GENETICS FROM TECHNOLOGY… Transhumanism For Millions Of Years Already! Humans Are The Technological Species: Homo Technologicus? Therein Morality?

Abstract: Human technology drove human genetics! Indeed, a recent scientific discovery shows that genetics can change at the rate of ecology. If one gives it some thought, that was a necessary meta-adaptation which life had to evolve, as it presented much advantage. And this is now demonstrated, at least in flies.

But why would it be different in humans? The underlying physics, biology and evolutionary pressures are the same. However, technology modifies human ecology. Homo Technologicus is 3 million years old, influencing our ecology. This is probably why humans changed so much in the last three milion years, in a virtuous spiral of a rising genetico-technological spiral! The genetico-technological singularity started millions of years ago. The consequences of this perspective to all aspects of what we call humanity are enormous.

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Everywhere We Look, Technology:

Not even poetry would exist, without technology. This is why only humans have poetry: because only humans have technology. Wherever we look, we humans see and are surrounded by technology, and have been for three million years, 150,000 generations… Plenty of time to co-evolve: technologies are us… Our big brains may be our first technology… the fruit of our technological efforts! Let me explain… 

Stones, cut and pointed to be sharp, cutting, penetrating or smashing… is technology. Our ancestors elaborated them before our brains grew at a rate proportional to their capabilities… Clothing is technology: no temperate area would have been colonized without clothing (and Africa was not excluded as genes went back and forth between Asia and Africa, for two million years, with Homo Ergaster!) Fire and cooking are technologies (Neanderthals cooked vegetables). Without fire, the megafauna would have been difficult to keep away from increasingly precise and subtle, but then weak and delicious humans… humans who could become ever more brainy and less brawny, as technology protected and leveraged them… ever more.

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GENETICS CAN GO AT THE SPEED OF ECOLOGY:

Recent studies have shown that genetic, inheritable variability in response to the environment can happen within three or four generations… ….”evolution is acting so fast that ecology and evolution are operating at the same timescale.” This is not surprising, as, naturally and frequently, the ecology can evolve very fast and then durably: contemplate the three Dryas episodes, when Europe fell back into glacial ages, all of a sudden, in a few years, and stayed there for a millennium, or more (the causes of the Dryas are still partly mysterious). 

An exponential rate of growth grows proportionally to itself. Now humans have long created their own ecology… Thus humans learned to exponentiate themselves… through technology. Maybe humans didn’t learn it culturally as much as genetically, but, as a species, they learned. That makes humans in some sense, if not masters, at least the cause, of their own evolution… And there always has been a genetic advantage to accelerate human genetico-technological evolution: contemplate the war in Ukraine, where drones are dominating the battlefield. 

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Dogs play, but they can’t do poetry: they don’t have the technology to record, nor the capabilities to make a recording: no hands, not much of a subtle voice.

My dog can vocalize grunts meaning yes, and others meaning no, and he is very good at pointing toward what he wants, or using body language, like walking away, after I make a suggestion he does not appreciate, or squealing enthusiastically after I bring food from the store. It seems that only humans can transmit culture without being physically present (wolves howling and lions roaring are the most primitive culture, through warnings…). 

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Bergson evoked “Homo Faber” The Homo who fabricates, to label us. But that’s not specific enough, we are more special than that. Lots of animals make and use tools. For example humpback whales use bubble cages to herd fish, and some crow species can devise extracting tools (as do chimps). Dogs would use tools, too if they had hands. These claws frustrate my dog so much.

Humans have been using tools and weapons which they fabricated, for millions of years. And then fire was mastered, maybe 1.5 million years ago (say Chinese archeologists).

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Technology is science and vice versa: 

Technology is too important a concept to be left as the exclusive province of the elite, billionaires and other plutocrats. Technology took part in the creation of our species. 

Technology is everywhere, and has been, for millions of years, to the point it helped evolve the human species. Books, clothing, weapons and pots are technology (of “hardware” type). Writing, speaking, fire making, sculpting, botany, ethology is technology (of software type). Techno-logy: Specialized discourse…. All of culture is actually technology. Making fire in a wet forest with just sticks is technology (and one modern people don’t know).

Science and knowledge, in this general sense, have much in common with technology. (If one knows one is hungry, or in love, or afraid, that’s not technological, right; but Quantum Physics can be viewed as technology, or engineering, as it’s a method, or more generally an art to make predictions of fundamental processes in some spaces; in general Qunatum Physics can’t make precise predictions, the problems are just too complex, one can solve completely only a couple of them, and the physics community hopes that Quantum Computers will help with Quantum Physics!)

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Etymology Of Technology: the fabrication of discourses:

“Technology” is the Latinized form of Greek tekhnologia “systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique,” originally referring to grammar, from tekhno-, combining form of tekhnē “art, skill, craft in work; method, system, an art, a system or method of making or doing,” from PIE *teks-na- “craft” (of weaving or fabricating), from suffixed form of root *teks- “to weave,” also “to fabricate.” 

Logy: Medieval Latin -logia, French -logie, and Logy: directly from Greek -logia, from -log-, combining form of legein “to speak, tell;” thus, “the character or deportment of one who speaks or treats of (a certain subject);” from PIE root *leg- (1) “to collect, gather,” with derivatives meaning “to speak (to ‘pick out words’).”

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What is the point of being technology aware? Understanding our world enough not to be enslaved by it. As AI becomes ever more important, it’s crucial to realize it’s not magic from a world of sorcerers and witches. Because, should we adopt the point of view of tech as magic, pretty soon we will be dominated by demons [1], and ruled by the likes of Harry Potter and other witches.

Technology made us genetically, so pondering technology is pondering what made us, our creator. Differently from Aztec gods, we can get to know that creator. While the prospects of war everywhere keep on going up, many have wondered what the roots of morality were. If the preceding is true, and it is, or close to it, our morality can’t be separated from our genetics and our technology.

The connection between ourselves and tech are as old as ourselves: transhumanism is what we do, and have been doing for millions of years. By the way, this answers the burning question of why there was a serpent in the garden of Eden… Technology was not created in the first place to smell the roses… But to master the flesh, and not just the flesh of apples… The will, the will to power, is also the will to technological power, and the power of the exponential. The exponential species, indeed!

Patrice Ayme

No tech, no art! A beautiful painting or music is not just a bunch of forms, but also technology in action. Only technology enables us to appreciate the beauty of the ocean in full. Up to a very recent time, seeing such a beautiful nonlinear wave action, could not have been poetically appreciated, because we would have been submerged, with the prospect of imminent death… technology makes even aesthetic appreciation possible:

[1] Life, increasingly enormously complicated self-replicating carbon based chemistry, appeared on Earth more than four billion years ago. Life is immoral, because morality assumes consciously embracing self-replicating ways… Something life couldn’t do without consciousness… and consciousness required brains, which evolved in the last half a billion years… However, to self-replicate, the essence of morality, humans need to embrace tech… as they co-evolved with it. 

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P/S 1: Famous philosophers have talked about tech, even before Heraclitus and Democritus (to whom Aristotle refer). Nazi Heidegger, a frequent reference among the pedants, was thoroughly confused (he stupidly thought technology started 2 centuries after math!) and hopelessly shallow, sploshing through his own turd… I mention Heidegger because Nazis-in-denial always mention Heidegger…

P/S 2: It goes without saying that the approach above is new, and radical…

BERATING VIOLENCE DOESN’T HEAVENS BRING

BERATING ALL And ANY VIOLENCE IS BERATING ALL And ANY MEANS OF POWERFUL ACTION AGAINST INFAMY, HENCE DEEPLY INHUMAN:

Violating truth can’t bring good, except when there is no hope. Denying the reality, the inevitability of violence, the essence of Homo, is, at best, a manipulation, at worst the death of any hope of improving matters significantly.

Let me try to explain the pitfall of claiming that violence will stop, if we just stop thinking about it. Quite the opposite.

We are witnessing the greatest violence against the biosphere in 66 million years. And we are culprit, down to baby diapers and poisonous elements in electric batteries. How did we come to that?

Violence actually characterizes the genus Homo’s activities. Turning a wild planet into one’s own garden… required some considerable violence in one’s gardening….

“One must cultivate one’s garden”, said Voltaire, naively enough (until one realizes he was Louis XV’s boyfriend… at which point his advice takes a sinister, self-serving aspect, contemplate his castle, his private hotel on the Seine, facing Notre Dame). Diabolical enough an advice, my dear Voltaire: we are cultivating the garden to death. Tricky herbicides such as glyphosate, used on much of the planet, don’t just kill herbs, they kill soils, for ever, and even the plants malefic scientists have engineered to resist them will ultimately die from impoverished soil.

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Sade Was A Genius, And A Saint, Sartre Was A Fool, And A Collabo: 

Sade, of course, spent most of his life in prison, sent there first by Louis XVI’s monarchy and then Napoleon’s tyranny… meanwhile saving thousands during the Revolution. Sade saved even his most vicious personal enemy’s life during the Revolution, because he had thought in depth about the nature of human violence, and thus, knew how to resist it. 

Jean-Paul Sartre was viewed by many, or, at least, the French, as a master thinker. He didn’t spend one day in prison: the authorities always viewed him as their friend, and he was. De Gaulle, idiotically enough said, speaking of Sartre:”One doesn’t jail Voltaire!” Hey, mon general, precisely, one imprisons Voltaire! Sartre was not jailed, precisely because he was a collabo….

Sartre wrote:

« La violence, sous quelque forme qu’elle se manifeste, est un échec. »

(“Violence, in whatever form it manifests itself, is a failure.”) This is viewed as one of Sartre’s master ideas… Master thinkers should utter master ideas they created themselves. Nevermind that, wherever we look at the planet, we see invaders who successfully colonized. Even in Greenland, the present inhabitants annihilated the preceding ones… who used to trade with the Vikings, all the way to extreme North Greenland (so the present “native” Greenlanders” replaced in the last 6 centuries both types of preceding inhabitants…)  It goes without saying that colonization, and especially invasion, is pretty violent…

Amusingly, this astoundingly stupid statement of Sartre is not original, being a 2,000 years old leitmotif of Christianism. One could even view the idea of violence as failure as the master idea of christianism: god is crucified, because god doesn’t want to use violence against His persecutors. So we see, just here, that Sartre, and his admirers, far from being revolutionary, are just plain old Christian, serving us the same old same old, without super hero god attached.

An Internet outlet called Cohérence loved Sartre do-goodism and tweeted it:

“Violence, in whatever form it manifests itself, is a failure.”

Jacques Attali , a friend of mine, and a famous adviser to many a major statesman and institutions in Europe sharply criticized the notion:  “Ah? Et la résistance contre les nazis, ce fut un échec ? Il est vrai que Jean-Paul Sartre fut largement absent de ce combat là. Quoiqu’en disent ses thuriféraires.” (Ah? And the resistance against the Nazis was a failure, was it a failure? It’s true that Sartre was mostly absent from that fight. Whatever his sycophants say.”

To kill Nazism, one killed 5.5 million Nazi soldiers, in the Wehrmacht alone. Helpers, not just in Gestapo, Polizei, but also from millions of collaborating troop also had to be killed with the entire German economy, which was so militarized Nazis had to steal most French output.

Humanity is all about violence. Hydroelectricity is generally viewed as “green”, “sustainable” power. In truth it causes enormous, hyper violent damage on the planet hydraulics. Contemplate the picture above. For scale, the dam wall is 221 meters tall (726’). It can release an astounding 11,000 tons of water, per second… More massive than the Eiffel tower… at a speed of 70 meters per second (200 kilometer an hour).

Here, have it in French, Sartre: La réussite, de quelque manière qu’elle se manifeste, est une forme de violence à l’égard de certaines formes pré-existantes. Refuser la violence sous toutes ses formes, c’est refuser l’humanité. Et donc pourquoi les dictatures demandent des moutons, pour achever leur inhumanité. Shortened translation: Success, however its nature, is violence against pre-existing forms. To reject violence under all and any form, it’s to reject humanity. 

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Denying Violence Exists, is enabling violence:

Some will say that believing violence to always be a failure is a wish, if we all believe in it, it would come true. No harm done, let hope rule the minds.

The problem with that approach is that it equates to saying that, if we should hope to run head first in a brick wall, that will not hurt, if we all believe this.

And what brick wall is that? Homo is both sheep and wolf. The wolves eat the sheep. And if there are only sheep, the wolves will arise. [1] Human genetics and epigenetics, human ethology, is the wall of reality. The very motivating principle of Homo is not curiosity, which compels the eye, but violence, which enables us to move. To go down from the tree and venture into the savannah an ape is not made for, was a violence against nature, the ape, the order of things. It took more than curiosity, it took the infliction of force… and that is exactly the definition of violence.

The best and most human progress Homo has made in the last 5 million years, among its different species, has been propped by the same curiosity enabled by violence. Five million years, 200,000 generations is plenty of time to enshrine behaviors genetically. Moreover, as Homo was a murdering success during those 200,000 generations, physically eliminating the Untermenschen, the sous-hommes, the low lives, the genetic pressure was intense: types which were not curious or violent enough were eliminated.

The end result is a very curious and very violent species.

I have walked dozens of miles, deep in dessicated canyons among the corpses of millennial trees… All the water having long been sent to Los Angeles by elaborate tunnels hundreds of miles long through towering ranges… Yes, the most violent species which ever was. Violence, of course doesn’t have to mean vicious. Unfortunately it often does.

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Can’t stop to the parents? Punish the child: seen and personally experienced in Spring 2019:

I had an excellent example in my personal life in the last two months: we presented our concerns about toxic chemicals, and other carcinogenic substances, and microplastics to the relevant administration. We were worried that the lives of hundreds of small children in two different elementary schools (starting in pre K) might be threatened, and exactly why. We reviewed thousands of pages of primary scientific and engineering and distilled that down to 100 pages or so. We offered non-toxic, or mitigating alternatives.

Instead of having a dialogue about our concerns, the relevant administration informed us that if we spoke of this with anyone, including trustees, our daughter, nine year old, would be thrown out of school, immediately. And so she was.

I have way higher moral standards than that: if the nine year children of Goebbels or the most vicious jihadist attended school, I would kindly teach them… Maybe I would teach sternly, but I would teach them… and never punish them for the acts of their parents. But here I was confronted with young punks in charge of a school, and, because they dine with Bill Gates, Macron and their ilk, all they need to know is which way money is flowing, and that we were in the way, making us most maleficent, in their greedy eyes of the ultimately connected.

Interestingly, as we resisted the infamy of the conspiring vicious greedsters, increasingly violent methods were used by those who wanted to submit us. Outrageous lies, in print… False accusations of violence, were instigators turned perpetrators were presented as victims, etc.

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Gandhi was naive about violence. The price has been heavy, worse is to come, potentially:

At that point, some will brandish Gandhi, often presented, ironically enough, as the epitome of non-violence. Gandhi “non-violence” was just violence by other means, and it worked because the British would have self-defeated by using greater violence in India. While Gandhi pressed the Indian Congress to not declare war to his friend Hitler, in 1939, the British Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared India’s entry into the World War without consulting prominent Indian Congress leaders who were just elected in previous elections.

Gandhi launched a movement against fighting the Nazis, although the latter’s atrocities had become blatant. In 1942, him and 60,000 of his followers were imprisoned for the duration (Gandhi was freed in 1944 for ill health). Meanwhile, the Muslim institutions in India enthusiastically supported the British war effort. Muslims constituted 40% of the huge Indian 2.5 million men army. That and the Indian armament industry stopped the Imperial Japanese drive into South Asia.

Thus India properly applied violence during WWII, in a way that advanced civilization… however Gandhi’s hypocritical pro-Nazism fed the split with the Muslims which led to civil war and the creation of Pakistan (and its potential nuclear Armageddon). [2]

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To be human is to be violent…

Even if it’s one plastic diaper at a time, or one load of detergent laden wash at a time, or one South Asia trip, from the other side of the planet, at a time… Tourism, with present polluting technology, is still violence, as far as the biosphere is concerned.

Violence is all over, it’s a psychological attractor. Consider the death penalty: it was excusable when jails were not very much available (say 2,000 years ago). However, nowadays, life imprisonment is much more effective. Yet the USA, for example still kills (and not just Bin Laden, who was silenced, even more than Saddam Hussein…)

By advertizing that some acts should be punished by death of the perpetrator, society promotes the idea that killing is sometimes best, the crucial belief murderers need to murder in the first place.

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So, what to do?

Face the music, the music of Homo. Understand that intelligence is violence, understand that some violence is good to have (say, to crush the Nazis). And that other forms of violence have to be absolutely avoided. When millions of protesters went into Hong Kong’s streets, they were violent, the government whined. Right. But it was even more violent to decide to send suspects to be judged by the other system, a violation of the spirit of the accord of re-integration of Hong Kong into the PRC… The violence of the protesters was arguably greater, just as the violence of opposition to Nazism was, by some measures, greater than the violence of the Nazis. The same holds for Hiroshima and Nagasaki: violent. sure, but two orders of magnitude less than what the Japanese military imposed on the rest of the world.

The calculus of violence optimizes it, from very careful studying, and thinking… and it’s crucial to determine for which ultimate aims. Optimal calculus of violence what humanity, at its best, does. Berating violence, to the point of ignoring it, is a cop-out, a strategy to avoid the most important debates. Violence is unavoidable, in any case. And, looked at it the right way, we are living in the most violent times. Ever. [3]

Patrice Ayme

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[1] In some species of fish, when there are only females left, some turn into males, and even super-males. Humans are the same; with too many human sheep around, some will turn into wolves… So it is, from deep seated evolutionary safeguards… 

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[2] Gandhi’s hypocritical pseudo-pacifism is reminiscent of the US Congress similar posing at the time.

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[3] Plutocratic sycophants such as Pinker have claimed we lived in the best of all possible times. Their ignorance of the ultimate violence of biosphere destruction is not just immoral, it’s going to turn Armageddon into reality, pretty soon.

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!

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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.

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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.

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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!)

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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.

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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

 

NEW IDEAS: NOT FROM CROWD HOWLING TOGETHER. CREATIVITY: WAR AGAINST CROWDS, Yesterday’s Culture…

DARK IMPULSES ENABLE INDIVIDUAL CREATIVITY, HENCE CURIOSITY, COLONIZATION, THUS HOMO. AS LOVE IS A GIVEN, THIS HYPER AGGRESSIVITY, AT THE ROOT OF HOMO, CAUSES AN AMBIVALENCE…

Evolution is not Politically Correct. Evolution just is. But evolution is our creator. Some have said: we are not evolution. Yes we are not just evolution, we are also the culture ourselves and our predecessors, evolved. But still, we have to understand this evolutive part we are entangled with… and which gave birth to our cultural capability, if not directly, our culture.  

New Ideas, wisdom, or even the love of wisdom, never come from a crowd howling together. However, we now live in times of crowds howling together on social networks, sharing silliness, superficial love and “likes”. But, even more enthusiastically, those crowds share hatred towards those they don’t want to understand, so that they can hate some more. Genuine creators have to make war to those brutish crowds, otherwise they won’t be able to create anew, that is above and superior.

Can’t escape War: war is tied in to the essence of the human project, curiosity.War is tied in to the essence of the human project, curiosity: that’s not really a problem, it’s tied in with Homo (or then Homo itself is viewed as a problem, and that’s nihilism). However, it’s a problem if, as “humanism” so far did, it’s ignored. Christianism viewed evil of curiosity, the original sin, tellingly contradicting Zoroastrianism.

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Stupid people howling with relish didn’t start yesterday: just look at the way Christianism took over the Greco-Roman empire, one burned library at a time. More recent examples: generations ago, philosophy was heavily contaminated by so-called brainless structuralism, or “French Theory”, a medieval harking back to the times of no-thinking (which lasted more than a millennium before that, thanks to Bible). Before structuralism it was Marxism, Stalinism, Nazism, Fascism which destroyed debate, and replaced it by lethal mob rule. Now, things are getting worse: increasing plutocratization depends upon stupidification (and thus the push towards controlled social networks, Communitarianism, Islamization, etc.). Wisdom, and its love, are on the wane.

Communitarianism is an enemy of wisdom and mental creativity. It categories people, and make these categories what’s most primordial about people. Instead of categorizing people, one should categorize ideas. If an idea is good, wherever it comes from, it’s a good idea. Roughly all thinkers have had some good ideas at some point, even Hitler or Saint Augustine! Thinking is about ideas, not howling together.

John Michael Gartland commented: “Thank You. One of the most astute observations I have seen in a long time. The insane fanaticism of the tribal political party narrative with no deviation from the party scriptures permitted no matter how fantastically fictional and politically convenient, steeped in the fantasy of something masquerading as the common good and self-righteousness has become a worldwide contagion.”

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A dirty little secret of humanity is that, absent friendship, one can always befriend hatred itself. As social networks, paradoxically, have increased loneliness, they incite more individuals to partake in hatred and pack attacks. Hence the increasing venom in said social media!

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In the Spanish Civil War, Republican forces arguably had more losses fighting each other than the devastation that they suffered from the Nazi and Italian fascist armies and Franco’s rebel army. The entire take-over of Spain by mass murdering lethal, church allied fascism, was financed by US plutocrats and corporations (many car companies and oil companies such as Texaco, which provided the Nazi air force in Spain all the fuel it needed to transport Franco’s army…

By allying itself with Islamists now, the left is making the error it did then, allying itself with Stalinists! Stalin and his goons ordered the killing of all the left. At the time, Stalin was secretly in a crucial military alliance… with the Nazis, on Russian soil.

Actually, the present alliance with Islamists is even worse than the alliance with Stalinists: the Soviets could claim to foster a new system of thought. A new man, let alone a new woman. Attacking the USSR in 1941, Italian tankers were amazed to find female Soviet tank officers, killed in action.

Instead, Islam was a new ideology… In 632 CE, in savage and primitive Meccan Arabia, which had been kept away from the major civilizing influences from all around (to the north, Rome, north-west, Egypt, north-east, Persia, west in Ethiopia, south in Yemen, and east in India). The Muslim prophet, speaking in the name of the great vegetable in the sky, ordered men to change in such a way it led to a demographic explosion, most militarily profitable (for example it was suggested not to kill girls, and have sex with slave girls…)

The success of Islam long baffled top Christians, such as this Byzantine emperor who debated an old Muslim scholar. In 1391 CE Manuel II Palaiologos debated a Persian scholar and recorded the exchanges in a book he authored (See dialogue 7 of “Twenty-six Dialogues with a Persian”) in which the Roman Emperor stated: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Right, the whole point!

Many Muslims were offended by this characterisation of Muhammad, and protested against it. For others it may simply have been false indignation or the assumption that non-Muslims had been offended by it, and they had to look outraged, to keep the reputation of Islam as peace.

In his book, Manuel II, apparently a personal acquaintance of “god”, continues: “God is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”

Well, we know better. Our creator is biological evolution and our creator used war to conquer the world, and shape up our genetic and epigenetic. War made us, not just love. Islam understood that perfectly well, hence its success.

War, hatred and extermination have propelled humanity through evolutionary gauntlets (leaving lots of genocides behind). Evolution intelligently selected those strategies, from the first ape who braved the savanna, and forged human neurology with them. Ignoring them is ignoring not just wisdom, but incoming fate!

Humanity is more complex, and more perverse, than humanitarianism has imagined so far. Ignoring that complexity ignores the opportunity new technology (“social networks”) offers for old fashion hatred. There is an architecture an evil, and humanity was built with it.

To demonstrate here the aggressivity of advancing wisdom, let’s victimize Albert Einstein a bit. Einstein famously said:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” (One could call this definition, “Einstein Insanity”). Guess what? Nonlocality predicts that, indeed, doing the same thing all over again, will lead to different results. And that’s how the universe work, experiences & logic show. So Einstein was as wrong as wrong can be. He missed the point entirely, by assuming the veracity of its opposite, which is false. And Einstein was clever enough to realize that what he called “spooky action at a distance”… could be true, by just evoking its possible existence.

Tying evil, strife and mental creativity exaggerated? No. Unavoidable. Morality and the principle of precaution have to admit it.

So I was just nasty to Einstein, in a sense (after all, I’m saying I see something that could be seen in Einstein’s day and age… And Bohr saw some of it…). I can do better: I can spite all mathematicians between Euclid and Bolyai. Gauss made a point to spite Bolyai, daring to say that recognizing and flattering Bolyai’s work would be to flatter himself… as he had, he claimed, secretly got the same results (but didn’t reveal them as he “feared the cries of Boeotians”, a classic allusion to Athens northern neighbors… whom Athenians thought honorable to view as stupid). Here is Gauss, in full nastiness mode: “To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work…coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.” In 1848 CE Bolyai discovered that Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky had published a similar piece of work in 1829 (but only on hyperbolic geometry). Discouraged by Gauss, Bolyai published only 24 pages, ever, out of the 20,000 pages of math he wrote…

In reality, after Euclid, mathematicians forgot that there was a wheel, a sphere, or even a cushion: Aristotle’s works contain SIX (6) theorems of non-Euclidean geometry (one hyperbolic, the rest elliptic). For all to see! Thereafter, in spite of these demonstrated theorems, an idiotic debate on the parallel axiom unfolded, for 21 centuries . Even worse, Non-Euclidean geometry had been used to measure Earth with great precision, around 300 BCE, in Marseilles, by Pytheas!

In the same vein, I have dared to stand all of mathematics on its head, and shake, by pointing out the infinity axiom makes no sense.

Any debate, in a sense, is a fight. Refusing all and any fighting, is refusing all and any debate. Hence, refusing us, the essence of what made us. It shouldn’t be a debate…

Patrice Ayme

Hating Tech? Hate Man!

Rampages against technology are fashionable: after all, we, and our entire world, depends upon it. Dependents are prisoners of their benefactor(s). The unwise will resent that. Technology is worse than a drug, then: it is the life support system of the most advanced apes who ever were. It is even more: our soul? The world-changing apes world-changed, and evolved for, and from, technology. If we have a creator specific to our species, here it is! Technology is out mother, father, what makes us possible. Hating our provider, our god: how pleasing!

Homo, the genus, and genius, is inseparable from technology. Saying technology doesn’t help, or doesn’t even help define what is human, is to have understood nothing to the genus Homo. Socrates took a stance: he posed as an anti-science, anti-tech, even anti-mental creativity type. Socrates refused even to write: after all, that’s tech too. But for his living, he depended upon an inherited stock portfolio, and his plutocratic friends and fiends. And, when, as a wealthy hoplite, he killed the enemy, it was because of his technologically superior, and very expensive armor and weapons. I can’t afford, as Socrates did, to be a hypocrite.

Diogenes too, was an anti-tech, anti-progress hypocrite: he lived in a barrel: that’s advanced technology, an expensive Gallic import… soon Gallic armies would battle down into Greece, thanks to their superior weapons due to superior metal works. Diogenes also had a dog:  another advanced technology, a Genetically Modified Organism, whose carefully twisted mind makes him love and obey his master. The reason Diogenes didn’t have to battle giant European Cave Lions was that those had been driven to extinction, thanks to superior weapons.

Also Athens existed, and could feed Socrates and Diogenes, because it imported grain from the Black Sea, two weeks of shipping away (at best). Or from Cyrenaica. Attica was too dry to feed the largest Greek city. And Athens paid back, with superior tech. Demosthenes, the philosopher, inherited also from his father. His 40 slaves were making advanced tech, sold throughout the Mediterranean. As I said, it paid for food of the last Athenian dog. It goes without saying that this imperial organization rested on the mightiest army and navy, which had persuaded cities such as Byzantium to reasonably cooperate…

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The more human we get, the more tech we get, and live from:

So on tech we go.
An interest of technology is to solve problems, which can’t be solved otherwise, lest we want to use massively the oldest methods, like cannibalism. There are countless examples, in history, of populations which have been reduced to zero, as needed by the sustainable ecological load.

As it is, we use much more planet than we have. We need another planet, or we need to quickly consume, say, 90% of humanity (the latter can easily be done, though… thanks to tech, both as an exterminator, and a redemptor).

Colonizing Mars would double the land area at our disposal. And yes, it can be done: there are giant ice cliffs on Mars: water was the big problem to terraform Mars. Up to last year, Mars looked desiccated, and it appeared one would have to crash comets into it to bring water. Now, no more. All we need is a mighty energy source. That too, tech could bring us: controlled thermonuclear fusion, already used in decent airports, looms, ever closer: a thermonuclear reactor connected to the grid is feasible… if we spent, say 100 billion dollars (5% US or EU yearly GDP).

The Counties of Alameda and Contra Costa (“AC”), in the San Francisco Bay Area form together AC Transit, which has purchased dozens of Fuel Cell Electric Buses. Those buses refuel hydrogen at dedicated service stations. Their waste? Water! Those buses aren’t just zero emission, they are the ideal complement of the photovoltaic energy rising in California. Some cities of AC provide free PV installations.

Elon Musk is an entrepreneur: he takes science invented by much deeper minds, and turns it into profitable technology. True, he got favored by Obama, in a shameless manner… while Obama killed important technologies such as Fuel Cells… to leave room to Musk, and other Silicon Valley friends Obama had (now busy making him rich). True the plutocratic connection between Musk and tech monopolies and the Obama administration was disgusting, and many involved should how be prosecuted. I wrote extensively against Musk and Bezos in the past, because they go so much help from the Obama White House. However, the fact is now both of these two plutocrat have made an important technological advance: rockets can be reused! “Space Shuttle” launches used to cost 1.5 billion dollars (yes, billion, with a b… per launch). Musk thinks he could launch a much bigger rocket for six million dollars. Indeed, doing the math, the cost of launch should be no more than a jumbo jet transcontinental flight… if the rocket is sophisticated enough.

Yet, the transition from deep science to a deeper socio-economy shouldn’t be neglected: they are entangled. No advancement of the socio-economy, no advancement of science, and reciprocally.

Rome failed because it couldn’t get going the science it needed, because its exaggeratingly fascist, pathetically impotent socio-economy (the combination of slavery and autocracy, too strong for enabling the People to contribute, not enough to crush plutocrats). Now, of course, the Romans weren’t too brainy to start with… and they kept Greece too subjugated, before finally snuffing it by mad theocracy (when the Academies were ordered closed by a Roman emperor.)

In the Tenth Century, new cultivars, of beans for the Franks, and of rice for the Vietnamese/Chinese, made a better fed Europe and East Asia forge ahead as ever more domineering civilizations… New cultivars are new technology…

Facebook is a different problem from the space adventures of Musk and Bezos. First, Facebook has no added value: all it does is spy, and find new fixes for its addicts (Instagram). Facebook is horrendously unethical, and a return to a primitivism worse than the Middle Ages. Facebook has indeed decided to censor artwork from the Middle Ages… “even if it has educational value“… Facebook grotesquely asserts. No wonder, it’s led by an uneducated grabster, used to wrap presidents around its little robotic fingers…

In general plutocracy is killing civilization. Always has, always will. However, the grandeur of Bezos’ and Musk’s missions is such, one has to make a grudging exception for them, as long as they keep on going… to Mars. That doesn’t mean we have run out of targets: all the financial derivative sector, worth 1,400 trillion dollars (yes, with a t, $1,400 thousand billions) should be destroyed. It is because it doesn’t exist in China, that China has become the world’s greatest economic power… Financiers bootstrapping themselves so they can crush us when they come down… What’s worse?
Patrice Ayme

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For comic relief, one can read Massimo Pigliucci’s and Correy Mohler’s”Diogenes the Cynic vs Elon Musk
What wisdom could the great Cynic offer to our modern-day Alexander?“. Dogs can bark, but thinking deep is not their forte… So I thank Massimo for the spark to the blistering critique above… And indeed, first, to compare Musk to Alexander the Great is beyond grotesque: Alexander is a serious, not to say mass lethal, subject. Musk is cute, but basically completely replaceable (first, consider Bezos, who is coming up with similar rockets…)