HUMAN  EVOLUTION HOME ORIGINS EVIDENCE VISIONS TIMELINE A culture is an agreement by a group of people that establishes personal behavioral standards for that group. A culture is a restriction of individual freedoms in exchange for a uniform cultural environment, one that fits the needs of the consensus. The purpose of a culture is to enhance the enjoyment and security of life of its members. In this vein it provides a uniform societal environment on which each member can depend in making his behavioral decisions. It provides a comfortable and predictable environment in which to live, work, raise a family, enjoy recreation, etc. THE HUMAN CULTURE Modern cultures grew from ancient tribal customs. Early man developed instincts which enhanced tribal survival. The human is an instinctively driven social animal with the capability of memory, imagination and intelligence. He has been shaped by evolution over a 4 million year period to live in small tribes. With the invention of fire and tools about 2 million years ago, his social life became that of a warrior/hunter. The survival of the individual and immediate family, in those harsh times, depended on the survival of the tribe. Even in these early times each human became members of several groups within the tribe. Females were primarily attached to their own children but also grouped with other females for camp maintenance, care of the sick and wounded, and group food preparation. Those without children grouped for local foraging for food and campfire fuel. Each male primarily served his own family unit, providing food and raw materials for housing and clothing. Males formed fishing, hunting or foraging groups to gather communal food. The males also grouped with all of the other males for defense of tribe and territory. Tribal management and leadership rested with a select group. The drives which cause the human to gather into groups and sub-groups are instinctive, the product of millions of years of evolution. Human instincts have never been uniform, and many instincts are selfish in nature. Successful group effort requires rules of conduct that everyone follow. Many of these rules require suppression of some instincts and augmentation of others. Behavior which provides benefit to the survival of the group (and ultimately the species) is encouraged and behavior which harms the survival of the group is discouraged. Intellectual control over instinct (self-discipline) developed as a distinguishing characteristic of the human. The more disciplined the tribe, the more focused its work, the better it survived. A description of the summed social behavior within a group (tribe or sub-group) is called its culture. Each individual within the group is autonomous, but cooperative for a common cause. Each is willing (indeed is driven by his own instincts to do so) to trade certain personal freedoms for the benefits he will gain from the group. As a free-spirit, each individual in the group contributes his behavior to the culture. The 'culture' of a group is not an entity with certain characteristics. The 'culture' of a group is the name given to a descriptive summation of the behavioral characteristics of the group. Management and planning was required within these ancient tribes. The decision on when to move a camp, for example, and where it should be moved, was critical to the survival of the entire tribe. These actions are not only behaviors themselves, and therefore part of the cultural description, they effect all of the behaviors of the individuals within the tribe. As with tribal leadership, the economic structure was also a part of the cultural description since it detailed the acceptable tribal norms in bartering and trading. The behavior of man (his culture) can affect his ability to survive as a species. An example would be the result of man allowing his population to expand without control, by that threatening two catastrophic consequences: (1) When a population is expanding, natural selection is not allowed to remove degrading mutations from the gene pool unless they are immediately catastrophic. The result is a general degradation of all of man's characteristics such as intelligence, longevity, health, and the passions such as mothers' love, compassion, cooperation, etc. along with the substitution of their opposites. The resulting culture drifts toward self-destruction. These characteristics are visible today. (2) The worldwide ecology, on which man feeds, is limited in resources. Over-population brings disease, starvation, and death. Are Cultures Unique to Man? Each mobile complex organism has a pattern of individual behavior unique to that species. This set of behaviors is the culture of that species. That culture provides survival enhancement for that species. All cultures of all animals, including man, are based on instinct. Some species are able to establish intellectual control over some or all of their instincts, by that optimizing the combination. Man is capable of this. At one time he did this. He does not do it now, except in isolated tribal pockets. Long before man began his journey as a bipedal animal, he had a culture that described his actions. There were language restrictions (one grunt for food, two for sex.). There were food restrictions. There were food gathering strategies. There were food sharing strategies. There were strategies in defense against predators. There were restrictions in working hours. Sleep required certain preparations. The care of the young was paramount. These were instinctive. This early animal had a small amount of memory and was capable of decision making. He was, therefore, capable of certain limited behavioral variations. He was quite capable of surviving. Otherwise, we would not be here. As man developed, some instincts were strengthened and other instincts were added (e.g., tribal cooperation, tribal defense, etc.). Added memory allowed extensive variations in serving this growing variety of instincts. Food sharing strategy instincts were teamed with tribal cooperation instincts intellectually to serve both instincts, giving birth to our need for a compassionate culture. Once man became tribal and his tribes became militantly isolated, cultural details diverged. The same instinctual needs were served by these separate cultures but in slightly different ways. Tribal isolation added to the cultural complexity. Speech, dress and hair styles were deliberately different to show tribal loyalty and provide a defensive symbol of defiance against all other tribes. In times of battle they served as identifiers to separate friend and foe. This cultural divergence is visible today in the ghetto invented language, dress and cultural background. They are trying to be a tribe that is separate from all others and they do this by providing diverging cultural identifiers. Other cultural elements, intellectual products without instinctive roots, have been invented. Hierarchies in the culture (pecking order) were invented to maintain group control. They were necessary once, when tribes were small and quick decisions were needed that could not wait for debate and consensus. They are of doubtful value now. Conclusion Some cultures are more successful than others, where success means species well-being and survival over the long term. Surprisingly, the most successful cultures (on those terms) are the most primitive, such as isolated tribes in Borneo, Australia and South America. Due to their isolation from the species gene pool, gene flow is minimized between their very small gene pool and the vastly larger species gene pool and its rapid accumulation of destructive alleles. Even with large families their numbers remain stable. The limited gene pool size and high death rate provide conditions that make the gene pool simple for evolution to maintain. If they maintain their isolation, birth rate and tribal population, their genetic structure will remain trim and healthy. It must be admitted that this is doing it the hard way. Culture and evolution control may be integrated so that all may enjoy the current bounty, without sacrificing our future generations to degeneration, degradation, starvation, countless genetic diseases and eventual extinction. Unfortunately, these cultural compromises are not acceptable to cultures steeped in dogma, whether the dogma is religious or socialist. << Back to Human Evolution PSYCHOLOGY AND EVOLUTION Psychology is the science of behavior. It determines, for a given species, the mean and spread of expected individual reaction under a given set of conditions. The human is an instinctively driven social animal with the capability of memory, imagination and intelligence. The environment which effects the actions of the individual human includes his physical environment, his physical and mental genetic structure, his accumulated knowledge, the pre-established community behavioral norms, the over governance and economic structure, and the individual's own notion of himself and his position in the universe. Pandora's Box Has Been Opened How can this be? Why can't these new ideas coexist with the old? The answer is simple: They are directly opposed. The one contradicts the other. This is not the acquisition of an optional and parallel approach. Genetics and evolution can't be tacked on current knowledge, it underlies all psychological knowledge with all the authority that only measurable fact can have. It negates all dogma which disagrees. The situation is one much like the old saw which says that no one can be just a little pregnant. All modern psychological knowledge is based on three premises: 1. The human is intelligent. He will behave properly with proper education (nurture). Aberrant behavior indicates trauma, disease, chemical imbalance or poor environment. Proper behavior is judged against the current academic elitist ideology (or is it that the current ideology was formulated by the psychologist?). 2. The human mind can create knowledge without reference to the outside world. In fact, some believe, true knowledge is best developed without the taint of the real world. Perfect thought comes from pure minds. Psychologists have pure minds. 3. Sufficient data about human behavior can provide a basis for determining the cause of that behavior. Determining cause from effect is a valid logical process. It is now recognized: that: genetics is a strong factor in the behavior of man; the current genetic configuration of man is the result of a process called evolution; and the human neural system is a part of that genetic configuration, therefore subject to the same forces as the physical part of the body. Once the human neural system is recognized as an evolved neural biological mechanism, none of the above three premises hold true. If they are not true then all of the knowledge based on those suppositions becomes highly suspect. The Myth of Human Intelligence Man has studied the evolutionary process by which he was formed, and has found it to be primitive, unpredictable and brutal, without intelligence, planning or goal. His physical and mental structures are both poorly engineered and suffer frequent malfunction, poor and erratic performance and early wear out. As man progresses into the study of the genetics of man and the process by which man was formed, it becomes more and more apparent that man, far from being a wondrous creature, is a makeshift creature at best, one which is now archaic and a misfit in a world suddenly crowded and technically complex. The wonder is that he is able to function as well as he does. The human is quite proud, and justifiably so, of his technological accomplishments. He looks at the chimp, his nearest relative, and finds him dim-witted and with deplorable social habits. All other animals fall even farther behind. Man then becomes arrogant as he surveys the differences between himself and all others. This is an arrogance that is not justified. Man is intelligent only when compared with the others. Actually, he is quite error prone and self delusional. The human neural system began its development when the first hominid appeared (the ape that walked). That was about 4 million years ago. During the next 2 million years, the early hominid developed as a herd herbivore. Almost all of the tribal social instincts were developed during that period. With the invention of tools and fire, about 2 million years ago, the human shifted from the herd herbivore to the hunter/gatherer tribe form of social structure. It was successful. The population began growing. Competition developed between tribes for territory. Relationships between tribes became militant. The hunter/warrior tribal system began forming. The neural system of modern man is honed for the hunter/warrior mode of living. The need was for fast decisions while under stress. Speed was more important than accuracy. Survival depended on it. The human neural system is primarily a parallel mode reactive decision mechanism, one ideal for controlling an automobile, hunting tigers, or designing a trap for the tribesman next door. The conscious thought system makes iterative use of the same mechanism. It was designed for relationships within the tribe and waging a defensive posture against territorial encroachment. The human mind was not developed for tribes with memberships in the millions, for urban (ant hill) living, for mixing of cultures, for being ruled by strangers of another tribe, for high-technology living, etc. The truth of the matter is that the function of the human brain, the mechanism which accepts and processes knowledge received through the senses, then provides behavior appropriate to the situation, is determined by a genome formed by chaos squeezed through a mindless random variable filter. Evolution is a process which is unplanned and without goals or standards. As is to be expected with any complex mechanism which was built with no engineering, our genome is a pile of junk. Worse still, man, having eliminated the filter portion of the evolution mechanism, is now subject to the accumulation of all mutations not immediately fatal. Since the neural system is more complex than the balance of the body, it receives a major share of these mutations. Not only is the thinking apparatus fixed by a genetic code designed by an idiot, that code is now wandering all over the map, and deteriorating all the while. In the lottery of being born with a genome of a particular configuration, the individual human may be an imbecile or a genius, or anywhere in between. Since the reasoning apparatus is a fixed mechanism, its change in capability with experience is quite small. Only the behavior of the individual changes, in response to the quality and quantity of the knowledge absorbed as processed by the fixed intellectual quality of the individual. The intelligence of man, therefore, is very questionable. One only needs to read the front page of a newspaper a few days to understand that. It only appears wonderful to us because there is nothing better around. Instead of boasting about his intellectual ability, man should be humble and careful, knowing that his every thought is suspect. The Myth of Human Intellectual Creativity If the human neural system is a biological mechanism (genetics and evolution prove this is so), then it is shorn of magic, spirituality and mysticism. It can not create gold from lead, truth from falsehood, or knowledge from dogma. Any mechanism has a finite capability. No machine can provide more than its fuel. There is always a loss in every machine, none may even reach 100% efficiency, much less produce more than it is given. The human brain can no longer be considered creative. It can not create knowledge, it may only discover it. The knowledge produced by thought must be contained in the premises (input data) on which that thought is based. Knowledge may be discovered by the human brain only when it has adequate truthful data on which to work. If the input knowledge (data) is inadequate or untruthful the output conclusions can be disastrous, and often are. Using unproven premises negates the reasoning that follows by the amount of its error. In the computer world we refer to this process limitation as "garbage in, garbage out." Conjecture, imagination, hearsay, and introspection are all useful tools in the formation of new theory. They will not reliably provide working knowledge, separately or collectively. Theory must be proven before it is applied, whether the subject is a space shuttle, bridge, or airplane. It is even more important if the subject is human. A human culture should not be used as experimental fodder. << Back to Human Evolution Mutations are inevitable in human reproduction. Very few mutations are beneficial, probably far less than one in a thousand. The human developed under a severe environment. Beneficial mutations improved survival chances, and deleterious mutations were quickly eliminated by the environment. The result was a high birthrate, high death rate, and a short life, but the process of evolution thereby maintained a lean and healthy gene pool. THE DEGENERATION OF MAN The human conquered its environment with tools, clothing, shelter, medicine, high food production and compassionate cultures. It gained a long life span and huge population growth. The environment no longer removes deleterious mutations unless they are immediately fatal. The human's gene pool is no longer maintained. The result is a rapid degradation in body and mind due to the accumulation without control of degenerating mutations in the gene pool. The rate of human descent is perhaps thousands of times faster than the rate of its ascent. Unless checked, the modern human (Homo sapiens), as a species, will soon collapse. The degeneration is already apparent. Dissent The views expressed in this text are not consistent with those of professionals in the fields of genetics and evolution. Their objections are threefold: 1. Diversity is natural and desirable. There is a new and changing environment to which the genetic structure of man is now adjusting. This new environment consists mainly of changes in the environment due to man himself. It is natural for a species to drift (diverge) to fit the new environmental requirements. 2. Even if true, the degeneration is in terms of millions of years for a significant change, allowing man plenty of time to recognize it and if true to counter it. Mathematical models show that it requires millions of years for a gene to change significantly. We answer these two objections: 1.There is a vast difference between divergence and degeneration when considering the process of evolution. Under a severe environment, evolution quickly weeds out deleterious genes (those that adversely effect the survival of the species) and perpetuates the 'good' genes (those which aid the survival of the species). This process is called divergence. Divergence occurs as the species shifts under environmental pressure toward a better fit with the environment. When the species is far superior to that required for basic survival within a given environment, evolution does not remove deleterious mutations. These then accumulate in the species gene pool, steadily degenerating the organism until it again comes in balance with its environment, a balance which requires a high birthrate, high death rate, and a short life. This resultant accumulation of harmful mutations is called evolutionary degeneration. 2.The degeneration of man as a species is already apparent. We now have Down's, muscular dystrophy, early heart failure, fiends that rape and murder small children, etc. Over 7,000 genetic faults are catalogued. If allowed to become more wide-spread, the genetic diseases now in our gene pool could end civilization. No significant gene shift is required, only a continued multiplication of the genetic faults we already have. The Design of Man In evolution, survival is the mark of success. If a life variation is a successful one, it allows that species to survive. When it becomes unsuccessful, the species will become extinct. At first glance, this section title appears contradictory. This comes about because there are degrees of success. A bare survival is considered success from the viewpoint of evolution. Though precarious, the species that barely survives is in perfect balance with its environment. It is neither superior nor inferior to its requirements. Its gene pool is maintained lean and free of deleterious mutations. Man existed under those conditions for most of the past two million years. When man developed agriculture, medicine, shelter, clothing and compassionate cultures, he, to a large extent, conquered his environment. Mankind as a species became far superior to the new basic requirements for survival. Evolution degenerates characteristics that are superior to those needed for survival. Mankind will thus degenerate until again in balance with the new nature that he has created. Such degeneration will cause the collapse of society, which is the mainstay for the new environment. So it will collapse also. The human, no longer equipped for the old environment will perish under it. DNA replication is an amazingly accurate process, but errors are sometimes made at a critical point during organism reproduction. Such errors (mutations) will pass to future generations. These errors often effect the ability of the new generations to withstand their environment. If the effect of the error is negative, and most are, death and suffering (natural selection) will remove the carriers of those deficient genes. This combination of mutations and elimination of most by death is called evolution. Mutation provides all initial change. When a mutation occurs, a new allele (a new variation in a gene) is created. As a first approximation, these accidents (mutations) are random (can occur at any location along the DNA), although there are many alleles which are repetitive, indicating a mechanical propensity greater than chance. The rate of these accidents is relatively constant within a given species. If the accident occurs in a critical location (believed to be less than 10% of the total in man), the result is usually disastrous. Other areas will accept change with no immediate consequence. Once made, and the first generation survives past reproduction, the mutation is perpetuated and variability within the gene pool of the species is increased. Natural selection occurs when the viability of an allele is tested in real life. It makes only one test. Contrary to popular opinion, evolution does not select the fittest, strongest, or most superior organism. It is instead a question of how many offspring the organism will have which in turn will reach sufficient maturity to have its own offspring. In other words, the figure of merit in the balance between mutation rate and environmental severity is the percentage of new-born which live to become grand-parents. If the effect is positive, the allele will become a permanent part of the gene pool. If the effect is very successful, it will quickly become a dominant allele. If the effect is neutral or negative, the allele will not spread rapidly through the gene pool and, usually, will disappear from the gene pool. Evolution is not a planned process. It does no engineering. The end products were never visualized. No goals exist. There is no thought of failure or success. There is no seeking of perfection. There is no seeking of anything. Evolution does not do anything. It only happens. Mutations produce chaos with genetic accident after accident, most of which are eventually fatal. Evolution uses misery and death to sort it all out. Evolution produces the strongest organism when the organism is in absolute misery. Rapid and early deaths make deleterious allele deletions quickly. Evolution produces the worst possible organism that will still survive. Evolution has no goals. It does not seek excellence. It does not seek creature comfort. The long term result of evolution is that a species is matched to its environment, neither worse than required for bare survival nor better. Genes that describe characteristics that are better than required in the current environment, will suffer the same mutation rate as any other. Since a mutation which degrades a characteristic which is better than required will not distress the recipient, that deleterious mutation will be acceptable to the gene pool of the species. The accumulation of such deleterious alleles will continue until the organism is so bad that it begins to have difficulty surviving. Further degradation will be halted at that point and there it will stabilize at the point of the maximum misery that can still be survived. If by chance a mutation should improve an already superior characteristic, it in time will suffer the same fate. Man, through his inventiveness and energy, conquered his environment through tools, housing, agriculture, clothing, etc. This removed the environmental pressure which maintained our gene pool. Life is no longer totally dependent on youth, eyesight, coordination, bravery, etc. As a result, a genetic cripple may bear crippled children and they may all survive to endlessly propagate the crippling gene. Our species has already declined to below that of survival in the environment of a short time ago, say 10,000 years. If our worldwide civilization should fail, there would be massive death, and perhaps species extinction. Since most mutations are deleterious, no species can afford to allow them to accumulate at a high rate in its germ cells. In a species that exceeds the requirements of its environment and by that is increasing in population, there is little natural selection pressure to remove degenerative alleles. Long life and a rising population are direct indications that our species exceeds the requirements of our current environment. Those same factors indicate the rate of degeneration within our gene pool. It is a common belief that this degeneration is quite slow, requiring many millions of years before becoming a real problem. Not so. The Species Uniformity Test of Gene Pool Maintenance A measure of how well natural selection is working in keeping the gene pool of a given species lean, is the amount of variation in outward appearance. The Thompson gazelle has a genetically small population subjected to a uniformly harsh environment. Line up 100 gazelles and see 100 peas from the same pod. Stand on a street corner and watch 100 humans walk past and the opposite is true. No two look alike. It would seem that we were watching a mixture of many species walk past. When new species are derived by evolution under a harsh environment, they are superior to those they replace. When derived under a benign environment, new species are inferior versions of the old. 10,000 years ago, the human was as uniform as the gazelle. He lived against a harsh environment. His population was stable, even with a high birth rate, and the average age at death was in the low thirties. Diversity is a buzz word which puts a spin on truth, since it is a measure of the degradation of the human gene pool, and that degradation is visible. Most of that degradation would have occurred in the last 1,000 years. << Back to Human Evolution Discussion With 21 million mutations each year spread across 300 million base pairs, every possible viable mutation is likely to occur once in each 11 years. These would remain in the gene pool until natural selection removed them. This bears out a recent report that more than 7,000 genetic disorders in the gene pool of the human genome have been cataloged (and we still do not have any idea what the purpose is of most genes). This figure must be vastly understated. Not one mutation in one thousand would be so obvious as to require medical inquiry. The huge third world populations are not included in the study. There must be far more than ten million lesser, but still degenerative, mutations in the gene pool presently. Essentially none of these would be found in the gene pool of ancient man, 100,000 years ago. The population was much smaller then and the environment was much harsher. This gave natural selection the ammunition it needed to keep the gene pool lean. Even as recent as 10,000 years ago, man's population was quite small and his living conditions quite harsh. Few alleles existed in his gene pool. It is true that each member of the species does not feel the impact of the millions of degenerating alleles now in the gene pool. Nor will anyone suffer all of them at once. It takes a very long time for a mutation to propagate across the immense gene pool of man, and the genome of the individual is limited to two sets of alleles. Nevertheless, those defects are in the gene pool and so will eventually share in the population with the current gene set. It is a gene pool that does not undergo natural selection. This is an impossible situation. Never before has a species been so successful that it has essentially halted the natural selection in its species. The result is a species that will degenerate in time to the point when natural selection can again become operative. It took man 4.5 million years to develop. The actual percentage of mutations that are beneficial is unknown. It is believed that the percentage is quite small. Not many students of evolution would expect more than one per thousand. If that were true then the degeneration of our species, since natural selection is removed, would be more than one thousand times faster than its development (again verifying that the problem time is in thousands rather than millions of years as many believe). The huge population is a two-edged sword. A huge population slows the apparent degeneration. It would also slow the regeneration of the species, if we can figure out how to correct it. The human gene pool is huge. It acts as a big tank, one in which a little garbage can grow to a huge disaster. The Human Combination of Instinct and Intellect is Species Deadly The unique feature of the human, when compared with all other forms of life, is its intellectual ability. When the species first appeared, it lived in a harsh and demanding environment. Its intellect greatly helped its adaptive ability, and therefore its ability to survive. It allowed mechanical inventions, such as fire, tools, clothing, shelter, etc., which solved many of the harsh features of the environment, improving both survivability and comfort.. The survival advantages of intellect are in its ability to control the instincts. Instinct is relatively fixed and lacks fast adaptability to changes in environment, such as when a species migrates into a new environmental niche. Intellect, by controlling the instincts of the species, is able to make quick behavioral adjustments. Mankind, though primarily a tropical animal, was thereby able to populate the earth, even into the remotest arctic regions. The modern human species came into existence with strong social instincts. These were a legacy from two million years of Homo erectus and Homo habilis. They in turn had inherited a prior two million years of herd/tribal cultural living from prior hominid species. Hominid cultures are, have been, and always will be driven by those strong social instincts. There is no conflict between intellect and instinct when intellect is applied to mechanical problems, but there is conflict between intellect and instinct when intellect is applied in the social sphere. For intellect to work in human culture it must control individual social instinct. If intellect is to contribute to culture it must augment some instincts and diminish the effects of others. Individual behavior within a culture becomes controlled by the application of intellect over the community rather than relying on the individual to instinctively behave in the right manner. As it does so, it negates the influence of instinct on the culture. Evolution degenerates characteristics not screened by the environment. If instincts are controlled by intellect, they no longer need to breed true, since the intellect will dictate proper behavior. The originally strong social instincts will, in time, become degenerate and perverted. As these instincts degenerate, it becomes more and more necessary to enforce community rules for proper behavior. The evolutionary spiral continues to develop more and more perverted instinctive behaviors as stronger and stronger offsetting enforcement measures are required to obtain an orderly community. These stronger behavioral enforcement measures will continue to grow, while the individuals in the community develop less and less tolerance, until a point is reached when the individuals in the community rebel. At that point the intellectual restraints are no longer effective, the now perverted and degenerate social instincts are allowed full sway, and the society teeters on the brink of collapse. If it should collapse, the human, now with distorted social instincts, would be unable to survive. In Conclusion How fast does a mutation spread in a gene pool? Under a tight evolutionary process (high birthrate, high death rate, severe environmental stress, short average life) the deleterious mutation is discarded from the gene pool almost as fast as it occurs. When the evolutionary stress is removed, all mutations, good and bad, have the same dispersion rate throughout the gene pool. Temporarily, the life span jumps and the population jumps. This abnormally low stress life will then decay until controlled by evolution again, if the species is allowed time to adjust to the new conditions. Unfortunately in the case of man, the downturn in capability can result in sudden societal collapse. The shock due to such huge environmental shift would most likely cause the species to become extinct. If man is to survive, he must begin immediately to control both birthrate and birth genetic quality. << Previous Page                                 Human Evolution                                 Next Chapter >> Home Origins Humans Evidence Visions Timeline