We human beings are animals, products of evolution from our animal forebears, as Charles Darwin concluded in his groundbreaking book On the Origin of Species. But Darwin did not recognize the crucial distinction between humans and our fellow creatures: we are cultural animals. As such, our culture impacts who we are and how we are continuing to evolve. It can affect gene expression through our epigenome, which I wrote about last week, and ultimately can cause the evolution of our genome.

By “culture” I do not simply mean the arts, music and literature, but rather all the characteristics of a human society and how it functions. We have extraordinarily complex cultures, but other animals do not. They may be organized into groups like herds, packs and pods. They may be governed by rules of hierarchy and behavior. They may have rituals for social bonding and for conflict. They may make and use simple tools. But even though they may exhibit some rudiments of culture, animal societies do not rise to anywhere near the complexity of human culture. They evolve little in comparison to the elaborate evolution human societies have undergone and continue to experience.

Culture began to arise in our hominin ancestors with the invention of stone tools and then learning to control fire. As early humans discovered information and practices which aided their existence, this lore was passed down from generation to generation. At some point the accumulated body of knowledge reached a critical mass, leading to the genetic evolution of the human brain by natural selection, which favored the survival of those with the brain power better able to retain, process and make use of that knowledge.

In his book The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, And Making Us Smarter, Harvard professor of evolutionary biology Joseph Henrich says that for hundreds of thousands of years, cultural evolution has been the central force behind human genetic evolution. He says “the culture-gene coevolution…drove our species down a novel evolutionary pathway not observed elsewhere in nature, making us very different from other species – a new kind of animal.”

One of the most significant developments in our cultural evolution was the emergence of spoken language. At first the process of speaking had to conform to the ape-like brains and vocal structures of our early ancestors, but then natural selection operated on these traits to improve the ability to communicate verbally, thereby aiding survival. The cultural demands of using language led to the genetic evolution of our larynx and tongue, as well as areas of the brain related to speech.

Henrich also points out that as humans began living in increasingly larger and more complex societies, “our ability to learn from others, to generate greater technological sophistication and larger bodies of adaptive knowledge” has given rise to what he calls “our collective brains.” Larger and more socially interconnected groups have larger collective brains, which in turn lead to even further cultural evolution.

As we become more and more interconnected in the Electric Age, human culture is continuing to evolve, leading in time to genetic evolution. The use of electricity, to rephrase Henrich, is driving humanity down a novel evolutionary pathway making us very different from previous species of humans – a new kind of human, Homo electric.

In his book Evolution for Everyone, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson also stressed the importance of cultural evolution. “The primary human adaptation…is for our behaviors to be acquired less and less directly from our genes and more and more from other people.” We share what we learn and thus we evolve. Electricity accelerates this process. We are crowdsourcing our evolution.

In the very last words of Origin, Darwin wrote: “There is grandeur in this view of life…endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” To Darwin evolution was an ongoing process, including, we can only assume, for humans today as well. We are being evolved. But Darwin never addressed the unique role of culture in the evolution of humans, “a new kind of animal,” nor the role actively played in that process by a new kind of human.

In tribal societies studied by anthropologists, changes in their way of life and social structure are not perceived by tribe members as cultural evolution, it’s just how things happen. But humans living in the culture of the Electric Age are very aware of how that culture is evolving, through the media and the internet. We are actively participating in that evolution, individually and collaboratively. David Sloan Wilson says, in his book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, that we are “consciously evolving our collective future.”

Because we can, because we must, if we are to survive.

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In 1856 Charles Darwin published his landmark book On the Origin of Species, in which he explained his new theory of evolution. Darwin observed that “many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive,” so there is a “recurring struggle for existence.” Any being with a slightly advantageous variation of a trait “will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.” This idea became popularly known as “the survival of the fittest,” although Darwin himself did not coin the term.

Through heredity, that advantageous trait will then be passed on to the survivor’s offspring and eventually propagated throughout the species, at times leading to the emergence of a new species. But neither Darwin nor his scientific colleagues at the time understood the mechanism of how heredity actually worked. Unknown to them, a monk in what was then Czechoslovakia was discovering what he called “the laws of inheritance” by experimenting with pea plants. Gregor Mendel published a paper in 1866 on his findings about what he called the dominant and recessive “factors” that determine traits.

Unlike Darwin’s book, a bestseller, Mendel’s work was soon forgotten and he died in obscurity. But in the early 20^th century his paper resurfaced, and his experiments were repeated and validated. “Mendelian inheritance” became accepted as scientific doctrine. The term “gene” was introduced in 1905 as the inheritable unit for the transmission of biological traits, and Mendel was retroactively dubbed “the father of genetics.” Taken together, the Darwin and Mendel theories became known as the “modern synthesis” of evolutionary theory.

The picture was completed after English chemist Rosalind Franklin took the X-ray photograph above of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). James Watson and Francis Crick had also been studying DNA, building models of its presumed but not yet proven double-helix structure. When Watson saw her photo of DNA strands, he said, “My mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.” Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, but Franklin died before she could get the recognition due her.

This then is what “evolution” meant until recently: through the normally-occurring variation of traits, natural selection of advantageous ones, and inheritance of such traits through the genes in our DNA, evolution proceeded slowly over many generations. Heredity was said to operate like a blueprint. The genes our mothers and fathers passed down to us determined who we were and who we as a species became over time. The gene is king.

Or maybe not. Epigenetics, a word coined in the 1940s from the Greek word “epi” meaning “on top of,” is the study of molecules sitting on our genes which can affect how genes behave, or as geneticists say, how they express themselves. When acting on a group of genes they can in effect be like a dimmer switch, turning some genes on and others off. They are the intermediary between genes and the world around them. Collectively, they constitute our epigenome, which responds to factors in the body and in the environment, and in doing so affects gene expression.

Unlike our fixed underlying genome, our epigenome can change during our lifetimes as a result of those factors, and those changes can be inherited. This contradicts a longstanding tenet about heredity since Darwin’s day, that changes we experience in our lifetimes cannot be inherited. But changes in our epigenome can.

Some research at McGill University on rats demonstrated this. Mother rats nurture their pups by licking and grooming them. Some have a high propensity for licking and grooming (LG), some a low propensity; it’s an inherited trait. Offspring of some low LG mothers were placed with high LG foster mothers, and grew up to be high LG mothers. Their offspring, which genetically should have been low LG like their mothers and grandmothers, were high LG. Their mothers had acquired the trait for high LG and passed it on epigenetically to their offspring.

In his award-winning book The Developing Genome: An Introduction to Behavioral Epigenetics, Prof. David S. Moore writes that “for anyone committed to the idea that only genetically determined characteristics can be inherited, a major upheaval is coming.” He calls the idea that only “hard” genetic inheritance can transmit traits “hopelessly simplistic… because genes do not operate in a vacuum.” The gene may be king, but his epigenetic queen often rules above him.

Next week I’ll look at something else recently seen as having a major affect on what we mean by “evolution,” and in humans specifically. We are uniquely cultural animals, and for hundreds of thousands of years, cultural evolution has driven our genetic evolution.

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The day is inevitably coming when you will only be able to find the human species Homo sapiens surviving in isolated bands in remote places like Amazon rainforest, or preserved in institutions like the Natural History Museum in London, where sapiens remains, like the skull above, will be catalogued and exhibited alongside the fossils of other extinct species.

I’m not talking about in the next 10-20 years, when some doom-and-gloomers predict that artificial intelligence will take over, if not altogether eliminate, human beings. Nor am I talking about in 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 years, the kind of time periods usually associated with evolution. A process is well underway in which sapiens is being replaced by a new human species, people already living among us today. Perhaps you’re one of them. I am.

Homo sapiens is said to be the last surviving species of human. It’s taken about seven million years to get here, from when the evolutionary path of the great apes that were our forebears split in two: one branch led to humans, the other to chimpanzees and bonobos. The human branch was not a straight line to sapiens but rather a winding road with many evolutionary dead ends that sometimes twisted back on itself through interbreeding. It’s a puzzle in which new pieces keep getting unearthed which need to be fitted in.

The term “hominin” encompasses all those beings on the human side of that branching (not to be confused with the larger grouping “hominid,” which includes hominins, chimps, bonobos and the great apes). The first hominin, as far as we presently know, was a creature from Chad in central Africa called Sahelanthropus tchadensis. It had a flat small skull with a brain about the size of a chimp, one-third that of a modern human. While it could move about on the ground, it did not walk on two feet full-time, its anatomy still adapted to the life in the trees of its ape ancestors.

I’m not going to go describe the twenty” or more different hominin species here, just mention a few important ones like Australopithecus africanus. When the first skeleton of the species was discovered in 1974 in East Africa, it became known as “Lucy” after

a Beatles song played regularly in the evening at the dig site. The species, which lived from 3.3 to 2.1 million years ago, was still small in stature and brain size, but was the first to be full-time bipedal. It didn’t need a big brain to be able to walk on two feet and to chew the tough grasses which were its main diet.

The first true human arose about 2.3 million years ago, Homo habilis (“handy man”), named for its ability to make and use stone tools, the product of a larger brain. Then came Homo erectus (“upright man”), named when the first remains of the species were found in 1891 and mistakenly thought to be our first bipedal ancestor. Sorry, Lucy. The species would have been better named Homo ignis (“fire man”), as the first humans to control and use fire about a million years ago, or even earlier.

Erectus had a brain almost as large as modern humans, invented better stone tools and, most remarkably, survived for about two million years, living when both habilis and sapiens did. It also overlapped with Homo neanderthalensis (“neanderthal man”). Named for the Neander Valley in Germany where it was first discovered in 1856, these were the first fossils ever found of a human species other than sapiens. Charles Darwin was unaware of the discovery when he published On the Origin of Species three years later, but it was powerful evidence of his new theory of evolution.

Arising 400,000 years ago, Neanderthals had brains even larger than ours, and were advanced in many ways from earlier human species, not the brutish cavemen they were once depicted to be. They created even better stone tools, wore clothing, made music with flutes and simple jewelry, cared for their injured and buried their dead. Homo sapiens arose 200-300,000 years ago. When they ventured into Neanderthal territory, which spread from western Europe to Siberia, its existing occupants soon disappeared. So did a half dozen or so other human species living at the time. By about 40,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was the only one left standing.

For a million years or more, fire was the foundation of human existence. But when we learned to control electricity in the 19^th century, a new species of human began to arise. Because we’re in the middle of this process, it’s hard to distinguish the new trees in the old growth human forest, to know who’s who while we go through this evolutionary transition.

To get a clearer picture of Homo sapiens, think of the species as it was just before humans learned to control electricity, say in 1776. Their two major technologies were the wheel, for transporting people and goods in vehicles pulled by animals, and the printing press, for disseminating information, whether in books, newspapers or poster-sized broadsides like the Declaration of Independence. That was the year when James Watt perfected a new and better steam engine that soon ushered in the first Industrial Revolution. Essentially it was a fire in a box fueled by human muscles shoveling coal or throwing wood. Electricity replaced muscles in the 20th century.

When paleontologists classify Stone Age humans into different species, an important trait to be considered are the tools they made and used. The tools we use today — especially computers, smartphones and the internet — radically differentiate us from

our sapiens ancestors of 250 years ago. They are changing who we are and how we think. They are the tools of a new human species arising in the Electric Age. Call us Homo electric.

Like all other previous hominin species, Homo sapiens is nearing its end.

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(Note: this breaking story prompted me to post this article now and delay until next week the extinction of Homo sapiens, the subject of my previously-announced post.)

The death of the bald eagle known as Jackie has left millions of people grieving. Very few of them ever caught a glimpse of her in-person soaring over Big Bear Lake in the San Bernardino mountains of California, but they feel they know her personally. She and her mate Shadow were YouTube stars, influencers, you might say, of an audience that followed the lifestyles of the feathered and famous.

In 2015 the group Friends of Big Bear Valley installed a camera feeding a 24-hour live video and audio stream, powered by solar, of an eagles’ nest 145 feet up a pine tree overlooking the lake. The nest remained empty until 2017, when a female eagle named Jackie took up residence in the nest, previously occupied by her parents Ricky and Lucy (no, her mother did not have red head feathers). In 2018 a male eagle named Shadow displaced Jackie’s previous mate and the pair settled into what became their permanent home together.

Life as a would-be mother was difficult for Jackie. She lost many chicks that either didn’t hatch or died soon after; the biggest threats were snowstorms and ravens who liked to dine on eagle eggs. 2025 was a good year for the couple, as Jackie hatched three eggs, two of whom survived to grow up and fledge (fly away to begin life independent of their parents). Two more eaglets followed in 2026, one of which was accidentally knocked out of the nest by the other, but being on the verge of fledging, flapped her wings enough to survive the fall.

These are but a few episodes from a life that was both “stormy” and “sunny” (the names of two of Jackie and Shadow’s offspring) and ever changing. Millions watched the video stream on YouTube. When it popped up on my feed in early 2025, I became an avid watcher in time to see the two chicks hatch, grow up and fledge.

Like other eagle fans, I tuned in regularly, whether to see Jackie being pelted by snow and wind as she sat protecting the eggs or Shadow flying in with a big fish for his family (sometimes they switched roles). The camera had infrared lights trained on the nest (eagles can’t sense it), so I’d check on them before I went to sleep, just to see if they were tucked in for the night.

In mid-July Jackie disappeared for a few days, only to be found floundering in the shallows of the lake. She had been attacked by a pair of subadult eagles, but when caught and brought to a facility specializing in the treatment of raptors, she was discovered to have an underlying medical condition causing severe anemia. Despite the best of care, she died on August 10th.

The outpouring of grief for her should not have been unexpected. Since the early days of TV people have developed emotional attachments to characters they watch regularly. We loved Lucy (the red-head one). The most beloved dog in America was the TV collie Lassie, although she was actually several dogs, all male.

Before we learned to use electricity, for millions of years humans could only interact in real time face-to-face. With the invention of the telegraph and then the telephone in the mid-19^th century, remote interaction first became possible. Today we have numerous means for doing so. On many days we spend more time interacting with people outside our homes electronically than in person.

These remote interactions can express emotions. Think of the happiness you felt while talking on the phone with a far-away loved one, or the feelings you expressed in an email or direct message, from joy to anger. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the most common phrases in texts is “I love you.”

Just after the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020, my wife Jan succumbed to a long battle with breast cancer. Due to necessary restrictions on public gatherings, it was not possible to hold a memorial service. And because I was immunocompromised, for two years my connections with family and friends were almost always electronic. I could have used some hugs, but the phone calls, emails, texts and Zoom sessions gave me the emotional support and satisfaction I would not have had without them.

Humans in the Electric Age have the capacity to interact with one another and express our emotions electronically. Through the Big Bear eagle cam we were able to intimately share the triumphs and tribulations of a pair of bald eagles. We were moved by their devotion and determination in raising their chicks in the formidable environment in which they struggled to survive. We experienced Nature in a way we never could before the internet, and felt a deeper connection to the living world around us.

Jackie and Shadow were totally unaware of our existence. But they showed us something about ourselves: living in the Electric Age we experience life in ways our ancestors never did. And in doing so, we are evolving as a new kind of human.

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On August 13, 2011, representatives of 22 small towns in western Massachusetts took a major step toward solving a perpetually perplexing problem. I represented my town of Washington, population about 500, founded in 1777. That was the year George Washington led his troops to their infamous winter encampment in Valley Forge, where they suffered from a lack of basic necessities. My neighbors and I lived in our own kind of Valley Forge, lacking a basic necessity of modern life: reliable high-speed internet service.

Cable companies were not interested in serving these sparsely-populated towns. So some people relied on antiquated dial-up service to get online. The lucky few had DSL (digital subscriber line), which used telephone lines to send and receive internet signals. If your home was close to the facility providing the service, you could get download speeds up to 10 megabits per second, uploads of some 2 or 3 megs. Those speeds declined as you got farther away, until at a distance of 18,000 feet (about 3 ½ miles), there was none. And in those rural towns, houses were scattered along country roads for miles and miles.

The only other solution was backyard or rooftop satellite dishes, which delivered slower speeds than DSL, and less reliably. The satellites providing the service were stationed in geosynchronous orbit 22,236 miles above a fixed point on earth. The transmission delays from sending signals back and forth over that distance caused all sorts of problems. On top of that, weather often interfered with signals passing through the atmosphere. I could tell a storm front was approaching when my satellite internet connection got flaky.

The townspeople who came together 15 years ago knew the solution to their connectivity problem: fiber-optics, capable of download and upload speeds of 1000 megabits, a gigabit. To achieve the deployment of future-proof fiber in their 22 towns, they signed a document creating a municipal cooperative called WiredWest, whose membership doubled to 44 in three years. This followed a long history in the United States of cooperatives providing electricity and telephone service in rural areas.

WiredWest developed a plan for a regional fiber network that would be owned by the towns on a proportional basis. To be part of the network, towns had to agree to pay their share of the network, about two-thirds of the total cost. This meant borrowing that money and raising taxes to pay the debt service on the loan. In town meetings across the region, voters approved the funding overwhelmingly, in some cases unanimously. For their part, individual citizens were asked to put up $49 deposits for service years in advance of the network being operational. Over 7,000 did.

So far, this was a story reflecting a uniquely human attribute which enabled Homo sapiens to evolve as the dominant species on earth: the ability to cooperate on a large scale. Speaking of WiredWest, State Representative William Pignatelli said, “I have never experienced an organization that brought 44 towns together for a common purpose. It was beyond belief what they were able to accomplish” (The Berkshire Eagle, February 6, 2017).

But then WiredWest encountered another trait of the species: its aggressive territoriality. The Massachusetts Broadband Institute, created by the state in 2008 to foster high-speed internet, controlled the other third of the money. Without warning in December 2015, the director of MBI decreed that those funds would not be available to build a regional network. He put forward various rationales for the decision. Having previously called the WiredWest plan a “high-quality solution,” he now claimed that WiredWest could not succeed financially, despite its plan having been vetted by broadband experts and lawyers.

Fundamentally it came down to this. MBI saw arising in WiredWest a strong and independent locally-based alternative to its top-down hegemony. To protect its perceived territory, MBI pulled the fiscal plug. To those of us in western Mass. who had put in years as volunteers to bring fiber to our communities, MBI now stood for “Making Broadband Impossible.”

Yet years of advocacy for fiber by WiredWest and the towns did not go for naught. The new Governor of Massachusetts, Charlie Baker, stepped in and removed the funds from MBI’s control. Towns could then apply to a different entity for funding to build their own separate networks, which they would own individually. Many of them did, and then contracted network operations to Westfield (MA) Gas & Electric, a municipal utility which had been in business since 1899. Its broadband division, Whip City Fiber, is named for the product which once drove the economy in Westfield.

Today, WiredWest endures as a cooperative of six of the original towns, including Washington. It began bringing fiber to customer homes in 2020, connecting people to the world just when the COVID pandemic physically cut them off. It too contracts with Whip City Fiber, which has become in effect a regional entity providing broadband service in much of western Mass. WiredWest is not only financially successful, but annually returns excess revenue to its member towns, which covers most or all of the debt service on their network loans. Just like its plan said it would.

Internet is a vital tool in the Electric Age, but for many people, getting access to fast and reliable service is not easy. Once a backwater of poor-to-no internet, western Mass. has become nationally-recognized for its state-of-the-art broadband. It was a long fight to get fiber here. Working with WiredWest we won.

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In the classical music era, symphony orchestras played a wide range of artistically-crafted instruments, many still used today. Music was characterized by melody, harmony, tempo and dynamics. Rhythm, the source of music for ancient humans, had largely slipped beneath the aural surface, still enabling musicians to play in unison but only occasionally dominant, like timpani in a symphony finale.

In the 20^th century new forms of more rhythmic music began to emerge. The 1920s are often called the Jazz Age, the 1930s the Big Band or Swing Era. These were still acoustic forms of music, but their composers and performers were influenced by the energy of life in the Electric Age, and by the radio and records electricity made possible.

Acoustic guitars were often part of jazz combos and big bands but were hard to hear above the roar of horns, the pounding of pianos and the throbbing of drums. In the 1930s musicians tried to solve this problem by using primitive pickups or playing into a microphone. Then in the 1940s two men – Leo Fender, a skilled technician who couldn’t play the guitar, and Les Paul, a skilled guitarist who couldn’t play the sounds he heard in his head – set out to give a new voice to guitars with electricity.

They created a new kind of instrument, one that did not produce sounds from round or ∫-shaped holes in a hollow wooden body, but was in a sense a powerful input device to control the amplifier and speaker which emitted the sounds. Les Paul was a pioneer among the many innovative electric guitar players who produced music the likes of which human ears and brains had never encountered before.

The electric guitar was the main weapon for a rock ‘n roll revolution in the 1950s led by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Carl Perkins, Duane Eddy and many others, even country pickers like Chet Atkins, who played on many of Elvis Presley’s early recordings. Bo often played a guitar that hardly looked like one, with its rectangular shape that virtually shouted, this ain’t no acoustic guitar. He didn’t play it like one either. Rhythm was the heart of his sound, the Bo Diddley beat. Rhythm is inherent in AC current, and is prominent in electric music.

The musical explosion of the 1960s was driven by musicians exploring the new sounds they could wring from their instruments, “guitar gods” like Jimi Hendrix, British blues-rockers Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, surf rocker Dick Dale, electric blues masters like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and B.B. King, and jazz innovator Wes Montgomery. Bob Dylan shockingly went electric. For The Beatles and producer George Martin, and many other artists, the recording studio, with its multiple tracks and electronic devices to control and alter sound, became an instrument in its own right, which “Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play.”

One of the most exciting, experimental and controversial bands of that era was The Velvet Underground, one-time proteges of Andy Warhol. The Velvets brought elements of Fifties rock ‘n’ roll, contemporary avant garde and futuristic electronics into a sound that rocked relentlessly, with uniquely poetic and often dark lyrics. The group was formed by Lou Reed, an aspiring if offbeat songwriter who grew up on Long Island, N.Y., and John Cale, a Welshman with a classical music background who came to the States on a fellowship at Tanglewood funded by Leonard Bernstein.

I first saw them play in April 1966 at the famed club The Village Gate in New York. Their hypnotic pulsing sound reverberated in my mind for months. A year later I saw them at The Boston Tea Party, a psychedelic temple of rock. When they did a twenty-minute rendition of their classic “Sister Ray,” the room and everyone in it vibrated. It was electrifying. By a strange twist of fate, I became the manager of the Tea Party and later produced rock concerts in western Massachusetts, presenting many shows by the Velvets. The band did not survive long, disbanding in 1970, but left an indelible mark on the evolution of electric music. Rolling Stone magazine called them “the most influential American rock band of all time.”

In a 1978 interview with the Los Angeles weekly newspaper Open City, Lou explained what he’d experienced with the VU playing a guitar with a fuzz pedal: “You go like this on the fuzz, daaaaaaaaaa – and what happens is that you don’t get just one note like a guitar, you may get eight notes, like daaaaahhhhheeeee…. You start hearing some really strange things…. We used to call it the Cloud, and like, on certain songs, we used to consciously enter the Cloud and you just hear all these funny things. They’re not you, but you know they’re being caused by the guitar, right?”

Improbably, one band spans the whole rock era: The Rolling Stones. They began playing together in 1962, but lead singer Mick Jagger had a garage band in the 1950s which covered Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Little Richard. Their critically-acclaimed new album, Foreign Tongues, released in July 2026, immediately went to #1 on the British charts, as did their first LP in 1964. The latter had a cover of a Chuck Berry tune, as was the last track on Tongues. Their roots are showing.

Electric music continues to evolve. Synthesizers swing. Rap is rhyming rhythm. New sounds keep getting made and being heard. From the Stone Age to the Stones, from banging rocks to rocking out, “the beat goes on, the beat goes on / drums keep pounding rhythm to the brain” (Sonny & Cher). Or as Plato put it 2400 years ago in The Republic: “Rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul.”

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Music has been part of every human society since the earliest days of Homo sapiens, and perhaps long before. Yet the role music plays in human evolution is not obvious. It even puzzled Charles Darwin. In The Descent of Man he wrote: “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” In other words, what in the world does music have to do with the survival of the fittest?

Darwin concluded that for humans, music was all about sex, like birds who emit calls and sing songs in pursuit of a mate, as do many other creatures. But that’s an odd conclusion from someone who lived during the golden age of classical music. It’s hard to imagine that the women in the audience at a concert were breathing heavily, ready to surrender themselves to members of the orchestra. Well, perhaps if the performer was the handsome Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt. He created such a frenzy among his female fans that the poet Heinrich Heine called it “Lisztomania” (more than a century before Beatlemania).

Other evolutionists looked at the role of music in tribal societies, where it was always accompanied by dance. They concluded that its primary function was to foster group solidarity, and in so doing to improve the survival chances of the group and its individual members, whether by cooperating in their daily lives or united in battle. If you’ve been to a rock concert, a rave or any other popular electric music event, especially where there is dancing, it’s easy to see how it’s about both sex and solidarity.

Where did music come from? Its origins have been much explored and debated, often linked to the origins of language. They do have certain characteristics in common as to how they’re processed by the brain, especially after music incorporated lyrics. But I think music originated long before language. Its genesis is in rhythm, not in words or melody.

Ancient humans lived in an everyday world of rhythm: the beating of their hearts, mating, the sound and feel of their footsteps as they walked or ran (try doing it without rhythm!). Then they became tool makers, chipping stones to form implements for chopping and scraping.

Think about how you perform a repetitive physical task like chopping trees or carrots: it’s always easier to do it rhythmically, your brain and muscles coordinating better to anticipate the timing of the next chop. Our archaic ancestors not only experienced rhythm but produced rhythmic noises while making tools -- chip chip chip -- and using them -- chop chop chop.

At some point in time early humans deliberately banged stones together to make rhythmic noises, not as a byproduct of work but for their own sake. They began to grunt or chant along. Then others started moving their bodies to the beat, and stomping their feet. A Stone Age rave.

Before going any further, I should clarify just what I think music is, and isn’t. I do not consider songs by birds and whales to be music. Those sounds are musical to be sure, and often beautiful, but not music in the full human sense. Human music has the potential for two or more people to make it together, to sing and play instruments in unison. That requires rhythm, melody and often harmony. We have rhythm, but with very few exceptions, like parrots, animals don’t.

A woodpecker can peck rhythmically for short bursts, for the same reasons we chop rhythmically, but it can’t synchronize its pecking with other woodpeckers, like a drum corps. Bluebirds can sing solo, but they can’t do bluegrass harmonies. Music in its complete sense is an evolved human activity.

Chimpanzees are the animals most closely related to humans. New research published in Current Biology (May 19, 2025) shows that chimpanzees produce rhythmic patterns by banging on the base of large trees, and that these patterns vary from one population of chimps to another. They got rhythm. But they don’t play together like a chimp version of The Monkees. Nor did they develop musically beyond tree banging. When humans got rhythm, we got music.

It’s hard to say when melody arose, at first in the form of human chanting, because it left no physical evidence. We do have a Neanderthal flute made from a cave bear bone about 60,000 years ago. Before that they may have used hollow reeds or wood, but they were not preserved.

Flute-and-drum is likely the earliest form of instrumental music-making. It can still be heard in the Peruvian Andes, a traditional form of folk music in which a musician carries a large drum he bangs with one hand while playing a long wooden flute with the other. It’s music to dance to. When I lived there, hearing the plaintive tootling of flutes and the thumping of drums transported me to an ancient time.

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With the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I got to wonder about the state of our democracy today, and where it might go from here. The term “democracy” originated in about the 5^th century BC in Greece and means “rule of the people.” It’s had a long and complicated history as to who was to be included among “the people” entitled to rule, and just how they would go about exercising their rule.

In the American colonies, the town meeting was the earliest form of democracy. Every eligible voter could appear in person to cast their “ayes” or “nays.” This is known as direct democracy, and is still widely used in New England, particularly for approving annual town budgets. I attended many of these meetings, which could go on for hours, in the town hall of Washington, Massachusetts, population 500. Usually only 35-40 people showed up, mostly repeat attenders.

The first colonial legislature was established in Virginia in 1619, in Massachusetts in 1629, and then in the other colonies over the course of the 17^th century. Needless to say, townspeople could not show up in person to vote at a state capitol which could be several days away by horseback, so they elected someone to saddle up and make the ride to represent them. The first national legislature, the Continental Congress, began meeting in 1774. So more than 400 years after representative democracy was intro-duced in America, what is the state of health of this form of government?

The standard by which to judge that question is found in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

For many years, the public has held a highly negative opinion of Congress. The American people feel that representative government as we know it is not performing satisfactorily. Congressional and legislative districts have been gerrymandered to assure electoral outcomes and in effect to disenfranchise certain groups of voters. Elected representatives too often represent their own interests first, especially in their subservience to wealthy donors.

The problem with our supposedly representative government lies in the fundamental assumption of centuries ago that the needs of the citizenry could be served by those who rode off on horseback (or now fly on jet planes) to speak for us from afar. But in many ways we speak for ourselves, even when we are silent. The private sector gathers massive amounts of information about us -- “Big Data” -- to understand consumer behavior in the pursuit of corporate happiness: profits. The public sector needs to make better use of information about our needs and wants as citizens so as to more productively secure our life, liberty and happiness.

Artificial intelligence is a controversial subject, yet even many of its critics agree that under the proper circumstances it can be a powerful force for humanity. A.I. can enable us to institute a new form of government based on a deeper understanding of those whom it governs, better policies and programs to serve our needs, and more effective balancing of our conflicting beliefs and desires than politics has achieved. Call this “intelligent democracy.”

Decision-making can be removed from those who represent us ineffectively from afar and brought back to each of us where we are, so that our voices are continually heard and heeded. We won’t have to go to town hall for a meeting once a year; town hall will be with us every day to anticipate our needs.

The Declaration of Independence goes on to say:

Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Representative democracy as we’ve known it must be replaced by intelligent democracy. A.I. is the product of human evolution in the Electric Age. It must be used to serve the needs of all humans, to ensure our safety and happiness, and not just to line the pockets of the few.

It is feared that A.I. it will eliminate many jobs. If elected representatives -- politicians -- are among them, so be it.

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In observing the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we recalled some of the key events which led up to the Declaration:

• the Boston Massacre (March 5,1770)

• the Boston Tea Party (December 16, 1773)

• the Battles of Lexington and Concord (April 19, 1775)

• George Washington taking command of the new Continental Army (July 3, 1775)

• Washington driving the British out of Boston (March 17, 1776)

All this happened in Massachusetts. It makes you wonder, was there something in the water, besides English tea? Nearly a hundred years earlier, the first act of rebellion against British dominion over the American colonies occurred in –- where else? -- Massachusetts. It was about money.

The power to issue money resided in central governments, like that in London, and its royal governors in the colonies. But in 1690 the Massachusetts legislature issued IOUs to militiamen in lieu of pay. Because those IOUs could be used to pay taxes due to Massachusetts, this made them as valuable as the gold and silver coins other people used to pay taxes. It was the start of colonial legislatures usurping the power over money from the King and his minions. Parliament enacted laws attempting to stop the colonies from printing their own currency, but by the Revolution, money made in America circulated widely.*

(* This paragraph is based on “The Revolutionary History of American Money” by Professor Christine A. Desan, Harvard Law Today, June 26. 2026)

When money first came into being, it was not controlled by governments. Various mediums of exchange arose between buyers and sellers, like sea shells or grains of barley. In time these became more standardized so that people could have confidence in how much they were paying or receiving, and the value of their savings. Governments got in the act with the minting of gold and silver coins, which had intrinsic value, and later the printing of paper currency, which did not but was backed by gold or silver held by governments. Today our paper money is not backed by anything but a common acceptance that a buck is a buck.

In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari writes that “trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted.” He notes that one side of the dollar bill bears the signature of the U.S. treasury secretary, the other the motto “In God we trust.” He says we accept dollars in payment for goods and services “because we trust in God and the US secretary of the treasury.”

To me, and many others using American money, God has nothing to do with it. It’s not manna from heaven. Look at a new dollar bill and you’ll see the signature of the current secretary, Scott Bessent. That hardly inspires trust, even less so when his egomaniacal boss is adding his own signature to all U.S. currency, which no American president has ever done. But a buck will still be a buck.

As others have observed, Harari says humans have a unique ability: we tell stories to explain the world around us and allow us to go about our lives. He calls money the biggest story of all, perhaps aside from religion, essentially a fiction that we have all conveniently agreed to believe in. But Harari confuses fiction and abstraction. Money is not a story, it is not fiction. It’s about as real as it gets, even though we no longer use coins you can bite into to see if they’re really gold or silver.

More than ever in the Electric Age, money is an abstraction, not something you can hold in your hand, but very real nonetheless. Trust only enters into the picture with the changes in the relative valuation of national currencies on money markets. Maybe Trump’s signature on U.S. currency will erode its value in the world economy.

In the early 1970s I worked on a consumer research project for a group of banks which wanted to introduce electronic direct deposit of payrolls. We found that people liked the convenience and the fact that they’d have access to their money sooner, but they wanted evidence that they’d been paid. So instead of being handed an envelope with a check on payday, they got an envelope containing a printed receipt for their deposit. But in time, they no longer needed the receipts. They could check their bank account online.

We no longer need pieces of paper, with or without signatures on them, representing money. Data in a computer allows us to buy and sell things, pay our bills, incur debts and accumulate assets. With cryptocurrency we’ve come full circle. This is money created without the imprimatur of any government: cybershells. No act of Parliament can stop the minting of this currency.

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The top nonfiction bestseller of the 21^st century is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari. More than ten years after it was first published, Sapiens is the #1 selling book on Amazon in the categories of Evolution, General Anthropology and Biological Sciences. It has sold over 25 million copies; by a publishing industry rule-of-thumb, perhaps another 25 million people have read it. That’s 50 million people who are misinformed. Maybe you’re one of them

I’ll give Harari this: Sapiens is an entertaining read. But many critics and scholars are not amused. Alice Roberts, a professor in England of evolution and anthropology, and a star presenter on TV and YouTube, has called “execrable” Harari’s simplistic description of how humans and chimpanzees descended from a common “grandmother” ape. My beef with Harari is a serious oversight in his book about how electricity has affected recent human history. He is silent on the subject.

Harari writes of three major revolutions in our development: what he calls the “Cognitive Revolution,” around 70,000 years ago; the Agricultural Revolution, beginning about 12,000 years ago; and the Scientific Revolution, beginning about 500 years ago. The latter two are well-established ideas, and Harari doesn’t have much to add to them. But his idea of a transformation of our brains and their capabilities is an interesting one. Putting a name to it focuses our understanding of how humans were evolving at the time.

When the species Homo sapiens first arose 200,000 or more years ago, it was an insignificant creature struggling to survive on the African savanna. But by 60,000 or so years ago, when humans began migrating out of Africa, they had evolved. To undertake such a migration required the brainpower and complex language which enabled a high level of group cooperation for planning and facilitating the journey. A band of people on the move into unknown territory would have to adapt quickly to survive in ecosystems totally foreign to them. The Cognitive Revolution allowed humans to leave Africa and populate the world.

Harari has nothing to say about an “electric” revolution. Yet is hard to think of any significant advance in modern life that did not involve electricity. The era in which we now live is sometimes called the Nuclear Age, or the Atomic Age, because of our ability to destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons. But without electricity, those weapons would not be possible, nor would the peaceful uses of nuclear power.

This current era is also called the Information Age, or the Computer Age, because of the ubiquity of computing in our lives. But without electricity, computers would not be possible. In the Tanner Lecture at the University of Oxford in May 2026, Harari noted that artificial intelligence cannot “do anything whatsoever without the electricity provided by power stations built by humans.” To be sure.

I call this era the Electric Age. Since learning to use electricity and its myriad applications, we have become totally dependent on it, we cannot survive without it.

In this, the 250^th anniversary of the American Revolution, think about how the typical colonial family lived on their farm back then, before electricity. Not all that differently really from how people farmed in, say, ancient Egypt, 3,000 years earlier. But on the modern farm, electricity is essential. It’s a new agricultural revolution.

1776 was also a landmark year because that was when the improved version of the steam engine invented by James Watt was first commercially deployed. In 1750, 80% of the people in England lived in rural areas, 20% in urban areas. As a result of the industrial revolution driven by steam power, by 1900 it was 20% rural, 80% urban. But the steam engine was only a prelude to the real revolution, the electrifying developments of the mid-to-late 19^th century –- the telegram, the telephone, the lightbulb, the automobile -- and beyond.

Using electricity is not merely a matter of progress. It is a revolution, a catalyst for human evolution, as using fire once was. It is not only changing how we live but who we are as human beings. We are evolving beyond Homo sapiens. A new species of human is emerging: Homo electric.

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While circling the far side of the moon, the crew of Artemis II traveled the furthest into space human beings had ever gone. In 1968, Apollo 8 was the first manned spacecraft to reach and then orbit the moon. As it emerged from behind the moon after its third orbit, on Christmas Eve, the crew became the first humans to see the Earth rise over the horizon of the moon. It blew their minds.

Lunar module pilot William Anders snapped the picture above, known as Earthrise, one of the most famous photos ever taken. What he experienced was a revelation. Anders said, “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” He likened what he saw to a “fragile Christmas tree ball which we should handle with considerable care.”

Seeing our planet from space, and even just seeing the photo, inspires an appreciation of Earth as home to all human beings, to all living things, a recognition of our responsibility as stewards of this “pale blue dot” as Carl Sagan called it. This planetary awareness is an evolution in human consciousness, enabled by a flight made possible by electricity.

This experience of seeing the Earth from beyond the Earth was termed the “overview effect” by “space philosopher” Frank White in his book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution. He characterized it as “a shift in worldview reported by astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight.”

He went on to write: “The experience often transforms astronauts’ perspective on the planet and humanity’s place in the universe. Some common aspects of it are a feeling of awe, a profound understanding of the interconnection of all life, and a renewed sense of responsibility for taking care of the environment.”

White interviewed dozens of space travelers, who to different degrees shared this reaction to seeing Earth from space. A revised edition of his book appeared earlier this year, but before the Artemis II circumlunar mission. Its crew had similar reactions when they saw Earth set behind the moon, a “shift in consciousness.” Mission Commander Reid Wiseman said, “”I don’t think humanity has evolved to the point of being able to comprehend what we’re looking at right now.” Perhaps not yet, but we’ve come a long way.

Rather than seeing itself as interconnected with all humans, the species Homo sapiens has long been characterized by its aggressive territoriality. We know this trait all too well from the conflicts in recorded history, but I suspect it arose much deeper in our past. A remnant of that past, a band of hunter-gatherers, still survives on North Sentinel Island, in the Bay of Bengal off India. They are fiercely protective of their territory.

A few years ago, a young evangelical missionary named John Allen Chau believed it was his calling to convert the Sentinelese. When he landed on the island, he was quickly killed by an arrow. Two fishermen, perhaps inebriated, met a similar fate when their boat inadvertently drifted ashore. Other boats have been driven away under a hail of arrows. The Sentinelese even shot at helicopters flying over to observe them from a safe distance.

Outside the island, humans are being interconnected by the primary tools of the Electric Age -- computers, smartphones and the internet -- even if at times they seem to be driving us apart. Evolution enabled by electricity is inexorably leading human consciousness beyond a narrow territoriality and toward the planetary awareness experienced in space, an awareness that we are all one.

The stand-up comedian and social observer George Carlin once said in a performance you can see on YouTube: “We’re barely out of the jungle on this planet…. And this civilization of ours, that we’re so proud of, this civilization with its so-called civilized behavior – you ever stop and realize how fragile all this is…how easily it could break right down? Just break right down…. Wouldn’t take much to throw us right back into barbaric times. All you’d have to do would be eliminate electricity.”

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Next week: Sorry, Harari -- what Yuval Noah Harari got wrong in his bestseller Sapiens.

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A million years ago, our archaic ancestors roamed the African savanna in search of prey to hunt and edibles to gather. They ate their food raw, and huddled together at night in fear of predators prowling in the dark. Lightning and volcanoes often unleashed a mysterious and terrifying force upon the land: fire. Animals fled in fear. But some humans were attracted to the heat and light it gave off.

They figured out how they could take a burning stick or ember to start a campfire, helping them to survive in a world where survival was tenuous. They had long been eating charred meat scavenged from the bodies of animals who hadn’t escaped a wildfire. Now they could char their meat and other foods at will, making them tastier, and easier to chew and digest.

Sitting around a fire at night with full bellies from a hot meal, with warmth and light, and with protection from predators, they experienced a new sensation: being comfortable. Eventually they developed languages so they could chat as they were gathered together, exchanging information and ideas, telling stories and sharing gossip. Cooking skills were part of the lore passed down from generation to generation.

Their small brains were just 2% of their body mass yet consumed 20% of their caloric intake. Cooked food provided the sustenance those brains needed to grow and evolve. Still, there was a problem. It was difficult to carry embers with them as they moved from place to place in search of food and shelter. They couldn’t always count on finding a convenient wildfire in their new neighborhood.

Stone Age humans were adept at banging two rocks together to make tools. They discovered that if they were the right kind of stones – iron pyrite and flint – sparks flew off which they could use to kindle a fire. Being able to make fire gave them more flexibility to move about, to eventually leave Africa and be able to survive in colder climates. Fire was critical to their existence as they spread around the world.

The Stone Age ended when they learned to smelt metals in the Bronze and Iron Ages. They built towns and then cities. Fires were ubiquitous in their homes and workplaces – hearths, forges, ovens, candles, lanterns, torches, eventually gaslights. When they got loose, ”Great Fires” regularly destroyed large swaths of cities, like London in 1666 and Chicago in 1871.

Chicago celebrated its revival with the Columbian Exposition of 1893. It was the first all-electric world’s fair, lit by 200,000 incandescent bulbs powered by the AC circuitry invented by Nikola Tesla.

The use of fire culminated in the 18^th century with the invention of the steam engine, at its heart a fire in a box fueled by the muscles of men. Ships could now travel rivers, lakes and seas much faster, with larger cargoes and more passengers. When the Titanic sailed in 1912, 176 “firemen” shoveled half a ton of coal a minute into 159 furnaces to heat 29 boilers to produce the steam which drove the pistons to turn its three giant propellers. Steam also drove four large electric generators to power facilities for operating the ship, preparing food, and providing amenities like the 10,000 lightbulbs which lit cabins, hallways and dining rooms.

The Titanic sailed into its death zone when it struck a floating mountain of ice. Its electric lights continued to shine long after its propulsion system failed, dimming and finally going dark just before the ship broke apart and sank. It left behind a world rapidly electrifying. Ocean liners soon began generating electricity to turn their propellers, and sonar to detect danger ahead. Airplanes made those ships obsolete, using electricity to fly at far greater speeds, and radar for guidance.

Fire was the foundation of human existence for perhaps a million years. We are now undergoing a transition from fire to electricity as that foundation, an evolutionary development of immense importance. A new species of human is emerging, Homo electric. We use electricity for everything from supplying our food to medical care to computing to sex. We depend on it. We cannot survive without it.

This transition brings new dangers, but it offers us hope for continuing progress and for our very survival in the Electric Age.

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Mount Everest was in the news last week when a Nepali guide, left alone at 25,000 feet on the mountain, escaped death by crawling down for six days, without food or bottled oxygen, to 18,000 feet, where he was rescued. His funeral was in progress.

Famed as the highest peak in the world, Everest straddles Tibet to its north and Nepal to its south. To ascend Everest from Nepal you must trek for up to two weeks to reach Base Camp, the starting point for your climb. At 17,598 feet above sea level, the camp is more than 2,000 feet higher than the tallest mountain in the Rockies. It’s all uphill from there.

Officially 29,031 feet 8½ inches high, Everest throws many challenges at would-be climbers: ice, blowing snow, temperatures far below zero, ferocious winds, blinding sun, avalanches, and deep crevasses concealed by snow. The route from Base Camp to Camp 1, the first of four before you reach the summit, traverses the Khumbu Icefall, a 1.2-mile stretch of jagged ice and crevasses which ascends over 2000 feet and takes 6 to 12 hours to cross. The “falling” glacial ice moves about 3-4 feet downhill a day, causing giant blocks of ice to form. Called seracs, they can weigh hundreds of tons and unexpectedly collapse on the climbing route.

Everest’s greatest challenge to climbers is not these dangers, which it has in abundance, but the one thing it doesn’t have: adequate oxygen. At the summit, a given volume of air contains only 30% of the oxygen it does at sea level. Except for a freaky few, climbers must breathe supplemental oxygen from cylinders they carry. It’s added weight to lug, but necessary.

The area above 26,000 feet is known as the “death zone,” where humans can survive for only a short time. Climbers must summit and return to Camp 4, at the edge of the zone, in perhaps 16-20 hours. Most of the deaths on Everest occur during the descent, when mountaineers are running out of gas, so to speak, and often literally running out of oxygen. Their bodies are exhausted, their thinking is fuzzy; if they sit down to rest even briefly, they may never get up.

I’m no mountaineer. What I know about Everest comes not from boots on glacial ice, but hands on computer mice. But I did experience high-altitude in the Peruvian Andes while doing anthropology research, as part of a Cornell Unversity project, among descendants of the Incas living in the community of Vicos at 10,000 feet, where a given volume of air has just 70% of the oxygen at sea level. To get there, we drove from the coast to a mountain pass at 14,000 feet (me pictured above). That rapid change in elevation in just a few hours caused chest pains in one of our party, which fortunately subsided when we descended to our destination.

It took several weeks to acclimatize to living at that altitude. By then I was able to hike up to the snow line, at about 16,000 feet, as a condor circled overhead. Before leaving Peru, we flew from Lima to Cuzco, once the capital of the Inca Empire, en route to Machu Picchu. Looking out at snow-covered peaks from the plane, I guessed we were at about 20,000 feet. The cabin of the plane was not pressurized, with the same thin air as outside, so we were getting less than half the normal amount of oxygen with each breath. Protruding from every seatback was a small tube for inhaling supplemental oxygen. I didn’t need it.

When you return to sea level, you quickly lose your altitude acclimatization. But people living at high altitude have evolved to adapt to those conditions. Interestingly, Andeans developed a different adaptation than Himalayans. The former have higher concentrations of oxygen in their hemoglobin than lowlanders, i.e., more oxygen per blood volume; the latter breathe more rapidly and take in a greater volume of air with each breath.

Evolution found different ways to solve the oxygen problem, just as it produced some 20 different human species in the course of 2.75 million years or so, before finally settling on Homo sapiens. Until now, that is.

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Humanity is undergoing a profound transformation.

Because we’re in the midst of this process, we’re usually unaware of it, like being in the eye of a hurricane and thinking it’s a calm sunny day, when in fact powerful forces are swirling around us. It’s hard to step out of the frame to see the big picture, to gain perspective on what’s happening to us. That’s what I’m trying to do with this blog on Substack.

The blog will in part be based on my book Fire in a Wire: Electricity Empowers Human Evolution Beyond Homo Sapiens, but will also delve into related matters involving science, society, human existence, technology, the natural world, the arts and even politics. I’ll be digging into the past and speculating on the future to try to understand how we became who we are as humans, and who we are in the process of becoming in this transformation.

The blog and book are based on a simple observation: just as fire was pivotal in the evolution of our early human ancestors, so too is electricity pivotal in the evolution of humans today. Electricity is the new fire. Fire in a wire. A new species of human is emerging, not in some imagined future but living among us today. I am one of them. You may well be too.

I didn’t arrive at this observation as the result of extensive research. Rather, it was a flash of insight while watching the sun go down over the Berkshire hills. I was thinking about how our lives have changed since I was a young kid -- from the first time I saw TV in 1947 (the first telecast of the World Series, between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers) -- to most recently helping lead a project to deploy fiber-optic networks for providing high-speed internet access to small towns in western Massachusetts lacking it.

I knew a little about the impact of fire in human history, so the parallel with electricity made sense to me when I thought about it, living as I do in a world powered by electricity, a world of computers, smartphones and the internet. Wanting to learn more and assuming there would be a lot to read about electricity’s effect on human evolution, I googled it. But to my surprise, I found nothing, nada. WTF? I mean, how often do you google something and come up empty?

I was on my own to figure it out, which led me to do research and write a book about how and why humans are evolving in the Electric Age. Aware that to get a publisher for it meant first being signed by a literary agent, I went through the laborious effort of trying to find one, what they call querying. After my queries had been ignored or outright rejected 76 times, I did finally get signed by an agent.

But she was unable to place it with a publisher. Several called my proposed book “interesting” or even “fascinating,” but declined to publish it, questioning who was I to say such things? A scientist? A professor? A previously-published author? No, I was just a nobody with a crazy idea, an outsider. Undeterred and convinced of the truth of that idea, I self-published the book and am writing this blog.

Now it’s up to you to decide whether to read what I write, and to discover who you really are as a human being: a member of the familiar species Homo sapiens, or someone else?

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