Please note: This is very much a work in progress! Please read, enjoy, and then write me some feedback to BG2006 @ whiteworld. com. I'm particularly interested in which parts you find interesting and which parts you find confusing. Both are things I want to know to make this better. Thanks --Roger
Looking at the fossil record, we see that mankind was a hunter-gatherer before he was a good thinker, tool user and speaker (a package of improvements I will call the "strong language skill package", or simply "language use", for short.) But as his skills in those areas grew, he became a better and better hunter-gather. So, what changes did mankind undergo as he moved from his pre-language Stone Age into his language-capable Stone Age? (note: these changes correspond roughly to what are formally known as the Old or Paleolithc and New or Neolithic Stone Ages. However, the fossil record has not told us directly about mankind's language using ability, so what I will be talking about next is an area subject to much speculation in the science community.)
The following are some changes to mankind that the strong language skill package encourages:
Humans grow old for their size. A French scientist [cite] noted that mammals living in the wild have a strong relation between their size and their lifespan -- larger mammals tend to live longer. Shrews -- the smallest of mammals -- live about a year, while elephants -- the largest of land mammals -- live about one hundred years. Humans don't fit the curve well, we are too long-lived for our size.
Why should that be?
Assuming that Mother Nature, Design Engineer is not playing favorites with humans, it means that older humans are more valuable to the species than, say, older mice or older bats.
I propose that language skill is making older humans more valuable to the species. It is making them more valuable because they can become respositories of valuable information, and they can pass on that information to the next generation.
All mammals are high performance life designs. (I will talk more about this in various places in this book.) Along with birds, they are the most active of species and they "do" the most during their lifespans -- they are busy creatures. This means that all mammal designs are "lean and mean" and have little "slack" in them. This means that once the generic mammal is finished bearing and raising it's young, it has finished contributing to the gene pool. From then on, all it is doing is consuming resource that might otherwise go to another member of the species.
This is why few mammal females live long beyond menopause... except human females. Human females now live long because for many, many generations they have been valuable to the community as repositories of knowlege.
This is an example of how language changes the lifestyle of humans. And, looking for average age of death is something that the fossil record can reveal. When humans are starting to live longer, in particular when human females are starting to live well beyond menopause, this is a direct sign that strong language skill has developed.
There is a second example of language making a difference that I encountered while reading an article in Science News. The article in the June 24, 2006 edition was titled "Older but Mellower", and talked about how neuroscientist Leanne M. Williams of Westmead Hospital in Australia had done some studies of brain changes as a person ages. What she found was that there was an orderly change in how emotion was handled. As a person aged beyond 50 the processing of viewing pictures of people expressing different emotions shifted between the pre-frontal cortex (the very front of the brain) and the amygdala (a part of the central brain).
The details of the change are not important. What is important is that this is an orderly change that the brain undergoes when a person is 50 years old or older. The reason this is important is that it means evolution cares about 50 year old humans, cares even though they are no longer having children. If people over 50 had nothing valuable to contribute to the human community, then changes to the brain in over 50's would be random changes -- Mother Nature would make changes to DNA that would show up as brain changes, and none would be weeded out because none would make any difference. The aging of the brain in humans would resemble people leaving a football game -- each would age in it's own way and have no relation to how other people's brains aged.
Instead what we see is more like people leaving a Sunday Brunch who then go to a football game -- the change is orderly and leads to a specific result. This is a sure sign that evolution cares. And if evolution cares it means that how a grandparent thinks effects the success of his or her grandchildren -- bad thinking choices are being weeded out. This effect is the result of a grandparent being able to communicate with the grandchild and pass on important information. It is one of the results of strong language skill.
This change in where thinking takes place is a big one. This means that evolution has been working on this problem of good thinking for many, many generations, and this is a good indicator that human language skill has been around for many, many generations. Current thinking is that human language skill developed to the extraordinary level about 7,500 generations ago (150,000 years).
One of the surprise uses of language skill is mate selection. When it comes time to produce young, a generic mammal, even a generic primate, tries to appeal to the member of the opposite sex that they are interested in producing young with -- boy meets girl, girl falls in love. In humans with language skill, it's different, in most human cultures marriages are arranged. This means that a young suitor must appeal to the potential mate's parents, not the potential mate himself or herself -- boy meets girl's parents, they are impressed. This is a difference, and it's a difference I've spent a few years trying to figure out. Mates and mate's parents both like healthy-, fertile-looking partners, so what are the differences?
One of the big differences is the issue of cooperation. Parents are going to be more sensitive than mates to the issue of "getting with the program." Will this potential mate support the family after he or she becomes part of it? Because of this cooperation sensitivity, arranged marriage has had a lot to do with human society becoming more and more cooperative over the generations. And this growing cooperation has been a key factor in allowing mankind to civilize. (See more under Adapting to Agriculture.)
There is yet another curiosity about Language and Arranged Marriage. That is that Industrialized Western cultures have abandoned arranged marriage. We have gone back to letting a mate choose a mate. This seems very odd, since the practice seems to be a cornerstone in mankind's rapid evolution. But, there is another change that has happened at the same time: men and women now get married when they are much older. The net result of these two changes is that people getting married are now picking their own mates, but they are thinking like parents when they do.
The strong language skill package has proved so valuable that Mother Nature is far from finished exploiting it. Before the language skill package was in place, there were a lot of thinking innovations that were just too complex to be worth investing in. For instance, reason and judgement are very expensive ways to think because they consume a lot of resource. If what you figure out is going to be lost each generation, there is limited demand for these kinds of thinking skills. But, if what you can figure out can be passed on from generation to generation, then reason and judgement take on new roles, and become astoundingly valuable! This means that once strong language skill was in place, adding brain power added survival value, and the human brain grew and grew....
The next "hard" limit came on brain size at birth -- human baby's heads started getting so big that birth became difficult. Still... what value! To this day we can see that Mother Nature places a whole lot of value on brain size because childbirth is such a risky process.
In Stone Age societies, one-in-100 live births results in the death of the mother. This means that Mother Nature has said, "Tragic... tragic... but acceptable. This solution is working better than having a slightly smaller head and a one-in-1000 death rate."
But the innovating was not finished! Mankind is a tool-user and mankind used one of those tools (himself or herself) to help mothers get their children born. Mankind invented assisted child birth of the form we are now familiar with.
Mother Nature's response was, "Excellent! Now I can make heads even bigger!!" Ah well... And thus we have the famously painful and difficult labor that human women must bear with.
There is a surprise effect to Assisted Child birth, as well -- sexy young women.
In generic mammals, a female is either a child (too young to have children), a reproducing adult (ready to have children), or dead (too old to have children). In humans there is a fouth state "old" (too old to have children, but still valuable as a repository of knowledge). In humans this "old" state is treated very differently from the "young" state.
I will define a young, reproducing woman as a "bride", and an older knowledge repository woman as a "matron". What is the difference in woman's relation to the community between when she is a bride and when she is a matron?
When a woman is a bride, she is raising young children. She spends much of her life either pregnant or lactating, and all of it tending young children. All of these activities are taxing, and all benefit enormously from community cooperation. Therefore a bride age woman is constantly searching for cooperation. She needs a lot of cooperation, and if she gets it, the community prospers.
When a woman is older, her children have grown and she's no longer in the pregnant-or-lactating stage of her life. This means her day-to-day living is not being physcially and mentally surcharged by family-raising activities, so her support needs change from tremendous to average. This means her need for cooperation changes from tremendous to average as well. In recognition of this change in condition, she is seen by the community in a different light. She transforms from a bride into a matron.
How does a young mother signal that she needs help? She signals this by being attractive. She signals that even though there are kids around and she may have a swelling belly, she's still fun to be around. This is why young women look sexy.
Older woman are ready to take an average role in society; they are ready to engage in classic dominance disputing. They gain in their community by looking like someone you don't want to cross, rather than someone you will feel good about helping even though you get little back.
Older women are not fools. They feel acutely what they are losing as they age, and they would like to have the best of both worlds: be able to win dominance disputes as an older woman can and have people help them spontaneously like they did when she was younger. This is the foundation of the pursuit of beauty.
The foundation of the human concept of beauty is cooperation. As human beings adapted to supporting assisted child birth and long dependant childhoods, they needed a way to signal a need for cooperation. Mother Nature found a way to do that by modifying some existing mammal instincts to come up with what we now call "beauty."
Consider the cooperating instincts of the Generic Mammal. The cooperating instinct is generally weak, especially compared to that of social insects. Females will sometimes cooperate, for example, the females of a lion pride will hunt cooperatively. Males rarely do much cooperating -- they won't hang around each other, and they won't even hang around females unless the females are in heat. When males do interact with males, it is usually to fight over females. The most common form of male-male interaction is the dominance dispute. Females also dominance dispute. Females cooperate and dominance dispute; males just dominance dispute. The cooperation that a generic mammal does do intensively is with the young. Young animals are relatively helpless and need adult support.
So, on Mother Nature's Design Board we have a preexisting instinct condition in generic adult mammals and primates which says, "Cooperate with young, but dominance dispute adults." And in tandem with this is a childhood instinct that says, "When I'm a child, I don't dominance dispute adults. I can whine at them, I can play with them, but I can't fight with them." And this instinct changes to, "Now that I'm grown up, I have to either fight for my share, or get out of the way fast when someone whom I know is meaner is nearby."
A real world example of this is chimpanzees. Baby chimps are well known as crowd pleasers at things such as human birthday parties. They are smart, they are entertaining, and they don't cause trouble. But, no matter how "human" their upbringing is as a child, adult chimps are notoriously mean, treacherous and downright dangerous. This was brought out dramatically in 1999 when three chimps at the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, Utah broke out. They attacked their zoo keepers savagely -- one of the chimps bit fingers off one of the zoo keepers. It took a shotgun blast to contain the confrontation.
Why this Dr. Jekyl/Mr. Hyde transformation between children and adult chimps?
It is the transformation from submissive childhood thinking patterns into adult dominance-checking thinking patterns. A child chimp is quite willing to be submissive and cooperative with humans, as it is with adult chimps. When it grows up it is quite willing to domimance dispute with adult humans, as it would with adult chimps.
And, this is what Mother Nature had as thinking patterns for pre-language humans, too.
So, how did Mother Nature modify these thinking patterns (instincts) in humans when she wanted to support assisted childbirth with more cooperation?
Basically, she extended the childhood thinking patterns into adulthood. Humans now maintain their childhood cooperative thinking patterns into adulthood.
And she added to that simple extension change, a signalling mechanism to signal a need for extra cooperation. That signal mechanism is beauty.
When we see something beautiful, we want to cooperate with it. In the modern extension of the beauty concept, that something can be a child, a woman, even something inanimate, such as a car. Seeing something as beautiful is a signal to the brain that if that something can be cooperated with, it should be. An example: Wildlife conservation organizations have recognized the importance of beauty for years. This is why beautiful pictures of wildlife areas are used to promote donations to wildlife causes.
Likewise, the goal of "becoming beautiful" is to signal that a person is willing to accept more cooperation from "strangers" -- people who would previously not have offered cooperation.
This signal to cooperate is closely linked to the signal to mate, so in humans "beautiful" and "sexy" are closely tied.
These are a couple of the many changes mankind had to make to become Stone Age humans. These changes allowed mankind to prosper in hunter-gatherer societies, first in Africa, Europe and Asia, and later in the Americas. These changes started about seven thousand generations ago, so the gene pool has had a long time to adjust to hunting-gathering humans with arranged marriages and strong languages skills.
About 250 generations ago (5,000 years), a few humans developed a radically new way of living. They learned to farm, and that ushered in the Agricultural Age.
Mankind's moving from hunter-gatherer to agricultural communities was a huge change in lifestyle, and it required huge changes in mankind's thinking patterns to really take advantage of the benefits agriculture could bring to the species.
Huge is the operative word. Agriculture changed mankind from being just another species which happened to inhabit six continents of the world, into a world-class environment changer. It set mankind firmly on the road to becoming a boom species. It also changed where mankind lived. Soon after farming was developed, farm buildings were developed, and mankind began living in a sedentary civlized fashion instead of as a sleeping-under-the-stars hunter-gatherer nomad.
The following are some other dramatic changes that occurred to mankind. These are changes that called for new thinking and new skills, and these are changes that have pushed hard on the homo sapiens gene pool.
The Generic Primate, like the Generic Mammal, has little use for male-male cooperation. Males live their own lives and spend time with females mostly when it is time to mate and sometimes when it is time to raise young.
One of the biggest changes Mother Nature had to design into homo sapiens was strong male cooperation. This was probably a long and hard fought change. It was assisted greatly by language development because then arranged marriage was possible, and parents were likely to be more sensistive to how cooperative a prospective mate was than their eligible children were.
This high level of male cooperation is what I call The Sacred Masculine. I call it that because it's the root of Civilized community building -- the less males cooperate, the less civilization we see in the human community. We can see examples of this linkage even today by looking at communities that do not have strong male cooperation. One place to find those is in disenfranchised communities around the world. A disenfranchised community is one that is not supporting itself and is not in charge of it's own interests. It is being strongly supported by external aid and managed by external agencies.
If you look at a disenfranchised community, you generally see:
This is life without The Sacred Masculine.
This ability for males to cooperate is the foundation for agriculture because maintaining fields and growing crops is much more efficient with large groups of people working together than with small groups. In hunting and gathering, small groups are efficient, but as agriculture becomes more successful, larger groups become more sucessful. Creating large groups of people that cooperate does not come naturally to primates, so this demand is pushing the gene pool. It is pushing the gene pool in the direction of making larger groups easier to form. That push has been helped enormously by having arranged marriages in which parents were looking for cooperative in-laws for their extended family.
Large groups were also helped by another innovation: Virtual Leadership, which I will discuss next.
One of the limits on the group size of any species is the time and effort that goes into dominance disputing. If a species has a pecking order, which means it's doing dominance disputing, then that pecking order must be tested regularly. It must be tested frequently because community members get sick (and better), old, and children grow up, then then grow stronger... so the pecking order is dynamic and needs to be constantly checked.
This checking takes some energy. It may take a little, or it may take a lot. During mating season mammal males may spend huge amounts of energy on dominance checking. The results of these huge energy expendatures are the spectacular mating fights that wild animal filmers spend hours capturing and then showing on TV shows such as Animal Kingdom. Even in non-mating season, and with energy conserving ritual displays instead of all-out fights, dominance checking takes time and energy. If it takes too much, the animal doing the checking weakens.
If the community does not develop a hierarchy, the number of checks that must be made grows dramatically with group size. The number of checks is the number of connections in a full mesh network. Which grows like the following table.
Members -- Checks
1 - 0
2 - 1
3 - 3
4 - 6
5 - 10
6 - 15
This is why so many species have a group size of around twenty adults. If the group gets bigger the members are spending so much time dominance checking that they physically weaken. Weakening due to dominance checking may be the signal that a community instinctively uses to decide that it is ready to split in two.
When mankind was a hunter-gatherer, he followed the general mammal rules, and split the group when it got too large and dominance disputing got too intense. But as agriculture became more and more a part of mankind's lifestyle, there was a push on the gene pool to support larger communities. Communities of hundreds or thousands could do better at many kinds of agriculture than communties of twenty to fifty could. So, Mother Nature searched for a solution to the problem of energy-sapping dominance disputing limiting community size.
One part of the solution was building the instinct for cooperation in general. Another part was supporting heirarchy, and yet another useful piece was inventing the concept of a virtual leader. In a hierarchy, communication (and fighting) goes on between the leader and the lead, not between every member of the group. This dramatically cuts down on the amount of dominance disputing. A virtual leader is a leader whom two potential dominance checkers will both follow, even if the leader is not physically present. If they are both willing to follow the same leader, they won't have to dominance check each other. The time and energy of dominance checking are saved, and the two leaders can cooperate with each other.
The ability to have virtual leaders was vitally important to the growth of agriculture and civilization. Unlike beauty and cooperation, this concept is not built on directly extending an existing strong instinct, so it's been a tough concept to add to the human thinking repetoire. Humans still revert easily to dominance checking thinking, and there is lots of worshipping of the "lone wolf" in the arts.
The best virtual leader is the perfect one. It is from this concept that the concepts of monotheism and theocracy spring -- serving a god and building a whole community based on serving a god. In these concepts all members of the community are willing to serve a god who is perfect. This belief gives community members a reason not to dominance check with each other as often, and reduce the intensity of disputing when it is done.
Religion has been a powerful force in allowing mankind to form larger groups, and this has been quite valuable to humanity.
Religion has another benefit as well. It is useful at blunting one of the bad effects of self-awareness thinking: Dark Nihilism.
Self aware thinking is one of the foundation changes that makes mankind distinctly human. Self-aware thinking allowed the concept of teaching others to develop in humans, and the concept of asking questions about how the world around us works. If we and the world around of can be thought of as different things, questions about the world around can be asked. In time, those questions can be answered in valuable ways.
But like every powerful tool, this ability can cause damage as well as help. For instance, if a person asks the question, "Why am I here?" he or she will not find a clear, unambiguous answer. Since this is an important question, not having a "good" answer can cause the questioner distress. If the distress is enough that it impedes the person's ability to help their community, being able to ask the question, "Why am I here?" is not good for survival.
Religion helps by providing an answer. If the questioner accepts the religious answer to "Why am I here?" they can comfortably move on to other important questions, such as "When is the best time to plant wheat?" and bring more benefit to the community. Religion helps mankind survive by helping self-awareness thinking to work better. It provides a "safety" to keep a strong self-aware thinker from drowning in dangerous questions.
Transitioning from hunting and gathering to agriculture has been a huge undertaking for those members of human species who have attempted it. It has taken time, blood, sweat and tears. Much of humanity's recorded conflict was between people practicing agricultural/civilized ways and people practicing hunting and gathering/Stone Age ways. From our perspective the end result of this contest is a no-brainer: civilization is always going to win. But if the contest was looked at in, say, 500 BCE, the result would still be in question. The reason for the question, and the reason agriculture/civilization have taken thousands of years to displace Stone Age lifestyles is because of the huge changes required in how people think to fully take advantage of the benefits the civilized style of living offers to mankind. Keep in mind that some humans have said, "No, thank you." to the change, and still live quite successfully as hunter-gatherers.
The same size of huge, wrenching change is required to transition from agricutural lifestyle to industrial lifestyle. And, huge changes in the ways people think are also required. This is why the Industrial Revolution has been a chronically violent one. Many communities undergoing Industrialization have felt enough stress during the transition that they have lashed out at local minorities and made them scapgoats. And, as with the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, some communities have said, "No, thank you." and said this with violence.
Here are some specific thinking changes that come with transitioning from Agricultural to Industrial lifestyles.
One change that traveled through Europe in the 17-1800's was putting a clock in the town square. In the fairy tale "The Pied Piper of Hamlin" the reason the town fathers won't pay the piper is they would rather pay for the town clock.
The clock in those days was a symbol of high technology, which in those days was Industrialization. It was an important symbol because puncuality is something distinctively industrial. Factories, railroads, most things mechanical depend on good timing. Things agricultural depend on good weather and good luck more than good timing. Bascially, gambling is a hunter-gather and agricultural skill that is that is replaced by clockwatching in Industrial times.
Being time sensitive takes a new style of thinking. This means that many people were deeply troubled by the concept of being asked to be in a particular place at a particular time. Those who were troubled by punctuality became marginalized by industrialization. Many that were troubled were not happy about being marginalized, and this was one source of the violence of the transition.
Hunter-gathers traveled regularly with seasonal changes and with food stock depletion. But agriculturalists don't have to. The most extreme case of giving up travel is the peasant farmer who lived, worked and died without traveling more than a few miles from his or her birthplace. Industrialization brings travel back into the human experience... in spades. Industrial Age humans travel as no humans ever have before.
New places = new experiences, so Industrial Age humans have to adapt to new experiences much more than their Agricultural forebearers ever did.
In the Agricultural Age extensive knowledge was nice, but far from necessary. In the Industrial Age extensive knowledge in all people makes the whole community richer. This means that Industrial Age people spend huge amounts on education, and we are pushing the gene pool hard in favor of better learners.
It also meant that in the early days of the transition there was a lot of arguing over whether educating all the people of the community was a good idea, or not. This was one of the issues of the French Revolution.
One of the more recent changes to the human condition is never ending good times.
Historically every community of living things has good times and bad times. This cycling of good times and bad times is noted as far back as Old Testament. (The psalm Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, about To Everything there is a Season, is an example.) All successful organisms have some design features which help them to survive the bad times, and others which help them take full advantage of the good times. For most organisms the good times are short-lived, and much of life must be spent enduring through bad times.
One of the more recent Industrial Age changes is the transition to never ending good times. The best symbol of this is refrigeration, humans that live in mainstream advanced industrial societies experience "good times" all the time. For instance, we can enjoy strawberries all year round, and we don't have to sweat through hot, humid summers without air conditioning. This means that human adaptations to bad times are never exercised, and those adaptations to good times that are supposed to be temporary are over-exercised. Advanced societies' rising problems with obesity are an example of poor adaptation to never ending good times.
In advanced societies, we are now pushing the human gene pool to weed out those who cannot adapt well to never ending good times.
Every child becomes an adult.
This may not seem like a radical idea, but to Mother Nature it is unheard of. No organism in Earth's history has attempted this! No organism has even thought of this concept! But with the population pressures put on mankind by its own success, this concept is becoming a "given" in most areas of the world.
This is earthshaking for many reasons.
First, Mother Nature typically does a lot of experiments that fail in egg-hood or childhood. Cats have four or five kittens in a litter, birds have many eggs in a nest, and even Stone Age and Agriculture Age humans had "spares" -- many women had no children, but if a woman had children, she would likely have six to eight.
Second, in many species many children are sacrificed to the food chain. Apple trees have apples, chickens have eggs, Cod fish have thousands of eggs in a spawn.
Third, having lots of children is a direct way of taking advantage of good times. Good times come rarely in the life of a species, most of the time a species survives in "just getting by" mode. When good times do come, a species must move quickly to take advantage, and having lots of children is one way of doing that.
But the rules are different for civilized mankind. Civilized mankind spends ninety to one hundred percent of it's life in "good times" conditions. This is why this unique concept has taken hold. But, it's not without surprise consequences. It has contributed to that odd fusion of anti-abortion feeling and population control feeling that is now called the "Pro-choice/Pro-life" chronic problem.
And this chronic argument is having a big influence on what promises to be the major lifestyle advancing science of the 2100's: biology.
One of the steady changes between a Stone Age lifestyle and an Information Age lifestyle is a growth in ways to cooperate. In a Stone Age lifestyle most of the cooperating a person does is with family members, and the most common transactions are barter and personal obligation.
In the Agricultural Age, obligations to larger social units are added to the cooperation mix. Paying taxes is an example of an obligation to a larger social unit.
The human activity that tracks the proliferating cooperation in the Human Condition best is commerce. Look at the communication-intensive commerce that modern humans engage in -- retailing, ATM's, on-line shopping -- and realize that these innovations are all new ways of cooperating.
This proliferation of forms of cooperation is a key piece to the freedoms of modern lifestyle.
One of the surprise results of increasing cooperation is modern Feminism. It is because females can get so much done without relying on husband- or family- cooperation that modern Feminism has been able to proliferate.
Tightly linked to universal education is tolerating diverse thinking. "You're either with us or against us." is Agricultural Age thinking. It was a part of the thinking that helped build large communities from small hunter-gatherer communities. But it is not an idea well-suited to Industrial Age living. The Industrial Age is so rich in choices and experiences that there are many possible right answers to most problems, and many, many inefficient answers that look good on paper. If a community pursues a policy of saying, "There is only one right answer." and tries to industrialize, that community will experience a lot of discontent, and it won't work very well as an Industrial Age community. There are some communities in the world that are attempting this experiment today -- the experiment of pursuing industrializing and the one-right-answer solution at the same time. They tend to be labled Totalitarian or Theocracies by those outside the communities.
One of the hard lessons a community has to learn to make a successful transition to the Industrial Age is how to tolerate minority opinions. And, once again, because this a hard-to-make thinking transition, the gene pool must be pushed hard to make the transition successfully.
One of the dramatic changes that has come with industrialization is how humans communicate. In Stone Age times people communicated almost exclusively with spoken languge. There was some communication with things such as dress styles, performance and art, but not much.
Agriculture added writing to the communcation mix, and that was a huge change. It allowed a lot of minutia to be accurately remembered for generations. The Industrial Age added several new forms of communication: radio, TV, audio recordings, phones and Internet.
One fallout from this proliferation of communications methods has been to dilute the value of old peoples' knowledge. In Stone Age and Agricultural Age technology mixes, what older people know is enormously valuable to the community. And, part of that value comes from how long it takes to acquire the information. Thanks to Industrial Age technologies knowledge of all kinds can be moved to young people much faster than it could before.
This has the effect of discounting the value of old peoples' wisdom, and, as the wisdom of age becomes discounted in value, the vigor of youth rises in value.
Prosperity in a society brings the ability to choose. As a society gets more prosperous, it can choose more ways of spending it's wealth. This leads to some odd choices, and it leads to some odd "chronic battles". For instance, the arguments over whether or not to execute extreme criminals is a case of using prosperity to support a "chronic battle." A poor community can't afford to support a non-productive person for years and years -- much less one that has grievously harmed the community. A rich community has that luxury, and the luxury of spending a lot of it's attention resource on arguing about whether to do so, or not.
Those people who are marginalized by one of these dramatic transitions are at first numerous. They are also not dumb about the fact that an impending change is not going to serve them well. These people sometimes pick up the nickname "born losers" which is actually a fairly accurate description of what is happening to their role in society and the gene pool.
The transition into the Industrial Age has been a violent one for many human communities. It has been violent in part because it required new ways of thinking. In addition to stress and violence, this push for new thinking styles is also pushing the gene pool hard, and in new directions.
Even as this book is being written we are on the threshhold of yet another profound revolution. This one being brought on by steadily cheapening computing and communicating power -- the Information Age Revolution. It is way, way too early to see the surprises that Information Age civilization will bring to mankind. But there are a few changes that are already clear.
Earth's Living Library used to be composed of only the information contained in DNA. Then brains were invented and the library consisted of "non-volatile" DNA and "volatile" brain memories. Then language was invented and brain memory became semi-volatile because it could be passed on from one genration to the next. Writing and publishing technologies have been steadily making brain-learned knowledge less volatile and more extensive. Computers and communication promise another huge leap in how much and what kind of information is stored in Earth's Living Library. Which means there are more deep surprises in store for humanity and Earth.
Language made old people valueable to humanity as repositories of knowlege. Books, graphic media and now computer storage media are making that function obsolete in humans. Old people need to find a new meaning in life, or they will be marginalized in a way they haven't seen since language was first invented. If they are marginalized, they will drop into the "born loser" category, and that will not be good for the human community.
While most Information Age surprises are still in the future, the first one has already arrived. It is a surprise that driving and talking on a telephone are mutually exlusive activities. I suspect they interfere because both are competing for the same judgement areas of the brain. It is this competition for judgement activity that makes listening to a cell phone different from listening to music or a taped book. And, for this reason, trying to solve the problem by using headsets is a bandaid. The big problem is: people like driving and they like talking on the phone. So, this is going to be like the drug problem: one that is very difficult to solve.
Machines are now helping mankind in many ways. Primarily, they are taking the drudgery out of life. But, this is challenging mankind as well. If machines are going to do the drudgery things, what is mankind going to do? As machines are combined with computers, the tasks they can perform get ever more sophisticated. If mankind is to avoid becoming a disenfranchised species, it is going to have to keep finding meaningful work for it's members. This is becoming an on-going challenge, but a nice one. Nice because each new evolution of the challenge means mankind's lifestyle has improved dramatically.
There is a dark side to being a boom species. The dark side is the threat of becoming a "bust" species, and then going extinct.
The process of becoming a bust species goes something like this:
A) A species becomes a boom species because it modifies its environment favorably as it thrives. This creates a positive feedback loop that fuels the boom.
B) Once a species has boomed and become a major factor in its own environment, evolution will have the species adapt better and better to this "boomed environement" -- the one in which it is a major factor. If this adapting to the boomed environment takes away from the species ability to thrive in the non-boom environment, the threat of becoming a bust species looms.
C) After a long period of boom, so long that the species is now well adapted to the boom environment, some catastrophe disrupts the environment and changes it back to some form of "non-boom" environment. The boom species has changed sufficiently that it no longer competes well in the non-boom environment. As a result it does not "resurge" and some mix of competitors takes over instead. In extreme cases, the boom species goes extinct.
Here is an example:
In Phase A pine trees grow well in acid soil, and pine needles acidify the soil. As pine trees get established in an area the soil acidifies and they thrive.
In Phase B the young pine trees that grow up in the pine forest become better and better adapted to growing in acid soil, and become more poorly adapted to growing in non-acid soil.
In Phase C a fire, drought, asteroid strike or other catastrophe kills much of the pine forest and before the young pines can reestablish, the soil loses its acidity. In the less acid soil some of the pine tree competitors thrive, and they choke out the pine trees before the pine forest reestablishes. They do so because the young pines trying to grow up after the catastrophe really really wanted that acid soil that is no longer there. After the catastrophe the pines become just one of many trees growing in the forest. They may reestablish dominancy if they can undo their adaptation to acid soil, or they may have gone too far, and now they go extinct.
Another example of this boom-to-bust into extinction may be the Passenger Pigeon of North America. When early European explorers arrived, the Passenger Pigeon was a dominant bird species in eastern North America. About 1800 the population collapsed and the species went extinct. Some historians have blamed the collapse on human overhunting, another possiblity is this boom-bust cycle I have just proposed. This is also a possible explanation for the dinosaur collapse at the end of the Cretacious: the Dinosur Family (a whole collection of species) was somehow a Boom Family that modified the Earth's environment to make it more dinosuar friendly. When the meteor hit, this temporarily upset that dinosaur-friendly environment. The "killer" for dinosaurs was that the post-meteor conditions were so different that dinosaurs could not recover their dominant position, and thus not recreate their pre-meteor dinosaur friendly environment that they had become well-adapted to. They withered and went extinct instead.
Because humans are intensive environment modifiers, our species is very vulnerable to this effect. For example: today in civilized societies about one in five children is delivered C-section rather than vaginally. If the human environment collapses to the point that C-section deliveries are no longer easy come by, the death toll on mothers is going to be high until humans readapt to vaginal-only births. This is just one example of the thousands of changes that take place to the enviroment as mankind becomes civilized, and those thousands of changes are pushing the human gene pool away from being well-adapted to a "pristine" (non-civilized) environment.