We're Climate Primates
We Earthlings love to talk about the weather. It is a unifying and universal "safe" topic because it affects us equally and determines how we survive.
Scientists are now uncovering evidence that the weather was the catalyst that propelled Humans to become bipedal problem-solving omnivores.
The biggest obstacle preventing us from working together is the hardwired impetus of our natural inclinations to dominate other groups and steal their resources.
One of the primary weapons in our arsenal has been religion.
In the grand scale of our arrival, religion is a very recent invention. Our petulant narsecissim demands some cosmological structure..a reason for "being" and an order of where we fit in. All of the geographically oriented gods were invented to justify that specific group's concept of it's superiority over the animal kingdom and other humans.
The pantheon of gods always reflected the geographic and climatic peculiarities of their territory. What surprises me, well sort of, is how unwilling most modern humans are to abandon the supserstitions of their ancestors?
I understand the psychological Fear...the thought that we don't fit in, the Universe just IS, and that there may very well be nothing after DEATH, are all anathema to our being special.
Even though we now have so much convincing evidence of the How?What?When?Where? and Why? we humans became the dominant species, the majority refuse to forsake the relics of our struggle to eliminate or dominate and enslave others.
At the moment I'm following two episodic TV shows;
BECOMING HUMAN &
DARWIN'S Brave New World
Charles Darwin was devastated when his daughter Annie died from tuberculosis in 1851.
It was the last spike in the coffin of his dwindling Faith and enough to dissolve his fears of publishing his theory of Natural Selection; that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors.
Victorian England was NOT amused and even the Scientific Community was still in the vice-like grip of the Biblical Creationists.
Darwin "could not see the work of an omnipotent deity in all the pain and suffering such as the ichneumon wasp paralysing caterpillars as live food for its eggs." In the program Richard Dawkins opines that the death of his beloved Annie pushed him over the edge.
Fast-forward a Century to present day and we discover that the majority of Humans still believe that they are "magical/special Creations" and vastly superior to the other members of the animal kingdom.
Others cautiously sit on the fence and imagine themselves as a kind of APEGEL..part mystical being with an eternal soul carried around in a mortal-physical package which is disturbingly similar to simians.
What really may have "created" us was the weather.
Recent discoveries have uncovered evidence of extreme climatic fluctuations in Africa where homo sapeins were forming. By then our ancestors had split from our nearest cousins 3 million years earlier and several prototypes of people had taken shape. The winner was the line that was the most adaptable. The extra protein acquired from scavenging bone marrow and meat from other carnivores probably sped up the process of growing bigger brains.
Africa was once a huge tropical rainforest but it has been drying up for 10 million years. Encroaching savannahs provided new opportunities and walking upright not only better visibility and protection from predators, but it freed up the hands. Walking is also far more efficient than knuckling.
Our brains began to expand to allow for more problem solving and our hands gave us a leg up on the other apes. Evidence of dramatic shifts between drought and deluge forced the early Humans to think up ways to acquire food and avoid predation.
This version certainly isn't as sexy or special as the garden of Eden myth. Since the time that humans invented their regionally-specific gods we have been at war trying to establish dominance over territorial ownership of goods and services.
Darwin was well aware that his discovery would spark a never-ending schism in society. I am shocked, well sort of, that so many people in the 21st Century still exist with the notion that there is a Creation-EVEsolution_controversy ?
This controversy is virtually none existant in the scientific community and most people who are literate and have access to this information are slowly coming around...but travel around the globe and you'll find that most Earthlings are still enslaved by a handful of self-appointed, fear-mongering, zealots who wield their authority based on religious precepts.
I'm old enough to know that achieving "World Peace" is impossible. Even without the intrusion of religion and all of it's divisive devices the natural instincts of our ancestors that we carry in our programming make it impossible to stop coveting our neighbour's natural resources and their goods and services.
That's why it's easier to just talk about the weather :)
