Origin and Destiny

By Chaumont Devin, Ka'u, December 2009.

Last updated August 22, 2011.

"The seeker after the truth is not one who studies the  writings of the
ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts  his trust in them,
but rather the one who suspects his faith in them  and questions what he
gathers from them, the one who submits to  argument and demonstration, and
not to the sayings of a human being  whose nature is fraught with all
kinds of imperfection and deficiency." Ibn al Haytham of Basra, born
965ad, died about 1040ad in Cairo.

Chapter 1.  Did life originate on earth?

From time immemorial, Many attempts have been made to answer this question
by religious and/or psychic means.  If this is the kind of answer you are
looking for, then read no further: return this book to the library or burn
it.  But if you are looking for answers that you yourself can
independently test and verify, no matter how long it may take or how
tedious the process, then this is the book for you.

What we are after is raw truth as unvarnished as possible, and to get at
the truth we shall employ what has become known as "The Scientific
Method," which is an iterative (repeating) process much like a very simple
computer program that can be stated as follows:

1.  Observe.

2.  Hypothesize.

3.  Test.

And all the time we are applying this scientific method, we shall hold in
reserve what is known as Occam's Razor to cut away any fat.  In essence,
the principle of Occam's Razor can be expressed as follows:

Occam's Razor: If there are two ways of explaining anything, and one way
is simpler or more in keeping with simple and repeatable observation than
the other, then the simple one is probably the right one.  Use the simple
one until/if it turns out to be untenable.

So did or did not life arise spontaneously from non-life on this planet?

The answer is NO.  If you are satisfied with this answer, skip ahead to
chapter 2.  If not, or if you are interested in the proof of the matter,
then please continue.

The idea that life can arise spontaneously from non-life is an old one,
and one that is not soon to die.  Aristotle believed that aphids arise
spontaneously from dewdrops, mice from dirty hay, and crocodiles from
rotting logs.  In 1668, to the consternation of many people, Francesco
Redi proved that no maggots appear in meat when flies are prevented from
laying eggs in it, and in 1861, Louis Pasteur demonstrated that organisms
such as bacteria and fungi do not spontaneously appear in sterile,
nutrient-rich media.  In 1864, Pasteur even went so far as to proclaim
that, "Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover."  Yet as
of February 1, 1871, in a letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker, we find Charles
Darwin speculating that the original spark of life may have begun in a
"warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, lights,
heat, electricity, etc."

"Spontaneous generation" and "abiogenesis" are terms commonly ascribed to
the presumption that living organisms have somehow sprung into existence
from inanimate matter without any guiding intelligence.  Another such term
is now "chemical evolution," which is doubly unfortunate since the
GENERATION of living organisms and the EVOLUTION of living organisms are
two very different affairs.

As an example let us imagine a very flexible computer program so carefully
designed as to be almost completely modifiable.  With only a few
superficial alterations it might be adapted to become a calendar and
reminder, a scheduler, a program to keep track of inventory, general
ledger, payroll, and various other accounting applications, etc.  Such
modifications would be analogous to evolutionary processes, but they would
have nothing whatsoever to do with the original design of the software
itself.  Humans have deliberately altered and adapted living organisms
(including themselves) since time immemorial, but no one has ever thus far
been able to design and create a new organism from scratch.  Thus terms
like "chemical evolution," when used to mean "spontaneous generation,"
serve only to muddy the waters and confuse the unwary.

In 1952, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey conducted an experiment at the
University of  Chicago in which they attempted to simulate conditions
thought favorable to the spontaneous generation of life in a sterile
environment such as may have existed at one time on Earth.  Their
experiment was successful in producing several different types of amino
acid such as those used in the synthesis of various proteins, but failed
to produce life.  Many people still cling to this experiment as proof that
life sprang into existence spontaneously upon Planet Earth.  But although
proteins have been touted as the "building blocks of life," it is also
true that the lowly hydrogen atom is just as critical to the existence of
any organism.

To put this experiment in perspective,let us imagine that after a long
summer, storm clouds gathered over a dry river bed, and lightning struck
the hard-baked mud of the river bottom in several places in such a way as
to fuse the mud into bricks of various sizes.  These mud bricks, which
might then be taken from the river bed and chipped into some standard size
that could be used for building would then be analogous to amino acids,
which are the "building blocks of life," whereas a living organism would
be analogous to a finished home with bricks stacked in its walls.

So having made all of these observations, let us now return to the three
points of the scientific method:

1.  Observe, and we have observed.

But do our observations warrant going further?  Living organisms are of
such complexity that even our best scientists cannot grasp more than their
simplest essentials.  People who have studied worms for years may know
that the body plan of C. elegans consists of exactly 959 cells, each of
which has now been named and catalogued.  Yet no human alive has ever come
close to explaining all of the workings of even ONE of these 959 cells.
Nevertheless because this idea of spontaneous generation is such a good
one and obviously worthy of preferential treatment, let us spit out the
gnat, swallow the camel, and continue.

2.  Hypothesize.  Let us leave no stone unturned and hypothesize that in
fact it could all really just happen by itself even if this sounds like
sheer madness.

3.  Test.  No matter what it may cost us, let us test and keep testing,
and we HAVE!  In fact ever since Darwin conjectured about warm ponds back
in 1871, and that will now be roughly 140 years ago, this die-hard idea of
spontaneous generation has been tested and retested in all the best
biological laboratories in the world with zero result.

So now, after 140 years, it is time to move on.  I am terribly sorry to
have to break this news, but it must really be true that crocodiles do not
spring into existence spontaneously from putrid logs, maggots do not
spring to life from putrid meat, mold does not spring to life from putrid
cheese, nor does sound logic spring from putrid ideas; but the awful truth
of the matter is this:

NO LIFE HAS EVER BEEN KNOWN TO SPRING SPONTANEOUSLY FROM NON-LIFE IN ALL
OF HUMAN HISTORY, and that's that.  Enough is enough, stop moping around,
get over it, no way, nada!

Ha-ha, I would like to believe I could lay that one to rest so easily!
 But such ideas have taken upon themselves the character of religion, and
no real religion, to my knowledge, has ever yet really died, so it will
continue.

And let US continue as well.  If we have really worked through this
business by means of the three steps of the scientific method, and if we
now truly believe that as best we are able to determine, no life ever
springs into existence spontaneously from non-life, then it is clear that
life did NOT originate on Earth because it is known that at one time there
WAS no life on earth, and before that, the earth was too hot to support
life.

Chapter 2.  Did life originate in this universe?

If the whole universe is in the process of cooling as we are generally
told, then the answer is NO.  Why?  For precisely the same reason life
didn't originate on Earth (see Chapter 1).  All life comes from other
life, and at one time the Universe was too hot to support life of any
kind.

Chapter 3.  What is the universe?

The universe consists of two components: (1) matter and energy, and (2)
patterns.

It would be useless for me to write about matter and energy, since these
topics are the subject of modern physics, the details of which would fill
many volumes larger than this one, but I WILL say some things about
patterns.

Since earliest times, The most perplexing of all mysteries to confront the
human mind has surely been the problem of the pattern.  In fact the ways
in which people have dealt with the fundamental idea of the pattern cover
a broad spectrum from the perspective of the primitive tribesman who sees
invisible "spiritual" patterns in just about everything around him  to
that of the modern conspiracy theorist who sees the darkest conspiracies
behind every action of those higher in the social hierarchyÀthan himself
to that of the Christian who believes in the survival of his own soul
beyond the grave and in the existence of an all-powerful, invisible God to
that of the materialist marxist who would do away with everything
"supernatural" altogether by disbelieving anything that cannot be detected
through empirical means.  And disagreements regarding the ways in which
people perceive and/or adhere to ideologies, which are simply religious or
political thought patterns,  have sparked the bloodiest wars and the
greatest of all inhumanities ever perpetrated by man upon man.

In recent times people have come to understand the nature of patterns much
better by means of the computer.  They go to the nearest computer outlet,
buy a CD with the pattern of a program they want already recorded on it,
take it home, copy it to their home computer, and thence to their hard
drive.  And during all of this copying and installation, were they to keep
weighing their computer and their hard drive, they would find that this
piece of software, which they may have purchased for hundreds of dollars,
adds nothing whatsoever to the mass of either.  Why?  Because patterns are
just as real as anything else, but quite massless.

So on the one hand we have matter, while on the other hand we have the
patterns formed in matter, the "spooky" part of it being that patterns
have no mass whatsoever--not even a single atom or molecule--and yet they
are just as real as anything else in existence.

it is surprising that no real "pattern science" has ever emerged, since
the universe itself and all matter would immediately fall apart without
patterns.  Yes, there are branches of learning that may call themselves
"pattern science," but they deal with pattern recognition and pattern
comparison rather than with the nature and properties of patterns
themselves, the difference being pretty much the same as the difference
between being able to compare girls on a scale of from one to ten and
actually being able to explain what girls are made of and how.   Because
of this apparent scientific oversight and deficiency, I will attempt to
nail down some basic facts about patterns as follows:

1.  Patterns are perfectly massless.  No smallest part of any pattern is
ever an atom or molecule or a subatomic particle.

2.  Patterns are perfectly real, and just as real as anything else in the
universe.

3.  Patterns are completely separate from all of the laws of the
three-dimensional universe, but are not free from the laws of time.  They
can never be said to be here or there or in motion, but they can be said
to exist or not exist at some time and may change over  time.

4.  Patterns are perfectly scalable.  A pattern can be just as large or as
small as desired.

5.  All material things including the molecules of gases are the outward
manifestations of patterns.   Why?  For one thing, because electrons form
specific "cloud patterns" about their nuclei without which the kind of
matter we know would be quite impossible.

6.  No pattern can exist without at least one physical host.

7.  A pattern can be hosted in more than one physical host at the same
time.

8.  Patterns come in two flavors: static and dynamic.  A static pattern
never changes, like the pattern of print on a typed page.  A dynamic
pattern, on the other hand, is self modifying and always changing.  The
human mind is precisely such an entity.  It is no more a human brain than
Microsoft Word is a computer, and yet it is just as real as Microsoft
Word.

All words are nought but massless patterns.  "But surely the ink on a page
has mass," you may argue, Yet the ink on a page is not really words.  It
is only matter that has been configured to encode a pattern of words.  The
real pattern, that thing which can be copyrighted in Washington, D.C., is
not paper and ink but the actual pattern that paper and ink can be made to
represent.  The paper and ink are visible and material, but the
copyrighted pattern itself is invisible and massless, yet no less real.

Chapter 4.  What is life?

Just like the universe itself, all life consists of two components: (1)
matter and energy and (2) patterns.  It would be useless for me to write
about the matter and energy of life, since these topics are the subject of
modern biology, the details of which would fill many volumes larger than
this one, but I WILL say somewhat about the patterns of all living things.

All living organisms are the outward manifestations of dynamic patterns,
but differ from inanimate objects in that they have built into themselves
the ability to self modify in ways more or less independent of the
properties of the stuff of which they are formed and of the stuff of their
environment.  For example, inanimate objects can move, but their motion is
determined by such things as their mass, surface characteristics, and the
external forces applied to them by their environment, whereas animals dart
this way and that in directions impossible to predict from their
environment.

The easiest way to understand this distinction is probably by studying
automated systems constructed by humans.  Computers are deliberately
designed so as to be maximally independent of anything that goes on in
their external environment.  People pay large sums of money to ensure this
independence, say, by means of failsafe backup power systems that
immediately kick in the moment a general power failure occurs.  If the
value of a byte in your laptop has been reset to zero, it will stay reset
to zero forever unless something internal to the system changes that byte
value to something else.  It matters nothing whether a hurricane is
blowing outside, whether the temperature is below freezing, or whether it
is a beautiful day and the sun is shining, as long as your laptop has
power and is able to function normally, the byte will remain zero.  And if
some program running inside your computer sets byte number 623491285 to a
value of 1, then you can bet that byte number 623491285 will be 1,
regardless of the weather, the state of your emotions, or whether your
grandmother is doing the boogie woogie stark naked right in front of your
web camera.  Nor does it matter in the slightest whether your computer is
made of silicon or sticks and stones, as long as it works.

This isolation from the direct effects of things that happen in the
outside world and independence from the constraints of the matter from
which an entity has been constructed, when taken together with the ability
to self modify by means of logical operations (if X then Y), is what we
call INTELLIGENCE.

By this definition of intelligence, it is clear that ALL LIFE IS
INTELLIGENT without exception, and that intelligence and life are
inextricably bound together, from which we have the corollary:

NO INTELLIGENCE HAS EVER BEEN KNOWN TO SPRING SPONTANEOUSLY FROM
NON-INTELLIGENCE JUST AS NO LIFE HAS EVER BEEN KNOWN TO SPRING
SPONTANEOUSLY FROM NON-LIVING MATTER.

In latter years, we have come to think of the patterns governing the final
forms of all organisms as being encoded in DNA, but in fact DNA is only
one part of the complete pattern , a part that we have come somewhat to
understand and that happens to be in vogue.

Chapter 5.  What/who is God?

Now, at last, we are ready to answer this question, and even to prove the
existence of a creator or creators without any problem as follows:

1.  All life and intelligence derives exclusively from other life and
intelligence, and no life or intelligence ever derives from non-life or
non-intelligence.  As proof we can but offer observation, but please
recall that observation is the identical proof that we might offer for a
postulate like, "All matter is attracted to other matter by means of
gravitational force," which would be considered to be hard science.

2.  At one time the universe was far too hot to support life or
intelligence.  The proof of this is that the bodies of all living things
are composed of elements that could not have formed except within the
molten cores of stars.  The Big Bang theory is just icing on the cake.

3.  Therefore life and intelligence had to have been injected into the
material universe from a living and intelligent source outside the
material universe sometime after the matter in the material universe had
cooled enough to support it.  QED.  Smoking gun.

So there can be no doubt as to the existence of a God or gods if God is
defined as that source of life and intelligence outside the material
universe from whence all life and intelligence have come.  The only issues
left open for discussion are thus such questions as, "Was there just one
God or were there many?"  "Is this age-old source of intelligence yet
living?"  "Was life and intelligence injected into the material universe
just once or many times?"   Etc.

Such an understanding of God immediately throws open wide the meanings of
various obscure scripture passages written by John.  For example, consider
this one:

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God."

Recall that a word is a massless pattern, and that all logic is nothing
but words.  The term employed by John for "word," was "logos," which means
"utterance," in the sense that an utterance is an utterance both before
and after being spoken.  So John says God is massless utterance or
intelligence, but also something else: "and the Word was WITH God."  Why?
Recall that intelligence is a pattern, and that no pattern can exist
without at least one host.  John seems to have known this.  So outside
this universe in the beginning existed the HOST of that intelligence, a
form no man has ever seen ("No man hath seen God at any time).  Recall
also that a pattern has no relationship to the three dimensions of the
material universe, but that it does exist or not exist in TIME.  Thus it
was possible for this intelligence to BE in the beginning without any
mention of WHERE.

Then consider the following:

"In Him was life, and the life was the light of men."

Once again it appears that John was aware of all that I have said and
more.  Life and intelligence are inextricably bound together, and by using
the word, "light," to mean "intelligence," John further implies the idea
of radiating out across the vast darkness of space.

Please do not suppose that by writing the above I am in any way endorsing
Christianity or any other theology.  I am merely pointing out the things
John knew, which I find somewhat amazing at this time.  What were his
sources?  Doubtless the early Greeks and Philo, but who else?  It is clear
that he is writing about Jesus, but what else?  two stylistic features
pervade many Biblical passages, as any serious Bible student knows.  One
is the phenomenon of multiple meanings depending on how the text is read,
and the other is an aura of mystery that is carefully maintained.

So if all life and intelligence spring from a source outside the realm of
matter, then how could it reach Earth?  Was it radiated out across deep
space as his subsequent words would seem to imply?  "And the light shineth
in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not."  Is it then true that
life can survive in deep space?  Back to the scientific method:

1.  Observe.  Life is here but it came from elsewhere.

2.  Hypothesize.  Life may be able to travel across deep space.

3.  Test.  Done, and here is the QED and smoking gun:

On April 20, 1967, the unmanned lunar lander Surveyor 3 landed near
Oceanus Procellarum on the surface of the moon.  One of the things aboard
was a television camera.  Two-and-a-half years later, on November 20,
1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan L.  Bean recovered the
camera.  When NASA scientists examined it back on Earth they were
surprised to find specimens of Streptococcus mitis that were still alive.
Because of the precautions the astronauts had taken, NASA could be sure
that the germs were inside the camera when it was retrieved, so they must
have been there before the Surveyor 3 was launched.  These bacteria had
survived for 31 months in vacuum on the moon.

BBC, 23 August 2010:

"Beer microbes live 553 days outside ISS

"The bugs have been classified simply as OU-20.  However, they resemble
closely a group of cyanobacteria known as Gloeocapsa.

"They have a thick cell wall and this could be part of the reason they
survived so long in space.

"Bacterial spores have been known to endure several years in orbit but
this is the longest any cells of cyanobacteria, or photosynthesising
microbes, have been seen to survive in space."

[End BBC citations]

So now we know that microbes, even unspecialized microbes, can survive in
space without a problem.

But how long can microbes survive?  Researchers believe they have found
living microbes 300 million years old in seams of coal, and other
well-documented examples include the following:

In 1995, Biologists Raul Cano and Monica Borucki extracted bacterial
spores from bees preserved in amber in Costa Rica.  Amber is tree-sap that
hardens and persists as a fossil.  This amber had entrapped some bees and
then hardened between 25 and 40 million years ago.  Bacteria living in the
bees' digestive tracts had recognized a problem and turned themselves into
spores.  When placed in a suitable culture, the spores came back to life.
As a control, the two biologists also attempted to culture from the same
amber a number of samples that contained no bee parts.  These cultures
were negative, adding credibility to the experiment.

Since then, various scientific laboratories have confirmed the existence
of living organisms both floating in the highest reaches of Earth's
atmosphere and embedded in objects from deep space.  Ancient organic
molecules abound.  Here are a few lines broadcast by the BBC on February
15, 2010:

"A meteorite that crashed into earth 40 years ago contains millions of
different organic compounds.  It is thought the Murchison meteorite could
be even older than the Sun.  The results of the meteorite study are
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  The
primordial Solar System probably had a higher molecular diversity than
Earth.  A study using high resolution analytical tools including
spectroscopy allowed the team to identify 14,000 different compounds
including 70 amino acids."

The PANSPERMIA hypothesis holds that the seeds of life have been diffused
throughout the universe.  It has been favored by such thinkers as
Anaxagoras (5th century BC), Jeans Jacob Berzelius, Lord Kelvin, Hermann
von Helmholtz, Svante Arrhenius, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Francis Crick,
Leslie Orgel, Fred Hoyle, and definitely myself.  All that was necessary
was for ONE such spore to safely reach Earth for life to begin on this
planet, because living organisms apparently carry within themselves not
only all of the intelligence necessary to immediately reproduce fresh
copies of themselves, but also to mutate into many other forms over long
stretches of time.

So why do so many scientists continue to cling to the idea that life
originates on Earth when the evidence is all against it?  Let everyÀtrue
scientist now carefully examine him/herself and see whether it is not
easier to get the scientist out of religion than it is to get religion out
of the scientist!  After all, didn't the Lord God form man from the dust
of the EARTH?  So it would seem that no matter what our outward
profession, without even knowing it we continue to be guided largely by
the dictates of our cultural heritage no matter what mere facts confront
us.  The past makes us blind to the future, and this is why the future
comes so slowly and hindsight is always so 20 - 20.

Even the most cursory examination of the literature will reveal that life
can exist almost anywhere and upon almost anything.  Why?  Because it is
(to us) inexplicably intelligent and adaptable.  We often misunderstand
intelligence, believing it to be only what we apprehend at a conscious
level.  But in fact we are much more intelligent at a subconscious level
than we could even begin to be consciously aware of.  As just one tiny
example, all the time we are thinking and feeling and living our conscious
lives, our subconscious minds are busily keeping our body temperature
within a single degree of normal, even if we may know nothing of DEGREES
or Fahrenheit or what is NORMAL at a conscious level.

Something almost all of us might agree upon as a criterion for godhood
would be the ability to create any living organism, and especially a human
being, from scratch.  Yet our bodies contain within them about 50 trillion
cells, each one of which is said to have all the information and
intelligence necessary to create a complete new human being.  Because of
this it may be said that within each of us are 50 trillion copies of God,
each one of which is so much more intelligent than we are at a conscious
level that the comparison would make us look more like a host of
cockroaches than men.

The knowledge of these facts should immediately tear down our incredible
arrogance and leave us humble forever, but human folly remains such that
they do not, and we remain ignorant and proud.

So is or was there ever life on Mars?  Almost certainly.  And why should
anyone believe otherwise?  In 1996, a meteorite originating from Mars
known as ALH84001 was shown to contain microscopic structures resembling
small terrestrial nanobacteria, and if material from Mars can reach Earth,
then material from Earth and elsewhere can reach Mars.  The burden of
proof in the case for life on Mars should therefore NOT be upon the
shoulders of those who concede the inevitability of life on Mars but upon
the shoulders of those who believe that life could somehow have missed
Mars altogether.  In fact the whole universe is probably teeming with
life, and life that is more or less closely related to life on Earth.
 After all, what could be more unnatural and artificial than the
presumption that we are the only life in the universe?  This whole idea
clearly arises from the spontaneous generation hypothesis, which is
patently false.  People have believed in extraterrestrial life since time
immemorial, and it is the most natural thing to do.

Occam's Razor:

1.  If the supposition that life exists only on Earth and the supposition
that life exists everywhere in the universe are equally possible and
valid, and if we find life to exist in every possible niche that we are
capable of observing, then the simpler and more reasonable hypothesis is
that life must exist EVERYWHERE.

2.  If life could not have originated on Earth, and if life can survive
for long periods in the vacuum of space, then the most probable hypothesis
is that life drifted here from elsewhere.

Such words are hard for Christians to accept because of these passages
from Genesis:

"And the lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

"And out of the ground made the lord God to grow every tree that is
pleasant to the sight, and good for food."

"And out of the ground the lord God formed every beast of the field, and
every fowl of the air."

But what if the "ground" is simply the material substrate from which
everything in this whole universe of dust is formed?  Then the life, or
the "breath of life" of any individual is just a very complex dynamic
pattern that is able to borrow substance from the material universe in
which to express itself for a time before relinquishing it again.  Recall
that in the Hebrew and Greek original texts of the Bible, the word for
"breath" and "soul" are always identical.

From the above it should be clear that God is the origin and source of all
life and intelligence as we know it, and that we have no source of life or
intelligence but God.

In recent times,it has become fashionable for intellectuals and would-be
intellectuals to style God a "force."  This is, of course, a sly insult to
the origin and source of all intelligence and life, but it is difficult to
imagine why any such being should care.  Forces pertain to the world of
mass and energy.  Intelligence is isolated from the world of mass and
energy, and pertains to nothing except time.

But having said all these things, it may be high time to re-examine some
old claims about God, not all of them unHebrew.

1.  God is omniscient (knows every single detail about everything).

2.  God really cares about you as an individual and plans to keep you
alive forever.

3.  God IS love, loves you personally, and loves all of mankind.

4.  God has prepared a lake of fire in which to roast anybody who
disagrees with Him alive day and night for millions of years.

5.  God is omnipotent (can do anything imaginable).

6.  God wants us to worship Him.

...

And more.

Now I know that a lot of my readers despise logic, but if you have managed
to read down this far, then it may be safe for me to continue without
getting burned at the stake for my pains--anyhow I will risk it.  Most of
what people believe about God is pure superstition grounded upon nothing
but the "inspired" writings and mad sayings of benighted men, and easily
traceable to various causes.  For example, among illiterate and
semiliterate people, ANYTHING written may be seen as sacred because such
people are in awe of things written just because they are written.
 Another important wellspring of superstition are the symptoms of madness.
 Without a knowledge of psychology, how could people be expected to
account for things like sadism, masochism, the desire to see living things
tortured and killed, the desire to be worshipped, etc.  To the Zulus,
madmen were considered taboo because their minds had been taken over by
gods, and the Zulus were not alone in such superstitions.  But mad Zulus
aside, it is pretty clear that theology can make just about anybody crazy
in the absence of real knowledge and the faculty for critical thought.
 Here are some disturbing examples:

Unless you are a confirmed all-American TV addict and couch potato, there
is no way you can be all loving, all caring, etc., and just sit back and
watch what is going on in the world today without lifting a finger to stop
itÀwhen you have all the power in the universe at your fingertips.  "But
God is almighty," I hear people saying, "therefore He can do anything
including loving everybody and just watching them suffer and die.  We see
things this way only because we don't understand Him.  God knows best.
 God knows what is right for us and has a plan for our lives"

"Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sins."  Get over
it, shedding the blood of hapless fellow creatures does not heal diseases,
get us on the good side of God, or expiate sins.  Bloodthirstiness is the
province of perverts and sadists: not the creator of universes.  Why
should the Master and Creator of the universe find pleasure or
satisfaction in the shedding of blood if he is truly Almighty and capable
of creating all the blood you could ever imagine?

"For God so loved the world that he gave His own son ..."  Sorry, loving
the world is no excuse for killing your son.  Furthermore, two wrongs do
not make a right.  Killing your son because the world is wrong does not
make the world right but DOES make YOU a murderer.  If God is all loving,
all powerful, almighty, etc., then He has to have a better way of saving
the world than by murdering His own son, which would constitute an act of
perversion.  Why should the master and creator of the universe derive such
great pleasure from the spectacle of his only begotten son dying slowly on
a miserable cross that this should make Him turn from His eternal plan of
burning everybody he loves forever in a perpetual lake of fire?

God gave Abraham the covenant of circumcision.  Aha.  But circumcision has
been practised since long before Abraham was ever even dreamed of, so how
could God "give" it to Abraham?  And why should the master and creator of
the universe be interested in mutilating little boys?  Sadism maybe?  If
so, then the male sex organ must be the right target, because sadism is a
perversion of the sex drive.  Even Jesus must have known better than this,
because he said, "Moses therefore gave unto you circumcision, not because
it is of moses, but of the fathers."  He does NOT mention Abraham, nor
does he mention God, but only "the fathers."  Why would he say such a
thing if circumcision were not already an established institution before
Abraham was ever born?

And why should the master and creator of the universe care whether humans
are WORSHIPPING him all the time?  If God is perfect and almighty and
strong, then why should he keep needing lowly humans to worship and adore
him?  Psychologically healthy people do not need others to be kissing
their feet all the time.  Kowtowing is a disease for Chinese emperorsÀand
paranoid rulers like king Herod: not for Almighty God.

And the list of insanities and inanities continues ad infinitum.  Get over
it, we have no reason to believe that God was ever a sadist or a pervert
or bloodthirsty or vengeful or wrathful or criminally insane or some kind
of doting oriental despot as all of these old "sacred" stories imply.  He
is simply the source of all life and intelligence and nothing more that
anyone has ever been able to determine.  If God really knew or cared
anything about what people go around doing and saying about him on this
speck of dust, then He certainly must have a knack for hiding His feelings
which in itself would make him more than divine!

One of the big problems with theology is that whether theologians actually
believe in it or not, and it is clear that a majority must not, it can
keep people in ignorance and bondage.  Theology fattens theologians, and
it thrives in the absence of education, therefore it naturally behooves
theologians to keep the "flock" in a state of ignorance and suspicion of
persons of experience and knowledge.  The superstitions promoted by
theologians would be laughable if they had no power over human lives, but
they DO, as Bruno and Copernicus and Galileo and a lot of people beheaded
by Arabs might have told us had they had the chance.

The truth is thatall lies are dangerous, and St.  Paul was probably right
when he said God cannot lie out of one side of his mouth while claiming He
could do anything out the other.  No smart deceiver will tell you a lie
without including much truth in its preparation.  After all it is not the
wholesome glass of orange juice that will kill you but that little trace
of arsenic in the bottom.

Another thing that theologians typically find disturbing is critical
thought.  How many times have you heard these words: "Brother, you have a
critical spirit, and you need to let the Lord deal with it right now," or
something on that order.  Then the guilt trip and the rejection.  Again it
behooves theologians and people jockying for positions of "spiritual"
power over us to expunge forever from our minds every trace of precisely
that faculty of critical thinking that would enable us to see through
their lies.

So I would say that all lies are dangerous, but especially lies about God.
 Our minds have been so twisted by what our parents and religious teachers
have told us that we are afraid to think for ourselves in the normal
fashion for which our brains were originally designed, and it seems quite
preposterous to imagine that any real God could have had anything to do
with such brutal brain warpings.  But we are in the good company of a host
of Chinese girls who have submitted to foot binding in their time--if this
is of any comfort.  Their parents convinced them not to think critically,
and to acknowledge that small feet were beautiful.    Of course some have
lost a toe or two in the process, but most have survived.

Meantime God is what he is or what THEY are, whatever the case may be, and
that's that, and no amount of war or brainwashings or burnings at stakes
can change it, so we should really lay the matter to rest and move on--if
our mothers will allow it.

Chapter 6.  What is beginningism?

Are you a Beginningist?  Quite possibly so.  All life just HAS to have a
beginning, therefore God.  All matter just HAS to have a beginning,
therefore the Big Bang.  But no one has ever seen God, and certainly no
one has ever seen a Big Bang.  What if the whole idea that everything must
have a beginning is simply an artifact suggested by our circumstances? The
sun had a beginning--we can see suns forming all around us.  The earth had
a beginning--the oldest rocks we can find are all less than four billion
years old, etc., etc.

It should not be surprising that we have come up with one or two origin
tales.  I no of no people on earth who has not spun some similar yarn.  We
were brought up on the Book of Genesis, but our ancestors probably
believed in Norse gods.  Buru people tell us that people can "explode"
into being from rocks and trees.  Other traditions may tell us that humans
are the results of strange unions between devils and gods.  At first it
may seem unlikely, but in fact there is a common thread running through
all of these tales, and that common thread is beginningism.  The idea that
everything must have a beginning would seem to be universal in all human
populations, but different traditions have made up different stories
around this selfsame idea, which is usually taken for granted without
question or pause.

But what if neither the material universe nor even life itself have any
beginning at all? What if they just ARE?

There may be a few problems with this hypothesis, but apparently a lot
less than with some other very common ideas, like the one of a Big Bang,
which we shall examine later.  The first problem is the fact that life is
evolving.  If life had no beginning, then why is it evolving?  But WHERE
is it evolving?  On Earth, of course, since we know of no life elsewhere.
And yet compared to the whole universe, the earth is like a speck of dust.
 If we only know about life on Earth, then how can we be sure whether life
is or is not evolving elsewhere?

A supporting argument against the supposition that life need also be
evolving elsewhere (assuming that it even EXISTS elsewhere) is that
microbes continue to exist and thrive even on Earth.  Haven't we evolved
lightyears beyond microbes?  Or at least this is what we might like to
believe.  Yet the earth probably has a greater bulk tied up in microbes
than in any other form of life, and we continue to share the earth with
microbes of a form not much different from the first life ever to exist on
earth.  So we have this troublesome fact--microbes would seem to be with
us forever, and will continue to persist unaltered much in basic form by
any number of eons of evolution.

And if this is so--that microbes are an integral part of life that never
goes away--then if life exists elsewhere, it must also exist there in
microbe form.  So along with the superorganisms and superminds that would
exist in a universe and biology without beginning, there must also exist
an abundance of "lowly" microbes.

And as we have seen, in the vacuum of space where "higher" organisms die,
microbes can exist unharmed for years.  In a universe and biology with no
beginning, therefore, it would stand to reason that the way life continues
to survive ad infinitum is by spreading itself to newly formed planets in
microscopic form.  These microbes then take hold, terraform the new
planet, and evolve themselves back into the multicellular life forms to be
found on their home worlds.  So it may be that we on earth, having freshly
attained conscious intelligence, have allowed ourselves to be deceived
into believing that the necessary evolution going on here is the norm,
whereas in fact it is only a special case--a stage life passes through in
the process of reestablishing itself when a star has exploded or a new
habitable world has been formed.

The second problem with this steady-state hypothesis is ...  Er, I really
can't seem to be able to find one.  Could it possibly be that there may
not be one?  Naw, there has to be one somewhere, but it may take some time
for me to find it.

In fact this hypothesis of a universe and biology without beginning fits
the facts very well in a surprising number of ways.  Why is it that, try
as we may, we cannot make contact with other intelligent life forms?  Is
it that we are the only intelligences in the universe?  Hah!  If life has
always existed, then the majority of intelligent life forms in the
universe might be to us like a human being to a cockroach and have no
interest in such lower life forms as we are whatsoever.  Why is life
evolving on Earth?  Because it had to start over from scratch on this
planet.  Why the sudden Cambrian explosion?  Because complex,
multicellular life forms have always existed in the universe, and one of
these or some kind of spore of one of these made it to earth about 500
million years ago.  Why does convergent evolution happen when there does
not appear to be sufficient reason for it from a purely evolutionary
perspective?  Why do marsupial predators in Australia look so much like
non-marsupial predators in Africa and Asia?  Because the evolutionary
process is not random, as we have supposed, but instead a process of
restoration back to the full bloom of life, whatever that might be, with
all of its many original forms.  How did human speech evolve when we know
that the basic human speech apparatus is not evolving?  Because speech is
part of intelligent life and the potential for speech is already present
in the genes of "lower" animals.  Why can many bird species emulate speech
when there would seem to be no sufficient evolutionary pressure for such a
complex mechanism to develop? Ditto.  Why is there no creator showing
concern about what we are doing to ourselves and to this planet? There are
so many planets in the universe and life is so ubiquitous and automatic
that Earth simply doesn't matter to any extraterrestrial being with any
intelligence at all.

So the main problem with this hypothesis of anti-beginningism is that it
fits so many facts so cleanly and is so hard to refute with solid
evidence.  But what about the Big Bang?  Er, the Big Bang...  Didn't
somebody get the Nobel prize for discovering its background radiation, and
doesn't this background radiation have encoded in itself the "signature"
of the Big Bang?  But really, if no one has ever seen a Big Bang, then how
in the universe can anyone say what its signature might look like?  And
isn't the universe naturally full of every kind of radiation?

As I have shown above, the proof of the existence of God is predicated
solidly upon the hypothesis that the universe was once too hot for life,
therefore there had to be a source of life and intelligence outside the
universe who injected life into the system once it had sufficiently
cooled.

But compared to this steady-state universe hypothesis, the Big Bang
hypothesis has quite a few big problems.  In the first place it is
completely counterintuitive.  This fact in itself could well mean little,
and yet it would seem worth something, just as the explicit knowledge that
the Big Bang theory is based upon beginningist intuitions must be worth
something if we dare to admit it.  How could all the mass of the universe
be gathered into some infinitesimal point?  This first idea itself would
seem preposterous.  We'll call this problem Big Problem #1.  Then, if it
was gathered into a "singularity," with the gravitational pressure such a
thing would imply, how could it then explode?.  An explosion would clearly
be impossible since the smaller the space matter occupies, the denser it
becomes, and the denser it becomes, the greater its gravitational
attraction.  It follows that something infinitely small (a "singularity")
would be surrounded by a field of infinite gravitational force from which
no finite chunk of matter could escape.  Call this Big Problem #2.  And
even if it could escape, how could it exceed the velocity of light (as the
theory goes on to tell us), which would be a bold faced violation of the
physicist's own laws?  Has anyone ever observed light traveling faster
than the speed of light between stars?  Call this Big Problem #3.  It
rather reminds me of the problem of the "biological certainty" that all
life got started in warm ponds though no one has ever seen life start in
warm ponds.  Next comes the idea that the radiation from this Big Bang,
instead of just radiating off like other radiation, keeps orbiting the
universe and can be picked up as "the background radiation of the Big
Bang." However, contrary to the claims of problem #3, we know that
radiation travels FASTER than matter, and if it ever existed, would long
ago have radiated away.  Call this one Big Problem #4.  Next we have the
problem of the original "proof" itself.  At one time it was believed that
all matter in the universe was shooting away from other matter as
propelled by the momentum of that great explosion, the Big Bang.  But it
was recently discovered that in fact matter is not radiating away from
other matter and slowing down in the process, as one might expect from a
Big Bang, but is actually ACCELERATING away from other matter, thus
obviating any need for a Big Bang.  This discovery should have rocked the
physics community, but didn't.  Hmmm.  I wonder why.  Could it be that in
their mad rush for the stars, our modern physicists have neglected to come
up with an alternative to the old "Book of Genesis" in order to have
something to fall back on when the current superstition collapses? They
should not really worry.  Even Albert Einstein believed in God.  Remember?
"God does not play dice with the universe!"

Chapter 7.   What are human beings?

I am not writing this chapter because I have run out of things to say
about the Big Bang, and I am not even a physicist.  There are simply too
many more important matters to contemplate when we consider the universe
as it really is.  How can people play Bingo when the real universe is so
much more exciting?

The path from God to man has been a long one.  At this stage of human
development, and based upon the intellectual resources available to me, I
would imagine the life that exists in the universe today to have
originated in a laboratory somewhere outside the world of energy and
matter, but I have no idea how.  Some will accuse me of simply "passing
the buck" by telling you that all life came from our creator or creators
without telling you who in turn created them.  But as a scientist, I am
not interested in unsupportable conjecture and must limit myself to the
available facts.

Must everything have a beginning?  The truth is that we do not know.  At
one time it was supposed that the Big Bang hypothesis must certainly be
the right one because all the galaxies in the universe were found to be
expanding away from one another as if in an explosion.  Yet this picture
quickly changed the moment men discovered a most counterintuitive fact,
namely that not only is the universe expanding, but that it is expanding
faster and faster through time.  And why so?  If the universe were simply
expanding, then this expansion must be the result of an explosion, or "big
bang."  But if all the matter in the universe is accelerating away from
other matter, then there is immediately no need for any "Big Bang" to
explain the expansion because it is happening by itself all the time.

At this point it is interesting to notice two things.  The first is how
easily our best hypotheses can be exploded, and the second is how
reluctant we can be to admit they have been wrong.  True science can have
zero regard for human prestige or emotion.  Something is either true or
else it isn't, and science is the pursuit of this truth.  But I have yet
to read a single scientific report admitting that the discovery of the
acceleration of galaxies away from each other has obviated the need for a
Big Bang.  Why?

So are we evolving?  I would certainly hope so, if for no other reason
than simply in order to produce a more honest kind of human.  But this
whole book is about life and evolution, so I must be granted the
opportunity of reiterating one point ere I continue: Evolution is not
genesis, and genesis is not evolution.  Genesis is the process of getting
life started, whereas evolution is the process whereby living organisms
adapt and change through time.

Thus far I have not questioned the theory of evolution by natural and
sexual selection because the idea of a world in which life does not evolve
is so untenable as to seem unworthy of consideration.  The act of
introducing a Negrito to a Norwegian would be proof enoughÀfor me, never
mind mutating microbes, fossil records, and ancient DNA.  So if you do not
believe that life is evolving, then burn this book or return it to the
library, because I will take evolution for granted and move on.

The first life to reach the cooling earth was apparently a single celled
organism of some kind.  It may have been specially designed to survive for
millions of years in space, or it may be that there are many life forms
that can do this.  At this point we simply do not know.  It may have been
some organism itself, or else it may have been the SPORE of some organism
better endowed to handle the rigors of space.  Once again, we do not know.

This first seed or these first seeds of life may or may not have contained
all of the intelligence and information needed to ultimately produce every
kind of life on earth.  I suspect that they didn't.  Why?  What CAN happen
WILL happen, given enough time, and if the universe was seeded with life
once, then it could certainly be seeded with life again, and there is
ample evidence that it WAS, A primary example being the great Cambrian
Explosion, in which all kinds of multicellular life forms suddenly appear
as if by magic in the fossil record.

The last such intervention in the evolution of life on this planet may
have been the augmentation of certain kinds or of a certain kind of
primate brain to enable the use of language.  Two things are clear: (1)
without language humans would not be completely human, and (2) language is
tremendously complex, and no reasonable mechanism has ever been found
whereby language might have spontaneously arisen through some accident of
evolution.  Furthermore it is clear that language is NOT evolving.  Why?
Because if language were evolving along with our physical evolution, by
this time Europeans wouldn't be able to learn Chinese, Chinese would not
be able to learn Hottentot, etc., yet any normal human infant can acquire
any human language with no problem whatsoever.

Occam's Razor:

1.  If one hypothesis states that there can be no intervention from
outside earth, and another hypothesis states that interventions do occur,
and if we know that at least one intervention did occur with the advent of
life, and if we know that something that can happen once can happen again,
and if certain evolutionary details seem impossible to explain without
some kind of intervention, then the intervention hypothesis is probably
the right one.

2.  If one hypothesis states that language came into being through
evolutionary processes that nobody can figure out and it is clear that
language has never evolved one iota since the beginning of human
existence, whereas another hypothesis states that language was added as an
augment to primate brain design, and we know that interventions can and do
happen, then the second hypothesis is probably the right one.

How such interventions have occurred may be a mystery, and yet the answer
is at hand.  In the animal kingdom alone it is known that there are
parasites capable of actually altering the brains of their host victims in
order to make them do things that they ordinarily would not.  Incredibly
it seems easy for scientists to believe such things could happen as
accidents of evolution and never by intelligent design.  In the face of
such facts as I have given above (and I have barely scratched the
surface), is this not tantamount to choking on gnats while gulping down
camels?

But as biology advances, scientists are learning how to permanently alter
genes by means of various viral vectors, and it is becoming increasingly
clear that any technology sufficiently advanced might easily be able to
permanently alter our genes in any way imaginable, probably from millions
or billions or even trillions of miles away, simply by shooting some
appropriate virus at or into our exposed atmosphere.

If our universe truly had a beginning, then the infusion of life into the
world of energy and matter may have been a "one shot" deal, pun intended.
 But if mass and energy have always existed (and in this universe it is
well known that mass and energy are conserved), then the seeding process
might be automatic and continuous.  Various kinds of spores would then
arrive from space on cooling planets, but all would die except for those
designed specifically for new worlds.  Then, after an oxygen-rich
atmosphere had been established, spores of the kind designed to produce
multicellular organisms might arrive to create a Cambrian explosion. Then,
after some life forms had reached a certain higher level of development,
microbes containing the genes for language and human-like intelligence
might take effect.

If this model were correct, then it might help to explain why some birds
talk.  Perhaps at one point certain dinosaur species had evolved to the
point where language and human-like intelligence might provide a survival
advantage.  It might be nearly impossible to detect any sign of dinosaur
intelligence 65 million years after the extinction.  But those who did
survive might reasonably be expected to be the smartest, and the
descendents of these might be modern birds.  It is well known that any
cultural innovation or ability that is not constantly used will quickly
disappear.  As an example we might take the Polynesians, who were ranging
the oceans in large double canoes right up untill the moment of first
European contact, which was quite recent.  But just ask any modern
Hawaiian the way to Tahiti, or ask any Samoan to build your son a toy
canoe and see if either one can do it.  Of course language is only partly
culture, but if through some great disaster language suddenly became
useless, it is interesting to speculate on just how long and in what form
it might survive.  It would appear that to evolve the ability to recognize
and reproduce words like some birds do would be evolutionarily far too
expensive for any small survival advantage it might confer, and therefore
the suspicion that birds may be descended from creatures who used language
like we do.  In other words, humans may not be the first "intelligent"
life on this planet.

But there is an alternative explanation.  What if this universe and its
life had no beginning.  Then newly formed worlds like our own would
receive the "seeds" of life from islands of life elsewhere in the cosmos.
 In this model, tiny "packets" containing the instructions for life (be
these DNA or whatever) would fall into the atmosphere of a planet from
time to time.  At every stage of biological development, it would only be
the relevant instructions that would have any effect.  Thus instructions
to generate eucaryotic cells would have no effect whatsoever when drifting
into the atmosphere of a planet on which more primitive life forms had not
yet gotten started.  At the same time, certain kinds of instructions might
engender changes in more than one kind of organism.  This would explain
convergent evolution--how marsupials and placental mammals and birds of
entirely different origins can come out looking almost the same.  Other
sets of instructions might produce differing or varying results in
different organisms.  This would explain why both humans and birds can
talk, but only humans have been able to benefit from full blown language.
 Such tiny "packets" would probably not arrive from space very often, but
even once in several million years might be enough to produce the results
we observe.  It is important to note that such instructions from outside
would in no way negate the process of evolution by natural selection.
 Instead these two processes would be complimentary to each other.

Much adoo has been made lately of the ability to use tools.  At first it
became dogma that tool making was an exclusively human ability, and
constituted one of the criteria separating humans from the rest of
animalia.  Then Jane Goodall discovered that Chimps could use twigs and
leaves, and tool making became the exclusive province of advanced primates
such as chimpanzees and humans.  And all the while, birds were busily
building nests from sticks and leaves and other things in our back yards
and getting ignored for their efforts.  This kind of foolishness can
clearly show how far we stray the moment we fail to apply old Occam's
Razor and the scientific method.  Now it is known that some of the most
intelligent of all animals are birds, and it is hard to find any
primateaptitude that birds can't equal or trump.

Scientific method:

1.  Observe.  Birds seem to be as smart or smarter than primates, and
trump primates because they can recognize and pronounce word sounds.

2.  Hypothesize.  If primates are the precursors of humans, then maybe
birds, which can also speak, are the precursors of something human-like in
intelligence.

3.  Test.  Can't.  All the dinosaurs got wiped out 65 million years ago.
 But do be on the lookout!

So what are humans?  Since the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus, it is no
longer fashionable to believe that humans evolved on the open savannah as
we were taught in anthropology.  Instead the story may go like this:

About seven million years ago, humans and chimpanzees had a last common
ancestor, after which they diverged.  The name for the human line is
changing, so I will call it by the old term, HOMINIDAE to avoid confusion.
 Hominids kept living in forests, but eventually evolved the ability to
walk upright along the bows of trees instead of swinging from branch to
branch with four handsÀas before.  But they still had opposable big toes,
which weren't so good for walking on the ground.  Then these opposable big
toes got unopposable, and hominids gained the ability to walk and run for
long distances on open ground.  From this fundamentally human form emerged
several more or less successful evolutionary experiments, the most
noteworthy probably being Homo erectus and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis.

But at last a tiny, smooth-skinned black creature with frizzy hair emerged
somewhere in Africa who could walk and talk and think like us.  This was
our common ancestor, the first Homo sapiens sapiens, of a type known
nowdays as the Negrito.  He/she was adapted for life in the depths of
great forests, but had within him the ability to move out into other
niches and survive.

About 74 thousand years ago, a volcano on the island of Sumatera erupted
with cataclysmic results.  It has been estimated that the energy released
was equivelant to that of an explosion of about 1 gigaton of TNT.  All
that remained of the volcano was a hole  about 60 miles long and 20 miles
wide now called Lake Toba.  It is believed that about 16 billion tons of
ash were ejected.  A huge die-off of megafauna resulted everywhere from
Java to Iran.  It is further estimated that in all the world only
something on the order of one to ten thousand breeding pairs of human
beings survived.

This megafaunal extinction was bad for megafauna, but wonderful for modern
humans (our Negrito ancestors), because people who lived on fish and
paddled canoes could now freely travel along the coasts of southern Asia
without fear of being eaten by tigers or Homo erecti, and travel they did.
 By about 10,000 years after the Toba eruption, the first humans had
spread as far as Australia.

As I have already written, our first forebears were quite black, and this
rendered them hard to make out in the dappled shadows of the forest,
especially at night.  They were also very agile and small, which made them
good at climbing trees and getting through the tangle of the underbrush,
and able to survive upon little food.  And they knew well the use of the
bow and arrow.  So they existed in a state of good equilibrium with their
forest environment, and this has been one of the factors that has
contributed to their many thousands of years of survival in great forests.
 Let them remain undisturbed in their forests, and they will hardly change
over the millennia because they are so well adapted.  But take their
forests away, and you change them forever or else drive them extinct.  I
would imagine that the only noticeable difference between the early
Negritos and modern ones would be the presence of dogs.  The first
Negritos had no dogs, and would not have dogs for many thousands of years.

As our forebears multiplied and spread, they continued to evolve, but at
an accelerated rate because now they lived in tiny isolated groups
separated by tens or hundreds or even thousands of miles.  New human
subtypes started to emerge.  An early subgroup were the Veddas, who
probably evolved in Srilanka and constituted the first step on the long
path towards the modern European.  Both Veddas and Negritos have survived
into historic times wherever their forests have remained undisturbed, the
main differences between them being that the Veddas are slightly taller
and have wavy instead of frizzy hair.

Two ancient Greek texts mention "fish eaters" living in caves at various
points along the East African - South Asian coast, but these accounts fail
to provide accurate physical descriptions.  However it is known that
Negritos were living in limestone caves in Malaya during ancient times,
and that modern Negritos often shelter in caves during storms in South
Thailand.

For the purposes of this book, I have dared assume that the original human
"mainstream" was Negrito, but in this I may not be the first.  In 1880,
Sir W.  H.  Flower proposed that all the Negroid types of Africa and
Melanesia may have been descended from Negritos.  Yet to my knowledge no
one else has ever dared suggest the same for honest white men!  It is
currently supposed that the first branching to occur among modern humans
was a split between the Khoisan, or Hottentot Bushmen of Africa and the
rest of us.  Maybe the Negritos branched off the Khoisan line instead of
the other way round, but because of the persistence of the Negrito type in
so many places throughout southern Asia, I will assume that the Khoisan
branched off the Negrito line instead.  After that it is difficult to
understand precisely what happened in Africa.  The Veddas of Srilanka must
have branched off early on, but the Australian Aborigines may have
branched before them.  It is also difficult to determine all that happened
in Melanesia and even more so in Indonesia.    All we know is that our
forebears must have known how to build good canoes, else they would not
have reached Australia.

The first permanent Australian Negrito settlements may have been in the
rain forests of northern Queensland, where they were living until well
into the 20th century.  There the forests would have provided them with
their usual habitat, while the Great Barrier Reef would have provided
ample marine resources.  But Australia also afforded a completely
different kind of environment, namely vast deserts, and great spaces in
which to mutate and adapt, and so the "Australian Aborigine" race began.

Charles Darwin wrote of sexual selection, but usually as something
exercised by the female of a species.  In humans this may have worked the
other way around.

I have not been among Australian Aborigines living near Negrito
settlements, but people in the Moluccan islands, where I spent my
childhood, had a pejorative name for anyone who looked Negrito and had
frizzy hair.  A favorite insult for any such person was, "Papua!"  So I
would assume that similar things may have occurred between Australian
Aborigines and their Negrito neighbors.  Why this should be so is hard to
imagine, but it appears that any new type of human being springing from
the original Negrito substrate will instinctively despise the Negrito, and
that the further removed a human female can get from the original Negrito
form, the more desirable she becomes.

While these things were happening in Australia, other Negrito peoples took
up residence in Melanesia.  We know that humans have been in Melanesia for
a very long time because of the great genetic diversity to be found among
its human inhabitants.  It is therefore probable that many mutations and
mutations upon mutations happened in Melanesia with the same demographic
results: mutated subgroups of humans living alongside Negrito settlements
and eventually encroaching upon them.

Melanesia is much like Africa in that a very high level of human genetic
diversity has occurred but the general population retains a varying degree
of similarity to the original Negrito inhabitants.  And like Africa,
Melanesia has exported human types far removed from the original Negrito
type.  The most important human subgroup to come out of Melanesia is
probably the Austronesian race.  The identity of the original Austronesian
homeland has long been a subject of heated debate, and anthropologists
have generally favored Asia as prime candidate.  But it is well known that
hundreds of Austronesian languages are spoken throughout Melanesia, and
that by all kinds of Melanesians of lesser or greater affinity to the
original Negrito type.

There are two main Austronesian subgroups in the Pacific: the Micronesians
and the Polynesians.  The latter are probably the farthest from the
original Negrito type, and despise anything that looks Negrito.  On
Rennell Island, for example, the Polynesian population refers to the
Negroid population of the Solomons as "Tonga Hitsi," and the Polynesian
inhabitants of the Mortlock Islands of PNG feel debased because they are
ruled by "black people."  And I would assume that given a choice, most
Polynesian men would choose a Polynesian, Chinese, or European as mate
rather than anything resembling Negrito.  I am writing this without the
slightest feeling of racial bias, but only with a sense of amazement at
how it all works--as if there were an unwritten law against marrying back
into the original mainstream.

The Micronesians are a bit harder to figure out.  They speak various
Austronesian languages, but people familiar with the languages spoken by
negroid peoples in places like the Moluccas will remark a strong
similarity in overall sound patterns.  Also, whereas "mainstream"
Austronesian languages tend to be disyllabic, Micronesian languages
exhibit a monosyllabic tendency.  And finally there is the matter of the
epicanthic fold.  How can people who speak Austronesian languages that
have a Melanesian sound to them tend towards monosyllabic words and
exhibit the epicanthic eye fold?  Monosyllabic languages and epicanthic
eye folds are associated with East Asia: not Melanesia.  Could it be that
the "east Asian" type has its roots in Micronesia, or is it just that
people from east Asia have come to Micronesia?

The skeletons of small humans have recently been discovered in Micronesia,
and these may shed further light on the subject.

Some interesting examples of how races change over time with a bias away
from the Negrito form are the kings of Egypt, who were originally black
African but became progressively whiter and whiter as the ages wore on.
 Another example are the Sultans of Ternate, who seem to have originally
been black Papuan, but are now light-colored Austronesian.  And this may
be true of whole tribes, such as the Tobelo, who have Austronesian skin
and an epicanthic eye fold but speak what is apparently a Papuan language.
 How did this happen?  "White thighs," as one frustrated Papuan woman has
aptly put it.  There is simply no substitute in the region for the
non-Negrito whiteness of Mongoloid thighs!

An extreme example are the Tomori, of Sulawesi Island.  Their name is
almost certainly derived from the Polynesian, "Tsau Maori," meaning "Maori
People," and yet they look much more like modern Japanese than
Polynesians.  Again we must be witnessing the work of white thighs over
the millennia.

Indonesia is an interesting case study because as one moves from northwest
to southeast skin color keeps getting darker and darker.  This is indeed
an invasion from the Mongoloid north--or is it?  It appears to be an
invasion that is in progress as I write this.  Unlike the scenario I have
described for India, it is not an evolutionary progression from Negrito to
white European but an invasion of the Mongoloid strain into the
Austronesian and Melanesian strongholds of the past.  The Mongoloid
Javanese have taken over everything and subjugated all of Sulawesi,
Maluku, and West Papua into abject submission, mostly thanks to their US
and Australian backers.  And yet it could be the other way round.  It
could be that the Melanesian type is slowly evolving towards Austronesian
and thence onwards towards the Mongoloid type of East Asia.  More research
is needed.

The women most preferred in the world today are probably white Europeans
or Arabs or North Indians, Polynesians, and silky haired East Asians, all
of whom are about as far as one can get away from the original Negrito
female form.  So what does this tell us about the future of mankind?  Look
for these kinds of human to predominate by means of sexual selection.
Nature will allow no reversion.  For better or for worse, there is no
turning back.

And yet I think we need a word of warning.  Male mating preference seems
to move us ever further off from the original Negrito form, but it is not
enough to create for us the best of future worlds.  Female intuition is
one of the most important forces in nature, and it is a terrible thing to
trifle with, yet people continue to do so all over the world.  As I
traveled eastwards from New Guinea into the Solomon Islands, I was
surprised by a series of events that showed a clear line of demarkation
between peoples who "kept their women under control" and those whose
strong traditions demanded female freedom.  The Polynesians can claim some
of the finest physical forms in the modern world, but they do not buy and
sell their daughters.  Instead, the woman is free to make her choice of
mate.  In fact the Austronesians may be the best example of just how badly
deliberate tampering with the genome instead of allowing free reign to
sexual selection can make things go wrong.  The Buru people are an
Austronesian folk who practise a form of female slavery in which women are
forced to marry the men who have contracted to purchase them, sometimes
before they are even born.  Unlike the tall, powerfully built Polynesians,
Buru people are dwarfish, the menfolk averaging no more than about 5' 2"
high, and often poorly formed if not downright ugly.  Another prime
example of the benefits of allowing free reign to female intuition are the
Vikings of the European north.  We need to make up our minds once and for
all to put a swift end to every form of the coersion of young girls and
women throughout the world, which is still a major problem in many
regions.

"The whole of the common characteristics with which heredity endows the
individuals of a race constitute the genius of the race." --Gustave le
Bon.

Another important thing to consider is behavioral modification, be it
deliberate or unconscious.  As Darwin pointed out, behavior is governed by
both instinct and conditioning.  Domestic chicks are not afraid of cats
and dogs, but chicks hatched by domestic hens from the eggs of wild fowl
ARE.  Of course instinctual behavior is not everything.  We may walk into
a restaurant when we are hungry and feel a sudden urge to grab somebody's
steak, but we don't do it because of our conditioning.  Yet we do struggle
with our various urges, sometimes with more success and sometimes with
less.  It may be impossible, as an example, for a kleptomaniac to resist
the urge to steal.

Governments are dangerous because they have the power to artificially
modify human behavior, and these modifications can get encoded into our
genes.  It is the overall tendency of any race to maximally indulge all of
its instincts at every opportunity, so it is of paramount importance that
we stop governments from forming bad habits before these have a chance to
hard-wire themselves into the human genome.  A major problem is the old
trick of corruption, which can quickly become endemic under any system
with more than sufficient power, and which, after many generations of
cultivation under Imperial majesties, now continues to plague modern
China.  Another is the disastrous pattern of military violence and the
ingrained instinct to make war over trivial provocations.

In the 19th century, naturalists and philosophers like Wallace and Bates
wrote of the temperaments marking various peoples and le Bon wrote of the
"genius" of races.  This is because after hundreds of generations, the
human genome adapts to fit its environment, not only physically but
psychologically as well--just like the case of the domesticated chicks
that show no fear of cats or dogs.  Behavioral patterns, when continued
long enough, can become a part of the genome.  Democrasies have worked in
the West, but elsewhere people are governed by other instincts developed
over millennia of natural and sexual selection, and these instincts may
not be conducive to democrasy.  Instinct is not everything, and it can be
overridden by training, and yet there is a natural tendency for people to
revert back into the instinctual patterns with which they find themselves
most comfortable and damn the consequences.  Christianity has also worked
in the West, but often fails among non-European races to the consternation
of Western missionaries.  Good behavioral patterns can be internalized
just like bad ones, but the process may require a span of generations.  So
we need to think carefully and clearly about what are governments and
institutions are doing to us at a subconscious level and modify them to
produce the kind of human being we want for the future instead of just
letting them modify us.

Government handouts are especially dangerous because they stay the hand of
natural evolution.  For example, continued welfare payments may influence
societies away from self reliance, good bonding, loyalty, etc., and result
in strong instincts for bad moral behavior.

Interfering with bank management may encourage people to make loans they
know they cannot afford, and then bank bail-outs may reward the culture of
cleverness, large-scale dishonesty, and various forms of government
sanctioned white-collar crime.

To encapsulate what I have just said as a philosophical principle, the
lesson is this: The world is made up of various extremely complex
automated systems which we can safely influence in trivial ways, but with
which any serious meddling may invite disaster.  Sexual selection is one
of these: take away the element of female intuition and your race may
shrivel up into complete inconsequentiality.  Economics is another:
eliminate the "invisible hand" and you may end up with Communist-style
economic collapse.  The danger with government is that people in power are
not selected on the basis of their ability to understand complex systems,
power makes them believe they know everything, and they tend to disrupt
the workings of well-oiled machinery on a large scale.  I could give you
many more examples, but I will only add this: Cut down one tree and you
may be able to build a good canoe from it, but cut down all the rain
forests of Planet Earth and you court cataclysmic disaster.

So are the Negritos really finished?  Everyone seems to despise them, and
everyone seems Hell bent on destroying their natural habitat and settling
them in villages as fast as they can if not sooner.  But I ask you this
question: Is it not possible that from this same raw material other
wondrous productions might yet be derived?  Evolution is impossible
without variation, and the smaller the range of variation, the lower the
expectation of evolutionary advance.  We have wiped out Homo erectus and
Homo neanderthalensis and Homo floresiensis: must we be the only human
type left alive on this planet?  The Negritos and their rain forests are a
fine-tuned machine.  Tweak it a little and it may survive, but meddle with
it as we have been doing and risk destroying the very future of life on
this planet.  I say that protecting mountain gorillas is of paramount
importance, but that protecting Negrito habitat and life style may be yet
many times MORE important.  Allowing our less educated brothers to destroy
earth habitat and the living prototypes of all mankind in the name of
political correctness is like shooting the human race in the foot.  Surely
future generations looking back from a planet of monocultures will see us
as a people perfectly willing to pollute, to trash our environment, and to
kill others for oil, but (except for a few tree huggers) completely
unwilling to do anything for Planet Earth.

Precisely how far the Negritos may have ranged into the Pacific is
unknown.  Did they reach Tasmania by sea or by land?  Who are the little
people about whom are spun the Hawaiian myths of the Menehune, and the
many other myths about small people in the Pacific and Indian oceans?  As
far as I know, no serious search has ever been conducted for Menehune
remains in Hawaii despite the fact that Hawaiian oral literature treats
them as quite real, and the fact that they are mentioned in an 1820 Kauai
census.  This is a mistake that should be rectified.

And why am I bothering to write about this?  In 1975, Annette
Laming-Empiraire found A fossil in a cave in Brazil which was later
discovered to be (you guessed it) Negrito.  Of course our busy
anthropologists immediately got to work spinning tales of earlier
crossings of the land bridge across the Bering Straight, but does anybody
really expect me to believe that a tiny black people adapted for life in
tropical jungles would cross some land bridge in Beringia?  Not hardly.
 Here is what we do know: The Negritos had the nautical expertise to sail
to Australia from East Africa over 60 thousand years ago.  They and their
ancient remains are always found near the water, and never far inland
except maybe in Brazil.  And how do we know that they weren't just
following coastlines?  Because they were in the Andaman Islands over 60
thousand years ago, and there is certainly no land bridge to that place.
 Early Negroid remains have also been unearthed on Madagascar, and
attributed to Bantus.  Did the Bantus and their descendents settle half
the Pacific and Indian Oceans, or am I missing something important?

It is interesting to notice how throughout Southeast Asia and into the
Indian Ocean wherever Austronesian people have been, there Negritos have
been before them and tend to be found surviving among them.  If for no
other reason, then for this reason alone the Hawaiian Menehune tales ought
to be taken seriously and investigations ought to be made.  In order to
understand the spread of early modern humans, we need to know how far the
Negritos got into the Pacific and whether they sailed across the Pacific
to South America.

I would suppose that America has been discovered by Africans more than
once.  The Olmec heads of Central America are almost certainly Negroid,
indicating that not only did Africans reach America, but that they became
very powerful once they got there.  But these later arrivals must not be
confused with Luzia (the ancient Brazilian fossil) which is far older, and
may belong to a Negrito maritime culture that stopped ranging over long
distances between 10 and 20 thousand years ago.

Let us now consider the subcontinent of India.  It is supposed that the
people of the Andaman Islands got there many thousands of years ago.  I
will simply assume that this must have happened during that first wave of
exploration that ended in places like Australia and Melanesia and maybe
South America.  The important thing is that the original inhabitants of
the Andaman Islands are still alive, and they are Negritos, and they
arrived there many thousands of years ago.  I will also assume that the
ancestors of the Vedda people of Srilanka were descended from the same
people--just another group of negritos.   And I will assume that at the
time of the original push out of Africa, there were Negrito people all
along the southern coasts of Asia.  In fact I will assume that with the
possible exception of some Homo erectus or Homo floresiensis populations,
Negritos were the Only people living along the southern coasts of Asia.
Today there are very few Vedda people left, and these are probably
thoroughly mixed with outsiders, but the earliest European descriptions of
them seem to imply a Negrito-like people--black hunters living in the
forest by means of bows and arrows.

But to summarize, on Srilanka, at the very southern tip of the Indian
subcontinent, there were once black Veddas, and as one moved northwards
through India, one might pass through many regions inhabited by Veddoid,
or Vedda-like peoples.  But the farther north one proceeded, the lighter
would become the skins of the inhabitants, and the more of them would
speak Indo-European languages, until at last one might reach the Punjab,
where the people were almost identical to Europeans except for a slight
swarthiness in color.

So what happened?  Indian folklore would have it that the god-like Aryans
came down from the north and civilized black India, and most
anthropologists would concurÀthat India was invaded by an "Indo-Aryan"
race.  Maybe so, but raids and invasions keep coming and going from and to
all directions, so this may not mean much.  What is definite and clear is
that the farther one moves northwards from the Andaman Islands and
Srilanka, the further the people get from any resemblance to Negritos and
the more "European" they become.  So was India REALLY invaded by godlike
Aryans from the north, or is India simply the crucible in which European
races were formed?

To seek more light on this subject, let us return to the Middle East.  Is
there any example of genetic diversity and gradation in the Middle East as
we have found in India?  The answer is an unequivocal NO.  With the
possible exception of a few Negritos or veddoids living along the coasts
of Yemen, The Middle East contains only fully developed Indo-European and
Negro types.

So I think it is only natural that I suspect India as the most ancient
genetic laboratory, where contrary to myth and accepted belief, instead of
modern European types moving downwards from some mythical greater Aryan
race, they actually spring from the kind of people now found only in the
Andaman Islands.  In other words, their ancestors were people who sailed
to their coasts from Africa after the Toba eruption and settled in the
south, then slowly evolved towards the European type as they spread
northwards across the climactic gradations of India, steadily mutating and
sexually preferring partners maximally different from their original
Negrito forebears until they reached maximum distance from the Negrito
type in the European formÀof human being.  This hypothesis completely
explains the whole process.  White Europeans did NOT get to Europe through
the Middle East, but were formed in the genetic crucible of India and then
traveled northwestwards to occupy Europe, hence the common IndoEuropean
language and racial type.

This idea may seem far-fetched, but a perfect example of migration from
India across Eurasia to Europe is that last wave of migration, namely the
Gypsies.  If the Gypsies did it, then probably many others did it before
them.

In the Levant we have the witness of the Hebrews and the Phoenicians, both
of whom claimed an origin north of the persian gulf in the region we call
Sumer: not in Africa.  And it is now known that Sumer was in regular
trading contact with the Harappa civilization of the Indus Valley.  Thus
we have an unbroken link from India to the eastern Mediterranean from
prehistoric and earliest historic times with migrations moving westwards
and not eastwards.

And as for the universal esthetic and sexual preference that has been a
central theme of this chapter, to paraphrase the NPR technology podcast
for the week beginning October 18, 2009: "According to okaycupid.com
co-founder and CEO Sam Yagan, Black women are the most slighted, whereas
Whites of both sexes are the most sought after.  Indian men do poorly, but
Indian women do well.  Black women respond the most to incoming messages
but get the fewest responses to their messages."  Is it not true that of
all modern women, Black women most closely resemble female Negritos, and
does this not bear out my hypothesis?

Of course this does not mean that the sexual selection away from the
Negrito type will work every time or at all times.  There will be many
exceptions to the general bias.  Stanley probably cohabited with a Pygmy
mistress while in Africa, but did not bring her home to America because to
do so would have been an unforgivable affront to the horrific racial
prejudices of his time.  And there are many more examples including the
heroine of the opera, Aida.  For true beauty is never only skin deep, no
matter how much skin color or physical form may conspire to obscure it,
because true beauty can only flow from the heart.

I will call this hypothesis (apparently original with me) the "Across
India" hypothesis.  It states that northern Europeans did NOT get there
from the Middle East, but from India, which is the cradle of the
IndoEuropean race, and proud, white northern Europeans spring ultimately
from a population of pygmies who sailed to Srilanka from East Africa!

This hypothesis rather neatly explains the origins of Africans, Indians,
Australians, and Indo-Europeans, but it fails to deal adequately with
Mongoloid East Asians and Native Americans.  Like the East Indians who
have always assumed an infusion of Aryan blood from the north to explain
the north-south racial gradation seen across India, for most of my life I
have assumed a Mongoloid invasion from the north and northwest for
Indonesia.  But now that I have written of the Negrito to Caucasoid racial
gradation across India, I cannot deny the Negrito to Mongoloid racial
gradation that exists from Melanesia northwestwards across Indonesia to
East Asia.  If a Negrito to Austronesian to Mongoloid evolution has
happened in this direction, then we may have what is more or less the
final description of how all of mankind has evolved from the original
Negrito mainstream in the last 60 thousand or so years.  To confirm or
refute this hypothesis we must now await the results of further genetic
analysis.

I will conclude this chapter with the following words by Charles Darwin:

"When we compare the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our
older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes
us is, that they generally differ more from each other than do the
individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature.  when the
organisation has once begun to vary, it generally continues varying for
many generations.  if the same cause were to act uniformly during a long
series of generations on many individuals, all probably would be modified
in the same manner.  If the new variety were successful in its battle for
life, it would slowly spread from a central district, competing with and
conquering the unchanged individuals on the margins of an ever-increasing
circle."

Chapter 8.  Why are we really so different from apes?

The last chapter was written before my 69th birthday, just before which I
made one of the most remarkable discoveries of my entire life, only to
learn that someone else had figured it out 81 years before me.  What was
it?  I will explain in the following paragraphs.

Science is the pursuit of truth.  Something either IS some way or else it
ISN'T.  The relativist exists in an out-of-focus universe of his/her own
making.  Nothing is true or false, but only true or false depending on how
you look at it.  This may sound smart, and considerably "wiser than thou,"
but in fact it is nonsense.  Things really ARE out there, and will
continue to be or not to be no matter what we may do or how hard we focus
our minds, and science is the effort to determine what really IS and what
really IS NOT--no IFs or BUTs.

Understanding this principle is something like understanding computers.
 It may take awhile for a new student of computer science to realize that
it is really possible to create a system in which the value of any one
among multiple billions of bits can be determined to be either off or on
(a 0 or a 1) with 100% reliability, because as human beings we are
creatures of fuzzy rather than precise logic.  In our world, things tend
to be more or less so, but never 100% so.  An archer may hit the bull's
eye, but if we were to take down the target and carefully measure, we
would find that no matter how "dead center" the arrow may seem to have
struck, it will always be found to be just a little off.

Many people are uncomfortable with this binary on-or-off kind of reality,
but if we can understand and apply it, it will open up a whole new world
of verifiable facts and provide insights impossible to us before.

So let us apply this understanding to some of the many popularized
conjectures about early man.  For example, many people believe that during
one time in our past we were able to build rafts but were too dumb to
build canoes.  Is this true or false? because we know it can't be both
ways.  What does a man need to know to build a seagoing raft?  Let us
consider that greatest of all insults to the native peoples of the
Pacific, Thor Heyerdahl's "Kon Tiki."  Thor seems to have believed that
early men in the Pacific were smart enough to build rafts but not smart
enough to build canoes.  So what does it take to build a raft like Kon
Tiki?  First of all a knowledge of woods and wood densities.  Then the
ability to measure in order to select trees of more or less identical
girth and to cut them to the same lengths.  But, oops, before even cutting
them down, there would have to be a high level of stoneworking knowledge,
because people don't just grab any old rock and use it to cut down great
balsa logs.  Then there would need to be a pretty thoroughgoing knowledge
of plant fibers and knotting techniques, else no matter how big the logs,
the action of the waves would soon rip them apart.  And we have not even
mentioned the construction of some kind of stout cabin to protect our
ancient sailors, much less the sophisticated knowledge of textiles
required to make a great sail.  And then we could go on and on about the
knowledge of winds and currents and how to keep headed in the same
direction, etc.  So it is easy to say that primitive people built rafts,
but very hard to imagine once we get into any level of detail.

Now let us consider the canoe.  First of all the ancestral human would
have to observe that concave vessels float.  Now this is a major hurdle
for landsmen, but every child who has played in the shallows quickly sees
how this works.  Coconut shells float in the water.  Seashells float in
the water.  Egg shells float in the water.  And probably most important of
all, palm spathes float in the water, and have an elongate shape that
makes them able to move smoothly and quickly in one direction but not in
other directions.  Then the early human would need to know how to carve
wood, but he/she would have to know the same thing to build rafts.  Then
the ancestral human would have to find some way of fastening a float
alongside his/her canoe, but he/she would have to do the same thing with a
raft--he/she would have to know how to lash logs firmly in place beside
one another.

So what is our conclusion?  If anybody is smart enough to build a raft,
then it is very hard to see how that person could not be smart enough to
build a canoe, and canoes are much better than rafts.  Rafts can be built
quickly, and with less work, but that is about their only advantage, and
these are exactly the considerations in the rafts of today.  Soif we
really believe in the scientific method, then we must conclude that humans
became capable of building both rafts and canoes at about the same time.
The idea that for some thousands of years humans were able to build rafts
but too stupid to build canoes must therefore be a myth people have
believed, not because they have bothered to think the thing through, but
because this is what they have been told.  Why?  Obviously because it fits
so neatly into the European idea of incremental progress, which "just has
to be true.".

Okay, one cockamamie idea down and a thousand to go!  Now for the "dumb
drifter" idea.  At one time humans were smart enough to get aboard rafts
but too stupid to see where they were going, so they just spread by
drifting, true or false?  Humans are an animal with two eyes facing
forward for precise distance and direction calculation.  Is it really
possible to believe that any such creature could ever have been unclear as
to direction or destination?  Barring traumatic brain injury, therefore,
the answer to the "dumb drifter" idea must surely be FALSE!

Next brilliant hypothesis: Early man drifted to places like Flores and
Australia by clinging to trees washed out to sea during storms.  Really?
How fast can a tree trunk move through the water, what says it has to end
up even close to Australia, and how long can a naked human last in the
water?  Some of these ideas clearly have not been thought through.  And
what about the problem of a mate?  Will our hypothetical early Australian
mate with him/herself?  I have heard this kind of thing many times, but I
have yet to hear of any case in all of human history where something like
this really happened.

So let us begin this discussion by observing that (1) early man paddled in
canoes, and (2) early man did not spread by dumb drifting.

Now consider the facts:

1.  Negritos or humans of the "Negroid" type are found to be the original
modern human inhabitants of all subtropical and tropical regions of Planet
Earth.

2.  These early "negroids" got to many places it was never possible to
reach except by sea.

3.  These "Negroids" didn't drift there on rafts or uprooted trees.

4. "Negroids" (modern humans) were not the only species that paddled
canoes.  Homo floresiensis must have paddled canoes to reach Flores.

If we consider these facts carefully, then the only conclusion we can draw
is that modern man has been paddling canoes since well before he/she ever
became modern man!

So far so good, and I have pretty much covered all of this ground in the
previous chapter.  But how can this really be, and how could early modern
man possibly reach Flores, Australia, and South America without crossing
over to these places along vanished land bridges?  There is no apparent
answer till we stop to consider one additional fact: With the exception of
a few spots on their bodies, humans are devoid of hair.  Why?  Is this not
because although fur provides comfort on land, it can kill you in the sea?
 When a hairless creature gets doused with sea water, he/she can quickly
wipe it off and get dry again, whereas a furry animal would suffer for
hours afterwards and tend to develop diseases that thrive in wet
fur--especially salty wet fur.

This line of reasoning leads directly to the following shocking
conclusion: We have been dead wrong, early man was NOT a creature of the
land, but of the sea.

So let's test this idea by means of our handy-dandy scientific method:

Observe: Humans have no fur.

Hypothesize: If humans have no fur, then maybe they got that way by living
in/on the sea.

Test: Is there any concrete evidence that can support this hypothesis?
Yes.  Early man reached Flores, Australia, and South America, all
apparently by sea.

But we know that for a fundamental physiological innovation to evolve and
spread takes much more than, say, a couple of dips in the saltwater,
therefore early man must have been living on and in the sea for a very
long time.  Could this be true?

Scientific method:

Observe: Man has this strange hairlessness not shared with other primates
but associated with the sea.  Many marine mammals are hairless, but very
few on the land, and none of these are primates.

Hypothesize: To become hairless in this fashion, an animal would have to
spend many generations in the sea, during which time other, less visible
adaptations would occur as well.

Test: Very true, and these have been carefully illuminated by the
proponents of what has become known as the "Aquatic Ape Hypothesis," which
states roughly the following:

1.  Unlike most land animals, humans are comparatively hairless like
aquatic mammals.

2.  Humans drink and waste huge amounts of water whereas true land mammals
conserve water.

3.  Land animals can typically drink large quantities of water at one time
whereas humans tend to drink small amounts.

4.  Humans do not concentrate their urine like typical land mammals.

5.  Human bodies waste sodium.

6. truly savannah-adapted animals do not have much subcutaneous fat.
Humans have lots of subcutaneous fat, which insulates them against heat
loss just as in marine mammals.     Humans are by far the fattest
primates, with ten times as many fat cells as would be expected in an
animal of the same size.

7.  As with aquatic mammals, human fat tends to accumulate just under the
skin, and not about the internal organs as with land mammals.  Human fat
clings to the skin like that of aquatic mammals, whereas the fat of land
animals clings to their internal organs.

8.  Human infants are born fat whereas the infants of other primates are
born lean.

9.  Humans are the only mammals that habitually walk on two legs.  Land
animals will walk on two legs in deep water.  In humans, the hands that
apes have on their legs have evolved into feet, indicating that they have
not been used to hang onto tree limbs for a long time.  They also have a
flipper-like shape better adapted for swimming.

10.  Humans have control of their breathing and can hold their breath.

11.  Unlike other ape species, human bodies are gracefully streamlined
like aquatic creatures.

12.  Human noses are equipped with a hood that keeps out splashed water.
This hood can also be pinched to equalize air pressure in the ears during
deep dives.

13.  Humans can give birth safely under water.  Human babies won't breathe
until they are removed from the water.

And the list goes on.

One of the strong arguments for the aquatic ape hypothesis has been that
big brains cannot evolve in the absence of a supply of omega-3 fatty acids
which are abundant in the sea but not in freshwater creatures.  It is also
true that humans require a steady supply of iodine in their diet, else
they become diseased with goiter.

Observe: To remain healthy, humans require at least two substances from
the sea.

Hypothesize: Early man must have been a creature of the seacoasts.

Test: He/she truly was.  Negritos, which are apparently the earliest
modern-human type, are generally found living near the sea and ancient
Negrito remains are found in caves near the sea.

I have only given part of the evidence here, and yet from what I have
written it would seem clear that early man was always a creature of the
sea, and not only that, but early man paddled and sailed vast distances
across the deep sea and settled along shorelines.

Observe: Ancient "Negroid" remains have now been found in Europe, Asia,
Australia, and South America.

Hypothesize: All of these "Negroid" remains are probably just Negritos who
made it to all of these places in the first wave of human expansion.

Test: To my knowledge no one has ever tested this clearly common-sense
hypothesis.

If I may be allowed to predict and conjecture, then I will say this: The
first modern humans were Negritos, therefore all modern humans have
Negrito blood in their past.  To these Negritos, it was nothing to sail
straight across wide patches of water, because they were partially adapted
to the sea.  I say "partially adapted" because it is obvious that they
share many adaptations with modern sea mammals, but they did not have time
to complete this transition, or maybe avoided this transition by
developing big brains soon enough to start building canoes, which might
have kept them from having to complete the transition to a marine species
as other mammals have done in order to survive.

In prehistoric times, large predators made Eurasia and Africa very
dangerous places for large apes.  The only way to survive was to stand and
fight big cats like baboons do on the savannah, to swing up into the
trees, or to get into the sea.  Freshwater streams and lakes may have been
an option, but these were infested with crocodiles and gigantic pythons
beside which the danger of sharks was trivial.  So the two best options
for safety for any great ape was always either the trees or the saltwater.
All great apes were originally adapted for the trees, and animals change
very slowly.  They had four hands instead of two, and this is why they
were said to belong to the "quadramana."  But for some reason or other,
one group of these quadramana started spending more and more time in the
sea until finally they started preferring the sea to the trees.  They
learned to walk upright in the water, and the hands on their lower limbs
no longer served much purpose, so they evolved into feet with vestigial
digits.

The aquatic ape theorists believe that this move into the water occurred
about 7 million years ago and ended about 5 million years ago at the time
from which we start finding prehuman remains on the land.  At the same
time, they point out that these early prehuman remains are always found
near some body of water.  I would argue instead that humans remained
creatures of the sea until well after the first diaspora of early man and
continue to be creatures of the sea in various parts of the world to this
day.  Among these people of the sea are the Bajaus, who pass their
newborns under the keels of their canoes as a rite of passage.  Early man
was definitely a creature of canoes and the sea, and this is how he spread
himself to all the warm-water coasts of the world.  He could never have
reached Flores or Australia or South America except for this fact.

But once our Negrito forebears had become established along the coastlines
of Asia, they began to spread inland, and this is how we finally evolved
into US.  As they spread inland, various groups of them became
isolated--first by mountain ridges, and then by tribal warfare.  How they
managed to get enough omega-3 fatty acids and iodine can be explained by
trade, which seems to have flourished even among warlike peoples.  Trade
must have been necessary for survival, and we know that trade leads not
only to physical prosperity, but also to government, taxation, and
organization.  So as our forebears moved inland from the sea, they quickly
became intellectually more sophisticated, while by living in small,
comparatively isolated groups, their physical evolution was accelerated by
means of genetic drift and the founder effect.  And just as we might
expect, the Negrito brothers they left behind did not evolve as quickly,
but remained pretty much the same.

I begin to feel uneasy as I describe this process because its details
still need to be worked out, and will probably not be worked out
completely for a very long time--if ever.  Yet I will point out one
interesting phenomenon.  After thousands of years, another maritime people
sprang up from no-one-knows-where, and ranged almost everywhere the
Negritos had ranged before them.  They reached the coasts of eastern
Africa and western South America.  The only place where they may have
failed to penetrate as far as the Negritos did was to the eastern side of
South America, namely to Brazil, where Negrito remains have been found in
the Lagoa Santa Caves.  This leads me to suspect that the Austronesians
may have arisen not by evolving as they trekked inland from the sea, but
as a natural continuation of the evolution of the Negritos in their own
element, the sea.  Many prominent anthropologists now call the
Austronesians "Mongoloid" people, but I think this is because they are
racially blind, or simply because they have never lived among true
Austronesian people.  Austronesians are NOT Mongoloid, Southern Mongoloid,
or any other kind of Mongoloid.  They are a distinct human type.  But if
the Austronesians did evolve from the Negritos as sea people, then it may
be that the Mongoloid race evolved from some Austronesian prototype
instead of directly from their own branch of the Negrito substrate.  This
hypothesis is worth testing for several reasons, not the least of which is
language, but I will leave the matter at that.

The scope of this hypothesis is vast because it covers the entire
prehistory of modern man, and I have only been able to scratch the surface
here.  It is a hypothesis of such power, and with so much supporting
evidence, that it might as well be considered fact until (if possible)
some better theory is discovered.  Archeologists and anthropologists ought
to just stop their whimpering over old, phony, outdated ideas, embrace it,
and get on with the huge task of filling in all of its many wonderful
details.

Meantime it is only right that those who have denounced Lamarckism should
fear this hypothesisbecause of the seemingly magical convergent evolution
it implies.  It raises the spector of a set of preprogrammed switches that
get turned on when any land animal in general returns to the sea, and this
flies in the face of simple evolution by natural selection, upon which
some people insist as the only explanation for all evolution.  Such a set
of switches would also support at least two other competing hypotheses:
(1) antibeginningism, or the idea of a steady-state universe in which life
never had a beginning (see chapter 6), and (2) that of intelligent design.

In fact the universe is not simple but complex, and this complexity keeps
shattering simplistic theories and shoving us back to square one.  The
trick is never to become personally or financially involved in the defence
of any idea, no matter how elegant, because it is the defense of the
"purest" ideas and ideals that causes the most dastardly wars.  True
science must remain ever pure, and true scientists must remain ever ready
to drop any idea that turns out to be false, no matter how attractive it
seems.  A true scientist can never afford to become emotionally or
financially or religiously or politically or ideologically attached to any
one idea or set of ideas.

I did not come to the conclusion that our past was tied to the sea by
studying the aquatic ape hypothesis.  In fact I knew nothing about it
before I arrived at the same conclusion based on the evidence presented in
chapter 7 of this book.  What stuck in my head was the fact that Homo
floresiensis, which was not even our species, had evidently reached Flores
by sea.  To me this fact, when taken together with Negrito settlement
patterns, constituted irrefutable evidence that we had been a creature of
the sea before we were even us.  Then I started looking for biological
evidence for corroboration, and the first thing I thought of was fur, and
the "man can outlast any animal in the chase because he has no fur"
hypothesis that has been so popularized in recent years.  Could it be,
rather, that this furlessness was because fur is a disadvantage in water?
I used Google with such search terms as "hairlessness" and "hair," and
found that, yes, every single hairless land mammal I could find was
somehow associated with water except for a hairless mole andcertain
artificially bred hairless cats and dogs.   I was excited because the
facts said I was right, and I had hit upon something really big, but then
I found the aquatic ape hypothesis information, and was dismayed to learn
that the British biologist, Alister Hardy, had come to the same conclusion
81 years before based on an entirely different set of facts except for
hairless skin.

One of the search terms I remember using with Google was "pelagic
primate," and it could be that I had the "aquatic ape" appellation stuck
somewhere in the back of my head from reading "The Naked Ape" over 40
years ago--I simply don't know.  At any rate I think I shall call the
hypothesis outlined in this chapter by that name.  It will be the "Pelagic
Primate Hypothesis Of Human Evolution," or something like that.

So why a "Pelagic Primate Hypothesis" when the "Aquatic Ape Hypothesis"has
already been around for so long?  Two reasons: (1) the aquatic ape
hypothesis fails to tell us whether the aqua- of aquatic was saltwater or
fresh, and (2) because as solid as its supporting evidence surely is, it
fails to explain how an aquatic past fits into the big picture of modern
human prehistory.--It seems to end with Ardipithecus.

So I will now summarize this more comprehensive "Pelagic Primate"
hypothesis as follows:

About 7 million years ago, some kind of great ape started wading into
saltwater to avoid predators instead of climbing into trees.  By spending
more and more time in the sea, this animal eventually lost its lower hands
and started walking upright on two feet.  Its diet was high in iodine and
omega-3 fatty acids, so it became dependent on these substances, and
because of the omega-3, it was able to evolve a larger brain.  This large
brain then enabled it to develop stone tools and build canoes, and by
means of these canoes to spread out along the coastlines of the world and
to distant shores unreachable by land.  Wherever it left the sea, it
evolved quickly into new forms by means of genetic drift and the founder
effect, and the results of this ancient ocean migration and subsequent
land-based evolution is us, alias modern modern man.

The evidence for the "Pelagic Primate" hypothesis as stated above is so
robust that I believe the anthropologists and archeologists who are
ignoring it are doing so on borrowed time.  My prediction is that all of
the National Geographic articles presenting our savannah origins as fact
will someday read like so many fairy tales.

I dare not speculate on Homo erectus and/or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis
at this time.  They seem to have followed some other path, yet the main
difference between them and us may be something as seemingly trivial as
the use of canoes.  Maybe they were the ones who were able to build rafts
but just couldn't ever get smart enough to build canoes.  Too bad Thor
Heyerdahl had to make them white men, but maybe they really were, who
knows?

Chapter 9.  What is an automated system?

An automated system is a self-contained self-modifying pattern expressed
in some physical medium capable of supporting it.  Recall that in a
previous chapter (What is the universe?) we defined two kinds of pattern:
static and dynamic.  An automated system is the physical expression of a
dynamic pattern typically isolated from its environment by some kind of
barrier.

Living organisms are the most sophisticated kind of automated system we
know about, and may be the highest form of automated system in the
universe.  The most rudimentary living organisms are single cells
separated from their environment by lipid cell walls.  The nuclei of
eucaryotic cells are further separated from their protoplasm by some other
kind of membrane, and each organelle within the cell is separated from its
environment in a similar manner.  These isolating membranes apparently
tell us that each component thus separated is a system unto itself, so
that every multicellular organism is a vast system of many automated
systems, all isolated from each other yet all working in perfect harmony.

In higher animals, this process of isolation and the internal modeling of
dynamic patterns extends to the brain and what we call conscious
awareness.  The animal brain is encased in an isolating container of hard
bone.  Nothing gets into it except carefully structured signals from
peripheral organs, and nothing gets out of it except for carefully encoded
commands.

The first automated systems created by humans may have been such things as
snares.  In the design of a snare can be seen the most fundamental if-then
principle of logic.  "IF anything touches your trigger, THEN spring!" Such
automated systems could only do one thing, had no isolating shields to
protect them from their environment, and might be triggered by falling
fruit or even the wind.

The road from the snare to the modern computer is a long one that has been
thoroughly documented elsewhere, and one that would prove tedious to
describe here.  The important thing to notice is that in the modern
computer, for the first time, man has at his fingertips an automated
system that he can fully control.  The laptop is a collection of silicon
chips capable of modeling dynamic patterns.  These are encased in a box
that has a hardness and ruggedness similar to that of bone.  These design
similarities were apparently not deliberately copied from the animal
model, but instead show clearly how designs tend to converge when the
basic principles are the same, especially at this higher level of
sophistication.

Scientific method:

1. observe.  The more sophisticated the things we design, the more similar
they become to the productions of nature.

2.  Hypothesize.  At higher levels of sophistication, it becomes less and
less likely that more than one approach to a problem will work.

Test.  The best flying machines are not helicopters or balloons, but
winged just like birds.  Or, negatively: Just try to build an automated
system without isolating it from its environment and see how far you can
go.

Occam's Razor: If there are two ways of doing something and one is found
in nature while the other is not, then the one that is found in nature is
probably the better approach, and may even be the only possible approach
that will actually work.

So if a mind is a dynamic pattern, and a computer can be used to host any
kind of dynamic pattern we can imagine, can a mind be modeled on a
computer?  Quite probably so, but I will not invoke the scientific method
to prove this one because we still don't quite understand the patterns
that control such things as volition and emotion, therefore it is
impossible to say.  Many people believe that it may not be possible to
model such things as minds without quantum computers or else some other
kind of computer we have not even dreamed of.  But as yet we have not
nailed down any special quantum processes at work in biological brains, so
it is hard to believe that quantum computers would be good for anything
else but maybe to make computing faster.  We seem to have gotten the basic
hardware design.  It is the design of the dynamic pattern that we have
failed to apprehend--especially that element of pattern design that makes
biological systems capable of programming and reprogramming themselves.

Chapter 10.  Why dualism and free will are real.

By this time, you, the reader, ought to be starting to see why arguments
against dualism and free will are cute but nonsensical.  Why?  Because
just like a modern computer, the human brain provides a platform for the
modeling of sophisticated patterns in a way that is maximally independent
of the environment and the materials from which the said platform is
constructed.  Here is a recent "American Heritage Dictionary" definition
for "dualism:"

Dualism, n. (psychology) The view that there is a phenomenal distinction
between mental and physical processes.

So is there or is there not a phenomenal difference between mental and
physical processes?  Of course there is and always has been because one of
the fundamental characteristics of automated systems is isolation from the
environment and from pattern predetermination imposed by the materials
from which the automated system is built.  In other words our brains have
been specifically designed in such a way that the patterns they host (our
minds) are maximally independent of our bodies and our physical
environment.  Thus the mind is not determined by the physical pattern
assumed by the neurons of the brain, but the neurons of the brain have
been deliberately designed in such a way that THEY must conform to the
mind, which is an invisible pattern, just like the bits and bytes inside a
computer have been designed to assume the pattern of whatever program
happens to be running.

Of course in every animal mind there has to be some kind of kick-start
designed to get the ball rolling.  In some animals this preprogramming is
dominant--for example a baby deer can almost immediately walk.  But in the
human animal this kick-starting is clearly minimized in order to allow the
human mind a maximum of flexibility and independence from
predetermination.

And regards predetermination, I would challenge the deepest thinkers on
this subject, not to determine the next decision of a human mind, but only
to consistently predict the weather, and I predict that they will all
quickly fall flat upon their faces.

The truth is that inputs to the human mind are more diverse and subtle and
abundant than the meteorological data input to supercomputers attempting
to predict the weather, and so far no one has ever been able to predict
even the weather with 100% reliability, let alone what another human being
will think or doÀnext.  All we can do is observe and continue to make
those imprecise guesses that keep ending up in divorce.

Scientific method:

1.  Observe.  The human mind is maximally isolated from its host and
environment.  Under normal circumstances (in the absence of external
pressure, great pain, etc.) the brain does not control the mind, but is
rather designed in such a way that the mind can control IT.

2.  Hypothesize.  Although influenced by inputs from the environment, the
human mind is free to develop a will of its own that is more unpredictable
than the weather and to act in ways that may be exactly opposite to those
dictated by external pressures.

3.  Test.  Everybody knows this is true from abundant examples too
numerous and too obvious to be worth mentioning here.

The human mind is a world unto itself.  Under normal circumstances it can
thrive and become strong in the face of adversity and overcome
unimaginable obstacles, or it can shrivel into complete
inconsequentiality, depending entirely upon its own internal
patterns,Àwhich are always changing.  Too much adversity--pain, terror,
disease, and distress--can break down the isolation of the mind and
disrupt its smooth internal workings as an independent entity, and this is
why I said, "under normal circumstances."

Furthermore the human mind is an automated system of great power, and
surely better than any automated system man has ever yet devised.  For
this reason such popular notions as embodiment (the idea that the mind
can't really understand anything without having the body to do it and
doing it) are nothing but intellectual dead ends.  Children born without
legs have no difficulty understanding what it is to walk, and children
born without hands have no difficulty discussing hands and imagining how
hands work.  Why?  Because the human mind can imagine almost anything, and
this is why it is so easy for us to deceive ourselves and be deceived by
others.  I would contend that people who submit their minds to the
tamperings of others are fools, be it tampering by hypnosis or the voodoo
of religionÀor whatever.  The brain does not have a hard brain case for
nothing, and the mind isn't designed to work in isolation for nothing.
 The mind is capable of imagining and modeling the details of any number
of past lives, and this is why the doctrine of reincarnation is a farce.
 The mind is also perfectly capable of modeling encounters with Jesus or
the Buddha in seemingly infinite detail.  So knowing the power of the
mind, it is imperative that we handle it with care.

Yes, free will is real, and so is the dual universe, and we can prove it,
perhaps not a la Descartes, but as I have just done, so beware those who
would tell us otherwise.

Chapter 11.  What is language?

Language is a powerful tool in that it provides a window into the human
mind and what it is to be human.

Scientific method:

1.  Observe.  All humans use language.

2.  Hypothesize.  It is language that makes us really human.

3.  Test.  Done, and here is the QED and smoking gun:

Feral children are children who have not had the opportunity of free
interaction with other human beings during infancy.  Some feral children
have been found naked in the forest, where it has been assumed that they
were nursed and fed by some wild animal such as a wolf.  Others have been
found in prisons or cages built for them by their parents.  Myths about
feral children abound, for example the Roman myth about Romulus and Remus.
 But we are not interested in such stories.  What we want to know is
whether feral children who failed to master language can ever become fully
human, and the answer would seem to be NO.  Without going into the tedious
details of well-documented accounts, it appears that no feral child in
history has ever been fully "rehabilitated," which in this case means
"humanized."  No matter how hard people have tried to "help" them, they
have remained essentially sophisticated animals.

Nor is it even possible for most people to imagine anyone being fully
human without ever communicating, even if this communication were only the
gesturings of people who are blind, mute, and deaf.

So language makes us human.

1. observe.  It is well known that sign language is just as real a
language as speech.

2.  Hypothesize.  Words are notclusters of alphabetic characters or sounds
but patterns assumed in our brains.

3.  Test.  People use all forms of communicated messages to create words
which are strung into thoughts in their minds.

So words are not external symbols, such as things written or said, but
invisible patterns set up in our minds.

1.  Observe.  Kids can pick up any language.

2.  Hypothesize.  Language has not evolved one iota since the dawn of
humankind.

3.  Test.  The children of the native speakers of any language can readily
learn any other human language.  If language had evolved, then it would
now work differently in isolated groups of humans as a result of divergent
evolution.

So although people are evolving physically (your average Negrito male is
no longer able to kiss your average Norwegian female on the lips without
standing on a box), the internal workings of language are not evolving at
all (Negrito kids can still learn to speak Norwegian just as fluently as
real Norwegians).

1.  Observe.   The human linguistic apparatus is not evolving, and it can
be used to learn any human language.

2.  Hypothesize.  The internal code supporting all languages is the same.

3.  Test.  Can all languages be encoded using the same code?  Yes, and it
is being done on computers as I write this.  For more information, learn
about the theory of Panlingua, as discussed in my "Real ABCs of Language,"
http://panlingua.net/txt/pan.txt.

So words are soundless, invisible, and internal, and form the elements of
a universal internal code that can be used to encode any language.

1.  Observe.  All higher learning is encoded in words.

2.  Hypothesize.  Any idea can be expressed in words.

3.  Test.  No counter example.  Everything we know can be written down as
words, and this includes both knowledge AND the algorithms to process it
(both data and code).

Corollary: All intelligence is words.

So all life is intelligent and all intelligence is words, and this is how
the ancients could call God, the ultimate source of all life and
intelligence,  the "Utterance," or the "Word," once they had assumed this
being to be one.  But although this assumption (that God is one) may sound
and feel right, I have yet to see it proven.  It is easy to prove the
existence of a creator, but not easy to prove that there is only one.  At
present, the following is my best shot:

Occam's Razor: If one hypothesis postulates a single source for all life
and another hypothesis postulates multiple sources, and it is found that
all life is evolving from a single proto form, then it is more reasonable
to believe the first hypothesis.

Chapter 12.  What of the future?

Man is truly a wearisome animal.  First he believes that he lives at the
center of the universe.  Then he persists in believing that he is a
special creationÀthat has nothing to do with animals.  Then he lets go
that idea and clings to the belief that although he may have evolved, HE
is at the pinnacle of that process of evolution and can evolve no further.
 Then he lets go that one and clings to the idea that, yes, he may yet be
evolving, but     he must be the only intelligent being in the universe,
and he is certainly the only animal capable of using tools.  Then that one
gets smashed and all bets are off on just what he may become next.  Er, he
is the only animal that has ever had it within his power to destroy
himself.  Yep, that's it!  And so the madness continues.

The truth is that mankind is right in the middle of it (the process of
evolution) right now just as he was when he first left Africa over 60
thousand years ago.  There is nothing really special about him except for
this new thing called human intelligence which is associated with language
and speech and many forms of madness.  This thing is new.  Homo erectus
was already here some two million years ago, but the Negrito has only been
around for 60-120 thousand years.  Did Homo erectus have a mind?  Maybe,
but one thing is certain, Homo sapiens does, and it is deadly dangerous.
 With it Negritos can teach each other how to make bows and arrows that
can kill other primates at a distance, and pale white men can make jet
planes and atom bombs.  And yes, it is true, Homo sapiens is the only
species that can destroy himself--and practically everything else with
him.

So human intelligence and language, however they may work, are effective
and deadly dangerous and new.  Sometimes we see cats play with their
injured mice before they deliver the final pounce, but nothing has ever
come close to the inhumanity of man to man and to the very earth itself
and all life in it.  Yet instead of growing less deadly over time, the
human potential for destruction keeps rapidly increasing.  We see madmen
like Sadam Hussein gaining the reins of power--men who would set the whole
Indian Ocean ablaze without compunction if only they had enough oil--and
we tremble.  What does this mean, and what will become of us?

Yet while some of our intellectuals are busily proclaiming the end of
evolutionÀbecause we have now stepped out of the forest, America is
actively expunging certain atavistic types from the human genome.  Sadam
Hussein will now have no more offspring, nor will any of those struck down
by any of the over 7,000 drones the "CIA" is employing in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan.  We are going to have to get rid of certain
kinds of human beings once and for all before they destroy us and our
friends and, yes, our very planetÀitself.

So we find ourselves locked into a deadly race against unreasonable men
who are Hell-bent on destruction.  Their first and best weapon is the
penis, because no matter how one looks at it, it is the sheer size of the
human population that will kill us in the end if we do nothing.  They
cannot or will not understand that Earth's resources are limited, nor
would they care the least bit if they did.  And the most sinister and
difficult part of the problem is that this kind of individual is
everywhere among us like wild grass deliberately seeded among good wheat.
 It is the ancient parable of the wheat and the tares.  It is impossible
to weed them out without surrendering democrasy to dictatorship and
destroying all we have gained.

But there is another side to this story, and it is the fact that whereas
humans have become capable of ever greater violence, their propensity to
use violence has diminished.  Compare current levels of violence in
Europe, for example, with the horrific institutionalized violence of the
Roman empire.  Compare the current per capita violence in any US city with
what it was a mere 100 years ago.  Compare current levels of violence in
places like China with what they were 100 years ago.  It is obvious that
violence has been decreasing.  Why?  Because man is evolving, and human
intelligence is a very new phenomenon that is in the process of being
automatically debugged.

The kind of becrazed violence that we have been witnessing is a uniquely
human phenomenon not seen before in the animal kingdom.  Animals kill to
eat--not in order to impose mad ideologies, brainwash the masses, or build
empires.  The will to impose ideologies upon others, to build empires,
tosystematically subjugate, rob, and destroy--all of these things are the
result of bugs in the software of the human mind.  Human intelligence is
brand new and quite buggy, and we are in the process of evolving.
 Unsuccessful mutations will die out, while successful mutations will
survive--unless we destroy ourselves first.

In the beginning human intelligence appeared to confer an evolutionary
advantage and make more humans survive, but lately it has become our most
dangerous liability, and the jury is still out on whether it will
ultimately be good or bad.  It is clear that the bug of excessive violence
is slowly diminishing, which means that if we can only survive long enough
without doing irreversible damage to the planet and without allowing the
development of evolutionary pressure towards increasing violence, we will
ultimately get rid of the problem and move on.  The nagging questions are,
will we manage to change in time, and if we do, then how much of the
original good of this planet will be left to enjoy?

Definition: A mud ball is what this jewel of a planet will become when/if
all macro life is extinguished and only microbes remain to begin again.
 With all manner of life forms going extinct right under our noses and
expanding dead zones in our oceans, we are hot on the trail of this
outcome and may already have gotten up too much momentum to turn back.

At this time, as every reader of this book must surely know, all bets are
off, and we cannot be sure of anything.  We can all see the looming mud
ball, so it is useless for me to dwell further upon it.  Instead, I would
like to close with the thoughts of what might be in the future if we would
only allow it.

Isaac Asimov once wrote about a planet called Solaria ("Foundation and
Earth") upon which lived only a few human beings, albeit human beings of
great intelligence.  These people had everything imaginable, and virtually
endless resources.  This is the kind of future now open to the inhabitants
of Planet Earth.  We are apparently on the verge of:

1.  Immortality. 2.  The ability to build robots that are nothing less
than human machines. 3.  The ability to alter the evolution of life in any
direction we please.

All we need to do is to somehow stop believing lies, stop fighting, get
our population far down from where it is today, and keep on studying and
really learning.  There is no reason for our planet to have large
populations.   We have all the time in the universe to produce as many
individuals as we may desire so long as we do not attempt to produce them
all at one time.  The only reason for overpopulation is simply that of
putting our old drives and feelings before common sense, and there is no
justification for not stopping it.

Our ability to design and build automated systems can only improve, and if
it improves long enough, then we should be able to create automata with as
much or more intelligence as our own, but without the bad instincts that
drive us.

I could write about these things forever, but you already know them.  We
could have back the Garden of Eden with an abundance of every good fruit
we can imagine--with or without mosquitos as we choose.  We could continue
to evolve into sturdier, better, and healthier bodies and minds.  All of
these things could be ours, and our planet could continue to shine on like
a jewel in dark space for millions of years.   Right now, human
intelligence is out of control, but it has built into it the ability to
control itself.  Er, when God first designed the human mind, He put into
it these new biological features called "self awareness" and "self
control."  So now let's take the bull of destiny by the horns and
transform this planet from a planet of whiners and losers into a Paradise
of overcomers before it is everlastingly too late for everything and
everybody.  We can certainly do it if only we will stop doubting and start
really using our minds.

Scientific method:

1.  Observe.  For better or for worse, humans are able to decide the
destiny of this planet.

2.  Hypothesize.  With this kind of power, all that humans have to do is
but to cooperate in order to create either Paradise or Hell on Earth.

3.  Test.  Let's cooperate to create Paradise on Earth instead of Hell and
see whether it just might not work.

Occam's Razor: Ifone hypothesis states that we have to suffer until God
comes down and delivers us and another hypothesis states that all we have
to do to stop suffering is to act, and if it is known that action stops
suffering whereas waiting for the deliverance of God has brought us all
kinds of suffering, both mental and physical, and pushed us to the brink
of eternal mud ball and Hell, then just maybe the right idea would be to
act NOW--but have I spoken in time?!?

The end.

Appendix: The Questions That Remain Unanswered.

Here are some of the important questions raised but not answered by this
paper:

1. Was there really ever a beginning (and hence a creator), or has the
universe and life in fact been going on forever?

2. Was the entire universe really once too hot to support life, or do
parts of the universe get hot while other parts cool ad infinitum?

3. Is it or is it not true that certain living organisms can survive
indefinitely in outer space?

4. Does terrestrial life have its origins in (1) a creator living outside
the universe or (2) other life forms that continue to survive elsewhere in
this universe and release packets or spores that reach Earth from time to
time?

5. How much of the knowledge required to create a living organism is
encoded in DNA, and how much comes from other sources?

6. Is intervention to keep evolution on track an ongoing process, and if
so, then how does this intervention work, and is it deliberate or
automatic?

7. What are the major episodes in terrestrial evolution that could not
have happened without outside intervention, and what are the ones that
have happened as a result of evolution by natural selection?

8. Did the final steps in prehuman evolution take place on land (as in the
currently held savannah hypothesis) or in and on the sea (as the pelagic
primate hypothesis claims)?

9. Does the institution of language represent the last external
intervention in human evolutionary history?

10. Do some bird species speak because they were partially susceptible to
the language intervention that brought on human speech, or are they able
to speak because they are descended from past intelligences that also used
language for communication?

11. Did the ancestors of the Koisan branch off from an essentially Negrito
mainstream or vice versa?

12. Was there or was there not a period during which Negritos spread out
of eastern Africa to all of the tropical and subtropical coastal regions
of the globe?

13. Are all modern humans descended from Negritos, and did they evolve
into all the many racial types we see today by adaptation to new
environmental niches as they moved away from the sea?

14. Do the Indian myths of an Aryan invasion from the north explain the
racial continuum from light to dark across the Indian subcontinent, or
does this racial continuum not in fact represent an evolution from Negrito
to Vedda to Dravidian tothe European types of northern India?

15. Did the first modern Europeans arrive from the Middle East or from
India?

16. Does the racial continuum we observe across indonesia represent a
Mongol invasion from the northwest or an evolution from Negrito to
Mongoloid human types from southeast to northwest?

17. Are the original Austronesians an exception: do they represent an
evolution away from the Negrito type that happened without a corresponding
migration away from the sea?  Do Austronesians represent the form Negritos
will naturally take if they continue to live on the sea?

18. Will we continue to drive all other species to extinction till we pass
some point of no return, or will we be able to stop this process in time
and use our intellectual powers to create a Paradise on earth?