Update on my life.

There is something different about human society and I can't quite figure it out other than the most obvious explanation, which is, there are simply more of us. Since there are more of us, that presents more opportunities for people to split up into groups that have unusual ideas.

Because of how upset I am with humanity, I spend much of my time alone. I focus on science fiction books, video game music and playing my Nintendo Switch. I don't see how I can help human society, so I've decided to ignore humanity and focus on what I enjoy. I will stop for a moment and mention four examples that make me realize humans can't be helped.

1. Flat Earthers - These are people that genuinely believe the Earth is flat. They have the right to propagate their ideas. Any rational society would now allow their ideas to flourish.

2. Creationists - These are people that believe the Earth is around 6,000 years old. Like the Flat Earthers, they have the right to propagate their ideas and even engage in debates. Any rational society would not allow their ideas to flourish.

3. Third Gender - There are people that believe there are more than two genders and that people should have the right to choose their "pronouns". Like the Flat Earthers and the Creationists, they have the right to propagate their ideas, which are supported by colleges and universities. Any rational society would not allow their ideas to flourish.

4. Racist Organizations - There are people that have beliefs that I can't quite define or understand, and the racist, or "hate" groups, fall into that category. Science has shown that race does not exist and there is just one species of human (we most likely killed the others). Like the Flat Earthers, the Creationists and the people that believe in more than two genders, racists have the right to propagate their ideas. Any rational society would not allow their ideas to flourish.

Take note the ordering of my examples. Each example contains a number of people that exceeds the previous example. The first three examples are purely wackos, highly uneducated, and choose to ignore science. The fourth example is the only one that is really a problem, as it contains the largest number of people.

Thoughts on Race

Although there is only one species of human, it is divided up into phenotypes that are genotypically almost identical. In other words, there are large groups of humans that are physically different in appearance from other humans, yet are still able to interbreed with all of the other groups. We call these groups races. The most notable characteristic of the races is the pigmentation of the skin. There are other differentiable characteristics, such as epicanthic folds, rhinology, musculature, speech, lip morphology, hirsuteness, genes, culture, etc.

My personal opinion of the word “race” is that it can be used to divide our species into three main groups. Those groups are: Asian, African, and European.

There is archaeological evidence from Thailand that Asians are the oldest primates (of which humans are descended). That doesn’t mean that Asians are the oldest humans, however. One thing is certain about Asians - they are the first Americans. They crossed Beringia, which was a landmass between the political land divisions now known as “Russia” and “Alaska”. Anyone that thinks Christopher Columbus discovered America is living in a dream world, perpetrated by the inane educational system in the United States. Columbus “discovered” outlying islands more than 10,000 years after the Asians had conquered North and South America.

There is archaeological evidence from Africa that humans originated in Africa, which indicates that Africans are the oldest humans. However, archaeological evidence is limited to what we can find, not what exists. What if older human remains are found on the moon? That’s improbable, but do you know what is under the regolith? I’m not forming an opinion with respect to where humans originated. Significant evidence has been found in both Africa and Asia, so I think it’s smarter to wait for more homo remains to be discovered.

Europeans are the result of northern migration. They tend to have lighter skin, typically called “white”, due to the need to absorb more sunlight. If our planet were not tilted with respect to the ecliptic, then we would not have seasons, and sunlight would be more intense in the northern regions. People migrating north would not have needed lighter skin, so that particular adaptation would not have occurred, or occurred with less noticeability.

What concerns me is why can I find patterns amongst the races? Why can I say one race excels at one thing, while another falters? Why does changing the phenotype change other things? I have always wondered why people of European origin comprise the bulk of science fiction writers. I can only name one African science fiction writer - Octavia Butler. I cannot name even one Asian science fiction writer. Why is it that “white” people write so much science fiction? Why are there not scores of African people or Cambodian people that are professional science fiction writers? Why have most of the scientific breakthroughs been made by people of European descent? Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Enrico Fermi, Edwin Hubble, Paul Dirac, etc. - all made profound discoveries and are all of European descent. I can certainly name some Asian people that have made breakthroughs, such as Hideki Yukawa, Chien-Shiung Wu, and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, but I can name many more Europeans. The reason why certain groups of people make more scientific discoveries is probably more related to opportunity and higher standards of living. If the people of Africa had been suddenly teleported into universities in the 1700s and given free tuition, then I would suspect that Africans would have made more scientific breakthroughs than Europeans.

Another interesting pattern I can find is in movies. Unlike science fiction and science, this one is not objective, but completely subjective. I have found that Asian people, particularly, South Koreans, make the best movies. I have read that this is due to low funding. The movie producers can only choose the best scripts, since they don’t have unlimited funds, like Hollywood. American movie producers can make movies out of scripts written by 12 year old retarded people and make enough money to retire for 8,000 years. I have to admit that I am guilty of funding Hollywood, since I watch their movies, hoping, wishing - they will make something good. Occasionally they do make something good, but nothing made by them affects me on such an emotional level as South Korean movies. Again, I must stress that this is not objective. Some people may find Korean movies are not to their liking, and greatly prefer mindless Hollywood mayhem.

What am I? Politically, I am called an American. But the people from whom I descended originated in Europe. Genetically, I am a European. I am certainly related to real Americans (people from Asia), but I have more in common with people from Europe. I don’t look anything like an Indian.

I think that all races are equally intelligent - and equally insane. Just look at the Europeans in the political division of land known as Germany. It produced one of the greatest minds (Albert Einstein) and one of the sickest (Adolf Hitler). I don’t think it’s wrong to label people by their skin color, anymore than I think it’s wrong to label colors. Colors have names, right? Skin has color, and thus should be called by its name. It’s a simple means of identification, but can easily be abused by people with sinister desires.

Afterword

I wrote the essay above on November 24^th, 2011. I forgot I wrote it and discovered it on my hard drive on November 27^th, 2014. It is an interesting read and I’ve since become more aware of the ethnic diversity of science fiction writers; Asia and Africa are simply overflowing with people that professionally write science fiction, which surprised me. I can’t picture a third world nation with people scrambling to secure food and water having time to produce fiction, but it does happen. And this makes some sense. Consider the state of the world when the mythological book, an early form of science fiction that eventually turned into The Bible, was written. The living conditions even in the best cities were possibly a marginal improvement over the squalor that squatters squirm in. The Bible, in its current state of translation, though, is barely legible. It’s more difficult to read than the clumsily connected hodgepodge of paragraphs known as “World War Z”. In defense of The Bible, it was not written in English and was written before grammar was codified, which was the unfortunate status quo even in Shakespeare’s day. I don’t know how The Bible could be written in English without losing the meaning intended by the authors in their native languages. In contrast, contemporary authors can write material as shoddily connected as that in The Bible, which is evident in “World War Z”.

A couple of terms in regular use that bother me are “African-American” and “Asian-American”. An African is someone that either lives in Africa or someone that is descended from people that evolved in Africa. An American is someone that lives in the political division of land called America. The term African-American is redundant and reeks of wrongness. The problem stems from the dual meaning of “African”, which can be political or genetic. If someone is black, then they are genetically African but can politically belong to any nation. The word “Asian” can also be political or genetic. A Chinese person is genetically Asian but can live in America; this is no reason to use the term “Asian-American”. If a Chinese person lives in America, then they are American. Likewise, it makes no sense to call a white person living in America a “European-American”. People with ersatz erudition that like to specify “such and such”-American, ought to know that this game can be taken much further. One could, for instance, call oneself a Pisces-American, since fish were the first chordates and humans also have backbones (I’m an amateur etiologist).

The ultimate bottom line in terms of race is that either all humans are African or all humans are Asian. Humans originated somewhere and then migrated from that point of origin and adapted to new environments by changing physiologically, which is primarily manifest in skin pigmentation, epicanthic folds and hirsuteness. Europeans are clearly not the first humans, since white skin is a result of migration and reduced sunlight, so anyone with white skin is ultimately Asian or African. My previous division of humans into African, Asian and European is thus incorrect, since Europeans can be shown to have evolved from the first two. It was also incorrect of me to state that the people I descended from originated in Europe, since Europeans did not originate in Europe; they traveled there from Asia or Africa and evolved. We only have truly hard evidence showing that Africans did indeed originate in Africa and sketchy evidence indicating that Asians originated in Asia. It is most likely that Asians are descended from Africans.

I can’t stop writing on the subject of race without referring to a recent event, in which a police officer shot and killed a human being. I am greatly, powerfully, unthinkably, unfathomably disturbed by the writing style and agenda of the media and reporters in general. Any news story concerning the shooting of Michael Brown refers to the officer as “white” and Brown as “black”. Why does it matter? A police officer shot a human; that is what happened. The media is partly responsible for fueling the riots and unrest by continuously stressing the pigmentation of the parties involved. There is nothing unusual about a white person shooting a black person in a community comprised of both white and black people simply because aggression and violence are traits of humans, irrespective of pigmentation. We choose to live in racially diverse groups and then bitch about the vagaries of statistics.

More abstruse words.

     On page 89 in Phylogenetic Systematics is when things start to supercharge in difficulty. Several new words are introduced that the author does not define very well, nor are they words I have ever seen prior to reading this material. Even worse, the words are used often, which means if one is not intimately familiar with them, then all the processing is spent on dealing with the words and being further frustrated by the difficult content.
     So a different type of reading strategy must be used in order to successfully read this book. I am accustomed to reading books within a few days and dashing over to my dictionary whenever an unfamiliar word appears. What I am accustomed to cannot be maintained when reading something of this caliber. I have to take time out and research words before I can continue reading. Here are some more of them:

     1. Plesiomorphous, Plesiomorphy - As with most words in phylogenetics, the authors seem to enjoy putting them together out of Greek roots. This reminds me of when I used to study calculus; the authors enjoyed using Greek letters in the equations. It was not necessary as standard Roman characters would have sufficed. But in phylogenetics it seems to me that it is necessary, perhaps not with Greek, but most certainly with something. In order to cope with these words, one must know that plesio-, plesi- correspond to "near" or "close". And morph- corresponds to "form", "shape", or "structure". In phylogenetics, the meaning refers to traits that are similar within a group, but not unique to that group. As an example, all mammals have a backbone, but so do fish and reptiles. Thus, the backbone is plesiomorphic to mammals, because they were not the first to evolve it, but they all have one. (Most common example I could find.)

     2. Apomorphous, Apomorphy - apo- corresponds to "separate", "away from", "derived from" and refers to traits that are derived from a different group. As an example, the "arms" of birds are used as wings. Thus, having wings is an apomorphy for birds because they did not evolve limbs and they use them for a different purpose. (My example.)

     3. Symplesiomorphous, Symplesiomorphy - sym- corresponds to "together with", "united", or "similar". This simply refers to plesiomorphous traits in different species. I decided to consult wikipedia for an example:

"A famous example is pharyngeal gill breathing in bony and cartilaginous fishes. The former are more closely related to Tetrapoda (terrestrial vertebrates, which evolved out of a clade of bony fishes) that breathe via their skin or lungs, rather than to the sharks, rays, et al.. Their kind of gill respiration is shared by the "fishes" because it was present in their common ancestor and lost in the other living vertebrates."


     4. Synapomorphous, Synapomorphy - This refers to the presence of apomorphous traits in different species. As an example, the opposable thumb in some new world monkeys is synapomorphic. It is a derived condition that they share with each other but not with all other mammals. I suppose that if all mammals had opposable thumbs, then the trait would be apomorphous. (I found that example doing a google search.)

     5. Autapomorphous, Autapomorphy - I can't find a definition that is pleasingly simple. All I can seem to find is that it refers to "uniquely defined traits". My guess is that abstract reasoning would be an autapomorphic trait for humans, even though such reasoning is without structure itself. Or is it? Morphology does not need to be restricted to those structures that are readily visible. The folds of the brain could also be a part of morphology, as well as the new "structures" in the brains of humans; the thinking that we do might have an actual shape in the brain, traceable by synapses.

Coping with Phylogenetic Systematics.

     I would estimate that I have read no more than 700 books in total since I learned how to read at age 5. While some have been more difficult than others, one of them has been the most difficult of all. The title is Phylogenetic Systematics, written by Willi Hennig in German. It was first printed in English in 1966.

      I have not yet finished reading this book. I gave it a try back in the summer of 2008 and got half way through. The problem was that every few minutes I'd have to look up some word I had never seen before and quickly internalize it, because it kept reappearing in the text. The unfamiliar words piled up and I found myself thinking about words and not ideas.

     The reading is much easier on my second attempt, as I have had time to contemplate many of the ideas in this book as well as ingest the various abstruse words. One such word is chorology, which comes from the Greek word khoros, which means "place". Chorology is thus the study of the spacial distribution of organisms. The distribution can be euryoekous or stenoekous. Again, we have to go back to the Greek to get a handle on these. Eury means "wide" and  steno means "narrow" and I have found evidence indicating that "oekous" can be equivalent to oikos, which means "house of". Therefore, an organism that is euryoekous is tolerant of a wide range of habitats, while an organism that is stenoekous tolerates very few. The problem with the words in this book is that I often cannot find them in my physical dictionary (American Heritage), published in 1992. It's not that the words are new, rather, they are obscure in the most extreme sense. Not even a google search offers any help with some of them. I have found a book, though, titled Animal Behavior Desk Reference which has many of them defined. I would love to buy the book, but it costs $175 at amazon.com

     While reading this book it is important to keep in mind the differences between three types of genetic relationships. Those are:

1. Ontogenetic relationships, which are those between semaphoronts.

2. Tokogenetic relationships, which are those between individuals.

3. Phylogenetic relationships, which are those between species.

     Don't know what a semaphoront is? Not sure about tokogenetic? Those are the types of early problems I faced while trying to read this book. All of 3 of those relationships together are called hologenetics and the author expressed that the book could be called Hologenetic Systematics. The Greek root holo, which means "entire" was used. It is also common to see this referred to as "Cladistics".

     This book is filled with fascinating definitions. Here's one of them:

     SPECIES: "the study of the evolutionary process in which groups of forms that have hitherto interbred, or at least were capable of interbreeding, become divided into two or more separate groups that for physical reasons cannot interbreed"

     It is also referred to as species cleavage, which you can see here graphically. It is an important concept, something quite obvious that had never occurred to me before.