We started off discussing the value of consumerism to even the most devout naturalists with In Praise Of Consumerism - It Appeals To The Thoreau In You and then discussed the materialistic greed of nature herself in In Praise Of Consumerism - Bees, Bacteria And The Value Of Wasted Time. Now now we're going to wrap things up by suggesting that consumerism is not the root of all evil. In fact, we’re going to propose the opposite.

Consumerism is responsible for some of the most important events in Western civilization. Consumerism has produced empowerments that have radically upgraded the lives of even the poorest people on the planet. And consumerism has even advanced the grand ambition of biomassto kidnap, seduce, and dragoon as many iinanimate atoms as possible into the 3.85-billion-year-old enterprise of life.

We left off last time with a not-so-simple question; what does consumerism do for human beings? To answer that, let me show you how spirit spun into material goods lifts other spirits down the line.

The traders of Venice in 1270 AD were motivated by sheer consumerist lust. They were driven by the hunger of Europe’s rich to do what bower birds and stags do - show off luxuries rarer than those of their neighbors.

The son of a wealthy trading family, a family powered by consumer lust, would change history and our vision of nearly everything we see. He was financed and set into motion by the luxury consumer goods industry. But he left behind a seed of spirit that, like Jack’s magic bean turned to a giant stalk, would put the Western World on a heady climb.

What he planted in the Western mind would uplift the spiritual ruminations of Thoreau and his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, plus your spiritual aspirations and mine.

As you read In Praise Of Consumerism - It Appeals To The Thoreau In You you may have wondered if I hated poor Henry David Thoreau. Not at all. He inspired me at the young and impressionable age of sixteen and has powered my engines ever since. There's a good chance that he did the same for you. But brace yourself for irony. Thoreau is the perfect example of the positive aspects of consumerism.

What is consumerism? It’s the flaunting of surplus. It’s the conspicuous display of surplus time, of surplus energy, and of surplus luxuries.

And what was Thoreau doing at Walden Pond? He was flaunting a small flood of hidden luxuries. He was flaunting the surplus time that the wealth of his father’s pencil factory had given him. He was flaunting his ability to escape the web of commercial trade and the meshwork of human technologies. He was celebrating his ability to ditch the conventions other rich kids followed - the obligatory trip to Europe and a permanent plunge into the newly-quickening madness of city life.

There's a rule of science we normally overlook. That rule? Challenge your assumptions. See what you can derive from a new point of view. Buck the normal. Today, it is normal to hate consumerism. It's normal to loathe what consumerism has done to us...and what it has done to the planet. So as good scientists, let's go anti-conventional. Let's sing an ode in praise of consumerism. Let's see if reversing the normal point of view will produce any surprises.

In praise of consumerism? I know what you're thinking; this is a great subject for the brain-dead or folks who utterly lack a moral compass, like Donald Trump and Paris Hilton. But it’s certainly not a good subject for you and me.

You’re not consumerists, and neither am I, right? We’re idealists aiming at high spiritual and intellectual goals. We scrimp and we save to gain the freedom to think and to pursue higher meanings in nearly everything we do.

Or are we?

In Screw 'Sustainability' - And I Am Here To Tell You Why we discussed the fact that Mother Nature is a bloody bitch. She is the mother of catastrophe. She has nurtured brilliant innovations like cells and DNA but she has also given us 142 mass extinctions, 80 glaciations in the last two million years, a planet that may have once been a frozen iceball, and a klatch of global warmings in which the temperature has soared by 18 degrees in ten years or less.

Mother Nature has sunken the pleasant habitat of land creatures to the bottom of swamps and has lifted the havens of sea creatures --ocean bottoms -- to the mountain tops. She has very seldom given us a Garden of Eden, a green and sunny utopia in which she and we live together in harmony and peace.

Nature tosses us challenges and dares us to survive. More properly, she challenges us to thrive.

What’s more, evolution is all about breaking Mother Nature’s rules — defying gravity when a lizard stands, denying buoyancy when a fish controls its depth in the sea, and saying “no” to gravity when a bird has the audacity to fly. That audacity is Mother Nature’s way of feeling out new paths of growth and radical new possibilities. How do we know? Birds have been paid off big time for their insolence. There are four times as many species of birds as there are of us land-lubbing mammals. Each species represents another victory over nature, another corner of nature’s maze turned into a new niche. Each triumph is another of nature’s own victories in the breakthrough biz.

That's why talk about 'sustainability' today is riddled with problems — and with the seeds of self-defeat. The lowest periods in recorded human history have come when society tried to maintain a status quo.

It's taken weeks to get here but we've covered 13.7 billion years of cosmic quirks. We've gone from The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture through Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture to The Big Burp And The Evolution of Elements.

We've seen the beginning of mass behavior among quarks, the proto-memory of atoms, and a strange preview of culture long before life arose.

In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed.

In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed.

In Supersynchrony And The Evolution Of Mass Culture, we talked about how even the most primitive components of the universe had a sort of retained memory; the culture of quarks, if you will.

In The Big Bang and the Birth of Culture, we talked about the beginning of culture long before what anthropologists had previously assumed and discussed why space travel is not only becoming important for ecological reasons, it's part of a universal mandate.

Now we're going to talk about some aspects of galactic order. Infinite monkeys in a random universe? No, more like a railroad train with a lot of ways to get from point A to point B - but it has rails and the universe can never leave them.

***

In the aftermath of the Big Bang, particles collided and shifted with terrific force - yet protons came out of these crashes intact. This identity retention was a primitive form of memory and it was the foundation of culture.

Evolution is shouting a message at us. Yes, evolution herself. That imperative? Get your ass and the asses, burros, donkeys and cells of your fellow species—from bacteria and plants to fish, reptiles, and mammals—off this dangerous scrap of a planet and find new niches for life.

Take The Grand Experiment Of Cells And DNA, the 3.85-billion-year Project Of Biomass, to other planets, moons, orbiting habitats, and galaxies. Give life an opportunity to thrive, to reinvent itself, to turn every old disaster, every pinwheeling galaxy, into new opportunity.

Do this as the only species Nature has generated that’s capable of deliberate travel beyond the atmosphere of Earth. Do it as the only species able to take on the mission of making life multi-planetary. Accept that mission or you may well eliminate yourself and all the species that depend on you—from the microorganisms making folic acid and vitamin K in your gut to wheat, corn, cucumbers, chickens, cows, the yeast you cultivate to make beer, and even the bacteria you use to make cheese. What’s worse, if you fail to take life beyond the skies, the whole experiment of life—including rainforests, whales, and endangered species —may die in some perfectly normal cosmic catastrophe.

In our first exciting episode of Who’s Smarter: Chimps, Baboons or Bacteria? The Power of Group IQ ( Part I ) we showed how small-brained baboons can outsmart big-brained chimpanzees and how bacteria can out-innovate chimps, baboons, and you and me. We also visited an evolutionary mystery in the world of a bacterial buddy that's with you every day, the E. coli found in your gut.

In Part II we discussed how E.

In our first exciting episode of 'Who’s Smarter: Chimps, Baboons or Bacteria? The Power of Group IQ' ( Part I ) we showed how small-brained baboons can outsmart big-brained chimpanzees and how bacteria can out-innovate chimps, baboons, and you and me. We also visited an evolutionary mystery in the world of a bacterial buddy that's with you every day, the E. coli found in your gut.

In a lab dish, E. coli can do something neo-Darwinian theory says just can not be.

Which have bigger brains, chimpanzees or baboons? If you guessed chimps, you’re right. Chimpanzees are our closest relatives on the planet. They share between 98.6% and 99% of our genes, depending on who’s counting. They are way up there in animal brainpower. An average chimp’s brain is more than twice as large as the brain of a baboon.

Now for question number two. Which are smarter, chimpanzees or baboons? The answer is … baboons. But how could that be? Chimps are brainier. Shouldn’t they also be, well, umm, brainier? Brighter by far? If baboons are winners on IQ measures, doesn’t that mean that intelligence is not just a matter of brain matter?

The answer is yes, there’s more to intellect than the number of neurons in your skull.