The Latin names for individual species are written using a system termed “binomial nomenclature” that was developed originally by Linnaeus. Quite literally, each species is identified by a combination of “two names”: its genus name and its specific epithet. Human beings (Homo sapiens) is classed as a species of intelligent primates.
I was a keen biologist at school. A mixture of the human anatomy, in particular the brain, land animals, extreme condition survival, plants and soil fascinated me. As I travelled the world and spent month if not years in far-flung locations eating cow’s testicles, frogs, crocodiles (not the whole thing), and meeting people of different cultures, looks and values, I started to realise that we humans were not represented fairly in biological terms.
Before I continue, I should add that I was travelling the globe for exploration and production of oil/gas, and not in search of exotic foods!
What began to fascinate me over the last 20 years was human character and behaviour. Every person I have met or been acquainted with looked difference, thought different and behaved different. One only have to watch the hundreds of crime programmes to understand that the mind is a fragile computer (perhaps crashes like a Windows operating system) and is versatile. But the brain is a computer. How does that determine our personlity or behaviour?
The pineal gland is a tiny organ in the center of the brain that played an important role in Descartes’ philosophy. He regarded it as the principal seat of the soul and the place in which all our thoughts are formed. Many people believe they possess a soul. While conceptions of the soul differ, many would describe it as an “invisible force that appears to animate us”.
It’s often believed the soul can survive death and is intimately associated with a person’s memories, passions and values. Some argue the soul has no mass, takes no space and is localised nowhere.
The brain is the organ with a map of our body, the outside world and our experience. Damage to the brain, as in accidents, dementias or congenital malformations, produces a commensurate damage to personality.
Plants are wonderful even to a non-gardener. I recall reading ‘Pleasure from Plants’ (Edward Hyams 1966); an absolute pleasure. His vivid descriptions of plants and his passion for plants was infectious. The pleasure of escaping from the hustle and bustle of modern life? For the childhood me, it was the magic of propagating new plants from nothing more than a handful of cuttings or a sprinkle of home-saved seed. Intrigued by my success in conjuring new life into existence, I felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice. One moment nothing, the next there were pots filled with tiny newborn seedlings and freshly-rooted plants.
What’s more important is that plants convert our waste gas (carbon dixode) into oxygen — a miracle of Mother Nature via photosynthesis. They bear colourful, scented flowers, which attract bees, going on to make honey from the nectar, the sweet liquid. Plants are short, tall, garden suffocating (ivy), having small leaves, large leaves, thick leaves, thin leaves, red flowers, blue flowers, yellow flowers, and thousands and thousands of permutations. Each plant is a different species, and has a different Latin name for identification, much like humans have a first name (Christian name) and a surname.
With human beings, everyone has certain likes, dislikes, quirks and idiosyncrasies — all the qualities that make up your personality, the things that make you you. That everyone has unique personalities makes life more interesting (or, sometimes, more difficult).
Over the last 25 years, psychologists have found that personalities coalesce around five basic traits. Everyone can be described as having varying levels of agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, extroversion and openness to experience. Contrary to common perception, people aren’t confined to certain personality types. Usually, no one is entirely an extrovert or an introvert, or a total neat freak or a slob. While a minority may be at the extreme ends of a trait, most people are somewhere in the middle.
The Minnesota Study of ‘Twins Reared Apart’, studied 350 pairs of twins between 1979 and 1999. Participants included both identical and fraternal twins who were either raised together or apart. Results revealed that personalities of identical twins were similar whether they were raised in the same household or apart, suggesting that some aspects of personality are influenced by genetics.
So, then what is personality? The word personality itself stems from the Latin word persona, which refers to a theatrical mask worn by performers in order to either project different roles or disguise their identities. At its most basic, personality is the characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make a person unique. It is believed that personality arises from within the individual and remains fairly consistent throughout life.
The idea of there being two or more selves in a single body sounds crazy. Look carefully, though, and you will see that the evidence for human plurality is all around us and always has been. We glimpse it wherever people talk to ancestors, get divine wisdom from spirit guides, receive messages from personified gods, consult oracles, get “taken over” by the souls of the dead or tune in to an “inner helper.” In the twentieth century, Freud’s enduring id, ego and superego model introduced the idea of a horizontal split between the conscious and unconscious mind, and Jung’s theory of archetypes held that there are separate powerful entities within the unconscious.
In the more simplistic view, humans are short (dwarves), tall, fat, thin, different skin shades, different eye colour, different hair types and colour, intelligent and not so, athletic and not so, introvert and extrovert etc. The permutations total perhaps 7 billion as no two humans are the same. Everyone has a slightly different DNA. There are some factors such as being fat or thin or athletic or intelligent that perhaps our environment shapes. We change as we develop. A plant if cut, will grow with the same characteristics. Would a human who lived exactly the same life including diet and exercise be the same person again? Would his/her personality be the same?
So, why can we not group humans into different species just as plants are? Everyone on the planet today, whatever they look like and wherever they live, is classified by biologists in the species Homo sapiens. But some people are now suggesting that the extinct Neanderthals with their heavy brows and big noses should be classified in our species as well — as they are classed as a different species. The physical traits of Homo sapiens include a high and rounded (‘globular’) braincase, and a relatively narrow pelvis. Measurement of our braincase and pelvic shape can reliably separate a modern human from a Neanderthal — their fossils exhibit a longer, lower skull and a wider pelvis.
The biological species concept states that species are reproductively isolated entities — that is, they breed within themselves but not with other species. Thus all living Homo sapiens have the potential to breed with each other, but could not successfully interbreed with gorillas or chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. On this basis, ‘species’ that interbreed with each other cannot actually be distinct species.
You probably wouldn’t conclude that plants and humans are related just from looking at them. After all, we’re not green and we can’t use light to produce sugars. But if you look beyond the leaf and go deep into a plant’s genome, you’ll see some striking similarities….plants and animals are related. All life on earth, both plants and animals, shares a common ancestor. Your dog and you yourself are related to the grass growing on your lawn. Scientists know this because of DNA, which is sometimes referred to as the “building blocks” or “blueprints” of life. Stored in the nucleus of every cell of every living thing, DNA is a long chain of amino acids that form together in ways to create a specific living thing.
Humans haven’t been around as long as other animals. We haven’t had enough time to develop much variation in our DNA. Humans also migrate and reproduce a lot. Different groups of humans are never apart long enough for genetic differences to add up. Human DNA is too similar to split us into subspecies or races. So we can’t use biology to sort people into groups like we can with animals. Even though our DNA is similar, humans look very different from each other. But the traits we use to guess someone’s race don’t always work well. Think about skin color. There aren’t just a few colors: there are more shades than you can ever count. The traits we use are also independent of each other. For example, being tall doesn’t mean you’ll also have dark hair. No matter which traits we use, there is no good way to group humans using appearance or DNA.
Instead, everyone groups people into races based on the traits they think are most important. The way we categorize people into races changes over time, too. Think about people you know who are Irish or Italian. Today we might categorize them as white, like many people from Europe. But 100 years ago, they were not considered the same race as Americans with European origins. Humans love to organize things into groups. But when it comes to race, these groups tell us more about our culture than they do about our biology.
Scientists believe that up to four Homo species may have coexisted on Earth as recently as 40,000 years ago. Can you imagine Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis, and possibly two other unidentified Homo species all living on Earth at the same time?
As for us modern humans, scientists believe Homo sapiens began to develop in East Africa around 200,000 years ago. Although the first Homo sapiens likely looked like us, they probably didn’t develop modern behaviors until about 50,000 years ago. Since all other species of the genus Homo are long extinct, Homo sapiens is left to carry on into the future!
Today we look up at the stars and wonder if we’re alone in the universe. In fantasy and science fiction, we wonder what it might be like to meet other intelligent species, like us, but not us. It’s profoundly sad to think that we once did, and now, because of it, they’re gone.
