Category Evolution

Aug 22 2011

The Wolf Within—The Truth About Why We Fear the Wolf

Wolf (dier) (soort is nog gewenst)

We never fought the wolf, never the enemy, we fought ourselves—and the enemy within us (Image via Wikipedia).

Our love-hate relationship with the wolf, the animal that shares 15 thousand years of common ancestry with man’s best friend, the dog, suggests a deep conflict, one that is well hidden and maybe closer to each of us than we dare to admit. Are we hiding a skeleton in the closet? Why do we take great pains to understand and be good to our dogs whilst we hunt the wolf mercilessly?

Back in time, there were no wolves or dogs, only Canis lupus perantiquus (my name), the common ancestor of Canis lupus lupus, Canis lupus familiars, and 37 other subspecies. Humans, by then Homo sapiens sapiens, developed, not surprisingly, a particularly healthy relationship with this Canis lupus perantiquus. Both shared common interests and humans were still just one of many species. The relationship was mutually beneficial and resulted in some humans favoring certain perantiquus and certain perantiquus finding human company particularly rewarding.

Natural selection favored the fittest and, as usual, species changed over the years. These changes can be so extensive that some species turn into new ones; others only into new subspecies. The Canis lupus perantiquus changed under selective pressure from humans and their environment and became Canis lupus familiaris. In a sense, we created this subspecies and all its variations to serve and protect us.

Some species react strongly to stimuli they have not experienced for thousands of years, the scent of a predator, for example. These alarming and life saving key stimuli remain in the species’ gene pool, a kind of genetic memory. It is very unlikely that our fear of wolves stems from this kind of genetic memory; if we were that afraid of the wolf, we would never have gotten as close to it as we did. Perhaps we were afraid of the wolf in primitive times, but thousands of years of living in close proximity and cooperating would have changed that, as the least fearful members of both species would have benefited from the other. In those days, we can presume that the wolves that were least afraid of humans and capable of cooperating had better chances of survival and propagation (and ultimately turned into dogs); and conversely, the humans that were least afraid of wolves and were better at cooperating were more successful hunters, therefore survived and propagated (and ultimately turned into dog owners). Our fear of the wolf makes no sense from an evolutionary perspective, but perhaps it does from a psychological one. After all, we seem to fear what most resembles us—the enemy within!

Our fear and hatred of the wolf began long after the domestication, when humans took the first steps to distance themselves from nature, to enslave and exploit it—it happened when we invented agriculture. In the beginning, there was no war, only small-scale feuds provoked by the occasional domestic animal being taken by a wolf. The large-scale extermination of the wolf is not due to a single factor, but to an intermingled combination of factors that include mythology, religious zeal, environmental changes economic incentives, and a deep psychological scar, as we shall see.

Mythology, such as Grimm’s fairytales and Aesop’s fables, evoke the wolf as evil, untrustworthy, conniving and cowardly, a greedy thief that will go to great lengths to devour a poor, little lamb, child or old person. Tales of werewolves also exacerbated our fear and hatred of the wolf.

Religious convictions support our hatred of the wolf. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.'” (Genesis 1:26-29). European farmers and American settlers were devout Christians and they didn’t need a clearer incentive to declare war on all that crept upon the Earth. “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:26-29)—and the wolf became the ultimate target and symbol of their mission.

There is a clear association between the wolf and the wild, the wilderness and the untamed. As Burbank puts it, “The New World wilderness, where the Pilgrims found themselves, was a sinister adversary, home of tribal savages who practiced evil. The Puritans regarded the wilderness itself as a howling beast, a wolf inspired by the Devil. In their desolation, they sojourned and their journey reminded them that believers wandered in a world of sin, a spiritual wilderness replete with Godless enemies and insane beasts that wanted only to consume the righteous.” (Burbank 1990:80)

Farming and the keeping of domestic animals in enclosures combined with the decimation of the wolf’s natural prey, forced the wolf to get closer to human settlements and to feed upon the occasional livestock. Today, most wolves avoid livestock when they have enough wild prey, but the wolves of the 1800s faced extreme food shortages and preyed upon cattle and sheep. This wasn’t a problem for rich farmers and even the smaller family farms could have survived the subsequent economic loss, nevertheless, governments attempted to solve the supposed problem by creating bounties in return for the head of a wolf. Besides shooting them, wolf hunters used traps, poison, denning (excavating a den and killing the cubs) and biological warfare (infecting captive wolves with sarcoptic mange and releasing them into the wild)—and so wolfing became a lucrative business.

Mythology, religious zeal and economy go a long way towards explaining the hatred but don’t explain everything. One thing is to control competition (it happens all the time in nature), another is to embark on radical extermination and what’s more, find pleasure in the practice of torture (such as setting wolves on fire, skinning them alive, hanging them, etc.). Such barbarism suggests the real reason for our hatred is well hidden and maybe closer to our hearts than we care to believe, or dare to face.

As with all organisms, human evolution happens quietly and slowly unless some sudden, drastic environmental change prompts the selection of unusual traits. The human brain was the sudden, single, dramatic cause that prompted a huge leap in the evolution of the species—and it was not an external cause, it came indeed from deep within us. The human brain enabled man to devise farming, then science and technology, and ultimately an anthropocentric religion. Farming enabled us to multiply far beyond the average rate up until that time and to colonize the entire world. Advancements in science and technology gave us the tools to subdue all life on the planet. Religious convictions provided us with motive and momentum beyond all rationality.

There is a high price to pay when evolution equals revolution. The (relatively) quick adoption of dualism and a mechanistic view of the world forced us to part with holism and animism, and left us with deep scars. In order to obey God, conquer the world and subdue all that crept upon our planet, we had to sever our connection with the natural, unruly, uncivilized world. To live up to the moral laws of Christianity, we had to go against our nature, denying who we were and where we came from. We had to cover our tracks. All that reminded us of our holistic past had to be oppressed, suppressed, forgotten. The wilderness in general and the wolf in particular reminded us of our true nature, the very same nature we despised. It became them and us, they were symbols of the unruly, the untamed and we, the purveyors of God’s wishes and civilized order. They symbolized what we were, not what we wanted to be. We had to subdue our own wild side, a legacy from our ancestors from many millions of years ago, which had proved highly efficient for survival, yet was despised and denied by the Holy Church. We were imprinted with religious zeal, which elicited the need to stifle the symbolic wild wolf inside each one of us; and we denied our origins, a strategy that was always only going to work on a short-term basis. A conflict of identity was inevitable; the werewolf perhaps represents our struggle to switch from an organic to a mechanistic worldview.

While the dog represents what we aspire to be, the wolf stands for what we refuse to acknowledge as part of us. The dog represents control, reminds us of our power, and is testimony to our ability to tame the wild. The wolf is our guilty conscience, it reminds us of our humble origins, represents the freedom we gave up, the togetherness we abandoned.

Through his fables, Aesop contributed to the creation of many myths that were detrimental to the wolf by depicting it with all the characteristics we despise most. Unknowingly, hence most ironically, in one uncharacteristic fable, he epitomizes our age-old conflict. In “The Dog and the Wolf,” the dog invites the starving wolf to live with him and his master, but when the wolf discovers it involves being chained, the wolf replies “Then good-bye to you Master Dog. Better starve free than be a fat slave.”

We became fat slaves by our own choice; and the wolf poignantly reminds us that there was a time when we had other options—herein the dog (wolf) lies buried*.

“Looking back, we did not fight the enemy, we fought ourselves—and the enemy was in us,” says Private Chris Taylor in Oliver Stone’s movie Platoon from 1986. Echoing Taylor, I’d say: we never fought the wolf, never the enemy, we fought ourselves—and the enemy within us. As long as we will remain in denial of our inheritance, the scar won’t heal and the enemy will remain well entrenched within us—and so will we keep fighting the wolf.

Keep howling!

R—


* “That’s where the dog lies buried,” means “that’s what lies behind.” This idiomatic expression exists in many languages, e.g. “da liegt der Hund begraben” (German), “siinä on koira haudattuna,” (Finish), “där är en hund begraven” (Swedish), but not in English. Most interestingly, the Swedish expression “att ana ugglor i mossen” (to suspect owls in the bog) meaning almost the same, comes from the Danish expression “der er ugler i mosen.” Originally it wasn’t “ugler,” but “ulver” (wolves), which makes more sense since an owl in the bog is nothing special. Since the two words in some spoken Danish dialects are difficult to distinguish from one another, it was translated incorrectly into Swedish, and the expression re-introduced in Denmark with owls substituting wolves. The expression and its history was too good for me not to use it in the context of this article. I hope the native English speakers will regard it as an enrichment of the language, rather than a nuisance.

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Jul 27 2011

Planet Earth has no Immune Response to Viral Attack

Dodo, based on Roelant Savery's 1626 painting ...

The Dodo, extinct since the mid-to-late 17th century (Image via Wikipedia).

The agricultural revolution caused by humans is the single widest ecological change in the 3.5 billion-year history of life, with more profound effects than the (probable) comet that hit Earth 65 mya. years ago. The invention of agriculture allowed humans to manipulate other species for their own use (animals as well as plants) which meant that humans did not need any longer to belong to any ecosystem‘s carrying capacities—hence the human population increased and spread rapidly. With the agricultural revolution, humans ceased to live with nature and began to live outside it.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors played particular roles in their local ecosystems. They had their own niches. With the agricultural revolution, humans stepped outside ecosystems. Agriculture was an overt declaration of war on ecosystems; it meant restricting land to produce a few crops and combat all other life until extermination. With it, native plant species became weeds and all but a few domesticated species of animals became pests.

Then, came the industrial revolution and with it another ecological catastrophe. The use of factories and mass production led to a loss of natural resources, leaving the environment permanently damaged. Deforestation left the wildlife in the forest uprooted and many species became endangered while others disappeared forever. If earlier, the humans had declared war only on those other life forms, which disrupted its own form of living, they now proceeded, in the air and in the seas as well on land, to kill indiscriminately. Extermination became synonymous with collateral damage.

The primary reasons for the extinction of species is environmental change or biological competition. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, many biologically classified species have gone extinct: 83 species of mammals, 113 species of birds, 23 species of amphibians and reptiles, 23 species of fish, about 100 species of invertebrates, and over 350 species of plants. Scientists can only estimate the number of unclassified species that have gone extinct. Using various methods of extrapolation, biologists estimate that in 1991 between 4000 to 50,000 unclassified species became extinct, mainly in the tropics, due to human activities. This rate of extinction is some 1,000 to 10,000 times greater than the natural rate of species extinction (2-10 species per year) before the human agricultural and industrial revolutions.

If with the agricultural revolution, we set ourselves aside the rest of the world and enslaved the very same nature of which we were born, with the industrial revolution, we embarked on a systematic and rapid mass destruction of our planet and its life. The terms weeds and pests assumed yet a broader meaning. We dealt with thousands of species that were in our way efficiently and once and for all; the entire planet became the niche and property of one sole species, other surviving species living at its mercy; and the human population grew virally by billions!

Planet Earth on the Solar System, Milky Way Galaxy, seems to have no immune response to the viral attack by this agent called Homo sapiens sapiens.

(To be continued)

Life is great, isn’t it?

R-

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Jul 26 2011

A Newborn is Perfect and You are a Survivor

A newborn is as perfect as it will ever get (Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net).

A newborn is as perfect as it will ever get, its brain and senses wide open. From then on, it can only go downwards. Some go dramatically down (most), repressed and oppressed by the environmental conditions. They survive, though, some better than others. Others (the few lucky ones) only get their potential reduced by a margin dictated by the inexorable selective environmental exposure. Like a mirage, they develop into balanced, happy adults.

Paradoxically enough (inevitable as well), the loving parents, even the educated and well-intentioned, are the cause number one of the newborn’s fall. From day one, parents begin teaching the newborn the science and art of survival, encompassing a variety of skills. They begin limiting the newborn’s potential, creating likes and dislikes, fears and phobias, ambitions and illusions, as well as notions of good and evil, and fixed patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Some of it is inevitable and will serve the newborn well for the rest of its life. Most of it is harmful, serves no practical purpose, and will be excess baggage in adulthood for which one will continually have to pay a high price.

For the balanced, well-intentioned parents, the challenge is to train the newborn to succeed in a world that is not yet there. Parents train their offspring to be successful adults in their own world, not in the world where the offspring will reach adulthood and have to fend for themselves. Most parents teach their offspring particular skills and norms that will be obsolete once they become adults. Partly, this is inevitable once the cultural environment changes faster than any genetic evolution can cope with, which is our case. Our brain is still roughly the same as the brain of our Stone Age ancestors. The environmental and social pressures it has to cope with are not.

So what can we do?  It seems to me that a solid agenda for any parent, one resistant to time and change, is to create for their young a close contact to nature, of which we are a part. We must awaken our sense of the beautiful and the good, of wondering rather than rejecting, of ‘living it’ rather than ‘analyzing it,’ of open-mindedness and acceptance rather than pettiness and oppression. We must re-awaken our values long obscured and repressed by scientism, technomorphia, and political correctness; re-awaken our perception of entirety before particularity.

You are a survivor. You’ve done well, but you don’t need to stop there, no matter the odds. The next step, alas, is the most difficult: to take away the ‘sur’ in ‘survive’, leaving only ‘vive’ behind, which means ‘to live’. ‘Living,’ rather than ‘living despite,’ seems to me to be the ultimate goal.

Keep smiling. Life is great!

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