The human drive to evolve.

            Living and working in Winters I don’t get an opportunity to drive much, I usually only get in the car once a week and the extent of that drive is often just down to Vacaville. I’ve always loved driving and I’m good at it too (if I do say so myself). I started drivers training shortly after turning 15 and got my license the day I turned 16. I’ve never been in an accident and my one and only speeding ticket was when I was 18 during the Carter years when the maximum speed limit was 55 and I was doing 80 in my dad’s Mercedes. To me Driving feels natural, like the car becomes an extension of my body even to the point where a lot of my actions are “unconscious”, kind of like being on autopilot.

            I know I’m not unique when it comes to being one with the car and that’s what I want to reflect on today. Recently on one of my drives I was deep in thought as I cruised up the 505 and was thinking about human evolution. In particular I was thinking about the question of how over our million plus years of evolution we humans developed the physical and mental skills to do something like drive a car, something that’s only become possible over the last hundred years.

            How is it that my brain and body can react to an action that is happening at over 10 times the speed that I could normally run at? Where does the coordination come from to make a decision based on something that’s happening a mile ahead? Why can I make a split second decision without even thinking about it when something happens right in front of me?

                And that’s just me, an average human, driving an average car. What about racecar drivers who are doing everything even faster? Or for that matter what about flying? That takes the concept of driving to a whole other level, it’s like going from two dimensions to three dimensions by having to not only think about front and back but also up and down. How did we develop that skill set? It’s not like our ancestors were riding around on birds instead of horses.

            Or maybe they were… what if somewhere back down humanities evolutionary path our DNA combined with humanoid visitors from another planet? That would probably give us the ability to do things we wouldn’t have naturally evolved to do. OK, OK, just kidding. With the modern science of DNA testing I think alien DNA would be a big red flag. I would also hope that if we had been visited by aliens they wouldn’t have just screwed us and left. But now that I think about it, that’s actually a fairly common human trait.

            But seriously, let’s get back to human evolution. Some people worry that modern technology is changing too fast for us to keep up or that children multi-tasking on computers and phones will affect their brain development. I’m not sure about the short term effect of our rapidly changing technology but I’m confident that humans will adapt. That’s the thing about our evolutionary journey; it’s made us a very adaptable species. It’s given us the ability to go from horse power to space flight in the blink of an evolutionary eye.

            Now I bet some of you are wondering why I’m talking about evolution as a given and not considering God’s roll in this. The simple answer for me is that the theory of evolution is backed by empirical evidence and God is a product of faith. I personally believe in facts not faith but that’s just me and I know I’m still in the minority.

I think that the reconciliation between fact and faith is the next major evolutionary hurdle that humans must face if we are going to advance and survive as a species. Especially since Faith is the driving force behind most of the violent conflicts we still see in the world today, the conflicts that could possibly cause our extinction. Also the science of Human history, anatomy, and psychology is becoming almost indisputable in its explanation of how and why we got here as a species.

My hope is that the more indisputable the science, the harder it will be for rational thinking people to still believe in an all mighty higher power and that the Human drive for knowledge and truth will win the race against religions need to prove that “my God is the one God, or else”.

Oops, almost missed my exit, I shouldn’t fantasize so much while I’m driving.

To view the column in it's original form go to page 11 of the following link. Winters Express 6/22/17

The Sixties and my age of awareness.

            Today, (if you’re reading this on the actual Express publishing day) is my 60^th birthday. Let’s pause on that thought for a moment because I’ve been trying to figure out how I feel about this milestone. As most of you that know me or regularly read my columns can attest, I tend to lean towards a pessimistic view of life and getting older sure hasn’t swung the pendulum in the other direction.

            Thinking about sixty actually got me thinking about the “Sixties” and when I started to become self-aware. If you do the math, I was born in 1957 so I was just a pre-teen kid during the sixties. But isn’t that the age when you start to notice the world outside your family and to develop feelings and attitudes about life in that world.

            I’ve often wondered why I see the negative side of most things first. I think it’s because of my personal history, especially during those formative sixties. My very first recollect able memory is from 1961 when I was 3 ½ and it was the morning my baby sister died. The memory is fuzzy but I can still feel my mother’s anguish. My next major memory was 2 years later, while sitting in first grade class. An announcement came over the P.A. that we should all stop to bow our heads and pray because President Kennedy had just been killed. The main reason I remember it is because of the awkwardness I felt at not knowing how to pray.

            The sixties were also when TV news becoming more graphic. I saw images of the Vietnam War from afar and of racial suppression, murders and riots at home. There was the start of the “Cold War”, the six day war in the Middle East, and the almost war from the Cuban missile crisis. There was the evil of Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson, the Zodiac killer, and the My Lai Massacre. All that combined with the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction was enough to make me want to hide under my bed for the rest of my life.

            I did poke my head out long enough to go crazy for the Beatles, the Monkees, Star Trek, and an early fascination with Playboy pinups. I also watched live when the first human walked on the moon (if it wasn’t faked) so yes, the sixties weren’t all doom and gloom but still enough to lean me towards the dark side.

            Oh, did I mention that during the sixties my father uprooted our family 3 times to follow his bliss. Not a very stable environment for an already anxious kid but what the hell, we were just baggage anyway.

            So now we have to answer the question, how did I survive almost 5 more decades without totally succumbing to the darkness? I think the answer is simply “Naive Optimism” because that’s almost always been my actions verses my thoughts. In other words, even though I think the worst of the world and I know that we’re all going to die I still say, “Today this will be OK” and go ahead anyway.

            A few examples are:   Not going to college and instead going to the school of hard knocks by becoming a door to door meat salesman.

·         Becoming a forklift driver then moving into management just because someone asked me to.

·         Getting married even though I saw my parents fail at it and I had no desire to start a family.

·         Buying a bagel shop with $2000 barrowed from credit cards because heigh, how hard can it be?

·         Giving up friends and comfort to move to California and then soon after buying a house I couldn’t afford here in Winters.

·         Giving up an easy, stable, and decent paying job to open a coffee house because there wasn’t a good place in Winters to get a cappuccino and again, how hard could it be?

·         Selling the coffee house after the economy tanked to become executive director of the dysfunctional chamber of commerce.

·         Last but not least (but hopefully last) going to work for a startup winery in an undeveloped wine region and without a sure tourism/customer draw.

            Like I said, I’m not sure how I feel about turning sixty other than not liking the real aches and pains by body feels, especially after manhandling a few cases of wine. The reality is that even though I never contemplated or imagined being sixty years old, I am, and I’m naively optimist that I will continue for another decade and I really can’t wait because if you think the Sixties were rough, wait until I tell you about the Seventies.

To view the column in it's original form go page 12 of the following link. Winters Express 6/8/17