AGUSTIN FUENTES

Agustin Fuentes  (on the right)

When in seminary I realized that I’d moved from Plato (one eternal ideal pattern for a faulty reality) to Heraclitus (all is process and shifting) I didn’t really understand that these two were streams of thought.  The faculty was not about to tell me, since they were invested in Plato.  But the world was on my side and there has been a steady growth in Heraclitian scholarship.

I have a list of as many thinkers as the names on Rachel Maddow’s roll call of wised-up White House people leaving for the provinces.  Mine are in-coming thinkers.  The most recent on my list is Agustin Fuentes, best approached on YouTube.  Here’s a one-minute intro.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmZX9dKMzqI

Another on my list is John Hawks, a fossil chaser who knows hominids.  These guys are box-busters who cross disciplines, but they are not just trendy.  Here’s a conversation between the two of them:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upRFk2b2vas

Here are some concepts I picked up from the talk.  One is plasticity, which has been applied to the idea that brain connectomes can physically adapt to new thoughts (learning) throughout their human lives — even that new brain cells can form, which is so new that it's still challenged, so there will soon be new research.  

The next is winnowing which is the idea that circumstances and the nature of the human individuals both change all the time, which means that inevitably they will lose the fittingness that allows them to survive.  OR they will figure out a new way to "be."  The ape that is arboreal in a time when drought kills all the trees will either learn to live on grasslands or disappear.  (I had not known that besides the 200 or so hominids there were many many kinds of apes, both of which assortments mostly disappeared.  There was no one missing link, but rather a stream of life that dried up or changed its flow.)  

Fuentes named the great ape categories we know: chimp, bonobo, gorilla, orangatan, gibbon — and notes that they are all a little weird, remnant populations in ancient places like jungle.  (I have never seen a list of fossil “pongids” which are what the category of us is technically called, or even a list of where pongids had a long and fortunate existence.)

But there are kinds of monkeys, closely related but not pongids, that are not threatened by the presence of humans, but in fact become part of the larger ecology to the point of challenging humans.  Fuentes studied macaques, a large monkey that thrives in Thailand.  The difference is that they are social and live in interrelated groups.

The key to survival for humans is not just fittingness to the circumstances, but also the ability to change their environment by creating a niche, which is done socially.  Much of it is sex/family based, but possibly defining family in a very broad way so that the animals, plants and even geology are part of that ecosystem.  For a rancher, protecting the cattle, the hay crop, the water dynamics, and even a certain level of predation (which includes diseases across species lines) can be part of the mix.

I discovered Fuentes because of a tweet pointing to this video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpr-4ykX0Xo  is a video lecture at the University of Edinburgh sponsored as part of a series called the Gifford Lectures.  This is how a diasporic rogue scholar (me) continues to participate in what used to be confined within the boundaries of a university.  It is an another example of a shift from a boundary to a central node.

In this lecture Fuentes leads us through history of the long kind — over hundreds of millennia rather than only back as far as written material records -- and also in terms of the evolution of individuals as they go through life from conception to death.  His assumption is not Platonic -- that we should all be pressed into some template -- but Heraclitian in our ability to invent, adapt, realize, wonder.  I use these two thinkers for markers for the people who believe that learning is always approached through past precedents defined by admired figures.

“Culture” and how individuals fit into them is one of my personal thought precursors from theatre courses and the same is true of Fuentes, though he didn’t linger over theatre very long.  The work of inhabiting another person, quite different from oneself, leads one naturally to plasticity and awareness of the environment that make social groups form.

Belief systems, as in religious and patriotic groups, emerge from the semiotic systems that record what behavior is.  These things are organic, not planned rationally.  This is a main difference between the Euro-origin industrial systems and those that are autochthonous.  The first is name-based, what a name defines/confines, and the second is based on the verb, what is done, “the way it rolls.”

If you are focussed on the former, your challenge will be to keep things the same, to build walls, to store resources, to eliminate challenges.  If you are focused on the latter, the energy will go into recognize new things, seeing how they can be understand and used, what they can give us as new access to in the world around us.

You’ll need language to keep track of this and to share it with others.  It is the skill bringing the group along through persuasion and instruction.  Crucial are the theatre-related skills, from imitating a cave bear by a bonfire, to the moral issues of Greek drama, to our present adventure of video narrative and image.

A human is a community of cells within a skin.  An interfacing interaction with social community then gives us the ability to construct a human “niche”.  This niche then forms the physical brain of people in it, plugging together the connectome.  Culture becomes anatomy.

I need to connect this to a specific story.  Last night I watched David Hare’s four-part series called “Collateral” (Netflix) which is a consideration of the collateral ecology around human trafficking — how different kinds of people are affected.  One character is an Anglican vicar, formerly a role symbolic of parish order and social conformity.  But this one has adapted: she is female, lesbian, rebellious, focused on the welfare of individuals.  Her lover is Asian, not quite fitting into the same niche.  This vicar is very appealing.

Another character is a female soldier who has identified with her father, also a soldier, and who has attracted a senior officer to dominate her sexually, partly because of the vulnerability represented by PTSD.  And hierarchy.  That is, he rapes her because he can and his identity is based on what he can do.  She is destroyed.

The third female breaking stereotypes is a cop who must move among the assorted characters and figure out what happened.  She represents what Fuentes identifies as imagination.  Not only can she imagine her way into these assorted and displaced peoples, but she understands the underculture well enough to find processes to move the situation in ways that might or might not conform to the written rule of law, which is meant to control and force conformity.

Nicola Walker

Fuentes then moves to transcendence which is beyond the scope of this blog post.  I would love it if David Hare continued with his challenged female Anglican vicar into the realm of the transcendent.

This is David Hare's introduction to the series:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/writersroom/entries/91345bbe-b361-4e9b-bebd-4502e79bd4ba

HORIZONS OF HUMAN CREATURES

"Sweetgrass Hills" on the Canadian border

“Horizon” is a term of terrain, which has been pulled by metaphor into other human experience.  It is the limit of what we can “see” and that doesn’t mean just by looking, but also by comprehending.  The limit is set by experience and the acceptance that there is an edge, and beyond that edge sometimes assuming there is at least nothing of much importance.

From here I see the 49th parallel marked by the Sweetgrass Hills, the Continental Divide marked by the Rockies and a swell of land about a mile to the east, probably pushed up by the glaciers that once covered this land, although the Sweetgrass Hills stand as a refugia where some animals and plants were able to persist in a sea of ice.  A glacier is something that moves, a horizon that approaches and recedes, basically a frozen ocean.

To many people here, even Native Americans, “history’s horizon” is the arrival of white people because they brought written history, the “real” history, so nothing happened until maybe Columbus or Lewis and Clark or the Conrad brothers.  Montana had to pass a law to require schools to teach Native American history.  Or maybe the beginning was Montana becoming a territory, which happened in receding stages, smaller and smaller areas, until it solidified into a state.  Parallel with that, the reservations were created (closer to the coalition of Italy and Germany into nations back in Europe than I would ever have guessed) and then their horizons closed in.  Writing meant boundaries on maps, not the ridges and rivers of reality.  "Belgium" was created in 1830.

Probably the glaciers didn’t arrive so quickly that they could be seen moving, as in “Game of Thrones.”  (“Winter is coming.”)  But they must have pushed the humans and animals south, slowly enough for even the plants to move along, growing a little farther south every year the way they are moving north now.  When the ice left, melting back, it created great torrents of water that hydraulically carved the land, but in the gentler times there would have been at least a summer greenbelt along the edge as the plants, animals and people moved back toward the north.  

In the past it has been assumed that Native Americans got to this continent by walking across the Bering Straits, imagined as a sort of bridge like the gangplank to Noah’s ark.  But now the geologists — and history is becoming geological so that horizon can be about land again — say that Beringia was more like Bangladesh, just above sea level, a broad and marshy land where mammoths roamed, enticing the humans with their spears and dogs.

Some evidence of human occupation of the Americas precedes the withdrawing of the glacier that blocked Beringia and probably sank it with rising sea level (a kind of horizon) when it melted.  Along the coast of South America, the evidence suggests, people came by boat on the ocean current gyres from South Asia.  Even jungle debris rafts from SE Asian cyclones wash up with creatures riding them.

But wait!  There’s more.

http://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/bering-land-bridge-first-americans/?utm_content=buffer394cf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

“Written history,” meaning decipherable traces of the past, can be found in the structure and vocabulary of linguistics, the gene and epigene records in cells, the isotopes and structure of molecules, the lines and shapes immortalized in stone, and so on, each providing their own horizons of events in the deep primordial past before there were humans — before there was life of any kind.  We've become fairly used to thinking about Pangea.

No one has thought much about what people were on the North American continent before the last glacier.  There has been little consciousness about people who did not move out of a territory because of a wall of ice but because of drought, abiding dryness that couldn’t form ice.  Slowly new suggestive evidence arises and converges, not so much a horizon as a valley.

“. . . all Native Americans stemmed from a single group that later diversified into two branches: one that included Amerindians, who occupied North America south of the ice sheets and also Central and South America, and one that included Athapaskans, Paleo-Eskimos, and Inuit in the far north.”  To my eye the people around Lake Baikal look like Blackfeet, said to be Athapaskan.  In the past some have gotten interested in a globe with the Arctic, an ocean, as the center instead of the equator.  At some points the Arctic has been open water.

A little girl’s “pinky finger” has revealed far more.  Though 40,000 years old, she left enough DNA to reveal a whole new branch of our species, one named “Denisovian.”  Not like Neanderthal.  Like Australians.  Like the SE Asian people who would have set out on boats for horizons along the coast of South American.  But wait — there’s more.

(First I want to interject an irrelevancy which is that in Blackfeet country a special tie between little girls and their fathers existed by custom.  If the father were grieving, it was sometimes the practice to displace his pain onto the daughter by cutting off a joint of her finger.  After all, a man must be able to fight and hunt and if he loved the child, it was still a sacrifice.  There’s a poetic connection with the Denisovian fossil — isn’t there?)

The “more” is that investigation of far north Eurasian populations revealed Denisovian genes like those of today’s Native Americans.  There is talk of “ghost populations,” paleopeoples who no longer exist but can be implied from evidence.  In terms of the big glacier event, these people at the limits of early habitation seem to have been more in eastern and northern Eurasia, in a great area of desertification rather than glaciation that could have driven them onto the barely connected American continent, both east and west, only to confront glaciers. They had gone “over the top” as we imagine the world.

“The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) was the last period in the Earth's climate history during the last glacial period when ice sheets were at their greatest extension. Growth of the ice sheets reached their maximum positions in about 24,500 BCE. Deglaciation commenced in the Northern Hemisphere gradually between approximately 18,000 to 17,000 BCE and in Antarctica approximately 12,500 BCE, which is consistent with evidence that it was the primary source for an abrupt rise in the sea level in about 12,500 BCE.”  (Wikipedia)

“According to one theory, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans are all descended from the ancient human Homo heidelbergensis. Between 300,000 to 400,000 years ago, an ancestral group of H. heidelbergensis left Africa and then split shortly after. One branch ventured northwestward into West Asia and Europe and became the Neanderthals. The other branch moved east, becoming Denisovans. By 130,000 years ago, H. heidelbergensis in Africa had become Homo sapiens—our ancestors—who did not begin their own exodus from Africa until about 60,000 years ago.”  https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/denisovan/

Horizons, even time-horizons, when they are crossed, make us realize the possibility that there are worlds on the other side and we get curious about what they are like.  We have mostly thought about re-population in terms of animals, who are now repopulating the cities (coyotes, raccoons and hawks) and will one day repopulate the great ecosystems where we raise grain as long as there is precipitation.  It’s not likely to be glaciers bearing down on us, but rather drought.  

The grizzlies are pushing, leaving the high horizon of the Rockies and coming into the river valleys, because water is life.  But indignant humans want pushback.  It’s water all living things emerged from, compete for, and must keep contact with.  It is one of the crucial edges of biological homeostasis.  We cannot live in dust storms, but we might need to try.  Think “Dune.”  Think about ghost populations.

WE PALEOPEEPS

The boy found by Professor Lee Berger's son and his dog.

Chris Anderson’s question, “what are human beings for?” was almost unaddressed in his TED talk that I described in yesterday’s post.  So I spent some time thinking about it and then thought of looking at vids on the subject.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFrRHbgBitI

If the ad I saw (Momondo) comes with this, it will feature our multitude of DNA connections by showing people discovering their own genomes.  But the vid itself is about a sculptor making a replication of a hominin from the deep past, like millions of years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl-hI2IsCo0    

Migration patterns.  Another version of investigating the ancient ties between a person’s DNA and the regions from which they came, in the days when people stayed put and became unique because of the place and the ways of being in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8EuTwPy4UY

Leakey Foundation explains that the ancestors of today’s humans are a great cloud of variations that finally acquire mind and emotion loops that we share — though we’re still quite different from each other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFuwyBEq1IA

This is a video for those who are interested and for kids, because it features a major discovery found by a 9-year-old boy: the bones of another boy from millions of years ago.  The dad of the living boy explains.

There are two forces that act deeply on human beings that are not explored in these videos, mostly because you can’t really see them on a vid.  They are molecules and microbes.  (I’ll come back to that.)  Also, in earlier times you couldn’t see the main force that varied all these ancient hominins in the past,  Now we can.  It was climate change.  Today we can see it in action: the droughts, the melting polar caps, the people forced out of their homes.

In the past those who opened their minds to evolution have seen hominins and hominids as a matter of linear progress, going along a time/path through the millennia as though they were one brave “Otzie” (the man found frozen from a mere few thousand years ago).  In fact, humans — like all other species — have been a wave, a herd, a hustling mass of refugees and explorers fanning out over the land masses and even the seas, sending long fingers of sojourners into all the possible places for humans to inhabit, inventing ways to survive as they went until they made homes in the caves along river valleys, along warm coasts where there were fish or frozen coasts where there were marine mammals, deep into forests and high along mountain shoulders, and even on camels in sand deserts.  As they went, the environments changed them.  Some whole groups died.  Others thrived.

Why would it be different now?

Estimated at the moment is that there were maybe 200 different versions of hominins until we settled into the last known final drafts, us and the Neanderthals we have now absorbed.  Africans have no Neanderthal DNA.  Eastern Asians and American Indians have Denisovian DNA and from another group that can’t be identified so far.  Some call it Melanesian and their descendants appear to have sailed to South America earlier than those on foot — maybe.  Remember Kon-Tiki?

Back to the microbes and molecules.  Besides hunting fossils with GPS and radioactive carbon dating, we have been ransacking our own bodies.  Forget the DNA body-plan that guides gestation — once born and adult how do bodies actually work?  What makes it veer off from good health?  How much can we control?

We’re told now that in the process of birth we acquire many one-celled beings.  By the time we die — we are told — we are carrying bacteria and so on that is half the bulk of our bodies made of the cells we generated according to DNA instructions.  In fact, some will say that we — like coral atolls — are actually colonies of one-celled animals that collaborate to provide oxygen, nutrition, and movement for the whole colony that is a human being.

So all individuals with so much family and ethnic pride, all that gilded nationalism and smiling identity — like the people shown getting their DNA analyzed — is probably valid for some purposes, mostly cultural — but totally submerged in the great waves of human and hominin beings over the million-year eons who have gone before, gone alongside, and are now just gone.

Quite aside from triggering climate change in a way we never have before, we are now able to construct molecules, the minute assemblages of atoms that are information-carriers, interactors, even creators of our flesh and the world around us.  We can make insulin.  We can make new molecules that aren’t quite like insulin but do the same thing.  Frankenstein doesn’t have to be a whole new human being — it can be a manmade Frankenfood or Frankenmed or just a plastic polymer chain that no mammalian system has ever encountered before.

The Frankenmolecules sink into the sea, collect at the bottom of abysses where creatures imbibe them, dying and rising to the top where the fish we eat eat them, until they saturate the world so that they get into polar bear mother’s milk and we inhale them — like it or not.

We worry about war and opiates (among the other brain-deranging chemicals we seek out) but fewer of us fear food additives or the out-gassing of new carpets.  Both make some of us sick.  This is not including the viruses that travel among us by various means and demand even more molecular inventions to correct the captured cell-components.  

Overpopulation of the planet has been a concern for a long time.  Some say this is the purpose of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that deal out death in the Bible:  war, famine, plague, and natural catastrophe.  This reframes mass death as a necessary editing, and sometimes claims are made that it gives renewed vigor to those left.  But only a few people are looking at modern subtle toxic edits: shortening life-spans, lowering birth rates, and causing simple “failure to thrive,” formally called “inanition.”  Also what I call “pencil deaths,” those caused by failure of governments to allot resources to anyone they don’t like, i.e. people not like them that they don’t understand, which is why we always want our representation to be at least proportional to the actual population.

Build all the walls you like — they mean nothing.  Become as enraged as you like.  It means nothing.  The problem and the solution are within us.  Where do we go from here?