Evolution does not happen by the gradual accretion of advantage,  it is jerked forwards by a change in environment.  That is what is thought to happen with our ancient ancestors.  A change in climate in eastern Africa constricted the forest, concentrating the apes that lived there and creating a niche on the edge, where the tall grassland encroaches, a space where only those apes with upright postures and opposable thumbs could hunt in.  Within the space of few generations,  certain humanoids have developed a specialised way of life; they became upright savannah apes that hunted in packs with spears and missiles.    

One advance creates the space of opportunity for other adaptations to occur. Using tools and  throwing missiles required a big, strategic brain to imagine, plan, predict and create.   Up to a point these abilities could be learnt by the small chimpanzee-like brain of our early ancestors, but those who had bigger and more clever brains were quicker and better at it, would survive at the expense of the others.   No longer did the strongest and fiercest inherit the earth by fear, the ability to create the future at a distance allowed the development of a meritocracy based on intelligence.  All that was required was the ability to project, not just physically, but literally throw one’s mind forward,  to imagine the way things might be, how others might think, to create a world out of our own mind.  Discovery always favours a mind, prepared by imagination and necessity.    And with imagination comes  strategy, planning, forecast, insight, hope, anticipation, and meaning; all the tools needed  to build a civilisation.

Survival on the savannah needed teamwork, the ability to work together as a group.  The maverick and loner would just starve.   Teamwork requires empathy and identification, the ability to project our wishes and desires onto others, to inspire them and create a group identity, based on meaning.  If people share the same meaning, then they will stay together and help each other.  So tribes stayed together and developed into larger communities not just because of a practical need, but because the tribe could preserve  the word, the identity that held them together.  Having an imaginative brain allowed human beings to derive meaning from things to make sense of their environment, to interpret, tell stories, invent Gods.

We begin to see the enormous advance the upright posture and opposable thumb, how these features allowed humans to project their minds into an infinity of intellectual space, rich in possibility.   

Godlike, we have produced a world in our own image and become adapted to that world.  We have determined our own evolution;  narcissism on an universal  scale.   No longer the tough stone age survivors, fighting to stay alive, dependant on the exigencies of the external environment, constantly on the move to where it is warmer and there is food,  we have tamed the wilderness and created a society, in which we can produce all we need, shelter, energy, food, water, entertainment. 

But in order to do this, we have had to forge ever more complex collaborations.  We have outgrown the narrow self centred confines of the tribe to develop much larger societies with different values, different priorities.   The ever increasing size of our communities from tribes to villages, to towns, cities, countries and finally a global community linked electronically, not only required a major logistic exercise in providing basic human utilities to everybody, but also created the need for civilisation, laws, morals and manners to keep such large in control.  Only those whose behaviour is compatible with the customs of society, will be allowed the freedom to live and breed in that society. Those who are more assertive and aggressive have been weeded out, killed, locked up, exiled. 

So we have we inbred domestication and passivity by our civilisation and laws.  We have selected out dangerous characteristics such as aggression,  ruthlessness,  physical strength and activity, and bred in other characteristics like laziness, passivity, dependency and overeating.  We have tamed ourselves.  And since aggression and physical strength are male prerogatives,  the new man has become more feminine. Civilisation means that men no longer seize their women by force, the power of selection is in the arms of the women, who arguably have a greater grasp of human nature.  And women are more likely to seek out sensitive, caring men to breed with.  They in turn will rear more sensitive children.     

All of this has created a different strain of human being, passive, a civilised, comfort seeking, intelligent and inventive creature.  Experiments conducted in Novobirsk, Eastern Siberia has shown that selective breeding over 50 generations has succeeded in domesticating Silver Foxes.  They become tame like dogs. The strange thing is that in breeding out aggression, other characteristics change too, like the colour of their coats and the shape of their heads, their ears and their tails.  In fact, they become like puppies.  Selective breeding for domesticity favours juvenile characteristics.

Has the same thing happened in human societies?  Has sexual selection succeeded in breeding out aggressive characteristics?   Are we all just big babies?   Have we bred domesticity in ourselves and in doing so become passive, lazy, needy and child-like?   And like the domesticated foxes,  have these social characteristics of being tamed, altered our appearance and the diseases we are predisposed to?    Has it, for example, caused us to become fatty and less hairy.  Has the combination of neediness and passivity predisposed to a plethora of diseases of civilisation; obesity, diabetes, heart attacks as well illnesses related to depression, such as Fibromyalgia and Irritable Bowel Syndrome?

Obesity and depression are the two most common illnesses of western society, affecting more than half the population.  Obesity is a disease of passive overconsumption and insufficient exercise.   We are consuming more than we need and we no longer need to work to get it.  There is an abundance of high energy food in infinite variety in our supermarkets.  Most of it is ready prepared and cooked and just requires reheating.  And without the basic requirements to hunt and fight, there is little need to exercise.  We travel to work in our cars and trains, we get our entertainment from the television, we do not even need to go out to work; we can work from our homes.  We don’t even need to get out of bed. 

In fact, we can exist without ever having to meet other people.  With personal computers, many people have their office at home.  No wonder we become quite isolated and depressed.    

If we remove the need to hunt, to build our own houses, to fight and compete, then we remove personal initiative.   And without human contact and something to strive for, life has little meaning.   We just exist, eating, drinking and sitting in front of the television,  rendered inert by the trappings of our own civilisation. Chronically bored, eating becomes less a necessity, more a displacement activity.  Many obese people are depressed.          

A few years ago,  I walked out from Malleleuca along Tasmania’s South Coast Track, carrying all the food I needed for 9 days on my back.  Meals were rationed; just enough for sustenance and no extra. I walked continuously from dawn to dusk across traversing precipitous mountain ridges interrupted by boggy valleys.  I felt more alive than I had for years and lost over nearly a stone in weight.

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To some extent, the erosion is predictable.  Computer models can factor in tides, currents, geology, bathymetry, and they provide an rough idea, but what actually happens often depends on politics and local interests.  As, my brother Simon, who is an artist interested in environmental issues, told me, ‘The situation is very different on the impoverished Holderness and Lincolnshire Coastline compared with the more affluent Suffolk Coast where there are major amenities like a nuclear power station, a world famous nature reserve and big coastal communities of Lowestoft, Southwold, Aldeburgh and Felixstowe.’  Down there, the coast is being protected by blocks of Norwegian granite and sand dredged up just off shore, but such measures are short term solutions.  Over the longer term, usch measures are counterproductive.  The granite blocks can sink and the tides find their way round the back of them while dredging offshore sandbanks can remove the first bulwark against erosion. 

‘What the land means varies from place to place’, Simon explained. ‘Such meanings are political  and local and their cumulative effect cannot be easily factored in.  Decisions on whether to allow arable or to allow the river to break through to the sea (as at Aldeburgh) are often made by local councils without reference to the bigger picture.  So what you can have is some local amenities protected, a golf club here, a ferry terminal there at the expense of desolation at bigger areas up and down the coast.’    

As an artist without the restrictions of commerce and local politics, Simon is free to use his imagination to create what might happen in the future.  He is not confined by the physical constructs of the computer modellers, he can bring in concepts of politics and meaning to gain a more realistic understanding of what might happen.  It’s a chaotic system but like the weather, not entirely unpredictable.

Not for the first time, have I seen comparisons between what Simon is doing and what I am interested in.  We think about things the same way.  Most illness is more influenced by the meaning of what happens to an individual; diet, infection, gender, contamination may be able to be factored in but are only part of the story.  For both coast and the disease host, you need to get up front and personal.

The image, Sand patterns, Isle of Eigg, by Dudley Williams  was the winner of the classic view, adult class, in this years Landscape Photographer off the Year competition.

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Successful expedition.  Grytviken basking in balmy zero.   Back on shelf at minus 14, well stocked with lamp oil, whalemeat, blubber, pickled cabbage and two bottles of aquavit!!  Freezing fog.  When we speak outside, the words stay in the air and hang around the tent.  Voice message from Oates there last night.  Unrepeatable, poor chap! 

Capt.RF (Keep Dancing) Scott RN.

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A hesitant dawn, you silence the bells 

And change the scene

with that touch of myth   

that turns every  living thing to ice.

Flakes bristle from every twig,

spicules sparkle like Christmas,

then detach and sink,

swinging through a sunlit sea. 

The trees, decked like brides,

Mock hungry deer with confetti

No celebration here as they clash  

And paw the snow in  their frostration.

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0610 GMT  04/12/10

Minus 15 with precipitation!  Visibility 200 yards.  Ice! 

Transport held fast.  Frost forming on rigging. 

Troops down in mouth.  Fog freezing on beards!   Try to encourage.  ‘Chin up!’  But supplies low.  Half rations. Last banana.  No brandy.  Fear mutiny.

 If no improvement, will try dash to base camp tomorrow

Scott, i/c expedition.

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Snow flurries overnight but pressure rising.  Blizzard yesterday made transport impossible; even sledges didn’t run.  By 6pm, snow tractor got through.  Now stuck in drift. Troops digging out.  Mount Sheffield completely cut off.  No radio contact. 

Supplies will last another week.  Plenty of logs for oven.  Bags of flour, so can make bread.  Half a cauliflower and a few potatoes, two cans of chick peas, pasta and rice and lots of spice.  Oates gone, but lots of muesli.  Huskies hungry – don’t like the way they stare at me and salivate.  Must let them go.    

Please arrange air drop of skis, brandy, tomatoes and onions.    

Predicted minus ten tonight, breaking out winter duvet.

Chin up, as always. 

Scott

PS. Who needs the Gulf Stream anyway?

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Add an external force like dropping a pebble in a bowl and water will adopt a natural frequency of vibration depending on the configuration of the container.  Vibration may also be imposed by wind or obstructions to flow, creating ripples, that can be recorded on sand and rocks.  The gravitational effect of the moon exaggerates natural rhythm of water around the globe.  

Waves in open water are created by the wind on the surface or a rising sea bed close to the shore. Although the wave moves, the water in it just circulates. Rays and other fish swim like a wave through the static circulating water.  The wave ‘breaks’  when wind accelerates the top and causes it to overbalance or when the rising shore line slows down the base.   This creates a horizontal air/water vortex that churns and oxygenates the water. 

In contrast, the standing wave generated by the fall of water in a weir is static and water flows through it.   So the wave is a feature of water, but does not necessarily relate to its flow.  

An obstruction in a river or the flow of a stream of water into a static pool,  creates vertical vortices; paired boundary areas where fluids of different pressures coalesce and mix.  

Multiple sources, sinks and currents combine to create more complex fluid structures that has been compared to a symphony in which different instruments have their own entries and rests and are brought together by an invisible conductor.  Flow must be turbulent for exchange to  occur.  If it is channelled through a straight pipe, or settles at the bottom of a deep pool, it cannot form vortices, transfer of material cannot occur and water stagnates .

Water is a complex, sensitive medium that can respond to the environment to create a multiplicity of forms.  Living creatures start their live as suspensions of cells in water.  They must therefore be  influenced by flow patterns of the medium of suspension and develop out of these patterns   So simple multi cellular organisms living in water often adopt spiral forms.  Snails have a spiral shell.  The muscle fibres of the heart adopt a spiral arrangement with compartments forming at the junction of different flows (oxygenated blood from the lungs and deoxygenated blood from the rest of the body).  Movements of fluid are incredibly sensitive; they respond to minor change.   Nerve cells seem to line up at the boundary zones where the effects of those changes have most effect. 

Now if we imagine that the world and everything in it was initially composed of fluids initially, then we can see how solid forms in nature conform to a vortex configuration.  Vortices are consolidated in rocks when they cool.  Jellyfish are 96% water and resemble complex vortices.  When their mantle contracts, they produce mirror images of themselves in the vortices they leave behind.  And look at other vortex forms, the cochlea of the ear, the semicircular canals, which in the lamprey are still fluid vortices, the turbinate bones of the deer, the intestine of the lungfish is spiral in form, the intestine of the cow circular. Even the embryo starts off as a complex vortex of cells, whirling boundaries where things occur, cells are laid down, nervous connections are created.   We might even envisage organs being created out of paired vortices).     

Water cannot just be understood by its chemical properties.  It is the stuff of life, the circulation that runs through all living things.  Sensitive Chaos; creation of flowing forms in water and air was written by Theodore Schwenk (1910- 1986), anthroposophist, engineer and director of The Institute of Water Research and Flow Science in the Black Forest.  It is a remarkable, thought provoking book that escapes the stagnation of research protocols and methodology and allows the imagination to flow unimpeded; the sort of book that makes us reflect on what might be so.  That, surely, is the  essence of science.    

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And birds have ceased to call  

When nighthawks glide through misty glades   

And fiery Mars comes up from shades

When fireflies blink and crickets wheeze.

and deer cough deep and owls sneeze  

The sky spreads its carpet of myth

Up ending Orion,

while I, sitting on a stone,

move the branch into the glow and wait   

‘til tousle haired, he brings dazed frogs, which,

steamed with greens, and pungent spice,  

we serve on leaves with sticky rice

and eat with bamboo shots.  .

Nyok!

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the sky deeper.  

Steam rises from the falls,

turns grass stems to prayer flags,

trees into wedding gowns. 

The windows of the big house,

shine gold and

Thomas Payne’s excellent bridge

burns like a biscuit     

against moors of palest pink

Crystal deep,

sparkling deer

join cosy sheep

In a warm circuit of silage,

fermenting an uneasy friendship 

in cloven harmony of hunger.

Flashing red, a woodpicker  

pecks at freezing bark

while Titmice forage,  

out of habit, more than hope,

Spying a discarded raft, I climb aboard

and launch myself down the slope until, 

disgorged in a tumble of laughter,   

I get the drift, use my hands,   

like rockets on a space module

to gain stability but no direction.  

A stranger eyes me by the cattle grid,  

‘I’ve only come for my grandson.’  

I smile like sheep in silage. 

And resolve to buy a sledge.

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Bird How is a simple construction, such as a child would draw; a rough stone box with a gabled roof , two windows and a door painted green.  It stood there, timeless and impassive, when William strode the coffin route from Ambleside with Dorothy scuttling in his wake, to take out a lease in Grasmere.  Restless beasts still bumped and sighed in the shippon and provided underfloor heating when Ruskin worried about industrial pollution from his perspective on Coniston and Mallory practiced the crags of Great Gable.    

The National Trust rescued the house in 1963. The conversion retains the character and feel of the original dwelling.  You enter into a simple living space, a chair a settee, a table and a fireplace with plenty of wood.  The kitchen is behind a curtain and two bedrooms are at the back, one larger with twin beds painted sky blue, the other with a double bunk. 

This accommodation has no bathroom. You wash in the sink or take a bowl onto the terrace.  But after a  muddy descent from the summit across Great Moss and down through the treacherous gorge,  what bliss to wash naked in the rain and pour warm water from the jug onto the shivering spot between the shoulder blades and then run inside to dry off by the chattering fire.     

There’s a chemical toilet in the shippon.  It doesn’t smell but the bucket has to be emptied into the cesspit outside; it’s that rustic.  We might have stayed three nights in a hotel in Grasmere for the same price, but the luxury would have spoiled us with excess and depleted our initiative. Bird How just provides shelter and basic necessities, but accepting the challenge to make a home in the wilderness creates a frisson of adventure and self sufficiency that can never be achieved in a hotel or on a package holiday.  Only don’t forget your sleeping bag and a spare box of matches.    

This article was short listed for The Guardian’s Travel Writing Competition and pubished in today’s paper.  

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