CAN'T LET IT GO

  I ate the last of the fresh strawberries this morning after the other night’s hard frost (21 degrees) and I’m feeling the urge to rearrange furniture. My short sleeve shirts have all migrated on their hangers to the dark end of the closet but I don’t mind the frost and long sleeves feel good for a change, but I’ll miss the berries. I had a roadtrip planned for this week but either something unexpected happened or something expected didn’t happened and I’m parked in Missouri until December. My blood pressure has been hovering at the boundary for a decade and it finally crossed the line so I’ll be adding another pill to my morning upload. If I wanted to grumble there is plenty to whine about but we didn’t evolve to be happy, we evolved to overcome and survive. So if it’s true, that life is a bitch and then we die then she’s a wonderful bitch; and if the fear of dying is too much to bear then there is religion. It won’t save you but believing makes you feel better.
I spend a lot of time learning more of the Human backstory. It’s not easy getting your head around the truly big blocks of time. Life spans are so short and to realize that other Homo sapiens just like us have been walking the earth, generation after generation in an unbroken chain of life for more than 270,000 years; it’s difficult to process hundreds of thousands of years when we only get to experience 90 years if we’re lucky. But the story is so fantastic I can’t let it go. 
Compared to how long it takes for humans to evolve, technology is advancing at the speed of light. When I was learning to use the telephone there were no reliable computers of any size, anywhere. A quarter century later the computer that guided Neil Armstrong’s crew safely to the moon and back had less power and less capacity than the smartphone in my pocket. So said; anthropology, the scientific study of Human origins and cultures from the beginnings to the present, it has been leap-frogging forward with that same, forward leaning technology.
Time for a disclaimer: Modern science as we know it is a relatively new discipline, less than 500 years old. Religion on the other hand can be traced back to its beginnings at least 70,000 years ago. Across that gap any questions about human origins and their purpose fell on priests, shamans and other holy men. Answers to difficult, complex questions required answers that were simple, easy to understand stories that were considered to be universal truths that would be true everywhere and forever. Within the last 500 years the science community has advanced knowledge with a process and discipline that has proven itself over and again. But that knowledge often comes slowly and with many dead-end possibilities that must be disproven before moving on. So what they got then was often either incomplete (emphasis on incomplete) or incorrect and the story likewise, too complicated for the layperson to understand. After all those centuries of faith based wannabe science, today we share the other truth. “This is what we’ve learned and have great confidence in but that can change. When we learn more and better we will tell the world and rewrite the book.” Anthropologists have been learning more and better in the past decades. What we believed when I was in college has been updated significantly due to better science and technology. 
In the past few decades the difference has been better technology and more scientists working in the field. They are making new updates concerning longer windows of opportunity for different Human species to interact and how that translates with DNA analysis. After all, fossils that were buried for hundreds of thousands of years and examined in the 20th century are being reexamined and yield new and better data than with the technology from only 50 years ago. Point of interest: “Human” is a genus category and there was a time when there were more than one human genus coexisting on the planet. But we (Homo sapiens) are the only surviving Humans on the planet now. All of the other humans have gone extinct. So when we see the word ‘Human’ used we also need to determine whether it includes one of several closely related species or just us. It seems that Neanderthals were not only coexisting with both Homo sapiens (us) in Europe and another human species, Homo denisovan in South East Asia but interbreeding as well. We’ve known for a long time that every modern human except for those in subsaharan South Africa carry a small amount of Neanderthal DNA in our body cells. We knew that but the vast increase in exposure to other species in terms of range and overlapping changes the way we treat the data. Here I am hanging on a hook and I can’t let it go. 
So I choose not to grumble, that this life is awesome even when it gets scary and even when it hurts. I’ll miss the fresh berries but I’ll make cookies. One thought in particular has humbled me for years. It goes like this: If I could trace my family lineage back from my mother to her mother to mother to mother all the way back to the dawn of civilization, about 10,000 years ago, I would consider that linkage as the path of my maternal grandmothers. The obvious question is, how many would there be? There is a certain amount of speculation but children matured sexually later than today’s children and lived shorter lives. So I speculate the average age for child bearing across the ages to be 20, for reasonable ease of calculating generations in a century. That would give us 5 generations per century times 10 for generations per thousand years, times another 10 for ten thousand years = 500 generations of grandmothers in my own personal, matriarchal lineage back to the dawn of civilization. Looking back I would have thought there be more than 500 grandmothers between the dawn of civilization and now but the numbers don’t lie. If it were possible you could get them all together in an auditorium and we could all share a meal together. What would I say to my 500th grandmother? I would certainly say “thank you”. She would have been born to a hunter-gatherer clan somewhere and moved continuously, following the food chain as seasons changed. She would have  grown up, given birth to a daughter, lived and died but most of all her DNA would have been passed on to my 499th grandmother, and from her to #498, and and from her to #497 and I can’t let it go. If that chain of grandmothers across 10,000 years had been interrupted just once by a different grandfather then her daughter would have been a different person and my DNA would make me different, eve if just a tiny little bit and I can't let it go.  
Buddhist teaching tells us; "Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful.”

RAMBLING A BIT

  By definition I must identify as a professional photographer and artist as well. I take photographs, make frames and some of them I put together, show and sell. Most people like them but choose not to purchase because they don’t come cheap. I have difficulty putting a price on my art so I ask my artist friends to help me and none of them have ever suggested I am asking too much; just the contrary. “Why only $450, this should be $650; people who appreciate art are willing to pay.” But if making money was my purpose that would make my photographs the means to an end and in my case the art is the end. No matter how much they sell for or whose wall they hang on, my name is on the mat and the frame and that’s not nothing; sort of like my children who move away and take on a life of their own. I want them to hang on a wall where people can appreciate them.
By definition, ‘Science’ is the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world. The only credible, reliable system to that end begins with observation then experiment, and the testing of theories against the evidence obtained. Those who make that study a way of life and lifelong profession would qualify as scientists. I am not a scientist. I made a career of teaching biology and a few turns at chemistry but at best that made me a facilitator for others at the start of their science journey. 
Science is a disciplined process and as long as that discipline is observed, the product (knowledge or technology) is reliable. But historically the science of science only goes back 500 years at most. Civilization on the other hand has been moving its feet for from 9,000 to 11,000 years in different places at different times. They all sprang from agriculture (plants & animals), densely populated cities, specialized jobs that created social classes, armies to protect the cities and (upper class) rulers to enforce authority and maintain the system. Every civilization had/has its own particular spin but they all conform to these criteria. For a civilization to prosper and endure it must defend its territory (food producing lands) and or capture the same from others by means of war. Rulers could be cruel and indifferent to their subjects or kind and compassionate, it doesn’t matter as long as the system works. 
Science has evolved and no nation/culture/civilization can compete without good science. It’s only been a few centuries but rulers keep a close reign on how science can benefit them and what science is discovering that can threaten their financial/political best interests. After World War 2 tobacco companies had the best laboratories, the best scientists but their science was tainted by either intimidation or extravagant salaries to bury evidence between smoking and cancer. Duke University in North Carolina is still heavily influenced by the tobacco culture. In the end, good science prevailed and smoking took a hit but nobody went to jail. Today those same companies have stopped overt advertising but still send subtle messages to minorities and children who are most likely to take up the habit. 
I am rambling a bit, thinking through my fingers and onto the page but I’m moving to a point where I question the efficacy of intelligence and knowledge. When good science gives us bad news about climate change or harmful side effects from any profitable industry there is a reflex pushback. They attack institutions and individuals with the same strategy insurance company lawyers use against victims; here-say and fabricated testimony to create doubt and destroy any credibility of the victim, the evidence or their witnesses. Good science is predicated on a profound discipline that favors no one, nobody, only what is! Too bad there are science experts who can be bought and sold by unscrupulous players.
The host of the PBS NOVA series HUMAN is paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi. She observes that modern humans have not evolved to live and function in this modern world. Living in a small clan of hunter-gatherers was relatively simple. Their brains were as developed, no different than ours today but the demands of their culture were simple. That has changed but our brains have not. Our cultural pressures make us vulnerable to believing the unbelievable and conforming to the whims of charismatic leaders. That’s my interpretation, not a quote. Then there is Harvard Primatologist, Evolutionary Biologist Dr. Christine Webb who has written a book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism. I am eager to get the Kindle version so I can have my computer read it like a podcast. Then I can stop, go back, listen again to a paragraph or a page, make notes and move on as it serves me. It certainly addresses ideas about the efficacy of intelligence and knowledge that I had already considered.
The church I go to has a good number of artist members. Some sell their work and others not but this time of year we hang a show for members to display their work. I put two matted, framed photographs in the mix. They are good enough to sell and I could use the money but they are NFS. Money has a way of going away and that’s alright but I wouldn’t have those photographs anymore and I would miss them. They both came down off my bedroom wall, one on either side of my bed. In preparation for taking them down and into my truck I discovered a photograph (it wasn’t lost I just wasn’t sure exactly where it was) I took it back in 1993 with a little point and shoot with a good, fixed lens. It’s a close up of snow covered ice in a farm creek with a very small sycamore branch in the snow. Next to the seed pods on the twig actually, there were several turkey tracks. It doesn’t sound like much but it grows on you. I’m going to mat and frame it sometime before Christmas and give it to someone I love. I have lots of those around.