How Water Keeps Us Alive

It's uncanny how many essential functions water serves for living processes. But perhaps the most important function is the regulation of temperature. And the amazing thing is, water acts to regulate temperature simultaneously and independently on multiple levels. On a micro sub-cellular level, a human level, a regional level, and a global level.

Life survives in a narrow temperature range that just happens to correspond with the temperature at which water is a liquid. That's not a coincidence. Life and water are tightly coupled on Earth. All of life's metabolic processes – the things that make a living organism “alive” - happen in water.

The temperature at which water is a liquid is not necessarily the temperature that's ideal for many types of chemical reactions. In some cases heat needs to be added to get a reaction underway, or a chemical reaction can produce a lot of heat in an uncontrollable chain reaction. Either way, the reaction proceeds at a temperature much too hot for life.

All biochemical reactions are catalyzed (made easier) by large convoluted protein molecules called enzymes. The key to an enzyme's function as a catalyzer of chemical reactions is its complex shape. And the key to an enzyme's shape is how the molecule twists and folds in on itself in relation to the water molecules that surround it.

Water is also necessary because it facilitates the flow of dissolved molecules that form the raw materials and the products of enzyme mediated reactions. But that's another story.

The enzymes that catalyze most biological reactions work best within a narrow range of a few degrees centering around 37 Centigrade, normal body temperature. Hotter than this and the enzymes lose their shape and cease to function. Too cold and the chemical reactions slow down too much to sustain metabolic processes.

The human body has several independent systems that work to keep the body's temperature within the narrow range necessary for life. All of these systems involve water in a crucial way and yet each uses water in a unique way.

When we are cold our circulation system shunts blood away from the extremities, where it would be more likely to lose heat to the external environment. This keeps more of the body's water within the better insulated core where it protects the vital organs.

When we are too hot our circulation system shunts more water out to the extremities where heat can be transferred out of the body. Another independent system kicks in to cool the body by secreting water in the form of sweat on the body's outer surface. On a hot sunny day the sweat on our skin evaporates cooling us off.

When we are cold another independent system come into play. We “shiver”. This is a muscular reaction that produces heat to warm the body by increasing metabolic rates and shunting blood to the large muscles of the body. Muscle cells are controlled by nerve cells, and nerve cells cannot tell muscle cells what to do without the medium of water.

So here comes the analogy. Just as water plays the major role in keeping our bodies alive it also plays the major role in keeping life on Earth alive. For it is water in all it's forms that moderates temperature on Earth's surface.

Water has the second highest heat capacity of any liquid. Water retains heat. That's why we use it for radiators. But that's also why it's warmer near the ocean in winter, and cooler in the summer. Large bodies of water moderate climate, because they absorb heat and are slow to give it up.

In places far inland it's colder in the winter and hotter in the summer because these places lack the moderating influence of a large body of water. Note that the majority of the world's population lives within 50 miles of the ocean.

Water also has a huge role to play in temperature regulation via an entirely different system – the weather. Here's how it works: The Sun's radiant energy heats the surface water of the oceans. When this happens some of the surface water evaporates. It changes from it's liquid form to water vapour – a gas. In doing so it absorbs heat and cools the surface water.

Not a big deal in terms of the proportion of water that ends up in the atmosphere .001 % of Earth's total, but it's still enough to make a huge difference to the Earth's surface temperature.

The water vapour rises up into the atmosphere where it gets blown far away by the winds. The higher the water molecules rise the colder the air. Eventually the the molecules condense back to liquid and form water droplets. When this happens the latent heat of evaporation is given off into the atmosphere.

But here's the deal - where the water molecule absorbed the heat and where it gives it back can be thousands of miles apart. Thus the sun's energy powers water's transfer of heat over the Earth's surface through the medium of the winds in the atmosphere.

But that's not all folks. There's another couple of systems involving water in a major role that effect the Earth's surface temperature independently of the one's I just mentioned. Water freezes into ice at 0 C. Ice reflects sunlight and cools the Earth's surface. That's why during an ice age the Earth's surface gets colder.

But there's more. In the atmosphere water vapour molecules have a stronger greenhouse warming effect than carbon dioxide. This is counterbalanced both by the cooling effect of evaporation, and the fact that water molecules do not stay long in the atmosphere before gravity takes over and pulls the water down to the earth in the form of rain.

OK but there's still more. Because water, unlike most other liquids expands when it freezes, ice forms on top of liquid water and because of that ice insulates water and keeps most of it from freezing in the winter.

Used for warming and cooling, multiple independent systems involved, tightly coupled with life itself -That's Water.

The Human Singularity - Part I

It seems ironic to me that the  idea that humanity originated with a  single decisive change now gets short shrift by most scientists and philosophers.   Instead the idea of a singularity is pinned on the popular science fiction fantasy of intelligent machines taking over the world at an unspecified future moment in time.

Nowadays scientists and philosophers are so specialized that they can’t possibly see the whole of human nature by looking through the lense of their separate disciplines.  Everyone is looking at little bits and pieces like the story of the blind men trying to figure out the shape of an elephant. As of yet, the experts don’t agree on what human nature is and how it originated.  Perhaps the subject of human nature is not really a scientific subject at all because it’s just too general for most scientists, as the concept of “life” is for biology.  

All life is purposive, in the sense that each life form tries to keep surviving and reproducing.  A flame may seem to act like a living thing because we can see it feeding off combustibles, we can  see it move and change shape and feel its heat if we get too close.  But a flame doesn’t have any  purpose.  It doesn’t anticipate running out of fuel, and it doesn’t look for more fuel elsewhere in order to keep itself alive.  

Similarly no machine generates its own purpose.  Machines do things, because they are designed and operated by humans.  At no future time will a machine cross over this boundary to become purposive and self-maintaining and self-replicating because there is nothing about machines that equates to the urge to live.

All critters are motivated to keep living, avoid predators, and dangers, approach and utilize food and shelter, enjoy the fruits of a good life and make babies. And they’ve been doing this for hundreds of millions of years.  All living organisms today share a common descent from an original organism that maintained and replicated itself more than three billion years ago.  For all that time,this chain of life has never been broken.

  Machines have no background like this. We need machines.   They don’t need to survive, because their “surviving” is totally dependent on specific  human purposes.  They only do what they are programmed to do.

Judging by  the widespread popularity of science fiction stories and movies like the Terminator, 2001,  Star Wars, and Avatar,  it is still  very easy to imagine and believe that human-type purposes can  independently  exist and animate machines.  But, this is really just an updated version of an old way of looking at our world called “animism” - the belief that spirits and gods animate natural phenomena like rivers, the weather, and volcanoes.  

Most of us are aware that storms are a natural phenomenon caused by  weather patterns, and they are not the result of storm gods punishing people or exacting revenge.  It might feel intuitively like that when we are caught in a  bad storm, but we know that that kind of thinking is projecting human qualities onto brute physical processes.

Now that we have Darwin’s theory of Evolution we have an explanation of how things came about that doesn’t involve projecting human intentions onto either nature or supernatural beings.  Natural selection, which means roughly, that populations are winnowed by natural causes and it is the survivors who preserve and pass on successful hereditary traits.  But it also implies that our origins were not from design, and that is still, to this day, a revolutionary suggestion to our ears.

 Humans can create social reality by design, by  conscious deliberation and collective agreement. On the other hand, nature is not human, it doesn’t have human consciousness, intentions and purpose.   The problem that this entails is simple but very far-reaching: the way that we came into existence must have been natural but through that  process we somehow created our own separate human nature.

Nowadays, to talk about a decisive difference between humans and animals is a bit unpopular.  It would seem that, by the principles of Darwinian natural selection there cannot have been a singularity because the transition from animal to man had to be a gradual one.  One could almost call it a consensus view that there could be no single factor in human evolution that led to homo sapiens, it had to be multiple factors, and over a vast span of time.

In other words, today it is easier to imagine our end with the Terminator than it is to imagine how we first actually  became different from animals.

The book of Genesis tells us that God made humans in God’s image.  A wonderful metaphor that could mean just about anything because we don’t have any direct evidence of God’s existence.  Presumably it is hinting at our comprehensive and expanding knowledge of the world and our use and possession of reason rather than just animal instincts and passions.

In Genesis God walks in his garden just as we do, he takes a well-earned rest after creating the world in six days,  and he gets into bad moods and wrecks things just like we do and this is all consistent with the theme that we were created in God’s image.   

I believe the collective use of moral judgement is what distinguishes us from animals and  this is what gave us the ability to bootstrap our way out of the natural world by making it  possible to construct our own reality and impose it on almost everything else.

The problem here is the same problem to do with the image of God.  Where is the evidence?  It turns out that there is some evidence, and it exists all around us but this evidence is so much a part of the background that it remains unseen, and taken for granted.  Humans have language and morality. What do these two have in common?  They are both rule-bound activities, that involve and include all humans, or at least, would do  so in a paleolithic group of thirty to a hundred humans.  

Why this size of group?   Like other primates we live in groups in order to survive.  and, there are some good reasons why the first humans lived in groups of from thirty to a hundred people. First off the first groups of humans couldn’t have been smaller than thirty for a number of reasons. Long before the invention of agriculture humans had to be able to migrate seasonally in order to get enough to eat, so they had to have few possessions and they would have depended on each other to survive.   They also had to deal with other groups of people and be able to defend themselves.  

 But larger groups, while they might be more effective in warfare, might not be supportable in many less-than-plentiful environments.  And dissension and violence seems to accompany groups when they get too large.  No doubt that humans are the co-operators par-excellence, but the rate of failure undoubtedly  goes up when a group gets too large.

Language, and morality are basic human social activities.  Knowing what they have in common might give us a good idea about what distinguishes us from animals.

The first quality is “commons”.  Both of these human activities would be shared in  common with everyone in the group.  Everyone in a group would speak the same language.  For any given language, all its speakers share the same words and the same rules of grammar.  

We also include everyone in our moral system, unless we believe that for some reason they cannot comprehend or follow its precepts. If we judge anyone to violate moral rules, they are punished, shunned, banished, or even executed.  ( Note that I am not here claiming that one particular moral system is shared by all groups but that every group of humans has a moral system.)

We have now touched on the second important distinction between humans and other animals.  Adherence to rules.  Both language and morality  are made up of rules.  If you don’t follow these rules then you cannot speak intelligibly and you can’t distinguish right from wrong.

The rule-governed world is organized by rules, but where explicit rules and choice as to whether or not to adhere to them do not exist, there you find “self-organizing systems”   What exactly are they?  Self organizing systems are systems in nature that are sustained by the mere natural interaction of their elements without any deliberation or planning.   These systems, like the solar system and earth’s ecosystems, just run themselves.  In the case of the solar system, it works by the force of gravity between the planets and the sun.  In the case of earth’s ecosystems, it is so complex that we don’t really understand how it works.    The fact is that we are incapable of creating and sustaining an ecosystem by deliberation or design.  Nonetheless, ecosystems work fine here on earth without our help.  

Our closest animal relatives are the great apes.  Apes live in dominance hierarchies.  In a dominance hierarchy the dominant animal, usually called the alpha male, controls sexual reproduction and the distribution of food.  The system works so that the alpha and other apes on the upper rungs get all the goodies, and the rest of the group gets the dregs.  

In hearing this, you might think that that is exactly what we have in place now.  But you would be wrong.  In a chimpanzee society if the alpha male is killed he is quickly replaced by the new alpha.  Human societies are not like this.  First, leadership is not automatically connected to sexual dominance.  Look at the Pope.  He is the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, but he doesn’t get to marry or have children.    Second, we don’t usually need to kill our leaders and CEOs in order to replace them.  Leadership generally follows rules and leaders, unless they are maniacal tyrants, cannot do whatever they want.

Hunter-gatherer groups make important decisions by consensus.  Many modern groups make decisions by majority vote.  All of these involve collective deliberation as opposed to the automatic functioning of dominance hierarchies. 

What with the continued existence of male sexual misconduct, bullying, and gang-related behaviour one might be tempted to think that nothing has changed since the time our ancestors were apes but all this shows is that we still  bring some of our strongest instinctual urges to the table.

It’s true that we will never really know what human society looked like two million years ago.  There is very little physical evidence left from that long ago.  But we can surmise, by working backward from what we see of human society, especially contemporary nomadic hunter-gatherer groups,  and working forward from what we observe about great ape societies.

Somehow we went from small-brained walking apes with dominance hierarchies to large-brained humans with consciously created social systems.  Something had to spark that change and it couldn’t have been just more of the same chimpanzee politics.  

We don’t have alpha males running harems of females (except maybe in Utah.)  Apes don’t follow rules, speak languages, or have moral systems.   It therefore seems unavoidable that the point of origin of human beings had to do with the collective institution of a system of rules that everyone was expected to abide by.

The Human Singularity - Part II

What was the singularity?  Was it the invention of morality or the invention of language? Many philosophers argue that language came first because morality would  not have been possible without language.  Or was it?  We can see in bonobos, a close relative to chimpanzees, a nascent morality, because male bonobos do not get to dominate females.  They are consistently  prevented from dominating females by the collective action of all the females in a group. This is close to a moral system, in spite of the fact that bonobos don’t have language.

Note that in order for the bonobo “moral” system to work, it requires collective action on the part of the entire group of females.  If the females couldn’t overpower individual males by acting together, than the males would dominate instead.

Interestingly, female bonobos have dominance hierarchies but they are much less violent than  chimpanzee male dominance hierarchies because bonobos use sex as a method of dealing with conflict.  Bonobo sex is independent of fertility and happens anywhere and anytime, with any and all combinations of partners.

In bonobo troops, it happens that females individual interests and collective interests exactly coincide in suppressing male dominance behaviour.  But is that the case for humans?

Let’s initially define morality as a system of rules and principles that are collectively used to judge and regulate social behaviour.  This definition would appear to presuppose language.

 We could say that female bonobos appear to be following the unspoken rule:    ”Never allow a male to beat up or harass a female.” But  an alternative explanation could be that female bonobos just instinctively act to  help lone females  by collectively responding when they utter distress calls.  I tend to favour the former explanation, myself.  

We know that our own behaviour is internally regulated by much that is nonverbal:   feelings, moods, hunches, intuitions.  It stands to reason that much social regulation of behaviour has to do with nonverbal feelings too.  

It is highly probable that shared feelings would have preceded any conceptual rendering of a moral principle.  

Could some situations be simple enough that regulating the behaviour involved doesn’t necessarily require the use of language? There is, in fact a type of vulture that collectively disrupts and attacks extra-”marital”  copulation in their fellow vultures.  Note that what’s different about these vultures is that the cuckolded male is able to recruit other vultures to help him attack the "guilty" couple.  

Regulation of behaviour doesn’t necessarily imply language.  But it is hard to see how a moral system could exist without language.  In a moral system we judge conduct according to standards.  There is no question that this is strongly facilitated by language.  

Is it possible to simplify moral standards down to a fundamental dichotomy, that is simple enough to understand and implement without the use of language?  I think it is.  We see the possibility in the examples of bonobos and vultures, even if we concede that there is a strong argument against their being actual moral systems.  

The sense of universality, that, to paraphrase  Jeremy Bentham, everyone should count as one and no-one as more than one, could be the basis of such a pre-verbal dichotomy.  We all have strong feelings about fairness.  We resent it when others are privileged, or when we are treated worse than others.  Both apes and monkeys have these feelings too.  

There is a reason why moral systems are supposed to apply to everyone equally.  We agree to follow the rules because we expect that everyone else will too.  This is why we agree to follow a rule which may not be in our own self-interest to follow.  This is why we are willing to go out of our way to punish rule-breakers.  

In a game, I play with others as long as I and everyone else plays by the rules.  It might be to my advantage to break a rule, but I play by the rules because I expect everyone else too.  Rule breakers are kicked out of the game.

Games  have a universal commons quality because the rules apply to everyone equally and the game works by rule following.  In a commons, a property common to all is shared according to rules agreed by all and applying to everyone equally.  

A big biological difference between humans and most other apes, is that humans live in larger groups.According to Anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s theory, we evolved language to deal with the social complexity of living in large groups.  There is a correlation in primates between brain size and group size and humans not only have enormous brains compared to primates, but they also live in indeterminately larger groups.  Dunbar’s theory is that if humans were living in larger groups they would have needed a method of communication and trust that was more efficient than what apes now have.  

But why did humans start living in larger groups?  As I have pointed out in part I, group size is a balance between the need for bigger size to protect the group and the propensity of larger groups to break apart through violent disagreement. Language, which greatly facilitates communication would also make larger groups more cohesive, more able to stay together.

But what would have inspired human groups to grow larger in the first place?  Something that would have radically changed the political and social group dynamics. Something that allowed the first humans to leave the natural world .   This happened long before language, but it would have then hastened the development of language, through the change in social dynamics.  

There is actually strong physical evidence for this change.  It is the stone tools from early humans uncovered by archeologists.  It is also evidence of a taller more gracile body form in homo erectus, and a smaller more human-like sexual dimorphism compared to previous hominids.  It is the fact that Homo Erectus was the first hominin to control fire and colonize continents outside of Africa.  

Walking upright, and the nascent ability to develop and use stone technology - these were the natural precursors to human behaviour.  Walking freed our hands to carry things over distances, and to make and fashion tools.  Stone knives facilitated meat eating and the sharing of meat by making it easier to cut carcasses; spears made hunting game and fending off predators easier.  

The truly radical change happened because stone knives and spears threatened the alpha male system.  Now any pipsqueak with a stone tipped weapon could dispatch the alpha in his sleep.  The important social result was that harems became untenable.  At this time violence must have become more widespread as individuals or groups of males vied for access to females.  

Another big biological and social difference between humans and apes is that humans pair bond and most apes do not. Pair bonding in a large group setting may be possible, but it is bound to be unstable in the presence of alpha male behaviour.  In order for stability you need the institution of monogamy - a collective agreement that all adults in a group have the right to pair up and form semi-permanent bonds. The other side of the coin is that monogamy  implies the elimination of the alpha male position and the continual public suppression of alpha male behaviour.

We have now uncovered the human singularity. It had to be the achievement of something relatively simple to conceive and institute.  It had to have immediate benefit for the majority of individuals. And it had to be a deliberate collective action.   It’s success led to bigger, stronger, more cohesive groups, and to all other forms of rule making and collective agreements.  

The original point of having rules, of having a morality  was to suppress the alpha and facilitate monogamy.  The evidence is all around us.  In almost every human society the majority live in monogamous relationships;  The human alpha male only exists in rare pathological conditions such as the case with murderous tyrants, serial killers, and religious cults;  Moral rules universally condemn murder and almost always  condemn sex out of marriage; both Inuit and IKung nomadic hunter-gatherer groups, coming from vastly different arctic and equatorial environments respectively, both have strong moral strictures against public displays of anger, bullying, boasting.  These are all alpha male behaviours.  

  We sometimes shun bullies and aggressive people but we don’t banish them as would happen in a hunter-gatherer society.  We are not surviving by the skin of our teeth, and we have governments, police and social workers -  so that may be the reason why hunter-gatherers are so much more morally strict about aggressive conduct - for them, suppressing alpha male behaviour is directly linked to their survival.

  Human male dominance behaviour is regulated by collective action when it falls outside of the pair-bond, but I think that most of the time and for most of human history alpha behaviour has been unregulated within the pair-bond and the nuclear family.  This remained the case until the last fifty years, so we can justly congratulate ourselves that we have made some moral progress since it is no longer considered OK for a man to beat up his wife or his children in Western society.

The Human Singularity - Part III

In The Genealogy of Morals, the German Lone Wolf Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:   

The guidepost which first put me on the right track was this question:  what is the true etymological significance of the various symbols for the idea  of “good” which have been coined in the various languages?  I then found that they all led back to the same evolution of the same idea - that everywhere “aristocrat,” “noble,”(in the social sense) is the root idea, out of which has necessarily developed “good” - a development which invariably runs parallel with other evolution by which “vulgar,” “plebian,” “low,” are made to change finally into “bad.”

According to Nietzsche, the “flowering, rich and effervescing healthiness of aristocratic values" are polluted and poisoned by the ideas of human equality.

The ‘masters’ have been done away with; the morality of the vulgar man has triumphed.  This triumph may also be called blood poisoning.  (it has mutually fused the races) - I do not dispute it.                                                                           

 Natural superiority is only diluted and weakened by rules of equality.  Why should physical and racial superiority bow before equality?  I immediately recognized where Ayn Rand got her inspiration for her twentieth century tirades against altruism, although she wisely abandoned Nietzsche’s theme of race.   

More than a hundred years later we recognize the  absurdity of notions about race purity, and we also have a much deeper picture of human origins.  I can understand why Nietzsche would only go back a few thousand years, based on the rudimentary archeological, and anthropological knowledge of the late nineteenth century.  

The usual modern philosophical  treatment of the  origin of morality doesn’t go back farther than a few tens of thousands of years, to sometime after the development of language in homo sapiens.  In contrast, I think we need to look back much further,  two million years ago, long before homo sapiens and language, to the time of homo erectus, the first hominin to control fire and to walk out of Africa.

Apes have alpha male hierarchies, these are naturally evolved, self-organizing systems of hierarchical dominance.  Humans have dominance hierarchies, but leadership is often collectively determined and the role is elected, appointed, or assigned.  Even hereditary kingship, requires justification through a story of the monarch’s exploits and achievements, the story of his family history,  and a theory of divine right. It is not at all self-organized.  

As the Primatologist Frans de Waal points out, with humans sexual dominance has split off from other forms of competition so that humans can independently excel at different abilities and cooperation can be strongly enhanced in human communities.

A group with an alpha male and a harem of adult females can only be so big and must exclude other adult males.  Intra-group cooperation is rudimentary and Inter-group cooperation non-existent. (because of the presence of competing alpha males.)  

This problem was solved by the institution of monogamy.  Allow and support every adult male to be an alpha with his mate and offspring, but with no others, the cost being that everyone participates in suppressing alpha dominance outside the family, keeping the group’s ability to cooperate and make collective decisions intact.

Out of this comes morality:  a system of collective judgement and expectations that regulates  behaviour in all human societies. The benefit  is the enhanced ability to cohere and cooperate in larger groups leading to homo erectus’s control of fire and  ability to colonize other parts of the world two million years ago; to the establishment of rules and universal adherence to them, and ultimately to homo sapiens development of  language.

It is my thesis that  two of the most important building blocks of human civilization- reason and morality -  both radically predate the development of language. One of the interesting consequences of this is that, if it is true, it puts into question most of what we would call analytic philosophy, because this type of philosophy is premised on the belief that a better understanding of language  is the key to all philosophical problems.  

So how does morality develop so suddenly in humans?  What evidence do we have, if any?  Archeological evidence shows us an origin for the first shaped stone tools of approximately two million years.  We see over and over again in history, how the development of new technologies leads to both positive and negative social transformation.  Karl Marx based much of his work on this fact.  

The first stone tools made sharing meat more practical but it’s more radical function, from our perspective, was the instability it created by making the violent replacement of the alpha male too easy.  The most common reason for murder in iKung bushman groups in Africa is a conflict over a woman.  It’s a fact that all moral codes prohibit murder.  It’s unchecked existence can lead to a vicious cycle of revenge and counter-violence.  

In apes, the presence of a physically larger and a stronger alpha male functions to stabilize intra-group violence, but stone technology radically weakened the hold of the alpha male, by making his position too precarious.  

Although we live in hierarchies, these are subject to cultural influences, and they co-exist with notions of fairness, and expectations of our having equal rights and responsibilities.  These expectations, which Nietzsche termed “slave morality”  are actually evidence of the genealogy of morals in collective agreements.  

A self organizing system runs on positive feedback.  It works because behaviour is reinforced by individuals pursuing their own self-interests.  A moral system, replaces this natural reinforcement with the expectation of universal adherence to moral rules.  We expect that rules will fall on all of us equally, and we expect everyone in the group to adhere to the rules.  Plus we expect that those who violate the rules will all get the same punishment.      

The more we see people adhering to rules the more we adhere, the more we see people violate the rules, the more likely we will violate them too.  The ability to prevent breakdown is deliberative.  We cooperate by detecting and punishing rule-breakers in order to keep expectations of adherence high.   

Monogamy is eminently simple, but from it springs most of  the complexities of human existence. In the book of Genesis, the story of Noah and his ark illustrates the centrality of monogamy.  Noah is commanded to build an ark.   All the animals on the earth come to the ark in pairs,  reflecting God’s original creation and the human institution of monogamy.   All wait together  and cooperate to get on the ark, reflecting the rule-governed order of human society. Once all the animal pairs are on the ark, along with members of Noah’s family, God causes a great flood, killing all life on land.  All the pairs of animals, including the humans become a new creation, recolonizing the land after the waters subside.  This is as close as you can get to a myth illustrating that the civilizing influence of human nature is born out of our original agreement to institute monogamy.

What is it about the singularity that led to our being human?  It was the collective nature of our action.  The first humans wanted to have stable pair-bonding, but the only way to get it was to collectively agree to honour monogamy and suppress the alpha male.  Other than walking, and the development of stone technology which preceded the singularity, everything that is specifically human has followed this first collective decision. morality, adherence to rules, language, music, games, religion, science….   all made possible by the public suppression of alpha bullying.  

Insanity Single Kick Drum Program

Before I start this thing I’ve got a confession to make.  Nobody asked me to write down my insanity single kick drum program, No request was made by a publisher, nor did any of my students ask me.  This is purely my own idea.  I just think it’s really important to have a kick-ass solid bass drum technique.  And I now know how to get it.

The two secrets to the insanity program are: 1. Always practice at a tempo that is slow enough that you can master the material right away, then very gradually increase the tempo so that you are always challenged somewhat, but not too much.  2.   Switch books once you get tired with practicing one set of exercises.  

I recommend five books for developing the kick drum.  The first is Bass Drum Control by Colin Bailey.  This is the best book on kick drum technique out there.    The exercises look ridiculously easy.  They are physically challenging.    They are simple but if you do even half of them they will radically  improve your coordination. At first, I found I was exhausted just practicing more than two pages from this book.  Building up your strength, keeping solid time, and building up your speed is a gradual thing, It can’t be rushed.  

Do read the page where Colin talks about right foot technique.  He says very little but it’s worth remembering everything.  You can catch you tube videos of  Colin Bailey.  He has incredibly fast technique.  Basically, he keeps his heel down for slow strokes and rests, and lifts his heel about half an inch for fast repeating strokes. His stroke never leaves the beater on the head but always lets it rebound.  

Don’t burn out on Bass Drum Control.  Before that happens get a copy of Syncopation by Ted Reed. If  you are a drummer you should already have this book.  You should have gone through the entire book playing quarter notes on the kick and alternating RL on the snare.  Now go over the entire book again substituting the kick for the snare line, letting your hihat play the quarter notes, one hand playing the ride and the other playing back beats on the snare or rim on 2 and 4, on 3, or on 4.  Make sure to do all the eighth note sections in both  rock feel and  in shuffle feel

You may want to skip the multiple sixteenth note sections.  Most of us will not be able to play solid lines of sixteenth notes on  one kick but you may be able to play up to four to eight sixteenth notes in a row, using Bailey’s method. .  

When you get to the accented eighth, triplets, and sixteenth note section at the end of the book go back to alternating R and L on the snare but play the hihat on quarter notes and play  only the accents on the kick drum.  

 

But for a real flowing single kick technique I recommend some of the eighth note triplet exercises in Double Bass Drumming  by Joe Franco.  I’m sure Joe does not approve, but I practice his exercises using a single kick , with my right hand playing bass drum number two’s line on the low tom, and my left hand playing quarter notes on the hihat and the backbeat (either 2&4, 3 or 4) on the snare.  Doing it this way makes a very good double bass simulation.  Most people will not be able to tell the difference between this technique and real double bass.  Start on pg 22 and do ex.  1 to 80.  Should take a couple of weeks or a month if you are not practicing every day.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

I find that Colin Bailey has better sixteenth note exercises for the bass drum than Franco.  But I really love Franco’s eighth note triplet fill exercises, p43 ex 1 to 108.  I substitute R kick for both bass drum 1 and bass drum 2,  and if there is more than four eighth note triplets  in a row for the bass drum to play I alternate R hand on the Low tom for bass drum 2.  Doing Franco’s triplet exercises has really improved the flowing quality of my  single bass technique.  But it only works if you practice enough to play the exercises really fast.  

After you get tired of those exercises, it’s time to learn a different style of kick playing called the linear style.  Glenn W. Meyer has put out a lot of material on this style.  It is playing by alternating hands and foot, so that you produce polyrhythms.  Beyond Stick Control is a comprehensive look at different ways that you can incorporate the bass drum into rudiments.  It covers ostinato bass drum , linear style, and linear jazz style.  It goes beyond the books Stick Control  and Syncopation because it shows you how to improvise with the bass drum.  Colin Bailey also does a great job of incorporating linear style and stick rudiments, but Meyer is better at showing how to improvise and how linear style works with Latin and Jazz.  

If you only have one book, it should be Ted Reed’s book Syncopation.  To learn the linear style, start with Lesson three on page 8 and play exactly as written.  It doesn’t get any simpler or easier than this, so it is really worth mastering.   Keep practicing until you can play it very fast.  Now go to the back of the book, where he deals with accented notes.  Start with Lesson One P47, on accented eighth notes.  Here are four ways to do these exercises for the kick drum.    The last  two ways will demonstrate the linear style.  

First, play the entire snare drum pattern on the kick drum, including the accents.  One hand plays eighths on the hi-hat or ride, the other plays a back beat on the snare, it can be 2 and 4, on the three, or on every quarter.

Second method:  play alternating RL on the snare, but instead of playing the bass drum on the quarter notes, just use it to play the accents.

Third method: Play accents on the kick but only play the unaccented notes on the snare. This will sound very similar to Colin Bailey's method.

 Fourth Method:  play the accents on the kick drum but play the unaccented notes one hand playing the snare alternating with the other hand playing the cymbal, or play a pattern of your choice with the same hand playing the cymbal and the other hand playing the snare.  You will be blown away by the grooves that you can get with this method.  Build up speed slowly.  It is a real pleasure to be able to play these patterns in a relaxed manner.  This is where you can really improvise using different hand patterns, making it sound like funk, latin, or middle eastern.

Now repeat these last three methods for accented dotted eighths, accented triplets, and accented sixteenth notes.  If you play the hihat with your left hand, you can simulate a double bass sound by playing the right on the low tom.   

For a comprehensive guide to linear style for rock drumming I recommend the exercises in Jungle/drum’n’bass  by Johnny Rabb.  Keep practicing these babies until you can play them at lightning speed and the effect on kick and hand coordination will astonish you.  

That’s my insanity program.  When I get tired of practicing from one of these books, I go back to the next one.  That way I keep getting better and I never burn out.  

The Mystery of Capital

“In medieval latin “capital” appears to have denoted head of cattle or other livestock which has always been important sources of wealth beyond the basic meat that they provide. Livestock are low maintenance possessions. They are mobile and can be moved away from danger. They are also easy to count and measure. But most important, from livestock you can obtain additional wealth, of surplus value, by setting in motion other industries including milk, hides, wool, meat and fuel. Livestock also have the useful attribute of being able to reproduce themselves. Thus the term capital begins to do two jobs. Simultaneously capturing the physical dimension of assets (livestock) as well as their potential to generate surplus value.”

What a wonderful way to put so abstract a concept. That’s from Peruvian social scientist Hernando DeSoto’s brilliant book, The Mystery of Capital.

Let’s be Ubercapitalist and see everything in terms of capital.

Life is like capital. In nature all living organisms are able to make use of raw materials to transform them into useful energy and functions.

Living things make surplus value out of materials and other life in a continuous ongoing process. Grass grows from the soil, the sun, and the rain. Cows eat grass and feed themselves and produce milk for their young. We make and consume dairy products and meat products. Bacteria live in our guts and make use of our waste products.

We need to understand that the nature of capital has a continuity that encompasses our human existence but goes beyond it to take in a larger circle. Life itself maintains and thrives by taking in raw materials and processing them into food and structural materials.

One of the commonalities of life processes and capital is ability to generate new things: descendants in the case of life, and income flows, in the case of humans.

But why stop at the living world why not consider the solar system? Starts out as a cloud of hydrogen and bits of flotsam and jetsam from a previous supernova. Then coalesces by the force of gravity into one big solar furnace called the sun; and the planets circling around the sun, so much smaller than the sun, were made from accretions of asteroid and comet bergy bits, created by gravity and sheer impact.

The sun: surplus value, a lot more useful energy than a cloud of hydrogen molecules. And the planets: the existence of life, human society, and property could not exist without them.

Why stop at the solar system?  What about the universe?  Big bang gives birth to the Universe – talk about surplus value:  everything from nothing.

Is it magic?? Of course in nature, only humans agree to divide land and things into property and have this property available to exchange for sums of money. Remember those qualities of cattle that de Soto talked about: the cattle were countable, movable, exchangable, and they gave surplus value. This is what drives human economics.

Think of mathematics. Mathematicians can generate beautiful geometric solids, wonderful infinite number series, entire worlds of imaginary objects. All from ideas.

But not just ideas. It’s our mind’s ability to convert space and time into equal units and then to manipulate those units by adding, dividing and multiplying them into forms and objects of wondrous variety. These objects do not exist in reality as some ideal forms, they are created and maintained by the collective acts of humans from all around the world.

What humans can do that the rest of nature cannot is to use collective agreement to create a system of property rights that propels capital forward.

Like mathematics, our economy exists and grows by virtue of collective agreements between humans to abstract out of reality certain features that allow for countability, transformability, and lower transaction costs. This is the role of property in most places where people make exchanges, but most dramatically in our modern economic system of Global Capitalism.

Suppose we organize a system of exchange where anyone can buy or sell units of property.  But how do we organize this market?  First we have to define a unit of account that will be used to measure the value of each property.  The property will have been surveyed as to its location and dimensions, or identified through description or serial number if it is an object.  

In order to make such units of account, descriptions, official surveys, etc. recognizable and acceptable there needs to be a legal system that describes property in a systematic way, and handles disputes between property-rights holders.  In order for this system to work there must be a government and the institutions of courts, schools, some sort of technology such as print, electronic files, etc..  that records transactions.  

Also, in order for the system to work the government needs adequate force and authority.  If marauding Vikings can plunder and pillage towns along the coast with impunity then communities lack an effective central government.  

Perhaps even more importantly there needs to be adequate trust within and between groups of people. All agreements require trust. Without trust commerce and trade diminish severely.  

The inculcation of trust requires complex social coordination that is enabled by the raising and schooling of children,  and the passing on  of recognizable customs, procedures, cultural habits and expectations from generation to generation.  

Trust also depends on perceived fairness in society.  The more inequality in a society, the more perceived unfairness, and the more likely that generalized trust in government, institutions, and other people will break down.

Social coordination and cooperation are at the beginnings and end of the story of capital and the real source of surplus value.  Capital is really social capital. Surplus value comes from the human ability to cooperate and make lasting agreements.

If we don’t begin to understand both human nature and social capital we will only accelerate our downfall.   By coming to understand this we can build economic systems from the ground up to be fair and  sustainable.