Friday, January 22, 2016

An Old and Incomplete Observation

Three years ago* I wrote this piece on Matthew’s account of the temptation of Jesus: http://bcmnghmn.blogspot.com/2011/03/dumb-credulity-or-engaged-reflection.html.

This morning I came across a note I had attached to Deuteronomy 8:3[1]: “How does that fit with Maslow? Does deprivation followed by satisfaction of a basic need produce a greater appreciation of higher needs?” The reference is to Abraham Maslow, the psychologist who proposed a hierarchy of human needs, ranging from the basic means of survival (water, food, shelter, etc.) to what he called “self-actualization,” the stage of development at which those who have attained it feel themselves to be most fully human. Most interpreters of Maslow make the generalization that higher level needs can only be satisfied, or even perceived as needs on the highest (most abstract) levels, when the most basic needs are met. This would suggest that extreme poverty and hardship do not produce great philosophers or mystics.


* I began this post on 28 April 2014, so it has been five years now. I do not now recall where I was going with this post, so here it is, as it is.
[1]“He (God) humbled you by making you hungry and then feeding you the manna that neither you nor your ancestors had ever experienced, so he could teach you that people don't live on bread alone.” Common English Bible with Apocrypha - ePub Edition. Abingdon Press. Kindle Edition.


A Sophoclean Conundrum

According to PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on January 19, 2010, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia 70 thousand years ago killed all but 15 thousand humans on Earth. That means, if we trace our ancestry back to the aftermath of that disaster, we have only 15,000 ancestors at most for the entire 7+ billion of us now.
I am sure you have noticed, looking at your family tree, that you have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and so forth, each preceding generation having double the number of ancestors as the one after. Assuming the average age at which my ancestors begat my ancestors was twenty years (a conservative  estimate, I believe) that means 3500 generations have passed since that terrible event in Indonesia nearly pre-empted my existence.
To calculate how many ancestors I have in a particular past generation, I need only raise 2 to the power of the number of generations back from me. That is, my parents are one generation before me, so I have 21, or 2, parents; 22, or 4, grandparents, etc. Since 70 thousand divided by 20 equals 3,500 (generations) the number of direct ancestors I would expect to have in the generation that survived the Indonesian catastrophe is 23500, or more than 4X101053 (four billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion, billion; that’s nine zeros for each billion) ancestors in that one generation alone. Clearly, in the words of Desi Arnaz, we have some ‘splainin’ to do.
There are four explanations that come to my mind:
  1. Some of my male ancestors had multiple wives/mates (polygyny).
  2. Some of my female ancestors had multiple husbands/mates (polyandry).
  3. There was quite a bit of mate swapping among the two groups above (polyamory).
  4. Some of my male and female ancestors were close relatives (incest).
The first should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Old Testament or Tales from the Arabian Nights, the second to no one who has taken a class in sociology, but the second two go a bit farther than what we were told in Sunday school or at bedtime.
Could it be that we owe our existence, individually and as a species, to both free and compulsory love, rather than the one-man-one-woman family values some would tell us is the divinely mandated norm of all but this wicked and perverse generation?