Having traveled through the far reaches of the universe, we come closer to what is immediately around us; why we are like the way we are, why we act the way we do, why we call ourselves human beings?
Eve's Genes
The unfit die-the fit both live and thrive.
Alas, who says so? They who do survive. SARAH N. CLEGHORN. The Survival of the Fittest.
Life's aspirations come in the guise of children. RABINDRANATH TAGORE (1928). Fireflies.
The religions interpretations of evolution conflict with many scientific positions but only if taken literally. The concept of Adam and Eve and their fall to earth has nothing to do with first appearance of man on this planet. It connotes man's rise from a primitive state of instinctive appetite to the conscious possessions of a free self, capable of doubt and disobedience. Several holy books provide sufficient evidence to refute the stereotypical religious interpretation. The Quran states, "God is the one who fashioned a man from Water, (25:54) referring to the unicellular creation from water-the concept held firm by scientific theories. Man having risen from dirt is the dictum of many religious metaphors but now science materially describes how-the famous CAIRNS-SMITH model. Accordingly, clay or minerals combine and crystals grow into which organic life began by outgrowing crystalline growth and took control of their structure through RNA. Natural selection produced living beings from the unicellular to Homo Sapiens.
The life originated with proteins and then evolved on to nucleic acids. And that's how God created man. The Quran reiterates what the clay model proposes. "Verily we created man from potter's clay and black mud." (15: Al-Hijr:26); "Verily We created man from a product of earth" (-23, Al-Muminun:12-15); "He began the creation of man from clay" (32: Al-Sajdah:7-9); "Allah created you from dust" (35: Al-Fitr:1).
Other theories of life origination on earth include random replication, self-catalytic RNA, coacervates, proteinoids, etc. The theory about life originating elsewhere include extraterrestrial seeding, interstellar clouds and comets, and of course Creationism.
Biologic evolution is a process of continuous change creating new species, some 1.5 million of them on this planet, all tracing their lineage to a single biologic cell. Why do species evolve? It is the innate desire for perfection. Darwin's concept of natural selection states that in all species there exist individuals with favorable and unfavorable variations; those who adapt survive, others perish reducing the frequency of unfavorable traits in a society-the principle of the survival of the fittest. The root cause of variations is now traced to genetic mutations with the possibility of new species arising suddenly. Mutation is a random change in one or more bases in the DNA molecules; mutations yielding favorable characteristics stay; others wither away. Cockroaches are one exquisite example of the game of mutation. They have survived for over 250 million years. Having emerged before the dinosaurs, they have outlived dinosaurs by about 65 million years-they are indeed marvel of nature's engineering.
For millions of years man has been under stress of survival that caused adaptations-the neck of the giraffe, the cushioned brained of woodpecker, the nematocysts of the Portuguese man-of-war, all examples of specific adaptations developed over long periods of time to preserve the species. Grazing animals which lived on the leaves of trees had to grow longer and longer necks, or starve. Biologic evolution creates precise adaptations so that a creature can survive in one single environment. Today it amounts to a wondrous stack of neurons and blood vessels encased in bone helping man find his food and shelter comfortably. Take a day in the life of Homo erectus about a million years ago. He is a member of a group of roving hunters. They will stay in an area, in shelters they contrive, until food stocks in that area are depleted. His tribe has begun to accumulate a store of knowledge and myth passed down from generation to generation. He would have been told of and shown the hundreds of different plants and trees which bear some relationship to his survival. "Never eat the fruit of this bush. To heal a cut, crush the leaves of this plant and tie them to the would with a length of vine." He knows the characteristic tracks and spoor of hundreds of creatures. To all this knowledge he keeps adding his own experiences and the only place to store all of this information necessary for survival is in his head. He has learned he must keep learning and remembering or else he would die as he has seen individuals of his tribe die when they forgot some essential piece of knowledge, like not challenging a rhino. Homo erectus was indeed stressed. His key to survival was his memory; constant use of memory caused brain size to increase helping him survive three great Ice Ages.
By ten thousand years ago man was cultivating plants, domesticating animals, and building more permanent shelters. It all started as a process of logic. If you control your environment, control your food sources, then you do not have to depend on luck. You depend on hard work and on more learning and remembering and handing down to your children and the younger members of the tribe what you have learned and remembered. If there is one dramatic departure in man's ability from animal instincts, it is in his caring for his off springs-the most crucial survival of the species tool.
Man shares his care for his off-spring with other animals but no other species has such strong emotional attachment that man shows for his children. Again, it is this strong attachment that allows the totally dependent newborn to survive; the human race would have otherwise perished. What has happened over the millions of years is that genes which stimulate chemical molecules of love at the sight of off-spring are highly developed in humans. Pheromones play an important role in the smell-oriented provocation of species. A mother can often easily recognize the undershirt of her child by smelling it. A child can at distant recognize his mother though he may even be able to open eyes. Mothers know well of the spontaneous lactation at the site of their infant. All these factors summarize the thesis that there is a strong chemical connection that allows motherhood to become stronger. However, after the off-spring grows up, the bonding often become weaker, most likely directed by social customs and cultural insistence. Children are known to attack and kill their parents and vice versa just like they would do to strangers. The relationship between man and his off-spring is that of convenience only helping to perpetuate survival.
Generally, animals which have the least amount of trouble living off their environment are the ones with the most curiosity, and the ones likely to have some sense of play. Otters, crows, squirrels, dolphins are good examples. Once man regulated his environment he began to have time to be more curious and more playful.
The modern man traces his lineage to a small population of about 100 to 200,000 people in Africa and perhaps to a single African woman (the equivalent of Eve). About a million years ago, Homo erectus, the predecessor of Homo sapiens of today left Africa and wandered throughout the world, migrating from the warmer south to colder north. There were likely several types of brainy bipeds that evolved from the Homo erectus, of which only the Homo sapiens survived the rest of the types including the Neanderthal man. It was only about 100,000 years ago that the mark of the modern man started appearing on earth. What made the modern man survive all other types? Sociologists and anthropologists agree that it was the scarcity of resources, compounded by the long Ice Age that forced man to begin socializing, sharing resources and above all knowledge since there were no written means of preserving valuable advice on surviving the rigors of the Ice Age.
(Man acquired so many artifacts he had to devise some way of keeping track of them. He had gone beyond the capacity of memory. This need of record keeping forced man to write, to scribble with in the beginning. The first writings, other than the famous Code of Hammurabi in 1800 BC. are records of shipments of goods in the Middle East. Until the fifteenth century, writing and reading were elitist skills. The discovery of moving type by Johann Gutenberg began to fill the libraries-man transformed his great burden of knowledge to books.)
Ability to keep warm was the turning point in the survival of man. Socialization combined with surviving instincts forced the needed genetic mutation to create a thinking man.
The thinking, arguing and reflecting man however only goes back to about 10,000 years ago; coinciding with receding Ice Age. We are a very new species on the surface of this planet; many species have much longer history than ours, take cockroach for example. In the giant time clock of nature we are but only a moment passed. The first five minutes of the cultural revolution of man's history outweigh millions of years of gradual evolution; agricultural revolution some 30,000 years ago changed the entire social character of man, requiring greater civic lifestyle to survive. Whether we would survive the next billion years is not possible to predict; but then, it should not surprise us if we do not. Like the smartest of all species that roamed the surface of earth, we are destined to be replaced by a more modern species which would have outgrown the weaknesses of this species. Homo "mordernus" is on the horizon; he will be talking about Homo sapiens as we talk about Homo erectus or the Neanderthal man today. Homo "mordernus" would surely be amused at our follies, unsociability, irrational behavior and the rest that makes the fallible Homo sapiens of today strange creature.