Archive for the ‘AGAINST NATURE’ Category

A Rebours

For some people, “Nature” means everything there is; others employ the term to denote only what they imagine to be statistically common. A given human behaviour, for example, might therefore be conceived of as either “natural”, on the grounds that lots of people do it, or as “unnatural”, on the grounds that not enough people […]

Posted on March 26, 2009 at 17:00 by Hugo Grinebiter · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: AGAINST NATURE, Preface

Can Mankind Learn?

There is a particular genre of edifying literature that talks all the time about Humanity with a capital H as the subject of all sorts of verbs – doing, mastering, advancing, learning and so forth. Some SF does the same. As C. S. Lewis pointed out generations ago, however, it is not a matter of […]

Evolution And Joachim Di Fiore

Such is the popular understanding of evolution that some American preachers have indignantly denied that monkey females could give birth to human beings. An equally ludicrous error is found among their enemies the fluffy progressives, namely that evolution is somehow about becoming better or nicer. The notion of the “ascent of Man” from animality to […]

The Pinnacle Of Evolution?

Not only is evolution not a thing, and so cannot “march” anywhere, but living creatures are not “marching” either. They are merely changing. Except that this phrase is equally misleading; for of course it is not that any given creature is changing, but rather that a later creature is differing from an earlier creature. When […]

The Omega Point?

Charlie Stross has observed that we are as stupid as it is possible for an intelligent species to be, there being no evolutionary pressure to be any smarter. What he means by this gnomic remark is that all creatures are on a very strict energy budget. Wastefulness is penalised, inasmuch as another individual of the […]

Gender IS Strategy

In principle, the social organisation of any species is reducible to the net result of the sexual strategies by which the individuals of that species endeavour to reproduce themselves. Or, more accurately, reducible to the net result of the sexual strategies themselves, considered as algorithms and transiently expressed in those individuals. If we argue that […]

Sneakers And Dashers

There are three basic male reproductive strategies: holding enough territory for one female; holding enough territory for many females; and holding no territory at all, but freeloading on the other two. This third strategy is generally called “sneak”, and comes in two variants: the “female-mimic” sneak, who infiltrates harems by pretending to be harmless, and […]

A Mildly Polygynous Species

Feminist writers have seen human history in terms of a battle to control reproduction. In consequence, perhaps, this crucial perspective has been unduly ignored by non-feminist historians. For history need not be approached with the Manichaean sensibility that treats male reproductive ambitions as automatically bad and wrong and female reproductive ambitions as automatically good and […]

Posted on May 5, 2009 at 07:40 by Hugo Grinebiter · Permalink · 3 Comments
In: AGAINST NATURE, "Love" Contra Social Stability

The Genetics Of Concubinage

That the natural interest of women is in high-minded monogamous marriage while the natural interest of men is a brutal free-for-all is an assumption that is more repeated than thought about; it is more prejudice and tactics than good reproductive economics. To be sure, it has been proven that modern Mormon polygamy is not in […]

Variance

Since evolution relies on the overproduction of animals and the selection of only some of them to breed, the only thing that could stop us continuing to be subject to it would be social arrangements that absolutely guaranteed that no human being had either more or fewer offspring than any other. Inasmuch as certain human […]