Let’s review the bidding – go back through the interrupt chain.
Three weeks ago I posted the video The Evolution of What Women Want on Rumble and a written version on my Substack. It is an interesting theme that no other author of whom I know is working. Closest is Edward Dutton in The Past is a Future Country, but he has different angles.
As you know my children are the focus of my life. Other people will say the same. However, there are evolutionary reasons for the way in which mine are my focus. That line of my thinking is not widely held.
Every species of animal, plant, one celled and even virus – is programmed to replicate itself. Except for modern human beings. This was pointed out 75 years ago by Sir Arthur Keith in Evolution and Ethics. Both liberalism and Christianity seek to deny evolution. Sir Charles Sherrington summed it up a century ago in an epigram: “Nature represents in the case of man a revulsion of the product against the process."
Modern humans don’t like to acknowledge evolution. Survival of the fittest implies the demise of the less fit. Moderns do not like to acknowledge differences among peoples, and we certainly do not want to condemn anybody to extinction. Yet, Europeans scrambled to the top of the heap by being the most evolved subspecies on the planet. To make that point I cite Why Did Europe Conquer the World?
The beauty of today’s world is that it need not be “red of tooth and claw” precisely because those who would compete against us for resources are not having children. Everybody else refusing to have kids leaves room for mine.
In preparation for broadening some of the points I have started to pull together my Amazon reviews such as those above.
Most tribal peoples have the evolutionarily correct vision of themselves as temporary custodians of cultures, languages and genes that will go on indefinitely, long after their individual deaths. Modern humans are the first in history to conclude that they don’t need children and grandchildren. Refuting Edmund Burke, they say they have no obligation to their forebears to continue their society, or to bear and nurture future generations. It is a society of individuals.
I want children. I believe, per Burke, that “Society is a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn.” I do acknowledge a debt to my ancestors for bringing me here, and an obligation to continue the family line. That’s only part of the argument. For that family to prosper they must find mates among people like themselves. Therefore, I have an interest in the gene pool of people similar to me. This is best expressed in a book by Frank Salter entitled On Genetic Interests Family, Ethnicity and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration. In addition to the review, I produced this video about how over the 15 years since his publication science has validated just about every one of his points.
I came to Ukraine to start another family. Though I had not thought the matter through, it turns out that per Salter the genetic distance between me and the average Ukrainian, and certainly between my children and the pool of their prospective mates, is smaller here than it would be in the United States. Not only that, the culture here is more traditional and homogeneous – more like my own, and more conducive to bringing up children to be like their parents. In particular, I want children interested in getting married and having their own children.
That’s enough deep thoughts for today. I am in the process of finishing my review of Melvin Konner’s Women After All. It is a book on the evolution of the sexes, in which he gets things more or less right up until two centuries ago, at which point he becomes afflicted by “revulsion of the product against the process” and prescribes a future for women in which every conceivable alternative objective in life seems more important than having children. Review will appear here shortly.
That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man continues to be pleased that his prognoses for the war seem to be being borne out. Bakhmut is still standing, Prigozhin is having a fallout with Putin. There are no major offenses underway. However belatedly, armaments are on the way, and we have had uninterrupted power for almost a week. Hallelujah!