A Knot on a Log

Yesterday, we helped our niece celebrate her 22nd birthday. In the span of two months, she has graduated from college (receiving a bachelor's degree in nursing, with a 4.0 GPA), married her college boyfriend, accepted a job as a cardiac nurse at the hometown hospital and turned 22 years of age. She will take the nursing licensing exam later this week, in expectation of starting her new job in mid-July.

As we've observed, she quickly adapts to life with another person, in this case her husband, including sleeping habits, eating habits, habits of thoughts and habitual daily actions. Of course, he gets to adapt to her habits, too. They overcome the shock of adjusting to one another by humourously sharing with family and friends their preferences for one habit over another.

Such basic animal interaction like this finds itself in comedy sketches, research studies, history books and romance novels. We humans are here because of our adaptation skills so why am I here writing about my niece's life with her new housemate?

I'm here to wonder about the cycle of human behaviour. Our current form as the species Homo sapiens has lasted thousands of generations, in some ways not a lot of data to look at, so any conclusions I could make will be flawed, both because the data is limited and my desire to look at the available data is low today.

Whatever, right? I'm writing for myself here, not my future offspring, so I don't have to be worried about making statements in anticipation of the assumptions I'm using being overturned by new discoveries in the distant future, proving that I have some sort of foresight. All I have is this body, a computer, a local source of electricity, the Internet, a view of the world offered by a pane of glass and the rest of the universe I ignore to focus on these words.

I saw a statistical estimate that the current set of living humans constitutes 5% of all humans who have lived. The other 95% made us who we are today, genetically and/or culturally. Thus, my niece and her husband constitute 1.4285714 e-11 of the humans who have ever lived. I would laugh at anyone who used that small a data set to summarize behaviour for 140 billion humans.

Even so, I will move forward with my observation of them. They belong to the cell phone generation, using cell phone calls, text messaging, facebook updates and other electronically interconnected means to communicate with other humans. Their use of electronics [demonstrates, implies or some other word I can't recall] a power infrastructure that uses fuel sources such as coal, oil, hydroelectric, solar, geothermal, and wind to convert raw materials into finished goods, including AC/DC current, electronic appliances, etc., which in turn provide power to radio waves transporting analog and digital data. The electromagnetic energy in the data that bounces around the planet may or may not have undesired effects on human bodies but has been demonstrated to affect non-human animals' sense of direction.

Thus, I wonder what effect the electromagnetic energy has on the adaptation skills of two newly-married humans living squarely within the EM data world they enjoy. Two people sitting uncomfortably on a log because of a couple of knots can move around until they're individually and jointly comfortably seated next to one another. But can they see the "knots" that modern technology inserts into their lives and figure out a way to readjust?

I don't have an answer. I don't have a control group to compare my niece and her husband against, except by looking back at history in the age before the widespread use of EM technology. Unfortunately, other factors weighed more heavily on those previous generations, including widespread diseases (now under control) which encouraged the production of more offspring per mating couple and changes in the socially-acceptable behaviour between the two genders.

Can I conclude anything? Can I make any predictions? My niece and her husband agree on most fundamental aspects of human living conditions, with one sticking point, the production of offspring (he's ready, she's not ready). Therefore, I believe they'll maintain their monogamous relationship for their whole lives. They may have children together, perhaps even via natural childbirth, unless they find the means and the acceptance of artificial conception/childcare to produce the next generation, freeing them up to pursue other dreams. Do their lives indicate any greater trends? I don't know.

Designer babies are no longer a fantasy. People are already picking and choosing zygotes or embryos with desirable characteristics for viable offspring. How much does it matter now and how much will it matter in the future when we find out whether we were naturally born (i.e., accepted by our parents as the random offspring of two humans) or preselected for "birth"? How will this affect humans as a whole (the global culture) and as individuals? Will and do EM radiation patterns play into this future?

Like the effects of RNA/DNA replication (i.e., evolution), we say that technology is blind - we can't see what's ahead of us as we move ahead at full speed. That's not going to change. It's integral to who we are as humans and who we are as general living beings. What matters is how we handle the changes individually and how we adapt to the changes when we live with one another. There's no wrong answer. There's no right way. There are no special secrets to uncover or share.

Bottom line: Adaptation is the way of life so have fun adjusting to one another. Turn work into play and enjoy the time you've got on this planet.