BEING HUMAN : IF - AND - THEN

It is the last day of November, a Monday and the beginning of the 49^th week of the year. Start the Week, a program on BBC Radio 4, was today hosted by journalist and broadcaster Amol Rajan. His subject was human ingenuity and shared inheritance. He was joined by three guests:

Simon Baron-Cohen FBA FBPsS FMedSci, clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge. He is director of the Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College. The show was plugging, in the nicest possible way, his latest book The Pattern Seekers: A new Theory of Human Invention. In the United States it is published under the title The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention. He shows how humans have evolved remarkable ingenuity from arts to the sciences by using complex systemizing mechanisms. The ability to formulate if-and-then processes.

 

 

Rebecca Wragg Sykes PhD, an archaeologist plugging, again in the nicest possible way, her first book Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art depicting the Neanderthals as curious and clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and artistically inclined. Humans are not uniquely special and share many traits and GNA with Neanderthal relatives.

 

Susana Carvalho PhD, who describes herself: “I am a primatologist and palaeoanthropologist. I was one of main founders of the field of Primate Archaeology. I have been studying stone tool use by wild chimpanzees in Bossou, Guinea, West Africa, since 2006, and carrying archaeological research in the Koobi Fora area, Kenya, East Africa since 2008, with a current focus on the archaeology of the Pliocene. I am the director of the Paleo-Primate Project Gorongosa since 2015, where an international team of 20 senior researchers is carrying an unprecedented interdisciplinary approach to understanding hominin origins and adaptations. In Mozambique, I am focusing on extant primates (baboons vervets) as models for behavioural evolution, and I am also directing surveys, excavations of fossil sites, and actualistic experimentations to achieve a more holistic understanding of our past evolution.”

She was not plugging a specific book but her research, in the nicest possible way.

 

The discussion centred essentially on what makes us human. The matter of the ability to make and use tools was mentioned as well as group interaction and empathy; however, the additional ingredient of imagination, a trait of planning for the long-term future, not only the immediate future, our extended friendship network and intensity is what makes a difference. We have an urge to transcend through interaction with others as well as through interaction with material things. We have a real urge to connect, to reach out and to share things and experiences or an urge to see and seek patterns. Humans have a generative inventiveness, an unstoppable inventiveness, an ability to systematize, a unique ability to see and form patterns, to visualise ‘if-and-then’. Or as Jacques Derrida would have it “le qui et le quoi”.

 

One of the aspects of this unstoppable invention is the ratchet effect, featuritis (feature creep), scope creep and mission creep. Things do not always go to plan and the invention can outstrip the technology meant to be able to cope with it. Which is why some computer systems so quickly become antique, because of the invention of new systems and software. It is the ability to imagine endlessly.

 

The first person to ever do something, like make a stone ricochet off water, never did it before. Barnes Wallis comes along and thinks “if-and-then” we have the bouncing bomb.

On the other hand, who could have imagined this endless Presidential election, or this seemingly endless pandemic. To a degree there had been some forward planning, or at least thinking about how to react to an infection crisis. There have been numerous stories and films about just such a crisis, so clearly it has been within the scope of human imagination.  Surely someone must have seen the pattern; however, seeing is never the same as coping or dealing with. The situation is effectively beyond control, or perhaps, within the small degree of control that takes the shape of lockdowns and other hopeful precautionary measures. The making of the vaccine was in effect already along the way, as research into different covid vaccines were being researched, and that research was shifted to deal with covid-19. That too is a question of ‘if-and-then’. Which is probably why it may not be so surprising that three vaccines have come along it such a short time, than might otherwise have been the case.

 

As to the matter of this fantasy limbo hovering over the United States, perhaps Simon Baron-Cohen could offer some incite. He has been looking into autism and people on the spectrum, assuming there is a spectrum. He did suggest that in some way or other we are all on the spectrum. It just depends to what degree and which end of the graph we find ourselves. It seems clear to some that Mr. Trump is at an extreme end of the spectrum. His obsessive self-obsessed behaviour, his obsessive denial and his obsessive attention deficit disorder, is something that surely requires therapy. His condition is not helped by the obsessive pandering to his obsessions. Journalist and politicians who continue to cater to his psychosis must surely see that they cannot continue on this path without losing the whole of any credibility they have left. Or perhaps I’m being obsessive.