Patterns are observed in all things, from the smallest particle of matter, to the largest cluster of galaxies. Global patterns surround us. In our everyday lives, there are patterns everywhere, in every direction, every corner.

People also behave in predictable ways. Individual behavior patterns, including routines, habits, rituals and obsessions shape our lives and define who we are. We sleep, wake, breathe, think, feel, eat, work, and play in regular patterns.

Our brains, eyes, ears, and other sensory organs have evolved to recognize and analyze these patterns.

Learning and being curious takes place in our brain.

Our brain is responsible for our emotions, our intelligence, and our capacity for knowledge.

A person’s brain can:

recognize patterns,
read and count,
grow and change,
cause us to be happy or unhappy,
love someone or something,
remember important information,
plan ahead,
compare one thing with another,
solve complicated problems,
invent, create,
and dream.

Our complex mind, long evolved, and well-adapted, provides us with:

an awareness of our surroundings,
the ability to explain what we observe or experience,
what we need to know to survive as individuals, and as a society,
what dangers to avoid,
what is meaningful and satisfying.

A person’s collective INTELLIGENCE depends on:

the ability to analyze and synthesize information,
the ability to generalize,
learning to shift ideas from one context to another,
developing a will to learn,
maintaining curiosity,
encouraging imagination.

The search for knowledge is both simple and complex. Finding problems to solve is easy. It is what our brains do best. Solving problems is difficult, and demands more from us.

The more we learn, the more curious we become.

Learning how to direct and manage our thoughts, our feelings, and our actions can be considered an act of creativity. It is a secret of life, and with it comes the ability to be resilient, adaptive, wise.

Humans share a strong desire to understand the unknown. The search for understanding is a uniquely human characteristic that provides a profound survival advantage. The more we intuit and understand the world around us, the better we are able to adapt to our surroundings.

The quest for knowledge and understanding may have begun as a response to the biological imperative of the absence of a shared purpose. Each of us must discover his or her own purpose in life. And to do that, we must be able to gather enough knowledge and information that will lead us to ourselves, and help to explain the world around us.

Yet, often, societal pressures, personal bias, outright deception, and an unwillingness or inability to share information for one reason or another, prevent us from discovering and maintaining a sense of truth and reality in our lives. One way of coping with this problem is to pretend that there is no absolute truth, that truth and reality are unique human perceptions; that the truth is different for everyone. When what we really know is that ‘you can have your own opinions, but you can’t have your own rules’. Most of us suspect deep down that there are some truths, and that we can know them.

So where do we discover reality, if there is such a thing? What are the rules that define truth?

Edgar Allen Poe said, ‘Truth is a pattern of consistency.’ Fundamental laws and principles define truth.

The Universe contains all forms of energy and matter, including human perceptions.

Reality is a word that is synonymous with universe. It means the same as truth; you may think of truth and reality as one and the same, independent of human perceptions.

It must be what English author David Mitchell meant when he wrote that ‘There is only one truth. All other truths are half-truths.’

Truth is unchangeable, while the understanding of truth changes with person, time, and circumstance.

Often the search for truth falls short. Sometimes it succeeds. Knowing the difference between half-truths and reality depends on our accumulated knowledge of the way things work. But for now, most of us must rely on our relative judgments and information gathering abilities in search of knowledge and truth.

The world is flat. The world is round. The former was thought to be true for centuries. The latter is known to be true today.

We are often told that there are no answers in life, only good or better questions. Yet we know there are simple, fundamental truths that exist, as well as insightful answers to a variety of thorny questions.

It has been a popular idea among philosophers for over a century that our brains do not have the capacity for ‘objectively’ representing the world. It has also been fashionable to suggest that ‘reality’ does not exist outside of individual perception; that, in practice, each of our brains ‘creates’ its own reality.

Of course, there is no way to prove or disprove this argument. It is true that we are prisoners of our own thoughts and feelings, and that we can’t be sure what someone else is experiencing. It is also true that each of us develops a unique ‘psychology’ based on our experiences beginning with childhood and continuing throughout our lifetime. My pain or joy may not feel exactly the same as yours.

Not surprisingly, experiments show that individuals may experience reality in different ways. What I see as the color ‘red’ may be different from what you see as ‘red’. That’s why personal experience, known as empirical knowledge, is not always an accurate or reliable judge of reality or truth.

Yet there are many inferences that can be made about the way a human brain represents the world. Consider eyes for example. Our eyes have evolved to capture light in the visible spectrum and channel it to our brains for processing. This allows us to ‘see’ objects and events in our field of vision. The same is true for other senses, such as ears, nose, and skin. Even without strict evidence, we can be reasonably certain that light, sound waves, pheromones, and other sensory stimulants are fundamental characteristics of a universal reality that is independent of our perceptions. We have acquired this explanatory knowledge because of our ability to observe, analyze, and explain phenomena such as light, sound, and molecular motions of the air.

In addition, we are able to observe that when someone dies, when a person’s brain no longer functions, the world continues on its course. It is more than reasonable to predict, then, that when plants and animals die, when we die, or if life on Earth would cease to exist altogether, that matter and energy, and the forces that influence them, will continue to proliferate throughout the universe.

Many animals, including humans, engage in elaborate forms of deception, self-deception, mimicry, and camouflage, within the social context of various partnerships and allegiances. Though useful weapons in the battle for survival, these strategies create what social biologist Robert Trivers calls a ‘bias of information flow,’ and complicate the search for truth.

Historically, iron rule, public consensus, organized religion, and courts of law have been arbiters of truth within society. Today, truth is verified through consensus, by internal feedback mechanisms, evidence checking, persistent information gathering, and analysis.

The scientific method, first employed by Galileo in the 16^th century, functions as the primary verifier of truth in today’s developed world. The process of generating scientific evidence and theory, which persists in all branches of science, is accountable through peer review and repeatable experiment. The rest of us must use careful explanations (when we can find them), our wits, common sense, intuition, and information gathering skills in our search for answers to meaningful questions.

Knowledge is knowing, the known. Like love and pain, knowledge accumulates and is processed in the nerve centers of our brains.

Knowledge is not information or data; it is not found in books or on the Internet. Knowledge is the product of converting information into meaning. This requires a long-term commitment to a certain degree of intellectual rigor along with trusting our basic instincts, which turns out to be something of a tricky charge in our fast-paced and get-what-you-can-now society.

Our basic instincts include Common Sense, which is a form of empirical knowledge. It is simple logic. If you don’t want to get wet, stay out of the rain. Logical. Yet too often common sense can be overwhelmed by emotions, ideology, or over-intellectualizing. It can easily slip away from us when we most need it.

Intuition is an internal sensation, another instinct. It is incomplete knowledge, partial knowledge of something or someone. We may sense that something is important or awry, and not be able to explain or understand it exactly. Or we simply may not have enough information to convert it to use. Or we may act upon our intuition and find that we are exactly right in our assessment, or discover that it leads to a creative solution of a problem. Creative minds often use intuition to trigger a different way of looking at something, or to jump-start a new pathway toward discovery.

Common sense and intuition are useful in the everyday, but are often short-lived and have limited reach. Reliable explanations – explanatory knowledge – have widespread implications and are key to solving long-range goals and eliminating unnecessary pain throughout the world.

For most of us, it is often easier to act, or to feel strongly about something, than to think. Yet thinking is arguably the most important thing we do. Thinking widens our options.

It is thinking that produces knowledge. Thinking requires a certain amount of solitude. Finding time alone each day to consider things, or to solve a problem, is a big challenge in our current environment of busy life-jobs combined with the distractions of widespread media and entertainment. Constant distraction reduces our thoughtfulness and curbs our attentiveness.

Thinking critically is the foundation on which knowledge is built. Thinking deeply is a key to understanding the world. It not only can provide a big picture, but it forces attention to details. And it can change your mind.

The daily habit of thinking prevents others from telling us how and what to do, or doing the thinking for us. (see Pier Forni’s book The Thinking Life: How to Thrive in an Age of Distraction)

INFORMATION is data. Data can be simple patterns of information, or they can be facts, depending in what form they exist and how they are used. Data are organized in many different ways, ranging from programmed systems that run your smart phone or computer to the inner workings of a human brain. The short history of computers is a tale of learning and developing the most optimal ways to program machines for human use. Similarly, brains have evolved to process sensory information and to make sense of it. Brain information is organized in many different ways, resulting in outcomes ranging from dedicated reflex actions to great works of literature, art, and music.

The reason that the world of Artificial Intelligence (machine intelligence) has been slow to realize its long-term goals of making machines that think, ‘feel’, and act like humans is that the difficulty in teaching a machine to convert information to knowledge has been hugely underestimated. Brains have had millions of years to evolve its complex functions. Computers are not even 100 years old. Still, due to persistence and combined human knowledge, we are closer than ever to achieving a true machine intelligence.

Working at Bell Labs in the 1940′s, Claude Shannon discovered that any quantifiable information (letters, numbers, sounds, image pixels, etc.) could be represented by a series of digits. It was called Information Theory and created the foundation for the digital revolution. Shannon’s theory, among other things, showed that digital information could be made nearly error free by a process of simple error correction. This formula was used to create high-resolution Audio CD’s and DVD’s. Along with many others, especially Alan Turing, Shannon’s theories were responsible for the early development of the digital computer.

How we classify, manipulate, store, retrieve, and disseminate information in today’s world is a subject of interest and concern for almost every discipline, business, nation, and individual. The Internet, Schools, Media, Private Industry, and Government all share public information. All of these cultural institutions have their special biases that make it difficult to sort out truths from half-truths, reality from deception. Also, sharing information publicly while at the same time preserving individual privacy is a difficult balancing act. Possessing useful information and knowledge is possessing power. Knowledge is power, and it is as powerful as anything we know. It is also power without authority or restriction, and therefore can easily be used for devious or destructive purposes. With scientific knowledge growing exponentially, with the widespread use of the Internet, and with an increased personal interest in understanding the world around us and how it works, it will become necessary to pay close attention to who controls the information, who is selling it, who is buying it, who is hoarding it, who has it, and who doesn’t.

Here is a short dramatic sketch that may help to clarify the human dilemma concerning truth and reality:

(A small room with a window overlooking the ocean; Z. and A. sit across the table from one another; a vase containing flowers rests on the table.)

Z.

‘Reality, and the experience of reality, are separate phenomena. Reality exists outside the boundaries of perception.’

A.

‘I agree. (pointing to the vase of flowers)  The flowers in the vase, the vase on the table, the table, the window, the ocean, will live out their lives separately from our perceptions of them.’

Z.

‘Yet, we only know what our perceptions tell us.’

A.

‘So then, what can we really know about the nature of a thing, such as the flowers on the table?’

Z.

‘We cannot know for certain that the flowers are in the vase, on the table. Only statements about things are true, or false. And just how true or false a statement is depends on the precision of the words as they relate to the thing in question.

We can make statements about the flowers in the vase, on the table, etc. And we, or others, can attempt to determine the merit or truthfulness of the statements through available means of verification, such as consensus, critical analysis, evidence checking, or peer review. But we cannot simply assume that the flowers are in the vase, on the table. We cannot verify that things are true, outside of the context of language.

It is language itself that provides us with means to consider whether something is true or false. There is a significant difference in stating that something is true or false, with its implication of flexibility, and maintaining that it is true or false from an inherently determined position.’

A.

‘Naturally, this is an intriguing idea, and one with philosophical precedent. I especially appreciate the emphasis on the precision of language.’

‘For myself, I consider anything that is real to be true. The many and varied activities taking place around and within us define reality, independent of human perception, and are therefore true.

All things, events in the universe are both real and true. The act of deception, for example, in an ironic twist, is part of human nature, part of reality, and therefore true.

Discovering truth is another matter. All known creatures are limited in their understanding. Humans, who speak and think, must rely on representational systems of verbal and written language, mathematics, and visual symbols to explore and define reality. We use these symbols to great advantage for the purpose of communication. At the same time, symbolic language presents formidable challenges in the pursuit of truth.

In the end, we must rely on our perceptions. And our perceptions are not always a reliable gauge of reality. However, when I look at the vase of flowers on the table in front of me, the window, the ocean, I enjoy a more or less true account of those things, depending on how closely my symbolic brain represents the patterns of energy and matter that define them.

A statement about an event may be true or false, but the event itself is consistent with nature, real, true.’

Z.

‘So, do you think this puzzle on the nature of truth and reality is one in which we may ever agree?’

Click below to view a detailed essay on knowledge and anti-intellectualism in American Culture:

You’re Too Smart for Your Own Good

People are social animals. We like to form close relationships with those around us. At the same time, individuals tend to be fiercely independent.

Our hominid ancestors evolved from apes which first lived in trees, then walked upright, later discovered and developed stone tool making, grew large brains, developed communal strategies, and finally migrated out of Africa, populating various regions of the world.* Since then, until fairly recently, humans have populated most of the world, lived in small communities, hunted and gathered food, developed simple technologies, and harnessed the use of fire.

Sitting around the fire, night upon night, experiencing its ghostly effects on the psyche, would have provided easy access to emotions and thoughts. It may have started a process of self-exploration and expression, and excited early forms of myth and ritual. It would have strengthened social bonding and tribal identity.

Modern human society began about 40,000 years ago. Our immediate ancestors were Cro-magnon, us. Humans are categorized as Homo sapiens sapiens, those who think about thinking. Early humans could think and speak symbolically, abstractly. They could sing and dance. They created visual art and musical instruments, formed myths and rituals, invented sophisticated technology, domesticated plants and animals, and evolved principles and rules for social behavior.

Along with more specialized brain circuits, extended planning ability, having a greater sense of how others feel and think, and exploring a deeper understanding of self would have provided a clear advantage in utilizing resources, developing hunting and gathering tools, and defense strategies, and promoting alliances and social bonding.

Consider technology. It is a major force in determining the identity of human society and culture. Since the advent of stone tool making by Homo habilis some 3 and a half million years ago, the invention and development of technology by hominids and then modern humans has virulently evolved. But it has a downside. Technological advancement has always kept a step ahead of society’s understanding of its potential consequences. If someone next door finds a better way of doing something, it is our nature, our instinct, to imitate that thing, without first bothering to review the long-term pros and cons. It has always been this way. Even today, with guidelines, checks and balances, restrictions, and controlling agencies, the emergence of a new technology still manages to outstrip our ability to predict its long-term effect.

The invention of agriculture, when it first appeared over 11,000 years ago, created a global revolution. The domestication of plants and animals meant that a few people could feed many people, which changed the face of human society and culture. Agriculture turned hunter-gatherers into farmers, and created cities and towns throughout the world. In a short time, most people on earth were farmers, or supported farmers, lasting until the late 1800’s when the Industrial Revolution took hold in Europe and North America, once again changing the face of global society and culture.

As a rule, the better we can adapt to our environment, the more comfortable we are, the more we tend to maintain the status-quo and the less we are motivated to change our circumstances. However, when things are not working well, when we are struggling against the environment, or unable to adapt to unfamiliar or dangerous conditions, we are more likely to expend energy developing and exploring strategies and methods that promise to be more adaptive.

As people began to congregate in towns and cities, living in close proximity primed a new awareness that focused on social responsibility. So exactly how did issues surrounding morality and ethics evolve from the time of early humans?

Morality is a set of rules that voluntarily govern social behavior. But what are the rules and where did we get them? Are moral principles instinctive? How do we know right from wrong? How do our brains recognize when something is appropriate or not, or when something or someone is ‘good’ or ‘bad’?

Our brains must be able to quickly sort out qualitative experiences in order to make survival decisions. The ability to detect what is right or wrong in a situation, what is normal or abnormal, what is appropriate or not, is an important set of skills. It may also have been the evolutionary origin of morality.

From the view of Darwinian evolution, a community whose members are prepared to support one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, have a better chance for survival. In this way, the standard of morality would tend to increase over time.

Although knowing right from wrong may be instinctive, acting on moral instincts is probably learned, in the same way that we learn a spoken language through imitation and practice.

Darwin has suggested that humans first learned from experience that benevolent actions could be returned; and that the habit of benevolence could be imitated. In fact we now know that there are ‘mirror’ neurons in the brain that allow us to feel sympathetic sensations of joy and sorrow for another person.

As reasoning and foresight became improved, individuals perceived the more subtle consequences of their actions. Virtues such as kindness, fidelity, and courtesy, which were once completely disregarded, became elevated to a position of esteem.

Darwin cites other useful virtues including keeping promises, helping others, praise, blame, shame, obedience, guilt, remorse, encouragement, admiration, sympathy, courage, patriotism, mutual aid, the distribution of benevolent actions, and benign responses.

Recent research has shown that at home, in school, and on the job, a single display of praise is more powerful than ten doses of criticism.

While a high standard of morality provides only a slight survival advantage to an individual, an increase in the standard of morality for all individuals provides a significant advantage to society as a whole.

As Darwin points out, selfish and contentious people do not form coherent communities.

We know that species that are both competitive and cooperative are the ones that tend to survive. The species that are mostly competitive kill off each other, while those that tend to be cooperative aren’t aggressive enough to meet their needs, or they become overwhelmed by other species.

We know that humans, as a group and individually, are both competitive and cooperative. Morality, greed, circumstance, and necessity create a complex tug-of-war between competition and cooperation. How we handle this conflict helps to mold our character, and define who we are. Yet, surprisingly or not surprisingly, depending on how you see the world, studies suggest that humans tend to be slightly more cooperative than competitive, probably because of our deep and long-standing concern for social morality and ethics. We are, after all both social animals as well as individuals, forever trying to satisfy the needs of both. (see Robert Wright’s sensitive look at this subject in his book Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny)

CULTURE is all of the things that we share or exchange with people within and across societies.

We enjoy sharing the things we value: our experiences, ideas, rituals, and material possessions. But it is more than that. It is necessary for us to share; it strengthens friendships, relieves loneliness, and promotes mental and physical health.

Every culture develops a unique character or identity, based on shared values of the group. The British are known for their literature, the French for their cuisine and painting, the Germans for music, the Russians for dance. There are many examples throughout the world. These are, of course, broad generalities, or stereotypes. But it raises questions: why do some cultures excel at some things and not others? Why are some nations highly industrialized while others are barely developed.

Jared Diamond, in his popular book Guns, Germs, and Steel, examines this question as part of his lifelong study of the people of Papua, New Guinea. The book describes the positive effect of the kind of cultural exchange of ideas, language, rituals, and resources that is possible across latitudinal geographies that are easily navigable, such as the wide expanse of Europe, much of Asia, and North America. In contrast, longitudinal continents such as Africa and South America contain physically isolated regions impassable by mountains, tropical forests, waterways, and desserts. It is very difficult to invent and share new technologies and ideas when you don’t interact with cultures much different from your own.

Local beliefs, popular trends, ideas, civil laws, moral standards, rituals, technologies, goods and services, and artworks within various societies and cultures around the world follow a process of growth and change over many generations, similar to Darwin’s natural selection. These cultural objects and events are known as memes.

In 1976, the English biologist Richard Dawkins wrote a book entitled The Selfish Gene in which he introduced the idea of a meme. The word meme is a hybrid of memory and gene.

A meme is a kind of replicator that transmits ideas across human culture, similar to genes that transmit biological traits from person to person. If an idea, jingle, or latest fad catches on, a meme is said to propagate from one brain to another ‘in a sequence of imitation’. (for a detailed description of memes and their function, see Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine)

Memes, such as a recipe or a song, for example, may be copied and distributed many times, and may survive for hundreds or thousands of years.

But just like genes, not all memes are necessarily advantageous. Memes don’t have to be useful. There are many examples of tired or worn out ideas or things that perpetuate themselves from one generation to the next. The arrangement of the keys on a computer keyboard is a classic example: the position of the letters was originally designed to keep the keys from sticking on the long-vanished typewriter. Library books are filled with old ideas and out-dated information. There are many examples.

There are also symbiotic relationships that are strictly cultural. These partnerships range from large consumer malls that contain a variety of different stores, to cell phones that integrate a telephone, camera, email and Internet access.

It is our nature to want to share who we are and what we do. Sharing is a basic instinct, a part of our human legacy. The force of this drive is so enormous that it pervades our lives and shapes our society and culture. Yet, ironically, our desire to share often becomes the very thing that leads to discrimination and alienation.

Sharing probably evolved as a form of bonding in which social ties were strengthened as a means of protecting the young. It also served as a mutual benefit to the community. The instinct to share our thoughts and desires with those close to us likely led to socialized attitudes of empathy, sympathy, and even altruism.

A deep desire to share thoughts, feelings, and actions may produce lifelong bonds, offspring, and a sense of community, but it may also be the cause of deep division.

Today, we are no longer hunter-gatherers scattered in small communities. Seven billion people reside on the planet; many are cramped into densely populated areas. As the population has increased, individuals have converged geographically who are different enough from one another that sharing has not occurred naturally. People from different origins and different cultures have massed together to form large and disparate communities. The desire to share similar values and rituals is frustrated by these differences, and often results in provoked tensions based on fear, anger, or ignorance. And when the divisions are wide and deep enough, they may lead to exclusion, provocation, and even war.

The same is true around the world for individuals, small groups, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and nations.

For the past several decades, the world has embraced the ideal of cultural diversity, but today we are learning at ground level exactly how to live and work with others supportively, even though we may not share similar views. We are already witnessing new hybrids that reflect this uncommonality. On the global scale, new world organizations, coalitions, and partnerships are emerging. In cities, there are recurring examples of cross-cultural activity such as fusion restaurants, fashion composites, musical mash-ups, and more. These are clear attempts to synthesize and transcend cultural difference.

In today’s global community, we can communicate with people around the world in seconds, we travel almost anywhere in a matter of hours. We are exchanging ideas and resources across cultures at a rapid pace. Racial and cultural integration is becoming commonplace. With an exploding population growing even bigger, strangers with completely different belief systems and social values are being forced to live side by side in order to take advantage of economic opportunities. Cultural diversity is the result.

But not everyone is happy about abrupt cultural change. Nations, communities, and individuals are struggling to catch up with these new and difficult challenges. Many practice tolerance. Others want to preserve their pure cultural legacy at any price. Learning to live and work together with people who share profoundly different belief systems is a worldwide challenge, and one that characterizes the times in which we live.

Finally, it should be mentioned that the scientific revolution that began with Leonardo, Copernicus, Gallileo, Newton and others in Europe only a few hundred years ago has produced a profound effect on today’s society and culture. Instead of relying on supernatural beliefs and systems alone, humans now have the capacity to creatively EXPLAIN and discuss, error-correct, and build upon new ways of solving difficult problems. In fact, it is not wishful thinking to consider that we are capable of solving nearly any problem that doesn’t violate the natural laws of physics. This includes the eradication of war and poverty, traveling to other stars and galaxies, and the elimination of death due to disease or ageing, to name a few. (see Oxford University physicist David Deutsch’s revolutionary book The Beginning of Infinity)

* (Although controversial, there is recent archeological evidence from China to suggest that hominids could have evolved in different parts of the world at the same time (the ‘global origins’ theory). This is contrary to the ‘out-of-Africa’ theory. Both the ‘global origins’ and ‘out-of-Africa’ theories have been heatedly debated by anthropologists for decades.)

Click below for a more detailed description of cultural evolution by the Nature and Inquiry Artists Group:

Cultural Evolution

But unlike other animals, we are able to talk at a young age. We all learn to speak a LANGUAGE that has a set of innate rules, or grammar. And we do this without having to be taught what the rules are. Similar to Mozart’s innate ability to compose music as a child without having to ask how, we are all geniuses at learning to speak.

Later, we are taught how to read and write the language we first learn to speak, as well as other languages.

Many animals communicate with one another using elaborate signaling mechanisms, including visual cues, sounds, taste, touch, and smell. Humans also use these inherited methods of communication to signal one another.

But we have evolved something in our brains that other animals don’t have, and that is a system of symbols that provides us with a wide range of expression for communicating with others. We use these symbols in different combinations to represent a nearly infinite amount of information and knowledge.

For billions of years creatures lived in water. It has been only millions of years that animals have walked on land. It is only comparatively recently that primitive brain cells have evolved. And it was in the very recent past that humans first used symbolic language to express our intentions, thoughts, and emotions.

The capacity for a human brain to represent the world outside of itself is a remarkable achievement of evolution. Writing, music, art, and mathematics are only a few ways in which we use symbols to represent meaningful aspects of the world around us.

These symbols include alphabets invented for the purpose of reading and writing language, and speech sounds used to articulate spoken languages.

There are as many languages in the world as there are cultures, with alphabets that use different letters or characters, and different ways of producing spoken sounds.

Some languages use pictures instead of an alphabet, such as the ancient Chinese language of pictograms. There are ‘click’ languages spoken in Africa. There are also languages that use graphic symbols, such as Morse Code, Braille touch language for the sightless, and Sign language for the deaf.

We use these symbols to communicate with one another: to speak, and write, and touch, and gesture.

Other symbols that we use to communicate include musical scales, numbers 0 through 9, visual shapes and forms, and body movements.

These symbol sets, such as an alphabet or music scale, and the rules that go with them, provide a wide range of expression that enables us to share those things that are most meaningful.

These symbols help us to represent the world around us.

Signals, such as sounds, pheromones, and colored areas of the body (adapted for attraction and camouflage) in multi-celled creatures are primitive forms of symbolism. They represent meaningful desires.

As animals evolved, symbolism became more sophisticated, such as the ‘waggle dance’ of worker bees, in which choreographed movements of the bees provide specific directions to food sources. Various mammals use body movements, as well as sounds including hissing, purring, licking, and growling, to make their opinions known.

As early primates became increasingly socialized, symbolism became more evolved, including the use of facial signals, elaborate body motions and attitudes. Some chimpanzees have learned sign-language in captivity. However, they show no inclination to teach it to others. Chimpanzees learn through imitation. ‘They can transmit observable skills, but not abstract ones.’ (for more, see Mary E. Clark, In Search of Human Nature)

As Homo habilis (3.2m) learned to make and use tools, and Homo erectus (1.8m) migrated from Africa to other parts of the world, various communal strategies, including primitive forms of symbolic language, evolved as a means of surviving new environments.

Homo erectus imitated animal sounds. They also used facial signals including smiles, pouts, eyebrow movements, staring, and lip-smacking. Sounds were combined with facial expressions to communicate simple basic intentions and reactions such as ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘please’, ‘sweet’, and ‘sour’¹ With increased communication came deeper social attachments.

In Homo erectus, we see the first significant positional descent of the voice box, which would have increased their ability to produce more human-like sounds, perhaps with some added inflection.

These systems didn’t just appear overnight. Early hominids evolved specialized brain circuits that could express and process symbols, such as meaningful grunts, growls, and whistles, facial expressions and hand signals. These evolved into brain processes that could imitate the sounds of other animals, read and interpret elaborate signals, form social attachments and express early forms of imagination, creativity, and planning. Ultimately these brain circuits expanded to be able to express the kinds of symbolic repertoire that we see in humans.

The rules of grammar, or SYNTAX, for learning to speak are programmed into our brains from birth. They are part of the human genome, our genetic code. Each of us uses the same set of rules to learn whatever language we are speaking.

Although different languages in different parts of the world may use different alphabets and sound different, they all have similar sentence structures. All languages include nouns that represent objects, verbs that refer to actions, and adjectives and adverbs that modify objects and actions.

But only the rules, or syntax, for spoken languages are hard-wired in our brains. In fact, it is interesting to note that different children who speak the same language generally acquire the rules of language in the same order.

The acquisition of language is also developmental. Speech sounds, alphabets,  musical scales, mathematics, visual and body language have been created and developed entirely by humans. All of these languages have developed in different cultures throughout the world since the beginning of modern human expression.

Modern research in linguistics has shown that young children don’t just imitate words they hear. Just hearing the words is not enough. In order to acquire language, young children must be able to continually communicate and interact with those around them. As children acquire language, they build an internal system; they develop a systematic knowledge through creative language practice. And a child must be able to do this at an early stage of development. It has been famously shown that in cases where infants have been isolated from all human contact before they are five years old, the development of normal language facility becomes all but impossible.

New research has also shown that the acquisition of language rewires our brains. Babies that are hearing two languages in utero develop bilingual brains before they are born.

And there are new experiments suggesting that young children, world-wide, develop a disproportionately large animal vocabulary, reflecting a deep, possibly innate, connection to the natural world. (google Jean Berko Gleason,  Psycholinguist, Boston University)

Whenever we use language, there is a necessary trade-off between clarity and brevity. We want to present our ideas clearly so that people understand us, yet we don’t want to go on for so long that they become bored. We may need to repeat and emphasize certain things, but not so much that we risk losing our audience. Syntax provides a structure that tends to support complex interactive communication.

Between 50 and 100 thousand years ago, intensified socialization must have put tremendous pressure on early Homo sapiens communities to communicate more fluently, using language. In order for this to happen, the brain needed to be able to process abstract symbols, but also the muscles of the voice box, mouth, and tongue had to be coordinated in order to produce complex speech sounds. Earlier, bipedalism, which made possible the interruption of exhalation, a precondition for speech, and an anatomically lowered voice box, made it possible for early humans ‘to laugh, sing and speak’ (see Robert Provine’s book Laughter). But it also raises provocative questions: Did thinking precede speech, or vice-versa? Did thought and speech coevolve? Exactly how are thought and speech related?

There has been a debate for centuries that thinking is dependent on language. Some say that some form of language is necessary for thinking to occur. Others say not. If it is true that language is required for more abstract thinking, then thinking itself must be shaped, in part, by the innate rules of grammar.

All languages are combinatorial and depend on a vocabulary of expression.

Any vocabulary may be derived arbitrarily from nature, such as a musical scale, or from the process of natural selection, as in the case of speech. The discrete tones of a musical scale are sampled directly from the natural acoustic spectrum. In the case of speech, the vocal apparatus and brain functions related to language have evolved over tens of thousands of years.

In speech, individual sounds, or phonemes, are combined to form syllables, words, phrases, and sentences that convey meaning. The vocabulary of speech is composed of from 13 to 200 separate phonemes, depending on the specific language that is being spoken. English-speaking peoples employ a vocabulary of 44 phonemes.

There is recent evidence suggesting that the further people have migrated from their human origins, the fewer phonemes were required to communicate. In other words, there is a direct correlation between the age of a civilization and the number of phonemes in its language. For example, Inuit languages in the far north contain the fewest phonemes, along with the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Rim, including Hawaii, while African languages tend to be rich in phonemes.

In writing, a few graphic symbols are arranged in thousands of different combinations, resulting in the sharing of a common language. In western culture, writing has a vocabulary of 26 letters, with various adornments. Other cultures have invented different character schemes.

Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, and George Bernard Shaw all have attempted, for one reason or another, to modify the number of characters in the English language.**

In the western world, the vocabulary of music is confined to 12 tones known as the chromatic scale. All other scales are derived from these 12 tones. In other cultures, melodic systems may include microtonal scales that are composed of many less discrete tones.

The vocabulary of visual art is point, line, plane, perspective, scale, color, form and dimension.

The vocabulary of numbers is zero through nine, plus or minus, with or without a floating point. In addition, there are mathematical symbols used in writing equations. Aristotle said ‘All things are numbers’, by which he meant that any physical quantity that may be imagined by a human brain can be represented by a numerical symbol or expression.

The vocabulary of computers is a binary code of zeroes and ones.

The vocabulary of smell is based on a finite set of pheromones. The vocabulary of taste relies on five elements of discrimination: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and what the Japanese call umami, meaning savory or delicious.

The vocabulary of human experience is actions, thoughts, and feelings. All things human are combinations of these three dynamic systems.

The vocabulary of human emotion contains neurochemical states with standardized names such as passionate, anxious, content, frightened. A variety of these primitive elements combine to form all of our emotions. The same principle works for facial expressions, as well as other forms of non-verbal communication, including physical gestures.

The vocabulary of life is DNA. Four chemical bases ATG and C create DNA sequences that map to all known forms of life. In addition, there are twenty amino acids arranged differently to create proteins that build and maintain organisms.

At last count, there are one hundred and nine chemical elements which, when rendered in various combinations, form all of the materials in the known universe.

The vocabulary of nature is atoms, or more precisely electrons and quarks.

Today, there are about 6500 languages spoken world-wide. Some 2000 of these are attributed to hunter gatherer tribes. In India alone, there are some 1000 languages in use. These are average figures. Languages are fluid, they change based on cultural circumstance and need. Languages and dialects range from ‘click’ and ‘sign’ languages to jargon and slang. While some languages are dying out, new languages are emerging. New words enter a language routinely, while others become extinct. Think of all the new computer-related words that were not part of our vocabulary even 10 years ago, such as ‘ebook’ or ‘smart phone’ .

The origin and use of different languages and dialects is driven by cultural and social patterns. Adolescents make up new dialects to keep secrets from authority figures. Small urban neighborhoods and other isolated communities are a perfect spawning ground for the creation of new dialects. Consider that it doesn’t take much time for immigrant children of different cultural backgrounds to make up new languages on the school playground in order to communicate with one another. This combining of two distinctly different languages into a new spoken form creates what linguistics call a Pidgin language.

There is a well-documented case of a parrot in South America which, for a time until its death, was the last surviving creature to speak the native language of the surrounding human population. When the parrot died, the language became extinct.

Here is an old-style limerick I wrote that describes the incident. It’s called Death of a Language.

There once was a Parrot from Peru
Who was older than me and you.
He could swear like a pirate,
Would rat like a fink.

When he finally died,
The anthropologists cried,
For the language he spoke
(and this is no joke)
Was realio, trulio extinct.

(** Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin wrote short pieces marveling at the invention of phonetic writing. Franklin also composed a delightful Bagatelle in which the letter Z petitions for the alphabet to be reformed. These short pieces, Lincoln’s The Invention of Phonetic Writing, and Franklin’s Writing and The Petition of the Letter Z are easily accessible online.)

MIT Media Lab researcher Deb Roy wanted to understand how his infant son acquired language — ‘so he famously wired up his house with video cameras to catch every moment (with exceptions) of his son’s life.’

See Deb Roy’s remarkable TED talk The Birth of a Word:

]]> http://naturescienceart.org/2011/11/06/language-and-syntax/feed/ 0 jholland1 Alice (Abe Morell) Alfred Jensen painting Speaking Out...(Sue Reed) Symbolic Representation Butterfly Camoflauge Language-Brain Grammar-Syntax Interactive Communication (Jean Mas) English Alphabet Speaking and Listening Parrot (Kristen Byers) http://naturescienceart.org/2011/10/30/memory-and-consciousness/ http://naturescienceart.org/2011/10/30/memory-and-consciousness/#comments Sun, 30 Oct 2011 13:52:21 +0000 John Holland http://naturescienceart.wordpress.com/?p=589 ]]> A human brain is the most complex system that we know. It contains about 100 billion neurons. It’s nerve fibers alone, if flattened out, could circle the Earth four times.

Our brains are bilateral, highly redundant, flexible systems that count, compare, think, reflect, plan, predict, and dream, to name only a few of its thousands of functions.

Our brains allow us to remember events, to be conscious of the world around us, and to be aware of ourselves. Because of our thinking brain, humans are categorized (by other humans) as Homo sapiens sapiens, creatures that think about thinking.

Each brain is a work in progress that combines inherited predispositions, a lifetime of social and personal development, awareness, and accumulated memories.

MEMORY is not a place in the brain where things get stored, like a shoebox. Memories are specific, neural pathways that are triggered each time we ‘remember’ something.

The storing and retrieving of memories take place everyday in our brains. There are different kinds of memories. Some long-term memories last a lifetime, while other, short-term, memories are quickly erased.

Short-term memory is ‘working’ memory; we may store a telephone number for only a few moments until we no longer need it. Most short-term memories last only briefly. Long-term memories can last a lifetime, and the more useful they are for our survival and well-being, the longer they last. Sometimes these memories are painful, other times blissful.

Semantic memory is fact-based. We use semantic memory when we recall the name of a state capitol or that Times Square is located in New York City. Procedural memory is related to motor activity. It is the reason we don’t have to learn to ride a bicycle each time we want to go for a bike ride. Episodic memory keeps track of our personal experiences, usually with us at the center. Who were we with on our trip to New York? When were we there? Was it fun, or was it a nightmare of noise and confusion, or perhaps both?

Episodic memory occurs in the brain’s frontal cortex, the last to develop in children, and the first to break down in later life.

When we sleep, daily memories are sorted and consolidated, then delivered to the areas of the brain responsible for long-term memory.

Our strongest memories are associated with emotions. Memories are deepened by intense emotional experiences. Intense emotions produce strong memories. Although physical pain is also remembered, emotional pain is relived. When we remember an intense emotional event, we experience it all over again, almost as though it were happening for the first time.

An efficient, but often frustrating, process that occurs in our brain is memory ‘editing’. Long-term memories are always modified and distorted during the process of consolidation. These distortions can involve stretching or shortening of time durations, physical distances, or the sizes and scale of objects.

Known as commoning, the brain re-creates a memory with just enough detail so that we can recall the most important aspects of the memory, but not enough to allow us to remember specific details. Other distortions include the invention of new features that fill gaps in the original memory, or the merging of elements from two or more entirely different experiences. This is why we don’t always remember events exactly as they happened, or why two or more people witnessing the same event may have very different recollections of it.

Given the number of memories processed everyday, commoning saves memory capacity without threatening our survival. This is a classic trade-off between the quality of a memory and memory bandwidth.

And yet when we become distracted, we are all capable of forgetting.

Most of our experiences eventually pass through the hippocampus, the center of memory processing. The major reason that smell and taste trigger strong memories is because they are linked directly to the hippocampus; they don’t have to cycle through other relay stations in the brain.

Most of us have heard of déjà vu, the feeling that an unfamiliar circumstance or series of events has happened before. This condition occurs in epilepsy patients where memory is involved, but the direct cause is unknown. Jamais vu is less well known and is exactly the opposite, the sensation that something well known to you seems completely unfamiliar. This experience can occur when you stare at a familiar object, where the object loses its familiar quality and morphs into a disconnected blur.

But we humans also store information in places other than our brains; these are  extended memories. They include books, newspapers, magazines, recipes, even tattoos, as well as digital storage devices such as computers, cell phones, video games, and audio and video recordings.

One of the most satisfying aspects of extended memory is our ability to store information in other people’s brains. Whenever you have a conversation with a family member or close friend, you are building memories in each other’s brains; you are storing your friend’s experiences and your friend is storing yours. It is an act of sharing, as well as a form of immortality.

Only recently, brain scientists have conducted breakthrough experiments concerning a different form of extended memory; and they contain huge implications. For the first time, researchers recorded a memory on a tape recorder (in the form of a series of pulses) from the hippocampus of a mouse performing a task, erased the memory in the mouse’s brain so that it could no longer remember how to perform the task, then reinstated the memory into the mouse’s hippocampus using the original pulses from the tape recorder. The mouse once again ‘remembered’ how to perform its task. The scientists could just as easily have inserted the memory into a different mouse. Think of the things you could quickly learn using this method! Acquiring a new language would certainly be easier. The consequences of this research are enormous and promise to open new pathways in medicine, morality and ethics, and everyday life.

CONSCIOUSNESS is the awareness of things.

All creatures large and small are aware of their surroundings.

Being conscious means that we can recognize differences between things. If everything were exactly the same, we would not be able to distinguish anything from anything else. There would be no consciousness.

Every living thing senses what is going on around them and is able to respond in some way.

Various creatures, including humans, have evolved different degrees and methods of consciousness.

Different creatures have different ways of experiencing the world. Butterflies see, but don’t hear. Bats hear, but don’t see. Spiders don’t see or hear; they ‘feel’ their way along. Worms don’t have eyes or ears, but detect movements through the ground.

All creatures benefit from some form of consciousness.

Bacteria, fungi, and plants are pre-conscious. They have no nerve cells, yet they can sense change in their environment and respond to it.

True consciousness occurred in animals around 600 million years ago. Animals were the first creatures to process sensory information using nerve cells.

Without memory, there would be no consciousness.

Consciousness involves learning, which depends on the ability to save and recall information, and to develop new behavior in response to environmental challenges. Consciousness also includes exploration, emotional states such as fight or flight, pattern recognition, signaling, mimicry, courtship, and social exchange.

Self-consciousness is the brain’s internal reflection of itself, and it’s interests.

Humans are self-conscious. My brain, and yours, is not only aware of its surroundings, it is aware of itself. Although we often take it for granted, each of us possesses a unique ability to monitor our own thoughts, feelings, and actions.

For a brain to be self-conscious it must be able to represent the world symbolically, which implies the use of symbols such as marks, visual shapes and patterns, rhythmic and tonal patterns. Expanded long-term memory is a primary requirement for a self-conscious brain. By definition, a self-conscious brain must also include language, with an innate set of grammatical rules, or syntax.

For a brain to be self-conscious, it must be able to think abstractly, question, predict, generalize, categorize, and reason.

Other characteristics that define self-consciousness may include complex emotional states, the use of metaphor and analogy, the formation of new ideas, morality, empathy, high levels of cooperation and altruism, creativity, insight, long-term planning, the capacity for spirituality, and cultural exchange.

Communal consciousness is group identity and awareness, which is characterized by a shared purpose. Groups that form a communal consciousness include, but are not limited to, nations, cities, neighborhoods, families, sports teams, choral groups, special interest clubs, classes that meet regularly.

Super-consciousness is consciousness of the future.

Super-consciousness may result from the evolution of self-consciousness that leads to the creation of a human/machine hybrid, or a super-intelligent robot or computer that is able to replicate and adapt to its environment.

Each neuron in our brain is connected to thousands of other neurons. These neural connections are responsible for establishing a particular detail of an experience in response to a stimulus. A single tone in music, a color, a smell. Groups of neurons work together to produce a more complex experience such as listening to a melody or recognizing a face. There is a neuron or group of neurons dedicated to every detail associated with each of our experiences.

Groups of neurons within a human brain are not ‘hard-wired’ as they are in insects for example. They often produce unpredictable or ‘random’* associations based on the chemical transfer of signals from one neuron to the next. These neurological inconsistencies provide flexibility at the highest levels of consciousness, resulting in our ability to make complicated decisions. It also accounts for confusion and indecision, which explains the popular quote: ‘To error is human’.

These same chemical processes that occur at the synapses between neighboring cells are responsible for the delayed time reactions in our thinking and motor responses.

Human thinking, feeling, and acting, for all of its planning, reasoning, and inspired attempts at perfection, is often messy.

The complete set of neurons and their connections in a brain is called a connectome, similar to the set of genes that make up a genome. Recently scientists have mapped all of the 300 neurons in the tiny brain of the C. élegans roundworm. They found that for each neuron there are hundreds of connections to other neurons. Today there are laboratories around the world working to map the human brain. But it is a mind-numbing task because of the sheer amount of neurons and connections in our brains. And, unlike roundworms and other simple creatures which have standardized nervous systems, our brains are different from one another; neurons are constantly rewiring and regenerating themselves and their connections. It took 12 years to map the roundworm connectome. It will take many more years to map the human connectome, but when it is finally complete, we will have a storehouse of knowledge resulting in a deep understanding of how our brain functions.

The thalamus is a region of the brain that collects all incoming sensory information and distributes it to specialized areas of the brain. The composite of our sensory experience at any given moment, the feeling we have that the world is unified or whole, appears to be caused by a wave cycle that originates in the thalamus and continually sweeps over the entire brain 40 times each second.

But that is only the tip of the iceberg in understanding how the brain converts brain signals and functions into mindful experiences. Although we have made steady progress in recognizing different groups of neurons that are responsible for particular tasks or perceptions, we have not been able to get very far in understanding how the brain works collectively, how it synthesizes streams of information and converts them into perceptual experience. The real power of the connectome is that it will finally allow us to address, neurologically, the nature of self as a unified whole. (see Sebastian Seung’s wonderful book, Connectome)

A human brain is able to acknowledge itself, including its thoughts, stored memories, and emotional states, as well as its overall presence or identity.

Identity refers to the ‘I’ or ‘Me’, which the brain recognizes as Self.

But what is ‘Me’, really? Is it my personality? Is it what I appear to be, or who I feel I am? Is it what I say I am? Is it what I do? Is it all of these things?

Does my true identity change over time? What do I mean by ‘inner self’.

Consider that ‘Self’, what we refer to as ‘Me’, is a composite of the experiences accumulated in our brain from the time we acquire language, at about age two, to the present.

When we unexpectedly catch a glimpse of ourselves in a mirror, we are often shocked to see something very different from what we feel is our inner self, or ‘Me’. Although our knowledge and experience gradually changes with age, including normal psychological transformations and adjustments, we perceive our inner self to be singular, unique, independent. This perception of self, or ‘Me’, remains essentially the same throughout our lifetime.

But we also build experiences and memories around familiar themes. Much of life involves repeated behavior that follows simple routines. Is this enough to cause the illusion of a coherent, persistent identity?

We spend all of our lives inside our brain, much of it thinking about what matters to us.

Suppose there are feedback loops within our conscious brain regularly oscillating and echoing along familiar pathways, triggering memories that reflect critical lifetime experiences, revealing our most persistent attitudes, hopes, fears and desires.

If so, these selected memories, supported by innate character traits, are being constantly reinforced, perhaps creating the unique perception of inner self.

Myth and tribal ritual, what has evolved into modern-day religion, may have been an important factor in stimulating the desire to know ourselves. The need for religion or spiritual unity appears to be innate. Today, religion and other forms of spiritual awakening, provide a powerful context for exploring and sharing personal and social ‘identity’.

Ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, fashion, sports, politics all trigger deeply emotional instincts within us. At bottom, they are related to our desire to discover or maintain personal and social identity.

The search for ourselves truly separates us from other animals. It has significantly shaped the lives of modern humans, and it is likely that it has been a driving force for our evolved consciousness.

The subconscious mind lies just below consciousness, and is easily accessible when we pay attention to it. We may know something, but we may not be able to access the information without focusing on it, such as a friend’s phone number.

The unconscious, on the other hand, lies deep within our brain and is generally not available for us to think about or to remember. There are things that our brain keeps track of, that we are aware of or may have directly experienced, but are so unpleasant or painful that we simply can’t access them consciously.

Sleeping is the way in which the brain suspends conscious activity. Dreaming, particularly REM dreaming, is a period of intense cognitive activity, in which the brain relies on internal information to form various states of mind. These dreams are shaped solely by memories, without controlled or conscious thought.

Dreams are typically narrative, but do not seem to call on the higher centers of language for structural continuity or meaning. The result is that ‘the language of dreams is fragmented, the plots are confused, natural laws are disobeyed, and obsession, phobia, and paranoia are commonplace’.

J. Allen Hobson, a psychiatrist and former head of the sleep and dream lab at Harvard University suggests that all of these dream characteristics are synonymous with textbook definitions of mental pathologies. And all are centered on internal dialogue, involving little or no interaction with the outside world. (see Hobson’s ground-breaking book on sleep and dreams, The Chemistry of Conscious States)

In the 19th century the iconic psychiatrist and dream interpreter Sigmund Freud believed that dreams were a pathway to understanding events in our childhood that were perhaps unpleasant, or that were buried in the unconscious mind. Today, modern dream researchers believe that dreams are more likely a roadmap to the things that are important in our everyday lives, but that we simply haven’t taken the time to address for one reason or another. Dreams can signal, symbolically, what we are consciously or subconsciously concerned about. And interpreting our dreams can be a very effective tool in preserving mental and emotional stability.

For centuries, scientists, philosophers, and others have debated whether the neurological workings of the brain, and our thinking, feeling, creative mind, are one and the same. Some say that brain and mind are identical. Others believe they are separate. As of yet, no one has devised an experiment that can settle the argument.

Related to this dilemma is what neurologists refer to as The Big Problem. If brain and mind are the same, or even if they are not, how does a collection of interconnected neuro-chemical circuits, 100 billion neurons in all, provide us with the remarkable experience of life, such as tasting an ice-cream cone, listening to our favorite music, or falling in love?

For now, one way we can think about this problem is to consider the brain as the functioning circuitry constantly firing in our heads and the mind as a direct result of this activity creating the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings we experience every day.

(for many and varied subjects related to the brain, treat yourself to Jonah Lehrer’s informative blog, Frontal Cortex)

* (Strictly speaking, there are probably no random events in Nature. But a human brain  perceives events as random when it cannot distinguish a coherent pattern of activity.)

When you meet someone for the first time that you find interesting or attractive, your brain produces a feel-good chemical (serotonin). If the feeling is returned, and you develop a romantic interest with this person, the brain creates a different chemical response (dopamine). A third chemical reaction (oxytocin) is associated with long-term attachment, such as a parent-child or husband-wife bond. All three of these emotions – attraction, romance, and attachment – produce, in us, different feelings of joy, happiness, passion, and contentment. (see Helen Fisher’s insightful book: Why We Love.)

But there is also a flip side. When things go wrong, when we suddenly break off an intense romance, or dissolve a long-standing relationship, we suffer the difficult pain of jealousy, hurtfulness, confusion and loss. These aching emotions are equal in intensity to the positive joys and passions of love, and can cause profound sadness and distress.  Painful emotions are also associated with chemical reactions in the brain.

All of these emotions, taken together, form an elaborate dance of courtship and intimacy that can often feel overwhelming. But the payoff is spectacular. If we are successful, it means we are headed for long-term joy and contentment, and perhaps the creation of future offspring.

When it comes to love, people across the world share the same kinds of intense, emotional, experiences. Learning to cope with these extreme emotions is part of what it means to be human. They are part of our evolutionary history, part of the basic instincts that have been passed on genetically from one generation to the next.

What makes us care deeply about some people and not others? Why are we instinctively attracted to certain people and less interested in others? Our unique differences and tastes as individuals determine our likes and dislikes; this is as true of the people we choose to be with as it is of our taste in music, food, or a dozen other interests.

Forming a loving relationship sometimes requires years of shared experience. On the other hand, parents who see their newborn for the first time love their baby instantaneously, and without condition or qualification. This is a kind of love that lasts a lifetime, a sublime contentment without equal. This immediate and intense attachment is necessary because human infants are completely helpless until they can walk, and because our parents would consider killing us, if not at the age of two, then certainly during adolescence!

What about ‘love at first sight’? If you ask a classroom of college students, as I have often done, whether or not they believe in ‘love at first sight’, the class as a whole, tends to be split. Some say yes, others say no. And gender doesn’t seem to be an issue; males and females are equally divided on the subject.

If love is so powerful, then why do most couples fight so much, and why are there so many divorces? How do arranged marriages, which are common in many cultures of the world, compare to freely choosing a partner? Believe it or not, arranged marriages have a better track record of success than conventional marriages. Why is this? Statistics show that the largest divorce rates occur when couples marry early in life. Sociologists have also found that childlessness, which can lead to loneliness and weariness, plays a major role in divorce. But the real answer is that love is complicated, and we don’t always know how to handle our emotions, which can lead to poor judgment and rash decisions.

Animals come programmed with basic emotions such as fight or flight, anger, appeasement, disgust, fear, and surprise. In humans, these instincts are automated in the lower brain. But we, along with other mammals, have also evolved more complex emotions, such as happiness and unhappiness, guilt and shame, longing and jealousy. Still, in humans, there are higher functions of the brain that involve emotions such as vengeance, pride, nostalgia, forgiveness, beauty, and spirituality.

Every human looks to satisfy the basic need for food, shelter, and security. Beyond that, we all share a quest for happiness. The Dali Lama teaches that the purpose of life is happiness. The American founders declared, in the Declaration of Independence, that the pursuit of happiness was an inalienable right. Both are revolutionary ideas. Happiness is something we all desire.

So what is happiness exactly? We know that everyone has ideas about personal happiness. But there must certainly be some shared criteria that we can point to. I don’t know of any clinical definition for happiness, but here are three things, taken collectively, that may describe a state of contentment or true happiness. The first is that you are fundamentally loved and appreciated by family or friends, and that you are generally accepted by society. Secondly, that you are able to realize your potential as an individual, to maximize your intellectual, emotional, and physical capabilities. And finally, that you are able to adapt to your immediate surroundings, to be flexible under a variety of circumstances and situations, and to adjust to these conditions without necessarily inviting compromise. Adaptability is a secret of life, of all living things.

When things in our life don’t work, when things fall apart, our self-esteem is lowered; we become stressed, angry, disappointed, depressed. The result is often loss of pleasure, joy, and as time goes by, contentment or happiness. Figuring out how to make things work is essential for our success and happiness.

When we are able to satisfy our fundamental needs, establish realistic goals, and follow our dreams, pain and stress are diminished and contentment fills the void. The implication is that humans are genetically predisposed toward a state of contentment, that most people are ‘hardwired’ to be happy. Decades of research in child psychology have shown that healthy babies are content until a basic need goes unsatisfied, or when pain or discomfort intervenes. We are born into an initial state of well-being. Only later do we allow pain and stress to block natural wellsprings of contentment and happiness.

But there are things that get in the way of our happiness, including classic times of struggle. As adolescents, our number one job is to break away from our parents so that we may become independent, mature adults. Teen-age years are difficult for everyone, and often happiness doesn’t seem to be within reach.

In our twenties, our primary goal is to discover how best to fit into the world, how to define our strengths and weaknesses and learn to make them work for us. This is no small task, because most of us don’t yet know what we want to do with our lives, and generally don’t get the help we need to forge a path necessary for our long-term health and well-being.

It also doesn’t help that our cultural institutions have agendas that are often counter to our developmental needs. Parents, for all of their love and support, really want their children to be safe. Schools today are mostly career factories. Business wants your money. Government wants your vote. The church wants your allegiance. Everybody wants something. So how do we follow our passions, or know what is really best for us?

And by the way, at the same time young adults are learning how and where they fit into the world, they are having to navigate the whirlwind forces of dating and long-term partner selection.

There are clearly times in our lives when happiness is tormented by circumstance. Ill-fate, poor judgment, and bad luck is the stuff of human legend.

As a rule, people tend to be philosophical. It is also the nature of the human spirit to seek the divine, the sublime. Many among us search for spiritual awareness and enlightenment. There are even those who abandon family and career in pursuit of a deeper inner experience.

The search for inner satisfaction is an instinct, a human drive. It is different from other emotional states such as joy, anger, fear, or anxiety. The enjoyment of fine art in its most expressive forms, the height of romantic love, the gift of birth, and the personal tragedy of death are human experiences which have the power to overwhelm our emotions. As we experience these events for the first time, it is our nature to question their deep meaning.

Most of us have known moments of deep consciousness, when we experience ourselves as completely connected to the present. We have had enlightened moments of physical activity when we are ‘in the zone’, and we have all known moments of discovery or creativity. It is also common to have experienced a heightened awareness while interacting with another person, or within a group. Any of these examples, including romantic love, listening to a memorable concert, solving a difficult problem, helping someone, creating something, or participating in an inspired sports event or group activity may provoke the sensation that the world is, indeed, bigger than ourselves; or they may remind us that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Inner joy, or what some would call spirituality, is not just a good feeling, or feeling good. It is a deep contentment in which intense thoughts and emotions combine to form a powerful and integrated experience.

These feelings may be triggered by a joyous experience, by long-term sensitivity to deep human concerns such as birth, death, morality, or war, and especially by our own mortality.

The joy of inner peace combined with sensitive feelings toward others promotes individual satisfaction and provides the species with a clear survival advantage. Balancing hope and faith against the fears and anxieties of life provide a sense of long-term stability and social harmony.

We often hear the phrase ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Yet, as the French mathematician Blaise Pascal pointed out, beauty is the result of a harmonious relation between our aesthetic nature and the subject that delights us; it is always a two-way street.

Although there are a great many differences among individuals, as a group humans tend to share certain criteria for what is acceptable behavior, what is normal intelligence, and what is beautiful. We know that our experiences of beauty take place in a specific region of the brain (medial orbital) located in the frontal cortex. Most of us appreciate the beauty of a sunset, a panoramic vista, a great painting or photograph. These are instinctive tendencies, but for them to blossom, appreciation must be nurtured and kept alive.

Beauty and desire originated early in evolution with attractive colors, shapes, movements, and sounds adapted by creatures that used them for the purpose of luring mates. Bees find flowering plants irresistible. Does that mean that bees find colorful plants beautiful? There is no way to know. Female birds are attracted to beautiful colors displayed by their male counterparts. Is this desire? More than likely the visceral attraction of insects to flowers, female birds to brightly colored males, as well as similar mechanisms in other species, are the precursor to chemical brain states that arouse in us a sense of beauty and desire.

But why is beauty so fleeting? What causes our experience of beauty and desire to wane over time. All of us have experienced the emotional letdown when the intensity of a new romance begins to fade, or when a piece of music that we have listened to a little too often no longer has the same effect on us it once did. One answer is that romantic love, attraction, and desire are dangerous states to be living in for very long. Intense desire and attraction are distracting; they render us vulnerable and may cause injury or even threaten our survival.

Emotions serve us well. They are responsible for our passions and pleasures, for ‘letting off steam’ when we become angry or frustrated, and for our ability to defend ourselves, and to bond with others.

But emotions can also act as cause for conflict or disruption, for example, when we take things too personally, or guard our emotions too closely, both of which may create stress within ourselves and for those around us.

Why do we often experience emotions that seem like they are more destructive than they are useful? Expressing anger, for example, is not pleasant and it causes pain, yet we see that it plays an important role in letting others know how we feel. On the surface, jealousy seems to cause more pain and harm than good. Yet it helps, in a general way, to keep close relationships intact. In a similar way, we are cautioned by shame and guilt to be better companions and citizens.

We are easily swayed by our emotions. It is easy for us to be guided by outside interests such as advertising or popular media, and by peer pressure, even when the products and ideas sold to us are clearly not in our best interests.

And what about our highly emotional allegiance to sports teams, homeland, political affiliation, religion, and taste in music? What causes us to become so irrational when it comes to defending these intense passions? We will look at this further when we discuss society and culture.

Part of growing up, of becoming emotionally ‘intelligent’ is learning to balance our emotions with rational thought, planning, and a healthy respect for those things that are sustainable for ourselves and for society.

We are social animals, as well as individuals, and our survival as a species depends on our ability to interact with different people under different, and sometimes difficult, conditions. Understanding, and learning to control, our emotions are important keys to our sense of well-being, and to our survival. (for more detailed variations on this theme, see Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence)

Nostalgia is an emotion that everyone experiences. And it tends to get stronger as we get older. There are words for nostalgia in every known language. Looking back on an important childhood event such as a first kiss, favorite place to escape, or the neighborhood or school where we grew up, provokes strong emotions that are bittersweet.

Billions of dollars are spent each year to satisfy the almost unquenchable thirst for our need to revisit our childhood. For many, school reunions are almost impossible to resist. Movies, television and other forms of popular media have a field day returning us to our recent past. Perhaps reality is too difficult. Maybe these feelings offer a simple escape from the hardships of everyday life.

Although the feelings of nostalgia may connect us to the past, they can also lead us away from the present and distract us in profound ways.

So why are these nostalgic feelings so common and so intense? What possible survival function could they serve? Humans are neotenous creatures, we retain some adolescent features throughout our adult lifetime, and we may simply be vulnerable to intense feelings.

Or perhaps our feelings of nostalgia are instinctive, artifacts left over from our early evolutionary ancestry. For example, many species of fish eventually return to the streams where they were born to lay their eggs. Salmon, for example, after swimming thousands of miles over a lifetime, return to the exact spot where they were hatched, to lay their eggs and to die. Nostalgia may be a similar impulse, inherited from one of our earliest ancestors.

A word about kissing. The act and ritual of kissing occurs in most cultures of the world. Yet kissing may mean something different to different groups of people, or to individuals, depending on how it is done, who is doing it and what their motives are.

Is kissing instinctive or cultural? With 90 percent of the world engaged in kissing rituals, it is likely that instinct determines behavior in this case. Although, in the Himalayas and some African nations, kissing has been historically discouraged presumably to protect the local population from bacteria.

Albert Einstein suggested that all human motivation, and I suppose we could say much of human emotion as well, is driven by fear or longing.

Because of new scientific research methods, including brain scan technology, we are able to look deeply into the emotions that affect us everyday. Although we have much to learn, we continue to expand our knowledge based on what we are discovering about human behavior, our evolutionary background, and our biology, including the brain chemistry that drives our emotions.

view three Prose Poems on related subjects of happiness and addiction:

Happiness
The Asymmetry of Addiction
Beauty Lost

Consider the question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? This is the kind of puzzle that anyone can easily entertain. It has an aspect of humor. Yet when examined closely, we see it has the possibility of revealing something inherent about biology, about the nature of life. We’ll come back to this question.

There are two common forms of reproduction in nature. The simplest is replication, where a single-celled organism splits in half, creating an exact copy of itself. We have all seen a bubble that expands in size and then splits in two. This is the way that bacteria and other cells reproduce. The other form is sexual reproduction, where a male and female parent each contribute a set of genetic material that results in the creation of a unique off-spring.

So how does sexual REPRODUCTION actually work?

Inside every cell of every living thing are chromosomes, which contain genes that are made of up DNA. Think of DNA as a mix of four basic ingredients that is used to make a recipe. Different species have different numbers and kinds of chromosomes. A fruit fly, for example, has only 11 chromosomes, which include DNA instructions for creating a pair of wings, sticky feet, and big eyes, while humans have 46 chromosomes, 23 from each parent. Human genes contain instructions for making different body parts, just as the fruit fly, but many more.

The human genome contains about 23 thousand genes. Strangely, the most number of genes belongs to the common water flea, Daphnia, a tiny creature about the size of a grain of rice. It has about 31 thousand genes. Biologists are not sure exactly why it has so many genes, but presumably it needs them to adapt to its difficult environment. Nature never fails to surprise.

Both males and females have special reproductive cells, or sex cells. The role of the male sex cell, or sperm, is to use its tail (or flagella) to swim to the female sex cell, known as the egg or ovum. Many thousands of sperm attempt to reach the female egg. If one of the sperm cells succeeds, it deposits its set of chromosomes inside the female egg. The female egg now contains both sets of chromosomes, her own, and the male set. With both sets of chromosomes combined, one from mom and one from dad, the egg can begin to grow inside the female.

There are many interesting details associated with the reproductive process, especially within the female body. For example, there is a chemical change in the immune system that allows the sperm cell, a foreign body that has entered the uterus, to continue along its way toward the egg without interference. Recent research has found that the ‘victorious’ sperm cell is held in a kind of ‘holding position’ before it is actually allowed to penetrate the egg. One of the unanswered questions in biology is: how do the egg and sperm recognize one another amongst all the other cells?

In humans, the development from the tiny fertilized egg to an infant (the way a baby looks when it is born) takes about 9 months. In other creatures, the length of a female pregnancy differs widely. Usually, a larger creature means a longer pregnancy. A baby elephant grows inside of its mother for 22 months before it is born, while a mother flea is pregnant for only 11 days.

Human males produce millions of sperm cells over a lifetime, while a female deposits about 400 eggs in total, one egg every month from the time she reaches puberty until she is middle-aged. A high school biology teacher became famous for her favorite phrase “sperm are cheap.”

The chance of any of us being born is astronomically slim. We are the chosen ones. Life is a gift, a miracle. As filmmaker Woody Allen has famously put it: ‘80 percent of life is showing up.’ Many are called. Few are chosen.

In medicine and biology, the word ‘SEX’ is commonly used to refer to a male or female. In social science and cultural anthropology, male and female are words synonymous with gender. In fact, the definition of sex is the creation of ‘a new organism containing genetic material from more than one parent.’ Creatures tend to mate strictly with members of their own species. Gender refers to ‘differences between any two complementary organisms capable of mating.’ ‘Many species contain hundreds, even thousands of genders.’ (see Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan’s brilliant and informative book What is Sex?)

There is a great range of sexual behavior in the plant and animal kingdoms that includes heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and non-reproductive sex. Through the process of natural selection, sex and gender are ‘adjusted’ to whatever behavior is required for a species to survive. Sexual diversity and gender variation are widespread. As humans, we are accustomed to thinking that there are two genders, male and female. Some species of plants include thousands of gender differences. Many species of fish change genders routinely. Shrimp, for example, are born male and later change to female.

Homosexuality, transvestism, sex change, and so-called ‘sneaking’ are alternative reproductive strategies that reappear throughout the animal world. Single-sex pairing is common in both males and females. Sometimes there aren’t enough males or females to go around. Or in the case of insects, young males may learn courtship behavior from older males. There are many examples. Transvestism involves female mimicry, especially males who sneak into the territory of males posing as females. (see biologist Joan Roughgarden’s fascinating book Evolution’s Rainbow)

There are also different forms of asexual reproduction. Parthenogenesis, or Virgin Birth, for example, is found in females, where growth and development of embryos occur without fertilization by a male.

In another example, there are many hermaphroditic species containing individuals that can reproduce by themselves because they contain reproductive organs of both sexes in a single individual’s body.

There are numerous examples of asexual reproduction throughout the natural world.

There are many unanswered questions regarding sex and reproduction. For example, when and where, exactly, did the first independent male and female genders originate? A place to begin  might be with the process of symbiosis in single-celled creatures. Perhaps with the combination of genes acquired from two different organisms, there would have been enough genetic variation in the resulting generations of offspring to develop ‘specialized’ genders such as male and female. Given the relationship between sex and death, this would be nearly assured.

Here is another interesting question: when did humans first discover that sexual behavior is the mechanism for procreation? It wasn’t until about 1900 that we knew of the existence of sperm cells. 10, 000 years ago we had already domesticated plants and animals and were practicing animal husbandry, so we certainly understood cause and effect by then. 40,000 years ago, with the advent of modern humans, we were recording the cycles of the moon, which are clearly correlated with menstrual cycles. Were our early ancestors naive, or did they understand the biological reality of sex and reproduction?

Today in hospitals and clinics all over the world, there are new methods and techniques dedicated to biological reproduction never imagined even a century ago. Modern technology has made it possible to remove an egg from the mother, fertilize the egg with father’s sperm cells in a petri dish in the lab, then reinsert the fertilized egg into the mother’s body, followed, hopefully, by a normal pregnancy. This form of assisted reproduction is known as in vitro fertilization, and has become a popular means of achieving parenthood for women who don’t have access to natural pregnancies for one reason or another.

Startling new medical research has shown that along with the typical 400 eggs produced in a lifetime, women also have a previously unknown store of ovarian stem cells from which new eggs can be created. Experiments have shown that ovarian stem cells can be isolated and made to grow into mature, healthy eggs that are capable of fertilization and reproduction. The consequences of this research are enormous both for women looking to reproduce through in vitro fertilization and for extending their reproductive lives.

Laboratory cloning is another form of assisted reproduction. Cloning is simply the process of making copies. Twins are clones. Because we have modern techniques for replicating and modifying DNA, science is able to ‘make’ or re-create plants and animals in almost any form. A variety of foods, along with small and large animals, have been cloned using various laboratory methods for nearly two decades. In years to come, human-assisted reproduction will change the way we experience life and family.

Today, with assisted reproduction, the creation of body organs and genetically modified life forms in the laboratory, genetically modified foods already on the shelf, and the possibility for human cloning within our grasp, we face difficult moral and ethical issues that challenge the very nature of who we are, and how we manage our ability to create and modify new and existing life.

Back to the question of the chicken and the egg. It has been pointed out that the Egg has existed on Earth for at least several hundred million years, while the Hen has been here only fifty million years. It seems obvious that the egg must have come before the chicken.

However, in direct opposition to this idea, it is possible that proteins may have evolved prior to DNA molecules. Proteins make up the structural framework of a cell, while DNA is typically located inside the cell’s nucleus. If you think of the nucleus as the embryo or egg, and proteins as its protecting membrane, or material body, then one may conclude that the chicken, did in fact, come before the egg.

view related Prose Poem that can be read aloud:

The Homoviral Hypothesis

for many colorful and idiosyncratic examples of sex and reproduction, see:

Marlene Zuk’s book, Sex on Six Legs, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt, 2001

Medical doctors, psychologists, and social scientists are able to observe and describe the insides of our brains, our states of mind including our emotions, our memories, our physical bodies, our families, our neighborhoods and communities, our societies and cultures.

There are questions about LIFE that we are all curious about. What exactly is life? What does it mean for something to be alive? How can we be sure that a thing is truly alive, such as a cat or a tomato plant? And how do we know for sure that something is not alive, like a rock or a chair? There is widespread disagreement in the scientific community as to exactly what causes something to be alive.

Everything is made of atomic elements. The objects around us, from plants to planets, are composed of different combinations of atoms and molecules. So how are we able to tell which things are alive and which aren’t?

There are at least four things to look for. First, in order for something to be alive, it must be able to make copies of itself. Second, it must be able to respire, or breathe. Third, it must take in nutrients, and convert them to energy. And finally, it must be able to regulate itself, maintaining basic bodily functions.

Different organisms reproduce, respire, input nutrients and output waste, and regulate their bodily systems in different ways. Animals breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, and, because they have the freedom to move around, hunt, gather and consume food and liquids. Plants, which stay in one place, gather nutrients and water from their roots. They also capture light with their leaves and convert it to useable energy. Plants breathe-in carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, the opposite of animals.

In addition to the four basic conditions for life, living things tend to grow and develop, just as we do. And all organisms learn to adapt to their environment. Some species adapt better than others, and these will tend to reproduce at a greater rate overall. New species that are not adaptive, or existing species that are no longer adaptive, don’t survive.

It is my view that things that don’t fulfill the four basic requirements for life are not alive; they are inanimate. Inanimate objects may posses one or more of the conditions of life, but all of the requirements need to be present and functional for an organism to be alive. For example, a washing machine is a self-regulating system, but it can’t make copies of itself and it doesn’t adapt to the environment. Some objects, such as crystals and mountains, can grow and develop, but they can’t breathe and they don’t metabolize, which means they don’t convert food into energy. A bird is alive; a rock is not. Interestingly, a virus is alive when it invades and occupies a host cell, but is patently not alive when it is floating along on its own.

Scientists have several interesting theories about the beginning of life on Earth. One idea is that life originated somewhere else in our galaxy and was transported to Earth by an asteroid. This is known as panspermia.

A classic theory presented in the 1950’s suggests that a kind of ‘primordial soup’ formed the first chemical basis of life and was triggered by a lightning flash, creating the initial conditions necessary for life to occur.

Another ‘creationist’ theory suggests that life was spontaneously generated from a simple set of conditions. This theory is supported by computer models which produce a variety of self-generating programs. The computer programs are able to create complex ‘organic’ forms from a simple set of rules.

The most popular theory among scientists today is that life began over 3 billion years ago with an organic, gooey slime that covered most of the planet. Eventually, small bits or pieces of the metabolizing slime split off, later folding over on itself, creating the first single-celled organism.

It wasn’t until another billion years had passed that the first green algae appeared in the world’s oceans. Later, more complex single-celled organisms evolved in the oceans, followed, on land, by fungi, animals and plants.

Complex life forms, such as flowers, trees, insects, birds and all other animals are made up of cells that communicate with one another. Different groups of cells cooperate to form everything that is a whole living system, whether it is a tree, mouse, elephant, or person.

As we know, all of life has evolved from a simple common ancestor. When one of the first single-celled organisms made copies of itself, there was a slight copying error that changed part of its genetic instructions. This resulted in the creation of a slightly different creature. The new creature reflected this change as it made new copies of itself. If it successfully adapted to its surroundings, it became a new species; if not, it died out. This process has occurred over and over, creating the diversity of life that we see throughout the world.

Living things are newly formed, grow, age, and die. Some organisms live to be over a thousand years old, such as the giant redwood trees of northern California. Others, such as tiny insects, live out their entire lifetime in a few days or weeks. Usually, the larger a species is, the longer its average lifespan. Just south of Australia, on the island of Tasmania, there is a giant bush that extends for miles. This plant has been alive for 40 thousand years, the age of modern humans. It is the oldest known living thing on Earth.

Recently, scientists have made great headway in examining the possibility of life beyond Earth. Many astro-biologists today believe that anywhere in the universe where there could be life, there probably is. Part of this optimism is due to the extraordinary discoveries of organisms living and reproducing in hostile environments here on Earth, especially in places where no light can penetrate. These microbes, known as ‘extremaphiles’, have been found living in dark ocean vents, deep caves and frozen blocks of Antarctic ice.

With the routine discovery of new planets in the Milky Way and other galaxies occurring almost on a daily basis, the idea that an existing climate for life may exist not only somewhere, but in many places throughout the universe seems quite plausible. Scientists argue that the origin of carbon-based life is inevitable due to the larger forces in the universe. Discovering life in other worlds would, of course, move the dialog from the safety of science fiction to one that would profoundly change human perspective for better or worse. (for more on this subject, see Marc Kaufman’s stimulating book First Contact)

How strange and sad it can be when someone or something is alive one moment, then is gone forever. DEATH is part of a natural process that, over time, we all must learn to accept, and to cope with.

For some, the death of a pet, for example, is a sadness we may experience in early childhood. For most of us, it is not until later that we are confronted with the overwhelming sorrow of the death of a loved one, such as a grandmother or grandfather, aunt or uncle, parent or sibling.

We know that all living things on Earth must eventually die. Yet why is this? What makes the certainty of death a reality? How and when did death originate? Is there some reason that everything has to die?

All things eventually decay and disappear. It is the physical nature of objects that they break down over time. The classical physicist Isaac Newton referred to this phenomenon as entropy – the tendency of things and events over time to lose more energy than they gain. Historically, not too few experiments have been created in an attempt to defy this principle. Many have tried. None have succeeded. My own thoughts on this subject led me to the idea that even though each of us must eventually die, we continue to pass on our genes to the next generation. This process of protecting the human genome, our DNA, from extinction has gone on for tens of thousands of years, and may prove, at least for the near future, a promising challenge to Newton’s famous second law of thermodynamics. There is a modern idea in the biology world that the human body acts as a ‘vehicle’ for the transmission of DNA, suggesting that humans are biologically expendable, while DNA lives on from generation to generation. (google Richard Dawkins for more.)

Death, as we know it, originated with biological sex. When genetically complex creatures such as plants and animals reproduce, as opposed to bacteria that clone themselves, the resulting offspring contains two sets of genes, one provided by the male, the other by the female. This amount of genetic material is capable of creating different kinds of cells (blood cells, body cells, immune cells, nerve cells, etc.) that are useful for adaptation, but can be harmful if the cells are allowed to divide and grow indefinitely.

The natural death of an organism, whether it is a potato, a parrot, or a person is due to an ageing process caused by the breakdown of individual cells in the body. From the time we are born, new cells continue to replace old cells. Cells in the body continually divide, making more cells, and replacing old ones. But there is a limit to the number of replacement cells that a person can have over a lifetime.

Early in the evolution of plants and animals, organisms evolved a method of controlling the amount of cells that can divide and grow. If there are too many cells growing too fast, the result is an unwanted cancer killing off parts of the body, eventually leading to the early death of the organism.

The ‘solution’ that nature selectively ‘invented’ for the problem of too much natural growth in our bodies was to limit the number of cell divisions from birth. Once the number of cell divisions is reached, which is different for different species, and for different individuals, the cells are chemically ‘turned-off’, and our bodies begin the process of breaking down.

As we age, and are no longer producing new cells, our body is not able to maintain itself in the same way it did when we were younger. Illness and injury become more frequent and severe. Our natural defenses become increasingly weaker, and finally we succumb to death.

So, our bodies don’t die naturally from being worn out by age, they are genetically programmed to stop replacing cells once we have reached the age of maturity. This process of programmed cell death is known as apoptosis and the cells that have been turned off are referred to as ‘suicide cells’.

Lynn Margulis has famously said: ‘Death is a sexually transmitted disease’.

The good news is that eating well, sleeping and exercising regularly, and finding ways of lowering stress in our normal routines can extend our lifetime by a number of years. Also current medical research promises to slow the ageing process, and the availability of gene therapies and the wholesale replacement of body parts will soon become part of standard medical care. While we wait, a process of sustained body freezing, known as Cryogenics, promises to suspend life until average life expectancy is significantly greater. Nobody knows for sure.

Strangely, there is an exception to the finality of death. It is simple bacteria, the kind that makes food spoil.  These free and independent single-celled creatures, known as prokaryotes, roam about freely, or they may attach themselves to another organism. These bacteria are immortal. Barring a mishap or random accident, they may live for millions of years, continually reproducing themselves.

As we mentioned, scientists have recently discovered the chemical switches used by the cells in our body to turn-off the ability to make more cells. This means that in the future we may be able to control how long we live, and maybe even whether we die or not. New medical experiments on fruit flies and other small creatures have resulted in greatly extending the lives of these organisms.

Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey despises death. He believes that ageing is a curable disease. Through the pioneering efforts of de Grey, George Church at Harvard Medical School and others, researchers are currently mining the secrets of death, hoping to curb or eliminate the ageing process for multicellular creatures like ourselves.

As eerie as this may seem, it is truly astonishing that for the first time in history, we are able to conceive of the idea of human immortality. This is a big idea and if it becomes a reality, it would force us to think about ourselves and others in a profoundly different way. Our private, spiritual, and social lives would be forever changed.

Naturally, human immortality brings with it a whole host of frightening challenges, moral concerns, and ethical issues and responsibilities. If immortality becomes a reality in the future, and nobody plans on dying, where are we going to put everybody? The world is already crowded and growing bigger. Who will get to live, and who won’t, and who will decide.

As emotionally painful and difficult as death may be to endure and cope with, there is a bright side. Death reminds us of the unity of nature, of something larger than ourselves. Following death, the very atoms and molecules that give life its form and function, return to the surrounding space from which they came. They are recycled into the inanimate world of energy and matter, perhaps forming new life once again. It is a comforting thought to realize that you may be breathing some of the same atoms that were once exhaled by Leonardo de Vinci or the Queen of Sheeba.

to learn more about Programmed Cell Death, view the Prose Poem:

Senescence

]]> http://naturescienceart.org/2011/10/09/life-and-death/feed/ 1 jholland1 Life and Death by Gustave Klimt Life Origin of Life Microbes in Deep Sea Vents Death Sex and Death Extended Life of the Elegans Worm Immortality http://naturescienceart.org/2011/10/02/evolution-and-change/ http://naturescienceart.org/2011/10/02/evolution-and-change/#comments Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:20:47 +0000 John Holland http://naturescienceart.wordpress.com/?p=394 ]]> There are many biologists, zoologists, botanists and other life-scientists who study every aspect of our living environment, including all known microorganisms, fungi, animals, and plants, and their surroundings. Scientists also observe human behavior; what causes us to be the way we are, and to do the things we do.

Since the beginning of life on earth 3.5 billion years ago, the struggle for survival has created an evolutionary process of growth and change.

Every living thing, from bacteria to plants to humans, grows and changes in a unique way. This happens because of two things. One, there is a set of genetic instructions contained in each cell of an organism that describes, chemically, what the animal or plant will generally look like, and how it will function over time. The other way a creature grows and changes is through learning and experience in the tough world of its environment.

Surprisingly, all living things have evolved from a single common ancestor, the first living organism on earth. We are all related to the microbes, plants, fungi, and animals from which we are descended.

Remarkably, this first organism was able to make copies of itself, thus passing on to its offspring the same ability. After a time, there were millions of similar organisms all struggling to adapt to their surroundings, and those that succeeded were able to survive and make copies of themselves just as their parents had.

But there is a twist. During the copying process, genetic irregularities can occur that slightly change what an off-spring looks like or how it functions. These anomalies, known as mutations, are usually detrimental to an organism. But sometimes the change is beneficial, providing a slight adaptive advantage, especially when the environment in which a creature lives undergoes a dramatic change. The new off-spring may have just the right mutation to adapt to the changing environment. Over time, successful mutations tend to result in the creation of new organisms.

This genetic process of continual growth (replication, reproduction) and change (mutation) has resulted in the huge variation of life on earth, from single-celled creatures, to insects, birds, plants, and animals, including humans.

Charles Darwin, the 19^th century biologist, was the first to correctly identify the process of EVOLUTION in living things. He called it NATURAL SELECTION because some creatures are selected over others for their ability to successfully adapt to their environment; and also to distinguish between the breeding of domestic animals by farmers and others, known as artificial selection.

The discovery of evolution, by means of natural selection, is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. It competes with religion and philosophy as a way of verifying the origins, or creation, of humankind. For this reason, the contemporary philosopher Daniel Dennett and others have referred to Darwin’s discovery as a ‘dangerous’ idea.

Remarkably, Darwin was able to describe natural selection without the benefit of knowing about genes. Famously, an account of Gregor Mendel’s genetic experiments lay unopened on Darwin’s desk at the time of his death.

Darwinian evolution is also an idea that is counter-intuitive. The ‘workings’ of natural selection are not always obvious, largely because there is no single ‘director’ in charge. Evolution is a process without a set of plans. And it has no specific motivation or intention.

As biologist and environmentalist Edward O. Wilson points out in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book On Human Nature, one of the challenges of human evolution is that there isn’t a programmed or prescribed set of rules to tell us what to do, or how to do it. There is no original or intrinsically shared purpose among humans. Each of us, as individuals, must develop his or her own sense of purpose in life.

Henry David Thoreau, the transcendentalist philosopher, author, and naturalist was the first American to champion Darwin’s ideas. Others around the world felt its impact, but it took almost 150 years before the general public began to fully appreciate the enormity of Darwin’s discovery.

An English biologist (whose name I can’t recall) contends that the answer to any question about life is: natural selection. When I first came upon this quote, like others, I was skeptical. Over the years, I have found it to be surprisingly test-worthy.

Another form of evolutionary CHANGE, that Darwin wasn’t aware of, is SYMBIOSIS. A special symbiotic relationship occurs in nature when two very different kinds of creatures form a lasting partnership. This partnership sometimes results in a new species.

For example, when a small single-celled organism tries unsuccessfully to invade and kill-off another single-celled creature, and neither is able to destroy the other, they may decide to ‘work together’, resulting in the creation of a new organism that combines qualities of both.

Our human body cells (soma cells) have evolved over millions of years in exactly this way. Each of our body cells is a ‘factory’ of living ‘machines’. At different stages in our biological history, an organism has invaded our body, and when failing to destroy a cell, stayed on as an ‘uninvited guest’, forming a partnership with the host cell. These invading organisms brought with them new attributes that made the human cell more powerful.

Over time, an increasing number of these ‘uninvited guests’ became permanent residents, resulting in a human body cell that is very efficient in doing the different jobs that are required to maintain our health and well-being. These inter-cellular residents, known, collectively, as organelles, include the nucleus, mitochondria, ribosomes, and several others.

Indeed, the human body itself is a classic example of symbiosis. A variety of microscopic organisms form bacterial gardens that take up residency in our mouths, guts, and colons. These millions, trillions, and even quadrillions of friendly bacteria help us to digest our food and to destroy bacterial enemies. Without them we could not function. Our entire bodies are living habitats.

(I highly recommend any of a variety of books by microbiologist Lynn Margulis, who is responsible for the pioneering and widespread popularity of symbiosis as an agent of evolutionary change.)

In addition, there are other kinds of long-lasting partnerships that don’t result in a new organism or species. These are common among plants and animals, including bees and flowers, insects and birds, trees and fungi, and many others.

Bees drink nectar produced by flowers, while flowers, which are stuck in one place, rely on bees to visit them in order to carry their pollen from one flower to the next. This relationship nourishes the bees, and produces the next generation of flowers. Both appear to be content with the arrangement. Another kind of partnership involves birds and insects. Birds like to eat insects. But a bird will not eat an insect that lives in its nest and helps keep it clean. Both the bird and the insect find the arrangement friendly and profitable. A tiny fish may inhabit the mouth of a large fish for its entire lifetime, both of which benefit from the partnership. Nature is filled with many such examples.

In general, symbiosis creates new, complex, species rather quickly, sometimes within days, while natural selection creates many diverse kinds of creatures over a period of hundreds or thousands of years; although microorganisms and small insects may evolve much quicker.

When a species of bacteria, fungi, animals, or plants successfully adapts to its surroundings, the species, in turn, modifies its environment. Every species coevolves with its environment, shaping and changing itself and the Earth.

view related Prose Poem that can be read aloud:

Adaptation

watch video A Record of Life:

Light waves are electromagnetic; they are caused by combined electric and magnetic influences. You can think of this as vibrational (electrical) resistance and (magnetic) conductivity of space. Sound waves are acoustic; they are mechanical in essence, requiring a medium in which to vibrate, such as gas, liquids, or solids. All known wave forms are either electromagnetic, acoustic, or, in the case of organic brain waves, electrochemical.

No one quite knows exactly what LIGHT is, but we know a lot about what it does. We do know that light is energy, that it travels through space, and that it is wavy. We also know that light travels at a phenomenal speed of about 186,000 miles in one second.

Light is created when an electron moves from a higher energy state to a lower energy state within an atom, and when subatomic particles collide leading to particle decay. When we look at a star in the night sky, view light from the Sun, or turn on a light switch, we are looking at light energy created by the actions of electrons.

Vibrations of light, known as photons, oscillate back and forth at different rates ranging from slow-moving low frequencies to extremely fast, high-energy gamma rays, depending on the source that produces them. The range of frequencies that light can produce represents the entire spectrum of electromagnetic energy, including ultraviolet, infrared, x-ray, and the visible light that allows us to see things around us.

Under certain conditions, photons may act like a particle, not a wave. So, what exactly is a photon if sometimes it acts like a wave and other times like a particle? No one seems to know for sure. But it seems like a good bet that the closer we come to understanding the fundamental nature of space at the smallest scale, exactly what space is, what it is made of, and what causes it to influence matter and energy in the way that it does, the more likely it is that we will discover the true identity of the photon.

One of the phenomenal things about light is that it is weightless. You can’t touch it or see it. It is energy, not matter. Yet it is what allows you to see the world. When light strikes an object and is reflected from it, the light meets your eyes and creates an image of that object in your brain.

The Sun is, by far, the brightest object in the solar system. It is continuously radiating sunlight in every direction. So why is it that when we look up into the dark at night, we see a black sky. Why isn’t it blazing with light? The reason is that you are only able to see when the sunlight bounces off the objects around you and strikes your eyes. At night, on Earth, the Sun is blocked and is striking only those objects on the other side of the world. Of course we can see the moon when the sunlight is shining on it, and we can easily observe points of light from nearby stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Because light travels through space at an average constant speed, it – light – tells us something about the nature of space. Einstein used this fact to formulate his famous theories about space and time.

In recent years, scientists and engineers have turned concentrated beams of light into laser instruments that are used for medical, scientific, and military defense purposes. Other recent discoveries include the use of fiber optics and other optical networking strategies used in communication and computer industries.

Some of the most exciting new research, known as quantum entanglement, involves faster-than-light speeds, and may represent a challenge to Einstein’s 100-year-old theories. Physicists are developing new experiments that foreshadow the science fiction of teleportation that has excited many of us at the movies and on the TV Series Star Trek. For the first time, scientists are teleporting photons across laboratory rooms and even across cities at superluminal speeds. They are at the early stages of this research, but once they have been able to repeat these experiments, substituting atoms (matter) for photons, ‘the game will be on!’ as Sherlock Holmes is fond of saying.

Unlike light, SOUND waves travel at slower speeds, around 750 miles an hour through air at sea level. And the speed of sound is not constant as it is with light. The speed of sound is determined by the medium through which the sound is moving. Sound travels faster in liquids than in air, faster still in solids.

Some jet airplanes can fly faster than the speed of sound, creating a special kind of sound wave known as a shock wave. When an airplane breaks the sound barrier, you can hear a loud, thunderous, sonic boom coming from above your head. There are even sound waves that can travel at nearly the speed of light.

But what is sound, exactly, and how does it get from here to there?

Sounds are waves of energy. They are created wherever there are free-moving objects in close proximity, such as molecules that make up air, liquids, and solids.  Normally, a room full of air is moving around randomly with molecules constantly colliding with one another because they are so close together. When a sound source, such as a crying baby, disturbs these motions, it creates a coherent pattern of molecules that we call an acoustic wave, or sound.

When the baby cries, the sound wave it produces spreads out in all directions, forming an expanding sphere in the air. This is the result of molecules that collide with one another, pushing their neighbors forward then rebounding, repeatedly, causing the wavefront to move forward at the speed of sound. The waves of air travel through the room at the speed of sound, about 335 meters per second (1100 feet per second) or 1207 kilometers per hour (750 miles per hour), easily reaching any pair of ears that happen to be present there.

When a raindrop hits the surface of a puddle, if you look closely you can see sound ripples expanding across the water in all directions. This is similar to what a

3-dimensional sound wave in air would look like if we could photograph it. Most sounds are graphically represented by a sign wave traveling from left to right on a 2-dimensional surface. This is, to say the least, a poor representation of the expanding sphere that actually travels through air.

In the case of the water droplet, you can’t hear the sound because you’re not in the water – the medium in which the wave is travelling. You might hear the drip of water as it splashes against the puddle, but that is because the droplet striking the water also produces a sound wave in air.

Any disturbance of molecules in air, liquids, or solids will create a similar sound pattern. And because the molecules are packed closer together in liquids than in air, and even closer in solids, the wave will travel faster.

Over millions of years, our ears have adapted to the molecular wave patterns in the air, so that today we are miraculously able to detect sounds from across a room, a city block, or an athletic field.

When the sounds of a crying baby reach our ears they are rapidly processed in our brain so that we may respond to its needs quickly. But how, exactly, does this happen?

The strength of a baby’s cry determines how far forward and backward the molecules in the sound wave move when they are vibrating. This is known as the amplitude of the wave and is determined by the extent in space of the vibration. When the wave arrives at your ears and is channeled into your brain, auditory circuits translate the strength, or amplitude, of the vibrations into what we experience as loudness or softness. We hear the baby’s giggle as soft, and its screams as loud.

The rate of vibration, how many repetitions per unit of time, such as beats per minute, is the frequency of the wave, and is translated in the brain as pitch. We experience a slow vibration as a low sound and a fast vibration as a high sound. And the vibration speed depends strictly on the dimensions of the source that creates the sound.

Smaller sound sources create higher sounds and larger ones create lower sounds. A big grizzly bear has long vocal chords that produce slow vibrations that we perceive as low growls. A songbird’s vocal chords are small and so they create fast vibrations that we experience as high sounds.

Incredibly, all sounds that you hear, loud sounds and soft sounds, high sounds and low ones are the result of vibrating motions of tiny invisible molecules riding the wave train from whatever is making sound to your brain.

There is one other important property of sound, and that is quality. What makes sounds different from one another? What makes a piano tone and a banjo tone, played at the same pitch and loudness, sound different from one another; or a barking dog, or a whistling teakettle?

A pure sound contains only one vibration. It is the sound you hear when somebody strikes a drinking glass or tuning fork. All pure sounds produce exactly the same quality and, when generated at the same frequency, are identical.

But most sounds are made up of not just one, but many different vibrations. The number of vibrations in a sound wave is determined by the dimension and material of the sound source that creates the sound. The quality of a sound then, depends on how many vibrations are present in the sound, and the frequency of each vibration.

Musical tones are produced by frequencies that are closely related to (multiples of) one another, while complex sounds, containing vibrations of many different frequencies, are noisy. Most sounds that we encounter are combinations of noises and musical tones, although one of the frequencies in a musical tone, known as the fundamental tone, is usually stronger than the others, which is what gives the tone its identifiable pitch.

Also, unlike light, there are many kinds of sound waves with different shapes and patterns, including normal traveling waves, standing waves, surface waves, internal waves, and shock waves.

But human hearing is only a small fraction of the acoustic wave spectrum. The full range of sound not only occurs in gas, liquids, and organic and inorganic solids, but extends from tiny, microacoustic waves produced by fluctuations of particles trapped within a normal sound field, to giant, macroacoustic wave disturbances including weather patterns, ocean waves, seismic waves, global waves, solar waves, and galactic waves.

These are all acoustic waves, by definition, and are propagated in the Earth’s atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere, as well as on or near other planetary bodies and satellites, in the stellar wind, on the surface of stars, in interstellar dust clouds, in spiral galaxies, and in giant molecular clouds that occur in the regions between galaxies and clusters of galaxies.

Not only that, sound waves throughout the universe vibrate at frequencies that range from billions of cycles per second, to a single cycle within a period of several days, months, or years. Sound waves travel at speeds ranging from subsonic velocities of several meters per second, to hypersonic velocities that approach the speed of light.

Of course we cannot hear or listen to these sounds because they vibrate at much ‘lower’ or ‘higher’ frequencies than our ears are capable of detecting.

(see a poster-size artist edition of the first comprehensive Acoustic Wave Spectrum)

So now that we know exactly what sound is and where to find it, let’s try and answer the popular philosophical question: ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ It turns out that the answer is not philosophical at all, but has to do with biology and physics.

If there is a tree growing in the forest, it means there is a surrounding atmosphere filled with molecules. When a tree hits the ground, it creates a sound pattern as it disturbs the random motions of the surrounding air. The sound travels outward in all directions completely unaffected by human hearing.

So the next time someone poses this so-called philosophical question, simply answer ‘yes, it very definitely makes a sound’, and politely explain.

The moon, however, is a different story. Since there is no appreciable atmosphere on our moon, astronauts landing on the moon’s surface cannot hear any sounds except for those created inside their spacesuits filled with air.

An interesting historical note. In 1789, responding to the complaints of a deaf friend, Benjamin Franklin performed an ‘exact experiment’ in which he cupped his ears with the palm of his hands, placing his thumb and fingers behind the ear, pressing it forward and widening it. Franklin found that he ‘could hear the tick of a watch at forty-five feet distance by this means, which was barely audible at twenty feet without it.’ This is an increase in the amplification of the sound by about fifty per cent. The experiment was performed at midnight when the house was still.

Two things about the eye. (1) Eyes have evolved independently many times in many different creatures over millions of years, and (2) The eye of the lobster was used as a model for the development of the telescope lens.

‘. . . out of the shadows even the most tenuous ray of light emerges,
the procreative power,
life’s first known ecstasy,
with the joy of passing from silence to sound . . .’

- Ernesto Cardenal

view related Prose Poems that can be read aloud:

A Catalog of Sounds
The Eye of the Lobster

view full-color poster of Acoustic Wave Spectrum:

Acoustic Wave Spectrum