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Born Unfinished It used to be assumed that our pre-human ancestors developed a larger brain and afterward learned to walk upright. In other words, we first became smart and then figured out there would be an advantage to standing up on two feet. It now seems to be accepted that the sequence was the opposite. We first walked upright and then developed a larger brain. In other words, our animal instincts were wise enough to shift us to an upright position and then this new perspective, from on high, as it were, challenged our brains to enlarge in order to accommodate this new way of being. As is true in all aspects of evolutionary development, a success always leads to new problems. In this case, the larger brain required a larger skull. Well and good; but the size of the head was limited to the size of the opening in the pelvic bones around the birth canal. At first there seems to be an easy solution: the impetus that made the head larger could also make the pelvic bones larger to accommodate it. But, no. Careful modeling studies have determined that a woman with significantly larger pelvic bones would be thrown off balance and could not stand upright. Back to the drawing board. The solution that emerged was what biologists call neoteny, bringing forth the young in an unfinished state. Human infants, lovable as they are, enter this world in a pitifully inept state. They have no teeth or hair, can hardly see, are woefully incontinent, and will learn to walk and talk only after painful effort. By contrast, the young of many species are born already knowing how to find their food and how to avoid danger. In a number of species, the young never even encounter their parents, the eggs having been left unattended, to carry on as best they can. Of course, the ignorance of newborns is only the beginning. We human beings need to learn social skills, suffer seemingly endless years of schooling, and add to our wisdom through many challenges and setbacks. If we find ourselves, even in our later years, experienced enough to live fully in the modern world we are among the fortunate ones. Could not the Creator have done better than this? The trade-off, of course, is flexibility. Lower animals are marvelously adapted instinctively to function in the habitat in which they have evolved. Social insects like bees and ants, for example, have set roles and functions, along with a caste system, that functions perfectly to reach the objectives of the community (whatever fosters survival of their species). On the other hand, let the habitat change sufficiently, and they have no idea how to function at all. Lacking flexibility of behavior and the ability to learn, they would be doomed to extinction, or, in the longer term, to succession by a better adapted, perhaps newly evolved, species. We human beings live in a world of such complexity that whatever skills might have been infused in us at birth would become useless within a few years. So the burden of being born unfinished brings us the benefit of a mind able to learn and adapt. Even further, we have the benefit of a heritage of social organization, religious values, science, and culture in general, with which we can build a richer life for ourselves and our communities. In spite of wars, violence and hatred (also learned behaviors), we are able to appreciate that we are not doomed by our “cultural genes.” Unlike our biological genes, which, so far, at least, we must learn to live with, our culture is within our power to change as we choose. The great promise of Teilhard’s thought, of course, is that evolution is in fact moving toward a state of higher consciousness, and Thomas Berry has understood this to mean that we are moving toward a kind of utopia in which the environmental crises will dissolve in the good will of an enlightened humanity. It seems too much to expect, however, that we humans will know right away how to deal with the complex challenges that will continue to arise. As a society, we are also in a certain sense born unfinished. So we will need to learn, gradually and perhaps painfully, how to deal with the complexities. What is the best strategy for us? Certainly there is a great store of wisdom acquired during centuries of toil and suffering. And, of course, we are fortunate in having the gift of language so that our experience can be passed down through the generations. The development of printing constituted a great step forward in making portions of this wisdom more widely available, and today’s miracle of electronic storage and accessibility of information is another step, unimaginable a generation earlier. All of this stored wisdom, however, is something like the instinctive skills of the lower animals: it is a set of learned solutions to problems of the past, readily available to us, stored in what might be called our “cultural genes.” This learned social behavior is extremely useful, and we call on it more than we realize. On the other hand, the most characteristic feature of the present age is its rapid change. Since these changes render some of our cultural wisdom obsolete, we have to learn new ways of dealing with the new age. How will new solutions emerge? An aspect of biological evolution which is not always appreciated is that successful adaptations are always accompanied by unsuccessful ones. In other words, there are a lot of trial and error attempts, and the errors are simply discarded. The process works best when there is a lot of diversity in the ecosystem. As we struggle to solve the serious problems facing us and our planet, we must not think that the solutions will appear to us simply as deductions from present (past) wisdom. We must be open to thinking in a different way, and we must expect to make some false starts. Above all, we need to cherish diversity, supporting the radical thinkers even if we think they are wrong. They may be wrong, but so may we. Is this a scenario to be afraid of? Quite the contrary. It can be stimulating to feel the challenge, to know that we do not need to carry the whole burden ourselves, to allow ourselves to live more authentically. If we do our best we need not be concerned that we might be wrong. It really doesn’t matter. We will be contributing to the intellectual diversity, even to the seeming chaos, out of which will emerge solutions suitable for the time. Dom Roberti |