But what is culture if not evolutionary idiocy writ large?

http://ehlee.humnet.unipi.it/books3/3/05.pdf

http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/11/23/the-subtleties-of-inheritance.html

I’m a sucker for compliments, so keep them coming.

Five years ago we had that thread on this blog.

“We live in a world, radically artificial twice over, and we haven’t begun to see what it will hold.”

http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/12/16/an-artificial-world.html

So much has changed since then. I’d appreciate your thoughts on that discussion! Perhaps we could revive it!

It begs the question, what is coming?

We have come a long way to get to this moment in time, surely there is something on the other side of the time paradox our consciousness has created for itself that is utilizes the complex emotional and logical capabilities that human beings have been developing for eras. It will surely be an interesting journey getting there, whatever comes our way.

Re: Gorillas, Wikipedia says 7 million years ago [1] — so perhaps I should have said proto-gorillas

Re: on slavery in pre-Behaviorally Modern societies, you are quite right. This is often the theme of fiction. John Norman’s “Time Slave” painted a picure of this several decades ago with cover art that has excited teenage boys since!

Rather, farming was the subordination of the majority of soviety into a field of work where they worked more and were less healthy. Chimps — and even Anatomically Modern Humans — could not have pulled that off.

Specifically, to make it work, you need fictive kinship [2], along the lines of the Roman Pater Familias system [3]. There needs to be a sense that is in some sense a family — even if not of the touchy-feely sort — for it to happen.

Re: the military, your observations of accurate. I wasn’t referring to the military of the Civil Government, but rather feudalism. The emergence of the Civil Government could be modeled as the successful monopolization of violence by the leader, but in any case this changes everything the change is cemented.

Re: Derbyshire, the line by which he quit National Review was this:

“(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway. ”

While National Review has a long history of having prominent Jewish and Atheist writers on staff, the magazine is basically Catholic in its orientation. Here Derb’s drawing the line as bright as possible, using an incendery topic (to enrage the hoi polloi) while explicitly rejecting Christ’s teachings (to enrage the Catholic elite).

Purpleslog,

Thanks for the update on Ridley’s book!

On Before the Dawk, the current model appears to be ‘Out-of-Africa, Again-and-Again,’ with waves of African diaspora profoundly impacting the human species. Wade’s book, IIRC, was perhaps the last serious work to support a massive Out-of-Africa replacement of around 2,000 individuals around 50,000 years ago led to the extermination of all other human lines that was not already in Africa at the time or exclusively descendent from this small population with no interbreeding.

I’m aware of no book which concisely summarizes the most recent model, but John Hawks tends to be a pretty good scientist-popularizer[4]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictive_kinship
[3] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2005/07/10/jesusism-paulism-part-ii-caiaphas-and-diocletian-did-know-better.html
[4] http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_dna/1000-genomes-introgression-among-populations-2012.html