Human Development

On Human Development

What if the Mayans were right?  What if in 2013 we entered into a new phase of human development?  A New Age.  It takes millions and millions of years for selective breeding and mutations to create subtle changes in a creature.   Homo sapiens went from walking upright to making tools to speaking logically and thinking abstractly in a relative blink of an eye in terms of evolutionary time scales.  Why don’t other animals speak logically to each other?  No other animal does it.  Whales and dolphins are close, and we don’t really know how smart they are, but they aren’t building cities and they have no real technology.  They’re not exploring space.  But why would they?  They don’t need to.  They get along just fine.  It’s the need to survive or be wiped out of existence that drives a species forward in evolutionary terms.

Early humans were screwed if not for their advanced brains.  They had few if any defenses out there in Africa against saber tooth cats and enormous lions.   Selective breeding took such a gamble on humanity.  It doesn’t make sense how it even worked out for us.  What sort of random, chaotic, accidental process leads to the channeling of energy away from the physical body in favor of a more complex brain, in an ecosystem that relied on speed and brawn to survive?  There is a real disconnect in logic when imagining the millions of years it took while the early human brain was first developing and the body was losing physical strength.  It seems like we shouldn’t have been able to make it out of that epoch alive as a species. We shouldn’t be here.   We were too easy to catch and eat.

Imagine that energy is currency.  So in order to pay for more complex brains we needed to divert payment away from the physical strength first before it could be paid to the brain, leaving weak animals that are just starting to develop a smart brain out in the middle of Africa to fend for themselves.  Not yet smart enough to make a fire to ward off predators and not fast enough to run away from them, and definitely not strong enough to stand and fight.  The only thing I can imagine is that there was a time when the tribe of early humans found refuge near the coastline.  We lived off of fish primarily and avoided the savannahs and its predators.  This could also be where we lost our body hair.  It’s called the Aquatic Ape Theory.  The humans who could swim the fastest caught the most fish and therefore had the most children.  The ones with the least amount of body hair could swim the fastest.  Okay. And all that fish protein helped improve our brains.  That works. But that had to have happened at a crucial point in our development.  The timing had to be perfect.  Is that the answer?  Or was something else influencing our development.  Protecting and guiding us?  Angels?  Aliens? Who really knows?  That’s up to faith for some people and future scientific discoveries for others.

The fact that the result of the evolutionary gamble created beings who could look up into the sky and speculate, seek to unlock the mysteries of the universe and to explore it, makes me wonder about the question of why evolution would favor brain for brawn.  We are manifestations of the universe, products of it, having been made aware of the universe.  The universe became conscious through us; at least in this tiny spec of someone else’s sky.

We made a huge leap forward in a way that’s never been done before.  So, are huge mental leaps aspects of being human?

Are we undergoing one of these major leaps in human understanding and progress?  Most people would probably say no.  We are probably going in the other direction.  Media is definitely dumbing us down.   But let’s hear from the ones who say yes.  Just for the fun of it.

In the last hundred and fifty years we’ve gone from the horse and buggy to the space age, the internet, the smart phone and Google Glass.  What happened?  And now here we are, sharing ideas like never before.  I had a very interesting conversation with a lady last week about what she called the “awakening” taking place in our world right now.  The lady was very interesting.  I’ll refer to her as the “highly spiritual” lady.  She holds seminars on spirituality.  She said things that I too have contemplated.  And the more people I talk to, the more I come across people who surprise me and say things that you never heard before about religion and the universe, things I thought only I thought about.  The old literal interpretation of the Bible and history are changing.  The fastest growing religious affiliation is “Non-affiliated.”  By current projections, by 2050 Non-Affiliated will be the box checked off the most of all other religions upon survey.  Many fundamentalist would say that’s what’s wrong with our world.  But I don’t know.  The fact is, more and more people I talk to seem to see the world in a complete new and different way.  They don’t accept the old models of what their grandparents believed in.  Are we ready for more information?  Are we ready to wake up to a new reality? 

It could be argued that thanks to modern media we have all been indoctrinated by the same sources.  We all watch the same shows and therefore ask the same questions.  Maybe so.  But isn’t that a form of global collective consciousness then? 

The earth is developing a nervous system through our smart phones and devices. We’re creating, with technology, a digital collective consciousness surrounding the planet that is connecting us all in a global web.   If done right, the internet could lead to real, honest, global democracy.  “Yeah, right,” says the CEO, coughing on his cigar smoke.  “There’s no money in it.”  “There will never be harmony among humankind due to human ego and greed,” says a friend of mine. I agree with him, most of the time, but sometimes I like to think otherwise.  Sure, it appears that way now, based on the old models of society.   But there have been enormous shifts in the way humans think, recently and in the past.

It’s like the first time a cave dwelling ancestor of ours decided to paint a picture on a cave wall.  We suddenly began to think abstractly.  No other creature had ever done that on this planet before.  And it wasn’t exclusive to one human being in one cave.  There are hundreds of caves that they’ve discovered throughout the world that have abstract paintings in them that go back as far as forty thousand years.  I wonder who was the first human to do that?  Did cave art develop slowly over a long period of time?  They don’t really know.  There’s evidence that one of the oldest cave paintings discovered is just as sophisticated as art that was discovered from periods twenty thousand years later.  Did it start by accident?  An early human blew red ochre onto the wall and thought it looked cool.   It seems that eventually it became part of their religion.  At some point we developed art and the creation of that art became a spiritual experience.  Something happened, rather suddenly by evolutionary standards, that can’t be easily explained.  I’m certainly not going to try to explain it.  But the fact is, we suddenly began to think abstractly and to represent that abstract thinking in art.  By evolutionary terms that happened VERY recently; a major shift in the human brain, almost like an upgrade took place.  Is it happening again?  Are we on the cusp of another leap?  I’m on the look out for it.  But then again, who knows?  Amen.  Or better yet, I don’t know.