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arguments for natural selection that I’ve ever encountered. I didn’t plant them there, nor did anyone else, nor did they plant themselves. Nevertheless the few seeds that found their way there certainly do like it with a direct intravenous drip every time it rains. I still can’t shake the notion that there’s a creative principle to evolution, but in the creative, not the created, phase. If only we could find the transfer particles.
once survival to the age of reproduction is secure. Actually Nature is like God; it doesn’t really do anything; it just IS. We act like it does something because we demand causality for scientific purposes. Our language is predisposed to the subject-verb-object model; other languages, for example Spanish, less so. In Spanish things can happen with the causal agent quite vague or nonexistent. When a beautiful woman is at stake, nature can afford to be vague; sexual selection takes over, though I doubt that it’ll ever replace Nature. When plants put out those beautiful flowers and those delicious berries that animals eat then spread around pre-fertilized, they’re re-producing the species. As long as a plant or animal can use brains or brawn or stink or thorns to reach reproductive maturity, then attraction takes over. Science fiction may be missing the boat in postulating a future population of big-brained pill-poppers. For all the bitching and moaning of my generation of boomer-brats, life is easier than it’s ever been. Neoteny favors the earliest possible reproduction as much as it favors retention of immature features into adulthood. To get into Heaven, one must be as a child, remember. If neoteny is the path of genetic drift whenever possible, then it might favor a big head, or a tail also, for that matter, but your potential mate probably wouldn’t. Baldness is already being selected against, I assure you. I know. That’s a blow to neoteny already. We ARE that future of big headed pill-poppers already. That’s past. Unless life gets difficult again to the point that only the smartest survive, then expect future humans to be the handsomest, most beautiful creatures imaginable, with no increase in hat size except to accommodate the ever-increasing quest for Ego-enhancement. History belongs to those who control the means of reproduction. That’s why I’m in Thailand. It’s science fiction.
as a means of explaining why we have subcutaneous fat and little body hair, looking so different from our closest relatives, the gorilla and chimpanzee. I thought that was a brilliant idea. That would explain a lot and is eminently feasible, that man’s adaptation to water was interrupted, but man still carries vestiges of that era. Certainly we’re not still hanging around the African ‘hood’, and there’s no shortage of water in the Great Rift Valley, for that matter, if the adaptation occurred early in man’s evolution. There’s no shortage of precedent from other sea mammals, whose closest relatives tend to be their land-based relatives, not each other. It’s a good career move. Life in water is relatively easy. Hell, I’ve thought about it myself. There’s only one problem. There’s no evidence that any such activities ever took place. Logic is cheap; evidence is expensive. Furthermore, there is another explanation that has a better record in the history of evolution: neoteny, the retention of juvenile or even larval characteristics into older age, and sexual maturity at an early age. Lose the hair and gain the fat; sound like anybody you know? Our close relative, gorillas give birth at a similar term and have a life expectancy in captivity similar to an African’s life expectancy, yet reaches sexual maturity at seven years. Why? It works. They’re lousy at math anyway. That would explain baby fat and adult diaper rash in humans. It might also explain some extremely juvenile behavior in adults, but that would be cultural neoteny, I suppose. It sounds better than cultural pedomorphism, at least.
at least here in Thailand, where TB still takes lives. These are the wars that may never end. Plagues have taken many more lives than any war, decimating the population of Europe repeatedly in the 1300’s as cities created perfect conditions for them. Maybe cities are just a conspiracy on the part of diseases to round us up for their own purposes. Germ warfare has long been used by men, without a thought that the real winners might be the germs themselves. It doesn’t help that antibiotics are frequently misused, even serving as food preservatives in places where health education is more enthusiastic than well informed. The new enemy is viruses, DNA in a nutshell, machine code, pure software without all the hardware. They’re tougher nuts to crack, not even being life as such. Life can be killed; viruses can only be outsmarted.
They’re called bacteria and they’re out to get you. They’re easy; they just want to eat, sleep, and reproduce. Sounds like ‘the hood’. Viruses are the tricky guys, DNA in a condom, ready for action. Where did DNA come from? Are humans reproduced with the help of viruses? Are humans reproduced for the benefit of viruses? Is it a fundamental dimension like space or time, light or gravity? We get a false sense of security in the developed world that all is clean and pristine, sterile and anesthetic. On the contrary, the world is nothing if not esthetic. Esse est percipi. All we know are our perceptions, not the things themselves. This does not mean that there are no things themselves, which can lead to some misunderstandings about the nature of human existence, hence conspiracy, holographic paradigms, and general discontent with affluence. Would there be a world of light, color, and sound without someone or something there to perceive it? The world defines itself in its own image and likeness. What else lies there waiting to be perceived for lack of a charged coupling device capable of processing the info? The stringier the theory, the more dimensions that are required for it to make sense.
through it all, meteor strikes and polar shifts, wildfires and tectonic rifts. But the spark never goes out. If it did, it might never come back. There are always survivors, hopefully. You’d hate to have to spark flint and steel again to try and start a fire. It’s much easier to keep the stew going no matter how far it deviates from its original course. They say such ancient species as the Komodo dragon harbor species of bacteria that can quickly kill a man if given the opportunity to infect, species that haven’t seen the light of day in millions of years, yet have found a safe haven in the mouths of dragons. Some bacteria can reproduce more than twice an hour; that’s fifty generations a day. The ten thousand generations that it might take a line of primates to re-speciate in isolation from its mates in some two hundred thousand years, a line of bacteria can do in less than a year. This is not a comforting thought to a TB patient facing six to nine months of antibiotic cocktails while the bacillus speed dials DNA combinations trying to unlock the key that’ll immunize itself against four antibiotics, all at once. We do the same, but it takes much longer. We’re sourdough man dipping our wicks in the perpetual stew. Take all you want, but eat all you take.
especially in humans; evolutionary success is reproductive success. Sexual and genital obsession is normal, but most people aren’t honest about it, as if there’s something dirty about it, or simply childish. Humans rule the earth, not necessarily because we’re smarter, but because we fuck like rabbits. We have to compete with bacteria, after all, and their turn-around time for a complete generation is about a half-hour, depending on your deodorant. We can kill them, of course, but they can kill us, too. Does increased intelligence coincide with increased sex drive? Mine does. The hornier I get, the smarter I have to be to drive the point home to some unsuspecting victim, usually my wife. It’s a game. They say some of the people with the highest IQ’s are prostitutes and other so-called sexual degenerates. They say the root word that gave birth to the word ‘sophisticate’ originally referred to prostitutes, the original Greek Sophists I supposedly. The Thai word for such, presumably derived through Sanskrit, ‘sophenee’, would agree with that. Somehow I think it all got confused with the concept of ‘worldliness’. Either you’re impressed or you’re not. That’s probably why Jesus admonished his followers to be as children. Once you think you’ve got it all figured out, then you’re in real trouble spiritually. If you think you’re clever because you’ve figured out that you can make money with your moneymaker, then think again. You’re getting paid to do things others won’t stoop to, things others won’t take lying down, things others won’t sit still for. It has little to do with IQ. There were already a lot of pragmatists on the streets these days; now there are sophisticates, too.
and self-conscious enough to do better, which in itself is natural enough I suppose. Artificial breeding dates back to the early days of food production, and was an inspiration to Darwin himself. On a more human level, random breeding has long been frowned upon, and though one is probably not thinking specifically about the same type of reproductive success when he chooses a mate that a molecular biologist is thinking about, one is, nevertheless, making a choice. And though I might not specifically have it in mind, when I play out my fantasy for an exotic foreign mate, I am promoting gene flow and hybrid vigor, thank you. Still I can’t help thinking that there might be a creative principle to evolution. Directionality has certainly not been ruled out. When my wife Tang started taking her antibiotic cocktails to overwhelm the TB virus which might develop a resistance to one, but not likely all four antibiotics, like a good little Darwinist I assumed that its long life-span must give it enough time to randomly mutate a resistant offspring, which would then thrive. Not so, according to a prominent source. It can produce an enzyme that specifically counteracts the effects of an antibiotic, but not likely four, the genetics behind this being a total mystery. Perhaps it’s just rolling the dice, playing the slots, spinning out new combinations of DNA to see if one works? If ultraviolet light, x-rays, drugs, etc. can easily produce mutations, similar natural phenomena certainly might, though not necessarily in a beneficial way. Given that the DNA in every cell in an organism is exactly the same, more needs to be known about its ability to ‘turn on’ in certain circumstances to account for different functions by different organs. God does not play dice with the universe; he plays DNA.
It doesn’t exist, nor is there any particular reason why it should. Equality in the chain of evolution is the end of evolution, as Darwin himself reluctantly admitted when it was pointed out to him. Blending of genes would blend down to sameness. Genes are not blended; they’re assorted, one or the other, digital, not a mixture of the two traits involved and selected. Mendel already knew the details long before there was even a theory to which it applied, like Reimann’s mathematics lying there in wait for a genius like Einstein to realize what it was good for, then buy it cheap wholesale and parcel it out piecemeal incorporated into cutting-edge physics. Equality in society and culture is no different. Ask the Soviets. When equality is enforced, evolution stops, and equality occurs on a level of poverty and dissipation for all. The issue of equal rights is the bone of contention and the bone we all fight over, a simple syllogism expanded from home to homeland, equal bathroom rights for all. Equality of rights and privileges in fact allows for differentials of accomplishment. Otherwise, forced social results demand unequal rights for their achievement, as in ‘affirmative action’ for racial desegregation in the US. It’s a thankless task.
your individuality, your history, your book, your genetic fingerprint all on a tiny chip embedded in every cell of your body. This is better than conspiracy, Nostradamus, and Revelations all put together. Birth is like scanning your goods through the supermarket checkout counter. Every act of sex is like inserting your ATM card and making a deposit. Death means turning in your coded key card at the hotel checkout desk, then waiting for the final reckoning. Only then do you find out about the tourist tax every state levies on the casual traveler. Every drool of spit is a blueprint to your physicality, if not your personality, complete with working title and nervous twitches, sexual preference: studs or bitches? You only get to fill in the blanks of a form getting longer with time, shorter on space. Junk DNA litters the passageways like dead ends in Istanbul, words that once had meaning until the entire context changed. Still the mud sticks to your shoes leaving a trail for the detectives to follow. Art imitates life, but poorly. You could never dream something like this up.
streaming consciousness... 
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