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The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham—A Review
We believe that humanity is about fine music, happy families, and good food. People look at things like the golden record and take pride in what humanity has to accomplish, and look forward to a future where Klingons and humans can cooperate.
What we should have done is included some photos of warfare, mushroom clouds, … all that stuff we do all the time that we pretend we don’t. If we’re going to give aliens or future humans a good idea of what we’re about, shan’t we offer forth both our best and our worst?
Except we’re embarrassed of ourselves, and we tell ourselves our achievements are great, and we look out into the stars in search of people like we are — the same way we once saw faces in nature in the sky, and called those “gods”. Our narcissism is so strong that we don’t even need reflections, and we just see ourselves in everything wherever we go. All I have to say is we’ll be damn lucky if aliens are even half like the ones you see on Star Trek.
There’s this saying that a deal predicated on a lie can only go downhill. If you were an extraterrestrial and you discovered humanity was lying to you, how would that make you feel? I, for one, would slowly back away and never return.
We’ll be fortunate if an alien life form can “feel” at all besides hungry. For all we know, the predominant life forms in the universe are just big blobs that consume solar systems like plankton in a cosmic ocean. But our hubris made us send out a beacon that not only signals nearby intelligent life, but we included a map on how to find us. Fortunately, it has later turned out to be woefully inaccurate.
This recognition should cause us to rethink what ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ really are. If by ‘nature’ we mean something divorced from or untouched by humans, there’s almost nowhere on Earth where such conditions exist, or have existed for thousands of years. The same can be said of Earth’s climate. If early agricultural land use began warming our climate thousands of years ago, as the early anthropogenic hypothesis suggests, it implies that no ‘natural’ climate has existed for millennia.
The musician and comedian Martin Mull has observed that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. In a similar way, there's an inherent inadequacy in writing about tools for thought. To the extent that such a tool succeeds, it expands your thinking beyond what can be achieved using existing tools, including writing. The more transformative the tool, the larger the gap that is opened. Conversely, the larger the gap, the more difficult the new tool is to evoke in writing. But what writing can do, and the reason we wrote this essay, is act as a bootstrap. It's a way of identifying points of leverage that may help develop new tools for thought. So let's get on with it.
Abstract: Africa is the source of all modern humans, but characterization of genetic variation and of relationships among populations across the continent has been enigmatic. We studied 121 African populations, four African American populations, and 60 non-African populations for patterns of variation at 1327 nuclear microsatellite and insertion/deletion markers. We identified 14 ancestral population clusters in Africa that correlate with self-described ethnicity and shared cultural and/or linguistic properties. We observed high levels of mixed ancestry in most populations, reflecting historical migration events across the continent. Our data also provide evidence for shared ancestry among geographically diverse hunter-gatherer populations (Khoesan speakers and Pygmies). The ancestry of African Americans is predominantly from Niger-Kordofanian (~71%), European (~13%), and other African (~8%) populations, although admixture levels varied considerably among individuals. This study helps tease apart the complex evolutionary history of Africans and African Americans, aiding both anthropological and genetic epidemiologic studies.