Over the years, I’ve built some strange things: a floating dock; a revolving bookcase; central air conditioning. But I’ve never gone it alone. At least, not completely. For guidance, there’s always been a magazine article, or a website, or, in the case of my latest project, an excellent book: Kiko Denzer’s Build Your Own Earth Oven.
Yes, I admit it. I’ve been getting all Neolithic in my backyard.
Human beings have fashioned ovens from mud for thousands of years, mainly because mud is readily available and, well, extremely cheap.
Denzer’s recipe calls for mixing two or three parts coarse sand with one part clayey subsoil, the kind of soil that shines when you cut it with a shovel.
Perry County abounds in clayey subsoil, a point I drove home in my very first column in these pages, which pitted my jacked-up Toyota Tacoma against a some ferocious local mud. Needless to say, the mud won.
But back to the recipe. To make a batch of high quality oven mud: pour out a thick ring of sand on a tarp; heap a goodly amount of clayey subsoil in the center; add water to taste; and blend thoroughly.
With your feet.
There’s great satisfaction in mixing up these very basic ingredients, and then using one’s bare hands to shape it into something useful, much as our ancestors did before the invention of, say, bricks.
Not far from the spectacle of all this mud-mixing and oven-building, a pair of Baltimore orioles have been noisily defending their nest high up in the big walnut tree. I watched them build that nest, a furry gourd amid a cluster of walnut leaves, one beakful at a time.
Orioles weave their nests from a combination of long fibers, like grasses, and springy fibers, like milkweed stems. Once the framework of the nest is complete, they line it with the softest, downiest stuff they can find, which they press into shape with a special nest-shaping dance.
Watching the orioles build their nest put me in mind of an age-old question: how do they know how to do that?
It’s a question many of us have asked as we’ve watched a spider weave its intricate web or admired the fine engineering of a beaver dam.
As far as I know, there aren’t any books devoted to web construction. At least, not the sticky silk variety. And I’ve never come across a subscription card for the “Journal of Incisor Construction.” Yet somehow, spiderwebs and beaver dams still get built, generation after generation.
Again: how do these creatures know how to do it?
It’s a question that provokes a knee-jerk response from both scientists and Creationists.
“Easy!” cry the scientists. “It’s instinct!”
“Hogwash!” the Creationists cry. “Intelligent design!”
I don’t find either answer very enlightening. On the one hand, I’m not one to go looking for a metaphysical answer to what seems to be a naturalist’s problem. I’m with Einstein, who saw in science and religion two different modes of understanding for two entirely different categories of experience.
On the other hand, I’m underwhelmed by the current scientific explanation of “instinct,” which relies on “yet-to-be-determined” chunks of the animal’s genome, or genetic code, acting as the storehouse for the accumulated wisdom of a species’ ancestors.
In the world of ethology, the scientific study of the behavior of animals, the definition of “instinct” is quite rigid. To qualify, a behavior has to be automatic; irresistible; occur at some point in the organism’s development; be triggered by some event in the environment; occur in every member of the species; be unmodifiable; and govern behavior for which the organism needs no training.
Think of the adolescent spider, weaving its very first web.
What, then, is mankind’s instinctual birthright?
Art? War? Religion?
Some argue that there is no single human behavior that meets the definition of “instinct.” At least, not in the sense of the spider’s uncanny knowledge of web-weaving, or the oriole’s innate nest-shaping dance.
I’m sympathetic, however, to a different point of view, put forward by Noam Chomsky, and taken up more recently by Harvard’s Steven Pinker, that argues in favor of one particular automatic, irresistible, early-onset, environmentally triggered, universal, unmodifiable, untrainable human behavior: the instinct for language.
This theory is not without its detractors. But I find it moving – and humbling — to think that the distillation of the wisdom of our ancestors — the one skill so crucial to the survival of our species that it has found its way into our very DNA — is simply our ability to talk to one another.
Human beings will talk. We must talk. We can’t not talk, any more than a spider can go on strike and not build its web. It’s something we simply have to do.
If only we had the instinct to listen.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 17 June 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
