Storymania - Getting A Leg Up On Evolution by Jeffrey Hansson

Getting A Leg Up On Evolution
Jeffrey Hansson

Getting a Leg Up in Evolution
By Jeffrey Hansson
Nothing beats a great pair of legs. Isn’t that what people say? I believe it’s true. Metaphorically, all life is about legs, and so is evolution. Language doesn’t lie, and neither does common sense. If truth is the bearer of wisdom, and wisdom is encoded in language, then evolution is a truth about which just about everybody recognizes. “It’s a jungle out there,” typifies it, it’s a “dog eat dog world,” describes it and “the cream floats to the top,” seals the deal. All of these phrases symbolize the evolutionary process, recognized by the great 19th century sociologist, Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase, “survival of the fittest.”
We use these words because they accurately describe the world we live in, and at the same time show us that evolution is actually quite easy to understand. People make it too complicated, regardless of what side of the issue they’re on. On the teeter, calling evolution a fact makes about as much sense as calling a series of international conferences a treaty. On the totter, saying it is just a theory is like calling the entire U.S. interstate system just a road. Proponents get mired down in scientific jargon about theories and facts, and opponents spend an excruciating amount of their time with inappropriate analogies or misapplied religious language. For anyone willing to take the time and educate themselves to both the principles and the facts, they’ll find that evolution is a rather simple and painless process to understand. But it also has some caveats that can trip up the unwary. I'll get to that.
Evolution is really about two interrelated things, skill and competition, and it works in both the biological and cultural worlds. The only thing that’s different about the two is the mechanics.
Everybody knows about competition, since, at some time in our lives, we have experienced both success and failure. All life is about competing, gaining advantage and coming out ahead. Competition is the essence of survival, and it’s as essential in the biological world as it is in the business world. Deer compete with one another for food, space and, perhaps most importantly, sex (we do too). Businessmen compete for customers, and athletes compete for positions. But, there’s an added factor that fuels competition, which makes it possible, and that’s scarcity. There’s only so much food, so many customers, or so many spots on the roster. It’s crowded there, and we’ve captured the essence of this process when we say “there’s no room at the top.”
But there’s a little more to it than just competition and scarcity, and that’s the principle of selection. Selection means that there are skills or traits in the environment that are “selected,” or favored, because they give an individual a leg up, in some cases literally, in the competition.
Biological skills, like speed, hearing and eyesight, allow deer to compete with one another and survive predation. Their body hair and four-chambered heart allow it to retain heat and deliver oxygen to its organs, helpful during a long winter. For businessmen, skills that might give them an advantage over his rivals is making a better product, having more investors, or finding better locations. For football players, say a wide receiver, skills include speed, agility, and ability to run routes and catch the ball. For women, they select for competent men, while men, they select for, well, legs, among other things. Women know this; they know that at the mating game therein lies the jungle, and in the jungle you pay for things.
Selection and competition are two sides of the same coin and, in fact, there can’t be one without the other. As usual, our language is here to help us, when we say, “the cream rises to the top.” Everybody loves a winner.
The final factor to wrap up the evolutionary package is time. Over time, more successful skills replace ones that fail. Environmental change might select for new skills, making old ones obsolete. This is the difference between those who adapt and those who fall by the wayside. Brown skin conveys an advantage in the tropics, white skin rules the day near the poles. Why? Because, on the one hand, our skin collects Vitamin D from the sun and, on the other, it protects us from skin cancer. White skin is good in a climate with a dearth of sunlight, while brown skin keeps us healthier when it’s constantly searing us. Steam power replaced horse power because it was more productive, and the soccer style kicker replaced the straight-on kicker in football because it allows one to kick farther. Also, over time, adaptive behaviors have become more complex. Early life on the planet came in the form of single celled-organisms with no brains to speak of, while more recent life, like humans has become more complex, even though some of us still have no brains to speak of. If you don’t believe in the simple-to-complex trajectory of evolution, then go get a poster of the correlated history of the world. I should warn you, though, that the pictures and language might be offensive to some, especially those who happen to either be creationists or high school dropouts.
But how is biological and cultural evolution different? It’s an important distinction, and this is where mechanisms come into play. For a long, long time, life on this planet worked out the survival of the fittest problem through DNA. Mechanically speaking, this means sex and reproduction. Take deer. Bucks and does pass on their DNA to their offspring. Those alpha males that passed more of their DNA than their competitors to the next generation did so because they had more mating opportunities, and thus Jane Doe carried the best of the species in her womb. For lower forms of life, like kelp and fish, they reproduced by the truckloads in the gamble that a small percentage would live long enough to reproduce. For more complex life, like mammals, fewer eggs were put into the basket with the payoff being bigger, stronger and smarter. For hundreds of millions of years, this is the way it went. It worked, slowly and gradually, until we came along.
Humans are a self-important species, and we tend to view things in terms of our own existence, our own frame of reference. We think we’ve been around forever. We haven’t. If a person was to view the history of life on Earth in terms of our yearly calendar, the appearance of humans would have occurred on December 31st at 11:59 PM. In the long view of geology and biology, our presence is the blink of an eye. But in that short span of our earthly existence, something happened to us that made us fundamentally different than other animals.
Our biology changed us, by, ironically, providing the very tool that would replace it as the primary evolutionary tool: a culture-bearing large brain. It’s a cerebral hard drive that is unprecedented. Take a brief look at the fossil record and it will show you that it took several million years for human ancestors to develop a brain size large enough for conceptual thinking and the ability to build things, swear at one another and turn trees into ashes. Even so, this happened rather fast in our history, so fast in fact that the evolution of the human brain has outpaced the size of the birth canal necessary to deliver it. Think about it. The brain of a newborn infant is pliable and consists of plates of bone that don’t even fuse together for several years. It’s the only way to get a large brain through a smaller passage way.
This wasn’t always the case. But once the brain got bigger, human culture took off like a snowball rolling downhill. And it allowed us to actually circumvent much of our biology. Hot? Turn on the AC. Cold, put on a coat. Culture has become our foremost adaptive tool. Maybe other than a few species of insects, there isn’t one habitat on the planet where humans don’t live, or couldn’t live. Overall, our bodies have not changed all that much in the last fifty thousand years. But look at our culture.
For most of human history, we lived as hunters and gatherers, living off the land for food, shelter and clothing. But just within the last ten thousand years culture has changed in dramatic ways. We have learned to control and manage water to produce our own food, build empires, build industrial economies, create modern medicine and increase our overall comfort. In short, we’ve adapted to our ever changing environments through more successful (at least in the short term) skills. We’ve actually evolved so fast culturally that our bodies haven’t had time to catch up. Our backs still think we live in the Pleistocene. We were never meant for sitting in chairs for hours at a time, and our backs don’t like it and let us know in no uncertain terms when we’ve pissed them off. Women pay a painful price for making their legs look longer by wearing high heels. Though the look might give them a leg up in the maing game, they pay for it bunions.
More successful skills replace less successful ones, and more successful cultures replace less successful cultures. Hunter-gatherer cultures are near extinction after serving us well for so long. But they simply don’t work in the modern age. People put down their bows and arrows and picked up computers, cell phones and learned how to drive a car. It’s nice that Ted Nugent can be a hunter-gather a la solo, but if everyone tried it we’d all be road kill for Heckle and Jeckle.
To all of this there are caveats that can trip us up. It’s perfectly accurate so say that cultural evolution is the product of intelligent design. Humans design, plan, implement, assess and revise their cultures. We set goals. Planning is what got us here, and there’s no turning back the clock. But as I said, we like to see all things in our own terms. We have plans, so nature must. We are goal-oriented and so too, is nature. But it only looks that way because we’re only able to see the past through our prism, and we mistakenly put the biological cart before the horse.
Part of the problem is with the connotation of the word “selection.” When evolutionists talk about natural selection they can give the impression that nature consciously makes choices. One has to treat the term carefully and explain it. It’s little wonder that proponents of intelligent design use the idea of selection as part of their philosophy. Biological evolution is not goal-oriented in the sense that we use the term. Nature doesn’t move toward some desired outcome and it doesn’t anticipate the future. Humans didn’t become upright walkers so they might eventually slam dunk basketballs, nor did we retain the shoulder-and-socket joint from our primate past to throw really nasty curveballs. It just seems that way through our eyes because we’re standing at the top of the mountain and looking back on the way we came.
There’s one more caveat. Like mixing metaphors we have to avoid the confusion of mixing different evolutionary agents. The evolution of technology, say from horse power to oil power, had nothing to do with sexual advantage and advantageous genes, but everything to do with planning and design. Likewise, the development of human skin color had nothing to do with plan or design, but everything to do with advantageous genes. And those legs? Well, it’s a little of both. Biology helps, but heels and nylons just might seal the deal.
See, I told you, evolution is not only simple, but it’s sheer elegance too.