What It Is To Be a Human -- Part I

A living organism is a complex and fragile mechanism that requires continual maintenance and repair.  Maintenance and repair of an organism depend on supplies of both material and energy. Some microorganisms obtain energy and structural materials from inorganic compounds in their environment. But the great majority of living organisms, both plant and animal, depend directly or indirectly on solar radiation for the energy to build and maintain their physical structure. 

Humans obtain the material and energy for growth, cellular maintenance and physical action by consuming other organisms: either plants that derive energy directly from the sun, or animals that derive energy by consuming either plants or other animals. 

Because all living creatures are mortal, perpetuation depends on reproduction. Hence, the basic human preoccupations: food and sex. Attention to all else, it might seem, is maladaptive.

But was the childless Sir Isaac Newton maladapted, was Saint Francis, or Jesus? Not necessarily. they each had a huge impact on the civilization in which they lived, and hence upon the survival and expansion of the gene pool to which their own genes belonged.

The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done

By John Ellis

Wall St. Journal, May 2, 2021: An advanced society functions by creating a series of institutions, telling them what it wants them to do, and funding them to do it. Institutions like the police, fire departments, courts and schools do the jobs society creates them to do. But one American institution—higher education—has decided to repurpose itself. It has set aside the job given to it by society and substituted a different one.

Higher education had a cluster of related purposes in society. Everyone benefited from the new knowledge it developed and the well-informed, thoughtful citizenry it produced. Individual students benefited from the preparation they received for careers in a developed economy. Yet these days, academia has decided that its primary purpose is the promotion of a radical political ideology, to which it gives the sunny label “social justice.”

That’s an enormous detour from the institutional mission granted to higher education by society—and a problem of grave consequence. For the purpose that academia has now given itself happens to be the only one that the founding documents of virtually all colleges and universities take care to forbid pre-emptively. The framers of those documents understood that using the campuses to promote political ideologies would destroy their institutions, because ideologies would always be rigid enough to prevent the exploration of new ideas and the free exercise of thought. They knew that the two purposes—academic and political—aren’t simply different, but polar opposites. They can’t coexist because the one erases the other.

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Death of the West: Autism and Atheism

Vox Popoli postulates a correlation between autism and atheism.

I first postulated my hypothesis concerning a link between the autism spectrum and atheism back in 2007 in response to a post by PZ Myers at Pharyngula in which he and other atheists were bragging about their relatively high Asperger's Quotient scores. I wrote: "Obviously, more comprehensive and scientific tests would be advised before any definite conclusion can be reached, but these initial observations do appear to indicate a possibility that atheism could be nothing more than a minor mental disorder."

 In that connection it may be noted that alleles for autism are reported to overlap broadly with alleles for high intelligence.

This correlation supports the notion that atheism is a consequence of rational thought. Certainly, there's little rational basis for theism, other than the fact that a society without a religion is doomed to self-destruction as is evident in the West today.

Unfortunately, it requires more than a couple of extra IQ points to recognize the necessity of irrational faith. It takes a civilization and an proper education system, both of which the Western nations have now jettisoned. 

Frans de Waal: An Ethologist's Confusion About Ethics — Part I

Ethology is the study of animal behavior. Franz de Waal is a distinguished ethologist and author of several best-selling accounts of primate behavior. As de Waal reports at length in the Atheist and the Bonobo, and other works, a key feature of the behavior of apes and to a greater or lesser degree other social animals, is sharing, helping, commiserating, comforting and demanding fairness. 

From this reality of animal social existence, de Waal concludes that morality is neither unique to humans nor dependent on religion, but is inherent in mammalian biology. Furthermore, he contends, that religion is, though difficult and perhaps impossible to eradicate, superfluous to the good society.

Thus, de Waal writes:

This brings me back to my bottom-up view of morality. The moral law is not imposed from above or derived from well-reasoned principles; rather it arises from ingrained values that have been there from the beginning of time.

In this, however, de Waal is sadly confused. The constructive, cooperative, fairness-demanding and mutually beneficial behavior of social animals is not evidence of morality, natural or otherwise. It is merely the rational, self-serving behavior of the small business owner who refrains from swindling his customers in the hope that they will return for more. It is the principle of you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. By helping one another, social animals achieve a level of well-being beyond that attainable were they to live independent, uncooperative lives.

What Accounts for the Past 500 Years of Western Global Dominance? Race, Culture or Blind Chance?

By Canspeccy

I have no sympathy for the imperialist enthusiasm of Oxford cum Harvard and Stanford Professor, Niall Ferguson. I am prompted, however, to come to his defense in the face of a viciously false allegation of white supremacism by a Pankaj Mishra, a cousin-in-law to the pseudo-Conservative and imperialist war criminal British Prime Minister, David Cameron.

Mishra's contemptible smear was published by the London Review of Books under the guise of a review of Ferguson's book, Civilization: The West and the Rest.

Mishra is a skilled exponent of defamation by insinuation.

Of Men, and Apes and Civilization

The close DNA sequence similarity between men and apes has led some to suppose that a man is no more than a wimpy chimp with a slightly swollen head. Further, it has been suggested, since the difference between men and apes is so trivial, there must be creatures somewhere in the limitless expanse of the universe at least as superior in intellect to us as were are to chimps. So, according to this line of thinking, despite the modest enlargement of the human fore-brain, we have little to be swelled-headed about.

But this reflects a misunderstanding of the difference between men and apes and the significance of that difference.

Both men and apes are mammals, which means that they are built to the same plan. They have liver and lights, stomach and spleen, four limbs, a head and a tail. At the cellular level the similarity of design is even closer: the same membranes, organelles, nucleic acids and enzymes. So inevitably men and apes share much the same DNA sequence, as they do with horses and hamsters, and even with reptiles and fishes, fungi and forest trees.

There is an underlying biochemical unity to the life of this Earth. But that does not make the fangs of a tiger and the molars of a camel functionally equivalent. Small changes in the proportions and slight differences in the elaboration of a basic design can result in fundamental differences in function.

Thus with the brains of man and chimp. In the lobes and their connections the two are largely similar. But the human brain has approximately twice the mass of the brain of a chimp, and there is a many-fold difference between the two in the size of certain lobes. The human brain is thus adapted to functions unknown to the mind of a chimp.

And it is possible for very slight genetic changes to result in qualitatively transformational changes in function. For example, a single-gene mutation that results in one additional rounds of cell division in some portion of the embryonic brain would double the final volume of that part of the brain.

Why, then, it might be said, if the only thing distinguishing a man from an ape is a small collection of single gene mutations, the difference between us is indeed trivial. But that is to misunderstand the evolutionary step that man has made and which no other ape has, or could ever make, so long as mankind exists.

To evolve a larger brain, an organism must have use for a larger brain. The brain is an energy intensive organ, requiring a continuous infusion of glucose and oxygen. A chimp with a brain like that of a human would be at a severe disadvantage. It would want to sit around and think but it would need to work harder than every other chimp to obtain the food necessary to keep its costly brain alive.

The only way such a chimp could survive would be to invent language, create a civilization and its associated technologies thereby raising the chimp living standard while lowering the hours of work.

That is what mankind achieved. And that is what no other species on Earth can achieve while mankind exists because mankind has preempted the resources of the entire planet.

As to the claim that an extraterrestrial intelligence would likely consider the mind of man as feeble a thing as we humans are inclined to consider the mind of a chimp, the answer should be, "give us time."

It took humans about one hundred thousand years to exchange the lifestyle of an ape for that of a yuppie. But most of that transformation occurred, with exponential acceleration, in the last ten thousand years.

Humanity is now at a critical point in its existence. We have technology that can put the entire accumulated knowledge of the species at the fingertips of every one of the seven billion membners of the species. And electronic media allow us to do that at trivial cost. The result could be an explosion in technological innovation the like of which we can hardly imagine and which will either lead us very quickly to self-destruction or grant us the power of gods.

Not only do we have the ability to educate every receptive mind to a point far beyond that reached by Aristotle or Newton, but to build intelligent machines that can outperform the human intellect by orders of magnitude.

This is precisely the transformation that any intelligent civilization created by organically evolved creatures anywhere in the universe must have undergone. It is the transformation from advancement through haphazard accumulation of mutations and genetic rearrangements that yield short-term survival advantage, to the engineered improvement of the organism and its enveloping civilization.

And once evolution is intelligently planned, it likely follows the same course anywhere in the universe. There is now no apparent limit to the advancement of human knowledge and dominion over the planet and beyond—unless we are destroyed by our own technology. But in that case, intelligent life may be a self-limiting phenomenon wherever it arises in the universe, in which case the civilization of humanity is approaching a climax of complexity that will never be exceeded anywhere in the universe.