Running ape meets Evoculture

Knuckle, senescent white male

  Time, sethren, to consider the organism.

  The organism.  Raise your right index finger where you can see it clearly.  Keep it there, and rotate it clockwise as seen if you were looking out along your arm, which you aren’t, thus demonstrating the potential independence from the real  world of the ideoverse, where you are looking along your arm.  Dogs can’t do this, and only in part because of anatomical shortcomings.  Now rotate that finger about the metacarpophalangeal joint, the proximal knuckle, sether, bottom, bottom, no, not your arse, sether, and the wrist, and then about the elbow.  Just watch those interdependent hierarchies of concepts whizzing past in your ideoverse.  Metacarpophalangeal doesn’t often get much of an outing.  It’s hardly a familiar demon, but look how it’s hogging the limelight here.  Alas, in vain.  What chance does metacarpophalangeal (its last desperate mememe) have of ousting knuckle from any gang of demons.  Not room for both, I’m afraid, and anyway, there’s only one metacarpophalangeal joint in the human hand, there are fourteen knuckles.  Without the praxis of anatomy, I guess the metacarpophalangeal joint would be long extinct in the metaverse.

  With luck, your finger tip is now in contact with your nose, or thereabouts.  Or maybe your mouth.  Whatever, you are touching the human organism.  So are you sether Albert, but I should stop if I were you unless you want to be taken away for a good talking to by yon community police person.

  Try to imagine this organism upon which you have your finger, without Evoculture.  If you had been raised by a pack of wolves, or dogs, or even dolphins, were you sufficiently aquatic, that is exactly how you would be.  Totally devoid of Evoculture.  You would be a wolf, or a dog, or a dolphin but, in all categories, physically very ill-equipped.  If you were a wolf or a dog, you might be able to compensate for your inadequacies with the evolved hand, pulling out thorns for instance.  Your vastly superior processing power might prove useful in some situations, but that’s doubtful.  It, your brain, has access to very little of the stuff it has evolved over three million years to process, so the possibility of, say, doing a little building work round the lair may well not occur in the neural substrate, and would probably not be socially rewarded even if it it were translated into action.  To dolphins you would be even more useless, even though dolphins might have a developed but wholly proximate ideoverse, unlike dogs.  By wholly proximate, I mean the ideoverses are wholly organism-based.  Such ideoverses could for instance result in complex social interactions, games, hunting cooperation, even meeting groups of Evocultured-up human organisms for joint ventures, hopefully involving killing third parties, fish, rather than the humans killing the dolphins, as found among the Faroe- and Japanese.  But nothing uses the environment of the dolphin’s brain to evolve.  Nothing.  The downside of flippers, maybe.  On the other hand, put a human baby in a dolphin’s environment and the downside of everything else, including hands, becomes apparent.

So, the organism without Evoculture.  Homo sapiens with nothing but the brain and the real world, the world before the hominins.  Little more than a running ape with a good cooling system.  That’s what you would have your finger on, sethren, if it wasn’t for Evoculture.

  I want to call this human organism something that differentiates it from what we know the human being + Evoculture to be.  I want to call it the Ho!?, but Ho!? In our street culture, and that’s where we fucking are, sethren, has connotations.  Ma ‘ho.  Not good.  But Ha!?.  I like Ha!?.  The grunt of surprise, followed by that hardest concept, that concept at the heart of Evoculture, the question.

  The question goes back through evolutionary history.  An African Hunting Dog asks questions.  Want to hunt?  Tougher than me?  Scared?  But the repertoire is limited.  The Ha!? asks the question thus.  The two of us are looking in the same direction.  Concerning that which is before our eyes, what is the case?

  Or rather, it’s not the Ha!? that asks that question.  It’s the Ha!?-Evoculture symbiosis.