By contrast, God, as Galton's friend Thomas Huxley drily noted, was inordinately fond of beetles.
More accurately God seems to have an inordinate fondness for microbes - he introduced them at the very beginnings of life, created millions of species and gazillions of individuals and they remain in those numbers today, almost four billion years later.
Humanoids, by pointed contrast, came very late in God's scheme, almost as an afterthought, with only a few humble species that today have dwindled down to one only species with an unique approach to extinction.
Instead of external events (say a big asteroid smashing into the Earth) leading to our species' extinction, we're going to kill ourselves off - Evolution's first ever example of collective suicide.
Rather than gas, pills or rope we are currently deciding between nuclear bombs or human-created global warming as our way to end it all.
Is evolutionary success to be measured by a genetic urge to collective self-immolation, as the Progressives believe ---- or is it how many viable offspring that are produced and for how long ?
Is Man or bacteria to be the current benchmark for evolutionary success ?
Galton and God still seem divided on this point ....
Showing posts with label beetles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beetles. Show all posts
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Researchers - not data - change
The historical ("primary") documents that fuel this blog don't change - can't change - frozen in time from the Manhattan of 75 years ago.
But my contemporary understanding of them continues to change, evolve, regress, whatever.
For a long time I saw today's bad climate change deniers as the best single contemporary example of the once widespread pre-war belief that denied any limits to Man's ability to control Mother Nature.
But these sort of deniers were actually the weak case.
They were the negative option : these deniers weren't actually actively claiming to control Nature, merely weakly claiming that they were sure another Manhattan nuclear Project, done by others, could quickly clear up any weather issues arising from normal human activity.
But all this fitted uneasily with my main contentions - that the overwhelming pre-war faith in "synthetic autarky" lead to "plenticidal indifference" and hence ethnicities and species extinction.
I eventually realized that nucleosynthesis ("fusion power"), geo-engineering/terra-forming and the active efforts to start human society again on a sterile Mars were the more active contemporary expressions of this pre-war fantasy.
And that the horrific fallout from our tolerance of all these bizarre efforts was a collective plenticidal indifference that has led us to today's runaway (Sixth) Mass Extinctions.
I am not sure there are even a handful of "Extinction Denier" bloggers lurking about --- rather there are about seven billion of us Extinction Tolerators reading about another beetle species gone extinct, sighing for a moment then resuming our daily lives.
After all, pace J B S Haldane , who - besides God - really wants 150,000 distinctly odd species of beetles anyway ???/
But my contemporary understanding of them continues to change, evolve, regress, whatever.
For a long time I saw today's bad climate change deniers as the best single contemporary example of the once widespread pre-war belief that denied any limits to Man's ability to control Mother Nature.
But these sort of deniers were actually the weak case.
They were the negative option : these deniers weren't actually actively claiming to control Nature, merely weakly claiming that they were sure another Manhattan nuclear Project, done by others, could quickly clear up any weather issues arising from normal human activity.
It all starts with an unrealistic faith in Synthetic Autarky
But all this fitted uneasily with my main contentions - that the overwhelming pre-war faith in "synthetic autarky" lead to "plenticidal indifference" and hence ethnicities and species extinction.
I eventually realized that nucleosynthesis ("fusion power"), geo-engineering/terra-forming and the active efforts to start human society again on a sterile Mars were the more active contemporary expressions of this pre-war fantasy.
And that the horrific fallout from our tolerance of all these bizarre efforts was a collective plenticidal indifference that has led us to today's runaway (Sixth) Mass Extinctions.
I am not sure there are even a handful of "Extinction Denier" bloggers lurking about --- rather there are about seven billion of us Extinction Tolerators reading about another beetle species gone extinct, sighing for a moment then resuming our daily lives.
After all, pace J B S Haldane , who - besides God - really wants 150,000 distinctly odd species of beetles anyway ???/
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...