I spent the last week working in Illinois (absolutely nothing resembling anything of value to be said or heard about anything having to do with that (bleep)hole state) and now I have to spend the week following Thanksgiving in Kansas (see above comment in parentheses.)
On a side note, I was actually looking at Twitter, trying to decide if it was worth selling my soul to be able to keep up with my favorite sports players on their Twitter accounts, and ran across a study that showed that 40% of all Twitter messages fall under the term "pointless babble." (That's their term, not mine, but I couldn't agree more.) This was the largest piece of the colorful pie chart they made for the non-statistically inclined. Pointless babble is linguistically referred to as "small talk" or, "commenting on what is perfectly obvious."
I'm really surprised it was as low as 40%.
From a linguistic point of view, small talk falls under ritualized communication, much like a dog barking because it heard another dog bark. Except I think it's a good chance that the dogs are displaying a better use of their mental faculties than most humans do in this case. The sad thing is, that in today's world, small talk is no longer pointless babble, it is babble that has taken on a very real point, that is, affirming one's own place in this world. Like scared children wandering through a hallway at night on their way to the bathroom who will sing to themselves as a form of self-assurance, human beings today feel the need to constantly flap their lower jaw and force air through their windpipes to prove that they exist, they are important, and they demand attention. No longer the image of the quietly self-assured, confident of his own existence. Now we have hairless gorillas, slapping their chests and pulling up grass to impress others.
Noam Chomsky wrote a few decades ago his theories on universal grammar. Taking the idea from a linguistic point of view, he showed how the parts of human psychology that are shared amongst all races show that the human mind will form, quite predictably, common ways to express thoughts or feelings common to all, and these modes are shared by all languages. Which is why even languages as radically different as English and Japanese have so many similarities in the thought processes which create the grammar, then vocabulary, of those languages. In every language I've ever heard of, a noun is a noun, which means that a thing is defined and it's existence taken for granted. A verb is a verb and describes action and therefore assumes that things undergo change in accordance with our common perception of time. Universal grammar. The implications are pretty far-reaching. Now, personally, I think Chomsky is an idiot who needs to be beaten with a stick every day for the rest of his life, but if this theory happens to be true (even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then) what does that say about humanity if the most common, global-wide form of communication (which, remember, shows the areas of human psychology and mental-makeup that can be found in all of us) is pointless babble?
I am reminded of Douglas Adam's theory on why humans talk so much. His alien character, Ford Prefect, on observing humanity ultimately decided that if human's mouths stopped moving, their brains started working.
Needless to say, I did not sign up on Twitter.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Saturday, November 6, 2010
The End of Mankind
I believe humanity faces a serious problem right now.
For the last ten thousand years humanity has scratched and clawed it's way to the top of the food chain. Nobody intelligent would argue that right now, of all species, humans are the masters of the world. We have struggled against nature and the other predators in the animal kingdom to emerge truly victorious. The road has been an interesting one.
Man is the most intelligent by far. Our infants have to be born with an already over-sized head. And even then, an average child's head will nearly double in circumference in the first three years of life. Because they are born with such large heads, our babies have to be born earlier and less developed than most other species, to allow passage through the birth canal. So over time, as our brains got bigger, our children arrived younger and weaker. Horses, giraffes, and many others can walk from day one. Many can at least forage for their own food within the first month. A human infant is extremely helpless for at least the first few years of life, unable to feed itself or defend itself from predators, even by flight. The natural outcome of this is that humanity began to develop society as a way to protect their young. They were simple at first, then increasingly complex. The more complex family-lifestyle society became, the more difficult it was to maintain that society as a hunter/gatherer one, so humanity began to tame nature itself by growing their own food. Thus farming was invented. Farming led to building, to social hierarchies, to stability. And to technology. Our huge brains and perfect tool-making bodies compensated for our slowness, lack of strength, and susceptibility to the environment. And it all took off from there.
Now, there is a theory (which I have studied a lot and now accept as fact) that once a species reaches a certain level of technological achievement which provides for the stability and comfort we now have, that species can no longer evolve.
Ancient man was at constant and total war with both the natural environment and the animal predators he was surrounded by. He evolved out of necessity. He created fire to ward off the cold. He created bows and stone flint arrows, then bronze weapons to ward of the natural predators as well as other men. Necessity has proven throughout time to be the mother of invention. History shows that most of mankind's greatest achievement comes from a reaction to war, ie, self-preservation.
Nowadays, though, we see something totally different.
Total war is defined as an entire society dedicating every single member and every single resource to the war effort. Accepting this definition, the US involvement in WW2 pales in comparison. In fact, no human society has seen a total war effort for at least a few centuries, if even that recently. Germanic tribes in the ages following the collapse of Rome may have dedicated everything from their small villages to survival. Greece and Rome were both too powerful to ever necessitate total war, though some of the smaller "nations" they fought were known to even send their women, young, and old into battle (the Celts for one). Besides that, you would have to go before recorded history, to when society in the agricultural sense was just being formed to see a true example of total war.
The good thing about total war, from a standpoint of human evolution, is that it is truly survival of the fittest. Only the strongest and fastest and smartest could survive. The best warrior, clad in leather and fur and carrying hand-made weapons of wood, who hid his infants most cunningly and taught his woman to fight most shrewdly and was strongest and most skilled was the one to survive and protect his family.
Today, when a society goes to war, we send a tiny fraction of our people to fight for us. And if not the best, they are far from the worst. They are usually of the most athletic, and most trained at survival. Those are the ones who die, and natural selection is ignored as the rest of society, no matter how stupid or slow, proliferates.
The very aspects of humanity that allowed us to do so much and become so great are the same things that allow the weak and stupid to live, and the strong to perish.
Thus, mankind is no longer evolving. We haven't truly had to evolve or adapt for thousands of years now. So we have reached a point of social stagnation. We, as a species, are going nowhere.We carried the wave of technological achievements made in desperation and necessity by the last world war; nuclear power, medical vaccines (though between 22 and 25 million people died in combat in ww2, between 32 and 50 million people, soldiers and civilians, died of famine and disease. WW2 saw the beginning of several breakthrough medical advances to combat this), the invention of the computer by von Neumann at Princeton (first begun as a result of needing to perform the complex calculations needed to build the A-bomb). But since then, our technological achievements have been built primarily on earlier ones. Smaller computer chips, better anesthesia, smarter traffic grids, etc.
Technology has seemingly peaked, as has mankind's rise in the world. The only thing that keeps growing is our population of increasingly ignorant and lazy consumers of resources.
So how do we fix this problem. The seemingly obvious answer is a total disregard of human rights and promoting total warfare, even a third world war in order to jump-start natural selection again. Of course, with the advent of nuclear power, a third world war would involve the destruction of half of humanity (at least) and the crippling of the natural world from nuclear disaster and fallout.
But the life on earth has survived comets that are today portrayed by hollywood as "global killers." Over the approximately 4.5 billion years this earth has been in existence, there have been at least five "great" mass extinctions, and dozens of smaller mass extinctions, caused by comets, volcanic upheaval the likes of which we can't even comprehend, radical changes in the environment, and God knows what else. The most famous happened 65 million years ago, and wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs. But crocodiles survived. As did sharks. Neither of those species has changed much at all since before that extinction ever happened. And mammals, a small fraction of life before then, not only survived but were finally enabled to proliferate, what with t-rex gone missing and all. But that wasn't even the biggest one. There were several bigger. The biggest extinction this world has seen was 250 million years ago, and that killed off about 90% of all life on earth. 90%. Yah, and we think a nuclear war would be the end of the world. There is nothing we could do to compare with what this earth has gone through and survived before mankind ever came along.
So maybe that wouldn't be so bad. Whoever did survive the war would definitely be held accountable to natural selection just to continue surviving after the war. Nature, ravaged and unforgiving, would ensure that only the strongest and smartest survived to continue the human species. It would probably be one of the best things to happen to humanity as a group.
But seriously, who wants that for their children. I can't in all conscientiousness, having love for my own nieces and nephew, and respect for life itself, advocate a nuclear holocaust.
Another option also involves the horror of totally disregarding the value of humanity's inalienable rights. The increase of violence on a massive, social scale would definitely curb the weaker and less intelligent of our species, but again, conscience decries and deplores the advocacy of such acts.
But there is another theory, one that suggests we as a species won't have to do anything about this at all. Going back over the fossil record, it shows us that there is a mass extinction on one level or another approximately, give or take, every 62 million years. The last one was 65 million years ago. There are some who think that we are high due another one. And another thing about all the previous mass extinctions throughout the earth's violent and turbulent history, is that we can't prove what caused even half of them. Oh, we can find iridium dust in layers around the world at the time of a few of the extinctions. And yes, iridium is a huge part of an asteroid's chemical make up, so logic follows that at least a couple of asteroids have smacked the crap, and a lot of the life, out of this little planet before. But for the most part most mass extinctions are not even shown to have been caused by outward events.
Thus the theory that sometimes a species can cause it's own destruction, or partial destruction. A further part of that theory, and how it applies to the human race, is that it occurs when a species, through becoming so dominant as to wipe out all natural predators, reaches the point where it can no longer evolve. It becomes stagnant, and then dies. This is a theory for at least one of the three great dinosaur extinctions, and it is a theory for humanity itself.
Our problems may solve themselves. But it won't be pretty, and we may not survive.
Ok, in previewing this post, I just noticed how much that last line sounded like something out of a movie preview. I apoligize for the cheeziness.
For the last ten thousand years humanity has scratched and clawed it's way to the top of the food chain. Nobody intelligent would argue that right now, of all species, humans are the masters of the world. We have struggled against nature and the other predators in the animal kingdom to emerge truly victorious. The road has been an interesting one.
Man is the most intelligent by far. Our infants have to be born with an already over-sized head. And even then, an average child's head will nearly double in circumference in the first three years of life. Because they are born with such large heads, our babies have to be born earlier and less developed than most other species, to allow passage through the birth canal. So over time, as our brains got bigger, our children arrived younger and weaker. Horses, giraffes, and many others can walk from day one. Many can at least forage for their own food within the first month. A human infant is extremely helpless for at least the first few years of life, unable to feed itself or defend itself from predators, even by flight. The natural outcome of this is that humanity began to develop society as a way to protect their young. They were simple at first, then increasingly complex. The more complex family-lifestyle society became, the more difficult it was to maintain that society as a hunter/gatherer one, so humanity began to tame nature itself by growing their own food. Thus farming was invented. Farming led to building, to social hierarchies, to stability. And to technology. Our huge brains and perfect tool-making bodies compensated for our slowness, lack of strength, and susceptibility to the environment. And it all took off from there.
Now, there is a theory (which I have studied a lot and now accept as fact) that once a species reaches a certain level of technological achievement which provides for the stability and comfort we now have, that species can no longer evolve.
Ancient man was at constant and total war with both the natural environment and the animal predators he was surrounded by. He evolved out of necessity. He created fire to ward off the cold. He created bows and stone flint arrows, then bronze weapons to ward of the natural predators as well as other men. Necessity has proven throughout time to be the mother of invention. History shows that most of mankind's greatest achievement comes from a reaction to war, ie, self-preservation.
Nowadays, though, we see something totally different.
Total war is defined as an entire society dedicating every single member and every single resource to the war effort. Accepting this definition, the US involvement in WW2 pales in comparison. In fact, no human society has seen a total war effort for at least a few centuries, if even that recently. Germanic tribes in the ages following the collapse of Rome may have dedicated everything from their small villages to survival. Greece and Rome were both too powerful to ever necessitate total war, though some of the smaller "nations" they fought were known to even send their women, young, and old into battle (the Celts for one). Besides that, you would have to go before recorded history, to when society in the agricultural sense was just being formed to see a true example of total war.
The good thing about total war, from a standpoint of human evolution, is that it is truly survival of the fittest. Only the strongest and fastest and smartest could survive. The best warrior, clad in leather and fur and carrying hand-made weapons of wood, who hid his infants most cunningly and taught his woman to fight most shrewdly and was strongest and most skilled was the one to survive and protect his family.
Today, when a society goes to war, we send a tiny fraction of our people to fight for us. And if not the best, they are far from the worst. They are usually of the most athletic, and most trained at survival. Those are the ones who die, and natural selection is ignored as the rest of society, no matter how stupid or slow, proliferates.
The very aspects of humanity that allowed us to do so much and become so great are the same things that allow the weak and stupid to live, and the strong to perish.
Thus, mankind is no longer evolving. We haven't truly had to evolve or adapt for thousands of years now. So we have reached a point of social stagnation. We, as a species, are going nowhere.We carried the wave of technological achievements made in desperation and necessity by the last world war; nuclear power, medical vaccines (though between 22 and 25 million people died in combat in ww2, between 32 and 50 million people, soldiers and civilians, died of famine and disease. WW2 saw the beginning of several breakthrough medical advances to combat this), the invention of the computer by von Neumann at Princeton (first begun as a result of needing to perform the complex calculations needed to build the A-bomb). But since then, our technological achievements have been built primarily on earlier ones. Smaller computer chips, better anesthesia, smarter traffic grids, etc.
Technology has seemingly peaked, as has mankind's rise in the world. The only thing that keeps growing is our population of increasingly ignorant and lazy consumers of resources.
So how do we fix this problem. The seemingly obvious answer is a total disregard of human rights and promoting total warfare, even a third world war in order to jump-start natural selection again. Of course, with the advent of nuclear power, a third world war would involve the destruction of half of humanity (at least) and the crippling of the natural world from nuclear disaster and fallout.
But the life on earth has survived comets that are today portrayed by hollywood as "global killers." Over the approximately 4.5 billion years this earth has been in existence, there have been at least five "great" mass extinctions, and dozens of smaller mass extinctions, caused by comets, volcanic upheaval the likes of which we can't even comprehend, radical changes in the environment, and God knows what else. The most famous happened 65 million years ago, and wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs. But crocodiles survived. As did sharks. Neither of those species has changed much at all since before that extinction ever happened. And mammals, a small fraction of life before then, not only survived but were finally enabled to proliferate, what with t-rex gone missing and all. But that wasn't even the biggest one. There were several bigger. The biggest extinction this world has seen was 250 million years ago, and that killed off about 90% of all life on earth. 90%. Yah, and we think a nuclear war would be the end of the world. There is nothing we could do to compare with what this earth has gone through and survived before mankind ever came along.
So maybe that wouldn't be so bad. Whoever did survive the war would definitely be held accountable to natural selection just to continue surviving after the war. Nature, ravaged and unforgiving, would ensure that only the strongest and smartest survived to continue the human species. It would probably be one of the best things to happen to humanity as a group.
But seriously, who wants that for their children. I can't in all conscientiousness, having love for my own nieces and nephew, and respect for life itself, advocate a nuclear holocaust.
Another option also involves the horror of totally disregarding the value of humanity's inalienable rights. The increase of violence on a massive, social scale would definitely curb the weaker and less intelligent of our species, but again, conscience decries and deplores the advocacy of such acts.
But there is another theory, one that suggests we as a species won't have to do anything about this at all. Going back over the fossil record, it shows us that there is a mass extinction on one level or another approximately, give or take, every 62 million years. The last one was 65 million years ago. There are some who think that we are high due another one. And another thing about all the previous mass extinctions throughout the earth's violent and turbulent history, is that we can't prove what caused even half of them. Oh, we can find iridium dust in layers around the world at the time of a few of the extinctions. And yes, iridium is a huge part of an asteroid's chemical make up, so logic follows that at least a couple of asteroids have smacked the crap, and a lot of the life, out of this little planet before. But for the most part most mass extinctions are not even shown to have been caused by outward events.
Thus the theory that sometimes a species can cause it's own destruction, or partial destruction. A further part of that theory, and how it applies to the human race, is that it occurs when a species, through becoming so dominant as to wipe out all natural predators, reaches the point where it can no longer evolve. It becomes stagnant, and then dies. This is a theory for at least one of the three great dinosaur extinctions, and it is a theory for humanity itself.
Our problems may solve themselves. But it won't be pretty, and we may not survive.
Ok, in previewing this post, I just noticed how much that last line sounded like something out of a movie preview. I apoligize for the cheeziness.
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