Discover the ego gene

and molecular biology is now on to something, the junction of nature and culture, the nature of self-perception reduced to code and transcript. What you perceive in others usually is what you find in yourself, reducing the usefulness of perception. If you can get past perception and cultural affectations and down to underlying pre-dispositions, then maybe new options would open up for altering them, something besides drugs, that is. Drug use is probably more effective at altering perceptions of others than it is at altering behavior of the user. Experimental and recreational drug use is an attempt to approach the speed of light in thought and perception, just like back home where the lights burn 24/7 with a laser-like intensity that approaches infinity. The speed of thought might actually be first to break the light barrier, premonitions and psychic activity providing raw material for investigation. Is thought a dimension all its own? If so, is it a natural or created one? Weigh yourself down with food to keep yourself grounded in a world without weight nor wisdom.

Nature selects for beauty, not brains,

once survival to the age of reproduction is secure. Actually Nature is like God; it doesn’t really do anything; it just IS. We act like it does something because we demand causality for scientific purposes. Our language is predisposed to the subject-verb-object model; other languages, for example Spanish, less so. In Spanish things can happen with the causal agent quite vague or nonexistent. When a beautiful woman is at stake, nature can afford to be vague; sexual selection takes over, though I doubt that it’ll ever replace Nature. When plants put out those beautiful flowers and those delicious berries that animals eat then spread around pre-fertilized, they’re re-producing the species. As long as a plant or animal can use brains or brawn or stink or thorns to reach reproductive maturity, then attraction takes over. Science fiction may be missing the boat in postulating a future population of big-brained pill-poppers. For all the bitching and moaning of my generation of boomer-brats, life is easier than it’s ever been. Neoteny favors the earliest possible reproduction as much as it favors retention of immature features into adulthood. To get into Heaven, one must be as a child, remember. If neoteny is the path of genetic drift whenever possible, then it might favor a big head, or a tail also, for that matter, but your potential mate probably wouldn’t. Baldness is already being selected against, I assure you. I know. That’s a blow to neoteny already. We ARE that future of big headed pill-poppers already. That’s past. Unless life gets difficult again to the point that only the smartest survive, then expect future humans to be the handsomest, most beautiful creatures imaginable, with no increase in hat size except to accommodate the ever-increasing quest for Ego-enhancement. History belongs to those who control the means of reproduction. That’s why I’m in Thailand. It’s science fiction.

A few decades back, someone apparently came up with the idea of man as the “aquatic ape”

as a means of explaining why we have subcutaneous fat and little body hair, looking so different from our closest relatives, the gorilla and chimpanzee. I thought that was a brilliant idea. That would explain a lot and is eminently feasible, that man’s adaptation to water was interrupted, but man still carries vestiges of that era. Certainly we’re not still hanging around the African ‘hood’, and there’s no shortage of water in the Great Rift Valley, for that matter, if the adaptation occurred early in man’s evolution. There’s no shortage of precedent from other sea mammals, whose closest relatives tend to be their land-based relatives, not each other. It’s a good career move. Life in water is relatively easy. Hell, I’ve thought about it myself. There’s only one problem. There’s no evidence that any such activities ever took place. Logic is cheap; evidence is expensive. Furthermore, there is another explanation that has a better record in the history of evolution: neoteny, the retention of juvenile or even larval characteristics into older age, and sexual maturity at an early age. Lose the hair and gain the fat; sound like anybody you know? Our close relative, gorillas give birth at a similar term and have a life expectancy in captivity similar to an African’s life expectancy, yet reaches sexual maturity at seven years. Why? It works. They’re lousy at math anyway. That would explain baby fat and adult diaper rash in humans. It might also explain some extremely juvenile behavior in adults, but that would be cultural neoteny, I suppose. It sounds better than cultural pedomorphism, at least.

If there were no obsession with the sex act, then evolution might suffer,

especially in humans; evolutionary success is reproductive success. Sexual and genital obsession is normal, but most people aren’t honest about it, as if there’s something dirty about it, or simply childish. Humans rule the earth, not necessarily because we’re smarter, but because we fuck like rabbits. We have to compete with bacteria, after all, and their turn-around time for a complete generation is about a half-hour, depending on your deodorant. We can kill them, of course, but they can kill us, too. Does increased intelligence coincide with increased sex drive? Mine does. The hornier I get, the smarter I have to be to drive the point home to some unsuspecting victim, usually my wife. It’s a game. They say some of the people with the highest IQ’s are prostitutes and other so-called sexual degenerates. They say the root word that gave birth to the word ‘sophisticate’ originally referred to prostitutes, the original Greek Sophists I supposedly. The Thai word for such, presumably derived through Sanskrit, ‘sophenee’, would agree with that. Somehow I think it all got confused with the concept of ‘worldliness’. Either you’re impressed or you’re not. That’s probably why Jesus admonished his followers to be as children. Once you think you’ve got it all figured out, then you’re in real trouble spiritually. If you think you’re clever because you’ve figured out that you can make money with your moneymaker, then think again. You’re getting paid to do things others won’t stoop to, things others won’t take lying down, things others won’t sit still for. It has little to do with IQ. There were already a lot of pragmatists on the streets these days; now there are sophisticates, too.

Equality is a fairly useless concept and elusive goal.

It doesn’t exist, nor is there any particular reason why it should. Equality in the chain of evolution is the end of evolution, as Darwin himself reluctantly admitted when it was pointed out to him. Blending of genes would blend down to sameness. Genes are not blended; they’re assorted, one or the other, digital, not a mixture of the two traits involved and selected. Mendel already knew the details long before there was even a theory to which it applied, like Reimann’s mathematics lying there in wait for a genius like Einstein to realize what it was good for, then buy it cheap wholesale and parcel it out piecemeal incorporated into cutting-edge physics. Equality in society and culture is no different. Ask the Soviets. When equality is enforced, evolution stops, and equality occurs on a level of poverty and dissipation for all. The issue of equal rights is the bone of contention and the bone we all fight over, a simple syllogism expanded from home to homeland, equal bathroom rights for all. Equality of rights and privileges in fact allows for differentials of accomplishment. Otherwise, forced social results demand unequal rights for their achievement, as in ‘affirmative action’ for racial desegregation in the US. It’s a thankless task.

Lamarckian ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’

was dropped by the scientific community because it has never been experimentally verified. Has natural selection ever been experimentally verified? Has it ever even been proved that a specific random genetic mutation can lead to a specific beneficial biological advantage or even a specific trait? If a genetic mutation is admittedly neutral at the local level, then how does it become transformed into a biological advantage at the species level? Presumably the law of large numbers comes into play, and we assume that given enough time, these things just happen. Since no particular instance can be proven over such a large span of time, we simply invoke the most convenient logic, or in this case, the most scientific logic. Though ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’ was dropped from the biologists’ lexicon, it’s never been dropped from the popular imagination. It would seem to be the ‘wishful thinking’ option, however, rendering it less scientific than the Darwinist rap. Still scientists talk about a species ‘adapting’ anagenetically, though this requires no mutation. Still human brains keep expanding in size with no apparent change in the DNA sequence, frequently invoking life’s challenges as explanation. Still we keep scanning the stars for radio signals, as if the exact same random genetic sequence might accidentally occur again. Certainly natural selection is not wrong, because it’s a tautology: those that survived were certainly the fittest. An impeccable scientific theory must be useful in making predictions, also, however. Just because it’s not wrong doesn’t mean that it’s right, nor does it mean that Lamarckism is wrong.

It’s a law of nature that a male keeps as many females as he can service.

One guy gets the harem; everyone else gets the hand. Lions do with brute force what men do with money, extrapolate themselves and their line into the future, and create the world in their own image and likeness. This genetic selfishness also inadvertently strengthens the species. The strongest stud propagates the new generation. This is the ‘founder effect’: “I found her; you can’t have her.” Cloning would not only take all the fun out of it, but would weaken the species by separating it from the usual trials of natural selection. Love is finished when there is no forward movement, just up and down, in and out. Evolution appreciates motivation and inspiration, punctuated equilibrium.

Hippos shit with a little automatic butt-wiper

of a tail flicking off the poop steadily. Otherwise it’d be drooling down their legs, I guess. I can’t imagine one getting into a crouch. It’d never get back up. Natural selection never rests. If it’s difficult to envision the transition of land mammals to sea mammals, one only has to look at the hippo to see the transition, overweight and water-logged, gliding through the water, bouncing on all fours, incapable of swimming. They’ll learn. You watch them fight with their mouths and compare to the methods of some of the sea cows currently extant and you realize that this is something not likely to happen, but something that has already happened, though still in progress. Some of the different varieties of current sea mammals might as likely have resulted from different waves of evolution from the same branch stock rather than evolution of unrelated stocks, evolution differentiated by time as well as space.

I refuse to believe that man’s skeleton, optimal for erect posture,

didn’t somehow derive from his distinct preference for an erect posture in preceding generations, and his decreasing need for a four-legged stance or even the intermediate knuckle-walking. The same would hold for distinct hands and feet, two of each, as opposed to four feet or four hands, as found in other species, arising from a new preference for savannas as opposed to forests. The only question is: by what mechanism would something like that occur? What would stimulate imperceptible evolutionary changes in a specific direction toward a general goal? A quantum mechanic must look for a transfer particle. Darwinism invokes mutation, without ever proving a single instance in which a specific mutation caused a specific trait to be selected for long-term adaptation. Darwinism has merely been accepted, not proven. The mechanism I’m looking for must have something to do with memory, re-programming, visual basic, feedback, something similar to creativity, without invoking creationism nor ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’. Genetic drift must be inherent to the process of evolution, itself to be selected or rejected for usefulness, and re-directed in another direction. Evolution must be inherently directional, whether or not purposefully, adrift in a sea of probabilities.

The history of language is a family tree that maybe began with a single stalk.

They say that 5% of any two languages will show similarities, as if that proves the insignificance of any similarities when in fact it may show just the opposite. They may well have all derived from just a very few, maybe just one. Don’t be surprised if that evolution parallels the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens themselves, if not directly, then by analogy. Whether there is any direct connection between language and DNA or not, they seem to function similarly in how they evolve over time. Much is made of the fact that homos are the only species that can speak, then going into elaborate explanations of the human vocal chords having worked their way deep into the throat for proper enunciation of modern languages. All this seems a bit anthropocentric to me, diminishing if not outright ignoring or rejecting the fact that communication can be equally, if not more, effective in other ways. If anything, humans’ own writing systems are more articulate than the speech they represent, but which may never actually be vocalized, particularly in the case of mathematical equations. Beyond the human sphere, other animals convey rather complex information, which, while it cannot be properly regarded as speech, is certainly a form of communication, i.e. transfer of information.