Slashdot Mirror
Natural Selection Can Act on Human Culture
Hugh Pickens writes "Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that the process of natural selection can act on human cultures as well as on genes. The team studied reports of canoe designs from 11 Oceanic island cultures, evaluating 96 functional features that could contribute to the seaworthiness of the vessels. Statistical test results showed clearly that the functional canoe design elements changed more slowly over time, indicating that natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs. Authors of the study said their results speak directly to urgent social and environmental problems. 'People have learned how to avoid natural selection in the short term through unsustainable approaches such as inequity and excess consumption. But this is not going to work in the long term,' said Deborah S. Rogers, a research fellow at Stanford."
Isn't this just memetics in action?
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Isn't it what we call "memes"?
Disclaimer:Not reading TFA is one of the memes making me able to survive here!
This almost reads more like a political agenda than a scientific study. "We must return to nature or we are doomed," to grossly paraphrase.
Does that mean because Windows Vista is an inferior design to XP does that mean natural selection could play a role in "weeding out" this particular direction the Windows world is taking? Definitely an "unsustainable approach" as far as I'm concerned.
Or we just put separate M$ design teams on a deserted islands on the Pacific and whoever can build a canoe to get them back to society wins?
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
Natural selection, vs Intelligent boat design: The new debate
But seriously, this approach on first glance says to me that these scientists don't understand the word natural in the term Natural Selection, and probably don't understand scientific method very well either. I mean for fuck sake, human beings have time and time again built bigger and better designs over time in many areas. Anything that can be engineered. Boats, Bridges, Buildings. You name it. That's nothing new. Misapplying statistical analysis, based on fitness criteria with 20/20 hindsight sounds like junk science. to me.
(Note: I do not have time to read the article right now and I'm having to assume the summary is accurate...which in itself ain't very scientific. Perhaps I'll take a look at the actual article tomorrow).
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
So if evolutionary processes can be observed in a system where design is clearly involved (e.g. making canoes), where does that leave arguments that the observation of evolution must imply a lack of a designer?
Well duh!
This reminds me of the study that determined:
Aside from bowing to the creative gods of proposal write ups that got paid to watch women walk by I wondered if research money could have been spent more wisely. This appears to be another example.
Maybe its just my godlike point of view :-), but I thought Darwinism ( a.k.a. selection of the fittest) applied to everything. If you have some system, biologic, economic, social, whatever, that is better adapted to the environment then it has an advantage and will tend tobe more successful than a competitor that doesn't. Where the discussion comes in is what is "an advantage" and "what is success". Darwinism tends to define "success" as "continues to have descendants", that doesn't even mean same species. Short term gain versus long term pain means that in the short term the thing "succeeds" but in the long term it doesn't. Its an on going process that will never end can not be stopped.
The idea that mankind is the "winner" on planet earth should be qualified with "at the moment". Dinosaurs were "the winners" longer than we have been and they eventually failed. seems kind of obvious that the jury is still out on us.
It basically says "human aren't retarded" and then tries to say "so this is why we should consume less."
If somebody has gotten anything else out of this article, please let me know.
Seem like it was written at 4 in the morning by someone on a caffeine binge who got their papers mixed up and was like "Fuck it. Nobody reads this shit anyway."
Mever nind the typos.
So they start off looking at canoes and then make the seemingly unconnected statement that "unsustainable approaches ... won't work in the long term" and are therefore (wait for it, this is good) unsustainable!
I don't know anything about canoe design, nor about sociology - if that's what this is, but from the quality of their conclusions I can;t see any worth to this study, except possibly that they all got a nice holiday in the pacific islands all paid for from a grant.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Nonsense. People haven't "learned to avoid natural selection", they've been subject to it. In the short term natural selection has favoured these "unsustainable approaches" which have helped in providing decent life expectancy and thus breeding opportunities for billions of people, in the long term natural selection may not favour this approach (by definition, it won't if they are in fact unsustainable). That's natural selection at work. There is no avoiding it.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Since culture is heritable and mutable, and affects survival and reproductive prospects at the levels of individuals as well as populations, it would be surprising if it weren't a target of natural selection.
It's scientific from that point of view, yes, but it still falls short of other criteria for defining what's scientific or not.
In the first paragraph they make the somewhat tautologic affirmation that "Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time that cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate than other cultural attributes". Oh, sure, people are more careful in adopting new ideas when survival is at stake, right?
No, not always. For instance, why was the concept of socialism so widely adopted in the economic sciences? The twentieth century provided us several examples of massive death rates in countries with socialized economies. So, there you have at least one counter argument to the thesis in the article.
Unless the scientists can show a clearly defined trend everywhere, all they have shown us is an example, not scientific proof.
is religion not a collection of survival lessons, wrapped in mnemonic stories to preserve the knowledge across generations? doesn't the bible have helpful hints like "get your drinking water _upstream_ from the latrine"? in a pre-industrial pre-scientific world the only reliable way to avoid STDs is monogamy.
and what better way to ensure compliance than to tap into the natural human spirituality circuits, invoking the authority of the deit[y|ies] spinning tales of eternal damnation for transgressors...hey, whatever works;-}
and handling waste & dead animals isn't really healthy, but a dirty job's gotta get done, so a society could relegate it to a wretched underclass isolated from the larger society...oh, let's just call 'em 'untouchables'...hey, can't argue w/ success;-}
Technology has been a boon to nature selection. The less survival worthy seem to find testing the limits of technology irresistable. Their valiant attempts to test those limits is helping to insure the security of the gene pool. If we really want to improve the gene pool we need to go wide with a TV show, "American Darwin". The contestants compete to come up with the most extreme way to commit suicide on national TV. No takers? Obviously you haven't seen Jackass.
So the problem is evolution in human cultures and the solution is intelligent design?
Isn't intelligent design in a culture more accurately referred too as authoritarianism? I'm sure somewhere Joe Stalin is smiling.
Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Okay, canoes have gotten better over time, and we can fit a mathematical model to it. How is that knowledge at all novel or useful? Is there really any doubt that technology improves over time in 2008? Is it really at all surprising that a mathematical model designed to fit things which improve over time can be fit to the data about technology improving? Next thing, people will be talking about how the historical rates of improvements in jet engine speed and cpu speed mean that we'll soon be transcending humanity....
So if I get this right... the outcome of their research is that over time, pacific islanders tried to make better and better boats?
By not changing features that worked well and changing features that failed?
Doesn't natural selection have to be done by nature for it to be natural?
Isn't this just selection?
For what it's worth, I suspect that the original paper had to do with the applicability of the mathematical models for predicting the rate of change, or something. To imply that divergence was shaped by a winnowing process during migration from island to island, they would have demonstrate that the alterations under consideration actually had improved seaworthiness. Otherwise, the divergence is just random drift, and it's just a demonstration that the pacific islanders knew what the critical elements of outrigger design were, and didn't mess with them too much. Saying that "natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs" is just saying "shucks, we didn't disprove our hypothesis."
[previously on the 'firehose' thingy by accident, whatever that is]It's amazing how smart people can be so daft. Of course the same forces apply in many fields. In biology it's called "natural selection", in economics it's called "the market", in engineering it's the trend towards a design monoculture (whether it's the internal combustion engine or Windows). Hell, even Rush Limbaugh knows about economic Darwinism.
The study itself is an interesting confirmation that market forces would lead to the same results over a long enough time period even when the available communication channels are biologically slow. But the conclusion that this is some kind of new revelation indicates to me that the communication channels between Stanford and the real world may also be biologically slow.
I am beginning to grow less and less fond of the application of terms from evolutionary biology to the study of culture.
In 99% of instances, cultural schemas do not need to be 'fit' in a darwinian sense to spread through diffusion or other processes - they can be spread due to power imbalance or just because whatever new widgets one makes once they follow the ways of whatever look cool.
I suppose that "cultural evolution" is somewhat shorter than "culture change over time", but that does not mean that when using the former term we should try and treat it like biological evolution - it just doesn't follow. Assuming that getting to the island they can't see over the horizon but know are there is an urgent crisis, then yes, they will probably have a somewhat linear progression of canoe design, keeping the innovations that worked around longer. To assume otherwise is to assume the early Polynesians were idiots. Why this becomes a problem is it is difficult if not impossible to determine what the urgent issues are for past cultures, and you'll need a few more examples to make a stronger case.
Even then, you may have an interesting theory about efficiency of design when under long-term pressure, but how the heck do you apply it to more ephemeral cultural components like religion or etiquette?
semantics are everything!
but they are saying they "discovered" something. (incorrect usage of the term "ironic" btw)
what did they discover? really. that humans learn from their mistakes? that people share ideas?
Mever nind the typos.
In 99% of instances, cultural schemas do not need to be 'fit' in a darwinian sense to spread through diffusion or other processes - they can be spread due to power imbalance or just because whatever new widgets one makes once they follow the ways of whatever look cool.
That's all "fit" in the Darwinian sense means: the idea that Darwinian "fitness" means anything but "this is what propogates". A peacock's tail is all about looking cool. Looking cool happened to be evolutionarily selected for in peacocks.
Turn it around, you can just as easily study biology in economic terms and talk about the effect of market forces on genes. They're the same forces.
Therefore upon scrutiny of the worldwide automobile industry,we are in a state of De-evolution.
"Oh daddy,we're all devo"--Mark Mothersbaugh
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Working on my thesis on evolutionary models. I have lots of references related to evolution of cultures.
I love it when scientists write a report and then say "we were here first!", when all they really did was some secretarial scut work to document what everyone already knew anyway.
at Burning Man.
Mever nind the typos.
You can change your behavior, you can't change your genetic makeup. That's why culture, language and the technology that goes along with it gives humans such an advantage.
One reason this sort of thing makes people uncomfortable is that it's hard do this sort of work without reminding people of folks like Herbert Spencer and his (pre-Darwin) attempt to explain how complex systems evolved. TSpencer thought there was a notion of universal progress and a scientific basis for morality, and thought humanitarians merely interfered with the struggle between (or within) societies.
It is precisely the concept of memetics as originally proposed by Richard Dawkins in his seminal work, "The Selfish Gene". Nothing is new here.
If this is true, what manner of natural selection explains Hannah Montana in US "culture"? 5 million little girls can't be wrong. If you want to argue Disney is manufacturing un-natural selection on American children, well.... OK.
This is not news. Read "The Selfish Gene", especially the 30th anniversary edition. Then you will realise that OF COURSE Natural Selection (the true meaning of which is much different than what your Grade 5 teacher told you) can act on Human Culture, just like it acts on anything else involving life and living organisms.
I am surprised that thiw has not been brought up by any of the previous posters, or at least none that I noticed.
natural selections, market forces, memetics is that world doesn't tolerate failure.
A success of a scheme increases it popularity. The marginal but superior technology or meme will dominate long-term while less-adapted or relevant things will fade into obscurity.
It's not NATURAL selection -- that denotes outside forces doing the culling. It's human choice driving design changes.
The only natural selection that may be at work here is the drowning of crews that're too stupid to recognize their boat is full of holes.
Gosh. Who would imagine that a part of science would be to confirm existing theories?
Well, it is. No one else had done such a study up to this point. Just because the revelation is "it's exactly what we expected" doesn't mean it wasn't a revelation. Up until the study was actually done, anyone who claimed to "know" what the result would be would invariably be speculating. Now, one could argue about the degree of uncertainty. But, every time another one of these studies are done instead of merely assuming the answer is know, the better capable of reducing the future uncertainty when speculation is invariably done.
But, yea, let's insult the nice scientists because they do studies to confirm things instead of boiling everything down to a system of unchanging beliefs. How's that working out for you?
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
F.A. Hayek already figured all of this out over 30 years ago.
Have these scientists never heard of the Scottish Enlightenment theories of social evolution? Of Adam Ferguson, for instance? Or the more recent F.A. Hayek? Social evolution is old news. Theories of social evolution preceded theories of biological evolution.
> "Scientists at Stanford University have shown for the first time...
But only if you ignore the fields of evolutionary anthropology, sociocultural evolution and human sociobiology.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Since when did we have culture around here?
The only human culture will be when nanites turn us into GreyGoo Yoplait.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
So designes which are more optimal change slower than those which are less optimal. Sounds like trial and error to me.
My second thought was:
We know that conservative approaches to design (small incrimental changes) tend to do a better job of creating functional items than innovative approaches because designs tend to be based on what works and subject to successive approximation rather than new ideas. That is true of software engineering, canoe building, swordsmithing etc.
In short, it dosn't sound well thought out. Can one see it as analogous to natural selection? Sure, but in this case it is artificial selection....
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Postulating a designer poses fundamental problems for scientific epistomology without solving any problems.
This means that the existance of a designer or lack thereof doesn't really have to do with the question of evolution. There may be a designer or not, but one cannot scientifically postulate one way or the other.
ID states that an intelligent designer *is necessary* to explain certain things.
Mainstream evolutionary theory states that an intelligent designer *is not necessary* to explain things. It does not postulate the lack of existance of such a designer though.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
There isn't an article yet. It's due out on Feb 19 - "in the online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" - from TFA.
The "article" is really a summary itself - in fact, it's more like a press release of the paper to come. Jared Diamond's in the "article" - a pretty heroic character for those that think - saying a good thing about the paper, so there's a clue.
In fact - a little googling revealed that TFA in question is nothing more than a sophomoric rewording of a Stanford "news release" - http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/2008/pr-ehrlich-021308.html
Wake me on the 19th when there's something to see.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Either TFA author thinks that canoes reproduce and have evolved independent of human forces, or he thinks Pacific Islanders are sub-human and not capable of thinking.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Hey, Karl Marx told us that cultures evolve over 100 years ago. Not only that but he told us that communism was the inevitable end state of that evolution. The whole soviet system was based on this presumption. Unfortunately the social engineering practiced by communists prevented the natural selection mechanism of free markets from working and their culture "evolved" into a cancer and died under its own weight. In a similar fashion the muddle-headed eco-engineering of lame-brained envirokooks will strangle the natural process of selection of successful technologies by free markets and result in paralyzed dead-end solutions which can not adapt to changing realities. The real conclusion is that the short sided perversion of evolution by well-meaning do-gooders is inevitably doomed to failure and extinction.
As basic organisms evolved, for obvious reasons they developed sensory apparatus, to detect heat and cold and each other. It was a matter of time before such an apparatus detected itself, and consciousness was born. But consciousness is not isolated to each individual. We are programmed to communicate with each other, and that communication is fundamentally about how to deal with life, and pass on our collective genetics. A long time ago, that would have been along the lines of understanding useful plants, making tools, and working together. The heritage of consciousness evolved dependent upon, and parallel to our pure genetic heritage.
The nature of self-awareness means that we can "interfere" with ourselves to make the situation better. For example, we can cultivate useful skills, and contemplate our place in the world and how the world could be improved. It is no accident that consciousness should attempt to address these larger questions, as it has to do with passing along a lineage of thoughts and ideas, and ultimately our genetics - the primeval force that dives all of life.
Our self-awareness has identified a problem, one of many that causes suffering and threatens our heritage. The problem comes from a conflict between a basic instinct to consume and possess, and otherwise engage in hedonism, and our intellectual understanding of the long term implications of that. Consciousness has, and always had, the ability to interfere with natural selection, although ultimately it is beholden to it.
For those calling for sustainable development, it is a matter of ethics. We can use our understanding to best sustain our consciousness and genetic heritage, or we can give into momentary pleasures that are really just chemicals being released in our brains. The call for sustainable development is about manipulating ourselves and the environment to best suit our long term viability - obeying the law of natural selection.
When, in the article, it says the people have "learned to avoid natural selection", it means that we are using our understanding of nature in an attempt to subvert its basic law. The bubble of ignorance we create is so that we can continue the doomed attempt to permanently satiate ourselves.
The longer we attempt to live ignorance, that harder and more dramatic the wake-up call will be. The point is we need to re-learn our place in the world, and start acting accordingly. Otherwise we stand to lose a lot, and the suffering of future generations will be immense.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Obviously, the morons behind this study are unaware that the more aptly-named field of cultural ecology is entirely based on this premise. To call it "natural selection" is to fundamentally misconstrue Darwin's thesis that biological evolution is based upon chance beneficial mutations rather than any kind of intelligent agency; indeed, his choice of the term itself is meant to distinguish it from guided selection (as in animal and plant breeding). Even ultra-materialists like cultural ecologists realize the role that the informed decision making accomplished by people means that cultural adaptation is fundamentally different from natural selection.
And I can sum it up in five words.
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Here's my feedback to editor@sciencedaily.com
I agree with this statement. What I'm less certain of is whether those cultures will be microbial or human.
If the measure of intelligence is the ability to flexibly overcome life's obstacles, then in the climatic intelligence test that's coming up, pitting us against other organisms, we may be in for a rude awakening ... er, ... a rude being-put-to-sleep.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
We really need some tighter definitional usage of "evolution" than, in effect, "anything getting better by any standard by means over any amount of time".
Less popular canoe -> customer feedback -> design -> more popular canoe, simply isn't "natural selection" in any way related to the term's Darwinian usage other than the vaguely metaphorical. What's wrong with simply "things tend to be improved"? That usage at least acknowledges the element of teleology, which, strictly speaking is absent from "natural selection". It's not only vague usage, it's also vaguely self-contradictory, in that sense. Ech.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
read him, got tired of the schtick;-) but, hey, it worked 4 el-ron & criuse-missile...and hey, mebbe they're right about psyc. drugs, or @ least unsuperviised cold-turkey:-( NIU http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/us/15cnd-shoot.html?ex=1218690000&en=ef3bfd3f78ba43e3&ei=5087&excamp=GGGNuniversityshooting&WT.srch=1&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_id=GN-S-E-GG-NA-S-university_shooting
"Statistical test results showed clearly that the functional canoe design elements changed more slowly over time, indicating that natural selection could be weeding out inferior new designs." Gee, sounds like what's happening to poor Vista. booyah!
Darwin said natural selection/survival of the fittest should not be applied to humans and their society. For one thing there no reason to believe that the best of us will survive. The brightest are often the first killed off by fascist regimes I think with mankind the most aggressive dolts are the most likely to survive. We'd actually be going backward evolutionarily speaking.
I have seen several Stanfordites spout this Darwinian logic applied to humankind. Darwin rejected it utterly. And contrary to the Stanford researcher I do hope to think that because of our minds and souls we will survive ultimately due to advances in clean energy; a realization that we cannot let our governments be run by criminals and oil kingpins;and massive advances in nutritional and medical research.
I always have liked talking to Stanford professors but some of their work product is rather surprisingly less than ideal.
Oh, it'll work out very well in the long term, that is, assuming the entire race isn't annihilated. The most sustainable cultures on Earth will survive. I think the quoted researcher meant to say medium term.
No, they won't. The cultures with the strongest militaries and the willingness to use them will kill off those that don't, and take their stuff.
This is my sig.
What the fuck has this got to do with evolution? Evolution reveals to us that humans and monkeys and alligators and gadflies and mushrooms are all related, and that they speciated as a result of accidental mutations selected by reproduction and millions of years. This paper reveals to us that... people can construct canoes by trial and error. Just like they build and refine any other tool ever produced.
Yo mama so fake, she failed the Turing Test.
I was teaching this about 40 years ago, in my Human Evolution, Anthropology, and Cultural Ecology courses at UC Santa Cruz, among other places. If this the latest at Stanford, I'd recommend some other school! Really.
Alcaide's Cafe,
"Natural" is a word of many meanings, but in the context of the scientific theory of evolution, it implies merely the absence of supernatural influence.
Your attempt to draw a distinction between human intelligence and "natural" reflects a dualistic mode of thinking that is itself unscientific and outdated. From the view of science, human intelligence and culture are as natural as any pack of wolves culling a herd.
Furthermore, the concept of fitness can only be applied in retrospect whether you're talking about genes or ideas, because the fitness can only be measured by subsequent success. A human designing a canoe has no more ability to foretell future events than a strand of DNA expressing a protein. Even now we can design a boat for today, but can we really predict the state of boat design in 100 years? Did the inventor of the transistor predict the Core 2 Duo chip? It seems obvious to me that human ideas undergo a speciation and winnowing process that is similar to genetic evolution. The unpredictability of markets demonstrates that we cannot foretell our paths.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I would suggest there's no such thing as "natural selection".
Except as a term to describe change over time, perhaps, much like there isn't necessarily (at least in my mind) such a thing as "time", except as a term to describe measurable change. If you can imagine that we perceive time due to change, not change due to time, then imagine that natural selection is merely a loaded way of saying "systems compete".
It's a loaded term because it generally means "improvements over time". Given that all species can die quite unexpectedly from outside causes (e.g. dinosaurs vs meteors), what exactly does "improvement" mean, if not a completely relative judgement within a closed ecosystem?
Dinosaurs survived very well until Meteorus Impactus said hello. So within the Earth ecosystem, Dino ruled. Within a wider ecosystem, they fail. So where in that wider picture is "natural selection" exactly?
More pertinently, there's global climate change. If "natural selection" took us from humus to human, only to be wiped out by a change in the weather, then at the very least I'd say "natural selection" doesn't mean what we think it means.
Sexual selection is a culling that involves no forces external to the population. Yet it is an important factor in natural selection.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If we KNEW we wanted to get to a submarine or particular boat shape because it was more efficient or whatever, we would have gone straight there. We didn't KNOW that we wanted the keel shaped so, we just tried random changes over "log hollowed out" shape and when lots of people drowned when it capsised, we didn't make those boats any more. If we'd KNOWN the end point, we would have known that shape wouldn't work.
If God make all the animals, he's incompetent or at least not omniescent because if he was competent and omniescent he wouldn't have had to try out all the weird shit that failed to work, he'd have just made them all right.
This is not the "journal article". This is just the Stanford press release about it. The article is released tomorrow. But there are 200 comments here from people who have already decided what they think about it. I'd like to see the author's data. I didn't think such detailed canoe info was available. "canoes of oceania" lacks hull lines drawings for instance. Here's the stanford press release, which is the same as that slashdot post. http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/2008/pr-ehrlich-021308.html and here's the article: http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/pnas/07-11802.htm the article gets released tomorrow. Today I get this error: "You currently do not have access to this embargoed journal page." I assume only "peer reviewers" get access until then, so they don't get confused by multiple comments from people who haven't actually read it. If you have actually read the article or can give me access, please let me know, I've photographed, measured and drawn many pacific outrigger canoes.
Have you, by chance, read Asimov's The Last Question?
"Show me a natural system that is truly as inequitable as our human systems. Show me a species that over consumes and still survives. You may not like the truth, but that doesn't make it false. You can hide your head in the sand and ignore it, but that doesn't make it go away. You can insult people who think differently from you, but that doesn't make them wrong. And it also won't make intelligent people agree with you.
Capitalism isn't freedom, it is a path to slavery, as there are no negative feedback loops to halt the runaway concentration of capital into fewer and fewer hands. This will lead to a new type of feudalism, where a small percentage of people own all the means of production, and everyone else will have to do what they say, or starve. Freedom to choose what flavor of soda you drink is not real freedom.
Hope you enjoy your own intellectual-inbreeding. You are obviously so frightened of other points of view that you've put yourself into an echo chamber, where all you hear are confirmations of your own bias. Do you really think our current civilization is sustainable in the long term? What happens when we reach the limits of growth?"
I disagree: free market capitalism is the only way to go it produces the best advancements and the best quality of life over any other system. Communal government run capitalism has a great tendency towards fascism also. The problems is free market capitalism can twist itself into this feudalistic- fascistic system we see occurring even in the UK and USA at this very moment in time. Some of it even for good reasons others done just for the crooks running our governments.
In order for free market capitalism to survive and flourish it absolutely requires a free and even competitive press that is not owned by interests with conflicting motivations and it also requires a vibrant and free Democracy unhindered by a crooked voting system or by a press which is now owned by the defence industry and other contrary parties. Freedom and free market capitalism do require constant vigilance and they do require us to stop blindly following the leader and waving our "patriotic" flags. But they are worth the efforts. A free press with a free people is very powerful. It can turn us towards eliminating the poisoning our environment and create sustainable and renewable alternative energy sources. We can even imagine reclaiming deserts and other wonderful things. We can actually go down a path where we end up with a super clean and beautiful world as a product of what we do. But we cannot ever hope to get there if we sit back and allow the press to be run by a few people and the government to be run by big oil and defence industry monsters. Stop letting ourselves get brainwashed by the mindlessness of political thinking whether it be from the left or right who cares. We can wake up and do research and become active participants in our future.
We must also be very strong against market take-overs or any actions that inhibit or reduce competition in the market place. the only way to achieve all of this is to start by making it a felony to give money to political entities. All money must be purged from politics it poisons the Democracy.
So they've proved what, exactly? That even stone-age, tool-using cultures understand the concept of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"? This paper strikes me as a stunning no-brainer, not the revolutionary research it's being hyped as.
"We've established that people don't randomly change useful tools to useless tools, but they do change the decorations."
That's a real exciting discovery there...
---dragoness
Last post!!!!!