You know, this has nothing to do with human morality.  I don’t deny God’s hand in life’s creation because I’m looking for some excuse to go out and shoot up on drugs, murder babies, and live as a nihilistic heathen, regardless of what many Christians may believe.  What an inane stereotype.

Think how terrible it is to go around telling everyone that if they don’t believe in your Holy book they must be stupid, evil, have no morals, and hate the world.  As long as the little spiel is delivered with a smile, and ended with, “Jesus loves you.  I’m praying for you!”, they think they’re doing the work of God.  Give me a break.  The certainty in which they make their claims is nothing but arrogance.  Us agnostics and atheists deserve more respect than this.

Here’s my own examination of nature.  I don’t see the work of an all powerful, all knowing creator.  Let’s just look at a few videos of the world as it really is.  Not a superficial glance at nature at its best, looking at the sunlight reflecting off the waters at sunset with the beautiful backdrop of trees, but a close examination of day to day life on the lake.  Let’s examine the life of cuckoo ducks and their relationship to warbler birds there near the banks.

After the cuckoo raids the warbler’s nest, eating its eggs, it then lays an egg of its own which, when hatched, launches any remaining warbler eggs out of the nest like a catapult.  Then its cry is set to mimic that of the warbler chicks, and the mother feeds it like it was her own.

The top comment for that video is hilarious.

This is far from the worst instance of cruelty in nature.  Do I really need to break out the serious cruelty?  Should I show a tiger chewing on some goat’s head?  Should I show a video of parasites eating out the inside of animals until they fall over dead?  Should I show a crocodile pouncing on some innocent gazelles coming to get a drink of water.  No, I’m not going to do that.  You’ve all seen that.

I wonder who really is in denial.  Why are things the way they are?  Why does this cruelty exist?  Oh the “curse”… Yeah yeah, we ate from a tree and God got mad at us.  I mean, c’mon.

Maybe it’s just because I’ve spent so much time studying books, but really, just think how dumb that is.  A talking snake, a humble man gathering up all the animals and loading them up in a boat, men living with dinosaurs, giants living among men… *shakes head*  How can 60% of people in the United States believe this stuff?

I was raised to believe in all of it.  I think it’s just people haven’t been exposed to the facts and haven’t studied science.  I won’t say that people are stupid.  I get tired of everyone saying the world is stupid.  I don’t want to insult everyone else out there.  It’s just unfortunate that people haven’t learned more and that schools aren’t doing a better job.  Really though, as little as school teachers are paid, sometimes I wonder if they’re going to find the talented, intelligent teachers who are able to teach biology with passion and force.  Those with the degrees in biology and genetics are going to be sucked up by private industry and offered way more money.

Many biology teachers start apologizing left and right when they discuss evolution.  That shouldn’t be happening.  You don’t apologize when you teach mathematics.  “Kids, I’m sorry, but 2 + 3 = 5…  You don’t have to believe this if you don’t want to.  Don’t tell your parents I told you this.”

On one hand we have Christians telling us a talking snake possessed by the devil got Eve to eat a fruit from a tree and we’re all now cursed.  On the other hand we have all the genetics evidence, faults in animal design, past vestiges in animal anatomy, the fossil record, potassium-argon dated rocks, and all the other mountains of evidence showing evolution.

And you know, this doesn’t lead you to a philosophy of hatred of the world and a life without morality.  It does the complete opposite for me.  It shows me how fragile life is and how much we all need each other to make it through in this place.  We need love, not because our sky daddy tells us to, and will pat us all on the back when we die, but because we need each other.

I’ve became far more compassionate now that I’m no longer religious.  I’ve had the opposite experience.  As a young religious boy, I used to think, “Well, you’re only suffering because you don’t follow the will of God!”  It’s embarrassing that I was such a nasty child, but I’ll man up to admitting it.

I feel empathy for my fellow human beings and their suffering.  That’s enough for me to live a moral life right there.  I want to try to live this life as best I can, and hopefully contribute toward making life a bit easier on us all.  I don’t need threats of hellfire to help you out when you’re in a bind.  I’ll help you because you’re in need.  That’s enough for me.

It’s nice that the BBC is putting all of David Attenborough’s films on Youtube.  I have them in better quality, but its neat that you can watch them online.  Try jumping to time 10 mins 12 secs in the video below.  Watch the coot parents beat their children to death because they can’t feed them.  Watch the little ducklings begging for food and the parents beating them to death.  Watch the duckling’s cute little head sink into the water when it dies of starvation.  Watch the Pelican chicks kill their brother because there’s not enough food to around.  Pelicans typically lay three eggs but there’s only enough food for one.  The strongest one lives whereas the other two are killed off and thrown out of the nest, almost every time.  The other two are only given life as a sort of insurance policy.

I can’t see the work of God in this. Christians may say, “His works are manifest for all to see”, but as for me, I think they’re being dishonest.  That’s not giving the entire picture.

Nature is aesthetically beautiful and I’m glad to be alive, but I get annoyed when people try to act like nature is some blissful paradise.  It’s not.

I’m not here to bring out the worst of the world and make you look at it.  I’ve presented enough, and I don’t want to depress you. I’m just tired of people denying it like it doesn’t exist.  Denying it won’t make it go away.  We have to create medicine because mindless viruses and bacteria want to kill us and eat us alive.  Parasites will infects us and eat out our insides.  Rodents will infest our homes spreading every sort of disease.

I won’t end on such a dreary note.  There are some animals out there which its hard to find fault in.  Take a look at this sloth!

If every animal in nature was peaceful like that sloth, and there wasn’t disease and starvation or parasites, then I’d be a little more convinced by the “works of God” in nature.  As for me, I just can’t see it.  There’s a lot of mystery and wonders, but its far from the work of such a God.  I think claiming this world the work of His hand would be an insult to His craftsmanship.

“What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature.”
- Charles Darwin, in a letter to his friend Hooker

I also would like to quote Richard Dawkins from his book The Greatest Show On Earth.  I recommend you all read it.  I’m going to bold some main points.

Nature is neither kind nor unkind. She is neither against suffering, nor for it. Nature is not interested in suffering one way or the other unless it affects the survival of DNA. It is easy to imagine a gene that, say, tranquillises gazelles when they are about to suffer a killing bite. Would such a gene be favoured by natural selection? Not unless the act of tranquillising a gazelle improved that gene’s chances of being propagated into future generations. It is hard to see why this should be so and we may therefore guess that gazelles suffer horrible pain and fear when they are pursued to the death – as most of them eventually are. The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so. If there is ever a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.

Parasites probably cause even more suffering than predators, and understanding their evolutionary rationale adds to, rather than mitigates, the sense of futility we experience when we contemplate it. I fulminate against it every time I get a cold (I have one now, as it happens).  Maybe it is only a minor inconvenience, but it is so pointless! At least if you are eaten by an anaconda you can feel that you have contributed to the well-being of one of the lords of life. When you are eaten by a tiger, perhaps your last thought could be, What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry? (In what distant deeps or skies, burnt the fire of thine eyes?) But a virus! A virus has pointless futility written into its very DNA – actually, RNA in the case of the common cold virus, but the principle is the same. A virus exists for the sole purpose of making more viruses. Well, the same is ultimately true of tigers and snakes, but there it doesn’t seem so futile. The tiger and the snake may be DNA-replicating machines but they are beautiful, elegant, complicated, expensive DNA-replicating machines. I’ve given money to preserve the tiger, but who would think of giving money to preserve the common cold? It’s the futility of it that gets to me, as I blow my nose yet again and gasp for breath.

Futility? What nonsense. Sentimental, human nonsense. Natural selection is all futile. It is all about the survival of self-replicating instructions for self-replication. If a variant of DNA survives through an anaconda swallowing me whole, or a variant of RNA survives by making me sneeze, then that is all we need by way of explanation. Viruses and tigers are both built by coded instructions whose ultimate message is, like a computer virus, ‘Duplicate me.’ In the case of the cold virus, the instruction is executed rather directly. A tiger’s DNA is also a ‘duplicate me’ program, but it contains an almost fantastically large digression as an essential part of the efficient execution of its fundamental message. That digression is a tiger, complete with fangs, claws, running muscles, stalking and pouncing instincts. The tiger’s DNA says, ‘Duplicate me by the round-about route of building a tiger first.’ At the same time, antelope DNA says, ‘Duplicate me by the round-about route of building an antelope first, complete with long legs and fast muscles, complete with timorous instincts and finely honed sense organs tuned to the danger from tigers.’ Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger – even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all – and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.

- Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show On Earth

Life and our universe were created by mindless processes, slowly grinding from lower, simpler life-forms to ever more complicated life-forms.  It isn’t something that just sprang into existence.  Everything has a reason.  Nothing is arbitrary.

Besides the forms of pain and suffering Dawkins mentions, there’s also some others I’d like to discuss.  Just a few weeks ago I saw a young man asking a young woman out to a social event.  I happened to be sitting in the row right in front them and overheard their conversation.  It was sad to see, but he was rejected.  After the event took place, reflecting on what happened, all I could think about was sexual selection, and just how painful it all can be.

The more I learn about why we do the things we do, find myself thinking, “Are you serious?  Is that why we do that?  My god, how stupid.  Just look at us.  This is ridiculous.”

If the struggles we face with disease, poverty, sickness, war, and everything else wasn’t bad enough, species on this planet (including ourselves) undergo so much needless pain and suffering due to sexual selection.  Animals battle tooth and nail for females to prove their worth.  Since these battles oftentimes end in death, a sort of arms races develops between the males, and for moose, their horns continue to grow longer and larger.  These horns soon become giant daggers, which they use to stab and mutilate one another in tiring, grueling battles, hoping to win the opportunity to mate with the females, so that their genes live on in the next generation.

But sexual selection doesn’t always lead to such brutal conflicts.  Sometimes it leads species to, well, act silly.  Many birds for example, to impress females,  perform elaborate dances on forest floors, or sing songs at the top of their voices to prove that they’re healthy and the best candidate to mate with.

Everything comes down to gene survival.  We as humans are no different.  When that young man introduced himself to that young woman, he immediately was faced with the task of proving his worth.  We don’t battle it out locking horns, or sing songs, or perform mating dances, but we still have elaborate mating rituals to prove our worth.

From what I can see, the most common selection criteria females humans use on men are rooted in our evolutionary baggage.  Take body weight for example.  Most women prefer men with a tight stomach, big chest, big biceps, and overall muscular figure.  If they’re not into that, they at least would like their man to be healthy and trim, without all the fat.

This is because men in the past had to hunt and provide for their females.  If they were fat and slow, they were less likely to be a good provider for them and the children, who would starve to death if they didn’t get enough food.  That selection criteria made perfect sense back then, but it’s nothing but evolutionary baggage now.

Health is another indicator.  Most of us avoid marrying a very unhealthy person.  I saw a disabled man the other day walking with a cane.  He was near blind and required a lot of help to get around.  He’s not going to be all that popular with the ladies, I can tell you that.   Once again, it comes down to not being able to provide as a hunter.

Other selection criteria are far more baffling.  When a species comes to point where they have no predators, and are not struggling to survive, one sex within that species begins to use other criteria for mate selection other than just the ability to provide food and primary survival needs.  You start to see fitness judged on how much energy an animal can be WASTE and the still be ok.

Styling your hair is a way of showing that you can waste lots of time and energy combing and primping, and yet still find time to gather food and do everything else you need to do.  We don’t gather food any longer, and this makes no sense in a modern context, but once again, we still have our evolutionary baggage.

The world is filled with silly, wasteful enterprises.  Take the male peacocks with their huge colorful tails.  They shine them for all to see, and the females are to look at them and unconsciously say, “Wow.  Look at how colorful his tail is.  That must put him in a lot of danger from predators, but he’s able to survive nonetheless.  He must be really healthy, fast, and strong.”

When I saw that poor young man get rejected, I don’t think he knew what hit him.  He didn’t come across to me as an exactly brilliant individual, so he’s probably never thought about the  “why” of it all.   I couldn’t help but think about how that girl had all kinds of irrational selection criterion going on, and there he was, completely unaware of all of them, hoping to get a date.  For whatever reason, she rejected him.  It could’ve been a lot different reasons.  I can’t really say.

Years ago I confessed to a girl and she rejected me.  She told me I wasn’t this and wasn’t that, and didn’t agree with my views on life, or the lifestyle I’ve chosen.  I didn’t get mad at her or anything.  She’s a great girl, and I still think the world of her, even though we haven’t talked in quite a while.

Really, it’s no different than those birds in these videos.  Here comes to female and I’m supposed to puff out my feathers and dance around in circles.  If all the stars align, the moon turns dark red in an eclipse, earthquakes and volcanoes erupt, and angels dance on her bedpost, somehow things work out how they’re supposed to and she returns my feelings properly.  The earthquake rumble wakes her up in the middle of the night and as the angelic choir sings she somehow realizes how much I mean to her and that I’m not that bad of a guy.  One of these days I’ll pull the lever of the slot machine and get all 7′s.

As for this other young man, I was rooting for him.  Overhearing it, I was like, “Go man, go!”  Then she was like, “Welll….i Dunnooo…”  Then I thought, “Awwww, why can’t the guy get the girl like in the movies!”  It’s my guess that she wasn’t interested in him because she was out of his league.  She was a very attractive woman, and he was, I guess you could say average?  I’m certainly no expert on that sort of thing, but that’s what I’d guess.  I’ve really lost touch with all those ways of thought.  Who knows.  Maybe she was really thinking, “Oh my god!  I can’t believe he’s wearing sneakers like THOSE.  Geez.  Like I’d EVER date a guy like him!  And ok, and ok.”

Sexual attraction in humans is probably the dumbest thing I can think of.  The fact that perfectly healthy women are born, with no defects to them, yet are generally considered far less attractive than other women is such a mystery.  I wonder all the time why I find one woman beautiful and another woman not so.

As best I know, here are some factors that contribute to our sexual attraction: Breasts are attractive because we’ve came to use them as an indicator of age, as large breasts sag when the woman gets older, so large breasts in a young woman is very attractive to males.  Blond hair shows youth, which is why blondes are the most popular.  A curvy figure shows off hips, and the proper proportion of hips to waist is a good indicator to how easily a child could be delivered.  Other than that, it seems attraction is pretty much all about the proportions the woman is born with.  For example, the distance between the eyes, how far down the nose is on the face, the chin, cheek bones, and that sort of thing.  There’s some sort of algorithm the male mind runs a woman thorough and judges her attraction.

Most men of our species find the same women beautiful, and the same women ugly.  The same applies to most women.  It’s not universal, but there’s a strong tendency.  The vast majority of women find Brad Pitt and George Clooney handsome, and if given the chance would probably get with them.  Men are similar.  If most men had the chance to get with a woman like Jessica Alba or Shakira, they would very likely take up the opportunity.

This is sort of thing happens all over the animal kingdom.  Take the Saxony bird of paradise.  You’ll notice that even though the top of this tree is filled with males, pretty much every female chooses to mate with the best looking male.  Other males barely get to mate at all.

I think evolution utilizes this to filter out ‘bad models’  Nest building birds will judge how well a male can build a nest before they’ll mate with them.  If they can’t build a good nest, they never are able to find a mate.  This is so the dumb birds, whose brains are no good, are not continued on.  Only those clever birds who can build the nest are allowed to mate.

Humans and birds have a lot in common.  Since this Australian bowerbird has no predators, the male goes to elaborate lengths to construct a flashy home, which he then uses to entice females to mate with him.

Some biologists and psychologists believe that we evolved our abilities to recognize art, music, and humor within our brains due to sexual selection criteria.  These things developed in the same way that colorful feathers developed in the birds in these videos.  Just like male peacocks, we strut around by being talented musicians, display our great sense of humor, our quick wit, or utilize a large useless vocabulary, with the main purpose being simply to show off how smart we are.

In a way you could say these are the very things that make life colorful.  Then again, you could equally argue that the reason we FIND such things colorful is because our brains have evolved to find them so.  You could equally well have evolved to find something else colorful and entertaining.

When looking at all of this from a broad perspective, I find it all a bit depressing.

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who haven’t yet found the “love of their life”.  How many families have I seen broken up because of these silly mating rituals and the constant struggle to balance out the reward chemicals in their heads.  “It used to be so fun, but now… it’s just not the same…”

Feelings seem to come and go and are all over the place.  People struggle to make sense of our needless mating rituals and are in so much misery.

Then again, these mating games are what many live for.  How many movies are made about love stories and romance?  To them, that’s what life is all about.  I guess I can’t blame them.  That’s how the brain is structured to release reward chemicals.  Regardless of all the pain it causes them and others, it does sometimes give them a big rush.

I wonder how much pain and misery women endure trying to keep themselves beautiful.  How many hours do they have to spend in front of the mirror making sure their hair is perfect, their make-up just right, and their clothing stylish and perfect for their particular figure.  They fight to keep their weight down.  They augment their breasts.   There’s just no end to it.  It’s all to win the affections of a male and beat other females in this silly game.

Then it’s an uphill battle.  They’re only young and pretty for a few years, then it very quickly fades.  In their late teens they’re perfect.  In their 20s they’re still great.  In their 30s the aging is starting to show, but they still look good.  At 40, you can see they’re getting older, but if they try hard enough, they can still be a “MILF”, as they’re called.  At 50, the makeup and other products can’t hide the aging.  They’ve lost it.  Beyond that, they’re an old woman.

That leaves like a 20~25 year window?  That’s nothing.  I can’t speak for you all, but time flies.  Why waste half of your life in front of a mirror playing a game you can’t possibly win?

It always hurts my feelings to see a beautiful woman having to fend herself off from all the guys approaching her, while 3/4 of the other women in the room are barely noticed.  It’s just stupid.  Instead of playing this stupid game, I think  that all you ladies would be better off spending time developing your mind.  That’s really what a man should admire.

The only reason us men are attracted to your youthful look as opposed to your more aged look is because your fertility drops with age, and back in stone age times, if we were to mate with a women, we wanted to make sure you properly have the child.  Evolution slowly built us that way.  That’s it.  That’s pretty much the main reason this whole battle you’re fighting exists.  Seeing it from the big picture, you’re just wasting the short life you have on this planet.

It’s amazing when you come to understand all this though.  Our studies in neuroscience are now leading us to understand how reward chemicals work in our brains and when they’re released.  I think, in time, we’ll change this whole system using science, modifying our genetics and brains, and none of this pain and suffering will exist anymore.

As for this whole process, I wonder what all we’ll keep and what we’ll scrap.  I’d be curious to know.

One possible alternate world would be to grow our babies in the laboratory, and eradicate the distinction between male and female.  Not too terribly far in the future, our science will reach a point where we no longer need separate sexes.  There’s more expedient methods to share DNA, and create diversity, than by males and females sharing their DNA when giving birth to children.

People may ask, “What would a life without love be like?”  That’s the wrong question to ask.  Ask yourself instead, “If all it is is reward chemicals in my head, why not just alter how my brain works, and give myself that same rush and love of life all the time, instead of having to go through a long pointless mating ritual, which leads to so much pain and suffering.”  You only care about love because your brain tells you to care about love.  If we modified your brain, you’d care about something else instead.

As I said before, I think we’re leaving the era of biological evolution by natural selection, and we’re entering a world where we control all life development and cultural evolution.

I really want to understand all of this more.  I want to study more into how sexual selection eventually led to music, art, and humor.  It really is truly fascinating.  Our world is beyond strange.  The more you understand it, you just look at it and say, “Man that’s odd.”

Speaking of science and improving ourselves, I’ve also been considering the food we eat.  I think with time we won’t eat food.  We’ll learn how and why consciousness enters matter in different forms, and we’ll build our own bodies which are far better constructed.  We won’t eat food and won’t need to destroy other life forms to maintain our own existence.

Even if we only partially modified our bodies, think of how wonderful that would be.  Imagine injecting little nano-bots into your bloodsteam which eat the plaque which builds up in your arteries, always keeping your heart and blood flow healthy.  Imagine if other nano-bots chomped away at your excess fat, keeping your figure trim and healthy.  Other nano-bots could notify your body of various vitamin and nutritional deficiencies, and a system could send a signal to your brain notifying you of the problem.

The future has amazing possibilities.  In a way, nature is somewhat kind to us.  I expect that as the human species develops we’ll extend our lifespan, probably living for millions, or even hundreds of millions of years.  We may well become practically immortal.  The thing is, we wouldn’t want to be immortal now.  I know I wouldn’t – not if things had to stay the way they are now.

But the thing is, when we learn how to control reality, we also learn to control our lifespans.  The two go together.  Isn’t that amazing?  Once we learn to control reality, we in turn learn how to extend our lifespan.  The two happen at the same time.  We’ve slightly improved our world over the past few hundred years, and we’ve also managed to extend our lifespans to a similar degree.  Once we really improve things, we’ll vastly extend our lifespans.  That’s neat.  It’s like nature doesn’t force us to endure a miserable existence for a very long time.

Some people’s lives are good.  Life can be good.  I’m not saying all life is misery.  I just think there’s too much misery around this place for my taste.  There’s a whole lot of beauty to this world, but it’s not evenly distributed.  Some people seem to have it all, while others end up with a pretty sucky life.

The era of pain and suffering on Earth is, I believe, only a temporary stage in the development of life.  We’ll take over this universe and change it completely.  The whole predator/prey/natural selection/evolution model was simply to get the ball rolling until conscious sentient beings develop which can take over and change that universe into whatever they wish.  That’s my current view on things these days.

I want to understand our brain entirely.  The more I learn about it, I just see the deep mysteries of the world unfolding.  So many things I used to wonder about are finally becoming clear to me.  I’m seeing that time and space aren’t what I think they are.  I’m seeing why I laugh, why I have emotions, why I’m attracted to beautiful women, and the purposes all of these things served in our pasts.

Well I better call it a night.  I have a lot of work to do tonight, so night everyone.

“….

Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall ‘er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. ….”

- William Wordsworth, an excerpt from Tintern Abbey

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined….”

- Bertrand Russell

Quite naively, I’ve thought of loneliness as a special sort of feeling I was supposed to feel when being by myself, as opposed to when I’m in a social setting.  I’ve never felt any different one way or the other, so I didn’t understand loneliness, nor what it meant.

I think my misunderstanding has stemmed from reading articles like this, from Psychology Today,

Friendship  is a lot like food. We need it to survive. What is more, we seem to have a basic drive for it. Psychologists find that human beings have fundamental need for inclusion in group life and for close relationships. We are truly social animals.

The upshot is, we function best when this social need is met. It is easier to stay motivated, to meet the varied challenges of life.

In fact, evidence has been growing that when our need for social relationships is not met, we fall apart mentally and even physically. There are effects on the brain and on the body. Some effects work subtly, through the exposure of multiple body systems to excess amounts of stress hormones. Yet the effects are distinct enough to be measured over time, so that unmet social needs take a serious toll on health, eroding our arteries, creating high blood pressure, and even undermining learning and memory.

A lack of close friends and a dearth of broader social contact generally bring the emotional discomfort or distress known as loneliness. It begins with an awareness of a deficiency of relationships. This cognitive awareness plays through our brain with an emotional soundtrack. It makes us sad. We might feel an emptiness. We may be filled with a longing for contact. We feel isolated, distanced from others, deprived. These feelings tear away at our emotional well-being.

- Psychology Today, The Dangers Of Loneliness

I don’t agree with that article at all.  My stress and blood pressure are more prone to rise when I’m around people, not when I’m alone.  When I’m alone and not bothered, that’s when I’m at peace.  But isn’t it nice how they word things? The “dangers” of loneliness.  Whatever.  How about the “dangers” of mass psychology?  Individuality is a virtue, until you become too different from the herd.  That’s when they diagnose you as neurotic, and have psychologists tell you you’re in all sorts of danger.

When Bertrand Russell mentions loneliness, he makes it sound as if it’s a feeling of being surrounded by a lifeless, cold-hearted abyss.  That’s when I immediately realized that I’m no stranger to loneliness.

I’ve felt that form of loneliness a lot.  I think we all have.  I came to appreciate love and marriage a lot more when I thought of things in that context.  Being married to someone who understands you and loves you must definitely help out with those feelings of loneliness.

It’s unfortunate for me, however, that I have a disposition that most women aren’t particularly attracted to.  I’m probably far too self-absorbed, vain, and show apathy toward things that matter.  By self-absorbed, I wouldn’t say that’s because I think very highly of myself, but because I tend to live within my thoughts, thinking about things, and am generally less concerned about the trivial day to day events of life.

I have to escape the monotonous boredom of everyday existence.  To do so, I study difficult subjects and try to find answers.  I think about the stars, the physical laws which govern their behavior, the origin of the universe, parallel universes, time travel, proofs for difficult mathematical problems, economics, the history of mankind, international relations, depth psychology, philosophical questions such as morality, indepth processes into how the mind works, and other things.

Take the most recent book I purchased “Spatial Cognition, Spatial Perception: Mapping the Self and Space”.  The book covers five main topics:

1. What do animals know and how do they represent external space?
2. Perception and memory of landmarks: implications for spatial cognition and behavior.
3. Evolutionary perspectives on cognitive capacities in spatial perception and object recognition.
4. Does mapping of the body generate understanding of external space?
5. Comparisons of human and non-human primate spatial cognitive abilities.

It’s a fascinating book.  I haven’t been so excited to get a book in a long time.  When it came in the post, I immediately opened the box and my heart raced.  I pumped my fist and was like, “Yeessss!”

The book goes into great detail about how different animals construct a model of space in their brains.  It really is completely remarkable.  It compares different species, how they navigate the world, and their brains.  It talks about their memory capacity.  It talks about how the progression by which each of their brains evolved over time, and shows the development.  It’s exactly what I’ve been wanting to know for a long long time.

I was recently watching a lecture related to wasps, of all things.  I found it completely fascinating.

Wasps really are mindless creatures, and I don’t think they have free will.  They’re biological robots who follow a very simple set of programming instructions.   Let’s explain their behavior, and I think you’ll be able to see clearly how mechanical they are.

There was one type of wasp (I can’t remember the name), that would go out and gather caterpillars.  We could summarize its life and everything it does with the following few points:

1. Dig a hole in the ground.
2. Lay eggs in that hole.
3. Crawl out of the hole
4. Fly up in the air, do one or two loops around the hole, and find a caterpillar.
5. Sting the caterpillar, kill it, and bring it back to the hole.
6. Crawl down in the hole just to make sure nothing had crawled in during the absence.
7. Crawl back out, grab the caterpillar, and stuff it into the hole.
8. Seal off the hole with a small rock nearby.

After this the young egg would hatch and the baby wasp would feed on the dead caterpillar as it developed in that little burrow.

That’s simple enough.  We’ve all seen wasps.  What’s the big deal?

Well, you can totally screw with that wasp’s mind by doing very simple things.  Wasps mechanically follow that procedure, and can do little else.  For example, grab a few pine cones and wait until it crawls in its hole.  Put the pine cones in some arrangement outside its hole.  When it leaves its burrow to go find a caterpillar, it does its loops to memorize that environment.  After it flies off, remove the pine cones and wait for it to come back.  It’ll come back to the general area but have no idea where its hole is.

Even better is when you leave the pine cones there.  It goes and gets its caterpillar and brings it back.  It lays it just outside its hole and then goes in to check if everything’s ok.  You then snatch the caterpillar and move it two inches to the right or left.

The wasp will then come out of its hole and walk to the location where it left the caterpillar.  Then it seems to say to itself, “Uh oh.  My caterpillar’s gone.”  Then it goes airborn to do its two loops to memorize the surroundings.  As it flies in the air it notices the caterpillar, “Oh, there’s a caterpillar.”  It swoops down, grabs it, and then lays it beside the hole.  It goes into its burrow to check if everything’s ok, and then you move the caterpillar, again.  It comes out of the hole, says, “Uh oh, my caterpillar’s gone”,  flies up in the air, does its loops, notices the caterpillar, grabs it, places it outside its hole, goes back in its hole… You can do this same procedure on the wasp until you’re tired of it.  Scientists have repeated this upwards of 40 times consecutively.

Now why is this so fascinating to me?  I wonder to myself all the time what “free will” is, or if it even exists.  If it does, how developed does the brain have to be before we have a degree of freedom?  Wasps have brains that do all kinds of things, but I don’t think they’re free to make decisions.  They seem awfully robotic to me.

Now imagine a book filled with case studies of how different animals perceive space and the neat experiments that have been done.  Fascinating isn’t it?

To use a simple analogy, I entertain the idea that our brain is kind of like a complex form of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer.  In that experiment, the photon can exist in multiple paths at once.  In the same way, I wonder if maybe our brains can exist in multiple potential states, where the state isn’t determined in various areas, based on some sort of complex arrangement, and that we can shift the electric potential in a certain “direction” (a sort of collapse of a neural quantum wave function).  Physical matter isn’t completely deterministic, and maybe our brain tissues can develop in some complex way in which indeterministic free will is possible.

What I like about this idea is that “free will” is confined to making decisions of a certain types, based on what the physical situation warrants – similar to how the Mach-Zehnder interferometer defines the possible paths for the photon.  This is important because people don’t exercise free will at random.  People could do all sorts of things, but they don’t seem to.  For the most part, they almost all behave like normal human beings.  I think their brains limits which decisions they have to choose from.

There’s a lot of problems with this idea though, which I haven’t been able to solve.  If it’s true, then how does your free will only affect your body, while my free will only affect my own body?  Is there some sort of subtle difference between my brain and yours?  I don’t get that.  I still don’t understand what forms the individual and makes them alive, distinguishing one person from another, or any animal for that matter.

I don’t think it’s a property of the physical matter itself, because the matter which composes us (the physical atoms themselves), changes throughout our lives.  It must have to do with the aggregate forms the atoms take on.  It has to be complicated though because our brains are changing all the time as we learn new things.  Dendritic arms grow connecting different brain cells together.

But free will must also depend on a lot of other factors.  A lot of what we think of as free will in species like ourselves really is likely to be just memory and complex brain functions.  This sort of thing is what the book I just bought is about, which is my passion of research.

For example, think about speech.  When we speak, most of us think we’re controlling our mouths and vocal chords using our free will and speech comes out.  This is far from the case.  If you have brain damage in just the right areas (Broca’s area), even if your vocal chords are fine, you won’t be able to speak or form coherent sentences.  It’s really your brain which is doing all that.  It’s the brain that generates the words to say and somehow links it all together and makes it work.

I don’t think that wasps have memory.  Since it has no memory, trying to think how free will would work in it is very difficult.  How can you make a decision if there’s no buffer space for you to lay out your different options in your mind?  How will you weigh the options if you don’t have an imagination to think out the potential effects?

I guess that was a bit of a digression from loneliness.  But you see, when I look at my own life, I’ve developed habits and ways of thought which relinquish any ties to other human beings.  I spend little if any time developing relationships of any sort with people.  I spend my days reading books like this, and thinking about problems most people rarely if ever concern themselves with.  And the thing is, I don’t feel depressed about it, nor do I feel like I’m lacking things that other people with social lives have.

Because there’s so few people who find the things I study interesting, I’m by necessity confined to being a lonely person.  I don’t see any way around this.  Most people bond together through common interests.  There’s few people interested in the things I’m interested in, other than really great scientists, psychologists, and thinkers.

It’d be really nice if I could sit in the pub reading “Spatial Cognition, Spatial Perception: Mapping the Self and Space”, and have cute girls come up to me saying, “Wow!  I’ve read that book.  It’s fantastic.  Don’t you just love the chapter on ants and the detailed research into how they use the sun to get back to their nest?  I love that stuff.”  I’d instantly fall in love, but that won’t happen, ever.

That’s just a fact I’ve chosen to live with.  I don’t really have any choice in that matter, I don’t think.  I’ve tried living the normal life most people live but I find it intolerably boring.  If people find the things I’m fascinated with boring, that’s just how it is.  I’ve seen videos where Richard Dawkins talks about great scientists he admires as his heroes.  Most all of them were/are just like me – taciturn and preferred isolated study to socializing.  They had great problems on their minds which consumed their thoughts, and they were far less concerned with banal everyday experience.

Though I wouldn’t recommend my lifestyle to most people.  Friends really are a valuable thing when you find them.  They’re a rare and priceless thing.  Treat them well.  I’ve made the mistake of treating people dear to me with far too little respect.  I regret that.

I have a problem with speaking my mind far too freely and I hurt people’s feelings.  It reminds me of a quote I heard from a physics professor,

“People will forgive you for darn well anything, but not for being right.”
- Dr. Schmitt

With most people, having a cordial friendly relationship is more valuable than the truth of the subject matters being discussed.  Everything you’re saying might be complete bullshit and make no sense, but if you’re friendly and everyone’s enjoying themselves, it doesn’t seem to matter.

I actually heard this quote during an astronomy course. Dr. Schmitt related the events of a social gathering, where a man there mistakenly assumed that our planet’s distance from the sun brought about the changing seasons.  Dr. Schmitt was very tempted to correct the man, knowing full well that our tilt about our axis of rotation is the real reason for the seasons, but he didn’t want to be an ass.

I’m the guy who IS an ass (to my own detriment), and is unconscious of the fact that he’s being so.  Completely socially unaware, I go on and on about our 23.5 degree tilt, the winter and summer solstices, and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.   And as everyone’s staring at me, wondering why I won’t shut up, I pull out a pad of paper and pen and say, “Here, let me draw it all out for you.”  Then as I feel I’ve shown a new truth to my friend, they’re all thinking, “What a douchebag.”

When you spend a lot of time alone, like I do, you don’t understand that there’s complex social dynamics at these sorts of events, where people lose face and look stupid.  Since I have no thought of what other people think of me, I’m totally unaware of these things that other people care a great deal about.

I actually took a huge psychological evaluation here recently, and my results were interesting.  They rated your mindset and way of life by several different categories.  When it came to learning for its own sake, I was 98/100.  My value of education and knowledge was 97/100.  My interpersonal skills and prudence was 3/100.

So yeah, that about explains me.  Completely clueless when it comes to people, especially women.

It’s quite funny really.  I was watching the film Pride & Prejudice, based on Jane Austen’s novel, and there was a moment in the film where this awkward priest was asking the main character, Elizabeth, to marry him.  She replied that there’s no way she could make him happy, and basically that they were a terrible match.   That really was profound to someone as dumb as me.

It’s not that I thought they’d make a good couple.  I could tell that he was a terrible person to be around, and that they were completely incompatible.  That man was incompatible with every woman on Earth.  But here’s where I found myself wondering.  The very thought of marrying someone in order to make you happy was something I don’t think I’ve ever thought of.  That had never crossed my mind.  Never.  My mindset is to be self-sufficient and that you need to make yourself happy.  It’s not someone else’s job to make you happy, nor can they do so.  I thought of marriage as a sort of arrangement where life is better with them than without them, and you sort of rationally weigh being single versus having them.  Even if they don’t add all that much, if it’s a positive gain, why not marry? This is coming from someone with a 3/100 in interpersonal skills, so just keep that in mind.

I went out for a walk that evening and thought to myself, “Marrying someone to make you happy.  Trying to make someone else happy.  What in the world could that possibly involve?”  I walked for an hour and during that time couldn’t even conceive, even in my fantasies, the majority of my happiness coming from a relationship with a woman.  I’m just being honest, even if that makes me look terrible to all you reading this.  I thought to myself, “What if you’re ALREADY happy?  What if you ALREADY have a good life?”  It’s so remote, and I’ve never met a woman even remotely that interesting.  Someone through which I could define the majority of my life, just by the relationship with her.  I can’t picture it.  And if she is that amazing (and she’d have to be one hell of a woman), the likelihood that she’s interested in me, of all people, is next to none.  My odds at a relationship of that sort are so low, I’m probably more likely to win the lottery buying a few lotto tickets at the gas station.

Love and relationships throws me for a complete loop, every time.  I don’t understand it.  I don’t get it.  With my 3/100, what can I expect?  I don’t understand these words that lovers say to one another.  I think that means I only understand what’s going on in around 3 out of every 100 social situations.  “You’re everything to me.  It’s all for you.”  What?  Define “all”?  When I try to understand it, I come to a conclusion that it’s something you feel, not something you think about.  The words are just a means to make known the feelings you have within your heart.  That’s why none of it makes sense.  They’re not meant to be logical.  They’re meant to instill and communicate feelings which I don’t think I’ve ever experienced myself.

Of course, going for a walk in isolation, not talking to anyone other than myself, surely isn’t going to find me the answer to this issue. 

If I marry a woman one day, I’d treat her beautifully.  What I’d value most are long walks outdoors together talking about deep subjects.  Even better would be to work together on intellectual pursuits.  When I was watching Dr. Bronowski’s series The Ascent Of Man, I believe he had his wife help him research the material he was presenting in the series.  That’d be an incredible relationship.  That is so amazing actually that I can barely comprehend being in such a marriage.  That would be beyond wonderful.  I’d marry a woman who wasn’t into everything I study, if she had a pleasant personality.  But I guess having an intellectual partner is my ideal.  I think that’s the only thing I could ever truly fall in love with a woman for.  Her intelligence.  95% of what matters is her intelligence.  4% personality.  1% everything else.

When I think about Bertrand Russell’s definition of loneliness, I feel just as lonely around people than being alone.  The thing is, being alone I can read my books and consume myself in interesting material.  When I’m around most people, I’m forced to endure mindless dribble.  It’s no wonder why I choose to stay home with my books every time.

Another major problem creationists have to contend with is the geographic distribution of species.  I’ll let Richard Dawkins handle this one,

It is almost too ridiculous to mention it, but I’m afraid I have to because of the more than 40 per cent of the American population who, as I lamented in Chapter 1, accept the Bible literally: think what the geographical distribution of animals should look like if they’d all dispersed from Noah’s Ark. Shouldn’t there be some sort of law of decreasing species diversity as we move away from an epicentre – perhaps Mount Ararat? I don’t need to tell you that that is not what we see.

Why would all those marsupials – ranging from tiny pouched mice through koalas and bilbys to giant kangaroos and Diprotodonts – why would all those marsupials, but no placentals at all, have migrated en masse from Mount Ararat to Australia? Which route did they take? And why did not a single member of their straggling caravan pause on the way, and settle – in India, perhaps, or China, or some haven along the Great Silk Road? Why did the entire order Edentata (all twenty species of armadillo, including the extinct giant armadillo, all six species of sloth, including extinct giant sloths, and all four species of anteater) troop off unerringly for South America, leaving not a rack behind, leaving no hide nor hair nor armour plate of settlers somewhere along the way? Why were they joined by the entire infraorder of caviomorph rodents, including guinea pigs, agoutis, pacas, maras, capybaras, chinchillas and lots of others, a large group of characteristically South American rodents, found nowhere else? Why did an entire sub-order of monkeys, the platyrrhine monkeys, end up in South America and nowhere else? Shouldn’t at least a few of them have joined the rest of the monkeys, the catarrhines, in Asia or Africa? And shouldn’t at least one species of catarrhine have found itself in the New World, along with the platyrrhines? Why did all the penguins undertake the long waddle south to the Antarctic, not a single one to the equally hospitable Arctic?

An ancestral lemur, again very possibly just a single species, found itself in Madagascar. Now there are thirty-seven species of lemur (plus some extinct ones). They range in size from the pygmy mouse lemur, smaller than a hamster, to a giant lemur, larger than a gorilla and resembling a bear, which went extinct quite recently. And they are all, every last one of them, in Madagascar. There are no lemurs anywhere else in the world, and there are no monkeys in Madagascar. How on Earth do the 40 per cent history-deniers think this state of affairs came about? Did all thirty-seven and more species of lemur troop in a body down Noah’s gangplank and hightail it (literally in the case of the ringtail) for Madagascar, leaving not a single straggler by the wayside, anywhere throughout the length and breadth of Africa?

Once again, I am sorry to take a sledgehammer to so small and fragile a nut, but I have to do so because more than 40 per cent of the American people believe literally in the story of Noah’s Ark. We should be able to ignore them and get on with our science, but we can’t afford to because they control school boards, they home-school their children to deprive them of access to proper science teachers, and they include many members of the United States Congress, some state governors and even presidential and vice-presidential candidates. They have the money and the power to build institutions, universities, even a museum where children ride life-size mechanical models of dinosaurs, which, they are solemnly told, coexisted with humans. And, as recent polls have shown, Britain is not far behind (or should that read ‘ahead’?), along with parts of Europe and most of the Islamic world.

Even if we leave Mount Ararat to one side; even if we refrain from lampooning those who take the Noah’s Ark myth literally, similar problems apply to any theory of the separate creation of species. Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution? Why would he put lemurs in Madagascar and nowhere else? Why put platyrrhine monkeys in South America only, and catarrhine monkeys in Africa and Asia only? Why no mammals in New Zealand, except bats who could fly there? Why do the animals in island chains most closely resemble those on neighbouring islands, and why do they nearly always resemble – less strongly but still unmistakably – those on the nearest continent or large island? Why would the creator put only marsupial mammals in Australia, again except bats who could fly there, and those who could arrive in man-made canoes? The fact is that, if we survey every continent and every island, every lake and every river, every mountaintop and every Alpine valley, every forest and every desert, the only way to make sense of the distribution of animals and plants is, yet again, to follow Darwin’s insight about the Galapagos finches: ‘One might really fancy that from an original paucity . . . one species had been taken and modified for different ends.’

- Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show On Earth

If you’re not convinced by the fossil record, the common ancestry found within all of our DNA, or potassium-argon dating, then this alone should be enough to convince you that creationism is wrong.  I’m thinking that over the next few months, each time I come across a piece of evidence like this, I’m going to post it on here for creationists to look at.

The picture we see in our telescopes gives factual evidence for the Big Bang.  When you look out using say the Hubble telescope, you see this,

Looking through a high powered telescope is like looking into a time-machine because the light reaching us is coming from different distances and was emitted at different times.  Quite a profound thing to think about.

There’s so much waiting for you to understand.   Give up your superstitions and learn the truth about our universe.  We’re a part of something truly amazing.  The universe is very big and very very old.  We can’t even begin to comprehend 13.7 billion years.  It’s even harder to comprehend that our universe is likely just one member of a multi-verse.

I just find these things silly.  Why does God need someone to introduce Himself?  God is all powerful and all knowing, and they claim He’s longing to have a relationship with me.  Even so, He won’t come down to my bedroom and appear before me. Surely it’d be simple for Him to do so, but no.  Instead He needs his faithful messengers to introduce Himself.  And how are these messengers instructed to do so?  They read cryptic passages out of the Bible on how He committed suicide on a cross in a bloody sacrifice in order to bridge a gap which He himself imposed between us.  I’m also instructed to take part in cannibalistic rituals, symbolically eating his flesh and drinking his blood in remembrance of the event.

“Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.”
- Voltaire, in a letter to Frederick the Great.

“Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies each with two hundred billion stars then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?”
- Ron Patterson

I get tired of talking about religion, but at the same time I have to because it’s so widespread; it’s everywhere you look.  Many years ago I too was caught up in religion.

So many people claim that God talks directly to them.  Whenever you start confronting them with facts, evidence, and inconsistencies in their beliefs, they always fall back on that unquestionable fail-safe, “Well, God talks directly to me.  I know He’s real.  Nobody has to tell me.”  They claim to receive divine revelations through prayer.

Being famous, Richard Dawkins frequently receives letters regarding these issues.  Sometimes they claim to have contact with aliens, or believe wholeheartedly that God speaks directly to them.  He responds by sending them a letter requesting the solution to a difficult mathematical proof which hasn’t yet been solved.  If God (or super-intelligent alien life-forms) really does have contact with them, surely He can tell them the answer.  As expected, they never can answer because it’s all in their heads.  If you think God speaks directly to you, I’d ask you the same question.  Ask God to tell you how to unite Einstein’s general relativity and the equations of quantum mechanics.  If “God” can’t tell you that, you’re talking to your own mind, not God.

“Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.”
- Napoleon Bonaparte

As an interesting side note, if Dawkins asks them the answer to a moral dilemma, they always have an answer.  Otherwise, no.

People live their lives with their imaginary friends, and I don’t know about you all, but I’m tired of it.  I’m tired of seeing women wrapped up head to toe in black garb in the middle of the summer heat-wave.  I’m tired of hearing about people stoned to death for petty things.  I’m tired of arguments about some stupid mosque being built near ground zero.  I’m tired of the conflicts in the middle east.  I’m tired of holy wars being fought over irreconcilable doctrines believed in blind faith.  I’m tired of being preached to from my family members.  I’m tired of arguments about whether or not we should have a tablet of the ten commandments in our courtrooms.   I’m tired of debates on whether or not we should have “In God We Trust” on our money.  I’m tired of Christians wanting superstition taught in schools.  I’m tired scientists needing to justify their every action to people who don’t even remotely understand their research.  I’m tired of seeing gays mistreated.  I’m tired of new-age mystics spreading superstitious nonsense.

“All thinking men are atheists.”
- Ernest Hemingway

I’m just tired of religion and mysticism.  Period.  Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism… all of it.

“Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”
- Jesus Christ, Matthew 10:34

Just look at what modern biological research is heading toward.  Watch this video of Craig Venter touring Richard Dawkins around his genetics facility.  We’re mapping the DNA patterns of all the different species on this planet using super-computers.  We can clearly see how all life is related.  Even if there wasn’t a single fossil on the planet, and there were no other forms of evidence for evolution, we would still clearly know that evolution is true because we’d see the common threads within the DNA sequencing.  We can see the common ancestry and links between species.

One day we’ll be able to create any life-form we wish just by using the proper DNA sequence like a strip of computer tape.  DNA is an instruction set on how to build a body and we’re coming to a deep understanding on how that process works.  We’re literally on the verge of that right now.  We’re doing it for small simple organisms already.

When I watch that video I’m in absolute awe.  What amazing research!  I look at the flaws within my own body, such as my poor vision, and think about how wonderful it’d be if I’d been born with perfect eyesight.  I think about how nice it’d be if the circulation in my hands and feet wasn’t poor.  I think about the headaches I get from the poorly laid out blood vessels behind my eyes.  Now imagine if prior to being born my DNA was examined and all of those problems were removed during my development in the womb!  It’s incredible!

We as a society can fund this kind of research, or we can continue building tanks and missiles for the power-hungry bastards running our governments.  I think it’s obvious the direction we need to take.

How long are we going to be held back by superstition and stupidity?  Will religious zealots end up burning down Venter’s facility like they did the library of Alexandria?   We have the power to fix this cruel world.  Day by day we’re coming closer and closer to doing so.  It’s likely that within my lifetime we’ll be able to carefully examine each person’s genetic genome and custom tailor medications for their body.  Medications will no longer be generic but will be created by complex computer programs tailoring the medicine to the individual.  Then again, we can turn back to faith-healers and prayer.

Here’s is the video’s transcript:

“I see great dangers for the human race. There have been a number of times in the past when its survival has been a question of touch and go. The Cuban missile crisis in 1963 was one of these. The frequency of such occasions is likely to increase in the future. We shall need great care and judgment to negotiate them all successfully, but I’m an optimist. If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space. If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. But we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years let alone the next thousand or million. Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years, but if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space. That is why I’m in favor of manned, or should I say, person-ed, space-flight.”

- Stephen Hawking, Big Think

With aggression, if we do not abolish national armies and our conflicts between nations, we’re likely to destroy ourselves in war.  At heart, wars have always been a form of organized theft.  They came into being when mankind first began settling into small towns, and nomadic raiders came to steal their grain and livestock.  They’ve been with us ever since.

“… unless and until mankind have achieved the security of a single government for the world, everything else of value, of no matter what kind, is precarious, and may at any moment be destroyed by war.”

- Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual

Because of our innate inclination toward selfishness, and our tendency to steal the property of another man via aggressive force and legal maneuvers, I’m wary about large concentrations of power of any kind.  When you look at our massive governments, they’re monstrosities full of bribery, theft, and pillaging of the people.  Historically that’s nothing new.  The ambitious and power hungry always seek control of governments because they offer a monopoly on the legal use of force.  Considering the legal use of force is so important, I would like to see most all political power of this kind flushed back to state and local governments.  That way people could feel more involved and in control again.  I’d like to see the democratic process extended into many other aspects of our lives, not just the political arena.

I oftentimes find myself entertaining almost radical libertarian ideas mainly because political change through the normal political process forces people to do things at gunpoint.  I don’t like that.  When a man fights for change in the government, what they’re really fighting for is a law allowing them to force their fellow man to do things at gunpoint.  If people don’t comply with the law, they’re fined, thrown into jail, and face other serious punishments.  I try to advocate freedom as much as possible, so I’m leery of the use of political force to change the way other people live.  I believe in changing people through argument, being a living example, and letting people come to their own conclusions on how to live.  I don’t like to use force on people because you can’t change a person’s opinions by forcing them to do things at gunpoint.  You can only temporarily change their actions, but tensions will build.  Eventually that will explode on you.  We’d be wise to listen to Pascal,

“We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.”

- Blaise Pascal

Powerful political positions represent, at heart, the ability to use force to get your way.  I find this incredibly dangerous, so I personally feel that if the most powerful positions in government were rather petty, local, and offered nothing but the capability to actually serve the people, half of our problems would go away right there.

It’s very difficult to exploit citizens at the local level.  As long as  you have transparency, people would be able to see where the money is going and it would all make sense to them.  Citizens can drive around town and see their tax dollars at work, and know where their money went.  Their leaders would also be far more accessible.  That’s the way I think things should be.

At the local level, your vote would count.  And if you wanted change, you could go around town talking to people and actually make a difference.  You could go to your barber and say, “Can you believe what our mayor just approved of?  He’s wasting our tax dollars.  We need him out of there.”  You could stand outside the grocery store handing out fliers talking about corruption which people relate to and understand.  Then the politicians, who live in that same town, would have to confront the people they’re exploiting everyday.  When they went to get their haircut, they’d have to face that barber who they’re cheating.  That is so much better than our world today.

I like the idea of states having a lot more power than the Federal government.  Take healthcare for instance.  If say the state of California wanted a socialist style healthcare system, whereas Alabama wanted a more market driven healthcare system, both states could have it how they wanted.  Then we the people could see both governments in action and let them compete to prove which is better.

Personally, I feel the state should provide healthcare to all its citizens, as well as provide for all secondary education needs.  I would move to a state which offered this.  It’s certainly not a tax I mind paying.  But other people feel differently, and it’d be nice if they could live in their own state with other like-minded people.

If you allowed citizens to freely move between states and cities, if one state government became corrupt you could move to another state which treated you better.  It offers more diversity and puts states in competition with each other.  People would leave corrupt states, which would force them to get their act together. It would also relieve a lot of the tension which is out there.

There’s a nasty cycle to selfishness and hatred. When mankind became a social animal his instincts developed in such a way to hate those who cheat the system.  Most of us live honestly and don’t exploit those around us, but there’s always those who try to cheat the system.  We’re wired to hate these people.  That’s to give us motivation to change things or boot them out.  This leads to violence, unfortunately.  The exploited seeking revenge operates off the same principle.

There’s always violence when people are wronged and mistreated. Capitalism without a social safety net is filled with wrongs.  People work hard to get an education in a certain trade which then gets cast along the wayside with changing times.  What’s a person to do when their job is no longer valuable, is replaced by machinery, or even worse, when it’s outsourced?  We need systems to help people get back to work.  We also need retirement plans which aren’t reliant on the caprice of the stock market and Wall Street.  And anyone who isn’t appalled by the vast income inequalities is just blind.  I could talk about capitalism and its flaws all day long.

I do know one thing – we’ll never have a peaceful society if we don’t provide security to people.  We all need a degree of security.  The world’s a far too lonely and dangerous place.  We need to look out for one another.  Our economic system is just terrible.

I recently was watching a documentary and they were talking about the Incas.  There were no starving or hungry in their society.  Everyone was provided for.  I don’t see why we can’t have that today.  And you know what?  When you talk to people they all feel the same way.  They say, “Yes, we should all look out for one another.”  But what holds us back?  Why does that never happen?

Well, there’s always someone who believes that helping each other out is going to destroy us all.  I’ll be first to admit that helping others is a subtle business. People abuse the system, no doubt.  The thing is, not having these sorts of social safety nets is a more dangerous than dealing with the few people who take advantage of it all.  If we moved our social programs to the local level, I think we could cut down on a lot of the abuses.

Just last weekend I was visiting my parents, who are very religious.  They were watching John Hagee, a fundamentalist Christian.  He got behind the pulpit and said, “The Bible has a lesson in economics we have forgotten.  If you don’t work, you don’t eat.”  He was talking about entitlement programs.  I just shook my head thinking, “Here’s the rich TV preacher, millions of dollars in the bank, flying around in private jets, himself not doing anything productive for society, just running his mouth spreading superstition, advocating wars and intervention in the Middle East, and calling everyone else lazy and not entitled to unemployment benefits after losing their job in a recession, looking for new employment.”  Then he pretends he’s spreading the love of Christ. Please.  These are the sorts of reasons intelligent people can’t possibly respect these religious zealots.

Here we have a new college graduate, who just spent the last decade studying to prepare for a job, and for whatever reason can’t find work.  Then Hagee walks up to this downtrodden individual and says, “You’re lazy.  You don’t work, you don’t eat.”  Then he waddles off to his jet.  That’s how people are and we wonder why there’s so much bitterness.  That’s the cycle of greed and hatred.  You don’t care about anyone, and because you don’t care about them, they don’t care about you.  With Hagee, there’s no love in that man.  He’s completely devoid of compassion. Jesus teaches to help the struggling man along the wayside, but his so-called followers are Spartan war-mongers.  If the Bible is true and there is a final judgment, I wouldn’t be surprised to see guys like Hagee come before God who then says, “Depart from me, I never knew you.”  A shocked expression comes over his big plump face and the demons drag him off to hell as he exclaims, ‘Jeeeessssuuuuusssssss’

Selfishness and violent aggression are not mutually exclusive; they’re inextricably bound together in a cycle.

If we were to have a global government, modeled like our national governments are today, our feelings of insignificance and helplessness are only going to increase.  Here in the U.S. I already feel completely insignificant.  I don’t feel in control at all.  My vote is drown out by the sea of people out there.  Imagine how bad it would be at the global level.

If we do have a global government, we need to make sure it has very little power.  I want most of the power to reside in the individual cities and small states.  Even the big cities are too big for one man to govern.  I would want a big city like St. Louis broken up into 50,000 or at most 100,000 people sectors.  I want people to feel in control over their lives and be free to live or work anywhere in the world.  We should not be subject to exploitative politicians who hide in their distant offices.

I could never imagine my hometown raising an army and attacking some other city.  The people who run local governments are just normal everyday people who actually do care about you.  It’s mainly the scumbags in the federal government who are up to no good.  I want their power taken away from them and national armies abolished.

There are some deep questions to consider as well though.  Take science research.  Institutions like NASA and the NSF need funding at the national level.  So there are some exceptions, but in general, I want most all power and tax dollars collected and spent at the local and state levels.  Other issues include environmental concerns and overpopulation.  Those things will probably have to be enforced from above.  Our current population would require 1.5 Earths to sustain itself.  We have to change.

All in all, I’m very open to different solutions to the problems of aggression and selfishness in society.  I think the central problems though are these massive governments and big corporations.  I would move to a state which forces these corporations to provide full benefits and sound retirement plans to their employees.  There also should be much more profit sharing, and far less profits for Wall Street tycoons.

It’s all very depressing, however.  There’s a very high probability that mankind will exterminate itself within the next few centuries.  That very thought sends me into such a deep despair, I sometimes don’t want to get out of bed in the morning.  These issues regarding the environment, corrupt economic systems, superstition, religion, and scientific literacy are not trivial.  I think they literally represent whether or not the human race will survive.  If we don’t solve them, we’re done for.

Blind faith has to be replaced by reason based on empirical observation.  That way our conflicts in beliefs can go away and be rooted in principles which are proven to work.  We have to start taking care of our planet and stop abusing it.  We’re going to have to live in harmony with it, or it’s going to kick us very hard in the rear, and may well boot us off to extinction.  If we can’t come up with an economic system that works, there’s no way we’ll have peace.  We can’t have a world where 95% of all the wealth is concentrated in the hands of 1% of the population.  We also can’t have industrial super-powers living right next door to third-world countries.  These nation-state borders have to go down and humanity has to unite.  It’s obviously a broken system.

The fundamental premise in capitalism basically says, “What can you do for me?  Why should I do something for you?”  and if you don’t have something to offer in return, there’s no “free lunch”, as they like to say.  That whole line of thought has to go.  It causes all the miseries and struggles mankind faces in this world.

I feel strongly that the world needs to live like the scientific community does.  They share all their research, are completely open to critique and change, have a deep respect for truth and empirical observation, and most of them go to great lengths to educate the public and their students teaching them everything they know.  It’s a very open-doors endeavor, where everyone is encouraged to get involved.

Capitalism on the other hand, everything’s about control.  In order to stay on top, you have to keep your technological research a secret, so that your products remain superior to your competitors.  It’s a tooth and nail struggle to stay on top, constantly battling for the almighty dollar.  If you lose that battle, and you don’t have some money saved up, you’re literally cast out onto the street and left to rot.  If there’s no safety net, you’re left to die, literally.  It’s a matter of life and death whether you can compete on the marketplace.  If you lose, you’re cast out into abject poverty.  Or, you have to work for one of the big corporations which exploit you, offer you no benefits, work you until you’re old, and then cast you aside.  With just a matter of changing times, you can end up losing your job, and lose everything you’d worked your whole life to accumulate.  You end up defaulting on your loans (which were cooked up out of thin air), and you lose your home, your car, and your means to provide for yourself.  As for the profits, they go to a few Wall Street fat-cats, who don’t even do the work.  I agree with Einstein that this is the main reason for conflict in this world.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.  We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor — not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules.

- Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?

In this same article Einstein talked about man’s relationship to society,

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

- Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?

I agree with him that our world is much too self-centered.  We live for us and us alone.  Our entire way of life encourages this and we hope the invisible hand is going to guide us to prosperity. We can’t have a world directed primarily by selfish principles. We probably need worldviews which are more collective in origin, but of course, everyone will disagree about what direction we as a society should go.

If I were to identify how we should live, I think a good role model would be Bertrand Russell.  Listen to his own life self-evaluation at the age of 84:

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found. With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.

- Bertrand Russell, What I have lived for

If we were to develop those same passions of love, the pursuit of knowledge, and compassion for those less fortunate, I think the world would transform dramatically.  Whatever changes we make to society, I believe strongly that those will have to be the guiding principles.

“However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.”
- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

When you look at all the violence and cruelty in nature, you can’t help but be disgusted.  Whether it’s birds chomping away at the insects, big fish gobbling up the little fish, or lions hunting down the peaceable grazing animals, it’s worth asking why things are this way.  What possible purpose could such madness serve?

I’ll let you in on a surprising secret — that very cruelty is what led to our awareness of this world!

The nature of life on planet Earth revolves around DNA.  Each time an organism has offspring there are random mutations.  Sometimes there’s a large mutation, and other times the mutations are far less noticeable.  Either way, they’re there.  DNA based life-forms have the property that they replicate with minor mutations. As the first cells came together, they began forming more and more complex structures and organisms.  Let’s take a look into how such structures formed.

The first thing you have to understand is the sheer age of everything around you.  The universe is 13.7 billion years old.  Our planet is over four and a half billion years old.  Evolution began not too terribly long after our planet formed.  Various chemical processes led to the first cells forming which had the property of replication, similar to bacteria.  They replicated in the waters and with each new generation there were slight mutations.  Cell colonies started to form, and this process eventually leads, over billions of years, to the complex organisms which you see all around you.  Colonies began competing for resources.

In a finite world, there’s only so much to go around.  All lifeforms on the planet have to compete for whose design will live on. DNA is a sort of computer program with instructions on how to build a certain type of body.  There’s only so much space on this planet, and only so many atoms to use, so nature is undergoing a long process to determine which design gets to use the available resources.

In evolution by natural selection, various environmental pressures weed out less well adapted designs.  A lot of people find evolution a crazy idea because they think, “How could something as complex as the eye, or the wings of a bird, come about by random chance?”  People who say these things don’t understand natural selection at all.  Evolution is a far from random process.  The small mutations in each organism’s offspring are pretty much random, but what’s not random is the fact that the environment weeds out the less well adapted designs.  Though there’s not a set direction in evolution, not all directions are allowed.  The bodies that evolution constructs slowly over time, piece by piece, minor modification by minor modification, have to be able to withstand their environment.  They have to hold up under planetary conditions.  For example, they have to be able to withstand the temperatures, hold up under the pull of gravity, and not come undone by the blowing winds or the swirling currents.

The vast majority of designs evolution cranks out are no good.  The thing is, those garbage designs were eaten by predators, died early in their youth, suffocated, baked under the sun, starved, were ripped apart in the waves, died of sickness, tripped and smashed their heads on the rocks, and so forth.  They didn’t reproduce and so their random mutation goes away while the better designs live on and reproduce further.  The tree of life started a little bud, but it was cut off there.  It never developed into a full branch. Nature constantly weeds out the duds and only “designs” adapted to the environment survive.  That’s why everything appears so well constructed for its environment.

So although people are tempted to say, “How could all this have just happened by chance?”, in reality it didn’t just happen.  You’re seeing the end result of a long process and what’s around you are the winning designs.  But just because they’re winning designs does not mean they’re perfect.  There’s flaws in everything when you examine it closely.

Just look at the human body.  It’s a mess.  In the interview below, Richard Dawkins is speaking with a physician who talks about how badly the human body is designed.  I enjoyed it when he showed our eye’s blind spot.  Our eyes have a very bad flaw.  The wires within the eye are placed in front of the light detection rods and cones, which is the worst possible design choice.  Creationists like to use the eye as the profound instrument which could never have come about by natural selection.  The thing is, when you realize the flaws in the eye’s design, and how eye designs differ from one species to the next, you can’t deny that our eyes are products of natural selection.  These are the sorts of things discussed in the interview.  (This is part 1 of 5.  If you want to watch the others, right click on it, say ‘Watch on Youtube’ and then watch the other parts which will be there in the sidebar):

A loving God would have never created a body which is so susceptible to disease, so prone to injury, and so fraught with pains.

Now to get to the crux of this post.

Predators serve a very specific purpose in the evolution of our nervous systems and consciousness – they weed out those who are less aware of their surroundings.  The predator and prey model led to a sort of “arms race” between species forcing evolution in a direction toward environmental awareness.  Without this system the likelihood of evolution producing life-forms, piece by piece and modification by modification, who are highly aware of their surroundings, is next to nothing.

Our awareness became fine tuned in our search for food and evasion of predators.  Those designs who couldn’t see well didn’t eat, and so they died off.  Those who couldn’t move quickly were caught by predators and so were less likely to survive and reproduce.  Those who weren’t very smart couldn’t catch prey and weren’t able to evade their craftier predators.  These sorts of selection pressures led to the construction of highly nimble body constructions and large brain capacities.  Without that system, we never would have developed our mobility or conscious awareness.

If life exists elsewhere in the universe (and I’m quite sure it does), and if they have a high degree of awareness of their environment, and a high degree of intelligence, they probably underwent their evolution under a predator and prey model on their planet.  Their life tree probably isn’t based around DNA per se, but will almost certainly use something similar. It’s very likely that many, if not most aliens are violent and dangerous.  If they’re really advanced, in order to survive and not blow themselves to bits during their technological development, they had to learn how to live peacefully.  As for others, they’re likely violent.

It’s my guess that advanced aliens would be peaceful but would have no interest in us at all.  They’d be so far advanced that we’d pretty much consider them gods.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they had such a deep understanding of physics that they could create realities around them at their whim.  Maybe they can control entire universes, or even modify the laws of physics.

Just look at the progress between us and a chimpanzee.  We’re only slightly different in DNA and just look at how much more intelligent we are.  That’s a very small difference in the eyes of evolution.  Imagine evolutionary progress over a period of a billion years.  Just look at how far science is taking us now.  Look at the exponential progress.  Even within the next 10,000 years, we probably won’t recognize humans.  Their bodies will be modified genetically and merged with the technology around them.

Violence and the struggle for survival may well be just a temporary phase in the development of intelligent life-forms by mindless natural processes.  Cosmologists now believe that the beginnings of our universe began with random quantum fluctuations.  The empty space all around us teems with random activity.  Maybe that whole plot from then to now is just to produce intelligent beings who then take control over their environment from then on, carving their universe how they like it.

I’m hopeful that planet Earth is slowly leaving the “age of violence”.  We’re on the verge of taking control of this planet and will, in time, change how everything works to our preference.  Biological evolution is being replaced by societal evolution and changes in states of mind.  Changes in our physiology, at this point, won’t do much to promote our survival.  As for growing a bigger brain, we won’t be able to do that.  Women won’t be able to deliver children with huge heads.  We’ll have to either grow our children in the lab, or modify them after they’re born, implanting technology into their brains. But don’t get too excited, we’re a long way from totally changing the order of things here on Earth.

But enough about all that.  To conclude this post, remember that everything has a purpose.  Nothing in this world is random, not even its cruelties.

Next their discussion moved into soil erosion, pollution, mass extinction of species, and other things which are of great concern to me.  It brings me comfort to know I’m not the only one saying these things.  I thought I’d provide the video as a warning to tell you that I’m not the only one.