Clever Porkers

 Killing Pigs

When Gorge Orwell (Eric Blair) sat down to write his masterpiece Animal Farm he brought to the project a lifetime of practical experience of farms and farming.

“Animal Farm might have been consigned to the dusty attics of history long ago had Orwell’s rendering of his animal protagonists not been so on point and credible — the sheep lemming-like, the pigs intelligent and top of the pecking order and the aged donkey, Benjamin, stubborn and knowing.

They are rooted in Orwell’s real farming experiences and they demonstrate his profound and deep-seated understanding of animal character traits, behaviour and husbandry requirements. ‘Major was already ensconced on his bed of straw… He was twelve years old and had lately grown rather stout, but he was still a majestic-looking pig, with a wise and benevolent appearance in spite of the fact that his tushes had never been cut,’ Orwell writes with a farmer’s knowledge at the beginning of the book.

‘My father was very observant of everything, and would quite quickly absorb the various characteristics of farm animals and subsequently pigeonhole them in his mind as to how clever or not they appeared to be,’ reflects Richard Blair, the son Orwell (real name Eric Arthur Blair) adopted aged three weeks in 1944, with his wife, Eileen.

‘I guess in Animal Farm, he started with the pigs and placed the animals in descending order as he saw them.’

Therefore it is not surprising that he gave to the pigs the top of the pecking order; as it firmly followed what he already knew – pigs are by far and away the cleverest animals on the farm.

Back in the day I used to sometimes help out on the farm belonging to the Hall family.  You gain an impressive understanding of animals, particularly farm animals by what used to be called O.J.T. – on the job training.

I sat on a tractor one day when I noticed a sow pig sauntering across the back forty toward a field of excellent corn, almost ready to be harvested.  Now I know this was not allowed and so did the pig.  In fact Pa Hall had strategically placed some barbed wire around the corn field so that no animals would get in there and ruin the crop.

He forgot to tell the pigs.

And, what’s worse, he forgot that pigs are smart – very smart. 

I kept thinking as I watched the sow head towards the corn, “She’ll never get past the barbed wire!”

There was a tree which formed part of the field boundary and it was misshapen.  It rose about three feet upwards and then split to form two branches before it continued skyward.  There was no barbed wire between the  two branches at the three foot level, the space was up off the ground and not very large so no wire has been strung there.  A very false economy as it happens!

I watched the old sow as she approached the gap and stood there looking at it.  Knowing that pigs are smart, I expected that she would see that she could not gain access to the corn, turn around and head back.

What happened next amazed me.  

She calmly walked back about 50 feet towards the farm yard, turned and charged the barbed wire.  And I mean charged.  Pigs can run surprisingly fast when they want to.  I was convinced that I was witnessing the very first kamikaze pig.  When she was about three feet from the tree that had no barbed wire in the very small gap, she launched herself right at it.  She was, of course, too fat to squeeze through the gap, but she did manage to wedge herself between the two branches.  I watched in amazement as she began to wriggle from left to right.  With increasing vigour she wriggled away for at least 15 minutes and with each wriggle she advanced ever so slightly through the gap; until at last she managed, after one almighty wriggle, to plop gently on the other side and began to feast on the corn.

Clearly she had done this before.  She was in no hurry.

I would have liked to stick around to see her get back to the farm, but I was honour bound to tell Pa Hall the story and let him make of it what he will.  I duly reported the events and although I’m not entirely sure he believed me eventually he just shrugged his shoulders and muttered damn pig!

Before I leave he old sow perplexing the humans, I must mention a story I often told to school children – as long as they were over the age of 13.  

Now, conventional wisdom has it that whilst pigs are quite clever; they are not intuitively so.  I disagree.

One of the least pleasant jobs on the farm, aside from slaughtering the cows, was castrating the male piglets.  They are often called shoats after they have been weaned.

First you have to round up all the young male pigs and corner them in the barn.  At this stage they are usually quite calm and curious about their new surroundings.  You manage to grab one of the little critters and whilst sitting on a stool you place the piglet between your knees with his bottom side up.  By this stage the piglet is screaming blue murder, but it clearly doesn’t know why – nor do the others. Next you take your single-edged razor blade and swiftly and deftly remove the pig’s ball bag and spray some disinfectant on the wound. Now he let’s out an unheard of scream, unlike anything heard before.

Immediately, all the other piglets scream and start running around looking for a way out. 

This special scream obviously means in Porcinesque “Help, they have just cut my balls off!”  How else would the others know exactly what’s coming?

The moral: pigs are smart and can communicate with each other.  Perhaps when we kill ourselves and despoil the planet through war or disease Orwell’s vision may come true – pigs rule!

Carbon Units Infesting This Planet

 

I’m sure there are folks out there trolling the internet for items about Star Trek. They’re called Trekkies. And the title of this post is a direct quotation from Star Trek - The Motion Picture.  So, it’s reasonable to expect that they may find this post and have a look. They will be disappointed. I apologise to them if they feel that I have tricked them into looking at my blog instead of interesting facts about Star Trek.  It is not my intention to trick anyone.  

This post is about us - the carbon units currently infesting this planet.  We’ve been infesting it for quite some time now, and if reports are to be believed we may not be infesting for much longer.  Let’s face it: the end of the world is a popular topic in fiction, films and documentaries.  Imagining the end of the world or of civilization is a growth industry.  Bad news still sells newspapers.  

Why should this be so? Sorry it comes with the territory. In historical terms it's pure hubris. Homo sapiens stands head and shoulders above other species as the pinnacle of evolution. And, unless you are a religious person this is simply the result of the march of evolution. But, evolution has no end product. And however much you may wish it wasn't so we are simply the evolutionary result of many chance encounters. We are in the box without knowing so and have no idea how to imagine any other reality outside the box.  We are prisoners of this planet and this reality.

We are, if the commentariat is to be believed, at a crossroads on this planet. The resources required to keep our species going forward are either too difficult to maintain or too depleted to enable us to go forward, as we have unerringly done for the last few thousand years. I submit that voluntarily going back to some sort of sustainable pre-industrial utopia is simply not an option. 

Now, it may well be that Micawber-like something will just turn up. Possible but increasingly unlikely in my view. Society has become so dependent on technologies that the average Joe doesn't really understand much about how things work.  He just doesn't need to. 

Think I'm joking? In the dim and distant past I taught science. I loved a lesson where I asked 12 year olds to explain how some mundane and common items in the home actually worked. A light bulb or a telephone or a heating system could they explain, even briefly, how they work? Some of the answers were very entertaining. Mostly they fell back on you just flip the switch. That was the extent of their knowledge and engagement with the modern world. And, it was not necessarily their fault.  To the average Joe things just work until they don’t and then you get somebody else to make it work again.  

Think we could turn the clock back and become subsistence farmers again? Get real. 

We either find some way to share the resources or our stay here may be much shorter than we either think or wish. 

Which neatly brings me to my dream, or should I say my nightmare. Essentially we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that though as individuals we are mortal, as a species we are immortal. We go on and on and on for as far as we can imagine. All our hopes and the remorseless march of the selfish gene populate our future. 

Out in the cosmos there are problems. Despite efforts lasting a long time in human terms we are still alone and may continue to be on and on and on. There are lots of theories purporting to prove that out there life must be really quite common. Thousands of habitable planets are just waiting for contact. But, there is a chilling alternative. Habitable planets and even life itself may be as grains of sand on every beach on Earth. Intelligent life could even be common, as grains of sand in a wheelbarrow. Time and the sustainability of civilisations could be the controlling feature. Many civilizations may have existed, flourished and died before the capacity we have of detecting them has become available.  

Septics will note here that what I’m describing is not new.  Ancient Aliens visiting us is not a new idea.  What is new is that they may have thought us so primitive as to not be worthy of another visit and before it occurred to them to look us up they themselves fell victim to what I’ve described.  Overpopulated, running out of essential resources and unable to sufficiently master the technology necessary to avoid an asteroid taking them out, or some new virulent disease plunging their civilization back into the Dark Ages; they just ran out of time for a return visit.  The fourth dimension - time may be the controlling feature here, not some complicated algorithm involving mathematical probabilities.   They may have just run out of time as we may before the cosmic forces align at precisely the right moment.

The comfort of religion or philosophy only works if we can be assured that we will be noticed and remembered.  Cast ahead to a future where the Earth is just an uninteresting looking  rock orbiting a nondescript star and a passing space ship just goes cheerfully on its way not realising that a complex carbon-based civilisation once was here but destroyed the Earth.

We leave no trace. We leave no marker.  We are truly alone in the cosmos separated not so much by space as by time.  Our immortality is gone in a flicker of space-time.  

That, I contend, is a nightmare truly worthy of note.

Germanwings

Mad as a March Hare

Alpine tragedy. 'Nuff said?

Actually, no, that is not enough said.

Airplanes falling out of the sky for no apparent reason is quite a rational fear. It harks back to our ancestor's earliest days. The main reason we have stereoscopic vision is so we can accurately judge how far away that next branch is; because we all instinctively know that if we miss it we are going to fall and the fear of falling is inbuilt. It's in our genes.

When we get on a plane that genetic fear is triggered again. We are afraid of falling. No matter how many time we are told that flying is safer than crossing a road, we still feel instinctively frightened. There are, of course, some people who insist they love flying. They are called idiots or downright liars.

Still, we all need to fly sometimes as the alternatives are either too inconvenient, too expensive or just plain not there. (I did see the other day some crazy idea to make a land route from Europe to Canada/US via the Bering strait – this I've got to see! In my lifetime? Not likely.) Check out: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/11493681/Plans-for-superhighway-linking-Britain-and-America.html

We get on the plane and we not only overcome our natural fear, but our problems are compounded by putting our lives in the hands of a large number of strangers – and the pilots are only part of it. There's the ground crew, responsible for seeing that our plane doesn't run into something whilst still on the ground (you may think this is much preferable to crashing, but the result is about the same – a plane full of fuel is likely to explode on the ground if you run into something), the air traffic controllers, the maintenance crews, the refuelling crews (remember the guys who didn't put enough go-juice in the BA flight that just made the runway at Heathrow a few years ago?). The list is long. And everything has to function perfectly for us to safely arrive at our destination. No wonder most of us are not all that keen.

All this becomes irrelevant if just one of the links in the chain becomes broken.

This is what seems to have happened to the Germanwings flight. The pilot crashed the plane, deliberately.

This is not in the script of possible frightening situations. Should it be? Probably yes, but no amount of pre-flight checks are likely to have had much chance of picking up this scenario. In the old days we would just call it an Act of God. Perhaps that is the best phrase for it.

10 000 BC - Update 18 Feb

And then it snowed

Predictably things went from bad to worse. With more people giving up, the tribe were down to 13 by the time the next show was screened on Monday.

A sudden snowstorm and freezing temperatures left them cold, wet miserable and more or less trapped in their huts. Disaster.

After consultations with the producers, it was decided to temporarily abandon the project and remove the tribe to a place of safety. With hot showers, hot food and some well-needed rest the remaining members recovered their spirits and the time was not entirely wasted.

The survival experts and the producers finally realised that two days of training to live in the Stone Age was never enough. So, in the time available while the snow poured down they tried to expand the knowledge of the group. Some tribe members used the time well. Some members, having been reminded what life in the 21st century was all about, decided to leave.

The seven remaining tribe members seemingly bonded well and appeared determined to make a success of the experiment.

Lots of positives were expounded, but could these be translated into real progress?

Finally they got back to the camp as the weather moderated. The tribe promptly decided to sack Steve. Steve is the archer and a wise head on old shoulders. How would he react?

Badly.

Steve decided to leave. And then there were six.

(aside – a recent news report concerned a proposed reality TV show. The purpose of the show would be to “select” members to join a mission to Mars – where they would set up a colony. The producers seem to think they can do this for almost no money (compared to the propose NASA budget for a Mars mission). This would, at least, be more realistic than 10 000 BC. Members of the tribe just quit; they leave the camp via a four-wheel drive vehicle, and they resume a normal everyday life. Put 20 people on Mars and then we'll see who can survive! Craziest idea I've heard in some long time!)

Left with six, three men and three girls, the tribe began to struggle, despite having their food stores replenished with 10 days supply of nuts and berries and yet another deer.

They managed to skin the deer and prepare it for making deer jerky. This is a good plan for the first deer was wasted because it was soon infested with fly maggots. They even managed to wedge it up a tree overnight to prevent animals feeding on the tempting carcass.

Paul Barnes (the leader voted in after the coup to get rid of Steve Nicholson got sick. Really sick. Constant coughing and short of breath. He was removed to the medical tent for assessment. Down to five.

Of the five, one of the ladies is a vegetarian. Great call producers! She is running out of food. (I didn't spend 10 000 years clawing my way to the top of the food chain to become a vegetarian!) Digging up the required roots for carbohydrates is back-braking work with no modern tools. She is going to starve!

John Paul was helping her to dig. He announced last night that he was leaving but the whole group begged him to stay, so he remains for the time being.

Melissa more or less takes over leadership as Paul's illness prevents him from playing an active part.

This looks like it could be a blessing in disguise. It is very possible that our ancestors lived in a matriarchal society. Men are hunting all day and women are raising children. Nagging has a long and illustrious history!!

Paul eventually arrives back at the camp but he is weak.

Last word to the Mirror:

“In just eight days they caught 10 tiny crayfish and – drum roll – a mouse. Enough to reduce everyone to severe malnutrition. Yay.

As more and more of them collapsed and had to be rushed to hospital, the on-site doctor declared a thoroughly modern medical emergency. Unless these ailing losers were fed fast the show was over.

Enter the programme’s hapless staff with a mammoth meal of jerky, honey, isotonic drinks and “for the first time in days”... fresh meat. A dinosaur-size slab of venison. What, no wine? A nice Bulgarian red to wash it down?

Wearing the panicked ­expression of a man whose mission was falling apart at the seams, producer Rob Rawlings lied: “The aim of this experiment isn’t to watch 20 people starve. It’s to see if 20 people can survive like a Stone Age tribe.”

Now I’m no expert, but I’d hazard a guess that when the going got tough for those real-life Fred ­Flintstones, there was no caring camera crew ready to provide them with tasty takeaways.

In other words Rob, the answer’s no. You have emphatically established that 20 people CAN’T survive like a Stone Age tribe. Your experiment has failed. On an epic scale. Get used to it.”

10 00 BC Update

And disaster was not long in coming to call

Why do people say, “I hate to be an I told you so.” It's such a cop-out. Actually, everyone loves to be the one who is proved correct whilst their buddies are all proved wrong. It's human nature – get over it!

This is exactly what has happened to the producers of the programme 10 000 BC. I told them it was not going to work and I was right.

After seven weeks in a programme which should have lasted for four months, it's just about over. The “tribe” has lost more members and those who are left are struggling to make any impression on the environment.

What's gone wrong?

In the first instance, the programme designers set up an entirely false premise. To recap – they had 20 people put into a stone age environment and (supposedly) left them to sort out how to survive.

First point: the tribe had two days of instruction from a “Stone Age survival expert”. So, what it took our ancestors 20 000 years to learn the hard way the tribe was supposed to learn in two days? This was never either going to work or be a fair test.

Secondly, the tools provided to the tribe were inadequate to make for an interesting test. Example: much play was made in the first programme as the tribe struggled for a whole day to get a fire going without matches or a cigarette lighter. This was completely unrealistic. Our ancestors had fire. No doubt they had methods of making fire if they had to. But, what they most probably did was keep the fire “at home” going. So a day was wasted when the tribe should have been doing more important things. Consequently they were way behind before they started.

Leadership has been a real problem. The producers should have stayed with the team for at least a week to identify possible leaders and prepare them. Instead the archer got the job and he has been singularly unable to make an impression on many members of the group. Why? He is too soft. He's a conciliator. He's a man of his time – that is to say our time. A good example would be his dealings with Amir. Amir is a waste of space. He has contributed nothing to the success of the experiment. In the last show, he calmly announced that he was only prepared to continue with the experiment if he was provided with a mobile phone call home each week and at least one hot meal per week as well!

Oh, did I mention that the producers had to step in and provide food so the tribe did not either starve or quit altogether?

Steve has been either unable or unwilling to tell Amir to go away. The tribe think that more people means more success – actually they need less people and more skills!

Steve is an archer – a hunter. He should be hunting. Instead he decided to bank on fishing as the food saviour. There is a small lake about 2 hours walk away. The lake has fish. The tribe have no way of catching them. They tried to make some hooks out of bone from the deer. They don't work. In any event they had no way to leave the bank and get out on the lake where the big fish are.

Again the producers should have provided them with hooks made by the survival expert. They should not have been expected to re-invent the wheel. They should have been provided with a boat – made to stone-age specs. Then they could have then sent the girls out on the lake to fish whilst Steve went hunting. With some sort of secure food supply they would stood some sort of chance. Instead, all they managed to do was to make less than adequate traps to catch crayfish. The caught six or seven in two days. Disaster.

They may make it for a little while longer – with the help and intervention of the production team. But, as an experiment in Stone Age living it has been a very poor test. The tribe have tried but have not really been given a realistic chance.

Good TV but poor premise.

10 000 BC

A real lesson

On Channel Five – a channel which I seldom watch – they are showing a programme called 10 00 BC. The premise is as simple as it is problematical.

Take twenty ordinary people from GB with a selection of practical and life skills, maroon them in a forest in Bulgaria for eight weeks with no technology from the 21st Century; and see how they make out mimicing our distant ancestors. The twenty included both men and women. Some had real outdoor experience either rock climbing, camping, or orienteering. Some had useful “civilian” skills such as archery, fishing and construction. They were a real cross-section of society – minus the “intellectuals”. For, only the end of the Stone Age and the development of agriculture would bring the deveopment of the complex, technological societies we see today.

Quite ordinary folks in an extraordinary situation, really. The group contained lots of your “I know a guy just like that” types.

Just to be on the safe side the producers had a survival expert stay with the group for two days to get them going. Sort of. They also provided them with a source of fresh water and three or four huts built to pre-historic specifications. Being kind-hearted folks they even left a freshly killed deer behind to provide a head start in the food race.

A film crew stayed with the group – otherwise there would be no film and no show! This is glossed over by the documentary makers, but an intelligent viewer would realise that they were not really marooned because the film crew (and therefore help) was always there in the background.

As an example, before the show got underway an elderly (late 50's) lady was taken ill and removed from the site before the challenge really got started. Also, one of the lads decided this was not for him and left. So, in practice rescue is really only a phone call away.

The first day was a bit of a lark. After spending some time trying to butcher the deer, they rightly decided that the priority was to get a fire started. Good call.

They had no matches, no butane touch, no nothing except a primitive bow and stick fire-making tool which our ancestors might have used. They spent most of the day trying and trying to get it to work after the first effort failed miserably. Finally, just as dark fell, they made it. Fire! Prometheus would have been really pleased!

With the fire going and sticks collected you might think that they were off to a good start. They roasted some of the deer over the fire and went to bed suitably fed and probably feeling as if a really good start had been made on Day One.

Day Two dawned. The left-over deer, which they had hung on the branches of a tree, was covered in flies. The weather was unseasonably warm and they were constantly attacked by the local mosquitoes. Some of the group were reluctant to get out from underneath their nice, warm animal skins. By evening the survival expert had bid they farewell and they were on their own. Wisely, they decided to “elect” one of their number as leader. The bow and arrow expert got the job. His success would be measured in the amount of co-operation and respect he could gain from the others. He did make a start at assigning jobs to various small groups. Some when to forage for edible plants. Some dug a primitive latrine. Some had another go at getting some useable meat from what was left of the deer. Some, alas, did very little.

One bright spark decided he knew where some edible mushrooms were and led a group in a wild goose chase after taking a wrong turn. Steve, the leader, led a foraging group who stopped to try and strip bark from a silver birch to use to make some sort carrying pots or containers. After spending hours with their flint tools, they decided it was too difficult, gave up and collected a few roots instead. One particularly dopey guy decided to spend the whole day devising a trap to catch a wild boar. If it works, which I suspect it won't, it might give a boar a headache of a bruised rib. Kill it? Not a chance.

Back at camp, it was discovered that despite having dug a latrine, a person or persons unknown had defacated quite near the tents. By the end of Day Two, food was running low, (the deer meat was covered in maggots) and it began to dawn on the group that this was not going to be a jolly camping trip in a charming, benign woodland setting after all. Dejection had well and truly set in. There were signs of tensions within the group. Some were clearly not pulling their weight. Some had been reduced to tears by trivial set-backs. Leadership was lacking. A sense of community was not really developing.

As the programme develops, the weather is going to turn colder and colder. You can clearly see this in the intro which shows our Stone-Agers shivering in their shelters with the snow falling and a good covering of the white stuff already on the ground. Lots of fun to come.

So, what have we learned so far?

Life in 10 000 BC was hard – very hard. I'm convinced that we have no real idea of how hard our ancestors had to work just to stay alive. I'm convinced the poor souls in this programme have no real idea how hard they will have to work if they are to make it to the end of the eight weeks.

Food is the essential and they show no sign of being able to either hunt for it or forage for it. Already some people are complaining of being hungry. This is despite the gift of a deer and the results of two days foraging. Do we “moderns” really understand hunger? I suspect not (except for those unfortunates in Third World Countries – actually the third-worlders might do a better job of surviving than this hapless crew of GB's finest!).

Clothing became a real problem real soon. The unseasonably warm weather meant a plague of insects, particularly flies. And where you have flies, you will have maggots. The animal skinsthey were using as bedding became infested with maggots, so the producers replaced them with wollen blankets on Day Two.

Shelter is just about Ok for the moment, but when it gets cold they are going to experience life like our ancestors, who must have been mostly cold most of the time in the winter.

This programme focuses the mind on the journey we made to get where we are. It has been a long one. It has been a costly one. It has been one of fits and starts. But, modern man is the product of people who overcame these kind of challenges. What seems to be missing is the ability to put to one side the usual modern sensibilites. To survive our ancestors must have been fairly ruthless – especially with those who did not pull there own weight. The Bulgarian guinea pigs seem unable to do this at present. If they can't master the skill of working together they will surely fail. I look forward to the rest of the programme.

Defining Characteristic

Why we are what we are.

Endless learned literature, endless speculation, endless theories attempt to define the human condition. We are, rightly, fascinated by who we are, how we got here and where are we going.

We see ourselves as special in so many ways. To the religious we are God's chosen. To the secular we are the pinnacle of a vast web of genetic mutations which, without pre-ordained purpose, lead eventually to us.

Whichever is your view, we can agree that we are unique. Well, almost. Elephants have great memories and appear to grieve when another elephant dies. Dolphins famously once said, “Goodbye and thanks for all the fish.” (Douglas Adams – Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Very human indeed. Chimps can plan an attack and work out that only co-operation between individuals will bring success. This is one, but not the most important one of being human.

I often illustrated the defining human characteristic to children by using lions as a prompt. We have all seen wildlife programmes and are intrigued by how lions will work together to bring down their prey. This is very human-like. They have a plan – though it does not involve much communication between pride members - mostly instinct. We seldom focus on the poor gazelles.

They graze, head down. They look up to see where danger lies. Nature has provided them with excellent vision at spotting moving lions. In the long grass and still (and down wind) the lions creep closer and closer.

Eventually the lions charge. All the gazelles run and run very fast. One lion trips a gazelle and it's down. A quick bite to the throat and it's dinner time for lions. Darwin's survival of the fittest in action.

What about the other gazelles? Do they stop to see what has happened? Do they remonstrate with each other at their compadre's ill-fortune? Does one gazelle cry, “Ouch, that's gotta hurt!”

No.

They are unable to summon up that most defining of human qualities – empathy.

We are able to put ourselves in other's shoes and imagine what they feel like. We can vicariously live the life of a lion or a gazelle or another human being and learn. No other creature can do this.

This is our greatest strength. The gazelles are much faster. The lions are much stronger, but we overcome them by empathising with each other, feeling each other's pain, imagining each other's suffering and co-operating with each other to defeat the much stronger foe. We alone can do this.

It is when we lose this ability – either through illness, stress or pain that we are most vulnerable. We can no longer see the “bit picture”. We are unable to plan effectively to overcome our difficulties. We are at the mercy of what Freud called the Id – the set of uncoordinated instinctual trends that in times of stress can override our rational thought processes. The Id may save us when confronted with a hungry lion, but is no help in a modern society with it's pressures that nature hasn't prepared us for.

For that, we have to nurture and regain our sense of empathy.

The Razor's Edge

Razor Addendum

How good is this! No sooner do I finish spouting off about one of my favourite gripes concerning human evolution than the scientists have come to my aid!

Researchers at Northeastern University in Boston discovered that most of us lead predictable lives. Who'd have guessed it!

Our travel arrangements are not very adventurous. By studying mobile phone data they found out that people rarely strayed from a six-mile radius. 70% of the time we can be found in our most visited location.

At Work? At a friends? Visiting John Terry's girlfriend's house?

They are hoping that the data will shed light on the spread of diseases. “We are all in one way or another boring,” said Albert-Lazlo Barabasi who co-wrote the study.

My point was and is that we are not very different (if at all) from our ancestors. What drives us would drive them.

Science may have some convincing evidence for the spread of human populations, but it has no answer to explain why people would up stakes from a sparsely populated and environmentally secure place and wander off to the freezing nether regions or worse.

This may be the Occam's Achilles. Seems like it to me.

Fancy a Close Shave?

Occam's Razor

No, this is not a Gillette commercial.

Rather it is a comment on Occam's Razor: first to Wikipedia -

Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor[1]), entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, is the principle that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" and the conclusion thereof, that the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one. The principle is attributed to 14th-century English logician, theologian and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham. Occam's razor may be alternatively phrased as pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate ("plurality should not be posited without necessity")[2]. The principle is often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae (translating to the law of parsimony, law of economy or law of succinctness). When competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selection of the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities while still sufficiently answering the question. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood. To quote Isaac Newton, "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, so far as possible, assign the same causes."[3]

Clear? I thought not. In layman's terms what it means is that given a choice between a simple and a complex explanation to a problem, always choose the simple one. It's probably correct.

This is fine, as far as it goes. Problem is is doesn't go very far.

Some examples. Why is there always a quantity of lost coins down the back of your settee/couch? Where do chickens roost in the desert? What did pre-historic man use for toilet paper? The list is long. The list is fairly endless.

But, is it correct?

I think not.

Let's take one of my favourite examples. One that has perplexed me since first I learned of it when I was (say) 12 or 13. Cro-Magnon man fascinated me. They were, as far as we can tell, modern humans. They would not be out of place walking down a street in London or New York. Yet for 25 to 30 thousand years they wandered about Europe and apparently achieved nothing. It took about that long to invent a wheel.

If, as we are led to believe, they were essentially us, what were they doing all that time? Back to Occam's razor. Occam would have us believe that the simplest explanation is the best and most accurate. They were just killing time. Fossil evidence says they were goofing around for thousands of years, getting nowhere. And the fossil evidence is always right. Right?

Maybe.

Let's back track a little. Our Cro-Frenchie pals were relative latecomers to Europe. Originally we were all Africans. The DNA tells us so. Out of Africa is all the rage.

According to both genetic and fossil evidence, archaic Homo sapiens evolved to anatomically modern humans solely in Africa, between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, with members of one branch leaving Africa by 60,000 years ago and over time replacing earlier human populations such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus. According to this theory, around the above time frame, one of the African subpopulations went through a process of speciation, prohibiting gene flow between African and Eurasian Human populations.[citation needed] The recent single origin of modern humans in East Africa is the near-consensus position held within the scientific community.[1]

So, if Wiki says so, it must be so.

What no-one really deals with is the why. If Occam is correct and the simplest explanation is the one the Our of Africa makes sense – doesn't it?

Not really.

If our ancestors wandered out of Africa about 60 000 years ago and got as far as Australia by about 45 000 years ago, what I want to know is not how, but why.

Assuming modern humans are the same as our African ancestors then what is interesting is not whether they wandered about all over but why they would bother. Who, for example, would voluntarily “vacation” on the snowy steppes of Siberia when you could just stay put on the warm, verdant coastal strips of India and Southeast Asia?


No-one deals with this. The DNA and fossil evidence says it is so; therefore, it is so. Full stop. Occam's Razor. I'm not convinced.

Missing Link?

Human evolutionary theory has suffered a shock recently with the release of details of a possible direct human ancestor dating from 6 million years ago – Ardipithecus ramdius – or Ardi for short.

Finding a specimen that old is surprising enough in itself; yet the real surprise is the revelation that Ardi lived in a well-forested and tropical environment and walked upright.

So, what' so surprising about that?

Previous theories about man's evolution have focussed on the idea that bi-pedal locomotion developed in response to a move to the dryer grasslands and away from the trees. This always seemed unlikely to me. The theory was that in order to see predators from a distance evolution favoured our ancestors who could stand and walk so they could see over the grass and spot the lions before the lions spotted them. Sounds good, until you stop and think about it.

In order for this theory to hold water you would have to have evidence that the environment was changing quite rapidly and that staying close to the trees was not really an option – unless you are a chip or orang-outang. This clearly flies in the face of obvious logic. Why would you choose a very precarious existence out on the plains when you could stay very close to the trees? Tough one that old Ardi may be able to shed light on.

According to the scientists involved in Ardi's discovery, she was up and about a long time before her descendants moved out onto the plains. Why? They speculate that by freeing up her hands she (and more particularly the “he” versions) were more able to gather food and return it to their mates, thereby providing the evolutionary advantage of walking upright a long time before we left the trees for good. Sounds fairly appealing.

But, in common with all theories – it's only a theory, and there are problems.

First, and I confess that I didn't really fully understand this before, the fossil evidence for Ardi and most of the other possible human ancestors you can find on the family tree is really very scanty. So scanty that we have many more fossils of, say, sabre-tooth cats than we have of humans. Therefore the analysis of human fossils remains and the extrapolation of the fossil evidence to form a theory about human evolution is based on very slim fossil evidence, to say the least. In Ardi's case the actual discovery of the fossil bones was made some 8 years ago and the field workers have been busy ever since in trying to firm up the evidence by using a variety of techniques and sources. We are just short of evidence. Very short! Why?

In my view, this is the key question.

Just stop and consider, we are talking about millions of years of human evolution. During that long period we have only a very few skeletal remains upon which to base any theory. Even given that the base populations in Africa were probably quite small, millions of years still adds up to millions of years of potential fossils. That's a lot of potential human carcasses lying about willing and able to form ancestor fossils.

They either are not there or we haven't found them yet. If they aren't there, why not?

Simple. What most of the researchers seem unable or unwilling to deal with is the place early man occupied in the food chain. Ardi and her cousins had very small brains – some only just slightly larger than a chimp. Their lives were short and brutal. They were prey species for all the large to medium predators. Think about the function of the hyenas and vultures on the plains of Africa today. They clean up. They clean up everything. They most certainly would have cleaned up any human remains they found. Result? Some very small, very chewed bone fragments.

After every rain (and these are fairly infrequent!) the scientists return to the valley where Ardi was found and search for newly uncovered bones. They may find some more evidence for Ardi and her kind. We wish them luck. Fortunately, the cause of evolution and, in particular, Darwinian evolution does not depend on their discoveries.

What evidence there is forced the scientists into formulating a new theory to account for the advent of bi-pedalism so early in the evolutionary saga. They came up with sex. Postulating that the males, by freeing up their hands, were able to gather food on the forest floor and near the edge of the savannah and carry it back to the females – thereby providing the earliest equivalent of the ubiquitous box of chocolate on record!! These males were successful in mating and evolution provided the rest.

This pre-supposes that early hominids were very unlike their simian relatives in mating behaviour. Even before the advantages of males co-operating in hunting activities may have “forced” them to be co-operative in mating, our ancestors were (seemingly) avoiding the potential fatal consequences of fighting to secure mates for a more equitable and sociable outcome. This gave us the real advantage over the other branches of the family. We work together and share the females. This behaviour is passed on to our offspring.

Every dog (or indeed proto-human) really does, therefore, have his day.

Bovine Mayhem, Raccoon Terror

Worrying!!

Strange to see in the paper yesterday two stories about animals attacking humans.

Story one, from the local EDP, concerned a farmer being trampled by his own cattle.

Number two – a woman in Florida was attacked by a marauding band of raccoons.

No, I'm not making this up!

Now, I have heard of cow attacks before. Despite the unlikely nature of such premeditated bovine assaults, it appears they are much more common than you might think. If you think not, try typing “cow attacks” into a Google search.

Herewith I must confess to putting a whole generation of school children at extreme risk by assuring them that cows are harmless, docile creatures and will not harm you. (Bulls are an exception!). I must plead ignorance. I just didn't know that cows were so damn dangerous! They never were when I was young.

At Thorndon in Suffolk, a farmer received “multiple injuries” after he was trampled by his own cattle. Roger Jones had broken ribs, cuts on his face and injured his shoulder after the cattle attacked him on his own land. He was in a stable condition in the hospital. (I had a look in EAU but didn't see Roger – I would have liked to find out some of the details!) Most of the cattle assaults documented on Google concern cows with calves. This makes sense. No matter how domesticated the beast, when the young are threatened (or are seen to be threatened by a brain-less cow) they will defend the calf. Fine. I can understand that. What I would like to know from Roger is what exactly was he doing when he was attacked? If they were his cows, surely they would be used to him and not see him as a threat?

People in England have died after being trampled by cows. Yes, it's true.

Part of my pitch to kids was our divorce from the natural world. Our recent ancestors would have had intimate knowledge of domestic (and wild) animals which we have lost. Ask most kids where a steak comes from and they will say Tesco's. The idea that a cow had to die and be butchered to get a steak is only peripherally known to most kids. They know it, sort of deep down, by they don't really think about it or imagine it as part of their daily lives. Confronted with the reality of slaughter, most kids instantly convert to vegetarianism (fortunately for Tesco this conversion only usually lasts until the next BBQ!).

I just wish the paper had let us in on more of the details.

Same day – same paper – a real human interest story.

Gretchen Whitted, resident of Florida was trying to chase some raccoons from her garden. Five raccoons surrounded her and attacked. She ended up in the hospital with cuts to her neck and leg (presumably she fell down – the idea that a raccoon could, or would, leap a metre or more in the air to bite Gretchen's neck is just too much to take in!) Still, a pack of killer raccoons loose in a Florida garden is pretty worrying!

Again we are sadly lacking in detail. Did, for instance, Gretchen corner the raccoons? Most animals will attack if cornered. What does it mean when she tried to chase them from her garden? With a stick? A broom? Her hands? A twelve gauge shotgun??

I need and want to know!

From the Associated Press

LAKELAND, Fla. — Animal control officers hope to trap a pack of raccoons that mauled a 74-year-old Florida woman who tried to chase them from her yard.

The sheriff in Polk County, east of Tampa, says Gretchen Whitted fell when five raccoons surrounded and attacked her Sunday. She was taken to a hospital with extensive cuts from her neck to her legs.

“We’re not talking about a lot of little bites here,” Sheriff Grady Judd said. “She was filleted.”

A neighbor called for help after hearing the woman’s cries and seeing her covered in blood.

Whitted was treated for rabies, though officials doubt the animals were infected.

Fire crews flooded nearby drains to drive the animals out, but none appeared. Animal control officers hope to catch them using cat food and sardines as bait.

Filleted! Not just bit, but filleted!!

There's something strange going on here! I'm sure raccoons could give you more than a nasty nip, but the idea that they form a gang, make a plan and then attack someone needs investigating – and now!! There are a lot of raccoons!! They're all over the place!!

My expose regarding harmless animals, given in good faith and with more than a modicum of humour and with tongue firmly in cheek is looking fairly irresponsible and, perhaps, the basis for a very expensive legal action.

I can see the headline now: Girl Trampled – Irresponsible Teacher Blamed!

A young lady was savagely attacked by a herd of cows whilst walking near Stowmarket yesterday. Sally Smith told he Mum she was going for a walk but is now in hospital in Bury with severe concussion after being trampled by up to 15 cows near her home in Lackbrain Crescent.

“I was just walking across the field to get home when the cows charged at me and attacked. I wasn't doing anything to annoy then! My English teacher, Mr Kauffman, told me years ago that cows were not dangerous. He lied to me! I'm very upset.” Suffolk Constabulary refused to comment saying the incident is under investigation.

I may need a good lawyer. Not to mention a fence to keep raccoons out of my garden!

Scary.

A Darker Shade of Pale

Home Truths from Abroad.

I'm sure I have seen Steve Jones on TV. I'm sure he is the “expert” regularly trotted out when matters concerning genetics are hot topics. He is, according to the Times, “The leading geneticist Steve Jones”.

Good enough for me.

Steve is explaining this week “how the world's population is blending into a single shade”. What's he's not explaining is how the world's population got to be so many different shades in the first place. This is probably a wise move as it might lead him into speculating on the origins of race in human populations. This, as you know, is mostly a taboo subject - for many, and sometimes good, reasons.

Steve explains how because of today's modern lifestyle with its almost limitless opportunities for travel and intercourse (in the sense of interaction) with people from all over the globe, we are all becoming a bit browner and much more racially homogeneous. From his tone you can conclude that he thinks this is a generally good thing.

Me too.

My own family are a fairly cosmopolitan lot. I have grandparents with English, Norwegian, Scottish and German genes. My children can add an infusion of more English and some Irish. Their children are shortly to add some South American and Jewish (via Ecuador) genetic material.

We are certainly getting about.

This exchange of genetic material is good for us. Nature loves diversity. It keeps us moving forward in the survival of the fittest stakes. Our browner children will be better equipped to deal with life's problems caused by genetic deficiencies – like my skin problems owing to my very fair, mostly northern European skin.

Things are looking up – evolution-wise.

Three paragraphs from the end of the article, Steve gets really interesting. He reminds us that “most readers will see on their way to work tomorrow more people than the average member of the human species would, until recently, have seen in a lifetime”.

I'm tempted to type that again – it's so profound.

He goes on to explain that, “For 99% of our past we were hunters and gatherers – rare and not particularly successful primates that gathered berries, hunted wild animals (and were hunted by them – Steve forgets to mention this important point) and flirted with extinction.” He goes on, “. . . . for most of history we lived in tiny, isolated groups, married the boy – or girl next door and lost diversity as a result. If the few hunter-gatherer tribes still left a few decades ago were any guide, any attempt to join another group, let alone exchange genes with it, was likely to be met by death”.

The implication here is easy to see.

The racial characteristics that we see today must have been present in the human population when we were very small in number. Steve asserts, though he doesn't explicitly state it, that we stayed in small very genetically homogeneous groups for most of human history. Therefore if racial characteristics are recent – they simply wouldn't exist. He, therefore, prescribes a mechanism to explain race in human populations – remembering that no matter which race we belong to we are all almost genetically identical. Steve says that we just didn't move around from group to group. We stayed put and interbred with our “home” population.

Thanks, Steve for that brilliant insight.

So, can you tell us how we managed to populate the planet in a very short space of time?

Just imagine: somehow we have to explain how we got from a small bunch of evolutionarily-challenged apes who disliked others of their own species for the purpose of breeding so much that we avoided them at all costs. Does this make any sense to you?

Me neither.

One thing that we do know about humans is that they would rather procreate than do almost anything - except run away from hungry lions. Given the chance, hunter-gatherers spying a loose female on the horizon will do what comes naturally.

Steve says no.

Somehow we need to explain how these “home-loving” HG's (hunter gatherers) managed to populate an entire planet in less than 2500 generations.

Computer says crap.

We are getting to the point where some very respectable scientific theories need to be either explained better, challenged or discarded.

Lest , dear reader, you assume I am making this up – or have lost what little marbles I ever had; I suggest you have a look at:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/indepth/featureitems/s876996.htm

and then try to explain how such a racially diverse population of humans developed in so short a time; and how a tiny number of people whose very existence was challenged on a daily basis by predation, disease and starvation could possibly fill the earth in so short a time? Some part of this has to be wrong.

Either the DNA evidence is puppy-plop or the archaeological evidence is dog-dung.

Think about it Steve (as I hope you are reading this ) and let me know.

Cheers