Reply #33: When you're a pioneer in the most controversial field in history... [View All]

...There really is no politically correct way to introduce yourself and talk about what you do. Your choices are: be blunt or get waylaid by endless debate and never get to the point of what you're trying to say.

You've never heard of my book because the Theocrofascists who control our government don't want to hear about it, and the Aristofascists who control our economy and media don't want to hear about it. That's why I'm staying as far away from the mainstream media as I can and finding underground means of spreading it to the public directly. I've made a hell of a lot of friends among people who, ah, don't depend on the government or other authority figures to save the day, and if I put the science directly into the hands of students and they start asking their teachers the right questions, the situation will have moved beyond the point of the flow of valuable information through society being able to be controlled by the government, the media, peer reviews, or teachers.

You can check out my website directly at www.newbookforanewworld.com, and feel free to ignore my website introduction there and skip directly to the introduction to the book directly beneath it, or download and listen to track 002 or 003 (I doubt 001 would interest you), skip to any section of the book posted there in any order you please, or download the entire audio book and listen to it for free. Or you can read The Blank Slate by Dr. Steven Pinker, Emotional Intelligence by Dr. Dan Goleman, Guns, Germs, and Steel by Dr. Jared Diamond, and Why God Won't Go Away by Dr. Andrew Newberg and Dr. Eugene D'Aquill to get an idea of recent developments in evolutionary science. Or you can read this:

In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Dr. Jared Diamond studies the origins of cultures and the course of civilization. Every culture in the world is made up of humans who are evolutionarily equal. The resources available in each part of the world are different. The people in each part of the world have figured out how to make lives for themselves by making the best use of whatever resources they have to work with. Cultures are different as a result of evolutionarily equal humans making use of different combinations of resources. In Mesopotamia about 10,000 years ago, the people lived in the most favorable climate in the world. That enabled them to develop agriculture before anyone else in the world, and it enabled them to use that agriculture to produce food more efficiently than anyone else in the world (which can be measured in calories of work energy expended to calories of food energy produced). Producing food more efficiently than anyone else allowed them to support the largest population of any civilization in the world, and that allowed them build the largest and most physically powerful civilization in the world. European and American civilization are the direct descendants of the civilization built on Mesopotamian agriculture. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, Europeans and their descendants are not inherently superior to anyone else; their ancestors just happened to live in the right place at the right time.

In their book Why God Won't Go Away, Dr. Andrew Newberg and Dr. Eugene D'Aquill study the evolutionary origins of religion. (Rather than try to explain how it's possible for scientists to know more about religion than religious leaders do, I'll let their conclusions speak for themselves.) Every religion in the world was created to serve the needs of humans who are evolutionarily equal, and therefore, capable of asking the same questions about life. Beneath their aesthetic differences, every religion in the world is exactly the same as every other religion in the world. Every religion in the world (and every sort of philosophy that serves in the place of religion, including atheism) offers its people an explanation for how the universe works, some way for people to escape their physical mortality, ways to build strong families and healthy communities, and some way to give their lives a sense of purpose. Those four universal characteristics of religion can be said to be direct products of human evolution, because in every part of the world where human DNA exists, these things also exist. Therefore, regardless of where you believe religion came from, any argument over whose religion is better than whose is impossible for anyone to win, because the two parties are not arguing about observable evidence. There is no religion in the world that's inherently better than any other because there is no religion that’s inherently different from any other. (There are, however, some religions whose members aspire to salvation through world-wide mass suicide, and others whose members believe they don't need to take responsibility for their actions because supernatural powers will save the day, and based on observable evidence, those people are a serious threat to everyone—and they better not be surprised if other people see them that way.)

Humans evolved as one species because the same set of biological laws affected all of our ancestors equally for virtually all of our evolution. If our ancestors had been affected by different sets of biological laws, we would’ve evolved as multiple species. That set of biological laws is written into our DNA, because everyone who didn’t feel like following them died out as a result. All human behavior revolves around that set of biological laws, and societies ignore biological laws at their own peril. Civilization has always moved in the direction of complying more and more with evolutionary law, because any time people are presented with a choice of two forms of government, they naturally prefer the one whose laws coincide with evolutionary law better, because those artificial laws are the ones the people feel most like following. (People disagree on minor details all the time, but that general trend is fairly obvious, because regardless of what political parties people belong to, they are all Homo sapiens.) Now that we understand evolutionary law so well and we’ve become aware of this process of evolutionary law compliance, we can see the end result of the process, and we can actively work to make it happen. To use the last three paragraphs for examples, nobody will ever participate willingly in a society that denies them basic opportunities to make their lives feel complete, that prevents them from developing or practicing their own culture, or that denies them any of the four universal constants of religion.

There is no existing political party or political system that adequately applies evolutionary laws and the laws of physics to our living conditions, because so many critical discoveries are only a few years old. Any political system that has ever worked at some point has worked because its founders figured out a way to apply scientific laws to society well enough in the form of artificial laws (without realizing that’s what they were doing) that enough people felt like cooperating with them to make the society function. However, the artificial laws of every civilization have always been founded on an understanding of human behavior within the living conditions that existed at the time the civilization was founded, but no one has ever realized that. As the living conditions of the societies change, the relationship of human behavior to the living conditions also change, and begin to conflict more and more with the established artificial laws of the society. That pits the government against the people and the people against each other, because as the artificial laws of the society become less and less applicable to the living conditions, more people break the artificial laws—meaning crime rates increase—and that only makes the dysfunctional government seem ever more necessary to protect the public. No political system has ever been constructed on a functional universal understanding of human behavior, and no political system has been able to adapt its artifical laws fast enough to keep up with the changing conditions of the world, which is why every system of government in history has broken down eventually—because so many people stopped cooperating with the artificial laws that the society ceased to function. Some just might say that all of those symptoms are showing themselves in America and all over the world right now, and a lot of people are wondering why it’s happening and what to do about it.

All progressive activists (whether they realize they’re doing this or not) are trying to help adapt our civilization to a new balance between biological laws and our living conditions. They’re doing that either by changing artificial laws, changing cultural values, or elevating human consciousness (such as by educating people). There are numerous ways a peaceful, sustainable global civilization can be built, but there are a much larger number of ways that it can’t be built. If nothing else, every progressive activist group is united by the common goal of building a peaceful, sustainable global civilization in a way that is physically possible, as opposed to trying to build one in a way that isn’t physically possible. Every group is trying to work toward that goal in one way or another. World peace depends on the public understanding enough about human behavior that they can avoid threatening other people accidentally and can protect themselves from potential threats from other people peacefully and productively. If progressive activists become consciously aware that they’re trying to do this, they can do it much more effectively, they can cooperate much more effectively, and they can attract a lot more public support.

If we are ever going to build a peaceful, sustainable global civilization, we are going to build it on what everyone in the world has in common, and not on the continued misperception that one group of people is inherently better than all the others. The one most fundamental thing everyone in the world is guaranteed to have in common is human evolution.

Has anyone else noticed that every type of functional community in the modern world has some sort of a Constitution to outline what each of its members can expect from the others, in order to enable them to function as a community? And has anyone ever noticed that we are now trying to organize our entire species into a functional global community without a Constitution? Not only are those inconceivably long odds, we’re also gambling everything on succeeding!

Once again, evolutionary science saves the day, because that set of biological laws that all human behavior revolves around is the Constitution of the Human Race. It wasn’t written by any mortal humans, it applies equally to everyone, it doesn’t depend on anyone to enforce it, and no one can escape it, change it, or corrupt it. Whether that set of biological laws is put into words or not, we have no choice but to abide them, because they’re written in our DNA. If they are put into words, however, at least we can choose to cooperate with them—or more specifically, we can see why we can’t possibly build a functional global community by trying to force other people to break them.

Human behavior relates to other human behavior more directly than it does to the environment, but a few simple principles of human behavior pretty much say it all. First, global environmental sustainability can never happen without world peace and an end to economic imperialism, because as long as countries compete against each other militarily, economically, or any other way, immediate survival will always be a higher priority for people than long term environmental sustainability. Second, for all of human history, all over the world, people who are evolutionarily equal to Americans have satisfied themselves with their lives in sustainable lifestyles, so obviously it’s possible to do.

Third, any time a new species is introduced to an environment, its population expands until it’s limited by predators, disease, food availability, or radical alteration of the environment caused by the species itself. The entire Earth is the environment of our species, and for about 7,000,000 years since our separaction from the other primates, our population has been expanding to fill the carrying capacity of the global environment. Thanks to weapons, medicine, and agriculture, we’ve eliminated predators, disease, and food availability as controlling factors to our population growth, which leaves only the radical alteration of the environment as our ultimate limitation. One way or another, the population of our species will reach a balance with the impact we’ve had on our environment, just as happens for any species that’s introduced to a new environment. I’m hardly alone in realizing that civilization as we’ve known it will not exist in the 22nd century, because one way or another, our species will make the transition from environmental colonization to (some form of) environmental sustainability. The two things we can control are what will replace civilization as we’ve known it and how we will make the transition. Our population growth and resource consumption will be brought under control either because we make it happen voluntarily or because through our environmental unsustainability we will destroy civilization, kill billions of people (even if only indirectly), and condemn the future of our species to a post-apocalyptic dark age.

There is no form of government, absence of government, financial economic system, or externally enforced religion that can save humanity from itself. As the Buddah taught his followers 2,500 years ago, the only way people can truly satisfy their wants is by choosing to stop wanting. That teaching becomes ever more relevant to us by the day.

Perhaps this would be a good time for me to point out that capitalism as an economic system is completely self destructive. The success of capitalism is measured in continued economic growth. Economies require material resources and energy in order to function. For an economy to grow indefinitely, it would require an infinite supply of material resources and energy. Because the Earth is a finite size, it can’t possibly contain an infinite supply of energy and material resources, by definition. A big source of problems facing the world is that the economic system America was founded upon is physically impossible to maintain indefinitely. We have a increasing world population and a decreasing supply of available resources. The only way for the materially rich to stay rich is for the materially poor to become increasingly poor. A fundamental law of human behavior is that people who are starving will fight over food. Considering the levels of poverty that exist in the world already, and considering that the continued “success” of capitalism necessarily requires those poverty levels to increase, not decrease, it’s a very short step of logic to see that any economic system whose success is measured in continued growth, instead of redistribution of resources, makes World War III a mathematical inevitability. In order for an economy to become sustainable, it MUST measure its success in something other than the consumption of resources and energy. That also means that if the Christian Coalition succeeds at nothing other than preventing our laws and cultural values from being adapted fast enough to achieve environmental sustainability in time to prevent global environmental catastrophe, they still get the battle of Armageddon they’re waiting for.

If humanity is ever going to build a peaceful, sustainable global civilization of any sort, it’s going to be built as a result of people learning to stop trying to advance their personal interests at the expense of their neighbors. That will depend on people learning how to recognize and anticipate the interests of their neighbors. While it isn’t possible to eliminate conflict from the world altogether, a lot could be done to eliminate conflicts that are so desparate that people are willing to kill and risk being killed to try to solve them. That will necessarily depend on people learning a lot more science than they’re learning now, including a lot of science that a lot of people currently don’t want to believe is true.

I could’ve been a doctor of human evolutionary science easily enough, if only the field had existed as a cohesive field of study back when I was in college. Instead I work in theatre and write fiction, which are two of the oldest studies of human behavior in the world. For 2,500 years, actors, directors, and writers have been making their livings by figuring out how to replicate human behavior well enough to make it believable to human audiences (or at least, the best artists have done that). Thanks to Hollywood, everyone in the industrialized world is already familiar with a working understanding of human behavior, even though they don’t realize it.

When I learned about the field of human evolutionary science, I quickly realized that I could teach the entire field of science in terms of movies, song lyrics, history, legends, religion, philosophy, art, and everyday life—terms that non-scientifically-minded people understand.

The scientists are not discovering any characteristics about humanity that poets and philosophers all over the world haven’t known about for millennia. The scientists are simply figuring out how all those characteristics fit together, how to recognize characteristics that everyone in the world has in common, and how to prove those things scientifically. Just to prove it can be done, I’ve been going to an open mic night near where I live and teaching evolutionary science to poets, artists, and musicians. The things I have to say there don’t sound terribly different from the things any other thoughtful, worldly people there have to say. The difference is that I’m talking about science, and they’re all expressing their opinions about something. If ten million poets and musicians all over the world say the same things, that only proves that ten million people have the same opinion about something. If one evolutionary scientist says the same thing, suddenly it becomes evidence admissible in court! Of course, if that one evolutionary scientist could figure out how to teach those ten million poets and musicians how he arrived at his conclusions, then ten million poets’ and musicians’ opinions become admissible in court. And public schools. And political races…