I was watching a TED-cast the other day, TED (www.ted.com) is a good mix of the best popular opinion. A very helpful resource but don’t misunderstand me, it is merely the very best of the current popular opinion, in other words the highest of the lowest common denominators.
In this TED-cast Jane Goodall was speaking about her experience and research with chimps in central Africa. She was waxing great imaginative lyrical about how she believes that the human capacity of speech evolved from mother ape-like ancestors of humans, and chimps supposedly, needing their hands to be free and thus putting their babies down and then having to rely on grunts and groans to communicate since mother and infant were no longer in physical touch. This, she postulates, caused the species to generate forms of verbal communication which stimulated neural development and thus more intricate verbal communication eventually resulting in intelligence, reasonability, self-awareness and speech. Characteristics displayed only by human beings.
So she wins a vote each for evolution and the feminist movement in one scientific sounding statement, a pretty smooth move, but not very rigourous.
Now just yesterday I was watching about two dozen birds of about three or four different species in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. They were all of a fairly noisy, excitable type; big yellow-billed hornbills, glossy and long-tailed starlings, some thrushes and a collection of sparrows and weavers.
I was sitting in a cluster of small trees, probably about 15-17ft high, the branches of these trees started low down and there was a fairly dense canopy at the top. The birds were excited because I had food, and I was watching them because many of them were perched right above me, and birds are utterly indiscriminate about where they deposit their waste!
Fairly quickly I could make out four levels in which the birds operated. Canopy and above was really out of the action, the next level down was like a transit either in or out of the trees. Then there was a dome around me where the birds were interacting directly with me and with eachother, lastly there was the ground which, in a sense, was the base of this dome.
No bird wanted to get too close to me, but equally no bird wanted to be left out should I let some food fall. Like a flock of credit providers in a recession, they were constantly calculating their risk and weighing up their potential opportunity loss should another bird get in before them. There was not a racket but there certainly was a large amount of chirping going on, each bird sizing me and every other bird up.
It was almost as if, for a moment, I was viewing life through their eyes, I could clearly see the various levels in this three dimensional world of theirs. I was even aware of a raptor circling above when suddenly all the birds seemed to disappear; there was an enormous amount of very quick neural processing going on.
Now, what is it, I ask that has prevented ancient birds-like ancestors from developing the same way as Goodall supposes her ape-like ancestors did? From what I can see they had much better reason to, they lived in a constant, multi-level, three-dimentional world, where the ape-like creatures interacted in 2 dimensions (relatively speaking). Also their ancestry is considerably older, according to the theory, than ours (150 million compared with our measly 35 million). They also seem to me to be a lot quicker at processing things, they seem to be multi-tasking all the time, and this must have been the case from fairly early on - as soon as the first bird-like creature took to the wing his neurons must have been stimulated in ways that would make ancient ape lullabies seem rather placid.
Surely the questions must be asked why it is that the ape ancestors developed intelligence and bird ancestors did not.
What then about fish, or cetaceans, like whales and dolphins? They also live in a three-dimentional, multi-level world. They have had to rely on voice communication for much longer than ape-like mommies.
Probably an answer will be given that humans developed intellectually because we did not have to worry about weight, as a bird would, and thus could afford a bigger brain. But, besides the fact that it does not answer the cetacean question, since when does brain size equal reasonability? Elephants and whales have bigger brains than us - and isn’t it true that we only use 10% of our brain capacity anyway? So then what is the evolutionary need for the birth of helpless human infants with "big" brains? Also if it was efficiency that was called for, surely evolution could have given the stimulated bird-brain neural capacity without adding huge amounts of weight? There is enough evidence of that kind of efficiency around. And lastly we are speaking here about the ability to reason and self-awareness, not mere intelligence.
I just don’t think it’s good enough science to simply suppose such an argument in the light of everything else, it is extremely narrow, so narrow that it borders on dishonesty.
Goodall’s suggestion is a bit like a man who was searching on the ground under a street light at night, a passer-by asked what he was doing, "I’m looking for my pen," answered the man on all fours.
"Let me help," offered the passer-by kneeling down to look.
After a while of fruitless searching the passer-by asked, "where exactly did you drop it?"
"Over there in the ally," answered the man pointing down a dark ally.
"Why then are you looking here?" asked the irritated passer-by.
"Well, isn’t that obvious," answered the man, "the light is so much better over here."
We all know that science developed from logical thinking… has it developed so far that it is no longer logical? If it has then how can we call it science? Perhaps we should just call it evolution.
