50/50 Exercise #41: Hot Water

Edward F. Gumnick — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:20:04 +0000

Professor Harlebut believed that hot water was the defining characteristic of human civilization. “It’s what separates us from the savages. From the beasts, no less!” he was often heard to say at cocktail parties.

As he lounged in the bathtub catching up on his reading, he considered the possibility that the entire trajectory of human evolution had been established by the temperature of the pool of slime where the first amino acids congregated. He was absolutely convinced that the puddle in question had been warm. He used the big toe of his right foot to twist the handle labeled H. He settled deeper into the sudsy water.

Suddenly, he scrambled to his feet, sloshing water across the white tile floor. “Good heavens!”

He swiped a faded, tattered towel across his back, blotted his bare scalp just enough so his glasses wouldn’t slip off his ears, and knotted the towel around his waist. He padded down the hall, leaving a trail of wet footprints to the study. He pulled several books off the shelves and dripped bathwater onto the dusty pages. He couldn’t lay his hands on the passage he was trying to recall. He thought maybe he’d read something in Titus Livius, or maybe it was Suetonius. Or was it somewhere in Gibbon?

“Nevertheless,” he thought, “I’m sure my reasoning is sound.”

None of his colleagues could dissuade him from the experiment. In view of his family’s longstanding relationship with the university, the department chair was not inclined to deny him the resources he requested. Accordingly, the Harlebut Primate Research Laboratory was remodeled at the university’s expense to include the finest state-of-the-art bathroom fixtures that anthropological-research money could buy. As soon as the updated facilities were ready for use, Professor Harlebut and his team of graduate students began teaching personal hygiene to the chimpanzees and orangutans.

The first stumbling block was persuading the animals that the bar soap was not a foodstuff. Although Professor H. considered it a step backward in the bathing arts, he grudgingly acceded to the suggestion to replace his preferred Cashmere Bouquet with an institutional pink powder—a soap for which the chimps had no appetite.

Note: The prompt for today was “hot water.” I do some of my best thinking when I’m bathing, don’t you? [The author scratches his head with a simian gesture.]

50/50 Exercise #38: Threshold

Edward F. Gumnick — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:18:55 +0000

Your Lordship, Madame President, my esteemed colleagues, ladies and gentlemen: You have by now read the report of the field team assigned to observe Species 287B, and I do not wish to take up the valuable time of this conclave in further discussion of the recommendations of that report. I ask indulgence, however, to draw your attention to some of my own observations of the subject species and to ask you to consider the broader question of the relevance of our Charter to this particular case.

As you are aware, our evolutionary anthropologists theorize that every race of beings that approaches sentience does so by developing, through well-understood evolutionary processes, a primary feature that distinguishes it from its competitors in the environment, creating an advantage for its survival. Our field team observed the evolutionary advantage of Species 287B to be a keen ability to recognize patterns. Over the course of our study, we watched as 287B leveraged its capacity for pattern recognition into an awareness of its surroundings that hadn’t existed among its competitors. In the relatively short timeframe of a few thousand generations, it moved up the food chain to dominate all other predator species in the environment. In typical evolutionary fashion, it developed a large and adaptable brain capable of language, abstract thinking, and all of the other higher cognitive and cultural processes we expect to find in sentient races.

What we didn’t expect to find, however, was that in this instance, the same evolutionary advantage that led to the development of sentience contained the seeds of the species’ destruction. In short, Species 287B, besides having an extraordinary capacity to accurately recognize patterns in nature, in mathematics, in technological development, and in its own history, possesses a disturbing tendency to see patterns where none exist. We have never before monitored a subject species so plagued with wishful thinking, flawed belief systems, irrational fears, and superstitions as those that torment 287B. We are concerned, frankly, that this species’ distinctive and acute imagination may one day soon bring its development to a cataclysmic end.

I draw your attention to Figure 14. The red line represents Species 287B’s technological capability, as a function of time, with particular attention to those technologies with the potential to destroy the ecosystem, the health of the race, and the macrocultural conditions of the planet. The blue line is a complex function representing the continuing evolutionary progress of the subject species. It takes many factors into account, including the manifestation of advanced philosophies, the emergence of quantum-mechanical theory, and development of the integrated psyche—trends we have seen in every species that survived such a period in its evolution toward what we regard as “true sentience.”

As is apparent, the two functions are on a collision course. Barring some leap forward in consciousness that our calculus cannot foresee, the subject species will not survive this period of perturbation. With its unparalleled imagination, Species 287B lives in fear of a thousand demons, creatures of its own invention. It has dreamed of and made real a thousand ways to kill itself. Can it probe its imagination more deeply to find one compelling reason why it shouldn’t do so? I fear that it will not.

I implore you to contemplate Species 287B as if it were a child trapped in a terrible nightmare. I ask you to set aside, for a moment, the first precept of our Charter, and to imagine yourself the parent of this childlike creature. What is our responsibility to Species 287B? Do we remain detached and mute while the child aims a loaded weapon at the ghosts of its imagination? Or is it time to lay a gentle hand on its shoulder and say, “Wake up! There is nothing to fear!”?

Note: The assignment was to consider one of the many meanings of the word threshold. It seems to me that we are approaching—or perhaps already standing on—a critical threshold in our history as a species.

Incompleat Iconoclast » Evolution

50/50 Exercise #41: Hot Water

50/50 Exercise #38: Threshold