Transition

CopyRight @ 2003

This book is about human survival. Humans survive by using learned strategies rather than by instincts. That is the mark of being human. Human survival strategies are called moralities so this is a book about morality. It becomes a very broad topic.
Right now, humans are in a crisis. Some of our old strategies that have taken us this far are not going to lead to survival in the future. We need to use different stratgies and more than that, we need to understand why we must use new strategies or we will not use them.

This book is the work of many years. It is made from science, religion, philosophy, history, reason, math, poetry, instinct, guesses and sweat. It rests on the shoulders of brilliant thinkers. It trys to answer old and new questions.

This is not just science. It is morality. It includes science, religion, philosophy and the rest to solve a moral problem. For purposes of organization, the problem and the result are described in the form of science where facts are segregated from hypothysis and all are connected in a web of reason so as to allow for systematic analysis and organized critique. Ultimately, a main goal is to show this view of morality is supported and verified by science. The goal also includes showing that it is supported and verified by religion, reason and faith.

Read this page, but don't read this chapter. This first chapter is boring and everyone knows that you have to get the interest of the reader at the beginning of the book. This book is a broad, integrated view of human ecology, genetics/artificial selection and morality. The next three chapters are a summary of each of the three main topics of the book. What is interesting about this book is the reasoning that is applied to a broad range of data. The reasoning in the summaries and the topics of the larger body of the book are quite interesting and novel. This first chapter though is a summary of those three summaries. It is necessary. All ideas must start with a synopsis of where the book is going, but as an initial, short, synopsis it is a declaration and does not include the novel reasoning of the rest of the book that is the interesting part. You'll want to read this eventually to organize the book, but the interesting parts start at the next chapter.

This book is a bit like an onion in that it has layers. This essay is meant to be the final inner layer. It is a distillation of the problems and solutions that humans must face in order to become more than simple animals and survive into the future. To make this introduction as short as possible, this chapter does not include support for what it states. The supporting arguments start appearing in the next layer out. Those outer layers are large, detailed and more interesting because of the view they show that leads to these conclusions. This inner layer has a very mild flavor. The outer layers have a more robust taste. Still, one must start at the beginning in order to tell the story right. Oh well. Go ahead and read it.

In trying to offer a summary of the entire book, this chapter makes a number of fairly large points. Reading this is going to require you to really exercise your reasoning ability. Some of the main points are:

Human Ecology

The world is changing. Anyone can feel that. Anyone who is thoughtful can see that a lot of these changes are fairly scary. Well, I wanted to figure out what these changes meant and what to do about them so I studied them in a number of different ways, but primarily in terms of biology. The best way I found to organize the information about the changes was to look at human ecology. Ecology is the study of energetics and reproduction of a specie or biological system. Human ecology has undergone huge changes. We don't survive the way we used to just a short time ago. We really aren’t adapted to any stable ecology and have not been for thousands of years, but to survive we must develop an ecology that we are adapted to and that is fairly stable.
Ecology is the study of how any specie survives. How it gets its food, where it lives, how it reproduces, etc. If you analyze human ecology you quickly see some really interesting things about what is important to human survival and what might not be. The biggest changes seem to be just how many humans there are and changes in our resource strategies. These changes were really started when humans began farming, both crops and domesticated animals. That change led to cities and technology and huge number of people we now see in the world. Another thing an ecological analysis shows is that we are in trouble. There are problems coming that we must deal with or humanity may well not survive as more than animals. We must find a new ecology that we can live in for a long time. This is to describe what we must do to accomplish that. It is a bit more complicated than it seems, because not only do we have to figure out a new ecology to live in, we are going to have to adapt to that ecology both genetically and by the strategies we use to survive. So the solution is in three parts, what the future ecology must look like for humans, human genetic adaptation to this new ecology and the new strategies that we will use.

The basis of ecology is called energetics and is a description of the resources that any specie uses to survive. Right now, we are widely using resources, like fossil fuels, that are quite limited in quantity. That is not even to mention the pollution they cause. In terms of human survival, they are just not a long term strategy. Even our current farming methods have long term problems. Still, a careful analysis of technology and human ecology suggests that if we solve the technical problem of a long term, clean energy supply like solar energy or practical fusion energy, all other resources humans require can be produced cleanly.

Human Genetics

At this point, some other problems in our ecology show themselves. Even if humans had limitless resources, other problems would predictably arise. One is disease, another is excessive population growth and another is in the genes themselves. Much of this book is about solving those problems.
The problem with disease in humans is that it used to be the most important limiting factor (called a selective effect). Before modern medicine and antibiotics, it used to often be that three out of five people died of diseases before they ever had children. That is a huge and important natural selective effect. It also acted as a uniquely general selective effect on those with weaknesses. Also, the more humans there are, the easier the disease can be transmitted through the population. Today, there are an awful lot more people on earth than there ever were before. That is a huge change.
The other problems are with humans themselves. We are very far from perfect. We have been undergoing rapid evolution in the past many thousands of years and while we have adapted a lot, there is still a long way to go. There are many people born that really are sickly, weak or have other genetic based problems. It used to be that disease and other selective effects removed these people from the population so that generally, only the strongest and healthiest from any family survived. Now it is far from that way. Not only that, but as things are now, people are having much smaller families. In ecology, there are simple descriptions of this. The equation of a human is determined by the long and costly requirements of raising children. With the rise of technology, this cost has become higher and longer. Parents tend to have less children and use medicine to keep them alive and healthy. Humans have sort of gone from a quantity strategy of many children, where only a few survived, to a quality strategy of having less children, more of whom survive. The problem is that the human genome has a number of problems. Genes naturally deteriorate from generation to generation. In natural circumstances, the weak die and the strong survive so that the children from each generation that reproduce are as healthy and adapted as the parents, or perhaps even more so as natural selection drives evolution. Humans have removed disease and many other natural selective effects. That is going to lead to a huge disaster as something effectively the opposite of normal evolution occurs. So the middle part of this book describing how humans can survive is based on how we can survive this problem with our genes. Solving that problem will solve a lot of other problems humans already face and will encounter in the future.

Realize that theoretically we could reintroduce natural selective effects like disease and let them run their course to solve this problem, but there are at least two reasons not to. The first is the issue of the basis of ecology, energetics. It takes a lot of resources to raise and educate children. Too much to waste by allowing disease to kill them off almost randomly. The second reason is that who wants to see their children get sick and die. If the selective effects that drive evolution are removed, something the opposite of evolution will occur and the best genes that humans have developed over millions of years will break down and disappear. In ecology this is referred to as Genetic Load. It is caused by a number of factors. One factor that acts slowly is mutation. A more important factor that will act much more quickly is natural genetic damage that occurs during recombination in the cell during reproduction. The only way to solve this problem is to introduce a selective effect. A selective effect must be introduced naturally or artificially, or humans will not survive. This book is based on the potentials and consequences of using what is commonly called pre-implantation selection. That is artificial selection before implantation in the womb.
Artificial selection has basically three overlapping potentials. The first is reduction of broken or ineffective traits. The second is to increase the frequency of good traits. The third potential is hybridization and is a bit more complicated. It is the main way that humans have progressed since the start of the cities. It is the mixing of the tribes so that their descendants have the genetic potentials of both their parental tribes. It is where the greatest potentials for humans have and will come from.
Consider Western culture. Three tribes came together to create the first city dwellers in the Fertile Crescent, the Sumerians. Over time the three tribes genetically hybridized to become one people. Thousands of years later, they were conquered by the Semites led by Sargon The Great. Over time, these people became one and spread in their cities. Their descendants included the Phoenicians and other city dwellers. Then, another peoples arrived, Indo-Europeans descended from horse herders in Southern Russia. These were known as the Greeks, the Eutustrians and the Romans. They replaced the Semites as the military rulers of the society, but by then the Sumerians and Semites were hybridized into one people. In all societies, social class and caste structures worked to prevent the mixing of the tribes. At the same time various factors, especially war and slavery, caused genetic hybridization. This also happened with the Indo-Europeans. While these were well known historical events and peoples leading to modern Western culture, there were many other tribes that were absorbed, most notably the Celts. Some tribes thrived. Some did not. The Celts were conquored politically and socially by the Romans, but they still existed as a people and over time, hybridized with the peoples of the ancient city societies. They contributed an incredible dynamic that has led to our current modern society. Individually, these tribes did not have the potentials they had when combined.
As already said, human ecology is rapidly changing and we do not exist yet in a relatively stable ecology. No current single tribe or race is going to have the genetic potentials to adapt to the changes that are creating the human future.
When parents from different tribes have children, the children tend to be “stronger” than the parents. They have the best traits of both parents. This is well known in domestic plants and animals, but is true for all species including humans. There is a downside to natural hybridization though. The next generations are generally not as strong as the first generation or even the parental generation. In human history, natural selection has selected for the strong hybrid at the cost of the weaker hybrids and the old tribal groups. It all gets pretty complicated and is explained in a later chapter, but suffice to say that artificial selection could allow humans to take great advantage of the potentials of the hybridization of the tribes, without the drawbacks of natural hybridization. It should give us the potentials to adapt to the ecology that we create. That raises the question of what this ecology will look like and what the people of that ecology will look like as well.
A related issue is racism. Racism is a more localized issue than most of the general survival issues that this book usually focuses on, but it is an important issue. Racism exists for a lot of reasons and is a real problem, but so much of the problem is how it is looked at. One reason is the real issue that hybridization can cause problems, but that problem can be removed by artificial selection. Another problem is about superiority and inferiority. Races tend to perceive each other that way. It is a win-lose situation. It looks like evolution would select one superior race to survive and the other races to go extinct. Even in a natural situation, that is not how it works. The genes of each race are very similar to the genes of other races and there is gene flow between the races as well. But in a situation of artificial selection, most of the more important the genes, such as many of the the ones that effect behavior and immunity, are additive. The potentials of the races can be additively combined into one race. Each race will look too different races for genetic potentials that it does not have. Racism becomes a very different issue and the racial issues become win-win. This point offers long term hope for humans, a great variety of genetic potentials held by the different races, as well as a short term hope in the current problems that the races have of getting along now.
It’s sort of like an automobile. They were most developed in the United States and Europe. Then the Japanese started adding their expertise to producing cars and revolutionized the automobile and how they were produced. Different strengths added together. Not everything will go together. That will represent a new selective pressure. Desirable traites that hybridize well, may be more successful than perhaps a better form of the same trait that does not hybridize well. Still, at present, it would be far wiser for humans to try to preserve what traites they can until we have a bit more wisdom about how to use the sum of human genetic wealth. So many tribes and so much human variability has already been lost.

Morality

This is the end of the first part of this book. It is the story of some of the physical ecology, that is energetics and reproduction. Examining human ecology shows that a huge part of human survival is based on strategies that they use for survival. Other species do this too, but not to the degree that humans do. Humans live by learned survival strategies as opposed to instincts. Have you ever heard of a learned survival strategy? It is referred to here as a morality. The second part of this book is about morality. It is meant to describe what humans will have to do to survive into the future in the coming ecologies. I think it will answer many questions that people have asked many times before
Don't confuse morality with religion. Religions may be based on moralities and may husband moralities, but morality came before religion and led to religion.

A question must be asked here at the beginning. Do we currently have morals systems that can take us into the future or do we have to develop new ones?

If you ask around, philosophy is a word with many meanings. People know it is an important word, but are not always clear on its meaning, simply because it is widely misused. Philosophy is how we know something. There are many ways to confirm what we believe is true. We may know something because it is part of some accepted science. We may know something because it is in the Bible, The Koran or because our parents told us it was so. We may know things based on reason, experience, faith, study, religion, feelings or because someone said it was so. All of these ways of knowing depend on belief. All of them. To know something is to believe it has truth. If you don’t believe science, then it is not a philosophy of yours. It is not a tool you use to describe things in your world. Implicit in the word philosophy is the choice to believe the truth in what the philosophy says is true. Note that everyone uses more than one philosophy and to be human is to use at least reason and experience. A person should try to be clear on what philosophies and parts of philosophies they believe and use. They should also be aware that at the same time those philosophies may not completely agree and the human mind is made to accommodate these multiple differing beliefs. That is important. The human mind functions in so many ways. Psychology and neuroscience has told us much about how the human mind works, as has what we have learned about computers. One important thing, of many, that has been learned is that human consciousness is a plurality, not a singularity. This is how we can have more than one opinion or belief at the same time. This is a critical feature of humans to understand, so as to be able to really understand the most important parts of this book.
Various philosophies, perhaps better called "ways of knowing something", have different levels of what and how they explain the truths they hold. Empirical sciences have a reputation for producing consistent truths, but are more limited to what can be measured and empirically shown. Religions explain more, but are more limited about details. Still, there is great truth in religions. It just tends to be conserved by prescedence and authority, which is not widely accepted in our current critical world. Religions need to examine their doctrines to see the real underlyng reasons and understandings behind the moral practices that they teach. Unfortunately, some religions have forgotten their real roots or do not trust their doctrines to the scrutiny of reason...
The philosophy of science about morality, that is what science says about morality, is that morality is about survival in evolutionary sense. Moralities are the tools and strategies that humans use to survive evolutionarily.
Take this book. It tries to answer difficult, human questions, so it uses all the philosophies I could muster, especially science, reason and religion. One point I make though is that I try to tell people what they already know, just have not been able to put into words. In the case of this book, I also try to fill in gaps in what a person already knows about survival from their moral sense, rather than offer completely new ideas. I use different philosophies to reach the same conclusions. A deep look at peoples beliefs, shows an incredible similarity and importance when it comes to survival.

There is another point that is critical to consider to put this book all together. You have probably noted this already. Thoughts come in natural groupings. I used to call them Mind Sets, but somebody else named them and offered some very interesting thoughts about the subject. He called them "memes" and said that they seemed to have a life of their own. A meme is a concept mentioned by Richard Dawkins that is a description of a thought or an integrated group of thoughts, in terms of how humans think. Moralities and a philosophies are memes. That is part of their importance. Memes are the natural information groupings that allow people to think and transmit ideas to other people. Memes are ideas, some of which fit together and some that don't. Two or more memes can combine into one. Memes evolve, develop and vanish. Memes seem to fit into the human mind almost like the lock and key process of the sense of smell. The development of memes by humans has been called the History of Consciousness and is the record of human philosophical and intellectual development. Any morality or philosophy must be considered in terms of memes. While memes are not a biological process, memes are a product of evolutionary processes, some of which are like biological evolution, some very different. As such, a meme has certain characteristics of evolutionary created objects. There is a simplicity, subtlty and integrity to them.

Memes exist in ones mind. Memes are descriptions of ones internal or external reality. They interact with the physical features of the mind. It is critical that they are accurate in terms of reason if not completeness or they will interact less effectively with the mind. The mind can adapt physically to memes, that is learning, but only within constraints set by reason. A lack of completedness does not doom a meme, but any logical flaw will reveal itself to the sight of reason and barring other issues, cause the meme to not be as thouroughly accepted in ones mind. The human, mathematical based ability called reason, is limited and like other traites, there is variation between people. Still, it is reason that is defined in the physical features of the brain that must interact with memes. Reason alone is often not capable of creating or verifying a model of reality. It can judge likelyhood of truth and it can detect a false premise, but a lot of models of external and internal reality seem quite reasonable in terms of how the mind and memes work, but they are not true. They do satisfy the requirements of the human mind for explanations though.

The Morality of Artificial Selection

Questions must be asked about the morality of artificial selection. It is a powerful tool with the potential to be used for good or bad, but because of disease (and other things) it is a necessary strategy for survival. The human equation is now that it is far more costly to raise and socialize a human to live in a technological society as opposed to the mostly farming societies of the past. It is too expensive to raise and educate children if a majority of them will die of disease. There is also the human issue of who wants to watch their children die? That is another philosophy. Beyond surviving diseases, artificial selection offers great potentials for improving what a human is. A question is, will that lead to increased survival or be a danger to human survival? What would be an improvement? These answers need input from science and other philosophies. These answers must be viewed in terms of the family.

Artificial selection not only offers some incredible potentials, it raises many important questions such as why, how, what it should be used for and what potential dangers are there.

If someone asks me why would we do artificial selection, I ask them if they had heart disease of early onset Alzheimer’s disease, what would they do to insure that their children did not inherit the diseases. That usually clears up the question. That is the first level of artificial selection, selection against broken or ineffective genes. There are more reasons why. What is it that you respect the most about yourself or your mate? There is no guarantee that your children will inherit that trait. The second level of artificial selection is to make sure that the children inherit the best potentials of the parents brains, health and beauty. The third level of artificial selection is going to partly be a consequence of the second. Just selecting for the best traites of the parents will cause mixing of the tribes. Still, the potentials for intentional hybridization, planned over generations, is to make the human specie something different. Something more. Some potentials and considerations of this are discussed in other chapters.

There are many other features of artificial selection that might increase or risk survival potential, but they too are discussed in detail elsewhere. Suffice to say, that the answer to the initial moral question asked here, is artificial selection moral, will it help human survival beyond the issue of disease, is that it can. It will help if we have adaquate moralities to use it correctly. That point is a bit of scientific philosophy. Another philosophy is that artificial selection can lead to healthy individuals, families and societies. That is moral in very basic terms. There are other moral questions about selecting for hybridization and human potentials, but they are considered in other chapters. Really, there is no alternative but to use artificial selection.
This should all lead to happiness of some sort, very like happiness has always been in humans. Still, happy isn't everything and happy people aren't always the ones that build things.

For the purpose of this book, intelligence is considered primarily in two forms, technical and social.
Since this whole discussion is mute if technology is not considered to be part of the equation, can it be assumed that humans can husband genetic potentials to be better at technology? Humans divide themselves up in society according to occupational caste. Historically, the primary castes are international ruling caste, priest, warrior, scribe, builder and peasant farmer. As groups, they are descended from tribes. There is a large genetic basis to these human technical abilities. Artificial selection could easily be used to increace the frequency of those potentials and there is probably minimal risk from this. Social intelligence is another issue that has potentials both cooperative and Machiavellian. Great human potential lays there, but that is discussed in other chapters.

If a lot of what this is about is morality and genetics, the question arises whether there is a genetic basis to the use of morality? Is there a genetic based behavior in humans the provides an inclination to use moralities or even particular moral systems? It appears so and it has been a focus of human natural selection for at least the last 1000 years. It is a basic survival strategy in humans. It is like other behaviors and can grow slowly or flower suddenly. Understand it like other emotions and you can recognize it in another person like you can sense anger or love in a person. It is faith... Now don't react to what you think of that word. It is a word commonly claimed by religion, but it is far more and created religion more than religion created faith, though a primary purpose of religion is to teach faith. Faith is an inheritable behavior that makes humans look for and use moral systems. An interesting comment made in the Bible is that faith is a gift from God that not all people have. That makes for an interesting comment on genetic variation. Its real meaning and ultimate implications are actually pretty incredible.

Faith is associated with powerful memes. One must not become intoxicated or overwhelmed by any meme.

Moral Systems

So what kind of a moral system could lead to long term human survival?

An important thought to remember is that from weakness comes strength, from strength comes weakness. This is a philosophy of mine, can often be empirically proved, is shown by reason and it is also a part of the Bible. It is important to keep this point in mind when considering this book.

So what can humans do to survive into the future? In biological terms, this means millions of years. Luckily, in this case, my objective is only to provide for a much shorter time period, because this is meant only as a foundation pointing at a pretty basic version of a stable ecology. Others will come along and describe more about what humans will need to survive and what potentials we have to use. This is meant to be a basis, just as humans effecting their own genetic nature is a basis of the future ecologies.

The foundation of this discussion of Morality is the premise that humans have survived and developed based on their ability to cooperate. This might seem odd, but careful study shows it to be true. This is a premise well supported by science. Still, humans have a violent past and there is a lot of violence in the present.

What are the attributes of a morality of cooperation? How critical to human survival strategy is cooperation? Language is an exercise in agreement about what sounds mean what. Humans work together to survive. The basic survival strategy of family, community, societies and nations are cooperative systems.
Ask a person their values and you will hear, human values are cooperative.
Part of cooperation is agreements. Agreements are made as implicit and explicit contracts. Money is a great example. Money is an explicit contract and look what money has allowed by facilitating the transfer of goods and services. It is a far better method of financial agreement than barter. Marriage is a contract that is not only a basis of our society, but is also the basis of our most basic human survival strategy, the family. There is far more to cooperation than agreements, but agreements illustrate the formal usefulness of cooperation. Actually, most agreements are passive and informal. In the long run, those agreements may be more imortant than the more formal ones, because personal agreements are about survival.
If humans have survived by cooperation, can humans survive better if they can cooperate better? In biological terms, the most basic meaning of intelligence is the ability to remember, understand and influence the behavior of other members of a person's society. This is the basis of social behavior. Much of human intelligence is believed to have developed for coordinating hunts. A large part of that is based on communication. The abilities that allow for the cooperation of a hunt are what allow humans to act together as teams and is one of the most powerful and important problem solving tools that humans have.

This part of this essay has been a discussion of how humans think and a few things that they think about. This should be enough to lay a foundation for describing the core of what human morality will have to be for humans to survive. Morality has always been a simpler issue of belief systems, but now must also include genetic strategies as well. Science is changing things.
So what science says about human moral systems is that they are all a matter of evolutionary survival strategies that happen to be based on cooperation.
As a specie, we survive because we cooperate. Well, we don't always cooperate. If we did, the system wouldn't work. There is a great deal of self interest involved, but the moral systems from family to nation that we use for survival are all based on cooperative systems. Humans are at the end of a long evolutionary branch. We are highly evolved. We have powerful instincts and respond to them, especially those that relate to survival and cooperation.

Moral systems are methods of survival that humans use. There are big ones like religions and small ones like how to build a better mouse trap. Most moral systems are husbanded by different institutions. Institutions are also refered to as multi-generational belief systems. They fulfill human needs that go on generation to generation. These institutions include government, law, academia, medicine, military, agriculture, engineering, industry, manufacturing, building trades, electrical skills, child care techniques, diapers, cooking, cleaning technigues, etc. Here, only four moral systems are mentioned to make a point. That is for brevity, I assure you that there is more discussion in the outer layers.
Consider these four examples of moral systems to see their different cooperative aspects. The systems examined include The Golden Rule, Darma, Christianity and Buddhism. Other examples could be used, but these are what I am most familiar with.
The Golden Rule is stated as do unto others as they would do unto you. It is interesting because it actually sets no standard of behavior but your own.
Darma is a concept, loosely speaking, that life is divided into three 25 year stages. In the first 25 years a person devotes their efforts to themselves and their own growth. The next 25 years were devoted to the persons family. The next stage of their life, they were supposed to devote their life to their community. This is a formalized example of the altruism that is necessary to support a community and society.
Christianity has a lot of connotations. A Christian is one who believes that Jesus was the Son of God, but there is more to it than that. There were three main messages taught by Jesus. Love God, love one another and teach others this belief. The message he taught and its consequences would be called Christian Philosophy. All three of those commands have profound implications in different terms of human survival, but the concept of "love one another" describes a profoundly cooperative system. Remember that there is a difference here between one who is a Christian and one who follows a Christian philosophy. Currently there are many Christians, but there are far more who follow a Christian philosophy. In Western Society, it is remarkable how natuarlly civil people actually are. Christian Philosophy is the basis of the cooperative system used by Western culture. Christian philosophy is a method of survival that probably qualifies as a cooperative enough system to take humans far into the future. It has already taken us to the modern world. Quite a gift from a Jewish Carpenter.
There are forms of Buddhism that say to love all things. Not just people, but the animals, plants, oceans, rocks, stars and everything. This is a profound concept and raises the question of how will humans have to relate to their environment. Future moralities may require extreme views of cooperation, a broader love than even Christianity or any other modern cooperative social system teaches. This has some interesting implications in terms related to environment and artificial habitats.

Now some interesting points come from this. Here are two very different advanced philosophies with very different traditions. They are probably amoung the most advanced of human moral systems and they both seem to suggest the same critical thing. In moral terms used to consider artificial selection of traits, this raises an interesting point. To every moral system, there are appropriate genetic based behaviors, just as the moralities develop in response to real human nature. Artificial selection should be used to increase the frequency of these traits. Notice that both of those advanced moral systems are based on the same largely genetically based trait, love. They go to great lengths to state this.

Humans will not be able to create complicated societies without using moral systems that are based on cooperation. Humans will not be able to maintain complicated societies without a morality based on a genetic and philosophical predisposition to love.

So there you have it. Love is the genetic foundation for the meme encapsulating the core of Western cooperative morality. One view of memes is that they are like objects in programming and have hierarchies and inheritance.

Beyond The Known

The study of morality does not exist in a vacuum. Up to now, this description of morality is just a rather explicit form of Utilitarianism with genetics and memes thrown in. It is a view of human existance almost simplified to Newtonian Mechanics. Survival is a result of evolution. Faith is an inheritable survival instinct. Thoughts are like things outside ourself and everything falls in the orderly realm of science. Think of Ayn Rand. If that is the case, our biggest hazards will become arrogance, sloth, hubris and ignorance, because those are the problems of a predictable and static world that most ideas address. But there are big differences between this and Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism tends to take a static view of the world. This book doesn't. While this book does talk about the common good like Utilitarianism does, it doesn't talk that much about happiness. It talks about survival and survival is more complicated than happiness. Utilitarians don't much talk about God. This does. So what about God? All this talk about morality and God has never even weighed in. Isn't it amazing that the person that taught the Christian Philosophy said that it was a gift from God. Quite a gift. It was a counter intuitive concept with amazing power. It was a meme. It would be called a very powerful meme.

This book is a meme. In terms of memes it is not highly developed, because it has not gone through much in the way of natural evolution. It's pretty cool though. This is being written after something like 33 years working to figure it out. This essay contains the core of the meme. It is a pretty complicated one, which is unusual for a meme that describes survival. Still it could be called an idea who's time has come. Humans are at such a critical point now. How to make the transition to a new ecology. Eventually, we will have to describe that ecology, but before that we are going to have to find out a lot more about humans now.

There are other topics in human ecology that this book examines to a limited degree, limited by the scant information and understanding we have available. These are subtle elements of human ecology, but accurate measurement of them will probably have to wait upon better understanding first. Faith is a good example of this and morality is another. We all have a conception of what these mean, but though this adds another view, we have a long way to go to understand the human specie. We certainly need new views of what humans are.

Beliefs

This whole book breaks into two parts based in biology and beliefs. The biology part is a complicated, technical discussion of ecological and genetic issues. The beliefs section is a long difficult discussion that as a fundamental point says that the belief systems we will need must be based on memes that include an understanding of how they function, as well as some great functionality. Social development and increased reasoning skills have led to very critical examinations of our beliefs. Many beliefs have fallen to discredit not because they were wrong, but because they were not supported to current standards. This essay outlines a meme that is a natural description of humans and human survival. It is an already existing meme that is human belief. This book trys to show the understanding and reasoning of that meme. It also expands the meme some by giving a new logical view of some old things, like faith, that get revealed by that understanding. Ultimately, it is supposed to offer a platform from which to systematically offer new questions and understandings about human topics such as conciousness, spirituality, psychic phenominae, Gods and the nature of human reality. It will take a strong foundation to be able to apply the methods of reason and science to offer an understanding of conciousness and the spirit. First though we will need to develop new views. If we find and can understand any of these things, you can be assured that they will become important parts of human survival satrategy and development.

This book is about life. This is frivolous, but it is practical. It is about history and how life has changed so much through history. It is about how a person can live now and in the future. This is only important to a person that wants to live, so because of that, there are some things that can be assumed. This kind of person feels that the world is changing rapidly. They also know that we cannot do things the way we have in the past. Some things have changed so much that we are going to have to find new ways to live. In the past, people have often lived their lives just as their parents and ancestors have, without understanding or even asking why. We are entering a new ecology, an Ecology of Conciousness. The world is changing such that people are going to have to have a better understanding of their lives and right and wrong or they will not have the reasons to strive to survive and they will not survive. Still, many people will judge what is right and wrong by what they feel more than just what they know. This book is so that people can both feel and know. This is for the people that feel that there should be a better way and a better reason to live. It is for people that know that there is more to life than themselves. This is to provide both understanding and reason. The reason is within you and that reason will be the judge of what I say.

Ecology is a term of science. That places severe restrictions on it. Up until now in this book, everything has been taken from the body of knowledge that is science or is based on reason. There is a lot more to humans than is accepted by science though and there is far more to humans than reason presently explains. There is also a lot that is simply unknown. Some of that is here in this book, but more this is to make a path to the unknown so that it can be examined systematically. These paths are new understandings of ones reality. Many more paths will be created that branch from these.

Memes and moralities, like laws and most other human methods are imperfect. So it takes desire to make them work.

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