Much of what I’m going to write about today and in my next post was inspired by Dean Falk’s wonderful book, Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language.

         When I left off (July 27), we were talking about human mothers having to carry their babies in their arms.  This was because in order to develop a big brain, yet still fit through the human birth canal, a human baby must be born very immature.  Too immature to hang on to its mother while she gathers food.

         However, studies of primates, including humans, show that primate infants need virtually constant body contact with their mothers in order to survive in healthy shape.  And these primate infants make sure they get the contact if at all possible by complaining and crying whenever their mothers put them down.

         So before the invention of baby slings, early human mothers has a big problem.  They needed both hands for gathering food.  To free both hands, they had to put their babies down.  But when they did so, the babies would complain and cry noisily, attracting predators. 

         In order to minimize the risk, Falk (along with a number of other researchers) surmises that mothers made noises to soothe their infants, noises similar to the ones other primate mothers make to their babies.

         Each time a human baby would cry out, its mother would respond.  This “taking turns” making noises would be a kind of conversation.  As the conversation of soft sounds became a habitual way to keep the baby safely quiet instead of dangerously noisy, mother-infant talk would include facial expressions and gestures.

         A female baby raised in this way, would learn to do the same with her younger siblings when she helped look after them.  All females would grow up to do this with their own babies.

         Of course this isn’t full blown language, but it certainly makes a good start.  And there’s much more to tell in my next post about this growing prehistoric spiritual bond between early human mothers and their babies. 

If we can never know for sure how language came about, we are free to invent any hypotheses we want.  But I only get a charge out of plausible hypotheses. 

         For instance, I never went for the notion of language appearing in one fell swoop, fashionable in philosophy about twenty years ago.  It just didn’t make sense in terms of what I know about evolution.  François Jacob had it exactly right when he spoke of evolution as a tinkerer:  Evolution takes what is already present and tinkers with it, turning it into something different that might be useful. 

         This has been true about simple cellular respiration and photosynthesis that became complex, about gills that have become jaws and jaws turned into hearing apparatus, of fins becoming limbs, and on and on.  It must also be true about the development of language.

         The story of human mothers and babies and language starts with the evolution of a big brain for humans.  It’s easy to see that a big brain with greater intelligence must have been useful as soon as it evolved.  It’s hard to say what exactly were the first uses that made such a brain a plus in terms of natural selection.  Was it good for tool making which brought more food, for maintaining group efforts which brought more safety?  We can think of plenty of uses.

         But extra intelligence must have been very, very useful, because a big, intelligent brain did not come without a price.  And the price was that in order to develop a big brain, the human infant had to get born at a very immature stage.  The reason for this is that if we were born as mature as even chimpanzee babies, we humans couldn’t fit through our mothers’ birth canals. 

         In order for us to be born immature enough pass through the human birth canal, the timing of human development had to change.  We had to grow into all the rest of our developmental stages in pretty immature bodies.  So we wound up with almost no body hair even in adulthood.  And even if we had had the body hair, unlike chimp babies, our immature babies weren’t strong enough to hang onto the hair while we walked around gathering food and building shelters.

         In other words, until the invention of slings, human mothers had to carry their babies around in their arms no matter what else they were doing.  This had big implications that may have resulted in language!  Stay tuned!



What an unexpected question!  It’s one of those questions, like how did we come to walk on two legs (See my posts for October 14 & 16, 2009.) or how did some animals come to have legs instead of fins (See my posts for October 20, 21, 23, 2009.) that we will probably never be able to answer definitely. 

         But a couple of years ago I was reading Robert Godwin’s One Cosmos Under God (a fascinating read about spirit and science), and came across the intriguing notion that the roots of language first developed between human mothers and their babies.

         In fact, Godwin emphasizes how essential babies have been and are to the development of human life as we know it today.  In particular he points out that babies seem to be hardwired for learning the basics of human life in their first few years.

         Godwin notes that human infants must bond with their parents in order to develop normally.  Part of that bonding entails eye contact and murmuring back and forth between the adult caregiver and the baby.  He cites theorists who see in this bonding the beginnings of language.

         I find this a captivating notion.  All of a sudden it makes perfect sense where no other hypotheses ever have.  I want to go into more detail about this idea in my next few posts.

The Mylar balloon I wrote about in my last two posts (July 13 & 15) descended to earth because it no longer was full of helium.  All balloons have microscopic holes and imperfectly sealed entryways.

         The atoms or molecules that make up a gas are constantly zipping this way and that, changing direction whenever they collide with one another or with the sides of a container, like scattering pool balls. And helium atoms are the second tiniest of all atoms, right after hydrogen.  So it’s highly probable that in a matter of days, the majority of the helium atoms in a balloon will hit a hole, easily slip through it, and escape.         

         Meanwhile, air molecules, mostly nitrogen and oxygen, are bouncing against the balloon from the outside.  Many of these may make their way into the balloon.  In this way, air replaces some of the helium, though the overall pressure inside lessens.

         But the result of this dynamic is that eventually all the helium, from all the helium balloons, escapes and disperses into the high levels of earth’s atmosphere.  Meaning helium is not a renewable resource.  So we have to keep finding more helium somewhere. 

         Right now, there’s plenty of helium on earth.  But it’s expensive to isolate from air or from natural gas deposits.  There is also helium on the moon that we might eventually exploit.  (What a concept!  And what an expensive concept!)

         The place with the most helium in our solar system is the sun itself.  All that solar radiation results from fusion, a nuclear reaction in which hydrogen nuclei fuse to form helium and give off a lot of energy in the process.  This is the energy Einstein was talking about in his famous equation: E = mc².

         Our sun is one of the billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.  And there are billions of galaxies.  So helium is abundant in the universe.  From floating balloons to the myriad stars in the night sky: helium is part of the magic of the cosmos.  Don't you agree?



The Mylar balloon I wrote about in my last post (July 13) reminded me of the rare helium balloons in my childhood.  I grew up in Cleveland, and once each summer, my family went to an amusement park called Euclid Beach.  It was the absolute most magical of all possible family jaunts.

         To a young child, the rides seemed hatched directly out of imagination.  Holding on for dear life in shallow, shiny chrome cars, we jerked up and down and side to side in wild, unpredictable zigzags.  Or we rose higher and higher in stately silver rocket ships, sailing in serene circles far above the ground.  Or, bathed in celestially bright light, we rode merry-go-round horses up and down and round and round to a hurdy-gurdy that took complete possession of our senses.

         All nourishment rules were suspended.  We chewed on Euclid Beach taffy, ten times more delicious than the saltwater stuff relatives sent from the East Coast.  We consumed cotton candy, popcorn balls, and ice cream.  Last of all, before we left, came a helium balloon for each child.

         As we drove back home, we were still full of the excitement we had experienced all day long.  But back in our workaday, ordinary house, the one bit of magic that remained, to prove it hadn’t all been a dream, was that balloon up on the ceiling, defying gravity.

         Maybe it was my child’s eye view, but I seem to recall those helium balloons staying up for days.  Or maybe the helium was purer, and they really did stay up longer.

         As an adult, I love the way helium balloons illustrate that we live at the bottom of an ocean of air.  Just as a beach ball floats on water because the air it’s full of is less dense than water, so a helium balloon floats on air because the helium it’s full of is less dense than air.  The reason is that helium atoms weigh much less than the nitrogen and oxygen molecules that make up most of our atmosphere.        

         Reflecting on this, I was startled when I realized that if we filled a balloon with helium on the moon, it would just drop to the ground!  No atmosphere on the moon for a helium balloon to float on.

         But that tendency of helium to rise to the top of the atmosphere here on earth means that once it gets loose, helium is always leaving.  Eventually, we may run out of helium, a disappointing thought.  More on this next time. 

My morning power walk takes me near the Sydney R. Marovitz municipal golf course, part of the Chicago Park District.  The course stretches between the bike path and Montrose Harbor, a scenic spot for golfers, bikers, joggers, walkers, and dog exercisers.  The chain link fence that separates the golf course from other traffic is painted black, so it’s barely visible; and this time of year, it’s draped with a cheery, orange-flowering vine I haven’t been able to identify (but which might be orange trumpet creeper). 

         Occasionally golfers appear by 6:00 AM, as early as the rest of us.  I can watch or at least listen to them tee off as I walk along, though I’m rarely in the right position to follow the ball’s trajectory.  Mowers appear also, roaring back and forth annoyingly.  But mostly the golf course simply presents a lush green savannah (though with short grass)—scenic and peaceful.

         However, yesterday, as I walked swiftly northward on my return trip, I spied, through the vine-draped fence, a shiny purple something lying on the bright green grass.  At first glance, it looked like a cast off backpack, or a down vest.  My mind struggled to match either object with golfers or grass trimmers.  But as I drew nearer, I recognized a purple, Mylar balloon, it’s “Happy Birthday” side down, its gleaming, blank purple back on display.

         Certainly, this balloon must have escaped its owner somewhere far away.  It must have risen high, high into the atmosphere, floated along, propelled by the wind.  Then, gradually exchanging its helium for plain old air, it must have drifted down, bouncing here and there among the tree tops, until it came to rest in the Marovitz municipal golf course in time for my Monday morning walk.

         I reflected on the difference between my childhood, when helium balloons (rubber, not Mylar) were a rare, magical treasure once a summer, and today’s dime-a-dozen ones.  I reflected on helium, the element, and on the earth’s atmosphere and the moon’s non-atmosphere, all which I will write about in my next couple of posts.



Last weekend we took my little grandson to the Field Museum of Natural History.  He wanted to see really big dinosaurs, so we walked past fossils of dinosaur heads and fossils of small and medium dinosaurs, until we found the room with enormous dinosaur fossils: brachyiosaurus, tyrannosaurus, triceratops, etc.

         Then, even though he’s only 2 ½, my grandson still had plenty of energy to visit the mastodon and woolly mammoth show.  There, in addition to the fossils, we saw dioramas of the tundra and forests these animals inhabited.  And we watched movies that were so realistic, a documentary film maker might have spent months living among the woolly mammoths to shoot the footage.  (I really don’t know how these films were made, but I hazard the guess it was done the way “Avatar” was, with a computer building on special elephant film.)

         During this Field Museum visit, the question came up, “If time travel were possible, and your safety could be guaranteed, would you go back to the time of the dinosaurs or of the woolly mammoths?”  My answer was absolutely YES!  I’m dying to be there, especially to see, hear, smell the dinosaurs and their swampy, warm earth.

         Then I found the May 21 issue of Science I thought I’d lost, and read an article about the origin of language (“Animal Communication Helps Reveal Roots of Language”).  Suddenly, I was wishing again that time travel were possible. Over the years, I have read any number of hypotheses about how language came about: for cooperative hunting, as a result of the long dependency of human infants, gestures-first-vocalizations-second, by copying parental grunts and croaks, by the same imitative means birds use to learn song....

         But what I wouldn’t give to go back to the pre-beginnings, beginnings, late beginnings, early development, development, etc.  It would be so satisfying to know at last the answer to this puzzle of the origins of human speech.  If only time travel really were possible!

         Alas, with respect to dinosaurs, mammoths, and prehistoric human speech, we will never know for sure what it was like in those early times.  But the hypotheses intrigue me, and I am always up for reading about—and imagining—yet another scenario.



Two recent articles in the online science journal, TheScientist, intrigue me with the apparent sociality of cells.

         One article reports Philip Donaghue’s discovery of apparently multicellular fossils, similar to jellyfish, from over 2 billion years ago, 200 million years earlier than we thought multicellularity first began. 

         The fossils show only the outsides of jellyfish-like creatures, with hints of cell-to-cell communication mechanisms.  One problem is that some of the same mechanisms are used by groups of single-celled organisms.  So with no innards to go on, it’s hard to be sure these fossils qualify as multicellular. 

         Yet multicellularity has evolved many times, an indication that it is often a successful survival strategy.  It allows an organism to be larger, with nutrients and information passing to inner cells from outer cells.  Large size may keep an organism (and hence, its cells) from being eaten.  Or large size may increase the possible size and quantity of prey, a boon to all the cells involved.  Or it may make metabolism more efficient, providing the multicellular organism with time to move beyond mere food consumption to courting or nesting.  Or any number of other advantages.

          The second article reports Milica Radisic’s biomedical engineering of heart cells from stem cells.  She places the stem cells on a scaffolding of cardiac tissue and supplies them with nutrients and oxygen: Not only do these cells begin to “beat,” but they find each other, connect with one another, and form a beating tissue like the natural tissue of hearts.  And they do this in response to a series of electrical impulses that simulate the electric impulses that pass through natural hearts from their controlling nodes.

         So what gives here?  Two very different types of cells, some direct descendants of single-celled organisms, some stem cells that just become cardiac cells by finding themselves on a support structure of heart cells, all connect with each other and function cooperatively.  

         Yet another wonder in a universe of wonders, don’t you think?



I’ve been writing (June 15 & 18) about my reactions to “Landscape and Narrative,” an essay by Barry Lopez in the collection called Vintage Lopez.  In this essay, Lopez speaks of outer and inner landscapes, and of storytelling.  It’s as if the satisfaction Lopez describes as stemming from hearing a good story has to do with a feeling of rightness or fit with the listener’s inner landscape.

         This reminds me of the bits and snatches of his childhood that my father used to reveal.  Lopez stresses that satisfying stories must be authentic, and this also reminds me of my father’s stories, some of which were authentic, some of which carried an agenda.  After a while I could tell the difference.

         For instance, my father was an enthusiastic gardener.  All through World War II he maintained a victory garden, and we ate freshly harvested peas, beets, scallions, sweet corn, beans, peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes all summer long.  Also, from early spring through late fall, my father surrounded our house with flowers: crocuses, daffodils, tulips, irises, marigolds, pansies, petunias, hollyhocks, cosmos, chrysanthemums.

         The hollyhocks blossomed all summer, and their blue, red, and purple, cup-shaped blossoms were always full of bees.  When I was six or seven, my father told me—with great laughter—how he and his brothers played a terrifying game.  They would grab a hollyhock blossom, closing the petals over a bee, trapping it inside.  As the angry buzzing increased, they would twist the petals like the top of a bag, temporarily sealing the bee trap.  Then they would fling these horrifyingly dangerous bee/flower packets at each other, ensuring that at least some of the bees would escape and some of the boys would be stung.  This awful boy-story felt absolutely authentic.  Chills went up my spine as if I were right there, in danger, helpless.  Ever after, in the landscape of my mind, the boys and their bee grenades accompanied hot sun and hollyhocks and the cicada-buzz of summer.

         But later, I grew old enough to compute the ages of my father and uncles in this story my father told to horrify me.  My father was the youngest of nine children.  My uncles were 17, 14, 7, and 5 years older than he was.  This meant that either my father only watched while the two brothers nearest in age to him played this awful game with each other.  Or worse, that a 14-year-old and 12-year-old threw bee-loaded hollyhocks at a helpless little 7-year-old boy.  Which definitely changed my inner landscape with respect to my father and who, exactly, was supposed to be horrified.



I’m surrendering to the third relapse of the cold I’ve been suffering from.  Once before, years ago, I had a cold like this: Just when I’m really feeling better and the cold seems to be on the run, here comes a new onslaught.  Can’t help wondering why.  My current theory is that this particular rhinovirus is able to mutate enough to evade my antibodies just when they get the upper hand.

         For the virus, the whole point of infecting me is to use cells of my respiratory tract to reproduce.  For my immune system, the whole point of forming antibodies and/or killer T-cells is to match the shape of the virus and thereby lock onto it, holding it prisoner until other immune cells can come and take in the virus and digest it.

         If a virus can mutate so as to change something about its shape, it may be harder for my immune cells to match it, and then there’s a wait until new matches develop.  Hopefully there comes a time when my immune cells have matched the virus’s whole portfolio!

         Once that happens, I’ll get on with my series of posts about the Barry Lopez essay on the inner architecture of the human mind.