Category Archives: Evolution

Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday to me.

Americana, Current Affairs, Evolution, San Mateo County

Yesterday was my 70th Birthday. It is a bigger deal than I expected. Michele suggested that we celebrate -partially – by weeding. It was a great Idea.

Part of the rebuilding of the Portola Valley Town Hall was digging up the pipe and re-naturalizing part of a creek that used to flow through the Town Hall area – only sort of re-naturalizing because, here, the creek was probably a flood plain. The new creek fragment has been planted with natives by Acterra a self-described Environmental education and action nonprofit.

The new plants are thriving but so are the invasive non-natives. The good thing about natives is that the native bugs1 like them. In the past, I would have thought that was a bad thing, but now that I am over 70 – and wiser – I realize that it is a good thing. Bigger bugs and birds like the little bugs and need them to survive. Bugs eating plants is the first step of the food chain.

Because bugs haven't yet adapted to and don't eat – in general – non-native plants, a great looking South African bulb like Crinum macowanii might as well be plastic. They look great but are not part of the food chain. 

Crinum macowanii 

So we spent a couple of hours, under Acterra's tutelage, weeding. It turns out to be a great way to spend a couple of hours on a birthday: getting rid of those things that – while they may look good – don't add to our lives. Sort of like taking stock….with action points. And, when we were finished, the creek looked like we hadn't been there.

TownHallGarden-1
TownHallGarden-2-4635
 

1 bugs as in insects, not bugs in the more limited sense of beetles only.

Sulcorebebutia rauschii

Evolution, Photography

 

Sulcorerebutia rauschii-36

One thing we did not see when we went to Nevada was any cactus. I am not sure why. It is generally thought that cactus, as a distinct, New World family – Cactaceae – originated in Mexico and radiated out from there. The family has colonized area pretty far into South America but not as far into North America.

It is not that North America is too cold. The Andes have lots of cactus and the plant shown in the picture above lives at an elevation of over 8,000 feet – actually this particular plant lives in my greenhouse, but it's ancestors came from an area in Bolivia at 8,800 feet.


God, Sex, and Race: how swearing has changed

Americana, Current Affairs, Evolution, Politics, Religion

From everything that I have read on the life and times around 1600 – which is not very much, excluding the 1632verse – using God’s name in vain was a big deal. I mean, a really big deal. People didn’t do it. When I read that, it seems so strange that I adjust the words to mean that it was probably like saying fuck today.

But, now that I have really thought about it, I am convinced that people didn’t do it. It was taboo.

By the middle of the 19th, century, people did take the Lord’s name in vain, people might say damn you, but sex was taboo. Even indirect words like bastard or son of a bitch were considered heavy duty. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was considered a great book for it’s accurate depiction of Civil War combat and it does not have any sexual swearing in it – I have not read it in more than 50 years so it is possible I might have forgot them, but I don’t think so. I don’t think fuck – or, to push the limit, cunt –  is to be found in Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not because they were effete – they were anything but – but because those words really were taboo.

Now, we use sex words. Michele and I are watching HBO’s Pacific and they use fuck all the time. But we don’t use disparaging words about race. As close as a white person gets to using the N word is to say the N word. It has become taboo.

The vice-president says This is a big fucking deal!  and nobody really notices. Senator George Allen, during his 2006 re-election campaign, calls somebody a Macaca, and he is political history. No reprieve.

Here is a test:

Imagine you have an eleven year old daughter; she comes home from school and says Jane, that fucker, lied about me to the teacher…. Depending on alot of things: you might tell her that If you say that again you will go to your room for a timeout; admonish her saying Nice people don’t talk that way; just laugh, knowing she wouldn’t say that in front of your mother and she was doing it for shock value for you only.

Now imagine she comes home and says Jane, that nigger, lied about me to the teacher… Among other things, you would probably consider pulling her out of school and putting her in a different school. I know I would and – I have to admit – I am sort of shocked about that.

Archeology as projection or We usually find what we look for

China, Evolution, Politics, Science, Travel

Psychological projection…is the unconscious act of denial of a person's own
attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the
outside world, such as to the weather, the government, a tool, or to
other people. Thus, it involves imagining or projecting that
others have those feelings. Wikipedia

Machu Picchu

In 1988, I had the opportunity to see Machu Picchu with a native guide who was an archaeologist. When I say native, I mean an Inca. Or a decedent of one of the other tribes subjugated by the Incas. Every once in a while, I read a sort of rhetorical question along the lines of what ever happened the Incas. – or Mayas? or, for that matter, the Romans?

The answer is nothing, they are still there but, because they are the indigenous people, they are usually ignored. Anyway, this anthropologist was one of the first indigenous people, in Peru, to get a degree in Anthropology. And he immediately set out to prove that the European anthropologists were full of shit.

Hiram Bingham, who is given credit for discovering Machu Picchu thought it was the estate of an Inca emperor or high priest, and he had all sorts of theories on what the various structures were. Usually the theories revolved around some sort of bloody sacrifice. Our guide thought it was just an run of the mill small town, like an Inca Healdsburg, and the only reason it was noteworthy is because it wasn't sacked by the Christian explorers like everything else.

He also showed us, what the Europeans thought were several "sacrificial altars" that even had little channels that "carried the blood away". Except that he showed us that the channels were lines that lined up with the sun or moon's location at
the Winter and Summer equinox. They were really solar and lunar observatories. One channel was even lined up with the true North-South axis.

He went from altar to altar, site to site, saying Look, look at this, they don't even ask what it is for. They don't even speak good Spanish and they don't speak any Quechua. They don't talk to the locals. Why not, they are Incas. I am glad to say that now pretty much everybody agrees with our guide. 

I bring all this up because, yesterday, I read an article in the NYT that there is going to be a show in California of mummies and artifacts found on the Silk Road in China. It looks like it will be a great show. The Chinese have found, or re-found, an old cemetery in a desert region of western China. And in this cemetery are mummies that turn out to have European features and DNA from Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia, but not China.

Small River Cemetery

According to the NYT,

As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet
tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from
some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand.

So what do they think these 13 foot tall poles are? phallic symbols,
signaling an intense
interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation. The whole of the cemetery was blanketed with blatant sexual symbolism.

Maybe they are right, but, in reality, they have no idea. Just like Hiram Bingham had no idea so he projected the bloody rituals on the Incas, the Chinese anthropologists project their idea of sex-crazed Europeans on these 4,000 year old mummies.But it still should be a very interesting show.


Watching the Olympics and thinking about New Stories

Evolution, Games, War

Afghan women

The other night, some friends came over for dinner and part of the conversation revolved around how our myths or stories no longer fit a new reality. Mankind – well, the USA and Russia for sure, and probably Britain, France, and China – have the ability to detonate enough nuclear weaponry to destroy mankind and yet we continue to act as if that were not the case..

I remember reading an article about two traditional Afghan villages getting in a Hatfield-McCoy fight sometime after the Afghans drove the, then, Soviets out of Afghanistan. The feud had been going on for many years in a cold war sort of way. To patch things up, the daughter of one family – let's say Delbar (meaning sweetheart) Durani – was married to the son of the other family – let's say Fariad (meaning outspoken) Mamadzai. 

A couple of months later, Delbar did something that pissed Fariad off and he beat her. Now Delbar, who had perhaps been too coddled as a child, did not like being beat up. The second time Fariad beat her, she snuck away and returned to her village. This put the Duranis in a bind, they either had to take Delbar in or return her. If they returned her, she would probably continue to be beat up; if they took her in, then the Mamadzais would be dissed.

They took her in and the feud was renewed. But this time, both families had AK47s and rocket grenade launchers. This time, the fight was short and lethal. The majority of the men of both villages were simply wiped out. The rules hadn't changed, the stories they built their lives around hadn't changed but the equipment had. The old ways no longer fit the new reality.

AFGHN-10083NF8

So, I sit here watching the Olympics and thinking about how every contest is a zero sum game. This high ideal – this lofty gathering is for somebody to win – for some nation to win. And that means somebody – some other nation – has to lose. And I thought how much that reflected almost everything in our modern world. 

Everything is about winning. I read recently that most people would prefer to make $100,000/year if everybody else was making $80,000/year compared to making $150,000/year with everybody else making $200,000/year. Think about it: we would prefer to make less – be able to buy less – if it was more than the next guy. 

And that led me to thinking about how much different it would be if the Olympics were about cooperation rather than conflict. What if cooperation were the ideal. What if everybody doing better were the ideal.

How about a bobsled contest in which a gold medal would only be awarded if the average time of all the competitors were were no more than 2% higher than the fastest competitor. In other words, to win a gold medal, the fastest guys would have to make sure the slowest guys went faster. How would that change our story of what a winner is?