May 21, 2023·edited May 21, 2023Liked by L.P. Koch
"This conclusion is highly illogical, though: faced with the information that we share 98% of our DNA with the chimps shouldn’t make us doubt obvious reality, that is, the vast gulf between us. The only logical take would be to say, well duh, seems that DNA isn’t as important as we thought! We are clearly missing something here!"
I'd take it even further than that. I think what it shows is that genetic similarity tells us next to nothing useful about the ocean of difference between what a human is and what other animals are. In fact, what we might be looking at when studying chimps in particular is a kind of anthropomorphizing paredolia, made even more enticing by their structural similarities (skeletal plan, binocular vision. etc).
I was watching a pair of crows the other day, and it put me in mind of how Eurasian magpies are one of a very small club of animals that can pass the MSR mirror test. That is, they show the ability to recognize themselves in mirrors. It's a strange little club, and one that includes chimpanzees and mountain gorillas (albeit with some age-and-sex-based caveats with the former, and a great deal of conditions and controversy with the latter). Bonobos and orangutans from Borneo also pass, yet all other primates flunk it, including ones we tend to think of as "intelligent."
Bottlenosed dolphins and killer whales pass it, despite their somewhat alien body plans and vast environmental differences. Some elephants pass. One fish, the bluestreak clear wrasse, supposedly did (though not without controversy). But I think the magpie interests me most. It's also the only other fully bipedal creature on the list aside from humans, but that's about where the similarities end. Is a magpie -- or are blackbirds in general -- closer to humans than a baboon or a lemur, despite their more distant genetic and morphologic proximity? Crows seem to remember and recognize individual human faces in the wild. Or are they doing something else, which we interpret as more humanlike the way we see shapes in clouds?
Something big is missing in the explanation, indeed. Unless I've been secretly typing these Substack missives to a bunch of magpies and bonobos all this time.
In university I took an introductory anthropology course, during which we were shown a documentary that contrasted the warlike, patriarchal chimpanzees with the peaceful, matriarchal bonobos. The political overtone was laid on thick, with the narrator concluding by noting that humans are, biologically, equally similar to both species, and can therefore choose which to emulate ... with the implication that we'd do better to model ourselves on the bonobos. It had rather the opposite impact on my teenage mind: if it was a choice between dying in war and being gay (the documentary made a specific note of the homoerotic methods of conflict resolution used by bonobos), then war it was.
But of course, humans are not chimps, but humans. Chimps can teach us nothing about what we *should* be, only about what our instinctual basis is. It's a matter of foundation and superstructure. To build, the foundation must be solid, meaning the biological and instinctive basis must be well developed and cared for. But on that foundation one may build whatever one wants, limited only by what the foundation can support. The foundation itself says almost nothing about the shape of the building.
It's quite common among leftists to proclaim for example that "we've evolved beyond" tribalism or what have you, which I've always thought is to completely misunderstand how evolution works. As though developing the capacity to think means we suddenly become beings of pure thought, or to use another metaphor, that evolving lungs means our metabolism no longer requires oxygen. Because humans are highly culturally flexible, they infer the tabula rasa ... a dangerous half truth. I guess what I'm saying is that chimpanzees can tell us a lot about the most fundamental constraints on human society, sort of like looking at the metrical structure of a poem, but they say nothing about the content of the poem itself. The left wishes to ignore the poem's structure, and therefore loses the poetry entirely, it just becomes a mess; conservatives focus too much on the structure, and therefore also lose the poetry.
The silliness of DNA argument is easily exposed by pointing at that *all* body cells share the same genetic code. How much is brain similar to liver to skin to intestine? 😏 Or from another angle, genome size doesn’t correlate with the complexity of organism, far from it. Some poor single-celled critters hoard much more precious nucleotide strands than we humans do 🤷
Hey hop, a leap to the other end of human life spectrum 😊 Dennis Meadows (of Limits to Growth renown) offers a balanced perspective, methinks:
🗨 I have often described politics as the art of choosing which of several impossible outcomes you most prefer. It is important to envision good outcomes. It may be useful to strive for them. But it is important to be realistic.
To me it seems, some people get intuitively why, in certain contexts, "natural" _is_ "good" (as a tendency), but can't explain it, and others just poop "naturalistic fallacy, you simpleton!" on everything without thinking.
Natural = good to me means, if you don't cringe too much at the analogy, a good compatibility between hardware and software and surrounding conditions, so that things can remain functioning in enough balance to not tip over into severe dysfunction (moving a system out of stable operation parameters).
Where this would touch ethics is, indirectly - because the major ethics violations seem to be always the same to me, just manifesting differently - if (groups of) people force, or even just manipulate others, esp. on societal level, to either live in ways that will produce dysfunction and thus destroy wellbeing (up to, the entire species, as things are currently going). Either by doing things in ways where natural requirements are not met, or conversely, going against natural boundaries, which disrupts balance.
This could mean to deny any sort of mental natural requirements and putting people into triste "Commie block" buildings and areas made up of them promoting depression (hypothetical AFAIK, but not too far fetched as example), turning their food into unphysiological crap, pushing a designed-to-be-toxic culture to divide, etc.
"A natural law will just play itself out regardless. But if we, as a society, can override such “natural laws” anyway, then why bother?"
It plays into what I'll touch on later in this post - natural laws existing, and, as a _heuristic,_ trying as closely as possible to stick to what seems to be _it_, having a tendency to keep things working, is not the same thing as *pretending* one *knew exactly* what the natural laws were and could/should compell everyone else to follow the same idea. It may indeed only "play itself out", in the big picture, if there is some stochastics involved - there will be some error and some demise, but overall, it will work. Forcing everything into one direction probably always ends similarly to roughly comparable experiments in history.
But species do go extinct, and it doesn't always have to be the environment changing too much to quickly for adaption to fail to keep up - it could also be a species, as a system of flesh and ideas, going catastrophically out of stable parameters for the system to keep working.
A lot of people then just pretend it was generally obvious and easy to understand what "natural" actually is - but that's really sometimes the biggest problem, I would say. Precisely because of our complicated (developmental) history - us being really a mixed bag of compromises to meet numerous requirements from different (pre-)historical phases. Looking at one particular thing someone has his focus on and proclaiming: "ah, see! That's natural!" may often be delusional / seeing only a fraction of the picture.
Which reminds me of times when people thought they knew "fate". If something seemed to be turning in some direction, or a cause was there for them to fight for: "yep, that's fate. So let's embrace & go for it" - which is perhaps great for motivation.
Later, the concept of "fate" was then ridiculed, but also used as a strawman to cheaply ridicule, or ascribe false detriments to, "determinism" - which does not include the pretense of impossible universal knowledge - by people who cling to the ill-defined, religiously inherited concept of "free will".
"This conclusion is highly illogical, though: faced with the information that we share 98% of our DNA with the chimps shouldn’t make us doubt obvious reality, that is, the vast gulf between us. The only logical take would be to say, well duh, seems that DNA isn’t as important as we thought!"
I wouldn't quite put it that way. People wildly assume to understand what "98% of DNA" means. What ever amount of it influences how our brain gets its initial wiring - there is A LOT of other complicated stuff in our bodies that needs to be encoded, lol. And that we share with animals that look similar to us.
How this "x % of information" is coded does not have to be linear or in any other way obvious, and certainly not be proportional to size & weight of organs, or even apparent complexity.
TL;DR - "98% similar" is not nearly as much of a precise description of what's going on as some people seem to imagine. It is a rather vague statement, except to the point that we are, apparently, not some sort of totally independent creation from those chimps.
I suspect we share 90% percent of our dna with just about all mammals....and probably many plants.
DNA is just "code" but if it is only a subset of the code that programs the "entity", then comparisons based upon the code as a whole are meaningless. I mean there is some fungus with way more DNA than humans - is that the basis of judgement? Who has the most? Obviously, the code runs deeper.
Myself - I could give flip and if you have free will you get to choose what you do and influence your own future - I suspect monkeys already know that, but it is just based upon their local situation.
Somebody blows up the pipeline obvious, but the chumps just take it?
Man - this is why I'm so glad my family left that place a long time ago.
Cause all evidence suggest the German folks are not only chumps, in disrespect to Bismarck and other leaders, but they are clueless and seem intent on following a pathway towards some light from some leaders who could give a diddily about chimpanzees and bonbons and others they consider inferior.
What you think - and know this - I would post this message, but hells-bells, I just paid to be a founding member and so I'd like to know the thoughts of a German.
No disrespect meant, but really Germany folks - they need to get a clue I think.
This is a test of my founding membership commitment for 1 year.
Well - test passed and let it be know there is info time-wise on that, but probably I'm the only one who really cares about my choice to be a founding member.
I sure hope it was a choice well made, but sometimes it gets on my nerves seeing others griping with each other, or flirting maybe, but not really improving discourse.
I for one appreciate good discourse. Whether the discourse is in German or English. Really - either way is fine by me and sometimes I think German is a better language for communication and truly good translation is the key to better communication - is it not?
I think that from the religious point of view, the answer is probably that Adam was not the first primate, not the first Cro-Magnon, or even possibly the first carrier of homo sapiens DNA. Fully recognizing the many limitations of Science Inc., I consider the existence of the Earth and of creatures biologically very like ourselves prior to ~6000 years ago to be pretty conclusively established. Whether we believe the Genesis account or not, we can clearly see that there were things very biologically similar to humans for a long long time, but that ~6000 years ago something changed which is hard to pin down but it doesn't seem way off the mark to call it the Creation of Man. But something did change, the observation that something changed is more or less on the level with cogito ergo sum. We are having this conversation ergo something changed.
I am prepared to believe that there were people before that time who were biologically identical with you and I, and they appear to have done the sorts of things that you might expect chimps to do with increased brain power or perhaps some other sorts of biological advantages that you and I might have. It seems clear that they formed communities, used more complicated tools than modern primates do, built some structures, drew some pictures. But what is it that is different between them and us?
I have read several things lately about the differences between Western man and the rest of humanity. It seems that about 1500 years of Christianity have left biological marks on us. A lot of it seems to be due to church law forbidding incest, but probably other things that the church did to change our ancestors way of life have had meaningful impacts. Anyway, the deep secret of the immigration debate is that Christendom's descendants and the rest of the world are not interchangable, despite sharing a lot more in common than any man and any ape.
I suspect that the Adam Change was something similar. I expect, btw, that the impact of the Adam Change has been somewhat muddied by intermarriage with Pre-Adamite biological humans, possibly those referenced in the Hebrew Bible as Giants or even Nephilim. But perhaps, the answer is that rather than being the first biological human Adam was rather the first biological human to carry the Imago Dei. Does this mean the first human with an immortal soul? First with an awareness of eternity and a spiritual world? First monotheist in a world of polytheistic Neanderthals? First believer? First of the Elect?
"This conclusion is highly illogical, though: faced with the information that we share 98% of our DNA with the chimps shouldn’t make us doubt obvious reality, that is, the vast gulf between us. The only logical take would be to say, well duh, seems that DNA isn’t as important as we thought! We are clearly missing something here!"
I'd take it even further than that. I think what it shows is that genetic similarity tells us next to nothing useful about the ocean of difference between what a human is and what other animals are. In fact, what we might be looking at when studying chimps in particular is a kind of anthropomorphizing paredolia, made even more enticing by their structural similarities (skeletal plan, binocular vision. etc).
I was watching a pair of crows the other day, and it put me in mind of how Eurasian magpies are one of a very small club of animals that can pass the MSR mirror test. That is, they show the ability to recognize themselves in mirrors. It's a strange little club, and one that includes chimpanzees and mountain gorillas (albeit with some age-and-sex-based caveats with the former, and a great deal of conditions and controversy with the latter). Bonobos and orangutans from Borneo also pass, yet all other primates flunk it, including ones we tend to think of as "intelligent."
Bottlenosed dolphins and killer whales pass it, despite their somewhat alien body plans and vast environmental differences. Some elephants pass. One fish, the bluestreak clear wrasse, supposedly did (though not without controversy). But I think the magpie interests me most. It's also the only other fully bipedal creature on the list aside from humans, but that's about where the similarities end. Is a magpie -- or are blackbirds in general -- closer to humans than a baboon or a lemur, despite their more distant genetic and morphologic proximity? Crows seem to remember and recognize individual human faces in the wild. Or are they doing something else, which we interpret as more humanlike the way we see shapes in clouds?
Something big is missing in the explanation, indeed. Unless I've been secretly typing these Substack missives to a bunch of magpies and bonobos all this time.
In university I took an introductory anthropology course, during which we were shown a documentary that contrasted the warlike, patriarchal chimpanzees with the peaceful, matriarchal bonobos. The political overtone was laid on thick, with the narrator concluding by noting that humans are, biologically, equally similar to both species, and can therefore choose which to emulate ... with the implication that we'd do better to model ourselves on the bonobos. It had rather the opposite impact on my teenage mind: if it was a choice between dying in war and being gay (the documentary made a specific note of the homoerotic methods of conflict resolution used by bonobos), then war it was.
But of course, humans are not chimps, but humans. Chimps can teach us nothing about what we *should* be, only about what our instinctual basis is. It's a matter of foundation and superstructure. To build, the foundation must be solid, meaning the biological and instinctive basis must be well developed and cared for. But on that foundation one may build whatever one wants, limited only by what the foundation can support. The foundation itself says almost nothing about the shape of the building.
It's quite common among leftists to proclaim for example that "we've evolved beyond" tribalism or what have you, which I've always thought is to completely misunderstand how evolution works. As though developing the capacity to think means we suddenly become beings of pure thought, or to use another metaphor, that evolving lungs means our metabolism no longer requires oxygen. Because humans are highly culturally flexible, they infer the tabula rasa ... a dangerous half truth. I guess what I'm saying is that chimpanzees can tell us a lot about the most fundamental constraints on human society, sort of like looking at the metrical structure of a poem, but they say nothing about the content of the poem itself. The left wishes to ignore the poem's structure, and therefore loses the poetry entirely, it just becomes a mess; conservatives focus too much on the structure, and therefore also lose the poetry.
The silliness of DNA argument is easily exposed by pointing at that *all* body cells share the same genetic code. How much is brain similar to liver to skin to intestine? 😏 Or from another angle, genome size doesn’t correlate with the complexity of organism, far from it. Some poor single-celled critters hoard much more precious nucleotide strands than we humans do 🤷
Hey hop, a leap to the other end of human life spectrum 😊 Dennis Meadows (of Limits to Growth renown) offers a balanced perspective, methinks:
🗨 I have often described politics as the art of choosing which of several impossible outcomes you most prefer. It is important to envision good outcomes. It may be useful to strive for them. But it is important to be realistic.
"What is “natural behavior”? And is it “good”?"
To me it seems, some people get intuitively why, in certain contexts, "natural" _is_ "good" (as a tendency), but can't explain it, and others just poop "naturalistic fallacy, you simpleton!" on everything without thinking.
Natural = good to me means, if you don't cringe too much at the analogy, a good compatibility between hardware and software and surrounding conditions, so that things can remain functioning in enough balance to not tip over into severe dysfunction (moving a system out of stable operation parameters).
Where this would touch ethics is, indirectly - because the major ethics violations seem to be always the same to me, just manifesting differently - if (groups of) people force, or even just manipulate others, esp. on societal level, to either live in ways that will produce dysfunction and thus destroy wellbeing (up to, the entire species, as things are currently going). Either by doing things in ways where natural requirements are not met, or conversely, going against natural boundaries, which disrupts balance.
This could mean to deny any sort of mental natural requirements and putting people into triste "Commie block" buildings and areas made up of them promoting depression (hypothetical AFAIK, but not too far fetched as example), turning their food into unphysiological crap, pushing a designed-to-be-toxic culture to divide, etc.
"A natural law will just play itself out regardless. But if we, as a society, can override such “natural laws” anyway, then why bother?"
It plays into what I'll touch on later in this post - natural laws existing, and, as a _heuristic,_ trying as closely as possible to stick to what seems to be _it_, having a tendency to keep things working, is not the same thing as *pretending* one *knew exactly* what the natural laws were and could/should compell everyone else to follow the same idea. It may indeed only "play itself out", in the big picture, if there is some stochastics involved - there will be some error and some demise, but overall, it will work. Forcing everything into one direction probably always ends similarly to roughly comparable experiments in history.
But species do go extinct, and it doesn't always have to be the environment changing too much to quickly for adaption to fail to keep up - it could also be a species, as a system of flesh and ideas, going catastrophically out of stable parameters for the system to keep working.
A lot of people then just pretend it was generally obvious and easy to understand what "natural" actually is - but that's really sometimes the biggest problem, I would say. Precisely because of our complicated (developmental) history - us being really a mixed bag of compromises to meet numerous requirements from different (pre-)historical phases. Looking at one particular thing someone has his focus on and proclaiming: "ah, see! That's natural!" may often be delusional / seeing only a fraction of the picture.
Which reminds me of times when people thought they knew "fate". If something seemed to be turning in some direction, or a cause was there for them to fight for: "yep, that's fate. So let's embrace & go for it" - which is perhaps great for motivation.
Later, the concept of "fate" was then ridiculed, but also used as a strawman to cheaply ridicule, or ascribe false detriments to, "determinism" - which does not include the pretense of impossible universal knowledge - by people who cling to the ill-defined, religiously inherited concept of "free will".
"This conclusion is highly illogical, though: faced with the information that we share 98% of our DNA with the chimps shouldn’t make us doubt obvious reality, that is, the vast gulf between us. The only logical take would be to say, well duh, seems that DNA isn’t as important as we thought!"
I wouldn't quite put it that way. People wildly assume to understand what "98% of DNA" means. What ever amount of it influences how our brain gets its initial wiring - there is A LOT of other complicated stuff in our bodies that needs to be encoded, lol. And that we share with animals that look similar to us.
How this "x % of information" is coded does not have to be linear or in any other way obvious, and certainly not be proportional to size & weight of organs, or even apparent complexity.
TL;DR - "98% similar" is not nearly as much of a precise description of what's going on as some people seem to imagine. It is a rather vague statement, except to the point that we are, apparently, not some sort of totally independent creation from those chimps.
I suspect we share 90% percent of our dna with just about all mammals....and probably many plants.
DNA is just "code" but if it is only a subset of the code that programs the "entity", then comparisons based upon the code as a whole are meaningless. I mean there is some fungus with way more DNA than humans - is that the basis of judgement? Who has the most? Obviously, the code runs deeper.
Myself - I could give flip and if you have free will you get to choose what you do and influence your own future - I suspect monkeys already know that, but it is just based upon their local situation.
Luke - got a quick question for you.
Are the Germans chumps?
Seems as so.
Somebody blows up the pipeline obvious, but the chumps just take it?
Man - this is why I'm so glad my family left that place a long time ago.
Cause all evidence suggest the German folks are not only chumps, in disrespect to Bismarck and other leaders, but they are clueless and seem intent on following a pathway towards some light from some leaders who could give a diddily about chimpanzees and bonbons and others they consider inferior.
What you think - and know this - I would post this message, but hells-bells, I just paid to be a founding member and so I'd like to know the thoughts of a German.
No disrespect meant, but really Germany folks - they need to get a clue I think.
Regards,
BK
This is a test of my founding membership commitment for 1 year.
Well - test passed and let it be know there is info time-wise on that, but probably I'm the only one who really cares about my choice to be a founding member.
I sure hope it was a choice well made, but sometimes it gets on my nerves seeing others griping with each other, or flirting maybe, but not really improving discourse.
I for one appreciate good discourse. Whether the discourse is in German or English. Really - either way is fine by me and sometimes I think German is a better language for communication and truly good translation is the key to better communication - is it not?
I think that from the religious point of view, the answer is probably that Adam was not the first primate, not the first Cro-Magnon, or even possibly the first carrier of homo sapiens DNA. Fully recognizing the many limitations of Science Inc., I consider the existence of the Earth and of creatures biologically very like ourselves prior to ~6000 years ago to be pretty conclusively established. Whether we believe the Genesis account or not, we can clearly see that there were things very biologically similar to humans for a long long time, but that ~6000 years ago something changed which is hard to pin down but it doesn't seem way off the mark to call it the Creation of Man. But something did change, the observation that something changed is more or less on the level with cogito ergo sum. We are having this conversation ergo something changed.
I am prepared to believe that there were people before that time who were biologically identical with you and I, and they appear to have done the sorts of things that you might expect chimps to do with increased brain power or perhaps some other sorts of biological advantages that you and I might have. It seems clear that they formed communities, used more complicated tools than modern primates do, built some structures, drew some pictures. But what is it that is different between them and us?
I have read several things lately about the differences between Western man and the rest of humanity. It seems that about 1500 years of Christianity have left biological marks on us. A lot of it seems to be due to church law forbidding incest, but probably other things that the church did to change our ancestors way of life have had meaningful impacts. Anyway, the deep secret of the immigration debate is that Christendom's descendants and the rest of the world are not interchangable, despite sharing a lot more in common than any man and any ape.
I suspect that the Adam Change was something similar. I expect, btw, that the impact of the Adam Change has been somewhat muddied by intermarriage with Pre-Adamite biological humans, possibly those referenced in the Hebrew Bible as Giants or even Nephilim. But perhaps, the answer is that rather than being the first biological human Adam was rather the first biological human to carry the Imago Dei. Does this mean the first human with an immortal soul? First with an awareness of eternity and a spiritual world? First monotheist in a world of polytheistic Neanderthals? First believer? First of the Elect?