Aristotle & His “Not Even Wrong” Ideas

Unbelievable bullshit people like Aristotle made the shit up without any epistemic humility but the real issue, these folks are still respected. People like Norman Borlaug, Robert Trivers names nor their works are known to anyone. Well, god bless my species. 

In the 4th century BCE, the philosopher Aristotle had two theories about this. He postulated that they hibernated during the winter as other animals did. Swallows, for example, encased themselves in little balls of clay and sank out of sight to the bottom of swamps. His other idea was that the missing species transformed themselves into the birds that did stick around for the winter, and changed back when summer came.

The little old man in de Bergerac’s tale was an imagined Spanish soldier called Domingo Gonsales, and he was the hero of another story. In 1638, just a couple of decades before Cyrano’s “A Voyage to the Moon” became available, the English cleric Francis Godwin published “The Man in the Moone,” a fictional account of Gonsales’ lunar adventure. In the book, Gonsales trained 25 swans to pull an ‘engine’ he had made. One day, he took a jaunt in his swan carriage which happened to coincide with the time birds were accustomed to disappear, as it seemed, from Earth.

Gonsales was about to find out the answer to the mystery. To his surprise, the swans flew upwards, until they reached what we would think of as orbit and became weightless. French scientist Blaise Pascal’s experiments demonstrating the lack of atmosphere in space had not yet filtered through to Godwin, as both birds and man breathed as usual. In 12 days they reached the Moon, where he found other migrating terrestrial birds, such as swallows, nightingales, and woodcocks. When the swans started to show signs of agitation, he divined that they were ready to return to Earth; and so he harnessed them again and sailed home in nine days, gravitational pull on his side.

This was a ripping yarn for sure, but some thought it was a plausible alternative to Aristotle’s theories, especially as there was a Biblical passage that seemed to allude to it. In the King James translation, it goes:

Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming (Jeremiah 8:7).

Animal Suffering...

Animals who are sick, in pain, cold, frustrated, or thirsty respond differently to experimental cancer treatments. Animal stress is not just bad for the animals but it’s also bad for the scientists’ data.

- How Animal Suffering Can Ruin Lab Experiments, Lab animal veterinarian

What Is The Question?

Finding the question can be fun, as in thinking of a cartoon caption. But it can also be extremely difficult psychologically. Scientists are often expected by the public to know it all, and yet, “feeling stupid” is a common mode of operation for us. Science is the art of dealing with things we do not know enough about. As Wernher von Braun, the father of German and US rocket programs, phrased it: “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” Science is humbling in this way. For young scientists, it is often very difficult to understand that it is perfectly normal to not know the answer—or even the question. Learning to embrace this uncertainty is part of our maturation as scientists.

Uri Alon has an intuitive image to describe the process of re-finding our questions. Given what we know about a given topic “A,” a researcher predicts that it should be possible to arrive at point “B,” a scientific destination that seems interesting—a hypothesis. However, the plot inevitably thickens over the course of the research project, and new hurdles force the scientist into a meandering path. Soon, the researcher is lost, having lost sight of the start point (which suddenly seems shaky) and end point (which appears unreachable). Uri calls this “being in the cloud”—you have lost your original question, but the reason why this has occurred is strange and thus potentially exciting and itself worthy of study. From inside the cloud, the situation may seem desperate, but Uri sees the cloud as the hallmark of science: if you are in the cloud, then you might have stumbled upon something non-obvious and interesting. “I’m very confused” a student would tell Uri, to which he would reply, “Oh good - So you’re in the cloud!” Eventually, a new question that arose inside the cloud may lead the way to an unexpected destination “C.”

Embracing uncertainty

The scientific method is often perceived as a simple sequence that leads from a problem to an answer, possibly through long iterations of modified hypotheses. But our reality is much less structured: it often starts with a topic and some observations, leading to the finding of patterns and questions about those patterns, possibly long before we have any explicit hypothesis or any direct tests. And even if a project starts out with a very specific hypothesis, in our experiences, it still generally arrives at a very different point than expected.

In some way, then, night science may be most productive when it has no agenda, when there are no particular questions it is trying to reshape or resolve. When the scientist does not have a hypothesis, she is free to explore, to make connections. In some sense, any kind of expectation on how things are to behave—a hypothesis—is a liability that could obstruct a new idea that awaits our discovery. Once night science elucidates and reframes this question, the researcher can use the full power of day science to solve it. In this sense, a major discovery is typically both the solution and the problem.

Much of basic, curiosity-driven science is exploration, and night science is a fundamental part of that; yet funding bodies often demand that research must be hypothesis-driven. But while some part of night science can be done with the help of an armchair and some good coffee, other parts require the exploration of large and complicated data sets. If no funding is provided for such endeavors, the generation of new questions may be stifled, hindering scientific progress: in science, the problem that is eventually solved is often not the one that was initially sought out.

- More Here

Real Evil - Inheritance

This is so wrong, massively wrong.

The pain and suffering of billions of unborn kids who will be losers of the birth lottery will be massive and immense in a scale that humanity has never seen. 

Without coming up with a way to control this stupidest idea of automatic inheritance, lot of problems in the world cannot be fixed.  In other words, this is one of the very few fundamental problems in the world. 

Just because A fucked B and C was born hence C gets everything A & B worked hard for in their entire life while C did zilch in life is wrong. This will be one of the the primary root causes that capitalism is failing and might cause democracy to decline in future, 

To state the obvious:

1. We need to segregate the process of defining and understanding a problem vs finding a solution. I am defining a problem here. I have no idea how to solve this problem. I think most of humanity will agree this is a problem. But disagreements come when you start confusing solutions with the process of defining the problem. 
2. Identifying this as a problem doesn't define me nor anyone as a communist or socialist. Fuck communism and socialism; its is proven over and over again as bad ideology not even close to a solution for any problem in the world. 
3. This is the time most people should start understanding this problem and agree that we have to find solutions to this issue. 
4. Solutions might not come for years or decades. 
5. Implementing the solution after #4 might take years or decades. 
6. So good luck sapiens. Max and I will not be alive to see what unveils. 

I have seen a few academic papers but not even is writing or talking about this a fundamental problem. I have been screaming about this for over two decades now. The birth-lottery a.k.a inheritance is the cancer which has potential to destroy democracy. Beware.

Gen X and Millennials Will Inherit Trillions in Real Estate Over the Next Decade - and this is just real estate (this doesn't include cash, 401K, investments et al.). 

Baby boomers and older Americans have spent decades amassing one of the largest concentrations of private wealth in history. Now, that wealth is starting to be passed down to the next generation—and it’s having a ripple effect across the high-end property market.

Over the next decade, roughly 1.2 million individuals with net worths of $5 million or more are projected to pass down more than $38 trillion globally, according to a new report from brokerage Coldwell Banker Global Luxury reviewed exclusively by The Wall Street Journal.

Real estate is poised to play a significant role in the great wealth transfer. Gen Xers and Millennials are set to inherit $4.6 trillion in global real estate over the next 10 years, according to the report, which incorporated data from research firms Altrata and Cerulli Associates. Nearly $2.4 trillion of that property is located in the U.S.

Real-estate brokers, attorneys and family offices say they are already seeing profound changes in who buys luxury homes and how purchases are structured. High-net-worth families are bringing children into conversations about inheritance earlier and making high-stakes real-estate decisions sooner.

[---]

In Manhattan, for instance, family money is accounting for an increasing share of major transactions.

“The price points have just gone wild,” said Ian Slater, a Compass agent who works with ultrawealthy families in New York. “I used to commonly see people buy $3 million to $5 million apartments for their 25- to 30-year-old kids. Now I see people buying $15 to $30 million apartments for their kids.”

[---]

Americans with a net worth of more than $5 million are expected to pass down about $17.3 trillion over the next decade. Centimillionaires—those worth more than $100 million—hold roughly 43% of that wealth, according to the Coldwell Banker report.

With so much at stake, many families are preparing their children by starting conversations early.

When Bobby Castro, 58, began planning how his money would one day pass to his children, he said he was driven primarily by fear that the fortune he and his wife built would be squandered.

“I read there’s over a 70% chance Gen Two—meaning my children—will wind up blowing all the hard work that the creators of Gen One, my wife and I, did,” he said. “And that is a scary stat.”

As a result, he and his wife, Sofia Castro, 54, who live in a sprawling waterfront home with a private dock in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., began building what they call their “100-year legacy plan.” Bobby made his money by founding and later selling a financial-technology company called Bankers Healthcare Group and using the proceeds to amass a real-estate portfolio along the way. The family is now worth about $500 million, he said.

[---]

In cases where multiple siblings inherit one property, things can get complicated, particularly if a plan isn’t put in place before a parent’s death, Cole said. 

“Kids have kids, spouses get involved and complexity becomes more of an issue,” he said. “One wants to keep it because there is sentimental value, one wants to sell it because they want the capital out. There’s a lot to untangle.”

Biggest Bullshit !

There’s a good likelihood that by 2050, all scientific research will be done by superintelligent AI rather than human researchers. Some humans might do science as a hobby, but they wouldn’t be making any useful contributions.

- Nick Bostrom

Oh jeez, these morons never focus on fundamentals and jump to fantasy. 

The fundamental problem is humans still don't know most of the fundamentals of science. Worse, we still don't know how to ask the right questions. 

Guess what? AI learns from what humans know. 

Say, Joe an average American is fasting for 21 days straight but Joe is able to poop one ton shit twice a day. 

God bless Joe’s plumber!

What I've Been Reading

London is Tacoma before Tacoma is even a gleam in a Guggenheim’s eye. 

We pay attention to the wrong things. We make a mystery of Jack the Ripper. 

It’s not a mystery. It’s history.

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser. 

Did anyone thought about asking this simple question of why there are less serial killers these days? Why?

Jessica Wolpaw Reyes was considering ideas for her PhD while worrying about lead paint since she was pregnant. She happened to listen to Steven D. Levitt's (of Freaknomics) talk. 

She narrowed down on the topic of "early childhood exposure and crime rate" in her dissertation (which was published in 2007). Her question became the seed for Fraser's brilliant book. 

This is yet another example of why it so important to meditate on why question to get at-least some of the causality behind a symptom. 

The most important question for us to ask now is - what is the x in 2025 compared to x = lead in 1950 to 1990 (almost 40 years time span)?

My answer is - consuming processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia and so on. 

Most reading this including myself will not be alive in 40 years if and when such a study comes out. 

One can wait for the next 4 decades or embrace precautionary principle now and avoid those potential mental and physical effects. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. 

Here's good excerpt from the book: 

According to Patterson, the average American during of age of leaded gasoline is so filthy when it comes to lead contamination that he's comparable to Pig Pen in the Peanuts comic strip. "Thats what people look like with respect to lead," he says. "Everyone. The lead from your hair, when you walk into a superclean laboratory like mine, will contaminate the whole damn laboratory. Just from your hair."

Not only that but Patterson calculates that the blood lead level of pre-industrial  humans would have have been 0.016 micrograms per deciliter, far lower than that of anyone living in the industrial age, American, he concludes, are suffering from "enough partial brain dysfunction, that their lives are being adversely affected by loss of mental acuity and irrationality. He devotes himself to campaigning against lead gasoline and to proving that everything Robert Kehoe ever said or upblished about "normal levels" of lead in blood is wrong.

The issue is currently its just not American's but the whole goddamn world is stuck in processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia and so on. 

Before even reading this book just last month I wrote: 

People who eat meat from factory farms pretending that nothing is going to happen to them is clearly a form of infallibilism.

I am not talking about the tragedy of commons in terms of moral and ecological consequences but their diet makes them live a parochial life, what thoughts they can think, how to live a good life, how to make better decisions for themselves and their families. 

In other words their diet makes their thinking and life stuck in a small rut of quagmire from which they cannot escape to realize the beauty of life right in front of their noses. Perhaps there are  thoughts we cannot think - in the spectrum of bandwidth of thoughts humans can think probably becomes even much smaller with their dietary choices which causes immense suffering. 

A much better payback happening here and now than some subjective future heaven and hell.

Take a moment and thank those men and women who fought so hard for decades to expose the effects of lead.  I bet "God" will appreciate that gulping dead bodies of Turkey.

Take a moment to identify the men and women are currently fighting to expose the cognitive and physical on human beings who are stuck in consuming processed food, eating dead bodies from factory farming with horrible conditions and antibiotics, over eating sans fasting, plastic, cable news, talk radio, social media, cell phone, ecology collapse and living in concrete urban and sub-urban jungles, daily life sans biophilia.

What I've Been Reading

I cannot remember the last time I laughed out so loud while reading a book :-) 

This is a master piece with around 10 minutes of reading time. 

The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo M. Cipolla.

• Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. 

• Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. 

• Law 3: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. 

• Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. 

• Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person. A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

10 Misconceptions About Evolution

• Evolution is “only a theory”  - Nope. 

• “Survival of the fittest” means that evolution favors those who are “strongest”  - “Evolutionary fitness” refers to reproductive success; more precisely, it’s a measure of the success of genes in getting themselves projected into the future and is achieved in many ways—including the ability to obtain food, to avoid becoming food for someone else, to overcome diseases, to adjust to local weather and climate, attract mates, and so forth. In a pioneering research report, male European red deer who were smaller and who bore less impressively developed antlers were often more “fit” than the hulking males, because these “sneaky fuckers” (don’t blame me: This descriptive phrase is part of the technical literature) copulated with the females while the more massive bulls were busy fighting antlero-a-antlero with other more physically developed specimens.  

• Evolution explains the origin of life (or it’s supposed to) - Nope. That is primarily a job for biophysics, biochemistry, and geology. 

• Evolution acts for the good of the species - It is estimated that something like 99 percent of species that have existed are now extinct, so if evolution is working for the good of species, it has done a terrible job! What really argues against “good of the species,” however, is the actual way natural selection operates. Although it is possible that species sometimes compete, and, as a result, better adapted ones replace their poorly adapted alternatives, evolutionary competition takes place almost entirely within species, not between them. 

• Evolutionary theory says that living things are the result of chance - No, it doesn’t. There’s a half-truth hidden here; actually, less than half. Natural selection’s power comes from differential reproduction, the logical, unavoidable process whereby some genetic variants are more successful—more fit—than others. As such, its raw material comes from genetic diversity, which is produced by mutations and, in the case of sexually reproducing species, the reshuffling of genes via meiosis and sexual recombination. These processes are essentially random. But that’s just the source of the building blocks employed by natural selection. Natural selection definitely isn’t random—it does the heavy lifting and fitting together, by picking and choosing among various options, with some genes being projected into the future more than their alternatives—i.e., our old friend differential reproduction once again. Then the process happens over and over, repeatedly retaining those that are more fit and abandoning those that are less so. 

• Because we rely more and more on brain power and less and less on our muscles, human beings in the future will have big heads and small bodies - It is similarly easy to get hung up on the Lamarckian assumption that insects, crustaceans, fish, and amphibians that inhabit pitch dark caves are often blind because they stopped using their eyes, which therefore disappeared. Not so. These evolutionary changes, which are entirely compatible with Darwinian natural selection, occur because eyes are useless in the dark—hence, they lose the selective advantage that they convey in lighted environments—and, moreover, they take energy to produce while also being vulnerable to injury and infection. So, go ahead and exercise, use your brains, and hang out in dark places if you wish … but your offspring won’t have larger biceps, bigger heads, or smaller eyes as a result. 

• Gaps in the fossil record argue against evolution - Of course there are gaps in the fossil record! It’s remarkable that we have any such records at all, given how unlikely it is that any given dead critter will be fossilized and preserved, to which we must add an additional low probability that these remains will be discovered and recognized as such, perhaps hundreds of millions of years later. As for “missing links,” picture a line between two taxonomic groups, with as yet unidentified species connecting them; now, identify something between (linking) them: Now you have two new missing links! So, any time we find intermediate forms, there will necessarily be “missing links,” because every time a linking specimen is found (such as the discovery of Australopithecines linking nonhuman primates and Homo sapiens), new missing links are produced. In short, the more fossils, the more “missing links.” 

• Human beings aren’t evolving any more - We are. It’s just that evolution is typically a very slow process, limited by selective pressures (differences in the reproductive success of different traits and the genes that underlie them), along with generation times. It is possible that human beings in the future will have evolved the ability to function and reproduce readily with microplastics and “forever chemicals” in their blood, not to mention Strontium-90 in their bones and DDT in their fat, or maybe enhanced ability to manipulate computer screens, if such individuals have more kids. Each person’s genotype is fixed, so as individuals, we don’t evolve biologically. But Homo sapiens does, and will continue to do so, unless all people and their genes reproduce identically. 

• Because of evolution, living things are always getting “better” - Not necessarily. Early in the Earth’s history, a few billion years ago, life was very simple. Since then, it has evolved increasing complexity and enhanced ability to flourish in a variety of environments. In that sense, living things have gotten “better.” But any notion of improvement is subject to human-centered bias.  

• Evolutionary biology isn’t a science because it’s a historical phenomenon and can’t be tested - Many sciences, notably astronomy and geology, engage uniquely with historical phenomena (we can’t experimentally manipulate stars or continents), and yet they generate impressive empirical testing, often based on detailed observational regimes along with falsifiable predictions. And there is no question of their status as bona fide sciences. Evolutionary biology is no different.  

- More Here

Tyranny Of Experts!

But the ethnographic record makes it amply evident that the large-scale adoption of shrimp farming has caused an ecological and social disaster in the Bengal delta, blighting once-fertile land and further impoverishing the poor and landless. This is largely because the species that was chosen for farming in Bengal is a saltwater variety preferred by Western consumers: tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon, or ‘bagda chingri’); Bengalis generally prefer a variety of freshwater prawn called Macrobrachium rosenbergii, or ‘golda chingri’.

Saltwater ponds for tiger shrimp aquaculture are often dug on agricultural land that is otherwise used to grow rice, fruit and vegetables. Over time, water from these ponds seeps into nearby fields and aquifers, salinising the soil until it can no longer support rice or any other crop. Then fruit trees and orchards begin to wither, and even the grass disappears, making it difficult to keep livestock. Soon, once-fertile stretches of land dotted with trees, market gardens and rice fields do indeed become, to use Paprocki’s words, ‘threatening dystopias’.

Dewan quotes a woman who went back, after an absence of some years, to a village where shrimp farming had been introduced: “I returned to a lona desh [saline land] without vegetables,” she said. “The salt is even in the air, eroding the walls of the houses so they crumble. Everything is lona [saline]. Everything dies. There are no fruit trees; the few date and coconut trees here do not bear fruit. Goats and chickens are too expensive to buy, and they often die due to the saline water. We need to buy all [our] cooking fuel, there are no trees or cow dung for us to use. There is no grass for livestock, the ponds are too saline for bathing, clothes washed in saltwater do not get clean and ruin quicker. We need to buy everything and because of this we cannot afford to buy fruit, eggs, or meat… The canals are gone; we used to bathe in canals that are now no more… we must bathe in the saline river. Our eyes sting, our skin itches and becomes dark. Our ponds are now saline. We used to drink pond water filtered with fitkeri [alum stone], now we must drink tube well water that we collect from far away. We suffer now, but the rich do not care.”

The social consequences of shrimp farming are no less ruinous than its environmental impacts, because it requires only a fraction of the labour needed to cultivate rice. So when rice fields are converted into saltwater ponds, the poor and landless lose their main source of income, and are left with no recourse but to migrate to urban shanty-towns to eke out a precarious living. This outcome is actually welcomed by some development professionals, because they take a dim view of subsistence farming in general, and see proletarianisation as a step up on the ladder of ‘progress’. Similarly, experts who advocate managed retreat as the most practical response to sea-level rise also regard migration away from the coast in a generally favourable light.

Irony of ironies: people who are forced out of their villages because of shrimp farming are often classified as ‘climate migrants’ by aid agencies and bureaucrats, despite the fact that their displacement is the result not of global warming itself, but rather of climate solutions advocated by credentialed experts. In effect, this is a process, as Paprocki notes, of “anticipatory ruination”, intended to ward off the possible harms of the future by causing actual harm in the present day.

[---]

The shared assumption in all of this seems to be that the great majority of people eliminated by the apocalypse will be the underclasses of the poorer nations. But what is the likelihood that this will actually be the case? While there can be no doubt that vulnerable people in the Global South will indeed suffer greatly on an environmentally disrupted planet, the ethnographic record suggests that the future may have some surprises in store for complacent global elites. Bengali farmers, for instance, no matter how poor, are by no means willing to go quietly into the night. On the contrary, they are clearly determined to confront the future on their own terms, privileging the values that are most important to them. In this effort, it is possible that the skills inculcated by subsistence farming will be an important source of resilience: that is, after all, precisely the thinking behind the ‘prepper’ and survivalist movements in the West. Indeed, it seems to me that the people who will be most at risk if a planetary catastrophe were to occur are those who depend on complex industrial systems for their day-to-day survival. Those who know how to live off the land may well stand a better chance of getting by when conditions deteriorate.

There is perhaps one other factor that could work to the advantage of ordinary people in the Global South: the fact that they do not share the pessimism about the future that is increasingly prevalent in the West. Indeed, doomsaying has now become so widespread in Europe and America that it is hard to know whether it represents a rational appraisal of the relevant data, or is merely an offshoot of a more general sense of political dysfunction and historic decline.

In my experience, it is exceedingly rare to encounter apprehensions of impending doom in India, or Kenya, or Indonesia. The absence of this generalised anxiety is probably the reason why apocalyptic fiction hasn't really caught on in India or elsewhere in the Global South. But it is also possible that Asian and African writers have abjured end-of-the-worldism for other reasons. “When all is said and done, this obsession [with apocalypse] may well be specific to Western metaphysics,” the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe notes in Necropolitics (2019). “For many human cultures, the world, simply, does not end.”

- How visions of catastrophe shape the ‘climate solutions’ imposed by aid agencies , read the whole piece; its so grounded in reality. 

The Dawn Of The Post-literate Society

I would say literacy is not enough; willingness to change one's mind by reading that challenges one's thoughts and goddamn beliefs. 

There are tons of people who "read" to signaling, to in-force their culture, religion, and/or beliefs. 

I know I am asking for when most don't read. 

It's amazing how we came this far. 

And well, back to reality, this is a must read piece: 

It was one of the most important revolutions in modern history — and yet no blood was spilled, no bombs were thrown and no monarch was beheaded.

Perhaps no great social transformation has ever been carried out so quietly. This one took place in armchairs, in libraries, in coffee houses and in clubs.

What happened was this: in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.

For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. Reading began to be described as a “fever”, an “epidemic”, a “craze”, a “madness”. As the historian Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”

This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.

[---]

It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.

Even more importantly print changed how people thought.

The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”

As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.

Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.

More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.

[---]

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.

[---]

This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.

As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacy, certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points.

[---]

Not only philosophy but the entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines.

These forms of advanced thought provide the intellectual underpinnings of modernity. If our world feels unstable at the moment — like the ground is shifting beneath us — it is because those underpinnings are falling to pieces underneath our feet.

As you have probably noticed, the world of the screen is going to be much a choppier place than the world of print: more emotional, more angry, more chaotic.

[---]

If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. It is probably not an accident that the decline of literacy has ushered in an obsession with cultural “nostalgia”; a desire to endlessly recycle the cultural forms of the past: the television shows and styles of the nineties, for instance, or the fashions of the early 2000s.

[---]

Richard Steele feared that “novels raise expectations which the ordinary course of life can never realise”. Others fretted that reading “excites the imagination too much, and fatigues the heart”.

It is easy to laugh at these anxieties. We have spent our whole lives hearing how virtuous and sensible it is to read books. How could reading be dangerous?

But in hindsight, these conservative moralists were right to worry. The rapid expansion of literacy helped to destroy the orderly, hierarchical, and profoundly socially unequal world they cherished.

The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancien regime — the old autocratic system of government with almighty kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom.

Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments.

The Devil Admits - We Are In An AI Bubble

I am in the field and I have been tired of this bullshit for 2/3 years now. I mean unbelievable bullshit, and everyone who doesn't even know the formula for calculating the area of a circle,  using the term AGI.

Now the guy who spread this bullshit admits well it's bullshit (and he continues to make money - pure pay-pal mafia strategy):

First he says AGI is not right term:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said artificial general intelligence, or “AGI,” is losing its relevance as a term as rapid advances in the space make it harder to define the concept.

AGI refers to the concept of a form of artificial intelligence that can perform any intellectual task that a human can. For years, OpenAI has been working to research and develop AGI that is safe and benefits all humanity.

“I think it’s not a super useful term,” Altman told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last week, when asked whether the company’s latest GPT-5 model moves the world any closer to achieving AGI. The AI entrepreneur has previously said he thinks AGI could be developed in the “reasonably close-ish future.”

And he spread this bullshit just last year:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says concerns that artificial intelligence will one day become so powerful that it will dramatically reshape and disrupt the world are overblown.

“It will change the world much less than we all think and it will change jobs much less than we all think,” Altman said at a conversation organized by Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Altman was specifically referencing artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a term used to refer to a form of AI that can complete tasks to the same level, or a step above, humans.

He said AGI could be developed in the “reasonably close-ish future.”

Plus now he is saying this a bubble (even a guy like I knew this for years and he played everyone for so long):

As economists speculate whether the stock market is in an AI bubble that could soon burst, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has just admitted to believing we’re in one. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI?” Altman said during a lengthy interview with The Verge and other reporters last night. “My opinion is yes.”

In the far-ranging interview, Altman compared the market’s reaction to AI to the dot-com bubble in the ’90s, when the value of internet startups soared before crashing down in 2000. “When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” Altman said. “If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing. Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited.”

He added that he thinks it’s “insane” that some AI startups with “three people and an idea” are receiving funding at such high valuations. “That’s not rational behavior,” Altman said. “Someone’s gonna get burned there, I think.”

People got overexcited? Such a snake oil sales man this guy likes his pay-pal peers. 

Yes, AI is extremely useful. Machine learning and Deep learning and other algorithms have brought so many benefits for more than a decade. But promoting LLM (a useful tool) as a panacea was done by a handful of folks like him in the industry. 

The point is they knew it was bullshit and yet, they spread this. 

The Politics of Contagion

Goddammit! 

Such beautiful words, sentences via a lived experience. 

Read the whole thing: eschew arrogance, victimhood, ideology and bring some gratitude into your life. 

In this moronic anthropomorphic world; most morons look for incentives. 

Remember, you will die sooner or later. Gratitude is probably the only tool which could reduce pain and suffering in months, weeks, and days before you die. 

There is you go, I gave you an incentive for having gratitude. 

It was summer. We all had mosquito bites and little scratches. That's how it is when you live in the woods. But now they didn’t heal. Instead, the bacteria was fizzing away in there, eating the edge of the wound outward, making it soft.

I started to feel kind of sick one day, and looked hard at one of my scabs. It looked sort of wet and puckered, like skin after a long bath. The next day all my little wounds looked like this. A few days later, it was worse. From a scrape on my shin I could see this angry red line of inflammation crawling up my leg—my blood had started to get infected—the evil was climbing toward my heart.

We had a well-stocked “medicine room” but only a few jars of old expired antibiotics. Those went to the worst cases. The rest of us tried healing it with herbs. I remember spending three hundred-fucking-degree days just hanging in a hammock, sweating and hallucinating from massive amounts of garlic and goldenseal and top-grade California hashish.

One guy actually had to have his lymph nodes removed—they liquefied in his armpits. He survived only because we took him to a hospital in the city, and they were legally required to treat indigents with no health insurance or money.

The worst part though, was the way it infected my mind. I felt like it was turning me evil. Oozing from many wounds, shambling around in the heat, surrounded by buzzing flies. I remember standing in the dinner line and wanting to eat my fellow comrades. Thinking about gnawing on their succulent flesh. Mouth watering at the image of a sizzling human drumstick. Suddenly thinking how very far away we were from society and its taboos.

[---]

Another year we couldn’t stop shitting ourselves, and didn’t know why.

We couldn’t find the culprit for weeks. We checked the drinking water filter and the hand soap, we cleaned the building, we made the primitivists move their roadkill tanning farther from the kitchen. But it wasn't enough. We kept getting sick. We learned later it was giardia.

Giardia is like a little tiny sucker fish in your stomach—not really a fish, it's a microorganism, but it latches its mouth onto your intestinal wall and sits there absorbing all the sugars and nutrients you would otherwise eat, and outputs the results of its metabolism. That means that it’s eating your food and shitting in your guts. They produce a lot of gas too, which has to come out somewhere, so all day long you’re burping out their farts.

No matter how much we washed our hands or cleaned our dishes, everyone kept getting sick. Sometimes we would recover for a minute and make a big decadent carrot cake to celebrate. Then we would all get sick again, shitting everywhere, spreading more of these critters back into our communal body. We learned later it’s the sugar that helps them multiply. Ass to hand to mouth to guts to ass, that’s the life cycle of giardia. And they were thriving.

[---]

Staph, giardia, and scabies in less than three years. Eventually I realized that these plagues were not coincidence. They were an inevitable outcome of the conditions. An organism is only as strong as its boundary layer. A society is much the same.

Our social organism was too open in some ways: the open door policy meant that all types of people could come in. All types of animals, diseases, and ideologies too. Our governance system was by consensus of those present, so as soon as you show up you get a vote. This made the governance completely impossible, as weekend warriors squared off against the people who would actually have to enact whatever decision was made.

We were too closed off as well. So far away in the mountains, with so little connection to the world, we lost immunities to things in the default world. When I returned I was disgusted by advertising, fluorescent lights, saran-wrapped foods, and all the other tissues of our modern technoleviathan. They were repellent to me, viscerally made me sick. I still think this is the correct reaction, but I’ve grown used to it now, and can stomach the grocery store with a smirk.

An organism must have a semi-permeable membrane. The ability to kick things out if they threaten its health, and the ability to intake resources to survive. Disgust is the immune system of the greater social organism. It protects us from contagion. But in a planetary society, we are constantly exposed to new vectors of change. Foreign organisms, environments, ideas; our cultures and societies are fully inflamed around these perceived intruders.

I see this online all the time. I watch as memetic phrases and viral emotions spread through my networks. We attack each other for following the wrong person on social media, for not wearing masks, for being inoculated with RNA, because we are all in constant fear of infection. No two groups can ally without first solving every small difference between them. Even homogenous ideological blocs tear themselves apart with loyalty tests and purity spirals. We are in a great autoimmune spasm of the human species.

If we are all one planetary social organism now, that creature is in pain. Its own organs attack each other, unable to recognize their interconnectedness. We’re constantly putting up boundaries. Boundaries between nations, between computers, between people.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I’ve learned a lot from experimenting with radical social structures, both in the woods and on the internet. At the commune, I thought we could prototype methods of living that were more egalitarian and ecologically balanced, and then export them past the barrier of our village to replicate. Those experiments were mostly failed utopias.

But I learned something important there, something I believe needs to spread and take hold: not all contagion is destructive. The flower feeds the bee and the bee pollinates the flower; neither can exist without the other. We are not separate species who must fear infection by the other. We are a system of flows.

 

 

The Discontinuous Mind

How many of us lie below the stupidity line? How many runners exceed the fast line? How many Oxford undergraduates lie above the first-class line? Yes, we in universities do it too. Examination performance, like most measures of human ability or achievement, is a continuous variable whose frequency distribution is bell-shaped. Yet British universities insist on publishing a class list, in which a minority of students receive first-class degrees, rather a lot obtain seconds (nowadays subdivided into upper and lower seconds), and a few get thirds. That might make sense if the distribution had several peaks with more-or-less shallow valleys in between, but it doesn’t. Anybody who has ever marked an exam knows that the distribution is unimodal. And the bottom of one class is separated from the top of the class below by a small fraction of the distance that separates it from the top of its own class. This fact alone points to a deep unfairness in the system of discontinuous classification.

These examples illustrate the ubiquity of what I am calling the discontinuous mind. It can probably be traced to the ‘essentialism’ of Plato – one of the more pernicious ideas in all history. At what precise moment during development does an embryo become a ‘person’? Only a mind infected with essentialism would ask such a question. An embryo develops gradually from single-celled zygote to newborn baby, and there’s no instant when ‘personhood’ should be deemed to have burst on the scene. The world is divided into those who get this truth, and those who wail: ‘But there has to be some moment when the fetus becomes human. Doesn’t there?’ No, there really doesn’t, any more than there has to be a day when a middle-aged person becomes old. The discontinuous mind can lead people to describe abortion as murder, even when the embryo has no more brain than a worm. And they may therefore feel righteously justified in committing real murder against a doctor – a thinking, feeling, sentient adult, with a loving family to mourn her.

Paleontologists may argue passionately about whether a particular fossil is, say, Australopithecus or Homo. But, given that the second evolved gradually from the first, there must have existed individuals who were intermediate. It is essentialist folly to insist on shoehorning your fossil into one genus or the other. There never was an Australopithecus mother who gave birth to a Homo child. Quarrelling fiercely about whether a fossil is ‘really’ Australopithecus or Homo is like having a heated argument over whether George is ‘tall’. He’s five foot ten, doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know?

Every creature who ever lived belonged to the same species as its mother. If a time machine could serve up your 200 million greats-grandfather, you would eat him with sauce tartare and a slice of lemon. He was a fish. Yet you are connected to him by an unbroken line of intermediate ancestors, every one of whom belonged to the same species as its parents and its children. ‘I’ve danced with a man who’s danced with a girl who’s danced with the Prince of Wales,’ as the song goes. I could mate with a woman, who could mate with a man, who could mate with a woman who . . . after a sufficient number of steps . . . could mate with an ancestral fish, and produce fertile offspring. It is only the discontinuous mind that insists on drawing a line between a species and the ancestral species that birthed it. Evolutionary change is gradual: there never was a line between any species and its evolutionary precursor.

- Richard Dawkins

Kevin Kelly's Words Of Wisdom On AI, Simulation et al.,

Thinking (intelligence) is only part of science; maybe even a small part. As one example, we don’t have enough proper data to come close to solving the death problem. In the case of working with living organisms, most of these experiments take calendar time. The slow metabolism of a cell cannot be sped up. They take years, or months, or at least days, to get results. If we want to know what happens to subatomic particles, we can’t just think about them. We have to build very large, very complex, very tricky physical structures to find out. Even if the smartest physicists were 1,000 times smarter than they are now, without a Collider, they will know nothing new.

[---]

There is no doubt that a super AI can accelerate the process of science. We can make computer simulations of atoms or cells and we can keep speeding them up by many factors, but two issues limit the usefulness of simulations in obtaining instant progress. First, simulations and models can only be faster than their subjects because they leave something out. That is the nature of a model or simulation. Also worth noting: The testing, vetting and proving of those models also has to take place in calendar time to match the rate of their subjects. The testing of ground truth can’t be sped up.

- More Here

Reasons Experts Should Not Debate Nonexperts

• Science and scholarship do not advance via public debate.
• Expertise on a subject matter is not necessarily correlated with rhetorical ability.
• Knowingly are unknowingly, in debates debaters frequently end up making logically, causally, or statistically flawed arguments that still sound good.
• There are a variety of rhetorical techniques that persuade without proving.
• Public debate rewards people who are willing to say anything.
• Confidence and certainty win debates while expertise is all about qualifying and hedging.
• A debate implies a winner and a loser.
• Experts can’t defeat nonexpert “spreads.”
• Such a debate implies that the nonexpert is on par with the expert on the subject of the debate.
• A public debate implies that nonexpert members of the public are competent judges of that debate.

- Brilliant piece here 

I would also add: 

1. Science is based on probability,  marginal improvements and so many nuances - its not binary. 

2. Humans are born to argue; its ludicrous to argue with someone who doesn't known rudimentary elements of the subject. 

3. Motivated reasoning. 

4. Lack of epistemological humility. 

5. Lack of gratitude for how far we have come as a species and how much luxuries we have. 

6. Sheer waste of time and energy which could be used productively. 

Billionaires Who Never Grew Out Of Marvel Comics (& No Understanding Of Complex Systems)

Mark McCaughrean, senior adviser for science and exploration at the European Space Agency, admits that sometimes he refuses to watch feats of virtuoso spacefaring from the new space barons, lest he get sucked in by their superficial glamour. It is not just sour grapes about the cool things they get to do with their wealth. It’s about the scientific, social, and philosophical implications of what they are doing and how they are doing it.

[---]

Anyone who thinks that Musk’s priorities align neatly with the needs of space science should ask astronomers what they think of his 1,500 or so active Starlink satellites that are now obstructing the view of telescopes with bright streaks and raising concerns about radio-signal interference. Starlink has filed plans to launch up to 42,000 satellites in total—about five times the total number currently orbiting Earth—and competing services like Amazon’s Project Kuiper plan to add thousands more. There are already 1,600 close encounters in space (within 1 kilometer) a week from Musk’s satellites, risking collisions that could strew debris in low Earth orbit.

“There was a time when I was enthusiastic about commercial space because I saw it as a possible way we could conduct more science,” Porco says. She now concludes that this is not the way it will work. “When you put science, and the way science needs to be conducted, up against commercial interests, the two make very bad bedfellows.”

“People get so wrapped up in wish-fulfilment fantasies about living on Mars that they lose context completely, as if you can just fly away and leave all our troubles behind. It doesn’t solve any problems by going to Mars,” McCaughrean adds. For the goal of survival, we would be much smarter using our knowledge and resources to keep Earth habitable in the face of the inadvertent geoengineering we are already conducting here.

[---]

We might plausibly extend that approach to an international, crewed research base on the moon. But we don’t need space tourism and private industry to get it. This doesn’t mean that big commercial ventures should be banned. But we should be more clear-eyed about their motives and priorities and consider how much we want their already ubiquitous presence in our lives to expand into the heavens too, with barely any regulation to constrain them.

Even if you feel in your marrow that our human destiny lies in the stars, you might want to look closely at what the space billionaires have done down here. Then ask yourself whether they are the best people to take us up there.

- More Here

One of my guilty pleasures is to live long enough to read the obituary of these self proclaimed omnipotent  sapiens. 

And to state the obvious, I will never leave this beautiful planet where Max and I shared precious time together. My last breathe will be in the same place where Max took his last breathe. 

The Book of Minds - How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings

Conceiving of a universe of possible minds can discourage human hubris, and advises erring on the side of generosity in considering the rights and dignity of other beings. But it also enables a literally broad-minded view of what other minds could exist. Mindedness needn’t be a club with rigorously exclusive entry rules. We might not (and may never) agree about whether plants, fungi or bacteria have any kind of sentience, but they show enough attributes of cognition to warrant a place somewhere in this space. This perspective also promotes a calmer appraisal of artificial intelligence than the popular fevered fantasies about impending apocalypse at the hands of malevolent, soulless machines. There is no reason to suppose that today’s AI has any more sentience or experience than the rocks from which its silicon is extracted. But it, too, shows intelligence of a kind, including the ability to learn and predict.

To suppose that something like artificial consciousness will emerge simply by making computer circuits bigger and faster is, as one AI expert put it to me, like imagining that if we make an aeroplane fly fast enough, eventually it will lay an egg. Computers and AI are taking off in the “intelligence” direction of mind-space while gaining nothing on the “experience” axis: their trajectory is heading not towards us but somewhere else entirely. If we want AI to be more human-like, many experts believe we will need explicitly to build human qualities into it – which in turn requires that we better understand what those are and how they arise.

Likewise, most of our fantasies about advanced alien intelligence suppose it to be like us but with better tech. That’s not just a sci-fi trope; the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence typically assumes that ET carves nature at the same joints as we do, recognising the same abstract laws of maths and physics. But the more we know about minds, the more we recognise that they conceptualise the world according to the possibilities they possess for sensing and intervening in it; nothing is inevitable. We need to be more imaginative about what minds can be, and less fixated on ours as the default. As the biologist JBS Haldane once said: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Our only hope of understanding the universe, he said, “is to look at it from as many different points of view as possible.” We may need those other minds.

- Excerpts from The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to Aliens by Philip Ball

David Solan's Atlas Hugged!!

David Sloan Wilson has written a new book "Atlas Hugged" (pun intended), a devastating critique of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and its impact on the world. Her philosophy has and continues to ruin millions of lives like any other addictive substance except addictive substances are usually objective but this one is purely subjective mythological magic. 

Atlas Hugged e-book is free or you can buy the paperback. 

Thank you, David. Thanks a million for fighting magic with fiction. 

We sapiens need a constant reminder that nothing is permanent; which means ideology is nothing but sheer magic which proclaims it can successfully "pin" time to be a constant. 

Check out a few hilarious excerpts here: 

Everyone knows about the existence of cults and their disturbing ability to steal minds.  Otherwise normal people give away everything to wait for the second coming of Jesus or aliens from outer space.  Midas and my grandfather would scoff at those irrational beliefs, but the society that they founded had all the earmarks of a cult.  The first structure that they erected was a giant gold-plated dollar sign atop a granite column.  They also invented an oath that members were required to recite at frequent intervals:  I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.  The word “give” was banned from their vocabulary.  Every human transaction was paid for with the gold and silver coins minted on site.  Obviously, this was only possible thanks to the vast wealth of Midas Mulligan, who provided a bank account for each new member based on how much had been “stolen” from them in the form of taxes in the outside world.  While the members of other cults waited for Jesus or aliens from outer space, the Galtians waited for society to collapse while working to build a microcosm of the perfect society for themselves. 

[---]

The first person to leave the cult was my grandfather.  He simply disappeared, just as he had disappeared from his engineering job.  This time he didn’t even leave a note or a boastful proclamation.  My father, John Galt II, was two years old and grew up knowing only the legend of John Galt I.  Then other members started to drift away.  Finally Midas Mulligan reached his breaking point and withdrew his financial support, observing wryly that the Galtians were more heavily subsidized than any socialist society.  Like fleas shaken from the back of a dog, the Galtians were forced to make their way back to the society that they’d mocked and seek the forgiveness of family, friends, and former business associates.

The Galtian movement was a failure in every way but one.  It had not resulted in a widespread strike of doers.  The static electricity engine was a folly.  The microcosm of the perfect doer society went the way of so many other utopian visions.  But Ayn Rant’s better-than-real cosmology was a survivor that had been propagated around the world by The Speech.  Everyone who fell under its spell became convinced, as fervently as any religious believer, that the path to salvation was to concentrate exclusively on making money for oneself.

How Pseudoscientists Get Away With It

Attempts to inculcate what are called “scientific habits of mind” are of little practical help. These habits of mind are not so easy to adopt. They invariably require some amount of statistics and probability, much of which is counterintuitive. One of the great values of science is to help us counter our normal biases and expectations by showing the actual measurements may not bear them out. Then there’s the math. No matter how much you try to hide it, much of the language of science is math (Galileo said that). And half the audience is gone with each equation (Stephen Hawking said that). It’s hard to imagine a successful program of making a non-scientifically trained public interested in adopting the rigors of scientific habits of mind. Indeed, I suspect there are some people who would be rightfully suspicious of changing their thinking to being habitually scientific. Many scientists are frustrated by the public’s inability to think like a scientist, but in fact it is neither easy nor always desirable to do so. And it is certainly not practical.

There is a more intuitive and simpler way to tell the difference between the real thing and the cheap knock-off. In fact, it is not so much intuitive as counterintuitive, so it takes a little bit of mental work. But the good thing is it works almost all the time. True science is mostly concerned with the unknown and the uncertain. If someone claims to have the ultimate answer or they know something for certain, the only thing for certain is they are trying to fool you. Mystery and uncertainty may not strike you right off as desirable or strong traits, but that is precisely where one finds the creative solutions that science has historically arrived at. Yes, science accumulates factual knowledge, but it is at its best when it generates new and better questions. Uncertainty is not a place of worry, but of opportunity. Progress lives at the border of the unknown. 

[---]

Good science provides clear evidence that may only go so far. Scientists have to speculate, which could go one of two or three ways, or maybe some way they haven’t seen yet. But like your blood pressure medicine, the stuff we know is reliable even if incomplete. Unsettled science is not unsound science. The honesty and humility of someone willing to tell you that they don’t have all the answers, but they have some thoughtful questions to pursue, is easy to distinguish from the charlatans who have ready answers or claim that nothing should be done until we are an impossible 100 percent sure. 

- More Here

The New Evolution Deniers

Evolutionary biology has always been controversial. Not controversial among biologists, but controversial among the general public. This is largely because Darwin’s theory directly contradicted the supernatural accounts of human origins rooted in religious tradition and replaced them with fully natural ones. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has described evolution as a sort of “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.” Fearing this corrosive idea, opposition in the US to evolution mainly came from Right-wing evangelical Christians who believed God created life in its present form, as described in Genesis.

In the 1990s and 2000s there were repeated attempts by evangelicals to ban evolution in public schools or teach the so-called “controversy” by including Intelligent Design—the belief that life is too complex to have evolved without the aid of some “Intelligent Designer” (i.e. God)—in the biology curriculum alongside evolution. But these attempts failed when scientists demonstrated in court that Intelligent Design was nothing more than Biblical Creationism gussied up in scientific-sounding prose. Since then, however, Creationism and Intelligent Design have lost a tremendous amount of momentum and influence. But while these right-wing anti-evolution movements withered to irrelevancy, a much more cryptic form of left-wing evolution denialism has been slowly growing.

[---]

Counterintuitively, the social justice stance on human evolution closely resembles that of the Catholic Church. The Catholic view of evolution generally accepts biological evolution for all organisms, yet holds that the human soul (however defined) had been specially created and thus has no evolutionary precursor. Similarly, the social justice view has no problem with evolutionary explanations for shaping the bodies and minds of all organisms both between and within a species regarding sex, yet insists that humans are special in that evolution has played no role in shaping observed sex-linked behavioral differences. Why the biological forces that shape all of life should be uniquely suspended for humans is unclear. What is clear is that both the Catholic Church and well-intentioned social justice activists are guilty of gerrymandering evolutionary biology to make humans special, and keep the universal acid at bay.

- More Here