Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

The Emergence of the Body The US paleontologist Neil Shubin, who in 2004 discovered in the Canadian Arctic a fossil called Tiktaalik that is the "missing link" between sea animals and land animals (dated to 375 million years ago), argued that there exists a common way in which life organizes itself into bodies, and “body plans” can be traced back even to unicellular organisms. For 3.5 billion years life meant microbes, no bodies. Multicelled organisms began to populate the sea about 600 million years ago (at the end of the Precambrian), and over the span of a few million years a lot of different bodies appeared. Nicole King found that the genes that build bodies are shared with some microbes ("A bacterial sulfonolipid triggers multicellular development in the closest living relatives of animals", 2012), so the appropriate genes were around much earlier than the first bodies. As Martin Boraas, who even created "proto-bodies" from "no-bodies", has shown experimentally, a body offers protection from predators while increasing the chances of becoming one: i.e. a body helps eat other bodies and protect from other bodies. ("Phagotrophy by a flagellate selects for colonial prey", 1998). Shubin believes that those genes needed the right environment to express themselves, namely an environment rich in oxygen. So Shubin concludes that at some point microbes learned to eat each other, a fact that made bodies an evolutionary advantage, and then 600 million years ago the atmosphere had enough oxygen to make that evolutionary advantage physically possible. The genes to create bodies were already there, since the beginning. The Emergence of the Brain The US anthropologist Daniel Lieberman emphasized that evolution doesn’t build bodies to be healthy and long-living but to make as many children as possible. Bodies of all animals not designed to be healthy and live forever. Natural selection is about survival of the species, not of the individual: it generally selects features that increase the chances of having children who will in turn survive and procreate. It does not necessarily produce long-living animals, i.e. longevity is not a goal of natural selection. It does not necessarily produce healthy individuals. Lieberman has a simple definition of life: life is the process by which living things use energy to make more living things (incidentally, the "energy" in that definition is mostly living things, i.e. living things eat living things to make more living things). However, humans (and in general apes) are exceptions to a simple rule of nature: most animals spend as little energy as possible for growing and as much energy as possible for reproducing. Whereas humans spend a lot of energy growing their bodies (and particularly their brains) and make relatively few babies. Lieberman speculates that humans violate that fundamental rule because they invest more in making sure that children will survive and reproduce. Most animals make many children and quickly but few survive. Human children are not many but more likely to survive. Human babies also require a lot more care than the offspring of other species. Robin Dunbar calculated ("The Social Brain Hypothesis", 1998) that the size of the neocortex correlates with group size. Extrapolating one can conjecture that the large human brain enabled humans to create bigger societies, probably useful for hunter-gatherers. Between the energetic demands of a large brain and the energetic demands of hunting and gathering, Homo Erectus had a desperate need of energy and was craving for fat and sugar (which is stored as fat in the body). About 400,000 years ago Homo Erectus also mastered fire. Cooked food provides more energy than uncooked food and greatly decreases the chances of getting sick when eating meat. Cooking food, especially meat, was one solution to obtain the energy needed by the hunter-gatherer. About 50,000 years ago Homo Sapiens started doing something funny: changing their habits. Most animals, and also ancient hominids, keep repeating the same habits, generation after generation. In the Upper Paleolithic humans started making a variety of tools, and each location made different things (so that we recognize a "culture" by their artifacts). Lieberman calls it a "technological revolution". Richard Klein (in "The Dawn of Human Culture", 2002) speculated that this revolution was triggered by the emergence of genes for cooperation and planning. Whatever the reason, the large human brain was presumably essential to the ability to change habits. The diet further expanded. The human population grew exponentially, and by 15,000 years ago hunter-gatherers had occupied almost every corner of the world, thanks to local innovations to deal with different climates and environments. Then about 12,000 years ago hunter-gatherers invented farming and set in motion the agricultural revolution. Life and Mind One wonders if the relationship between life and mind could be turned upside down. Life is a cycle of chemical reactions that eventually got enveloped in a "skin" and embodied in a body. Mind (as the set of cognitive faculties, ranging from vision to learning) is, ultimately, a cycle of electrochemical reactions. What if it arose independently but eventually evolved within bodies? Mind may not require life, but it would probably not have evolved to our stage without a living body to use and serve. Mind (conceived as this abstract electrochemical phenomenon) may have existed before life. Life gave it a body, a brain. Life gave it a life. Mind may not be the only process that was "absorbed" by life. Digestion may have pre-dated life, as a phenomenon freely occurring on Earth. And so many other chemical processes. Mind is one of the many processes that a body uses to grow, survive and reproduce.   Back to the beginning of the chapter "The Evolution of Life: Of Designers and Design" | Back to the index of all chapters