Ten thousand generations ago, when we were divided into many small groups, these propensities may have served our species well. We can understand why they are almost reflexive, why they should be so easy to evoke, why they are the stock in trade of every demagogue and hack politician. But we cannot wait for natural selection to further mitigate these ancient primate algorithms. That would take too long. We must work with what tools we have—to understand who we are, how we got to be that way, and how to transcend our deficiencies. Then we can begin to create a society less apt to bring out the worst in us.
Still, from the perspective of the last ten thousand years extraordinary transformations have lately been playing themselves out. Consider how we humans organize ourselves. Dominance hierarchies requiring debasing submission and obedience to the alpha male, as well as hereditary alphahood, were once the global standard of human political structure, justified as right and proper and divinely ordained by our greatest philosophers and religious leaders. These institutions have now almost vanished from the Earth. Chattel slavery—likewise long defended by revered thinkers as preordained and deeply consonant with human nature—has been nearly abolished worldwide. Just a minute ago, all over the planet, with only a few exceptions, women were subordinate to men and denied equal status and power; this also was thought predetermined and inevitable. Here too, clear signs of change are now evident nearly everywhere. A common appreciation of democracy and what are called human rights is, with some backsliding, sweeping the planet.
Taken together, these dramatic societal shifts—often in ten generations or less—provide a compelling refutation of the claim that we are condemned, without hope of reprieve, to live out our lives in a barely disguised chimpanzee social order. Moreover, the shifts are occurring so swiftly that they cannot possibly be due to natural selection. Instead, our culture must be drawing forth propensities and predispositions that already reside deep within us.
We humans hold at least 99.9% of our DNA sequences in common. We are far more closely related to one another than we are to any other animal. By the similarity standards we use in other matters, humans—even of the most disparate cultures and ethnic origins—are essentially identical in our heredities. Of the immense number of possible beings, realized and unrealized, we all are cut from the same cloth, made on the same pattern, granted the same strengths and weaknesses, and will ultimately share the same fate. Given the reality of our mutual interdependence, our intelligence, and what is at stake, are we really unable to break out of behavior patterns evolved to benefit our ancestors of long ago?
We have been dismantling ancient institutions that no longer serve, and are tentatively trying out others. Our species is becoming an intercommunicating whole, with powerful economic and cultural bonds linking up the planet. Our problems, increasingly, are global in venue, admitting only global solutions. We have been uncovering the mysteries of our past and the nature of the Universe around us. We have invented tools of awesome power. We have explored the nearby worlds and have set sail for the stars. Granted, prophecy is a lost art and we are not vouchsafed an unclouded view of our future. Indeed, we are almost wholly ignorant of what is coming. But by what right, what argument can pessimism be justified? Whatever else may be hidden in those shadows, our ancestors have bequeathed us—within certain limits, to be sure—the ability to change our institutions and ourselves. Nothing is preordained.
We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologizing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections. Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows. In this act of ancestral remembrance and acceptance may be found a light by which to see our children safely home.
EPILOGUE
It is not possible to be ignorant of the end of
things if we know their beginning.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Summa Theologica1
We have described the Earth before humans set foot upon it. We have tried to understand something about our ancestors, using as our guide the fossil record and the gorgeous panorama of life that now graces our planet. While there are still vast numbers of missing pages in our orphan’s file, the progress of science has enabled us to glimpse a few of the lost or forgotten entries—perhaps even many of the important items. But we have explored only the early chapters of the file. Its key central section—chronicling the dawn of our species and its evolution up to the invention of civilization—is the subject of the next book in this series.
Notes
Prologue
THE ORPHAN’S FILE
1. Attributed to Empedocles by Sextus Empiricus, in Against the Mathematicians, VII, 122–125, in Jonathan Barnes, editor and translator, Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 163.2. Science and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951). Schrödinger was one of the discoverers of quantum mechanics.3. In many scientific accounts of the origin of the human species, there is a story something like this. (Cf., e.g., Misia Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991].) But rather than being imposed on the evidence, we hold that it flows naturally out of the evidence. Human origins have in fact been very humble. We have in fact, by many standards, become the dominant species on the planet, and done it partly by dint of our own efforts. We are in fact profoundly ignorant of many of the details of our origins. It is natural to represent ourselves in metaphor as a favored child brought up in obscure circumstances, and then as hero venturing forth into the world to seek our identity. The principal danger of the metaphor would be if we thought our success due to one generation or people or nation; or if our success were to blind us to the danger we have placed ourselves in.4. Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953), p. 108.5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov (1880), translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), Book Six, Chapter 3, p. 318.6. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 4, 5.7. A similar metaphor was employed in The Origin of Species, Chapter 10, where Charles Darwin compared the geological record to “a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history, we possess the last volume alone … Only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page only here and there a few lines.”
Chapter 1
ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN
1. In Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, translators, Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane’s Bill (New York: Grove Press, 1973), p. 20.2. Translated by Dennis Tedlock (New York: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1985, 1986), p. 73.3. What we are describing here is the origin of our Solar System—not the origin of the Universe, or at least its latest incarnation, which is most often described as the Big Bang.4. The Second Law of Thermodynamics specifies that in any process, the net orderliness of the Universe must decrease. Some places may get more orderly as long as others get more chaotic. There is plenty of order to draw on in the Universe, and nothing in the Second Law is inconsistent with the origin of the planets or the beginnings of life.5. Except for a tiny fraction generated by the radioactive decay of atoms hailing originally from elsewhere in the Galaxy.6. Two millennia after his last worshipper died, the name of this god was given to a newly discovered planet.