Human Evolution: A Revaluation

22.11.10 Mostly because of the pervasive pessimism of our current era, it’s typically assumed that the human species is decaying, devolving, becoming dumber and less capable of making and using tools. Some think this is because our advanced technology has taken pressure off our minds and bodies, making life so easy that we atrophy.

There is some truth to this assessment. But even if our average cranial capacities are less today than a few thousand years ago, we're nonetheless enormously more capable now as individuals and as a species, with our established technology and worldwide social relationships, than we were even just a few decades ago. And the trend is accelerating.

It’s also a major mistake to treat the entire human species as a single entity, one that's all headed in the same inexorable direction. In fact, even a casual glance at the remarkable diversity of the human form, in height, weight, color, strength, intelligence, creative aptitudes, and so many more aspects, is enough to indicate that this species is anything but a monolithic entity; and unusually so. Human evolutionary activity is far from random, certainly not on a small scale, because of so many outcomes based on rational (or at least consistent) decisions, but it’s wildly multidirectional, and on a scale that’s rarely recognized in the way it deserves to be.

One interesting aspect that’s emerging as part of global integration is the ability of like-minds to connect, and not just by distant communications but thanks to the ease of intercontinental air travel, face-to-face. Smart people have better access to intercontinental travel, and to a limited extent can even move to where the best jobs are. And these smarter and more mobile people have kids with each other, thereby enhancing the heritable effects of intelligence, and whatever other attributes associated with their social and economic category. Keep in mind, none of this was easy for the public to do even fifty years ago. This is really a revolutionary event in human history.

The International Space Station (ISS) is one example of this process in action. Engineers, scientists, astronauts and researchers from around the world meet and collaborate towards a common goal. Many other examples of a smaller-scale are occurring all the time.

The point is that the human species is not a singular mass, and the individuals and groups within the species category are not moving in a singular or linear direction.

Maybe over centuries an HG Wells ‘Time Machine’ class-based dystopia would emerge, but as cultural values mutate and people continue to move back and forth around the world, the realistic outcome is likely to be much more variegated – colorful and endlessly fascinating. 

Perfectly Dysfunctional

October 2005

Gorillas in the Midst

You can't create a society without empathic capacity residing in the individuals of that population. In fact I think it could be reasonably argued that all culture, and social bonding in general, is perpetuated through females; sort of a virtual equivalent of mitochondria DNA. Generally speaking, men don't bond together to perpetuate stability, they connect to form bonds of convenience; imagine modern day Afghanistan or Liberia - a grinding hell of drug abuse, chronic warfare and violence, where men and boys desperately fight each other over increasingly depleted resources. Why is this?

A cluster of people without empathy or ability to grasp the emotions and sensations of others is a cluster of psychopaths; they don't build a society, they destroy it. Think about it, this is why America today has the highest incarceration level in the world - vast numbers of unemployed or unemployable young men, many of which are immigrants, with either an inborn or inculcated inability for empathy or reciprocal socialization.

Welcome to Liberia, or what's left of it...

Modern society has no use for these people, brute labor is no longer needed because it's been replaced by machines. And in fact they're not just redundant but act like acid on a stable society, and just like using acid in a laboratory a little bit goes a long way; hence, the only 'moral' solution is to use what they naturally do, all they can do - antisocial acts - as a pretext to lock them away for long periods of time. These males are all action and no thought, all impulse without any mitigation or forward planning involved; this is a definition of the animal mindset of instinct over intellect. Animals should be treated like animals and blaming them for being what they are is as deluded as expecting them to be reformed by judicial reprimand!

Over-population of young males used to be one of the primary yet unstated reasons for wars - it stabilized society by re-balancing the male-female ratio. As technology progressed in complexity military firepower become too powerful to keep it on the battlefield, to the point today where warfare spares no one, be they soldier or innocent non-combatant. Perhaps what we need is another Australia (but not THE Australia) to ship them all off to where they can happily kill each other or mellow out when and if they get older, because the financial drain from the productive parts of society to support the prison system is rapidly reaching a crisis point. 05.09.03

Apologies to real Gorillas (who are mostly non-violent) for the title pun.

Winners are just the first losers in a foolish competition

November 2004

Brain Schism

The Sims computer game is different in the way it appeals to game players of both sexes, and not surprisingly it's one of the biggest sellers around. The Sims popularity can be attributed to the fact that it's relationship-based, rather than the more typical object-based game structure. Women think based on relationships, how things are related to another, whereas men tend to think based upon objects and what they are in and of themselves. Of course any generalization is only useful until one looks too closely, but it's still safe to state that in general women think in relationships and men in objects.

This brain design can also be seen in how the two sexes manipulate to gain power. Men will collect and order, while women will map connections and relate objects to others knowing 'who's who', hence gossip and other stereotypes. In a worldview composed of relationships nothing can exist apart from everything else, which is why social connections, as well as the necessity of maintaining pre-existing bonds even regardless of their value or benefit, are more important to females than males.

Every secondary trait follows from this, such as an increased verbal capacity and communications skills, and the thinking portions of the brain necessary for remembering names, dates, and so on. Social position and status are important because relationships are inherently hierarchical, whereas objects can remain independent or even value-neutral.

Although both have their place, I think that the female mind-mode is more balanced and robust in the long run because it more accurately depicts the true state of events in that it properly defines meaning through connections rather than through singular points. All meaning is relative, it is relational. Take anything out of context and it loses it's meaning and becomes absurd. This is why meaning seems so transient and difficult to define upon close inspection. Meaning is not a 'something' it's a 'because of' (derivative). Trying to find meaning through collecting cars or gaining money is a guarantee of ending up unhappy and defeated because it's an inherently meaningless endeavor. Relationships are dynamic and self-perpetuating, yet objects are at best static and usually decay quickly. But building, defining, understanding connections is not pointless, it's the opposite of trivial pursuits because it's not transient and it contains human value, social value. 01.09.03

Why is it when somebody is walking around talking to themselves in animated conversation we send them to a mental institution. Yet if that solo conversationalist holds a small hunk of plastic and circuitry to their ear they instantly transform into a sophisticated and important person?

Cute, eh?

But wait! Here's how to cure the ever growing ranks of mentally ill within our society - give them all cell phones! Now they can have a toll-free 24 hour hotline to Jesus!

The part I like is during a flight, nobody touches the built in phones, you know the ones that charge $5 a minute? But as soon as the plane lands and stops, simultaneously they all fire-up the brain-warmer cell phone. Presumably to tell everyone they know how they miraculously survived that bout of turbulence, narrowly avoiding a crash into a fiery ball of twisted metal.

Guess Your Age (animated gif)

May 2008

Breakdown of the Mythical Family

Consider the prevalence of institutionalized torture and similar senseless brutality within, for example, the period of 0-1900 AD in Europe, where the police of Church and King gouged out eyes and severed limbs for stealing bread. Torture to address trivial crimes served no rational purpose because the crimes were motivated by structural socio-economic forces. The only apparent purpose was as sadistic entertainment and the infantile thrill of exerting power over helpless elements. Yet it's well established that this thrill, the general desire to torture others, is a byproduct of childhood abuse. The socio-anthropological evidence points to a rainbow of serious and chronic child and intra-family abuse from verbal to sexual. In other words abuse was more than common throughout at least the past 2000 years of conveniently well documented western history, and likely wherever urbanization has set in, forcing people together to survive yet simultaneously making that survival dependent on larger social institutions and authority forces.

If you were unfortunate and average enough to be cursed with atrocious parenting, what recourse was open to a small child? Well, virtually none unless you were to runaway and find benevolence before starvation, or being sold into slavery. And I would posit with emphasis that such abuse was much more common than today. Dickens may have been a romantic in his portrayal of child abuse in England but the chronological era is not far from our own, and they had the benefit of industrialization with the concomitant employment opportunities (such as they were). Perhaps also it's an element of overly masculine culture priding itself on power over the powerless and domination of the 'weak'. That certainly works to promote and justify violence within the family and within society as a whole. The 'I was abused so I'll abuse everyone smaller than me,' mindset.

Families are not quite the natural everlasting institution envisioned by the moral majority, for families seem much more a simple product of necessity than sacrosanct institution; a flawed and unpleasant collection one seeks extrication from as soon as possible. Indeed, a healthy distance between family members rarely hurts relations.

And indeed for millennia that was not possible, families were stuck together by a collective fear of solitude in a very hostile and hungry world. But now that's simply not the case, and indeed the family breaks down often because of the lack of compelling outside forces holding them together. The breakdown of the family, so lamented by vociferous conservatives, is not the fault of a lack of religion. or even negative social influences it's just a manifestation of the inherent flaws of the nuclear family exposed by a milieu of greater freedoms and economic prosperity.

The traditional family structure may not be obsolete, but its obsolescence is painfully obvious. The true issue becomes one of replacement, or at least modification, preferably one generating a superior product. In other words I think it wiser to worry less about the details of family structure and more about the care, training, and education the child is receiving; product over process just as it should be. 20.08.01

* * *

Torture is the mentally-damaged mind’s way of taking internal, intangible hurt and turning it into a visible form by transferring it onto another in order to express, control, and externalize that pain. Self-inflicted injury is the same pain and mental sickness being directed not at others but onto the self for the same basic reasons – to manifest psychological injury and suffering into a physical form as a distorted way of trying to externalize, cope with, and manage that pain. Both humans and animals are known to intentionally inflict injury upon themselves due to extreme stress as well as physical and mental abuse that they may be exposed to. However, only humans are capable of institutionalizing pain and suffering in order to intentionally perpetuate it. 30.10.04

In an insecure society people strive to be what they are not.

Give Hate A Chance

It used to be one was called 'reactionary' or 'fascist' when certain types didn't like your ideas. Now it's the ever-so-modern 'hater' or hate criminal. And although the derogatory terms have just as little meaning as before the damage to the collective ability to freely communicate is even more pernicious because the actual language is being acutely distorted. This is the abuse of hate. And indeed if banned outright, as politico panderers and moralists wish, they would merely be forced to concoct some new evil to save us from. All this displays a clear ignorance of the need for hate, a facet of a whole equally as crucial as love! For there can be no God without Satan and no good without bad.

Truly, ignorance and arrogance are a positively nefarious combination, a deleterious synergy increasingly fueling the vociferous moral guardians of society from both the left and right. You know, the types that stage a protest when trees are cleared out only to have their houses burn next summer when the ultra-combustible brush and overgrowth bursts into flames. Why these loudmouthed fools are the ones driving policy should be a forefront question to every sane individual. 27.02.01

Party Tricks Volume II

If you pay close attention in a room full of conversing people you'll notice how they start out at minimal volume level of soft tones. Yet as soon as the background level increases even slightly, or one person begins to laugh or speak louder, instantly everyone else increases their own conversational volumes. This creates a feedback loop and within a matter of seconds the room goes from soft tones to a loud roar. It's like a permanent release of potential energy akin to an avalanche. Yet the question remains, how to return everyone to the quiet conversational volume? 04.06.01

The Trolls of Revenge

Isn't it curious how individuals that are guided by hatred, by a monomaniacal desire for revenge against everyone they despise, always end up in trouble? The perception of enemies and friends is often capricious but often broadly inclusive. Even the slightest trifles can generate infinite desire for payback a thousand fold. People whose lives are guided by revenge hold a one way ticket to prison or social ostracism, unless they're wealthy enough to pay their way out or buy temporary friends.

Anger as a sociological concept is not entirely useless, just usually misdirected. Vindictive venom injected into enemies rarely achieves the desired result for the aggressor. But this only fuels a self-punishing cycle because as they see that their enemies are left incompletely destroyed they have more need for attack. After all an enemy less than 100% punished has won! This is why the vengeful usually fail and when up against righteous individuals aware of their self-worth will always lose. Anger and hatred has to have visible effect for it to have any value to the aggressor. A person that can walk away or rise above their attacks has succeeded in deflecting the anger back against the angry because they avoid displaying signs of damage. To be solely motivated by revenge may well yield concrete results but those results will ultimately have little strategic social, or even personal, significance.

The singularly vindictive Trolls afflicting everyday life generally don't need more punishment than they earn themselves as they're remarkably adept at digging their own grave, so to speak. Eventually enemies outnumber the friends and even wealth loses it's luster when it can so easily be gained elsewhere in less offensive company. Since truthfully these wrathful types will create a horde of foes in even the most benign surroundings it seems wise to let them boil in the hottest crucible they can make to vaporize themselves all the quicker Rumpelstiltskin style. 27.12.00

Within American(ized) culture(s) isn't it curious how men want women to act like women but women want men to act like women? Example, women expect men to have all the politeness of tactful, non-offensive social interaction, yet actions and behaviors that are standard for males simply aren't acceptable within the presence of women. Yet for men they don't really care how others act around them, be it crude or polite, but generally they accept that men will often be crude and women polite. This is why anywhere women go the atmosphere changes; good examples include, military and law-enforcement but I'm sure you can think of equally compelling alternates. The mood and even the goals change to suit women, perhaps slowly and subtly but undeniably still. In some cases for the worse but often for the better.

Mind Modes

The more one studies it the more astounding the human mind becomes, really a programmable computer that has unlimited memory despite finite size. Continuing the analogy it's a machine that we program every day of our lives through events, interactions and learning. So I guess one could say that living life is an exercise in chronic self-improvement, or at least the positive aspects.

The really amazing thing is that the modern human mind came about only 40,000 years ago thanks to the intense selective pressures of the Ice-Age. But still my first reaction is how can it be improved? The physical structure of humans is good enough to do just about whatever we need to accomplish. Certain edges could be polished a little sure, but also some limitations would be difficult to overcome, like the ratio of the size of the head to that of the birth-canal. Already a narrow margin for modern woman even to the point of requiring surgery for some. But since we only use a fraction of our brains anyway I think what we have to work with is enough ... to start with anyway.

And I think that humans need to be improved. The problem is no one wants to do it the old fashioned way, grueling survival lifestyles under intense evolutionary stresses. So the only reasonable way to do it is cut and paste, selective enhancements, genetic engineering. Remember the Holological principle: every generation should be better than the previous. If it can be done it will be done. I say it should be done.

Aggression, violence, and physical competition may well be counterproductive historical relics of an animalistic evolutionary era, rather than modern necessities. If improvement now comes from surgically precise, planned genetic engineering rather than blind and blunt, competitive evolution then those old vestiges should be excised from society, or at least mitigated. And to say that one sex can't do this or one sex can't do that is specious. Civilized life no longer requires brawn and brains to succeed. Physical strength is not a guarantee of success, although it still often has vestigial social attraction. So I think that the major difference existing between the sexes is now irrelevant. Success is dependent on the ability to reason, to use the mind to manipulate symbols. Brain chemistry is not the same in both sexes but neither does that preclude either one from success or failure in any mentally challenging endeavor; it's merely different ways of doing things. Future collective success will come not from 'dog eat dog' but 'dog helping dog', from cooperation and intelligent decisions rather than from mutually destructive competition.

One obstacle is cultural and that is neither female nor male mindset presently has the maturity to handle either tactic with even a modicum of aplomb. Not that they can't, just that we so little experience or training to do so. Well, I guess both are pretty good at the mindless competition part. But anything more socially responsible will definitely take some competent cultural inculcation to get both sexes on the right track. 04.12.00

The Poison in Our Daily Bread

No matter what you do, or how magnificently well you do it, if it's conducted within a box or a vacuum, it has no profitability, no ability to sustain the-self. Thus every endeavor must have a means of communications with the outside world. Every product must have a marketplace.

Second, in order to make it worthwhile the exchange must be beneficial for both parties. In other words, one must want the product and the seller must get a benefit from selling it.

Herein lies a paradox, one that bedevils everything. No matter how brilliant and creative one may be, if no one else feels the same way about it one can't use it to further the self economically. Being economically dependent means being socially reliant on others.

The reverse of that is to find what others want and cater to it, but that requires destroying the self and negating your own values in favor of foreign values. This is the trap, the societal pit, the loss of identity inherent within social participation. No one really has the ability to be themselves, they must always sacrifice self-interest for survival. Even the rich must sacrifice in order to keep their business and their money and do whatever it takes to stay in business; really the company owns them and they're servants to the machine. However the chains aren't nearly as painful as for the wage slave.

Most people exchange time as labor for money. They perform a service for a corporate entity in exchange for salary. They gain only immediate sustenance while the corporate entity gains both short term profit as well as interest income to include things like patent rights.

Some create a product and market it, inventors, artists, musicians. They have an advantage in their creativity and the marketing potential of their names. By taking something ordinary (cheap) and making it unique (expensive) such as turning words into novels or paint into paintings, taking a rock and carving it into sculpture or notes into music. This is value-adding to an existing product. Once it is unique it has value and can be marketed. But once again they can only trade products within a marketplace and every marketplace is ruled by the buyer's interests and needs, not the artist's. Therefore the best relationship would be an artist that makes a product that is of mutual interest to both buyer and seller.

But this analysis misses the underlying fundamentals. Marxism and related theorems merely exchange societal roles. Addressing the problems of identity and personal purpose that are so critical to individual and group health requires more than mere economic posturing. Unfortunately, presently the only value a citizen has in our modern culture is measured by what they do. It's like Jeopardy when they introduce the contestants and each one is preceded by their occupation. Think of a agrarian culture where farming and animal husbandry are the sole employers, how would they introduce everyone on Jeopardy then? "Jack Jones a farmer from Topeka Kansas, Jill Smith a cloth maker from Podunk Virginia ..." It doesn't have the same meaning because then it didn't matter what you did; everyone did the same thing - try to survive! That could mean doing anything in any given day from veterinary medicine to bricklaying. Today we're so specialized and mechanized that who we are is no longer relevant, rather it's what we do, what service we provide to the collective that matters. As a consequence an unemployed person is perceived as worthless, they're robbed of identity and they have no value because they're not serving the system. However if you're rich and unemployed than clearly you are so by choice, and your wealth is being used to support the system (if by no other means than taxes) and you now have value. This concept is so insidious, so horrendously degrading, it's astounding that nearly everyone accepts it as inviolate fact, submitting themselves to the indignity and humiliation of a self-destructive order.

It's not sufficient to merely exact revenge against the traitors and profiteers of our present order, nor to demolish the political and legal frameworks they exist within. Our culture as a whole is as much a part of the cancerous infection that is slowly killing us all. Until an ample breadth of the populace is even aware of the toxic qualities of our cultural habits and daily interactions, the poison in our daily bread, they will never be able to change anything for the better even if our Evil Empire were to crumble to dust tomorrow. Our answer is the question -- to question everything. 19.09.00

Sex is fun

The social deregulation of sexuality seems an assault on traditional mores, but then Church edicts covering the topic have been remarkably restrictive for centuries. Just think of ancient Rome or Greece where graphic sex acts adorned public walls and phallic monuments littered the countryside. Sort of a breakdown in the double standard because even when sex is culturally closeted it still happens.

The emotional intertwining of love and sex has similarly disintegrated. Sex now manifests as a mechanized action on the level of the primal compulsion, a structured mode of rape whether either side realizes it or not (because it's purely self-gratification). So the establishment's edicts on sexual conduct haven't vanished they've merely been rewritten.

The credulity of the masses is such that they lap it up as roaches would a pool of blood from a slaughtered beast. Sex is free and fashionable; consequent disease and emotional/psychological damage, an inconvenience like a flat tire on the freeway -- easily rectified with a quick fix-up and then it's back to the party for more, because that's all life is for, right? 05.08.00

Generation Peak

The ‘great generation’ lived during troubled times. Two world wars and a great depression, they struggled against outside forces confident that a better world was being drafted through their sweat and blood. Their descendants the ‘boomer’ generation existed on a historical cusp, a world of prosperity and peace completely unheard of before. Their enemies were a combination of external and internal forces, Korean and Vietnam wars, social 'crisis', but those didn't pose a tangible or serious threat to national security and future; the Cold War was psychological, a war of words and threats that neither side truly dared to carry out, because it was impossible to win anything. This generation generally believed that a brighter future awaited them, especially given their history and the things they have seen such as miracle drugs, cures for crippling disease (like polio), and widespread financial prosperity. Their descendants have parallels to the 'great generation', their grandparents. They’re struggling against enemy forces but not external ones; these enemies are domestic - gangs, drugs, disease, and economic inequality. They have a much dimmer view of the future as not being a never ending upward climb into utopia. Indeed with the same vigor that their grandparents believed the future was bright many of these people see the future as dim.

After working to achieve all the things they want but shouldn’t have we are left with a dilemma of our own creation. A generation spoiled, or more accurately so used to getting what they want that they become increasingly incapable of dealing with the minor annoyances, stresses and difficulties of everyday life. Microwave mentality, petty violence, anger and self-centered viewpoints. For example in 1950 they claimed the greatest problems in 2000 would be smog, but turns out it’s road rage! Why care about anything beside myself when that’s all that matters right? Culture and consumerism panders to the self, compounding social psychological dysfunction. Could it be that this cusp of our civilization has been reached with the present power generation, the Clinton presidency and the CEO world economic dominance culture? The masters of the world who care not a bit for things beyond their 401k and stock portfolio? And what of the reverse slope Generation-X, the Pepsi generation, sold-out and bought up; they have too much and yet not enough. 28.12.99

Looks Aren’t Everything

I think that physical appearances are over-valued in our society. Really unless you’re a freak or super beautiful then you’re average with all the little flaws that ‘everybody’ has to varying degrees, it just doesn’t matter because people judge a person by the words they speak, not so much physical appearance which is two-dimensional and doesn’t convey personality.

Thus what a person says is a more critical judgment factor in social settings. Evidence the fact that if you say little or nothing you will feel invisible in social settings because others have no handles to attach to you and judge you.

Most people don’t have any physical features that stand out, they’re average; and average doesn’t mean anything by itself. It’s like white on white. In order for personality to be expressed people have to see some black on top of that white background. That black takes the form of verbal communications. This is why the fast talkers and actors become the most admired people in social settings, not for their appearances which are generally quite average; this is despite what the print media wants us to believe and indeed what our cultural common sense tells us. And in fact I would posit that beauty may even be a byproduct of verbal personality. Example Bill Clinton who is certainly an average looking individual but his verbal-personality ratings are sky-high, and this creates an aura that even makes him attractive, well, to some anyway. 16.03.99

The metaphors of language betray the underlying motives. Example the use of the word 'cute' to mean eligible or highly acceptable male, the female motive is that adult male could be exploited to yield an infant of cute qualities, one with successful, malleable properties and attributes. The tenacity of Christian morality has failed to reach the depths of language as evidenced by common phrases like the undesirable nature of weakness, weak used to refer to the quality of coffee or a film plot. Stupid being another one, an undesirable human trait or a faulty device, etc.

"Married Paramedics Bickering Over Best Way To Restart Heart" - Onion faux newspaper headline.

Relationship

Once there was a terrible comedian and a persistent heckler. Everywhere the comedian would go, every stage played on, the heckler was right there in the front row shouting demeaning phrases like "you're not funny" and "get of the stage" - just being about as obnoxious as possible. Finally in one town a review journalist for a local paper went to see the standup routine and was surprised to find the comedian playing to an audience of one - the heckler. The comedian just kept going on despite the relentless barrage of taunts and insults quipping away one lame gender comparison, one lame wisecrack after another - 'women be different than men!' After the performance was over the reporter asked the comedian why they tolerated that heckler night after night, and then did an entire routine to a crowd of one! The comedian responded, "are you kidding, that's my most reliable audience!" Clearly wondering how serious the comedian was, and equally troubled as to what he'll be able to write for the paper through this entire charade, he went to the heckler and asked, "why do you spend so much time badgering this one comedian?" The heckler replied, "are you kidding, this is my favorite comedian!"