Paul Gauguin was born in Paris, France on June 7, 1848.  After a series of career setbacks (unsuccessful business, the stock market crash); in 1882, he resigned from a career in securities and focused on a full time career in painting.  In order to simplify his life and find his personal “Garden of Eden”, in 1890, he moved to Tahiti in the South Pacific.

Seven years later in a state of poverty and ill health and shocked by the news of his daughter’s death.  Gauguin, under tremendous emotional grief desperately tried to find the value of life through his painting.  Working with a fierce determination to understand and find the meaning of life, Gauguin painted non-stop for a whole month and created his most famous masterpiece and wrote three questions—“Where Do We Come From?  What Are We?  Where Are We Going?” which later became the name of the painting.

 

 

Where Do We Come From?

 

Putting aside religious, cultural and ethnic backgrounds of humans today.  According to archeological research, we shared a common ancestor with the chimpanzee dating back 7 million years.  The human ancestor branched off from this, 5 million years ago so our DNA only differ by 1.5% from the chimpanzee.   However, this evolution progress stopped at the end of the last Ice Age occurring 15,000 years ago. Therefore, our physiological structures don’t differ too much from our ancestors who were living in the end of the New Stone Age. 

Why Did Evolution Stop?

3 Main reasons why evolution stopped: 

• Evolution is a result of natural selection.  In the last 15,000 years the change in climate has been the least dramatic in all of the Earth’s history and humans no longer had to face the threat of mass extinction due to the environment. 

• Although, 15,000 years is a tiny fraction compared to 7 million years.  Traces of any changes in evolution have been difficult to detect in this last 15,000 years.  Thus evolution has been static since then. 

• The rapid advancement of culture along with the human brains development, has allowed humans more flexibility to cope with the changes in our outside world allowing us to circumvent the fate of natural selection. 

 

No matter how much civilization has progressed, our bodies are essentially the same as they were 15,000 years ago.  The evidence is as follows:

 

• Our brains still process images in a symmetrical manner, comparing the mirror images of our right and left brains.  Although most written texts, which are mostly unsymmetrical, have been with us for more than 7,000 years (e.g.  Mesopotamian and Sumerian cuneiforms).  Children at the beginning stage of recognizing text all go through a phase in development where the difference between the number “3” and the letter “E” is indistinguishable and sometimes mixed up. 

• The way in which our bodies store fat is essentially the same as it was during the Stone Age when hunting and fishing were our only way of survival.  This pre-programed body fat “set point” is integrated into our bodies so that it can maintain the best possible body weight for the given environmental conditions.  This “set point” which was perfect for the Stone Age (since fishing and hunting did not always yield food), is not very ideal for the modern world as our food is abundant and readily available.  When food is very sparse, the next meal is dependent on the success or failure of your hunting or fishing and not as easily had as picking up the phone and making a reservation at a restaurant.  When we are surrounded by delicious and abundant foods, we will feel hungrier and will gorge to devour this food into our stomachs which allow it to be stored as fat.  This is a natural impulse originating from our Stone Age days when food was very sparse and the next meal was dependent on the success of our hunting or fishing.  That’s why fasting to lose weight cannot be successful because fasting will stimulate the body’s natural survival response which is—in an abundance of food after a period of starvation, the body will devour all edible foods in sight in order to quickly store it as fat for the next starvation period.  So when you see foods, you cannot resist them and will quickly eat and store it as fat thus defeating your purpose of diet in the first place.  

• Rapid secretion of adrenaline is to allow our bodies to react quickly to emergencies that we are faced with (e.g. a lion suddenly appearing in front of you).  The energy required for this type of situation in our civilized modern society is minimal if not zero.  If you were able to take a time machine back to the Stone Age and kidnap a child.  Then bring the child back to our modern world and allow him to develop in our cultural and technologically advanced society.  His chances of obtaining a PhD in Computer Sciences is exactly the same as you or I. 

 

Snowball Effect of Cultural Advancement

 

The unique evolution of the human brain, whereby accumulation of cultural stimulation surpasses that of genetic limitations, has allowed us to surpercharge change in our way of living.  We have only evolved for 5 million years from Homo Erectus.  It took 2 million years for our ancestors to learn how to use stone and flint to make tools; and another 3 million years to learn to use steel, but from a piece of steel to the atomic bomb only took 3000 years. If we say that 5 million years of evolution is a 24 hour day, then 7,000 years of Agricultural society is comparable to 2 minutes and 250 years of industrial revolution is comparable to 4.3 seconds and the recent 20 years of the Internet age is comparable to 0.35 seconds.  

 

The Root Of Modern Illnesses

 

The rapid accumulation of cultural resources has allowed humanity to escape the fate of natural selection.  But, at the same time, the suffering and cause of many modern illnesses in our modern civilization is due to the fact that the human body was not designed to cope with our busy, tense and stressful modern lifestyles.  We cannot choose to go back to the pure and natural land or our Earths’ Garden of Eden.  Even if we can, we cannot forsake the conveniences that modern civilization affords us today.  How to avoid the side effects of civilization to regain the balance of our body, spirit and mind is an important issue that the modern man must address.