who also sport great sagittal crests for processing tough plant foods.

Part 3

Among all of these australopithecines emerged the first members of the genus Homo, by 2.8 million years ago. What set apart Homo from the other hominins was a number of anatomical features, including a recognizable increase in brain size. In studying brain dimensions, paleoanthropologists rely on cranial capacity: the volume of space inside the brain-case. Whereas australopithecines averaged around 23-38 cubic inches, the earliest members of Homo had a cranial capacity of 34-49 cubic inches. There was also a lack of sexual dimorphism, with males and females averaging about the same height and width, as opposed to australopithecines and other apes where the sexes show great distinctions in size. For example, male Praeanthropus afarensis reached heights 50% taller than females. It is usually with this genus that paleoanthropologists and other researchers recognize these hominins as ‘humans’, and I will be referring to these ancestors of ours with that name from now on.

In time the climate continued to change. The cooling and drying of the world’s regions accelerated and reached its peak at the end of the Pliocene epoch. It is here where we enter the Quaternary Period, which began 2.58 million years ago and continues to the present day. This period has only two epochs, the first is known as the Pleistocene, and encompasses the great ice ages that we briefly discussed in the last episode.

I mentioned tool-use earlier and how many different animals use tools for everyday problem-solving. The biggest distinction between tool-use in humans and tool-use in chimpanzees and other animals is that we have the ability to actually visualize tools, not just use them. Some species, like crows and chimps, can slightly modify sticks and stems for specific purposes, like fishing for a food source. However, humans have the ability to look at any one object and “see” the desired shape they require, and then go about changing the object to suit that need. Though there is evidence of their use as far as 3.6 to 3.4 million years ago, the first stone tools found in the archaeological record date back to 3.3 MYA. This is the Lomekwian toolkit, named after the site where the remains were found. These rocks show evidence of clear knapping (shaping stone by striking it). We do not know why these tools were made, but we recognize that chimpanzees and other primates use stone tools to crack open nuts and other hard foods, so perhaps they were an extension of this strategy. In this case, the stones would have been shaped for the purpose of doing that job, as opposed to chimpanzees who search for stones of the right shape. Given their age, Lomekwian tools would have been created by australopithecines.

The next toolkit to appear in the archaeological record is the Oldowan, which dates from 2.6 to 1.7 million years ago. The name derives, yet again, from the site where they were first found, the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. This stone tool technology shows a much more varied use: cutting, scrapping, sharpening, striking. There are many sites from this period that show that these stone tools were used to help get at animal carcasses. A good, sharp cutting tool can easily tear a hide to get at the meat. It has been suggested by some anthropologists, including Agustín Fuentes, that this change in diet would only have been permitted by very good teamwork. These family groups of early humans would not have been actively hunting after the kinds of large-bodied prey that we see their Oldowan tools associated with. Analysis of the marks on the bones of these carcasses tells a different story. It seems that early humans were observing the kills of predatory mammals like lions, leopards, and hyenas, and later moving towards those mostly-skinned skeletons to scavenge the remains. This mode of behavior then seems to have shifted around 2 million years ago, when the remains of kill sites show that these humans were actively scaring away these carnivorans and then using the tools to cut away as much flesh as they can before the animals return to take back their meal. At that point, the humans would have carried their spoils to a safer place where they could consume them. This has been termed “power scavenging”, and it was one of the baby steps that led to a great revolution in human diet.

The earliest species of Homo, like Homo habilis (2.6-1.65 million years ago) and Homo rudolfensis (2.09-1.78 million years ago), were still very much like australopithecines in size and appearance, save for their markedly larger brains, lighter build, and more carnivorous diets. Early humans had very flattened faces, more so than the australopithecines, who still retained the outward projecting or prognathic jaws. However, there was a notable brow-ridge along the bottom of the forehead, which would have given these humans a distinct appearance.

Up until this point in time, humans had been confined to the African continent, but there were inklings that they were starting to spread out beyond their ancestral homeland. Around 2.1 million years ago, early members of the genus Homo were living in Asia. In the town of Dmanisi in Georgia, remains have been found of many members of our genus, dating to 1.85 million years ago. What is remarkable about these fossils is that they all have very distinct skull shapes, suggesting a wide variation in body forms for this singular population. These remains have been controversially named Homo georgicus, suggesting that all this variation was found among one species. This is not farfetched in the slightest, seeing as variation among individuals is a hallmark of species and of natural selection. Plus, there is great variation among the bones of humans around the world today, and there is no denying that they all belong to the same species. That said, many researchers who examined these fossils argued that had they been found in separate localities and dated to different times, they all would have been classifying as different species. And indeed, some studies seem to have found evidence that all the individuals at Dmanisi represent different species of humans.

This controversy stems from a much larger discussion that occurs in paleoanthropology, that being the distinction between the “lumpers” – those who look at diversity within a single species – and “splitters” – who see diversity as representing multiple, sometimes co-existing species. Beyond the often stringent arguments regarding how to know what a species is (which is another complex subject for another day), there is a bit of personal gain plaguing this discussion, as many researchers in the “splitter” category are motivated to find a new species of human and give their own name for it. The process of scientific investigation, however, has no room for personal quarrels, and it is where the evidence leads that researchers much recognize and accept. In the case of the Dmanisi fossils, some paleoanthropologists in the “lumper” category argue that the name Homo georgicus is not valid, and that these fossils belong to another, already named species called Homo erectus (which I’ll discuss in a little bit) and that this early human species simply encompassed an enormous range of anatomical diversity. At the end of the day, we currently have no real way of knowing the status of the Dmanisi fossils, and we’ll have to wait for more and better fossils to help shed light on these remains. One thing to note is that one of the skulls seems to represent an elderly individual that has lost nearly all of their teeth, and survived despite that. The most likely explanation for this was that they were being fed and cared for by other members of the group. This is evidence of a form of compassion that is not seen in any other living primate species.

Despite this, the Georgian fossils are most important in that they reveal that humans were expanding their ranges outside Africa and settling in new environments. Recent comparative anatomical studies have revealed that some of these members of the early Homo group made it as far as southeast Asia. On the island of Flores, today belonging to Indonesia, there are several fossils and stone tools that reveal that groups of humans became isolated on the island before 700,000 years ago. This was Homo floresiensis, who only grew as tall as 3.7 feet and weighed 55 pounds as adults. This implies that these humans experienced island dwarfism: this is an evolutionary phenomenon where species of animals become isolated on islands and gradually adapt their bodies towards a much reduced size. This means that they do not require as much food to eat and therefore there is no self-imposed threat to resources. Other animal fossils on Flores show island dwarfism too, with the native elephants standing several feet shorter than their mainland relatives. Also in play was island gigantism, where island animals gain a larger body size in response to an abundance of resources. This means that Homo floresiensis shared its island with enormous storks that stood almost 6 feet tall and giant rats some 45 inches long from snout to tail.

Homo floresiensis made stone tools that resemble the Oldowan technology, and researchers have looked at the microwear or microscopic markings on the stones and revealed that these little humans hunted after small animals and cut up woody-stemmed plants. They seem to have refuged in caves, safe from the dangerous animals that lived in the rainforests, including Komodo dragons that would have easily made a meal of one of these people. Homo floresiensis was not a particularly good runner, as evidenced by the shortened and broad legs of their skeletons. This species would had to have remained close together during hunting, certainly keeping watch of any dangers and working together to escape threats. Homo floresiensis seems to have survived on the island of Flores until around 60-50,000 years ago.

Part 4

Later members of the genus Homo increased in overall height and brain-size, reaching as high as 6 feet and sporting a cranial capacity of between 37 and 79 cubic inches. Throughout these species, there is evidence of much more complex forms of behavior and the emergence of elemental cultures. Evolving in Africa 2.27 million years ago was Homo ergaster, which ranged throughout the continent. Populations of this human moved out of Africa in another great wave of expansion, and followed along the similar paths that the earlier Homo species took and reached China and southeast Asia. It was these non-African groups that gave rise to Homo erectus around 1.85 million years ago; the famous Java Man and Peking Man fossils belong to that species. Some paleoanthropologists who advocate “lumping” see Homo ergaster as belonging to the species Homo erectus. In any case, large and slender bodied humans, with lengthy limbs and even lengthier legs had evolved. They still had large brow-ridges, but started to look very much like our own species.

For one, the shape and length of their legs indicated that these humans were specialized for long-distance walking and running. In Homo ergaster and Homo erectus do we see the development of the modern foot, with all toes connected and compacted into one pad. Without a big, outward-facing toe to get in the way, the body could be better balanced on two feet. Longer legs enabled these humans to make longer strides, furthering energy-saving. Coupled with this, we also have genetic evidence that suggests that by around 1.2 million years ago, the fur on the body reduced significantly, the skin became darker, and sweat glands began to form across the body. This package of trait-changes had large benefits. A lack of thick fur and subsequent exposure of (almost) nude skin allows the body to cool better under the hot sun. Having sweat glands all over the body further aids in this process (sweat glands remove heat through evaporation). Dark-pigmented skin – a trait found among all humans in tropical climates – acts as a thermoregulatory tool, blocking ultraviolet radiation from entering the body (restricting hair to the head also helps with this). There are clear environmental reasons for all these new traits, but why the need to run?

Besides the obvious need to escape fast-moving predators, Homo ergaster and Homo erectus appears to have been running after its food. They were no longer power-scavenging, but actively hunting with weapons. Archaeologists have associated these humans with the Acheulian stone toolkit (1.76 million to 200,000 years ago). This toolkit is much larger than the older Oldowan tools: new additions include large handaxes, made by knapping a stone along all sides until the desired shape emerges. The symmetric shape of these tools reveals a possible capacity for aesthetic appreciation, an extension of the metal capabilities that allowed the earliest hominins to picture finished tools before they constructed them. Much speculation has emerged as to what these stone axes were actually used for, and indeed, more have been found than would possibly have been used, but they at least appear to be multipurpose. If anything, the toolkit as-a-whole included implements for killing and cutting up prey animals, including the earliest known evidence for spears. Evidence shows that large mammals make up part of the diet of Homo erectus. While many such mammals, like antelope, horses, and deer, are clearly faster, humans can actually match their total distance per day. There is a difference between sprinting and endurance running. A prey animal will run with all its might from a predator, in this case Homo erectus, but after a while it will need to rest. With endurance running, a human can keep the same pace because it is not putting all its energy into moving. It may be significantly slower, but given enough time, it will still manage to catch up to an animal that will have eventually collapsed from heat exhaustion, allowing for the kill via the thrust of a spear. Some modern forager peoples still hunt in this way, so we have been able to compare their lives with those of early humans that faced similar environmental pressures. Comparing the lives of modern peoples with those of the past is tricky: keep in mind that though these studies provide valuable insights, they are not direct evidence of prehistoric behaviors. Forager groups are people of the present day, not the past.

Homo erectus may have also been one of the first hominins to utilize fire, but there is much controversy in this field of study. For one, we know that living apes (particularly chimpanzees) recognize and do not fear wildfires, seeing them as a means of obtaining food: they will follow the movement of a fire and go after the burnt animals and plants. Secondly, there is a big different between recognizing what fire is, following wildfires, borrowing fire, and making it. Even though the earliest sites for hominin use-of-fire go back at least 1.6 million years ago (associated with Homo erectus), there is nothing to suggest that earlier species did not use fire in some way. It seems more likely that the use and eventual learning of how to make fire was a gradual process. The ability to cook food is certainly a very helpful strategy. Simple observations have shown that cooking helps soften and decontaminate food, as well as increase a food’s vital nutrients – it is essentially pre-digestion. Perhaps cooking helped foster new changes in both physiology and psychology. For example, we have discovered that Homo erectus and related forms around this time had developed key structures of the brain called frontal opercula associated with motor processing and more complex social behaviors. There was, thus, more to the increase in brain-size than meets the eye.

And what about speech? When did humans begin talking to each other with languages? This is a very controversial topic and there is no consensus as to the evolution of speech and language, so let’s just take a look at what we know and see where the evidence could lead us. Communication – the exchange of information with others – clearly extends back into our primate heritage. Language – the symbolic code that facilitates communication, verbally or non-verbally – is a bit trickier to pinpoint. It has been argued by many researchers that several organisms, including dolphins, have languages, but there is a lack of concrete evidence for this. What does neuropsychology have to say? There are key areas of the brain that aid with the facilitation of speech and language, like Broca’s Area (which controls the regions of the mouth, throat, and lungs that produce speech) and Wernicke’s Area (which deals with speech comprehension). Physiologically, the low position of our larynx has allowed humans to produce a wider range of sounds than other primates can. So all we’d have to do is look at what fossil remains we have for early humans and see when these important features show up. As far as brain casts are concerned, we see a human-like Broca’s & Wernicke’s Area in Homo habilis & Homo erectus, as opposed to the more ancestral brains of australopithecines. Interestingly, the shape of the base of the skulls in mammals shows a correlation to larynx position. What we find is that a low-oriented larynx shows up in Homo erectus, but it isn’t until around 300,000 years ago that we see the right curvature in the base of the skull, suggesting that a larynx that allows a fully-fledged suite of symbolic speech had appeared. This corresponds with the earliest Homo sapiens and their kin. That’s about the best we can do for now: explanations for the evolution of these traits are, at best, informed speculation. We can be confident, however, that when clear evidence of symbolism, including expressions of culture, appear in the archaeological record, we know that early humans must be communicating with each other using languages of a type that we’ll never hear.

All of this new information would have dramatically changed the family-group dynamic of early humans. Learning how to knap and shape stone tools would have been information that was shared and passed down generation by generation. This collective learning, as it is called, would have been facilitated by experienced individuals who understood the intricacies of making the proper stone tools. Young children could have been directly taught by these teachers, or simply observed them and tried it out themselves. Among other primates today, like chimpanzees, the young are often close-by watching their parents or other members of the group when they gather and use tools, learning for themselves how to undertake the task. And over time, new ways of making the tools can arise from these individuals, adding much needed improvements and revisions, and these can be taken up by the rest of the community.

Another key change was in the way that the young were raised. Based on the analysis of the best pelvic bones we have for hominins, anthropologist Robert Martin has argued that childbirth would have become very difficult by the time of Homo ergaster. This would have been due to the gradual transition towards bipedality (which altered the shape of hominin pelvises) and the expansion of the size of the brain which meant that mothers faced extreme pain and pressure trying to pass their infants through the vagina. If left alone, there was a strong possibility of death by childbirth, which is why Robert Martin has proposed that the practice of midwifing – assisting a mother in labor – would have to have been in practice at this time. There is also evidence of a shift in childhood among later Homo species, with the length of time for development growing. This meant that, for at most the first 5 years of life, young humans would have been staying by their mother’s side for much longer, nursing and bonding until they were of the age to assist with other members of their family group. Like other primates, there would have been many members of these family groups assisting in the care of the infants, allowing the mothers to participate in hunts, tool-making, and other problem-solving activities.

All of these shared experiences, of working together to survive the odds, of bringing up the next generation, and of assuring that their children have all the skills they need to function in their communities, are all hallmarks of humanity. It is perhaps reassuring that it is these most basic and most precious of human social behaviors that have been around for millions of years.

And with that, we must lay anchor to our river journey. In the next episode, the story of human evolution continues. We visit a world caught in the grips of the ice ages and various human species struggle to survive the extreme shifts of temperatures as they expand across Africa and Eurasia. We meet two of our closest human relatives, the neanderthals and denisovans, and see what sorts of cultures they created, hundreds of thousands of years ago.

That’s the end of this episode of On the River of History. If you enjoyed listening in and are interested in hearing more, you can visit my new website at www.podcasts.com, just search for ‘On the River of History’. This podcast is also available on iTunes, just search for it by name. A transcript of today’s episode is available for the hearing-impaired or for those who just want to read along: the link is in the description. And, if you like what I do, you’re welcome to stop by my Twitter @KilldeerCheer. You can also support this podcast by becoming a patron, at www.patreon.com/JTurmelle: any and all donations are greatly appreciated and will help continue this podcast. Thank you all for listening and never forget: the story of the world is your story too.

#Transcripts #On the River of History

0 notes