Cats and Us

I just finished reading “The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival,” written by John Vaillant (A Canadian, by the way). Set in the Bikin River valley in Khabarovski Krai, a province in far eastern Russia (near the Sea of Japan). It is, as the title says, an account of events involving a man-eating tiger in this area during the 1990’s. But, it is far more than just a narrative of events. In the book Vaillant explores the complex relationships between man and tiger (and big cats in general).

If we go back approximately two million years, we find our ancestors (homo habilis) living in the African savannah. Other than snakes, our greatest enemies were cats—very large cats—the progenitors of today’s lions, tigers, and leopards (the three main groups of large cats). We avoided becoming victims of the cats by restricting our hunting to daylight hours (cats generally prefer hunting at night), and staying close to a fire at night. At the same time, homo habilis and large cats had a symbiotic relationship. Man—and let’s use this in a very general sense—is not very well equipped for hunting, unlike the cats who are have large fangs and claws, powerful legs, and an intuitive ability to stalk prey. While homo habilis had large jaws and some nasty canine teeth (much like today’s baboons), he was pretty much otherwise defenseless, except for two advantages: the ability to sweat through our skin and the ability to make tools.

Sweat? Yes. Other land mammals rid their bodies of excess heat by panting—rapidly breathing over a wet out-stretched tongue to promote quick evaporation. A result of this is that most mammals cannot run very far in a single burst—they have to stop periodically to pant. People have no such problem. By perspiring through their skin, they can continue to run even as their bodies cast off any excess heat generated. Today in the Kalahari Desert this ability is put to use: hunters simple run their prey into the ground. Eventually the pursued animal will suffer heat stroke because of the constant pressure of pursuers who never give it a chance to stop to cool off by panting.

The other advantage is tools. Going back two million years the only tools we find are simple stones deliberately chipped to create a sharp edge on one side. Not much use for hunting—but very useful for cutting meat and cracking open bones.  That was our only tool for about a million years before the invention of the stone hand axe—and that gave the advantage that it could be easily carried and used for more delicate tasks than cutting meat from sinew. The stone hand axe was it for about another million years. So, for most of our history we used simple stone tools that had limited uses.

Out-running animals to the point of heat exhaustion is pretty useful, but not always practical, especially if you have a large group to feed—or you had moved to an area where it was generally cooler. Our ancestors had to find another way to supplement their high-protein diet and that they did by scavenging. The African desert lions and cave lions frequently left partially-devoured prey. Today’s hyenas utilize that to move in on an abandoned carcass, probably very much like our ancestors did. A quick dash to the carcass and a few swift chops with a hand axe and a capable hunter could recover a fair-sized chunk of meat. The only way we could pull that off is by not angering the cats. There is evidence that humans left part of their kill for the cats, and the cats left part of their kill for the humans. Also, both humans and cats are territorial creatures. As our territories undoubtedly overlapped, some sort of modus vivendi had to be worked out between the two species.

The situation today is that in remote areas like eastern Russia people and big cats (in this case tigers) generally co-exist. As long as people leave the tigers alone and respect their “rights,” tigers will leave people alone and give them their due respect. The problems arise when tigers are hunted (for pelts and Chinese medicines) or crowded out of their territories by logging and similar activities. Vaillant describes the almost mystical relationship between the cats and humans in striking detail and example.

Which brings me to the purring ball of fur on my lap. Today’s domestic cats are descended from small African wild cats. The oldest known association between these cats and humans is a 10,000 year old grave containing skeletons of each. The crude symbiotic relationship between humans and large cats likely became more clearly defined in our relations with the small cats. They would keep the rodent and snake population around human encampments in check and we would provide them with a safe place (near a fire) for the night. I’ve seen it suggested that we never really domesticated cats, as we did dogs, but, rather, our two species simply got used to each other being around. We are all aware, I am sure, of the high regard that ancient Egyptians had for cats.

So reading Vaillant’s book made me look at our little friends in a different light. We are still dependent on each other—our cats and us. They need our attention just as we benefit from their loving attention to us. But, underneath it all, lies the heart of a hunter. Two hunters—actually—the clumsy human one and the highly skilled feline one.

A question for those who are always right...

There is something I have never understood: why is it that many people get angry when they talk about the poor? All sorts of negative words come out of their mouths, such as lazy, freeloading, tax burden, excuses. They usually relate an anecdote or two about someone they knew—or heard of—who was cheating the system. I get the impression that, somehow, they see poverty as an affront of some sort; something that offends them at a visceral level.

Well, as Jesus of Nazareth is quoted as saying, “The poor are always with you.”

So, I am asking: why get angry about the victims of a state that appears to be endemic to civilization? Why not, instead, get angry about the processes that put the poor in the position they are in in the first place and the forces that keep them poverty-stricken?  That, it seems to me, is the only way that any significant changes can be made to reduce the number of those who can’t cope with the demands that civilization imposes on them.

Take this story: I got it from the newspaper today. RB is a 50-year-old woman who suffers from diabetes and failing kidneys, has had six heart attacks, is blind in one eye, has Hepatitis-C, has a badly damaged arm, and needs a walker and a wheelchair to get around. She has a grade three education. She lives on $1,000/month in disability insurance. Three times a week she goes to the hospital for dialysis treatment; each treatment requires her to be immobile for four hours at a time. Add the time it takes to get to and from the hospital and we are talking of about 6 or 7 hours—three times a week.

Did I mention that she sometimes supplements her income by panhandling?

I know, I know. I can hear it now: she should get a job. But, how many jobs are available for a 50 year old partially blind woman with a host of medical problems, no education to speak of, and is unavailable for work three days a week?

Often, when I tell folks about people like this woman, they start spouting a lot of “should’aves.” She “should’ave” done this, or that. Yet, everyone’s life is filled with “should’aves” and “could’aves.” We sure are smart when it comes to looking in the rear-view mirror. And, isn’t hep-C associated with drug use? So, how did she get it? As if to suggest that there are moral reasons for disease (which, by the way, you can pick up during your Caribbean vacation at a luxury hotel).

I really don’t get it. Why should I be angry at this woman if she approaches me on the street asking for “spare change”? It doesn’t matter how she got into the situation she is in: she’s there now. We don’t yet have time travel, she we can’t send her back to grade three and tell her to stay in school. We cannot undo what’s done. All we can do is deal with the present situation and make efforts to reduce the likelihood of others in the future winding up in similar situations.

Of course, that’s called “molly-coddling” and “bleeding-heart” syndrome intermixed with accusations of proposing “tax and spend” as well as probably being a “socialist.” It often escalates to accusations that I am against business and want to tie them up in red-tape, or, perhaps I am a “tree-hugger” who believes in lies like “climate change” and other so-called “scientific stuff” like evolution. After all, what makes me so smart?

I guess I really am stupid, because I still can’t see how punishing the poor, cutting what social services they do have, banning them from street-corners, and condemning them from some self-righteous platform is helping anyone. Maybe someday a political conservative can explain it to me in terms that I can understand, but, I sincerely doubt it; any more than they could convince me that the earth is flat.

Poverty and the Rest of Us....

Every so often I run into someone who is offended by the fact that there are poor and homeless people in our midst and imply that they are simply lazy and content to sponge off of the poor hard-pressed taxpayer. I wish such people would spend a week living in one of the shelters for the homeless and then we would see what happens to their self-righteousness.

I have no doubt that there are people in our midst who are content to live on welfare and have no ambition to do anything else. In fact, I’ve met them. But the overwhelming number of poor and homeless people I have met and spoken with do not fit into that category. Many are embarrassed by their situation; many feel helpless; some are bitter.

So, why is it that some people, who have been blessed by circumstances that have led them to leading fairly comfortable lives, judge those they know virtually nothing about? How many suburbanites have actually held a conversation with an inner-city beggar? If they are among the majority, they will pretend that they simply didn’t see the ragged clothes and sunken cheeks or the pronounced limp. They pretend that the people who do beg on our streets are simply lazy and that they could change their lifestyle if they worked at it. After all, anecdotal evidence tells us that someone once did offer a homeless man a job and the man turned him down. Goes to show, eh?

If people would actually converse with the people who have their hands out they might be surprised at what they discover: that the homeless are just like us.  Hard to believe, eh? Imagine you had lost your job and could not keep up with your mortgage payments, your spouse left you, and perhaps you’ve suffered an injury or a disease. Before you’d know what hit you, you’d be standing on a downtown street-corner with your hand out. What else are you going to do? Crawl into a corner and die? I have met highly educated and professionally-trained people living in our shelters. There are doctors, teachers, engineers, military personnel, accountants—whatever trade you can dream off—who, because of a few bad breaks, are forced to seek shelter wherever someone will take them in.

After all, bad things do happen to good people.

I know that the Christian religion does not accept that: God is supposed to bless the good folks and punish the bad guys. That, of course, leads to the inevitable conclusion that if you are well-off it’s because you are deserving and the homeless are there because of their own failures. They are somehow less worthy than our neighbour in the condo.

There is another very sad and disturbing fact: many of our homeless are mentally ill. At one time they would have been institutionalized and treated, but, governments have discovered that that costs an awful lot of money and who really cares if the government shuts down the local loony-bin?  We didn’t want it there anyhow.

When I was young, I met a lot of ex-military folks who were living on the streets. Mainly veterans of the Second World War and the Korean War. We send young people into dangerous situations and, when they are injured, physically or mentally, they turn into burdens that the taxpayer can’t afford—despite the lip service that we pay to veterans on Remembrance Day.  The rest of the time we wish that the guy missing an arm who can no longer communicate clearly would simply go away; get off our streets; stop messing up the landscape.

Of course there are people who abuse the system. Just as there are salesclerks who slip a twenty dollar bill into their pockets; or managers who take credit for the work their underlings have done; or policeman who take bribes; or doctors who make mistakes; or priests who fondle little boys; or students who cheat on a test. None of us is perfect. But do we judge an entire class of people because of the shortcomings of a tiny minority of them? If I concluded that all salesclerks are thieves; all managers are bullies; all policemen take bribes; all doctors make mistakes; all priests fondle little boys; and all students cheat you would be, quite rightly, outraged.

The poor, my friend, are no better and no worse than anyone else. And, we are in no position to judge anyone until we have walked in their shoes—or, at the very least—talked with and listened to them.

Quantum Memory

In my most recent little essay I talked about how physics and cosmology are on the verge of explaining “everything.” A lesson we learn from studying quantum physics is that we have to adjust our way of looking at history if we are to make sense of it all. Rather than starting from some sort of primal event and following the chain of cause and effect until we get to the present, we must start at the present and work our way back. This has an enormous consequence. Our traditional way of viewing history begs for a prime mover, god, or a guiding intelligence to explain how events that happened 13.7 billion years ago led to us being here and now. Looking at things from the point of view of the present and adopting a quantum attitude the requirement of a prime mover, god, or guiding intelligence disappears. Our presence in the universe here and now is nothing more than one of an infinite number of possibilities. The fact that we are here “proves” that events in our universe have led to our existence.

So, besides chucking out the idea of a god in order to make sense of our existence in the universe, this has consequences for all histories, including our personal histories. It is fairly well established that traumas in childhood can have a negative effect on thinking and behaviour later in life. But I pose this question: what if those traumatic events never happened? Or happened in a different way than what we remember? The problems with human memory are enormous as our brains are constantly rearranging our experiences so that they “make sense.” If I am an unhappy neurotic adult then something must have happened in my past in order to make me this way. Right? Isn’t that how we think? The brain needs to find a “reason” for our present state.

So, there we are in the psychiatrist’s office and he (or she) says, Tell me why you think that you are unhappy? Your brain immediately starts looking for reasonable-sounding explanations.  The psychiatrist, because his brain works the same way, is also programmed to look for events that can be linked together. Well, you answer—your brain finally finding something to latch on to—I never played games when I was a kid. And why is that? Come on, brain, find something. Ah, well, I wasn’t very popular with the other kids. I didn’t get along with them. And so the session goes until you are recalling something nasty that your parents did that made you withdrawn as a child, which led to your alienation from other children and your life-long unhappiness.

Again: what if that nasty event never happened?

Our brains, to repeat a point, are constantly rearranging our experiences and memories so that they form a pattern that we can be comfortable with. Courts of law are learning that the most unreliable evidence being presented in trials is often from eye-witnesses. Suppose you saw someone walking away from a bank and that person seemed to be in a hurry and distressed. You later hear that there was a robbery at that bank around the time that you saw this individual.  Your brain starts to piece together a narrative linking what you remember seeing with what you later learned happened around the same time. Before you know it, you have become a witness to a crime and everything you experienced around that event fits together to link the robbery and the person you remember seeing. But, memory is unreliable and our brains will fill in details in order to make a more complete picture. If the police say they are looking for a male in his twenties wearing a red jacket, by golly, that is exactly what you remember seeing. It must be so, because you witnessed the event and your brain tells you that you “remember” such details.

Same thing with traumatic childhood events. Children often cannot comprehend events, motivations, and consequences. Their brains record the events and start to rearrange things so that they fit together from the child’s perspective. As the child gets older and learns more about how people function that knowledge gets “plastered” over the memory and becomes a part of it. Friends and family have told me about events that I was involved with that I have absolutely no memory of—even events that happened in middle-age. Similarly, I have vivid memories of events that they cannot recall when I relate them. Whose memory is more reliable? Theirs or mine? The answer: both and neither. It really doesn’t matter whether or not a past event really occurred, because what matters is what your brain tells you that you remember.

Try looking at things this way: I am here and now and this is my state. What happened or did not happen in the past is irrelevant. I should focus on how to improve my present state of being. The memories will change and evolve over time, so why look for rational explanations there? Your brain will lead you to believe your memories are accurate, but, they are not. Memories are phantoms pieced together from many different sources and influences and they—even the fact of whether or not you recall them—are a consequence of your present state, constructed by an organ that is obsessed with creating order and “logic” out of the sensory input it receives.

Just something to consider….

Quantum History

A lesson I am learning from contemporary physics and astronomy is: instead of looking at the history of the universe as a series of events that led to us, we should look at it the other way round. Because we are here, the universe has the history that it does. Semantics? Not quite. Our “normal” way of looking at history is: “A caused B to happen, which caused C to happen, etc, etc.”  Another way to look at history is to say that because current events exist the way that they do, then history must have followed a series of events that led to their existence.

Try it again: while it may be true that in the 15^th century the illegitimate son of a street vender murdered a young woman who had been “destined” to be the mother of a hero who conquered the world, the fact that this “conquering” did not occur means that this hither-to unknown murder was only one possible explanation for what followed. There is no way we can verify that this specific event caused the non-outcome, or that some other seemingly unrelated event was the “cause.” This is a problem with destiny. What is destined is what actually occurred, not what might have occurred. It is like trying to prove a negative. So, no world conqueror means there is no cause for no world conqueror, unless one wants to admit an infinite number of alternative theories.

Another example is the old science fiction conundrum: what if I went back in a time machine and murdered my grandfather?  What would happen? I submit that nothing would happen. You are here now, so that means that you did not go back in a time machine and kill your grandfather. If you had succeeded in that event, then you would not be here and your grandfather would not have been murdered by you. When you start multiplying negative numbers you have to be careful of which side of zero you are on.

And that’s essentially how quantum physics works. A photon moving from point A to point B has an infinite number of possible paths that it could have followed to get there. There are only degrees of probability as to which path was actually followed; in other words: some choices are more likely than others—but that does not completely eliminate all other possibilities. The fact that we are here in the universe at this time means that an infinite number of other possibilities, some more likely than others, did not happen in our universe. We are here; therefore when the universe was 200 seconds old exactly the right proportions of hydrogen, helium, and lithium atoms existed to enable our later existence. If there were not the right proportions of those three primary elements at the right time in the history of our universe then we would not be here to talk about it. We were not caused by the right combination at the right time because there are an almost infinite number of alternative histories that could have been followed after that critical moment. Only one path leads to us; all other paths lead to “not-us.”

The conclusion is that because we are here, our universe has the history that it does. Without us, it has an infinite number of alternative histories, separated only by degrees of probability.

This is actually a radical shift in thinking about history. The history of anything, I might add. Our brains are hardwired to see causes and consequences. That is the basis of the science and philosophy of the past 2500 years. We see something. What caused it? What effect did it have? In this way of thinking, we need a primary cause, because events can not be caused by nothing. So, we invent a god or a “prime mover” to fill in the logical hole. But, if history is a series of probabilities, then we do not need a primary event to get things going. We just have to ask: what are the probabilities that something exists rather than not-exists? Given an infinite number of possibilities, then eventually, no matter how small the probability, something will exist.

Look at it this way: if something can happen, then it will happen (or has happened). Our universe is just one of an infinite number of other probable universes.