Human Creatures: A Broader View: the World Behind the Modern Surface

By Fred Howard

A broad, but easy reading, world-view of realities behind the anciently permanent traits of human behavior which cause simple societies to grow, to flourish in great civilizations throughout the world, and to collapse repeatedly, usually with much loss of the expanded populations. Both democracies and tyrannies follow that universal pattern into autocratic decay of civilized empires. This view leads to a search for critical factors that determine the beginning and course of the typical decays (which have already begun in modern democracies.) Invariably, all those great nations had strong religious and moral practices during their early growth to large numbers of vigorous people, up to the points of beginning the slide into collapse. All had strong leaders who escaped reasonable limits beyond their necessary uses. This book was written before the authors previously published, Headlong Into Quicksand - The Tale of Today in America -, and provided its basis and starting point.
Viewing human natures overall adaptations for life-survival necessities in a real world also includes: Family, love, play, arts, psychology, dominances, politics, governments, imperial disasters, death, philosophy, world history, science/knowledges, religion, morality, and balanced democracy.
(An alternative evolutionary sociobiology.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 13, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462827169

Fred Howard

Forty years ago he began looking behind the surface of a changeable modern world for permanent realities. This persisted through a career ranging from youthful farm work, commercial fishing, reporting, technical teaching, Navy, defense research & engineering, to meeting Rietta in UNC graduate school, marrying, & together raising five children.

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1     

A LOOK IN PASSING ON A SUMMER Day

A young man walked slowly off a shady sidewalk onto a small concrete pad warmed by late morning sunlight. He was not hesitant nor uncertain in movement, but aimless. He looked straight into the eyes of an older stranger in a car waiting for gas, but gave no reaction, and continued on his way past. The look in his eye seemed to the un-involved observer to be from a deeply puzzled bewilderment, of long standing, about the young man’s inner-most being and his world surrounding him. A preacher or a nurse in the same place as the observer might have tried to talk with the young fellow, thinking of a death or illness. The stranger merely felt a disturbing sympathy, and soon drove his carload of children out of the little cross-road community with its old houses.

But he found he could not put the scene behind him. The rolling miles that came up ahead of him and passed around the car could not erase the feeling aroused by the younger man. There was something too fundamentally human about it. He suddenly realized that everyone needs a way, whether good or bad, to find out, What am I? And what is the world? And a way to fit into a world that keeps changing its appearance, even in a single place or in a single day, even in that quiet little country town, just with the rising of the sun and the falling of rain, if nothing more. But then he knew that this was true anywhere in a world in constant ferment, a world of which he himself was a typical, restlessly changing part, still looking for something permanent about himself and his own surroundings.

It occurred to the observer that he had seen almost the same look as that of the young man in the eye of a weakening, half-starved dog or of a sick chicken. Children had sometimes appeared to have nearly the same feeling of sympathy with such animals as he had felt with the fellow. But, that young fellow had been clean, as well dressed as anyone in that town, well fed, and healthy. There was the possibility that he was troubled with girls, but there was no appearance of that kind of excitement (a different fundamental thing.) Conceivably he was disturbed at being drafted; but he was neither angry, put upon, nor self-pitying; and the time was after the war in Korea (well before the build up in Vietnam.)

Other alternatives gave way to the conclusion that the nearly grown man needed at the very least to find a fitting part that he could play in life, and that he was deeply unsettled at not making a connection between himself and the rest of the world. It appeared that he was too thoughtful and well raised to take the easy way out and become merely rebellious or join a gang of young rogues. Possibly he was very religious, for he gave the impression of a strong and kind, moral upbringing; you could call him a good and decent young fellow. But that had not apparently been sufficient in his case to work him, as he saw himself, into a place in the world he saw.

As the observer had already known, many people do grow up in societies which make it easy to fit into real and satisfying parts to play in life. Many have more choices for a way of life open to them than they can take care of all at one time or in one life. Many find that just playing a suitable part is not enough, and that an attempt at fully understanding life and the world must be made. A large number get sufficient help from the established religions with such problems. Many others seem either to become religious mystics on their own, or to become so emotionally disturbed that they find no satisfaction in life other than simmering around in their own feelings. Sometimes they become lost in such an emotional habit, to the extent of being unable to take care of themselves.

Many other people are apparently so dissatisfied with the ready choices open to them in life that they rebel or join the social rogues outside the accepted stream of their society. There they may build up their own society or simply live by taking advantage of unmet needs and unacceptable urges of people who are largely in the mainstream. Some of these outside activities even become necessary or accepted customs in many societies.

Democracies in particular seem more frequently to place almost a burden on the individual to find the personal part to play. But some of their more static localities, like the less changing small towns and farms, seem to have parts ready made for anyone to fit. And the autocracies of all sorts tell everyone what to do.

Success in trying to take hold of life and the world at their core seems to depend mainly on each person’s ability and choice in picking out what is really important in life and in working toward it so that the person fits in with what else is going on in the world. This practice has been called co-organization of the person’s activities with the outside world. It seems to start with the normal new born baby in reponding to its mother by nursing through instinct in its first few days. The baby is ready from its beginning hours of individual life to recognize the touch of a very important little bit of the world outside itself and to organize its own actions in a response that brings it food, which it sucks and swallows. Later, this inborn ability to organize its own actions in contact with the nearby world will take it through childhood to maturity and old age by constantly learning, remembering, and getting more complicated in ways of dealing with the world.

In baby animals that nurse, after a little struggling that clears the lungs and straightens the legs, the very first outward going action of each baby is a social one with its mother. Social actions in organized responses will necessarily be very important throughout life for all nursing animals (mammals.) Apparently self-organizing social behavior has been going on for a long time. It can be recognized in the most ancient writings of western history and the Bible, in the Buddhist and Confucian writings as well as in their forerunners, and in the Mohammedan scriptures and the stone or clay inscriptions of Egypt and the Middle East. (Of course, to recognize this you must sometimes take an understanding view of what self-organized activity could fit in well with the powers of ancient kings and priests.)

In fact, the well documented existence of this kind of organized social behavior among wolves, apes, monkeys, birds, dogs, deer, alligators, insects, and so on, makes it highly likely that people have been behaving this way from their beginning, however you wish to say what that beginning was. Because of this very long term survival of such activity it appears suitable to realize that it must be necessary to the past and present survival of human creatures and their societies or it would not be so universal. To put it another way, it looks as though only the human creatures who inherit this kind of organizing ability from their ancestors can survive for very long, or otherwise there would be a lot more of those who do not have the ability alive now. So cooperative organization of a life, or coorganization, necessarily has to be a very important basis for much that goes on.

To follow this line of thought it must be remembered in a broad view that very antagonistic behavior toward many other people, such as invaders, may at times be the best cooperatively organized activity available. (They want to kill us to get our food; so we’ll fight.) In the same way rogues who cannot fit within the mainstream of a society may pull out to make their own sub-society, and in so doing sometimes provide an activity that turns out to be necessary to the main society; at least it survives a very long time. That can be taken as evidence of some peculiar kind of necessity. (Here, the presence of the Christian outcasts, or rogues of that society, in Imperial Rome can be viewed as having salvaged a decaying civilization to preserve it for hundreds of additional years by giving it a vigorous new morality.)

Furthermore, complicated societies seem to need strongly dominating chiefs of some sort to insure that at least bread and water transportation can be kept going, as well as other necesssities. And chiefs usually come to sufficient dominance through very antagonistic behavior. So, in the broad view, some violent behavior is unavoidably necessary and cooperative with a real world, and should not necessarily be expected to become bred out of humans.

All of this train of thought, however, only introduces an observed social behavior in a small town, with a few quick connections into a broad human background. It does not yet get into what humans are like inside in other parts of their nature. Nor does it yet cover what the real world must be, including all the people in it, that cooperative behavior must fit to. Nor whether that world has changed essentially through history. Nor most particularly whether that kind of observed behavior has some special and significant meaning for the modern world, where the appearance of being disconnected from vigorous life has been seen very often in the last quarter of the recently ended century and was not unknown in the confused half century before that.

2     

A LOOK FROM SPACE

Broad Diffusive Points of View

Everyone has seen recently how different the world looks from space and how small it seems when you are an astronaut out in space going around the world every hour and a half. It looks even smaller if you are further out where it takes all day and a night to go around so that you see only one side of the earth. It is not anything new to say how thin the layer of air in which we live seems from out there, especially if you are far enough out to get a really broad view of the whole earth in one look out of one small window. The picture doesn’t change enough to matter if you figure on adding the even smaller thickness of the water in the oceans and lakes to the air thickness. It’s a really thin layer of water and wet air that we live in on this ball of rock that swings around the sun as if we were on a string being swung around as a small boy would swing a toy airplane. (Astronomers like to say that the earth is held by the pull of gravity in an orbit around the sun, like the rest of the sun’s planets, such as Jupiter and Venus, which we see as the bright evening and morning stars from time to time.)

From the pictures in all the magazines it is clear that we live on the beautiful planet. None of the other planets can touch it for pretty colors in constantly changing patterns, with many strange and important meanings to think about as you watch. The earth seems to glow as if part of its light came from the inside, instead of only being lit up by the sun. Of course, if you were low enough and on the dark side, you might see an aurora in the north or south that really is light from the upper fringes of the air; but then this too is caused by electric particles which are blown outward to the earth by the sun as a very thin gas in a kind of solar wind. Further study might show that some part of the daylight airglow comes from a kind of fluorescent reaction to some of the invisible black light that the sun also puts out, very much like Halloween suit colors near a black light bulb. But you would not be able to separate any such effects by looking at the earth ball with the eye. It would all be very mysteriously beautiful, and you could not help marveling at it.

Out in space you might also worry about the pieces of rock and ice that are known to be speeding around out there with you. While the chance of a space ship’s being hit by a rock big enough to damage it is pretty slim, these ships are always being peppered with very tiny bits of solid matter. There are enough of those dust grains around the earth’s orbital path that when conditions are just right a faint glow of scattered sunlight can be seen as if from a thin mist in space. The light has been seen often enough from the surface of the earth that it has been called the zodiacal light. This is because long ago when most people were interested in such things, the light always appeared in a line with the star constellations of the Zodiac as if it were pointing them out for their importance. They do serve to identify the plane of the earth’s elliptical orbit around the sun. (From the earth, just before sunrises and just after sunsets, it looks as though the sun is moving around the sky from one constellation of the Zodiac to the next during the course of the year; and that’s the way people used to think about it. In any given month the sun is said by the astrologers and horoscope fortune tellers to be in whichever constellation you cannot see because the sun is too bright to let you see those stars in the daytime.)

Also, passing through the zodiacal cloud, there are larger pieces of rock which may come from farther out in the whole solar system of planets orbiting around the sun. Some of these rocks seem to be as big as a house or a mountain. When some of them happen to hit the earth, they can leave holes that are miles across. Not too many thousand years ago a smaller one left a hole in Arizona about a mile across and half a mile deep, called Meteor Crater. The impact melted a lot of rock to glass and splashed a mixture of glass and crushed rock out for hundreds of miles. Many much larger and older impact craters have weathered away and filled in til they are hard to pick out by the eye. For some of those, a camera, or a radar, in space has been found to show them better than looking across the ground. Some are so faint that only years of study (by geologists) will prove that a circle of rock layers which were crushed and folded by an ancient impact is still there under the present surface of the earth.

It is thought that long ago, billions of years past, gravitational attractions inward together of gases and dust and rocks and ices from space must have built up the earth and the other planets we see today, as well as the sun, the various moons, and even other distant stars. That’s according to the astronomers and cosmologists (not the beauty parlor cosmetologists working with their cosmetics, or paints and powders for the ladies’ faces.) The heat of the multitudes of collisions, and of later radioactivity, could have melted down all the larger build-ups of colliding rocks and ices into great round molten balls of lava surrounded by hot steams of evaporated liquids. These would then have cooled down into the solid rock and cold liquids we see in the round planets circling in orbits around the sun and in the large moons circling around the planets. Their orbits actually are slightly elliptical, or almost circular.

Some of the more widely scattered comets are considered to be like clumps of the original gases and liquids, frozen around a few rocks, that are still falling in toward the sun and taking up more highly elliptical, or clearly not circular, orbits in and out between the planets of the rest of the solar system. (One apparently hit the earth in Siberia around a hundred years ago and the heat of its collision created about as much havoc from its superhot, evaporated steam blast as did the solid rock meteorite that hit at Meteor Crater.)

However, some few observers of geological and astronomical science think that a lot of the comets and bare meteorite rocks we see today in very elliptical orbits are only the left over splashes of a big collision which must have broken up an entire planet that used to circle around the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. That is where most of the larger-sized broken rock of the asteroids orbits now. In fact, one of the more unusual observers has proposed that all of the odd and poorly explained differences from planet to planet in the solar system might have come from that kind of single collision (see Occam’s Razor, or the principle of parsimony, on the powerful logic of the smallest possible number of starting assumptions in complicated explanations.) In that view, if it were not for such an assumed single and only planetary collision with its vast scattering of crushed rock debris, all of the planets and moons in the whole solar system would still be largely entirely smooth, perfectly round and regular as the sun ball still is, from their original melting.

In that case there would be no landmarks of earth mountains above the earth’s oceans, nor mountains on the moon nor on Mars and Venus, nor red and white spots on Jupiter, nor any of the odd-shaped moons and rings around Saturn, nor any tilted poles of spinning rotation of any of them. In other words, all the present irregularities of the solar system could owe their presence to such a single initial collision between two planet-sized or moon-sized objects when the whole solar system was young, but old enough that the earth and other smaller planets were already cooled down to being solid on the outside. In that view the large collection of mountains on the earth’s moon, standing up above its once smoothly melted and globular, basalt rock seas, and all of the seemingly solid continents of the earth standing up above its water seas and deeper basalt globe, could both have been deposited on the earth and moon in a couple of hours of earth time as crushed and splashed collision debris from the destroyed planet. This rock material, lighter than basalt, from further out in the solar system, would have hit in a blob on one side of the earth, forming all the continents as a single one (Pan-Gaea, it has been called.)

Such a single continent on earth is already thought by most geologists to have formed in some way or another before being broken up into several separated pieces as we see them from space today. They think the break-up would have occurred under the influences of convective currents (somewhat like those in a boiling pot of taffy or caramel candy) in the underlying, partially melted, basalt mantle. And afterward, the pieces are considered to have been drifting over the earth, floating on the heavier mantle as continents and colliding with each other, causing volcanoes and earthquakes at a slow rate over many hundreds of millions of years. (Inside the earth, most of the basalt except for a thin outer crust under the oceans is in the thick semi-liquid mantle which flows slowly, both from its own almost boiling action and under the uneven pressures of the weight of the outer crusts. This also provides the earth’s volcanic eruptions of red hot to orange hot melted rock. Some few observers think that the greatest and hottest boiling action that drives the continents around might just be under them, where the more heat resistant continents might act as a blanket to keep the earth’s heat inside instead of radiating out into space.)

In impacting one side of the moon, such a blob of lighter, crushed rock debris might have spread out a little more due to interactions with the earth’s strong gravitational attraction before falling in on the moon. This would be particularly likely if the moon happened at the time to be in its orbit somewhat behind the earth in approaching the evidently large swarm of shattered debris. But this action still would have given the moon the slightly bulged shape that seems to have stopped its apparent spinning rotation with respect to our sight line from the earth, so that we never see but one side of the moon. Now that we have pictures of the far side of the moon, as well as a complete satellite-measured network of moon gravity tests and corrected measurements of its overall shape, it is easy to see how slightly one-sided and out-of-round it is. (And on the moon the drifting around of continental plates of the debris, with continuing volcanoes and moonquakes, would clearly have been prevented by the fact that the moon, being smaller than the earth, would have cooled its original melted basalt to a thicker layer of solid rock crust much more quickly than on the earth.)

Similar comments would apply to the other planets and their irregularities. (And maybe the earth’s oceans were picked up at the same time, from the liquid part of the debris of that lighter planet from further out away from the sun in the solar system. Also the much discussed idea that there was once water on Mars, since there appear to be dried out water wash channels in places, may be correct for the same cause, with the exception that on Mars after the first heavy rain of water from the lighter planet there was not enough for an ocean and it all soaked into the rock debris on the surface. There may be something to the overall idea, though it has not been the official picture from the space program in its early decades.—There are even rumors of thoughts, or working hypotheses on how things must have happened, a scientist might say, to explain why it is that, compared to the inner planets nearer the sun, the outer planets are less dense, lower in mass and lighter in weight at the same gravity for each gallon or cupful of substance. This could have occurred because the early solar wind might have operated like a vast form of gas chromatograph blowing the lighter materials away from the sun like straws in a hurricane, and separating most of the lighter liquids and gases off to the outer planets away from most of the heavier rocks in the inner planets. Such an action might work very much like the small chromatographs that some chemists use to separate lighter from heavier substances in the wind of a flowing gas in a tube full of marbles or other materials in modern laboratories. Even though condensed liquid water and solid ice are quite densely heavy, this could be compatible with the original sorting of water out to the planet beyond Mars since the gaseous molecules of evaporated water are among the lightest of molecules, and so could most easily be blown further out by the solar wind. And frozen water snow flakes, if they could avoid evaporating in space, or little soft graupel snow balls like the supposed cores of comets, are also quite low in average density or in mass per unit area of wind drag.)

In any event, after a while of marveling at the beauty of the earth and worrying about being hit by space rocks, you might begin wondering again about how all the live things on earth are all mixed up in its very thin layer of water and moist air. What with the trees, bushes, grasses, and seaweeds with invisible animals sliding through between the leaves and hairlike strands, you could be forgiven for thinking that the whole surface layer of the earth is covered with something very much like the soupy slime on the rock you picked out of the creek mud last week. It was so slimy it slipped between your fingers when you tried to throw it. Still when you looked at such a slime under a microscope back in high school or college biology class, it was full of things that looked as big as waving tree branches and dogs or bears. It soon becomes clear that a lot of things have appearances that depend entirely on the breadth of the field of view and special circumstances such as using a microscope or telescope. Maybe people could seem like middling large animals living in a soup of live things, with each kind of thing having its own life to lead in its own way.

Another interesting point is that of all the live things living in this thin layer of life on this ball of rock covered with small bits of mixed rocks called dirt, of all these, only the plants or vegetables (and a few things that may or may not be plants) can live on dirt, air, water, and energy from the sunlight or from other sources of heat. In fact many of these live things do much better if they also have some other live or once alive things to draw food from. The animals especially can only live by eating live or once alive things and by breathing oxygen that the plants have released as their wastes. So on the whole, plants live on the bare dirt, water, air gases or dissolved gases, and sunlight, and they make the earth livable for a few other plants and for all the animals. The main thing about this is that without the energy in the light and heat from the sun (plus possibly a little from within the earth in hot springs, etc.) there would be no life at all on the earth such as we see every day. (Perhaps the ancient Persians like Zoroaster, and others, were not so very far wrong in one way when they worshiped the sun as the giver of life on their cold, high mountain regions.)

Animals then, like us, must eat either plants or other animals that have eaten plants. People, like bears and dogs, cannot make their own vitamins, starch, nor many of the proteins they must have to live. Actually a few plants have also no ability to make every one of their necessary foods and must seek out with their roots or fly-trap flowers the dead or living bodies of animals to find all the kinds of food they need. They got that way, after starting out like other plants, from many generations of living with plenty of animals around.

(An ecologist would probably say that this is more efficient for them than making their own proteins. It would probably be more realistic to say that these plants accidentally happened to change so as to be able to feed on animals, and then they happened to change again so they could no longer make all their own food; but as long as animals are around, these plants don’t seem to die out.)

If the view of life is really broad, both from space and through the microscope, with a long session reading about biochemical details which scientists grow gray trying to understand, then a lot of other odd things about animal life begin to come out. There is an almost uncountable variety of different kinds of animals, as well as of plants, and of living or almost living things that may not be, or are positively not, either plants or animals as we usually think of them. Some of these things, such as the cold virus that attacks us with damaging disease, are so tiny that they cannot be seen by eye with the best standard optical microscope using glass lenses (though some very complicated electronic microscopes have given us good pictures.) From the very tiniest of these things that are not really creatures (most people would say), to the largest elephant or whale, almost every one of these things, except the true most basic plants, is taking food out of the chemical substance of each nearby kind of thing which it can possibly feed on. Each eats those live or dead things which it finds eatable (edible to it) for some nourishment, for energy and body building materials.

In this, each thing is limited only by its own capabilities to feed on the other, unless some special difficulty has developed to prevent it, or unless the eater is complicated enough to learn that there is a special advantage in not eating that particular other thing. The feeding targets range between smaller than the feeder and enormously larger than the feeder. That the target is vulnerable to that feeder (weaker in some way, not well enough defended against it) is the primary matter. The feeder in each case does whatever it can do. It generally satisfies its ability to eat something by doing it.—Let’s not forget that people in general are likely to do this too, and so do the collections of people, such as tribes, nations, societies. Even the collection of all people is likely to satisfy the ability to eat by consuming the plants and animals close at hand to each person or batch of people, whenever those edible things become vulnerable to people.

It follows, from these observed goings on, that the live (and life-like) things which do more feeding on another kind of thing than it does upon them really dominate the eaten thing, and make it a subordinate supporter to their life activities. This two-way street of acting together may have surges back and forth of short term dominances and reversals such as we have seen between the French and Germans, or such as those that occur when people who eat rats are bitten in their sleep. Sometimes the action is more roundabout, as when people kill off a nest of rats that have been eating the peoples’ seed corn and bringing them fleas with typhus infections. So it becomes clear that the dominances we see around us may be simple and direct feeding dominances or very complicated supports of ways of life through roundabout chains of action that may not be easy to uncover and understand. (Ecologists work on this kind of problem.) Particularly among people, dominance may appear on the surface merely as an emotional behavior, enjoying pushing other people around, or being more confident, or speaking in a more determined manner that overrides the views of others. Those who can dominate usually do, sometimes without seeming to make any special effort.

Dominance may also arise from size of a person or a wolf, or from numbers of people or dogs in a pack. Especially when a very large army wipes out a small town, such dominances are easy to understand. There is a much harder kind of dominance to get a grasp of, but it may have very important and long lasting effects. It seems to be involved in the development of the more complex forms of life, and it appears to be present in the case of outlying smaller towns or suburbs that sometimes dominate larger towns, or in the case of manufacture of a very complex final product from a farmer’s harvests. This may be called complex product dominance.

This kind of dominance seems to apply between the factory and the farmer who raises cotton, and again between the thread or cloth factories and the clothing factories. It may also determine the result in a straight forward competition between ladies’ dress makers; the maker of the prettiest dresses (more complex in satisfying customers) is frequently the winner. It can also apply between scientists; the seemingly simple statement of the math equations of Einstein’s theories about relativity actually brings together more of modern physics than anything that came before it and must be considered an outstandingly complex product which has continued to dominate a large part of science.—Above all, it must be said that the more complex products of a modern industrial society provide an easy dominance over primitive societies or even over advanced agricultural societies.

In another way, the sensitive complexities of Hebrew ancient thought and writings about religion and morality have dominated that area of thought in the heritages of the more physically dominant Greeks and Romans throughout the western world for about 2000 years. This was particularly important in the constant Bible reading of the early United States.—In a somewhat similar way, there is the complex product that human creatures have in themselves in their brains’ average ability to put important experiences in words and math symbols, plus the voice structures and hands able to speak and to record the complexities of the word and math symbols (not forgetting the eye and ear ability to receive and pass on the symbols to the receiver’s brain.) These all taken together have given people a complex product dominance over many other kinds of live creatures. That also leads directly to such dominances in complex social coorganizations. This occurs both between societies of people and those of dogs, horses, cattle, etc., and within human societies, of very small to large sizes, even including the world-wide society.

It is possible then to have competitions for dominance between those with the advantages of size or numbers and those who have or make more complex products. Such competitions for survival advantage can become so involved that it is difficult to tell which capability is winning, even in a local area, unless one of the competitors is driven into very small areas of refuge or dies out completely. Sometimes a change of local climate or other independent change will throw the advantage from one competitive side to the other or result in a stalemate with neither side putting the other into a subordinate position.

There is still another area of importance when life is viewed from such a distance as space gives us. When thinking of the soup of many kinds of live things on the thin surface coating of the earth, it is easy to see that while the larger kinds of life do live and die as separate persons or alligators, and so forth, producing separate young from inside the body of a mother, some smaller kinds only divide over and over again. Some of the very tiniest seem to duplicate themselves over and over by each lining up along-side similar chemical fragments in the soup without producing a new live or almost alive replacement from part of itself. The possibility arises that we should think of our children as primarily a dividing off from the mother internally, even though it must be initiated in the larger animals by sexual union with a distinctly non-motherly male, and though there are mixtures involved of two separate groups of the inheritance carriers we call genes and chromosomes from the two parents. From either point of view, once life got started billions of years ago, new life seems to come almost entirely from earlier life. That is the only sure place for it to come from. Life at this point in the age of the earth does not seem to come alive very often all by itself from the bare rocks and water and air with the sun’s energy (or with the internal heat energy of the earth), as it may have done long ago.

However that may be taken, just as with simple and very small dividing kinds of life, while leaving for space it is hard to keep track of a single person even with a most powerful telescope. Any one person just merges with the crowd in a family house or city street. The movements and buildings of large groups of people can be followed easily. And from the upper air, it is easy to see with fairly small telescopes or cameras the general differences between large groups of darkly tanned people in open tropical houses and of very pink people in houses that must withstand snows, and so forth. But the single persons in all groups look very much like ants or termites around different kinds of dirt hills. It’s possible to think that perhaps the individual is not really the only player in life.

Certainly the large and moderately small animals and many plants do live and die as individuals. Certainly the individual brain must observe and organize an animal creature’s actions for itself. Certainly there is a kind of spirit that appears through every creature’s outward impression to others, and it is usually unlike that of any other creature. Yet, everyone feels influences on personal actions from others. And there are the Chinese to whom the family has long been of more importance than any single member. There are the Scots with their deep sense of the clan. Many men have considered themselves of less value than their church or their nation or their ship’s passengers or their associates in a social group. To most women their children are usually far more important than their own selves. Perhaps it is most real to say that every individual human lives at the same time as a single person, as part of a family, as a participating shareholder within a local community, in a sub-society, in a larger society at several levels of size, in a state or nation, in a variety of people with a quite similar gene pool, in the human race, in the live animals, and as a little portion of the live things that swarm over the land and water which would be bare without all of them. The same is true of all the other kinds of creatures in a general way.

Within, and as a part of, these many different sorts of streams of life, the single creature of any kind actually lives its life in this broader view. It shares in the subordinations and dominances of each stream as well as in the life or death outcomes for each. It cannot avoid these relations, even by trying to mix with other not closely related streams, for to that degree its own original streams become mixed too. In fact, many of these streams do merge or separate more completely in processes that never completely stop.

As a result of all this interplay, it must be said that most of the very large decisions, for any form of life or separate individual, are made, not by single creatures, but by a very spread out process through an entire life stream, a diffusive decision process. With imperfect observations and individual thoughts available to any one creature, a centralized decision made by one or a few for all members of a society or life stream is as likely as not to be fatally wrong due to any of the possible unforeseen consequences. Where numbers of individuals separately observe any other members’ earlier trials at making any necessary decision on a choice of possible actions, then review the results, and each separately try again, one after the other, there is a diffusive decision process. This is what really happens in the biggest decisions of all about getting food, belief in a higher moral power, choosing mates, and raising children in clans, tribes, or larger societies, and in families. Those were the survival decisions made for the life streams of the whole human race and its forerunners over a period of several thousand to millions of years ago by the great average of millions of individual actions. It appears from the very high present level of success in human affairs, as witnessed by the very large and growing number of live humans, that diffusive decision has had a good, sound, and realistic demonstration of its capability. (This lays the basis for the recurring forms of diffusive democracy, individual enterprise, and religious freedom which show up throughout human history and must be referred to again and again in finding the background for the democracy of the United States.)

Each of the successful large animal life forms could be said to show the same kind of life amid the flows of many streams, each of which is constantly involved in diffusely decided actions for survival. That many of them are being forced toward extinction by human domination does not destroy their earlier success. (It appears likely that almost all the separate levels of life streams may eventually die at some time, for each type of creature, just as individuals do.) Life seems to be over and over again a flourishing and then a replacement at nearly all levels of the streams.

In a more personal way, there is a strong impression among many people as they grow older that the value of the life stream of the continuing family strain, interwoven as it must be with other (probably similar) family strains, becomes more and more apparent, easier and easier to understand. There is a great satisfaction of the most important human survival (reproduction) capability in a continuing family life stream. To be truly continuing, the family should be of at least average replacement size (three or more per generation, somewhat more than two, in each branch to replace all the parents and dead ends); and it should stick together well. Children are usually linked together best, not only by parents, but also by aunts, uncles, and cousins, and by living grandparents. The grandparents can provide a survival benefit in holding the family together, strengthening its guiding principles, and providing insight into human behavior and history, long after their reproductive life is over. In this aspect the family is made up of individuals, but the immediately reachable, interlinked family can become more and more important through time to each one. And the individual failures or growths of capabilities (and dominances) accumulate to all through participation in the linkages of the life stream.

It does not take much thought to realize that the interweaving of otherwise separate, but usually somewhat varietally similar, family strains has been going on for a very long time. This family kin network of broad branching extension back and forth in time, as well as in unknown living extension side-to-side through distant cousins at a moment in time, may indeed be the truly most important stream of life in which an individual participates. Most biologists would probably like to call this kind of network a small gene pool, emphasizing the shared genetic heritage rather than the individuals who embody it. You could say that any varietal form of life, occupying both time and land surface area, seems almost to employ the many living individuals of its gene pool in both number dominance and multiple complex product dominances scattered through its area of life. (In addition, there are likely to be advantageous cooperative subordinations, especially within a family or other larger life stream.)

In sexually reproducing life forms, each type of animal in the large view also is benefitted by its individual members in keeping the type’s gene pool well mixed. This takes place in some seemingly random ways, but many of those have a systematic basis which has grown up or evolved because of the survival advantages of mixing with the near life streams rather than constantly in-breeding in a single family stream.

The satisfaction of childhood emotional growth capabilities seems on the large average to build up such a powerful set of emotional habits between young home members that when the teen years arrive with their strong new set of emotional capabilities which must be satisfied in sex, the earlier childish habits of behavior are usually too strong to be turned around completely enough to be really satisfactory in sex. Family conflict and dominance habits also play a part in this. At any rate, the developing teen-ager usually does not go beyond casual exploring of sex differences within the near-at-hand family. The typical late adolescent takes new sexual attachments as part of the expanding opportunities for satisfying more and more of the growing internal capabilities through contacts with other reachable acquaintances outside of the family and free of many family restraints. Sometimes a few go far beyond the familiar life streams.

The emotional structure to bring that about on the normal average in the human life stream has to be inherited and inborn or it would not be possible to accomplish it in very many teen youngsters, much less in a large average of many youngsters. It also appears to be present in many other kinds of animals in the wild, as in the young male lions which leave the family pack or pride, as the pack is usually called in speaking of lions. On the whole, the structure and the behavior seem to have a fairly wide permanence among large animals, though not necessarily in every case. (In a much broader aspect of reality that arises here, it must be accepted that a live thing can only do what its inherited structure enables it to do, plus the effects of any new change, or mutation, that arises by accident in its genes and final structure, whether from cosmic radiation arriving out of space, or from some unusual chemical eaten in jimson weed blossoms, or elsewhere.)

It is easy to see once more that there is a complicated background structure behind what might look like a simple, social custom. It is clearly important to the continuing health of gene pool life streams to stay well mixed to ensure that the occasional bad or deadly recessive gene is not very likely to come up in both parents of a basic family and so will damage few children. This keeps the gene pool and its individuals strong on the average. The overall survival necessity for this was probably greater many thousands of years ago when people were few and widely scattered. With the rise of dense populations the loss of a limited number of new individuals to bad genes probably means much less to the general survival of a varietal life stream. But the emotional and social structure to ensure genetic mixing is still there and working.

As soon as we start thinking of an interwoven gene pool for a small variety group of people, such as the original Northern Scotch, the Border Scots, Saxons, Basques, Eskimoes (Inuit), or Iroquois Indians, the realization becomes inescapable that these pools are also more distantly interlinked into broader varietal pools of all the pinkish people, all the light brownish, the very dark brownish, the yellowish, or the reddish people. Furthermore, these pools are yet more distantly interwoven by the occasional random inter-varietal coupling that occurs because two mates are located near each other. (This may often also be because the two mates are misfits in their own communities and may remain misfits. Where such mates are competent at coorganizing with their own kin, they may continue competently together.) The children of such a union may then, or after several generations as possible outcasts, rejoin either of the parent pools. This sort of interweaving works out so that there is a current, as well as a long departed ancestral, interlinking of a gene pool of all humanity. This pooling only dies out at the edges where humanish individuals have for some millions of years now been unable to cross-breed reproducing hybrid children with apes, with monkeys, or (further back) with any four-footed mammals.

As this shows, each of the larger gene pools of any kind of animal is made up of somewhat separated smaller pools.

This kind of separations of smaller gene pools for different varieties and types of animals is usually caused, first, by physical separation of groups of individuals on different continents or in different areas of fertile food growth. This then would be followed by different changes in genes caused by radiation arriving from space or from within the earth, or by eating some semi-poisonous weed. Accidental changes from such causes may lead to different structures in the chromosomes within the egg and sperm cells that must be joined by sexual activity to start a new child or puppy.

After a length of time the accumulated changes in chromosome structure can become so different in the two groups that the egg and sperm cells can not join together fruitfully. A biologist would probably wish to say that the two groups of a single variety of animal went through changes to two separate varieties of the original animal and then to separate species of similar animals, which may be easy or hard to tell apart, depending on the effects of the gene changes on such things as hair and skin color, leg length, quarrelsome behavior, etc.

Separation between two animal groups which are nearby may also be just as readily caused by small early differences in appearance or by one group’s eating more garlic or smelly fish, so that the young male or female of one group does not look right or smell right to the opposite sex from the other group. This can lead to gradual reduction of coupling mixes between the groups with increasing opportunities for isolation of different gene changes.

This process of separation between groups of similar animals may be speeded up if one group develops a strong dominance over the other, especially if it drives the other out to less fertile feeding areas. The poorer food can lead to changes in skin, hair, behavior, odor, etc., so that the young of one group do not look right, smell right, feel right, or appeal in any other way to the opposite sex in the other. (Sometimes sex is very driving, and sometimes it is very easy to disturb.) The separation can be just as real as if they were on separate continents. Possibly the initial difference might have been as small as one group’s living a little further up the mountainside where it was not as hot and the eatable bugs were different.

After thinking for a while about all these complicated threads of real interactions between live things in the soupy moss on the thin surface layer of the earth, it begins to seem worth thinking about that the human varietal gene pooling which is going on may perhaps be somewhat like that of Labrador, Mexican hairless, collie, or poodle dogs, and various wolves, as more distinctly separated now from the various coyotes or foxes. Varietal pools are also found in rats and mice, where people are not likely to think about individual members of the gene pools at all. So people can think fairly clearly about varieties of dogs, cows, horses, bears, snakes, etc., but especially well about snakes and rats, since they are farther away from individual consideration. Still, it appears to be very hard to be clear-headed and unemotional about human varietal gene pools, since they are not far enough away from every one of us.

(In this connection there is one very interesting sidelight on the subject of rats. They, like people, are able to eat nearly everything that comes their way, whether plant or animal, and they are very agressive in seeking out such widely varied food, and in reproducing in large numbers to use up all the available food. Very few other animals of any middling to large size are so successful in this as people and rats. Possibly, millions of years from now, with the same basic genes plus a small number of accidentally accumulated gene changes, rats may grow and push humans into a small variety of isolated groups living under rat dominance, very much like the lizard remnants of today exist in the presence of mammalian humans after the dominance of the dinosaurs millions of years ago. But they will not be able to change the fact that humans will have had their flowering into dominance over many forms and types of living things, except insects and microbes, and even over a few microbes.)

One very recent modern activity in the US and the Industrial West that adds much emphasis to this kind of broad view of life in the world is the progress in biochemistry. That is the advancement of chemistry from simple things like baking soda and battery acid reactions, through about a hundred years of steady increase in knowledge by thousands of people, to a considerable understanding of what goes on in each tiny biological cell of living creatures of all sorts. The broad result is that every living thing that we would call a creature is known to be amazingly closely related to every other living thing. The only big division is between all living creatures and the bare rocks, water, and atmospheric gases of the non-living world. There is not really too much of a biochemical separation from the questionably living things like the viruses. After all, they can reproduce too, as well as the animals can, and they do it all the time, right in the cells of our living bodies on which they almost seem to feed in a way.

There are chemically only minor differences even between humans and the vegetables on which they frequently feed, and much smaller differences from the mammals such as cows which they dominate and feed on. Of course, some people claim to be vegetarians, eating only the most distant kin. And that can probably be made to sustain human life for much of a normal life span. That is made workable in part by the presence of large numbers of microscopic animals in the normal and healthy human gut, where some of them contribute special protein foods or vitamins to us.

At any rate, in addition to eating plants, the large majority of humans eat meat from our closer mammal relatives as often as they can get it. Many primitive people (as well as the chimpanzees) still get a good share of their protein food from monkeys, which are not even distant enough kin to be unmistakably four-footed. Then there are definite records of human cannibals eating the meat of their own kind. So, as live animals, we are locked in a total dependence on dominating and feeding on our relatives.

Even further, it is apparently not possible to