A Boom species is one that is growing luxuriously in it's environment and becoming the "main" species of it's environment. Some famous examples of boom species are the buffalo of North America, the sardines off the Peruvian coast and coconut trees on tropical beaches. "Main" is a hard word to define precisely, but since the surfaces of six of the seven continents have become covered with Homo Sapiens, and mankind's excavations for farming, mining, road building and city building will dominate the "fossil record" of this period of Earth's history, it's pretty certain that mankind is a main species in its environment. Mankind is a boom species.
Having a species boom is a common phenomenon in Earth's history. It happens when a species gets into a positive feedback loop with its environment -- the more of the species that grows, the more the environment changes to promote the growth of the species. In the process the boom species crowds out other species competing for the same resources.
Mankind is the dominant species of life on six continents. What is interesting for our discussion is not that humanity is a boom species, but why is it? What changes happened in the Homo Sapiens species of 40,000 years ago that changed it from the ability to be "just another species" on three continents into having the ability to become the main species of six continents, as it is today?
That is the main topic of this book, and I propose that the change came about because of three changes that have synergized. The three are: advanced language skill, self-awareness and advanced tool using skill. Those three are the core, and then around them have developed numerous other important changes. Of these three I will spend most of my time talking about language and the changes it has made in humanity's lifestyle. Lets get the other two out of the way first.
Most species of plant and animal live with the environment they are given. Mankind changes his environment to better suit him. This ability makes a huge difference in both survivability and in what genes are valuable to pass down to children. It makes a difference in survivability because mankind can tolerate more extreme conditions.
The ability to modify the environment favorably makes a difference in what genes are passed down. In the average organism evolution pays a lot of attention to passing down genes that help the organism adapt better to its environment. In mankind's case, evolution pays most of its attention to passing down genes that help mankind use tools better. This is a very different criterion. It means that environment adapting is playing second fiddle to tool using, and whenever evolution faces a tradeoff between these two, tool using wins.
An example of this tradeoff is dealing with cold resistance. Lets go take a look at Mother Nature, Design Engineer as she ponders adding cold resistance to different organisms: geese, maple trees, deer and humans.
With geese she thinks, "This is easy! Since they fly already, I'll just have them fly south for the winter -- no cold adaptation at all, to speak of. What I'll have to add to their gene package is good navigating ability, so they know where they are flying when they go long distances."
With maple trees she thinks, "Hmm... I can't have them walk out of the cold, can I! Hmm... not only is winter cold, the light is rotten, too -- the day is short and the sun low in the sky. OK, what I'll do is have the tree shut down for the winter. I'll have it hibernate. I'll add a gene set that will have the tree drop it's leaves in the fall, and grow new ones in the spring. A side benefit of this is that I will take food away from those pesky leaf-eating caterpillars for many months of the year. That will fix their wagon!" (Two surprise results from this change are: that the caterpillars learned to live quite nicely on just a few months of leaves, and that humans learned to tap the first run of the spring sap and make maple sugar out of it.)
With Whitetail deer she thinks, "Hmm... Hibernation is a tough package to assemble, and they are big enough... why don't I just redesign the circulation system so they can resist the cold, and the digestive system so they will enjoy eating bark instead of grass during the winter months? Then they can stay active all winter."
With humans she thinks, "Hmm... If I strengthen their tool using skills, they can build houses and clothing. The houses and clothing will keep them warm, so they don't need a cold tolerating gene set. And, if they can build houses, they can build all sorts of other things that help modify their environment. And if they build clothing they can use that for all kinds of social signalling as well. Yeah... tool use is the way to go! I'll do that instead of cold resistance."
The moral of this is that evolution has found many, many strategies for allowing organisms to live in colder climates, and that for humans the strategy for dealing with cold was to use tools to build shelters. Tool use has allowed humans to adapt to many climates on Earth, and promises to allow humans to adapt to many climates in the Solar System as well. From the point of view of evolutionary success, developing tool use skills has been a hugely successful strategy for humans.
The human organism has invested heavily in thinking ability -- just one look at how big the human brain is makes that clear. Thinking comes in many varieties, and I will spend a whole chapter talking more about thinking. The "breakthrough" thinking skill that set humans on the path towards civilization is the ability to understand that "you" and "me" are two different entities. This is an important concept for many reasons, but the first of those many is that humans realize that other humans need to be taught -- that one human does not automatically know what another human does.
Teaching is one of the first uses of advanced language skill. Another important use is story telling, which hinges on a different concept, the concept that one human may not act the same as another human when presented with the same circumstances. Story telling is about motivation, and this is another spin off of self-awareness.
Yet another spin-off of self-awareness is the ability to ask interesting questions about the world around a person -- questions such as, "Why is the world like it is?" Questions such as these are the foundations for the science skills.
Tool use and self awareness are vital parts of the foundation, but language use is the most spectacular of the humanity foundation skills. It is the one that shows itself off all during most of a human's waking hours.
Language is a tool for moving ideas. This is it's primary function: to move ideas from one organism to another. Many organisms have language skills, but human language skills are a million-fold more developed than any other Earthly organism. No other organism has invested anything like the effort that humans have in language skills. From evolution's point of view the only way this kind of "over investing" makes sense is if the payoff is good. In the case of humanity, the payoff has been huge.
High language skill has allowed humanity to develop: first, the Stone Age human gene suite, and then from that, the Civilized Human gene suite, and this gene suite has allowed humanity to become a boom species on six continents. Yes, the payoff from investing in language skill has been huge.
In the high-technology industries a "killer app" (killer application) is that first use of a technology which makes it thrive and become valuable to the community. In the late 1970's Apple Computer was a small struggling company that could easily have disappeared like its many contemporaries did. Part of what made it emerge from the pack and become a dominant company was the product of another small, startup company, Visicalc. Visicalc made Visicalc, an electronic spreadsheet program for the Apple computer. People looked at the Apple running Visicalc and thought, "I can use that!", and Apple sales took off, and the whole PC industry was established. Visicalc, the electronic spreadsheet program, was the killer app that let Apple thrive. (Today Visicalc is no longer with us, but it's place in the PC "application universe" has been taken by Microsoft Excel.)
Language is the killer app for humanity. It allowed humans to do many of those things we now consider standard parts of The Human Condition. It's surprise application was it became a gene pool extension. More on this in the Evolutionary Information Boom chapter.
(See Chapter Three: the Evolutionary Information Boom)
"When are you going to get married?"
This is the most famous question of parents to their post adolescent children around the world. This is also an example of jawboning taking over some of the load from instinct. In animals that can't speak, instinct, the preprogramming of the brain, must take the full load for deciding when an animal should mate. In mankind, parents using language can share control with instinct.
This means that as mankind has adapted to having language ability, one of the adaptations has been to weaken the mating instinct. It no longer has to be so strong because parents can make up for the instinct with language "reminders" (commonly called "nagging" by those who don't want to be reminded.)
This is an example of the gene pool being stressed by the one of the surprise uses of language. The gene pool for humans is being pushed twoards weaker mating instinct.
Mankind is famous for its bad teeth. Why should mankind have particularly bad teeth. Sadly, the answer is one of mankind's oldest medical practices: dentistry.
If an animal without dentistry gets bad teeth, it is life-threatening, which means those animals who get bad teeth won't contribute as much to the gene pool as those that don't. When humans began intervening in the bad tooth cycle with dentistry, they made bad teeth a less life-threatening problem. Mother Nature responded by saying, "OK, lets have more bad teethed people. Doing so frees up resouce I can devote to other pressing problems."
The fact that bad teeth are widespread among humans is an indicator that dentistry has been practiced widely and for a long time.
Mankind is a boom species. In the 40,000 years since the current Interglacial warm period began, Homo Sapiens has grown and prospered until it is now a major species on six of seven continents. This prospering is based on three foundational changes to the design of humans: improved tool use, thinking that involves self-awareness, and fanstasic language skill. These three changes have allowed mankind to:
These three have synergized to create what we now experience as The Human Condition, and it has been a very successful condition, indeed.