Human Development & Evolution

Population Growth Must Stop

Posted by Gail the Actuary on June 30, 2010 - 3:00pm in The Oil Drum: Campfire 
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: ecological overshoot, overshoot, population growth [list all tags]

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This is a guest post by Gary Peters, a retired geography professor with a long time interest in population issues. I have added some discussion questions at the end. - Gail

Earth’s population is approaching seven billion at the same time that resource limits and environmental degradation are becoming more apparent every day. Rich nations have long assured poor nations that they, too, would one day be rich and that their rates of population growth would decline, but it is no longer clear that this will occur for most of today’s poor nations. Resource scarcities, especially oil, are likely to limit future economic growth; the demographic transition that has accompanied economic growth in the past may not be possible for many nations today. Nearly 220,000 people are added to the planet every day, further compounding most resource and environmental problems. The United States adds another person every eleven seconds. We can no longer wait for increasing wealth to bring down fertility in remaining high fertility nations; we need policies and incentives to stop growth now.

Much has been written about population growth since the first edition of Malthus's famous essay was published in 1798. However, an underlying truth is usually left unsaid: Population growth on Earth must cease. It makes more sense for humans to bring growth to a halt by adjusting birth rates downward in humane ways rather than waiting for death rates to move upward as the four horsemen reappear. Those who think it inhumane to control human fertility have apparently never experienced conditions in Third World shanty towns, where people struggle just to stay alive for another day.

In 1970 Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on developing new plant strains that formed the basis for the Green Revolution that began in the 1960s. However, in his Nobel acceptance speech Borlaug perceptively commented that "There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort. Fighting alone, they may win temporary skirmishes, but united they can win a decisive and lasting victory to provide food and other amenities of a progressive civilization for the benefit of all mankind." That was four decades ago. During that time the world's population increased by more than three billion and the struggle to feed, clothe, house, and educate ever-growing numbers of people continues. "Temporary skirmishes" seem persistent, if not permanent.

Writers sometimes confuse population issues. For example, in his post, The Population Bomb: Has It Been Defused?,", Fred Pearce wrote that "The population bomb is being defused at a quite remarkable rate." He conflates rates of growth with actual numbers. It is true that the rate of population growth worldwide has declined since 1970. However, the base population has grown by more than three billion; thus we currently add 80 million or more people to the planet each year. That is hardly "defusing" population growth!

Writers may sometimes have short memories when they write about population growth. Fred Pearce's post at"Consumption Dwarfs Population as Main Environmental Threat," is one example. George Monbiot's post on "The Population Myth," is another. Both authors seem to have discovered that our rate of consumption is an issue, so both play down population numbers and focus on our consumption habits. Neither mentions the work of Paul Ehrlich and his I = PAT equation, where I represents our impact on the Earth, P equals population, A equals affluence (hence consumption), and T stands for technology.

Both population and consumption are parts of the problem--neither can be ignored and both are exacerbating the human impact on Earth. More distressing, however, is that many among us don't even see that there are problems created by both growing populations and increasing affluence bearing down on a finite planet. To pretend that another 80 million people added to the planet each year is not a problem because they are all being added to the world’s poor nations makes no sense at all. Many of them will end up in rich nations by migrating, legally or illegally, and all will further compound environmental problems, from strains on oil and other fossil fuel resources to deforestation and higher emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. As Kenneth Boulding noted decades ago, "Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."

Population, consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow until we either face up to the fact that there are limits on our finite Earth or we are confronted by a catastrophe large enough to turn us from our current course. If Chinese, Indians, and others in the poorer world had consumption levels that rose to current western levels it would be like Earth's population suddenly increasing to 72 billion, according to Jared Diamond, who then wrote that, "Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven't met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies--for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy--they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people."

This promise is often made by people who believe that that alone will stop population growth via the demographic transition, conveniently forgetting about such exceptions as China. As Tom Athanasiou argued, in Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor, "In a world torn between affluence and poverty, the crackpot realists tell the poor, who must live from day to day, that all will be well in the long run. Amidst deepening ecological crisis, they rush to embrace small, cosmetic adaptations."

The widespread acceptance and political influence of modern neoclassical economics is a central part of our global problem. In one widely used economics textbook, Principles of Economics, Greg Mankiw wrote that “A large population means more workers to produce goods and services. At the same time, it means more people to consume those goods and services.” Speaking for many neoclassical economists, Tim Harford concluded, in The Logic of Life, that "The more of us there are in the world, living our logical lives, the better our chances of seeing out the next million years." The absurdity of Harford's statement must be recognized and challenged.

Economists do not deserve all the blame. As Thomas Berry noted, in The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, "Western civilization, dominated by a cultural arrogance, could not accept the fact that the human, as every species, is bound by limits in relation to the other members of the Earth community." On his Archdruid blog, John Greer added his observation that "Our culture's mythology of progress envisions the goal of civilization as a utopian state in which poverty, illness, death, and every other aspect of the human predicament has been converted into problems and solved by technology." We don't want to hear about limits.

Nowhere is acceptance of the twin towers of economic growth and increased consumption more apparent than in the United States, where "growing the economy" is still paramount, despite the leftovers of a financial meltdown created by banking and shadow banking systems run amok and a Gulf fouled by gushing oil. As Andrew Bacevich noted, inThe Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, "For the majority of contemporary Americans, the essence of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness centers on a relentless personal quest to acquire, to consume, to indulge, and to shed whatever constraints might interfere with those endeavors." Yet evidence that modern economics has let most people down is abundant.

More than two decades ago Edward Abbey wrote, in One Life at a Time, Please, that "[W]e can see that the religion of endless growth--like any religion based on blind faith rather than reason--is a kind of mania, a form of lunacy, indeed a disease," adding that "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." He expressed his concern about modern economics as follows: "Economics, no matter how econometric it pretends to be, resembles meteorology more than mathematics. A cloudy science of swirling vapors, signifying nothing." Similarly, Nassim Taleb wrote, in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, that "Economics is the most insular of fields; it is the one that quotes least from outside itself!" Gus Speth argued, in The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, that "In the end, what has to be modified is the open-ended commitment to aggregate economic growth--growth that is consuming environmental and social capital, both in short supply." Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, in This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, that "The economists' odd fixation on growth as a measure of economic well-being puts them in a parallel universe of their own. . .the mantra of growth has deceived us for far too long." Whether in local areas, the United States, or the world, no problem that I can think of will be more easily solved with additional millions of people.

Future oil production will come at an increasing cost, if it comes at all. As Bill McKibbin noted, in Deep Economy: The Wealth of Comunities and the Durable Future, "Cheap and abundant fossil fuel [mainly oil] has shaped the farming system we've come to think of as normal; it's the main reason you can go to the store and get anything you want at any time and for not much money." More expensive oil will eat into world food production, especially if we continue to use foodstuffs to help fill gas tanks.

Scientists need to encourage a deeper and more realistic interest in population growth on a finite planet and its effect on many of the major issues of our time. We ignore the implications of further population growth at our peril. In 1971 Wilbur Zelinsky, in an article entitled "Beyond the Exponentials; The Role of Geography in the Great Transition," fretted that "The problem that shakes our confidence in the perpetuation and enrichment of civilized human existence or even our biological survival is that of growth: the rate, volume, and kinds of growth, and whether they can be controlled in intelligent, purposeful fashion."

Continued population growth is unsustainable, as is continued growth in the production of oil and other fossil fuels. As Lester Brown argued, in PLAN B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, "If we cannot stabilize population and if we cannot stabilize climate, there is not an ecosystem on earth we can save." As Alan Weisman wrote, in The World Without Us, “The intelligent solution [to the problem of population growth] would require the courage and the wisdom to put our knowledge to the test. It would henceforth limit every human female on Earth capable of bearing children to one.” Started now, such a policy would reduce Earth’s population down to around 1.6 billion by 2100, about the same as the world population in 1900. Had we kept Earth’s population at that level we would not be having this conversation.

Beyond Self-Interest Fundamentalism:
A New Human-Centred Economy 

by Joe Brewer

Self-interest fundamentalism was the economic religion of the twentieth century. Its birthplace, in the guise of “rational choice theory”, was the very military think tank that gave us the  global arms race. But a new view of human reason is emerging. It finds we are profoundly social and wired for empathy. Furthermore, human reason is embodied. We interpret the world through core values. Here then, is the authentic working basis for a new, human-centred economy.


Chris Jordan's "Barbies" depicts 32,000 Barbie dolls, the number of elective "boob job" surgeries performed monthly in the US - a triumph of self-interest fundamentalism.


Why should appeals to self-interest lead to a just society anyway?
Self-interest evangelicals have been spreading the "good news" of self-interest fundamentalism for decades in public policy programs, political science departments, and financial institutions.  Converts can even be found in environmental organizations that tell us we’ll save on our energy bills if only we change those light bulbs.  And blind zealots run polling companies that deploy the doctrine of self-oriented rationalism when they tell us that the preferences of individuals exist in a meaningful way to be measured – with nary an inkling that the way polls are conducted might influence how people respond.

Is all this self-interest fundamentalism finally beginning to die?  Cracks are spreading through its foundations. The questions we need to grapple with are whether it should die away and if so, with what should we replace it? 

Rationalist fundamentalism still has a stranglehold on society.  It’s meteoric rise to dominance goes back to the nuclear arms race that poured truckloads of cash from public coffers into defense contractor piggy banks, through the “game” of mutually assured destruction (MAD) during the Cold War.  We saw it clearly during the Vietnam War when “body counts’ laid the foundation for an entire generation of video game players to score points by killing more enemies – never mind that we were slaughtering innumerable civilians.

And, of course, it was only a matter of time before schools fell under the knife of test-based book-keeping to “hold students accountable” to rationalist ideals of performance measurement – at the expense of actual learning.  A web of trans-national organizations have come into existence – the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank being the best known – that push the ideology of self-interest into the centre stage of world affairs.

Theory of Self-Interest: A Creation Story
How could an impoverished model of the human-as-self-focused-calculating-machine have ever come into being?  A common myth is that self-interest theories rose out of behavioural studies conducted by psychologists.  It's a nice bedtime story perhaps, but it isn’t true.  Would you believe me if I told you the behavioural model underlying the global economy came, not from the human sciences, but from mathematics?

Back in the 1940’s and 50’s, a research center was created to explore fundamental issues of concern to the US Air Force.  This Research ANdDevelopment institute was aptly named the RAND Corporation.  Within the high security walls of this military think tank, mathematicians developed abstract principles for nuclear strategy during the Cold War.  In the midst of this particular, historically contingent environment – and motivated by concerns of defense contractors in the air combat arena – the notion of self-interested rational action was born. It's proof positive that the most bizarre stories are found in the non-fiction section of your local library.

So the birth place of modern market fundamentalism, in the guise of “rational choice theory”, was the military think tank that gave us the disastrous arms race.  Untested and theoretical, it quickly spread throughout the highest levels of government during the tenure of Robert McNamara at the Department of Defense, then whipped through the economics departments of many prominent universities, spurred the creation of public policy analysis as a “scientific” field, and undergirded today’s global institutions of economic governance. But things are starting to change.



Close-up detail of Chris Jordan's Barbies

Looking Forward: 21st Century Institutions
The first experimental studies of rational choice theory by behavioral scientists, principally Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, showed that a foundational premise of the theory was wrong.  (As a technical point, they showed that preferences can be reversed by merely framing the question differently.)  The “prospect theory” that arose through these experiments became the bedrock of a new field – behavioural economics – that has grown in prominence since its birth in the 1970’s.

Throughout the subsequent decades, researchers found more damning evidence against self-interest.  Paul Slovic and collaborators at Decision Research have systematically explored how risk perception influences our decisions in many ways that fly in the face of rational choice theory.  Human beings depend on emotional cues to make decisions.  And many of these cues are associative, rather than based on inferences. They do not fit the paradigm of rationality presumed by rational choice theory.  In fact, human beings cannot manage risk – especially in the highly complex social situations we often find ourselves in – when regions of our brains that process emotional information are damaged.  Antonio Damasio sealed this argument in his 1994 book, "Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain".

A new view of human reason is on the rise in academia.  Unlike its predecessor, the new paradigm is profoundly based in the workings of our bodies.  This “embodiment” view incorporates insights from computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and robotics.  Its adherents include people like Gilles Fauconnier, Raymond Gibbs,  Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Eleanor Rosch, Mark Turner, and Drew Westen.

Arising with this new view is a profound shift in how we understand human thought and behaviour.  Just as the institutions of yesteryear grew out of the old paradigm, research in the cognitive sciences beckons us to think differently about the institutions of tomorrow. 




I’ve seen how methods like cost-benefit analysis fail utterly when applied to environmental challenges.  Future costs are weighed against current gains in a false choice between short-term profit seeking and long-term sustainability. I’ve also watched as public policies built on outdated performance measures undermine that which they are meant to improve.  A key example is the educational paradigm that gave America No Child Left Behind – high-stakes testing – which flies in the face of what our teachers know about real learning.  Any effort to treat moral pursuits – like making the world safe for future generations or educating a child – will demand broader measures of success than numbers alone can describe. There are some things we’ll need our institutions to do in the 21st Century. In a world based on this new perspective, things will work very differently:

* Citizens will recognize fear-inducing news reports intended to inflate manufactured risks and hide awareness of genuine threats, thereby reducing the effectiveness of manipulative tactics. 

* Journalists will understand the consequences of how facts are presented and beliefs are promoted in the structure of news reporting, resulting in coverage that enhances, rather than erodes, the democratic process. 

* Policy-makers will abandon contrived and faulty presumptions about “economic rational actors” and craft solutions to societal challenges that improve of real peoples' lives. Deeper insights into the human condition will lead to policies that stand the test of time. 

* Advocates will articulate clear and compelling calls to action that resonate deeply with the values of the citizenry, promoting greater civic engagement and community empowerment. 

What’s more, we’ll need to build a new foundation for our economic institutions.  A recent example shows that the old approach is inadequate.  Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, two Nobel prize winning economists, led a commission to improve upon the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) when measuring economic well-being.  They spent most of the 79 pages of their personal reflections describing a long history of criticisms that show GDP to be grossly inadequate.  Yet, very little of substance was offered to take its place. What does it mean that leading economists don’t know how to measure economic progress?  In the words of Sen, when talking about the limits of rational choice theory:

It seems easy to accept that rationality involves many features that cannot be summarized in terms of some straightforward formula, such as binary consistency.  But this recognition does not immediately lead to alternative characterizations that might be regarded as satisfactory, even though the inadequacies of the traditional assumptions of rational behavior standardly used in economic theory have become hard to deny.

This tells us that many economists recognize the limitations of rational choice, but they don’t have ready-made alternatives.  Yet the old tools are well-known and ready for use so they pick them up again and again.  They are looking for something better, but haven’t found it yet.

I’d like to offer that the alternatives are starting to emerge in the unexpected corner of academia where researchers study the human mind.  New tools cannot be found so long as the old paradigm of human nature remains.  My colleagues and I are in the process of developing these new tools.  What does our paradigm look like?  Here are the key features:

* Human beings are profoundly social. We are wired for empathy and we learn how to act in the world through interactions with other human beings and the natural world; 

* Human reason is embodied. We think and act through the interplay of brain, body, and environment.  Emotions are vital to effective decision-making.  And our understandings are shaped by the contexts we operate in; 

* Human thought is evaluative. We interpret the world through core values, our sense of identity, and conceptual models for how we believe the world works. There’s no such thing as “an objective world” when dealing with social and political issues because we are co-creators of the realities we experience. 

Each of these features tells us something about how a human-based economyshould work.  It should recognize the value of community in our dealings with one another.  It should be designed around our biological needs for survival in a world where things like potable water and fossil fuels are becoming limited and the planetary climate system has been disrupted in a manner that threatens us all.  And it should acknowledge that interpretations of human well-being are perpetually contested by competing perspectives.

Yes, it is time to let self-interest fundamentalism go the way of monarchy and feudalism.  It may not go silently into the night, but the end is nigh.  Pretty soon we will have laid the foundation for a sustainable future – both ecologically and financially.  In order to do so, we’ll have to acknowledge how human beings actually are, instead of how theorists engaged in military strategy presumed us to be 60 years ago. It is a huge undertaking.  It won’t be completed overnight.  Nor will it be the sole effort of a few visionary thinkers.  But it must start somewhere.  My suggestion is that you’ll see it starting to take shape at the boundary between cognitive science and the world of expert practitioners at all levels of governance. 

Joe Brewer is founder-director of Cognitive Policy Works, from which the above article was slightly modified. He works at the intersection of advocacy, policy, and technology. His view of human values & behaviour is based on cognitive semantics and complex systems. His goal is helping build livable communities for the 21st Century, by training people through insight into the political, cultural, and psychological aspects of social change. 

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Thomas BerryThe Ecozoic Era

Thomas Berry, cultural historian and mystic, a writer whose perceptiveness and eloquence concerning the human relationship with the Earth and the Universe is unique. His seminal works include The Dream of the Earth, The Great Work & The Sacred Universe.

As we think about the future form of an integral Earth Community we might begin with the observation that in the sequence of biological periods of Earth development we are presently in the terminal phase of the Cenozoic and the emerging phase of the Ecozoic era. The Cenozoic is the period of biological development that has taken place during these past 65 million years. The Ecozoic is the period when human conduct will be guided by the ideal of an integral earth community, a period when humans will be present upon the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner.

The Cenozoic period is being terminated by a massive extinction of living forms that is taking place on a scale equalled only by the extinctions that took place at the end of the Paleozoic around 220 million years ago and at the end of the Mesozoic some 65 million years ago. The only viable choice before us is to enter into an Ecozoic period, the period of an integral community that will include all the human and non-human components that constitute the planet Earth.

The first principle of the Ecozoic era is recognizing that the Universe is primarily a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. This is especially true of the planet Earth. Every being has its own place and its own proper role in the functioning of the planet, its own presentation of itself that might be identified as its voice.

Our difficulty is that we have become autistic. We no longer listen to what the earth, its landscape, its atmospheric phenomena and all its living forms, its mountains and valleys, the rain, the wind, and all the flora and fauna of the planet are telling us. Since the Seventeenth Century we have not heard, we have not understood the inner world about us. We have experienced the external phenomena. We have had no entry into the world of interior meaning. We have not heard the voices.

Until we do listen, until we do hear these voices and understand what they are telling us, our lives will continue to be shrivelled, our judgment as absurd, as destructive as we can presently observe in what we have done to the soil, the water, the air, and the living forms of this loveliest of planets. We will appreciate or revere the planet if we are to form a viable Earth Community.

To achieve this intimacy with the Earth we need new religious sensitivities. The redemption- oriented religions in their traditional forms have fulfilled a significant part of their historical mission. Cosmologically oriented religion is the way into the future. We need to recognize the story of the universe as we know it through our empirical sciences as our sacred story. From its beginning the universe has had a psychic-spiritual as well as a physical-material dimension.

Earth in a special manner has given expression to this psychic-spiritual dimension of the universe. The human belongs among these forms. It establishes with them a single community. There is no effective spiritual or religious mode of being for the human in isolation from this community. The visible world about us is our primary scripture, the primary manifestation of the divine, and this for human communities throughout the entire planet.

A second principle of the Ecozoic era that might be proposed is the ethical principle that beyond suicide, homicide, and genocide, there are even more violent crimes – biocide and geocide: biocide, the wanton killing of the life systems of the planet; geocide, the killing of the planet itself in its major forms of expression. Ultimately humans cannot extinguish life on the planet. What humans can do is to severely damage the planet beyond recovery to its former grandeur within any comprehensible period of human historical time. This in some manner deserves the designation of geocide.

We might indicate the third principle of the Ecozoic era by noting that the human is derivative, the Earth is primary. The primary concern of every profession, institute, and activity of the human betrays itself unless it makes this larger earth community its primary referent.

So with Economics, the first concern, the first principle of understanding, must be the economic integrity of the planet. Concern for the Gross Earth Product must be the primary concern, not the Gross Human Product. Only within the ever-renewing cycle of Earth productivity can human productivity be sustained.

So with the healing professions, the primary concern must be to maintain the integral well-being of the planet. Not even with all our medical sciences and technologies can we establish well human beings on a sick planet.

A fourth principle might propose that in the future the Earth will function differently than it has functioned in the past. Throughout the Cenozoic the Earth evolved independently of the human. In the emerging Ecozoic period almost nothing will happen that will not in some manner be related to the human. Not, however, that we will control the inner workings of the planet. We cannot make a blade of grass. But there is liable not to be a blade of grass if it is not accepted, protected, and fostered by the human. We have completely new and comprehensive responsibilities now that we never had before. Ultimately we should be diminishing the domestication of the planet and assisting the wilderness to reactivate itself. A contradiction, perhaps. Yet what is needed is that we accept and foster the wild fertile forces of the planet that are consistently being weakened, unless humans withdraw their terrifying presence and grant to the other members of the Earth Community their rights to habitat and their share of the Earth's benefits.

A fifth principle might propose that any valid Progress must be progress of the entire life community, not progress of the human at the expense of the non-human members of the community. To designate human plundering of the plant as Progress is an absurdity beyond description.

A sixth principle guiding the future might propose the need for celebration. The universe throughout its vast extent in space and its sequence of transformations in time might be considered a single multiform celebratory event. The very purpose of the planet Earth seems to be to exhibit a culminating celebratory mode of expression, something to justify the emergent galaxies, the supernova explosions wherein the elements were formed, the shaping of the solar system, the emergence of this privileged planet. When we ask what is the meaning of the flight of the birds, their song; what is the meaning of the quiet gliding of fish through the sea; what is the meaning of the evening song of the cicada: we can indeed assign some pragmatic answer, but that would not go to the deeper meaning of the phenomena. This we find under the rubric of celebration.

So with the human, our entry into the Ecozoic period can only come through celebration of the grandeur and loveliness and joy of existence on the planet Earth. Once we begin to celebrate, all things become possible - even an Ecozoic era.

Dr Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009), a Christian monk of the Passionist Order, was a leader in the tradition of Teilhard de Chardin, cultural historian and leading Earth scholar. The key elements of his work have been described as follows: The universe is the only self-referential reality in the phenomenal world. It is the only text without context. Everything else has to be seen in the context of the universe...The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.

The Universe Story

Brian Swimme & Thomas Berry


This NASA image shows a small portion of the Cygnus Loop Supernova. The formation shown marks the outer edge of an expanding blast wave from a colossal stellar explosion that occurred some 15,000 years ago. As the blast wave slams into clouds of interstellar gas, it causes it to glow.

The story of the universe has been told in many ways by the peoples of Earth, from the earliest periods of Paleolithic development and the Neolithic village communities to the classical civilizations that have emerged in the past 5000 years. In all these various circumstances the story of the universe has given meaning to life and to existence itself. The story has been celebrated in elaborate rituals. It has been our fundamental referent as regards modes of personal and community conduct. It has established the basis of social authority.

In the modern period, we are without a comprehensive story of the universe. The historians, even when articulating world history, deal not with the whole world but just with the human, as if humans were something separate from or an addendum to the story of the Earth and the universe. The scientists have arrived at detailed accounts of the cosmos, but have focussed exclusively on the physical dimensions and have ignored the human dimension of the universe. In this context we have fractured our educational system into its scientific and humanistic aspects, as though these were somehow independent of each other.

With all our learning and all our scientific insight, we have not yet attained such a meaningful approach to the universe, and thus we have at the present time a distorted mode of human presence on the Earth. We are somehow failing in the fundamental role that we should be fulfilling -- the role of enabling the Earth and the universe entire to reflect on and to celebrate themselves, and the deep mysteries they bear within them, in a special mode of conscious self-awareness.

A new type of history is needed as well as a new type of science. We are long past the time when history was considered to be the recorded account of the past few thousand years, and when everything prior to the Sumerian development was considered to be prehistory. Gone too is the period when the various civilizations could be explained through the sequence of their political regimes, and the listing of battles fought and treaties made. The period is also gone when we could deal with the human story apart from the life story, or the Earth story, or the universe story.

Just as surely, we are beyond the time when the scientific story of the universe could so identify the world of reality with the material and mechanistic aspects of the universe as to eliminate our capacities for that intimate communion with the natural world that has inspired the human venture over the centuries, an intimate communion that has evoked from our poets and musicians and artists and spiritual personalities all those magnificent works of celebration that we associate with the deepest modes of fulfilment of the human personality.
This new situation seems to call for a new type of narrative--one that has only recently begun to find expression. This new story has as its primary basis the account of the emergent universe such as this has been communicated to us through our observational sciences and through such long periods of time. We have only begun to read the immense amount of data that we now have before us. The greater problem is not in the lack of data but in our capacity to understand the significance of the data that we already possess. This data has not yet been sufficiently assimilated to bring about a new period in our comprehension of ourselves and of the universe itself.

The most significant change in the twentieth century, it seems, is our passage from a sense of cosmos to a sense of cosmogenesis. From the beginning of human consciousness, the ever-renewing seasonal sequence, with its death and rebirth cycles, has impinged most powerfully upon human thought. This orientation in consciousness has characterized every previous human culture up to our own. During the modern period, and especially in the twentieth century, we have moved from that dominant spatial mode of consciousness, where time is experienced in ever-renewing seasonal cycles, to a dominant time-developmental mode of consciousness, where time is experienced as an evolutionary sequence of irreversible transformations.



Within this time-developmental consciousness we begin to understand the story of the universe in its comprehensive dimensions and in the full richness of its meaning. This is especially true as regards the planet Earth, a mysterious planet surely, as we observe how much more brilliant it is, when compared with the other planets of our solar system, in the diversity of its manifestations and in the complexity of its development. Earth seems to be a reality that is developing with the simple aim of celebrating the joy of existence. This can be seen in the colouration of the various plants and animals, in the circling flights of the swallows as well as the blossoming of the springtime flowers; each of these events required immense creativity over billions of years in order to come forth as Earth. Only now do we begin to understand that this story of the Earth is also the story of the human, as well as the story of every being of the Earth.

We are now experiencing that exciting moment when our new meaning, our new story is taking shape. This story is the only way of providing, in our times, what the mythic stories of the universe provided for tribal peoples and for the earlier classical civilizations in their times. The final benefit of this story might be to enable the human community to become present to the larger Earth community in a mutually enhancing manner. We can hope that it will soon be finding expression not simply in a narrative such as this but in poetry, music, and ritual throughout the entire range of modern culture, on a universal scale, Such expressions will sensitize people to the story that every river and every star and every animal is telling. The goal is not to read a book; the goal is to read the story taking place all around us.

The urgency of our time is that the story become functionally effective. The present disintegration of the life systems of the Earth is so extensive that we might very well be bringing an end of the Cenozoic period that has provided the identity for the life processes of Earth during the past sixty-seven million years. During this period life expanded with amazing florescence prior to the coming of the human. 

But by now the human has taken over such extensive control of the life systems of the Earth that the future will be dependent on human decision to an extent never dreamed of in previous times. We are deciding what species will live or perish, we are determining the chemical structure of the soil and the air and the water, we are mapping out the areas of wilderness that will be allowed to function in their own natural modalities.

All of this is filled with risk and presumption, but if there is any way of guiding our course in such difficult decisions, it will be discovered only through an understanding of the most intimate aspects of the natural world. This is something more than our sciences are generally concerned with. A new mystique is needed, but a mystique associated with the highest level of comprehensive knowledge and critical competence.



                             *                               *                            *


Brian Swimme PhD is a mathematical cosmologist & the director of theCenter for the Story of the Universe at the California Institute for Integral Studies. The author of 4 books on cosmology, evolution and religion, he has stated: If you take Buddhism and Christianity and so forth there's a kind of battle — a subtle sort of struggle taking place because they're not standing in a common ground but ... take the Earth or ecology, then suddenly they can begin to explore what they have to offer. So I do think absolutely that there will be a flourishing of religions, not a withering away. And they will flourish to the degree that they will move into the context of planet and universe. I even think that as a matter of fact that some of the central insights of the religions are more powerfully presented by what we know about the universe now then when they were first formulated. Thomas Berry PhD (d. 2009) was a most eloquent writer on culture, cosmology and ecology (The Great Work, The Sacred Universe ) and the co-author of The Universe Story. The above article is extracted from its  Introduction.
Photos courtesy of NASA & Mongabay.com

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The depth and richness of new content this year will be well appreciated!  following is just some of the exclusive content prepared by Positive Spin for this year's event.

• Jane Goodall: United Nations Messenger of Peace, and Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute.  We will showcase a celebration of the life and work of Dr. Jane Goodall on her 75th birthday, looking back at fifty years of dedication to animal welfare and primatology
• Mary Robinson: former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and former president of Ireland
•  Sergio Duarte: UN Undersecretary-General for Disarmament
• "We Unite":  a report on how Indian women are using micro-loans to better their lives
• "Dance for Life": story on the United Nations Population Fund's "Dance for Life" program
• Olga Speranskaya: recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize 2008
• "Brother to the Dreamer: Behold the Dream": a documentary detailing the life and controversial death of the Rev. Dr. Alfred Daniel Williams King -- younger brother and an important strategist to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Wanze Eduards and Hugo Jabini: environmental activists and Goldman Environmental Prize recipients for organizing efforts led to a landmark ruling giving indigenous and tribal peoples control of their natural resources.  (see: Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Rights)
• report on Brazil's innovative techniques and strategies to save the rain-forest.

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Wes Nisker 
The Evolution Sutra

"From so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been evolved."  - Charles Darwin

The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being? - Joseph Campbell 
      
There is no longer any doubt that the scientific story of evolution is true, at least among those who have a relatively large forebrain. So now we can begin to worship the story, embracing evolution as our new creation myth. Besides, we are due for an upgrade of our metaphysics. Haven’t we lived long enough believing that our essential self is somehow disconnected from this body, or atoms, or materiality, whatever that happens to be. We’ve also gone long enough believing that our purpose and salvation lie somewhere outside of the life we are now living. 
      
Those beliefs are now dysfunctional. They take the divine away from the earth and place it in some other realm, robbing life of its due reverence. Our major religions have come to regard Earth as little more than a training planet, a place where we come to learn a few lessons, or burn off some karma, or get saved by some messiah or another. The general hope is that once we’re done on this funky old sphere we can go off to a better place, where we truly belong, and be in another life living happily ever after. We will be going “home.”

It would serve us better to bring our spiritual attention back to the Earth. If we could feel ourselves as part of the life of this planet, we might take better care of our environment. If we bring our sense of the divine to this earthly existence, we might even find more joy in living, however briefly, here and now. 
 
For now, our understanding of evolution still lies rusting in our neo-cortex. We need ways to revere the story: make ritual around it; give it song and dance; internalize it. We need to mine evolution for its spiritual gold, learning our new role in the grand scheme of things. 
      
In fact, the story of evolution can offer us everything we traditionally seek from religion: a basis for morality, humility, meaning, purpose, a message of self-liberation, and as much awe and wonder as any bible. Let’s stop looking upward in prayer and gratitude for this or that, and instead direct our gaze downward at the Earth and all around us, to celebrate Nature, the instrument of our creation, and the closest and most obvious source of all our gifts.
      
When modern ecologists and neo-pagans search for a symbol for wholeness and health, they come back to the ancient goddess, Mother Earth, Mother Nature, the Greek’s Gaia. Only today she starts as a “hypothesis,” and must trickle down from her rebirth as scientific postulate to become sacralized by the people’s shamans. - Theodore Roszak

Hello Earthling
      
The story of evolution tells us that we are part of the history of life on this planet, making our primary identity that of “earthling.” (Of course, if we discover life in other galaxies we might have to become galaxy identified, which would make us “Milky Wayans.”) You can feel your earthling nature inside your body, which is composed of “all natural” earth ingredients. Just rub your upper and lower teeth together for a moment and feel the hardness of your bones. They are made out of minerals found in the Earth – calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium – all mysteriously molded together into your skeleton. Can you feel that you are a piece of Earth walking on Earth? It is though we are Earth sprouts that somehow gained a lot of mobility.
 
Meanwhile, about 75% of your body is liquid, and most of that liquid has the same chemical consistency as the oceans. You literally sweat and cry seawater. It’s as if the ocean splashed up on shore and eventually walked away. When you think about it, where else could our bodies have come from but the Earth and it’s seas? You are certified organic. 

Not only are we made out of Earth and ocean, we have been shaped by them. Your legs and feet, fingers and thumbs, this upright posture and big brain, even your instincts, emotions and thoughts -- all are the result of life adapting to elemental demands. Remember that for a couple billion years of life on this planet there were no legs or feet simply because there was no land to walk around on. Legs were of no use. 
      
As we consider our body, we might reflect on the fact that the most critical steps in its creation can be correlated with major environmental change. Scientists believe that upheavals of land masses nearly six hundred million years ago triggered the "Cambrian Explosion"-- also known as the “Big Birth” (biology's Big Bang) -- which marks the first appearance of many forms of life, including multi-cellular animals with skeleton-like structures. Vertebrates like us.
      
Over the course of three and a half billion years volcanoes erupted, continents bumped into each other, ice ages came and went, and life kept figuring out new ways to live, growing new appendages, plumage, camouflage, new ways of sensing, eating and moving. Nature is the sculptor, carving and coaxing all life forms into being. Nature is the artist, and we are the art.    
 
Mountains' walking is just like human walking. Accordingly, do not doubt mountains' walking even though it does not look the same as human walking. You should penetrate these words. If you doubt mountains' walking, you do not know your own walking. - Dogen: Mountains and Waters Sutra

Geologic events have molded us. A meteor crashing to earth sixty-five million years ago has been linked to atmospheric changes that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, allowing for the subsequent evolution of larger mammals, present company included. The dinosaurs toppled over, and there we were, the ones who nurse their young -- the hairy ones.

Bonobo (Pygmy Chimpanzee) mother and child: 6-8 million years ago, our Hominid evolutionary lineage diverged from the one that gave rise to the two Chimpanzee species. About 1.6% of our DNA differs from theirs. Most of that is 'redundant', so the differences are ina small fraction of 1.6%  -Ed. 

More recent geologic and atmospheric events are associated with the emergence of our species, Homo sapiens. Twelve to fifteen million years ago the land mass of Africa was dramatically altered by tectonic forces, producing the Great Rift Valley which erected an east-west barrier to the existing animal populations. As a result, the common ancestor of humans and apes was divided, and each group began evolving under different conditions. They got the jungle and we got the savannah.

Suddenly our human ancestors had no trees to live in or escape into, and boy, it must have been scary. The savannah was full of lions and tigers and hyenas ready to pounce and gobble you up, so you desperately try to see out over the tall grasses, but you really aren’t big enough. So what do you do? You stand up on two legs. Bi-pedalism may have partially been born of fear.
 
The ice ages are now recognized as a major force in the emergence of Homo sapiens. Scientists believe that our family of Hominidae came into existence during the colder weather of the late Miocene, seven millions years ago, and our genus Homo, along with those of cattle and gazelles came into existence during another cooling period two and one half million years ago, the late Pliocene. Our tremendous human energy and ingenuity may have a lot to do with the fact that we were cold. Consciousness and the opposable thumb may have originally been designed as tools for shoveling snow.

We, mankind, arose amidst the wandering of the ice and marched with it. We are in some sense shaped by it, as it has shaped the stones. Perhaps our very fondness for the building of stone alignments, dolmens, and pyramids reveals unconsciously an ancient heritage from the ice itself, the earth shaper. - Loren Eisley

And just think of it, my earthling friends, here we are spinning around on the Earth's axis at about 1,000 miles an hour. Meanwhile, the Earth is spinning around the sun at about 66 thousand miles an hour, and the entire solar system is spinning though the Milky Way Galaxy at a million miles an hour toward a point in space that astronomers call the Great Attracter. Yea, baby! And everything attracted to the Great Attractor is moving at about 800 thousand miles an hour toward a super cluster of galaxies called the Shapely Attractor. Whoa, earthlings, this mother ship Gaia is moving fast! And you don't even have to hold on. Because the Earth is holding on to you, like the dear mother she is, embracing you with her strong arms of gravity. Even black guys can't jump all that far off the Earth. We are on the Earth and of the Earth. It is the true “rock of ages.” It is the Milky Way’s little biosphere project, and everybody’s `hood.
 
So let’s offer praise and reverence to the home planet. We could turn Earth Day into a major international holiday, and maybe even celebrate an “Earth day” every month, on full moon. (The moon is also a child of the Earth, and helps keep our oceans waving and our orbit stable.) Earth days are not just a call to “do something” to heal our damaged eco-systems, but more of a spiritual exercise, a time to celebrate all life, regardless of kingdom, phyla, or species: regardless of colour of skin, feathers, fur, flowers, leaves or bark. Earth days will be a time to reflect on our connection to this planet, and to embrace our basic identity as earthlings.
      

The Divine DNA

There is a simple grandeur in this view of life with its powers of growth, assimilation, and reproduction, being originally breathed into matter under one or a few forms, and that while this, our planet has gone circling on according to fixed laws, and land and water, in a cycle of changes, have gone on replacing each other, so that from so simple an origin, through the process of gradual selection of infinitesimal changes, endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been evolved. - Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, final paragraph
           
One of the most important lessons we can learn from evolution is that we are related to all that lives, and to all that has ever lived. Once we begin to include ourselves in the story we are no longer on an individual journey, but have joined that grand procession of “endless forms most beautiful and wonderful.” Instead of being the singular focus of all creation we are now at one with all creation. It’s an excellent trade-off. 
      
When we join the evolution story our family suddenly increases by a million, million fold. Almost as deep as being blood-related, we are all cell-related, and the proof is in the pudding, and in this case the pudding is the plasma, and inside of it lies the secret of all living things—the DNA.
Have you seen a strand of DNA? It looks like a slinky with a purpose. It would make an excellent religious symbol, with its two identical halves and elegant spiral shape: the logo of life. It is ready for the evolution artists to adorn and embellish. 
      
From the funkiest fungus to the most nothingness bacteria, to the ordinary grass that grows all around, to the great cats and big-brained humans, even the weeds and mosquitoes--all beings grow out of the information contained in the double-helix. This is the stuff that seems to separate life from non-life; that turns ordinary matter into replicating plasma. It is the physical manifestation of spiritus mundi: the holy ghost, the eternal Tao. 

As the seed substance of the entire biota, I think the DNA deserves some spiritual attention. We could start with its name, “deoxyribonucleic acid,” which is much too cold and clinical. I have created a new acronym, and I suggest that from now on, whenever you read or hear the three letters DNA, think “Divine Natural Abundance.” 

The DNA also carries with it a powerful message of self-liberation, because as scientists unravel the codes, we discover that we are not so particular and individual. Consider the fact that your personal DNA is 99.99% identical to the DNA of every other human being. In other words, the instructions for building and maintaining you are almost exactly the same as the instructions for building and maintaining me, the Dalai Lama, George Bush, Oprah, Julia Roberts, Jack the Ripper, and the Buddha.  Our individual looks, personality and I.Q. are just a thin layer of paint over the basic human design. We are over 99% the same. “Can’t we all just get along.”

Meanwhile, over 98% of our DNA is the same as that of the great apes, and even more shocking is the fact that we share about 90% of our DNA with mice! But we don’t have fur or tails, and not only can we run a maze, we can build one. So why is our DNA code so similar to mice? The answer is because it takes most of our DNA -- that enormous library full of information inside each of us -- just to create a basic mammal. It took billions of years for nature to learn how to build a good skeletal structure, circulatory and nervous system, and those designs are at the core of who we are. 
      
DNA also connects us to the slimier side of life. The Victorians were shocked at Darwin’s suggestion that we are related to apes, but they would faint dead away to hear that we share nearly 60% of our living instructions with worms. Indeed, we owe a lot to the worms of the world, who were the first creatures to develop spines: they virtually invented our phyla of vertebrates! And do we ever thank them?  No, we put hooks through them and use them as bait. 
      
The DNA lesson in humility goes even deeper with the revelation that we share about 50% of our DNA with…yeast! Yes, the stuff that makes the dough rise. But that discovery also raises an important spiritual question for those who believe in an eternal soul -- does the yeast have a soul? Does each individual yeast cell have a soul? I mean, if we are going to declare ourselves divine, then what about the slime? And if we don’t consider the slime divine, then where do we draw the line? Do mushrooms get a soul? How about mollusks? Daisies? Crab grass?
      
A t-shirt created by a bunch of scientists at the University of California conveys the same message, “We share 25% of our DNA with bananas. Get over yourself!” Our species could certainly use some humility, but the message of DNA does not necessarily put us down. It doesn’t deny our divinity -- it just denies our exclusive divinity. Everything that lives contains the seeds of Divine Natural Abundance.

Nucleosome: the repeating unit of DNA and regulatory proteins that packs the genomes of  all multicellular life-forms into the nucleus of each cell. Nucleosomes are folded through a series of higher order structures into a chromosome. - Ed. 

Survive or Die

The story of evolution teaches us the laws by which we must live, and the first commandment is to stay alive. More specifically, the first commandment is to make sure that your information stays alive, your particular instruction manual, your imprimature, so to speak. That is the number one imperative of every living being, including every single one of the trillions of cells inside of us. And yet, the notion that we are driven by the survival instinct is traditionally cast in evil. As if you should be caring more about some DNA other than your own.

So it was that a storm of outrage followed the publication of Richard Dawkin's book The Selfish Gene, whose title seems like a taunt to both the bible thumpers and the humanists. He was simply relating the findings of modern biologists who are telling us that our behavior is largely governed by genes who only want to replicate themselves. 
      
So don’t blame yourself if most of your thoughts are about you. Even if your genes are selfish, it’s not your fault. Blame it on your genes. It’s evolution’s fault. Nature wants it this way. And for good reason: Life needed to be deeply programmed with the determination to continue or it might have died out at the first sign of hardship. The anerobic bacteria who began to choke on their own waste may have just given up rather than morph into beings who lived on oxygen. Life had to be pumped up with the desire to live, down to the most basic molecules, or else living beings might never have gone to the trouble to become multi-celled, let alone to have figured out higher mathematics. 
      
So rather than cast the survival imperative as evil or brutish, maybe we should celebrate it. If we could only see living beings as a single entity, or at least part of the same experiment, then the selfish gene can be seen as noble, glorious, even worthy of reverence. It is no longer regarded as selfish for its own sake, but for the sake of life itself. We should all be singing the praises of the selfish gene and toasting its insistence on living. 

Your Mama is a Germ

Why should we think that the universe was made for us? A better case can be made that the world was created for the lowly bacteria. Single celled bacteria are the most successful of all life forms, having lasted for three and a half billion years, surviving all the great species extinctions and still thriving, uncountable trillions of them, teeming everywhere, covering everything. In fact, billions of bacteria are living their individual little lives inside of your mouth right now. Maybe they even have houses in there, churches and roads -- a whole civilization between your cheeks! There is some speculation that bacteria invented humans as moving feedlots. Inside of us they get room and board as well as a tour of the neighborhood.
      
But, you ask, could the bacteria be created in God’s image? Why not? I can imagine God in the shape of a single-celled being: like a little round ying-yang symbol. God as a drop of protoplasm pulsing with life, with a permeable see-through membrane. God, the Great Germinator.
      
Whether or not they are the crown of creation, bacteria are incredibly successful, and one reason is because they reproduce by just dividing-- they don’t have to take each other out to dinner first. The little bacterium just pulls its DNA evenly across its body, and then splits itself into two.     
Maybe to a bacterium that splitting-in-two behavior feels good like sex, and that’s why bacteria divide so often. Is it something akin to masturbation? 

Too bad we humans can’t go back to dividing as a means of reproduction. Of course, it would be traumatic to think of losing half of yourself, but on the other hand, dividing would double your chances for a happy life. And then quadruple them, etc…Another reason to believe that life was created for bacteria’s is the fact that they aren’t programmed to grow old and die. Bacteria can be killed but they don’t die naturally, which brings us to a major turning point in the life of the planet – death.

The bacteria themselves were doing quite fine for well over a billion and a half years, having a leisurely time floating around in the Archean seas. Then one fateful day (epoch), at some auspicious moment (era), the bacteria began to merge with each other, and started to combine their little packets of DNA. Blame it on love, or at least, attraction. Okay, it was a marriage of convenience. The merging of two cells usually took place when it was useful for the survival of both—“You’ve got a little flagella to move yourself around, and I’m growing some eyes, so let’s get together and we’ll be sittin’ on top of the food chain!” After some time, the cells that joined together became a whole new life form, a multi-celled being, who was now carrying information and instructions from two different DNA sources. Since two packets of Divine Natural Abundance are more inventive than one, the new microbes began incorporating other useful creatures into themselves, and eventually had to start putting their overflowing library of DNA into a completely separate body. There was no more room in the cell.
 
So, “Ta-da!” Sex was invented as a way of putting great amounts of DNA together into a separate new organism, leaving lots of room for variation and complexity. It must have been very exciting for the first few couples, suddenly discovering those thrilling sensations of having sex. Try to imagine two proud microbes, mama and papa -- you’ve seen them on the Petri dish -- looking at their little baby microbe saying, “Isn’t it cute! Look at it twitch!” But there was a catch, as usual. Once the mama and papa microbe got their DNA into a separate new body, it was no longer necessary for them to stick around forever. Their information had been passed on (life is information!). So the mama and papa microbe eventually became programmed to grow old and die. What happened, to put it bluntly, is that life traded sex for death.
   
Now there’s a choice for you. Would you rather live forever without sex, or have sex and die? Of course the question is ridiculous, because we have no choice in the matter. It was only through a phenomenal number of DNA combinations, through sex, over the long course of biological history, that life grew into a being complex enough that it can even contemplate the choice, or begin to understand it’s own origins. In order to become the smart-ass creatures we are today we had to have both—sex and death. (Not to mention the fact that if there had been no death, earthlings would have run out of room a long time ago.)
      
At least now we know enough to acknowledge the bacteria and microbes as the parents of us all. And it’s time to give them their props. Let’s offer a deep bow to the smallest but not the least among us, the brilliant and innovative progenitors who invented sex, mobility, oxygen breathing -- all sorts of fun things. BACTERIA! MICROBES! Without them there would be no Adam and Eve. They were the first to be alive.


  
A  "missing link" in human evolution, Australopithecenes lived from 4 to 1.5 mya in south and east Africa. Their limb proportions, teeth and brain sizes were intermediate between chimpanzees and humans. Donald Johanson discovered  40% of the 3.2 million year old skeleton of a young female in Ethiopia. His team often played a Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, (from the album Sgt. Pepper) at the time, and thus his celebrated paleo-anthropological find came by her name, Lucy. -Ed.

New Animal on the Block

Drive all blames into one.  - Tibetan Buddhist saying

Friends, do you want to find forgiveness? Then place yourself in the story of evolution. If you believe in sin, or that you are seriously flawed as a human being, or that all human beings are similarly flawed, then sink yourself into deep time, into the history of life, and you will see that none of us is to blame. We are all saved, forgiven, absolved! Can I get a witness? 
      
If we see ourselves in the story of evolution we realize that we are not our fault. We did not invent ourselves. We were created out of the shape-shifting stream of life as it danced with ever-changing Earth conditions and natural phenomena. We did not chose our particular type of consciousness or our instincts for love or for killing, any more than we chose our thumbs.
      
So in the story of evolution we are absolved of our supposed sins, the original one as well as all those we have copied. Mother Nature forgives us because we have no choice but to be who we are, and also because we are still such a young species, and know not what we do. 

We are, in fact, a brand new kind of animal. (I hope you aren’t offended by being called an animal. In some contexts you love the designation. “You animal, you!”) Our eminent scientists classify us as animals for very good biological reasons, but most of us refuse the designation. You’ll find evidence of our collective denial at any café or supermarket where there is a sign in the window saying “No Animals Allowed.” Humans walk right in! 
 
But we are a brand new kind of animal, and just figuring out that we are one. The body that you and I inherited breaks away from the rest of our primate crowd only about five million years ago -- just yesterday in biological time. That’s when the Great Rift Valley was created in Africa and our ancestors had to go from the trees of the jungle to live in the tall grasses of the savannah. It must have been as difficult as first learning how to live on land. Among those who began to hang out on the ground was an ape-woman who the scientists have named “Lucy,” considered to be the mother of us all. Can we therefore presume that the father of us all was “Ricky?”

After living on the ground for a while our ancestors began making crude stone tools, and became a sub-species of human who we now call Homo habilis, or “handyman.” The “handyman” started standing upright more often, probably to fix a leaky roof, and after a while we seemed to like it so much that soon our ancestors became what we now call Homo erectus or “upright” humans. And we’re not talking morality here. In fact, standing up put our sexual organs right out front for everyone to see, and no doubt that led directly to the invention of the loincloth. Four-legged animals don’t have to worry about clothing because their private parts are hidden by their stance. Once we stood up we exhibited full-frontal nudity.

Standing up not only brought us shame, it also brought us pride. I have a theory, fully uncorroborated, that the upright stance elevated our heads too far off the ground, and that’s precisely when we started feeling remote from the earth. We also started looking down at other creatures. We thought the crawlers weren’t as good as those who walk. Our upright stance may have also contributed to our belief that we came from some other realm. With our heads lifted high, we thought we were above it all.      

Most important, according to evolutionary biologists, standing up seems to have triggered a rapid increase in brain size. You would think that the exact opposite would happen, and that standing up would cause our feet to swell instead. But that’s not what happened. Here’s the theory: standing up left our hands free, and after a while we realized that we could use them to hold and manipulate objects. So we started using tools -- spears, axes, chopsticks – and that required far more brain connections to co-ordinate the more precise movements of our hands and fingers. So a feedback loop was created: better hands, bigger brains, bigger brains, better hands. Pretty smart, Mother Nature. Worthy of a deep bow.
 
Standing upright also left our arms free to carry our stuff around with us, and after a few million years we started migrating out of Africa. Nobody knows exactly why we left, but I suspect it was to look for Chinese food. At the time our brains were only half the size they are today, otherwise we would have been smart enough to just send out for Chinese food. Anyway, we started wandering around the planet, and got caught in an ice age or two, and that may be one reason our brains kept growing — we had to think hard and fast how to stay warm. Of course, it would have been easiest just to grow a heavy coat of fur, but at the time our brains just weren’t big enough to figure that out. So instead of a fur coat we grew a bigger brain and learned how to make fire. Then we started huddling around that fire and telling stories about ourselves. Stories like this one about evolution.

Wes ("Scoop") Nisker (b.1942) is an author, radio commentator, comedian, and teacher of Insight Meditation. A longtime fixture on San Francisco radio station KFOG, he coined the catchphrase, "If you don't like the news ... go out and make some of your own," which he used as the title for his first book. His subsequent books include Buddha's Nature and Crazy Wisdom Saves the World Again - Handbook for a Spiritual Revolution. The poet Gary Snyder described Nisker's work as, "the foolishness of the real...This is good medicine."