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.

Bible Literacy

I recently finished reading a book in French called Zapping de la Bible. Published by Larousse, better known for dictionaries, this book was neither promoting nor degrading the Bible. It had about three thousand little boxes of facts about the Bible. “Zapping” means that no single piece of information was explained at length. It is a sort of summary of the things that people should know about the Bible. Everything from Cain and Abel to Noah to Abraham to David to the prophets to Jesus to Paul. I knew most of them, from decades of Bible study. But there were some overall surprises.

The first was that most people know few, if any, of these things. There seems to be two groups of people. First, the ones who claim to believe the Bible, but know almost nothing about it. I did surveys of my students back when I was teaching in Oklahoma, and found that most students claimed to believe the Bible but knew almost nothing about it (e.g. who King David was). These people just believe what their leaders tell them to believe about the Bible. Most recently this means to believe that Donald Trump is bringing about the Will of God on this planet (a belief strengthened by the release of the Trump Bible). Any difficult questions simply do not occur to them.

The second group is people who reject the Bible as nothing more than white males trying to control, even enslave, the rest of the world. These people, also, seldom know anything about what the Bible actually says.

The fundamentalist mindset that controlled me for many decades of my life blinded me to the true purposes of much of the Bible. Take, for example, the apocalypse (Revelation). My fellow fundamentalists all believed that the details of the Apocalypse would all occur in the future—not the author’s future, but ours. Point by point. One radio preacher even organized a tour group to go see the valley of Megiddo in Israel, which, she said, would be filled with blood as deep as horses’ legs (which would require billions of people to be killed). But in reality Revelation was a message to the churches which were just beginning to experience Roman persecution: keep the faith. It was coded in a mysterious way so that, if the manuscript got uncovered by Roman authorities, they could not understand it. It was all a retelling of concepts from the Old Testament. The four beasts came from Daniel; the four horses from Zechariah; the lion from Amos; the sky rolled up like a scroll from Isaiah; the locusts from Joel. The whole symbolism was lifted from the marginally-crazy visions of Ezekiel. No one in Jewish-Christian society of about 100 C.E. could have missed this. But us fundamentalists did.

The Bible, in reality, raises many interesting questions about the purpose (if any) of humankind and the world, and about how we should live. Often, the Bible itself offers no clear answers or, if it does, these answers are contradictory. But I believe that, in our culture, to deal with these questions, it is important to know how the authors of the Bible dealt with them, in order to selectively agree or disagree with them, neither swallowing nor rejecting the whole.

The first and most obvious fact about the Bible is that it is not a book. It is 66 books, written by at least 40 different people (we assume, men, but we cannot be sure about some of them) over the course of at least 1500 years. Not surprisingly, the authors all believed different things. The final list of which books to include in the Bible was not made until the Council of Carthage in the year 397 of the current era. The Bible presents these different viewpoints then leaves it up to us to figure out what it all means.

Whatever you believe, you can probably find it in the Bible. If you believe that God has chosen a people (originally, the Israelites, and today America) to rule the world, you can find a lot of this in the Bible. If you are agnostic, or even think that God is inexplicably unjust, you can find that too, especially in Ecclesiastes and Job.

I strongly believe that my grandchildren should have access to this information so that they, as I eventually did, can make up their own minds about what to believe. This is how we raised our daughter who, like me, had a journey from faith into skepticism. And our daughter and son-in-law believe the same thing: they do not hate the Bible. They are willing to let our grandchildren explore it.

Meanwhile, we are all fiercely dedicated to the general religious principles of how to live: to love your family and your neighbors, for example. No destructive behavior, toward self or others, is tolerated. This is no different from those humanists who accept altruism as one of the main components of evolution. Love is a product of evolution, not a miracle from God.

The only problem is, explore it when and how? I struggled with the idea of how to bring the subject up with my grandchildren, who are still too young to understand much about life. Not to indoctrinate them, but just to get them interested. If there is a Spirit, the Spirit can take it from there.

It turns out that nature can take its course. When I finished the Zapping book, I left it on the return-to-library shelf. My granddaughter saw it and asked about it. Before long my wife and I were explaining the Exodus and how the modern Christian Passover is Easter, a holiday we had just celebrated by seeing the resurrection of the green foliage of the trees.

And there is no turning back now. The subject of the Bible is open for the next generation. I did not need to artificially open it. France is a secular society, but it has many holidays based on the Christian calendar. Everything closes down not only for Easter Sunday but for Good Friday and Easter Monday as well. You won’t find that in Christian America.

Joan of Arc and Science

I recently visited the equestrian statue of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc) in Strasbourg, France. I have posted a video [https://youtu.be/ahKGTla7E18 ] about what I learned.

Joan of Arc was a peasant girl, aged about 17, when she claimed that the Archangel Michael and Saints Margaret and Catherine had told her that she needed to lead the French troops to victory over England, which at that time (1429) occupied a large portion of what is today France. This was during the Hundred Years’ War, and France was not doing too well. The French troops were under siege in Orléans.

Jeanne must have had a mesmerizing personality, because she convinced the future French King Charles VII that the voices in her head had told her France would prevail and Charles would be king. She was put in charge of the portions of the French army that eventually drove the English away from that siege and some others as well. She was a military heroine—a 17 year old peasant girl. The story did not end so well for her. She started losing battles, and when she was 19 she was put on trial and convicted of heresy. She was burned at the stake in 1431. One of the charges was that, in leading battles, she had worn men’s clothing. Later, a new trial found her not guilty and today she is esteemed as one of the patron saints of France. Everyone has heard about her.

Every artistic depiction of her shows her to be very beautiful. The usual standards of physical beauty, however, is not at all necessary. She would have appeared beautiful to those who believed her divine claims, no matter what she actually looked like.

What this means for us, as we examine the role of religion in human history, is that even the craziest of claims are credible if the person making them is persistent and absolutely convinced of them. She heard the little voices in her head and had not the slightest doubt of their authenticity. Many historians today believe that Jeanne was schizophrenic (the little voices were in her brain) or had Menière’s disease (the little voices were in her inner ear). We do not know. More to the point, she did not know.

Religious claims can be made and believed on no further basis than the assertion of those who make them. No other evidence is needed. Many people claim that there is, in fact, evidence other than assertions that support many religious beliefs, such as Jesus’ resurrection. But such evidence is not necessary to true believers.

Scientific thinking, however, requires that the person making a claim provide evidence that is verifiable to people other than the one making the claim. You can read more about it in my book Scientifically Thinking. This is an important reason that we should depend on science, rather than religious assertion, to guide us in making decisions of worldwide importance—which nearly all of our decisions are these days.

How History Can Liberate Us

I read a most unusual book, Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian who is on the Cambridge faculty. It has been a widely-read book in the English speaking world. Many of the author’s assertions are not completely credible, but there was one insight that drew my attention right away. As an historian, the author naturally asked himself and his readers, of what value is history? Why study it, why write about it? Many of you have personal interests in history, perhaps because of where you live or your family history. This is why I write about Cherokee history. But why should anyone be interested in history in general, or other peoples’ histories?

Harari’s answer is simple and powerful. There are many problems of oppression and injustice in the world today. The only way to solve these problems is for us to re-imagine the future, a future in which we will have put these problems behind us. I live in France, and I can see Germany from my window. But not once have I had the slightest fear that a new crop of Nazis will coming marching or sailing over the Rhine. That was what happened eighty years ago, but Europe re-imagined its future, a future without aggression and war. It worked.

And the first step to re-imagining the future is to retell our history. Harari said on page 69, “Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future.”

And this is what I am doing in my book, now in press and due out in July 2025, Forgotten Landscapes. I will tell you a lot more about it as its publication draws closer.

One major problem in America, often overlooked, is the continued oppression of Native Americans. And one major reason for it is that American culture, in general, dismisses Native American tribes as dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the Rez in flyover country. This image makes Native American progress sound totally hopeless.

And this image emerges from an historical mythology. One of the dominant, foundational myths of American culture is that Europeans came across the Atlantic and found a continent that was sparsely inhabited by savage hunter-gatherers who hunted deer and gathered nuts and berries, running through the forest and leaving scarcely a footprint behind them. Europeans then took the land, pushing Natives out of the way, but in the end the land was better off for it, even for the Natives. God blessed the Europeans, and the Natives too, by the Manifest Destiny of the United States.

This version of American history is totally and verifiably wrong. Some books (for example, by Dee Brown and Angie Debo) have tried to correct this false image, mostly from the historical viewpoint. My book will also retell the story of Native American history, and tell it accurately, this time including scientific as well as historical information.

North America was not sparsely populated by Natives. It was densely populated. A civilization that was as highly developed as any in Europe or Asia had just collapsed when Columbus came, but the economy of that civilization lived on, in a network of large, healthy villages connected by strong trade networks. These large villages were healthier than the cities of Europe. European soldiers would not have been able to conquer America had it not been for their diseases, which wiped out ninety percent of the Native population. Europeans also conquered Africa and Asia. But today Asia is mostly Asian, and Africa mostly black, while America is mostly white. And the reason for this is epidemic diseases.

Nor were Natives hunter-gatherers who lived on in unaltered wilderness. Natives transformed the entire landscape by the controlled use of fire, burning whole forests and prairies. They controlled animal populations by hunting. They relied upon agriculture, including by means of irrigation and orchards.

I am not the first to write about this, but other books have been lost in the scholarly literature. They include Forgotten Fires by Omer C. Stewart and America’s Ancient Forests by Thomas M. Bonnicksen. My book will be, as far as I am aware, the first time this story about Native transformation of the American landscape has been told for a popular audience.

I provide documentation for all of these things. In this book, I have retold Native American history and got it correct this time. This will be my contribution to a popular rethinking of Native Americans and their ongoing oppression today.

It is equally incorrect to depict Native Americans as having lived in perfect harmony with their environments, something about which numerous books have been published. Natives changed their environments and sometimes degraded them. But the myth of the eco-friendly tribesmen is not a dangerous myth, unlike the primitive-savage myth that dominates American thinking and keeps Native tribes in ongoing repression, poverty, and obscurity.

I hope that my book will have an impact similar to that of Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, which revealed how, even in the twentieth century when most white Americans assumed the Indian Wars were over, members of the Osage tribe were murdered so that whites could get their oil rights. Although I cannot hope that Martin Scorsese will make a movie from my book.

I posted this essay on my science blog. For this religion blog, I can add that our perverted American form of conservative Christianity is largely to blame for contorting our view of the past and our chances of making life better in the future.

Fourth of July, Celebrating What? Part two.

As I posted previously, the Fourth of July is a celebration of white supremacy.

The “self-evident truths” about “unalienable rights” applied only to white men, later to white women, and never completely to people with darker skin. Non-white people have very little to celebrate.

I have reached the conclusion, slowly over the years, that the white races have been the primary source of evil in the world. In many places around the world, lighter-skinned people have conquered and enslaved darker-skinned people. This was even true in India, where lighter-skinned people invading from the north conquered darker-skinned southern people and created a caste system to keep the dark people suppressed. The genetic signature—a Y chromosome from lighter races—proves that, in many parts of the world, light-skinned men dominated and inseminated dark women, as described in David Reich’s masterful book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.

We all know that each and every human being is both good and evil at the same time, and that every race, however defined, has both good and bad people. But I have now concluded that the people of the world should make the preliminary assumption that white people are evil. That is, this is what we should assume in the absence of further evidence; the null hypothesis should be that white people are evil. What this means is that white people carry a burden of guilt for being the primary oppressors in human history. It is therefore the responsibility of every white person to present evidence for public examination that they are actively dedicating their lives to making the world a better place. It is not good enough for white people to simply not be bad. White people should have to prove themselves good, or otherwise should be assumed to be evil. The burden of proof is therefore on white people to prove themselves to be good.

For many or most white people, this should be pretty easy to do. Just post on your social media outlets the evidence that you are a good person who loves people of other races. But if you remain silent, the dark majority of the world will assume that you are one of the oppressors.

For dark people, the world should make the preliminary assumption that they are good. This is the null hypothesis, to be accepted in the absence of further evidence. Of course, many of them are not, and the evidence for it comes from criminal records, financial or other scandals, etc.

Therefore, I proclaim to you what we must do. White people must present evidence that they are actively performing acts of goodness, while for dark people, all you have to do is not be evil.

Every person is still responsible for their own goodness or evil. If you are religious, you would say that God judges each of us individually, regardless of race. But the standards of evidence are different. White people have to work to counteract our history of evil; dark people just have to not make it worse.

What about those of us of mixed ancestry? I celebrate my Cherokee ancestry, but I look white. I am ashamed of my white ancestry, but what can I do? I must err on the side of love: I will make myself obviously good, so as to stand out from the history of evil created by my white ancestors. Maybe I don’t have to try as hard as a pure white man, but I still need to work hard. If you are half-white, you might have it easier, but you still have work to do.

When you have a world full of white people and almost-white people trying to make the world better, and dark people just not being evil, that sounds like a much better world than the one we live in right now.

And with all of this, I don’t have time to go around shooting off fireworks and driving a big pickup truck around with a Confederate flag waving from it. Okay, my fellow whites and almost-whites: get busy, and post on social media about the good things you are doing. Maybe you are already doing them. Well, let your neighbors, especially your dark neighbors, know you care about them. This will lead us to the next essay.

This essay has appeared in a blog about evolution primarily because, from an evolutionary viewpoint, human races do not actually exist.