Evolution shows how we are a small twig on the tree of life

Evolution is a scientific fact. Sure, all facts are subject to being proven wrong. But the chance of that happening to evolution is very slim, because the evidence for evolution is so strong.

Since I love to learn about true things, this is why my pre-meditation reading each morning often consists of a science book. I see no reason to pick up a religious book any more, because my eyes have been opened to the falsity of believing in God or other supernatural entities.

A few weeks ago I finished reading Joseph LeDoux's book, "The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains." 

I'm a habitual highlighter of non-fiction books. I supplement my highlighting with notes in the back blank pages found in most books, where I write down the page numbers of subjects I found most interesting, along with a highly personal system of underlining, circles, question marks, arrows, and other notations that remind me of portions of the book that I considered significant.

Here's some passages from the 432 pages in LeDoux's meaty/tofuy book that garnered significant markings. Before each one I'll briefly explain why I liked them.

I heartily agree with LeDoux that conscious awareness is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to goings-on within the human brain, and likely every other kind of brain. We simply have no clue about what most of our 100 billion neurons with their trillions of connections are up to. He writes:

Behavior did not arise to serve the subjective mind. It came about and persists to enhance fitness -- to keep organisms alive and well so that reproduction can occur. 

This perspective puts the behavior of humans and bacteria, and all organisms in between, on a level playing field, one in which consciousness, in the sense that humans mean by the term in everyday life, has a peripheral role in most of the history of life.

If we commit to the very reasonable assumption that over the long course of evolution behavior has mostly been generated by nonconscious systems, and that behavior, even in humans, should be assumed to be nonconsciously controlled unless proven otherwise, the science of behavior would advance much more smoothly.

And, by the same token, so would the science of consciousness. This is the perspective I will take as I guide you on our ascent of the tree of life in the remainder of this book.

One of the most ridiculous things about religions is that they usually consider humans to have been created by God in God's image. This is clearly not true, given the fact of evolution. Like every species, Homo sapiens is different from other forms of life, but not better or worse than those other forms.

Evolution does not create superior or inferior organs or tissues; it created diversity through divergence (not by accumulation of features).

What works in a given environmental situation is determined by natural selection, but as the environment changes, or the group moves to a new niche, new traits become important and previously useful traits can become detriments.

In trying to understand how changes in brains over the course of vertebrate evolution gave rise to our own behavioral and mental capacities, we thus have to take care to climb the vertebrate tree of life without using Edinger's ladder, and also to be cautious not to overinterpret the differences we encounter.

We are newer and different, but not better.

As I have pointed out, we have to guard against anthropocentric tendencies, but also against anthropomorphic ones. In other words, we sometimes attribute too much to other animals, and sometimes to ourselves. We have to find the right balance, which I strive to do in the coming chapters.

However, we humans do possess a marvelously capable brain that has impressive cognitive powers. Yet as LeDoux notes at the end of this passage, human cognition is an outgrowth of capabilities that our evolutionary ancestors possessed.

Our species has survived and thrived not by being bigger, faster, or stronger, but by being clever. We haven't, like most organisms, simply evolved by adapting our Bauplan to the world as it changes; we have used our cognitive abilities to change the world. We do so because we think it might be advantageous to our bodies and way of life, or that it might simply be interesting to tinker with nature.

No other animal, not even our closest primate relatives, can have an idea like building a skyscraper, finding a cure for a disease, composing an opera, or writing a novel, then describe it to a colleague, plan how to execute it, and carry it out.

That human cognition is unique in no way means we are better or more entitled than our ancestors or animals with which we currently share the planet. It just means we are different. Unique though it may be, human cognition emerged by building on cognitive capabilities possessed by our mammalian ancestors.

There's zero evidence to support the idea of a conscious soul separate from the physical brain. Consciousness is one aspect of the brain in action, not something ethereal or supernatural. Research on split-brain patients proves this, since basically their consciousness is divided into two parts -- which couldn't happen if a unitary soul was the source of consciousness.

Because language is usually controlled by the left hemisphere, split-brain patients are able to give verbal reports about information presented to the right half of visual space, which is preferentially seen by the left hemisphere, but cannot name stimuli in the left half of visual space, which is seen by the right hemisphere

They can, however, respond nonverbally to the stimuli seen by the right hemisphere, by pointing toward or grabbing objects with the left hand, which is preferentially connected to the right hemisphere. Similarly, when blindfolded, these subjects can name objects placed in their right hand, but not objects placed in their left hand.

Such findings showing that conscious experience can be isolated in a specific part of the brain by cutting axonal connections provided compelling evidence for something that scientists long believed but could not prove: namely, that consciousness depends on the brain's neural circuits, and is not, as Descartes had said, associated with a separate, nonphysical, soul.

I'm completely open to the fact that people have religious and mystical experiences, in part because I've had those experiences myself. (This doesn't make those experiences objectively true, of course.) But science teaches us that it is wise to be cautious about trusting the accuracy of accounts of any experience recounted by memory, since the brain engages in top-down reformulations of the memory every time it is remembered.

As Gerald Clore, Daniel Kahneman, and others have noted, the closest we ever come to the truth of experience is when we are in the experience. Everything that happens later is a top-down reinterpretation of the memory of the original experience.

In therapeutic situations, such revisionist histories can be revealing of one's psychological tendencies and proclivities, but they can never be as true to a past experience as the experience itself was in real time. The mere act of retrieving a memory can, through the process of memory reconsolidation, change the nature of the memory (this is a natural process through which memories are changed after retrieval, requiring restorage).

The longer the amount of time that passes between the actual experience and the memory of it, the greater opportunity to revise and reconsolidate it upon retrieval of the remembered narrative.

Here LeDoux repeats his contention that we humans are different, not special. We are part of a four-billion-year process of evolution that continues to this day, and will keep on for as long as life exists on Earth. 

Our survival circuits connect us to the survival history of organisms with nervous systems. And the universal survival strategies that survival circuits and behaviors tactically implement connect us to the entire history of life. Separation of the history of emotions and other states of consciousness from the deep history of survival circuits allows us to see our place in this ancient story.

Like all other species, we are special because we are different. Our differences are important to us because they are ours. But they are mere footnotes in a four-billion-year-old saga. Only by knowing the whole story can we truly understand who we are, and how we came to be that way.

Comments

[Sonia]

Brian, you are a prolific reader!!!

“One of the most ridiculous things about religions is that they usually consider humans to have been created by God in God's image. This is clearly not true, given the fact of evolution. Like every species, Homo sapiens is different from other forms of life, but not better or worse than those other forms.”

Yes, I don’t know which “god” they are referring to when they say humans have been created by God in God’s image.

But I think the term consciousness is used quite liberally. What is consciousness anyway? What are brain waves? Do they extend from our bodies to the brains of others? From animal brains to other animal brains who seem as if they think almost telepathically without language.

Just recently I’ve become fascinated by human language itself and the limitations it can impose.

[Sonia]

Language, like science, is evolutionary. Concepts and illusions are both formed and destroyed by the power of language. Language is humanity’s most powerful tool.

“ Language is, today, an inseparable part of human society. Human civilization has been possible only through language. It is through language only that humanity has come out of the stone age and has developed science, art and technology in a big way. Language is a means of communication, it is arbitrary, it is a system of systems. We know that Speech is primary while writing is secondary.

Language is human so it differs from animal communication in several ways. Language can have scores of characteristics but the following are the most important ones: language is arbitrary, productive, creative, systematic, vocalic, social, non-instinctive and conventional. These characteristics of language set human language apart from animal communication. Some of these features may be part of animal communication; yet they do not form part of it in total.”

https://neoenglish.wordpress.com/2010/12/16/characteristics-and-features-of-language/

[Spence Tepper]

"One of the most ridiculous things about religions is that they usually consider humans to have been created by God in God's image."

All things are created in the image of life. We are literally projected from a Microscope pattern that keeps shifting. That tiny pattern builds a world containing living relics from the past, reproductions of ancient artifacts, hidden treasures and Easter eggs waiting to be discovered within each of us, but which are mostly undiscovered our entire lives.

We contain patterns and pieces of billions of other creatures from the distant past.

We think we are living in the now, but all the machinery and its workings are antidiluvian, and we still barely understand them. We are surrounded by old tech. These bodies? We are living in a reproduction of an ancient machine.

These thoughts and behaviors we think are entirely ours, bespoke? In truth we are off the rack.. A single copy from a series of nearly identical clones. Every thought, every emotion, every human dynamic is basically pumped out of a mold hundreds of thousands of years old.

And none of it of our making. All that design /build goes on without our conscious knowledge billions of times every moment. The knitting and the deconstruction, 24/7.

Our awareness is largely tangential and infantile by comparison. What we create is a crayon drawing by comparison. Without a designer, without even thinking, nature designs far more brilliantly. Without an engineer nature tests and refines in perfect accord with all physical laws. No one is at the wheel. But it all builds perfectly.

That's genius beyond genius. The method is flawless.

We are all made of that stuff. But like a beauty queen, we bask on the glory we didn't design, we didn't make, but which was handed to us.

How we define ourselves? We take ownership and pride in what we didn't create and don't actually own.

That's the illusion. It's not just God that doesn't exist. Our illusions about ourselves are illusion and self - delusion.

We are in denial about what exists. Because we can't shrink it into our tiny brains.

And we are in denial of who we are, because we, as defined by our name, our our individual careers, relationships, accomplishments, are far far less than we make of ourselves.

Yet what is in this form, when we put aside our definitions, is astounding stuff.

What does exist? So much more.

[Spence Tepper]

When you look at your computer, your car, your business plan, your treatise, your story, your article, you think this is truly something human created, that song you wrote, that painting you made, human designed, human refined, a human accomplishment.

Ah, no. Everything we do, just like all things insects and subatomic particles do, is the predictable outcome of nature. Whatever these biological thinking machines come up with us actually just another result of the forces of nature. Every thought, trigger and response is a part of a machine built hundreds of thousands of years ago.

So many variations, and over time the most functional survive, with so many trial and errors in nature. Humanity, with all its thoughts and accomplishments, is just more of that. These are part of nature. The distinction between natural and artificial is a gross overstatement. A stupid misunderstanding. It is all nature.

[tucson]

Hi !

Consciousness is prior to manifestation and our brain is simply one of the myriad of manifestations in Consciousness.

Consciousness, functioning as 'brain', or frog for that matter, sees itself in relation to various manifestations of itself it encounters which it sometimes fails to recognize as itself.

Frogs are just frogs frogging. They don't analyze it. We brains do the brainy stuff and continually fool ourselves.

Thus, Self and 'other' are born.

The search for self begins in a sea of 'other', always seeking what it already is.

Separation and the resulting suffering and anxiety appear.

Awakening is seeing:...

The Universe is Conscious.

'Primordialy' this Consciousness is undifferentiated.

Consciousness moves (will) and space, time, and duality is manifest.

Thus, the Universe of objects with which Consciousness identifies itself as itself is born.

This sometimes creates the sense of self and other when in actuality there is neither.

There is only Consciousness appearing as itself which is no-self because if Consciousness had a self that self would be other!!… key point.

We are that Consciousness. (by now you are realizing that?)

In reality, there is no 'we'. It is just a term for communication in the duality of appearance.

There is no before or after Consciousness.

If there was 'before' Consciousness, 'now' would never arrive because 'before' has no end. "Now' would never get here. When does 'before' begin? How far back can 'before' go?

See what I mean? Before is now!

There is no 'after' Consciousness (now) because there is always only now no matter how far in the future you conceive it.

In other words, when you get there, it is still now. So, there is no getting 'there' which is impossible to get to since you are already there now.

There is no there there. There is always only here no matter how long you wait!

Consciousness rests.

Space and time disappear.

As a result, objects and duality cease.

The manifest Universe disappears.

The undifferentiated state persists...until It, Consciousness, moves again.

That's It.

[j]

Yet NASA says they still haven't found any indication that life -- any kind of life, even a microbe -- exists beyond this planet.

Scientists have found the map of evolution, but still say they don't know how life arose from gases and rock.

Nor is there a scientific explanation for consciousness. Theories, yes. Explanations, no.

We may not truly believe in a God. In fact, I doubt that most religious people truly believe in a transcendent reality. If they did, they'd be totally fearless of death. But on the other hand, how many materialists or atheists truly believe that life is a colorful collection of atoms going nowhere? Their valuation of life's meaning and desire for existence is itself proof that they see life as more than the sum of material things.

I think Jordan Peterson is on to something when he says that religious belief is common to most people, whether they subscribe to religious dogma or completely disavow it.

[Sonia]

It’s impossible not to believe in evolution when you consider the fact that all of life has been in a continual state of evolution since life began. Our biology is evolving (sometimes devolving). Animals and plants—all species are constantly adapting and passing along the DNA of those adaptations to their offspring. It’s part of survival. It has been going on since the beginning of time and will continue until the end.

Consciousness is another thing. Hard to quantify something like consciousness.

[Sonia]

I don’t know if this is evolution or devolution but it’s really interesting.

“Human height has steadily increased over the past 2 centuries across the globe.”

I toured some of the famous mansions on plantations in the Deep South many years ago and what struck me most was how “doll like” the furniture seemed. Furniture was smaller because people were so much smaller in both height and width.

https://ourworldindata.org/human-height

[Tim Rimmer]

Brian

Had a look at what you posted from Le Doux (a neuroscientist). First thing that comes to mind is whether or not he has researched any spiritual paths, been in nature a lot and/or is a meditator? If he was I might be more receptive to his take on consciousness, which from the quotes you give he believes is a function of the brain only?

He (Le Doux) says ‘behavior has mostly been generated by nonconscious systems, and that behavior, even in humans, should be assumed to be nonconsciously controlled unless proven otherwise’. What does he mean by a nonconscious system? Something that is not conscious? I suppose he’s talking about human evolution being driven more by necessity and ‘external factors’ rather than choice? My thinking is that this is part of the problem with us humans - If we were more tuned into/conscious about these ‘systems’ we could well have more control on how we choose to react and therefor what our behaviour will be? I presume he is talking about such behaviour when he mentions anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism however saying the latter is about attributing too much to animals I don’t really get in the context given.

I follow your argument about memory in regard to experience, and that this is a strong point Le Doux’ makes in regard to how humans survive and evolve. Le Doux says: ‘Separation of the history of emotions and other states of consciousness from the deep history of survival circuits allows us to see our place in this ancient story’. So part of the link as far as I can tell is that it is important to limit excess information that could impede/reduce connection with our survival strategies. Such info relates to events with emotional charge etc that may not be recorded correctly - fair comment.

I wonder what Le Doux means by ‘other states of consciousness’?

My view is that his view is limited and that we can only get to know the whole story when we have access to all available information. I reckon his use of the term ‘survival circuit’ could well be another name for the brain’s DMN or Default Mode Network, which to my current understanding is a kind of consciousness filtering system employed by the brain as a survival aid. However, when you look at what Pollan wrote and what is said about it by other neuroscientists, a lot of folk consider it to be the seat of the ‘self’ as it appears to govern a lot of behaviour that generates such.

You (Brian) talk of conscious awareness being the tip of the iceberg. I’m assuming the picture involves a tip with a vast unknown bulk below. How about it being a tip with a vast expanding bulk above?
I.e. the bigger picture is chopped down so to speak by such things as the DMN which helps generate this self with all its belief in separation and need to survive. As has been discussed several times on this blog various drugs can alter this perception. As can deep immersion in ‘nature’ a cool look from an ‘awakened one’ and of course meditation.

As tucson reminded us:
‘We brains do the brainy stuff and continually fool ourselves.
Thus, Self and 'other' are born.
The search for self begins in a sea of 'other', always seeking what it already is.
Separation and the resulting suffering and anxiety appear.
Awakening is seeing:...
The Universe is Conscious.

This makes so much more sense to me.