I've always suspected that there was something more to the selfish gene idea. I don't believe that our programming is simply to perpetuate the interests of our genes.

I believe a lot of our genes seek to perpetuate the interests of our gene pool. I believe that this is as good of an explanation for the existence of virtue as is that "selflessness turns out to benefit your self-interest."

I want to go one step further and say that our genes also seek to perpetuate the interest of the land.

Eco-fanatics make it seem like humanity is engaging in some unique sin by destroying Mother Earth, when I bet there were many tribes in the past that abused and plundered their land to their own peril. I believe that these tribes died off, and the ones that lived on now have a genetic predisposition of compassion to the environment.

You do have to ask why big civilizations have historically passed away. How come they didn't just reduce themselves by half to a more sustainable size, rather than becoming extinct all-together? When they died off, who and what survived?

This is from "Writing for a living: a joy or a chore?"

(via kottke)

Dr. Alex Benzer, writing over at the HuffingtonPost, has an interesting post titled, "Why The Smartest People Have The Toughest Time Dating." One argument he makes is that smart people shouldn't think so hard if they want to reproduce successfully. He cites the Ancentor's Tale idea to support his argument:

Here's an incontrovertible fact: every one of your ancestors survived to reproductive age and got it on at least once with a member of the opposite sex. All the way back to Homo erectus. And even further back to Australopithecus. And even further back to monkeys, to lizards, to the first amphibian that crawled out of the slime, the fish that preceded that amphibian, the worm before the fish and the amoeba that preceded the worm.

And you, YOU, in the year 2009 C.E., the culmination of that miraculously unbroken line of succession, you, Homo sapiens sapiens, not just thinking man but thinking thinking man (or woman), are the only one smart enough to SCREW THE WHOLE THING UP.

Perhaps you should consider thinking a little less then.

This is a very novel use of this idea. I've touched on it before in a rap song and in a book by Dawkins.

I was surprised to hear some touching lyrics about a (sort of) evolutionary concept in a rap song on my playlist. This one, from The Streets, caught my attention:

For billions of years since the outset of time
Every single one of your ancestors has survived
Every single person on your mum and dad's side
Successfully looked after and passed on to you life.
What are the chances of that, like?
It comes to me once in a while
And everywhere I tell folk it gets the best smile.

This is a meme that really needs a name, because it seems to be something many people independently ponder. Awhile ago, I discussed how we have at least 300 million ancestors behind us, leading up to a worm. I cite the book The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, where Richard Dawkins discusses 40 rendezvous with our concestors (common ancestors), such as Chimpanzees.

Here's the song On The Edge of a Cliff by The Streets:

We have at least 300 million generations behind us.

Dawkins estimates, very roughly, that some kind of worm is our concestor ("common ancestor") 590 million years ago. He estimates that it is our 300-million-greats-grandparent. Pondering the implications of that is astounding. That means that at least 300 million animals survived to an old enough age to reproduce, and did. My DNA contains the remnants of at least 300 million consecutive success stories in surviving and reproducing. This makes it no surprise that we are so hungry to mate and reproduce. It also makes suicide and homosexuality interesting puzzles.

And bizzarely enough, I think about this. Do I want to be the end point of that 300 million long chain? Do I want to be the first one in my line to drop the baton?

We don't know exactly what worm it is, but it is some kind of worm. That is only to say that is a long thing, bilaterally symmetrical, with a left and a right side, a dorsal and a ventral side, and a head and a tail end. 590 million years later, and we humans still follow that basic template.

I culled this information from The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins.

This book is going in my Hall of Fame. It's modeled after Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. It's segmented into 40 rendezvous with various concestors starting with Humankind's "Eve," then continuing to Chimpanzees and so on all the way back to Eubacteria. They're rendezvous points because we re-unite with our long-lost relatives when we discover our concestors.

This book is exactly the kind of book I fantasized about writing when I imagined my writing and recollection skills of grand caliber. Here's an excerpt:

Any animal that moves, in the sense of covering the ground from A to B rather than just sitting in one place and waving its arms or pumping water through itself, is likely to need a specialised front end. It might as well have a name, so let's call it the head. The head hits novelty first. It makes sense to take in food at the end that encounters it first, and to concentrate the sense organs there too — eyes perhaps, some kind of feelers, organs of taste and smell. Then the main concentration of nervous tissue — the brain — had best be near the sense organs, and near the sense organs, and near the action at the front end, where the food-catching apparatus is. So we can define the head end as the leading end, the one with the mouth, the main sense organs and the brain, if there is one. Another good idea is to void wastes somewhere near the back end, far from the mouth, to avoid re-imbibing what has just been passed out. (p. 386)