On The Origin of Unnatural Selection

"We Ain't Got Nuthin' Yet"

I. Introduction

One of our cultural trances (Choose Your Trances Carefully) is propaganda (Choose Your Propaganda Carefully).

Before culture, before human civilization, propaganda existed without the bells and whistles of the billion dollar industry it is today (The Deceit Business, On the Origin of Propaganda, 2).

Both religion and business (and even science) have promulgated propaganda massively and still continue to do so today.

One thing common in all three of those realms is war, in the sense that all of them at the operational level support war, and they war among themselves as they support official wardom (e.g. religion X vs. religion Y, business X vs. business Y, and scientist X vs. scinetist Y).

And, since our "knowledge" is in general handed to us by members of those professions, the underlying dynamic for our cognitive existence is belief and/or faith (The Pillars of Knowledge: Faith and Trust?).

II. Where Are We Coming From?

The story we are told is that we are the most evolved creatures on Earth, because "natural selection" brought us here from there.

The knowledge producer, Darwin, intimated about a "natural hike" from already living things into better living things.

This was happening, Darwin opined, because some force, power, energy, or whatever ("nature"), was making natural selections for us and everyone else, way before we personally were born.

He expected that it did not stop with us personally, did not stop with just making species, but went on to continually perfect existing species as "it" made new ones.

One way that was done, in the human species, was by getting rid of defective "lower" races.

Sarcastically I ask, was that type evolution done just to make us realize how much higher our race is over theirs?

It was not a foggy concept to Darwin:

"Lastly, I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilisation than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risks nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago, of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races [Chuck was a tad-bit racist eh?] will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world." - Charles Darwin (1881)

(The Evolution of Anthropogenic Extinction by Catastrophe, quoting Human evolution: Darwinism, by Jan Anthony Sapp, emphasis added). Evidently, "there are many here among us," still, who are the eyes of Darwinian evolution.

I say that because "natural selection" energies seem to be tapping old Sir Survival of The Fittest on the shoulder and pointing out that there are some "natural selection" events still needing to be done (Symbolic Racism: A Look At The Science - 3).

Back to the history ...

Sir Darwin heavily persecuted even his peer scientist Lamarck, according to two well known scientists (Ward and Kirschvink).

They authored a book that Dredd Blog recently took a look at:

Charles Darwin's theories, first published more than 150 years ago, still set the paradigm of how we understand the evolution of life-but scientific advances of recent decades have radically altered that understanding. In fact the currently accepted history of life on Earth is flawed and out of date. Now two pioneering scientists, one already an award-winning popular author, deliver an eye-opening narrative that synthesizes a generation's worth of insights from new research.

Writing with zest, humor, and clarity, Ward and Kirschvink show that many of our long-held beliefs about the history of life are wrong.

(Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 42). There is a video at the bottom of that quoted post where, among many other interesting things, the persecution of Lamarck by Darwin et. al. is discussed.

III. Natural Selection vs. Unnatural Selection

If we look around human civilization, to me two statements stand out in the context of today's post.

First, the evolutionary scientist Ernst Mayr was convinced that human intelligence was, and is, a lethal mutation (What Kind of Intelligence Is A Lethal Mutation?).

Second, another person, historian Arnold Toynbee, pointed out that a high percentage of civilizations commit suicide (Civilization Is Now On Suicide Watch).

Suicide seems like a poor selection for perpetuating one's survival, especially if one is the fittest civilization.

So, I feel that we slander nature when we improperly identify that type of unnatural selection with a wrong description: "natural selection."

I am reminded of the Vietnam warmonger ideology "destroy in order to save."

I think we should refine our nomenclature and begin to use the term "unnatural selection" to identify the points along the way when civilizations commit suicide, a.k.a. ecocide (Good Nomenclature: A Matter of Life and Death).

Thus, I would call that part of human evolution, which is brought about by lethal mutation, a process of unnatural selection.

We should sharply contrast unnatural selection, because is anathema to natural selection, which for an advanced civilization is the selection of staying alive beautifully.

Natural selection would pass The Test, while unnatural selection will not (The Tenets of Ecocosmology).

IV. Has It Has All Come To This?

We Ain't Got Nothin' Yet
(by The Blues Magoos)

One day you're up and the next day you're down
You can't face the world with your head to the ground
The grass is always greener on the other side, they say
So don't worry, boys, life will be sweet some day
Oh, oh, oh, oh
Oh, oh, oh, oh
We made enough mistakes
But you know we got what it takes

Oh, we ain't got nothin' yet
No, we ain't got nothin' yet

Nothin' can hold us and nothin' can keep us down
And someday our names will be spread all over town
We can get in while the getting is good
So make it on your own, yeah, you know that you could
Oh, oh, oh, oh
Oh, oh, oh, oh
We got to make the break
'Cause we got too much at stake

We made enough mistakes
But you know we got what it takes

V. Natural Genetics

Sir. Darwin knew nothing of genes, RNA, or DNA, because they were discovered long after him (e.g. The Double Helix).

But, we came to find out that neither did the scientists who glorified human DNA:

Some would say that genomics has been able to distil some humility into humankind. The finalised version of the human genome deprived us of the illusion that we are one of the most complex creatures on Earth — an illusion that was at the basis of some guesses that Homo sapiens was expected to have at least 100,000 genes. When we look at a table of genomes by species, and specifically at the number of genes that have been counted or estimated for each species, we notice that humans are surpassed by several plants and invertebrates.
...
... some 90 percent of the protein-encoding cells in our body are microbes ... 99 percent of the functional genes in the body are microbial ... exchanging messages with genes inside human cells ... microbes cohabitating our body outnumber human cells by a factor of 10, making us actually “superorganisms” that use our own genetic repertoire as well as those of our microbial symbionts ... We just happen to look human because our human cells are much larger than bacterial cells ... no matter how you look at it, it’s high time we acknowledge that part of being human is being microbial ...

(The Human Microbiome Congress). Those who discovered the first "human" DNA bloviated a bit too much while we were not yet aware of our microbiome (The Human Microbiome Congress).

The geneticists once actually thought all "that other stuff" was literally junk:

More problematic is the reality that the human genome is still a vast catalogue of the unknown and scarcely known. The Human Genome Project’s most startling finding was that human genes, as currently defined, make up less than 2 percent of all the DNA on the genome, and that the total number of genes is relatively small. Scientists had predicted there might be 80,000 to 140,000 human genes, but the current tally is fewer than 25,000 — as one scientific paper put it, somewhere between that of a chicken and a grape. The remaining 98 percent of our DNA, once dismissed as “junk DNA,” is now taken more seriously. Researchers have focused on introns, in the gaps between the coding segments of genes, which may play a crucial role in regulating gene expression, by switching them on and off in response to environmental stimuli.
...
If not for a virus, none of us would ever be born.

In 2000, a team of Boston scientists discovered a peculiar gene in the human genome. It encoded a protein made only by cells in the placenta. They called it syncytin.
...
What made syncytin peculiar was that it was not a human gene. It bore all the hallmarks of a gene from a virus.

Viruses have insinuated themselves into the genome of our ancestors for hundreds of millions of years.
...
It turned out that syncytin was not unique to humans. Chimpanzees had the same virus gene at the same spot in their genome. So did gorillas. So did monkeys. What’s more, the gene was strikingly similar from one species to the next.

(One Man's Junk Gene Is Another Man's Treasure Gene?). That really pisses off those who spent countless hours in college studying how human genes determine everything.

Some of them (who are reactionary) choose denial, refusing to believe current scientific discoveries which are more sound than previous erroneous ones.

That denial is typical (Global Warming / Climate Change Will Generate Dangerous Religion).

VI. Genieology Is The Opiate of Unnatural Selection

Thus, unnatural selection is the proverbial square peg in the round hole of natural selection within a certain pop-hybrid science-religion (On The Origin of Genieology).

I am sure you remember one of the incarnations of that heavily evangelized and maladjusted cognition, a.k.a. the selfish gene ideology (The Uncertain Gene, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10).

VII. Conclusion

The evolution of something that destroys anything and everything it can is not done by natural selection, it is done by unnatural selection.

There is a day and night difference (You Are Here).

It is well past the time we figured that out,

So that we can stop being predators on life itself, rather than living within life (The Psychology of the Notion of Collective Guilt).

Life itself is not short, it is many billions of years old, so dig it Oil-Qaeda (Oil-Qaeda: The Indictment).

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The lyrics are in Section IV above.

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