The weird and sort of shady neighborhood of the blogosphere I haunt was lately abuzz (a-twitter?) about a new book called The Big Brain, by neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger. I haven’t read it yet, but I gather it’s an account of the evolution of the large human neocortex. It is making news, however, for reviving interest in a paleoanthropological anomaly that had been forgotten since the first few decades of the last century: the Boskop race (or species) of hominids that supposedly inhabited part of South Africa for about 20,000 years.

The Boskops were thought to be remarkable because their brains were 25-35% larger than those of modern humans, indicating a significantly superior intelligence. They also possessed pedomorphic (childlike) facial features: large eyes, small mouth, etc. Pedomorphia in human evolution has been taken as indicating “advancement”: Adult humans look like overgrown baby chimps, the same way the Boskops looked a bit like overgrown baby humans. It suggests they were smarter, perhaps “more evolved,” than us—that is, more removed from our nearest great ape ancestors.

According to those early paleoanthropologists, this population of baby-faced, big-headed hominids went extinct only about 10,000 years ago. That’s an eyeblink ago—practically within cultural memory.

Lynch and Granger have already been criticized for ignoring the fact that subsequent paleontologists discredited the existence of Boskops altogether. These people were not a separate species, those critics argued, but were just a subsection within the normal human range of variation. The paleontologists who first described them were actually just arbitrarily separating them from the normal human remains found in the same region. Boskops were held to be a statistical fiction, in other words, and not paleontological reality. And thus, until The Big Brain, the whole Boskop question went into the dustbin of discredited science and was forgotten for 80 years.

I certainly don’t know enough to give an opinion on the science behind Boskops, but the whole question of a possibly more intelligent variety of human that once walked the earth alongside Homo sapiens sapiens is really, really interesting. It has already been suggested on a number of blogs (including Cabinet of Wonders) that Boskops, if they were real, could be the evolutionary origins of “alien” Grays: The big brains and big eyes certainly suggest such an idea. It’s fun to think about, if you like thinking about such things.

But what interests me as much as the possible hominid, “cryptoterrestrial” origin of aliens is the nature of our resistance, or even abhorrence, of the idea of more advanced hominids sharing our planet. I don’t think it can be chalked up merely to an inferiority complex. I think it has to do with a major cultural—and especially scientific—imperative of our times: to think of the human race as singular and undifferentiated when it comes to intelligence. The very possibility of slightly more intelligent hominids reopens the door to seeing mental endowments as unequally distributed, the basis of scientific racism.

Past centuries were dominated by racist thinking. Variations in intelligence between human groups were accepted as obvious fact by the European imperialist societies, and this idea legitimized all forms of exploitation and injustice. The scientific racism of early anthropologists is still a bitter memory in academe, linked inextricably to the worst excesses of European Fascism. No one wants to go down that path again. As a result, there is a tacit imperative in the social sciences to chalk up apparent differences in intelligence to variation in culture and environment. Whenever a maverick scholar bucks this convention and puts forth a view of racial differences in intelligence, as the authors of The Bell Curve did in the mid 90s, it causes a furore. No ink is spared in the effort to discredit the idea.

The political reasons are sound and obvious, and the scientific argument that all modern humans have the same innate cognitive endowment is one that I have always been persuaded by. But I’m open minded enough to think that political correctness could be biasing the science. Scientists absolutely do not want to face the possibility that the world’s peoples might not be equally endowed with mental ability. We may not want that to be true — but preferring a certain picture of reality doesn’t necessarily make it so.

Could the Boskops’ fate in 20th century anthropology have been linked to the basic reluctance to consider a scalar rather than categorical nature of inherited intelligence? To answer such a question, I think it’s useful to consider the other cryptoterrestrial that enjoys equal disrepute among modern scientists: Bigfoot.

I’ve often suspected that the scientific establishment’s dismissal of the possibility of “less intelligent” bipedal hominid cryptids is related to its resistance toward the idea of more intelligent beings like extra- or crypto-terrestrials. Imagine what would happen if it were to be established that there were slightly less intelligent hominids living in the world today: not slightly less intelligent in the sense of apes or dolphins, but slightly less intelligent in the sense of children or impaired adults: that is, within but at the extreme low end of normal human variation. What if they turned out to be essentially primitive humans, but lacking our linguistic capabilities and thus having inferior cultural capacity?

Chimps are sometimes said to possess the intelligence of 3-year-olds. What if there were creatures in the forest that basically look like big hairy versions of us, and that possess the intelligence of 8- or 10-year-olds?

No one wants to face such a possibility. While we concede an amazing range of biological difference throughout the animal kingdom, living humans are the exception: We don’t want any dangerous gradations, any continuity with lesser or higher forms that would make the distinction blurry. We need a buffer between us and our nearest ancestors. Sasquatch would obliterate that buffer.

The political dangers are real, not only because it would pose an ethical conundrum about what rights to grant Sasquatch, but because it would by extension reopen the question of intelligence variation in human populations. Are blacks perhaps really inferior to whites (as The Bell Curve argued)? Could they be somewhere on a continuum between whites and Sasquatch? It’s an abhorrent idea, but proof of Sasquatch would reopen the door to that kind of thinking.

Are Asians perhaps really smarter than everyone else? Are they a missing link between blacks and whites, on the one end, and alien Grays on the other? Again, the discovery that there are advanced cryptoterrestrials among us, a smarter offshoot of humanity, or even a past race of super-gifted South Africans, would, again, encourage such ideas.

I suspect that keeping that door shut is part of the reason scientists and other respectable people don’t even allow the “cryptid” question to be raised, and why it is consigned to certain disreputable neighborhoods of the blogosphere.

I just finished reading Lierre Keith’s new book, Vegetarianism is Moronic, and I’m speechless. It’s passionate, brilliant, and amazingly well written—a must-read.

Well okay, that’s not the real title. It’s what I would have called it. But Keith is far more sympathetic to the dietary philosophy she is addressing, because she spent most of her life embracing it. The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability is, to me, a perfect followup to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, which I waxed ecstatic about a couple years ago. Such a powerfully as well as sympathetically stated case against all the arguments underlying vegetarianism is long, long overdue.

Keith, a former, very committed vegan, takes the reader through her own long journey and ultimate disillusionments, considering carefully the full range of initially compelling reasons why idealistic people, especially young women, become seduced by the vegetarian lifestyle: the desire to not kill, the desire to be better to the planet, and the belief that eating only vegetables is the best thing for the human body. She beautifully chronicles her own acceptance of these arguments and how, in the end, all of them fell apart—along with her body, which was devastated by this lifestyle. Women who have drunk or are in danger of drinking the kool-aid of vegetarian thinking should be captured and forced to read this book.

The symbolism and psychology behind vegetarianism has always interested me. A huge force behind the modern vegetarian movement was feminism. Vegetarianism became popular when women became empowered. After the hippies died out, the major demographic duped into eating only vegetables was women. Don’t deny it: Most of the vegetarians you know are women.

The reason for this link between womanhood and vegetarian ideals is simple: In our society, as in most if not all societies around the world, vegetables (and by extension grains) are symbolically linked to femininity, and meat to masculinity. There’s the obvious male/hunting, female/gathering thing. It’s not a myth. Anthropology pretty much bears out this division of labor for most societies. Even in a modern, urban world, stereotypes of food gathering break along the same gender lines: Men hunt or ranch; women (and sort of “metro” men) garden and shop (when they aren’t doing yoga, which is the most ineffectual martial art after Tai Chi—but that’s another post).

It was no accident that the idea of putting lots of veggies on our plates came to dominate nutritional thinking exactly when women were struggling for equality, during the sixties and seventies. Vegetables were empowered along with women: The same way women took back the night, vegetables took over our plates. Suddenly, coincidentally or not so coincidentally, meat started to be viewed by nutritionists as unhealthy.

I grew up during this period, in a household dominated by the belief in vegetables. We weren’t vegetarian, and my mother was a little too old to be a “feminist” per se, but she gardened heavily and made my dad and I eat lots of really boring and tasteless vegetables–squash, tough fibrous beans, more squash, sweet potatoes, and so on—because they were good for us.

I’m not denying that some vegetables are good for you, and a healthy diet makes a place for them, and always has. But the symbolic nature of food sometimes trumps nutritional reality, and during the period I grew up—the period of female empowerment—the reputation of meat eroded right along with male self-esteem, and that wasn’t a good thing. The problem was, the basic rationale for vegetarianism had nothing to do with nutrition. It had to do with changing our symbolic constitution. Even today, vegetarians are not eating vegetables. They are eating symbols of all things moral and peaceful and wholesome and nonviolent and loving toward the planet.

Don’t underestimate the symbolic power of food. Among the other food insults I endured during the seventies was wheat bran. Every morning we had to stir a tablespoon or so of bran in water until it dissolved and drink it down. LOL. I just made a joke there, but you probably didn’t get it. Bran doesn’t dissolve. We had to stir vigorously to get the brown flakes suspended in the water, then chug it down fast before it could settle to the bottom. It always made a big lump in our throats. Sometimes I choked.

Bran tastes like sawdust, because that’s basically what it is. I suppose it cleansed our bowels, scouring them bright shiny healthy pink. I saw my colon in live action once, during a colonoscopy; it was like a big twisty cavern, and besides the amazing paleolithic artwork, its walls were indeed nice and clean and pink. But the main benefit of all that bran was symbolic: Bran was a way of getting trees into our bodies. Trees, those symbols of ecology and purity and all things good and wholesome and peaceful and feminine. Things to be hugged and not shot. Getting lots of fiber in your diet is really the ultimate form of tree hugging.

(Yeah, I know bran is not actually wood. But you know what I mean.)

The fact is, any nutritional argument for vegetarianism has been shown to be baseless. Research studies supposedly supporting it, such as The China Study, have been blown out of the water—the authors fudged their interpretations of the data and were card-carrying members of PETA. They were bad scientists because they were biased. If you don’t believe me, just do a bit of research. And I’ve already written about the physical and mental advantages of a Paleolithic diet (i.e., high-protein and fat, no grains), so I won’t repeat.

And lest you think that vegetarianism saves animal lives, guess again. Keith devotes a section of her book to how how cultivation of plants and grains kills animals, kills whole species, and kills ecosystems.

But the one argument for vegetarianism that always seemed persuasive to me was that meat eating is unsustainable and basically unfair. The argument is that you can yield more calories by cultivating vegetables, and better yet grains, from an acre of land than by pasturing livestock on it, and thus meat eating is ecologically irresponsible in a world full of hunger. It’s the whole Francis Moore Lappe Diet for a Small Planet idea, which progressives embraced during the seventies.

I always assumed Lappe was right, and so resigned myself to the possibility that the human dietary optimum might not be optimal for an overpopulated planet. Nutrition vs. ecology could, I figured, present us with a choice as insoluble as the fiber my mom made us drink. But the great thing about Keith’s book is that she shoots the nonsustainability argument out of the water too. This was the eye-opener for me. She makes a persuasive case that our diet of refined grains and factory farmed vegetables is as destructive and unsustainable in planetary terms as it is for our bodies, and that pasturing animals on grasses is the best remedy for both (an argument that dovetails well with that of Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma). Factory farming of grain is horribly destructive to the environment; just think of all the petroleum and chemicals it floods the environment with–creating for instance a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey. I’m still not 100% convinced that pasturage and the whole food movement could sustain the world’s population, but Keith makes a strong case, and provides a much needed corrective to Lappe. I’d say this argument is the most important and unique contribution her book makes to current debates about diet.

There’s a reason that the walls of my perfectly healthy colon are covered with ancient paintings having hunting themes: hunters with bows and arrows chasing herds of bison and woolly mammoths, shamans dressed in the skins of animals, just like the fingerpainted images that come alive in the flickering torchlight in the caves at Lascaux, France. Humans evolved to eat animal protein and fat. Meat and fat are good for you. If you want to be healthy and happy and not beset by inflammatory bowel disease, vitamin deficiencies, acne, and tooth decay, you should eat meat and fat. And if you want to do a favor for the planet, you should stop eating grains. However much vegetarians want it to be true that their diet is making them pure and healthy, all it gives them is gas and bad skin, and in the long run makes them fat and diabetic (from all the grains, rice, and potatoes they eat instead of meat).

You know this—you just haven’t admitted or acknowledged it to yourself. Consider this post (and The Vegetarian Myth) an intervention. I’m not against feminism, obviously. But sorry, gals. A diet based solely on veggies and grains is bad for your bodies, and it’s bad for Mother Earth.

M.J. Harper (The Secret History of the English Language–see previous post) has been taken to task for an apparent misunderstanding of how evolution works: A form can’t evolve from another living form, goes the dogma; rather, two related forms are said to share a common ancestor. So, for example, humans did not evolve from chimpanzees; rather, humans and chimpanzees share a recent (5 million years ago) common ancestor. Harper’s suggestion that the Germanic and Latinate languages “evolved from” Modern English (or something pretty close to it) sounds like making the faux pas that humans evolved from chimps, as if chimps haven’t been changing for the past 5 million years just like we have.

But that’s just political correctness—or, I suppose, good manners. The professional insistence on not calling one extant form a descendent of another extant form is really just a matter of politeness. It would offend fragile human sensibilities to say we evolved from chimps—I mean, just look at them!—so we say instead “from a common ancestor.” And the chimps feel better too, because yeah, they haven’t been just slacking off either; they’re nothing like those boobs of the Pliocene. When you assume evolution moves at the same pace for everyone, everyone saves face; everyone keeps up appearances that “we’ve all been evolving all this time, everyone evolves the same amount, nobody’s calling anyone ‘primitive.’”

But just because a word or a concept can be used derogatorily doesn’t mean it’s not descriptive. Let’s put aside political correctness (and, heck, manners) just a moment. Evolutionary biologists know that some species and some adaptations are more primitive than others. Evolution does not occur at a constant rate for all species, and there is no reason one living species couldn’t have branched off another living species that, for whatever reason, did not change at all in the interim. When speciation occurs due to geographical separation, for example, there is nothing in principle mandating that one branch could become radically different due to rapidly changing local selection pressures while the other branch could be relatively unchanged after a given period of time due to selection pressures that remained constant in its particular neck of the woods. Speciation is not Newtonian: It doesn’t demand an “equal and opposite reaction” on the part of both bifurcating species, esp. if geography is the reason for the split.

Cockroaches and coelacanths and sharks are called “living fossils” because they’ve stayed the same while the world around them has changed more rapidly. It’s not a sign of being old and stuffy; it’s a sign of a good adaptation, one that nature hasn’t found a way to improve upon in its particular niche. Harper is suggesting that this is what happened with English—or, English as she was spake in Neolithic Britain. Some sort of English (he argues) was spoken in the dim mists of prehistory by a group that settled throughout Europe. On the Continent, affected by different historical and demographic pressures, this ur-English bifurcated into two broad linguistic streams: German and French, which in turn evolved into various local forms. But on the island of Britain, it changed much more slowly. (I gather that place-name archaeology and genetics are starting to corroborate this idea, at least somewhat, although linguists will have nothing to do with it.)

In other words, following Harper’s line of thinking, saying German and French didn’t evolve from Modern English is trivially true only in the sense that they didn’t evolve from the English spoken in our day, but the English spoken thousands of years ago. Yet, if that ancient English was so close to Modern English to be regarded as, essentially, the same language, then why not say German and French evolved from English?

Well, I already answered this question: It’s just politeness that dictates you don’t say that. The Germans and French must be allowed to save face, here. No doubt, should Harper’s paradigm gain more acceptance, manners will dictate that we name the English spoken in pre-Roman times something else, like “proto-English” or whatever (since “Old English” is already misappropriated by the Anglo-Saxonists), and it will be called a “common ancestor” to modern English and the bitter tongues of the Continent.

Wikipedia has a terrific, thorough and readable explanation of the evolution of the eye from earlier structures (directional photodetectors found in simple, even single-celled organisms). It has nice diagrams and pictures of the intermediate forms leading to this astonishing structure. Next time you have lunch with a Creationist or “intelligent design” proponent–who love to flog the eye as defense of their case–do your homework first.