So, I’ve decided to read a book that’s irked me off for a while: Thumbs, Toes, and Tears: And Other Traits that Make Us Human by Chip Walter. But I started reading it in the bookstore, and saw another opportunity to dissect something….and to feed my book addiction, of course.

From the back cover:

Among the countless attributes that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom, six stand out–our big toe, opposable thumb, oddly shaped pharynx, and our ability to laugh, kiss, and cry. Though seemingly unconnected, they are actually closely linked, each marking a fork in the evolutionary road where we went one way and the rest of the animal kingdom went another.
Drawing on complexity theory, the latest brain-scanning techniques, and new insights from fields as diverse as anthropology, artificial intelligence, and robotics, Thumbs, Toes, and Tears reveals a creature that was shaped as much by its social relationships and internal self-image as by its ability to walk upright, make tools, and use language.

What a headache.
It gets better in the foreword, written by Ray Kurzweil. Here are some excerpts:

The fifth epoch, which we are now initiating, is when technology-creating species (that’s us) uses its technology to understand (to reverse-engineer) its own biology, including the method of its brains, and incorporates the design ideas borrowed from biology into its own technology.
To explain the sixth epoch requires insight into the exponential nature of an evolutionary process. Evolution works through indirection: it creates a capability and then incorporates that capability when it evolves subsequent stages. For this reason, the process accelerates, and the products of the evolutionary process grow exponentially in capability. For example, it took a billion years for DNA to evolve but then biology used DNA in all of its subsequent stages.
…This exponential progression will lead us to saturate the ability to support sublimely intelligent computational processes here on Earth within a century. We will then expand into the rest of the universe to keep the exponential progress of this evolutionary process going.

Where to even begin?

Starting from the back cover– what “countless” attributes separate human from other? Who writes that? At best one can only maybe maintain a handful of these supposed attributes. Even so, the trend in biology is that science is starting to find more and more similarities between humans and other species, including the use of tools, language, complex adaptive behavior, and emotional expression. And I’d like to add that there are a lot of things that other species can do that humans can’t.

Sure, humans can change and alter their environment on an impressive scale. Is that ability necessarily an achievement of some sort? We have an ability to destroy this entire planet and all the life on it. Ok, super. When looking at evolution as progress in a specifically human direction, this is a measure of evolutionary achievement and inherent separateness. From a posthumanist (and Christian!) perspective, humans are sooooooo different and separate. But I detest this conceptual brick wall around our species! It creates more problems.

So, that’s the story from one cross-section of science. It’s a very specialized and reductionist view. We need to zoom out and getting a larger perspective….look around!

Are we really better off from all of our civilization and evolutionary advancements? No, really…..are we? What kind of insight about purpose has this brought? What are the results for life on Earth? It doesn’t work.
It. Just. Doesn’t. Work.

Chip Walter’s anthropological assumptions are wrong and outdated. And Kurzweil, DNA did not take a billion years to evolve. According to Crick, who discovered DNA, its origins are extraterrestrial. And I wish us luck when we become cyborgs and expand into the universe when we can’t even figure out how to feed ourselves.

Such a fundamental disconnect! Seriously! This demonstrates such a fragmented way of looking at things–an imbalanced phylogenetic development. Seeing development and progress in such narrow ways, and putting energy into further “developing” them makes us lopsided–personally and collectively.
We can’t get anywhere without understand our intrinsic interconnectedness. That’s why we can’t come up with systemic solutions to some serious, serious problems facing life on this planet.
If we can’t think in terms of the whole, we’ll keep acting in broken and fragmented ways.

Oh, and notice the use of the phrase “sublimely intelligent computational processes”. Is this Kurzweil’s working definition of intelligence? I sure hope not.

Oh, Chip Walter, I shall take pleasure reading this book…interesting although it might be, I already really doubt its conclusions….but I will give it a chance.