HOMEChapter 1
The W H Y Chromosome
A conversation between the author and a friend named Joe.
"There is not now and there has never been a living species on this planet with intelligence even remotely close to Homo Sapiens. Less than a hundred thousand years ago this species appeared on earth, and for some reason all other similar human-like species disappeared. This creature possessed a skill unique only to that species which became known as human. The first Homo Sapiens had it and passed it on to all of us."
"Enough dramatics; what is it?" asks Joe.
"The ability to comprehend the abstract. All species of higher intelligence can ask what and where. Only humans possess a series of mental commands that enable us to ask why."
"That’s all that humans have that animals don’t, the ability to ask why? It doesn’t seem like that’s enough to make such a big difference," Joe says skeptically.
"Our brain is structurally a little better but it’s that ability to conceive of abstract concepts which makes humans different."
"You mean that the reason animals can’t talk, read or write is that they can’t ask why?"
"No, animals can speak. They also can understand what you say. And they can argue with you. A dog will bark, whine or use some other means to tell you it wants to eat. The dog’s owner can distinguish the sound their dog makes when it wants food and tell it from a sound of alarm the dog makes. Your dog will argue by continuing to beg and even pull at your pant leg. A child will do the same thing asking for candy. They will beg like the dog but the word ‘why’ will usually be in there someplace. The dog can only beg."
"I knew that. I meant that dogs can’t carry on a conversation like we do."
"They have the ability to say what they find necessary to say. You’ll find that most of our conversation would disappear if we only discussed absolutes and ignored abstracts."
"Attorneys would be struck mute. You’ve avoided the question of reading and writing," warns Joe.
"Animals read and write. You just need to understand their language. Take the bear for example. The bear will go around it’s territory, stand up on it’s hind legs and scratch marks into a tree as high as it can reach. In fact they have been known to be just like human writers and exaggerate. They do it by making marks as high as they can jump. It may seem like bear scratches to you but the bear has written a clear message: This is my territory. This is how big I am. Keep out. Other bears can read it clearly. It’s not uncommon for another bear to read the message then stand up to the tree and compare his size to the writer’s."
"You’re right, and when humans do that educators call it cognitive reading skills. One minute you wax eloquently about how superior we are, the next, how little we are different from animals. Which is it?"
"Humans are quite similar physically to many other animals on earth but incredibly different in a few very important ways. One of these differences is rather strange. A scientist named Gould determined that almost all animal life span can be measured by the number of heartbeats and breaths they take. The amazing thing is that it was the same for almost all: 800 million heart beats and 200 million breaths. Except for humans. We far exceed both those numbers."
"Almost? Are there other exception?" asks Joe.
"Dolphins."
"Dolphins are supposed to be very intelligent. Is there an implication there?" comments Joe.
"No. Dolphins can’t think abstractly. Nothing on earth can, except humans. I mentioned earlier that once Homo Sapiens emerged, all other humanoid species disappeared. Think about the number of different species in the cat family. Humans don’t have other members of the human family."
"How about Pygmies and Dwarfs? Couldn’t they be variations of humans? What’s the difference between a lion and a lynx? It doesn’t seem to be much more than hair color and size," says Joe.
"The Pygmy and Dwarf have not developed into a separate identity within our species nor do they seem to exist in great number. In fact they are shrinking in number, at least as a percentage. That proves to me that humans, in some mysterious way, do not tolerate any similar species."
"Maybe we haven’t evolved to that stage yet. I read that DNA researchers claim we haven’t been around long enough to have evolved much," speculates Joe.
"We seemed to have evolved only superficially in the last hundred thousand years. Physically, researchers can’t find much difference between modern man and the earliest remains of our Homo Sapiens relatives. Just recently they found a five-thousand-year-old human male preserved in ice in the Alps. Researchers commented that he looks so much like modern man he could have walked down the street in the area he was found and no one could have told that he was from a time five thousand years ago."
"He might look the same but intelligence has evolved so much that he’d probably seem retarded to us," comments Joe.
"Don’t bet on it. The brain might have grown in size a little, but that doesn’t necessarily compute into more brainpower. In fact, until just a couple hundred years ago humans hadn’t grown much larger that early Homo Sapiens remains indicated their size. Japanese children are now in a growth cycle caused by diet change. They are not fitting into the old Japanese homes and cars, but there is no indication that they are more intelligent than their elders."
"Whether our brain is bigger isn’t my point," said Joe. We’ve acquired tremendous amounts of knowledge because our brain is better developed and much more effective, and we are more skilled at using it. And, we’ve only tapped the outer fringes of our brain’s capacity."
"Let me answer the last point you made first because it’s an idea so widely held. The first person to discover that the human brain had a huge reservoir of untapped capacity was named Buc. He lived about fifty thousand years ago."
"Oh oh, I suspect I’m about to be treated to one of your stories that makes the point," says Joe.
"One day he was squatting behind a bush. On the throne so to speak. That of course is where some of man’s greatest thinking has occurred. Buc suddenly thought, I’m much smarter than I am. I just don’t know how to be that smart yet. He rushed out from behind the bush and confronted his small family group. Because language hadn’t yet developed much past sign language he circled his head with one hand. Next he laid his hands along side his head and jerked them away in an exploding action. His brother thought he had a headache. His wife thought he wanted sex. His son thought he wanted to go hunting and ran to get his club. From then on that miraculous idea has been handed down from generation to generation until modern day. The tendency to concoct strange theories has remained one of the skills of that family tree. Even today many descendants with names like Buckner, Buckingham or Buckley concoct strange theories that have no discernible source, except possibly the bathroom, and of course are completely wrong."
"Takes you a long time to get to the point. If it’s wrong, why?"
"If I suggested that your bile duct was capable of producing a thousand times more bile than it does, would you agree?"
"Yeah, matter of fact I would. The other night when I ate a pizza just before bedtime my bile duct produced just about that amount. OK, I get the point. My bile duct produces the bile I need. It doesn’t need to produce a thousand times as much, so it can’t."
"The fact is that your body’s organs have designed parameters. They function within those designed parameter. The mind is no different."
"Got any proof?" scoffs Joe.
"It’s all around you if you just look. Doctors are supposed to be among our brightest minds. As the knowledge of medicine expanded, have doctors simply absorbed it all? No, just the opposite. They have limited their practice to smaller and smaller segments of the field."
"Everybody agrees we have just barely touched the full capacity of our minds," states Joe firmly.
"Far from everybody agrees. The mind is not an ever-evolving intellectual organ. It is an organ that processes knowledge, or you might want to call it data. The better data or knowledge you feed it the better data it produces. This knowledge results in our species discovering new concepts. The mind is not the end product of knowledge. Knowledge is an end product of the mind. The problem is that our mind can’t store all the knowledge. Fortunately we have now developed the capacity to store and manage all the knowledge we’ve accumulated so far. That brings us back to what you mentioned earlier. The tremendous amount of knowledge we humans have amassed."
"Wait a minute," says Joe. "Scientists have proven that the brain has billions of tiny storage areas. They believe we never use but a fraction of this storage capacity. How about people with perfect memories. They can store as much in their minds as they want and never forget a thing."
"They are right about a large storage capacity but wrong about how it is used. Consider that no one knows exactly how data is stored in the brain, how it is received or how the brain works internally to create thought. To estimate the brain’s capacity without that knowledge is like estimating the carrying capacity of a donkey by the size of it’s ears."
"OK, but what about the people with amazing memories?" asks Joe.
"You will store more data in your mind on a trip across the U.S. by auto than a memoirist will store memorizing an encyclopedia. A memoirist is impressive because he or she can store and recall unrelated and/or abstract data."
"You mean all that memorizing doesn’t take up a lot of space?" asks Joe.
"We are just beginning to understand how to store large amounts of data in computers. Factual data is easily stored in a small storage area while items such as images require huge amounts of space. It’s very likely the same in the mind, with data needing very little space and images needing a similarly large proportional amount of space."
"You mean my mind is just filled with pictures of pretty girls?" asks Joe.
"Probably in your case. But haven’t you noticed that mental images you stored yesterday deteriorate rapidly? What that girl was wearing or the color of the car you rented is hard to recall even a day later. This suggests that image detail involves a lot of data and is easily forgotten."
"Aren’t you estimating the mind’s capacity now?"
"No, I’m saying it is large and being used at designed capacity. I base this on the fact that all of us have a tremendous amount of data stored in our minds. Think of all the routes you have stored in you mind. How to get to work, to Las Vegas, how to get from your bedroom to the bathroom, and a thousand other places that are just basic knowledge we all have to acquire to live. Your mind regulates your bodily functions constantly. Think of not just the data but the subconscious mental process that must go on twenty-four hours a day. How to move your mouth and tongue to speak, how to walk. Think of all the images you possess in you mind—faces, places, cars and ad infinitum. We could go on for hours cataloguing what is stored in all our minds and not mention our so-called intellectual data. I suspect that if we could accurately determine all that is stored in our minds, intellectual data would be far less than ten percent."
"Then our minds are all filled up?"
"An infant has plenty of room, but as we grow the space to store data fills up. Somewhere along the line we all fill our minds to capacity. After that, old data degrades, that is we forget, and new data pushes it out of the way."
"They say that we never really forget anything. We just can’t recall it to our conscious."
"They are dead wrong. It is foolish to suggest that the mind can or even has a reason to store every sight, sound, taste, feeling, thought, or heaven forbid, smell we have ever experienced. From our own experience everyone knows that they have totally forgotten a lot they have learned."
"But I still have many memories from my childhood," states Joe
"Marvin Minsky, author of The Society of Minds, made an excellent and poetic observation regarding old memories. He stated, ‘To remember an early experience, you must be able to not only retrieve some old record, but to reconstruct how your earlier mind reacted to them—and to do that you would have to become that infant again. To outgrow infancy, you have to sacrifice your memories because they’re written in an ancient script that your later self can no longer read.’ What he’s saying is that as we age it becomes impossible to feel those raw emotional moments of youth and to top it off; much of what we recall is faulty. Ask a brother or sister about something that happened to both of them in their childhood. I guarantee that most of the details will not be the same. In other words, what you remember from childhood is fragmented memories with illusion created by your current mind filling in the blanks."
"If we use our brain to capacity, have always used our brain to capacity and our brain isn’t much better than when good old Homo Sapiens crawled up out of the ooze and said, "howdy you all’, then why are we so advanced compared to that creature?"
"Early man passed on knowledge from his memory to his descendants’ memories. It was limited by the lack of storage capacity and the inaccuracy of recall. The brain had as large a capacity then as now, however most of it was used in the storage of knowledge that kept the human alive. Humans didn’t really begin to acquire knowledge until they learned to store knowledge outside their mind, and more accurately."
"Reading, writing and arithmetic?" asks Joe.
"When humans perfected those skills man’s knowledge trail soared steeply upward. Today a technician, be they doctor, mechanic, lawyer, air-conditioning repairman, etc., needs a shelf full of manuals in order to do the job. The knowledge required is way beyond anyone’s capacity to hold it all in their memory."
"The computer is replacing manuals and making finding the data you need easier and quicker, and upward spirals our knowledge," says Joe.
"That’s true, and it’s changing what’s important in the thinking process and what we need to learn. We don’t need a large accurate database in our mind. We need the knowledge of where to find it, how to understand it and how to use it. As the use of the computer accelerates, we are beginning to not need to understand it, just know how to access and use it."
"You mean like the modern woman? She may not know how to cook but she knows how to order the best ‘take out’ in town?"
"That’s sexist and maybe even harassment, you old dog. And no, I mean like a pilot of a modern fighter aircraft. The plane is so complex he can’t fly it by himself. A computer analyzes his input to the controls, determines what the pilot wants and fly’s the aircraft for him. The pilot operates a computer that flies the aircraft. He doesn’t have to understand all the outputs to the control system; he just has to understand how to use them. Our knowledge is out-pacing our ability to even understand all of what we do. We are now using our mental resources to manage the knowledge we’ve acquired. It’s the only way we can keep up."
"What’s this got to do with being able to comprehend the abstract? What is it besides being able to ask why?"
"It’s hard to define but it is the strange power that separates us from all other intelligent species. Comprehending the abstract doesn’t directly result in action, and unlike logic it draws no conclusions. It simply asks questions and compels our minds to figure it out.
"Comprehending the abstract is an awareness that something else exists beyond what our five senses reveal to us. To all species on earth except us, the stars are just bright spots in the sky. We name them stars, ask why they are there, and study them. Humans are the only species that recognizes a God. That’s because we are the only ones who can ask the question, ‘Why are we here’? Human groups had God symbols way back near the beginning of our species."
"We’re the only species that has ever recognized a God?" asked Joe.
"Correct! No other species can comprehend the abstract idea that something exists that can’t be seen, heard, touched, smelled or eaten. It was the awareness that some force had to bring us into existence that cause the logical conclusion that a creator exists."
"And that’s why we worship a God?" Asks Joe.
"No. We recognize a creator because we are able to understand that our parents came before us, our grandparents before them and our ancestor's stretches back into the past. This leads to the obvious conclusion that, sometime in the past, something had to create us. Worshiping God occurs on the other end of our life. It is the result of our ability to recognize that our children will continue after we pass, their children after them and our descendents will continue on into the future. This allows us to conceive of destiny. We want to be part of this destiny of humans. That is one of the reasons we pray to a God."
"Is curiosity part of our ability to comprehend the abstract?" asks Joe.
"All species of higher intelligence have curiosity skills. A cat will become curious about a bug crawling across the ground. It will toy with it, but unless it’s eatable the cat will lose interest. Animals are aware and curious about what’s around them just as humans are. But humans, using that strange extra sense we possess, ask why and compel our intelligence to find answers. We don’t see just one way of doing something. Abstract thinking makes us search for other answers. Not because we think they are needed but because our mind instinctively searches using that strange power within each of us. We call this creativity. We don’t live day to day. Humans, and only humans, recognize a time line. This allows humans to recognize the future, the past, and understand that strange thing called destiny."
"Are you saying we are ruled by abstract thinking?"
"Humans are obsessed with the abstract. When you ask, "What’s for dinner’? That's abstract. Would you like to have sex is abstract. An animal will eat or not eat what is available but it won’t ask to be given a multiple choice. When a male dog sniffs a female dog he’s not asking, he’s determining if it’s possible. Animals think in a practical sense. They never ask, ‘How’s your Aunt Mary in Oregon?’ No other species is aware of a creature that exists outside of it’s immediate domain that it hasn’t had personal contact with. Think of the hundreds of things you might say in a normal day. How many of them would an animal have passed through its mind?"
"You said that humans started out with all the basic intelligence they possess today. We’ve been here nearly a hundred thousand years and have only really progressed in knowledge in the last five or six thousand years. It doesn’t seem logical that if we’ve had it from the beginning we’ve only used it in the last several thousand years."
"There are small tribes of people living in stone-age conditions now. It’s obvious that not all humans have made that intellectual jump, even today."
"You mean lost tribes living a primitive life? Isn’t it just that they didn’t cluster with others?" asks Joe.
"That is probably part of the reason and it really puts them behind the learning curve. Some researchers believe that it was about ten thousand years ago that tribes began to cluster into large groups. There is evidence that around that time Natufian tribes on the Sinai Peninsula increased in size from small family units to three hundred or more."
"I wonder why they began to cluster at that time?" ask Joe.
"The human species’ instinct is to cluster into small extended family units following a pattern somewhat similar to the way other animals herd in the wild. When humans began to cluster into larger groups of not directly related humans it was for mutual protection. Some researchers believe that when families settled on one piece of land and started to farm that’s what caused the increased herd size."
"I still don’t understand why it took so long to get it all started."
"Humans take twelve or thirteen years before they can bear young. It takes another ten years of caring for their children before the kids can fend for themselves. During these early times humans seldom lived to the age of thirty. The evidence of huge die-off from causes such as famine and other unexplained conditions also must have set process back. Expanding the size of the tribe was an enormous task. When the human population became large enough to make trading important we still needed to develop excess production in trade goods. It took tens of thousands of years before humans acquired things that needed help to protect and then man’s insatiable desire to make war against other tribes may also have held things up a bit."
"Some people believe we progress the fastest during war. That it is war that drives humans to excel and progress," suggests Joe.
"Does war help or impede progress? Probably both. All of the things mentioned above were surely factors."
"When we overcame all of those things that was when the most intelligent humans began to advance rapidly," speculates Joe.
"Not necessarily the most intelligent. You know the definition of intelligence, Joe?"