evolutionary psychology, bonobos and our future
Having got stuck into evolutionary psychology in my last post (and others), or at least one essay published under this monicker, and recalling that the essay was published in 2016, I’m wondering how this relatively recently-minted field of study is faring. Wikipedia, I must say, gives the field a fair shake of the sauce bottle in its lengthy presentation. My own interest is largely in the area of sexuality, and I’m particularly interested in female sexuality. Bonobos, I’ve noted, engage in female-female sex, generally in the form of genito-genital rubbing, significantly more than males in male-male sex, and this, obviously, strengthens female-female bonding in general.
As I write this, I’m thinking of devoting a lot more of my writing to the sexual aspect of human behaviour, and how it can be utilised more productively, after the fashion of bonobos. Of course it can be argued, as Freud argued back in the day, that sublimation of the sex drive is – well, the basis of civilisation. By ‘controlling’ our sexual urges, or ‘channelling’ them, we’ve created art and science, and made piles of money. But then again, Genghis Khan sired oodles of children but still managed to slaughter, or preside over the slaughter of, millions – though there was nobody around to do a body count. The point being that you can build empires and spit out children at the same time, or something like that. But of course his campaigns and those of his rellies could hardly be said to be major contributions to civilisation.
It would be hard to describe marriage in terms of evolutionary psychology, but let’s try monogamy. It’s for the birds, surely. Mammals, not so much. The BBC Earth website tells me that only 3 to 5% of all non-human mammals are monogamous, though in primate species it’s closer to 30%. At least, that’s for social monogamy, which apparently isn’t the same as genetic monogamy. Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation:
Social monogamy does not describe the sexual interactions or patterns of reproduction between monogamous pairs; rather it strictly refers to the patterns of their living conditions. Rather, sexual and genetic monogamy describe reproductive patterns. It is possible for a species to be both genetically monogamous and socially monogamous but it is more likely for species to practice social monogamy and not genetic monogamy.
So, in the society that I and most of those around me were brought up in, i.e. Christian or post-Christian society, we’ve been expected to be socially and genetically monogamous, and many of us are. You could say it’s an easy and even lazy option. Of course we are sexually attracted to others outside of our marriage or coupledom, but it might be costly to act on, or try to act on, that attraction. We can also allow ourselves a sense of moral superiority in resisting temptation, even if the person we’re attracted to finds us as alluring as a rusty nail.
There are also difficulties in eschewing monogamy, due to our current highly segregated, and socially sanctioned, system of child-rearing, with essentially basic families all living under separate roofs, uniting two sets of genes to produce offspring. And of course this system has, by and large, proved extremely successful, though there’s no reason to suppose a more bonoboesque set of arrangements would be worse, IMHO.
Yes, shock, horror, don’t be ridiculous, I hear my tendentious twin barking, surely the private home and the nuclear family are here to stay. We don’t live in trees and wank each other all day, we make space telescopes, cyclotrons, LLMs, and superfoods, and it’s all down to monogamy and keeping our clothes on, mostly.
Well, I think we should keep our options open, at the very least. And that is happening, as we slough off religion and discover, through history, experimentation and the many-faceted post-industrial world, that there are more or less infinite ways of living collectively.
Experiments have been done with chimps and bonobos which are quite revealing in terms of their different strengths and weaknesses, and much has to do with the environment they grew up in. Bonobos landed themselves, quite fortunately, in an area south of the Congo River, heavily forested, with an abundance of food, especially of the non-meat variety. With enough to go round, there was no need to be overly competitive in obtaining the stuff. So, interestingly, the sexual dimorphism in bonobos has reduced slightly compared to that in chimps, remembering that they only separated between 1.5 and 2 million years ago, a sliver of evolutionary time. This is most likely due to a lesser need for strength in hunting live game – more of a male activity in that male-dominant society (and think of the implications for post-industrial human societies). More sharing, less competitiveness – this has led to general differences in bonobo versus chimp behaviours, and cognitive skills. Here’s a quote from a paper entitled Differences in the Cognitive Skills of Bonobos and Chimpanzees, published in PLoS One in August 2010:
We compared both species on a wide range of cognitive problems testing their understanding of the physical and social world. Bonobos were more skilled at solving tasks related to theory of mind or an understanding of social causality, while chimpanzees were more skilled at tasks requiring the use of tools and an understanding of physical causality. These species differences support the role of ecological and socio-ecological pressures in shaping cognitive skills over relatively short periods of evolutionary time.
.There’s a lot of food for thought here, and, in my view, much to hope for. My thoughts naturally run to human males as more competitive, and females, the mothers of us all, as more empathic. It’s not a yawning divide, of course, and there are plenty of individual exceptions, but there have been changes in the western world, in particular, since Darwin’s remarks about women’s intellectual inferiority, so typical of his place and time – changes which include our much greater knowledge of neurology, as well as changes in work practices and education in the post-industrial age – changes which, with a bit of imagination, we can compare to the abundant bonobo world leaving behind the tough, competitive chimp environment. Today we have the tragic, stupid wars against Ukraine and Iran – egotistical decisions that were typically male – or I might say, wars started by increasingly atypical males in the context of an increasingly less male-dominated or macho society. But the wheel turns painfully slowly, and I’m getting old, dammit.
We’re facing crises today which aren’t about wars, in spite of the enormous local suffering they cause. They’re about climate change and our varied and in places devastating impact on the environment and its multifarious gigantic and minuscule inhabitants. Einstein dreamed of a world government, and as a humanist, who participated in a humanist group for a decade or so, that’s one of my wildest dreams too. We’re affecting the whole planet, and so our species has, whether we will or no, responsibility for that planet’s future. When will we come to fully realise this, as a collective?
Okay, maybe I’m getting carried away, but the bonobo example is a good starting point, methinks. They care and they share. It can even be sexy.
References
https://www.bbcearth.com/news/seven-animals-who-mate-for-life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_monogamy_in_mammalian_species
Are humans monogamous by nature? Will they always be?
bonobo girls
I often forget the title of this blog, and what I’m supposed to be writing about, so multifarious is my genius (I contain multitudes mate), so let me return, hopefully not too briefly, to bonobos, behaviour, patriarchy, matriarchy, evolution and all that stuff.
In an earlier blog piece, some time ago, I reviewed an essay in a probably defunct journal called Evolutionary Psychology which tried to get stuck into a couple of feminists for promoting a bonobo-type lifestyle. What struck me most about this extremely irritating article was that it had virtually nothing to say about bonobos – this in an Evolutionary Psychology journal! – and everything to say about the supposed absurdity of the feminist writers. Here’s a classic example:
It is egregiously naïve to conclude that, “bonobos reveal that an incredible range of sexual diversity is normal for animals like us” (p. 99, emphasis in original).
This is, of course, not at all naïve. There are no animals on the planet closer to humans than bonobos, so to describe them as ‘animals like us’, is completely accurate. Elsewhere in his essay, he criticises his targets for not ‘understanding human sex differences in sexual desire’. He doesn’t elaborate on these sex differences. This is because there’s no such thing, any more than there is in bonobos. Of course there are individual differences. Some humans, and no doubt some bonobos, tend to be more randy than others, for all sorts of reasons, to do with up-bringing, neural development, genetics, whatever. Gender does play a role, of course, more in some societies than others. Let’s not forget that the penalty for adultery in early Christian society was to be stoned to death – but only for females (males were barely penalised at all). I say females, not women, since females were more often than not sold into marriage on the payment of a dowry from the age of ten, or even younger. A bit of a dampener for a girl’s promiscuous impulses, I’d say.
It’s my view that monogamy is more a cultural institution than a natural given for humans, and I would cite our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, both non-monogamous, as evidence. Some six to eight million years separate us from those relatives, and there isn’t much evidence about the sex lives of neanderthals, australopithecines or other hominins – and not much chance that we’ll ever find out about their sexual proclivities. It’s been argued that Australopithecus afarensis at least was a sexually dimorphic species, but there’s a question about the extent of evidence. In any case, though sexual dimorphism might have equated with dominance a million years ago, it’s hardly much of a factor for modern humans. From hunter-gatherers to post-industrial society, physical size has mattered less and less – power has been measured differently. We have evidence, presented by eminent researchers such as Joseph Henrich, that the ruling classes of not so long ago, evolutionarily speaking, tended to monopolise the field, with polygynous systems that left the lower classes bereft of partners. I’m talking male dominance here, of course, something like that of gorillas, with financial and military heft replacing that of physicality. Those upper class polygynous societies were essentially about female enslavement, though there would certainly be nuances – hierarchies among the women, benefits to the more intellectually endowed, even the occasional female ruler. But mostly it would be male dominance, which, in the more ‘intellectual’ cultures, such as those of Athens, Rome, Alexandria and later Baghdad, led to the dogma of ‘feeble-minded women’ (and if you don’t sufficiently recognise your inferiority you might suffer the fate of Hypatia), which has taken centuries to quash, and which in some regions, such as parts of the USA, is still with us.
Modern science has taught us that there is no evidentiary basis for male dominance. It certainly can’t be based on intelligence. Decades ago a young female friend expressed a belief to me that males were on average smarter than females. I was too stunned to respond. Did she think that male dogs and cats were generally smarter than their female counterparts? Her view was a relic of millennia of patriarchy. And recently I read something priceless, a comment on a youtube video presented by an anti-feminist young woman, bizarrely enough. The comments, less surprisingly, were all from approving males. This bloke’s simple remark was ‘They need to realise that power comes with responsibility’. I switched off pretty quickly, but this odd and ridiculous remark kept striking me with its arrogant ignorance, so here’s my response:
Responsibility is indeed important, like the responsibility for nurturing an embryo, then a foetus, then a child, as it grows inside a womb, and for suckling and feeding that child after his birth, guiding his first steps and teaching him his first words. Think of the billions of human infants who’ve been nursed and cared for in this way, just in the last few decades. And then think of our marital system – how many infants, born outside of that system, have been raised by men, rather than women? And within the system, how many women have left the marriage, and its children, compared to men? How many men have been the victims of domestic violence, compared to women? How is it that men sexually abuse or rape women, and this never happens to men, except sometimes at the hands of other men? So, yes, responsibility… there’s nothing more important.
Bonobos make good mothers, helped by other adults, and siblings, male and female. They engage in plenty of rough and tumble stuff, and they can get violent, usually when males get too uppity. A defensive violence, a sisterhood, because it’s a physical environment, much more so than our own, and the males are a wee bit bigger. It would be hard to translate their non-monogamous world into our own, which has become only slightly less monogamous over the last couple of centuries, but their example is, to me, an inspiring one, so vive les bonobos, let’s always manage to keep them in their wild state, so they can keep us thinking of different ways to be, collectively.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
https://prezi.com/wuvsj2ah8gbf/women-in-palestine-during-the-time-of-jesus/
on cyanobacteria, mostly
green stuff
So, since reading about photosynthesis and its emergence with cyanobacteria – perhaps – I’ve been fascinated and confused by the early ages of this planet and the beginnings of life. Here’s how Oliver Morton defines these bacteria in the glossary to Eating the Sun:
Cyanobacteria: the only bacteria which practice oxygenic photosynthesis. The chloroplasts in algae and plants are derived from cyanobacteria.
Is there another kind of photosynthesis? Clever me looked it up and, yes, anoxic photosynthesis is a thing. It’s a ‘light-driven metabolic process used by certain bacteria to make energy and organic compounds without producing oxygen as a byproduct’, according to AI.
Chloroplasts, to be clear to myself, are plant and algal organelles which convert sunlight into chemical energy. This photosynthesis process uses chlorophyll, a sunlight-absorbing green pigment, to turn CO2 and H2O into glucose and O2. It absorbs red and blue wavelengths and reflects green, hence the colour of all plants (I love that), and I notice it’s popular in dietary supplements – bien sûr!
So how did these cyanobacteria evolve, and how are they going these days? Apparently they evolved in the ocean – remembering how very watery our planet once was – some 3 billion years ago or more. The general view apparently is that those ocean waters were rather hot, with barely any oxygen. Anaerobic microbes existed in these waters (here be magic?) – for whom oxygen was toxic, although there were some ‘aerotolerant anaerobes’ who didn’t mind oxygen but had no use for it.
So cyanobacteria, aka blue-green algae, are thought to have evolved in freshwater (low salt) environments, in the ‘photic zone’, that’s to say the upper, sunlit layer. We only have clear evidence of their existence from 2.1 billion years ago, and disputed evidence from 2.7 billion, and maybe they go back to 3.5 billion, but their effect on the planet, via the ‘Great Oxygenation Event’ (GOE), wasn’t felt until after about 2.4 billion. This rise in oxygen is likely to have adversely affected the biosphere of the time (made up of archaea, not bacteria), which fed largely on methane.
Much of our evidence of early life forms is based on stromatolites and oncolites. Stromatolites (prime examples are found at Shark Bay, Western Australia), are ‘layered biochemical accretionary structures formed in shallow water [the photic zone] by the trapping, binding, and cementation of sedimentary grains by biofilms (microbial mats) of microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria’ (Wikipedia), and they are the oldest known fossil remains. Oncolites are small near-spherical structures forming around a spherical nucleus, like a shell fragment, and are untethered, unlike stromatolites. They’re an indication of warming waters in the photic zone, and are also found in contemporary freshwater. Oh, and they’re also formed by cyanobacterial growth.
So here’s another Wikipedia quote which I’ll then try to make my own sense of:
Oxygenic photosynthesis only evolved once (in prokaryotic cyanobacteria), and all photosynthetic eukaryotes (including all plants and algae) have acquired this ability from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria or their endosymbiont hosts. In other words, all the oxygen that makes the atmosphere breathable for aerobic organisms originally comes from cyanobacteria or their plastid descendants
Aerobic organisms, that’s us, amongst quite a few others. So, to unpack. I sort of know the prokaryote to eukaryote story, but let me go a bit deeper, or a bit less shallow. It’s where endosymbiosis comes in – a symbiosis, I think, where it’s the end o’ me as an independent organism, but I live on as an essential element in something bigger and grander, usually. Mitochondria are often the go-to example, former bacteria harnessed by eukaryotes to break down nutrients and convert them to energy in the form of ATP.
So what is ATP and why is it the energy molecule? See what I did there? I forced myself further into the murk. Adenosine triphosphate, the energy provider of all living cells, is made up of a nitrogenous purine base called adenine – formula C5H5 N5 (those three elements are always in there somewhere), and fundamental to DNA and RNA and no doubt much else that sparks with life.
This reminds me that there are purines and pyrimidines, but getting back to energy, AI never lies (and I have to say I’m quite frightened of this AI shite, because, as we all know, it’s controlled by billionaires who don’t have the interests of people like myself in mind) tells me this:
ATP does not technically create energy; instead, it acts as a chemical battery that stores and delivers energy. It releases this energy when a water molecule breaks the weak bond holding its third phosphate group off, turning ATP into ADP (adenosine diphosphate) and releasing usable power for the cell.
So why does this bond get broken? And I note that there’s also adenosine monophosphate (AMP). And the adenosine part consists of adenine, a nitrogenous base, and ribose (sugar). And all these complicated changes and breaking-downs are part of the process called metabolism, the conversion of the energy food provides into molecules that keep us going, such as proteins, but of course many others.
I’ve never spent much more than an hour or two in a lab, so I find it hard to think through these metabolic developments. Let me return to the ubiquitous cyanobacteria. I may be repeating myself, but mea culpa – they have a vast variety of forms (all with much the same colour), and some are much given to symbiosis with various unicellular and multicellular organisms. So, with their photoautotrophic, oxygen-producing abilities they’ve been the sine qua non of complex, oxygen-based life on this planet. I think I’ll just stop here.
References
Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun: the everyday miracle of how plants power the planet, 2007
deciduous and evergreen: pourquoi?
star magnolia (Magnolia stellata) – I think. Thank you, internet
It’s now more or less officially spring, and leafless trees are blossoming, like the one across the lane from my new home, as pictured. So I’m wondering how they have the energy, and more broadly, why do some trees lose their leaves seasonally, and others not? I’m no expert on trees, and I hope, before this piece is finished, to identify this one, but at least I know it’s deciduous, I think.
I also want to know how this deciduous and evergreen dichotomy relates to photosynthesis, as surely it does. So, of course, I must look it up. Surprisingly, Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun makes no mention of the evergreen-deciduous thing, but then I likely wouldn’t comprehend his explanation…
But here’s a photosynthesis formula that I can more or less comprehend:
6CO₂ + 6H₂O + light energy → C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂
Which can be roughly translated as: six lots of carbon dioxide (from the air) plus an equivalent lot of water (from the soil), plus solar energy, makes glucose, and starch. The starch, the carbohydrate, is stored in the roots, trunk and branches. Deciduous trees shed their leaves in autumn, and enter a period of dormancy – reduced metabolism, which slows or stops growth. Presumably energy is expended, though, in the production of blossoms. It’s a risk worth taking, however, because blossoms exposed to the open air can be seen and more easily approached by pollinators and can have their seeds blown by the wind.
I’m guessing that evergreen trees are mostly located in dense forests, which tend to create their own microclimates, less susceptible to seasonal change. And they’re more of a thing in the tropics, where the weather’s always – tropical, more or less. And the leaves of evergreens tend to be thicker and spinier. Ms AI tells me this:
Evergreen tree leaves—whether needle-like or broad—are uniquely adapted with thick, waxy outer layers and robust cellular structures that minimise water loss and resist freezing. Instead of shedding all foliage at once, these trees retain functional, chlorophyll-containing leaves year-round, slowly replacing them individually over several seasons.
I’m hopelessly ignorant about tree and plant types but I’ve found a website that will freely inform me (or try to) of the identity of any tree or plant I present to them via a photo I’ve taken. Instant learning! I’m quite excited.
Apparently some individual tree leaves can live for over twenty years, and these leaves ‘tend to be tougher and thicker, and more expensive to build’, according to a Macquarrie Uni article, referenced below. Other interesting facts are that ‘conifers and other evergreen trees make longer-living leaves the closer they are to the poles’, and ‘deciduous trees do the opposite. Their longest-lasting leaves are found at the tropics’. It’s all about maximising carbon absorption. If you’re an evergreen conifer in poor soil and facing a long harsh winter you’ll need to make a long-term investment in your leaves, but if you’re a deciduous maple you’re best to create new leaves quick-smart that will capture the summer sunlight before dropping in autumn, and that means investing in fast-growing, cheap but flimsy leaves. I’m more or less paraphrasing here.
So I’ll make this piece a short one, but I’ll be taking more photos in the neighbourhood and trying to learn more about blossoms and soil and climate and photosynthesis for future posts and my own delectation. I’m feeling Spring in my step!
References
A Tree Blooms Without Photosynthesis (Leaves)? The Science Behind Spring Blossoms
human longevity stuff: Blue Zones
The other day, I was talking to friends about human health and longevity and the claim, in a book I use for teaching English to NESB adults, that Okinawans are known for their longevity and that this is likely due to self-sufficiency, physical activity, diet and regular human interaction. While this was generally accepted in our discussion, I received some mild push-back to the effect that this had been exaggerated somewhat, and that the concept of ‘blue zones’, which I’d never heard of, had been largely debunked. So, let me look into this.
A December 2025 article in The Gerontologist, also published in the National Library of Medicine, entitled ‘The validity of Blue Zones demography: a response to critiques’, and which has two named authors, opens with these remarks in its abstract:
Blue Zones are geographically and temporally defined areas with a history of disproportionately high concentrations of nonagenarians and centenarians. Nearly two decades ago, these zones gained international attention when the Blue Zone term was introduced in seminal articles published in Experimental Gerontology and National Geographic. Since then, numerous scientific papers have extracted valuable insights into human health from investigating the long-lived people who live there. However recently, validity of the ages of people living in the Blue Zones has been questioned. Here, we address these concerns by describing in detail the age validation process undertaken in Blue Zones and comparing it to the prevailing standards in gerontological demography.
The abstract goes on to point out what is fairly obvious, that ‘most self-reported claims of exceptional longevity are false’, and of course I remember reading in the Bible about 969-year-old Methuselah and his remarkable rellies. Well, at least their god is real, en it? Anyway, the abstract ends with the claim that ‘cross-checking multiple independent documentary sources’ has effectively minimised or eliminated ‘errors due to fraud, honest mistakes, poor memory, or identity switches, especially between homonymous [identically – or near identically-named] siblings’. And this, it’s claimed, leaves us with Blue Zones that are ‘valid and reliable’.
Reading on, the paper states that Japan has been accurately found to be the longest-lived country for at least the last century, but more importantly for this little essay, it highlights the work of a 19th century pioneering demographer and folklorist (he apparently coined the term ‘folklore’), William Thoms, who proposed these steps for verifying longevity claims:
(i) search for official birth records; (ii) check the records for other individuals with the same name; (iii) corroborate the birth record with additional forms of evidence; and (iv) if the person is still alive, verify as much as possible by quizzing the person about things such as public events that can be cross-checked with additional data sources.
These are a start; in the 21st century we generally have more effective record-keeping, at least in the ‘first world’. In those countries where, unsurprisingly, records aren’t so well kept, credulous investigators can be duped. This happened when National Geographic sent a Harvard physician, Alexander Leaf, to various soi-disant ‘longevity hotspots’, in Equador, Pakistan and the region now known as Azerbaijan, in the early 1970s. Leaf’s report, apparently, was a monument to credulity, and was soon invalidated by more experienced analysts, but it all eventually led to what became the ‘Blue Zone’ disputes. The term is explained in the Gerontologist article, referenced below.
When one of us … in 1999 presented for the first time data suggesting the existence of exceptionally long-lived communities in the central area of the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, where the proportion of centenarians was demonstrably higher than in the rest of the island (Pes, 1999), most demographers reacted with skepticism. From 2001 to 2019, a collaboration with the Belgian demographer Michel Poulain was able to demonstrate that Sardinian longevity in these areas was genuine. For instance, it was determined that people born in this longevity hotspot between 1880 and 1900 were nearly three times as likely to live to the age of 100 years as Sardinians living outside the area. The area was dubbed a Blue Zone because of the blue marker used to indicate the area on a map. The first scientific article mentioning this term was published in Experimental Gerontology in 2004 (Poulain et al., 2004).
So the Blue Zone concept has been extended to other regions based on careful research (I cannot, of course, confirm this, but the article goes to great lengths to present and justify its methodology – in fact that’s the article’s entire purpose, so all skeptics should read it). Four areas, in particular, have been confirmed, and are ‘generally accepted by the international scientific community’, along with the Blue Zone concept: Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; and Nicoya, in north-western Costa Rica. These regions are separately dealt with in detail in the article, so I would be hard put to provide a summary here. The article also points out that Blue Zones can come and go, or weaken or strengthen, due to immigration, emigration, westernisation or other factors. Okinawa, for example, has recently been in dispute regarding its status due to some of these factors, as has the Nicoya zone.
Finally, I’ll just quote the age verification processes used:
… it requires: (i) identifying potential high-longevity target areas based on public demographic databases; (ii) accurately counting the number of people born in the target area, categorised by sex and year of birth; (iii) identifying and confirming the age, using additional data sources, of individuals who have reached a preset threshold age (e.g., 90 years); and (iv) calculating the ratio of the 90+ population to total births recorded during the same time interval. This ratio reflects the probability of people born in the target area to reach the threshold age. The process is designed to minimise the likelihood of false positives (type I errors) and ensure accurate identification of Blue Zones.
And I’ll just finish by mentioning a few points. The first-described Blue Zone, in Sardinia, as mentioned, doesn’t include the whole island, but ‘six villages located in the hills of a rural region in east central Sardinia called Ogliastra containing about 12,000 people’. The percentage of centenarians there…
was approximately five times as high as the percentage of centenarians throughout Europe and nearly three times the percentage in Sardinia as a whole. Equally surprising, although worldwide there are roughly three times as many female as male centenarians—in the Sardinian Blue Zone there were approximately equal numbers of male and female centenarians (Poulain et al., 2004). Since that original analysis, the proportion of centenarians in this Blue Zone has increased (Poulain & Herm, 2025).
That is really fascinating, as it brings to mind the general question of female longevity in comparison to that of males. Something for another post, perhaps. It also, of course, raises the question of why only one area of Sardinia qualifies as a Blue Zone. No answer is provided or attempted. And, to be fair, the article’s purpose is to validate the existence of Blue Zones, not to explain why they exist.
The Blue Zone in Nicoya, Costa Rica, has, on re-investigation, shrunk to about a quarter of its size compared to earlier studies, but ‘a new Blue Zone had emerged in three provinces in northern Costa Rica near the Nicaraguan border’. The Blue Zone on the mountainous Greek Island of Ikaria, which has a population of about 8,000, has been validated between 2008 and 2009, with details provided. And while there is evidence of false claims regarding centenarians in Japan, the data from Okinawa has been validated.
Of course there is speculation as to why these Blue Zones exist, and why they tend to occur in ‘under-developed’ regions. Often under-developed regions have high crime rates, and lower life expectancies, but more isolated and self-sustaining regions appear not to have experienced these problems. It does seem to be the case that community support and connection, physical activity, as well as some genetic elements as yet uncovered, are an important part of the answer.
Reference
abiogenesis is heavy, man
So, once more into the breach, let’s try and have fun with abiogenesis. It supposedly starts with organic compounds, generally considered as carbon-based, though I’ve heard tell of the possibility of silicon-based life – presumably you want to start with an element that combines readily with others, and those elements, but carbon in particular, fit the bill. Hydrocarbons, the simplest of which is methane (CH4), are an obvious example. However, as far as I’m aware, we haven’t been able to bridge the gap between non-life and life, inanimate and animate, chemistry and biology, in any clear-cut way in our laboratories and experiments. Membranes, self-replications, chains, autocatalysis are all more or less required, but nobody seems to have any clear idea of how and when it all started here. There may have been a few starts that then ended, until one didn’t. Here’s a bit from Wikipedia:
Life functions through the chemistry of carbon and water, and builds on four chemical families: lipids for cell membranes, carbohydrates for chemical energy storage and structural composition, amino acids for protein metabolism, and the nucleic acids DNA and RNA for heredity. A theory of abiogenesis must explain the origins and interactions of these classes of molecules.
Sounds like hard work, especially the genetic stuff. So I’ll start with amino acids, since I don’t have a clue… We get them from food, essentially, but what is food but living stuff, organic stuff, and so goes the circle. But let’s keep going. They were first discovered/identified in the early 1800s, the first being asparagine, from asparagus, in 1806. Apparently our bodies need twenty types of these carbon-based molecules, strings of which, or chains of which, form proteins. Of those twenty, eleven can be made by our bodies, and are labeled non-essential, while the other nine, the essential ones, must be obtained by food. All in all they’re important for brain chemistry, hormone production, and for maintenance and repair of muscle, skin and organ tissues.
But how did amino acids come to be? And what’s the difference between L and D types of amino acids? Apparently they’re like the mirror image of each other which makes me think of chirality which I barely understand. Britannica starts one of its articles with this:
The question of why organisms on Earth consist of L-amino acids instead of D-amino acids is still an unresolved riddle. Some scientists have long suggested that a substantial fraction of the organic compounds that were the precursors to amino acids—and perhaps some amino acids themselves—on early Earth may have been derived from comet and meteorite impacts. One such organic-rich meteorite impact occurred on September 28, 1969, over Murchison, Victoria, Australia.
… which is interesting but doesn’t help much, though it’s certainly a cause for wonder. Anyway, the video referenced below tells me that of the 20 amino acids that build proteins in our body, 19 are chiral. Then one particular amino acid, alanine, is focussed on, as it’s one of the simplest enantiomers – pairs of molecules that are mirror images of each other, and so un-super-imposable.
So this molecular biology is about life-sustaining molecules but not quite organisms, and nobody knows precisely how complex molecules become organisms – otherwise we’d be having fun creating new life forms, and only gods are allowed to have that kind of fun.
So we haven’t made life yet, but we’re getting there?
I’ve heard of course of an RNA world that might have preceded the DNA one, so let’s go there for a while. Nucleotides, nucleic acids, nucleosides, nucleobases and such all have to be understood and connected together to make sense of it all. So from here on in it will be attempted definition after attempted definition, with further attempts to connect them all together.
So what about prebiotic synthesis? Or, to quote another video referenced below, ‘location… where can we find the satisfactory chemistry required to make bioactive molecules? And what were these first biomolecules? We must surely need water and carbon – that’s what life as we know it requires, at a minimum. Then there’s nitrogen, key to building proteins (amino acids being nitrogen-based), and RNA and DNA for ‘information’. And phosphorous, essential for building many biomolecules, ATP for cellular energy, and phospholipids for cell membranes. Also referenced are amphiphiles (never heard of them) for forming primitive cells. They’re made from phospholipids so I’m not sure of the difference, just as I’m not sure of the difference between lipids and fatty acids – and did somebody mention tryptophan…? You need largely to be there in the labs being educated by the experts, and observing and experimenting.
The discovery in quite recent times of hydrothermal deep ocean vents and the chemo-synthesised, sunlight-free ecosystems they support, has added fuel, such as hydrogen sulphide, to the quest for the earliest life forms. But, to quote Phy the Neutrophil:
In an alkaline vent environment, the conditions for chemistry heavily disfavour the formation of cells. While hydrothermal vents do have the chemistry to make long-chain fatty acids, the harsh salty environment of the ocean is going to make it very difficult for these proto-membranes to form.
Mr Phy likes the Darwinian idea of a warm little pond, but also recognises that this too has its problems. In any case, some kind of cell or capsule formation, however or wherever it may have evolved, would be a major advance. Creating an enclosed micro-environment is likely to speed up the process of effective chemical development, and Mr Phy goes into much detail on this, and its alternatives, but of course I’m not strong on biochemistry, so proton gradients haven’t triggered my neurons.
But I must soldier on. AI has this to say on proton energetics:
All life uses proton gradients across membranes to drive energy production via ATP synthase. Because building proton pumps requires pre-existing energy, scientists propose that life began in alkaline hydrothermal vents, where natural geological pH gradients across inorganic pores provided the first proton-motive force before biological pumps evolved.
Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) , which I know is associated with mitochondria in humans, and is always called the ‘energy molecule’, or the energy storage molecule, as Wikipedia puts it, relies on this ATP synthase enzyme, which catalyses ATP using ADP (adenosine diphosphate) and inorganic phosphate. It gets very complicated with protons being pushed along an electrochemical gradient so that ATP can be stored by cells for future use.
Of course the evolution of ATP synthase, like so much in the make-up of the earliest life forms, is obscurely ancient, but well worth exploring as it appears to be central to all life. Wikipedia goes into hellish detail about it all, which is impressive and exhausting. I’m not sure if I can go on…
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Amino_acid
https://www.britannica.com/science/amino-acid/Amino-acids-and-the-origin-of-life-on-Earth
oxidised by hydrogen escape…? Chasing the origins of life…
first life? something tiny and green?
I’ve been intrigued and mystified by this phrase (among many others) in Oliver Morton’s book on photosynthesis, the chemistry of which I’m really struggling with. I first read the book a decade or so ago, and in this second reading I’m really beginning to understand how little I’ve understood about the process so central to life on Earth. So, as I too often do, I’ll start with AI (never lies):
Oxidation by hydrogen escape is a planetary process where light hydrogen atoms permanently drift into space from a planet’s upper atmosphere. Because hydrogen is lost, leftover oxygen atoms and other heavy molecules chemically bind to crust and mantle rocks. This leaves the planet’s surface and interior permanently oxidized over geologic time…
I don’t fully understand this. Light hydrogen atoms are also known as protium, which is the most common and lightest isotope of hydrogen (AI again). It’s just a proton in a nucleus. So this drifting off of light hydrogen in an atmosphere, leaving oxygen, etc behind, suggests that the atmosphere must have contained water vapour, inter alia?
So there are further explanations. Ultraviolet sunlight breaks apart water vapour in the upper atmosphere, as well as methane CH4), The hydrogen, being light and fast-moving, escapes the atmosphere, while the heavier elements, such as oxygen, drop down to the planetary surface, and, for example react with iron in the crust.
So what’s with this oxidising thing? It’s a bonding in particular with iron and manganese and appears to have a connection with the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). According to Science Direct, ‘oxygenic photosynthesis appears to be necessary for an oxygen-rich atmosphere like Earth’s’. Are there other kinds of photosynthesis? Apparently so – anoxygenic photosynthesis is used by some bacteria, with hydrogen sulphide being the likely electron donor, but let’s not get side-tracked…
Atmospheric oxygen today is at around 21% concentration, and this is known as PAL, the present atmospheric level by volume. The GOE has been calculated as a 200 million-year transformation occurring about 2.4 billion years ago, bringing about a relatively rapid rise in atmospheric O2…
So, our atmosphere is layered: nearest the ground and rising about 12 kilometres is the troposphere, and above that is the stratosphere (up to 50 kms), then the mesosphere (85), the thermosphere (600) and finally the exosphere, where it thins out into space and where satellites are mostly situated. But to complicate matters we also have the homosphere, and at its upper boundary the turbopause. This ‘sphere’ is so called due to its more or less uniformity. To quote AI it’s ‘the lower layer of the atmosphere where constant mixing by wind and turbulence keeps the chemical composition uniform’.
So when did our atmosphere stabilise, assuming it ever has? Again, I find this is divided into periods, the first one being ‘primordial outgassing’, some 4.5 to 4 billion years go, ‘As early Earth cooled, volcanic outgassing created a thick, toxic precursor atmosphere mostly made of water vapour, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen’. And the Smithsonian Environmental Research Centre goes on, re the Archaean Eon, during which:
methane droplets in the air shrouded the young Earth in a global haze. There was no oxygen gas on Earth. Oxygen was only in compounds such as water. Complex chemical reactions in the young oceans transformed carbon-containing molecules into simple, living cells that did not need oxygen to live. Instead they made energy out of sulphur and other elements.
It also points out that in this early phase of our planet’s life the sun was only around three quarters as bright as it is now – it has gotten brighter over time. The Earth was prevented from freezing over by the greenhouse gases, mostly CO2 and CH4 (methane). But over time, cyanobacteria began to flourish in the oceans, and they were photosynthesising, making free oxygen gas from CO2, H2O and the sun’s light, and so creating something like the atmosphere we know today.
So what exactly are cyanobacteria and why did they come to exist, and then flourish? As to when – likely not before 3 billion years ago, at least not in great numbers. As to where – in the oceans, which were more plentiful, a ‘water world’, according to you know what. And as to how, that’s of course more complex and uncertain. AI gives this not-so-satisfactory explanation:
- Ancestral Microbes: Early Earth had an anoxic (oxygen-free) atmosphere filled with methane and carbon dioxide.
- New Biochemistry: Single-celled anaerobic bacteria in the oceans evolved specialised cell membrane structures.
- Splitting Water: These organisms harnessed sunlight to split water molecules (H2O) and carbon dioxide into sugars for energy.
- Oxygen Waste: The process released oxygen gas (O2) as a waste product, which built up over time and triggered the [GOE]
So, it’s all about ‘ancestral microbes’ and ‘anaerobic [meaning ‘sans oxygen’] bacteria’. So, the ‘life from non-life’ problem presumably remains unsolved. Understandable, I suppose.
References
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0009254113003513
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anoxygenic_photosynthesis
https://arxiv.org/html/2512.09844v1
ages, and the how of life on earth – some thoughts
Stromatolites, Shark Bay
I’ve written before about my difficulties with Oliver Morton’s Eating the sun, a complex book about photosynthesis, its beginnings and development, its components and combinations, carbon dioxide, oxygen, chloroplasts and chlorophyll, rubisco, stomata, grasses and trees, the ages of the Earth, Gaia and so much more. I’ve never felt more overwhelmed. So to clarify and comprehend I want first of all to get my head around timelines for the Earth, starting with the pre-life period.
So, without being too precise, Earth began its existence as a more or less defined planet about four and a half billion years ago. The Hadean is recognised as the first geologic era, lasting about half a billion years, and has been described as hellish, as the name suggests. So, from Wikipedia:
Earth in the early Hadean had a very thick hydride-rich atmosphere whose composition likely resembled the solar nebula and the gas giants, with mostly water vapor, methane and ammonia.
Understandably, there’s quite a lot of uncertainty about this end-of-planet-formation period. So a ‘hydride-rich atmosphere’ suggests hydrogen, I reckon. Hydrides are the anions of hydrogen (H-), having two electrons to give them a negative charge, I think (there will be lots of uncertainties in this piece). So a cation has a positive charge – fewer electrons than protons, which is to say, for hydrogen, no electrons at all.
So the water vapour condensed as the planet cooled over time, creating an ocean surface, but it was likely still being bombarded by asteroids and wee planetesimals, and this with upwelling gases from vulcanism led to a new environment, or period, or eon to use the standard term, known as the Archaean, dating from just over 4 billion years ago to 2.5 billion. During this time the surface gradually cooled, continents began to take shape, and the first life forms appeared. And of course it’s life that I’m most interested in. So, just to be clear, the Earth’s history is divided by the cognoscenti into four geologic eons: Hadean, Archaean, Proterozoic (2.5 billion to 539 million, approximately) and Phanerozoic (up to the present).
It’s generally believed, but not quite certain apparently, that an event called the late heavy bombardment marked the beginning of the Archaean (or the end of the Hadean). Much of the evidence for this comes from a period of intense lunar bombardment dating to around 3.9 billion years ago. Presumably, if this is verified, Earth would have been bombarded in the same period, but it’s believed that our planet was covered in water at this time. Wikipedia again:
The Earth during the Archean was mostly a water world: there was continental crust, but much of it was under a super-ocean deeper than today’s oceans. Except for some rare relict crystals (Hadean zircon), today’s oldest continental crust dates back to the Archean. Much of the geological detail of the Archean has been destroyed by subsequent tectonic activity. The Earth’s atmosphere was also vastly different in composition from today’s: the prebiotic atmosphere was a reducing atmosphere rich in methane [CH4] and lacking free oxygen.
I’ve removed the links to reduce my level of discombobulation. So what about these life forms in the Archaean? There were microbial mats in the shallow waters, also known as stromatolites – or to be I think more accurate, the stromatolites formed microbial mats. Or maybe not – stromatolites are layered microbial formations (famously found in Shark Bay in Western Australia), which date back to around 3.5 million years ago, and they were built by cyanobacteria.
So, were these the first life forms, and how did they come to live? Via photosynthesis apparently. So, cyanobacteria are autotrophic gram-negative bacteria that ‘can obtain biological energy via oxygenic photosynthesis’ (Wikipedia). Is there any other kind of photosynthesis? Apparently so, but the oxygenic type is ‘by far the most common type of photosynthesis used by living organisms’. An autotrophic organism makes its food out of stuff that isn’t food, or not as we know it Jim. That is, from mineral elements, CO2 and maybe unknown other stuff.
It might seem that I’m getting away from the Earth’s ages here, But I’m particularly interested in how life forms shaped our atmosphere, our biosphere and such, over time. Cyanobacteria and other microbial life-forms, beginning in the Archaean, began to oxygenate the atmosphere. This was the so-called Great Oxygenation Event. Or maybe not, that was a bit later…
The earliest life forms may date back as far as 4.1 million years ago, based on a tiny piece of ‘biologically fractionated graphite inside a single zircon grain in the Jack Hills range of Australia’. So the early Archaean marks life’s starting point, quite early in Earth’s history. We’ve found evidence in Greenland (the Issua Supracrustal Belt), and again in Australia’s Pilbara region, all between 3.5 and 4 billion years ago.
So the ‘Great Oxygenation Event’ (GOE) occurred near the beginning of the Proterozoic eon, about 2.4 million years ago, long after the beginnings of life, but that earlier life was anaerobic, I think. Meaning it didn’t require oxygen. So what did it require? Information from various sources tells me that this first life was single-celled, sans nucleus, just a bag of chemicals, more or less. And genes. As there was no oxygen, or very little, and the Earth at this time was covered in water, they would have congregated mostly at ocean vents, living off the heat and assorted carbon-based chemical compounds. So this was the situation up to about 3 billion years ago. It was a watery world with very little oxygen, mostly methane and CO2 in the atmosphere. The land, when it emerged, was void of green, or even soil. Life, essentially bacterial, lived on the border of land and sea, but mostly sea. Sunlight was weaker then, but there was no ozone layer to shield the surface from ultraviolet radiation.
So that was the situation for more than a billion years up to the aforementioned GOE. Cyanobacteria are it seems the culprit regarding the mass production of oxygen. Lots of cyanobacteria, presumably. They basically learned to split H2O via sunlight, releasing oxygen as a waste product. That process, or set of processes, is of course the subject of Oliver Morton’s book, and it’s fiendishly complex, and took decades to fully comprehend.
Anyway, let’s get back to cyanobacteria. I’ve described briefly what they are, but how did they come to be? After all, it seems they lay claim to kick-starting the abundance and variety of Earthly life, mainly due to their oxygen production. They’re often known as ‘blue-green algae’, but then, what are algae? The answer is that they’re not yet quite plants but they require water as well as light. So, on surfaces or edges. They can be eukaryotic or bacterial, as the earlier forms were. And of course they’re endlessly fascinating as probably the first life forms – the connection between life and – chemistry. Or how about the bridge between inorganic and organic chemistry? Chemical building blocks coming together over thousands, million of years until, somehow…
And it seems photosynthesis was the trick that flicked chemistry into biology. Light was the energy source, oxygen the waste product that in turn, and really quite bizarrely, became the next great life source. So how did these barely living entities effect this without which not transformation?
Well, it wasn’t their intention, and it certainly didn’t happen overnight. They used some kind of chemistry, based on light, to create cells. But no, they already had cells, as bacteria. Organic molecules, whatever that means, preceded cells. Here’s something from AI:
Simple organic molecules formed in Earth’s early environment, eventually enclosed by lipid membranes to create the first primitive cells. These simple structures developed metabolic energy, complex DNA replication, internal organelles, and eventually multicellular cooperation.
That’s a helluva lot of development in one tiny paragraph. And again, what exactly is the difference between an organic molecule and a mere molecule? The internet tells me that they ‘must’ be based on carbon, though I know there has been speculation that other base elements, such as silicon, might work, if the environment was right. That’s to say, nothing like that of Earth. Carbon can form strong chemical bonds with up to four other elements, as well as itself, in long chains. Think CO2, hydrocarbons, methyl groups and such. Do I know what I’m talking about? Not really, except that complexity is key. Life somehow emerges from complexity. Carbon-based complexity, due to this flexibility, this love of bonding, this affinity with other elements. But I’m still looking for that boundary, that spark, that difference that made all the difference. But then, it’s also reasonable to assume, or understand, that we will never locate that precise place or time when that entity we recognise as ‘alive’ came into being. It may have come, and then died, many times before a generational link occurred, and a chain of being came to persist. Time, after all, was on its side.
So I suppose I should try to satisfy myself with what we know. The above AI quote mentioned ‘complex DNA replication’. DNA?! Out of nowhere? Maybe that’s the next thing to explore…
References
five year plans, war plans and the future of Ukraine
Mother Russia calls you to make the ultimate sacrifice!
Soviet Russia became renowned – not exactly the right word – for its five year plans, of which there were twelve, starting in the early 1920s. There was a lot of fanfare about all this death-laden slave labour, first proposed by Leon Trotsky but taken up with great bellicosity by Stalin. It would miraculously transform poor old backward agrarian Russia into the envy of Europe, a region all the Soviet leaders envied:
The Five-Year Plans… aimed to accelerate the tempo of the whole economy.’The Five-Year-Plan in Four!’ was their slogan. The Plans reconfigured time itself along a series of strategic targets on the path towards a Communist utopia. In this sense they built upon the age-old striving of the Russian people for a higher form of existence that lay at the heart of their religious consciousness, particularly their belief in the possibility of a utopia on Russian soil. The creation of belief in the Soviet system required the replacement of religious ends with secular objectives tangible enough to motivate the people but meaningful in ways to satisfy the eschatological endeavour of the Russian collective psyche. By hailing the achievements of the Five-Year Plans, propaganda aimed to foster the belief that the utopia was imminent, that it could be reached by one last collective effort… but the utopia was never reached (Figes, p220).
As is the habit of utopias. But speaking of such plans, Mr Pudding’s special military operation in Ukraine, envisioned as a sort of quick kill-and-grab affair, might now, after four and a half years, be worth analysing as one. AI (never lies) – quoting Wikipedia, to be fair – tells me that the Russian war dead is now around 500,000, with overall casualties approaching 1.5 million. Ukrainian losses, according to The Economist, stand at around 60,000 to 100,000 killed and 400,000 wounded. That’s overall something like a 5 to 1 ratio, and Russia has roughly four times the population of Ukraine. Not sure how meaningful any of that is, especially as the outcome of this war will not be about numbers, though of course those numbers will say everything about needless suffering.
In any case Mr Pudding’s plan back in February 2022 was clearly for something quick, deadly and incisive. How could it all have gone so catastrophically wrong? Could it still be turned into a Five-Year Plan? If so, time is fast running out.
More importantly, how could he have done this in the first place? Is there any good reason for any nation to invade or declare war on, or topple the leadership of, any other nation?
But those are different questions from each other. And of course, ‘nations’ don’t decide to do such things, their leaders do, and those decisions are mostly to do with self-promotion – though not always. Frump, who promised ‘no foreign wars’ in the run-up to one of the elections he participated in, has declared war on Iran, I’ve no idea why except that it seems to have been as a distraction from his domestic problems.
In any case, Ukraine isn’t a real nation, don’t forget. But the trouble with that claim is that it can be made against any nation that has ever existed, or has claimed to exist. We invented nations, in the modern sense, through modern, or relatively ancient, warfare, mostly. In the piece of land now known as Australia, it was easier than it was in the lands now known as New Zealand. It took some time in the land now known as the USA, and Russia’s history is full of land-grabs, some more successful than others, over centuries. Ukraine was indeed once thought of as an indivisible part of Russia – but so what? The same might be said of Poland, Estonia or Finland – something the beady-eyed Mr Pudding is well aware of. The trouble for him is that democracies are generally kinder, if nothing else, than dictatorships. And they’re more likely to support each other. NATO is an alliance of democratic countries – some more democratic than others, clearly, but the alliance generally exerts pressure on its member states to maintain or improve their democratic credentials, and this can have economic as well as defence benefits. Compare Russia’s alliances. China is eternally self-regarding, North Korea is a tragedy inside a bad joke, and the former Soviet states are never quite sure of their independence, never fully trusting of the Kremlin.
The invasion of Ukraine has surely turned into something of a disaster for Mr Pudding. Orlando Figes’ history shows that sacrificing humans for wars and for Five-Year Plans and such has been a regular feature of the long Russian despotism, but that has rarely stopped its despots from piling suffering upon suffering. And they have rarely suffered for their crimes. Consider Stalin, surely the worst of a bad lot, and thoroughly idolised at his death.
Russia is a long-term tragedy, from a humanistic perspective. Millions of people have died there as a result of its leaders’ ‘experiments in power’. The same has occurred in China, under Mao in particular. And such individuals are not only never brought to justice, they’re fêted as heroes. This is why the battle most be fought, not only for democracy, but openness. I’ve not read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, but when I look at the societies and political entities around me, those that avoid anything cultish and highlight skepticism and humanism are the ones that attract my attention. Ukraine, I think, is trying to build such a society, and needs all the help we can give it.
Reference
Orlando Figes, The Story of Russia, 2022
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_war
mostly about Ukraine and Russia and hopes for a better future
just some blokes
As a generalist sort of pseudo-intellectual in quiet and calm Australia, I’m tossed between the best and the worst stuff to focus on, mostly in the top hemisphere of our planet, as if I know which way is up. War and Russia and the USA under Frump (talk about the world’s worst-ever own goal), and the grim future with global warming, and the runaway rich-poor gap in so many countries, and the worries over the rapidity of AI developments and who’s controlling them, and then JWST (no longer Just Wonderful, it seems) and the future Nancy Grace Roman and all the exoplanets to come into our purview, and dark matter as structure or whatever, and the Hubble Tension, and gravitational lensing trickery, and then back down to Earth and its rubisco abundance….
So I’m re-reading with difficulty, but also great admiration tinged with annoyance, Eating the Sun, which I’m committed to finishing even without full comprehension, for who has such a thing, but I’m also reading a vastly different book, not as an antidote (for that would require some planning which I’m incapable of), but because I try to contain multitudes, as we all do to some degree (do we?).
The Story of Russia, by Orlando Figes, was published in 2022, so presumably was written, or mostly written, before the current attack on Ukraine, but is of course being read by me with that ‘special operation’ in mind. Needless to say, I despise Mr Pudding as much as I despise Frump, while also realising they can’t help but be who they are. They are the products of very different environments, and have both exploited those environments very effectively indeed.
What I’m learning from Figes, much of which I sort of knew already, is that Russia has long defined itself in opposition to Europe – or rather its leadership has. Russia is vast, and its multitudes contain vast differences, but they’ve never really had a voice, and it seems that they don’t want to, or they don’t know how to. It doesn’t really have a single definable ethnicity, and it defines itself more by class than anything else. The owner class, the worker/peasant class, the political class. It has never experienced anything remotely close to democracy, and I think it has, historically, been more open to, or more easily persuaded by, that vague, hopeful, egalitarian-sounding concept called ‘communism’, in which you don’t even have to vote to be part of the government, somehow or other. The people seem to have been convinced that Europe is their enemy – evil, presumably debauched, and rapacious. Out to get them, to steal their identity, to rub them out as a proud ethnicity. Certainly this is the kind of propaganda that Putin makes use of, but what does that bizarre much-murdering individual really think? For example, he never for a moment believed that Ukraine was full of Nazis, but he did believe that this line would work in Russia. So what does he think of the average Russian, then, and is he correct, or at least close to it? How popular is the bloke? Presumably not as popular as five years ago, but even so…
As I learn, through Figes, of Russia in 1917-1920, with Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries (a different group apparently) and of course Germans, at a time when so much was up for grabs – Ukraine, Poland, Estonia, Finland – when Petrograd, that all-too-European city, was switched out for Moscow, the pride of Russia, as its capital – everything was changing, Tsars gone forever, and supposed freedoms being fought for with ever-increasing brutality by the new men, Lenin, Kerensky, Trotsky and the grotesque Stalin. All seeking to impose something entirely anti-European while looking over their shoulders at the European powers with a weird and dismal kind of love-hate. And that’s a theme, of course, that continues to this day. A kind of spurned lover’s hatred for the west, and a desperate need to find some superiority to cling to. This appears to be Mr Pudding’s obsession, and he really seemed to think that some weakness, or some Old Russian-ness in Ukraine would deliver it to him. He has under-estimated the depth of contempt that Ukraine has for him – for him personally, rather than Russia itself. And of course he has also under-estimated that country’s western advancements and passions, as well as the real difference that separation from the horrors of his regime has wrought. He has absolutely nothing positive to offer Ukrainians.
One can only hope, for Russia’s sake, that their 73-year-old dictator is their last. They deserve so much better than the thieving, murdering, backward-facing lot that finally emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 80s and early 90s. All that hopeful sense of glasnost and perestroika was brutally shattered. I’ll be interested to read what Figes thinks of Russia’s future in the final chapters of his book.
Reference
Orlando Figes, The story of Russia, 2022
Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun, 2007