Creation story...

EVERY culture seems to have some sort of creation story that embeds a way of looking at the world in the hearer’s psyche.

One of my favourites has long been that of the minority Ainu culture of Japan. It tells of a tireless little bird, a wagtail, that flits over the primeval bog, flicking water to this side and that to reveal earth that it then flattens to firmness: a task that takes a near eternity.

Biologists Nick Lane and Bill Martin recently gave me another one.

In this story, there was a particular moment on a particular day — about two billion years ago — when a bacterium swallowed up an archaeon (an organism that was among the first “living” stuff on the planet). Both are microscopic, single-celled organisms with no cell nucleus, but they are distinct groups.

The little archaeon survived inside the bacterium and was great at pumping out energy; it became the first mitochondrion. The result was a new kind of creature that could produce multi-celled descendants. They are called “eukaryotes”. Before that, all of life existed as single cells. That archaeon fuelled the future of life on earth. Its memorial is with us still, as the mitochrondrial DNA in our body cells.

The extraordinary detail is that Nick Lane and Bill Martin believe the pairing happened just that once, although archaeons and bacteria had flourished on Earth for a billion years. It was a bizarrely improbable thing to have happened and, it seems, it hasn’t happened again.

The new creature’s descendants grew, got the idea that sex could be fun and, as the whole genetic diversification, natural selection thing began blazing away in more directions than skyrockets from a burning fireworks factory, they variously produced plants and animals in all of their glorious diversity. And us: we are “eukaryotes” too.

What it means, of course, is that EVERY living thing is related and every living thing more sophisticated than a bacterium can trace its origins to that special, singular day when the archaeon got together with the bacterium.

We should be observing an annual Global Eukaryote Day: a celebration of sexuality, diversity, life, unity, possibility, mystery and connectedness… of the marvellous beauty of all living things and our capacities to experience them: a festival of consciousness and the beauty of life from amoebae to redwood pines and us, and including fish, cows, scorpions, birds, turtles, snakes, toads and butterflies… and including all of the plants and animals we don’t know about yet because we’re still discovering our planet. Nature’s a kaleidoscope… a great beautiful kaleidoscope and we’re in the midst of it. So it’s past time give thanks to the bacterium and archaeon.

But this is where science lets us down — and lets itself down: ritual and celebration.

Science is a flux of wonder that, too often by far, is experienced by non-scientists as a dry, inaccessible and tedious compendium of certainties that can solve any problem we care to land ourselves in: our surest source of “truth”.

So — if we’re so devoutly smart — what do we, personally, make of the idea of the “Multiverse” — the mathematically derived explanation of existence in terms of an infinity of infinities, and the nine or more dimensions of string theorists. How do we conceive, personally, of sizes that range from the proton to the galaxy and beyond? How do we appreciate the billions of cells in our body or the inanimate atoms of which they are composed but which reduce to pure energy? How do we relate to the mystery that is us? Some of these things will not resolve in common, tangible, everyday statements we can make sense of with our limited faculties.

It was the Enlightenment that set us on our knees before reason. And reason has given us tremendous power. But there’s a larger part of us that transcends reason and our humanity demands that we attended to ALL that we are. We owe our insecurities about all of this to the overblown ideas about “reason” that morphed into populist dogma in the wake of the Enlightenment. It’s a dogma that expels emotion and responsibility from the nature of “reason” and confuses “knowledge” with “wisdom”.

So the importance to our self-image of rationality, reason and intelligence can lead us into some serious inhibition on the one hand, and broken self-esteem on the other: “I’m JUST a kitchen hand/housewife/labourer (or whatever),” have you heard people say?

And, how often, when we’ve done something simply because we felt like it, are we burden us with others’ expectations that we’ll come up with a “reasoned” excuse for it. “Why did you do THAT?”

So we make up something. We lie. Our lies, once couched in “reason”, too easily snare us in one-dimensional traps. We deny our intuition even when we’ve just acted on it. It’s too bad… it makes us less likeable.

That said, it’s important for our intuition to be informed by a degree of thoughtfulness.

And our popular notions of science’s place in this are often dangerously odd, and the general public understanding of science in our “scientific” society is irresponsibly limited. There are, for example, many, many literate, educated people who believe that the Earth’s shadow is responsible for the phases of the Moon, that we use only 10 per cent of our brains, that humans lived on Earth before the last dinosaurs were extinct, that population growth is still accelerating, that there’s “zero” gravity in space, that hair and fingernails keep growing after you die, that there are non-surgical ways to make a penis bigger, that there is a “cure” for split ends and that not winning a lottery increases your chances of winning the next time… and the scary bit is that, because we know so little, but with such intense certainty, we heap enormous expectations onto professional science, relying on people in white coats to come running in and mop up after our every social and moral blunder.

Science began as human response to the great mystery that is the Universe. In his diary, Rene Descartes, the 15th century French soldier whose mathematical genius paved the way for the emergence of modern science, recorded that “one night when I was in a deep sleep, the Angel of Truth came to me and whispered the secret connection between geometry and algebra.”

Then there is the story of the great Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, a co-founder of quantum mechanics, who was asked by a student about the superstition attached to a horseshoe Bohr had nailed to the door of his summerhouse. Bohr denied believing that the horse shoe brought him luck, then mischievously added: “but I understand that it works whether you believe it or not.”

Albert Einstein said his life work in physics was an extended meditation on a dream he’d had as a child: he was on a toboggan that and the stars — it was night time — changed colour as the toboggan went faster and faster down the hill. And, in his late 60s, he described a moment he vividly remembered from his childhood: “I experienced a miracle… as a child of four or five when my father showed me a compass.” It excited him so much that he trembled and grew cold. “There had to be something behind objects that lay deeply hidden… the development of (our) world of thought is in a certain sense a flight away from the miraculous.”

Science is a creative, exciting, powerfully enabling and imaginative realm, and it is a wonderful tool used well. A great part of science’s inspiration is awe: an experience of awe that is not totally different from the awe that, for millennia, has inspired the genuine mystics of many cultures. But science has not yet unravelled the mystery. Nor, in its entirety, is it ever likely to.

For that to happen, and for it to be intelligible, the mystery would have to be no greater than the reach of the human mind, and the human mind’s shortcomings make themselves abundantly clear.

Science serves us best when it inflames us with inspiration and excites our imaginings, when it encourages our best impulses: to compassion, to delight, to possibility, to our sense of existence, to appreciation… to value ever more highly the humbling gifts of awe and wonder.

So, on this two billionth (more or less) anniversary of the establishment of multi-cellular life forms, let’s now light a little candle for Global Eukaryote Day, and take it from there…

Economic history in a tea cup

Let me offer just one little story about the way ‘The Economy’ works.

It begins in Britain when it was entering a time that became known at the “Regency” period, at the end of the “Enlightenment” and the dawning of the era of “Liberalism”: Rousseau and Edmund Burke, Wordsworth and Coleridge, grandiose extravagance, high ideals and gross brutality… bare-knuckle boxing, public executions, bull-baiting, cock fighting, gambling, dandyism and a new game called cricket. The newly independent United States of America were working out their Constitution; France was emerging from “The Terror” of the Revolution and the Napoleonic era was about to begin. The industrial revolution was afoot but the modern, machine-driven world was still very much in the making.

Britain was one of Europe’s most powerful and most rapidly prospering nations. A burgeoning middle class was enjoying the fruits of trade abroad and industrialisation at home.

“Disposable” income began giving this class a wonderful opportunity to savour exotic new delights, refine their tastes and pursue fashions.

One such fashion was the taste for Chinoiserie: glimmering, vivid Chinese silks, fine, limpid green jade, near-transparent porcelain and the sipping of tea: an ennobling pastime, at first for ladies, but later as a show of sobriety by men of discernment at a time when gin ruled as the leading agent of self-destruction among the lower classes.

Tea consumption in Britain was running at about 3,000 tonnes a year. Silks and fine porcelain commanded high prices, and there were hopes that China would become a market for Britain’s growing industrial surpluses.

The stumbling block was that the Chinese had little time for the foreign devils and no great interest in their clumsily manufactured goods. There was a lacklustre interest in China for Indian cotton; sandalwood and beche de mer (sea slug) had their buyers. The Chinese would happily accept silver but British supplies of the precious metal were running low. The Ch’ing government allowed trading to take place only at the port of Canton and only through the hands of a small guild of licensed merchants, the Cohong.

Along the way, a paying niche opened in China for furs. The Russians, trading sea-otter pelts from Siberia into northern China, were the first to spot it. From the mid 18th century, the trade included seal skins. Chinese furriers had found a way to selectively remove the long, stiff, outer guard hairs from the pelts, leaving the warm, wearable soft fur underneath. And they knew how to turn inferior furs into felt. From 1776, when they were paid well for a shipment to Canton of 13,000 fur seal skins, the Americans were into the market, and so too were the British.

It was suddenly all on: a rush to ship seal skins to Canton, fill ships’ holds with Chinoiserie and reap a handsome profit back in London. And along remote and rocky coastlines around the world, seal breeding colonies were searched out and the seals were slaughtered. A good sealer could tear the pelts from 600 seals an hour, and seals were taken by the tens of thousand and the hundreds of thousand.

Seals are shy creatures and their breeding colonies were scattered around some of the Pacific Ocean’s least hospitable shores. In many cases, indigenous communities, to whom they were a vital source of sustenance, had harvested the seal populations with careful stealth and restraint. The sealers’ violent assaults obliterated the colonies. And, with the sealers, came new diseases and rats (European ships notoriously scattered fast-breeding, disease-carrying and habitat-degrading black and brown rats — Rattus rattus and Rattus norvegicus — wherever they touched shore).

Although the real profits went to the speculative ship owners and masters, even an ordinary deckhand might hope that, with a bit of luck, he’d be able to buy the freedom and security of a small farm after a few trips. In 1796, when a London fur dealer discovered how to rid the pelts of their guard hairs, a market for seal-skins opened in Britain too. Seals had got harder to find and the long haul to China made less sense. It was simpler and more profitable to put the skins up for auction in London.

By the time the Chatham Islands in the far-off South Pacific were discovered, sealing had peaked, but activity still fluctuated along with pelt prices and the discoveries of new sealing grounds.

It was perhaps 15 years after a British naval captain charted the Chatham Islands that the first sealers stormed ashore on their beaches. Soon there were scores of them, there to rush and ravage the islanders’ carefully conserved seal colonies, killing and skinning as many seals as quickly as possible and leaving the flayed bodies, blood and entrails to rot on the rocks and sand. The sooner the ships could fill their holds, the shorter the voyage and the surer the returns.

To finish off the suddenly depleted and broken colonies, captains landed shore parties whose job included growing potatoes and pigs to provision the ships on their next visits. They used their guns to hunt shorebirds for a change of diet and often abused, beat or raped the islanders. They had been raised to use fear as way to control others and defend themselves. Their dogs, cats, pigs and rats scavenged, killing or scaring off the ducks and rail that also had long fed the islanders.

As well as seeing their single most precious food source laid to waste, Chatham Islanders succumbed to the newly introduced illnesses – measles, influenza, venereal diseases – which often killed them. In four years, 1828-1932, the Chatham Islands population was scythed from more than 2,000 to about 1,600 by epidemics of measles and influenza. Well might the Chatham Islanders have retaliated. In New Zealand, Maori warriors had clashed with and killed sealers. Groups of Chatham Islanders could have done away with some of the more obnoxious new arrivals and got away with it.

But they’d adopted a law that forbade killing: the Law of Nunuku. So strong was their governance, based on respect and honour, that killing ended. People of this warrior culture destroyed their weapons. For the most part, they did their utmost to avoid the sealers, getting on with their own lives in their own way. And, with their seals all but exterminated, the Chatham Islanders might have expected the depredation to end.

But, in the bloody wake of the sealers came the whalers, questing the world’s oceans for blubber to render into lamp, stove and machine oil. Whalebone to nip the waists of fashionable women, ambergris to fix the aroma of their perfumes and spermaceti for candles, ointments and lubricants were also in demand. In the Chatham Islands, the whalers found a foul-weather haven right on the edge of the Southern Ocean hunting grounds.

When the final invasion came — by Maori warriors abetted by whaling captains — nearly 1,000 Chatham Islanders, including 160 local chiefs, gathered at the sacred ground of Te Awapatiki, a low-lying point on the main island, and for three days debated the options that faced them. Younger leaders advocated setting aside of the Law of Nunuku and wiping out the Maori intruders. The Maori warriors might be more experienced and better armed but they were outnumbered and new to the islands. Some were still getting over their rough and crowded passage from Port Nicholson. It could be done. The invaders could be anihilated.

Older, highly respected chiefs, imbued with the mana of rank and ancestral wisdom, instead spoke for the traditions that made up and held together the fabric of the islanders’ universe. To break the Law of Nunuku would be to sever a vital thread in that pattern; without obedience to the ways of life that defined their universe, their world would shatter as the mana drained from it. This must not happen.

With a deliberation that is still daunting for its courage and calm spiritual resolve, the Chatham Islanders heard the arguments and decided collectively that at no cost should their mana be compromised; their mana would be defended in the only way that it could: by obedience to its sources; they would place mana above physical survival, the Law of Nunuku above expedience and above natural inclination. The measure of their warriorhood would be the courage with which they faced death.

And death is was. Maori tradition required that rights of conquest be established through the spilling of blood.

In “walking the land” to establish these rights, the Maori invaders met with no resistance. They cut down 226 Chatham Island men and women, whose names have been recorded, and a number of children whose names were not. Those who remained – their population at the time of the invasion had been something over 1,650 – were made slaves, moved deliberately from their own areas and put to work to feed and establish the Maori settlement, and to produce the surpluses needed for trade with the whaling ships.

The whaling captains soon found the Chatham Islands a handy port, close to the grounds and blessed with relatively mild winters, where plenty of fresh pork, potatoes and other provisions could now be had for cash, tobacco, cloth, rum and whisky. The ships, mostly American but also Australian, French and more rarely of other nationalities, would anchor off Waitangi half a dozen and more at a time, stowing their oil and fresh provisions while their boats were kept ready to take any whales that fortuitously strayed near the anchorage.

In 1840 - 41, the fledgling New Zealand Company settlements at Wellington depended on slave-grown potatoes from the Chatham Islands. The old culture that chose not to kill had been erased.

And the Chinese? After the Qing Dynasty toughened its opposition to the already illegal importation to China of opium (grown specifically for the purpose in British India as a monopoly of the British East India Company), the British launched the military assaults known as the “Opium Wars” that forced the Qing Dynasty not only to expose its subjects to an unfettered drugs trade but also to hand over the island of Hong Kong as a trading base.

The Chinese people found their government’s humiliation so infuriating they rose against it in 1850 and 1899 and, in 1912, the discredited Qing Dynasty fell. In many ways, this set the scene for the post-Second World War ascendancy of Mao Zedong, Chinese communism and the modern China.

And to think… it may have all begun with a cup of tea.

As others see us...

My wife, Sue, and I sat comfortably in a small, friendly bar in Sober, south of Monforte de Lemos in Galician Spain. Glasses of wine were set in front of us. All day we'd been treated royally.

The centre of the Amandi wine-growing area, Sober saw few tourists but had, on that very day, opened a tourist information centre.

Word got around that we had come from Scotland and, although few of them spoke much English, the local folk became quite determined to do all in their power to make us feel welcome.

A television in the corner was tuned to a local cable station, until someone persuaded the proprietor to find an English-language channel for our benefit. He flicked through the channels until a chat show came on that we confirmed was in English. The locals cheered, ushered us forward and turned to watch the screen. Then, to our horror — and the Galicians’ hushed amazement — an elephant filled the screen, and the show’s guest proceeded to lever his head into the elephant’s rectum. We were being looked at a little oddly at that point and decided to finish our wine and leave before the hospitality extended to finding us an elephant.

Sometimes we are as others see us. Sometimes we very much hope that we are not.