The Devil always finds work for idle hands to do - even in the workplace!

Recent events here in Canada have underlined the fact that even though we normally tend to lag behind big brother USA in terms of international disdain, gun violence and terrorist attacks, it only takes a single bullet to evaporate any complacency one has over that state of affairs. The chickens are indeed coming home to roost, and things may well have changed forever, even north of the border. 

It remains a staggeringly disappointing reality of our very existence that humans simply cannot get along, even in supposedly civilised times. Whether it's international or domestic forms of conflict, it seems that humans just can't (or often don't want to) get along, even when the stakes are extremely high. I mean, we seem to have a very hard time making a go of even marriage in modern times, and it's incredible how vicious that form of conflict (divorce) can often be, even when it's someone with whom we were once madly in love!

No surprise then that a particularly regular source of inter-human conflict and coincident stress comes from where we spend a great deal of our daily existence - the workplace! I have had a few discussions of late with colleagues complaining about this person or that one in the office; people seemingly intent on derailing daily lives if not even going so far as to jeopardise one's actual position in the workforce. The latter point being simply inexcusable, of course. 

The question of how to deal with toxic people in the workplace is rarely one that comes with a straightforward answer, nor should the significance of the situation be trivialised - it can be serious business indeed - and an inappropriate response to it can often do the "victim" more damage than the perpetrator. But that's the idea, right? Every situation can be as unique as the distinct people involved, and sadly there are no golden rules to follow or quick fix solutions. There are a few key points one should bear in mind though when dealing with conflict or outright toxicity in the workplace:

• Let's get one thing right out into the open, right away, shall we? Toxic individuals in the workplace are to a man or woman almost unquestionably, wait for it, unhappy! Show me wonderfully happy people who routinely become monsters in the workplace and I will show you a fish that rides a bicycle. Those who come into work with an agenda that involves disrupting other people's work and lives are rarely happy and in fact are usually downright miserable. Misery Inc., in fact. To even consider letting them get inside of your circumference of normality and daily contentedness is a mistake - they must be kept at arm's length at all times. The guard must always be up, because you need that job and the stakes are definitely that high. 

• The absolute #1 priority has to be to put yourself first. It is perfectly okay to be selfish; as selfish as the person who insists on taking out their bad day on you, or who tries to spin you into their own web of discontent with management or the top clique at work. Rather than going out of one's way to listen to their endless complaints or devious attempts to get one to join the conspiracy, it is perfectly acceptable to state that one doesn't have time and that one needs to get back to work. It's one thing to lend an ear, and quite another to be expected to be the bottomless sink for all their tales of woe. 

• One needs to spot toxicity when and where it arises, and frankly the solution that works best is to have as little to do with it as humanly possible. There is (or should be) no place for personal conflict in the workplace, and it can be very disruptive to both individuals and the team alike. Once someone presents a clear and present danger then someone needs to step up and speak up with human resources, particularly if other colleagues are willing to endorse such action. To do what is most commonly observed, i.e. nothing at all, is to allow the toxicity to fester and begin to seep across the floorboards into other offices where it will spread with great ease. It's a bit like Ebola - better nip it in the bud early rather than trying to sort it out once three quarters of the offices are infected with it!

• Of course, avoiding/ignoring conflict is way more easily said than done, and often one needs to interact daily with someone who has us in their sights, and seems hell-bent on disrupting our work life. Toxicity comes in more than one form, and can be harder to spot when it's served up with a warm smile and giggle to accompany the put-down or outright insult, such that others nearby think that the instigator is all sweetness and light, while you are the unstable one who overreacts all the time. The fact that such toxicity does exist in the workplace is almost always a sign of a lack of (true and clear) leadership, but that is a sad fact of life that is almost insurmountable, I'm afraid!

• Once you have spotted a toxic persona, you need to spend as little time in the day around that person as feasible, and if you can, deal with him/her in public as much as possible, and avoid the closed doors at all costs. If you limit private exposure to the problem person, you tend to also limit their attempts at derailing your day and your work. The devil finds work for idle hands to do, and while that person may not be focused on their work to the extent that they should be, this is no excuse for you to do the same - turn a blind eye and a deaf ear, and get on with the job at hand. It's a workplace, not the high school playground.

• All of this is all well and good, but what if the main personality clash or problem at work is a superior, or God forbid, even the boss? I could be tempted to say that it's not easily possible for the boss to be classically toxic, because they were selected for due to a variety of positive attributes, but can it happen? Well, yes, it can and it has if I consider various testimonies I have heard over the years. So, the conundrum is what to do when there are personality clashes with a superior or the boss?

• It's funny how far one can go on the back of a solid work ethic and some great work! Irrespective of how one feels about the boss, perhaps even disliking their attitude a lot of the time, there is little they can truly moan about when your production is firing on all cylinders. They still might not like you, you might truly dislike them, but if you are doing a great job then it's not easy to put you down. Focus on the work, not on who may directly benefit from that work, and I bet you go up on the popularity ratings, sooner or later. One has to play smart, and truly liking that person is not a job requirement for producing what they expect from you; so zip it and get on with it and let good days become great weeks that turn into extremely productive years. It's hard to imagine that this won't pay off one day or another. 

• As sage as that point no doubt is, frankly if you have an ongoing clash with a superior or the boss, while it is smart to smile, get your head down and get on with the work, it is also smart to get your resume, LinkedIn and other social media profiles updated and aligned with your personal brand and value proposition for the inevitable job search ahead. I say "inevitable" because if you are feeling used, abused or under-appreciated at work, it is unlikely that you are happy, and this will almost certainly end at a perhaps unforeseen crossroads - the one where you choose to move on, or you get moved on. Life is too short to stay unhappily in a job, and if you see the writing on the wall then take control of your situation and do something positive about it while you are still in a job. It goes without saying that finding a new job is always easier when you are still in a job, and not out there in limbo with so many others. 

In the end, it's all about the work, and if someone does try to stop you from getting it done then it's time to confront them about it and put an end to their nonsense, either by clarifying your refusal to deal with their BS directly, or if that does not do the trick then by going to human resources or an appropriate superior to rectify the problem. Resolution between two individuals is always the best solution, rather than involving the organisation, but it's quite rare I feel. As simple as attempting resolution sounds, it still does not help much with how you feel about the conflict or the stress that it brings to your day, but you must try to remember that this is the goal of the toxic persona - to get inside your head and heart. 

It is mandatory to recognise that, and to minimise the impact of their unhappiness on your happiness. However hard they try, they cannot take away who you are, and it is because they are often envious of who you are that they try to crack through your shell - but you have to be resolute in the face of that. Don't let their weakness, insecurity and envy become your problem. Think of it this way - you already are miles ahead in the race because when you get out of bed first thing each morning, you already have something huge to celebrate - the fact that you ain't them! 

When does a bowl-a-soup potentially become E-bol-a soup?

As any real virologist knows, it doesn't take too much human Brownian motion to turn a minor news item about an outbreak in a far-off country into a full-blown national crisis. In fact, it only takes some long distance Brownian motion by one human to wreak havoc on the population of an entire country - a lesson learned in devastating fashion by the dissemination of the AIDS virus in North America in the eighties. 

In 1984, epidemiologists at the CDC identified a certain Gaetan Dugas as the index case or patient zero for the entire AIDS pandemic, and even though that has become a somewhat controversial conclusion since, the data illustrates the deadly capacity of one peripatetic infected individual to potentially infect a nation. Why are we talking about this today, I hear you ask? Well, unless you have been living under a rock it has to be blindingly obvious that we are of course thinking about the mounting fears over another very nasty little virus - Ebola. That this viral particle can essentially liquify a sophisticated organism such as us humans with a mere 7 genes is both shocking and incredibly humbling.

And let's be specific here - the spread of AIDS primarily necessitates intimate (sexual) contact between humans, the spread of Ebola does not! As much as the authorities downplay the threat, with even Barack Obama doing his best to encourage the nation to sit back and forget about it, inevitably the virus has made its way from Africa to the United States. A shocker, not. It's interesting how Obama can make very much of one hidden threat, ISIS (or ISIL as he calls it), readily cranking up the hyperbole on how dangerous that particular enemy is to American life, yet downplaying worry over an even more insidiously hidden threat, a little virus we call Ebola. 

This laissez-faire attitude has spilled over even to the medical profession itself, and this came to light in an excruciatingly embarrassing incident this past week via the dangerous actions of a medical loose cannon who works for the NBC news division - Dr. Nancy Snyderman. She is the Chief Medical Correspondent at NBC, and regularly is on-air on key shows such as NBC's "Today" and "Nightly News with Brian Williams". Not totally unlike many an MD one has come across at some point or another, Snyderman can come across as sanctimonious, supercilious and dare I say even superficial when dealing with medical affairs, and when spouting advice to the great American public. 

I honestly find the bulk of what she typically says to be scratch-the-surface common sense; rarely does it ever exceed what I would expect from a science grad intern who had researched this disease or that one for even 30 minutes on the Internet. When someone on the opposite chair or panel asks a really scientific question (make that an unscripted scientific question!) the polish peels off rapidly, and the cracked veneer reveals an extremely basic general scientific knowledge. While that may be fairly typical for many general practitioners, I hardly think it is appropriate for a CMC at a huge network and news franchise such as NBC.

Yes, yes, I can hear the whispers that I am perhaps being a little harsh, but you know, everything that I have said (and more) is backed up by her staggeringly unsophisticated and even unprofessional actions upon returning from filming in Liberia. Snyderman and her crew returned from reporting on Ebola in Africa, having been in direct contact with an infected colleague, cameraman Ashoka Mukpo, who is now being treated for Ebola in Nebraska. NBC announced that the entire crew would enter voluntary quarantine (21 days) upon their return, which is precisely what should have happened. 

Now, it's one thing about how to police or enforce a voluntary quarantine when it's Joe Public, but when the ringleader is a very public, high profile MD then we have nothing to worry about, right? Wrong! Rather than assuming that because it is Nancy Snyderman, we can all breathe easily and not be in fear of taking our last breath due to Ebola, it appears that the contrary is the case. In other words, because it is Nancy Snyderman, the state of New Jersey is at heightened risk of being infected!

Shockingly, it transpires that the supposedly quarantined MD was spotted out and about in New Jersey, incomprehensibly even being seen outside a Hopewell restaurant (the Peasant Grill) picking up some soup. Are you kidding me?! You are an incredibly wealthy TV MD and yet can't find a way to get your hands on some soup without putting the lives of an entire state at risk? Her careless, carefree, dangerous and uneducated actions appear not only to be amazingly arrogant, but border on almost being criminal. Yes, I think potentially exposing people's lives to a deadly virus to be an action that is at least semi-criminal in nature. 

Her very presence outside the Peasant Grill goes against any recommendation that any serious medical professional would advise. The fact that the New Jersey Health Authority had to step in and enforce a mandatory quarantine for an NBC CMC for violations - well, it is almost certainly a reason for termination. If for no other reason, simply due to a total loss of credibility for the role as well as for the network, while she remains in that role. She can coldy hand out her warnings to the American public, yet what's good enough for them is not good enough for her, because she knows more, so she doesn't have to take precautions against spreading a deadly virus such as Ebola?!

It reminds me of a medical hubris we have all seen from one MD or another, during out lifetimes. Getting a lecture on not smoking, or the evil of eating too much junk food, and then you see the off-duty doc standing against the side of a McDonald's restaurant, smoking after devouring their Big Mac! Somehow, dealing with cancer and heart disease every day almost endows one with a feeling of invincibility to it, because it happens to them (patients) and not us (doctors), right?

That's all well and good, when you are not putting anyone else at risk. But what Snyderman did was unforgivable for any medical professional, never mind one of the most high profile public doctors in the country who speaks to millions of people regularly on the "Today" show. Synderman's ongoing arrogance even in her "apology" caused the pot to boil over completely, and the media ripped into her with fervour. America gets over the sins of major celebrities but when they apologise vaguely, that is something that brings out the backlash - big time. Think Paula Deen or Lance Armstrong, whose careers were effectively halted or even terminated by such arrogance in the face of public outrage - and let's be clear, nothing either of these two examples did ever put an entire state's (and then country's) lives at risk!

"As a health professional I know that we have no symptoms and pose no risk to the public, but I am deeply sorry for the concerns this episode caused," Snyderman said. 

I bet that reassured the nation! Not. Note that she did not confirm whether or not she had violated the voluntary quarantine. But what conceit to state that simply because she has a degree in medicine, she can be confident that there are no Ebola virions circulating in her veins or in those of her colleagues, when in fact, she has no idea if that is true or not. She exhibits astounding personal and professional hubris that is simply not in keeping with her high profile (and exceptionally high salary) nor her role as an information source and key influencer. 

Then again, why am I surprised? This is the same woman, who, on a recent episode of "Today" ridiculously claimed that the regime in Saudi Arabia was fairer to working women than that of the USA! That would be the same Saudi Arabia that requires women to have a male's permission to work in the first place, and the one that bans women from driving, and the one that enforces a strict dress code on women, right?! Cough. Splutter. Or did she actually mean the "alternative" Saudi Arabia, that other one, the one that exists only in her own head? 

The extent of Snyderman's arrogance is not even so much depicted by her dangerous, careless action in heading out for take-out, but is rather truly underlined and emphasised by her woeful excuse for an acknowledgement or real apology, afterwards. Thankfully, in spite of her incredibly risky and arrogant lapse in judgement, New Jersey is alive and well, and the threat has been contained. She will be free soon enough to go out and about and roam everywhere she wants, just like before. 

However, whether she will remain aligned with and attached to the estimable NBC brand is another question entirely, and I think that NBC has been put into a corner that there is only one way out of - if it does want to move forward with any credibility in the medical affairs arena. If social media are any barometer of what the nation is thinking about this sad state of affairs, and they are, then NBC must surely know what is expected from them now by way of a real response, in place of that condescending insult from their Chief Medical Correspondent. 

Don't let your smartphone make you look stupid!

With the prevalence of smartphones and social media in our society today, and given the release of bigger, better (in principle) iPhones in recent weeks, I have been chatting to various friends and colleagues about the use of these devices in the workplace - with a particular focus on business meetings. 

Although smartphone etiquette seem patently obvious to me, it appears that there is much confusion about what is correct and what is not, no doubt due to the fact that there actually is no unified set of guidelines never mind actual rules for either social media or smartphone use. Things have moved incredibly fast in communication technology, and we are more or less all in a position now to be bombarded with communications and information at every minute of the day - even when at work, and even when in meetings with other people.  Quite when or where people felt that all of this streaming communication became equally important as work, at work, is not obvious to me. 

One reason why there is confusion or lack of clarity in various organizations is that the CEO may very well (typically?) be anything but au fait with the latest trends and technologies, and the fashion in which younger employees choose to use their devices becomes almost a way of life for the entire team. In a business form of role reversal, it somehow became the kids teaching the parents what was appropriate and the sheep should all follow them. Right? How about no?!

The parent and kid analogy is actually quite a relevant one because how many parents have had to fight with their kids over the use of their smartphones at the dinner table? The kids get told that they can put it down for an hour while the family eats and talks, and their world won't fall apart in the meantime - so put it down or turn it off. It all would make sense, if that is how their parents behaved at similar sit-downs at work. 

The sad thing is that the parents (typically?) don't adhere to their own rules, when it comes to the workplace. They scream at their kids to put the bloody thing down, but then at work stride purposefully into meetings clutching their smartphones as if the world may stop turning at any moment, and/or, the world outside the meeting relies on them so heavily that if they do not communicate with it then that might be the reason that the globe stops revolving! 

There simply seems to be a lack of education and/or sophistication in how people behave with their smartphones when it comes to business. The older generation did not grow up with such devices, and there are no rules for using them, so it has become a bit of a free-for-all. After talking to various levels of personnel in various different areas of business, four main classifications of smartphone abuse at work were the most commonly observed, and they fall into the following groups that I categorise as:

• The busy bee - this might well be the CEO or team leader who does shoulder a higher level load than many, and who feels that they need to be online at all times. While it can well be the case for an outfit that has physical operations on which the business depends, or products out there in the marketplace that are at critical stages of roll out, in most cases a supposedly "lost" hour in a meeting will change absolutely nothing. I might vouchsafe that what in fact is being lost is that hour interacting with team members - an essential component of mutual respect between management and subordinates. But at the very least, if your face is going to be buried in the phone for a solid hour, the phone should be silenced, so as to not distract anyone from the purpose of the meeting - and if that is not acceptable, because there are critical things to attend to - the answer is simple: stay out of the meeting if the phone is more important than the content of the meeting on that day! It is much more considerate and polite to do so, when your presence will be nothing more than distraction. If you really are (and it is entirely possible) that busy, then stay out of meetings better handled by other management, and get on with your own demanding business.

• The image builder - there is some crossover with the novice in this department, in that the image builder will abuse the phone in ways that can be typical of a novice, but the difference is that the image builder does it consciously with intent. Like the busy bee, they insist on bringing the smartphone into each and every meeting and displaying it on the table proudly, but refuse to ever silence its annoying/impolite clanging. In some cases, because it is about image and not content, the image creator's phone misbehaves simply because its owner doesn't actually know how to change the default settings! However, one major difference between the busy bee and the image creator is that the former does pick it up and read each incoming communique and often types replies, while the latter simply leaves it ringing incessantly for all to either marvel at ("Oh my God, he gets so many texts and emails, he must be way busier than I thought!") or roll their eyes at ("God, can you just turn the bloody ringer off at least?!"). I could come up with various hypotheses as to why such types get a thrill out of a phone apparently getting a message every 73 seconds, yet never one that merits actual reading of it - but I think it's better left unsaid, or left to each reader's own imagination! It goes without saying that your common-or-garden image builder also will often have the hottest new phone available, but rarely uses it to even 5-10% of its capability.  It's a bit like forgoing the SUV and getting into the cockpit of an F-35 Raptor for the daily commute to work! Prior to the evolution of smartphones, the other way the classical image builder used to operate was to routinely (I mean, like, 99.99% of the time) show up late for meetings. The implicit message being that unlike everyone else, I am so overloaded and every minute of my time is precious, therefore I will always be last to arrive at meetings. Uh-huh.

• The novice - a bit like service providers themselves, we all get a grace period when we first enter the smartphone world. Many providers will forgive or reduce a large roaming bill when you first run into that particular problem, or if you didn't realize that texting to the USA was not included, they will adjust your first bill, and so on.  Ditto for smartphone abuse in meetings for the novice, of any age. These days the true novices are rarely young, because the young eat these devices up at a rate of a new model every 9-12 months! However, one can quite routinely see an aging, greying executive who might be a seasoned professional but whose organisation has finally forced the dreaded iPhone on them, and here they are in middle-age desperately trying to catch up and keep up. Some of the older novices are very prone to smartphone abuse, having just caught up to 2014 after many years of refusing to jump onto the bandwagon, and now use it the way they see their kids use it at home. However, the critical thing that must happen is that the novice has to be told early on (how) to either silence the bloody thing or don't ever bring it into a meeting again. This is neither the high school cafeteria nor the Facebook locker room - it is a business. 

• The kid - this is usually the intern or most junior person in the organization, but, wait for it, in direct correlation, he/she could be the one who is most on top of all of the latest devices, apps, and social media trends. Quite often this allows them a kind of smartphone supremacy, and we all must do our best to copy their smartphone ways, right? Nope. While they might get away with smartphone fixation even at the dinner table at home, their work parents need to nip it in the bud from day two, and do them a huge favour by refusing to let them dictate their habits onto an entire workplace. One friend did tell me about an intern who would let the phone buzz incessantly on the boardroom table, even during presentations by renowned senior scientists, and to me that represents just about the greatest height (i.e. low) of arrogant rudeness, at worst, or simply a clear lack of class and manners, at best. If you are a boss and you let this go, well, you are going to get just what you are asking for - a room full of people mistakenly thinking that they have a right to be aware of every single communication that arrives at work, even if that's a selfie of one of their Facebook friends in a wet T-shirt. There is no intern or junior employee (barely in their twenties) who is important enough to justify endless buzzing on a table. One wouldn't let them cut in and routinely interrupt senior personnel having a discussion at a level beyond their experience, so why would it be tolerable for their smartphone?

It all comes down to common sense and good manners, and maybe this is just a personal opinion but I regularly feel that good manners not only went out of fashion but actually blew right out of the window in recent human evolution over the last decade or two. However, while there is little doubt that social media and smartphones have ironically made us more anti-social in public, people need to be reminded that this is not acceptable in the workplace. A good general rule for any team meeting is that all phones must have their ringers turned off and vibration mode should only be acceptable in one's pocket, or, if this just doesn't work - then no phones should come into meetings at all, unless they are being solely used to take notes. Anyone crying that this is an outrage should be reminded why we call it "work", and forced back down out of their fantasy land of self-importance, with their feet (and phone!) firmly planted on cold ground with a solid thump.  

I totally understand the need to have a phone on hand if the wife is pregnant, or the husband is in hospital, or the kids have a huge exam or you are waiting for news of a multi-million dollar deal - but how many days a year is this the case for most people? Trust me, (tearfully) leaving the smartphone on the desk and going into meetings unburdened can actually be a very liberating experience; it even serves to remind us of how much personal freedom we have lost by clinging to these devices! And who knows, by unchaining our wrist from the phone, we may even be more appreciated by clients and colleagues alike, for giving them our undivided attention - now that would be something we can call progress!

Evolving by eliminating - it's human nature!

A question one hears often about the whole creationism versus evolution debate is: if we have evolved from apes then how come they stopped evolving?! Are they actually more intelligent than we all thought, and once they managed to create humanoids and spread them throughout the planet, they sighed and went into retirement with no further interest in doing it again? A bit like man going to the moon. Been there, done that!

But it is an interesting question, and in the absence of the ultimate "missing link" being excavated tomorrow, it continues to come up. However, unless you never heard of that nasty acronym, DNA, and think of it as mere smoke and mirrors, then it is essentially impossible to deny our intimate relationship to the great beasts that came before. As Darwin always believed, the forceful scythe of evolution will exert its effect and carve out a better version of what preceded it - given time, favourable environment and sufficient resources.  

The mystery over why great apes stopped evolving into "us" doesn't seem that complicated to me.  First off, at some point, due to a collusion of advantageous circumstances, we split off from the apes at an evolutionary crossroads of sorts known as speciation, whereby a distinct new species evolved from its precursor. To this day we do not know precisely what it was that permitted this new branch to form on the tree of life, but we cannot rule out that some of it happened by geographical/environmental good luck. In other words, what might have transpired in one region of Africa might not have been repeated in other parts of the country. 

One fascinating aspect of how we appear to have evolved from more primitive relatives concerns social behaviour and fire. This has not changed that much in millions of years, which the millions of barbecues grilling slabs of raw meat in the summer bear witness to - we love to get together outside and cook on an open fire! From what is known about our evolution, it appears to have been when our ancestors discovered fire that everything changed. 

Why? Well, let's get to the more obvious point first. Whether it happened by accident or by a spark of early human-like genius, some bright spark threw their piece of a carcass onto the fire, and discovered that the meat was tastier and much more tender than the raw version. Bingo! The effect that this had on our development appears to have been a staggering one. Can you imagine why?

Well, all of a sudden, and keep Darwin's evolutionary scythe in mind, the need for such power in the jaws and teeth was obviated when the meat was juicy and tender. Unquestionably, over time, this led to changes in the maxillofacial skeleton: jaw size and maximum force were significantly reduced. This had an incredibly profound effect on the development of early hominids (as opposed to humanoids!) because with much less evolutionary pressure applied on the jaw, it meant that skull size (and therefore brain cavity) was increased. 

It seems perfectly obvious now that I write it, but it would never have occurred to me had I not read it myself. I guess it truly underlines the saying that "you are what you eat"! So, smaller facial muscles and jaws allowed the brain to take a major leap forward, and nothing would be the same again. Scientists have even determined that a mutation in the sequence of one gene, MHC-16 (a gene involved in muscle development), some 2-3 million years ago, seems to have been central to this development of increased skull cavity and brain size. 

Another take on this whole story is that it was as much the social behaviour that was part and parcel of cooking meat on an open fire (Friday night barbecue, gang?!) that played a major role in our evolution. It's impossible to imagine exactly what type of interactions occurred but maybe something about community building or joining forces and eating together seemed to be favourable for all? Social interaction is a major part of survival for many, many species, and to this day humans benefit from social contact among those close to them, even while fighting other members of the species farther afield. 

In any case, some combination of local environment, the appearance of fire, dietary improvements and changes in the jaw/skull size ratio led to a more truly evolved creature. I could be cynical and say that as far as we are aware, none of the great apes are sitting around cooking meat at campfires today, due to a key environmental factor being missing for such development, therefore there are no new early hominids. But that's a bit too easy, and is probably far from the real reason. 

You know, in many ways it is pretty accurate to say that the most deadly creature on the planet, is, well, wait for it - mankind. We have raped and pillaged, and colonised, and taken, and eliminated anything in our way on the journey. There's a line of thought (hardly a stretch) which suggests that early mankind was ruthless in eliminating its closest competitors - those bigger-jawed dumbass beasts that came to steal our food. It is entirely believable that our ancestors cleaned out their surroundings in order to survive and then spread out to spread the word. Go west, young man!  

We have eliminated so many species from the planet in the interests of our own survival, whether it was direct (food supply) or indirect via optimising the planet for our continued growth and evolution. If that ruined ecosystems or the ozone layer or polar ice caps, well, that's life, right? Had we discovered a violent species on the moon which threatened us, what would we have done? Back then, we would almost certainly have eliminated it, too. The negative effect of mankind's presence on the planet was recently underlined by reports that wildlife population in the world has declined by a massive 50% since 1970!

Modern man has devastated the natural ecosystem of species even close to extinction, so it's hardly surprising that apes no longer can evolve into hominids given that their natural environment of days gone by effectively no longer exists. The mere presence of man on the planet has made the jungles less safe places to be - for the animals! That expanding presence probably does represent a negative stress in the jungle, one which was absent earlier in evolution.  

In other words, not long after speciation occurred and we became slack-jawed but big-brained hominids, we eliminated our closest relatives, and the right combinations of favourable circumstances never occurred again. It's even believed that man eliminated Neanderthal man, some 40,000 years ago, and humans have since manipulated the planet in ways that are not strictly evolutionary, which has wreaked havoc on the Earth. But if one looks at it as a result of our increased cranial size and brain capacity, and it is all about survival of the fittest, then it will all go down in future history books as part of the ruthless evolutionary process.

But not everyone is as convinced as me, and to each their own. In fact, it's grey, cold and wet here again, making it a perfect day to go squatch hunting with the gang of "Finding Bigfoot" - however, the closest they have gotten so far is finding big feet - their own! I wonder why? ;)