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  hardie karges 11:05 am on March 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ego ( 33 )   

  Ego raises its ugly head like a shark at the beach, 

  drawing fire if not blood for whatever it fails to accomplish with pure fright. Put enough ego in the car’s tank to get in running, then cut it back before it chokes the engine out. Making a thousand minor adjustments is much easier than making a single huge cataclysmic adjustment. Keep the carbs clean and the engine tuned. Ego is like profit motive. You need some to get you going, but you don’t want to indulge in it. It’s the strategically placed carrot perched directly in front of your face to keep you turning the treadmill even though you’re really not even hungry. Even if you don’t really need the money, you still need the profit as compensation for effort expended, reward for a job well done. If you want to give something away free, then you’ll have no shortage of takers. How can you know that someone appreciates your efforts, if they won’t even flip you a dime for your time? Ego is like that, something to pump you up, imagining yourself in exalted situations, just to get yourself out of bed and maybe half-way there, on a good day.

   

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  hardie karges 3:30 am on March 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ego ( 33 ), EVOLUTION ( 21 )   

  Discover the ego gene 

  and molecular biology is now on to something, the junction of nature and culture, the nature of self-perception reduced to code and transcript. What you perceive in others usually is what you find in yourself, reducing the usefulness of perception. If you can get past perception and cultural affectations and down to underlying pre-dispositions, then maybe new options would open up for altering them, something besides drugs, that is. Drug use is probably more effective at altering perceptions of others than it is at altering behavior of the user. Experimental and recreational drug use is an attempt to approach the speed of light in thought and perception, just like back home where the lights burn 24/7 with a laser-like intensity that approaches infinity. The speed of thought might actually be first to break the light barrier, premonitions and psychic activity providing raw material for investigation. Is thought a dimension all its own? If so, is it a natural or created one? Weigh yourself down with food to keep yourself grounded in a world without weight nor wisdom.

   
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  hardie karges 12:20 pm on March 15, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Plants are the original solar collectors, 

  leaves bending toward the light without the aid of computers and motors. Plants are like old-fashioned women, housewives with mop and broom and the horror of dishpan hands, bending to the will of the guy upstairs. On a good day, they’ll hang out a flower that means ‘available’, just like hanging out the red lantern, and waiting patiently for a suitable suitor to come and pollinate the Hell out of them. Any stigma attached only enhances the experience, like the wounds of Christ offering validation. Life is a passive experience, sunbathing and looking pretty, creating complex carbohydrates from little or nothing, just a little water and flour and another thing or two, depending on the recipe in the DNA cookbook. The prettiest flowers grow from the ugliest plots, conspiracies of uncertainty, and experiments in nothingness. They crowd the side of the road instinctively, advertising their wares and trying to flag a ride. There’s no time to waste and no time to kill, just enjoy life to its fullest in the short time available, accumulate whatever wealth is available, and be sure to pass something on to the next generation. Go forth and multiply; go forth and divide; make the world a better place without the burden of consciousness.

   
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  hardie karges 11:57 am on March 8, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: natural selection ( 4 )   

  The ferns beneath the eaves of my roof are the best 

  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.

   
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  hardie karges 11:59 am on March 7, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: EVOLUTION ( 21 ), sexual selection   

  Nature selects for beauty, not brains, 

  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.

   
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  hardie karges 12:13 pm on March 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: apes, EVOLUTION ( 21 ), humans ( 2 )   

  A few decades back, someone apparently came up with the idea of man as the “aquatic ape” 

  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.

   
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  hardie karges 10:19 pm on March 2, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Bacteria are the ancient enemy, 

  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.

   
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  hardie karges 10:45 pm on March 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: dimensions ( 3 ), DNA ( 47 )   

  Unseen forces rule the world. 

  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.

   
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  hardie karges 10:41 pm on February 28, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Nature keeps a starter culture going, 

  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.

   
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  hardie karges 8:23 am on February 28, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: EVOLUTION ( 21 ), sex ( 39 ), sophistication   

  If there were no obsession with the sex act, then evolution might suffer, 

  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.