Now I must tell you more about the complicated fields of biology and psychology.

People have always studied plants and animals, for as long as people have existed.  They studied all the same things you study about your own plants and animals.  How do you breed better plants and animals?  When is the best time to plant your seeds?  How do you make your plants grow the best?  What food do animals like to eat?  Where is the best place to look for animals when you go hunting?  What time of the year do certain animals come to your area?  And so on.

Your ancestors and the Europeans and other agricultural people figured all those basic things out long ago.  That was enough for people to grow their farms and feed their families.

But a few people were still curious to learn more.  There were some things they didn’t understand well yet, so they kept studying plants and animals, because they thought they might be able to figure out more important things.

A big thing people still wondered about was why there were different kinds of plants and animals.  They could see that children inherited characteristics from their parents.  They could see that people could breed plants and animals to pass their characteristics on to the next generation.  They could see that if they bred some animals or plants together that had certain characteristics, and they bred plants or animals together that had different characteristics, they would have two breeds of plants or animals that had different characteristics from each other.

If a farmer had some horses, he could breed lightweight, fast horses together to get more lightweight, fast horses.  He could also breed big, strong horses together to get more big, strong horses.  Now he has lightweight, fast horses, and big, strong horses.  Then he could breed the fastest of the fast horses together and get even faster horses.  He could breed the strongest of the strong horses together and get even stronger horses.

People could breed corn the same way.  If a farmer had a field of corn and some of the plants grew sweeter corn cobs than the others, he could breed those plants with each other to make sweeter corn.  Then he could breed the sweetest of those plants together to make even sweeter corn.  Meanwhile he could breed the plants that had the biggest corn cobs together to make plants that grew bigger corn cobs.  Then he could breed the plants with the biggest of the big corn cobs together, to make plants that grew even bigger corn cobs.

Farmers all over the world figured out how to do this.  These scientists wondered if it was possible to breed plants or animals together for so long that they would turn into different plants or animals.  If you bred fast horses with fast horses, and strong horses with strong horses, long enough, could you turn them into two completely different animals?

In the same way, donkeys and horses are very similar animals.  Are those two different animals both descended from the same ancestors?  Horses are bigger and faster than donkeys, but donkeys can climb better and can walk over rough ground better.  Was there one ancestor species where the ones that were bigger and faster bred with each other, and the ones that could climb better and walk over rough ground better bred with each other, until they turned into two different animals?

If that had happened, the scientists had to answer two more questions.  How long did it take?  And, what made it happen?

Animals are different because they have different characteristics.  Parents pass their characteristics on to their children.   A breed of strong horses and a breed of fast horses have different characteristics, and donkeys and horses have different characteristics.  The only difference is, fast horses and strong horses have a few different characteristics, and donkeys and horses have a lot more different characteristics.   Breeding animals together makes their characteristics change slowly, but it does make their characteristics change.  If animals’ characteristics change, that means one kind of animal could turn into a different kind of animal.  Since their characteristics change slowly, that means that turning one animal into another animal would take a very long time.  But no matter how slowly it happened, if it went on long enough, it could happen.

To answer the question of how long this breeding took, first you have to answer a different question.  How old is the Earth?  That will give you some idea how long plants and animals could’ve been breeding with each other.   If the Earth isn’t old enough for plants and animals to have bred together long enough to turn into different plants and animals, then this couldn’t have happened.

For a long time, nobody knew how old the Earth was.  Nobody had any way of finding out how old the Earth was.  A lot of people thought the world was about as old as people were.  The Old Testament of the Bible was written about 5,000 years ago, so a lot of people thought the world was about 6,000 years old.

If the world was only 6,000 years old, that wouldn’t be enough time for horses and donkeys to start out as the same animal and breed with each other differently until they became two different animals.  So that idea wouldn’t work.

But nobody was sure how old the Earth was.  Maybe the Earth was older than 6,000 years.  Maybe there had been enough time for animals to turn into other animals.

Eventually, some scientists figured out how to build machines that would help them find out how old the Earth was.  They discovered that instead of the Earth being 6,000 years old, it’s 4,500,000,000 years old.  That would be plenty of time for animals to turn into other animals.

The other big question that had to be answered was, why would plants and animals that had certain characteristics breed with each other by themselves?  People could make plants and animals do that, but people didn’t make plants and animals do that.  If people didn’t do it, what else could’ve done it?

A great scientist named Charles Darwin figured out the answer to this.   This was back before anyone figured out how old the Earth was, but he had a good idea that the Earth could be old enough for this to happen.

Charles Darwin lived in England in the 1800s.  He sailed around the world in a sailing ship.  He visited many places, saw many different plants and animals everywhere he went, and met a lot of different people everywhere he went.

He spent a lot of time in South America, and especially the Galapagos Islands.  The Galapagos Islands was where he made his big discovery.

The Galapagos Islands are a group islands out in the middle of the ocean.  That gave him some important clues no one could get in most other places.

First, the Galapagos Islands are isolated, out in the middle of the ocean.   People didn’t live on the islands then, so they hadn’t brought their own animals with them.  Also, the same animals had lived on the islands for a long time.  New animals didn’t come to the islands very often.

Second, there were many islands, and they were close to each other, so the animals that did live on the islands had spread to all the islands.  But because they were islands, the animals didn’t cross from one island to another very often.

What Charles Darwin discovered was that each of the islands had the same animals on them, but on each island, each type of animal had slightly different characteristics.  In the same way that a farmer can make different breeds of horses, on the Galapagos Islands, each island had its own breeds of turtles, and birds, and lizards, and whatever.

Each island had a slightly different environment. Since each individual plant or animal of a certain type had slightly different characteristics, some of them would have characteristics that would help them survive and reproduce a little better than the others.  Since those plants or animals could survive and reproduce a little better, they would have more children.  Since they had more children, that would mean that more members of the next generation would inherit their characteristics.  Then they would be able to survive or reproduce a little better than the other plants or animals, and then they would have more children.  Then even more of the next generation would have the characteristic, and so on.  Eventually the characteristic would spread to all of the type of plants or animals, so the whole group would have the new characteristic.

Since each island had a slightly different environment, and each individual plant or animal had slightly different characteristics, the characteristics that would help plants and animals survive and reproduce on one island would be slightly different than the characteristics that would help them survive and reproduce on a different island.  That means that if the same type of bird or turtle or whatever lived on two different islands, certain characteristics would get passed down to more birds or turtles in the next generation on one island, and different characteristics would get passed down to the birds or turtles in the next generation on the other island.

Charles Darwin discovered a lot of things like the same type of birds living on two different islands who have different shapes of beaks.  Birds might have different beaks because there were different insects living on the two different islands.  Or the insects might be the same but the trees they lived in were different.  Either way, the birds always had the shape of beaks that helped them catch their food the best.

The same pattern of cause and effect would work everywhere in the world.  If the ancestors of horses and donkeys lived somewhere where there were plains and hills, and they could live pretty well in either place, some of the animals would live on the plains, and some would live in the hills.  In order for all the animals to get as much food as they could, they would spread out to everywhere they could live pretty well, wherever there was food for them.

The animals that lived on the plains would need to be fast, because the plain would be flat, so they could run easily.  All the other animals on the plain could run easily too, including the ones that would eat these animals.  So out of the animals that lived on the plains, the ones that could run the fastest would survive and reproduce the best.  So they would have the most children.  Then out of their children, the ones that were the fastest would survive and reproduce the best again, so the third generation would be even faster.  And so on.  Just like the farmer could breed his fastest horses together, the environment on the plains, itself, would breed the fastest animals with each other.  All the animals would try to breed with each other, and the ones that were the fastest would be the most successful, because the slower animals would be the ones that got eaten by predators the most.

Meanwhile in the hills, the animals that lived there would need to be able to climb well and walk across rough ground well.  So the hills themselves would breed the best climbers with the best climbers.  Again, all the animals would try to breed with each other, but the ones that could climb the best would be the most successful, because the ones that couldn’t climb as well would fall and kill themselves more often.  So the best climbers would have the most children, and then the next generation of the animals would be better at climbing than the first generation.

This is called natural selection.  The environment breeds the animals that are best at surviving and reproducing in that environment.  When that happens for thousands or millions of generations, the animals on the plains turn into horses, and the animals in the hills turn into donkeys.  This is another thing I meant when I said that the whole world is like a farm, but who are the farmers?

Charles Darwin called this evolution.  Evolution is the cumulative adaptation to an environmental pressure.  That’s just a fancy way of saying that the animals or plants that survive and reproduce best in an environment are bred for the characteristics that help them survive and reproduce, generation after generation.  When that goes on long enough, two different groups of animals that had the same ancestors get so many differences between them that they can’t breed with each other any more.  Then you say that the two animals are two different species.

Horses and donkeys are two different species, but they’re still a lot more closely related to each other than most other species.  Horses and donkeys are similar enough to each other that they can still have children together—and their children are mules—but their children are sterile.  Horses and donkeys can’t mix back together and turn back into the same species now, because mules can’t have children with each other.  That means they can’t pass their characteristics down to the next generation, and that means that the mules that are the best at surviving and reproducing can’t pass their characteristics down to the most children of the next generation.

Every single characteristic of every plant or animal is a characteristic that either helps it survive and reproduce now, or else it helped it survive and reproduce at some earlier time.  As farmers you probably know that your own plants and animals use most of their characteristics to survive and reproduce.   The same is true for plants and animals all over the world.  Whatever characteristics plants and animals don’t use to help them survive and reproduce are characteristics they used at some other time.

Filed under: i: Zapatista University by Ezra
No Comments »

The next question that needed to be answered was:  What gave plants and animals their characteristics?

This was discovered by a man named Gregor Mendel.   Gregor Mendel worked in a monastery in the country of Austria-Hungary in the 1800s.  (Austria-Hungary no longer exists—now Austria and Hungary are two different countries, and the rest of Austria-Hungary has broken up into many other countries.)

Gregor Mendel grew pea plants in the garden of the monastery.  He found that most of the plants grew peas that were smooth, but about 1 out of every 4 grew peas that were wrinkled.  So he tried breeding different plants with each other to see what would happen.

When he bred plants with wrinkled peas with other plants with wrinkled peas, he always got more plants that had wrinkled peas.

When he bred plants that grew smooth peas, some of them would always create more plants that had smooth peas.

When he bred other plants that grew smooth peas, they would sometimes create more plants that grew smooth peas, and sometimes create plants that grew wrinkled peas.

When he bred plants that grew smooth peas with plants that grew wrinkled peas, two different things could happen.  One out of three plants that grew smooth peas would produce a second generation that always grew smooth peas.  Two out of three plants that grew smooth peas would produce a second generation where half of the plants would grow smooth peas and half would grow wrinkled peas.

If a plant grew smooth peas, but he knew that one of its parents grew wrinkled peas, he found that if he bred the plant with another plant that grew wrinkled peas, half of the next generation would grow smooth peas, and the other half would grow wrinkled peas.

If a plant grew smooth peas, but he knew that one of its parents had grown wrinkled peas, and he bred it with a plant that grew smooth peas and whose ancestors had always grown smooth peas, the plants of the next generation always grew smooth peas.

Gregor Mendel discovered a lot of clues.   Then he tried to find a pattern of cause and effect that could make all the clues fit together.

You know that if you want to make tortillas, you can follow a recipe.  You can grind up corn, mix it with water, mix it with some other things if you want, and then heat it over a fire.  If you mix different ingredients together, you get different tortillas.

In the same way, Gregor Mendel discovered that peas, and all other plants and animals, grew the way they did because they had some sort of recipe inside them.   The recipe for each pea plant included a part that made its peas either smooth or wrinkled.  There were two parts to that recipe.  When he bred two pea plants together, each of them passed half of their recipe on to each of their children.  Each pea plant inherited half of its recipe from each of its parents, so that each pea plant got a whole recipe.

If both halves of the recipe said wrinkled peas, the plant got wrinkled peas.  If both halves of the recipe said smooth peas, the plant got smooth peas.  If half the recipe said smooth peas and the other half said wrinkled peas, the plants got smooth peas.

That makes four possibilities:  The plant gets a smooth recipe from both parents, it gets a wrinkled recipe from both parents, it gets a smooth recipe from its father and a wrinkled recipe from its mother, or it gets a wrinkled recipe from its father and a smooth recipe from its mother.

That makes all the combinations of characteristics Gregor Mendel observed.  Out of those four combinations, one makes plants with wrinkled peas, and the other three make plants with smooth peas. Out of those three plants with smooth peas, one will pass on a recipe for smooth peas to all of its children.  The other two will pass on a recipe for smooth peas on to half their children, and recipes for wrinkled peas to the other half of their children.

Now we can go back to talking about plants and animals being made up of chemicals.

Every plant and animal is made of a lot of pieces that are so small you need a microscope to see them.  These are called cells.  Cells are basically like the bricks that make up a building.  Every part of a plant or animal’s body is made of different cells.  Animals have bone cells, skin cells, blood cells, hair cells, muscle cells, liver cells, and so on.  Plants have bark cells, wood cells, leaf cells, and so on.  Each of them work differently, so I won’t bother to try to tell you how they all work.  That’s something else you could learn from teachers or university students in your area.

What all of an animal or plant’s cells have in common is that each of them contains the recipe for the entire animal or plant.  All of the recipes are made up of big, complicated molecules.

Some of the smallest of these molecules are protein molecules. There is a lot of protein in meat and beans.  When you eat meat or beans, this is what you’re eating.

I’ve told you how everything in the world is made up of 100 kinds of atoms, and those 100 kinds of atoms are made of 3 kinds of subatomic particles.  Here we see something like that again, because every living thing in the world is made up of the same 4 kinds of protein molecules.  In the same basic way that everything in the world is different because of the different ways those 100 kinds of atoms and 3 kinds of subatomic particles interact with each other, every living thing is different because of the different ways those 4 protein molecules interact with each other.

Those protein molecules bond together to form even bigger molecules.  The easiest way I can explain the next part is to say these bigger molecules are called genes.   This isn’t technically true, but it’s close enough to true for you to understand how it works.  Some genes might be parts of molecules, and other genes might be made up of more than one molecule.  The point is, genes are the next bigger unit after proteins, and they work like molecules, even if they aren’t literally molecules.   If you want to go to college and learn about biology you’ll have to learn something a little different, but if you’re farmers, that’s close enough.

Gene molecules bond together to form bigger molecules, called chromosomes.  There are many chromosomes in each cell.  Humans have 46 chromosomes in each cell.   Other animals and plants have different numbers.

All of the chromosomes are divided up into pairs.  Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes.   All humans have the same 23 pairs of chromosomes, and the chromosomes all work the same basic ways.

Chromosomes are also called DNA molecules.  A DNA molecule is a chromosome.  All of your DNA is divided up into 46 DNA molecules.

Genes are what create the different characteristics of plants and animals.  Genes fit together to make the same chromosomes, but the genes that can fit into the same part of a chromosome are slightly different from each other, so they work slightly differently from each other.

If you look at your arm, you can see that you have five fingers, then you have a hand, then you have a wrist, then you have a lower arm, then you have an elbow, then you have an upper arm, and then you have a shoulder.  If you look at your friend’s arm, you can see that he has five fingers, a hand, a wrist, and so on, just like you do.  His fingers, hand, wrist, and so on are different from yours, but they still work the same basic ways.  If you had his fingers on your hand, and he had your fingers on his hand, your hands would work a little differently, but your hands would still work pretty much like they do now.

If you look at a horse, you can see that where you have your arm, the horse has a hoof, a foot, an ankle, a lower leg, a knee, an upper leg, and a shoulder.   If you look at another horse, you see the same thing.  Again, their hooves, feet, ankles, and such work the same way but are slightly different from each other.

When a woman has a baby, you know that the baby is going to be born with arms pretty much like yours.  It isn’t going to be born with the forelegs of a horse where its arms are supposed to be.

Chromosomes and genes work the same way.  A chromosome is like your arm, because it has the same pieces in the same places, and all the pieces work the same basic way.

Genes are like the pieces of your arm.  They’re the same basic pieces, but they’re a little different from one person to another.  One person might have longer fingers than another person, or one person might have bigger hands than another person.  That makes your arms work a little bit differently, but still pretty much the same way.  The difference between your arm and your friend’s arm is a lot less than the difference between your arm and the foreleg of a horse.

Human genes make human chromosomes, and horse genes make horse chromosomes.  Human chromosomes make the full recipe for a human because they get all the right pieces in all the right places.  Likewise for horses.

Human are a little different from each other because they have different genes, but they are pretty much the same because they all have human genes.  Each human is unique, but each human has more in common with any other human than he or she has in common with a horse.

(I should say here that humans and horses actually have a lot of the same genes, which is why humans and horses have the same basic shape of a head, a body, four limbs, similar bones, muscles, skin, hair, blood, internal organs, and so on.  Cows, pigs, chicken, cats, dogs, and mice all have that basic pattern of a head, a body, four limbs, and similar bones, muscles, skin, hair, blood, and internal organs.  The differences between humans and horses and any other animal are caused by differences in a fairly small number of genes, compared to all the genes they have.  This is another one of those things that you’ll have to learn more about if you go to the university to learn about biology, but as far as farmers are concerned, humans have human genes and horses have horse genes.)

Genes that each can fit into the same place in a chromosome and each do the same basic job are called alleles of each other.  The difference between your hand and your friend’s hand is caused by the different alleles.  You both have hand genes that work the same basic way.  Instead of saying that you have different genes for your hand than your friend does, and saying that you have different genes for your hand than you have for your fingers, now you can say you have different hands because you have different alleles of the same hand genes.   That just makes it easier to keep track of what we’re talking about.

(Again, I’m simplifying this a little.  You don’t actually have genes that create your hands, you have many genes that work together to create your hands, and some other genes that create your bones, some that create your muscles, and some that create your skin.  Most parts of your body are created by lots of different genes interacting with each other.  As far as genes relate to you, I can say you have hand genes, but if you went to a university to learn about biology, you would have to learn something more complicated.)

When Charles Darwin discovered that characteristics are passed down from parent to child, and the characteristics that let a plant or animal survive best in its environment get passed on to the most members of the next generation, what he discovered—without realizing it—was that different alleles of the same genes that gave the plants or animals their characteristics were the things that were being passed down from parent to child.

When the animals split up between living in the hills and living on the plains, they each had genes that created their leg muscles.  Since the ones who lived on the plains could run fast on the plains, and running fast helped them survive and reproduce, the ones who had alleles of the leg muscle genes that gave them strong leg muscles, survived and reproduced the best.  They had the most children, so they passed more of their alleles down to the next generation.  By passing their alleles down to the next generation, they passed their characteristics down to the next generation—because the alleles were what gave their children their characteristics.

Eventually, those original animals, whatever they were, kept certain alleles in their group, while the others died out.  That combination of alleles that survived and spread through the group gave that group of animals the characteristics that made them horses.

Meanwhile, the animals that came from the same ancestors but moved into the hills, where they needed different characteristics, spread a different combination of alleles through the group from generation to generation.  When that combination of alleles spread through the whole group, and the other alleles died out eventually, those animals developed the characteristics that made them donkeys, which made them different animals from horses.

Filed under: i: Zapatista University by Ezra
No Comments »

The next question we have to answer is:  How do genes get passed down from one generation to another?

Women create egg cells, and men create sperm cells.  When a sperm meets an egg cell, the two join together to create a fertilized egg.   That’s simple enough that I’m assuming you already know about it.  If you don’t, I’m guessing any school teacher or university student could explain it to you.

You grow by creating new cells.  Once an egg is fertilized, it splits into two cells.

Here we can talk about chemistry again.  The chromosomes in the cell are really big molecules.  You have other atoms in your cells.  The chromosomes start a chemical reaction with some of the other atoms.  That makes some of the other atoms in the cell turn into copies of the chromosomes.

When the fertilized egg splits into two cells, a copy of each chromosome goes into each cell.  Then those cells each split in two and create four cells.  And so on.  This is how you grow from the time your mother gets pregnant up until you stop growing.

In the fertilized egg cell there are different chemicals in different parts of the cell.  When the egg splits into two cells, each cell gets the same chromosomes, but each cell gets different amounts of the other chemicals in the cell.  The different chemicals in each cell make different chemical reactions happen.  That turns your cells into bone cells, muscle cells, skin cells, and all the other kinds of cells you have that make up the different parts of your body.

Over the course of your life, this keeps happening to you.  Individual cells get old and die, but as long as you stay healthy, you keep replacing the old cells with new cells.  If you build up muscles or get fat, you turn food molecules into new muscle cells or fat cells.  If you get hungry and lose weight, you break up some of your cells to get the energy out of the molecules in them, and you don’t replace them as quickly.  If you get sick, or when you get old, some of your cells die, and then you don’t replace them with new cells as quickly.  Then you lose weight and you get weak.

When you make sperm or egg cells, a different chemical reaction happens, which makes those cells divide differently.

To create a sperm or egg cell, first all the chromosomes in a cell break up into genes.  Then the genes mix together, join back together, and form new chromosomes.

Now the cell has 46 chromosomes in it, and all of the genes are yours.  The chromosomes are different from any of the other chromosomes in the rest of your body though.

In the other cells in your body, you have 23 pairs of chromosomes.  You got one of each pair from your father and the other from your mother.  There are hundreds or thousands of genes in each chromosome.

When your chromosomes break up to form sperm or egg cells, some of the genes from one chromosome in a pair mix together with the genes from the other chromosome in the pair.  The other genes from the two chromosomes join together to make another chromosome of the pair.  Now you have a pair of chromosomes again, but now some of the genes on each chromosome came from your father, and some came from your mother.

Let’s say you had a pair of chromosomes for making your arm.  On each of those chromosomes you have a gene for your fingers, one for your hand, one for your wrist, and so on.  This isn’t really how genes and chromosomes work, but it’s the basic idea.  This is another of those things that if you go study biology at the university you’ll have to learn the real version, but for farmers this is close enough.

When your genes divide up and create the new chromosomes, now you have two different chromosomes from the pair that made your arm.  Now one of the chromosomes might have your father’s gene for fingers, your mother’s gene for hands, your father’s gene for wrists, your mother’s gene for your lower arms, and so on.  The other chromosome in that pair would have your mother’s gene for fingers, your father’s gene for hands, your mother’s gene for wrists, your father’s gene for lower arms and so on.  These are different from your original pair of chromosomes because in your original pair all the genes from your father were in the chromosome you got from your father, and all the genes you got from your mother were in the chromosome you got from your mother.

The chromosomes you got from your father were different from the chromosomes your father had, because when he created his sperm cells, his genes divided up and reformed new chromosomes in the same way.  Some of the genes you got from your father came from his father, and some of the genes came from his mother, but now they were mixed together in the same chromosomes.  And the same goes for the chromosomes you got from your mother.

Now that your mixed-up genes have joined together to create your 46 new chromosomes, your cell divides.  Now one of each of the 23 pairs goes into each cell.  Now you have two sperm cells or two egg cells that each carries 23 chromosomes.  When a sperm cell meets up with an egg cell, they join and mix the chromosomes together.  Now you have 23 pairs of chromosomes again in a fertilized egg.

I should say here that what’s known as the 23rd pair of chromosomes is the pair that determines the gender of the child.  (It’s called the 23rd pair because biologists keep a list of the pairs of chromosomes so they can talk about which pair is which.  The gender pair of chromosomes is the 23rd pair on the list.)

Some chromosomes are shaped like Xs and some are shaped like Ys.  In the 23rd pair of chromosomes, there are actually two different kinds of chromosomes that can fit into that pair and work together.  One is called the X chromosome and the other is called the Y chromosome.  Men have an X and a Y chromosome.  Women have two X chromosomes.  That means that all of the eggs a woman creates carry X chromosomes.  That also means that half of the sperms a man creates carry X chromosomes and the other half carry Y chromosomes.  That means that if the sperm that fertilizes an egg carries an X chromosome, the fertilized egg has two X chromosomes, so it becomes a girl.  If the sperm carries a Y chromosome, the fertilized egg becomes a boy.  Whichever combination of chromosomes the fertilized egg gets for the 23rd pair start chemical reactions that create the head and face and body and arms and legs and everything else of a boy, or of a girl.

Now if we can say that you have a chromosome for your arm, and you have your mother’s finger genes and your father’s hand genes, you won’t end up with fingers exactly like your mother and hands exactly like your father.  You end up with fingers like your mother and hands like your father, but your fingers and hands are either boy fingers and hands or girl fingers and hands, depending on which one you are.  So if your mother had long fingers and your father had large hands, those are what you get, but you either get long boy fingers and large boy hands, or else you get long girl fingers and large girl hands.

This is an example of how lots of genes work together to create your body.  Every part of your body is created by a lot of genes working together, instead of one gene for your fingers and one for your hands and so on.  Someone who studied biology at a university could teach you more about that if you wanted, but that’s close enough for what I’m telling you about in this book.

Among a lot of animals, the males fight against each other to try to mate with females.  This is another way that the strongest genes get passed down from generation to generation.  The animals that have the strongest genes are the strongest animals, so they win the most fights, mate with the most females, have the most children, and pass the most of their alleles down to the next generation.

Men fight other men to mate with women a lot of times.  Even when men don’t fight each other literally, they compete against each other to see who can build the best house and the best farm, or who can make the most money, or whatever.  That’s the same competition animals have that keep their species healthy by passing the strongest alleles down from one generation to the next.  That’s why competing against each other feels like such a good idea to a lot of men.  Even though we have the same feelings most animals have when it comes to competing against each other, human intellect lets us compete differently.  We still feel like it’s supposed to work the same way, but it doesn’t always.  That can get us into trouble.

Men who are sickly can’t compete very well, so they can’t pass their alleles down to the next generation as well as healthy men, because healthy men have more time to find women, and have more time to do the things that attract women.  However, when healthy men compete against each other, that doesn’t prove anything about who has the strongest genes.  A farmer might have better alleles than a banker, because the farmer might be stronger than the banker and smarter than the banker.  But if the banker has certain abilities, he can get a job that pays more money.  If the banker’s parents had more money than the farmer’s parents, the banker probably went to the university and the farmer didn’t, so that’s another way the banker can make more money than the farmer.  Now that the banker has more money than the farmer, he can buy more things than the farmer.  That will help him attract more women because that will make him seem to have better alleles than the farmer.  That will help him have more children, and that will help him pass more of his alleles down to the next generation, just like he wanted to do.

The banker can even use all his money to take the farmer’s farm.  That’s another way the banker can compete against the farmer.  When the banker owns the farmer’s farm, he has one more thing he can use to help him survive and help him attract women and have children.  The farmer has one less thing he can use to help him survive, attract women, and have children.

This is a big problem that people who don’t understand much about biology are causing, which is causing problems all over the world.  It’s really easy for people who take other people’s farms to say that the fact they were able to take the farmer’s farms proves the farmers were just stupid people, and get everyone else to believe them.  So nobody else thinks anything of the farmers, and the people who are taking the farmers’ farms can keep right on taking their farms.  That benefits a few people, but it harms a lot more people.  It seems to a lot of people that the competition benefits the human race, but it doesn’t.

There aren’t any other species that can threaten us as a species anymore, so we don’t need a stronger species.  What we need is a smarter species.   Competition among people is spreading a lot of misery through the world.  People have found a lot of ways to compete against other people.  The whole purpose of military weapons is to help people compete against other people.  Murder is a way people compete against each other.  Theft is a way people compete against each other.  Taking people’s land is a way people can compete against each other.  War is a way people compete against each other.  Slavery is a way people compete against each other.  Any kind of oppression is a way that people compete against each other.  But on the other hand, revolution is also a way people compete against each other.

Filed under: i: Zapatista University by Ezra
No Comments »

The question we must answer now is, how did life on Earth begin?

Charles Darwin had no way of figuring this out, but scientists figured it out in the 20th century.  The first living things had no bones, so scientists can’t find any clues about them that way.  But now that they’ve discovered that evolution is the cumulative adaptation to the environment, they can use chemistry to see what could’ve happened to start that process.  That way, they can see how the first life forms turned into the animals and plants that live in the world now.

Scientists have thought of many ways life could’ve begun on Earth, and it’s impossible to say which one it was.  It doesn’t really matter.  The important thing to figure out was how a pattern of cause and effect that could lead to the beginning of life on Earth could’ve started.

There are some things on Earth that always happen the same way.  A river is a good example.  Water always runs downhill, so water always runs to the lowest point it can reach.  A river is always at the lowest point water can reach in an area, and a river always runs downhill to the ocean.  That’s why a river flows in the same place today as it did yesterday, and why it will flow in the same place tomorrow.

Raindrops are another example of things that always work the same way.   A cloud is a lot of moisture in the air.  When the moisture cools off enough, it condenses into water.  Water molecules always cling together in the same way, which is why raindrops are always the same shape.  They might be different sizes, but they’re always the same shape.  From that we can tell that way back when the world began, when it rained, the raindrops were the same shape as raindrops are today.

I’ve told you how genes are what make life possible.  For genes to make life possible, two things are necessary.  The genes have to replicate themselves, and they have to replicate themselves accurately.  If they don’t replicate themselves accurately, what they create instead of another copy of themselves might be a molecule that can’t replicate itself.

One other thing we can tell about genes is that the number of new genes one gene creates depends on how quickly the gene replicates itself.  A gene that can make a copy of itself once per minute can create a lot more copies than a gene that can only replicate itself once per day.

Before life began, the Earth would’ve been very different.  People, animals, and plants are made up of certain chemicals.  That means before there were people, animals, and plants, all those chemicals were somewhere else and were doing different things.   Without life, the world would’ve had a different atmosphere, and would’ve been covered in water, rocks, sand, and mud.

The simplest idea of how life began on Earth is called the Primordial Soup Theory.  This says that all the chemicals that would make up the plants and animals eventually, started out in the mud and floating around in the water.

This strange muddy water was spread all over the world for a billion years.  A billion years is a very long time.  You know how long a second is, and you know how long a year is.  A billion seconds is about 32 years.  If you’re 32 years old, and you turned every second that you have lived into a year, that’s about the length of time it took for the chemistry of the muddy water to create the chemistry of life.

All the different chemicals, spread all over the Earth, kept mixing together in different ways.  The sun shone on the mud all day long, lighting stuck it sometimes, volcanoes erupted into it, and so on.  All those different kinds of heat and electricity added a lot of energy to the mud, which made a lot more kinds of chemical reactions happen.

Eventually, somewhere in the world, a chemical reaction happened that created a molecule that became the first gene.

This molecule was a lot simpler from any genes in the world today.  All it had to be able to do was to make copies of itself.

That made it an unusual molecule.  There are some other molecules, like salt crystals, ice crystals, and diamond crystals, which can make copies of themselves.  But usually when a molecule meets another molecule and they start a chemical reaction, they both break up into atoms and then the atoms reform into different molecules.

The first gene molecule was able to make a copy of itself.  That meant that after the chemical reaction there were two gene molecules.  Then they each started their own chemical reactions and created new gene molecules.  So now there were four gene molecules.  Then those four gene molecules made copies, and now there were eight, and so on.

These chemical reactions usually worked the same way.  But once in a while, a chemical reaction would be affected by something unusual that made it work differently.  Then the new molecule that was created would be slightly different from the old molecule.  If it was a molecule that could replicate itself, it would start making copies of itself.  It wouldn’t make copies of the original molecule.  So now there are two different kinds of molecules making copies of themselves.

Eventually, this chemical reaction spread all over the world, through the air and the water and the mud.  Eventually, the world was covered in these original gene-molecules.  By that time, a lot of them had been altered, so there were many different kinds of gene molecules in the world.

For the gene molecules to replicate themselves depended on their bumping into the atoms they needed to replicate themselves.  That means bumping into more of the chemicals they were made of.  But eventually, all the chemicals in the world would be used up.

Basically, at this point, the world was like a farm that had no farmer.  It was all covered in soil where things were growing, but all the things that were growing would be too small for us to see.  There weren’t any plants or animals yet.

Now that the gene-molecules had spread all over the world and brought the soil to life, and they had used all of the atoms in the world to make copies of themselves, they had a new problem:  How to keep making more copies of themselves.

So far, the gene-molecules we’re talking about are only slightly more complicated than raindrops, so they weren’t thinking about how to make more copies of themselves.  They were making more copies of themselves because they were molecules that make more copies of themselves.  Any time they came into contact with the same atoms they were made of, they made more of themselves.

If some of these gene-molecules didn’t come into contact with any more atoms they could use, that was fine.  They didn’t need to make more copies of themselves.  They only made more copies of themselves whenever they came into contact with the right atoms.

At least some of the gene molecules could do something more complicated by now.  They could react with atoms that were part of other gene-molecules.  Basically, these gene-molecules started eating other gene-molecules.  Eventually, all the gene-molecules that couldn’t eat other gene molecules got eaten.

Now the rate at which a gene-molecule could replicate itself became important.  By now, all the genes were getting eaten by other genes.  If a type of gene couldn’t replicate itself at least as fast as other genes ate it, there would be less and less of those genes, until they all got eaten and they were gone.

At that point, the world worked the same basic way it works today.  All the genes ate something else and got eaten by something else, but they always balanced each other out.  Now the world was like a farm in another way.  Everything living in the world was a part of a food cycle, where things got eaten at a certain rate, and new ones were created at a certain rate to replace them.

But at the same time, we are still talking about a chemical reaction here, of molecules making replicas of themselves.  This is important, because this shows us how chemistry turned into biology—that is, how chemical reactions turned into life.

At this point the environment was mostly stable, but things were still changing in it slowly.  New genes were still being created because sometimes genes didn’t replicate themselves perfectly, they only made new genes that were mostly like themselves.   Whenever a new gene was created that made more accurate copies of itself than other genes made of themselves, or that made copies of itself more quickly, or that was better at eating other genes, or that was harder for other genes to eat, those genes made more copies of themselves.  That means some other kinds of genes made fewer copies of themselves.  This went on all over the world for about a billion more years.  The genes that were the best at making copies of themselves kept making copies of themselves, and the ones that weren’t as good at making copies of themselves got eaten up.  The genes kept getting better and better at making copies of themselves by this process of elimination.  This was natural selection.

There were just a few more important steps left for these chemicals to turn into life as we know it today.

First, some of the gene molecules made themselves a lot harder for other genes to eat by turning other chemicals into armor for themselves.  If they could build up walls around themselves, they could keep themselves safe from other genes a lot better.  These genes surrounded by walls became the first living cells in the world.

Second, some of the gene molecules made themselves harder for other genes to eat by sticking together with other genes.  Some genes literally stuck to each other, and some just lived in the same cells as each other.  This is how they got from one gene per cell to 25,000 genes and 46 chromosomes per cell in a person.

Third, some of the gene molecules could make themselves harder for other genes to eat by keeping their cells stuck together after they divided.  This is how we got from single-cell organisms like bacteria, up to multi-cellular organisms like trees and horses and people.

A lot of people have creation myths that say the Earth gave birth to plants and animals and people.  Those myths were right about that, but exactly how the Earth gave birth to people turned out to be so complicated that it took until the 20th century for people to figure it out.

This particular story of how the Earth created life is different from any other creation story in one specific way:  All of planetary biology depends on this story of the origins of life.  By that I mean that every single thing biologists have ever figured out about life is contained in this story.   This is not a story about the origin of life that happened as a single event once long ago.  Any time you look at any living thing, you are still seeing the pattern of cause and effect that created life continuing to happen.  You are seeing genes continuing to make copies of themselves.  You are still seeing the story of the origin of life continuing to be told.

Filed under: i: Zapatista University by Ezra
No Comments »

The next question scientists had to answer was:  Where did people come from?

Charles Darwin figured out the answer to this question.  People look a lot like monkeys.  Monkeys act a lot like children.  Monkeys and humans have the same structures of bones and muscles—the individual bones and muscles are just different sizes and shapes.  From a lot of clues like this, Charles Darwin discovered that people were descended from monkeys.

(Actually, people and monkeys are both descended from the same ancestor, in the same way that horses and donkeys are both descended from the same ancestor.  The original animal wasn’t a monkey, because monkeys have evolved over millions of years also.  This is another of the things you’ll have to learn a more complicated version of if you go to a university to study biology, but if all you want to do is to work on your farm, this is a simplified version that will work well enough.  So I’ll say that people are descended from monkeys just for simplicity, even though the real story is a little more complicated than that.)

Evolution is the cumulative adaptation to the environment.   Monkeys evolved into people because some of the monkeys lived in an environment where the ones who were a little more like people were able to survive and reproduce the best.  By doing that, they passed the most genes down to the next generation to make more children that were like themselves.

So now the question is, how did the monkeys’ environment change from one where the monkeys could live best by being like monkeys to one where they could live best by being more like people?

Now you can look at how people are different from monkeys, why those differences work better for monkeys the way they live, and what kind of an environment some monkeys could’ve moved into (or how some monkeys’ environment could’ve changed) to make being more like people more helpful to them.  This is the same question of how one kind of animal turned into donkeys and horses, only now applied to ourselves.

There are three big differences we can look at:  How people and monkeys use their hands, how people and monkeys stand, and how people and monkeys think.  We can also look at the bones of earlier ancestors of humans to get more clues that way.

Monkeys use their hands for climbing in trees.  They also use their hands for walking on the ground, but they can also stand upright.  They have brains that let them do the things they need to do to be able to live the way they live.

How brains work is pretty complicated, and it’s what most of this book is about.  Before I compare how monkeys think to how people think, it’s easiest to compare how some monkeys think to how some other monkeys think.

There are a lot of different species of monkeys that live in jungles all over the world—in Central and South America, in Africa, in Asia, and on some islands in the Pacific.   Different species of monkeys eat different food.  Scientists have tested different kinds of monkeys to see how they think, compared to what kind of food they eat.

Monkeys that eat insects or certain types of fruit that grow in trees are a lot smarter than monkeys that eat leaves.  The reason for that is simple.  Monkeys need food to live.  Whichever monkeys are best at finding food are able to survive and reproduce the best, so they make the most children that are like themselves.

When you live in trees, if you eat leaves, your food is all around you, so you don’t have to think very hard about where to find your food.  If some monkeys are born that are smarter than most, it doesn’t help them survive and reproduce, because out of all the things the monkeys need to think about to be able to survive and reproduce, the dumb monkeys can figure all those things out too—because all they need to know how to do is to climb in trees, pull leaves off, and stick them in their mouths.

If you eat certain types of fruit, you have to think a lot more, because you can only find your food in certain places.  Your food only grows in certain trees, and only in certain parts of those trees.  So you have to be able to remember where you’ve found food before.   You also have to be able to imagine where you’ll be able to find food again if you wander into a part of the forest you’ve never been in before, by recognizing the kinds of trees that grow your food, and recognizing the parts of the new trees where your food grows.

If you eat insects, you have to be even smarter.  Just like the monkeys that ate fruit, you can only find your food in certain places, so you have to be able to remember where those places are and be able to imagine new places to look.  You also have to have better hand-eye coordination than a monkey that eats fruit, because if you eat insects, you eat food that can run away from you!  So you have to be able to catch a moving target.

When you put together all the clues that scientists have found, it shows that monkeys began turning into people at the southern tip of Africa about 7 million years ago.

In southern Africa there are a lot of different environments.  Monkeys lived in jungles there.  There are also grasslands in Africa, some of which were near the monkeys’ forests.  A drought could’ve made the climate change.  Some of the forest could’ve died and turned into grassland, and some of the monkeys wandered out into the grassland to look for food.  Or the monkeys could’ve been so successful at surviving and reproducing that there were too many monkeys in the forest, so there wasn’t enough food to go around.  That’s another way some monkeys could’ve wandered off into the grassland to look for some food.  They might’ve spent a little time in the grassland looking for food at first and then went back to their trees at night time.  But then it turned out that they were able to live in the grassland well, so over time they spent more and more time in the grassland and less and less time in the forest.

Either way, monkeys moving into the grassland explains how they could make all their changes.

First of all, monkeys that stood upright more than others would’ve had an advantage at surviving, because the monkeys who stood upright would be able to see further.  If a monkey stood upright, he could see over the tall grass to see if a predator was sneaking up on him.  If a monkey walked on all fours, he wouldn’t be able to see the predator until it was a lot closer.  That meant a monkey that stood upright could see a predator further away and run away sooner.  That meant that monkeys that got eaten the most were the ones that walked on all fours.  That means that when all the monkeys that walked on all fours all the time got eaten, the next easiest monkeys for the predators to catch would be the ones that walked on all fours most of the time.

This went on for about 4 million years.  In each generation, the monkeys that walked on all fours the most were the ones who got eaten the most.  The ones who stood upright the most were the ones who could run away the best.  So the ones who stood upright the most had the most babies that were like themselves.

Once monkeys started living in grasslands and standing upright, they didn’t need their hands for climbing in trees or walking any more.  That meant they could use their hands for other things.

A lot of monkeys in the world today use tools.  They use rocks to break open nuts, they use sticks to help them catch ants in holes in trees, and they even throw rocks and sticks at predators to scare them away.   There are other kinds of animals that use things separate from their own bodies to help them survive and reproduce.  For example, birds build nests and spiders build spider webs.

If the monkeys who lived in the grassland and stood upright didn’t need their hands for climbing or walking anymore, that would make using tools the most important thing they could use their hands for now.  At some point they learned to use clubs for hunting, for keeping themselves safe from predators, and for fighting each other over mates.  They also learned to throw rocks to help keep themselves safe.  At some point, they learned how to hunt by throwing rocks.  If one monkey could throw a rock and hit a bird, he could catch food that another monkey who couldn’t throw rocks as well couldn’t catch.

These monkeys who could use tools for so many more things than other animals had a huge advantage at surviving and reproducing.  They were already pretty smart to begin with.  Now that they could use tools to help them survive and reproduce, the monkeys who used the most tools could survive and reproduce the best.   The monkeys who were smartest could use the most tools, and they made the most children who were like themselves.

Over the next 2 million years, people began making their own tools out of stone, and also learned how to use fire.  There’s no way to tell when people started using wooden tools, because wood rots.  So archeologists can find stone tools that people made millions of years ago, but the wooden tools are gone.

The first stone tools people made were crude tools, only made of one rock.  If you can find a rock with a sharp edge on it, or you can use one rock to break another rock and make your own sharp edge, you can use the sharp rock to do things you couldn’t do with a round rock.  Likewise, if you find a rock that’s a certain size, you can use it to do things you can’t do with a rock of a different size.  So people used simple stone tools to help them kill animals and cut up their meat, break open plants and grind them up if they were too hard to break open and chew with their teeth, and things like that.

By this time, people were spread all over Africa.  They had spread slowly, so there were a lot of different species of people who had each evolved differently in different environments, after they all spread out from the same place.   About 1 million years ago, people started spreading out of Africa.  They spread all the way to Asia and Europe.

These ancient people began doing a few other things that people do today.  They used the hides of animals for crude clothing.  They also began caring for their sick and burying their dead, which were things no other animals on Earth did.  So from clues like this, scientists can see that people were getting more and more intelligent.

Then, about 60,000 years ago, the people who lived in northeastern Africa evolved in a way that made them a lot smarter than everyone else.   Nobody can see what part about them changed, because their skeletons didn’t change, and that’s the only part of ancient people scientists can find, because everything else rots pretty quickly.  So they’ve had to use other clues to figure out this puzzle.

It looks like what happened was that people figured out how to talk in words, or figured out a way to use words that worked a lot better than the way any other group of people were using words.   Monkeys and lots of other animals make noises with their mouths to communicate with each other.  It looks like what happened here was that people figured out how to attach certain mouth-sounds to certain ideas—or they learned a way to connect mouth-sounds to each other to talk about bigger and more complicated ideas.  That way, if one person had an idea and made a certain noise with his mouth, another person could tell what he was thinking about.  That way people could learn things from each other, instead of having to learn about everything in life mostly on their own.

Suddenly people went from building simple tools to building specialized tools out of stone.  They started making tools out of bone.  They made needles, awls, and fishing hooks.  They made multi-piece tools, like harpoons, spear-throwers, and eventually bows and arrows.  They also invented rope and cord for nets, lines, snares, and sewn clothing.  They began building their homes. They began burying their dead ritualistically.  They invented art, like jewelry, cave paintings, statues, and musical instruments.

From all of these clues, and the things people had been doing before, it looks like a lot of people had been thinking about a lot of different things, and now they found a way to share their ideas.  Before, they couldn’t invent very much, because each person could learn a little bit from other people, but they had to figure out most things in life on their own.  That way, all they could invent were simple things that had basic uses—because the people all had the same basic needs, and they could see the things other people built to do the same job.

Before people could talk, if one person figured out that making an axe by tying a sharp rock to the end of a stick would let him chop things easier, but he couldn’t figure out how to tie a rock to a stick, he couldn’t build an axe.  If another person could figure out how to tie a rock to a stick but hadn’t figured out that it would let him chop things easier, he wouldn’t see a reason to build an axe.  If the two people couldn’t talk to each other about their ideas, the axe would never get built.  But if they could talk to each other, they could put their ideas together and build axes for both of them.   That’s just a simple example of how people being able to talk about ideas lets them invent a lot of things they couldn’t invent otherwise.

Something else that might’ve happened at this point is that people learning to attach certain ideas to certain mouth-sounds helped them remember things better.  That might’ve helped them distinguish in their minds between ideas about actions, objects, people, feelings, and so on.  That would help them learn better than other animals can, because that would let them attach ideas to each other, and separate ideas from each other, to figure out more about how the world worked.

For instance, before people learned how to talk, if a person saw a lion, was afraid, and ran away, he might’ve remembered being afraid more than anything else.  But after people learned to talk, and he had heard words for lion, afraid, and run, he could figure out that the reason he’d been afraid was because he saw the lion, and he reacted to his fear by running away.  Now that he understands better what happened, he can think about what else he could do.  If seeing lions made him afraid, he could figure out where the lions lived and stay away from them.  If running away from a lion kept him from getting eaten, now he could think about better ways to run away from a lion.  He could even think that instead of being afraid of lions and running away from them, he could get some friends together and they could hunt the lion, kill it, and eat it, so they wouldn’t have to be afraid any more.  This would help people develop a sense of cause and effect for dealing with the world, and that would make them more intelligent.

These people were called the Cro-Magnons.  They spread out all over Africa, Asia, and Europe pretty quickly.  The other people who already lived there all died out.  When the Cro-Magnons came, the Cro-Magnons were better at hunting animals and gathering food.  That made the Cro-Magnons the best at surviving and reproducing, so they had more children than the other people, and passed their abilities down to the most people of the next generation.

In southwestern France, someone discovered what are known as the Lascaux cave paintings.  (Lascaux is a French name, like the name of a town.)  They were created about 15,000 years ago.  They are good works of art compared to paintings people make today.  The Chauvet cave paintings, discovered in southern France more recently, are the same kinds of paintings, and are about 30,000 years old.  From this, we can see that people of 30,000 years ago saw the world the same way people see it today, because when they painted pictures of things they saw, they painted pictures that look just like the paintings people make now.   From this we can tell that the people who lived 30,000 years ago noticed the same things people today notice.  From that we can see that people then thought about the same things people of today think about.  From that we can see they were modern people, just like us.

About 40,000 years ago, there was an ice age.  The world was a lot colder, which meant a lot more water froze at the north and south poles, and in the snow and ice on mountaintops.  Since there was a lot less water in the world, the oceans were lower.  People who lived on the coast could’ve invented boats by then.  With the lower sea levels, the people could walk a lot of places that are under water now.  With their boats, they could cross seas by rowing from island to island.  People who live on the ocean and travel in boats a lot learn how to recognize where land is by watching how birds fly.  The birds know where their nests are, so they fly out over the ocean to look for fish during the day, and then at night they fly straight back to their nests.  That means that people who travel by ocean a lot learn how to recognize when there’s land nearby, even if they can’t see it themselves, by watching where the birds fly in the evening.

During that ice age of 40,000 years ago, people crossed a lot of dry land and seas from Asia to Australia and a lot of islands in the area.

Then, about 14,000 years ago, there was another ice age.  When the oceans were lower, there was dry land stretching from Asia to Alaska, from the north-eastern-most corner of Asia to the northwestern corner of North America.   Some people walked from Asia to Alaska.

(The fact that they didn’t walk from Asia to North America before is a clue that they didn’t live there during the previous ice age.  Either that or the previous ice age was a little different.  Maybe it was so cold there that the people moved south to get away from the ice, and maybe the land between Asia and North America was buried under ice, so the people didn’t see any reason to walk into North America.  Then when the ice age was over and the people came back, the land between Asia and North America was under water again, so they couldn’t walk across anymore.)

Later, after the last ice age was over, some people crossed from Asia to North America in boats.  There are a lot of islands between Asia and North America up in that corner of the ocean, so once people moved into the area, they could cross the islands from Asia to North America more easily than they could cross from Asia to Australia.

People who lived on the coast and built boats could travel down the west coast all the way to the tip of South America in about 20 years.  When the first people crossed from Asia to North America, they found two whole continents that had no people living on them.  That meant there was a lot of land to settle, a lot of animals to catch, and nobody to get in the way.

This is where your ancestors came from.  I know a lot of Indians tell stories about how they were created in the Americas, but that’s just another example of people who lived thousands of years ago not having any way to figure out as much about the world as people can figure out now.  The people who first told those stories figured out as much about the world as they could, and their stories were so good that a lot of people felt like they must be true, but that doesn’t prove they were true.

Here in the United States there are a lot of Indians who don’t like archeologists telling them that their creation myths are wrong, because they feel like people proving their creation myths are wrong is going to make them look like a bunch of dumb savages.  But that doesn’t prove anything.  Everyone in the world has creation myths, and nobody’s creation myths tell the story the archeologists have discovered.  If you want to talk about whose creation myths are wrong, then everyone’s creation myths are wrong.  Having a creation myth that doesn’t agree with the story the scientists have discovered doesn’t prove you’re a bunch of dumb savages, it proves you’re people just like everyone else in the world!

Filed under: i: Zapatista University by Ezra
No Comments »

A great scientist named Dr. Jared Diamond figured out how to use physics, chemistry, and biology to write a new history of civilization.  His book is called Guns, Germs, and Steel.  He did this about 10 years ago, so a lot of people haven’t heard of it yet.

Humans are made of atoms, food is made of atoms, and everything else in the world is made of atoms.   We can’t see atoms though.  To us, people, food, and everything else in the world look like different things.  So we naturally think of them as different things.  But people, food, and everything else in the world only different things in the sense that they’re different combinations of about 100 kinds of atoms.  The atoms are only different from each other because they’re made up of different combinations of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and those pieces of atoms are the same from one atom to another.   This is another way that the world doesn’t work the way people thought it did.

I’ve already told how chemistry works.  Molecules contain energy in the molecular bonds between their atoms.  Chemical reactions either absorb or give off energy, as a result of molecular bonds being created or broken.  When plants absorb sunlight through their leaves and nutrients through their roots, they use the sunlight energy to create new molecular bonds, to turn the nutrient atoms into bigger molecules.  Firewood, food, and fossil fuels are all made up of big molecules, which are broken when firewood and fossil fuels are burned and food is digested, which is why they all give off energy.

Now here’s what Dr. Diamond was able to do using biology and chemistry:

The food cycle of an environment is the way atoms and energy move through an environment.  In healthy environments, the atoms and energy keep moving at a consistent rate, which is why the environment sustains itself instead of breaking down.  Plants absorb sunlight and nutrients.  Herbivores eat plants.  Carnivores eat herbivores.  Carnivores eventually die and are eaten by bugs, worms, and bacteria.  Those break the dead animals down into the nutrients that are eaten by more plants.  All the energy that cycles through the environment came from the sun. (Except for some places, where some of the energy comes from volcanic heat from underground.)

Atoms and energy move back and forth between people and the environment.  Atoms and energy move from each person to the environment at a fairly consistent rate.  If atoms and energy don’t move from the environment to people at an equal rate, it means the people aren’t getting enough to eat.  That means you have a famine.  When a woman gets pregnant, she needs to eat more.  By eating more, she uses her digestive system and her uterus to turn topsoil nutrients into a baby.  We are all made out of topsoil nutrients, because our bodies are all made out of the food we’ve eaten.

A lot of people think it’s wrong to think of people as being made out of dirt, so they say we shouldn’t use science to try to figure out how the world works.  But just because you don’t like thinking about a certain thing doesn’t prove you have the power to make the world work differently than it does.  Your body, including your brain, is made of nutrients that came from the food you ate.  The nutrients in your food came from the dirt.  Like I said, we were created by the Earth in the beginning, and we are still created by the Earth now.

I’ve heard that people where you live say that people are made of corn.   That’s one example of farmers figuring out something by working with plants and animals all their lives, and scientists figuring out more about it by using their machines and spending their time studying these things.  It’s true that people who eat corn are made out of corn, but not everybody eats corn.  People are made out of whatever food they eat.  Their food comes from the soil.  Since people are made out of food and food comes out of the soil, you can say that people are made out of soil.

So this is an example of great scientists discovering that something peasant farmers believed is true, and not only that, it’s even more true than the farmers believed it was.  There are a lot of people here in America who don’t believe that’s true, and who believe the world is supposed to work the way they want it to work, but they believe the world works they believe it works because they don’t spend their lives working with plants and animals.

A lot of people say that they agree that people’s bodies came from the dirt, but what about their minds?  What about their spirits?  What about their souls?  Those aren’t made out of dirt, so that must prove they come from somewhere else.

People who make that argument are trying to use their own ignorance of science to prove that they’re experts at science.   You are able to think about your mind, your spirit, and your soul because of your brain, and your brain is made out of dirt.  Everything you’re able to think about, you’re able to think about because of your brain, and your brain is made out of dirt.

Your brain is an organ, just like every other organ of your body.  Just like every other organ of your body, your brain does certain things, and thinking is what your brain does.  Your brain is the most complicated organ of your body, which has made it the hardest to figure out, but just because something is hard to figure out doesn’t prove that supernatural powers must be causing it.  Just because something is hard to figure out doesn’t prove that the simple version someone wants to believe in must be true.

That brings me to Dr. Diamond’s history of the world.  The world wasn’t conquered by Europeans, Whites, or Christians.  The world was conquered by the people who were the most successful at turning topsoil nutrients into people.  Those people turned out to be Europeans, Whites, and Christians.  It’s easy to assume that their conquering the world had something to do with them being Europeans, Whites, and Christians, but that’s only because those things are a lot easier for people to see than how different parts of the world have different kinds of soil and different kinds of soil produce different amounts of food.

10,000 years ago, people were spread out over all the habitable land in the world, with the exception of some islands they hadn’t reached yet.  The people in every part of the world were just like the people in every other part of the world.  That meant that no group of people was superior or inferior to any other group because of who they were.

In Mesopotamia, in the Middle East, the environment was the most favorable for people of any in the world.  The soil in Mesopotamia produced more food that people could eat than the soil in any other part of the world.

The soil in Mesopotamia had the highest food productivity in the world because it was the easiest place in the world for food plants to grow.  That also made it the easiest place in the world for people to figure out how to grow their own plants, because once people figured out how to plant seeds, it didn’t really matter what they did after that.  Through trial and error they figured out a lot of things they could do to help the plants grow, and produce more food as a result.  Since the plants grew so well in the environment all by themselves, the Mesopotamians could afford to make more mistakes than anyone else in their learning process—which let them learn faster.

The people of at least four other parts of the world, and maybe as many as eight, also developed agriculture on their own.  The Chinese developed agriculture about 1,000 years after the Mesopotamians.  The Maya and the Inca each developed agriculture about 5,000 years after the Mesopotamians.  The Indians who lived in the Mississippi river valley, here in America, developed agriculture about 1,000 years after that.  There were also three places in Africa and a large island off the coast of Asia where the people might’ve developed agriculture independently, but scientists haven’t found enough evidence to tell one way or the other.

Scientists figured this out by digging up places where ancient people lived, which have been buried underground, and finding their food scraps.  They can find out what plants the people ate by the corn cobs or whatever the people threw away, and they can find out what animals the people ate by the bones they threw away.   Also, they can find clues from things like paintings and statues people made.  They can also find clues from things like the weapons people made for hunting animals, the tools they made for harvesting their plants, the dishes they used for cutting up or grinding up their food, and the baskets and pottery they used to store their food.

Another big clue scientists use is the logs they find in ancient settlements.  A tree is a calendar.  The log has light rings and dark rings, which show how the tree grew each year.  The light rings are created by softer wood where the tree grew quickly in the spring, and the dark rings are created by harder wood where the tree grew slowly in the summer.  By counting the tree rings, you can find out how many years old a tree was when it was cut down.

How fast a tree grows in a year depends on what the environment was like that year.  If there was a lot of rain, the tree grows quickly, which makes the rings wider.  If it was a hot and dry year, the tree grows more slowly, so the rings are narrower.  All the trees in an area grow the same way every year, so their rings for each year look the same.  If you cut down a tree that’s 100 years old today, you can count backwards through the rings and find the ring that grew 50 years ago.  Then if you find another a log that someone cut to build their house, you can look to see if any of the rings in the old log match the rings in the new log.  If the last ring in the old log matches the ring from 50 years ago in the new log, it means the old log was cut down 50 years ago.  If that log also had 100 rings in it, now you can see how trees grew in that area 150 years ago.  Then you can compare those rings to the rings in even older logs, and see how trees grew even longer ago.  When I say that people who spend their lives studying science and using machines to help them figure out things other people can’t figure out, things like this are what I’m talking about.

To make the transition from hunting and gathering to farming, a group of people needed four things.  First, a population that had grown too big for them to support by hunting and gathering any more.  Second, they had to lead sedentary lives.  Third, they had to have a high enough technological level.  Fourth, they had to have the right variety of plants growing in the area.

The population had to have grown too big for the environment to support by hunting and gathering for a simple reason.  Everyone knew how to hunt and gather, because people had been doing that for as long as people had existed.  Hunting and gathering is what all the animals do.  Farming was a completely different way to produce food, because it depended on people figuring out how to put seeds in the ground to make them grow, and make a lot of long-term plans for what their plants were going to need when, which plants they would be able to eat at which times of the year, and so on—all the things you do on your farm.

That means that before people learned how to farm, they knew how to hunt and gather well, and they didn’t know how to farm well.  The only thing that could’ve made spending their time farming seem like a better idea than hunting and gathering would’ve been if they couldn’t produce enough food by hunting and gathering any more, so they were trying to think of something else.

If the people lived in an area where they couldn’t produce enough food by hunting and gathering any more, that gives us more clues about the way they lived.  First of all, they moved into the area because they could find enough food by hunting and gathering.  If they couldn’t, they wouldn’t have moved into the area.  Second, if the environment couldn’t produce enough food any more, it means they had more children than they should’ve for the amount of food they had in their environment.  They had too many children and ate their food too fast.  At first there were only a few people and a lot of food in the environment.  Now there was less food, which means the people must’ve been eating the food faster than the environment could produce it.  That means there must’ve been more people.  That means that somebody must’ve been having a lot of babies.  So this is an example of how an environment breaks down when people turn too many soil nutrients into too many babies.

The people had to lead sedentary lifestyles for a simple reason also.  When people of today think of hunter-gatherers, they think of nomadic people, like people who live in the jungles of the Amazon.  All hunter-gathering people are nomads now, because most all the land that’s good for farming has been turned into farms.   Before people learned how to farm, things were different.  Then, people lived on the land that was good for farming, but they weren’t farming.  That meant their environment was completely different.

Land that’s good for farming is good for farming because it’s so productive of plants.  Before people started farming, it would’ve been very productive of plants also, it just would’ve produced different plants.  If the land was so productive that people could find all the plants they needed growing nearby, year round, then they basically lived on a farm that didn’t need a farmer.

If the people lived on land that was so productive that they didn’t have to move around over the course of the year to follow herds of animals and the growing seasons of plants, that let them do something important.  That let them stay in one place year round, which is exactly what people have to do in order to farm—or to learn how to farm.

Nomadic people couldn’t afford to stop and try to figure out how to farm, because they had to keep moving to get their food.   People who could live in the same place all year round could go collect their wild food, and then they had time to experiment with growing their own plants, until they figured out how to do it right.

Another advantage sedentary people had in learning how to farm is that when they went out, found their wild food, ate it, and threw their scraps away, they used the same refuse dumps all year ‘round.  That meant that some of their food scraps still had good seeds in them, and they were throwing the seeds into piles of fertilizer.  Then they stayed there for the rest of the year, so they could watch new food plants grow out of the refuse dumps where they threw their food away from last year.

One other important difference between sedentary and nomadic life was that nomadic mothers could only carry one child at a time.  That meant that they had to have their children about four years apart so that each child would be big enough to be able to walk on his own without slowing down the tribe on its travels.  Sedentary families didn’t have that problem.

People also had to have the right technology to be able to learn how to farm.  Sedentary people who harvested a lot of wild food had an advantage here again.  When nomadic people moved around, they had to carry everything they owned with them.  That meant they could only own simple things, and the things they owned had to be things they could use for a lot of different things they needed to do to be able to live.

Sedentary people, however, didn’t need to be able to carry everything they owned when they moved.  That let them own more things, and it let them build specialized tools for doing things they only needed to do a few times a year.  That let them build better tools for harvesting plants.

Sedentary people could also store food to eat later in the year.  That was critical to being able to learn how to farm.  Nomadic people couldn’t carry a year’s supply of food with them, and they couldn’t find a year’s supply of food anywhere they went.   Buildings for storing food in was an important part of farming technology, because in order for people to start farming year round, they had to be able to save up a year’s supply of food to eat while they were waiting for their next harvest. That meant the people had to invent the buildings for storing their food in before they could learn how to farm, because without the buildings, they couldn’t store enough food to eat while they were waiting for more food to grow.

A group of people had to have a good combination of plants growing in the area so they could grow a well balanced diet.  If they didn’t have the plants they needed for a well-balanced diet, they couldn’t afford to devote all of their time to farming.  That meant they couldn’t afford to give up hunting and gathering.

There are a lot of foods people grow today that aren’t good staple crops.  That means they can get some nutrients out of them, but not enough to live on year round.   People couldn’t learn how to farm with those, because really, the people weren’t trying to learn how to farm.  They were trying to learn how to produce the food they needed to live.  Some people learned how to farm because that was the best way they could find to produce the kind of food they needed.  If gathering wild plants was the best way they could find to get the food they needed, they would’ve done that, and wouldn’t have bothered going to all the trouble of learning how to farm just so they could grow food that wouldn’t be very helpful to them.  When a group of people learned how to farm, they started by growing highly nutritious food first.   But that also means that in order to be able to learn how to farm, a group of people had to have plants growing in their area that could produce a lot of nutritious food, and that were easy to learn to farm.

Also, the plants the people started farming with had to be plants they could store and eat all year round.  Grain is good for that, so are roots and vegetables that can be dried easily.  A lot of foods, like fruits and some vegetables, only stay fresh for a few days or a week after they’re harvested.

Once people learned how to grow a well balanced diet that they could eat all year round, then they could start planting more crops, to grow food they didn’t depend on to live.  Then they could afford to grow some food they would only be able to eat at some times of the year, when it was fresh from the harvest.  Then they could afford to grow fruits and vegetables and spices to go with their staple foods.

So now we come back to the story of Cortez and Montezuma getting into a war over whether people were supposed to eat wheat and peas or corn and tomatoes to be healthy.  The people of Mesopotamia had two kinds of wheat, barely, peas, chickpeas, lentils, bitter vetch, and flax growing in their area.  That was three kinds of grain, four kinds of vegetables that were high in protein, and a fiber crop they could use for making clothing and rope—and save themselves the trouble of hunting and gathering for those things.  The Maya domesticated corn, beans, and squash to give them their combination of grain, vegetables, and protein.  Once the farmers could support themselves with well-balanced diets year-round, the Mesopotamians and Maya domesticated a lot more local plants.

Once we can see that the Mesopotamians and Maya started with the same four environmental conditions, and so did every other part of the world where the people learned how to farm on their own, we can look at their differences to see why they developed their agriculture differently.   Each of those groups of people lived in different environmental conditions, so those four things they had in common affected them differently—some more, some less, and some in unusual ways.  Each group of people also had differences that affected how much they could use agriculture, what they could use it for, and what they were able to do after they learned to farm.

The Mesopotamians had seven more important advantages over every other group of people who learned to farm.

First, Europe, Asia, and North Africa make up the biggest landmass in the world by far.  That makes it the landmass with the most kinds of plants. Of the 56 best grain producing species of wild grasses in the world, 32 of them grew in Mesopotamia.  Of the eight original crops of the Mesopotamians, flax and barley were the only two that grew wild in many places outside Mesopotamia, while one kind of wheat and chickpeas only grew wild in or around Mesopotamia.

Second, with the exception of Australia, the smallest continent, Eurasia/north Africa is the only continent that’s longer east to west than it is north to south.  That means it has the largest number of places with similar growing conditions because of similar cycles of sunlight throughout the year. The approximate latitude of Mesopotamia stretches from the coast of Portugal to the coast of China.  The entire coast of the Mediterranean Sea has the same basic climate as Mesopotamia did at the time, and so did other places in Asia.  That meant that even though the Mesopotamian plants were so highly concentrated in Mesopotamia, once they were domesticated they could be planted in other places.  After those plants were domesticated, it was much easier for Mesopotamian agriculture to spread into other areas than it was for the people who lived in other places to learn to farm on their own.

That’s why it’s so difficult to determine if one of the nine possible centers of original agriculture was an original center of agriculture.  Mesopotamian agriculture spread into northeastern Africa almost immediately.  Local plants were domesticated in the area around the same time Mesopotamian plants were adopted, but it’s impossible to tell which came first—if they inherited Mesopotamian agriculture and then started domesticating their own plants, or if they started domesticating their own plants and then added Mesopotamian plants soon after.

Third, the plants that grew in Mesopotamia were the easiest to domesticate in the world, because of the Mesopotamian climate—hot, dry summers, wet winters, and variable weather conditions.  That created hearty plants and a large percentage of annual plants.  That made the plants of Mesopotamia the easiest to domesticate because they needed the least amount of attention after people stuck their seeds in the ground.

Fourth, the Mesopotamian plants had the greatest ratio of calories of food produced to calories of work energy required to raise the food.  Food is the fuel of civilization.  The plants the Mesopotamians had let them turn their soil nutrients into food the easiest, so that let them turn food into babies the easiest. That advantage alone would’ve made the civilization built on Mesopotamian agriculture the biggest and most physically powerful civilization in the world.

Fifth, humans evolved in Africa and spread into Europe and Asia fairly quickly.  That meant the animals that lived on those continents had time to evolve a fear of humans while the humans were still figuring out how to hunt. Humans didn’t reach Australia until 40,000 years ago, and didn’t reach the Americas until 14,000 years ago.  By the time humans reached those three continents, they had well-developed hunting skills, and the animals they found had no natural fear of humans.  The humans soon hunted numerous species of animals into extinction.

The same thing almost happened more recently when humans first traveled to the Galapagos Islands and Antarctica.  The animals there had no natural fear of humans either, so people almost hunted many of those animals into extinction also.  The explorers could practically walk up to the animals they found there and kill them with their bare hands.    That sounds strange to most people, because in most of the world all the wild animals are naturally afraid of humans.  The reason for that is perfectly simple: all the wild animals that weren’t naturally afraid of humans got killed and eaten thousands of years ago.

That hunting of animals into extinction prevented the people on those three continents from domesticating any large animals, with the exception of the Incas’ domestication of the llama in the mountains of Peru.  Dogs and various types of rodents and birds were domesticated all over the world, rabbits were domesticated in Europe, silkworms were domesticated in China, and cats were domesticated in Egypt, but those smaller domesticated animals couldn’t do as much.

Agrarian societies that didn’t (or couldn’t) domesticate large mammals couldn’t use them for meat, milk, leather, wool, or fertilizer, and couldn’t use them as draft animals, transportation, or for warfare.  For instance, the Maya domesticated dogs and turkeys, while the Incas domesticated llamas and guinea pigs.  Mesopotamia was the home to the wild ancestors of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, and camels, while horses and donkeys both originated nearby.

In addition to providing the Mesopotamians with milk and meat, those animals also provided them with wool for clothing and blankets, leather for clothing and armor, and they turned a lot of grass into fertilizer that the Mesopotamians could spread on their crops.  The Incas and Maya could use their animals for those things, but not as much.  Oxen, camels, horses, and donkeys could be used to pull plows to cultivate soil that was too hard to cultivate by hand, they could carry riders faster than humans could walk on their own, they could carry more cargo than a human could carry, and they could pull carts, wagons, and chariots.  The Incas could use llamas to do some of those things, but not as much.  Meanwhile, the Mayas and later the Aztecs had to build their empires entirely by human muscle.

The sixth geographical advantage was Mesopotamia’s location in the center of the best climates of Europe, Asia, and north Africa.   Mesopotamia lies in the middle of the longest stretch of land in the world with similar latitudes and growing conditions, where domesticated plants— and consequently agrarian civilization— could spread easily.  That put it in literally the best place in the world for trade routes.

That meant the Mesopotamians could get more things from outside their land than anyone else in the world, and they could get things from further outside their land than anyone else in the world.  That includes simple things like raw materials and things people made themselves.

More importantly, it includes the ideas of how to make those things.  If someone who lived far away invented a new thing and you got one, you could see how it was made and what you could do with it, and then you could start making them yourself.  This also includes abstract ideas, like writing, mathematics, metal working, new farming techniques, and new forms of government.  Then, the more ideas you bring together, the more ideas you can combine with each other to invent more new things.  For instance, if you were farmers and you learned how to domesticate horses from one group of people, and you learned how to forge metal from another group of people, you could figure out how to build metal plows that worked better than wooden plows.

The seventh geographical advantage that contributed to the success of Mesopotamian agriculture never benefited the Mesopotamians themselves, but it’s the main advantage that broke the tie between the success of Mesopotamian and Chinese agriculture.  Europe and China are both large areas on the largest continent, with equitable plant and animal resources.  They both shared the first five geographical advantages.  Even though China was at one end of the continent instead of right in the middle, it was still part of the Mesopotamian trade route, so everything that reached Mesopotamia could reach China also, even if it took longer.

The geographical advantage that set Mesopotamian agriculture ahead of Chinese agriculture was the fact that Europe is divided by numerous seas.  That made it easy for people, crops, technology, information, and ideas to travel throughout Europe, but it created a great obstacle to political unification.

That meant that people in numerous countries were constantly aware of what the others were doing, they were constantly trading, borrowing, and stealing each others’ developments, and they were constantly competing against each other, first in open warfare and later to colonize empires around the world to take advantage of natural resources from other places.  Various empires rose and fell in Europe throughout most of history, but in the end they all fell.   It was fairly easy to wage wars of conquest against other countries in Europe by sailing the seas, but afterward, controlling conquered lands across the seas was more difficult.

China has two of the world’s largest rivers—the Yellow River to the north and the Yangtze River to the south.  Agriculture might’ve originated independently on both rivers, and one way or another it had to be developed on each, because their climates are too different to allow crops to be transplanted directly from one to the other.  Either way, they were fairly close to each other and didn’t have any major barrier between them, so they were quickly joined into one agricultural civilization.

Rivers are much easier to travel than seas, which allowed people, crops, inventions, news, and ideas to travel easily throughout China, and they were an asset to political unification, because rivers were the highways of the ancient world.  China achieved political unity about 2500 years ago and kept it intact fairly consistently ever since.  The Europeans are still trying to figure out how to unify politically right now!

At first, that let the Chinese get ahead of the Europeans and their Mesopotamian agriculture in spite of the Mesopotamians’ thousand-year head-start.  When Marco Polo traveled to China from Europe, he brought back many strange and wondrous Chinese inventions—including gunpowder.  But that early political unification became China’s downfall. The Chinese were much more powerful than all of their neighbors for so long, they didn’t need to compete with anyone.   The kings of the separate kingdoms of Europe kept trying to get ahead each other, so they ended up getting ahead of China too in the process, but no one realized that until much later.

The people of Mesopotamian had another advantage that’s worth mentioning.  To the east, the mountains rose to 5,500 meters above sea level. Different elevations had different growing seasons.  The fruits and vegetables at each elevation evolved to make full use of their growing season.  That meant that people could migrate up and down the mountains over the course of the year, as fruits and vegetables ripened at different times.  That also meant the people could bring a variety of seeds down to plant on the farms, and those fruits and vegetables would be ready to harvest and eat at different times of the year, instead of all them ripening at once.

Now we can look at the differences between the environments of the Maya and the Mesopotamians.

First was their difference in animals, which I already told you about.  The Mesopotamians could use horses, donkeys, and oxen to plow land that was too hard for a person to plow by hand.  That also let one farmer farm more land.  That also let a farmer use animals for other agricultural jobs, like threshing, grinding, and irrigating.  The Maya couldn’t use animals for any of those.

The Mesopotamians could use their animals for a lot of meat and milk, and the Maya couldn’t.  That means the Mesopotamians could use their animals to turn grass that people couldn’t eat into food people could eat.

The Mesopotamians could also use their animals for a lot of leather and wool, which meant they had a couple of raw materials to use that the Maya didn’t.

The Mesopotamians could also use their animals to turn grass into good fertilizer for their crops.  The Maya couldn’t do that.

A big difference the Maya’s lack of animals caused was the size of the countries the Maya and other people in Mexico and Central America were able to build.   An empire is an economic system, where people pay taxes and the emperor decides how to use them. If you have a hundred people in a farming village, or a million people in an empire, the hundred people in the farming village might like each other better and might be happier with their lives, but the million people in the empire have 10,000 times more people, energy, and resources on their side.  That’s why people from huge empires usually conquer villages full of happy farmers. But I guess I don’t need to tell you about that, do I?

To build an empire, you need an army.  Otherwise, the people don’t pay their taxes—they keep them for themselves.

The size of the empire is limited by how far the army can travel.  The army can only conquer people whose lands they can reach.

The kings of Europe could build big empires because their armies had horses and oxen to ride, or to pull wagons full of supplies while the armies marched on foot.

The Mayan emperors didn’t have draft animals, so they had to use their armies differently.  All the food the Mayan armies brought with them while they were marching had to be carried by men.  But the men who carried the food had to eat some of the food they were carrying while they were marching.  The further the army marched, the more of the food the food carriers had to eat to be able to march.  That meant the less of the food there was left to feed the rest of the army.  That meant the sizes of the empires was limited to the land the armies could reach within about a week’s march, because they didn’t have any way to bring enough food with them to march further than that.

That meant the Maya built smaller empires, and their empires fought each other, broke up, and formed new empires and alliances a lot more frequently than the Europeans did, because it was a lot harder for people to build empires, and a lot easier for people to break away from empires, in Mexico than it was in Europe.

Another important difference between the Maya and the Mesopotamians was that corn was a lot harder to domesticate than wheat or barley.  Wheat was the easiest crop in the world to domesticate, because all the Mesopotamians had to do was to bring it home and plant it.

Corn, on the other hand, was so hard to domesticate that the greatest biologists in the world today still can’t figure out how the Maya did it.  That’s a big reason the Mesopotamians learned how to farm 5,000 years before the Maya did. The closest wild relative of corn is barely edible to people, and nothing biologists have tried has ever turned it into a kind of plant that is edible enough to people to be worth the trouble of growing it.   Farming takes energy, and food crops contain energy.  If the food you grow doesn’t contain more energy than you have to spend to grow the food, ancient people couldn’t grow the food, because the food wouldn’t replace the energy they had to expend to grow it.   If ancient farmers tried that, they couldn’t grow enough food to keep themselves alive, so they would starve to death.  Of course, long before they starved to death, they would give up on farming whatever they were farming, because farming it wouldn’t be doing them any good.

Another problem with corn, compared to wheat and barley, is that wheat and barely have a lot more protein in them than corn.  That’s an important nutrient people need to live.

Another problem the Indians faced that the Europeans didn’t was that it was a lot harder for agriculture to spread through the Americas.  I’ve already told you how Europe and Asia are longer east to west than they are north to south.  The Americas are just the opposite, because they’re longer north to south than they are east to west.  It takes a lot longer for farmers to be able to move their crops north or south, because as you move north or south, the daylight cycles change.  The further from the equator you go, the longer the days get in the summer and the shorter they get in the winter.  Moving very far north or south requires you to breed new crops as you go.

The Americas are also almost completely separated into two continents.  Central America is only 40 miles wide at its narrowest point, which is also covered by dense jungle.  The Maya and the Incas built great empires, but there’s no evidence that the Maya and Inca ever met each other, or even knew about each other.  Each of them had things the other could’ve used, and neither of them ever got those things.  For instance, the Inca had llamas and had learned how to build roads, which would’ve been valuable to the Maya.   The Maya had invented writing and wheels, which would’ve been valuable to the Incas.  The Europeans traded ideas like those over much greater distances than the distance between the Maya and the Incas, but they didn’t have great obstacles between them.  It isn’t just a question of how far apart two groups of people live, but of how easy it is for them to travel between their two lands.

Also, there are a lot of jungles and deserts in the Americas, and there aren’t any jungles or deserts in Europe.  Crops that grow well on plains don’t grow very well in the jungle or desert.  If you learn how to farm well in deserts or jungles, you can’t grow your crops very well anywhere else.  So if you learn to farm on the plains, build farms all over the plains, and then reach a desert at the edge of your plains, you’ve basically run into a wall.  If you want to move into the desert, it will be very difficult, or impossible, for you to bring your crops with you.   Instead of moving into the desert, it would be a lot easier for you to move in a different direction where there were more plains.  If you do move into the desert and can bring your crops with you, it will take you so long to build farms in the desert, breed plants that can grow in the desert, and cross the desert by building new farms each year, that by the time you reach the other side of the desert and find more plains to plant your crops in, you won’t have crops that grow well on the plains anymore, you’ll have crops that grow well in the desert.  Or you could cross the desert quickly, but to do that you have to leave your crops behind and feed yourself by hunting and gathering wild plants and animals in the desert.  If you do that, by the time you reach the plains on the other side of the desert, you still won’t have any crops to plant there.

Here in the United States we have a lot of plains where we grow a lot of food now, but Native American farming never reached those places, because we have a lot of deserts in the western and south-western parts of our country.  Native Americans here in the United States built farms in the eastern part of the country where they learned how to farm on their own, they also built farms in the southwestern part of the country where they got crops from the Maya, and corn spread all the way to the east coast, where the first European explorers found it.  But there were no farms in the western part of the country or on our central plains until the Europeans came and built their own farms there.

The last big difference I need to talk about between the Europeans and the Native Americans was the diseases the Europeans brought with them.

The Mesopotamian and European farms that produced so much food for people also produced a lot of food for germs.  They did this in a lot of ways.

First of all, producing all that food and having all those babies let the people build big cities.  But in those cities, the people were packed densely together.  That meant there was a lot of garbage and filth in the cities.  That meant there were a lot of places for germs to live and then infect people.

The people owning so many animals was another way for diseases to infect people.  The animals had their own diseases, and sometimes diseases that affected animals could affect people too.  Also, all the manure from the animals was another place for germs to live.

Draft animals let people transport food further, so that let people live further away from the farms they depended on for their food.  Being able to live further away from the farms let people build bigger cities.

For all of these reasons, a lot more germs evolved in Europe than evolved in the Americas.

A germ is basically a tiny animal that eats people.  When germs infect people, they attack the people’s bodies and start eating the people.  In order for the germs to survive as a species, they need the person to pass some of the germs on to another person before that first person dies.  For most diseases, you get a little bit sick, you can pass the germs on to someone else, and then you get over your sickness.  That means your body kills the germs in you, but by then you’ve already passed some germs on to someone else.  That means the germ survives as a species, even though the germs that were infecting your body are dead.  The germs you passed on now infect someone else, they start eating his body, and they start making more germs—which means they make more germs like themselves for that person to pass on to someone else.

With a germ that makes you a little sick, if it takes you a week to pass the germ on to someone else, the germ can’t afford to make you very sick.  It has to keep you alive for a week, and it has to let you move around so you can come into contact with other people and infect them.  The germs in your body are killing you, but they’re killing you so slowly that your body can fight them off before they do.  But the germs have to let you do that, because otherwise they can’t reproduce.

If you think of this like the germs are planning on what to do, it doesn’t make any sense, because then it sounds like the germs that infect you are planning on letting you kill them just so they can reproduce.  This is one place where it’s good to remember how life began.  These germs are making copies of themselves, just like the original gene-molecule made copies of itself.  The life cycles of germs are more like a chemical reaction than they are like life as we normally think about it.

Inside the germs are gene-molecules that are replicating themselves by that same basic chemical reaction that’s been going on for 3 1/2 billion years.  In order for the molecules to make copies of themselves, they’re taking the atoms they need to make the new molecules out of your body—which is why the germs are eating you.  If the germs ate you too quickly, you would die, and all the germs in you would die, so the germs wouldn’t make more germs like themselves in someone else.  So that isn’t how germs are normally transmitted from one person to another.  Instead, the germs that get transmitted from person to person are the kind that leaves the person healthy enough to recover from his sickness and kill all the germs in his body.

If you crowd a lot of people together in a big filthy city, you make it a lot easier for a person who has a disease to infect another person with it.  If you can pass the germ on to another person in a day instead of a week, the germs can eat you a lot faster.  For that matter, if your city is so filthy that when you die you’ll still transmit the germs to someone else before they bury your body, that will also help spread the germs to more people.

That lets germs evolve.  First you have a disease that make people sick but doesn’t kill them.  Usually, when germs make more copies of themselves, they make more germs just like themselves.  But sometimes something changes unexpectedly, and they make a germ that’s a little different from themselves.

If that new germ eats you more quickly, it can make more copies of itself than the old germs can.   That means now you have two kinds of germs.  The ones that eat you more quickly get the atoms they need to make more copies of themselves more quickly.  So even though you only started out with one of the new germs, it makes more copies of itself than the old germs were making of themselves.

If this goes on for hundreds of years, every time a germ changes into a germ that can eat you more quickly, and you still pass the new germs on to other people, those new germs don’t die out.  So if you live in a big, crowded, filthy city, where you can infect someone else with your germs in one day, germs that eat you quickly will be able to survive and spread to other people.  If the germ kills you in two days, but you only need one day to infect someone else, the germ can make a lot of copies of itself in one day.  Then you’ll have a lot of germs to pass on to someone else.  Then the next day you’ll be dead, but some of your germs will be eating someone else and making more copies of themselves in that person’s body.

If you need one day to infect another person but you live in a big, crowded, filthy city where your can still infect people when you’re dead, the germ doesn’t need to keep you alive.  If the germ kills you in one day and makes so many copies of itself that it infects someone else before they can carry you out of the city and bury you, that germ will go right on making copies of itself, and killing lots of people.  That’s exactly what the plagues in Europe did.

The people who survived the plagues in Europe were the ones with the most resistance to disease.  This made the people evolve.  The people who survived the plagues had more children than the people who didn’t survive the plagues.  The people who survived the plagues survived because they had genes that gave them better resistance to disease.  So when they had children, they made more children like themselves.  That meant they passed their disease resistance on to more members of the next generation.

After the plagues swept through Europe, the Europeans who survived had better resistance to disease than the Europeans had before the plagues came.  The germs weren’t gone, they just weren’t affecting people as much any more, because the people who were left had better disease resistance.

Then when the Europeans came to the Americas, they brought their diseases with them.  The Indians they met hadn’t been exposed to the diseases before, so they caught a lot of Europeans diseases and suffered plagues like the Europeans had before.

Something that has been discovered recently is that Native Americans don’t have as good of resistances to diseases as the Europeans did even before the Europeans got the plagues.  The reason for that is people had lived in Africa, Asia, and Europe for as long as people had existed, so they had moved around a lot and passed their disease resistance genes around to each other.

The Americas were settled by a fairly small group of people who lived in one corner of Asia.  They didn’t have as much disease resistance in their group as people had in all of Europe.  That meant they didn’t have as many genes for disease resistance.  That means they didn’t bring as many genes for disease resistance to America.  That means their descendants didn’t inherit as many genes for disease resistance as people did in Europe.

That’s one reason it’s been so hard to figure out how many Native Americans were killed by diseases, because the number was so much bigger for Native Americans than it was for Europeans that a lot of people thought the numbers must be wrong.  In Europe the plagues killed about 1 out of every 3 people.  In the Americas it was more like 9 out of 10 people, or something like that.

(I should add here that the Native Americans being descended from a smaller group of people made them healthier in some ways than the Europeans ever were, especially before the Europeans brought their plagues.  In the same way that the small group of people only brought a few genes for disease resistance when they came, they also brought only a few genes for disease with them.  There are some genes people have that give them diseases, because those genes don’t work very well with other human genes, so they make people unhealthy.  But the small group of people who settled the Americas didn’t have a lot of those genes either.  That meant that Native Americans couldn’t inherit a lot of disease genes that affected Europeans, because nobody’s ancestors had brought those genes into the Americas in the first place.)

People learning how to farm started a lot of big changes in the world.  The people who were learning how to farm didn’t know what was going to happen as a result of what they were doing.  All they knew was that they were producing food the best way they could find.

People who hunted and gathered wild animals and plants each had to be able to produce their own food.  The economic relationship between people and the environment was simple enough that people had to be self sufficient.  Since the people lived in a wild environment, they each had to know how to do everything they needed to do to live in their environment.  That included producing their own food, making their own tools, and building their own homes.  There was some basic division of labor between men and women, adults and children, and younger and older adults, based on the things they were physically able to do.  People who hunted and gathered got very good at the things they did, but they had no way of controlling what jobs they did when.

This is hard for a lot of people in America to understand, but farmers still live this way.   Hunter gatherers lived this way even more.  Since the people lived in the wild environment, they didn’t control their food production, or anything else in their environment.  The environment produced their food and the other things they needed by the changing seasons and the weather.  Here in the United States we have a saying, “You have to make hay while the sun shines.”  When the environment produces something you need, everyone has to work at collecting those things while they have the chance.  Then everyone moves on to the next thing they need to do.

If animals migrate through your land at a certain time of the year, that’s the time of the year all the men go out to hunt them.  If the fruit of a certain kind of plant ripens at a certain time of the year, that’s the time of the year everyone has to go out to pick them.  If fish migrate up a river at a certain time of the year, that’s the time of the year everyone has to catch their fish.  And so on.

There are a few ways you can look at this.  First of all, this is how all the animals live—every animals is self-sufficient in finding their own food—and people who hunted and gathered had nothing else to compare their lives to, so they had no reason to think of a different economic system.

Second, the cycles of the environment produced the things the people needed to use about as fast as the people used them, so no one could afford not to take advantage of the things the environment was producing at any time.  Even if people could afford to let some opportunities go to waste, they still had to imagine they could afford to let the opportunity go to waste, and they had to think of something else they could be doing instead.  When your river is full of fish and everyone you know is out catching fish, just like everyone you know has always done every summer, what else are you going to think about for the best way to spend your day?

Third, if everyone lived out in the wild environment, and everyone knew how to get the things they needed to live in the wild environment, there was no way to force economic inequality on anyone.  Since everyone knew how to provide for themselves, and everyone knew that everyone else knew how to provide for themselves, that was the economic system everyone used.  Everyone worked equally hard, and everyone produced equally much, because if you tried to force anyone to work harder than anyone else, or tried to take some of the products of someone else’s work, they could leave your group and go produce the things they needed for themselves somewhere else.  Everyone in the group knew they could do this, and everyone knew that everyone else knew it, so if you were the leader of the group and you tried to tell everyone that you were so important that they should catch your food for you, they’d all laugh at you and tell you you weren’t the leader of the group anymore.

Every group of hunter-gathering people lived in a different environment, so some groups of people could produce more than others, and some groups had to work harder than others.  Some groups couldn’t afford to support any non-food producing people, and some groups could’ve supported some but didn’t think of it.  However it happened for any particular group, the end result was that groups of hunter-gatherers didn’t support many non-food-producing people.

I’ve told you how farming was a more efficient way to produce food than hunting and gathering wild animals and plants.  I’ve told you how farming depended on people being able to store the food they grew to eat year round.  When people started producing enough food to store year round, it meant they had food sitting around all year round.  That meant some people could afford not to farm now.  That meant the farmers had to work a little harder, but the work was spread out over a year, and the food was all brought in at the same time in the fall.  The farmers produced a lot of food anyway, so if they worked a little harder and produced a little more food, would they notice?

If ten farmers supported one non-food producing person among them one year, and then two the next, and three the next, and so on, would they notice that they had to work a little harder each year?  When you get to 10 farmers supporting 20 non-food-producing people, they’ll all have to work a lot harder than they did when they were only supporting one non-food-producing person 20 years ago, but supporting 20 non-food-producing people won’t be much harder than supporting the 19 non-food-producing people they supported last year.

The surplus food production made division of labor possible.  It started out with a few people who were very good at something besides farming doing something else that benefited the farmers, in exchange for food.  Inventors and craftsmen could invent and build better tools for the farmers, or build better buildings for storing the food in, or whatever made farming easier.  That let the farmers produce more food, and that let them produce even more of a food surplus.

Now other occupations were possible also.

Now the people could support full-time political leaders, so those political leaders could do more of what they were good at, organize people, and figure out what the people needed to do to get the things they wanted—like keep themselves from getting conquered by their neighbors.

The farmers could support full time assistants to their political leaders, to help them keep track of things.  With more and more people living in the same area thanks to all that food being produced and all those babies people were having, the people needed bigger and bigger political structures to keep everything organized, make sure all the work got done, make sure everyone did their jobs, and so on.

Farmers could support full-time spiritual leaders, who could devote all their time to contemplating life and thinking of things to say to cheer the farmers up.

Farmers could also support full-time militaries to keep them safe.  Full time soldiers could spend all their time training and fighting wars.  That gave them a big advantage over hunter-gatherer warriors, who had to try to fight wars and feed themselves at the same time.  Full time militaries were also important for keeping farmers from getting conquered by their neighbors who supported full-time militaries.

Each of those occupations were jobs that people had already been doing as hunter-gatherers.  But now that the people who were good at them could devote all their time to them, it made a lot more things happen.

The full-time inventors and craftsmen could build better weapons and armor for the full-time soldiers, and the full-time political leaders, with the help of their full-time bureaucrats could send the soldiers to conquer more land to add to their kingdom.  The full-time religious leaders could support the political leaders’ decisions by saying that waging wars and conquering people was the right thing to do.

The full-time inventors could invent new things and the full-time political leaders could tell the full-time craftsmen to make a lot of them.  Then they built irrigation canals for their farms, roads, bridges, dams, buildings, castles, or whatever else the political leaders wanted.  Each new thing the people built let them do things they couldn’t do without the thing, or let them do something they couldn’t do as easily without it.  Roads let people travel faster, bridges made it easier for people to cross rivers, castles made it easier for people to defend their lands against invaders, and so on.   Eventually, the Europeans built a lot of ships and learned how to sail across the ocean, where they discovered the Americas.

The full-time religious leaders could figure out how to tell everyone what to do by making everyone afraid of what their gods would do to them if they disobeyed the religious leaders.  The religious leaders could even use that trick on the political leaders, to make the political leaders do what the religious leaders want them to do.  Or political leaders could decide what they wanted to do and get the religious leaders to cooperate with them.  Then if the political leaders wanted to make the farmers work all the time and take all the food they produced, the religious leaders could tell everyone their god had told them that’s how the world was supposed to be.  That helped keep peasants from overthrowing their kings, because if a lot of them believed that their god decided that this was how the world was supposed to be, a lot of peasants wouldn’t see that it would do any good to overthrow their king, or they would believe they couldn’t do it because the king had their god on his side.

One important invention that farming made possible was metal working.  It took a lot of work for people to learn how to forge metal into tools and weapons.  People were only able to do that work after farmers learned how to produce surplus food for the people to eat.  It took the Mesopotamians almost 5,000 years to develop metal working after they learned how to farm.

The Inca had started metal working just before the Europeans came to the Americas.  They had made some copper arrow heads.  When the Conquistadores came, they had steel armor and helmets, steel swords and pikes, and muskets and cannon.  The Spaniards’ weapons could cut through the Incas’ armor easily, and the Aztecs’ and Incas’ weapons couldn’t cut through the Spaniards’ armor at all.  That was a big reason Hernan Cortez defeated Montezuma and Francisco Pizzaro defeated Atahuallpa.

Another important invention that farming made possible was writing.  Writing was another thing that was extremely useful, but very difficult to invent.  It took the Mesopotamians a little over 5,000 years from the time they learned how to farm to invent writing.   The Maya also invented writing, and it took them over 2,000 years from the time they learned to farm to invent writing.   Those are the only two places on Earth where people are known to have invented writing independently.  The Egyptians and the Chinese might’ve invented writing on their own, but they both started writing after the Mesopotamians started writing, and they both shared trade routes with the Mesopotamians, so there’s no way to tell if either of them learned about the idea of making marks to represent words because they saw some Mesopotamian writing or because they heard about the idea from someone who saw it, or if they thought of the idea on their own.

The Mesopotamians and the Maya both invented writing to help them remember things.  The Mesopotamians invented writing to help their bureaucrats remember how much taxes everyone owed.

The Maya invented writing to help them remember their calendar.  The calendar was probably more important to the Maya than it was to the Mesopotamians, because the Maya didn’t live in as favorable an environment for farming as the Mesopotamians did, so the Maya had to remember better when to plant their crops.  The Mayan calendar counts three different things.  One thing they count is the cycle of 365 days in a year.   The next thing they count is a cycle of 260 days, which measures the nine-month cycle of a woman’s pregnancy.  Those two cycles coincide once every 52 years.  The third count they use to count from August 13th, 3114 BC, in the same basic way the Gregorian calendar supposedly counts from the birth of Jesus—that is, assuming he was born at the stroke of midnight on January 1st, Year 1.

Whatever reason the Maya had for keeping three different calendars, they believed that whatever they were counting was important enough that they were willing to go to that much trouble to count it.

Hunter-gathering people could’ve invented writing, except that hunter-gatherers didn’t need to remember or count anything badly enough to make inventing writing worth the trouble.  They could paint or carve pictures on rocks, so obviously they knew the things they needed to know to be able to invent writing, but they lived simple enough lives that they could remember everything they needed to remember without having to invent a different mark to represent each word in their language.

Writing was very valuable for people who had it, and it would’ve been valuable for everyone else, if only they’d had it.   Writing helped people communicate.  You already know what happened when people learned how to talk and share their ideas with each other that way.  Writing let people share their ideas with even more people.  Writing let people communicate ideas with people they never met, it let them communicate ideas with people who lived at other times, it let them communicate more specific ideas, and it let them record ideas to remember again later.

People who couldn’t read or write could only communicate ideas with people they met in person and could talk to.  They could only hear as many words as the person said, and they couldn’t remember all of them.  People could keep oral histories of their people, but the only people who can remember specific events are the people who were old enough to live through them.  If your grandfather told you a story about something that happened to him when he was a boy, you can tell the story to your own children, but you couldn’t tell it as well as your grandfather could tell it.  When your grandfather died, all the history he knew would be lost.

People who can read and write can write letters, or journals, or books that other people can read and learn from.  The people who write those things can write down specific things they want other people to know.  Those books or letters can be read by people who never meet the people who write them, or they can be sent from one person to another so the other person can learn something without meeting the person who wrote the words.  A person can write something down and then people can read it after he’s dead.  If your grandfather wrote down a story about something that happened to him when he was a boy, your son can read your grandfather’s words after your grandfather is dead and still learn the story directly from your grandfather.

Likewise, people who learn important things can write those things down so that other people can learn them easily, instead of having to back up and learn them all over again on their own.  For instance, before the Europeans came to the Americas, some of them figured out how to build ships and wrote down what they learned.  They figured out how to navigate by the stars and wrote that down.  Then Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas and wrote down a map to show how to get here.  Then Hernan Cortez got a copy of the map and came here with the Conquistadors.  Then he met Montezuma, fought him, and won.  Then he wrote that down.  Then Francisco Pizzaro read what Hernan Cortez wrote, and got another copy of Columbus’s map, came to South America, and met Atahuallpa.  And when he did, he used the same trick to defeat Atahuallpa that Hernan Cortez used to defeat Montezuma.  Pizzaro learned Cortez’s trick because he knew how to read, but Atahuallpa didn’t learn what happened to Montezuma because he didn’t know how to read.

I told you how you can see how the scientific story of the origin of life continuing to be told in any living thing you look at.  So let’s look at how it’s playing out in this agricultural history of the world.

Life began because that original gene-molecule made replicas of itself.  It continued because gene-molecules built cells, genes stuck together in cells, and cells stuck together to make larger life forms.  Now humans have thousands of genes and billions of cells, and our genes made our brains to make us replicate our genes.  Other genes created plants and others created animals.

There are two main ways you can see that happening in this history of the world.

First of all, humans helped some animals and plants to replicate their genes, and they used the animals and plants to help themselves replicate their own genes.

When humans found plants or animals that they could use for food, they planted the seeds of those plants and they tamed the animals, brought them home, and bred them.  Those animals and plants had a lot more children because of what the humans did.  Having children is exactly what the plants and animals were trying to do.

The humans brought those plants and animals home because they had characteristics that were useful to humans.  When the humans bred the plants and animals with the best characteristics, they helped the plants and animals with the best characteristics make the most children that were like themselves.  That means that when people learned to farm, they made wild plants and animals evolve into domestic plants and animals.  Domestic plants and animals are different from their wild ancestors, and they are different precisely because they have characteristics that are more useful to humans.  Dogs are more friendly to humans that wolves are, domestic tomato plants grow bigger tomatoes than wild tomato plants, and so on.  When farmers continue to breed domestic plants and animals they make evolution continue to happen.  They produce different breeds of dogs that are good at different things, like hunting, or guarding someone’s house, or helping to herd sheep, or whatever.  They produce breeds of tomatoes, or corn, or whatever, that’s bigger than the others, or sweeter than the others, or whatever.

The other way you can see the scientific story of the origin of life continue to play out in this story is by the way people acted.  People are made out of genes that replicate themselves through extremely complicated processes.  It sounds absurd to think this agricultural history of the world was a story of genes replicating themselves, but consider this:

The Mesopotamians and the Maya each learned how to farm because that let them produce the most food.  They needed food to live.  When they produced more food, they could have more children.  When they had children, they made copies of their genes and put them into their children.  Each child is half a copy of its mother and half a copy of its father, because each child carries half of the mother’s genes and half of the father’s genes.

Then the Europeans got the Mesopotamians’ agriculture, and they did the same thing.  Then they built ships, discovered the Americas, and colonized them.  When the Europeans colonized the Americas, they killed a lot of Maya, Aztecs, Inca, and other Native Americans.  Then the Europeans settled on the Native Americans’ land, planted their crops there, grew their food, had more children, and filled up the Americas—especially the United States and Canada—with European descendants.

The Maya did the same thing, but they weren’t as successful.  They learned to farm, built their empire, and conquered other people.  But for their various reasons, the Native American empires weren’t as physically powerful as the European empires, so when the two groups met, the Europeans won.

The Europeans were made of gene-molecules that were trying to replicate themselves by extremely complex chemical reactions.  When the Europeans sailed the seas, colonized new lands, built farms, and had many children, replicating their genes was exactly what they did.

Now you can see the part of the origins of life story where the world filled up with genes but some genes were able to kill other genes and use their atoms to make more copies of themselves.  Native Americans hunted animals, ate them, and had children.  The Maya learned to farm, built their empire, conquered the people around them, killed a lot of people, took what they had, and had children.   Then other empires came and went, and more people conquered other people, killed them, took what they had, and had children. Then the Europeans came, conquered everyone, killed a lot of people, took what they had, and had children.

Now you can see why the story of the origin of life is so valuable.   You can see it happening to you, right now.  The Capitalists are trying to conquer you, take what you have, and send you to work in their factories—which is almost the same thing as killing you.   Why are they doing it?

It’s not necessarily so they can have bigger families than they could have if they didn’t take your farms.  It could be so they can buy more things for the children they do have, like better educations, bigger houses, better clothes, and so on, so that their children can be more successful.  If their children are more successful, they’ll be better able to have children of their own.  Alternately, it could be because the people who are taking your farms want to buy more things for themselves.  If they’ve already had their children and their children are grown up and making their own livings now, the Capitalists can use the money they make from taking your farms to buy things for themselves to make better lives for themselves—which means, to help keep their own genes alive.

The other way this story of the origins of life is so valuable is because by knowing how to recognize it we can choose to act differently.  People, and especially Capitalists, think they’re so smart because they’ve invented a lot of machines—computers, airplanes, electrical power plants, and so on.  But when you look at the way people have been using their machines, you can see that they aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are, because they’re still acting just like animals.

When you put a new species of animal into an environment, the population of the animal expands to fill up the environment.  That pushes other species of animal out of the way.  That’s happened with a lot with European animals that Europeans brought to their colonies and then escaped.  Now European rats live in the jungles of South America, or on islands in the Caribbean Sea, or wherever, and some local animals have all died out because the rats ate all their food.

When you look at how the Europeans have acted, or how the Maya acted, or how many other groups of people have acted, you can see that they haven’t acted any differently from animals.  Not even rats.  What they did was just a lot more complicated than what animals do, but that’s all.  Beneath their superficial details, it was the same thing.

Now, when you look at the Capitalists taking your farms, you can see they’re doing the same thing too.

We can use our brains to figure out a different way to act, so that people can stop conquering each other, killing each other, and making each other miserable.  But if we want to do that, we have to use our brains.   If we just do whatever feels right to us, we’ll keep right on acting like animals without even knowing it.

This is a big reason why knowing how plants and animals live is the most important thing people can know about.  As farmers, you’ve seen most of the things I’m telling you about happen to other animals.  All I’ve had to do is to show you how the same things happen to people all over the whole world, and show you how to recognize why the same things that happen on your farms happen all over the whole world.

I think now you can see how Americans and the people who are taking your farms not knowing anything about how plants and animals live is such a big problem.  I can teach these things to you, but can anyone teach it to them?   If they can’t learn these things, they can’t recognize the mistakes they’re making, so they can’t change their minds and start acting differently.   But if they know so little about how plants and animals live, why do they think they know how to be the farmers for the whole world?

Imperialistic people love to find out about things like this, and say that the fact they conquered the world proves they’re fulfilling their roles in the world by survival of the fittest.  But that’s just an example of people who don’t understand what science is not looking at all the evidence.  It’s easy to say you’re fulfilling your part in the natural cycles of the world by survival of the fittest when you’re winning.  But the simple fact that people don’t like being conquered proves that human behavior just isn’t as simple as everyone learning to accept survival of the fittest as their political system.  One ability people have is the ability to cooperate with others for their mutual protection.  Another ability people have is the ability to think of these things ahead of time and realize that conquering people is only going to result in people fighting back against their conquerors.  And as anti-Capitalist revolutionaries, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

There is one other valuable thing we can see from this version of the history of the world.  All of world history, for the past 10,000 years, happened the way it happened because of farmers.  A lot of people have done a lot of things over the past 10,000 years, but in the end, the people who knew how to grow the most food…

Won.

Filed under: i: Zapatista University by Ezra
No Comments »

I’ve told you how all of biology is chemistry but biology was so complicated that it was hard to figure out a way to think about and talk about biology as chemistry.

What’s the chemistry of a horse?  Biologists know that every part of the horse is made of chemistry.  They can talk about the chemistry of how a horse breathes, or how it digests its food, or how it builds up muscle tissue, or how its blood works, or even how it grows its hair.

But how do you talk about the entire horse as chemistry all at once?  There is so much chemistry in a horse that one person couldn’t remember it all.  And even if one person could remember all the chemistry of a horse, what happens when the horse meets a cow?  How could one person remember all the chemistry for a horse and a cow?  And even if one person could do that, what would they do when the horse and the cow met a dog and a cat?  If the person tried to study biology as chemistry that way, he would die of old age before he even learned all the insects.

This problem was solved in the 1970s by a great scientist named Dr. Richard Dawkins.  He called his solution the Selfish Gene Theory, because he discovered a pattern of cause and effect that showed how genes make copies of themselves.  I’ve already told you how his solution worked, now I just have to tell you what that means.

He started by asking:  What chemical reaction does all life have in common?  Plants, animals, fungus, bacteria, and viruses are all very different things.  Viruses are the simplest of all.  They don’t need to breathe, they don’t have blood, and they don’t have most of the things that we need to live.  So what do people have in common with viruses that neither of us could live without?

The answer is genes.  Without genes, life can’t be conceived.  So now the question is, what do genes do?

Genes replicate themselves.  Way back when life on Earth began with that first gene molecule that made copies of itself, all the way up to horses and cows and dogs and cats and people doing all the things they need to do to live, genes have been replicating themselves.  That first gene made a copy of itself directly.  Then as time went on, genes built cells, genes combined with each other, and cells combined with each other, because those were all things that helped genes make copies of themselves.  The genes that were the best at making copies of themselves kept making copies of themselves, and the genes that weren’t as good at making copies of themselves died out.  Everything that’s alive today is alive because its genes were able to make copies of themselves ever since life began.  The way a virus makes copies of itself isn’t much different from the way the first gene molecule made copies of itself, and the way the genes of a horse make copies of themselves is much more complicated.  But all of the genes in the world keep making copies of themselves because the way they make copies of themselves keeps working.  As long as people keep having children, they’ll keep passing down their genes they got from their parents, so people will keep on living.  The same is true for every other living thing on Earth.

The reason it was important that Dr. Dawkins figured this out is because it gives scientists a point of reference to use when talking about chemical reactions in biology.

Now that we can see that life continues because genes copy themselves, and we can see how they copy themselves, we can see that everything any living thing does in its life, it does to try to help make copies of its genes.

Anything that you or any other living thing ever does in the world involves a chemical reaction.  No matter what you do, doing it requires energy, and you get your energy from the food you eat.  That makes your entire life a chemical reaction.  With the Selfish Gene Theory, now we can see that all the different chemical reactions of your life are steps along the way for genes to be able to copy themselves.

That sounds strange to a lot of people at first.  But when you consider that our bodies were created by our genes, and our genes live by continuing to copy themselves, the only possible explanation for anything a living thing does is that it does it because it helps make copies of its genes.  The fact that it doesn’t seem that way to us doesn’t prove it isn’t true, that only proves that we haven’t figured out why it is true yet.

On your farm, you know which plants are supposed to be growing there and which ones aren’t.  When you harvest your crops, you don’t go out and harvest all the weeds, because you can’t eat weeds—that’s why they’re called weeds, instead of crops!  When you learn to recognize which plants are weeds and which ones are your crops early on, you can pull out the weeds early on when they’re still small, so they don’t take up all the sunlight and soil and water that your crops needed.  Then you can grow healthier crops and produce more food.

This is exactly what you’re doing.  You pull the weeds out of your crops because it feels to you like the right thing to do.  It feels like the right thing to do because you need your crops for food, and the weeds make your crops produce less food.  But why do you feel that food is so important in the first place?

This answer is:  because your genes made a lot of chemical reactions happen that created your brain, and your brain makes you think in a way that makes you keep your genes alive.  Your genes need the energy from food to be able to make copies of themselves.  So your genes created a brain and a body that would get food to get the energy the genes needed to make copies of themselves.

Dr. Dawkins called this the Selfish Gene Theory.  Basically what that means is that every gene in the world survives by making copies of itself.  A lot of genes cooperate with each other, but they only cooperate with each other because that helps them make copies of themselves.  For example, all the genes in your body cooperated to make your body, and every time you have a child, you make copies of half of your genes.  If you have two children, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll make a copy of all of your genes.  Genes don’t think about things like this, because they’re just molecules that make copies of themselves, but the reason they keep making copies of themselves is because the way they make copies of themselves works well enough for them to keep making copies of themselves.

When I told you about the agricultural history of the world that Dr. Diamond discovered, that was pretty easy for you to understand, because that was just a story about people learning how to farm and what happened when they had more food to eat.  That story is easy for biologists to understand also, because they study how plants and animals live also, so they know what happens when animals get more to eat also.  But then at the very end I told you how it was also a story about how genes made copies of themselves because of people helping some plants to grow, getting more to eat by eating the plants, and how some people conquered other people, had more children, and made more copies of their genes that way.  So in that way, the history of the world I told you was not just an agricultural history of the world and a biological history of the world, it was also a chemical history of the world—because it was the history of how gene-molecules made copies of themselves.

Remember, genes are just molecules, so they can’t think about how to create your brain and your body.  You have the brain and body you have, and every other animal has the brain and body it has, because of a lot of trial and error.  All the genes that created brains and bodies that didn’t get enough food to keep them alive, died out.

For instance, suppose that once upon a time there were genes that created brains that made people want to find food and eat it, and there were other genes that created brains that made people want to smoke marijuana all the time.  Well, all of those genes need energy to be able to make copies of themselves.  The ones that created brains that made people want to eat food got the energy they needed to make copies of themselves, so they made copies of themselves.  The ones that made people want to smoke marijuana all the time didn’t get enough energy to make copies of themselves, so they didn’t make copies of themselves.  When those people died, their genes died with them.  The genes that got passed down to the next generation were the genes that created brains that made people want to eat food.

One way or another, everything you can do in life is something you can do to help replicate your genes.  The same is true for every animal.  Every action any other animal takes is an attempt to help replicate its genes.  Dr. Dawkins is a zoologist, which means he specializes in animal biology, which is how he was able to recognize this.  Since people are animals too, he knew this had to apply to people also, but he couldn’t figure out how.  Another scientist figured that out, and I’ll tell you about that later.

From the very strange discovery that all of life is a process of genes making copies of themselves, we make a discovery that seems so obvious that it doesn’t seem like a discovery at all.  But often times, things that seem obvious are the easiest to overlook or misunderstand.

Now that we can see that all of human life is a chemical reaction of gene-molecules making copies of themselves, that means that every chemical reaction people cause they cause because of trying to copy their genes.  More specifically, they do all of these things because their genes exist in the first place.  That seems obvious, because if human genes didn’t exist, humans wouldn’t exist, so all the things people do wouldn’t be happening.

This is a good point of reference to be able to use because a lot of people say that the world is so complicated we can’t know why things happen.  But that’s a lie.  The things that happen because of people, happen because people make them happen.  They don’t happen by magic, and they don’t happen by accident.  If something happens because of people, it happened because people made it happen.  When you know that, you that if people say things just happened in the world and no one knows why, you know they’re just playing stupid.  If you know that things happen because people make them happen, you know that if there’s a problem, people are creating the problem somehow.  If you want to make the problem stop, you just have to find what the people are doing, and how to get them to do something different.

The big question is, why did doing whatever caused the problem seem like a good idea to the people in the first place?

A big reason people have trouble figuring out that their own actions are causing problems is because they feel like a lot of things they do are good ideas.  If a person feels like doing a certain thing is supposed to be a good idea, but then something goes wrong, why would he think that his own actions were causing the problem?

With the history of agriculture, I showed you how people used their intelligence to figure out how to do a lot of things other animals couldn’t do.  But then when the people used all their new inventions to do what they felt to be right, they still acted just like animals without even realizing it.  Now they were just animals that knew how to build airplanes and cities and guns.

That’s an example of people using the brains their genes created and acting upon whatever their brains make them feel to be good ideas.  What Dr. Dawkins discovered was how to recognize that happening in any animal.  Then other scientists figured out how to use Dr. Dawkins’ work to recognize that happening in people.

There are a lot of problems happening in the world right now that are being caused by people doing whatever they feel to be right, and not realizing that their own actions are causing the problems.  The people who are taking your farms are one example of this.  They feel that taking more land is a good idea.  Then what happened when they took your land, but you had a revolution?  Now they think that the revolution is your fault, and that you must be a bunch of dumb peasants.  They feel that taking your land was right, so they don’t think the problem could be their fault.  But farmers need somewhere to live and a way to get their food.  If they take the land you needed to make your living, why wouldn’t you do whatever you could think of to try to keep your land?

This is what happens when people act on whatever they feel to be right without thinking about what they’re doing.  The people who are taking your farms could’ve used their intelligence to think about what would happen if they tried to take your farms.  But they didn’t do that.  Now you’re struggling to defend yourselves, and they can’t even understand why.

The problem could’ve been solved before it even began by the Capitalists thinking that they should just leave you alone and not try to take your farms.  But they didn’t think of that.

You don’t need to know things like this to raise your food on your farms—although there’s no reason you should be prevented from learning it either.   However, this is important to know about for defending your farms from the people who are taking them, for a simple reason.  This is an extremely important piece of information to know about how all life on Earth works.  The people who are taking your farms are trying to be farmers for the entire world, and they don’t know about this.  Once again, they are trying to be the farmers for the entire world and they don’t know the first thing about how the world-farm works.

Filed under: i: Zapatista University by Ezra
No Comments »

Another major breakthrough in the chemistry/biology problem was made in the 1970s.  This was called the Gaia Theory, which was discovered by another great scientists named Dr. James Lovelock.

Dr. Lovelock discovered how to study biology as chemistry for the entire planet at once.  Dr. Dawkins and Dr. Lovelock disagreed with each other on a lot of things, because they were studying biology at two different levels, using two different approaches, so it wasn’t always obvious that the two fit together.  Sometimes it looked like they disagreed with each other, even though they were talking about the same things using two different vocabularies.  But now that I’ve told you how Dr. Dawkins discovered his Selfish Gene Theory, it’s easier to use the Selfish Gene Theory to show you how Dr. Lovelock discovered the Gaia Theory.

Just like all the genes that create an individual person have settled into a chemical reaction that keeps working by all the genes working together to make copies of themselves, all the genes in an environment have settled into a much bigger chemical reaction that keeps working by all of the genes working together to make copies of themselves.

This is where Dr. Dawkins and Dr. Lovelock misunderstood each other.  All the genes in an environment don’t cooperate with each other the same way that all the genes in a horse or a person do.  Every living thing in an environment is trying to eat something else, and every living thing is trying to keep from getting eaten by something else.  But the result is that the whole environment, just like a species of plant or animal, keeps working the way it works because all the genes keep making copies of themselves through their interactions with all the other genes in the environment.

I’m a little surprised that Dr. Dawkins didn’t think of this, because he’s the one who discovered the Selfish Gene Theory.  That means he’s the one who discovered that all the genes in a tree or a cow or a person keep working together so each of them can keep making copies of themselves.  All the genes in an environment keep working together so they can make copies of themselves.  According to Dr. Dawkins’ Selfish Gene Theory, all the genes in a plant or animal only work with all of the other genes in the plant or animal because it helps them make copies of themselves.  Making more copies of themselves is exactly what all the genes in an environment do, even though the individual animals who carry the genes keep eating each other.

This is why environments survive for thousands of years, even though individual plants and animals are born and die.  Environments keep working the way they work because genes keep making copies of themselves.  But that’s just the beginning…

When we talk about local environments, that’s really just a human idea to make environments easier to think about.  It works pretty well most of the time.   But every “local” environment overlaps with all the other “local” environments around it, so there really is no such thing as a local environment.  If you want to talk about all the genes in an environment working together and making copies of themselves in a very big chemical reaction, you have to talk about the environment of the entire Earth.

Dr. Lovelock worked in the early space program here in the United States.  The space scientists had already figured out how to build things that were kind of like airplanes, which could fly all the way up to outer space.  They had even flown all the way to the moon, and some people got out and walked around on the moon.  Now they were trying to figure out how to fly all the way to the planet Mars.

Mars is a lot further away than the moon, so the scientists couldn’t send people all the way to Mars.  But they could send a machine to land on Mars that they could control from Earth, using radios.  They could put cameras on the machine to take pictures, and mechanical shovels to dig up some of the dirt to see what it was made of, and some other things like that, so they could learn some things about Mars without anyone having to go there.

One big thing the scientists were wondering was if there was life on Mars.  They wondered how they could figure that out.  Since they didn’t know where the life was, they didn’t know where to send their machines to look for it.  If they sent one or two machines to search for life on an entire planet, and their machines landed in the middle of the desert where nothing lived, they would think there was no life on Mars, but they would be wrong.  So they needed to figure out a way to search the entire planet from one place.

The solution someone thought of was that here on Earth, plants and animals breathe in and out.  That means they need a constant supply of certain chemicals, so they breathe in air to get the chemicals, and they breathe out air that has different chemicals.  Plants and animals keep each other alive that way because animals need the chemicals the plants breathe out, and plants need the chemicals the animals breathe out.

The scientists could figure out what the chemistry of the planet was pretty easily, by seeing what chemicals the rocks and dirt was made of.  From that they could see what chemical reactions would happen on Mars, and what gasses would be given off.  Those gases would create the atmosphere.  That would give them a pretty good idea about what the atmosphere should be like.

That meant that all they had to do was to outfit their landing machines with equipment to test the chemistry of the air.  If the chemistry of the air was a lot different from the chemistry the rocks and dirt should’ve made, that would be a big clue that something on Mars was breathing in and out.

Dr. Lovelock didn’t stay at that job very long, because all he was doing was helping design a small part of the machine, and that was pretty boring to him.  So he left there pretty soon.

Then he got curious.  Now that he knew how the experiment was going to be carried out on Mars, he tried the experiment on Earth.

Before, scientists had always assumed that the atmosphere on Earth had always been pretty much like it is now, and that plants and animals had only changed it a little bit.  But this is what happens when you assume you know things about the world without studying what you’re talking about to see how it really works.

Dr. Lovelock found out what the chemistry of the rocks here on Earth was, and from that he figured out what chemical reactions the rocks would have with each other, and what gasses they would give off.  That told him what the chemistry of the atmosphere should be.

Then he looked at what the atmosphere of the Earth really is like.  Scientists have known that for a long time.

What Dr. Lovelock discovered was that the atmosphere of the Earth was nothing like what it the chemistry of the rocks should’ve produced.  That means our entire atmosphere was created by the plants and animals that live on Earth.

The chemistry of the atmosphere the rocks would’ve created is the chemistry the atmosphere must’ve had before life began on Earth, because before life began, the chemistry of the rocks was all the chemistry there was.

That means that when the first gene-molecule was created, it probably didn’t need to breathe.  But either that gene, or one that was created sometime after it, started making chemical reactions happen that created new kinds of gas.  So those gasses were added to the atmosphere.  Eventually, a gene was created that could use some of the chemicals from the air to help make copies of itself.  That meant it started changing the atmosphere in another way by taking chemicals out of the air.

Over about a billion and a half years, the genes and cells living on Earth changed the atmosphere from what it was then to what it is now.

Then Dr. Lovelock studied the chemistry of the oceans.  The oceans were another way that a lot of chemicals get circulated around on the Earth, so plants and animals that needed constant supplies of chemicals could get some that way.

Dr. Lovelock discovered that the salt content of the oceans was wrong.  He could figure out what the salt content should be from the rate rainwater washed salt off of the land and into the ocean.  Then he compared that to the salt content of the oceans now—which was something else scientists already knew.

Before then, scientists had assumed that the salt of the ocean was caused by rainwater washing salt into the oceans.  But once again, they assumed they knew something about the world without testing their ideas to see if they were right.  On the one hand, before Dr. Lovelock figured out how to do this, nobody had ever thought of studying the chemistry of the entire world, or had figured out how.  But on the other hand, they are scientists, so they’re supposed to know better than to assume they know things without testing them to see if they’re right.

The salt content of the oceans is kept constant by sea animals that use ocean salt to build their shells.  When the animals die, the weight of their shells makes them sink to the bottom of the ocean, where they get covered up with mud.

If the chemistry of the atmosphere or the oceans was what the chemistry of the rocks and water would make it all by themselves, almost everything on Earth would die.

That means that life on Earth depends on life itself.  All the things that are alive right now are alive because of the environment that was created by the living things that came before them.  The combination of all the living things on Earth is what makes the environment of the Earth work the way it works.  Every living thing on Earth evolved to live in the environment that was created by all the living things that came before them.  Simultaneously, all the living things on Earth depend on the environment of the Earth continuing to work the way it works to keep them alive.

Everything on Earth has been evolving to live in the environments of the Earth for so long that by now every single thing on Earth is used by something.  Something depends on every single thing on Earth for its life.  That includes every single thing that other living things leave as waste products, from the bones predators leave behind to the air people breathe out.

Another big way local environments overlap with each other is easy to see.  A lot of birds migrate every year.  The birds are a part of the environments they live in for both parts of the year.  If something happens in one place that affects the birds, it affects the environment in the other place.

If some birds spend the winter in Mexico and spend the summer in Canada, the environments in Mexico and Canada affect each other.  If the birds build their nests in a certain forest in Canada, and then the same people who are taking your farms go cut down that forest, the birds will have nowhere to build their nests.  If they build their nests in a different forest, there will already be birds living in that forest.  That means there won’t be enough food for all the birds, so a lot of them will probably die.

Then the next winter when the birds are supposed to come back to Mexico, a lot of them won’t come back.  If there were insects that live in the jungles of Mexico, and the birds ate the insects, now there aren’t as many birds, so there will be more insects.  If the insects eat the leaves from the trees, now that there are more insects because there aren’t as many birds, the insects will eat more leaves.  But the trees need their leaves to live.  If too many of the trees leaves get eaten, the trees won’t be as healthy.  Now the jungle in Mexico will start to die because someone cut down a forest in Canada.

For another example, I’m sure you know that wearing light colored clothing in the hot sun keeps you cooler than wearing dark colored clothing.  That’s because dark colors soak up more sunlight, and that turns into heat.  Light colors reflect more light, which is why they are light colors—because more light bounces off of them and goes into your eye.

Snow is white.  That makes it the lightest color of all.  Now that air pollution is causing the greenhouse effect, the atmosphere is warming up.  That’s making snow melt all over the world.  The more snow melts, the less the white snow reflects light.  The ground under the snow isn’t white, so it absorbs more sunlight than the snow did.  That loss of snow creates an additional way the world absorbs more heat than it did before, and that makes the greenhouse effect even worse.  That makes even more snow melt, and that makes more ground soak up heat, and that makes more snow melt, and so on.

There are many things like this that can happen, that scientists have figured out now that they know about the Gaia Theory.  Some of the things would be very difficult for me to explain to you.   School teachers or university students could learn more about this and teach you more. What they all have in common is that someone does something that has an effect on something else, and that has an effect on other things, which the person didn’t expect.

Any time people do anything to the environment, they make it stop working as well as it did before.   If you extract something from the environment, you throw off some chemical reactions of the environment.  That throws off more chemical reactions of the environment. The environment can withstand those things to a point, because the new combination of plants and animals can balance themselves out again.  But if you keep doing things like that, eventually your environment breaks down.  Then your healthy forests start to die, and turn into thinner forests with smaller trees, with less living things in them.  Then thin forests turn into grasslands, and grasslands turn into deserts, and so on for every kind of environment.

Planetary biology is a very tricky thing, because people can’t live without having an effect on the environment.  However, people can’t naturally perceive the entire world, or the effects they have on it.

As long as people were living by hunting and gathering, they had very little effect on the environment.  They changed the environment, in some places they changed the environment a lot, and in some places they destroyed the environment.  Here in America, some of the Indians would hunt by setting forests or grasslands on fire.  Other Indians, who lived in the desert, would move from place to place, plant crops, eat everything they could find until there was nothing left to eat, and then move on to do the same thing somewhere else.  That worked for a while, but eventually their entire environment broke down because it didn’t recover fast enough, and they had nowhere left they could go to find anything to eat.  Those people disappeared, because their tribes broke up and the people joined other tribes who lived in other places.  Other people in other parts of the world made the same kinds of mistakes.

But whatever people did as hunter-gatherers, it was never enough to destroy the environment of the entire Earth all at once.  People destroyed the environment in some places, but for the most part, they didn’t.

10,000 years ago, that began to change when people first learned how to farm.  Before, an environment was made of thousands of plants and animals all living together and each of them creating the things other plants and animals needed to live, including being their food.  But when you clear out a whole field or forest to plant one crop in it, you change the environment of the area to one where only one kind of plant grows.  An environment with only one kind of plant growing in it is not a healthy environment.  Lots of some chemicals get produced, and lots of some chemicals get used up, and the other parts of the environment that had turned the new chemicals back into the old chemicals before, are gone.  So then you have to do things like bring in fertilizer from elsewhere, rotate your crops from year to year, and let your land lie fallow once every few years.

Right now, people are using about 50% of the land area of the Earth for farming, factories, mining, logging, cities, towns, and villages.  Doing any of those things means tearing out the natural environment and replacing it with something else.  Most of the land we use is for farming.  That means that with farming alone, we’ve already destroyed almost 50% of the environment of the Earth.

In a way, it sounds like farmers have been destroying the environment more than anyone else.  It’s true that farmers have been destroying the environment a lot more than most people realize, because farming doesn’t destroy the environment in ways that are as obvious as cutting down a whole forest and building a city or building a factory or mining coal or something.  Farming looks like people growing plants, and growing plants is what the environment was doing anyway.  The problem is that the farmers aren’t growing the right combination of plants to keep the environment working.

In another way, however, everyone has helped to destroy the Earth’s environment with farming.  Everyone needs something to eat, and everyone’s food comes from farms (with the exception of a few people who are still hunter-gatherers).  Who worked on the farms doesn’t really matter.  Someone had to work on the farms.  If everyone worked on farms and grew their own food, then everyone would’ve helped destroy the environment.  Anything else that people do to get their food depends on someone growing food on farms.

This is an example of why people learning about planetary biology is important, no matter who they are.  Since we all have an effect on the environment, we all need to learn what effect we have on the environment, and what we can do to have a different effect on the environment.  Teaching people about planetary biology means teaching it to them in whatever way they learn best—not just teaching it to a few people who know a lot about science and telling everyone else they’re just too dumb to understand it.

This is also an example of what happens when people who don’t know much about how plants and animals live try to take everyone’s farms and be the farmers for the whole world.

I’ve heard a lot about the milpas farmers grow in southern Mexico.  The milpa is probably the most highly developed form of farming in the world.  Instead of growing one kind of plant in a field, you grow a dozen plants.  Those dozen plants make a well-balanced diet, and they also help fertilize each other, give each other shade, or help each other reach the sunlight.  You don’t need to rotate your crops or let your land lie fallow.  A farmer can grow all the food he needs out of one field for his entire life.   In some fields, farmers have been planting milpas every year for 4,000 years.  I’m not telling you this because you didn’t already know it, I’m telling you what I’ve heard.

Considering everything you and your ancestors obviously figured out about farming in order to plant milpas, and considering everything I’ve told you about planetary biology so far, I hope you can see that you’ve figured out a lot more about farming than you realized.

A milpa isn’t just a farm, it’s an environment.  A lot of people think you’re dumb peasant farmers because you don’t farm big fields with big machinery.   How little those people know!  You’ve built the biggest farm machine in the world, but it’s completely invisible.  You don’t need to buy a tractor to help you grow a milpa, because you figured out how to plant crops that would help grow each other—which means they do the work of a tractor for you.   Probably the greatest environmental scientist in the world today figured out the Gaia Theory, but your ancestors figured out how to build Gaia machines 4,000 years ago.

Now those people who aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are come take your farms, call you dumb peasants, tear out your milpas, and use their big machines to plant their big fields with one crop, and say they know more about farming than you do, because they know how to get more food out of the land than you do.  But that doesn’t prove anything.  If they can get more food out of the land than you could every year for 50 years, or even 100 years before the local environment breaks down the way it does in a lot of places where people farm too much, what will that prove?  How much food have you gotten out of the land in 4,000 years?  However much it is, I bet it’s a lot more than anyone could get out of the land with a tractor in 100 years.   This is an example of science depending on people looking at all the evidence, including the evidence that contradicts what they want to believe.  If they want to talk about who can get more food out of the land than who, they have to look at all the numbers.

Meanwhile, those same kinds of people who are trying to farm the entire world but don’t know nearly as much as they think they do, are causing a different version of the same problem.

I don’t know how much you’ve heard about things that have been happening in the Untied States the past few years.  In 2001, some people who were kind of like you in a few ways anyway, got tired of Americans coming to their countries and telling everyone what to do.   A lot of Americans say those people are insane, or that their religion makes them hate us, but I’m not so sure about that.   We obviously did something to them, because they don’t hate people in Canada or Japan or anywhere else nearly as much as they hate us.

Those people attacked the United States one morning by hijacking big airplanes and crashing them into buildings.  They destroyed a couple of buildings and killed about 3,000 people.   We call those people terrorists, because they fight by killing as many civilians as they can on purpose.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, with all our factories and our cars, we produce a lot of air pollution.  That’s true in Mexico also and every other country in the world, but here in America we create more pollution than any other country.

Some of that air pollution traps the heat in the atmosphere, which is making the Earth heat up.  That’s called the greenhouse effect.

Hurricanes are created by hot air.  As the atmosphere warms up because of our air pollution, it’s going to make bigger hurricanes.

In 2005, a huge hurricane, which we called Hurricane Katrina, hit the United States and completely destroyed New Orleans, which is a large city on the Gulf of Mexico.   It destroyed a lot of smaller towns and cities also.  It killed about 1,800 people, or maybe more, and it left 3 million people homeless.  3 million people is 1% of the population of the United States.

I’ve told you how humanity has been destroying the environment in various ways for 10,000 years, without realizing it.  Now the environment is fighting a war against us, a lot like the terrorists are.   The only difference is, when the terrorists fight us, they destroy buildings.  When the Earth fights us, it destroys entire cities.

But the people who are taking your farms and trying to farm the entire world, or people just like them, are also the ones who own all those factories and keep producing all that pollution.  They say they know a lot about science because they know how to build factories.  That doesn’t prove they know anything about science.  All that proves is that they’ve figured out how to use scientific discoveries to build factories.  If you aren’t willing to look at all the scientific discoveries and see what they mean, you don’t even know what science is.

When you look at all the scientific discoveries people have made, you can see why it’s a mistake for the people to take your farms.  All the scientific discoveries put together say that one-crop farming and factories are both destroying the environment of the Earth.  If these people really knew as much about science as they say they do, they wouldn’t be taking your farms and tearing them down, they would be coming to work on your farms and learn what you know, so that they could plant milpas all over the world.   All the scientific discoveries put together say that milpa farming is the best way to farm without destroying the local environment, and without needing farming machines that create air pollution that causes the greenhouse effect.

If those people who are trying to farm the world knew anything about how to farm the world, they wouldn’t be tearing out your milpas and replacing them with single-crop farms, they would be tearing out their single-crop farms and replacing them with milpas.

Dr. Lovelock called his discovery the Gaia Theory for a specific reason.  I’ve already told you how the scientific story of the origins of life on Earth began with the Earth creating life.  A lot of religions around the world have creation stories that begin that way.  I’ve told you how you can recognize that same story continuing to be told in every living thing you ever see.  A lot of religions have stories like that too.  Now Dr. Lovelock had discovered that in a way, the Earth itself was alive.  In the same way that all the genes in your body work together to make copies of themselves, and they keep making copies of themselves because the way they make copies of themselves works pretty well, all the genes on Earth work together to make copies of themselves, and they keep making copies of themselves because the way they make copies of themselves works pretty well.  A lot of religions have stories about the Earth being alive also.

Dr. Lovelock realized that what he had discovered affected everyone, so he tried to make his discovery understandable to everyone.  To do that, he named his discovery after Gaia, a goddess of the Earth from an ancient Greek religion, because a lot of people knew about stories like that, so that would help them understand what he had discovered.

Dr. Lovelock was trying to do what I’m doing now, only he wasn’t as good at it as I am.    Of course, the things he had to work with to try to do what I’m doing were different also, because there was no internet back then, so people couldn’t spread their ideas all over the world then as easily as they can now.   He was trying to explain his scientific discoveries to people who didn’t know much about science, by comparing them to things people did know about.  In the same way, I’m teaching you about biology now by comparing it to farming.

Naming a scientific theory after an ancient goddess helped in some ways, and didn’t help in other ways.  It did make Dr. Lovelock’s discovery understandable to a lot of people who wouldn’t have understood it otherwise.  But it made a lot of scientists mad.  A lot of people who weren’t as great of scientists as he was tried to prove his discovery was wrong, or else they ignored it, because they couldn’t make the distinction in their minds that the name Dr. Lovelock gave it was just a name, and it had nothing to do with whether his discovery was right or wrong.

When Dr. Lovelock wrote his first book, he could see that the environment of the Earth was in a lot of trouble.  He was trying to warn people that they had to start living differently, or a lot of things were going to go wrong.  But it took other scientists so long to stop complaining about the name he gave to his discoveries and realize that his discoveries were right, that by the time they did, the problems he was trying to warn them about were already happening.

Scientists are people just like everyone else.  A few are extremely smart, and many are very stupid.  This is true for people who live in the United States and England (which is where Dr. Lovelock is from) and other places in the industrialized world, in a way that it isn’t true for peasant farmers.

When you’re a peasant farmer, you have to know a lot about a lot of different things.  You seem dumb to people from the United States because you aren’t very worldly.  As farmers you know a lot about dirt, you know a lot about seeds, you know the best ways to cut down plants, and so on.  You’re very specialized at a particular job, but you also know how to do all the other jobs that need to be done around your farm, like how to take care of your animals, how to build storage sheds, how to dig irrigation trenches, and all the other things your farm depends on.   You’re very good at doing one of the most important jobs in the world—producing food.  You don’t make much money at what you do, but if you know how to do everything yourself, including grow your own food, you don’t need to make much money.

Here in the United States, a lot of people who are very good at certain things specialize in their jobs also, but they don’t learn how to do anything else.  That would be like if you knew everything about how to grow plants, but when you needed an irrigation ditch you sat around and cried about it until someone else came and dug it for you.   These Americans, some of whom are scientists, are intelligent people, but that isn’t the same thing as being smart.  Discovering things and learning things is one thing, but what do you do then?  How do you put the information to use?

A lot of Americans use what they know to make money, money, money, and they think that proves they’re smart.  But it doesn’t, that only proves that they’re good at a particular thing.  They still don’t know how to grow their own food or raise their own animals or otherwise provide for themselves all the things they need to live.

They do provide for themselves, but they do it by focusing on how to do one job, getting paid money for it, and then using the money to buy all the things they need.  When they want food, they buy it.  When they want a shed built, they pay someone else to build it for them.  When they want an irrigation ditch dug, they pay someone else to dig it for them.  And so on.  Whatever people do in life, if they only know how to do one thing, when things change and they need to know how to do something else, or need to think about a lot of things all at the same time, they’re completely useless.

This is why most Americans think you’re just a bunch of dumb farmers.  Most Americans don’t care about dirt, or seeds, or the best way to cut plants, or raising animals, or building sheds, or digging irrigation ditches.  They care about buying new cars and new TVs and new clothes and things like that.  You don’t know anything about that, so they assume you’re just dumb peasants.

But where do all the things they buy come from?  And how many more will they be able to buy?  They have no idea.  They assume someone else keeps track of those things, and that someone else knows what to do.  But what if nobody is keeping track?  What if some people think they’re keeping track, but they’re wrong?  What if everyone is just doing what they feel to be right and assuming it’s supposed to work, and causing a lot of problems in the world, and they can’t figure out where the problems are coming from?  It will take me the rest of this book to tell you all about that.

Where I grew up, nobody had very much, so we all had to learn how to do most things for ourselves.   I lived on the coast, so there were a lot of fishermen where I lived.  It was in the forest, so there were a lot of loggers also.  There were also some farmers.  I didn’t learn how to do those things, but I learned how to do a lot of other things.  I learned how to build houses, fix cars, and a lot of other jobs that involve buildings and machinery.  I also learned how to be an artist, how to write books, and how to fly helicopters.  I also learned a lot about math, science, history, philosophy, and a lot of other things.  That’s why it’s so easy for me to learn about all these different things that scientists have discovered and see how they all fit together.

That’s also why a lot of scientists assume that I can’t possibly fit all these scientific discoveries together, because they all assume that I’m supposed to be as dumb as they are.  By that I mean they’re intelligent people with highly specialized educations, and no common sense.

This is a big reason why I’m writing this book about planetary biology for peasant farmers.  These scientists make a lot of big talk about how much they’re figuring out about what’s going wrong with the world, but they don’t realize how much they’re contributing to the problems they’re studying.  A lot of them think that learning about one field of science proves they’re so smart that they can prove that anyone who tries to teach science to people who aren’t scientists in ways those people can understand it, can’t possibly know anything about science.  So on the one hand these specialized scientists keep trying to prevent anyone from doing anything to solve problems in the world, and on the other hand, they keep complaining about how all the problems in the world keep getting worse.  Like I said, lots of intelligence, lots of education, and no common sense.

I’ve written another book like this one for scientists, but I’m not really planning on many of them reading it.  But you’re practical people who spend your lives working with plants and animals, and who know a lot about a lot of different things.  The specialized scientists already know some important things about planetary biology, and you already know other important things about it.  All that left for me to do was to fill in a few gaps.  Now we’ll just see who is smarter than who.

The Gaia Theory gives us another good point of reference for talking about biology.  Any time you talk about biology, you’re talking about individual genes copying themselves, and simultaneously, you’re also talking about billions of genes all copying themselves by interacting with each other.  You can talk about the Gaia Theory in terms of chemical reactions, or if it’s easier, in terms of food chains and lifecycles of plants and animals, and you can shift back and forth between chemistry and biology as necessary.

Filed under: i: Zapatista University by Ezra
No Comments »

The Gaia Theory is good for everyone to know about, but using it requires people to have a lot of scientific information.  You can’t get hold of a lot of scientific information, and you don’t have the education you need to see what all the information means.  But the Gaia Theory affects you, just like it affects everyone in the world.  Your ancestors figured out a lot about it in your local area, even though they didn’t have a way to figure out how it worked for the entire world.  So how can you talk about the Gaia Theory without the people who are taking your farms being able to say that the fact you don’t have a lot of scientific information proves you’re just a bunch of dumb farmers who don’t know anything?

Luckily, another great scholar figured out a way to do this.  His name is Jeremy Rifkin.  He wrote a book called Entropy, which is about the social and economic effects of the Laws of Thermodynamics.  This gives us a good way to connect biology to physics.

The Laws of Thermodynamics are the most fundamental laws of physics.  That means they’re the most fundamental laws of the universe.

A lot of people think the most fundamental laws of the universe are told to them in their religions, but that can’t be true for two reasons.

First, nobody can prove that their religion has the most fundamental law of the universe, because different people’s religions have different fundamental laws of the universe.   If two different religions say the fundamental law of the universe is two different things, they can’t both be right.  So what do people do then?  Fight each other?  Now we have Cortez and Montezuma getting into a war again over whether people are supposed to eat wheat and peas of corn and tomatoes.

Second, the fundamental laws of the universe in religions are always fundamental laws that involve people.  These kinds of fundamental laws usually say things like, “People must do something.”  But that assumes that people are the most fundamental part of the universe.  What about plants?  What about animals?  What about rocks?  What about stars?  What are they supposed to do?  People seem to be the most fundamental part of the universe to us, because we are people.  But that doesn’t prove that we are the most fundamental part of the universe, that only proves that we’ve confused ourselves.   This is another example of how humanocentricism gets people into trouble, and of how using science depends on looking at all the evidence, including the evidence that shows something you don’t want to believe is true.

This is also an important way that science is different from religion.  Some people of some religions have figured out the same trick, but not all people of all religions.  Scientists don’t study the way people act in the universe, they study the way everything acts in the universe, whether people are involved or not.  They discovered their fundamental law of the universe by studying what people do, and also what plants and animals and rocks and stars all do, and seeing what they all had in common.  When they discovered that all of them work the same way all the time in certain ways, those ways became the scientists’ fundamental laws of the universe.

I’ve already told you the scientists’ story for how life on Earth began, and told you how you can see that story continuing in every living thing you look at.  In the same way, scientists have discovered a story for how the universe began, and you can see that story continuing in everything you look at.

There are four laws of Thermodynamics.  They are called the zeroth law, and then the first, second, and third laws.  They are called scientific laws because they affect everything in the universe the same way, and they never change.  Out of all the millions of things scientists have studied, from ants to the sun, no one has ever discovered anything that the Laws of Thermodynamics didn’t affect.

The zeroth law was discovered sometime after the first law, and it turned out to be an idea that the first law depended on, so it was called the zeroth law.  It’s an important point of reference for scientists.  Basically, it says that if you have three cups of water, and one of them is the same temperature as the other two, those two are the same temperature as each other.  Basically, scientists found a way to prove that in thermodynamics, 1 = 1 = 1.   Scientists need to know how to prove things like that because if you just assume certain things are true because they seem obvious to you, that’s humanocentricism.  Sometimes you’ll be wrong, and then you’ll make a lot of mistakes in whatever you’re studying.  I’ve already told you what happened when they did that with the Gaia Theory.  When everyone assumed the atmosphere worked the same way it’s always worked, they didn’t realize how much it was possible for the atmosphere to change, or how much trouble that would cause.

The First and Second Laws are the most important for understanding how the Gaia Theory works.  The Third Law is useful for understanding how the universe works, without life being involved.

Perhaps you know that the Earth moves around the sun.  We can’t feel the Earth moving, however, because we’re on the Earth.  In the same way, the sun moves through the universe, and so do all the other stars, but we can’t see that by eye, because all the stars we can see are moving at the same speed and in the same direction.

Scientists who study stars have a lot of big telescopes for looking at stars, and have discovered a lot of science about how stars move.   By studying how light shines from stars, they discovered that a star would give off light differently if it was moving toward us or away from us.

You can see—or I should say, hear—the same thing happen if you stand by a train track while a train passes by.  A train makes noise the same way anything makes noise.   The parts of the train moving make the air molecules around the train move.  When those air molecules move, they hit other air molecules and make them move.  That keeps happening until the air molecules in your ears move, and then they hit the insides of your ears and make them vibrate. Your ears are parts of your body that are very sensitive to feeling air moving.  By feeling the air moving with your ears, you can tell that a train is coming.

If you’re standing beside a railroad track and a train is coming, or you’re standing beside a railroad track and a train is moving away from you, or you’re standing across a field from a railroad track and a train is passing by, the same train, the same distance away from you, will seem to make three different sounds.

When the train is coming toward you, it makes the air molecules move faster.  The parts of the train keep moving and making the air move.  Since the train is moving closer to you, each movement of the air it causes starts closer to you than the last one did.  That squeezes the movements in the air closer together.  A high-pitched sound moves air molecules faster than a low-pitched sound.  The sound of the train isn’t changing, but the train moving toward you has the effect of making the air move faster, because each part of the train-sound that reaches you starts closer to you than the sound before it.

After the train passes by you, the opposite happens.  Now the train has a lower pitch to you than it did when it was approaching you.  Now that the train is moving away from you, each part of the train-sound starts further away than the last one did.  That has the effect of making the air between you and the train move more slowly.  Since lower-pitched sounds are caused by air moving more slowly, the sound you hear is a lower pitched sound.

This is called the Doppler effect.  It doesn’t really matter if you can understand all of that or not.  If you can hear that trains have three different sounds depending on whether they’re passing by you at a distance, coming toward you, or moving away from you, that’s all you need to understand how the scientists figured out how the universe began.

The light from stars works the same basic way as the sound of a train.  Scientists who study stars figured out how to build telescopes that let them measure how the light from moving stars was being changed in the same basic way you can hear how the sound of a train changes.

There are a lot more stars in the universe than the ones we can see with our eyes.  Stars are bunched together into a lot of groups called galaxies.  All the stars we can see with our eyes are part of our galaxy.  There are some faint smudges of light you can see in the night sky that are the light given off by other galaxies.  With telescopes, scientists can see other galaxies a lot better, and can see galaxies that we can’t see with our eyes.

When a star is moving toward you, the light gets compressed, because each part of the light starts out closer to you than the previous part of the light, just like the train moving toward you sounded higher-pitched.  That makes the light of the star bluer than it would be otherwise.  If a star is moving away from you, the light gets stretched out more, just like the sound of the train moving away from you sounded lower-pitched.  That makes the light of the star redder.  You can’t see this red or blue shift with your eyes, but scientists can build telescopes that can detect this.

What the scientists discovered was that all the galaxies are moving away from a central point.  The way they’re moving away from each other shows that the universe must’ve begun with a huge explosion that shot out all the stars.  They called this explosion the Big Bang.  What the universe looked like before the Big Bang, no one can tell, because it wasn’t like anything in the universe as we know it now.  What we can tell about it is that it must’ve been some sort of huge ball of energy, which contained all the energy in all the stars in the universe.  It might’ve been one gigantic star that was millions of millions of millions of millions time hotter than the sun.

Figuring out how the universe began let the scientists figure out how it would end.  Since the universe began with a gigantic ball of energy that exploded, the universe would end when all that energy spread out.  This is basically what the Third Law of Thermodynamics says.  When all the energy is spread out evenly, the universe as we know it will stop.

Energy makes atoms and molecules move.  Atoms and molecules are always moving.  When you add energy to atoms or molecules, it makes them move faster.  When you remove energy from atoms or molecules, it makes them move more slowly.  When atoms or molecules with a lot of energy (meaning ones that are moving fast) hit atoms or molecules with less energy (ones that are moving slowly), some of the energy gets transferred from the atoms or molecules that have more energy to the ones that have less energy.  This happens because the atoms or molecules that are moving faster hit the ones that are moving slower.  When that happens, the ones that are moving slowly start moving faster than they were, and the ones that were moving fast start moving more slowly than they were.

You can watch this happen with two experiments.

First, find two soccer balls.  (You could use two rocks or two of anything as long as they weigh about the same amount.)  Set both soccer balls on the ground some distance apart from each other.  Then kick one of the soccer balls as hard as you can and hit the other soccer ball with it.

When you kicked the first soccer ball, you put a lot of energy into all the molecules in the soccer ball, which made all the molecules in the soccer ball move in the same direction.  You can tell this happened because the soccer ball is made of molecules and when you kicked the ball, you made the whole ball move in a certain direction—not just half of the ball or something like that.

When the first ball hit the second ball, it made the first ball move faster than it was moving before.  The second ball wasn’t moving at all before, and when the first ball hit it, it made the second ball move.  When the first ball hit the second ball, that also made the first ball move more slowly.

When the molecules in the first ball hit the molecules in the second ball, the molecules in the first ball transferred some of their energy into the molecules in the second ball.  That made the molecules in the first ball move more slowly, and it made the molecules in the second ball move faster.  You could see this happen because both balls are made of molecules, and when the fast-moving ball hit the slow-moving ball (the stopped ball, which had zero speed), the fast-moving ball slowed down and the slow-moving ball sped up.

You can try any variation of this experiment you want.  As long as one ball is moving faster than the other ball, there is no way you can make the two balls hit each other without the faster ball slowing down and the slower ball speeding up.

For the second experiment, you need two pans, some water, and a fire or stove to heat them over.

Chill one of the pans by putting it in a refrigerator or leaving it outside overnight.  Then put the water in the other pan, and heat the water over the stove or fire.

When you heat the pan of water over the stove or fire you are adding energy to the molecules in the pan and the water.  That’s making the molecules in the pan and the water move faster.  The molecules were already moving, but you couldn’t see that, because unlike the soccer balls, the molecules in the pan and the water are so small you can’t see them.  Now you’re making them move faster.

I’ve already told you how you get the energy out of a fire.  You use the heat of a match to break the molecular bonds in some wood, to let the sunlight out.  Some of that heat breaks more molecular bonds, and that lets out more heat.  Some of the heat hits the air molecules above the burning wood, and that makes those molecules move faster.  Then some fast-moving air molecules hit the slow-moving molecules in the pan and make them move faster.

Now maybe you want to ask how the energy got into the match head to start the fire.  The match head contains some chemicals that only need a little bit of heat to start burning and giving off more heat.  When you strike the match, you rub it quickly against something rough.  That creates heat by friction, and it’s enough heat to make the match head burn.

If you’re trying this experiment with an electric stove, the electricity moving through the stove burner is making the atoms in the stove burner move faster.  If you want to know more about how all that works, you could ask a teacher or university student who has studied physics.  This is what I mean about science and democracy depending on the same things.  There aren’t any questions you’re not allowed to ask.   Also, it doesn’t matter who you ask, because the physics that make an electric stove work—or that make anything else work—work the same way for everyone, in every part of the world.

Anyway, with the heat energy from your fire, you make the molecules in the bottom of your pan move faster.  When those molecules hit other molecules, they make the other molecules move faster.  That slows the first molecules down, but then the heat from your fire speeds them up again, so they stay the same temperature instead of cooling off.

Soon, the heat from the fire works all the way through the bottom of the pan.  Then the fast-moving molecules in the pan hit the slow-moving molecules in the water, and make the water molecules move faster.

When those water molecules move faster, they hit other water molecules that weren’t moving as fast.  That makes the slow-moving water molecules move faster and the fast-moving water molecules move slower.  But then the heat from the fire travels through the bottom of the pan and heats up the fast-moving water molecules again, so they keep moving fast.

As you heat the water over the fire, you make the heat spread through the water, which is why the temperature keeps rising.  Fast-moving water molecules keep hitting slow-moving water molecules and making the slow-moving water molecules move faster.  This makes the heat of the fire spread through the water.

If you heat the water enough, it will start to boil.  When the water was cool, it looked like it was just sitting there.  The water molecules were moving, but they weren’t moving enough that you could see them moving.  When you boil the water, you add enough heat to them that they start moving so fast you can see them moving.  You can see this happening because when the water starts to boil, the heat from the fire makes the water start to move.

Now take the pan of water off of the fire or stove and let it cool down for a while, until you can put your hand in the warm water without burning yourself.  Then pour half of the warm water into the cool pan.

If you feel the side of the pan now, you will notice that it isn’t cool anymore.  Now it’s warm.  Some of the heat from the water traveled into the pan because the fast-moving water molecules hit the slow-moving molecules of the pan.  The water molecules slowed down, and the molecules in the pan sped up, just like molecules have been doing to each other throughout this experiment.

Now put one of your hands into the each of the pans of water at the same time.  You will probably notice that the water in the pan you heated over the fire is a little warmer than the water you poured into the cool pan.  That’s because the fast-moving water molecules that you poured into the cool pan transferred some of their heat into the pan.  When the fast-moving water molecules hit the slow-moving molecules of the pan, the water molecules slowed down, which made the temperature of the water drop.

The reason I told you about the soccer ball experiment first is because as far as molecules moving and transferring energy to other molecules is concerned, molecules are just tiny little soccer balls that are so small you can’t see them.  The pans and the water you used in the second experiment—as well as everything else in the world—are made up of billions of miniature soccer balls.  When you heated the pan over the fire and then poured the warm water into the cool pan, you heated things up and cooled them down by making all those miniature soccer balls hit each other and move either faster or slower.

Everything in the universe is made of molecules.  Making molecules move requires energy.

Energy moves because there’s more energy in one place than in another.  Energy moves from the area of high concentration to the area of low concentration.  You saw this in your water experiment.  First there was more energy in the fire than there was in the water, but when you put the pan of water over the fire it made some of the heat of the fire travel into the water.  Then when you poured the warm water into the cool pan, some of the energy of the warm water traveled into the cool pan.  That made the water cool off and the pan warm up.

When all of the energy is distributed evenly throughout the universe, there will be no more areas of high and low concentrations of energy.  Energy will no longer move from one place to another, so it won’t make atoms or anything else move anymore.  Everything in the entire universe will stop.

More recently, as scientists have learned even more about how the universe works and built even better telescopes, they discovered that the origin of the universe is more complicated than they thought, so the end of the universe is more complicated also.  What the earlier scientists discovered was close, but today scientists understand more about the Big Bang.  Now they’ve discovered that all the galaxies are moving away from each other at an accelerating rate.  If the universe was formed by a simple explosion like a gigantic piece of dynamite, it should’ve given all the galaxies one big push at the beginning.  If it did that, they would be slowing down.  At most, they would be moving away from each other at a constant rate.  Instead, all the galaxies are moving away from each other faster and faster.

That means that something very strange is happening in the center of the universe.  It seems that the Big Bang might still be happening.

If that was the case, then the universe wouldn’t stop all at the same time.  Instead, the oldest parts of the universe would stop, but would keep getting pushed out of the way by the newer parts of the universe.  Whatever is happening in the center of the universe, even if new energy is being created, that energy will never reach us, because the center of the universe is very far away, and we are always moving even further away from it.

That might seem confusing and seem like an idea that’s so strange there’s no point in thinking about it.  But that brings me to the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, which is how you can watch the story of the origins of the universe continue to be told in your own house.  These two laws are also two of the most important pieces of the Gaia Theory, which let you see the Gaia Theory working, without any scientific education or scientific equipment.

The First Law of Thermodynamics says matter and energy can never be created or destroyed, they can only change form.  That means the total amount of energy in the universe is finite.  For the energy in the universe to be infinite, the universe would have to be infinitely large or infinitely hot, neither of which are true.  Even if new energy is being created in the center of the universe, the total amount of energy in any part of the universe is finite, because each part of the universe is moving away from the center of the universe.   Even if that isn’t literally true and our part of the universe is getting more energy from somewhere, the Earth is getting that new energy so slowly that it isn’t changing anything Mr. Rifkin wrote in his book using the old version of the Big Bang.

I should point out here that this is how science works oftentimes.  First scientists discover big clues about how the universe works, and get a general understanding of how it works.  Then later, more scientists discover smaller clues and refine their understanding of how the universe works.

You probably learned how a farm works the same way.  Maybe when you were three years old you learned that farms work by farmers putting seeds in the ground.  As you got older, you learned more and more about that basic idea, so you learned more and more about how to farm.  Today, as an adult, you know enough about how to farm that you can run your own farm, but you probably still learn more about how to farm as time goes by, so that when you’re 50 years old you’ll know more about farming than you did when you were 20 years old.  If you knew everything you knew when you were 50 back when you were 20, you would’ve been much better at farming, but life just doesn’t work that way.

This brings me to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics says entropy tends to increase.  That’s a fancy way of saying that matter and energy always move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration more than they move from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration.

You saw this happen in the water experiment.  All of the heat from the fire didn’t go into the water.  Some of the heat from the fire went into the water, but some of it went into the air.  You know this because you could hold out your hand and feel the heat from the fire making the air around the fire warm.  Also, some of the heat from the fire traveled though the water and came out the top.  You know this because you could hold your hand over the pan of water and feel the heat rising from the water.

You started with some energy concentrated in one place—in the firewood.  You wanted to concentrate that energy somewhere else—in the water.  But when you burned the firewood some of the energy from the firewood didn’t go into the water.  That means that the energy that went into the water was less than the energy that came out of the firewood.  That’s exactly what the Second Law of Thermodynamics says—that matter and energy always move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration more than the move from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration.

You can see the same thing happening on the front doorstep of your house.  You can see it happening to your shoes, and your clothes, and your tools.  The universe began with a high concentration of matter and energy, and all that matter and energy will keep spreading out until the universe ends.  The scientists’ story of the origin of the universe is being told everywhere you look.

Unless the front doorstep of your house is brand new, it’s worn down from where people have stepped on it walking in and out of your house.  This is the same thing that happened to the stone temples in ancient Greece, where the wise old men discovered the idea of atoms.  Every time someone steps on the doorstep of your house, the friction of their foot makes a few atoms break loose from your doorstep.  Basically, every time someone steps on the front doorstep of your house, they turn a tiny bit of your doorstep into dust that’s so fine no one can see it.  That dust then gets blown away on the wind, or washed away by the rain, and mixes with the rest of the dirt outside your house.  Or maybe it ends up inside your house and you clean it up when you sweep your floor.  It doesn’t matter.  The point is, it’s no longer part of your doorstep.  That means that as time goes by, the more people step on your front doorstep, the more your doorstep gets worn away.

This happens to everything in the world.  Your shoes get worn out over time.  So do your clothes.  So do your tools.  It all happens the same way.  Friction makes atoms and molecules break off whatever they were attached to.

In every case, in the beginning a lot of atoms and molecules were concentrated in one place.   If you have a stone for the front step of your house, it means you have a high concentration of stone molecules for your front step.  As time goes by, the stone molecules wear off the stone and get spread more evenly throughout the world.  Before there were a lot of stone molecules in one place.  Now there are a few less stone molecules in the original place, and a few more somewhere else, turned into dust.

The sun is basically a gigantic ball of fire.  It isn’t a fire like you would light in a fireplace to make tortillas, it’s a lot more complicated than that.  The sun burns the way it does because a lot of atoms are constantly being torn apart and give off huge amounts of energy, which is why the sun burns at millions of degrees instead of a few hundred, like your cooking fire.  This is another one of those things that you’ll have to learn more about if you go to a university to learn about science.  But as far as farmers who want to learn about planetary biology are concerned, the sun is a giant ball of fire.

Like any other kind of fire, the sun needs fuel in order to burn.  It has a certain amount of fuel, and as time goes by, its fuel gets burned up.

The sun is very hot.  Outer space is very cold.  In the same way that mountains are colder at the top than they are at the bottom, the sky above a mountain is a lot colder than the top of any mountain.   The reason for this is simple enough. If you warmed two rocks by the fire, a bigger rock could store more heat than a smaller rock, so it would stay warm longer.  The Earth is a gigantic rock, so it soaks up a lot of heat from sunlight.  High in the sky, there is nothing to soak up heat except for tiny dust particles.

The sun is much bigger than the Earth, and it’s very far away.  Out of all the sunlight the sun gives off, only a tiny amount of it shines on the Earth and turns into heat.  The rest shines off into outer space.  If you go to a university, you’ll have to get into a complicated explanation at this point about what exactly heat is.  But there are two basic ways you can look at this, and for what I’m talking about it doesn’t really matter which one you use.

The easy way is to say that the sun is very hot but space is very cold and outer space is a lot bigger than the sun, so it soaks up all the heat from the sun and never warms up.  That would be the same as if you heated a rock by a fire and then threw the rock in the ocean.  The ocean would cool off your rock.  Your rock would heat up the ocean also, but it would be by such a small amount you wouldn’t notice it.

The more complicated explanation is to say that the sun shines into space, and most of its light never hits anything, so it never turns into heat.  Then the heat of the sun is basically tied up in light that travels through the universe forever.

For our purposes here on Earth, talking about planetary biology, the easiest way to think about thermodynamics and the Gaia Theory is in terms of sunlight turning into heat.  Scientists have more complicated ways of talking about sunlight and heat that work well for some things, but the way I’m talking about them is the easiest way to talk about them for the things I’m talking about.

When the sun shines on the Earth, it heats the rocks and the dirt and the water and all the other things it shines on.  That warms up the ground, and the ground warms up the air.  That’s pretty simple.

Now we get back to talking about something you do know a lot about:  plants.  When sunlight shines on plants, it makes a lot more complicated things happen.  The sunlight adds energy to the chemicals in the plants that makes chemical reactions happen that makes the plants grow.  When the plants grow, they soak up nutrients—meaning more molecules—through their roots, and take in more molecules from the atmosphere.  Then they turn those molecules into new plant-molecules, which is how the plants get bigger.   The new plant molecules are large, and have a lot of energy tied up in the molecular bonds.

Then if you cut down a tree and burn it, or pick an ear of corn and eat it, the energy you release in the fire or the energy you get from eating the corn is the energy that came from the sun.  I’ve already told you all about this.

If there were no people in the world, this is how the environment would work forever.  Plants would grow from the sunlight, animals would eat the plants, other animals would eat those animals, those animals would die and be eaten by bugs and worms, the bugs and worms would turn the animal back into dirt, and then more plants would grow in the dirt.  Everything eats something else, everything gets eaten by something else, chemicals keep moving around in the environment, and the natural cycles of the world continue.  If there were no people involved, this is how the world would work until the sun ran out of fuel and there was no more energy for the plants.  That would take at least a billion more years.

Humans have used their intelligence to figure out how to do things no other plants or animals can do.  We can take things out of the natural cycles of the world, use them, and create waste products that nothing in the environment can use.   An example of this is styrofoam.  Styrofoam never breaks down because there are no animals in the natural world that can eat styrofoam.

Also, we can take things out of the natural cycles of the environment, use them, create waste products that could be reclaimed by the natural cycles of the environment, but leave them in places where those cycles of the environment can’t reach them to reclaim them, or can’t reclaim them fast enough.  An example of this is carbon dioxide.  Smoke from factories and automobile exhaust contains carbon dioxide.  Plants use carbon dioxide to help them grow.  But if you create too much carbon dioxide, the plants can’t use it up fast enough, so it builds up in the atmosphere.  Also, if a lot of carbon dioxide built up in the upper atmosphere, high above the Earth, plants couldn’t reclaim it there, because plants don’t grow high up in the atmosphere.

Taking anything from the environment and creating waste products the environment can’t reclaim uses up natural resources and creates pollution.  We call this environmental unsustainability.  We are taking things out of the natural cycles of the world, where everything is always being used by something to help it live, and we’re filling the world up with things that nothing can use to help them live.  What we end up with that way is less living things in the world, because we are turning a lot of things in the world from things that living things were using into things living things can’t use.

If one of the people who are taking your farms planted a crop on your land that used up the soil nutrients faster than it replaced them, this is exactly what would happen.  Right now, you start out with good dirt, you grow your crops, you harvest your food, and when your plants die they rot and turn into more good dirt.  The people who take your farms want to grow food faster. Farming that way, they will get more food, but they won’t have as good of dirt next year as they had this year.   Then those people will hold all that extra food up and say, “See?  Isn’t this a much better way to farm?”  But they won’t notice that the soil isn’t as good as it used to be.  People like that are doing things like that all over the world.

Before, you had good soil on your farm every year because you farmed in a way that made your dead plants turn back into dirt.  Now the people who take your farms farm in a way that produces more food, but doesn’t create good dirt for the next year.  That means they’re turning more of your soil nutrients into food, hauling the food away to cities or wherever they take it, the people there eat it, and the soil nutrients never come back to your farm.

The Laws of Thermodynamics give you a good way to talk about the Gaia Theory because in the same way that you can talk about matter and energy being concentrated in certain areas, you can also talk about them being concentrated in the natural cycles of the world.  In the same way that matter and energy always move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration, they also move from high concentration in their natural cycles and into wherever they aren’t as highly concentrated.  The natural environments of the world are so highly evolved that there are many natural cycles happening in every local environment, so there really is no way for matter and energy to move out of high concentration in one natural cycle and into somewhere where it won’t be as highly concentrated.  No matter where it goes, it will end up in another natural cycle of the world, and it will be used in that cycle just like it was used in the previous cycle.

Indeed, this happens constantly in every local environment.  I’ve talked about plants growing out of the ground, animals eating the plants, other animals eating those animals, the animals dying, bugs and worms eating the animals, the animals turning into dirt, and more plants growing out of the dirt.  But I never said that the plants that grow out of the new dirt had to be the same as the original plants that grew.  The plants that grow out of the new dirt could just as easily be different plants.  Then different animals would eat those plants, different animals would eat those animals, and so on.  So the same soil nutrients keep cycling thought the world, but they move around from one cycle to another all the time.

When humans get involved, they make this stop happening.  Perhaps the people who are taking your farms farm this way, but even if they don’t, a lot of people like them do farm this way.  If you plant a crop in a field that will produce as much food in one year as you can get, it means you plant only that crop.  That means you don’t plant other plants with deep roots that keep the soil from eroding.  That means that when the rains come, they wash your topsoil out of your fields and into the river.  From there, the river carries your topsoil into the ocean.  Your topsoil doesn’t do anything any good in the ocean.   Now you have less topsoil on your field where things can grow in it, and a lot of topsoil in the ocean where nothing can grow in it.   That means that when people extracted things from the natural cycles of the world and used them in a way that didn’t make them return to the natural cycles of the world, those things ended up somewhere they didn’t help anything to live, and you ended up with less living things in the world.

There is one particular way that people are making energy move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration right now that’s causing problems for everyone—and for some people more than others.   This is the burning of fossil fuels.

Coal is made of trees that died and were buried in the ground before they decomposed.  Oil is made of animals that died and were buried before they could decompose.  Natural gas is made of plants and animals that died and were buried, but decomposed afterwards and gave off gas that was trapped under the ground.

Now people are digging up fossil fuels and burning them to get the energy out of them.  The energy fossil fuels contain is sunlight that was buried under the ground.  This is causing two problems.

First of all, there is only so much sunlight that’s buried in the ground.  Now people are digging it up and burning it faster than more sunlight is being buried in the ground.  That means we’re going to run out of buried sunlight sooner or later.

Second, all that sunlight is stored in carbon molecules.  Our global environment evolved when all that carbon was buried under the ground.  For our environment to continue working the way it works, that carbon needs to stay buried under the ground.

When those carbon molecules are burned and are broken, the carbon atoms escape into the air.  In the air, they combine with oxygen atoms and turn into air pollution.  That’s called carbon dioxide.  That’s one important kind of air pollution that’s trapping heat in the atmosphere, and causing global warming.

With the Laws of Thermodynamics, you can see even more reasons that if the people who are taking your farms really did know as much about science as they think they do, instead of taking your farms they would be learning how you plant milpas and figuring out how to plant them all over the world.

Filed under: i: Zapatista University by Ezra
No Comments »

The basic economic effect that the Laws of Thermodynamics are having on the world is that all life depends on energy, but we always have less energy in the world, because people are using energy faster than new energy is replacing it.   People began mining and burning coal about 200 years ago.  They started drilling oil and natural gas some time after that.  Ever since, they’ve been mining and drilling more fossil fuels every year.  That means there has always been more energy available in the world for people to use every year.  People have gotten used to that, so now they keep planning on there always being more energy in the world every year.   But that won’t last forever.  At some point, we’re going to use up so much of our fossil fuels that we won’t be able to produce as much energy from fossil fuels as everyone is expecting. Then we’re going to have less energy available to use every year, instead of more.

It takes energy to make an economy function.  If you have more and more energy every year, you have more and more of an economy every year.  But if you have less and less energy every year, you have less and less of an economy every year.  That means your economy breaks down.  That means poverty increases.

Poverty is a relative term.  You don’t make much money compared to people in the United States, but if you produce enough to be able to live well, you’re not really impoverished.  That’s how I grew up too.  Where I lived, nobody had much money compared to people in most of the United States, but everyone knew how to produce the things they needed to live.   So people from most of the United States would think we were impoverished, but we never thought we were impoverished, because if you compare having enough to not having enough, we had enough.

A big reason you are able to produce the things you need is because you have the skills you need to produce the things you need to live without using much money.  Another reason is because you have cultural values to accompany the way you live.  If you live in a certain way, and you have the skills you need to produce the things you need to live that way, and you feel like the work you do to produce the things you need is the right way to live, you have everything you need to live that way.   That way, you’re not impoverished.

Poverty becomes a problem when people don’t have the skills or cultural values to live within their economic system.  We get this in the United States a lot, and you get it in cities a lot too when you leave your farms to try to work in factories.  If you live in a situation where you don’t know how to work in a way that will produce the things you need to live, it doesn’t matter how much money you make.  If someone offers you a job in a city making twice as much money as you make now, but it costs you five times as much money for food and a home in the city, you can’t live as well in the city as you could live on your farm.  You will be making more money, but you will also be impoverished.

Likewise, if you work on your farm and are happy with your life, it means you feel like you have enough to live.  Here in the United States especially, people have found they can make a lot of money by making people unhappy with their lives, by making them feel like they don’t have enough.  That sounds stupid, I know.   People have found a number of ways to do this.  The simplest way is to put advertizements on TV for things people are selling, where people are wearing expensive clothes, or driving expensive cars, or using whatever it is the people are trying to sell, and acting very happy about it.  That makes a lot of people feel like they would be happier if they had one of those things.  So to get one of those things, they have to go make more money and buy one.  So where do they make more money?  Anywhere they can.  If they can come take your farms and make more money that way, that’s what they’ll do, just to try to buy enough things to make themselves happy with their lives again.

But then someone else is going to put another commercial on TV and those people will want something else to make them happy.  So then they’ll go take someone else’s farm to try to make enough money to make themselves happy again.  That’s a never-ending cycle.

Since there is only so much energy in the world, in order for one person to get more things than they have now, they have to get more energy—because it takes energy to make all the things they want.  So the more things they want for themselves, the more energy they need for themselves.  The more energy they have for themselves, the less energy there is for everyone else.  All those people need energy to live, and to get the things they need to live.  With the Laws of Thermodynamics, we can see that the only way people can get more for themselves is to take what other people have.  If you have only a little, and someone who has a lot wants more, then he can take what you have until you barely have enough to live anymore.  Or maybe you won’t have enough to live anymore, and you’ll starve to death, or be weakened and die of diseases.

The Laws of Thermodynamics create an economic system for the entire universe.  Matter and energy move through the universe in certain ways, and not in other ways.  I’ve already told you about that.

Life uses its own economic system.  Plants and animals need certain kinds of matter and energy to be concentrated in certain places to be able to live.  When you eat your food, your digestive system breaks down your food-molecules to give you energy, and it turns some of the atoms from the food molecules into new molecules you need in your body.

This is where the part about matter and energy moving from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration more than they move from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration is important.  Life depends on matter and energy moving from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration, but even more matter and energy moves from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration in the process.

When a tree grows, it soaks up a lot of nutrients from the soil and the atmosphere.  It only soaks up certain nutrients—the nutrients it needs to grow.   That means it takes a lot of nutrients from the dirt and concentrates them into one place.  Basically, a tree is a machine for turning soil nutrients and air into wood and leaves and maybe flowers or fruit.

If an animal comes and eats the leaves or the fruit of the tree, it gets the nutrients it needs to live.  That means it also concentrates certain kinds of matter and energy into a smaller space than it had been in before—from lots of leaves growing on many trees into the animal’s body.

But here you can see how more matter and energy is moved from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration.  The animal needs some of the energy it eats to move from tree to tree, eating more food.   Think about how much food you eat.  If you eat half a kilogram of food at every meal, and you eat three meals a day, in a year you eat five hundred kilograms of food.  But you don’t weigh 500 kilograms more this year than you did last year, do you?  If digestion worked that way, when you were 40 years old, you would weigh 20,000 kilograms.

For animals and plants, this wasn’t a problem.  Their digestion systems never used all the matter and energy they took in from their food, but one way or another, all the matter ended up back in the environment where it was used by something else to live.  The energy always radiates into the air eventually, and sooner or later it radiates off the Earth and out into space just like most of the energy from the sun does.  But all the energy that radiates off the Earth is always replaced by more energy from the sunlight that shines on the Earth.

Since the economy of the universe makes matter and energy move from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration, and the economic system of life depends on matter and energy moving from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration, you can see that the economic system of life works against the economic system of the universe.  But the economic system of life always made matter and energy move around in the environment in a way that other plants and animals would be able to use it afterwards.  The only energy that was lost permanently was the energy from the sun.  So even though the economic system of the universe and the economic system of life were opposed to each other, that wasn’t going to be a problem until the sun ran out of fuel.

Humans make matter and energy move in ways that remove matter and energy from the cycles of the world and don’t replace it, as I’ve said.  The problem is that people naturally perceive the economic system of life, but they don’t naturally perceive the economic system of the universe.  People, like all other living things, live by concentrating matter and energy into small spaces.  That makes concentrating matter and energy into small spaces seem like a good idea to people, because they don’t naturally perceive the effects their actions have on the world.

This is another example of how humanocentricism gets people into trouble.  If people act on what they feel to be the best ideas, and assume that the fact they feel them to be the best ideas proves that must be how the universe works, their actions will cause problems, and then they won’t be able to recognize where their problems are coming from.  This is another problem that people have to think about in order to solve, and that they have to look at all the evidence to be able to understand—even the evidence that shows things they don’t want to believe.

Consider what is necessary to make a simple metal shovel head.  A shovel is useful because it lets you dig in the ground.  A shovel head is made out of steel, and it works the way it does because it’s a very specific shape.  That means to make the shovel head, someone moved a lot of matter and energy from areas of low concentration to an area of high concentration.  But that also means they must’ve moved even more energy from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration.

First they had to dig a mine to get to the iron ore they needed for the steel.  They had to eat a lot of food to do their work and burn a lot of oil to power all that mining equipment.  That means they used up a lot of energy.  They also had to move a lot of rocks out of the way to get to the iron ore they wanted.  That means they had to move a lot of matter from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration.  Maybe moving a lot of rocks from one place to another doesn’t seem very important, but it is still work that has to be done, and doing that work requires energy.

Then people have to burn more fuel to smelt the ore.  Then they have to burn more fuel to forge the steel.  Then they have to burn more fuel to shape it into a shovel head. All of that matter had to be moved, and all of that energy had to be expended, just so you could shovel dirt on your farm.  You wanted steel to be highly concentrated into one place, and you wanted it to be concentrated into a certain shape.  So you have to pay for that in matter and energy at every step of the process.

Here in the United States we build things that are way more complicated than shovel heads every day.  We build airplanes and cars and computers and huge office buildings, and all kinds of things.  Every time anyone builds anything like that, a lot more energy and matter is moved from areas of low concentration to areas of high concentration, in order to make the thing, just like when you wanted your steel shovel head.  And just like when you wanted your shovel head, the Americans had to pay at every step of the process by moving even more matter and energy from areas of high concentration to areas of low concentration.  Since cars and airplanes are so much more complicated to build than shovel heads, that means there are a lot more steps in building them.  That means a lot more energy and matter has to be moved from place to place.

The economy of the people who are taking your farms— Capitalism— seems like a good idea to so many people because that economic system depends on people understanding the least about how the world works.  Capitalism only depends on people wanting matter and energy to be highly concentrated in certain things, which is how the economic system of life has always worked.  But it uses up a lot of resources, creates a lot of pollution, and destroys a lot of environments, and the people can’t understand why.   People can learn how the economic system of the universe works, but that requires education.  If they don’t have the education, the economic system they understand and that they try to use never works the way they thought it was going to.  Then when things start going wrong, they can’t figure out why.  The Capitalists keep promising everyone that it will work, they just haven’t figured out how to make it work yet, but if everyone is patient, it will work out for everyone in the end.

What the Capitalists can’t understand is that their economic system will never work the way they want it to.  When they thought of how they wanted their economic system to work, they didn’t understand how the economic system of the universe works.  If they want an economic system that works the way it’s supposed to, they have to learn how the economic system of the universe works.  They can’t just change the economic system of the universe to make it work they way they want it to.

This is why it’s so easy for the Capitalists to make anti-Capitalist revolutionaries look like a bunch of dumb peasants who just aren’t smart enough to know that Capitalism is the best economic system in the world.  Capitalism seems like a good idea to so many people because they lack the education they need to see that it doesn’t work the way they think it will.  A Capitalist economy is the easiest kind to use, because it requires the least amount of education for people to understand.  On the other hand, an economic system that won’t break down depends on people learning how the economic system of the universe works.

When I talk about education, I’m not just talking about the kind of education you can get at universities.  If you are farming on the same land your ancestors have farmed for 4,000 years, and you haven’t destroyed your environment, you have some of the most important education in the world.  And where did you get it?  You got it by learning how to farm from your parents.  You were able to learn it because you grew up on your parents’ farm.

So what happens if you’re driven off your farm and you go work in a factory?  If you don’t live on a farm and work on a farm, you can’t teach your children the things your parents taught you.  In your brain, you hold 4,000 years worth of knowledge that your ancestors discovered little by little.  If you don’t pass that knowledge on to your children, your ancestors’ knowledge will die with you.

As you can see, when I talk about Capitalists preventing people from getting the education they need to understand how a different economic system works, I’m talking about a lot more than how many people can afford to go to universities.

The Capitalist economy was invented back before anyone knew how the economic system of the universe worked.  Now some people have made a lot of money in the Capitalist economy.  So now they’re using some of their money to prevent people from learning how the economy of the universe works, so they’ll keep using the Capitalist economy.  They destroy people’s cultures, they spread propaganda, they don’t fund schools, they undermine people’s interest in science, they say the environment is doing something unexpected all by itself, and they blame all their problems on other people, or whatever else they can do to keep anyone from noticing that they are the ones who are causing the problems.  They call people like you dumb peasants and they call people like me terrorists, and say that if we were as smart as they are, we’d be Capitalists too.  No, the truth is, if they were as smart as we are, they wouldn’t be Capitalists either.

Filed under: i: Zapatista University by Ezra
No Comments »