The human brain is not part of of the natural organism

Are you calling those particular fossils P. Randompithecus?

I dont think that "random" applies. When a species , such as Pongids or Hominids have developed, the future responses in evolution are somewhat dictated by those previously developed. Wed hardly expect a Hominid to develop a Trunk, but they would develop a nasal cavity large enough to provide warmer air.
Such is the concept of "randomness" taken out of the equation.

When a paleontologist looks at fossils, she sees the environment that has changed so that the fossil was forced into extinction.
EG , when brachiopods are found in severe shell masses, they are usually found in environments that indicate a rapid siltation beyond what they were able to handle as filter feeders, so they died.
Same thing with other deposits. The evolutionary significance is that, somewhere, in an environment higher (impying later in time) possibly lies a fossil opf a species that adapted to the changing sedimentary deposition and evolved a type of ashell that protruded beyond and through the silty stream. This was the Evoltionary trick that the species tried (No design of its own implied) and found ideal, thus it flourished.

Hominids can easily be seen tied to their changing environment which, in their native land, was one of increasing aridity from the late Pleiocene into the early Pleistocene.

I have not referred to any fossils, particular or easy to get along with.

Oh well perfectly good pun gone to waste

I found this interesting theory. Don't know if it is accurate but it is thought provoking. BBB

VPR News

From Primitive Parts, A Highly Evolved Human Brain
Monday, 08/09/10

by Jon Hamilton

From one perspective, the human brain is a masterpiece. From another, it's 3 pounds of inefficient jelly. Both views are accurate, and that's because our remarkable brain has been assembled from some very primitive parts.

"Although the things it can do are very wonderful and impressive, its design is very poor engineering in many respects," says David Linden, a professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the author of The Accidental Mind.

Linden says there's a simple explanation: evolution.

"In evolution, you never build something new if you can adapt something you've already got," he says. "It's the ultimate tinkerer and the ultimate cheapskate."

Our brain has been put together with parts from jellyfish and lizards and mice, Linden says. These parts may have been OK for their original owners, he says, but they aren't ideal for us.

Take brain cells, for example.

"They are slow. They are inefficient. They leak signals to their neighbors," Linden says. "Consequently, if you want to build clever human us with these very suboptimal parts, the only way to do it is to build a brain that is simply enormous and massively interconnected."

And that means it's very slow. Linden says getting a simple message from our feet to our brain can take a remarkably long time. To get a sense of just how long, he says, imagine a giant with her head in Baltimore and her toe off the coast of South Africa. If a shark bit that toe on Monday, Linden says, "she wouldn't feel it until Wednesday, and she wouldn't jerk her toe until Saturday."

Why the lag? Linden says it's because we're still using a communication system developed 600 million years ago by jellyfish.

Deep Down, We're Lizards

Jellyfish don't have a brain, but they were the first animal to have any sort of nervous system. It's a loose network of nerves called a "nerve net," says Chet Sherwood, who studies brain evolution at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Jellyfish don't exactly live life in the fast lane, so their nerve messages could travel pretty slowly; the ones on a telephone wire move a million times faster. But once evolution had come up with a messaging system, it kept using it, Sherwood says.

"The nerves and the manner in which signals are sent is similar to what we have ourselves," he says.

Our brains are also limited by design features we share with lizards, Linden says. Evolution's tinkering gave lizards the brain they needed to hunt and survive in a tough world, and our brains still have that ancient wiring.

"If I throw a baseball at you, you're going to reflexively duck your head, and there's nothing you can do to override that with your conscious mind," Linden says. "Your ancient, subconscious, lizard-like visual system is doing that task."

Three Scoops Of Ice Cream

A lizard brain is about survival -- it controls heart rate and breathing, and processes information from the eyes and ears and mouth.

When mammals like mice came along, the lizard brain didn't go away. It simply became the brain stem, which is perched on top of the spine, Linden says.

Then evolution slapped more brain on top of the brain stem.

"It's like adding scoops to an ice cream cone," Linden says. "So if you imagine the lizard brain as a single-scoop ice cream cone, the way you make a mouse brain out of a lizard brain isn't to throw the cone and the first scoop away and start over and make a banana split -- rather, it's to put a second scoop on top of the first scoop."

That second scoop gave mammals more memory and a wider range of emotions. It also allows a mouse to do things a lizard can't, like using experiences to anticipate danger instead of just responding to it.

To create the brain found in apes, Sherwood says, evolution added a third scoop. It allows apes to reason and live much more complicated lives than mice.

"In these brains, you can find all of the very same parts that you would see in a human brain," Sherwood says. But there's a difference -- the brain of an adult human is about three times the size of a gorilla brain.

The Cost Of A Big Brain

Much of the size difference appears after birth. The human brain continues to grow rapidly for the first five years after birth. It takes 20 years before all the circuits are laid out and connected up, Linden says.

"A miracle happens," he says. "You have enough neurons in this cortical circuit, massively interconnected, and somehow what emerges from that are these amazing human traits: The ability for me to know what you are thinking based on social cues that you give me, other forms of observational learning and high-level cognition."

In one sense, we've had to pay a heavy cost for our big, inefficient brains: Childbirth is difficult, childhood is long, and our brains consume 20 percent of the calories we eat.

But Linden says these adaptations turn out to have some surprising payoffs, like romantic love.

"If our neurons weren't such lousy processors and we didn't need 100 billion of them massively interconnected in order to make a clever brain out of such lousy parts, then we wouldn't have such a long childhood," Linden says.

And without that long childhood, he says, evolution wouldn't have equipped us with the force that bonds parents together to protect their children.

"We wouldn't have love," Linden says.

Related Links

* Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter
* Mrs. Charles Darwin's Advice For Walking Upright
* Food For Thought: Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter
* Armed And Deadly: Shoulder, Weapons Key To Hunt
* SPECIAL SERIES: The Human Edge

http://www.vpr.net/npr/129027124/

Well, jeeze . . . didn't you see the joke in reply?

The evolution of life on this planet probably did begin with the jelly fish, lizards, and mice that eventually developed into other species. It's not too difficult to imagine when the reproductive process for most life forms require sex to perpetuate the species.

As for our biology, it's been shown from many different perspectives that the human body is not well designed. It's probably the fault of all of our ancestors.

That we grew "out of Africa" to occupy this planet is a testimony to human aggression and need for exploration.

Dumb scientist . . .



No i won't. I'm going to put up my left hand, catch it, transfer to my right hand and throw it back at you just as hard as i can--you witless nerd. (Nerd addressed to the idiot scientist who constructed such a silly analogy.)

Yes, the larger cranium, but why? If one of it's consequences is higher infant mortality at birth.
With what purpose would nature have allowed a larger cranium in exchange for this higher infant mortality? Not only higher mortality, but everything else we actually do?
Mortality itself has a function in nature. Was the homo sapiens at the very beginning with the larger cranium becoming an animal of prey? Were the dead infants prey for a particular specie? And, I suppose , their mothers as well?
It doesn't make any sense.
I've looked up the length of pregnancy of gorilla, bonobo, chimpansee and orang-oetang. It's approximately 8,5-9 months. Babies are breastfed three years long. The bonobo's can have one baby every five years. The oran-oetang female can have maximum 6 babies during her life span (if she isn't shot of course). These primates do not fulfill the function of prey in nature. Why thn would human beings have evolved towards higher mortality rate, and especially at birth, involving the death of the mothers? I've seen figures of the Middle Ages... if I'm not wrong, about 30% of the women died at childbirth. Women have one child after another up till now. My neighbours have 6 children in seven years time. My mother had three children of six in three years time. My sister had three babies in three years time...
I don't know the statistics about abortion. But I know that fifteen years ago or so abortion on a large scale took place in China after seven months of pregnancy. I can't believe that nature would accept such a thing, especially because other animal species and plant don't benefit from it.
Why didn't we stick to a natural way of three year long breastfeeding during which women are not fertile?

I see the larger cranium not as an evolutionary advantage unless nature allowed a specie to evolve that uses its own individuals as prey, not to eat, but more in a parasatic way. That would f.i. mean that when Monsanto promotes and sells seeds that can not be used as planting seeds to mostly semi analphabetic farmers in India, we have to see it as 'balance in nature'. It would also explain 'slavery'.

In that respect ants are much more clever in maintaining their lice colonies. They don't kill the lice.

But nature would never allow that one specie destroys other species of animals and plants, or their habitats.

Yes, I'm trying to consider how it must have been in those days ... you don't have a time machine by any chance?

Why, Setanta, do you see cooperative hunting as an advantage of our brain? Lionnesses and wolves, and hyena's are very cooperative hunters.
If the homo sapiens before he had his brain as we have it now, was a predator, I actually don't see any obstacle why he wouldn't have been a cooperative hunter. Even with speech. Or I daresay, especially without speech.

The relationship between homo sapiens and homo neantherthalis is since new studies confusing.
The old version was that Homo sapiens drove Neantherthalis into extinction. But that version is no longer holding. I'm sorry, I'm not up to date. I know there are new findings but I haven't read them.
I think we haven't seen the last of the confrontation Homo sapiens-Neantherthalis, if there was a confrontation at all. They must have met but how?

The making of tools, used as an argument to underline our intellectual superiority, is also confusing.

To me a tool is something you make, you then use to make something else.
The making of the tool : making arrows to kill, making needles, making 'knives' out of silex...
When a bird chooses a particular plant, distract certain leaves in a certain way to build a nest, is he toolmaking or not?
Probably not, but to me the function of making is fulfilled. His beak is his tool. Why does a tool has to be something outside the body? Beaks, claws, slime, spiderwebs, tails to chase away flies, are all tools. We imitate all those things but at what cost?

Suppose we were able to weave with our bare hands. Wouldn't that be more efficient than producing a spinning machine? All the pain, all the material necessary to make something to cover our bare skin.

It's not because we need to make tools to 'survive', that we have to see it as intellectual superiority. A bird weaving its nest with only its beak as a tool, and using material he finds in nature, is in my humble opinion, much more efficient, and in a way also superior.

So instead of regarding the making of tools as something important, you can also see it as a weakness.

To me the definition of 'tool' is confusing. You mention that that the evidence is good that tools were being made and used long before homo sapiens arrived on the scene. I'm not surprised.

Actually, the hyena is the careful and successful hunter. It has been shown in recent years that lions often drive hyenas off their kills. I know of no evidence that lions do any more that hunt at the same time, which will have the effect of isolating and exposing to the kill the less wily or the weaker animals.

Humans build surrounds, they drive herds off cliffs, they bring down healthy young animals in their prime. That goes against the ways of nature, in which healthy young animals can escape, or can, as a group, face down predators. It is possible that before the rise of higher order hominids there were examples of hunting groups of "proto-humans" (for lack of a better term) using such techniques, and successfully bringing down healthy animals--but i know of no evidence to that effect. The is plentiful evidence, however, of neolithic humans using surrounds and dead falls to take down large numbers of game animals, including healthy young animals. The use of surrounds and dead falls can only succeed if the hunters can identify and manipulate the behavior of herds.

I can't for the life of me follow your argument that tool use is a weakness.

I agree.
Had to look up oxymoron (f.i. old news)
Th economical depression is only temporary, I think, but it will not be the last one. What amazes me and worries me, is that human beings easily get used to anything as if we suffer from some kind of amnesia. We don't seem to hold track of how things were before.
Now we are getting used to floods on a surface four times Belgium, and who cares about 4 million people without resources. Ten years ago I started a novel (sf thriller) situated in 2050. I describe a universal society where millions of people flee Bangla-desh because of the useless land covered with salt, the floods.
And now I see Pakistan.
Look at Europe : frequent floods now in Eastern-Germany, Polen... at least two years consecutive.

But a government instructing architects to design houses vertically (on poles or so), no way.
Transforming the firebrigade into a waterbrigade...
Looking up the regions which were swamps before the Romans arrived (a great part of Belgium)... the swamps will return, not only in Belgium.
All we actually do is getting used to it.

Oxymoron, thank you for this new word!

Very interesting what you wrote. I took some time to think about it.
Let's assume or accept that predators hunting herds in a natural way, choose or succeed killing 'slow' animals (sick, old, hurt, OR very young).
When herds give birth, it's in a relatively short period. The very young are a target but because they are all born in a short period, a sufficient number escapes and grows up and guarantees the existence of the herd. I understand that herds of antilopes, deer, zebra's, gnoes, ... fulfill the function of food for predators to maintain the balance in nature. The existence of the herd is always guaranteed.

Surrounds (driving animals into an enclosure?) and dead falls are indeed unnatural because the healthy, fertile and maybe even pregnant specimen and the young ones and the yearlings are killed.

You know of evidence of 'wasteful hunting' yes or no regarding 'proto-humans' and neolithic humans and I haven't read sufficiently about hunting skills regarding that period. I'm honest about it.
According to what you say it is possible that the proto-humans hunted in a still natural way (like f.i. the Bosjesmannen in the Kalahari dessert before they were forced to become sedentary, or like the Aboriginal who also were forced not to 'move around' anymore, or like the Inuit). I saw in several documentaries that hunters performed a simple ritual towards their killed prey. I liked that.
Suppose proto-humans didn't use surrounds or drove herds over the edge, and suppose neolithicum humans did so (you speak of plentiful evidence), can we then accept there is a breach between them in one way or another?

It would help my theory, because it would be one more argument to support the idea that the human brain of the neolithic man (fire, tools, burials, paintings,...) seriously no longer fulfilled its function in nature. That the schisma in that period of human evolution already was taking place.

But I'm careful. Evidence might still show up that proto-humans also drove healthy, fertile, young and pregnant animals into a cliff. And it's also possible that neolithic humans drove only a certain part (males f.i.) or a small part of the herd over the cliff.
Is it correct that the Bison bison herds in North-America let's say in the 16th century consisted of millions of specimen during their migration? If that is correct, only a very small part of the herd would fall victim of these hunting techniques, not enough to hurt or unbalance the existence of the herd.

If the last presumption would gain evidence (perhaps there is already evidence?), then I cannot use it as an arhument to support the ide that then already humans fell out of the natural system.

The slaughtering of these animals in the 19th century, however, leave no doubt. Unless of course it was part of a territorium fight, but to that extent...?

I agree with your last sentence : 'The use of surrounds and dead falls can only succeed if the hunters can identify and manipulate the behavior of herds.'

I'm personnally convinced that the hunters possessed more than enough knowledge to identify and manipulate the behavior of the herds. If they destroyed the nucleus of the herd, and its existence, these hunters took a step away from their function in nature as a predator. If they didn't unbalance the herd, and 'took' only a small part of the herd, then they still would fit in the organism.
It's of course tempting for me to say:'You see, even neolithicum man discarted himself from nature with his brain. But dead falls, surrounds, driving herds off cliffs...it could have been done in a very sophisticated way so that the main herd was spared. The remains could also be the result of an accident, or the context of a place where accidents occurred. In Belgium, there are a few roads were the number of trafic deaths is much higher than the average. We call them literally translated : 'death roads'. I imagine that in those time death roads also existed. In that respect it would be more significant to look for evidence if the herd in that area diasappeared because of the hunt driving the animals off cliff, or not.

Thank you.

Oh, yes, about the tools.

No human being can do without tools. Me included. I know I'm kicking against a 'holy house'.

I'm only wondering why animals have bodily tools quite sufficiently, and very effecient to have a relatively good live, to offer adequate shelter to their young ones. We haven't. We are far from having it.

In fact, a lot of humans are being used as tools. These human tools use material tools which were made by human tools...
Some human tools are replaced by material tools...

When I was twenty-two I worked two months in a German factory (holliday job). During eight hours a day doing the same movement over and over again... that is being a tool. I was a tool and used tools. I spoke with a German woman who worked there for twenty years and she spontaneously told me she liked her work. I admire her still.
But to me she is prove that the human brain is not part of nature. The fact that she said she was happy to work there.

Do you have evidence of an animal specie that is a tool for its own kind to use a tool made by its own kind? During the best hours of the day? Also during the night (night shifts) ?

And what is the result of this 'toolactivity' ? A hammer and nails, a nuclear bomb...

Our tools don't fit into nature. The end product of our tools even less.
That's what I mean to say.

Yes, surrounds are a type of impromptu corral into which the game animals are driven. This technique was used well into historical times, and was noted by explorers and colonists. The same is true for deadfalls. There is a state park in Illinois called Giant City. One of the many impressive bluffs there is called Stonefort, and it has to this day the remains of a series of what are called dry stone walls (i.e., stone walls built without benefit of mortar) which lead to the highest point of the bluff. In historical times, the Pottawatomie were known to repair the stone walls and then use them to drive game herds (bison) off the cliff.

I don't know what you mean by a breach--you'd have to explain that to me again before the nickel drops for me.



I don't see that at all. I don't see how you can claim that any of that is evidence that the brain was not fulfilling a natural function. Indeed, anything the brain does to assure or enhance the breeding opportunity of individuals is precisely the natural, evolutionary function one would think it would have.

However, you're changing the rules as you go along. I'll go look again, but i don't recall that you originally specified neolithic man. At any event, there is something which may be of some interest to you on the general topic of the thread. On the CBC radio program "Quirks and Quarks" today they had a repeat (their in their summer re-run mode) of a program during which they interviewed an anthropologist who states that there is evidence in a dig in Kenya that early hominids in a period from 2.6 million to two million years ago were beginning to make primitive tools and using them to hunt turtles, alligator and fish in a lake which existed at that time in the area where the archaeological site is located. He stated that this is significant because is corresponds to a time when the size of the brain was expanding. He then says that the task is to determine if brain size is expanding because of the new foods in the diet, or if the expanding brain has provided the ability to exploit new food sources. If you click here, you can go to the "Quirks and Quarks" web page to look for a podcast or MP3 of today's broadcast.



I'd be interested to know how you suggest they'd be able to be so discriminating with a herd of stampeding animals.



On the Great Plains, yes. But bison were ubiquitous in the prairies east of the Mississippi as well, and the French record this fact in historical times.

Once again, i don't see a basis for suggesting that the brain was leading human beings away from a natural function. Evolutionary traits which enhance breeding opportunity enhance the success of individuals in passing on their genetic make-up. There's nothing unnatural about the brain being employed in that manner. And that's true if the brain is being used to make modern agricultural implements which will be purchased and used on corporate farms.

This, to me, is redolent of the continuing religious argument which seeks to place humans apart from and above the natural world--the notion that we are the special chosen ones of a "god" who gives us the natural world. I can't think of any plausible argument that man is not a part of the natural world.

That doesn't mean that tools are evidence of a weakness. Far from it, tools give us an opportunity to manipulate the world around us in a way that other animals can't. It is a signal advantage.

I don't understand why you say tools don't fit into nature. We are a part of nature, we use tools, and we make them from materials we find in nature--even when it's iron ore and coal to make steel.

I also think that vision is very important. But vision implies more than only sight. There are more things connected to it. And I also suspect that humans once had far more than vision and that even some humans living now still have those things, though forlorn, and completely useless.

I'll give a fictive example : someone enters a café or a place where a lot of people are : he/she remarks at once where the fire exit is, where the bar is, where the toilets are, who is talking behind or beside her/him, the easiest way to reach a free table, a hanky, a coin, or a wet spot on the floor.
That's what a wild animal does and much more.
How can I explain, its not only vision. Vision is part of it but there is much more : an overall impression. I once called it 'railthinking' but it could become 'multirailthinking'. It's some kind of assessment. Smell is also involved and the slightest movements, or an assessment of all the movements at the same time whereby focus immediately goes to those movements which might be treathening.

I din't know that elephants ate/eat fermented fruit. I'm not surprised. Monkeys (I have forgotten the specie) also like it. They became drunk and fell asleep (a documentary I saw). It would be interesting to know how many times a year or in which season these fruits ripen... Not every week-end, I suppose. If we humans want to, we can drink fermented liquid day and night. It is also something that intrigues me. Why humans are so fond of alcohol and other drugs.
Elephants and monkeys wait for a certain tree to carry or to drop half rotten fruit. Nature observes a strict schedule. We don't.

Whether birds can smell... I don't know either. Perhaps they have much more than we up tll now have discovered. I believe they also have this railthinking or this overall assessment capacity, but there is definitevely more than that.

I will reply later on your second part.

Thank you.

You know, i think it will be useful at this juncture to point out several flaws in how you are approaching the subject. The first, and most obvious, is that you have created an hypothesis ("the human brain is not part of the natural organism"), and you are now engaged in the logical fallacy of "shoehorning," which is trying to make the data fit the hypothesis, rather than examining the data and then producing an hypothesis. Another fallacy which goes hand in hand with shoehorning is the fallacy of confirmation bias, which means you only look at things which tend to confirm what it is that you wish to believe--in statistics this is known as the fallacy of the enumeration of favorable circumstances.

Finally, you are indulging in hasty generalization. You had a few ideas, and came up with an hypothesis before you had examined sufficient data to justify the hypothesis.

None of this means you are wrong--however, you should give serious thought to the idea of shoehorning. You've got an idea you like (that the brain is part of the natural organism), and you're now engaged in attempting to manipulate data to confirm what it is that you wish to believe, rather than examining data and deciding what you ought to believe.

This then, this web site, is an ideal place for the exercise, since people here will argue you with about damn near anything--so there's lots of opportunity to critically examine your hypothesis.

What you write is so true. I haven't replied on the various items in between... its too much at the moment to think it over.
But I know already that, in a way, I abused or did not respect the definition of 'tool'. It's clear to me that I'm not ready to discuss 'tools' into my statement. I have to read more about it, and perhaps I'm using the word 'tool' to say something else. F.i. I have the tendency not to concentrate on 'tool' but see intelligence of the human kind more as destructive and the intelligence of wild animals equal in creativity but constructive within the context of nature.
I shouldn't use the term' tool'. I need to look for something else.

Although I don't know the term 'shoehorning', I understand very well what you mean. I'm trying not to do this because I think a statement with that kind of arguments is not worth very much. The practical obstacles are that I'm not academically schooled and that my statement covers different disciplines.

Wether I'm right or wrong, it doesn't matter. And 'shoehorning' I have to avoid.
But I can't get rid of the impression that theoretical statements from the academic world 'feed' upon each other, in so much that the visions become more and more narrow or tend to go upstream, as if there are no estuaries, or silent waters, or even a nearby river going downstream.... And may I add to this (no offense meant to anybody) often coloured by religion and politics. Last but not least : 'economical'.

I had to use a new handbook of history in class. Few lines in it attracted my attention : that nomadic people in prehistory had such a harsh life to such extent' that they left their newborns behind to get rid of them because there was often not enough food.
Sedentary people in classroom history books are the real heroes : specialization because of enough food, even the person with a broken leg was busy making sculptures or other handicraft or he (he and never she!) played the role of medicine man.
This is what children learn when they are eleven, twelve years old; that life really started when human beings became sedentary. I was educated in the same way. Everything 'nomadic' was offered in a negative way, real life started from between Eufraat and Tigris, fertile valleys, Turkey, remnants of cities, trade ... tools, weaving...the glory of the pyramids to end with what?

So I bluntly told my pupils that nomadic familygroups never would leave their newborns behind because of starvation. Because there was no starvation as such. That this was a transposition of a situation and a lack of knowledge now towards the 'underdogs' of nomadics in prehistory. To me 'abortion' is leaving new borns behind. In rural sedentary communities newborn girls are killed with rice or thrown into the river or otherwise; women going to a clinic and when its a girl, abortion follows. And how many children die of disease, bad water, lack of food , born in an enironment overflowing with everything needed? Blame it on nature is the message. But is this correct?

Why would nomadic prehistory man (difficult to say where and when and in which state) leave newborn babies or two or three years olds behind because of starvation when nature was still intact?

When we talk about nature, it seems to me we are talking about a ball of wool, and we desperately want to knit one stocking, while nature in prehistory was probably a very thick Persian like carpet covering our planet, in so many colours and different designs.
I'm very much shure one person can survive on two acres four seasons long, year after year.What are two acres in the prehstory?

I always have to laugh when in documentaries about animals, proudly and encouragingly is announced that so many thousand seabirds ar present in a certain spot, or so many seals... those numbers are peanuts.

In prehistory colony animals would have been in their millions. But we can't imagine that anymore.

And so often when f.i. starlings gather, they are experienced as a threat. And governmental regulations are taken to shoot them or to destroy them otherwise. So a few million starlings gathering are a plague. Because of the cherries. And other fruits perhaps. Those same cherries that have become very expensive and scarce because of a disease (bacterial?).
Where's the balance? Where's the logic? Sparrows were eaten, hedgehogs too, so many other animals. If you mention that, all you get are looks of horror.

All the signals I collect is that people are afraid of nature, they don't know nature anymore, and even the smallest, harmless spider can cause panic. Or a mouse! Human beings have created a world of their own. There are no essential links anymore with nature. We try to imitate the links. Yes. But that is something completely different from being part of nature and fulfilling a function into the whole system 100%.

Why do we create a society wherein young mothers have to start working a few weeks after birth? Do you know that English prostitues did exactly that in the 18th century? And when I gave birth twenty years ago, and I was 'discovering ' my baby the day after. She was laying between my legs on the bed and I was 'playing' with her . And the gynocologist popped his head in and the only thing he could say was : 'Are you spoiling her already'.
So for the first time you go to a hospital and you look up to the doctor who afterwards is saying something alien and stupid like that.
When my daughter ever gives birth, it will be competely different, I swear.
How they separate newborn babies from their mothers in Russia and elsewhere, or in the past, here in Europe. Oh yes, because of the lack of central heating. Thirty babies wrapped up in separate cribs, and thirty mothers and a few fathers behind the glass window looking.
A zoo.

How can homo sapiens be so clumpsy in the most important thing as procreation. I've never seen a specie of animal that procreated in such a hazardiously way as human beings. No nest, no food, no space but still the babies come . And die like flies. A complete waste. A complete loss of nine months investment. We procreate like mice but we are not offering food to another other specie with our losses.
I'm not even speaking of casualties of war throughout history.

I have so many favorable circumstances and data that I no longer indulge in a hasty generalization. For new items like 'tools', yes, and perhaps even for more items coming. And yes, I have not sufficient 'serious' data. To have sufficient 'scientific'data would mean to read everything and that is impossible. Even if you read the most recent research results on different aspects...there will always be a selection living in available data. I prefer to see and to listen and to connect old data with recent ones, to keep track of certain things... not very scientific, I admit.
But the skeleton is there. the nervous system too.
The flesh and the muscles, and certain organs... not to speak of the fingers and the toes, however, provide of course the confusion.

It's my first confrontation and I'm very grateful that I have found a spot where I can 'exercise'. I also see it as exercise. I don't even know why I do this. It's completely useless.

'several flaws' : that makes me think.

Thank you.

The way we make tools, invent tools, use tools, are to me a sign of weakness. Why? Because al these tools result in nothing more than largening the gap between human race and nature.

'Manipulating the world' : you write this as if this is a big achievement. And because no othe animal can do what we do, we must be the most suvccessfull in being the fittest and the strongest.
I understand this verwy well. Most people think this way.
But one serious matter is overlooked. That this planet is green en lively because of an overall natural system wherin it doesn't matter which specie of animals is more clever than the other one. It doesn't matter at all. As long as every specie of animal or plant fulfills its role in the organism to contribute to 'balance', it's sufficient.
But we, humans, don't have any clou where this balance is all about.
W only stare ourselves blind on the very often misinterpreted words of Darwin 'the strongest and the fittest'.

Homo sapiens behave as if they are in competion with surrounding flora and fauna. That is , I'm very sorry, very stupid.
Why compete with other animal species, or even with plants, in so much to intervene in their habitat, destroy their habitat, use pesticides, insecticides to prove what?

How on earth can we be part of a system that we don't understand and destroy, or disturb?
Why should homo sapiens be the strongest and the fittest on this planet. To hang olympic gold around the neck of every dead child younger than five years, or around the neck of every person that comitted suicide, or to put some Kenian tulipes already dying on non existing graves of the clutter of blood resulting from abortions?