Tricksey little ......

That charming fresh faced innocence that we cherish in our children seems to be destroyed by one of two juggernauts as our lives skip along the path towards maturity.  An engulfing cloud of credulity or a tidal wave of cynicism.  "April the first" seems to polarize these sharply contrasting opposites.  One camp sardonic and disbelieving about everything they read whilst another camp mind numbingly gullible.  Me? I worked all morning and missed all the fun, thankfully.  One rather incisive read about the media's failure to instil any confidence in the integrity of journalism and hence utterly failing to trick us on April 1st is here, or is it?  you'll have to click to check.....

Greed is good

		Is it? Is it really?  Do we teach it? encourage it? revere it?  Greed takes hold of weak people and twists them into snarling sociopaths, shaped like human beings but missing some vital components of human existence such as;  integrity, community, ethics.   It is possible, initially, to be conned by the facsimile of humanity as it is presented but scratch the surface and that shell, which echoes with the cries of futility, stands bare in front of you.  Any endeavour, whatever its nature, will ultimately fail if it has at its core a selfish desire. The tragedy of the commons is no apocryphal parable, it is not solely an ancient moral, it is a truism.  It is a breach of a fundamental tenet of our existence that some amongst us defile to the detriment of all.

Didactic or Polemic? You decide - PART I

Not being a student of history, its often difficult for me to locate important events on a timeline and to see their relative importance and why they may have an influence on our lives today.  The hypothesis that humans have a single origin was published by Darwin in 1859.  There is significantly more evidence to support this theory today,  apparently hominids diverged from chimpanzees 5-7 million years ago and a discovery within the last decade puts this nearer the earlier date.  Modern humans, Homo Sapiens evolved in Eastern Africa 200,000 to 140,000 years ago and using genetic testing a much more accurate map of human ancestry and migration to all inhabited parts of the world is now available.

Apparently there is still much academic debate, which occasionally spills over to mainstream media, regarding the Recent African Origin (RAO) model.  Around 60,000 years ago a group of 150-200 early humans made it out of Africa and proceeded to populate the rest of the planet.  Ultimately surviving all earlier hominids that had journeyed out of Africa previously.  Looking at the timeline at the top, in the last 800,000 years (80% of the last section of the 7) there were eight ice ages, each interspersed with warmer periods of around 10,000 years.  The impact of the extreme cold on the planet does not only have the obvious effect, that of the ice sheets advancing across the northern hemisphere cutting off vital resources for these hunter gatherer communities, but also the locking up of water in these sheets meant that lower rainfall turned half the land between the tropics into desert.  A torrid time then for the human race.  About 12,000 years ago the last ice age was drawing to an end - temperatures rose, vegetation returned and animals spread into the former wastelands.  The hunters followed.  By this time in the Near East and Central America these humans had begun to develop new ways of producing food, farming had started.  During the 150,000 years that preceded this time, modern humans numbered only in their millions and had migrated the globe foraging and hunting in small groups.  This fundamental change in human behaviour signalled the start of the transition to modern society.

The Levant is an imprecise word with sometimes emotive definitions but in general it can be thought of to cover the area shown in the picture.  I have chosen the picture that has a very arbitrary shading and uses ancient names for the regions comprising it, clearly modern day  Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories fall within this region.  It is believed that the origin of the word is from archaic French and refers to 'rising' as the Sun rises in the East.  This crucible of humanity is where 10,000 years ago these once migratory small groups of humans had advanced their agriculture sufficiently to allow them to remain in one location permanently.  This is worth absorbing.  After 7 million years from the split from chimpanzee, 200,000 years after modern Humans evolved, 60,000 years after migrating out of Africa, after beginning to domesticate animals and selecting genetically superior plants to farm, finally Humanity started to take root.  Small villages with partially subterranean dwellings were clustered together in a community.  Around 8000 BC then, during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA), the world's first known town, Jericho, appeared in the Levant and was surrounded by a stone wall and contained a population of 2000-3000 people and a massive stone tower.   It was a further thousand years before the inhabitants of modern day China would start cultivating rice and farming appeared in parts of the Aegean, it was not until c 4000BC before this reached the shores of Britain and maize was first cultivated in Modern Ecuador and Columbia around 3000BC.  Tune in for part II, where I will explore what these pioneers in the Levant, our ancestors,  did with all their spare time, now they were not hunting for food every waking moment.
  

Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex | Video on TED.com

Matt Ridley: When ideas have sex | Video on TED.com

If you can get past the attention grabbing title, this is actually a very interesting lecture.  The premise is a simple one; communication, sharing, support are the reason why humans have evolved.  Enlightened self interest.  Stunning thought, there isn't a single person on the planet that knows how to make a pencil!  Mining the graphite, harvesting the wood, manufacturing the tools to make it are all skills held by many people collectively but not in a single mind.

Don't do the crime

..... if you can't do the time.

So, I guess it's in some way inevitable with modern cars, no training for 20-25 years and a certain complacency that we all seem to acquire with driving.  I've been caught speeding.  The social acceptability of this crime is clearly changing.  Depending on context and era, certain crimes are deemed acceptable one moment and then completely unacceptable the next.  At some point in this nation's history, killing a Scotsman would have won me many accolades right now - unless he was in downing street, I'm guessing there would be a public outcry.  During my lifetime, I remember chuckling with Pop (my grandfather) about how he seemed to drive better when he'd had a couple of beers!  This would be unconscionable in today's society only 25 years later.  Thus I hang my head in shame, I'm not proud, yes I was clocked speeding.

Before I go on, there is a brief anecdote about the actual incident that, should your opinion of me not be on the floor already, will make it fall further.  For fear of turning into Ronnie Corbett I'll be brief.

I was heading to Basingstoke one morning, not far from my home, entering the village of Moulsford.  This village has two schools directly on the main road, one of which Will went to for many years.  Quite rightly the speed is 30mph, as I approached the village, as ever, I slowed to 30mph.  When I rounded the slight bend I saw a mobile speed van parked in the lay-by.  I checked my speedo, c. 30mph good, so I piously drove by with a self-satisfied grin on my face.  I then proceeded to text as many contacts in my mobile phone as I could find who I knew would be driving through Moulsford.  I have left this purposely ambiguous as to whether I was driving or not as the law on mobile phone usage has changed recently.  Plausible deniability and self incrimination are not so comfortable bed fellows.

So it was with much swearing and protestation as to my innocence that I read the notice that I had been clocked doing 34mph on that very day!!  After my ranting affirmation that I would take this to the European Courts for a ruling had subsided, eventually I was calm enough to discuss the document with Anne.  There was an opportunity to opt for paying £60 to go on a "Speed Awareness Course".  No need to tell the insurance company, no need to get 3 [more] points on my licence.  It sounded too good to be true, just the catch of course - it was a 4 hour session.  Still it had to be better than the points, right?

Actually, it was much better.  Clearly, there have been many punters through the doors of this "voluntary" course.  The course presenter was very good, he had heard it all, he knew what people were going to say before they said it, and he had all the answers.   Interestingly I can honestly say the 4 hours flew past and I feel much better informed about all the nonsense that we carry around with us about speeding, speed cameras and road signage.  I only hope that the shift in attitude that I have felt myself over the last few years has just taken a jump to a level that will help decrease road deaths.  What was quite worrying was that many of the attendees when asked to select answers from a multiple choice quiz about the highway code, failed.  If they were to take their driving test today, they would not pass.

Some thoughts:
In 2007 There were 247,780 road casualties in the UK.  There were 27,774 serious (life changing) injuries and critically there were 2,946 fatalities.  That is around 9 people every day die on our roads.
OK that's still better than the 70's proportionately.  Today 3k deaths out of 34M drivers and in the 70's it was 9k deaths out of 12M drivers.  We have improved from 9 deaths per 10,000 drivers to 1 death per 10,000 drivers but I don't think we should get complacent, that is still 9 people dying per day with the highest proportion of child deaths in Europe.

When the police attend an accident they have to choose from 54 categories as to what they think the cause of the accident is.  25% have excessive speed as the primary choice.  Over 75% have it as one of the top 3 reasons.  Speed is a major cause of accident and therefore death on the roads.

Roads are classified as Urban, Rural or Motorway there are some counterintuitive accident and death rates associated with this.  Where do accidents occur? Motorway 4%, Rural 25% and Urban 71%. Where do people die? Motorway 6%, Rural 54% and Urban 40%  The high rates of accident are simply related to the times that you are required to make a decision, on a motorway its rare in the town its common.  When we make decisions we are prone to errors.  The high rates of death in the town are the pedestrians, children and cyclist we kill.  On the rural roads it's just the myriad inanimate and animate objects that we are able to hit at high speed.

Conclusions:
Attitudes to speeding are changing - mine most definitely has, your tax payers contribution to my course has paid off.  Education and training surrounding driving is woefully inadequate - we should all be electing to do this type of course.  The driving test and maintaining your knowledge of the highway code should be tested much more stringently and regularly.

Cultural Diversity

Qu: Has the environment that promotes cultural and thus genetic diversity subsided? And what will be the impact on society and human evolution?

Genetic similarity of breading partners has long been associated with deformity and poor mental health, from the decline of the Pharaohs to jokes about Norfolk, this appears to be a truism.  In order to ensure genetic diversity humanity has had to rely on a range of surrogate markers of "difference". You look different, or more specifically you come from a different migratory tribe or ever since civilizations have settled in particular location, you come from a different land. Often this desire for cultural distinctiveness, that I suggest is primarily to nurture the health of our species globally, has been misinterpreted as "apartheid" and we end up with the likes of Nick Griffin both socially and genetically. I believe the "Nick Griffin" effect is more to do with competition over resources. See previous blog about the tragedy of the commons and enlightened self interest.  This type of person sees the immediate self interest of cultural identity, usually based around resources such as jobs, land, power, valuables or food — as the primary motivator for remaining culturally distinct.  They do not see that identifying who you are is a way of advertising yourself to somone who is genetically different.  Trade and social interaction with the tribe next door is apparently important for short term tactical reasons such as politics or resources, but has been vital for the diversity needed for the evolution of humanity.  Professor Winston has produced some interesting documentaries looking at the reasons why humans subconsciously select a mate.

Living, as we do now, in the global village — where travel is cheap (albeit environmentally expensive), telecommunications are accessible and new media social interconnectedness is vast and growing, we have no need (or derive no competitive edge) to align ourselves to a tribe or locate ourselves permanently in a specific region.  Will this create homogeneity of heterogeneity?  So if competitive advantage is not a sufficient draw to keep us in culturally and genetically distinct groups, and technology is allowing as to interact socially over vast distances will we become more similar or more different?  I can see a utopian humanity where we are one pan global race, the human race, with significant genetic diversity distributed evenly, not clustered, across the population.  If this is our destiny, if cultural diversity will diminish and genetic diversity will become homogeneous what of society?  Will politics and social governance structures become more global?  I'll think I'll save that for the next post.

Sent from my iPhone