48 Hours to Chaos:
An Engineer Looks at Life and
How the World Really Works
John D. Waterman
Copyright 2011 by John D. Waterman
Published by Dennett Ink
129 Bleachery Blvd., Suite 135
Asheville, NC 28805
Smashwords Edition
ISBN: 978-0-9831636-2-6
Library of Congress Control Number 2010942917
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recorded, photocopied, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover Art compliments of Linda Waterman
"Chaos in a Solar Prominence" acrylic on paper.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 2 -- 100,000 Years Ago
Chapter 3 -- The Meaning of Life
Chapter 6 -- Primitive Religion and Tribal Leadership
Chapter 7 -- Growth of Early Civilization
Chapter 11 -- Fairness, Summary, Government, Law
Chapter 12 -- Social Organization
Chapter 16 -- Kill or Be Killed
Chapter 19 -- Fantasy Theme-Park Syndrome
Chapter 20 -- Anthropomorphism
Chapter 21 -- Hollywood Syndrome
Chapter 24 -- Better Government
Chapter 25 -- Other Functions of Government
Chapter 26 -- County Government
Chapter 30 -- Recipe for Disaster
Chapter 31 -- Balance of Power
~~~~
This book is dedicated to
Linda
without whom
none of this would be possible
~~~~
PREFACE
Let me say at the outset that I am all in favor of truth, beauty, justice and the American way, and I am opposed to evil and destruction. I would suspect that most of my readers will share this view, regardless of their political persuasion. I have an engineering background, and take a scientific attitude when observing behavior or solving problems. When I look around, I see a world filled with conflict and evil, yet I also see an environment of great wealth where people conduct their lives with respect for others and work hard for their own advancement. How do such opposing concepts coexist in the same society? Why do some people choose a life of crime while others seek to act in virtuous ways and promote peace? Why does a politician who has sworn to uphold his constitution descend into corruption? Questions like these seem to trouble a lot of people, and such concerns motivated me to start seeking answers. Here are a few of the situations that stimulated my curiosity, and eventually led to the writing of this book.
When I was a college student, I heard a professor say that civilization is always a mere forty-eight hours away from chaos. All an enemy would need to do is find a way to cut off the food supply, and society would be destroyed. After two days without food, all your friends and neighbors would revert to animalism, and the delicate fabric of society would be ripped to shreds along with all those people who are not the strongest and most vicious fighters. The image of that fate stuck to my impressionable young mind, and grew older with it.
Another of my instructors, a grad student, was pleased to announce that he and his new wife would soon accept job offers in industry. This would allow them to finally earn enough money to truly enjoy life. But the graduates were worried about the inevitability of Mother Nature stepping into their lives. The happy couple would soon have babies to care for. Such additional responsibilities would spoil their freedom and put a crimp in the enjoyment of their newfound wealth.
He set me to wondering whether we, as rational human beings, are actually just slaves to our animal instincts. Certainly children would be preventable, with a little forethought and self-discipline.
Have you ever noticed that you spend a significant part of your day eight feet away from certain death? When you drive to work in the morning, and again when you go home at night, you pass numerous vehicles on the road, hurtling along in the opposite direction at a closing velocity of 100 miles per hour. A simple counterclockwise motion of your steering-wheel would spell disaster. How do most of us consistently avoid this ever-present danger?
Sometime during the seventies I was watching an episode of the original Star Trek, where Captain Kirk swaps places with his counterpart in an alternate universe.[1] Due to a transporter malfunction, Kirk arrives in a civilization with a more brutal, animalistic outlook. The starship officers in this other universe advance in rank by undermining or assassinating their superiors. In his quarters Kirk discovers a spying device that can secretly monitor anyone aboard the ship and can also be used to eliminate them. His girlfriend in this episode encourages him to use it to destroy the competition, but he resists the impulse because of his more civilized nature.
How, I wondered at the time, could the people of this alternate universe survive for long in their advanced technological society, if they always practiced such anarchistic behavior? After a little thought I realized that such an attitude has been common in our own world history and is still practiced by those who hold power in dictatorships today. Stalinism is a term we use to describe this school of management practice.
During my career as an engineer in the aerospace industry, I ran across many people who had a different approach to life than I did. I became mildly curious about why they choose their behaviors, when I would have approached a similar situation from a different angle. I decided that these people must have a different understanding of life than I did, or at least used a different method for solving their problems. Some managers were tyrants who chose bullying as a way to make their subordinates toe the line. Some bosses led by example and inspired loyalty in their workers. Some people advanced to positions of power, yet were sorely lacking in competence. Some folks attained their positions by playing office politics, and succeeded despite their shortcomings. Is it not amazing that some organizations continue to function and deliver their products while burdened with such widespread inefficiencies? It is no wonder that every year a whole new set of books about management technique appears in the bookstores.
Perhaps an engineer learns a particular way of approaching and solving problems that is not the same as folks in other career fields. Or maybe people are raised differently by their mothers and start out with an alternate view of life, and how to behave. Some people believe that socialism holds the answers to all the world’s problems; others think some form of capitalism would be a preferable way to manage the affairs of mankind.[2]
Thoughts like these percolated in the back of my mind for many years, but during my engineering career I never took the time to think through the entire subject. Once I retired, I undertook the opportunity to make a thorough investigation. Among other things, I discovered that when you go looking for ethical or moral guidance you inevitably end up in religion. God imposes the shalls and shall-nots from His authority on high. Shouldn’t there be a way, I thought, to arrive at the same conclusions about the benefits of virtue and love by using the precepts of science and logic? Certainly rational thought should lead us through the temptations of evil to the higher planes of peace and beauty, without reliance on the doctrines of a particular religion or supernatural inspiration.
Throughout history many wars have been fought for the glory of one god over another. This despite the fact that religions teach us that killing is evil. Nevertheless, each army went into conflict convinced that God was on their side. Certainly, in these contests one side or the other was wrong, or both were. Can we conclude that the winner of every battle was the one favored by God? Personally, I cannot agree with that conclusion.
So let us consider the world from an engineering perspective. Take the materials we have available, provided by nature, and use them to build a lasting structure based on the foundations of logic, without resort to miraculous intervention. Let us take a look at how life arose on Earth. Let us analyze how mankind fits into the big picture. Let us consider how the various peoples and cultures on this planet interact and attempt to maintain their civilizations.
The purpose of this book is not to convert you from your current political persuasion to something else. It does not intend to change your religion from whatever you have chosen (or have been forced into) to a different one. The goal of this book is to provide you with a few mental tools, a new perspective, a way of thinking, to use in construction of a better understanding of the world you see around you today.
This is a book about life, and it is based upon the precepts of science. We will avoid conclusions based on religious belief or the command of God. We will not consider the question of life after death. We will consider life on Earth in the here and now, and necessarily the life of our children who follow us into the future. Death is considered the end of life. One’s reward or punishment from God or the devil in the afterlife is not addressed herein.
Please note that this is not a book on philosophy. Philosophy books contain terms like: a priori, epistemology, essentialism, existentialism, eschatology, ipso facto, metaphysics, monad, ontological, qua, teleology, vis-à-vis. We will not even bother to define these words because we will not use any of them. Other than this paragraph, you will find no further occurrences of them in this book. Ergo, this is not a philosophy book. Q.E.D.[3]
However, we will take one question that is commonly found in philosophy books and answer it up front, from an engineering perspective. The reader should already have the perception to grasp the actual meaning. “If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one around to hear it, does it make any noise?” The correct answer, for those of you with any doubts, is: Yes, it makes a lot of noise. And the bigger is the tree that falls, the more noise it makes.
As human beings, the only creatures on Earth possessing the rational thought processes to understand the meaning of such questions, we intend to use our intellect to acquire the answers to even more significant questions. Let’s get started.
Chapter Notes:
[1] Mirror, Mirror, Star Trek episode #39, October 1967.
[2] Disclaimer for purposes of political correctness:
The terms “man” and “mankind,” as used in this book, are certainly intended to include woman and child. We don’t wish to exclude over half our potential audience. We do not wish to offend anyone by our choice of using the traditional language reference to “man,” rather than the clumsier sounding terms “humanity” or “persons.” The individual reader is free to substitute gender-specific terminology suitable for his or her own taste.
[3] Q.E.D., quod erat demonstrandum, from the Latin meaning, “which was to be shown or demonstrated,” commonly used at the conclusion of a mathematical proof.
~~~~
INTRODUCTION
Civilization has suffered numerous mortal blows throughout the slow march of history, yet always seems able to regenerate from the ashes of its demise, much like the Phoenix of ancient mythology. The population has always bounced back from whatever tragedy it experienced, and subsequently advanced further than it had the time before. Why that should happen at all is one of the themes that motivated this book.
Our purpose here is to give you an enhanced view of civilization, and the world in general. We want to show how to use a set of mental tools, so to speak, for analyzing the events that occur around you, a set of ideas and techniques to employ in observing the attitudes that different people assume in arranging their own lives. This is done from the point of view of an engineer, a highly-trained professional who addresses problems with a technical and analytical frame of mind. An engineer believes in cause and effect, that things happen for a reason, and if he can figure out the reason, he can do something to affect the outcome. His goal is to build better things from the resources at hand, and he is always looking for a different way to do things. He asks why something works this way and not that way. If we change this feature on that machine, will it run faster or more economically?
How, you might ask, is an engineer different from any other student of science? Why should you listen to anything he says? Perhaps an old gag will help illuminate his mindset.
Three men, a physicist, a mathematician and an engineer, were sitting around a lunch table in the college cafeteria arguing about some deep, scientific abstraction.
The physicist looked up from his notes to see a beautiful female professor strolling past with her lunch tray. The eyes of all three men locked on target, watching her sashay to the next table. She sat down and began nibbling her salad.
The physicist leaned closer to his companions and whispered, “I know this lovely woman, and I can arrange to introduce one of you guys to her, but you will have to follow my instructions to the letter.”
“Yes, yes?” they urged him on.
“You must approach her in small steps to avoid being rejected, because she doesn’t like her men being pushy.”
“Of course,” they agreed, “tell us more.”
“In each step, you may only move closer to her by half the remaining distance, but you can take as many steps as you need.”
“Oh, no,” said the mathematician, giving up, “even with an infinite number of steps, I could never reach my goal.”
“No problem,” said the engineer, “I can get close enough!”
Ambiguity
On a more serious note, we need to look at how anyone acquires understanding of a new subject. When we learn something new, we must compare how the new information fits in with things we already know, so we can decide whether to believe it or not. When a subject is entirely new, we need to have a tolerance for ambiguity. We will accept new information temporarily, on the authority of the speaker, until we have enough experience to judge whether it all makes sense. One person can never appreciate all aspects of a subject, because unanswered questions are always nagging at the mind.
When you were a child, your mother told you how to behave in many different situations without giving you any reasons for her directions. You trusted her, and she counted on her authority in giving you instructions. Don’t cross your eyes or they’ll get stuck like that. Don’t stick out your tongue at me. Help me wash the dishes. Don’t hit your sister. Don’t run out in the street. Brush your teeth every day. Don’t run with scissors. Don’t talk to strangers.
After a few years you figured out on your own the reasoning behind the instructions. She was trying to teach you to be polite, to show you how to do things, to warn you about the hazards of traffic, or tell you that nasty strangers could be trying to harm you.
By the time you are ready to pursue your engineering degree, you have become socialized and have learned hundreds of rules about how to behave in public. But the fact that you are going to college implies you need to learn many other things before you are ready to practice engineering in the real world.[1] In your math and physics classes, you may safely assume that everything the professor teaches you (about math and physics) is true, and you can safely incorporate this new information into your belief system. However, the things you learn from your history professor must be taken with a grain of salt. After all, a good portion of history has been written by the victors about the losers of previous conflicts, so the bias will favor the existing regime. Political history is most likely to be biased by the opinions of the person telling it to you, and is thus subject to your own interpretation.[2]
This suspicion about the truth of things one learns in school suggests a reason why many students choose to go into scientific fields rather than the humanities. Perhaps many of them would prefer to spend their lives dealing with facts they know to be true, rather than basing their decisions upon opinions of other people, or political expediency.
Therefore, adults in the real world need a healthy tolerance for ambiguity. We need to incorporate new knowledge through our mental filters, provisionally subject to modification as new facts come to light. We use our life experience to judge which things to believe.
This book is intended to guide you on the path to a better understanding of the world around you, while you cultivate your tolerance for ambiguity.
To that end, we may view human life as a long series of conflicts. We see good versus evil, cooperation vs. conflict, friendship vs. hostility, love vs. hate, allies vs. enemies. Each of these opposing forces, and hundreds of other pairs of conflicting attributes, may be visualized by placing them on a diagram, perhaps at the opposite ends of a line, or on opposite sides of a circle. A larger view, in three-dimensions, would place them on different sides of a sphere or bubble.
Consider, for example, love versus hate in a relationship between two people. There are many degrees of emotion between these extremes that we could arrange on our chart. On the side of love we might find friendship, respect, and trust. On the opposite end near hate we could see revulsion, enmity, malice. Somewhere between we might encounter indifference, toleration, or apathy. For each pair of conflicting words we could draw cycles or spheres of revolving ambiguity, like a great conglomeration of bubbles forming a froth of complexity.
Think of your kitchen sink with a stack of dirty dishes after dinner. Turn on the spigot to fill the sink, and squirt in some liquid dish soap. Watch the froth of bubbles gurgle up to cover the dishes and the water’s surface, ever higher and thicker. The complexity of this froth may be thought of as an analog for life. It grows as turbulence arises from beneath. It changes form as small bubbles coalesce into larger bubbles, or shrinks when the larger bubbles burst to disappear into nothingness.
Although this idea about a froth of complexity is merely a poetic analogy that has no scientific basis, it may help us to visualize the vast disorder that constitutes the many conflicting forces we observe around us.
As a metaphor, each bubble may be thought to symbolize one individual life, or one life form, or even a collection of life forces, all competing for survival with their neighbors. Some succeed and grow; others burst and disappear. Every bubble will exist for some limited lifetime before it finally pops and is eliminated from the picture.
Let us dive into the bubble bath of life to see if we might splash some enlightenment out of this bathtub of chaos.
Chapter Notes:
[1] This is not to suggest, of course, that a college education is necessary for a successful career. Some 55 percent of the U.S. population haven’t gone to college, yet these folks prosper in our economy. Any adult, regardless of his formal education, cannot avoid learning new things throughout his lifetime. Everyone is exposed to new products and opportunities in society, and in our diversity of everyday activities.
[2] We are not trying to irritate history professors here. Really. History professors form a valuable segment of our society in performing research and educating students. But we must always consider the source of any information, no matter where it comes from, including history professors, and engineers.
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CHAPTER ONE
BEFORE MAN
Let us have a look at what life was like on our planet before the advent of man. We want to observe the interplay between plants and animals before they were affected by the activities of humans. This discussion should illuminate some interesting features of life, and suggest some techniques for understanding the world we find around us today.
Life
First we need to define what we mean by life. The features of life can be observed in an agent, an object or a being of some sort, if it displays directed behavior, as opposed to strictly random behavior. A stone has no life. A stone just sits there doing nothing. An oxygen molecule has no life. It just blows around in the atmosphere randomly bumping into other molecules, like so many tiny stones. Oxygen can combine chemically with other molecules to form different compounds or materials, but that is not directed behavior, thus not life.
The simplest form of life, as far as we will be concerned in this book, is the single celled creature, such as an amoeba.[1] Under a microscope, amoebae can be observed using their pseudopodia to push themselves around in an effort to find food and to seek out more auspicious environments. Perhaps they are looking for better temperatures or pH levels, so they may continue to exist in a suitable host environment. The amoebae reproduce by cell division to make copies of themselves. Thus they grow their communities and propagate their species. It is possible for the amoeba to mutate via random chemical errors in its constituent DNA.[2] A mutation may improve the cell’s chances for survival as its environment changes, so it can be considered adaptable. The successful adaptations are propagated in following generations, while unsuccessful adaptations die out quickly. This is natural selection in operation, a concept first proposed by Charles Darwin in his book, Origin of the Species, published in 1859.[3]
The amoeba displays directed behavior, growth through metabolism, reproduction and the ability to adapt to the environment. These other features expand our definition of life to an extent which seems reasonable to most people. Examples of higher levels of life are multi-celled creatures, worms, plants, insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, to name a few. Humans represent a highly advanced life form, but we are presently considering the world before the advent of humans, so we will ignore them for the time being.
History
Since life seems to have originated on Mother Earth, and appears to have advanced to an amazing degree, let’s see if we can watch it develop over the ages. We can look at the geological history of our planet from the beginnings up to the present time.
Science tells us that the world condensed out of a swirling cloud of matter about 4.6 billion years ago.[4] The chaos of collisions among the smaller lumps of this planet stuff, which eventually stuck together, set the world to spinning on its axis. This rotation defines the length of the day. The force of gravity, acting on all the material, compressed the planet into its spherical shape. The swirling motion in the cloud of matter also left the earth in a stable orbit around the sun, which defines the length of the year.
First Chart
Now that we have a new planet orbiting in the sunshine, let’s draw a time-line for its 4.6 billion years of history. Using the top end of the time-line as the beginning, stretch the line down for 100 yards, the length of a football field, where we place the present date. See Figure 1. What events in scientific history can we identify along this time-line, and where do we place their yard markers?
During formation of the early earth, all of those collisions between rocks, ice, dust and gas generated a lot of heat. This, along with the heat generated by radioactive decay, caused the early planet to assume a molten state. During this time, around 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars sized object collided with the planet, causing a large amount of material to go into orbit, and creating the Earth-Moon pair.[5] This earliest event on our figure is indicated at the 2 yard-line near the top.
Nearly a billion years of planetary cooling took place as the earth radiated heat into space. The firm crust solidified approximately 3.6 billion years ago, near the age of the oldest rocks ever found. The marker for this event goes on our figure at the upper 22 yard-line.
The first identifiable feature of life that has survived in the fossil record is the prokaryote, the simple cell without a nucleus. This primitive life form appears 3.2 billion years ago, at our 31 yard-line.
What caused this life form to arise from the primordial ooze is controversial, but we may assume it was a happy coincidence of the right chemicals and amino acids mixing together in some puddle of warm fluid, combined with an energy input from a lightning strike. This is, of course, merely speculation, unsupported by any direct evidence. Many scientists are working to discover the spontaneous development of life from inorganic materials, but a viable theory has not yet been published.[6]
The next major step in the advancement of life is the appearance of the eukaryote, the cell with a nucleus, and the basis of multi-cellular creatures. This event occurs at 2.1 billion years ago, which corresponds with the 46 yard-line on the lower half of our football field, past the halfway point in the history of planet Earth.
After a lengthy period of time, more than 1.5 billion years, the evolution of life produced trilobites. This occurred approximately 530 million years ago, in the Cambrian Period, yard-line 11.5. The trilobite is that famous arthropod with a segmented shell that everyone remembers from high school science class. Fossilized trilobites are commonly found in sedimentary rocks all over the world.
The Cambrian Period, 542 to 488 million years ago, yard-lines 11.8 to 10.6, is noteworthy because of the explosion of new animal life forms in the seas. During this time, plant life was limited to marine algae, while the land surfaces were still barren.
In the remaining ten yards to the goal line of our football field, we find development of the amazing diversity of life forms that created the living environment of our present day planet. This fascinating time of history has been thoroughly described in several fine books, so we will touch here on but a few of the major events.[7]
Insects first appear about 400 million years ago at our 8.7 yard-line.
Reptiles first appear about 350 million years ago at our 7.6 yard-line.
Dinosaurs first appear about 210 million years ago at our 4.5 yard-line.
Early mammals first appear about 200 million years ago at our 4.3 yard-line.
Birds first appear about 150 million years ago at our 3.2 yard-line.
Flowering plants first appear about 110 million years ago at our 2.4 yard-line.
The Mesozoic Era, from 251 to 65 million years ago, is known as the Age of Dinosaurs. The Mesozoic is subdivided into three periods, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, which have been popularized by displays of dinosaur fossils in many museums.
We should pause at this point in our rush through history to take note of the mass extinction that occurred 65 million years ago. It was a sudden catastrophe that appears in the fossil record indicating the destruction of most life forms. Also known as the K-T boundary, for the dividing line between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods, this event is now understood to have been caused by the impact of a large meteorite with the planet. The collision caused giant tsunamis in the ocean and threw tremendous amounts of material into the atmosphere, which blocked sunlight from reaching the surface for months. This disruption of climate killed off the dinosaurs and made way for the evolution of mammals. The Cenozoic Era, from 65 million years ago to the present, immediately follows the Mesozoic, and is known as the Age of Mammals.
The mass extinction occurs 65 million years ago at our 1.4 yard-line.
Primates first appear about 54 million years ago at our 1.2 yard-line.
Primates are the apelike creatures that will eventually evolve into man.
Horses first appear about 52 million years ago at our 1.1 yard-line.
Whales first appear about 50 million years ago at our 1.09 yard-line.
As we near the one yard-line of our historic football field, which corresponds to the time of 46 million years ago, we find we still have an immense quantity of interesting history crammed into this remaining yard of space. Let us expand this remaining one percent of historic time onto a new chart. Hold down the lower goal-line, grab the one-yard-line and stretch it up for 99 yards, like a big rubber-band, thus magnifying this historic interval by 100 times. See Figure 2.
Second Chart[8]
Now the upper 99% of our second time-line stretches from 46 million to 460 thousand years ago. What interesting historical events can we identify in this zone?[9]
Years ago
/Yard-line . . . .Event
41M/11 . . . . Monkeys first appear.
23M/50 . . . . Large ape species.
18M/39 . . . . Afropithecines.[10]
15M/33 . . . . Kenyapithecines. About this time apes have migrated from Africa to Asia and Europe.
12M/26 . . . . Dryopithecines.
4.4M/9.6 . . . . Australopitecines. Bipedalism, the ability to walk on two legs, develops in the apelike creatures that are evolving towards human form.
4M/8.7 . . . . The period from 4M to 2M marks the transition from ape to human in evolution.
2.5M/5.4 . . . . Oldest fossils in the genus Homo, and the oldest known stone tools. Early Homo extends through 1.6 million years ago.
2M/4.3 . . . . Middle Homo begins with Homo erectus, who was the first to discover and control the use of fire. From 2M to 1.6M early humans migrated out of Africa.
1.9M/4.1 . . . . Homo habilis.
1.6M/3.5 . . . . Stone ax user.
1.2M/2.6 . . . . Youngest australopith fossils imply extinction of this creature.
500K/1.1 . . . . Paleoanthropologists generally define the earliest Homo sapiens fossils from about 500K where the braincase is larger than that of H. erectus.
460K/1 . . . . Our one yard-line defines the transition to the next chart.
Third Chart
Now the upper 99% of our third time-line stretches from 460 thousand years ago to 4600 years ago. See Figure 3. What notable historical events can we identify in this zone?
Years ago
/Yard-line . . . . Event
200K/43 . . . . Earliest Homo neanderthalensis fossils. Neanderthals were man-like creatures that lived during the same time as early H. sapiens in Western Europe and central Asia, and no doubt competed with him for territory and resources.
130K/28 . . . . Modern H. sapiens evolved in Africa.
100K/22 . . . . Time traveler visit to the Earth of a time before modern man, see Chapter 2.
90K/20 . . . . H. sapiens migrates out of Africa to begin settling in other regions.
36K/7.8 . . . . Youngest of the Neanderthal fossils implies extinction around this time.
35K/7.6 . . . . “People” are wearing clothes, using language, creating art.
27.8K/6 . . . . Extinction of the Cave bear.
11.5K/2.5 . . . . Extinction of Sabertooth tiger.
11K/2.4 . . . . Boundary between the Pleistocene and Holocene Epochs marking the end of the last ice age.
10K/2.2 . . . . Extinction of the Woolly mammoth near the end of the Pleistocene
7K/1.5 . . . . Earliest Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia.
5K/1.1. . . . Development of writing, in Sumerian cuneiform.
4.6K/1 . . . . Transition to next chart.
Fourth Chart
At the one-yard-line of our twice-expanded football field, corresponding to the time of 4600 years ago, we have the entire recorded history of modern man crammed into this last yard of space. If we were to stretch our chart again, we could only attempt to summarize this enormous subject, the era of mankind. But this task has already been admirably accomplished by Ed Hull in a vastly more detailed fashion than we could ever hope to duplicate. We therefore refer the reader to the Wall Chart of World History.[11] Hull’s work presents the entire recorded history of mankind, brilliantly summarized and illustrated as a flow of branching streams in time, which unfolds to a colorful, 14-foot-long display.
Our own fourth chart, and Figure 4, follow a slightly different format than our previous ones by listing the names and dates of the people and events mentioned later in this book. It may be viewed as an index in chronological order. Note that we have changed the time-line from the number-of-years-ago format to the dates of the Gregorian calendar.
Introduced in 1582, the Gregorian calendar starts counting with the year 1 AD at the birth of Christ. If we assume the present time as the year 2010, this places the upper edge of our chart, 4600 years ago, at 2590 BC.[12]
The timeline of human history is said to start at 4004 BC, according to Hull, which corresponds to the biblical creation in the Garden of Eden. This number is consistent with the conclusions of Ussher, from Note 4, below, and places the beginning of recorded human history at 6014 years ago. In another perspective, the Jewish calendar traces its history back to the creation, or to the first man, Adam, as related in Genesis. In September of 2010 the Jewish calendar began the year 5771, which would place the creation at 3760 BC. So we can see that agreement on the precise date is problematic.[13]
We thus conclude our tour of Earth history, hoping our readers have an appreciation for the vastness represented by 4.6 billion years of time, and the relatively insignificant period we humans have resided on the planet, representing one-millionth of the total.
Chapter Notes:
[1] There may be simpler forms of life, but we select the amoeba as our starting point. The amoeba is a eukaryote, which is to say a single-cell containing a nucleus. The eukaryotes were preceded in the development of life forms by the bacteria and archaea, which are single-celled without a nucleus.
[2] For a thorough and fascinating account of the discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid, find a copy of the book DNA, by James D. Watson. See Watson.
[3] See Darwin.
[4] We are using the conclusions of science in our arguments here rather than those of religion. But we don’t wish to exclude any readers who hold strongly religious beliefs. This book can be read as a logical argument based on the ideas considered, without denigrating ideas based on other doctrines. So let’s take a brief look at one of the doctrines promulgated by a seventeenth century cleric.
James Ussher, whose dates are 1581 to 1656, was a prominent churchman and a bishop in Ireland. In the 1650’s he published a chronology of incidents in the Bible, and came to the conclusion that the year of creation, as described in the book of Genesis, was 4004 BC. This result was based on his study of the scriptures and other documents available to him, and represents a highly erudite estimate for his time. Many people today still adhere to this number, since they believe the bishop must have been divinely inspired. However, over the ages many other leaders from various regions, and from other religious persuasions, have made different conclusions based on their own studies and backgrounds.
Today we have a vast amount of scientific information that was not available to these earlier investigators, and we plan to use much of it to form our own conclusions. If we were to limit our discussion to the 6000 years Ussher would allow, we wouldn’t have enough time for the forces of nature to have evolved all the life forms we wish to consider in this book.
[5] See MacKenzie for a thorough discussion of the formation of the Earth-Moon pair in his book, The Big Splat.
[6] See Dennett 1995. The details of this question about the spontaneous development of early life from the inorganic constituents of the primitive earth have been extensively analyzed in scientific literature. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea contains an excruciatingly detailed, though eminently readable, discussion of the subject.
[7] The information in this first chart is derived from the book Earth: Portrait of a Planet, by Stephen Marshak. See Marshak.
[8] We use the abbreviations: “M” for mega, millions; “K” for kilo, thousands.
[9] The anthropological information in the second and third charts is derived from the Human Origins Program on the website of the Smithsonian Institution. See Smithsonian.
[10] Please refer to your local library or your favorite Internet search engine to obtain further details about the primates mentioned here without elaboration.
[11] See Hull.
[12] Calendar date conventions.
The traditional date notations of BC and AD come from the Christian tradition that, for many years, dominated in Western Civilization.
BC – before Christ
AD – anno Domini (in the year of the Lord)
More modern writers have substituted the notations of BCE and CE in order to be more sensitive to easily offended non-Christian readers.
CE – common era
CE – current era
CE – Christian era
BCE – before common era
BCE – before current era
BCE – before Christian era
In any case, the terminology refers to the same thing, that is, dates on the standardized Gregorian calendar.
When the author was growing up and learning to read in his particular schooling environment, the customary terminology was to use the BC/AD standard, so he has chosen to continue that tradition in this book. Of course, for the purposes of political correctness, any reader is welcome, even encouraged, to substitute the terminology she or he prefers.
[13] Although we insist that this book is based on facts from science, it is impossible to entirely ignore the traditions of religion that have become important influences in our culture of today. A simple example is the Gregorian calendar baseline selected for counting years.
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CHAPTER TWO
100,000 YEARS AGO
Now that we have taken a cursory look at the history of our planet, let’s go back to visit a time before the advent of modern man. Jump into our time machine while we adjust the controls for 100,000 years ago. This date will give Earth a chance to have evolved most of the life forms that are present today, but without the complications of modern man.
During the Pleistocene Epoch, the time from 1.8 million to 11,000 years ago, global cooling alternated with warming periods for 20 to 30 cycles. The resulting ice ages caused glaciers to advance and recede over Canada and the northern U.S., Europe and Asia.[1]
As we travel back in time, we should look to visit a period between ice ages. When we get there, we will find a world covered with lush vegetation, except for the snowy, polar regions and some desert areas. Vast forests and grasslands cover most of the land masses. The land plants have been evolving for more than 400 million years and range from mosses and ferns to grasses, bushes and trees. Living in the midst of this vegetation we find insects of many types; worms, crawlers, hoppers, flyers. Birds populate the trees and skies, in many varieties. The land supports amphibians, reptiles, and mammals in increasing variety. The seas, covering two thirds of the planet, are teeming with life as well, with plankton, mollusks, jellyfish, eels, sharks, and many others. Life, of course, started out in the seas.
Early man was also on the scene by this time, but he certainly hadn’t taken command of his environment. Our ancestors, modern Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa about 130 thousand years ago, long after the earliest genus Homo of some 2 million years ago.
At the time we will visit, 100,000 years ago, man is still a hunter-gatherer, at the mercy of the weather and other forces of nature. Life is hard for these cavemen (and women, and their children), who live much the same as any other wild animals. So we will avoid disturbing any of them.
Let’s choose to re-materialize our time machine in a temperate climate, in a place that may some day be chosen for a national park. Observe on our past-o-scope this particularly attractive area to park our machine in a meadow next to a little stream at the edge of a forest. Since our time vehicle operates a lot like a helicopter, we should be able to place it on that spot without causing any damage to the environment.
Thump. A perfect landing!
Now that we have arrived, open the hatch and step out of our vehicle into the sunshine. What a beautiful summer day it is in this idyllic place. Take a deep breath of the clean fresh air. Smell the pleasant aromas of the forest in the afternoon.
See the birds circling in the air, riding the afternoon thermals, keeping an eye out for their dinner. Hear the calls of other animals in the forest, alarmed by our arrival, giving their fellows the word to be cautious. Listen to the birds singing from the trees. Hear the burbling of the water in the creek, flowing around the rocks.
Look at the profusion of wild flowers blooming in this meadow. See how they are attended by bees, busy collecting nectar, and incidentally, pollinating the flowers. Feel the rich soil, like a sponge beneath your feet, nourishing the roots of the lush vegetation.
Look across the meadow at that big tree. Can you see the fox, or perhaps a proto-fox, sneaking out of the woods? He sees us, but knows we are far enough away to be no threat. He is stalking some small creature in the grass. Did you seem him dart after it? Looks like he’s got his lunch.
So here we have Mother Nature in all her glory. We can appreciate this balanced ecology with a great diversity of plants and animals living together in the continuing cycles of life. It seems to be an ideal world existing in a time before the depredations of man. Wouldn’t this place be a true paradise for an avid environmentalist?
Now let’s stop to think for a moment how this perfect ecology came to be. It seems an idyllic garden on an earth, from not too long ago, without the disturbances of modern man. This profusion of life forms, all the plants and animals together, are interacting in a busy, complex fabric of life and death. Each individual, in concert with others of his species, has carved out a niche to survive in the ecology.
How did all these creatures come to this happy state? They all arrived at this point in history by every individual watching out for himself, acting only in his own, selfish, narrow self-interest, with no regard whatsoever for his neighbor.
Think about that one for a minute. A highly complex collection of life forms, in amazing diversity, blanketing the entire planet, forming an ideal ecology, that looks frighteningly similar to what you see today outside your window, was created by each individual, throughout history, watching out for himself alone.
Anarchy
This idyllic scene represents the anarchy of the natural world. Anarchy is the complete lack of government, because there are no people to establish one. Anarchy means that behavior is governed by the law of the jungle, where the rules are: kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.[2] Anarchy leads to survival of the fittest, and natural selection at its finest, where violence is the answer to every question.[3]
When you, as an animal, live in this kind of environment, you need to act for yourself, and do whatever you are capable of. If you have teeth and claws, use them. If you are fleet of foot, use that talent to flee the creatures that want you for dinner. If you find some tasty berries on a bush, go ahead and eat them. Don’t bother asking permission first. If you are a carnivore, lie in wait for your victim to wander into range. Jump out quickly and kill him before he has the chance to flee. Don’t worry about fairness or a human concept of justice. You are an animal trying to survive in the wild. Satisfying your hunger is the instinct you must obey. Nobody else is there to help you. You must take care of yourself, if you want to survive and propagate your kind. Only the strongest and fittest survive. The slow or less skilled in killing succumb to the more powerful, and become their dinner.
Welcome to the wild world of nature, where might makes right, and the ends justify the means. Violence rules the world.
The question of good versus evil always arises at this point in our discussion. We wish to know whether this law of the jungle, as practiced by the animals we see around us, is morally justifiable or not. At this point in the history of the planet, there is no way to tell. Remember that we are looking at a time before man has developed any civilization worthy of the title. Nobody with a brain large enough to appreciate the concepts of good and evil has bothered to consider the subject. For the present we must ignore the subject of justice. The world of animals is simply life as it is, without judgments.
So here we are standing around our time machine, admiring the beauties of nature on the earth of 100,000 years ago. Have you noticed all the flying insects buzzing around our ears? That’s fairly irritating to our civilized tastes, but you need to expect that when you go out in the woods. It’s a good thing we brought along our insect repellent. We certainly don’t want to give up our modern conveniences. Speaking of which, we can’t stay here for too long, because there are no hotels or grocery stores. Besides, some large animals may smell us, and come to investigate. We wouldn’t want some Sabertooth tiger, or a similar creature, to decide we look like dinner.
Also, we ourselves would start to get hungry after four hours or so, and we don’t want to start hunting or harvesting fruit, for fear of disturbing the past and changing history. We wouldn’t want to get back to our own time and learn that our trip had altered our own civilization in some significant way. So let’s pile back into the time machine and return to our own time, where we belong.[4]
Now that we are safely back to our familiar twenty-first century environment, we may go outside and find a world similar to the one we just visited, one where the anarchy of nature still holds sway. If you visit your local national park, or even a nearby state park, you can hike for a half-hour and get far enough away from the highway to be completely on your own in nature. The plants, birds, insects, rodents, and whatever larger animals you encounter, still live in the same type of environment we saw during our time travel. Their lives are generally solitary, brutal and short as they strive to survive in the hazardous conditions of their competitive world.[5] They try to scratch their livings from their wild environment using whatever skills their evolution has provided. They still exist in that narrow ecological niche they and their ancestors have been able to carve out of their environment.
Chapter Notes:
[1] See Marshak, Earth, Chapter 22, Section 8, “The Pleistocene Ice Ages,” pp. 709-718.
[2] Loaded words warning: “Anarchy” is one of those loaded words that means different things to different people. It can mean confusion, disorder, formlessness, illegality, lawlessness or revolution. Anarchism in the political sense can mean liberty, where people may agree to develop their own sense of morality based on their individual beliefs. This may be considered a good thing, a happy state of affairs, where people have the freedom of political and economic self-rule. As a philosophical concept, anarchy can suggest liberty without the implication of disorder. However, for the purposes of this book, anarchy means the complete lack of a government order, as in the world of animals where every creature acts only for his own narrow self-interest with no regard for how his actions might affect the lives of others.
[3] See Darwin. This view of nature, of evolution by natural selection, was first described by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book, Origin of the Species. These concepts represent a giant leap forward in the scientific understanding of nature. The subjects of evolution and natural selection, where the animals compete for survival in an evolving environment, and related topics have been exhaustively described in the literature. See also Dennett, 1995, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, for a modern analysis of the entire subject.
[4] Full disclosure: The scene featuring the time machine is a fictional device used to illustrate the points about life on the early Earth. Time travel is actually impossible under the current scientific understanding of reality, and will remain so until the second law of thermodynamics is superseded by a more sophisticated explanation of the underlying principles.
[5] The quote about life being brutal and short comes from Thomas Hobbes, whose dates are 1588-1679. In his book, Leviathan, Chapter XIII, “On the Natural Condition of Mankind, as Concerning their Felicity, and Misery,” while lamenting the sad state of mankind in the throes of warfare, the philosopher wrote “ . . . and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” See Hobbes.
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CHAPTER THREE
THE MEANING OF LIFE
In Chapter 1, we looked at the amoeba and mentioned that it is the simplest form of life we would consider in this book. What is the meaning of life for this most basic life form? This may seem to be a ridiculous question, but if we eventually wish to contemplate the meaning of life for humans, for ourselves, we should first consider much simpler cases.
This creature exists in nature, and has survived for millions of years, so we think this kind of success implies an underlying meaning to it all. We, as humans, realize that the term “meaning” has no meaning to the amoeba itself, or even to the community of amoebae.
We propose that the meaning of life for the amoeba is simply the struggle for survival and propagation of its kind, because that is what it spends all its time doing. This explanation for its behavior forms the baseline for the simple forms of life, and will continue up the tree of life as more complex forms develop.
Above the single-celled creature on the tree of life, we find multi-celled creatures, which represent a major step in the progress of evolution, but they add little to our understanding of life. But once multi-celled creatures evolved, cells began to become specialized, so as to perform different functions for the host organism. Think of a primitive worm with a mouth, a digestive tract, and an anus. It has become a food-processing organism, made up of different types of cells that perform their own functions in support of the creature. It has skin cells to isolate it from its environment. It has gut cells to extract nourishment from its food. It has some early form of muscle to move the food along inside its gut, and also to propel the creature in its search for more food. It eats things and casts off waste products.
What does the worm eat? It eats organic materials and other creatures of lower life forms it is able to digest. It converts food to energy to support its bodily functions. Thus, a food chain has developed in nature to support a primitive ecology. And this worm may yet become part of the food chain for some higher animal of the future.
What is the meaning of life for this worm? It is still the struggle for survival and propagation of its species, just like the earlier, less complex creature. The larger the community of worms becomes, the better chance they have to survive and advance together in the scheme of nature. One of the functions of the worm in its environment will be to provide food for some other animal, higher on the food chain in the ecology. But to become food for others is not a meaning of life, it is one of the hazards. The meaning of life is the struggle for survival, which includes avoiding becoming food. The worms must propagate their kind faster than they are consumed by enemies, otherwise they will become extinct.
Extinction is a major hazard in the web of life. Extinction has eliminated many millions of life forms from the game of life, but the larger ecology still seems to grow in complexity and diversification over the ages, despite the many threats to its continuation.
Plants
Moving along to another life form, let’s look at the meaning of life for a plant. Take a fruit tree as an example. Life for a tree is pretty boring. It can’t go anywhere, and it has no brain to use for worrying about its lot in the world. It is stuck in one spot by its roots fastened in the ground. It uses its roots to extract water and nutrients from the soil. It uses its leaves to gather sunlight and make food via photosynthesis. It grows new branches and puts on more leaves. It creates fruit and seeds to drop on the ground in the hope that it will propagate its kind, to create a grove or even a forest of trees. But, of course, it has no awareness of this “hope.”
If an animal comes along to eat its leaves or fruit, it has no defense. It must stand there and take it. But it has developed the capability to re-grow its leaves and create more fruit. So a plant can serve a useful function in the ecology as food for other creatures, but it still must grow faster than it is consumed in order to survive. It also retains the trick of re-growing from its roots if all of its branches are severed or burned away. And the seeds it has sprinkled about its location can hide in the soil until the conditions of moisture and temperature stimulate germination, and thus the beginning of a new tree. The meaning of life for a plant is also its passive struggle for survival, wherever it happens to be located.
Mammals
Let us climb up the tree of life, ignoring thousands of other life forms, until we reach the birds and mammals. These creatures have evolved into organisms with hundreds of different cell types to define their various bodily functions. Bone, muscle, nerve, blood, gut, hair or feather, and cornea cells represent a small sample of the many types making up the creature. Birds and mammals have their cells organized into fabulously complex systems which allow them to fly over or run across or burrow under the surface of their world to find food and shelter, build nests and modify their surroundings to benefit themselves and their offspring.
They have developed brains, and a degree of awareness about their surroundings. Use of tools and perhaps a bit of creative thinking might be attributed to some of the more advanced specimens. An example would be a simian using a stick to probe an anthill to stir up more of the inhabitants for his lunch. Or think of a sea bird carrying a shellfish high in the air and dropping it on the rocks below to release the tasty morsel inside.
The behavior of all of these animals is directed towards feeding themselves, fighting off enemies, and propagating their offspring. And they use all the capabilities at their disposal. If they find berries on a bush, they eat them without asking permission. If they see another creature they want for food, they will try to kill it for dinner. When they are hungry, their motivation is to fill their bellies, and they use whatever tooth, beak or claw they have for the purpose, while taking care not to be killed themselves.[1]
For all the animals and plants living in the wild, it is a hard life out there. They must compete for survival in the anarchy of nature, against other creatures for the same resources.
Although birds and mammals are abundantly more sophisticated than the life forms discussed earlier, the meaning of life for them is, again, simply the struggle for survival.[2]
Deception
Do animals lie, cheat and steal? These are human concepts, so how could they apply to the life of animals? But note that lying, cheating and stealing are merely human versions of deception.
Deception is a powerful weapon in the arsenal of survival. Deception has been practiced by animal life long before humans appeared on the scene. If you are a predator, hide behind a rock until your dinner wanders past. Pretend you are not really there. Conversely, if you are prey, hide in the bushes as your predator skulks by. Pretend you are not there. Try to fool them.
If you are a turtle with a tongue that looks like a worm, open your jaws and wave that bait around in the current. When your prey swims past looking for dinner, it will come over to investigate that tasty looking morsel. Slam your jaws shut at the last moment and eat him whole.[3]
If you are a chameleon, change your color to match the surface you are resting on. Camouflage yourself against the background. Pretend you are not there so you may deceive those nasty birds that want to eat you.
Watch any nature show on TV. Read an article about wild animals in National Geographic. Observe the animals practicing deception against their predators and prey. Lying, cheating, and stealing food is a way of life in the animal world. Deception is a handy tool for use in the game of survival.