Development of the Family/Speculation on the First Units of Society

"Human females have hidden external genitalia and do not advertise estrus, thus differing from females of other primate species. Both men and women, when bonded, invite continuous and frequent intercourse. The practice is genetically adaptive: it ensures that the woman and her child have help from the father. For the woman, the commitment secured by pleasurable nonreproductive intercourse is important, even vital in many circumstances. Human infants, to acquire large organized brains and high intelligence, must go through an unusually long period of helplessness during their development. The mother cannot count on the same level of support in the community, even in tightly knit hunter-gatherer societies, that she obtains from a sexually and emotionally bonded mate." Robert Ardrey, The Hunter Hypothesis 1976

"When this happened, the male acquired a motive for keeping the female, or, speaking more generally, his sexual objects, near him; while the female, who did not want to be separated from her helpless young, was obliged, in their interests, to remain with the stronger male." Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents 1929 Book IV footnote

The family is the first unit of society. A true family involves a bond between offspring and parents who invest in offspring something other than their gametes and birthing. Animal life until the influence of culture is shaped primarily by natural selection which decides what is inherited by posterity.

Not all living things have sex. Reproduction by multiplication creates offspring with most of the same DNA as the parent. With sex, offspring have half of each parent's DNA, and the individual must find and be a partner fit enough to ensure the survival of their genes in changing environments over generations. Sexes evolved it is thought because it offers greater genetic variation relative to asexual reproduction for future generations to continually adapt to parasites, the "Red Queen" hypothesis. Why two sexes? It seems to have been the most stable arrangement due to its popularity but isn't the only way things could have gone.

Sex is the most important bond between animals besides birth, but in most animals this occurs during a small part of the year, heat season, and the male and female don't stick around with each other after that. Another bond is that between offspring and mother, but this becomes an important bond later with birds who have nests and pair bonds and mammals who give live birth and provide fluids to their young after birth. Reptiles just lay and bury eggs and leave them to hatch on their own. Giving live birth and providing milk gives mammal females a stronger bond to offspring than reptiles and their eggs.

Our distant evolutionary ancestors didn't have specialized sexual organs. They had a cloaca like birds and reptiles, a single hole for excrement and fertilization. The specialization of genitalia is a later acquisition in developmental history. Placental mammals, most mammals, don't have a cloaca. The reason is that most mammals don't lay eggs; the embryo develops internally and demands fluids provided by the mother, thus specializing sexual organs from the birthing process.

The "invention" of specialized genitals is because of the gestation and live birth of mammals. This is the first step in sexual organs becoming divorced from other bodily functions and sexual activity becoming more than a reproductive activity, leading to other bonds between sexes. Both greater mammalian maternal attachment to the child and greater sexual attachment of males to females are linked to these anatomical changes.

The major biological breakthrough was sexuality becoming continuous rather than periodic. Most animals go through seasons of heat and rut, reproducing during a particular time of the year. Human and ape females go through monthly cycles of ovulation and can have sex year round. There aren't as obvious signs for female ovulation, by "hiding" ovulation regular sexual activity is encouraged. Unlike chimpanzees and other apes however, human female sexual organs aren't on display and don't give the obvious sign of ovulation. This is the first step toward social bonding as males have a motive for being around females continuously. Continual sexual receptivity and "concealed" ovulation.

Strengthening the sexual bond is face to face sex rather than from behind, which is almost exclusive to humans. Having genitals and not a cloaca is the first reason for this, as is being bipedal with the organs on display, with greater lower limb locomotion. This creates an affective bond, individualizing the sexual experience. This would be quite adaptive to get males to stick around to invest in their offspring.

Having a big brain requires a long period of physical development outside of the womb. Our big heads wouldn't fit through the birth canal if allowed to grow any larger, and so we're born premature. It takes over a year for a baby to walk, whereas foals can get and go when they're born. Its not for 15 or 20 years that we're considered adults.

A basic sexual division of labor would emerge from differences in parental investment in offspring which would be considerable to develop those big heads; man the hunter and woman the gatherer. The father would go out and hunt/find food to provide for the child and the mother would spend time caring for the child, feeding. This would be due to a stronger bond between mother and child because she always knows the child is hers whereas the male cannot be certain. The mother's mobility is limited by the child as carrying the youngling would immobilize at least one arm and limit activity to gathering within the area. Men with less of an attachment to the child would go hunt. Since a man only invests his sperm at one moment for the development of a child whereas a woman has to carry the fetus for nine months, women should be more "choosy" when it comes to a mate. A male would have to demonstrate their commitment by provision of resources. This would be done in competition with other men who if not successful have to wait at least nine months for another chance or find another partner. In terms of children, women are guaranteed a child if pregnancy is successful.

The limited mobility of bipedal motion, with no wings, and the long time it takes to develop physically due to large heads precludes multi-generational life. Having a campsite to go home to where women and children would be would be advantageous due to limited mobility. A mother can't just fly off and start her own nest like birds. Most likely she would stay with members of the group, or possibly join another group presumably of the male partner (matrilocal versus patrilocal residence). Having a home camp would preclude multi-generational living. Though life expectancy was low, the number partially dragged down by high infant morality, some of those who survived into adulthood could assist care for grandchildren. This "investment", presumably by the mother's parents, wouldn't be as much as a mate would provide, but would certainly help. Knowledge could be passed down directly from generation to generation, a gerontocracy of knowledge.

Always operating with this first unit of society is kin selection. All of this investment would be adaptive because of its promotion of inclusive fitness; propagation of genes of the individual as well as relatives sharing genes. A child shares half its genes with both parents and siblings, a fourth of genes with grandparents and half-siblings and uncles/aunts, and an eighth of genes with cousins and great-grandparents. Hunter gatherers lived in small bands of 10 to 100 people who were most likely related in some way. Sexual couples all having their kids could continually mate together. Could the children of Adam and Eve avoid incest in sufficient numbers? What effect would this level of relatedness have on social life compared to contemporary society?

Larger social groups like tribes could have emerged from the practice of exogamy, individuals leaving a group to find partners not related to them to prevent incest. Perhaps men stole women from a rival group, something that began the Trojan war in Homer's Iliad. Or men challenged the men of another group to battle and the outcome could've joined members of the two groups. The resolution of the conflict between families could've been like the wergeld payment of old Germanic law in which restitution for theft, damage, injury or murder was paid to the victim's family to prevent a blood feud between the families of the victim and perpetrator, Hatfields and McCoys style enmity. The practices of brideprice and dowry, which are different, could also be reflective of an origin to larger social organization from a merging of different families through a mutually acceptable agreement. Maybe exogamy began with men leaving the group since a surplus of men doesn't lend to as much reproductive opportunity as a surplus of women to fewer men. A polygamous situation could have sparked this male exogamy by monopolizing multiple women to a single or few men and leaving the other men with no reproductive prospects in the group.

Is Group Selection Viable?

I feel like EO Wilson is trying to do two things in The Social Conquest of Earth 2012. One is to defend multilevel selection versus individual genetic selection by using ants, bees, and termites as examples of eusocial species and the compare/contrast them to humans. The second thing is to demonstrate that humans really are altruistic/eusocial on a real level because the mechanism of group selection operates on us at a genetic level.

Back in the 1970s when he coined the term sociobiology Wilson was a proponent of individual inclusive fitness. Inclusive fitness is the view that natural selection acts on the level of genes which through the vehicle of the individual organism aim to pass themselves on to the next generation. The two forms of altruism that can occur with inclusive fitness are kin selection, direct benefit to relatives who share genes by different degrees, and reciprocal altruism in which one helps others for benefit in return, “you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours.”

Group selection also operates at a genetic level but sees genes as influencing individual behavior toward their social group which is a unit selected for genetic expression. Group selection was more widely accepted before the 1960s and 1970s when mathematical models of individual fitness proved themselves more useful. Since the 1990s however a repackaging of group selection has come about called multilevel selection, proposed by David Sloan Wilson (no relation to EO Wilson). Selection does occur on the individual level, but can also occur on the group level under certain conditions, hence multilevel. Genes they would argue already operate on different levels on individuals, whether it be protein formation or eye color. If groups are a concrete enough influence and compete with one another, then genes can be selected for individuals which orient them to the good of the group. Wilson seems to have switched his position because of his work with ant colonies and what to him seems to be research conflicting with inclusive fitness.

The case for multilevel selection as existing at all is the most interesting even for those who disagree. The best parts of the book are the middle and latter parts which discusses eusocial colonies. Eusocial means “true social”; organisms which behave and sacrifice their lives for the good of others. Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, termites, ants) are the best example of eusocial organisms in which their many members cooperate for the good of the hive/colony, sacrificing themselves in defense and not breeding, only the queen doing so. But as Wilson points out most organisms and even most insects aren’t eusocial. “The twenty thousand known species of eusocial insects, mostly ants bees wasps and termites, account for only 2 percent of the approximately one million known species of insects. Yet this tiny minority of species dominate the rest of the insects in their numbers, their weight, and their impact on the environment.” Eusociality is rare, but if the conditions are met, it can be very advantageous.

So what are the conditions for eusociality? There are two important preliminary steps: 1) a defensible nest, and, 2) multigenerational division of labor. Birds make the first step of having nests, but don’t stay around the young long enough for step 2. In an ant colony the queen stays and the workers forage for food. Multigenerational living is what creates the group. The parents or older generations stay with the young past childhood and exert a greater influence, create stronger bonds. Eusociality works because everyone in the colony is related, born of the queen. The insects aren’t altruistic the we think of it, they are really the “robotic extension of the mother’s genome.” The ants are the extended phenotype of the queen. A home to return to gives an incentive to work together, dividing the labor, as some must maintain the home and others to find food. Wilson admits this isn’t the altruism we think of, which is on the individual level and toward strangers for no benefit to the individual and instead a cost. But it demonstrates to him the possibility of the group level of selection.

Eusociality has further steps to become adaptive. 1) formation of groups 2) nest 3) alleles for eusocial traits 4) favorable environmental forces 5) group selection sufficient to produce changes. The third step is very important, the alleles which are altruistic must be capable of genetic selection. Flexible alleles capable of different expression help the division of labor. For these alleles to be selected favorable environmental forces must be present.

Wilson says that for humans these are large body size and limited mobility which make us dependent on each other. We need protection when traveling as we don’t go very fast on two legs, and females can’t easily leave and start their own family because of their limited mobility as well as that of the infant which can’t walk for at least a year. It takes a while to develop our big brains, so we go through a long period of physical dependency on others.

For vertebrates eusociality is extremely uncommon. Only the naked mole rat and, Wilson claims, humans have made it to true sociality. The case for human eusociality doesn’t actually begin with our big brains, as there isn’t a strong correlation between brain size and eusocial behavior. Apes are quite smart and have rudimentary social communication but aren’t truly altruistic.

So what are the causes/evidence for humans being eusocial? Humans have defensible campsites as well as multigenerational living. Having campsites is something predatory carnivore species like wolves and lions have, to return to after hunting and to protect offspring when away. Humans stuck around for a long time after the birth of children to raise them to maturity, which takes a long time. The argument is really that the transition to hunting life with the challenges of the last ice age are what changed us from a primate social order to eusociality because of a home base, greater male cooperation and investment in offspring, women raising children for a long period of time, growing brain size enabled by all of this and finally technological innovation with the control of fire and later agriculture. Humans live in social groups, though these were much smaller in Paleolithic times, 30 to 100. Likely it was that everybody in the group was related and being social also means excluding as well as including; non-kin. Having multigenerational living, an extended family, with a basic division of labor would be the factors inducing eusociality.

William Hamilton came up with the famous formula for inclusive fitness, rb>c; the degree of kinship to the altruist times the benefit to the recipient must be greater than the cost to the altruist for altruistic behavior to occur. Wilson reverses the equation and argues that sometimes organisms cooperate not because they are related genetically, but are related because they cooperate. The criticism Wilson sort of touches on is how the hell does an organism know it’s degree of relatedness to others? Also do organisms calculate the costs and benefits of every action? Most of this behavior in social encounters occurs without conscious choice, so something else is operating. It is genetic selection, but of what kind? The example in the book is the Westermarck effect; we aren’t as sexually attracted to people we grow up with. This is an example of behavior evolved for a specific social purpose which benefits the species, preventing incest. The effect applies to even non-kin if one is raised in close enough proximity early on. It is a pro-social adaptation which can operate without even knowledge of genetic relatedness.

What Wilson wants to argue for humans is that human altruism is genuine, rooted in our genes, and not just from relatedness or an extended phenotype. What seems to be going on is what is called coercive empathy or negative altruism. Emotions of stress and anger are produced when acting in certain nonadaptive selfish ways, so that one literally feels the pain inflicted onto others. Presumably this has to do with proposed mirror neurons which activate the same areas of the brain for certain activities we observe in others. The amygdala emotionally charges memories of our earliest relationships which form attachment patterns later in life. We feel pleasure at the punishment of those who don’t follow our expectations of behavior towards other, displacing our own anxieties which in turn reinforces our own expectations. All this is prior to the rational judgement of the cerebral cortex, which is above the amygdala-limbic system and evolved later. Some physiological adaptations like a visible white sclera, crying, and blushing make shame easier to induce as our emotions tend to follow what our body is doing. Individuals and groups would have their genes passed on because of these mechanisms/behaviors which benefit us in our social lives, rather than the genetic advantage leading us to as unconscious Machiavellians to manipulate people’s emotions.

The incentive for developing group selection is competition with other groups. If certain traits allow the group to outcompete another group for resource conflict, then they will pass their genes on.

I’ve thought of some mechanisms that would allow group selection to occur. All would have to increase the genetic relatedness of the group over time, relative to other groups. The most simple is reproductive isolation over time. People breeding amongst themselves for many generations will come to resemble each other genetically and in phenotype more than outsiders. They should favor those who look like them, because they are probably more related to them than other people. This we’d call ethnocentrism. This would work relative to other groups though, as individuals would still be as genetically related to others within their group as outsiders are related to their own ingroup. But greater competition with other groups would make the intragroup differences more salient and induce greater ethnocentrism. Presumably people would evolve different traits according to their environmental challenges over time other than just appearance which would differentiate them from and help compete with other groups:

-As humans moved latitudinally away from the equator’s tropical climate into colder territory, paternal investment would become greater. Women couldn’t gather year round, and men had to take up hunting meat. Those in the colder climate with changing seasons, eurasians, would develop: greater paternal investment, later sexual maturity, less sexual dimorphism, and greater intelligence to survive and plan in the regularly changing environment. Such persons would follow a K-selection reproductive strategy, K for competitive, which emphasizes quality of births over quantity, which is R-selection, R for rate.-

Consanguinity, marriage between first cousins, would make individuals more genetically related within the group than strangers within their groups. Polygamy, mostly polygyny of several females to a male, would also produce more genetic similarity and approach something like the eusocial condition of insects who reproduce from a single queen. Even when polygamy is proscribed, it occurs de facto with adultery, bastards, with particularly powerful men, and also divorce where the same man can have several children from different women.

Humans overall compared to other animals are moderately polygamous, serially monogamous, and are more K-selected. This differs between groups and would explain different survival strategies and levels of ethnocentrism.

The Hunting Hypothesis: Why Aren't We Apes?

The Hunting Hypothesis 1976 is the capstone of Robert Ardrey's "nature of man" series of books: African Genesis 1961, The Territorial Imperative 1966, and The Social Contract 1970. Throughout these books Ardrey promoted a different view of human nature than the one reigning by the mid twentieth century. "Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born" is the first sentence of the series. The commonly accepted origin for mankind was either in Asia, the discovery of Homo Erectus in Indonesia in the late 19th century, or in Europe as the infamous piltdown man fraud in Britain 1912 convinced many for over 40 years. In either case it wasn't in Africa that modern Homo Sapiens evolved, a reflection not only of archaeological discoveries and hoaxes at the time but also racism and ethnocentrism. The skeletons found there were seen as too primitive and close to the ape to be our direct ancestors. It was also thought that the expansion of the human brain is what separated us from apes and made us human. The skull of piltdown man was actually a Homo sapiens skull fitted with a modified orangutan jaw to make it appear that the big brain preceded decrease in jaw size, preceding a change in diet. Humans must originally have been scavengers or even vegetarians at first, rarely acquiring meat. We were smart peaceful mostly vegetarian apes who learned to walk on two legs because of our ability to make tools and because we searched the ground for food instead of trees.

As for human nature in the traditional social science paradigm, that is determined by culture. Only our physiology is inherited, not our behavior and social practices. Evolution just gives us fixed instinctual responses and physical response capabilities to stimuli. Anything more complicated is socially learned early in life from authority figures. It is society which makes us violent, we're either good or amoral by nature. This is the view shared more or less by the influential behaviorist and Marxist perspectives, see Lysenkoism in the USSR which opposed genetic research. Sigmund Freud applied evolutionary theory in his anthropological/cultural writings, though not always with modern Darwinian mechanisms. The blank slate view was reinforced by the discovery of pre-agricultural people in the "new world" who observers concluded represented how humans originally lived rather than a separate path from our ancestors, much like the idiotic "we come from monkeys" critics lob at evolutionary theory, as if primates today are the same as they were millions of years ago. Also the fact that many animal studies were done in capativity, the conditions which alter animal behavior. Thorndike's cats, Pavlov's dogs and Skinner's pigeons. 

By the 1950s this view was being challenged. Raymond Dart discovered Australopithecus Africanus in South Africa back in 1924 and identified it as the beginning of our line, but was dismissed for decades. In 1953 Dart wrote the article The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man which argued that man evolved from a line of apes in Africa which became reliant on hunting and eating meat from evidence of fractured bones in A Africanus caves. Some primates like baboons will eat meat when nothing else is left, but A Africanus made it part of its diet, and with large beasts. Upright posture, freeing hands for tool use, would only be made adaptive to use weapons for hunting prey. The A Africanus skulls indicate that decreased dentition preceded a big brain, as eating meat cut up with tools along with use of fire would deliver a lot more energy and less mastication than fruit and tubers. Man didn't evolve to be upright as Friedrich Engels thought just by labor and technology freeing the hands, but by a need to hunt and subsist below the trees which gave us a reason to use tools. Meat eating and as we'll see changes in social organization preceded expansion in intelligence.

The transition to hunting ape most likely didn't happen this far back in history with A Africanus however. These hominids probably were scavengers and opportunists for meat and mostly ate fruits and nuts. However by Homo Erectus nearly 2 million years ago, who also discovered fire and left Africa, the hunting transition became part of human nature.

Robert Ardrey took Dart's work and presented it to the public, making it an all encompassing story of human origins. Back in the Miocene epoch about 20 to 5 million years ago forests were more abundant and the primates flourished. There was plenty of food for the vegan primate diet and tree cover to live in rather than facing formidable terrestrial predators. But then an unremitting drought and diminished rainfall wiped out millions of square miles of Miocene forest. The climate turned against the apes by the time of the Pliocene; the forests of Africa began to disappear and ape populations have slowly dwindled ever since. What was left was the environment of the savanna. To survive in this environment an ape would have to compete with the specialized claws and fangs of land predators for the new food source of raw meat. Man was expelled to the east of Eden, and came to bear the mark of Cain. The only was to thrive was to adapt from the ape legacy what could be used for predation: starting with a greater upright stature and hands specialized from feet and then sweat glands and less body hair for going long distances. 

The great question of The Hunting Hypothesis is why are we human beings and not apes? We diverged from our common ancestor with chimps 5 to 7 million years ago and have taken radically different paths. Chimps are known to hunt small game occasionally, though it's not an important part of their diet. This implies that at some point chimp ancestors could have taken the hunting ape path. Humans retain much of their ape ancestry such as a body fitted for general tasks not specialization, reliance on vision, a natural curiosity, desire for varied taste pallet and diet, social behavior and intelligence and the higher apes walk upright for periods of time or in a hunched position. The social behaviors that make us different like sharing food, cooperation on hunts, and keeping a home base are shared with meat eating predator animals like wolves and lions. Before better weapons like bow and arrow, slings, or throwing spears were developed hunting would have been most effective in groups. Cooperation and strategy would have to suffice for mans inferior hunting equipment. Baboons travel in large numbers so the rudiments of social organization were availiable from ape life. Hunting life would mean becoming a more territorial animal with a sexual division of labor, men going out to hunt and women protecting the home. Males would have to learn to trust one another, to work together and share the rewards of their collective effort, and eventually develop a different social order than one with the alpha ape on top having primary access to women and food. Some greater access to women had to occur, be it monogamous pair bonds or sexual promiscuity, which occurred with early humans is still debated. With agriculture and a surplus of wealth the alpha male emperor with a harem of females would be reestablished in early societies around the earth: Babylon, Egypt, China, the Aztecs, the Incas. But by the time of hunter gatherers relative egalitarianism between males and monogamy would for the most part rule. Multiple wives as well as slaves are costly. 

Ardrey's project has a larger goal than establishing hunting and eating meat as crucial in human development. This is to link behavior with evolutionary development; that certain behaviors and social practices are due to genetic inheritance and behavior itself produced evolutionary changes. Anatomical change comes about as a consequence of behavioral change. "Birds do not fly because they have wings; they have wings because they fly." There are roughly three "instinctual" or imperatives that drive behavior in all organisms. These are dominance, territory, and sexuality. Animals have a "pecking order" which determines who has access to food and territory. The importance of dominance is that whoever can outwit or brow beat their fellows into submission is more likely to pass on their genes, and so animals have a disposition to fall in line, like a castration complex. Ardrey appears to disagree with Freud and psychoanalysis that sexuality is the driving force in behavior, instead arguing that those who don't come on top or outcompete don't get to reproduce and so dominance is actually preliminary to acquiring a mate. However the position that sexuality but not dominance/aggression is innate is really that of Neo-Marxists like Herbert Marcuse who tried to incorporate Freud into the general Marxist canon, minus the aggressive drive. Individuals are motivated by drives, but the species is defined by reproduction and so there will evolve ways to gear sexuality towards behavior which will secure reproductive fitness. 

"First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women." Scarface 

Sexuality is the drive that produces greater bonds between individuals. Most animals go through seasons of heat and rut, reproducing only a single part of the year. There isn't an incentive for the mates to stick around after fertilization, and sex isn't a very pleasurable affair for many animals. The incentive of continual sexual activity isn't there. Regular periods of ovulation, estrus, means year round sexual receptivity and an incentive for the male to stick around. Once the eggs are laid for reptiles or chicks born for birds the parents don't stick around the offspring. These two things begin to change with mammals and particularly with primates. Giving live birth and providing fluids to offspring extends the amount of time the parent spends with the child, giving a stronger social bond. "Primate sexuality was the consequence, not the cause, of primate social life. Basic to that life was the handicap of slow growing young, the long years of learning, and the immobilization and vulnerability of mothers. Without the group, few would be the young who lived to maturity." Continual sexual receptivity became adaptive because it ensured greater paternal investment in the female and children, needed because of the long time it takes for us to mature. Sex became personalized with face to face sex, itself a product likely of bipedalism. Human females have "concealed ovulation" in that most of her sexual organs are not on display and isn't immediately apparent when ovulation is occurring. So the prospect of sex year round for the male and greater time raising offspring for females is what gives us our family unit. 

Territory is the drive that Ardrey has the most to say, as he wrote an entire book on it. Dominance and sex are pretty well known, though those on the political left downplay the former and those on the right would downplay the latter as determining human behavior. Territory was not really considered relevant to human behavior until The Territorial Imperative came out. Anthropologists used to think that scarce resources and/or property ownership are what caused social conflict, and in turn the struggle for dominance. But it isn't as if all people are under harsh scarcity all the time, there can be plenty out there but none for Peter is Paul monopolizes the good land. Those who don't have territory also have bad prospects for mating. Territory is very important to animals as it is defined within a species as well as between males which decides access to females as well as resources. 

The concept of territory has some misconceptions. Keeping territory isn't about killing intruders or taking revenge, just repelling them. Human aggression and war have to do other factors as well as territory. For most of the time, people can just avoid one another especially if populations are low, which they would be in the envrionment of our ancestors without agriculture, and space is large. Humans are so generalizable and curious that we can travel in succeed in a variety of different environments. But if somebody intrudes on your territory, the first instinct isn't to welcome them. As Thomas Hobbes noted we still lock our doors even when we live under a state with laws, sometimes locking rooms or possessions away from people we live with or welcome into our home. In Anglo law at least an individual does not have to retreat of defending their home. In the US many states have adopted the castle doctrine-the right to use firearms when on your property. But as divisive as territory is it also brings people together.

Ardrey has the amity-enmity complex to apply the territorial complex to civilization; humans protect their own and destroy their enemies because of the same impulse of defending what is theirs. This complex purports to explain the social behaviors altruism, loyalty, charity and mercy as compatible with the struggle for survival. We identify with people like us because of who we're against and vice versa we identify who we're like. Plato identified this as a quality of the guardian in his Republic; fierce towards enemies and loyal toward masters, like a dog. No doubt the transition to hunting intensified the dual nature of the complex, extending who identify with as well as who we're against. From the family to the clan, to tribe, to nation against other families, clans, tribes, and nations. As populations increase and come in contact, both unity and division is the result. It's no secret that the enemy of an enemy is a friend, which is why the complex works on different levels. Families within a nation will unite against an enemy nation in war even if they don't like or know each other. The good of social life is mixed with the bad, and it doesn't seem likely or easy for us to identify with all at the international level and against no one, in spaceship earth. 

The final chapters of the book concern the relationship between human nature and climate, between the last ice age and the current interglacial period. The question for humans after the transition from ape is why did we leave Africa, and what happened to the other hominids living in Eurasia? The answer seems to be a combination of natural curiosity and want of variety from primate past along with new technology from hunting enabling survival. Homo sapiens became Homo sapiens during the last ice age when some of us left Africa and didn't come back. Those that left didn't come back because our evolution transcended the former forests which our ape ancestors once live, and it isn't possible for us to revert back to that lifestyle anytime soon. It was our new technology, eventually fire and dogs, and social organization that allowed us to survive in different environments. Much of the world was frozen over and sea levels far lower than they are today. In addition we had to contend with large land mammals and other hominid species. By the end of the ice age 12,000 years ago humans were the only hominids left, Neanderthals going extinct 30,000 years ago possibly absorbed by the Cro-Magnons or other modern humans. Ardrey argues that the disapearance of the Neanderthals in Europe was genocide, clearing the way for territory. Just look at how much people hate others who differ from them in small ways. But Cro-Magnons inhabited Europe with the Neanderthals for 10,000 years or so without wiping them out, and today both the Cro-Mags and Neanderthals are considered to probably just be homo sapiens. The disappearance is a mystery, but it would follow Ardrey's theories on conflict which don't exclude some interbreeding. As human populations grew and explored new areas, they wouldn't be able to avoid one another and be content to evict intruders. It takes 3-7 miles of hunting range to support one person, claims Ardrey. The possibility of ethnic cleansing was opened up given the same weapons we used to hunt and cut open meat. Individual transgressions would turn into collective ones if a stray male was ganged up on or a female stolen from the camp. Small separate bands could practice avoidance and satisfy the territorial imperative, but no longer. 

Homo sapiens has prospered since the end of the ice age. I myself wondered why if humans in modern form were around for hundreds of thousands of years, why do the earliest civilizations only go back 10,000 years? Its because an interglacial period began 12,000 years ago. By the end of the ice age fire was discovered, wolves domesticated, some men permanently left Africa, and other hominids were gone. Warmer temperatures are better for global human flourishing, opening up new land for agriculture; see the viking colony of Greenland during the medieval warming period. The industrial revolution occurred soon after the end of the "little ice age" around the 19th century and temperatures have risen since. Ardrey thinks humans are doomed, or at least will have their standard of living dramatically reduced, in the long run because of the eventual return of another ice age thousands of years from now. Ardrey today reads like a climate skeptic; he didn't buy into global warming apparently, but then again not so many did back in the 1970s when some mainstream publications warmed of global cooling. Of course there are many climate skeptics/deniers today, the worst who deny any warming trend and the more cogent who attribute it to solar cycles. This dates the book more than anything else, along with a very brief discussion of the then new inclusive fitness view of evolution, which is that organisms evolve to promote their own genes and not that of the group. Ardrey speculates whether his hunter hypothesis follows the some of the logic of group selection, though I don't think it has to given that the argument is that while individuals can behave altruistically, the species' continuation is due to selfish imperatives. Such imperatives can be largely unconscious to the individual, and made to seem virtuous.

I thought The Hunting Hypothesis was quite good. The book is relatively short and very general, but full of informative speculations which go well with his other books. Robert Ardrey's influence is pretty widespread, which can unfortunately dull the impact of his ideas today. That humans came from Africa, weren't peaceful vegans/scavengers, and evolutionary history still has an effect on us aren't as heterodox positions as they once were. The Neo-Darwinian paradigm was developing when he was writing his series, and the popularity of his works gave a ready audience for sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 movie with Arthur C Clark 2001: A Space Odyssey is influenced by Ardrey, most obviously the opening scene when the ape proto-men pick up bones as weapons, something actually mentioned in African Genesis. The jump cut of the bone thrown up into the air to a space probe acknowledges that this change from primate behavior exhibits itself even in the space age. Another director of the same time period Sam Peckingpah read Ardrey; his controversial 1971 film Straw Dogs definitely exhibits the territorial imperative. In general his thesis of human evolution from apes as being due to hunting of meat is widely accepted today, even by honest vegans who like the wisest of us recognize the incongruity between reality and human's desires. Robert Ardrey was a professional playwright before writing his series of books, and here he gave a popular audience his evolutionary tragedy of man.

There is one conclusion derived from the hunting hypothesis that is still debated and relevant today, which is that the switch to a hunting lifestyle for males meant a change to a more pair bond or monogamous living situation for hunter-gatherers, a position taken in The Naked Ape 1967 by Desmond Morris. The recent book Sex at Dawn 2010 uses the evolutionary psychology position to argue that humans were originally promiscuous free lovers, like the bonobo chimps which are as related to us as are regular chimps. Bonobo chimps have egalitarianism between male and females who hunt together and sex is used as an aphrodisiac. Bonobos have face to face sex, something shared with humans and not chimps. So rather than humans being naturally polygamous or monogamous, we had sexual freedom, equality, and because we didn't care about paternity uncertainty or mate guarding, peace. This conclusion is controversial and probably not all true, but not without merit, but it demonstrates the continuing relevance of the hunting hypothesis and reconstruction of our evolutionary past which even the political left is starting to see matters for society today which is a testament to Ardrey's work.

God Told Me to Skin You Alive

God left us to die here
With no proof of his existence
We're subjects trapped in a world of objects
With no knowledge of how we got here

All we can figure out about ourselves: On a planet surrounding a dying star, relatively hairless bipedal former apes who perceive three dimensions of space and one of time, largely unaware of the causes of things.

"Poem" by me, Nicholas Anderson. Above collage by Winston Smith, used as cover art of Green Day's 1995 album Insomniac. 

The Typewriter is Holy: Retrospective on the Beat Generation

This really is the uncensored and complete story. The book is full of interesting stories and little moments which give a very personal understanding of the members of the "beat generation." One story that in particular caught my interest is the account of Lucien Carr biting off glass from his beer bottle; bleeding badly he challenges the others to do the same, and Burroughs enters the room with a try of razor blades and light bulbs as "hor d'ouevres." 

The book's theme is that the beat movement should be seen as an extensive social group with Allen Ginsberg at the center bringing and keeping everybody together. Whether this is totally accurate (this is the first history of the movement I've read) isn't really important. The thesis gives a nice structure to the work and is credible enough. What defines the Beat Generation is a general attitude of life; adults coming of age in the World War Two and post-war years feeling a lack of authenticity and spirituality in American society, who welcomed and experimented with alternative and low life ways of living as personal inspiration. The beats were as intellectual as they were sensual, an aspect overlooked by contemporaries be they reactionaries or hippie baby boomers. 

As for the name the beat generation, it was coined by Jack Kerouac who first heard it from small time thief Herbert Huncke describing the beaten down feeling of the post war conformist culture as well as the spontaneous feeling of jazz music which inspired their work. John Clellon Holmes, whose 1953 book Go is the first beat novel, got to describe the generation to readers in the New York Times and brought the term to public consciousness. And as for the name of this book, it's from a footnote in Howl: "The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!"

The beginning of the beat generation was a chance encounter between college students Allen Ginsberg, a New Jersey native, and Jack Kerouac, from Lowell Massachusetts, at Columbia university during World War II when Allen heard music coming out of Jack's room at the residence halls and decided to visit him. Ginsberg and Kerouac, who was there on a football scholarship, got to know another classmate Lucien Carr and through him David Kammerer, an older homosexual admirer, and through Kammerer William Burroughs, heir to inventor of an adding machine, became part of the group. Burroughs, Carr, and Kammerer's all previously lived in St. Louis Missouri; Kammerer followed Carr to New York and so did Burroughs. Through yet another Columbia student, Hal Chase, Ginsberg and Kerouac got to know Neal Cassady with whom they would make their famous cross country travels. By hanging out with these individuals, the inhibited Allen and Jack got inspiration for their work as well as the ability to transgress social boundaries. This is when the lore of the generation begins, with a story of murder figuring in at the beginning. Kammerer's sexual advances on Carr who was straight weren't welcome and when David tried to follow Lucien on a trip overseas, Lucien stabbed David and threw his body into the water. Kerouac and Burroughs would collaborate on a book about the event, And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Pots which was published only recently, named after a radio report they heard about a zoo fire. Carr got off pretty easily as back then murdering a homosexual wasn't much of an offense, so he literally got away with murder. 

Allen and Burroughs got involved with criminals and criminality through Herbert Huncke, the king of 42nd st, which furthers the story. Herbert was living with Allen and started stashing stolen items there. In 1949 Ginsberg was caught in a police chase in a car with stolen goods and escaped after the car crashed, but was incriminated by the writings left behind. He escaped hard time by pleading insanity and become institutionalized. While institutionalized Allen met Carl Solomon who introduced surrealism to him. Solomon himself was institutionalized for his erratic behavior which was at least partly aesthetic, like throwing potato salad at a lecturer on Dadaism. Solomon actually demanded a lobotomy be performed on him. Allen was so influenced by Carl that he dedicated his famous poem Howl to the man. 

Burroughs sold morphine syringes to Herbert, who thought Bill was FBI due to his attire, an account retold in Burroughs' first novel Junkie. Bill would move to Texas with his common law wife Joan Robinson to try his hand at farming hemp, and then sell it as marijuana. 

While staying in Mexico in the early fifties Burroughs killed his wife Joan. While drinking Joan put a glass on top of her head and dared Bill to shoot it off, like the legend of William Tell. Burroughs was usually a good shot, but he missed and killed Joan. Burroughs left Mexico, was tried in absentia, and for nearly two decades didn't live in the US for any protracted period of time; not coming back permanently until 1974. By then the US changed and was becoming more open to alternative lifestyles, but I suspect it really was Joan's death. He did say that Joan's death made him become a writer. Much of Naked Lunch is inspired by his travels in South America and his time in Tangiers.

The rest of the beat story is mostly geographical. Living and typewriting in Mexico City, Kerouac making his famous travels with Neal Cassady to the west coast, meeting European intellectuals like Duchamp and Celine in Paris at the "beat hotel", Burroughs spending two decades living outside the United States in Europe and Tangier Morocco, and very significantly setting up a west coast cultural movement in San Francisco, making ties to the burgeoning counter culture. Ginsberg moved to San Francisco after failing to rekindle a romance with Cassady in California, his wife didn't approve of it. It was there that Allen gave an important public reading of Howl at the Six Gallery 1955 which was met with great enthusiasm. 

Notoriety of their writing built up slowly over the 1950s. In San Francisco the city lights bookstore run by Lawrence Ferlinghetti published their work in pocket editions and contact was made between the west coast counterculture there with the beats who originated in New York City, along with the so-called subterraneans of Greenwich Village, where a folk music movement would latter blossom. Kerouac's On the Road got a positive review in the New York Times when it finally came out and he was dubbed the voice of a generation. The two high profile censorship court cases of Howl and Naked Lunch also boosted their public profile. It was in San Francisco and the city light bookstore that Ginsberg poem ran into legal trouble, peddling profanity. The judge sided with Ginsberg and the ACLU and accepted the artistic merits of the work. The case also led to an end of censorship of other controversial works Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Naked Lunch was banned in Boston in 1962 which was reversed by the state Supreme Court in 1966. After this decision outright censorship, like the destruction of Wilhelm Reich's books, would become a thing of the past. 

Most people who know of the beats know only of the big three: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S Burroughs and their well known respective works Howl, On the Road, and Naked Lunch. But there were many others important to the movement and who influenced or appeared in their work. Most prominently Neal Cassady who appears as Dean Moriarty in On the Road, and who inspired the spontaneous free writing style used in the book, in a letter sent to Jack describing his sexual conquests. Other important figures besides those I've mentioned were Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the few African Americans Leroi Jones, Diana Di Prima, Ginsberg's lifetime partner later in life Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snider etc. The largely white and male status of the generation is discussed by Morgan in a critical though contextual light. The generation was throughly progressive in its acceptance and practice for many of homosexuality.  Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kammerer were homosexual and Cassady slept with men from time to time. Their writings are the first and most honest portrayals of homosexuality in American literature, and so the pc crowd can get over some of their sins. 

It is still useful to view the history of the beat generation through the three personalities of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs. Ginsberg was the communicator and movement builder of the group, making important relationships with the likes of Bob Dylan. Ginsberg came up in the age not only of repression of homosexuality, but active efforts to reform non hetero behavior through the medical establishment. He actually convinced himself that his homosexuality was a sign of mental insanity, which had taken over his mother. Ginsberg went through psychotherapy which actually convinced him to date women and be straight. Incidentally his mother went through psychiatric surgery, which Ginsberg agreed to with great regret, which turned her into a vegetable. Ginsberg of the three was shy and inhibited, as was Jack, but also it seems the most congenial and ecumenical. His curiosity, desire to experiment, and just to be with people like himself helped to link the people in the book together. Also as mentioned once in the book Allen sort of took on the persona of his Jewish mother, protective and understanding. 

Jack Kerouac is a tragic case. Shy and inhibited like Ginsberg, he was also fairly conservative. Though the heterosexual of the trio, he was married thrice and avoided child payments for the rest of his life, denying paternity. Of the three he is the intellectual spokesman of the generation, who articulated its principles and aimed the most to be a traditional writer. He had a knack of coming up with titles and phrases, "he took life in the raw" is how he describes Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Kerouac really just wanted to be a respected American writer like Thomas Wolfe. Though now recognized as one of the great American novelists by many, in his lifetime he and his writings were the subject of criticism and ridicule. He didn't like the counterculture and distanced himself from the outside world. An important reason for this was his strong attachment to his mother Gabrielle; if Jack never let go of the apron strings he would never get to be his own man. As she aged Jack spent more time and moved in with her, probably something to do with his French Canadian heritage. What did Jack in was his drinking problem, which led to his death and unlikable public persona. He made a serious attempt to kick his habit, recounted in one of his last books Big Sur in the Sierras, but wasn't successful. Kerouac died before reaching 50, in 1969, to be outlived by Ginsberg and Burroughs who lived to the 1990s. Recently, as in twenty first century, there has been "new" material from and about Kerouac such as the 2007 publication of the original taped together scroll manuscript of On the Road, the 2008 publication of the Burroughs collaboration And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Pots mentioned earlier, as well as the 2012 movie adaptation of On the Road directed by Walter Salles, which is okay (don't watch before reading the book). So he lives on.

Burroughs is portrayed as aloof and intellectually eccentric, despite having a deadpan demeanor and dressing in a g-man suit. The oldest of the group he was also the most revolutionary artistically. He along with Brion Gysin pioneered the cut up method: take a page and cut it down the middle and place the halves with halves of other pages to make something completely. This method can open up new ways of reading texts and he claimed see into the future. Much of Burroughs' work enters the realms of fantasy, science fiction, and even horror. There is a dark humor to his writing and along with the anti realism would go on to influence postmodern literature. Burroughs is the one who's influence extends beyond the 1960s to the punk/alternative subcultures, being an inspiration to Ian Curtis of Joy Division and even collaborating with Kurt Cobain before Nirvana went big. Bill even appears in the music video Just One Fix by industrial band Ministry. Director David Cronenberg was heavily influenced by Burroughs with his postmodern horror vision, and even directed a film adaptation of Naked Lunch in 1991 which is also biographical. Burroughs really outlived the beat generation and the 60s counterculture which he didn't like and anticipated the new cultural and youth movements of the late 20th century. 

If Ginsberg is the Jewish mother, Kerouac is the wayward son and Burroughs is the perverted uncle. In terms of their political views Ginsberg was the liberal activist most sympathetic to socialism, Kerouac was conservative, and Burroughs a libertarian maybe leaning to the right. 

Of great interest is the connection between the beats and the 60s counterculture. Cassady was the driver of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' acid trip, recounted in the book The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test. Huncke and Burroughs participated in the 1948 Dr. Alfred Kinsey sexual study of the American male which presaged the sexual revolution. Allen partook along with Kesey in the mk-ultra program, the CIA program which tested LSD. Timothy Leary also associated with the beats but his drug advocacy was not as intellectual as theirs was. Burroughs traveled South America looking for powerful hallucinogenic drugs to inspire his writing. 

The beats were the beginning of the American counter culture all the way back in the 1940s, chiefly in Greenwich Village and San Francisco where later movements grew out of. Kerouac himself claimed that the actual movement ended by the early 50s, whereas in the popular mind beatniks went all the way up to the 1960s, reading poetry to jazz music and wearing all black turtlenecks and sun glasses, playing bongos and smoking cigarettes. When you consider the generation as a social group around Allen Ginsberg, then the generation extends from the 1940s to the 1970s, as this book recounts. 

The beats hold a special place in history. They exist as an example unto only themselves and those who care to listen. They were against the controlling conformist world they came into and were misunderstood by the later counterculture which didn't care for the intellectual and reflective side. I think they exemplified what Americans should be, proud individualists who dare to explore new things, no matter how seemingly strange or dangerous. Their goal was to expand human consciousness into both the lewd and obscene as well as the intellectual and spiritual. The entire capability of human experience, which most movements and cultures throughout history seek to limit to fulfill their agenda. It reminds me of what John Stuart Mill said in response to the simple utilitarian criteria of all pleasures being equal: "it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." While typing away manuscripts their raucous exploits could be given the careful treatment of conscious reflection to cull something greater than the sum of disparate events, and communicate this to willing readers. If you want to understand the members of the beat generation, you have to read and think as well as "be" and "feel". I don't expect you to understand. 

I got interested in the beats back in High School. My interest was consummated when I first read On the Road the summer of my senior year. Around the same time I was fascinated with the book and movie Into the Wild which is about Christopher McCandless' own cross country journey and rejection of the life expected of him. Towards the end of high school I came across a copy of Naked Lunch in a name-your-price bookstore downtown which sold old playboys with a nobody under 18 label. I later befriended a neighbor who I didn't know existed not far from my street who had a little collection of beatnik literature, which is where I read Howl while house sitting. My interest in Kurt Cobain and the music along with the reading Jon Savage's history of the Sex Pistols England's Dreaming in middle school was what convinced me that the ethos of the American counter culture was how I should model my own life. Nothing has pleased me like making connections between the individuals who have have influenced and interested me. Jim Morrison also read On the Road at a formative age. It's the people who expressed themselves in the way they conducted their lives which becomes handed down to posterity who make life something to be treasured. For me it begins historically with beats, like when John Lennon said that before Elvis there was nothing.

We Come From the Water

We come from the water. Our common ancestors from millions of years ago are shared with ocean dwellers today. Land animals only emerged 350 million years ago during the late Devonian period, the age of the fishes. Life itself began in the water, either in the oceans or in pools of water. In either case water containing amino acids is what the first single cellular organisms developed from. The first cities were founded by the water, and our great cities today are by bodies of water. Egypt grew around the Nile, Mesopotamia around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The first philosopher/scientist Thales thought that water was the fundamental element of the universe.

"Thales, the founder of this kind of philosophy, says that it is water (that is why he declares the earth rests on water). He perhaps came to acquire this belief from seeing that the nourishment of everything is moist and that heat itself comes from this and lives by this (for that which anything comes into being is its first principle)- he came to his belief both for this reason and because the seeds of everything have a moist nature, and water is the natural principle of moist things." Aristotle-Metaphysics

Another pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander is supposed to have said that humans originally developed inside the bodies of fish until they were able to look after themselves. This is symbolic both of the long time it takes for humans to mature as well as our oceanic ancestry. Since society developed near the water, before humans could develop their own industry and figure out ways to irrigate we were dependent on bodies of water.

"Animals come into being <from moisture> evaporated from the sun. Humans originally resembled another type of animal, namely fish." Hippolytus-Refutation of all Heresies

"Further, he says that originally humans were born from animals of a different kind, became the other animals can soon look after themselves while humans alone require a long period of nursing; that is why if they had been like this originally they would not have survived." Plutarch-Miscellanies

"Anaximander of Miletus says he thinks that from hot water and earth there arouse fish, or animals very like fish, that humans grew inside them, and that the embryos were retained inside up to puberty whereupon fish like animals burst and men and women emerged already able to look after themselves." Censorinus- On Birthdays

"The descendants of old Hellen actually sacrifice to Poseidon the Ancestor, believing that men grew from the moist substance, as do the Syrians. That is why they revere fish, as being of the same species and the same nurture as themselves. Here their philosophy is better than that of Anaximander. For he says, not that fish and men were born in the same surroundings, but that at first men came into being inside fish and were nourished there-like Sharks- only emerging and taking to land when they were able to look after themselves. So just as fire consumes the matter from which it was kindled (it's own mother and father, as the poet who inserted the marriage of Ceyx and Hesiod's poems said), so Anaximander, having declared that fish are at once fathers and mothers of men, urges us not to eat them." Plutarch-Table Talk

There's a similar "theory" out there today for our direct origins from the water. The heterodox "aquatic ape" hypothesis argues that homo sapiens evolved the physiological features different from other primates like lack of body hair and subcutaneous fat because our ancestors spent some of their lives in the water. There isn't much proof for this and it is a minority position. I first heard of it from the Mermaids: The Body Found mocumentary from the Discovery Channel when to my surprise I learned it was an actual hypothesis. The aquatic ape hypothesis does keep our aqueous heritage on the mind. 

Looking to mythology, the Babylonians supposedly learned the arts of civilization from an amphibious fish-man hybrid named Oannes, also known as Adapa a Promethean figure, who came from the ocean. Oannes is probably the fish-God Dagon who was worshiped by Semitic peoples: the Babylonians, the Philistines, and the Phoenicians. The temple Samson destroyed in the Old Testament was a Philistine temple to Dagon. The name Dagon means something like grain, referring to agriculture, knowledge of which is what inaugurated humans into civilization. 

"At first they led a somewhat wretched existence and lived without rule after the manner of beasts.

But, in the first year after the flood appeared an animal endowed with human reason, named Oannes, who rose from out of the Erythian Sea, at the point where it borders Babylonia. He had the whole body of a fish, but above his fish's head he had another head which was that of a man, and human feet emerged from beneath his fish's tail.

He had a human voice, and an image of him is preserved unto this day.

He passed the day in the midst of men without taking food; he taught them the use of letters, sciences and arts of all kinds. He taught them to construct cities, to found temples, to compile laws, and explained to them the principles of geometrical knowledge.

He made them distinguish the seeds of the earth, and showed them how to collect the fruits; in short he instructed them in everything which could tend to soften human manners and humanize their laws.

From that time nothing material has been added by way of improvement to his instructions.

And when the sun set, this being Oannes, retired again into the sea, for he was amphibious."

Oannes/Dagon is related or identical to the Sumerian God Ea/Enki, as well as Poseidon/Neptune of the Greeks and Romans. Enki was the patron god of man and resided in the first city Eridu. His temple was underwater, and he was described as half-man half-fish, like Oannes. Enki saved life on Earth from the great flood by warning Altrahasis (Utnapishtim in The Epic of Gilgamesh) in a dream and orders him to build a ship like Noah's Ark. 

There is a possible parallel between Dagon and the Egyptian god Osiris. Osiris was castrated and dismembered by his brother Set. Osiris's wife Isis recovered his body parts and brought him back to life, but didn't find his penis. His phallus was swallowed by a fish in the Nile. This fish supposedly became Dagon. 

The name Dagon and the description of him as amphibian teacher to humans, Oannes, may be related to the Dogon people of Mali, Africa. The tribe has a great knowledge of astronomy, claiming their gods come from the distant star Sirius, implying they had contact with or descended from an advanced civilization in their past like Egypt (or maybe aliens...). The Dogon worship ancestral spirits named the Nommo, which means "to make one drink." The Nommo are amphibious creatures with a humanoid upper body and legs with a fish torso and tail. The Nommo are the ones who taught the Dogon people astronomy, among other things. 

I and many people I suspect learned of Dagon and his status as a water god from HP Lovecraft's 1917 short story Dagon. In Dagon, the narrator is drifting in the Pacific ocean on a lifeboat after his ship is captured by German during World War I. The water south of the equator becomes black and thick enough to walk enough, supposedly what used to be the ocean floor has risen to the surface. Upon descending a mound he encounters a stone monolith covered with hieroglyphics of sea creatures, and disturbing amphibious humanoid creatures:

"I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shown disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well... They were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiseled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shown in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself."

After encountering the monolith, a monster emerges from the water . In an attempt to alleviate his traumatic experience the narrator seeks the same mythology mentioned earlier. "Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries." There's no consolation from the remnants of ancient history for him.

The shrine beneath the waves is that of Cthulhu, who like Enki/Ea had a palace under water. In the later story The Shadow Over Innsmouth 1931 the fish men are referred to as "the deep ones." The New England town of Innsmouth came into contact with the deep ones who a merchant Obed Marsh learned of from a tribe in the West Indies. The town was in economic trouble, and so Obed and his followers summoned the deep ones to increase their wealth. They build a church, the Esoteric Order of Dagon and offer human sacrifices and women to mate with the amphibious creatures. The offspring are born normal looking humans, but grow up to be fish-men and join the old ones in their cities underground. The US government shuts all of this down, arresting large numbers of people and destroys buildings, under the guise of enforcing prohibition. 

I was quite pleased to find out that Lovecraft based a lot of this on old Mesopotamian mythology. Many of his stories are about the unearthing of the inhuman origins of humanity which have been hidden away, to protect us from an inimical and indifferent universe. The further back one goes in human history, the closer one gets to the truth. 

It is with the rise of the Abrahamic religions begins the end of the water gods' hold over western culture.

1 Samuel 5.2-7
After the Philistines had captured the ark of God, they took it from Ebenezer to Ashdod.
2 Then they carried the ark into Dagon's temple and set it beside Dagon.
3 When the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the LORD! They took Dagon and put him back in his place.
4 But the following morning when they rose, there was Dagon, fallen on his face on the ground before the ark of the LORD! His head and hands had been broken off and were lying on the threshold; only his body remained.
5 That is why to this day neither the priests of Dagon nor any others who enter Dagon's temple at Ashdod step on the threshold.

The literal falling of Dagon before the ark is symbolic of the eclipse of paganism and the rise of Abrahamic monotheism. The God of Abraham does not subsist in and is not born of the primordial waters like the old gods.

Enuma Elish, Babylonian creation epic:
"When on high the heaven had not been named, firm ground below had not been called by name, naught but primordial Apsu, their begetter, and Mummu Tiamat, she bore them all, their waters commingling as in a single body: no reed hut had been matter, no marshland had appeared, when no gods whatever had been brought into being, uncalled by names, their destinies undetermined-then it was that the gods were formed within them."

For the Abrahamic religions, the waters are divided by a firmament. God separates the heavens from the earth from the very beginning. The western pagan religions have it that the gods themselves are born of the primordial waters, matter precedes the gods. In Hesiod's theogony of the Greek gods the chasm or chaos is primary, less materialist and more "philosophical"; a transition to the religion of the Word.

Genesis
"Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day."

Notice God says and it is done, the word determining material reality. The conscious fulfillment of a wish.

As western society has progressed, we have moved away from worship of our origins in the water. Yet some say that the pope's current hat, the mitre, has its origins in the worship of Dagon the fish god. The opening of the mitre is a fish mouth! The high priests of Babylon it is said wore fish head hats and robes which resembled fish bodies. An alternative explanation is that of Jesus saying the apostles are to be fishers of men, which already sounds fishy. Perhaps the design is unconscious, a product of the Church originating in a pagan world.

Looking to the esoteric, the Pythagorean cult can give us symbolic meaning to our aqueous origins.

The first thing in existence was the monad, a single circle, self contained like the single cell, the life in the water or the embryo in the fluids of the womb. Then comes the dyad when one becomes two, though still linked together. The shape created by the two circles is the vesica piscis, the fish bladder; the physical origin of separateness from the mother, duality. The vesica piscis is the vagina, the passage of birth and also the urethra of the penis, from which fermenting semen comes. Also it is the fish symbol Christians use, the ichthys. The separation of life from the ocean for the first land dwellers is a symbolic recapitulation of the original separation. 

As millions of years pass, our aqueous ancestry is pushed back further into our physical development. The mammal fetus has gill pouches early on just like the fish, though these don't develop into functional gills and serve other functions. Western religion goes on to separates man from the waters early on, though still retaining aspects. Through irrigation we are able to have sedentary civilization further away from the source of water and see our labor and ingenuity as the fountainhead of civilized life. 

The human race's separation from the water is like the tale of Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus's perilous journey home is so because of the antagonism of the god Poseidon, who is angry at Odysseus for killing the cyclops, his son. It is Poseidon who makes Odysseus' return home so long, the sublime power of the oceans which still have the capacity to overwhelm us. Most of the depths of the ocean are undiscovered and the surface of Earth is mostly ocean and sea. When we look for signs of life on other planets, we look for water. 

Thomas Hobbes' 1651 political treatise Leviathan uses the eponymous sea monster of the Hebrew bible as a metaphor for the political sovereign. The human ruler instills fear and the sense of greatness in followers by common consent to total coercive authority which replaces the terror of nature and God in providing order. Ancient societies declared their rulers as gods, giving special authority to their reign. Up to Hobbes' time Christian, rather than polytheist, absolute monarchists defended the divine right of kings, descended from Adam, to justify the sovereign's authority as higher than worldly performance. Hobbes applied the principles of the burgeoning scientific revolution, namely the law of inertia, to human nature and inaugurated a new form of political justification; the will of the people. Since humans are just matter conserving their state of motion like anything else in the universe, social order isn't natural but artificial. Society only works by external restraint on people's bodily motion which left alone will continue to the possible detriment of others. Before Galileo it was thought that a body required continual force to be in motion, a first mover, but if an object in motion conserves its state of motion then the threat of force isn't enough. It is the uncertainty of the state of nature in which there are no physical restraints on what people can do which requires humans to make their own leviathan. Only by common consent to a common power are we able to instill the fear that any individual will be prevented from breaking the law. 

This is the beginning of modern political thought; human political order as our own creation, understood with the same principles that govern the physical universe. No gods or first movers are required, every individual can understand why we have the law with their own reason and participate in the making of the law with the advent of liberal democracy. We have become the leviathan. A retracing of our evolutionary history and the beginnings of western religion can reveal our origins and hopefully give us a renewed understanding of our relationship to the water, our first home. 

The Meaning of Existence

The achievement of pleasure and the absence of pain both lead to boredom. Both pain and pleasure are quantitative disturbances of chemical equilibrium. Hope and fear both emerge from an inherent realization of the dominance of equilibrium, of a certain biological constancy. We hope for pain to end and return to us to a previous satisfactory state or perhaps payoff for a different but similarly constant state. We fear loss of what gives us pleasure or increase of what causes more pain, desiring a return to equilibrium.

The subjective qualities of pleasure and pain differ, but each are an excess of energy of a certain time and duration which cannot last. Our demand is an energy demand on the mind to work and so has a somatic origin. Emotions as the word suggests put us in a state of motion, for they ultimately share the same purpose. All irritation.

The purpose of all life is death. From nothing to nothing. The unliving outnumber the living in the universe.

In Spanish what is fun or amusing is divertido, a diversion, as my sophomore Spanish teacher told me. Passion from Latin "pasus" means to suffer. A passion for life, for anything, entails suffering.

The state of indifference characterizes us for more of our existence than pleasure or pain.

We spend much of our lives asleep, largely indifferent to the outside world. Our days are intermittently interrupted by day dreams where we are consciously indifferent to our immediate environment. One becomes lost when reading an engaging novel or envelopes while watching television or film.

Hypnotism, meditation, and the placebo effect demonstrate the great power the mind has to be indifferent to certain stimuli and simulate reality. Our mental state can be altered by intense focus, because of suggestion by ourselves or others, without the somatic effect of external stimuli. 

Our brains can't possibly process all the information of our senses, electrical activity in the brain occurs before we are conscious. To imagine is to think less than we perceive. To be actively indifferent to stimuli. The mind didn't evolve to mirror reality but to serve the promulgation of the species. Man never realizes how anthropomorphic he is, as Goethe said.

Freedom of the will consists in doing what we will do unimpeded externally and the conscious functions in agreement or ignorance with the act. As per Schopenhauer; man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. What bodies do is different than what the mind commands, they do what they do. We're just lucky that we either are unaware of the physical causes of our actions or are in conscious harmony with them.

The meaning of life is found in the act, that which sustains and enhances our own lives. Anatomical change comes about as a consequence of behavioral change. "Birds do not fly because they have wings; they have wings because they fly"-Robert Ardrey.

Life escapes meaning outside of our individual activity, but we are able to spend much of it in complete indifference to this reality. It is only in our waking moments of self-reflection that the meaning of life has any significance. But we create this problem for ourselves, for demanding meaning from existence is to view existence as something alien and itself in demand of justification, to treat being as an individual thing to be analyzed. We make the meaninglessness of life a problem because we demanded justification in the first place.