Well Jim, obviously there's more to reality than simply what people imagine and create. Cliffs do fall down, bolides arrive, diseases go on the rampage and mobs do too.
But increasingly [and way back then too] people have decided their own future via ingenuity.
While wars are currently unfashionable and considered a bad thing, in fact they were an essential part of life because there were too many people due to breeding races which were the arms race of the day. Those who didn't breed were over-powered by those who did. The losing males were eliminated, the females taken over and the breeding race continued with expanded territory and empire.
So even wars are a matter of ingenuity and were a good thing in that those who had ingenuity did better than those who didn't. So those lacking ingenuity were eliminated from the gene pool.
The process is so rapid that all non-African males are the descendants of some bloke who left Africa only 20,000 years ago [or maybe it was 30,000 years, I forget].
Non-African females all derive from a woman who left Africa 90,000 years ago, so women were heavily involved in the winnowing process too. But males, being able to act as father to many children with a few or several females, could be eliminated at a greater pace, and were.
To restore proportionately to historical levels, we should eliminate two thirds of males. Personally, I'm happy to adopt a new paradigm for human development rather than breeding and genocide. Globalized brother-hood of man Christian concepts appeal to me more and make more sense in an era of contraceptive which enables people to choose to not have children and avoid the genocidal results.
China, interestingly, has taken the opposite approach and has created hordes of spare males by killing female foetuses. We might yet find that has geopolitical consequences and does not just mean there are lots of lonely males in China.
Hopefully they'll all happily work on developing mobile cyberspace and extra-somatic intelligence and leave the mating to others. I'm not sure that's a good bet. Spare young males have traditionally, around the world, found gainful employment in the front lines of territorial expansion via conquest.
Mqurice |
