How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 7: Your Amazing Body

Chapter 7: Your Amazing Body

Hello again, newborn baby. I’m here again to give you advice on many important topics. This is our seventh visit, the seventh chapter to this 100-chapter story.

Today we are going to talk about your amazing human animal body. First of all, you don’t have a body. Rather, you are a body. “You” is shorthand for trillions of cells that somehow work together. When “you” decide you are hungry, that is actually trillions of microscopic cells coordinating their separate energies into a few macroscopic actions: crying for milk, sucking and then swallowing the milk. How did that miracle of coordination happen? Honest people don’t claim to know.

All of this is pre-verbal for newborns like you—done without the use of words. This seemingly makes you brilliant but actually this puts you into the same predicament as chimpanzees, pigs, mice and earthworms. Your amazing body almost entirely takes care of itself without needing any words at all. And when you finally develop language, you’ll have only the illusion that those words are pulling the strings, whereas your words are only an epiphenomenon. Whenever you “decide” to say “hello,” something else made you “decide.” Your words don’t cause your words, because that would be an eternal regress. We will save the rest of this dangerous topic for another day, however.

People think they know their bodies, but they know almost nothing. We don’t even know how it is that “we” control our breathing or how the body does this automatically when “we” ignore it. We don’t even know how we think thoughts or imagine the ocean. We don't know how we keep from falling over as we run down the sidewalk on our two peg legs. We don’t even know how it is that we are able to start peeing. Or how we digested yesterday’s meal.

Some people will protest and claim that we do know a lot of things. I agree. We know a LOT of things and it is wonderfully useful to know those things. This knowledge allows us to invent smartphones, medicines and rockets. But we never get totally to the bottom of anything. We think we are explaining, but we are only describing. As I was once told by philosopher Andy Clark, “An explanation is a description that makes us feel good.” We have only thin explanations in a deep world. As Nietzsche said,

Just beyond experience!– Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience – just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

Maybe we don't fully and deeply understand anything but certainly we can make things, right? Not really. We can only rearrange things. As Carl Sagan said, ““If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Making things worse, when we do rearrange things, they always eventually fall apart, as Heraclitus noticed thousands of years ago.

We appear to be dynamic patterns rather than bodies. The stuff of the universe moves in and out of us, yet somehow the pattern and form our bodies more or less remains. We are thus like flames, though far more complex. We turn bananas into poop to assist our largely subconscious effort to pass our genes to the next generation. How's that for complexity, especially when we figured out how to transport our bananas to our city from 1,000 miles away by using a flying aluminum tube?

We like to say that we understand basic things like how our body works, but that is mostly to keep our sanity. We say lots of things to reassure ourselves, yet we don't even know how our words convey meaning from person to person. We blithely accept words as substitutes for deep understanding because we must. We are experts at concealing our ignorance of our own bodies. Nietzsche had a lot to say about this self-ignorance:

Does nature not conceal most things from him-even concerning his own body, in order to confine and lock him within a proud deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the bloodstream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key. And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous-as if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger.

Now, back your body. It is more complex than you will ever be able to imagine, multiplied by fifty trillion. Your liver is an immense chemical factory packed into one side of your abdomen and it works extremely well even though we don’t have any deep knowledge of how it works. We notice correlations and we attribute causation, but the magic is in the complex fluid movements and as we drill down from biology to physics to quantum physics, the ultimate “things” we would like identify as the objects of our explanations smear into wave patterns.

OK. Maybe that is too esoteric. Let's simplify. Have you ever considered your ankles? Mundane ordinary ankles. They are a collection of bones so small you can almost wrap your hand around them, yet they hold up your body all day long and they can last for 100 years. Even one ankle can hold up your entire body weight, even if you hop. How is that possible. If they get injured they usually fix themselves. How is that possible?

How is it possible that the body is so good at patterns of actions such as peristalsis, vomiting, sneezing and orgasms, where the body orchestrates a complex cascade of mini-actions? And we haven’t yet mentioned the brain, three pounds of such “mind-blowing” complexity that it allows us to fire up our memory and imagine walking through our house! We can generate mental representations in such exquisite detail that we can find our keys while lying in bed with our eyes closed! “I left my keys on the back porch!” And it doesn't help us to blithely say that our brain is like a computer. Our brain does not work like a modern computer. It doesn't have architecture anything like a computer. Further, everything thought we think is infused with emotional valence.

Instead of working like a store-bought computer our brain seem to run on connectionist architecture that excels at pattern matching. We’re “good at frisbee, but bad at math.” That’s another observation by Andy Clark. We have thinking meat in our brains. How does meat think? How is that possible? If all of this unnerves you, perhaps you would rather conclude that thinking goes on somewhere other than in a body, perhaps in a disembodied soul. That is a dramatic fail.As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio concluded: "There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body."

We have immune systems that are factories of natural selection (and much more) within our own bodies. They identify and neutralize complex threats without requiring us to think about those threats. How powerful are immune systems? When someone dies, their body starts to “rot” within a few hours. But the bugs and microorganisms that devour bodies at death are always trying to devour our living bodies too, but bodies, relying on their immune systems, usually beats the invaders decisively. That’s how powerful your immune system is. Without a functioning immune system, a newborn baby like you would never make it to two days of age.

On a microscopic level, there is probably a lot more going on in our bodies than we even want to know. Yesterday, for example, you were oblivious that your body defeated pre-cancerous cell that would have replicated and killed you in a year. Again, it’s probably a really good thing that “you” aren’t needed to keep your body running well. If you were in charge of your body, all of the harrowing microscopic things going on underneath your skin would scare the shit out of you and you wouldn’t have a clue about what to do about any of this.

As you grow up, look at your hands often and marvel at them. Think about how amazing they are, giving you the power to grasp and sense and fight and caress. The hand: a multi-function tool if there ever was one. Your hands are all the evidence you need that your body is extraordinary.

And now please note that we’ve only discussed a few of your amazing body parts. There are hundreds more, including your tiny ear bones which, millions of years, ago served as jaw bones in our reptile ancestors.

Take care of your body. It’s more amazing than anything a science-fiction writer could imagine. Be good to it. Thank the stars that you inherited something so incredibly complex and functionl that defies deep explanation.

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How to Be a Human Animal. Chapter 4: You are (Indeed) an animal.

Chapter 4: You are an animal.

I need you to listen very carefully because most of the people who enter your life are extremely uncomfortable with the thing that I’m about to tell you.

You are an animal, a human animal. You are a tail-less primate, an ape. Your DNA is 99% the same as the DNA of a chimpanzee. We have great great great . . . grandparents who are also the great great great grandparents of modern day chimpanzees, and that’s just the beginning. We are cousins with every other living thing. You and that potted peace lily hanging near the window are biologically cousins. We are part of an extremely complex web of life, not separate from it or in charge of it in any meaningful way because that web includes our bodies. And even this deep relatedness to every other living thing is only the tip of the iceberg because, as Carl Sagan noted, we are made of materials that were manufactured by ancient stars.

Our Sun is a second- or third-generation star. All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff. . . . The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

There are real-life consequences to being made of elements and being part of a vast ecosystem. Mostly, life is not like a video game. You will get only one body and if you ruin it, you don’t get a another body. You’ll need to take care of your body or the laws of physics and biology will cause your body to be ruined and nature does not care about your feelings. If you fail to take care of your body, you’ll become miserable and you might even die young. You would think that these well-demonstrated risks would cause all of the human animals to take care of their bodies, but everywhere you look, you’ll notice a lot of other human animals ruining their bodies by over-eating, seeking out addictions and acting recklessly. For example, you won’t believe how badly many people drive. Many of them willingly take their eyes off the road while their car is streaking down the highway in order to watch cat videos or to check the stock market.

Here are some additional amazing things. All of us carry around clear evidence that we descend from other animals and sometimes the evidence is especially clear. For instance, some of us have vestigial tails and gills. As Neil Shubin reminds us, we each have an "Inner Fish." We have evolved to who we are and we continue to evolve, as evidenced by lactose tolerance in many of us. You would think that this overwhelming evidence, including our exquisite resemblance to the other great apes, would make it clear to everyone that we are, indeed, animals. But many of the human animals you will meet are extremely uncomfortable with that thought. They think of themselves as above the other animals on the “chain of being.” Perhaps it is due to their fear of death, which they work hard to paper over with various types of tribal pursuits and ideology.

There are mere bandaids because you don’t have much say in who you are. Your trillions of cells are interacting in complex ways with each other and with the outside world and you don’t have a clue as to what is going on with most of this action. Your brain will like do a good job (like it does for most other human animals) of convincing you that Life is essentially simple and understandable. Someday, you can read about the many experiments that have been done to demonstrate that fear of death triggers massively creative and energized denial of death. That area of study is called "terror management theory."

Your complex biological and physical properties mean that your thoughts and actions have deep causal chains far away from you and inaccessible to that person you think of as “you.” To the extent that there is a meaningful “you” is another topic for another day, however.

To summarize, you are the beneficiary of a great gift: a human body. Use it wisely because you only have about 1,000 months to use it and then your time is up.

You are also the recipient of an immense cultural basket of gifts. All of the ideas that have survived the test of thousands of years will be yours for the asking. All kinds of things like language, math, art. Treasures beyond belief will be offered to you. You are probably excited to hear this. But then you’ll notice that many, perhaps most people ignore most of these treasures. Many of them would rather rant on social media or engage in tribalistic endeavors like watching millionaire athletes for many hours per week.

Given our immense biological and cultural inheritance, you would think almost all of us would should great gratitude for how lucky we are every day in many ways. We are an odd species, however. We are difficult to predict, hard to please, impatient, insecure and generally unwilling to live in accordance the sacred principles we utter. We’ll talk again tomorrow. There is nothing simple about this precious life you are just starting to live.

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal. Chapter 4: You are (Indeed) an animal.

Gad Saad’s Homage to the Late Harvard Biologist EO Wilson

I've followed the works of E.O. Wilson for many years, starting with his book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), which I read as a teenager. His recent death is both a great loss and an opportunity to remember his substantial contributions to evolutionary biology.

Gad Saad offers this excellent homage to E.O. Wilson's work. One thing that stood out to me is Saad's coinage of the term "human reticence effect." Here is Saad's explanation of this critically important term (and phenomenon):

The human reticence effect: It's perfectly okay to apply evolutionary principles to explain one million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine species, but if you apply to study one species called humans, well then, you are Himmler and you're a nazi. And so E.O. Wilson, in daring to apply incredibly rigorous and profound evolutionary principles to explain incredible animal behavior, including some very puzzling animal behavior, once he used that framework to apply it to human behavior, then he was a persona non grata which, of course, is exactly what you see 45 years later with evolutionary psychologists. If you apply a principle to study the evolution of mating behavior of the salamander then bruh, you're a great scientist. If you apply the exact same mechanism the same methodology, the same epistemology, to study the evolution of human mating in humans, well then, come on bro that's just faux science. It's "nazi science" it's "pseudoscience." I have written about why people have these emotional and cognitive obstacles to accept the application of evolutionary principles to the study of human behavior in much of my scientific work.

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Mother Trees that Care For their Children Trees

What I'm currently reading: Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard (2021). Simard makes a stunning claim. Here's an excerpt from her introduction:

My queries started from a place of solemn concern for the future of our forests but grew into an intense curiosity, one clue leading to another, about how the forest was more than just a collection of trees.

In this search for the truth, the trees have shown me their perceptiveness and responsiveness, connections and conversations. What started as a legacy, and then a place of childhood home, solace, and adventure in western Canada, has grown into a fuller understanding of the intelligence of the forest and, further, an exploration of how we can regain our respect for this wisdom and heal our relationship with nature.

One of the first clues came while I was tapping into the messages that the trees were relaying back and forth through a cryptic underground fungal network. When I followed the clandestine path of the conversations, I learned that this network is pervasive through the entire forest floor, connecting all the trees in a constellation of tree hubs and fungal links. A crude map revealed, stunningly, that the biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings. Not only that, they connect to all neighbors, young and old, serving as the linchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes. I’ll take you through the journey that revealed the most shocking aspect of this pattern—that it has similarities with our own human brains. In it, the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading acrossfungal membranes.

The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin.The old trees nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children. It is enough to make one pause, take a deep breath, and contemplate the social nature of the forest and how this is critical for evolution. The fungal network appears to wire the trees for fitness. And more. These old trees are mothering their children.

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