Robert Phillips | ACT Author Insights - category / Humour

BIPEDS RULE OK

 18 Aug 2025    published by: Robert Phillips

SPONCH. We’re all made of SPONCH. Every living thing is made of Sulphur, Phosphorus, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Carbon and Hydrogen.

Along time ago, these six elements got together in Darwin’s heated swimming pool and had a big party. Maybe there was alcohol involved. Anyway, they all got drunk and, with carbon being the promiscuous element that it is, thought it was cool to make some long chain molecules called amino acids. Then they thought it would be fun to twist them all together to make DNA. And so life began.

It was rather dull life at first – boring little anaerobic bacteria that spread throughout the world. But then, some naughty bacteria started getting high on oxygen. It gave them more energy and they gave off oxygen that was a poison to the other bacteria. This led to the greatest battle in the planet’s history, between the anaerobic and aerobic empires. The aerobics won, and took over the world. Yay!

Then they invented sex, which made reproduction so much more interesting, they clumped together to form multi-cellular organisms, and evolution was well under way, plants and animals.

Some animals developed a spinal cord and gave rise to the chordates. They were worms, mostly, so remember that when you are calling someone ‘a miserable little worm’, you are paying tribute to several hundred million years of evolution

Then the fish had the bright idea of enclosing their spinal cords in a backbone, with vertebrae for good measure. So was founded the great Order of the Vertebrates. Some of them got bored with swimming around in the sea and crawled onto soggy land, where they became amphibians (reebit, reebit), except for the lung fish, which can’t make up its mind.

Some escaped from the watery environment altogether and became reptiles. They had to lie in the sun to soak up the warmth, otherwise they got cold. So every time you feel like sunbaking, you’re pandering to the whims of your reptilian brain.

From the reptiles came the mammals, which may explain our fascination with mammary glands. Others evolved into dinosaurs, which all got wiped out in Hollywood disaster movies, except for those that evolved into birds (tweet, tweet).

While a few mammals went back into the sea to become dolphins and whales, most stayed on land to become quadrupeds with long snouts and eyes on the side of their heads. But some weirdos decided to live in trees. They developed flatter faces with forward-facing eyes and binocular vision, smaller forelimbs with prehensile hands and opposable thumbs. These were the first primates.

But many primates were bored with living in trees, and descended to the ground, where they could grow bigger as chimpanzees and gorillas. The problem was, walking along on their hind legs and knuckles was rather tedious. Besides, it was difficult to grasp things when you are perambulating like this, and so some decided to stand on their own two feet.

Thus it was, that the first creatures of the genus homo, the first bipeds, came into being a few million years ago. Bipedalism turned out to be pretty groovy. They could walk long distances, and it left their hands free to carry stone tools and smart phones. The fact that smart phones hadn’t been invented yet may have been an example of anticipatory evolution: the forces of nature were thinking ahead of the curve and realised we would invent them someday.

Yet the greatest invention of our ancestors, maybe a million years ago, was to rub two sticks together to make fire.  For all our super-duper modern technology, (including smart phones), fire making was our greatest invention. For the first time, we were no longer limited by the energy of our bodies – how heavy a rock we could lift or how far we could throw it. We could cook things (yum yum), and make more weapons and utensils.

The bipeds grew bigger brains and evolved into several sub-species by about a hundred thousand years ago. There were Neanderthals in Europe, Denisovens in Central Asia and humans in Africa, plus any other bipeds that happened to be around at the time.

The bipeds were randy beggars: DNA studies showed that everybody interbred with everybody else, leading to some crazy, mixed up bipeds.

The Denisovens died out around 50,000 years ago. The place with the highest concentration in Europe of Denisoven DNA is now Iceland. Go figure.

So then, it was between the Neanderthals and us. How did we win out over them? Well, there may be two reasons.

The first is diet. The Neanderthal diet was about 80% meat and 20% veggies. Ours is about 20% meat and 80% vegetables. So the Neanderthals were carnivores that ate some greens, while we are vegetarians that eat some meat.

In fact, we are omnivores. If you go to the markets of the world, or even your local supermarket, you will see an amazing range of food stuffs on display. If something is capable of being eaten, we have found a way of eating it, including poisonous puffer fish, scorpions and rancid herring. (Was it the herrings that attracted the Denisovens to Scandinavia?)

In short, we may have out-evolved the other bipeds, not because we were smarter, or stronger, but because of our superior palates.

In the Ice Age, game was in short supply, and many of the large herbivores died out. We could cope all right, living off nuts and veggies, but not so the Neanderthals. Imagine mummy Neanderthal saying to the kids, ‘I’m afraid there’s no mammoth meat today, dears, because the mammoths have just become extinct. But I have a wonderful surprise for you. Lentil soup. Won’t that be yummy?’

So one reason the Neanderthals died out was because they would not eat their greens. Remember that next time you’re having a meal, and are tempted to push the broccoli and Brussels sprouts to one side.

The other reason may have had something to do with hunting. The Neanderthals may have been more equalitarian, with females hunting alongside of men. But many of them got gored and trampled on, leaving not enough females to have children. In humans, however, it seems that while women sometimes went hunting, they did not do it as much as men.

As for human attitudes to hunting being a largely male preserve, depending on your preference, one may subscribe to the male chauvinist theory or the smart woman theory.

‘Listen, hunting is men’s work. You women stay home and gather nuts and berries and look after the kids, while we go and slaughter a mammoth and bring it back to the cave. Oh, that’s right, they just became extinct. Look, we’ll whack something on the head and bring it back.’

Alternatively, ‘you men are so strong and brave. We’re just poor, helpless females. (Flutter eyelids.) So you go and hunt the wild animals, while we stay at home and gather nuts and berries and nurture the children.’

Whichever theory is correct, we protected our breeding stock. It is a characteristic of many large mammals that the females can produce only a few young, while the males can sire many children. So males are largely expendable. We can lose many men from hunting and fighting and still have enough left for breeding purposes.

This is, after all the attitude we take to livestock breeding: look after the cows and ewes but most of the bulls and rams aren’t needed.

Some people may object to being compared to livestock. The reason we are so precious or hoity toity about that is because we are the only conceited species on the planet. We think we are the proverbial ‘ant’s pants’ or ‘bee’s knees’. Yet, biologically we are no different from the other large mammals. We just like to think we are.

So, we are conceited, our ancestors invented fire, we are randy beggars that will breed with anyone, we are omnivores that will eat anything that can be eaten (or anyone, if we’re feeling really peckish), and we protect our breeding stock.

That is why we won the battle of the bipeds.

So ‘up yours, Neanderthals’.

P.S. If you have any questions, there’s no use asking me. Everything I learnt I got from my smart phone.

Feline Tactics

 29 Jul 2017    published by: Robert Phillips

Cats may be smarter than people. (Well, mine has outsmarted me many times). They have many tactics to ensure they get what they want. Feline theology tells them that the great Mama Puss placed humans on Earth to be their servants. The world is their oyster: the mice and birds are intended as tasty snacks.

Two major preoccupations of cats are food and comfort.

To get food, my cat uses several tactics, on a graduated basis:

• The plaintive mew. ‘Please feed me. I’m a poor starving pussy cat that hasn’t been fed for at least half-an-hour’.
• The stare. Puss doesn’t say anything. He just stares at me as if to say, ‘you know what I want.’
• The persistent meow. ‘Feed me! Feed me’. I call puss my randomly-programmed mobile alarm clock: at any time of the day or night, he’s likely to wake me from my slumbers to stagger off to the kitchen and throw something in his bowl.
• Jumping up on one’s chest and demanding ‘FEED ME!’
• Being naughty. Getting my attention by jumping up on the table and attacking the Kleenex box or my papers.

Note that cats have built-in price detectors. They can tell when you’ve bought a less expensive brand of cat food, and will turn up their noses accordingly.

As far as comfort goes, humans are under the illusion that they own the furniture that they buy, like sofas and beds. In fact, they are merely keeping them warm until the pet arrives. We go out to work so they can live in comfort.

A favourite feline tactic is to wait until their human has been sitting on the sofa for a while, warming it up nicely. The cat then meows for food. The human gets up and goes to the kitchen, but the cat doesn’t follow them. When the human gets back, the cat has curled up in their nice warm place on the sofa.

As for bed, the favourite feline tactic is to curl up on one corner of the bed, as if to say, ‘I’m only going to take up a little bit of the bed, so you won’t even notice I’m here.’ But as the night goes on and they warm up, they spread out, always across the bed and never along it. They eventually block off at least half of it, usually in the middle, so one is forced to sleep in a narrow strip on the edge.

Another favourite feline tactic of course, is to be cute and cuddly. They can’t help being cute, and their cuddliness is more out of self-interest. They like curling up on a nice, warm human. They also like being patted and scratched behind the ears. Human enjoy patting and stroking them, because of the tactile sensations. So it’s a win:win situation.

There’s nothing quite like the sound of a contented cat purring. It’s probably a smug purr. The great Mama Puss designed humans to appreciate contented cats.