The Thinking, Walking Bipded, part two. Joe Amato in foot

As explained in the previous essay, walking has been perhaps the single most important evolutionary innovation for the human body and the human mind. Is it too much to attribute the evolution of human intelligence to walking? In the essays that follow, I will describe and analyze numerous examples of people who, throughout human history, have done their best work and their best thinking while walking on foot, even when other means of transportation were available. And sometimes not.

As the late Joe Amato explains in his book On Foot, for most of human history walking has been the only available, or reasonably available, option for going from one place to another. Until quite recently, roads between human towns—everywhere in the world—were scarcely better than trails, hardly suitable for wagons or even horses, unless conditions were perfect. As I explain in Forgotten Landscapes, Native Americans built a civilization on trails that connected cities and large villages. Amato makes it sound as if even the much-praised Roman roads were not too good for most of their length. It is a miserable story of humans trying and often failing to travel to new locations.

As soon as other conveyances became available, Amato explains, they instantly created a hierarchy—those who could ride a horse or in a carriage had higher status than miserable pedestrians, and so it remains even today. In America, if you are on foot, people in cars think something must be wrong with you. This attitude is not as prevalent in France, where I now live.

But even in modern warfare—that is, before the age of missiles and drones—most of the movement was on foot. Chevaliers rode on horses, some soldiers rode in tanks, but most of them have been and are infantrymen.

But also throughout history, people have chosen to walk, sometimes very long distances, on foot even when it makes no logical sense to do so. The immediate example everyone thinks of is pilgrimages. Pilgrims considered it sinful to do their pilgrimage some other way, although rich pilgrims often figured out a way to justify it.

When I first met Joe, he was walking. He was my colleague at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, where I worked until 1998. In 1993, he had just published a book about a pyramid scheme that took place right in Marshall. It involved getting farmers to plant Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus), a kind of sunflower with a big starchy root. The roots could be used to produce biofuels. This is all very well, but the corporation that promoted it made all its profits off of getting farmers to sign up for it. Joe called his book The Great Jerusalem Artichoke Circus. I was the new botanist at the university, and Joe wanted me to speak at the book launch.

I think Joe appreciated nature walks very much, but that is not what he was doing that day. He was walking around and around in the interconnected hallways of the university. In Minnesota, the winter wind on ice can blow you down. The university system decided to build Southwest State to be a campus where you could go anywhere without stepping outside. It was an intentional magnet for all the disabled students in the state university system. Joe wouldn’t let even major heart surgery stop him: he had just had major heart surgery when I met him. He lived another forty years. He was an offbeat genius and very amiable.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 9. You Little Demon

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth, The Book of Ruth; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; Ursa Minor (all reviewed earlier); The Gentleman (not reviewed in my blogs); and You Little Demon (reviewed here).

It is a little known fact that, once every thousand years, a demon (living in Hell) gets a chance to visit the Earth. He has to return unless he can convince a human being to switch places with him. Then the demon gets to live on the good green Earth. The down side is that he becomes mortal. In this story, a demon almost gets to stay on the Earth, even though living in the country with a frumpy old wife, just before he dies of a heart attack.

There is a long literature of mortals visiting Hell, from Dante all the way to the recent bestseller Katabasis by R. F. Kuang. It is refreshing to see the plot go the other way.

Like Rice’s other books, this one gets me to ask questions that I did not know I wanted to ask. And it this story is very short, written with irrepressible humor.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part one. Pascal Picq and Human Evolution

This essay begins a series about the importance of walking in human evolution and history.

Cogito, ergo sum, said Pascal, or someone. I think, therefore I am. In French it would be je pense, donc je suis. But one French writer, an anthropologist named Pascal Picq, has changed this a little. He says, je marche, donc je pense. I walk, therefore I think. He has made the case that we are not just bipeds who think, but we think because we are bipeds. He attributes the evolution of human intelligence not just to the fact we are bipeds, but because we are bipeds who can walk and run for long distances, with outstanding endurance not found in other mammal species. Maybe this is obvious to you, but I’d never thought of it until I read Picq’s book La Marche.

Picq overviewed the history of scientific explanations for why humans walk upright. This has always been somewhat of an enigma. Quadrupeds can run a lot faster than we can. Anthropologists have come up with all kinds of advantages that bipedalism conferred on our ancestors, such as being able to look out over the vegetation to see either danger or opportunity, or to use our forelegs as arms that can carry things such as food and kids and weapons. Long distance migration is what evolution has favored in our species: even old people can walk long distances unless they have health problems or are injured (I do it nearly every day), and there are a lot more elderly marathon runners than elderly speed sprinters.

While these things are all true, Picq has added another: bipedalism has altered the evolution of our minds. Bipedalism (as in Australopithecus) preceded intelligence (as in Homo), and here are some reasons why.

Humans are superb wanderers and have been so throughout our evolutionary history. National Geographic writer Paul Salopek is retracing, on foot, the epic journey of humankind from our African genesis to the end of the journey in South America. Other mammals run faster, but do not migrate as far as humans have. Starting about a hundred thousand years ago, prehistoric humans spread from Africa to every continent except Antarctica. These migrations set up an advantage for intelligence, because our ancestors had to decide whether to migrate (that is, is migration worth the cost of leaving home), and then how to get someplace and know that the new place was where we wanted to stay. This required superb observation and memory of the environment and ability to analyze opportunities. This was true on the short scale (we want to go this way, but there is a river, and we have to figure out how to cross it, which may involve turning around and going back the way we came) and the long scale (we want to get to that hill, from which we can see into the distance and plan what to do next, if anything). Homo sapiens was apparently better than this than Homo neanderthalensis. Our intelligent ancestors also had to think ahead about, and remember, the migration routes and habits of their prey. Neanderthals killed mastodons; humans planned ahead about where the mastodons would be before trying to kill them.

In all these ways, our thinking evolved as a series of logical steps. That is, it required reasoning ability. A primitive (or modern) philosopher or scientist will try out ideas to see if they work, then come up with a backup plan if it doesn’t. This, Picq speculates, uses a similar mental network to figuring out where to go and how to get there on foot.

On top of all that, walking and running makes us feel good and releases us from stress. Picq said he got some of his best ideas while walking. I have the same experience. And perhaps the best example is Charles Darwin, whose “walking path” at Down House was where he got, and perfected, his major ideas. He did not get them sitting at his desk. Many famous composers, as well as other scholars, carried writing equipment with them. I have heard that Beethoven and Dvořák wrote musical ideas as they walked (see a later essay on this topic). Today, we have cell phones on which the thinking walker can record ideas.

All of this appeared on my science blog. I might also speculate that the origin of religion is partly influenced by walking. Our ancestors might have come up with religious explanations of the origin and purpose of things they saw and thought about along the way. And if they headed toward a distant mountain, this might make them wonder if they were headed toward a distant heaven as well. We walk by faith, and not by sight, the Bible says.

According to Picq, what science and philosophy needs more of is people who walk and think, rather than sit at desks and read what other people have written.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 8. Ursa Minor

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

 

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth, The Book of Ruth, The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith (all reviewed earlier); The Old Burrill House (reviewed in my science blog (url); The Gentleman (not reviewed in my blogs); Ursa Minor (reviewed here); and You Little Demon (reviewed in the last essay in this series).

In Ursa Minor, Rice explores friendship vs. sexual love. The unnamed main character is helplessly dependent on the sexuality of his girlfriend, who acts as if she does not need him. Then he meets Ursa Minor, an old man, who is far less fortunate in love and life than he is, but seems to accept it. To the main character, Ursa is like a teddy bear (which is what ursa minor means), but then realizes that he himself is a teddy bear for the woman he adores. When she becomes terminally ill, they both realize that the teddy-bear kind of love, humble friendship, is more important than sex.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 6. The Lord Will Provide

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

 

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth, The Book of Ruth (all reviewed earlier); The Old Burrill House (reviewed in my science blog); The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith (reviewed here); The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

This story is actually two stories of faith gone wrong. In the first, a crazy religious man gives all his family’s money to a holy-roller preacher. But the man’s wife comes to the preacher to ask for the money back because her sick son will not survive without it. Even though to the preacher the highest form of religious experience is speaking in tongues, he realizes that mercy is more important than religious signs. In the appendix of the book, Rice explains that this story is true: the crazy man was his grandfather, and the sick child his father.

In the second story, a small fundamentalist congregation consists of just two people: an old man and his wife. The Bible forbids women to have any role in church other than to sing songs selected by the men, that is, the husband. The wife finally gets enough of it and leaves the church. In the appendix of the book, Rice says that this, also, is a true story.

These stories get inside the crazy mindset of fundamentalists. The old man would not attend any church that did not have what he considered a completely Biblical doctrine, and, after his wife left, was willing to drive fifty miles to the next nearest congregation of The True Church. His wife, meanwhile, just went around the corner to another church which was, as far as she could tell, just as good.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 4. The Book of Ruth

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

 

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth (all reviewed earlier); The Book of Ruth (reviewed here); The Old Burrill House (reviewed in my science blog; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

This is a story right out of the Bible, about which Rice, who has written extensively about religion, knows a great deal. Ruth is a Moabitess woman. Moab is one of the tribes neighboring Israel, which considers itself God’s chosen people. She is the friend of Naomi the Jewish woman. They live as gleaners, by gathering the grains dropped on the ground after the harvesters have passed through the grain fields. Ruth is extremely worldly, while Naomi is very religious. Actually, this story is not straight out of the Bible, but is what happens when Ruth intersects with Bizet’s operatic character Carmen. Ruth knows what she wants and how to get it.

A religious wanderer, Mahlon, sees Ruth and falls in love with her. Ruth wants Mahlon to fight for her; when he hesitates, she sings Carmen’s song from the opera. When a violent farm worker threatens Ruth, Mahlon quickly defends her. The rich land owner, Boaz, drives Mahlon away and decides to protect both women by giving them work within his house. He then marries both of them. Of course, as you could guess, this was not the end of Mahlon.

The Bible makes it very clear that Israel, not Moab, was God’s chosen people. As a reader of this blog, you probably have your doubts about this. This story will make you doubt it even more.

In case you think the Bible is full of boring theology and regulations, you are wrong—the Bible has some dramatic stories, including the book of Ruth the spicy details of which you never hear in church. Put it together with the equally spicy story of Carmen, and you are in for a wild ride.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 3. Bleeding Earth

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle (both reviewed earlier); Bleeding Earth (reviewed here); The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

Robb is an environmentalist who works at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a federal agency which is friendly to farmers, not to the environment. Robb meets DoAnna, who owns a large farm and does everything environmentally wrong. But she knows it and asks Robb for advice. He gives her more advice (such as “Get rid of your cows”) than she wants. But he nearly convinces her to be an eco-farmer until she catches him trespassing on her land to get runoff water samples to identify her farm as a major source of pollution. They had just started to be friends…

Robb loses his job even before DoAnna files a complaint about his trespassing. Depressed and sleepy, he parks his car at a rest stop and falls asleep. He awakens during a severe dust storm and finds DoAnna has prepared him a picnic lunch. She is now convinced he is right—our farms are blowing away in the wind—and she hires him as a full-time advisor on how to make her farm into an eco-farm. They soon become lovers.

Running an eco-farm turns out to be nightmarishly difficult, especially the way Robb and DoAnna do it. The project (raising hemp) fails. They have to start over—but how? They blame each other for what has happened. A summer storm brings on a mud-fight, which leaves them laughing and loving once again.

The point that is of interest to readers of this religion blog is that farming is not just a business. It is a stewardship. That is, the land (thus the farm) belong to God and we have to take care of it and keep it from dying. Farmers cannot do this alone unless everyone else supports them.