Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Push ’Em to the Wall

"Stone tools found embedded at the base of cliffs in southeastern England show that early humans lived in northern Europe 700,000 years ago -- much earlier than previously thought, scientists said on Wednesday." Says Reuters. Push those dates back. Push ’em back, push ’em back, way back.

At the same time every time you turn around some swimmer, some runner, has again broken the world record. How boring is the World Series, the golf tournament, if some record isn’t announced as broken every other second: all part of our self-hypnosis that no one has ever been better than us.

In the 1950s, when I ran the mile, a time of four minutes was believed to be an unbreakable barrier. Once it fell, the new record got peeled and re-peeled in short order. Will it ever be found that humans lived in Europe 900,000 years ago? A million years ago? Before the birth of the earth? Before the Big Bang?
Will the mile ever be run in three and a half minutes? Will the times for the Australian crawl ever get to minus figures: you come out of the pool before you dive in?

Statisticians have a good model for what stops us from getting too absurd. The left wall is where we come from. Bacteria never ran a mile, so their time is infinite. Since then some creatures have gotten speedy indeed: horses, cheetahs. Men aren’t very fast on their feet, but if we put a lot into it we can run faster and faster ... until we reach a right wall for our species, for our environment. Maybe some prior Homo species could cover a mile in three and a half minutes, but modern humans are probably pretty damn close to the right wall for the species. (Running on the moon won't count.) Someday, to use Stephen Jay Gould’s example, some human may be able to hit the fast ball a tiny bit better than Ted Williams, but no human will ever be able to hit any kind of ball more than a tiny bit better than Ted Williams. Ted Williams was damn close to the right wall.

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