TheMillerCircle.org

Who would argue that of all nature’s creatures, the evolutionary process of natural selection achieved its most stunning success when it brought Homo sapiens onto the world stage, about 200,000 years ago. You can imagine nature’s pride as she announced,  “here is my best work, 7 million years in the making” (the first human (hominin) ancestor in the fossil record is Australophithecus afarensis, who walked erect, but lived in trees, ate fruit and nuts and was preyed upon by the numerous predators of that era, like giant hyenas, saber-tooth tigers and many others. A. afarensis was an edge species, the size of a small ape, who  lived in the trees and on the ground. Perhaps 6-10 per cent of A. afarensis fell victim to these large, fast predators, based on the fossil record of  A. afarensis showing predator skull punctures and tooth marks on other bones). The guiding light for evolutionary change is natural selection operating on mutations that result in improved means of survival and procreation.

As humans, there is much that we can celebrate about ourselves. While we don’t have the greatest body plans and we are not the fastest or the most agile or the strongest species, we do have a brain worth bragging about, a modern marvel, and perhaps the pinnacle of the evolutionary process. Although big brains per se may be worth noting, it is far more important to understand what part of our brains have evolved in such a way that we manage to dwarf the achievements of all other species with our rich linguistic skills, a powerful sense of logic, a prolonged period of social learning  and the creation of a vast culture that has led to a sea change in the earth around us.  Our  language facility  keeps our social evolution on a continuous staircase of change and adaptation, one in which each new generation adds its own cultural layer on top of those of its predecessors.The central question is whether we can continue on the staircase we are currently on or whether we need to backup and start over on a new trajectory. As far as I know, there is no evidence in the fossil record that suggests Homo sapiens was ever confronted with something as threatening as what we might face with global climate change and its potential impact on our culture. Are we smart enough to make the kind of adaptation that may be required to meet this new uncertain future?

Cortical surface of human, cat and rat brain (NEUROSCIENCE: EXPLORING THE BRAIN, Bear et al, Fig 7-27; not to scale)

The figure above illustrates the cortical surface of thee different mammalian brains, including human, cat and rat. These are not drawn to scale, but magnified as required to illustrate how different regions of each brain are functionally divided into visual, auditory, motor and somatic sensory partitions (the olfactory bulb in humans is  tucked under the frontal lobes of brain and can’t be seen using this view). Most of us understand that the cerebral cortex (neocortex), the outer, undulated surface  of our brains, is the real envy of the neighborhood. It’s what has our competitors swooning. This convoluted outer surface of our brain is so vast that it has to be folded into peaks  (gyri) and valleys (sulci) to squeeze  its huge surface area into  our skull; within the skull, the brain is suspended in a fluid-filled shock absorber system, surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and suspended by strands and layers of concentric, fibrous collagen, through which blood vessels penetrate to nourish and oxygenate the brain: an impressive engineering marvel with natural selection at the control center. You can appreciate that the cortex of the rat has very few folds, whereas the number and complexity of them increase as one moves from cat to human.

The three pound universe that resides in our skulls, constitutes  a small percentage of our body weight, but requires 25% of the oxygen we consume. Our brains do not store energy, so blood supplied glucose provides the main nutrient and must be continuously available.  Every region of the brain is within 90 µm of a capillary, reflecting this supreme dependency on continuous access to oxygen and nutritional support. Our brains have created a miraculous way of regulating their own blood supply: the blood flow within the brain is not uniform, but varies according to the tissue demands. Brain regions where neuronal activity is high receive more blood flow compared to brain areas which have lower levels of activity. So, blood traffic in the brain is under neighborhood regulation. It’s like the street gets wider if the traffic gets heavier.  It is the change in blood flow, based on neuronal activity (maybe glial cells too (see below)), that serves as the signal detection basis  for the technique of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or fMRI. The cellular  mechanisms which regulate this regional blood flow  are still poorly understood, but appear to involve glial cells, the non-neuronal cells that were once thought to merely be the “glue” that keeps the neurons together.

Our brains contain more than 6 billion nerve cells and perhaps a hundred times that number of glial cells. It is now clear that glial cells play many important roles in modulating neuronal excitability through a generalized set of tools we refer to as “glial-neuronal control.” Other than acknowledging that it exists, we still have a very poor grasp of the significance of this relatively new controlling pathway. We are far more familiar and conditioned to the idea that the neuron to neuron form of transmission is the sole basis of brain cell communication, primarily because we know that neurons communicate with one another through elegant, chemically mediated structures known as “synapses.” But we now know that glial cells can also communicate with one another: they do it through much slower mechanisms of “calcium waves” and connect with each other through electrical rather than chemical synapses based on structures called gap junctions. So, in all future considerations of brain function, we have to recognize the possibility that glial cells may be doing far more for our brain functions than we ever imagined.

There are two broad systems of nerve cell connections that contribute to the normal day to day operations of the brain. One of these systems consists of global extensions of nerve cells from regions within lower brain centers that innervate extensive areas of the cortex and other brain structures; these broad, diffuse connections provide for the global features of sleep, wakefullness and overall regulation of excitability or the “tone” of the nervous system. These systems are transmitter-specific and consist of overlapping connections of fine axons containing dopamine, serotonin acetylcholine and nor-epinephrine. The second brain system at the other end of the brain connectivity organization, consists of localized regions of nerve cells that work within a small region of the brain and constitute “local circuits.” These local circuits carry out the computational requirements needed to derive a small component of our sensory or motor functions and our behavior. In the visual system, local circuit neurons in different subdivisions of the occipital cortex (posterior in the brain) are used to derive information about the location of a stimulus, its color, its shape or its  movement pattern and direction of movement and, of supreme importance, whether the object we see is something we recognize: if so additional activity within the inferior temporal lobe of the brain is used to detect pattern and image recognition and that’s where visual identities are stored.  Each local circuit has an output, a means by which the computations carried out in one local circuit get transmitted to other regions of the brain; both nearby and more distant brain regions are served by these kinds of connections. In the case of the cerebral cortex, these connections are vast; one obvious set of connections is found in the corpus callosum, the giant collection  of nerve fibers (axons) that wire the two halves of the brain together and serve as the connectivity basis of many global brain functions. For most individuals language is stored in one half of the brain, usually on the left side and in the temporal lobe.  Here is one surprising fact about our brains: though our cortical functions are divided into different regions for vision, auditory, touch and motor functions, the microscopic structure of each cortical region does not reveal special cell types. The so-called pyramidal cells for vision look like the pyramidal cells for auditory signaling. So, it is the region of the brain and not the cell type that determines its function. Deaf people that learn to use sign language for communicating, use their temporal auditory cortex for processing this information, not their visual cortex.

There are many other kinds of fiber pathways that connect local circuits with both regional  and more distant areas of the cortex. We are still trying to understand how all of this novel pattern of connectivity results in a normal functioning brain, and, of equal importance, what happens to brain function if these connections are lost or not wired properly in the first place. In addition, not yet fully understood, is the functional basis for our state of consciousness or awareness of ourselves and our brain processes. Consciousness appears to represent a way of reading out the activity of the cortex and being aware of ourselves, our surrounds and our memories. But, how finely-tuned our state of consciousness is to local circuit operations, vs. more global “summaries” of activity remains one of the great problems for modern day neuroscience. Though we don’t yet understand its cellular origins, consciousness serves as the basis of our human character: it is the sum of all the parts.

Not everything we learn is available to our conscious awareness, which includes the fusion of long and short-term memory. Psychologists like to divide our memory into two forms–declarative–that which we can verbally articulate (where we were yesterday) and nondeclarative–the non-conscious commands we use to control our movements for example. When we walk, we are not aware of the alternate signals we send to our arms and legs that make our movements automatic–we simply give the command “walk” and the brain takes care of the rest with the details unknown to us. This too is adaptive genius, because it frees our brains to focus on the capacity to execute new global commands without worrying about the details of each command that is executed.  While the origin of these two forms of memory relate to what we can verbalize through our conscious recall,  the mechanisms that determine the demarcation line between declarative and nondeclarative memory remain one of the many mysteries of the human brain and its functional organization.

The cortex varies systematically in thickness from about 0.4 to 1.8 inches, depending on the region and the extent to which large input and output functions are part of its repertoire: it has a massive surface area of 233-465 square inches. If you removed the cortex and spread it out flat, it would cover about two newspaper pages.  It is the cerebral cortex, within which lies our capacity for language, rich vision, the planning and execution of movements, our ability to appreciate other senses like sound and touch and the capacity to integrate all of the sensory and motor information through special integration areas that also reside within the cortex, that sets us apart from all other animals. Integration of this vast amount of information is continuously updated through a millisecond to millisecond flow of information. It is this real time knowledge and our conscious awareness that provides us with the means to make rapid adjustments to changes in our environment and undoubtedly served our distant ancestors with a powerful set of survival tools when humanoids were prey rather than predator. Moreover, animals lacking a significant cortical structure typically have a far more redundant and limited capacity to vary their response to new challenges that appear in their environment–their escape reflexes are often more stereotyped and less flexible in their capacity to adjust to a new l challenge or threat to their survival.

Because our early mammalian ancestors survived by living under the feet of the dinosaurs, one can presume that natural selection participated in the development of the beginnings of a primitive form of a cerebral cortex that provided these early mammals with a new flexibility in the range of their escape possibilities and survival options through “escape diversity.” A cerebral cortex provided clear survival advantages at a time when speed and agility may not have been enough–when we might be confronted by a stronger, faster, more agile adversary (though no one knows for sure). The evolutinary pressures  of living with the dinosaurs produced in our distant mammalian ancestors the natural selection pressures that favored the development of a neocortex, becuause only mammalian species have them.

Another advantage available to smaller animals is that achieved from the skill of living in trees and using trees as an escape pathway. But moving quickly through tree branches with agility, reliability and confidence, places demands on the brains of those who achieve that selective niche and you can appreciate from your own experiences that no animal excels in moving through trees better than primates–the masters of agility in the tree environment: that agility was achieved by having a cortex that can process and react to the new environment as it appears in the personalized movie of the external world that  plays continuously in their brains, revealing the rapidly changing images sequencing in front of the escaping animal.  Excellent vision was one key, while exceptional motor skills were the other and the emerging cortex was the control center that made it all possible. The tree escape option places strict demands on one’s ability to move, since the mover will be continuously challenged by obstacles and branches and an ever changing visual scene that requires continuous shifting in the motor strategies needed for skillful movement and avoiding objects. But the integration of the information needed to make that adjustment could only be achieved by the cortex, for that is the center where sensory information and motor  planning come together so that strategic decisions can be made quickly and, with practice, seeming ease. And, there was no room for error. Falling from the tree was likely to prove fatal, either from the fall itself, the hobbling injury, or the new vulnerability to predators on the ground. The advantages of tree dwelling and the tree escape route was probably essential to our early ancestors, as most of our homini predecessors lived in trees. When Homo species came out of the trees, they were proficient hunters, meat eaters, tool makers and more fully prepared to deal with those who would predate on them, as they transformed their operations from prey to predator, using tools and strategies that would eventually lead them to dominate the world.

As we execute our daily lives, our complex visual mechanisms, through their cortical processing power, give us a continuous 3D movie in color, running in our brains at about 20 or so frames per second, which gives us our visual representation of the events that transpire before us, rich in color, speed and connected in such a way to evoke strong memories and stimulate our analytical powers. Perhaps half of the cells in our brains can be activated by visual information, making us a truly visual animal. During periods when we are awake, our cortex is alive with nerve activity. If our conscious state is related to cortical activity how is it possible to concentrate on a subset of the activity to meaningfully achieve something? All of us are aware of our capacity to quickly change our attention based on our motivations at the moment (reading a book, while shutting out all other potential distractions, like nearby conversations) or the sudden interruption of our visual environment by something demanding our attention. The ability to change our attention to one subset of our cortex over another is a powerful feature of cortical processing, without which we would be hopelessly engaged in a massive flow of information, perhaps paralyzed by neuronal activity overload.

I remember taking peyote once and lying on a couch listening to music and examining artistic paintings on the wall, getting pleasure out of all the sensory stimulation that was surging in my brain. While under the influence I thought to myself that the state I found myself in must be something similar to what it’s like to lose your ability to attend to only one region of your cortex, while excluding the ongoing activity of all other regions.  I was experiencing sensory overload because I couldn’t shut out one stimulus–sound–while concentrating on the other– the paintings on the wall. It seemed like the colors and sounds were too intense and inter-related for me to select one or the other to focus on. So, though we know little about the process, the gift of shifting our attention rapidly and selectively is a component of our consciousness and another gift of our genius cortex.

You can appreciate our dependence on vision by witnessing the severe challenges that blind people  go through to achieve the many things we take for granted or do almost automatically because we have our own vivid, personalized, lifetime movie that plays continously in our brain. Fortunately, our society has many compensatory assistance options for those suffering from visual loss, but it is self evident that a blind person living among our early hominoid ancestors, trying to survive on the African Savanna, would have been severely disadvantaged and challenged on a regular basis just to survive the array of predators that were around at that time. In that era, there were far more predators than one sees today.

Vision is the supreme sensory system we have and for good reason: by capturing light signals, we can detect objects in our environment at distances much further than those provided by any other sensory system, including sound. It’s the difference between signal detection from a source traveling at 186,000 miles/sec vs sound traveling at 1200 ft./sec. We are so advantaged by vision, that we actually process visual signals much more slowly than we process sound signals. Despite the slow nature of vision, it’s hard to deny the power of the  stunning movie we see in front of us our entire lives. Perhaps standing on two feet and becoming bipeds,  gave us an advantage for taking in a more panoramic view of the environment, or perhaps, as Darwin suggested, standing on two feet freed our hands to explore objects tactily and make tools more effectively. In any case, the great distance advantages provided by vision is one of the prominent reasons we have devoted so much of our brain to analyzing and responding to visual stimuli. Visual stimuli not only provide us with our conscious sense of vision, but they also regulate unconscious actions responsible for our eye movements and changes in pupil diameter that are used to fixate on new objects of interest and continuously compensate for the ambient light levels in the visual environment.  We enjoy going to the movies where we use our splendid parallel processing of visual information that instantaneously connects our visual signals with our emotions that in turn can evoked feelings of fear, anxiety, disgust, contempt and sorrow as well as all the other elements of our human psychological makeup. The giant screen in front of us provides large visual images with little contrast and strong interconnections to our visual memory, triggering the immensely gratifying experience we often get by going to the theater. We are compellingly attracted to movies in powerful ways still not fully understood.

It is the tapestry of cortical-derived options that have greatly increased our chances of survival and eventually secured our current state of planetary dominance. The evolution of the human brain probably had a lot to do with our early mammalian ancestors, who were running under the feet of the dinosaurs. In those very early mammals, survival skills were enhanced by the development of the early primitive cerebral cortex. Although the cortex is typically only a few mm in thickness, it was that outer shell within our brain that produced a new miracle–the miracle of knowing where you are and then deciding whether to leap, run or execute some other plan of escape: through the evolution of their primitive cortex, our distance mammalian ancestors could think before they made an escape decision. Through the cerebral cortex, the survival instincts of our early ancestors, or their escape behaviors, could be based, not on a simple reflex, like the predator-prey decision processes of the frog, but a reaction based on where they were when the decision had to be made. If they were on a cliff, in a tree or perched on a rock, successful escape behavior might have to be different for each environmental circumstance and could be not be mediated by a simple stereotypical set of reflexes. You had to think before you jumped!

The need to execute a different response for different circumstances served as one of the supreme survival tools of the animals with a primitive cortex: the cortex became the pinnacle of redundancy avoidance. And, once an escape plan was initiated, the power of the cortex provided the animal with the ability to modify the behavior based on the moment to moment updating of how it was going during its execution. This rapid modification was possible because the cortex provided these early mammals with a means by which knowledge of their circumstances could be rapidly and broadly integrated with all their sense organs, enabling a more “informed decision” to be made about the adaptive change required for the most efficient means of survival behavior. If, when moving through trees rapidly, by grabbing alternate branches with the right and left hands, and you suddenly detect that the branches are wet and slippery, you may decide to change your escape strategy by moving to lower branches that may be drier or get closer to the tree trunk and scale up to safety where the grip is more secure. These changes in direction and speed would not be possible without close linkage between the visual, motor,  memory,  and the sensory information needed to detect of wet branches. All of these signals come together in the cortex, where the command center for future movements is located. The ability to continuously update executed movements,  through on-going  cortical processing, like a massively parallel computer, with moment to moment revision of our state and place within the environment, provided the ultimate in adaptive behavioral variability that must have been part of our ancestors survival skill set. Thanks to our cortex, simple reflexes were replaced by strategies and plans based on knowledge and current circumstances. The modern mechanisms of learning and memory, with long-term memory residing in our cortex, meant that each new success we experienced could be adapted and incorporated into the evolving sophistication of our memory, as part of our iteratively adjusted engram. It was like switching from obligatory reflexes to a plan of execution based on knowledge of the threat and the circumstances we found ourselves in when we had to make the appropriate decision: early mammals started it and primates brought it into perfection.

When we consider the motor system that we use to execute and carry out our plans, it is not the cerebral cortex alone that is important for this aspect of our behavior. Our cerebellum, particularly the lateral hemispheres of the cerebellar cortex play an important role in the planning, early execution and modification of movements as well. This part of the brain is particularly clever at helping us make smooth movements and correcting those movements as new sensory information feeds into the cerebellar system. What is remarkable about the cerebellar cortex is that its output through specialized Purkinje cells is entirely inhibitory, so it’s importance is in reducing signals and refining planned movements rather than adding to them.  In addition, motor learning is a feature of the cerebellum that allows us to modify primary motor functions as our environment changes. We are not specifically aware of the actions of our cerebellum unless it is damaged or diseased, at which time we struggle to make smooth movements, as if the afflicted person is drunk, when in fact they are sober. Then too, the basal ganglia, which lie underneath the cortex are also important for smooth execution of movements, as well as their initiation. Anyone who has seen the motor limits of a person with Parkinson’s disease, a deficiency of dopaminergic neurons in the basal ganglia system, can appreciate that this region of the brain plays a role in regulating the normal smooth movements, particularly the initiation of these movements, associated with our voluntary motor behavior. Yet, it remains the singular task of the cerebral cortex to initiate the movements and make the decisions to alter them once they have begun.

Those of our ancestors that didn’t survive, might have lost the race, or the test of strength, but those that emerged from that era, did so with the beginnings of the greatest brains of evolutionary history. Our brains further evolved to give us the capacity for language, another cortical gift, which gave us a deeper culture and served as the birthplace of a common history and purpose. We don’t know when language first emerged in our evolutionary history because language acquisition does not leave a trace in the fossil record. But everyone appreciates that language-based culture helped generate ever more improved methods for survival, as the knowledge and history of our ancestors before us was transmitted in ways that served to our advantage: man could at last write a good survival manual.

A popular theory of man’s evolutionary history is that the rapid growth in his brain size, something he shares with other primates, reflects a disproportionate growth in the frontal lobes of his cerebral cortex, the specialized  region of the brain where man’s most longitudinal level of thinking and his projections for the future reside. I have commented on this topic previously in discussing hyenas and the Republican brain, which seems devoid of frontal lobe activity. Much of the neuronal machinery responsible for our personality and our capacity to think logically and strategically is embedded within the frontal lobes of our cerebral cortex. So, the sociological view of human brain evolution suggests that frontal lobe development facilitated man’s ability to form social networks, distribute the workload to create a social structure that not only initiated his cultural development, but also formed the basis of his hunting prowess with protection from hostile clans and the predators that plagued his distant cousins, such as Australophithecus afarensis. While the acquisition of language does not leave a trace in the fossil record, it seems likely that man’s capacity to form a culture must have been based on the development of language, with the progressive evolution of symbolism into concrete language forms that define many of the cultural differences seen today among the Homo sapiens subcultures. Language acquisition is a complex  evolutionary development that resides primarily in the temporal lobes of our brain, but also has important representation within our frontal lobes. The act of understanding language and expressing it through complex vocal commands requires integrative functions and collaborations with specific regions of the frontal cortex and the temporal lobes of our brains.

Although modern humans have been around for some 200,000 years, the acquisition of fire and tool-making had appeared in earlier iterations of our ancestors, though it has been argued that efficient hunting methods are a relatively recent development (~60,000 years ago). These cultural achievements, particularly group hunting, were probably essential for man’s development into an efficient predator against large scale animals. The higher levels of protein found in animal food sources meant that, with successful hunting and cooking methods, man could devote more time to cultural development, diversification of skills for survival and the implementation of social customs.  But, in the process of cultural development, man fused  his survival paranoia with the personality of his clan, such that the very earliest forms of complex societies included the art of making love and war. It seems to me however, that a high degree of variance exists within each culture about the importance of war and the degree to which war policies became more central to one culture over another. War as a reflex to new objects is not uniformly distributed among the population within a culture, particularly in modern cultures in which religion and cultural dominance are a strong component to the war-making mentality. The development of a paranoid state in early hominins is understandable. It was a successful defensive reaction, a sort of better be safe than sorry response. But, this long period of war-making and plundering other groups proved to be culturally threatening in the 20th century, when the tribal instincts of warfare got wedded to the modern mechanization of military hardware. I look at Hitler as a pagan warrior who probably wouldn’t be in history when conflicts were resolved with bow, arrow and sword. But with the ultimate weapons such as nuclear bombs and missils, anyone can be a catastrophe-maker. While we haven’t had a global conflict in nearly 65 years, we continue to kill Homo sapiens as if our older reflexive behavior dominated our thinking. The war option reflects an emotional component of our behavioral makeup that requires input from the amygdala and hypothalamus, the regions where survival insticts of rage can be called upon for assistance. How our analytical instincts, generated through frontal lobe analysis, get outvoted by the war-making rage instincts that probably require inputs from the amygdala and hypothalamus remains as one of the secrets to our survival success  in the distant past, but one of the obstacles for dealing rationally with our future.

All of the early means of survival, as hunters, gatherers, farmers or fisherman, relied on adaptations to the world that was not changed by our own adaptive behavior, at a time when the world seemed like an infinite collection of resources waiting for human exploitation. It was not until much later, after the industrial revolution, that our methods of mass hunting and fishing and general resource depletion of the earth, including the depletion of our forests, began to produce deficiencies in a vast number of natural resources, with the promise of future resources being vastly compromised if Homo sapiens continues on his present course. Just a hundred and fifty years into the industrial revolution we began to generate planetary deficiencies that man could not even begin to count, because he didn’t know enough about the planet he was destroying. That cultural deficiency seems to be getting worse as time goes on, rather than improving, stimulated by the irrational character of many updated and downgraded religions. Indeed, biologists argue that we are in a not-so-early phase of the sixth mass species extinction. The difference between this one and all of the others, is that this is the first man-made mass extinction.

In the latter half of the 20th century, we  slowly began to realize that the world was not a constant in the universe, a place of infinite resources, but was in fact a small planet, with finite resources, such  that we could easily appreciate the limits and the down-side to man’s adaptive superiority. All other species on the planet had to adapt to the planetary forces for their survival and these forces were immutable to the species struggling for their own personal continuity. But man’s adaptive genius began to change the planet over the past few hundred years, such that he now faces the ultimate challenge to his survival: how to survive on a planet in which human forces have changed it  in ways that he is only beginning to understand? Just meeting the fundamentals of life, those things that we once regarded as unchangeable, like clean water, clean air and a livable environment, will be the supreme challenge to man’s adaptability in this new 21st century.

Our early ancestors found value in forming clans, with work tasks distributed by sex, age and skill. Now the challenge is to determine if we have the capacity to form a clan of 9 billion people, or roughly the population of the earth projected as the steady-state population in the near future. Our modern culture has new demands for its survival, including energy costs to run our complex societies and support large economies, each with its own social order and environmental dependencies. Although our ancestors may have been responsible for creating some species extinctions, such as the woolly mammoth, who apparently had no innate fear of man and fell an easy victim to his hunting prowess, they largely adapted to the world they found and lacked the numbers and knowledge to change their environment significantly: earth was master and man had to find his own key for survival and reproductive competency. It was that way for several million years and for all Homo species, it was that way for the last 200,000 years.

As our culture evolved into and through the industrial revolution, with dramatic improvements in social wealth, communication, public health and industrial skills, we began a process that was entirely new for Homo sapiens, and eventually for the Earth. We began putting a new surface on the earth, one of cities and farms and expanded our collective civilization into one that increasingly changed the earth, and in many cases, the new makeover was made of materials with which Mother Earth was unfamiliar. We changed the chemistry of the Earth in ways that began to encroach on the essentials critical to our own survival, but we started these actions long before we understood their implications or their future impact. We cut down most of the trees (98% of the Pre-Columbian forests in North America have been cut down) long before we began to understand the importance of trees for our air and water resources.

In the relatively short geological life span of Homo sapiens, the very processes through which we had obtained our initial success, our planetary superiority, and the things we had taken for granted, like clean water, reliable food and safe, breathable air, began to erode as the new skin we put on the Earth’s surface got larger and larger, such that the products we produced and the very energy we used to sustain our culture, began to change our own atmosphere long before we were aware of it.  By the time the implications of all these changes became manifest in one way or another (the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught on fire in 1969–that was for me personally a very early alarm–it represented something that was against nature, since burning rivers do not seem to be part of nature’s plan), it was too late to think of these issues as the subject of a rational analysis confronting humans, not unlike things our ancestors might have faced before, though surely on a smaller scale. But, these new findings are things we need to view as threatening to our own survival.

In America, the issue of global climate change and toxins in the environment and the man-made changes in the atmosphere became politicized. Politicization of these issues, meant the complete suspension of man’s sense of independent thinking, of his commitment to  a rational method of problem solving. The suspension of those biological facilities, the very basis of his evolutionary success, was a requirement for successful political party formation. The political system in America produced something brand new in the evolution of the human brain–a frontal lobotomy–created by the two party system of politics. What will win out? Will man restore his frontal lobe functions after years of denial, inactivity and the atrophy of disuse, or will he continue to descend into a resource depleted Earth that cannot support the life forms contained within it? This is the greatest and most serious choice that is now available to Homo sapiens. What will he do? Should we open up a new derivatives market and stock exchange to trade in man’s new vision and his new adaptive challenge? How would you invest in this market based on human and animal survival? What will be the meaning of private wealth during the 21st century?

So if man’s capacity to change the Earth now threatens the basic requirements for his own future, has the culture he produced become so runaway, so much on automatic pilot, that he has no chance of controlling the factors that are increasingly understood to be the result of his own environmental purges and exploitation? Did man reach the limits of his cortical apparatus to formulate a new escape plan, at the very time that he needs one now more than ever? Has he abandoned the use of his own frontal lobes at the very time when that is the only structure he has that is capable of seeing him successfully negotiate a new and better future for his species? Now more than ever, the threat to man is not so much the threat at hand, but it is based on the one around the corner–the one he can only imagine and can’t quite predict, though it is probably less than a hundred years away?

RFM