Unnatural Intelligence: Crows and the Father Expose the Cuckoo

By Mike L Anderson

Imagine intelligent humans emulating a certain parasite, the cuckoo, under the influence of yet another microbial one with devastating impact on our children? From rather disparate quarters such as psychiatrists, psychologists, parasitologists, evolutionary anthropologists, philosophers and theologians there is an emerging sense that for all our intelligence and knowledge, there is something that has become prevalently off about the human psyche. I am going to call it unnatural intelligence for reasons that will become apparent. For all this intelligence, a certain ancient wisdom has been very largely lost among many. Along the way we will find that there is a connection between parasites and philosophers, brain hemispheres and boarding school, books and depression, cat ownership and unbelief, fatherlessness and faithlessness and between crows and our Loving Heavenly Father. And we will find that there are certain common threads in such a tangled web.

What if I told you that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was a critique of the supreme propaganda piece by a certain philosopher who was one of the main champions of the mindset associated with this parasitism? What if I told you that between the monster in her story and Dr. Victor Frankenstein it was the latter that had the problematic psyche in the first place? What if I told you that the parasite affecting the fracturing of the human psyche has an accomplice in one of our most beloved pets? We like to think of ourselves as being the highpoint of creation and the pinnacle of evolution (which, as we will see, is theologically and evolutionarily naive). Those with a big head may take umbrage at this, but what if I told you that a bird brain, the crow, can inspire us out of this predicament? What if I told you that considering a certain wisdom in the derided crow, it is, in some respects, created more in the image of God than humans? Now imagine a social parasite that did its thing for the sake of the host parents at the expense of itself. What a strange parasite indeed! It has happened once, as we will see, and in so doing has provided humans with inspiration and much more that goes far beyond what crows can do.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike L Anderson
• Release date: Nov 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005166243

Mike L Anderson

Mike L Anderson, PhD (Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology). Mike develops educational resources and software and plays Starcraft.

Book preview

"Until I read Mike Anderson’s brilliant book, I’d always thought of myself as the odd man out. After all, boarding school has its way of isolating each child to cope with the unspeakable agonies alone. No whispering allowed after dark. I’d never considered that the thin veneer of acceptance was a generic mask. Nor that my own sense of ‘apartness’ - which has lingered long into adulthood – was not personal weakness, but an inevitable post-traumatic stress disorder that came with the territory.

Mike has a spellbinding way of drawing from nature to explain the essence of nurture and the world’s betrayal of its children. He approaches this hideous subject with love, care, and gentleness, sprinkling it with humour, and wrapping it all up with the great news - God’s amazing love in Christ for His children – including me. Mike has given me real psychological terms for my nightmares, reassured me that I am not alone, and reminded me that through God, us victims can be victorious. I can’t thank Mike enough."

Richard Vowles

Husband, father of four beloved children, boarding school survivor

Dr Mike Anderson has been a personal friend of mine for over 55 years having shared many mutual adventures and challenging experiences together. Reading his account of our shared days at boarding school including both primary and high school years have been both insightful and therapeutic for the spirit and soul. His experience of God, impeccable research and wonderful way of authentically weaving complex research, theology, evolutionary biology, anthropology and psychology in uniquely comprehensive and comprehensible ways is remarkable. It has been edifying to experience his lovely banter and spiritual depth despite or perhaps because of his suffering at the hands of others. Mike is testimony to the mercy and truth of Jesus and Ubuntu (I am because you are) despite our flaws. Be enriched and enjoy the book, you will find the research comprehensive and his heart open.

Jim Carlyle¹

Retired pastor and boarding school survivor

I have known Mike for over 40 years. In that time, I have come to know him not only as a close friend and confidante, but as a scholarly writer, tackling difficult subjects with formidable insight and erudition. His new book is no exception. In it, with great innovation and originality of ideas, he draws together diverse topics with aplomb, reaching ground breaking conclusions that are both enlightening and sobering. Through sharing personal aspects of his own life journey, he brings added pathos to the message of the book. This is by no means easy reading, but I highly recommend it and believe the effort taken to grapple with its message will be rewarded.

Dr Andy Potts

Head of Laboratory of the Bacterial Serology laboratory,

Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute

Unnatural Intelligence:

Crows and the Father expose the Cuckoo

Mike L Anderson

Published by Smashwords

Copyright 2021 Mike L Anderson

Revised 2023

ISBN 9781005166243

Discover other titles by Mike L Anderson at Smashwords.com

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/mikelanderson

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. This ebook is freeware and may not be sold. If you have paid for it, you have been scammed. Unless otherwise stated, quotations from the Bible are taken from Holy Bible: New International Version, Copyright © 1978 by the International Bible Society, New York.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife Janice, my children, Rachel, Nathan and Sharon, my sons-in-law, Richard West and Deco Cruz, my brother Gerald, my boarding school survivor friends, Jim Carlyle, Ben Rubin, Richard Vowles and my best friend, Andy Potts.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many people, but want to especially mention Jim Carlyle for his review and Dr Andrew Potts; Andy Muranda and Richard Vowles for their reviews and edits.

Cover design: Adapted from Lalan²

Table of Contents

Messengers from the Father?

Humane Crows

Living in Cloud Cuckoo Land

Covert parasites

Unnatural intellectuals

Cuckoo parents

The most Compassionate Social Parasite

About Mike L Anderson

Other titles by Mike L Anderson

Notes

Messengers from the Father?

I was five years old when I came across an ailing rat under my bed in the dormitory. In retrospect, it had presumably been poisoned. The institution must boast sterile facilities. The urge to look after the creature overcame me. I picked it up, placed it under my tucked-in shirt and against my warm skin. Was this uncomplicated compassion, or did I do so because I needed its dwindling warmth, as I thought it did mine? Perhaps it was an attempt to create my own substitute for a little caring family, however short-lived. Little did I realise that the rat may well have been harbouring a particular parasite that, strangely enough, could well help to explain why I was in the institution in the first place.

Imagine intelligent humans emulating a certain parasite, the cuckoo, under the influence of yet another microbial one with devastating impact on our children? From rather disparate quarters such as psychiatrists, psychologists, parasitologists, evolutionary anthropologists, philosophers and theologians there is an emerging sense that for all our intelligence and knowledge, there is something that has become prevalently off about the human psyche. I am going to call it unnatural intelligence for reasons that will become apparent. For all this intelligence, a certain ancient wisdom has been very largely lost among many. Along the way we will find that there is a connection between parasites and philosophers, brain hemispheres and boarding school, books and depression, cat ownership and unbelief, fatherlessness and faithlessness and between crows and our Loving Heavenly Father. And we will find that there are certain common threads in such a tangled web.

What if I told you that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a critique of the supreme propaganda piece by a certain philosopher who was one of the main champions of the mindset associated with this parasitism? What if I told you that between the monster in her story and Dr. Victor Frankenstein it was the latter that had the problematic psyche in the first place? What if I told you that the greatest prankster of the human race (fully one third of us) does possess a brain.

What if I told you that the parasite affecting the fracturing of the human psyche has an accomplice in one of our most beloved pets? We like to think of ourselves as being the highpoint of creation and the pinnacle of evolution (which, as we will see, is theologically and evolutionarily naive). Those with a big head may take umbrage at this, but what if I told you that a bird brain, the crow, can inspire us out of this predicament? What if I told you that considering a certain wisdom in the derided crow, it is, in some respects, created more in the image of God than humans? Now imagine a social parasite that did its thing for the sake of the host parents at the expense of itself. What a strange parasite indeed! It has happened once, as we will see, and in so doing has provided humans with inspiration and much more that goes far beyond what crows can do.

Evolutionary anthropologist Joseph Heinrich notes that a very peculiar psyche has emerged since the industrial revolution particularly among the educated. Cognitive psychologists John Vervaeke and colleagues use stronger language. They say, Evidence from the General Social Survey (GSS) paints a bleak picture of our interpersonal engagement. From 1985 to 2004, the proportion of people who report having no one to discuss important matters with nearly tripled.³ They call the 21st century’s crisis a zombie apocalypse saying, The outbreak of zombieism is a twentieth century phenomenon, but in the twenty-first century it explodes into zeitgeist.⁴ The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey has documented a steep rise in mental illness in the British Isles and North America between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵ According to another psychiatrist, Iain McGilChrist, for all the trouble over our interpersonal engagement it comes along with another characteristic - reckless denial. It does not bode well for our future. We can, says McGilChrist expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss.⁶

So, something seems to be happening to the human race? What is behind it? As we will see, an inadvertent and seemingly diabolical collusion between multiple factors and agents has led to the quagmire, from genes to parasites to culture to institutions to technologies to celebrity intellectuals. An unholy alliance has fostered an unnatural intelligence. We are becoming crazy in several respects, but especially in how we engage with each other and most especially with the young. In this there is another bird and an intelligent species, the crow, that shows us up. That stupid parasites might be fooling us due to the peculiarities of the human brain, that we might be emulating another, and that we can be inspired out of the morass by crows may seem unbelievable, but the evidence is there if we are prepared to pay attention to brainless parasites, bird brains and researchers from widely differing fields.

The parasite driving our fractured psyche uses a trick, not consciously of course (it is a single-celled organism) that is the mainstay of illusionists. It uses the intelligence of its hosts against them. The brainless leading the brainy by the nose, now that is something to ponder! Very few have heard of it, yet it chronically infects about two billion people worldwide! Not only has it evaded our consciousness, it evades our immune system by, wait for it, forming cysts in the brain! Yet, it invades and influences our consciousness! It invented covert operations long before humans ever did. It is in cahoots with a certain pet and has affected institutions and cultural practices to our considerable detriment. It may well have played a part in a certain very influential mad genius who promoted strange ideas about parental care. It seems ridiculously improbable that the most intelligent creature on the planet could be hoodwinked by one with zero intelligence. It is a little like a physics professor getting duped within his field of expertise by a student. How can the less knowledgeable hoodwink the more? And yet this has happened.

How to dupe the intelligent

Introducing Reginald V. Jones, the physicist who became as acclaimed as a prankticist. By that I mean he was not just an inveterate prankster, but a terrific exponent of the theory of how to do it. He was the one who gained such a reputation for foiling the Nazis during the Second World War. Jones made a bet with a fellow student that he could get their physics professor to do a really silly thing. As it so happens, the student was having dinner that night with the professor. The phone rang. The prof excused himself and returned only moments later. The student inquired whether anything was the matter. The prof replied that, strangely, there was no one on the other end of the phone. This happened several times until finally, the voice on the other end identified himself as a telephone technician and asked, Are you having trouble with your phone?

Indeed, I am, replied the prof. The technician took note and said that they would send someone around in a few months. He apologised for the delay, explaining that there was a huge backlog. The prof pleaded desperately for someone to come around sooner, but the technician said there was nothing he could do. However, if he could have the professor’s full cooperation, they could try some remote tests. The prof assured him of his full cooperation. The technician was, of course, Reginald V. Jones.

Jones managed to persuade the prof to do increasingly ridiculous things from banging a metal spoon against the phone, to repeating the procedure with his shoes off and, finally, to begin lowering the phone into a bucket of water! What a hilariously silly scene! At this point, Jones’s student friend felt that prank had gone too far and tried to intervene. But the prof persisted. When Jones asked what the commotion was about, the prof replied that his student was under the impression that there was a prank going on. He asked what sort of student he was and after the prof answered Jones replied that he had guessed as much, that physicists were the worst - thinking they knew everything when they knew nothing!

In a paper in 1957, Jones explained the principles of pranking.⁷ The dud phone calls were used to set up the professor. Jones did not have to try and persuade anyone that their phone was out of order. It was deduced. The crucial principle is this: Certain victims, or marks as they are called, will believe something far more firmly if they have deduced it from experience themselves than if they have been told it.

The illusionist James Randi brings out that there is a certain component behind such pranks and why this is so critical in deceiving the intelligent. That component is a person. He writes, "Scientists are very easily deceived. They think logically, extrapolate possibilities from evidence presented, assume (with a good probability of being right) certain aspects of the observed data and draw on their past experience in coming to decisions. This is to say that they act very much as all humans do, struggling with sensory input to derive new facts from it. But scientists do this with a certain authority and certainty born of their training and discipline. They are thus excellent candidates for being flimflammed by a clever operator who is aware of the fact that scientists seldom bring the human element into account"⁸ (emphasis mine). He has also said, Generous funding doesn’t make scientists smart . . . Nor are they able to detect trickery without help.⁹ Instead of ‘smart,’ Randi should have used ‘wise’ since seeking out the help of others requires humility. That intelligence and knowledge is not necessarily a safeguard against deception, but can actually facilitate it, is something cognitive psychologists have been pointing out, as we will see.

Notice that the deductive powers of the professor, far from preventing the deception, were exploited by Jones in his orchestrating of the prank. He got the professor fixated on the workings of the telephone which requires observation and deduction concerning things and is in the realm of objective knowledge rather than on the machinations of the person on the other end of the line which requires trust in a person and is in the realm of personal knowledge. In the parlance of illusionists this is the classic and vital move of misdirection. Jones got away with his prank because he managed to sideline the personal.

The tactics played out here in a single prank, if played out in civilisations, could make swathes of people become increasingly impersonal. Could a stupid parasite, without the slightest capacity to argue, exploit the brain of an intelligent species so that their experience is altered and they become obsessed with the objects over persons? Could it invade the brain in such a way that far from destroying it, use its very abilities for its own purposes? And could it do so covertly that humans were thoroughly oblivious to what has happened until only very recently. The answer, as we will see, is a resounding yes to all.

If parasites can influence humans negatively and the very intelligent can be duped, perhaps other creatures could teach us something? We will see how a single chimpanzee made such a deep impression on a highly educated scientist that he revolutionised his ways. How about other creatures? A team of cognitive scientists have recently established, using a battery of tests, that ravens are on a par with chimps in intelligence.¹⁰ Perhaps, then, birds could teach humans a thing or two? Biologically, crows and ravens belong in one genus, Corvus. A crow is pretty much a small raven and a raven is pretty much a big crow. We may be very prejudiced about considering them as teachers. They have a creepy mystique that is accentuated by their habits, gothic attire and raucous, unmelodious calls (see accompanying painting by August Friedrich Schenck¹¹). They have been variously seen as harbingers of death, messengers from on high and even as trickster gods among the indigenous North Americans.¹² They are hardly unambiguous as sages, even less as models. Yet, there are very good reasons to pay attention to them. Jesus Christ, no less, called on us to consider them (Luke 12:24). And, as we will see, the evolutionary process has produced in them something that shows humans up. Perhaps they can be seen as messengers from the Father after all.

Ravens are the first birds specifically mentioned in the Bible (Genesis 8:6-7). How can God come to mind when considering these birds, since the collective noun for ravens is 'unkindness' and for crows is 'murder'? How could Jesus have been onto something?