Depression Is An Adaptive Evolutionary Mechanism

Abstract: Why depression? Because those who can’t contribute to the way, must get out of the way. Humanity is not just here, there and everywhere. Humanity is a force that goes. And produces… More mind! Those who can’t help produce mind are enticed to self-destruct (by long psychologically buried evolutionary mechanisms). There is reduced compassion for the mentally unproductive (including self-compassion).

***

It is wiser to be optimistic than pessimistic because if one is too pessimistic, one gets depressed and one does nothing… and, ultimately, wisdom is born out of action. So extreme pessimism contradicts the very nature of the Sapiens species. For example one needs experience to learn, but experience needs action. Physical action, mental action, or a mix.

This brings up a question: how does one reconcile wisdom (in the species) and depression (in the individual)? Simple: the latter reinforces the former.

No action, no wisdom, also explains how depression became an adaptive mechanism in the advanced species, but especially humans. Mentally unsuccessful and, or mentally unmotivated humans became prone to self-destruction, in a phenomenon similar to apoptosis, what’s useless, dysfunctioning and causing trouble is eliminated. Depression ensures that elimination. 

Humanity’s existence as a species rests on mental superiority, discovering new, more correct ideas, and spreading them culturally. New ideas can be found only through experimenting, and thinking hard about experiments one has set-up. No hard thinking, no survival.

Mental activity, and cultural spreading of the ideas it produces, requires energy, lots of it. Should one be unable to muster this energy, one does not contribute to the advancement, or even sheer sustainability, of the human species, which rests on continual innovation (as humans tend to destroy their environment, they are forced to continually adapt to the new worlds they create).

But then the mere existence of an individual uses resources, a usage of resources which deprive other more mentally creative humans. So the species’ persistence is better served by eliminating less mentally productive individuals.

This train of thought does not support the disappearance of the physically weak but rather the (self) elimination of the mentally unproductive: if they couldn’t think, they better be served for dinner… So wise old crippled blind grandmothers are OK, as long as they can evoke tales of times long gone. Suicidal youth are also OK, as long as they go kill that encroaching lion.

Patrice Ayme

Dying Of A Broken Heart Is The Evolutionary Thing To Do

Is dying of a broken heart an evolutionary trait? Yes. Because it saves energy whena person’s utility to the group has vanished. The sudden death of Queen Elizabeth drew attention to this: one day she commented on a dark cloud coming to a photographer, as she could see a storm gathering in the distance, from her Balmoral castle in Scotland… a few minutes before receiving the new female Prime Minister, Liz Truss. The next day the Queen was dying. 

WHY WOULD DYING OF A BROKEN HEART BE EVOLUTIONARY ADVANTAGEOUS?

Survival of the fittest means also not just the fittest individual, but the fittest group of individuals. With human species, old individuals didn’t bring the bacon in, but brought in how to bring the bacon in, and many other pieces of wisdom only revealed in the fullness of time…

In other words old individuals such as Queen Elizabeth, the elderly, weak and difformed could still bring irreplaceable know-how which prehistoric people needed to survive. 

However, such Old individuals tend to die readily when their heart is broken. And not only them, but younger ones too. 

Why? 

How and why did the broken heart trait evolve? 

Because the “heart” is an indicator of happiness. That happiness flows, in part, from the social need the individual feels to be personally filling up. A broken heart indicates one has lost social utility.

True happiness also flows from satisfying animal needs: hunger, thirst come first.

However, for the old, many of these animal needs stopped being so pressing, for a number of reasons, including sensory failure and other basic mechanisms failure: for example, there is less hunger and thirst to satisfy when one feels neither hungry nor thirsty.  Cuddling is probably still an oxytocin enhancer, but a cat will do.

What remains in older age is the need to fulfill a social function. In prehistoric society that meant the old teaching to the less experienced. A broken heart, though, indicates that this function is not fulfilled anymore. The old one has just become a mouth to feed. Short in food yet pragmatic, many North American Indian tribes left the old to die in the wilderness.

Queen Elizabeth at 96…

Charles III was amply prepared, the queen, undermined by infirmities didn’t have the love of her life by her side, Philip, who died at 99, after driving until 98 (and causing an accident when he was blinded by the low sun). Philip, an authentic war hero (he played a crucial role as a commander in a crucial sea battle against the fascist italian navy), was of great counsel and the queen may have felt out of her usual depth advising all including Prime Ministers and family members, now that she had lost her sounding board.

The queen had lost her utility, her broken heart told her, so she died.  

Some have professed to want the queen to die an “excruciating death”. They are typically employed, not to say owned, by the plutocratic establishment so called “universities” which has put them in charge of stupidifying the youth. The idea was that she should suffer for the enslaving empire (except slavery stopped being lawful in England in 1066 CE… when England was really born and not just a Viking playground anymore). However, we do not choose how we were born. Queen Elizabeth had a dignified life and made pretty well out of it. Could she have done better according to my own criterions? Of course, but that’s from out there, Africa, America, and in insight.

“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying,” Dr. Uju Anya, an associate professor of second language acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in a tweet on Thursday. “May her pain be excruciating.” 

Anya knows no history: none of the alleged crimes happened during Elizabeth’s life.

Jeff Bezos, the world’s third-richest man in stock market capitalization, then quoted Anya’s tweet and tweeted back: “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better?” 

“I don’t think so,” Bezos added. “Wow.” 

Later Carnegie Mellon said Anya’s hatred “absolutely do not represent the vie of the university“…

But Anya’s Deep State satanic influencers who direct that her and her ilk be employed in making the youth better, Pluto’s way, saw hatred through division. Anya does her job well. However hatred, in this day and age, in its ultimate expression, is nuclear war. Anya then pushes for it by glorifying misplaced hatred, and teaching that this is the righteous way.

Elizabeth never did that. That made her a better role model than many a “humanity” department has to offer nowadays…

Patrice Ayme

Elizabeth Philip was her man when she met him, and she was 13…

***

P/S: I am of course against the monarchy, an institution obsolete already 25 centuries ago. However, it would have been better if the British-Indian Raj had kept Elizabeth as queen (no silly wars between Muslims and Hindus, killin millions, as happened). The preceding essay is just about a broken heart, and one must recognize that, given her karma, as an individual, except for not expressing herself clearly on the question of Brexit (she was against it), she did a very good job… Whatever her job was supposed to be.  

Monarchy keeps on reappearing. In Britain, it’s constitutional… Yet, all the way down the Eighteenth Century, it could be nasty. 

Queen Anne, upon accessing the throne in 1701, immediately declared war on France (Louis XIV of France had recognized earlier the rightful heir, James III ,the “Old Pretender”, as rightful king of England and Scotland (September), prompting Parliament to legislate for an oath requiring a public abjuration of the Stuarts’ claim to the throne). Queen Anne, upon dying in 1714, was succeeded by someone from… Hannover (Germany). It’s British plutocracy which rules…

Last time a monarch intervened, in England, with a veto against parliament was Queen Anne in 1708, when she blocked the reestablishment of a Scottish militia by the London Parliament in Scotland, “An Act for settling the Militia of that Part of Great Britain called Scotland”… the fear of the Queen being then that Scotland would join France in battling England…

It is the ongoing exercise of the veto power of the monarch which precipitated the US war of independence, because George III kept on refusing “assent” for many laws proposed by local governments in America…

Tyrant Putin is a monarch, but he doesn’t have the excuse Elizabeth did, to have inherited the charge… so that makes him technically what the Greeks called a tyrant (from unique in Greek)…. besides his advertised desire to bury the world in radioactive ashes if it doesn’t accept Kremlin suzerainty.

Evolution Is A Voyage Through The Cosmos

Advancing science is not just fostering understanding, and power, it is also a teacher for our logical acumen, the lessons of whom can be carried all over human common sense and sensibilities. 

The classic movie “2001 A Space Odyssey” pretends that extraterrestrials made apes into proto-humans. Once proto-humans have reached the Moon, extraterrestrials tinker again with evolution. It was beautiful when written, but now it sounds rather silly and contrived: if evolution had reached the ape level, it would surely get to the human level, given a few million years… As it did: no need to intervene at this late stage; getting to apes was hard and took hundreds of millions of animal evolution, but once there, the mix of cultural and physiological evolution would reach a singularity of progress. 

Another flaw of “2001” was the assumption of extraterrestrial civilization: not only it is to be helpful, it is also unlikely to exist. Habitable planets are clearly in the millions, if not billions, in the galaxy. But conditions stable enough to enable a star traveling civilization are probably exceedingly rare.

***

By the preceding I do not mean that it is boring out there, and that life on Earth was not influenced by the cosmos. Quite the opposite: it’s not boring, and the cosmic influences are not just great, but primordial.

Not only that, but the cosmic environment has an influence on evolutionary smarts. Yes, there is such a thing.

Official evolution theory in recent generations held that evolution was the fruit of chance (haphazard mutations) and necessity (a better adapted organism will reproduce better). This standard “Darwinism”, also known as “Selection of the Fittest”. It is unlikely that Darwin believed just in that evolution mechanism, since, after all, he went to Scotland to study Lamarck, the discoverer of biological evolution in its full many-million years’ glory (evolution itself was known and exploited by the Ancient Greek breeders…). 

Lamarck, after spending decades behind his microscopes, believed that there was a mysterious force for complexification, and that usage created evolution. Although the details are not in, we can guess how that happens.

DNA has weak hydrogen bonds at its core. Submitted to a changed cellular environment, those bonds will loosen and reform, enabling mutation. The changed cellular environment can arise from a changed ecology (something the animal consciously controls)… But it can also arise from other changes, such as a change of radiation levels.

***

Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977 and flew by Jupiter and Saturn, targeting Titan. Voyager 2 was launched previously, in August 1977, but on a slower trajectory, and flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Thanks to gravity slingshot effects using the giant planets, both spacecrafts are now headed out of the solar system into interstellar space on hyperbolic trajectories (they are not coming back).

Nuclear powered, the Voyagers’ instrument suites have proven hardy. Few failed, and now five scientific teams, 45 years later, serve the VIM, the Voyager Interstellar Mission, an extension of the Voyager primary mission that was completed in 1989 with the close flyby of Neptune by the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

Humanity is heading for the stars. For real.

***

Here is Science Magazine pondering in a long article why it would be a good thing to launch an Interstellar Probe (IP) going at the speed of the Earth-Moon distance every three hours: THE LONG SHOT

The Voyager probes raised perplexing questions as they exited the Solar System. Now, scientists have conceived new missions to interstellar space. (28 JUL 2022; by Richard Stone.)

Voyager found that 75% of the cosmic rays heading our way from interstellar space get filtered out in the heliosphere’s outer reaches. If the encounter with the next cloud squeezes the heliosphere all the way down to Earth’s orbit, life forms would be exposed to an intense radiation environment that would riddle DNA with mutations, Brandt says. (Brandt is John Hopkins APL space physicist and chief scientist on the Interstellar Probe mission concept study.)

There’s evidence of such an event around the time early hominids were just beginning to pick up stone tools, and Brandt muses on a possible connection. “Let that creep up your spine for a moment,” he says. In recent years, scientists have discovered iron-60 isotopes in ocean crust samples dating from 2 million to 3 million years ago. Iron-60 is not found naturally on Earth: It’s forged in the cores of large stars. So, either a nearby supernova blasted the heliosphere with the iron dust, or the heliosphere drifted through a dense cloud laden with iron-60 from a previous supernova. Either way, Brandt says, “The heliosphere was way in, and we had a full blast of galactic cosmic rays and interstellar matter for a long, long time.” To look for relics of other such events, IP could use plasma wave antennas to essentially take the temperature of nearby electrons. Hot regions might mark the blast paths of material from past supernovae.

***

Philosophically, that is on the grandest scale of the plausible, what does this all mean? First that cosmic radiation may have been the good fairy which accelerated human evolution. No need for extraterrestrials as in “2001”, cosmic machinery had its hand in the growth of human intelligence. A rational aura from this is that radiation shouldn’t not just be correlated to fear (as X rays, radiotherapy, and carbon free nuclear energy already show).

Second, life on Earth is much more cosmos dependent than it looks: not just sun weather (sun explosions, sun activity, up or down), but also cosmic weather are not just important for humanity, they may have played a primordial role. 

Third, the Voyager probes were intended to take the first detailed pictures of the outer planets. They became the first interstellar probes thanks to their usage of the heat of three Plutonium cartridges to keep warm and generate electricity. Plutonium is mighty, but those Plutonium batteries are still running out of power. Due to radioactive decay converted into heat, the Voyagers’ Radioactive Thermoelectric  Generators are losing about .8% of their power output each year. So the heat was dialed down on some of the instruments, which remarkably kept working (the ultraviolet detector still works at minus 80 C while it was designed for a minimum of minus 35C… Same with the Cosmic Ray System on Voyager 2). 22 systems were turned off in Voyager 1 to save power over the decades (as of 2022 CE)… However the ducts for the hydrazine propellant keeping the spacecrafts’ High Gain Antenna aiming towards Earth cannot be allowed to freeze…

In any case, after 50 years, the on-going operations of the Voyagers is not just a testimony to great nuclear and electronic technology, but keeps on bringing unexpected discoveries contradicting previous logic, that is keep on bringing great science. 

Those who argue for shrinking civilization should be reminded of the feats tech can accomplish, and the understanding it leads to. It turns out indeed that some of the unexpected results of the Voyagers were unexpected because the logic used for these predictions was not subtle enough. With more subtlety in the computations, we get some of what the Voyagers showed to be true.

In cases like that, when reality shows us that our logic is coming short, what is established is the necessity for more rigorous and clever logic, and the mistake(s) that were done… And the lessons carry everywhere, especially in complicated fields such as politics, economics, sociology, the human sciences. 

Hard science forces us to learn to think better, when time and time again, little innocuous reasonings we thought were sufficient turn out grossly mistaken because of little details we overlooked… which, after all, were not that small in the consequences they bear.

Launch more Interstellar probes (China, heavens bless, is planning two…)

Humanity is a voyage to the great beyond. Claiming it’s not, and actively blocking the voyage, especially in the interest of anti-intellectual, parsimonious or puritan ethics, is inhuman.

Patrice Ayme

 

 

It turns out the shape of the diverse features here are not as expected, or even their nature. The Termination Shock turns out to be rather spherical (it was expected to be comet-like). Also it is less of a shock than expected. The Heliosheath (confusely named heliosphere above) turns out to be flatter than expected (thus why Voyager 2 came out of it faster than expected, as V2 plunges below the (sort of) plane made by the Solar System). In retrospect, many of these characteristics should have been expected, the logic previously used was not subtle enough.

Is Intelligence The Definition Of Quantum Life? … Spatial Consequences…

IS LIFE, QUANTUM VERSION, CLEVER ENOUGH TO CREATE WHAT WE CAN’T? Yet? 

Obviously… As humanity gets beaten up by COVID 19, one may want to ponder how clever life is. Is COVID 19 a clever answer? To a question which was not asked enough? Do you, humanity, have enough decency to be clever enough to survive? What about space? How does life survives that? OK, it’s not exactly booming in Antarctica’s Dry Valleys. 

There are two aspects, contradicting each other, one disfavorable to life, the other favorable, which may not have been given enough weight in evaluating Advanced Intelligence in space. First the situation of Earth is special, very stable, in part from having a large Moon (compare with Mars’ wild rotation axis tumbling, with super winters, and super summers). Plus, the solar system is historically stable: no supernova exploded real close in the last 4 billion years. Many are the disasters possible, out there in space.

Disaster land: Scott, who discovered them, called Antarctica Dry Valleys the “valleys of death”. Katabatic winds regularly reach 300 kilometers per hour, and more, all the way down them… This is only 1,300 kilometers from the South Pole…

Red Dwarves, which are both most frequent and most unstable, are a case in point, with huge flares, Coronal Mass Ejections. They may be OK for human colonization, but biological evolution to multicellular level, is something else.

40 BILLION EARTHS? Yes & NO.

However, and in the other direction, it is likely that biological evolution is in great part a Quantum Process. Basically, to put it bluntly, the Quantum is intelligent (think about the interference pattern from the double slit: how does the photon know where to go? More prosaically, electrons find, Quantum Mechanically, the lowest energy solutions, as if they were little sorcerers: if that’s not clever, what is? This is used crucially in life forms extracting energy from the sun).

The delicate architecture of DNA is Quantum-sensitive to environmental conditions: if things change inside a cell, DNA can change in a selection-of-the fittest DNA. A process quicker than the selection of the fittest species, and which will appear as clever telenomic adaptation harnessing necessity beyond chance. 

So Quantum biology may be clever enough to survive in conditions which look impossible to us… Or even to be created in impossible conditions (think Red Dwarves).

The most sinister interpretation of the Fermi Paradox is not that civilizations don’t last. It is that they are in hiding, because it’s a jungle out there. That’s the Dark Forest theme found in many science fiction novels. Exploring Earth, Mars, Europa, Enceladus, and the closest star systems, should throw light on the subject. It’s possible that life is stuck at a very primitive level, all over. Indeed we don’t know how life evolved on Earth, thus, how likely the different steps… Quantum Computers should help with lowest energy solutions to find those probabilities…

The Antarctic Dry Valleys are basically deprived of life. However, there is some.

Researchers have discovered that Antarctica Dry Valleys are home to a variety of extremophiles (organisms that live in extreme environments). Among them are lichen and mosses, communities of microbes (including cyanobacteria), and nematodes (microscopic worms). Researchers continue to find and study these and other organisms and their adaptations, which allow them to survive in one of the most punishing environments on the planet. A natural question is: how well would they do on Mars? For that matter, is there life on the summit of Mount Everest? Everest has bare rock expanses, not far from the summit, in conditions reminiscent of the Dry Valleys. Now, of course the highest atmospheric pressure on Mars corresponds to 28,000 meters on Earth… (it’s at the lowest point of Mars geoid, 8,200 meters below it… A more subtle observation is that they may not have had enough space and time, and stable enough an environment to evolve…

Life is smart. Maybe that’s its definition. How smart? Our own expansion away from Earth will help us figure it out…

Patrice Ayme

REMORSE: When WILL To TRUTH Bites Back

Abstract: Many human emotions make sense when analyzed in the context of humanity’s purpose… which is to establish truth. Humans are truth machines.

Where does this strong emotion, remorse come from? From the Will to Truth, and, more specifically the will to moral truth. Remorse entices humans to obsess So remorse is a good thing, a teaching attitude. Individuals and societies should practice it more. 

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Emotions Such As Remorse, Which Ground Morality, Are Grounded In The Last Billion Years:

Morality, considered in its most fundamental way, is revealed to be a neurological, a neurogenetical (in the sense of genesis) aptitude to manage optimally the ways which enable the survival of the species… This neuroethics is more or less automatically inherited (in ways science has not fully elucidated yet… but research as deployed here should help). Automatic systems such as walking: when one has two legs, one ends up walking on them, as long as one is in “human” circumstances (that is not stuffed in a small cage; having other walking humans around helps).   

Thus, all and any trait of fundamental moral etiology is grounded in the old ways of our ancestors, some living hundreds of millions of years. A lot of our neurological biochemistry works so well, it has not changed since our fishy ancestors.
***

WHAT IS REMORSE?

The feeling of remorse consists more specifically in deep regret or guilt for a moral wrong committed. Morality (from “mores”, the old ways in Latin) is what insures group survival[1]. For example, the Nazis violated the old ways, the mores, so at least 8.5 million Germans died (that was about 10% of all Germans) [2]. 

So remorse addresses wrongs against the ways which insure group survival. Remorse is the motivation, the spur for much truth seeking of a social nature. 

***

An Example: Afghan Remorse:

The USA has been officially at war in Afghanistan for 18 years, the longest US war, ever. In truth, the order of attack was given on July 3, 1979, by “Democratic” president Jimmy Carter. The cynical excuse to justify the attack was to harass the Soviets, allied to the Republic of Afghanistan with Muslim Fundamentalists (the true reason, laying below, was even more sinister…. It was to insure no Franco-Russian sphere of co-prosperity would grow in Central Asia).

But that immoral war, initially launched, by Carter, for the indefensible reasons, in the most abject way (advise Muslim Fundamentalists to attack schools for girls)…  is not the subject of this essay. Instead the subject of remorse is.

From the New York Times: “My Friend Lives Inside the War on Terror. Listen to Him.”

“A moment of moral reckoning came when Specialist Murphy had to conduct a body cavity search of a college professor who could barely walk without a cane, during his prison intake for some unknown crime.

“And here I was in my United States Army uniform and here was this very sensitive looking grandfather-type guy, and just the … I don’t know. It kind of was one of those moments where I was just taken aback and I just was affected.”

All the while there were nightly mortar attacks. Rockets, too. There were ambushes at the gate and explosives on the roads. 

But MORAL INJURY — the damage to the soul caused by participating in something unjust — has a wide blast radius for anyone with a conscience. The ambiguity of military operations since 9/11 are fertile ground for moral injury. Average Americans may feel guilt or shame for the conduct of the war on terrorism — the pardoning of war criminals or the indefinite jailing, without trial, of men at Guantánamo or the civilian casualties caused by drone strikes — but it can be devastating for those who are a part of it.

To keep from being desensitized, he told me, he resolved to learn all his prisoners’ names and listen to all the questions they had for him during the twice-daily head counts.”

Moral injury? A good concept, because it reflects reality. Human beings are made prone to moral injury, so they can be hurt, and, hence, learn from it. 

***

SEARCH FOR TRUTH REQUIRES REHASHING THE PAST:

Human beings with a normally functioning mental machinery tend to relive past events and to regret their actions. Some sneer that it’s useless to relive the past. But of course, if such were the case, all literature would be of no interest and be gone. Besides, we would never examine our lives, thus, according to Socrates, would not have lives worth living. 

Less amusingly, and more fundamentally, if we didn’t revisit the past, we would learn nothing as learning consists into backtracking over what one thought one knew, finding all the inputs which preceded the errors, and proceed to the probable truth by systematic elimination of failing logic or bad data. Those who can’t revisit the past, can’t learn. When one can’t learn, one may suspect it has to do with inability to revisit the past.  

Some call learning by trial, error, and rehashing what went wrong, the “scientific method”, insinuating “science” is new. We the smarties have been doing science for 500 million years, it’s our home. Humans, who are truth machines, do much more of science than our beastly ancestors. Thus we thrive from much more equity seeking and remorse… among other apparently weird, very human behaviors.

***

WW 2 Hirohito riding proud with fellow criminal army idiots

An Example of Insufficient Remorse: Japan

Japan declared war to all of South East Asia in a period of half a century, concluded by the two atomic explosion, and the immediate threat of a third atomic strike. The Japanese invasions killed up to 50 million people, most of them civilians. By contrast, Japan suffered around 2.5 million dead… most of them Japanese troops which died of starvation. US bombings of Japan, conventional or not, killed less than 700,000… Thus, however horrifying the death toll was for Japan, it’s not commensurate to the death toll Japan inflicted to the the rest of the world… And in particular Korea, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia (to put the aggressed countries in chronological order).

Germany, starting in 1945, recognized its crimes against humanity, through remorse which brought genuine atonement (see below; atonement took decades: top Nazis like von Manstein stayed influential for decades, preventing recognition of the German resistance against Hitler).

As he was preparing his 1952 speech at a ceremony to commemorate Japan’s return to independence with the end of the U.S. occupation, Hirohito insisted that he “must include the word remorse”. Hirohito was in excellent position to express “remorse” as he was nominally in charge. Hirohito felt that, instead of surrender, he wished he had been able to end the war earlier. He also privately expressed horror at the atrocities committed by the Japanese military, according to the documents. But he also said that the military was so powerful that he couldn’t influence it.

Hirohito wish to express remorse was relayed to then-Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, who advised against it. However, since then, the present Japanese emperor, grandson of Hirohito, has expressed “deep remorse”. However these things take time to percolate down throughout society. The switch of Japan from nuclear to massive coal, presently underway with the complicity of Australia, shows that Japanese remorse doesn’t go far enough yet.

More of the same Hirohito riding high. The problem with such plutocrats is that they ride on hubris, and with hubris they blind the peasants. Clearly the imperial position, symbol of hubris, per se, should be cancelled in Japan (in China too: they justify each other…

)***

EQUITY BRINGS TRUTH:

Experiments have shown monkeys attach an overwhelming importance to truth: submitted to unfair situations, they can cut the Gordian Knot by attacking the experimenter. Why is equity so important to primates? Because being just insures the survival of the group, by making sure they all get taken care enough. Thus one would expect all social animals with intelligent societies to have a developed sense of equity. There is some evidence of this with, say, lions, wolves, hyenas.

Now equity has the equal sign therein: before having some equity, one needs to have some truth (to find out what’s equal; hence the power of equations!) Without truth, no equity. Conversely, much truth is socially, culturally derived (monkeys and apes don’t discover all by themselves foods and pharmaceuticals in the forest: they learn it from their parents, elders…). So equity and truth are entangled.

***

Atonement is Jewish, Remorse, French:

Remorse is often conceptually entangled with “atonement”, particularly in the USA, of course… Atonement is any change of attitude to create unity, to make many “at one” (at-one-ment).    In other words, “atonement” is a more primitive form of psychology than true remorse. To survive, the monkeys need to be “at one” (Latin adunare “unite,” from ad “to, at” (see ad-) + unum “one.”). Atonement is tribal, something monkeys and other advanced social animals (say wolves) have plenty of practice, to constitute the group which will allow them to live. 

Unity is most major in the USA, otherwise they would have none (since Americans are immigrants who came from all over the world, the US traditions use every possible tricks to create unity). Translating “Day of Atonement” gives Yom Kippur in Hebrew, the most sacred celebration of the Jews.

In a country such as France, an old instinct says that survival comes from mental diversity, not “atonement”.  Indeed, France got its unity from diversity! (Now Britain and the USA, descendant states from France are also ruled by that notion… historically to a lesser extent, but they caught up…)

Hence is France atonement is practiced only very reluctantly, to the point that the notion, this side of Vichy, is not even conceptualized…

In a country such as France, one would expect only a fascist government to set-up a day of atonement, repentance, etc. Right, this sort of thing happened in the Middle Ages… Times of great theological fascism and plutocracy, indeed. And that’s precisely why the late Middle Ages have bad press nowadays. Also then, in the Middle Ages, the Pope would go once a year to the Synagogue in Rome and try to persuade the Jews to convert to Catholicism: a fight of universalism, as Catholicism means just that. Catholicism proved more universal than Yom Kippur: there are barely more Jews now than under Rome, whereas the Christo-Islamists have multiplied like rodents (there are more than three billions)… Christo-Islamism expanded, precisely because it celebrated universalism, that it, to some extent, diversity, rather than Jewish atonement, unity as necessary, to plaster over the fragility…

***

True remorse is more specifically human, it rises above the herd to question the lonely conscience. Nostalgia and a capacity to sit away from oneself, let others be, and, more generally, listening to life speaking for itself, are not far behind. 

Want the truth? Learning to bite back at your own soul should be part of your arsenal!

Patrice Ayme

***

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[1] Medieval Latin remorsum” a biting back or in return,” noun use of neuter past participle of Latin remordere “to vex, torment disturb,” literally “to bite back, bite again”

Medieval Latin phrase remorsus conscientiæ (“remorse of the conscience,” 

 

One could also say, some Medievalists, obsessed as they were with words, have got to think about it, that re-morse is uncannily close to re-mores (refurbishing one’s mores…)

***

[2] These are minimal numbers. I use spanking new statistics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_casualties_in_World_War_II

Notice that includes 5.5 million dead young men, the soldiers, presumably the best stock of the German “race”…

 

We Eat Meat Therefore We Think, Thus We Are

Man self created above ape, thanks to the trick of eating meat (and making war to predators) in a much more effective fashion than chimpanzees could. That was no mean feat: in some cultures, chimpanzees are obsessed with meat, and can eat more than a pound of it a day, every day. They chose to cling to the trees. Our ancestors, instead, went where chimp didn’t try to dare go before; the savanna. Now we have Moon, Mars, Europa, Enceladus to go to.

So evolutionary speaking, the creation of the human species adapted to the ecological niche of the carnivorous, savanna ambling killer ape we created for ourselves. Yes, it was red in blood, claw, and tiny weapons. So important are weapons and meat eating to creating thinking, this is so true that Homo Floresiensis, who derived directly from Homo Erectus (and not the Homo Antecessor then Archaic Homo Sapiens route) was found with plenty of tiny but extremely lethal weapons.

I meat therefore I think: not even tragic, and certainly true.

A way of life creates a way of metabolizing food. Rats, when they exercise more, synthetize  vitamin C more. Not so humans, who don’t synthesize vit C: they are supposed to pick it up inside fruits, because our ancestors ate fruits from tropical trees, for dozens of millions of years.

Now massive meat eating has characterized the human ancestors and driven their evolution, for more than 5 million years. So it’s very unlikely that human physiology has not adapted to that fact: our deep human physiology is carnivorous. Hence not eating meat is healthy… simply because it is, literally, inhuman. 

For million of years, no human population had a vegan diet, for the good and simple reason that it kills (from lack of vit. B12, L Carnitine, etc.). Not even gorillas, chimps or orangutans, or even bonobos have it, either. All love meat, and need it.

We need to get re-acquainted with reality. Our reality. Our conquest and control of the planet, now our true and good spaceship Earth, arose from our creator, evolution. We have been master of our destiny. We now need to control what drives evolution, survival.

“God” is another word for sorcery… without the magic.

The magic was in the meat, and the culinary arts.

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: The preceding is related to an article in the New York Times:

Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.
The evidence is too weak to justify telling individuals to eat less beef and pork, according to new research. The findings “erode public trust,” critics said.

By Gina Kolata

Sept. 30, 2019

Public health officials for years have urged Americans to limit consumption of red meat and processed meats because of concerns that these foods are linked to heart disease, cancer and other ills.

But on Monday, in a remarkable turnabout, an international collaboration of researchers produced a series of analyses concluding that the advice, a bedrock of almost all dietary guidelines, is not backed by good scientific evidence.

If there are health benefits from eating less beef and pork, they are small, the researchers concluded. Indeed, the advantages are so faint that they can be discerned only when looking at large populations, the scientists said, and are not sufficient to tell individuals to change their meat-eating habits.

Philosophy Suggests That Advanced Homo Is From Eurasia

The spark of a correct guess is often drowned into a sea of wrong guesses. I am going to give here an example of the philosophical method, the method of the artful guesses, used in paleontology, on human origins. The official story goes this way: man originated in Africa, nothing to see, let the professionals do their work. it’s probably wrong.

But a philosopher will say this to a specialist: how do you know that man evolved in Africa? Usual answer: because that’s where the fossils are from.  My counter-objection: conservation bias. And a philosopher would add: why did man evolve so fast? Usual answer: natural selection (as if there was another… even human selection is natural, Homo being part, a meta part, but still a part of nature!) My counter-objection: how to we know there was no accelerator of evolution?

At this point our friend the official paleontologist of the old school will become suspicious: accelerator? And the philosopher will point at technology, the companion and extension of Homo. To live in the most hospitable regions of East Africa, once one has found how to limit losses due to ferocious animals, one doesn’t need technology absolutely: one can just frolic in the buff.

Not the case in Europe, which, for most of the last 2.7 million years was too cold to live without clothing, fire, shelter, etc. And europe was probably Homo occupied for at least two million years (date at which varied Homo Ergaster fossils were found in the Caucasus, a place quite cold in winter in Dmanisi, Georgia. Hominid fossils as well as stone tools were found throughout the 1990s. The fossils looked similar to those of Homo erectus. But in 2000, an unusual jaw was found; its size and shape didn’t quite match H. erectus or any other known hominid that lived about 1.8 million years ago. So the team named Homo georgicus. Since then, more bones belonging to H. georgicus have been unearthed.

Homo Georgicus Female Looking At You Boy, 2 millions years across, and Saber Tooth Tigers Don’t Faze MeMore recently, a completely new Homo species was found in the Philippines, and some Australian researchers have started to claim the human occupation is at least 120,000 years old. Obviously, the hypothesis long-favored in China that human origins are from all over, is gaining ground.

And a philosopher will say: how come that was not obvious all along? Just look at a map, and think!

***

Out Of Africa? Not So Sure, Even If Anglo-Saxon Saint Darwin Proposed It:

Once an English gentleman passed by East Africa, found it quite old, and decreed that man came out of East Africa. n his 1871 book The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin suggested that the hominin group originated in Africa – an idea most anthropologists believe today, because beliefs are easier to remember. But Darwin also wrote that the group may have arisen in Europe because, at that time, fossils of large apes had already been uncovered there.

 

Now, indeed, the climate in East Africa; typical dry, high altitude, is prospitious for preserving fossils. So naturally very old hominin fossils were found there. It is a case of all the drunks finding all the keys below all the lamps.

 

Hominins are a group of primates that includes modern humans, more or less extinct humans like Neanderthals and Denisovans, our immediate ancestors, and more distant species such as the mysterious Homo Antecessor, Homo Erectus, Homo Habilis, and earlier species on extinct branches, including australopiths like the famous Lucy. It is harder to find their fossils in Europe, because the climate and soils there were harder for fossil conservation.

 

So what happens? Rare fossils are found in temperate areas, and many of them… don’t fit the “Out of Africa” story. For example one, just one, fossil found in Italy looks ancestral to some forms found in Africa. Fossils of a 7.2-million-year-old ape called Graecopithecus that once lived at Nikiti in Greece seems to have small canines, plus hominin-like “fused” roots to one of its premolars. In 2017, a team cautiously concluded that Graecopithecus might be a very early hominin.

Under this scenario, the 8 to 9-million-year-old Nikiti ape could represent a group of “proto-hominins” that gave rise to hominins in Europe, represented by Graecopithecus at 7.2 million years old. Hominins then would have migrated into Africa around 7 million years ago.

***

Conservation Bias Beware:

Conservation of things can introduce a “conservation bias”. An example: the Egyptian desert climate preserves old paint very well. However, Egyptians were not the only ones using paint in the past. The “Picts” of Scotland who confronted the Romans were called that way, the “Painted” (Picti) because they were covered with colors. Due to damp Scotland, those colors didn’t get preserved (although they beat the Romans)… Nor was the Picts’ writing. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t write… they wrote.

In general fossil are not conserved well in a wet, biologically active climate.

***

Impenetrable Africa:

Subtropical areas are one thing:  they typically have a wet season, are endowed with savannah park, and are easy to penetrate. Full tropical areas, though, are much less welcoming of human travel. A further problem is that most of the savannah park is crisscrossed by forest galleries, forests built around water ways. A simple forest gallery in Africa is more than a wall. It’s a chain of obstacles with obscurity, exuberant vegetation, tse tse flies, dangerous animals, snakes, spiders, crocs, ambushes… A forest gallery, with its profusion of trees and lianas, not to say leopards and giant carnivorous rats, can make hundreds of meters, and sometimes kilometers of nearly impassable jungle.

Forest galleries partition a lot of the tropics into small pockets which don’t communicate with each other.Hence the profusions of extremely varied languages in Africa. (In my quasi-native Senegal, six languages ruled, some tonal, others not; they are mixed, with pockets all over!)

***

Gigantic Eurasia, Garden of the Gods, Easy Travel:

But then look at a map: the regions of East Africa susceptible of maximum accelerated human evolution (temperate, high altitude reasonably wet) are a small fraction, no more than 5% of what Eurasia offered… Once enough technology to resist the cold had been invented. Then wet, temperate Eurasia, presented an enormous area in which human groups could evolve, trade, compete, exchange ideas. Moreover, as I said, to just subsist in Eurasia one was technologically spurred more than elsewhere… namely in the tropical areas.

Most of the world temperate area is located in Eurasia, and particularly in Europe. Very little is found in Africa.

Eurasia, instead is easy to travel across… if one is a Mongol, some would object. Indeed, there is a giant steppe from Hungary to Korea, and the Huns and Mongols used it, a lot. But they were not the first to do so. The Indo-Europeans did this, much earlier. From West of Mongolia, in the Altai, they could go west to Europe, south to India, and east to China. And they did. Not coincidentally, the first Denisovan was found at Denis’ cave, in the Altai.

It is known that many advances of Chinese civilization were launched by European types originating from the Altai, 5,000 years ago. I suggest the same mechanism of dissemination of people and ideas was at work already two million years ago. A hint is that Chinese scientists claim to have discovered human usage of fire, in China, 1.3 million years ago.

***

Conclusion: If one visited from another star system, one would find likely that humanity emerged in the largest continent, Eurasia. All the more as it was more challenging technologically, and the easiest to trade people, goods and ideas. Call that the anti-Tasmanian Effect. The Tasmanian effect is that an isolated society which has it all too easy, will devolve (Tasmania is temperate and got isolated after the last glaciation):

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/tasmanian-effect/

The anti-Tasmanian effect is that a maximally exposed mental maelstrom of a society will be most creative. But that carries over, with roughly the same mathematics to phenotypes: a maximally exposed phenotype maelstrom of an hominin population will be phenotypically most varied, enabling the evolution of most successful types, and thus becoming the main engine of evolutionary progress..  

Thus Neanderthals invented the burning of fossil fuels, 80,000 years ago in Europe (an interest of living in an extremely old continent rather than much younger continents or islands full of volcanoes). Europe was the best place to have a big debate on what were the best technologies, for two million years. Now, of course, citizens of nearly all countries can run air conditioning, talk and even see at a distance. But this is now. The most natural place for Homo species to evolve more was Eurasia. This is what philosophy says…

Science will follow and figure out the details, to be certain.

Darwin RIP…

Patrice Ayme

 

God As Evolution Abstracted

GOD, CREATION OF THE CROWN OF EVOLUTION

If God is all-powerful, God can’t be a prisoner of human logic, God is beyond human logic (Descartes, creator of analytic geometry, and Pascal, a creator of calculating machines understood this). Thus God can lift an unliftable stone. (Saint Thomas had a petty vision of God, considering God couldn’t lift an unliftable stone, as if God were subject to human logic… Something Saint Thomas actually decided, as if he could impose on God His own powers…)

The problem with evil is exactly the same as with God lifting the unliftable stone: God and evil co-exist, it’s nothing humans can understand: that exact argument is held by Allah Himself, God Itself, in the Qur’an. The very co-existence of a good God and Evil is a proof of the existence of God, as it shows something is beyond human logic, thus all-mighty.

Man, the genus Homo, torments other beings, because if Man can find pleasure in tormenting, Man will be enticed to exterminate other conscious beings, as needed, including oneself. Indeed the latter is fundamental not just to ecological balance, but to the survival of… the genus Homo. Thus the infliction of pain, just as the reception of pain, have reasons beyond the individual, the group, or even the species. It is the genius of the genus.

Representant of the Genus Homo Rules Over the World As the one and only God that Matters. The son of God is son of Man, indeed.

So what wisdom did super mathematician and physicist Pascal suddenly found in the God of Abraham (after a severe illness attacked his brain)? What did Pascal find in that apparently cruel, illogical, somewhat demented, sometimes smart and good, Creator? Well, the inner logic of our own ethology: we are all children of a creative process we are made to abandon ourselves to, because we have no choice: creation itself, biological evolution… our smart, all-powerful, evil and most generous Creator… a (probably) subquantum process we don’t understand, but which certainly exists, and has all the characteristics of the proverbial “God”.

In a way, then, inventing God was a preliminary to discovering evolution. We found God, Evolution, and it created us, by evolving us with all the smarts Evolution is capable of. So here we are, most thankful, and now consciously in charge…

Patrice Ayme
***

***

Notes:

a) In the most prosaic way, it was simply how late Roman emperors justified their God-like tyranny, as I have explained in many essays. The Christian God invented under the Flavian emperors was anti-Judaic, beside being pro-Caesar and pro-Roman. The Catholic God perfected and invented by Emperor Constantine depicted a God made in Constantine’s image. How convenient!

EMPEROR CONSTANTINE CHRISTIAN TERRORIST 325 CE (Fall Of Rome Part X)

***

b) The short essay above was a comment to the New York Times (published!), on an essay “A God Problem
Perfect. All-powerful. All-knowing. The idea of the deity most Westerners accept is actually not coherent.” By philosophy professor Peter Atterton. With all due respect, the essay didn’t break any new ground on the subject (my comment did).

***

c) If God knows everything, and is all-powerful, deciding upon everything, why should we bother to gather knowledge? Thus the imposition of God (enacted by Constantine, see the essay linked above) was an imposition of a mood conducive to deliberate ignorance. And then what? Still another mood bathing We The People conducive to dictatorship, emulating

Democracy is first about knowledge. Those who block the transmission of knowledge block the inception of democracy. This has plenty of consequences such as addressing Pluto ownership of media or We The People not voting laws.

***

d) Nineteenth century German pessimist yet sleep-around philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer drew attention to what he called the “diabolical” in his work “On Human Nature”:

For man is the only animal which causes pain to others without any further purpose than just to cause it. Other animals never do it except to satisfy their hunger, or in the rage of combat …. No animal ever torments another for the mere purpose of tormenting, but man does it, and it is this that constitutes the diabolical feature in his character which is so much worse than the merely animal.

But then, if one claims man is bad, god is good, as God knows what it is like to want to inflict pain on others, the conclusion is, again, that God enjoys evil.

e) When Pascal died his servant found sewn into his jacket the sentence: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars.” That was before the discovery of evolution in full. In those more obscure times, scholars and philosophers had no idea of what biological evolution was capable of, indeed those intellectuals couldn’t know that the mass murdering God of Abraham was exactly our Creator… with the help of the occasional asteroid or super volcano.

f) I tried to explain that the concept of God is extremely coherent if one understands that it is an abstraction of our true creator, biological evolution. In that light, all the apparent incoherence, the badness, and the goodness, the stupidity, brutality and the benevolent intelligence all make sense. Now, of course that return to tyrannical nature was very useful to emperor Constantine, who imposed Christianism…

Morocco Sapiens 315,000 Old, Generalizing Humanity

Entangled With Neanderthals?

Fossils have been discovered in Morocco. Archaeologists unearthed the bones of at least five people at Jebel Irhoud, a former barite mine 100km west of Marrakesh, in excavations that lasted more than 50 years (notice that this is not far from the Atlantic Ocean). A team led by Jean-Jacques Hublin published their finds in the journal Nature.

They reported the oldest known remains of Homo sapiens. Anywhere. This suggests that Sapiens Sapiens evolved all across the African continent, not just East Africa (somewhat similar fossils were found in South Africa, 260,000 year old). Remarkably, those 315 K old early Homo Sapiens had faces much like our own. They would not have been noticed in the subway. Their faces were more modern than their skulls!

***

Neanderthals Colonized North Africa For Hundreds Of Thousands Of Years. Why Not Reciprocally?

Thus, we did not evolve from a single ‘cradle of mankind’ somewhere in East Africa, contrarily to Charles Darwin’s statement claiming this. Darwin had no proof of what he said, yet he was followed like the sheep follows the shepherd (0nce more demonstrating the sheep love to follow sheep effect scientists are prone to). On the face of it, it’s perfectly ridiculous to claim there was something magical and sacred about East Africa (except for long distance running, and Morocco has also very good long distance runners… for basically the same evolutionary reason: excellent places to run down animals at high altitude… and getting genetically adapted that way)

We evolved all across the African continent. But not just this: the Gibraltar strait is only 14 kilometers wide, presently and it was less than half that wide during the many great glaciations of the last few million years. At that point, the strait was less than 5 kilometers across. It was easy to cross. And crossed by humans it was.

300,000 years ago, Neanderthals just appeared, and both them and the new Sapiens fossils found in Morocco could go back and forth across the strait.

Neanderthals came across, to Africa, from Europe: there are more genetic Neanderthal markers in North Africa than anywhere else. Now Neanderthals came later, while North Africa had, presumably, descendants of the recently found fossil of Sapiens. This proves an inequality:

Homo Neanderthalis > Archaic Homo Sapiens. Neanderthals are considered a sister group that lived alongside, and, particularly in Morocco,  even bred with, our modern human ancestors.

If Neanderthals could go to Africa, no doubt Africans could go the other way, to Eurasia. So why didn’t they? Were Homo Sapiens from Africa that inferior? Well, sort of.

This apparently unidirectional exchange (Europe TO Africa), for hundreds of thousands of years, shows that the Neanderthal type was more adapted to Eurasia and its conditions at the time, considering the technology available (this my thesis that Neanderthals were ice adapted Sapiens, tech dependent).

***

DEMANDING EURASIAN ENVIRONMENT MADE The METAPHYSICAL ANIMAL STRONGER:

This major discovery in prehistory didn’t surprise me at all: advanced, 300,000 year old Homo Sapiens were discovered in Morocco. (North Africa is genetically mostly European, contrarily to what the locals fancy!)

Homo Sapiens is the metaphysical animal, going beyond the physics of nature to invent its own. What does not kill us makes us stronger, and more clever. More clever genetically, and culturally.

Thus it should not be surprising that the most sophisticated cultural-genetic versions of Homo appeared in the most demanding climates. Thinking otherwise may be PC, but not smart.

315,000 years old Sapiens skulls from Morocco.

This is what Jared Diamond did not want to understand, when he tried to claim in “Guns, Germs and Steel” that European superiority was just happenstance. Diamond said Europe had the best animals and the best plants: true enough. But he did not realize that was all from human bioengineering (much of it from the Fertile Crescent, 10,000 years ago, or more…)  

There were three most advanced civilization centers: Europe and Middle Earth, China and Mesoamerica. They have a temperate climates in common (in Mexico from high altitude). This is not accidental. It comes from having higher, more profitable sociocultural-evolutionary pressure there: basically ferocious progress was more possible there, from ease of communications, over vast human communities, and better rewarded.

These same forces have long been at work. Neanderthals had to achieve great superiority, just to survive. That’s probably why some of their genetic variations ended up all over North Africa, and all the way to South Africa.

***

Why The Great Steppe Was Different And Conflictual With Europe and China:

Races long behaved differently for excellent reasons, tied to geography: the Mongols (Huns, etc.) terrorized the Chinese  for 40 centuries, because living in Mongolia made people tougher, more war like. 20 centuries ago, a Chinese army of 140,000 elite soldiers penetrated Mongolia over 1,000 kilometers, in a search and destroy mission. It was successful: the Huns fled west defeated their blondish cousin the half-bred Alani, further west, mixed with them and then defeated the giant Gothic empire. The Goths begged Roman emperor Valens’ administration to shelter them in the Imperium Romanorum. That turned into the proximal cause of the Fall of Rome.

I am not trying to be sneaky anti-Mongol here, calling them for the barbarians they were. The Mongols reached from Toulouse, France, all the way to Japan and Indonesia (and I have at least one Mongol genetic marker!)

Before I return to prehistoric man, let me point out that only 30,000 elite Chinese soldiers, from the expedition I evoked, came back to civilization…

***  

Out Of Africa And Out Of Eurasia:

For many decades there was a debate between the Out-Of -Africa theory and theories that Homo evolved in Africa AND Eurasia. To enforce the Out-Of-Africa theory, it was long argued Homo always evolved the most in East Africa. The Moroccan fossils shoot that down. Moroeover, modern North Africa are genetically Europeans, demonstrating the entanglement of Eurasia and Africa there. Having found nearly modern looking Homo Sapiens in North Africa shows that Neanderthals and Denisovans were indeed cold climes adapted versions, not inferior in any way.

***

What to think of all of this? The Notion of Humanity Needs Enlarging!

For hundreds of thousands of years, all sorts of human species cohabitated on Earth. Some were hobbits (Homo Florensis), some were tall Homo Erectus, both two million years behind in leading cerebral evolutionary, others were sophisticated Eurasians (Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis, Homo Sapiens Denisovianis), etc.

These humans who lived between 50,000-300,000 years ago, or even up to two million years ago, are a morphologically diverse bunch. The ones living in cold climes (like Homo Ergaster in Georgia ) were obviously using technology. Whenever we find more than a couple of them from Morocco, Ethiopia or Israel, their morphology is all over the place both within and between samples. And we also know this for their genetics, also all over the place.

This implies that the notion of humanity needs to be broadened.

The present humanity is the fruit of an evolutionary process where many different species were mixed. Pieces of various genetics interacted, competed, eliminated each other. We have some genetics which may look Sapiens Sapiens, but may actually have evolved from Neanderthal ancestors reverting to deeper Homo Sapiens features their ancestors used to have.

In any case, we are clearly in a situation where the out of East Africa is itself out: all of Africa evolved Sapiens, and those Sapiens themselves were entangled with Neanderthals and Denisovans (and even more so on the side of the Nile and the Sinai, where we know Sapiens and Neanderthals mixed for dozens of thousands of years).  

We have a very entangled past. Yet, much of that evolution depended, naturally enough, upon where it happened. That, in turn, often depended upon what we wanted. Human groups had different abilities, mixing them enables to select better ones (that’s the exact opposite of what the Nazis thought, by the way). The strange relations between human groups in North Africa and Europe is not just history, it’s all about what, and how some capabilities of humanity are superior to others (and those are technology dependent). Superiority itself can lead to extinction, at least so did I suggest. (This sort of observation is a warning, looking forward! We can’t just be “superior”, hoping thus not to get extinct!… As all Jihadists will telly you…)

Depending upon where we went we evolved into different versions of who we are… The archeology of Morocco makes this obvious.

Patrice Ayme’

France, US: Exterminating Islamists In Iraq

France ACTIVELY Hunts Islamists In Mosul, Iraq

France, now followed by the USA, has switched to a strategy of “ANNIHILATION” Of Islamists:

The right temporal prefrontal cortex activates the amygdala, an organ in the middle of the brain, in charge of fear. If the former is destroyed, the latter sleeps. Result of said destruction? Patients thus affected tends to cheat and otherwise hurt their fellow human beings.

When such individuals get in political control, they will hurt on a massive scale. To try to appeal to their moral sense, which they are not neurologically equipped to have, because they mechanically cannot have a feeling of guilt, is asking the Moon to fill up our plate, it’s pointless. So one cannot reason with them, the basic motivation for reason being absent. Instead, to get rid of them, of their mental infirmity, one has to put them physically out of commission. Why? One cannot persuade them with flowers, or logic, or anything at all. Except, maybe the prospect of annihilation (of their freedom, or even, their lives).

One sees here that moral sense (right lateral prefrontal cortex) can only be implemented with fear (the amygdala). Thus, to instill social moral sense, one needs social fear.

In other words, to fight Islam, one needs Islamophobia, in the (strict) sense of fear of Islam. Those who intent to apply Islam’s orders to the letter, literally, that is, should be rendered so afraid that they cease and desist. But what to do with those without fear circuitry? 100 million years of primate evolution hold the answer, it was created long ago, by our revered creator, evolution itself. Here is a hint:

French Soldier In Helicopter Created Dust Storm In Mali. Notice the length of the gun he is carrying. Obviously a weapon made to leave a lasting impression.

***

It Is Smarter That France Clean House In Iraq:

French citizens have been killed by Iraqi artillery and ground troops using location coordinates and other intelligence supplied by France during the extermination of the extremists in Mosul, Iraq. The occasional firing of very long-range, very precise French “Caesar” guns has also proven effective (they look straight out of gigantic battleship, but are carried on very large trucks, and their shells go further). 

Live Firing Of French Caesar Gun In Afghanistan. The 70 kilogram Shells Deploy Winglets And Self-Guide to the place a laser illuminates.

French special forces have enlisted Iraqi soldiers for months to hunt and kill French nationals who joined the senior ranks of Islamic State, say Iraqi officers and current and former French officials.

Iraqi commanders leading the fight for Mosul said French special forces have provided to Iraqi counterterrorism troops the names and photographs of as many as 30 men identified as high-value (senior) targets. A great number of French citizens have been killed by Iraqi artillery and ground forces, the commanders said, using location coordinates and other intelligence supplied by the… French.

French nationals with allegiance to Islamic State will never return to terrorize France, said current and former foreign-affairs adviser to the French government. Wisely, the warriors for civilization have come to the conclusion that no quarters should be given to the enemies of civilization: progress.

During the Franco-Algerian civil war, some extremists advocated, in propaganda they published all over the world, to kill little girls in the most torturous ways. The idea was that civilized people would leave Algeria, leaving the countries to monsters to exploit in peace. At the time, intellectuals of the “left” (with the exception of Camus), behaved as if this was kosher. Well, it was not kosher. Bouteflika is still “president” of Algeria. In the 1950s, he was one of the principals of FNL. The fact such people are still in power, 70 years later (!) is directly related to staying silent, when confronted to the horrors they advocated.  

Officially, not counting secret agents, the Air Force and French Navy, 1,200 French troops assist Iraqi forces to retake Mosul. Times have changed since 2003, when France refused to join in the assault against the secular regime in Iraq.

The French special forces direct Iraqi soldiers to target French Islamic State fighters. A senior Iraqi police official showed The Wall Street Journal a list of names of 27 suspected Islamic State killers sought by France, accompanied by photos. The list is updated as men are killed in Mosul, the official said.

France sent its elite forces into Mosul to locate French Jihadists, a Western security official confirmed.

About 40 French special forces operate state-of-the-art intelligence-gathering tools, such as surveillance drones and radio interception devices, to help locate the enemy, said senior Iraqi and French government officials.

“They are dealing with them here, because they don’t want to deal with them at home,” said a senior Iraqi counterterrorism officer directly involved in coordinating with the French special forces. “It’s their duty. It’s common sense. The most lethal attacks overseas were in France.”

US Defense Secretary, 4 star general Mattis, just confirmed on TV that the USA switched to a policy of “ANNIHILATION” of the Jihadists, especially the foreign ones, so that “they won’t return home”. 

A spokesman for Iraq’s Justice Ministry declined to say whether the government has any foreign Islamic State fighters in custody (but Islamist fighters were seen taken alive!) Iraqi commanders said most of the fanatics fight to the death.

“If anyone is alive, in jail, because they surrendered, they will be executed in Iraq for joining Islamic State. And France won’t intervene. It’s a convenient solution.” said a current French official familiar with the matter. So much with Macron being sweet with infamy.

An estimated 1,700 Frenchmen have joined the Islamists in Iraq and Syria, according to the Soufan Group, a New York-based organization that researches extremism. French government officials have estimated that hundreds of those men have either died in battle or returned home.

Other Western countries have lists of their nationals fight with the Islamic State. But only France is engaged in actively hunting to destroy them in Mosul, Iraqi officers said.

A massive French October airstrike that year aimed at, and killed French Jihadists near Raqqa, Syria, by deliberately striking a compound known to be full of foreign fighters. The French government cited a provision in the United Nations Charter that allows member states to use ANY means of “legitimate defense” if under attack. (Famously, after 9/11, France threatened to use nuclear weapons against any country harboring terrorists, after a particularly outrageous attack. Pakistan took the threat badly.)

France’s laws and constitution offer little protection to citizens who take up arms with the enemy to fight the government, said Michel Verpeaux, a professor of constitutional law at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris. Such traitors were routinely condemned to death, and executed in 1945.  

“The French are fighting not a state but an armed group,” Mr. Verpeaux said. “It’s a highly uncertain situation with few legal rules.” Even if French citizens were fighting for a state, they would be at risk for summary execution, according to the laws of war.

The government proposed to strip citizenship for those joining terror groups to bar their return home, as the U.K. has done, a proposal that met stiff resistance in the French parliament.

Dozens of French nationals fighting with Islamic State have been killed in the battle for Mosul, two Iraqi officers said. The seven-month offensive by Iraqi forces and international allies is close to exterminating remaining Islamic State fighters from the western part of Mosul, the religious fanatics last major holding in Iraq. The Islamists hold only ten percent of Mosul, the Old City, a labyrinth of small streets, but with still 200,000 innocent civilians therein.

***

Home Away From Home:

French special forces often move through Mosul without Iraqi military partners. There are millions of Arabic speakers in France, many of origins in North Africa, and tough love for Islam (that’s why their ancestors emigrated from North Africa) . They search homes abandoned by foreign Islamists, as well as command centers in search of physical evidence or documents that link their citizens to Islamic State, two senior Iraqi counterterrorism officers said.

In April, French special forces swept through a medical clinic near the Mosul University campus, checking the identities of the wounded against their list of French nationals working for Islamic State. The French forces, often wearing Iraqi uniforms and driving vehicles with Iraqi military logos, are particularly concerned about any chemical-weapons specialists working at the university, according to a senior Iraqi commander who coordinated with French forces.

Mosul University was used by Islamic State as a command center until Iraqi forces recaptured the campus in January, the Iraqi commander said. The French special forces have a forensics team that collects physical evidence—tissue and bone from the dead and wounded, as well as discarded drinking cups and utensils—to find DNA matches with the men on their wanted list, Iraqi and French officials said.

The team collects bone samples from dead insurgents and run the DNA collected through a database to compare with the DNA of French nationals suspected of joining Islamic State, according to the former foreign-affairs adviser to the French government. A team of four French special forces went door to door in the neighborhood in January. Two of the soldiers checked the identities of residents while the other two men stood guard. “They have their own targets,” an Iraqi counterterrorism officer said as he passed such a scene.

French special forces have recently focused on Republic Hospital, a large complex in Mosul’s Old City, according to two Iraqi Army officers who worked with them. The Old City, a warren of densely populated streets and alleys, is a commercial center and the last district in Mosul controlled by Islamist fanatics.

The French forces suspect that the remaining high-level Islamic State commanders, including some Frenchmen, are holed up at the hospital.

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Turn Not The Other Cheek To The Devil:

In other, yet related, news Noriega, ex-dictator of Panama, died in a Panamanian jail, of a brain tumor. He had been overthrown by President G. Bush in 1989. Bush used to be the head of the CIA, and Noriega was one of his agents. Noriega spent the rest of his life in prison, first in the USA, then in France, and finally he was returned to Panama. Was one making sure he could not describe exactly the way the US plutocrats managed Central America?

Some will view the preceding as an apology of war and violence. No. Describing the Moon is not making an apology of the Moon. The Moon is there, we may as well write about it.

The connection between the prefrontal cortex, in a small area may a square centimeter, and the center of fear, and the combination of both engendering moral sense is something for future robot manufacturers to contemplate.

Absent such a connection, one contemplates irredeemable evil. Not that it is the only way to get to evil, neurologically speaking: all people are susceptible.

Once confronted to irredeemable evil, it has to be eliminated. This is what France is doing in Syria. 1302 years ago (yes, a bit more than 13 centuries!) France was fighting the Islamists in Aquitania, France. Fighting Islamists in Iraq is progress. Iraq is also where the secular Roman emperor Julian died from a wound suffered in combat.

The Christians hated Julian, they called him “The Apostate”. Julian’s sin was to die decades before his time. Fighting evil is best, as long as one wins.

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Colliding With Evil Head-on, Is The Ultimate Method:

And now more than ever, civilization needs to win all the time. Now, indeed, evil can fire a few rockets, and kill maybe more than 50 millions. And such an enemy exists: North Korea has made explicit threats of annihilation. How to stop those threats? By scaring North Korea, not just with annihilation (a given), but with complete impotence. How? By shooting down those rockets.

For the first time the US fired an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) from somewhere in the Pacific, and tried to shoot it down with a “Midcourse Interceptor”. Some of these tests had been successful in the past against IRBM (INTERMEDIATE Range Ballistic Missile). ICBM try to go around the Earth before falling back on the ground, so they go faster. The Interceptor makes a head-on collision, that’s the idea. Electronics has vastly improved since the latest tests, in 2014. The relative interception speed is close to ten miles per second (15 kilometers per second). That’s around ten times faster than a high power rifle.

Interceptor bases are located in Alaska and California (next to Silicon Valley). In case of attempted strike by a single rocket on Los Angeles or San Francisco, the Alaska base will fire more than one missile (how many exactly is classified).

The interception was successful.

Was it successful enough to activate sufficiently Kim’s amygdala?

Time will tell.

Peace is not just about offering flowers, or understanding, or even scaring evil into reason. In the worst cases, peace requires to annihilate evil first. This is a very simple truth, known for three million years. That’s it’s not understood nowadays by so many “intellectuals” show that all too many confused progress in understanding with bleating idiocy. Glad to see the French government finally sees what our ancestors understood even before man became fully man, namely that evil exists, and needs to be annihilated. It’s also reassuring to see that France’s prodigal child, the US, faithfully execute on parental guidance. Hopefully the war against Islamists will not have to be pursued for another 1302 years, but will be over much sooner!  

Patrice Ayme