🚀 go-pugleaf

	In the book _Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise, and Other Imponderables_
(by David Feldman, Harper & Row), we find an interesting proposed
explanation of why people like lawns (pp. 47-50). One theory is that
lawns represent a sort of indulgence, but why one indulgence and not
some other, like a swamp? Picture people surrounding their houses not
with lawns, but with swamps. Or dense forests. Or sand. John Falk of
the Smithsonian Institution believes that this taste for lawns
reflects the habitat of our hominid ancestors, which lived in the
grasslands of East Africa. If they had a genetically programmed
tendency for living in grassland, then some of their descendants (such
as us) would still have "I want to live in grassland" genes. Falk also
noted that common lawn ornaments, such as shade trees and fountains
and pools, correspond to typical East Africa grassland trees and
springs and water holes. He and psychologist John Balling have shown
pictures of five terrains -- deciduous-tree forest, conifer forest,
tropical rainforest, grassland, and desert -- to people the world
over, and asked them where they would want to live. The first choice,
they found, was the grassland, with their native habitat the second
choice. This was even if the people had never seen grassland before.
Children under 12 years old expressed an even stronger preference.
Does anyone here on the net know of any attempts to check this
research?

	If we are equipped with "I want to live in grassland" genes,
then this may also explain why we find sunsets and the stars so
beautiful. Both sunsets and stars are easy to see in open country,
while both are difficult to see from inside a forest. Additionally,
both sights are much easier to see when the sky is relatively free of
clouds, which is true of semiarid or arid terrain, such as East
African grassland. Water that falls as rain condenses as clouds first,
and if there is little water to condense and make clouds, there will
be little rain. There is a common objection that such experiences as
love and beauty cannot be mechanistically explained, because they
don't _seem_ mechanistic. But these would simply be how we experience
our genetic programming, in the fashion of our other perceptions.
"Pain" is bad because we are genetically programmed to avoid
"painful" stimuli. Love and friendship may simply be how we experience
genetic programming to be social animals. I do not mean that
_everything_ we do is genetically determined. Language is a universal
human feature, but most people speak only a small number of languages
well, and sometimes find it hard to learn new languages after
childhood. The language that one speaks well is most often the
language that one has learned in childhood. Thus, there exist
interactions between genetic tendencies and learning. Indeed, in some
songbirds, it is known that the songs the birds sing are part instinct
and part learned. _Homo sapiens_ may be no fundamentally different in
that regards, though our species certainly has a much higher "learned"
component.

	I note that the question of human social groupings may be a
bit relevant to the question of human origins. Recent research with
the genes of mitochondria -- energy-producing structures inside of
cells that have their own genetic-transcription apparatus, and which
are inherited only from the mother, in egg cells -- suggest that all
present-day human mitochondria are descendants of the mitochondria of
one woman who lived approximately 200 thousand years ago. The oldest
split in the human family tree is between the Africans and all the
others, which suggests that modern _Homo sapiens_ originated in, or
near, Africa. This research has gotten headlines such as "The Search
for Adam and Eve", but it is unlikely that humanity was descended from
some primordial couple. Since living in groups of several individuals
is a universal human feature, and also a feature of chimpanzees and
gorillas (our closest living relatives); it seems likely that all of
humanity's ancestors, _Homo erectus_, _Australopithecus africanus_,
and so on, lived like that. So, modern _Homo sapiens_ may have
originated when some genes for an expanded brain and more childlike
features spread in some isolated population of a few hundred or
thousand of _Homo erectus_ or "archaic _Homo sapiens_". The locale:
Africa, most likely. This population grew and grew, and ultimately
spread all over the world, apparently driving other humanlike
populations, such as the Neanderthals, into extinction. More genetic
studies may well reveal the details of this speciation event or
events. Thus, we may truly understand the origin of our species.

-------------
Loren Petrich, the Master Blaster
lip@amid.s1.gov
lip%amid.s1.gov@and.s1.gov
lip%amid.s1.gov@mordor.s1.gov
(whichever one works)