Black the cloth in heavy wreathes

folds over every Nation;

cruel works of many wheels I view,

wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic,

moving by compulsion each other,

not as those in Eden, which,

wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve

in harmony and peace.

- William Blake, Jerusalem

From Section 1: Progress and Progression

And Moses said: Are you envious for my sake? I would to God that all his people were

prophets, and that he would put his spirit upon them.

- The Book of Numbers

History is seldom a simple matter of facts. Songs, legends, chronicles and documentaries may recount deeds, disasters and other doings but the details often matter less than the desire to tell a story. Without that desire no bard would have bothered to sing of arms and men, no scribe would have looked up from his ledger long enough to scribble gossip in the margin and archaeology would never have progressed beyond grave-robbing. Nor would anyone have taken up that most challenging and least appreciated of disciplines, prophecy. Historians and prophets use similar methods and materials, yet their work has traditionally met with quite different receptions. Chroniclers of victories have always been able to sell celebratory stories to the triumphant elite while sceptics and satirists have thrived among the knowing throng, but neither the mighty nor the mean are keen to hear that time has a habit of revealing the rising tide of fortune to be a passing wave which tends to carry its riders back down into the depths of obscurity, dash them headlong on the rocks of disaster or leave them high and dry on a hostile shore. Such reminders are the stock in trade of prophets, whose visions of the future seldom contain anything that cannot be found in the past - which is just as well because those who envisage genuine novelties are often dismissed as mad, as was William Blake when he described the ominous visions he saw amid the glimmerings of industrializing Europe.

The problem between Blake and his contemporaries was not that he foresaw a revolution, but that he foresaw a revolution quite different from the one those around him envisaged and desired - a revolution that any sane person would have feared and avoided. He lived at a time when change was dominated by people who saw the world as a great and wondrous machine, crafted and set in motion by a divine hand and left to the governance of those who had gained such power over the creator's handiwork that they were able to set about remaking it in the interest of a public desire for progress and a private lust for profit. Blake refused to buy into the idea that God had abandoned the world to man, nor did he share the faith that man could improve upon nature, or indeed upon himself. With prophetic stubbornness the poet warned that men had abandoned God when they began to construct their new world, and that only evil could come from burying ancient harmonies beneath cruel mechanisms that were ultimately driven by their own compulsions.

That, at least, is my reading of what Blake was getting at in works such as the one quoted from at the beginning of this chapter. Whether I am near the mark or not regarding the prophetic implications, those words do a fair job of capturing one of the most important things we have learned about cancers, which is that in the microcosm and macrocosm alike they often act like they are driven by irresistible compulsions along the road to malignancy. When physicians observe this evolutionary pattern in cancer cells they call it progression and when we find similar patterns unfolding in the world at large we call them ..... well a variety of adjectives apply when the malignant consequences become clear, but prior to that those involved often describe what is going on around them as progress. According to the literary cadence I have established, I should now provide an example of people who thought they were enjoying progress while they were actually experiencing the progression to malignancy. For example I could have said that what the rulers of the classic Maya city-states saw as a rise to glory - the kings did become gods, after all - was actually a malignant progression that destroyed their social and ecological supports. That may be a legitimate example of the link between progress and progression, but presenting it as such implies that like the cellular cancers that sometimes afflict human bodies the Maya episode was a sporadic and isolated case of macromalignancy, and the fact is that we do not know enough to make such a judgement. We know that many human bodies are afflicted by malignancies that develop from their own cells but we have yet to determine the susceptibilities of societies and ecosystems to developing and/or developing into macromalignancies, nor have we explored how such malignancies may be connected - indeed for all we know individual cases may be linked to a larger phenomenon, like the current trend towards malignancy in the world's fisheries.

These are some ideas to bear in mind as we begin our search for the roots of our malignant tendencies, a search that will take us deep into the past in an effort to retrace the history of the interactions of people with each other and their natural surroundings. Like all historians we will rush through tales that have been told better elsewhere and hurry over ground where much remains uncertain and our interpretation of ancient events will be shaped by our own experiences and by what we have already learned in our exploration. For example our studies of cancer cells and societies alike have shown us that growth and change can spur each other on as populations, lineages and living organizations evolve, so we will be looking for similar interactions as we explore the connections between progress and progression. We may also find that as new connections have emerged older ones have faded away in the face of the compulsions that have been spinning us ever farther and faster since we left the peaceful harmonies of Eden.....

From Section 2: Adaptation to Adaptability

According to the principles of systematic taxonomy the specific name that Linnaeus gave to people like us, Homo sapiens, implies that the characteristic which distinguishes us from other representatives of the Homo generic lineage (i.e. hominines) is sapience, or the capacity for being wise. This interpretation is a bit misleading, because at the time Linnaeus made his designation it was generally accepted that there were no other hominines besides us, although he did allow orangutans into the genus (as Homo sylvestris) for a brief stay before they were eventually lumped in with the gorillas (our loss, I would say). From then on traditional anthropocentrism ensured that people like us literally remained in a class of our own until the mid-19th century, when the discovery of the remains of Neanderthals led some paleontologists to contemplate opening the family roll once again. The idea met considerable resistance, as did the notion that the creatures who resemble us most closely, the great apes, are also our closest evolutionary relatives. It took several more decades and the discovery of other extinct humans, hominines (e.g. Java man) and hominoids (e.g. Australopithecus) before it became widely accepted that the history of our lineage is much more complex than had once been imagined, and subsequent studies of genomic information confirmed the suspicion that we share much of that history with other living creatures. Of course contrary to popular parodies, the apes and monkeys are not our ancestors. They have been doing their own evolutionary thing ever since our paths diverged within an ancient population no-one knows how long ago, although current estimates range from six to fifteen million years.

I mention all this not to criticize Linnaeus or other taxonomists for bending the rules when it comes to our lineage. The name Homo sapiens does after all capture the imagination much more effectively than the Latin equivalent of "slim-wristed humans with chins, big noses and not very prominent brow-ridges," or our paleontologically-correct designation as "anatomically and behaviourally modern humans." The latter term arises from the archaeological observation that at one time there were people who looked like us but they do not seem to have acted like us, while the other designations are necessary to distinguish people who looked like us from contemporaries who looked rather different, such as the Neanderthals. Some people have tried to clarify these various differences by referring to Neanderthals as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and to people like us as Homo sapiens sapiens, which to me seems to be going a sapiens too far, considering that the physical evidence we have for distinguishing all of these people amounts to a rather modest trunk full of assorted bones.

One thing I will agree with is that Linnaeus was correct in recognizing that some of the most striking differences between us and our closest living relatives are associated with what are commonly considered to be the higher intellectual functions. Most notably, we share a powerful aptitude for learning from experience and observation, sophisticated communication skills that allow us to work together and share information with unparalleled speed and flexibility and a vast capacity for accumulating information and sharing it via cultural elements like stories, songs, dances, plays, images, symbols, traditions and rituals. These impressive innate abilities influence all aspects of our interactions with each other and our surroundings, and we have been able to supplement them with some powerful information-handling inventions such as writing, mathematics and machines that can perform intellectual tasks, such as computers. These innovations have helped to separate us even further from the rest of the living world and indeed from many of our own ancestors, which brings us to another notable point: the fact that we are called Homo sapiens does not mean that people like us have the exclusive franchise on all of the intellectual qualities which have given us such a distinctive outlook on ourselves and the world around us.

This may seem a rather petty observation, but without it we have no hope of exploring human evolution using the conceptual tools we have developed so far. That fact was recognized by no less an authority than Alfred Russel Wallace when he proposed that our intellects are the results of a process in which divine forces fashioned human brains into vessels fit to receive immortal souls. This proposition follows logically from the conclusion that the unique aspects of the human intellect are unprecedented in nature, which means there is no point in trying to understand their development using the standard biological approach. Embryology can show us how birds develop from eggs, neurology can give us some clues concerning why birds behave in certain ways, ecology can help us understand why some birds have long beaks and others short ones, and paleontology and evolutionary biology can help us to explain how and why such differences arise under the influence of factors like natural selection and genetic drift, but the modern sciences of growth, behaviour, change and adaptation have nothing to say about things that appear out of nowhere. And was Wallace justified in concluding that our intellects could not have evolved in the same way as other aspects of human form and behaviour? Some of his contemporaries - most notably Darwin - did not agree, although given the evidence available at the time they were also operating largely on faith. They also had the disadvantage of going against a contemporary world view that saw Europeans as having a divine right to subjugate the rest of humankind and plunder the planet, a notion that was closely allied with traditional anthropocentric sentiments which ensured that even those who were willing to admit that humans were subject to evolution often saw us as a special case, especially with regards to our godlike intellectual abilities. This sentiment still persists in some quarters, despite the evidence which has accumulated to show that our puissant intellects are neither as divine nor as unprecedented as they once seemed to be.

Beginning on the physical side of things, a quick inspection of human sensory and information processing equipment reveals it to be of standard primate issue, operating within normal specifications to present us with sights, sounds, smells, tastes and assorted sensations much like those experienced by our relatives. Indeed anyone who has ever tried to sneak up on other primates on their own turf will have noticed that they seem to be rather more aware of what is going on around them than we are. It is true that we have exceptionally large brains even by the standards of our brainy branch of the family, which presumably gives us an edge when it comes to processing information. This has not, however, translated into anything approaching a godlike perspective on the world. Our brains, like those of many animals, actually screen out most of the information that is coming in from the senses, which is not a limitation but a necessity since a rich awareness of the world around us would be useless without the ability to focus on things that are important to our immediate survival, like crouching leopards and ripe fruit.

Moving to the behavioural and cultural aspects of the human intellect, here again we find evidence that we have come by our attainments honestly. Up until a few centuries ago most people lived in social groups that were organized much like those of other primates, with the parallels being especially strong among our hominoid relatives, whose social lives also revolve around basic elements like families, troops, clans, dominance hierarchies and alliances. Many primates also share our ability to exchange and conserve useful information; for example young orangutans spend several years learning from their elders where and when to find various foods in the forest. Some primate social groups also exhibit a modest capacity for acquiring and perpetuating more explicit cultural elements; for example chimpanzee troops have been observed to develop technological traditions associated with the manufacture and use of simple tools, like sticks for capturing termites and hammers and anvils - typically a handy length of branch and a flat stone - for cracking nuts. Some troops have also been observed to develop specific approaches to co-operative activities such as hunting small animals, which may be another example of differences in what we can think of as lifestyle traditions.

There certainly is no denying that the cultures of other primates pale in comparison to our own when it comes to the amount, range and impact of the information they contain and perpetuate. Human cultures have embraced lifestyle traditions ranging from nomadic foraging to farming to city-dwelling, and they have preserved and perfected technologies associated with everything from stone tools to spacecraft. Our acquisition, use and perpetuation of cultural information has also become associated with some unique and powerful modes of communication, such as languages based upon gestures, sounds and symbols. These achievements are so impressive that it is not unreasonable to suspect, as Wallace did, that they involve capabilities that are unique and unprecedented, but the facts suggest otherwise. Take the use of language, for example. Our hominoid cousins have shown a modest capacity for learning some of the basic elements of gestural and symbolic languages from patient human teachers, which indicates that they may share some of the intellectual equipment that gave our ancestors a fortuitous head start on the road to developing more impressive linguistic skills. The prominent roles that language and culture have played in the success of people like us also indicate that our ancestors would have had some good reasons for going along that particular evolutionary road.

A definitive resolution of this issue would require us to know what intellectual equipment our ancestors had when they started on the road to advanced culture and language, and how they changed as they went along. We will likely never have that knowledge, although some progress has been made in understanding which aspects of the brain and nervous system were involved, such as the language areas of the cerebral cortex and the nerves controlling the larynx. For our purposes such details matter less than the observation that cultural evolution has long been the dominant source of adaptation and change for people like us at all levels of organization from individuals to communities, societies and the human world at large, all of which have shown a capacity for evolving at unprecedented rates and in unprecedented ways. For instance over the past few millennia several spoken languages have supplemented sounds with symbols that speak on their own and can be used to store masses of information in archives, libraries and databases. Of course it must also be noted that even in these days of global networks and broad-band access to immense amounts of real-time and stored information, the collective and/or individual knowledge most of us have about what is going on around us and what has gone before hardly rates as omniscient - in many cases more appropriate adjectives would be tenuous, patchy, ideosyncratic and fanciful.

So to summarize, when it comes to intellectual fundamentals we humans have the largest brains, the most flexible behavioural repertoires and the most extensive cultures within a big-brained, flexible and culturally-adept family, and these attributes seem to have given us some significant advantages in the struggle for survival and success - at least when we measure success in terms of total population size, global dispersal and influence over the natural world. It may still be a leap of faith, but to me this indicates that it is worth considering how our intellectual qualities may have been shaped by natural influences before we start invoking supernatural ones. For instance if we assume that present-day hominoids inherited their basic intellectual equipment from common ancestors, we might want to consider how and why the lineage that gave rise to us may have undergone an evolutionary equivalent to the biblical dictum that to they who have much, more shall be given - something along the lines of what is implied by those charts that hang in classrooms and adorn T-shirts around the world, which depict modern humans as the culmination of longstanding trends towards increasing body size, postural uprightness, cerebral volume and intellectual power.

Most of those charts are of course woefully out of date, because according to current reconstructions of our family tree most of the "human ancestors" that have been identified over the years - including famous relics like the Java, Peking, Heidelberg and Neanderthal people and assorted variations on the theme of Australopithecus - were most likely not the ancestors of anyone alive today. For example the original Java man fossils, which are around a million years old, are now recognized as descendants of Homo erectus populations (i.e. erectines) that started leaving Africa around two million years ago, as did some representatives of Homo habilis (i.e. habilines), while people who are look like us show no signs of having lived anywhere outside of Africa until around a hundred thousand years ago. This means that in the simplest reconstruction of the human family tree the most recent ancestors present-day humans could have shared with the Java people were the early erectine emigrants, although more complex scenarios alternatives have been proposed, as we will see a bit later.

So how do we reconstruct a family tree from mostly dead branches? Fortunately, that is not our job; what we are after is an idea of what was going among our ancestors with regards to the way they interacted with each other and their surroundings, and since consultations with our living relatives have already proven informative it stands to reason that scientific seances with even closer dead ones will be useful. Indeed we have already learned something important from the early erectines and habilines who left Africa to make Homo the world's most widely-distributed primate lineage while their brains were considerably smaller than ours, their technology was restricted to fire and a few stone tools and they likely did not have more than a rudimentary facility for language. They tell us that two million years ago our ancestors were already smart, well-organized, technologically adept and adaptable - and they were on the move......