Genetic Condition Quotes

When we meet somebody whose separate tunnel-reality is obviously far different from ours, we are a bit frightened and always disoriented. We tend to think they are mad, or that they are crooks trying to con us in some way, or that they are hoaxers playing a joke. Yet it is neurologically obvious that no two brains have the same genetically-programmed hard wiring, the same imprints, the same conditioning, the same learning experiences. We are all living in separate realities. That is why communication fails so often, and misunderstandings and resentments are so common. I say "meow" and you say "Bow-wow," and each of us is convinced the other is a bit dumb.

Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement? Why do women always have to come clean? The magnificence of Genet’s last great work, The Prisoner of Love, lies in his willingness to be wrong: a seedy old white guy jerking off on the rippling muscles of the Arabs and Black Panthers. Isn’t the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong?

Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic “causes” of these “conditions”?

I suffer from a unique genetic condition. It's called Dumbass Syndrome and, unfortunately, there's no cure.

Most of us become so rigidly fixed in the ruts carved out by genetic programming and social conditioning that we ignore the options of choosing any other course of action. Living exclusively by genetic and social instructions is fine as long as everything goes well. But the moment biological or social goals are frustrated- which in the long run is inevitable - a person must formulate new goals, and create a new flow activity for himself, or else he will always waste his energies in inner turmoil.

It is my belief that the basic knowledge that we're providing to the world will have a profound impact on the human condition and the treatments for disease and our view of our place on the biological continuum.

In fact, genetic medicine has brought the problems of rare genetic conditions right to my own door.

Pain and dysfunction get passed down from generation to generation. A mixture of genetic inheritance and environmental circumstance ensures that our lives unfold according to a complex web of conditions that is infinitely larger than ourselves. The only way to stop the vicious cycle of reacting to pain by causing more pain is to step out of the system. We need to let our hearts fill with compassion, and forgive ourselves and others.

If we are all streams of consciousness, then apart from genetic similarities, and conditioning, we are all strangers to our siblings.

The calcium in your bones came from a star. We are all made from recycled bits and pieces of the universe. This matters because origins matter. For example, if you were born to a reigning monarch but kidnapped by the black market baby underground shortly after birth and sent to America where you were raised by common, unremarkable people from Ohio, and when you were in your thirties working as a humble UPS driver, dignitaries landed their helicopter on the roof of your crummy apartment building and informed you of their thirty-plus year search for you, His Royal Highness, the course of your life might change. You know? Our familial genetic origins -medical histories- inform us of medical conditions which exist in our families and when we know about these specific conditions, we can sometimes take certain actions to prevent them. Which is why I think it’s important to consider that billions of years before we were students and mothers and dog trainers and priests, we were particles that would form into star after star after star until forever passed, and instead of a star what formed was life; simplistic, crude, miraculous. And after another infinity, there we were. And this is why for you, anything is possible. Because you are made out of everything.

If New York was a patient, it would be diagnosed with agrypnia excitata, a rare genetic condition characterized by insomnia, nervous energy, constant twitching, and dream enactment - an apt description of a city that never sleeps, a place where one comes to reinvent himself

Discoveries about genetics are not limited to just those 6,000 conditions of a strongly hereditary nature, however. We are now in the midst of a genetic revolution that will touch all of us in numerous ways:

They were not medical problems to rehabilitate. We were not medical problems. I was never going to undo the damage polio had done to my nerve cells and walk again, nor was this my goal. The disabled veterans coming home from the Vietnam War were never going to grow their limbs back or heal their spinal cords and walk again. My friends with muscular dystrophy were never going to not have been born with muscular dystrophy. Accidents, illnesses, genetic conditions, neurological disorders, and aging are facts of the human condition, just as much as race or sex.

Did you know PTSD is the only mental illness you can give someone? A person gave it to me. A man actually drove me crazy. He transmitted this condition. Like the man who gave my gay cousin HIV, or like my grandfather, who gave my grandmother the clap. You can “get” schizophrenia or bipolar in the genetic sense. You might inherit genes that predispose you toward hearing voices or intense fluctuation of mood. In that sense, these conditions are “given” to you. But they aren’t given to you in the same way watching your father cut off your mother’s head on Christmas gives you PTSD.

In making us work for its goals, society is assisted by some powerful allies: our biological needs and our genetic conditioning.

As eminent scientist R Buckminster Fuller stated: We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply in terms in which we have been conditioned to think His words are echoed by Dr Michael Ellner: Just look at us. Everything is backwards. Everything is upside-down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religion destroys spirituality

The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of these bodies makes a single sound at any time during the sultan’s speech.

I believe that a new philosophy will be created by those who were born after Hiroshima which will dramatically change the human condition. It will have these characteristics: (1) It will be scientific in essence and science-fiction in style. (2) It will be based on the expansion of consciousness, understanding and control of the nervous system, producing a quantum leap in intellectual efficiency and emotional equilibrium. (3) Politically it will stress individualism, decentralization of authority, a Iive-and-let-Iive tolerance of difference, local option and a mind-your-own-business libertarianism. (4) It will continue the trend towards open sexual expression and a more honest, realistic acceptance of both the equality of and the magnetic difference between the sexes. The mythic religious symbol will not be a man on a cross but a man-woman pair united in higher love communion. (5) It will seek revelation and Higher Intelligence not in formal rituals addressed to an anthropomorphic deity, but within natural processes, the nervous system, the genetic code, and without, in attempts to effect extra-planetary communication. (6) It will include practical, technical neurological psychological procedures for understanding and managing the intimations of union-immortality implicit in the dying process. (7) The emotional tone of the new philosophy will be hedonic, aesthetic, fearless, optimistic, humorous, practical, skeptical, hip. We are now experiencing a quiescent preparatory waiting period. Everyone knows something is going to happen. The seeds of the Sixties have taken root underground. The blossoming is to come.

Black orators, more eloquent than Genet, had informed white Americans for three centuries that our living conditions were intolerable. David Walker in 1830 and Frederick Douglass in 1850 had revealed the anguish and pain of life for blacks in the United States. Martin Delaney and Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey and Dr. DuBois, and Martin King and Malcolm X had explained with anger, passion and persuasion that we were living precariously on the ledge of life, and that if we fell, the entire structure, which had prohibited us living room, might crumble as well. So in 1960, white Americans should have known all they needed to know about black Americans.

Discrimination is the most polite word for abuse aka denying equal opportunity by anyone in power based on age, ancestry, color, disability (mental and physical), exercising the right to family care and medical leave, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, military or veteran status, national origin, political affiliation, race, religious creed, sex (includes pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding and related medical conditions), and sexual orientation.

We humans don’t suffer from a genetic-opportunism-driven ‘animal condition’, but a conscious-mind-based, psychologically troubled HUMAN CONDITION.

same genetic make-up who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very different imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values.

The text is not inserted into a genetic process in which it is understood as emerging from this or that prior moment of form or style; nor is it 'extrinsically' related to some ground or context which is at least initially given as something lying beyond it. Rather, the data of the work are interrogated in terms of their formal and logical and, most particularly, their semantic conditions of possibility.

Once a virus gets into an intensive poultry shed it can move quickly through the flock, constantly replicating itself. Any ‘errors’ or changes to the genetic code during replication don’t get repaired: this is how the virus mutates and new variant strains emerge. The tragedy is that while intensive farms provide ideal conditions for the emergence of new aggressive disease strains, wild birds can then become infected too. Experience

The drive to change one’s state must face countless obstacles. One can act on genetic conditioning but not ignore it. Belonging to one class or another can be camouflaged but not canceled out. The individual is in the end only a battlefield, in which privileges and disadvantages war fiercely. What counts in the end is the collective flow of generations. Even when there is both merit and luck, the efforts of a single individual are unsatisfying.

Karl Marx, himself a denizen of one of the most congested of all London districts, was equally impressed by the dismal conditions of the new proletariat. he sent Darwin a copy of 'Das Kapital' (which was found unread after his death).

depression can occur because of biological factors such as genetic predispositions, hormonal changes (including menopause, childbirth or thyroid problems) and differences in biochemistry (an imbalance of naturally occurring substances called neurotransmitters in the brain and spinal cord). In other cases, depression is caused by psychological factors, severe life stressors, substance abuse and certain medical conditions that affect the way your brain regulates your moods.

Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same genetic make-up who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very different imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values.

In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g. DNA) indicates that most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups. Conventional geographic "racial" groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes. This means that there is greater variation within "racial" groups than between them. In neighboring populations there is much overlapping of genes and their phenotypic (physical) expressions. Throughout history whenever different groups have come into contact, they have interbred. The continued sharing of genetic materials has maintained all of humankind as a single species.

one of the main legacies of the Cognitive Revolution. Thanks to the appearance of fiction, even people with the same genetic make-up who lived under similar ecological conditions were able to create very different imagined realities, which manifested themselves in different norms and values.

If any field needs integration, it is medicine. If any field needs an integrative paradigm that can make sense out of all the different models of healing, it is medicine. The weaknesses of the conventional medical model have been clear for some time. Its procedures are too invasive and have too many harmful side effects. There is no conventional medical model for the treatment of most chronic and degenerative diseases (germ theory and genetic predisposition are not adequate explanations for most conditions in this category). Last, but not least, conventional medicine is expensive. In contrast, there are so many

EVOLUTION RESTS ON three steps: (a) certain biological traits are inherited by genetic means; (b) mutations and gene recombination produce variation in those traits; (c) some of those variants confer more “fitness” than others. Given those conditions, over time the frequency of more “fit” gene variants increases in a population.

Happiness is impossible,” he murmured. “We’ve just been conditioned to seek it. Pop culture and television promise it’s out there, some ideal if we just play our cards right. But it’s not real. It’s not true. Happiness isn’t something we’re genetically programmed for. We’re programmed to want—and the more we want, the farther we go.

Ma was isolated and alone. Under those circumstances people behave differently. Kya made a soft groan. “Please don't talk to me about isolation. No one has to tell me how it changes a person. I have lived it. I am isolation," Kya whispered with a slight edge. "I forgive Ma for leaving. But I don't understand why she didn't come back- why she abandoned me. You probably don't remember, but after she walked away, you told me that a she-fox will sometimes leave her kits if she's starving or under some other extreme stress. The kits die- as they probably would have anyway- but the vixen lives to breed again when conditions are better, when she can raise a new litter to maturity. "I've read a lot about this since. In nature- out yonder where the crawdads sing- these ruthless-seeming behaviors actually increase the mother's number of young over her lifetime, and thus her genes for abandoning offspring in times of stress are passed on to the next generation. And on and on. It happens in humans, too. Some behaviors that seem harsh to us now ensured the survival of early man in whatever swamp he was in at the time. Without them, we wouldn't be here. We still store those instincts in our genes, and they express themselves when certain circumstances prevail. Some parts of us will always be what we were, what we had to be to survive- way back yonder.

This reflects the standard social-Darwinist view that those who fail to succeed in a dog-eat-dog environment have inherent deficiencies, whether genetic (right-wing conservatives) or rooted in social conditions (liberals). As Ryan showed, in neither case is the cause related to the very foundation of society itself, its pervasive racism, classism, and sexism.

There is a significant hereditary contribution to ADD but I do not believe any genetic factor is decisive in the emergence of ADD traits in any child. Genes are codes for the synthesis of the proteins that give a particular cell its characteristic structure and function. They are, as it were, alive and dynamic architectural and mechanical plans. Whether the plan becomes realized depends on far more than the gene itself. It is determined, for the most part, by the environment. To put it differently, genes carry potentials inherent in the cells of a given organism. Which of multiple potentials become expressed biologically is a question of life circumstances. Were we to adopt the medical model — only temporarily, for the sake of argument — a genetic explanation by itself would still be unsuitable. Medical conditions for which genetic inheritance are fully or even mostly responsible, such as muscular dystrophy, are rare. “Few diseases are purely genetic,” says Michael Hayden, a geneticist at the University of British Columbia and a world-renowned researcher into Huntington’s disease. “The most we can say is that some diseases are strongly genetic.” Huntington’s is a fatal degeneration of the nervous system based on a single gene that, if inherited, will almost invariably cause the disease. But not always. Dr. Hayden mentions cases of persons with the gene who live into ripe old age without any signs of the disease itself. “Even in Huntington’s, there must be some protective factor in the environment,” Dr. Hayden says.

All the windows were fogged over now. Neither Walt nor Lem tried to clear the misted glass. Unable to see out of the car, confined to its humid and claustrophobic interior, they seemed to be cut off from the real world, adrift in time and space, a condition that was oddly conducive to the consid eration of the wondrous and outrageous acts of creation that genetic engineering made possible.

The internal conflict in conscience caused by competing levels of natural selection is more than just an arcane subject for theoretical biologists to ponder. It is not the presence of good and evil tearing at one another in our breasts. It is a biological trait fundamental to understanding the human condition, and necessary for survival of the species. The opposed selection pressures during the genetic evolution of prehumans produced an unstable mix of innate emotional response. They created a mind that is continuously and kaleidoscopically shifting in mood—variously proud, aggressive, competitive, angry, vengeful, venal, treacherous, curious, adventurous, tribal, brave, humble, patriotic, empathetic, and loving. All normal humans are both ignoble and noble, often in close alternation, sometimes simultaneously.

A genetic fundamentalism permeates public awareness these days. It may be summed up as the belief that almost every illness and every human trait is dictated by heredity. Simplified media accounts, culled from semidigested research findings, have declared that inflexible laws of DNA rule the biological world. It was reported in 1996 that according to some psychologists, genes determine about 50 percent of a person’s inclination to experience happiness. Social ability and obesity are two more among the many human qualities now claimed to be genetic. True or not, narrow genetic explanations for ADD and every other condition of the mind do have their attractions. They are easy to grasp, socially conservative and psychologically soothing. They raise no uncomfortable questions about how a society and culture might erode the health of its members, or about how life in a family may have affected a person’s physiology or emotional makeup. As I have personally experienced, feelings of guilt are almost inevitable for the parents of a troubled child. They are all too frequently reinforced by the uninformed judgments of friends, neighbors, teachers or even total strangers on the bus or in the supermarket. Parental guilt, even if misplaced, is a wound for which the genetic hypothesis offers a balm

Dijk and his prolific team examined gene expression in a group of healthy young men and women after having restricted them to six hours of sleep a night for one week, all monitored under strict laboratory conditions. After one week of subtly reduced sleep, the activity of a hefty 711 genes was distorted, relative to the genetic activity profile of these very same individuals when they were obtaining eight and a half hours of sleep for a week.

We can choose the narrative we tell about our lives. We're born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn't choose. We're born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can't control. We're sometimes thrust into social conditions that we detest. But among all the things we don't control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to organize perceptions.

Psychopathy does not appear to be caused by poor mothering or early trauma, or to have any other nurture-based explanation. It’s a genetically heritable condition31 that creates brains that are unmoved by the needs, suffering, or dignity of others.32 The elephant doesn’t respond with the slightest lean to the gravest injustice. The rider is perfectly normal—he does strategic reasoning quite well. But the rider’s job is to serve the elephant, not to act as a moral compass.

Death is only relevant to "genetic adaptation" insofar as it relates to the capacity for self-reproduction (what is relevant is not that an individual died, but success in gene propagation while alive). The potentially misleading phrase "genetic adaptation" means that either because or despite an organism's adaptedness to external conditions, genes were or are successful in propagating themselves. Success in reproducing genes, in other words, is the ultimate measure of so-called "genetic adaptation". The possibility of adaptation unto extinction through individualism does not contradict the Darwinian notion of adaptation for survival. On the contrary, it is only a confirmation of it. The question here is what survives, the individual or its genes? The genes, and not the individual organism, provide the measure of survival in biological evolution. This point is illustrated by the modern corporate executive who adapts to the changing economic conditions better than any of his or her competitors, but fails to produce any children.

Readers acquainted with the recent literature on human sexuality will be familiar with what we call the standard narrative of human sexual evolution, hereafter shortened to the standard narrative. It goes something like this: 1. Boy Meets girl, 2. Boy and girl assess one and others mate value, from perspectives based upon their differing reproductive agendas/capacities. He looks for signs of youth, fertility, health, absence of previous sexual experience and likelihood of future sexual fidelity. In other words, his assessment is skewed toward finding a fertile, healthy young mate with many childbearing years ahead and no current children to drain his resources. She looks for signs of wealth (or at least prospects of future wealth), social status, physical health and likelihood that he will stick around to protect and provide for their children. Her guy must be willing and able to provide materially for her (especially during pregnancy and breastfeeding) and their children, known as "male parental investment". 3. Boy gets girl. Assuming they meet one and others criteria, they mate, forming a long term pair bond, "the fundamental condition of the human species" as famed author Desmond Morris put it. Once the pair bond is formed, she will be sensitive to indications that he is considering leaving, vigilant towards signs of infidelity involving intimacy with other women that would threaten her access to his resources and protection while keeping an eye out (around ovulation especially) for a quick fling with a man genetically superior to her husband. He will be sensitive to signs of her sexual infidelities which would reduce his all important paternity certainty while taking advantage of short term sexual opportunities with other women as his sperm are easily produced and plentiful. Researchers claim to have confirmed these basic patterns in studies conducted around the world over several decades. Their results seem to support the standard narrative of human sexual evolution, which appears to make a lot of sense, but they don't, and it doesn't.

In fact, we are living in an age of biblical prophecies come true. What would have seemed miraculous in the Middle Ages is now commonplace: the blind restored to sight, cripples who can walk, and the dead returned to life. Take the Argus II, a brain implant that restores a measure of sight to people with genetic eye conditions. Or the Rewalk, a set of robotic legs that enables paraplegics to walk again. Or the Rheobatrachus, a species of frog that became extinct in 1983 but, thanks to Australian scientists, has quite literally been brought back to life using old DNA. The

Brocq's disease was incurable until 1951 when a sixteen-year-old boy with an advanced case of the affliction was referred as a last resort to a hypnotherapist named A. A. Mason at the Queen Victoria Hospital in London. Mason discovered that the boy was a good hypnotic subject and could easily be put into a deep state of trance. While the boy was in trance, Mason told him that his Brocq's disease was healing and would soon be gone. Five days later the scaly layer covering the boy's left arm fell off, revealing soft, healthy flesh beneath. By the end of ten days the arm was completely normal. Mason and the boy continued to work on different body areas until all of the scaly skin was gone. The boy remained symptom-free for at least five years, at which point Mason lost touch with him.6 0 This is extraordinary because Brocq's disease is a genetic condition, and getting rid of it involves more than just controlling autonomic processes such as blood flow patterns and various cells of the immune system. It means tapping into the masterplan, our DNA programming itself. So, it would appear that when we access the right strata of our beliefs, our minds can override even our genetic makeup.

widespread. Some states go so far as to forcibly sterilize people with certain disabilities. Some prohibit marriage for the genetically disabled, for fear of procreating hereditary conditions like mine. Visibly disabled people are actually barred from appearing in public in cities such as Columbus, Ohio—Dad’s hometown—until 1972, and Chicago until 1974, under what are collectively called the “ugly” laws because they target anyone perceived as unattractive, for being a disturbance of the peace. The movement to change all this and more is rising in discrete pockets all over, inspired by Black civil rights. Closer to

For almost twenty years, one of the Brocks’ two new bacteria, Thermophilus aquaticus, remained a laboratory curiosity until a scientist in California named Kary B. Mullis realized that heat-resistant enzymes within it could be used to create a bit of chemical wizardry known as a polymerase chain reaction, which allows scientists to generate lots of DNA from very small amounts—as little as a single molecule in ideal conditions. It’s a kind of genetic photocopying, and it became the basis for all subsequent genetic science, from academic studies to police forensic work. It won Mullis the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993.

Campaign to destigmatize so-called "mental illness" often take a wrong turning here. They try to demonstrate how suffers of some condition have made amazing contributions to the science or the arts. Trying to destigmatize the diagnosis of autism, for example, we read how Einstein and Newton would have received that diagnosis today, and yet made fabulous discoveries in the field of physics. Even if they are acknowledged to have been "different", their worth is still reckoned in terms of how their work has impacted on the world of others. However well-intentioned, such perspectives are hardly judicious, as they make an implicit equation between value and social utility. Taking this step is dangerous, as the moment that human life is defined in terms of utility, the door to stigmatization and segregation is opened. If someone was found to be not useful, what value, then, would their life have? This was in fact exactly the argument of the early-twentieth-century eugenicists who complained for the extermination of the mentally ill. Although no one would admit such aspirations today, we cannot ignore the resurfacing in recent years of a remarkably similar discourse, with its emphasis on social utility, hereditary and genetic vulnerability.

The obvious question is, what are the “conditions to which presumably we are genetically adapted”? As it turns out, what Donaldson assumed in 1919 is still the conventional wisdom today: our genes were effectively shaped by the two and a half million years during which our ancestors lived as hunters and gatherers prior to the introduction of agriculture twelve thousand years ago. This is a period of time known as the Paleolithic era or, less technically, as the Stone Age, because it begins with the development of the first stone tools. It constitutes more than 99.5 percent of human history—more than a hundred thousand generations of humanity living as hunter-gatherers, compared with the six hundred succeeding generations of farmers or the ten generations that have lived in the industrial age. It’s not controversial to say that the agricultural period—the last .5 percent of the history of our species—has had little significant effect on our genetic makeup. What is significant is what we ate during the two and a half million years that preceded agriculture—the Paleolithic era. The question can never be answered definitively, because this era, after all, preceded human record-keeping. The best we can do is what nutritional anthropologists began doing in the mid-1980s—use modern-day hunter-gatherer societies as surrogates for our Stone Age ancestors.

Lake Natron resided in northern Tanzania near an active volcano known as Ol Doinyo Lengai. It was part of the reason the lake had such unique characteristics. The mud had a curious dark grey color over where Jack had been set up for observation, and he noted that there was now an odd-looking mound of it to the right of one of the flamingo’s nests. He zoomed in further and further, peering at it, and then realized what he was actually seeing. The dragon had crouched down beside the nests and blended into the mud. From snout to tail, Jack calculated it had to be twelve to fourteen feet long. Its wings were folded against its back, which had small spines running down the length to a spiky tail. It had a fin with three prongs along the base of the skull and webbed feet tipped with sharp black talons. He estimated the dragon was about the size of a large hyena. It peered up at its prey with beady red eyes, its black forked tongue darting out every few seconds. Its shoulder muscles bunched and its hind legs tensed. Then it pounced. The dark grey dragon leapt onto one of flamingoes atop its nest and seized it by the throat. The bird squawked in distress and immediately beat its wings, trying to free itself. The others around them took to the skies in panic. The dragon slammed it into the mud and closed its jaws around the animal’s throat, blood spilling everywhere. The flamingo yelped out its last breaths and then finally stilled. The dragon dropped the limp carcass and sniffed the eggs before beginning to swallow them whole one at a time. “Holy shit,” Jack muttered. “Have we got a visual?” “Oh, yeah. Based on the size, the natives and the conservationists were right to be concerned. It can probably wipe out a serious number of wildlife in a short amount of time based on what I’m seeing. There’s only a handful of fauna that can survive in these conditions and it could make mincemeat out of them.” “Alright, so what’s the plan?” “They told me it’s very agile, which is why their attempts to capture it haven’t worked. I’m going to see if it responds to any of the usual stimuli. So far, they said it doesn’t appear to be aggressive.” “Copy that. Be careful, cowboy.” “Ten-four.” Jack glanced down at his utility belt and opened the pocket on his left side, withdrawing a thin silver whistle. He put it to his lips and blew for several seconds. Much like a dog whistle, Jack couldn’t hear anything. But the dragon’s head creaked around and those beady red eyes locked onto him. Jack lowered the whistle and licked his dry lips. “If I were in a movie, this would be the part where I said, ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’” The dragon roared, its grey wings extending out from its body, and then flew straight at him.

No one can deny seriously any more, or for very long, that men do all they can in order to dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves; in order to organize on a global scale the forgetting or misunderstanding of this violence, which some would compare to the worst cases of genocide (there are also animal genocides: the number of species endangered because of man takes one’s breath away). One should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly consider it explained away. It gets more complicated: the annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of the continued existence or even their overpopulation. As if, for example, instead of throwing a people into ovens and gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being continually more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation, or extermination by gas or by fire.

Had she been able to listen to her body, the true Virginia would certainly have spoken up. In order to do so, however, she needed someone to say to her: “Open your eyes! They didn’t protect you when you were in danger of losing your health and your mind, and now they refuse to see what has been done to you. How can you love them so much after all that?” No one offered that kind of support. Nor can anyone stand up to that kind of abuse alone, not even Virginia Woolf. Malcolm Ingram, the noted lecturer in psychological medicine, believed that Woolf’s “mental illness” had nothing to do with her childhood experiences, and her illness was genetically inherited from her family. Here is his opinion as quoted on the Virginia Woolf Web site: As a child she was sexually abused, but the extent and duration is difficult to establish. At worst she may have been sexually harassed and abused from the age of twelve to twenty-one by her [half-]brother George Duckworth, [fourteen] years her senior, and sexually exploited as early as six by her other [half-] brother… It is unlikely that the sexual abuse and her manic-depressive illness are related. However tempting it may be to relate the two, it must be more likely that, whatever her upbringing, her family history and genetic makeup were the determining factors in her mood swings rather than her unhappy childhood [italics added]. More relevant in her childhood experience is the long history of bereavements that punctuated her adolescence and precipitated her first depressions.3 Ingram’s text goes against my own interpretation and ignores a large volume of literature that deals with trauma and the effects of childhood abuse. Here we see how people minimize the importance of information that might cause pain or discomfort—such as childhood abuse—and blame psychiatric disorders on family history instead. Woolf must have felt keen frustration when seemingly intelligent and well-educated people attributed her condition to her mental history, denying the effects of significant childhood experiences. In the eyes of many she remained a woman possessed by “madness.” Nevertheless, the key to her condition lay tantalizingly close to the surface, so easily attainable, and yet neglected. I think that Woolf’s suicide could have been prevented if she had had an enlightened witness with whom she could have shared her feelings about the horrors inflicted on her at such an early age. But there was no one to turn to, and she considered Freud to be the expert on psychic disorders. Here she made a tragic mistake. His writings cast her into a state of severe uncertainty, and she preferred to despair of her own self rather than doubt the great father figure Sigmund Freud, who represented, as did her family, the system of values upheld by society, especially at the time.   UNFORTUNATELY,

Right now we’re enjoying first generation GE crops; soon we’ll have versions that can grow in drought conditions, in saline conditions, crops that are nutritionally fortified, that act as medicines, that increase yields and lower the use for pesticides, herbicides, and fossil fuels. The best designs will do many of these things at once. The Gates Foundation–led effort BioCassava Plus aims to take cassava, one of the world’s largest staple crops, fortify it with protein, vitamins A and E, iron, and zinc; lower its natural cyanide content, make it virus resistant, and storable for two weeks (instead of one day). By 2020, this one genetically modified crop could radically improve the health of the 250 million people for whom it is a daily meal.

And by the early 1970s our little parable of Sam and Sweetie is exactly what happened to the North American Golden Retriever. One field-trial dog, Holway Barty, and two show dogs, Misty Morn’s Sunset and Cummings’ Gold-Rush Charlie, won dozens of blue ribbons between them. They were not only gorgeous champions; they had wonderful personalities. Consequently, hundreds of people wanted these dogs’ genes to come into their lines, and over many matings during the 1970s the genes of these three dogs were flung far and wide throughout the North American Golden Retriever population, until by 2010 Misty Morn’s Sunset alone had 95,539 registered descendants, his number of unregistered ones unknown. Today hundreds of thousands of North American Golden Retrievers are descended from these three champions and have received both their sweet dispositions and their hidden time bombs. Unfortunately for these Golden Retrievers, and for the people who love them, one of these time bombs happens to be cancer. To be fair, a so-called cancer gene cannot be traced directly to a few famous sires, but using these sires so often increases the chance of recessive genes meeting—for good and for ill. Today, in the United States, 61.4 percent of Golden Retrievers die of cancer, according to a survey conducted by the Golden Retriever Club of America and the Purdue School of Veterinary Medicine. In Great Britain, a Kennel Club survey found almost exactly the same result, if we consider that those British dogs—loosely diagnosed as dying of “old age” and “cardiac conditions” and never having been autopsied—might really be dying of a variety of cancers, including hemangiosarcoma, a cancer of the lining of the blood vessels and the spleen. This sad history of the Golden Retriever’s narrowing gene pool has played out across dozens of other breeds and is one of the reasons that so many of our dogs spend a lot more time in veterinarians’ offices than they should and die sooner than they might. In genetic terms, it comes down to the ever-increasing chance that both copies of any given gene are derived from the same ancestor, a probability expressed by a number called the coefficient of inbreeding. Discovered in 1922 by the American geneticist Sewall Wright, the coefficient of inbreeding ranges from 0 to 100 percent and rises as animals become more inbred.

In 1995, China passed the National Maternal and Infant Health Law, forbidding couples who had “genetic diseases of a serious nature” to procreate. The conditions listed include mental retardation, mental illness, and seizures. These couples were required to undergo a mandatory premarital medical exam. It was hugely controversial, reviving international criticism that China practices eugenics. Actually, the wording of the national law was considered mild. Some provinces had more explicit regulations. In 1988, Gansu Province passed local regulations prohibiting “reproduction of the dull-witted, idiots, or blockheads.” Gansu abolished that law in 2002. Similarly, the National Maternal and Infant Health Law was defanged when requirements for the premarital medical examination were quietly dropped in 2003.

There are a small number of debilitating conditions with a strong genetic basis, such as muscular dystrophy or Huntington’s disease. These are rare, affecting about one person in ten thousand or even fewer. They do not pose a significant threat to the survival of the species. If, however, we add up the numbers of people plagued by depression or ADD or the other common psychological problems people in this society struggle with, including alcoholism and anxiety, we will have identified no less than a third of the North American population. Genetic explanations for these conditions assume that after millions of years of evolution, nature would permit a very large number of disordered genes, handicapping a third of humankind, to pass through the screen of natural selection — a highly unlikely proposition.

Multi-generational sexual child abuse is such a common cause of the proliferation of pedophilia that Hitler/Himmler research focused on this genetic trait for mind control purposes. While I personally could not relate to the idea of sex with a child, I had parents and brothers and sisters who did. I still believe that George Bush revealed today’s causation of the rapid rise in pedophilia through justifications I heard him state. The rape of a child renders them compliant and receptive to being led without question. This, Bush claims, would cause them to intellectually evolve at a rate rapid enough to “bring them up to speed” to grasp the artificial intelligence emanating from DARPA. He believed that this generation conditioned with photographic memory through abuse was necessary for a future he foresaw controlled by technology.

It is important none the less that our remotest identifiable ancestors lived in trees because what survived in the next phase of evolution were genetic strains best suited to the special uncertainties and accidental challenges of the forest. That environment put a premium on the capacity to learn. Those survived whose genetic inheritance could respond and adapt to the surprising, sudden danger of deep shade, confused visual patterns and treacherous handholds. Strains prone to accident in such conditions were wiped out. Among those that prospered (genetically speaking) were some species with long digits which were to develop into fingers and, eventually, the oppositional thumb, and other forerunners of the apes already embarked upon an evolution towards three-dimensional vision and the diminution of the importance of the sense of smell.

It is one thing to explain the causal origins of thinking, as science commendably does; it is an entirely different thing to conflate thinking in its formal or rule-governed dimension with its evolutionary genesis. Being conditioned is not the same as being constituted. Such a conflation not only sophistically elides the distinction between the substantive and the formal, it also falls victim to a dogmatic metaphysics that is impulsively blind to its own epistemological and methodological bases qua origins. It is this genetic fallacy that sanctions the demotion of general intelligence as qualitatively distinct to a mere quantitative account of intelligent behaviours prevalent in nature. It should not come as a any surprise that this is exactly the jaded gesture of antihumanism upon whose shoddy pillars today's discourse of posthumanism supports its case. Talk of thinking forests, rocks, worn shoes, and ethereal beings goes hand in hand with the cult of technological singularity, musings on Skynet or the Market as speculative posthuman intelligence, and computers endowed with intellectual intuition. And again, by now it should have become obvious that, despite the seeming antagonism between these two camps - one promoting the so-called egalitarianism of going beyond human conditions by dispensing with the rational resources of critique, the other advancing the speculative aspects of posthuman supremacy on the grounds of the technological overcoming of the human condition - they both in fact belong to the arsenal of today's neoliberal capitalism in its full-on assault on any account of intelligence that may remotely insinuate an ambition for collective rationality and imagination.

Cordelia – “Why so rough?” Aral – “It’s very poor. It was the town center during the time Isolation. And it hasn’t been touched by renovation, minimal water, no electricity choked with refuse.” “Mostly human,” added Peoter tartly. “Poor?” Asked Cordelia bewildered. “No electricity? How can it be on the comm network?” “It’s not of course,” answered Vorkosigan. “Then how can anyone get their schooling?” Cordelia “They don’t.” Cordelia stared. “I don’t understand, how do they get their jobs?” “A few escape to the service, the rest prey on each other mostly.” Vorkosigan regarded her face uneasily. “Have you no poverty on Beta colony?” “Poverty? Well some people have more money than others, but no comm consuls…?” Vorkosigan was diverted from his interrogation. “Is not owning a comm consul the lowest standard of living you can imagine?” He said in wonder. “It’s the first article in the constitution! ‘Access to information shall not be abridged.’” “Cordelia, these people barely have access to food, clothing and shelter. They have a few rags and cooking pots and squat in buildings that aren’t economical to repair or tear down yet with the wind whistling through the walls.” “No air conditioning?” “No heat in the winter is a bigger problem here.” “I suppose so. You people don’t really have summer. How do they call for help when they are sick or hurt?” “What help?” Vorkosigan was growing grim. “If they’re sick they either get well or die.” “Die if we’re lucking” muttered Veoter. “You’re not joking.” She stared back and forth between the pair of them. “Why, think of all the geniuses you must missing!” “I doubt we must be missing very many from the Caravanceri.” Said Peoter dryly. “Why not? They have the same genetic compliment as you.” Cordelia pointed out the – to her -obvious. The Count went rigid. “My dear girl, they most certainly do not. My family has been Vor for nine generations.” Cordelia raised her eyebrows. “How do you know if you didn’t have the gene-typing until 80 years ago?” Both the guard commander and the footman were acquiring peculiar stuffed expressions. The footman bit his lip. “Besides,” she pointed out reasonably, “If you Vor got around half as much as those histories I’ve been reading imply. 90% of the people on this planet must have Vor blood by now. Who knows who your relatives are on your father’s side. Vorkosigan bit his napkin absently. His eyes gone crinkly with much the same expression as the footman and muttered, “Cordelia, you really can’t sit at the breakfast table and imply my ancestors were bastards. It’s a mortal insult here.” “Where should I sit? Oh I’ll never understand.

The stagnancy of energy, lack of interest in life and creativity, unproductiveness and mediocrity which beset so many people is not the consequence of their genetic and biological programming but of parental and social conditioning. The great Otto Rank acknowledged this and correctly rectified Freud's Thanatos concept. He, like several humanist and existential philosophers and psychologists who came later, realized that our Death Instinct or drive manifests itself in the very repression addressed throughout this book. Repression is a form of violence against the Self. Rank and his followers also realized that man's blind conformity to social norms and lack of differentiation from crowd-consciousness also serves to deaden creativity and productivity. They understood that the robotic organization man, behind his cubicle or on his cell-phone, slaving for some faceless corporation, fully embodies the Death Instinct.

With more and more decision making and work done by robots, what will be left for humans to do? Do we really want to compete biologically with robot technology by using brain implants and genetically improved intelligence and social behavior? This choice would mean a sharp departure away from the human nature we have inherited, and a fundamental change in the human condition. Now we are talking about a problem best solved within the humanities, and one more reason the humanities are all-important. While I’m at it, I hereby cast a vote for existential conservatism, the preservation of biological human nature as a sacred trust. We are doing very well in science and technology. Let’s agree to keep it up, and move both along even faster. But let’s also promote the humanities, that which makes us human, and not use science to mess around with the wellspring of this, the absolute and unique potential of the human future.

What motivates Olympic athletes to train for years for one event—in some cases, for just seconds of actual competition? It’s the same thing that kept my friend Pete nosing around old bookstores for years. It’s the same thing that makes a person venture out of a comfortable job to start a new business. We see it in the artist who spends day after day in a studio chipping away at a block of stone. Look closely and you’ll find it in the shopper who passes up the good deal in search of the best deal. It’s one of the things that makes us most human. We consciously pursue what we value. It’s not simply a matter of being driven by biology or genetics or environmental conditioning to satisfy instinctive cravings. Rather, we perceive something, prize it at a certain value, then pursue it according to that assigned value because we were created that way. This ability to perceive, prize, and pursue is part of our essential humanness, and it’s the essence of ambition.

There's a psychologist called Mary & Diamond who at Brooklyn in California, in the 80s studied rats. And they took rats at different ages. Newborns, some of whom they deliberately brain damaged, adult, middle-aged, elderly rats. And they exposed these rats to different levels of environmental stimulation, better food, more playmates, toys to play with and so on. They found out a couple of months later that the rats, at any age, including the brain-damaged rats, who had the better stimulation, they were smarter. But in the autopsy then they also found that in the front part of their brain they had larger nerve-cells with more connections with other nerve-cells and richer blood supply. In other words that environmental stimulation actually caused a change in the state of the brain, even in the older rats. And that's called neuroplasticity. The capacity of the brain to develop new circuits. So whether it comes to ADHD, addiction, depression or other childhood disorders or any other issue with adults as well, if we recognize them not as ingrained, genetically-determined diseases, but as problems of development, then the question becomes very different. Then the question becomes not just "how do we treat the symptoms?" (and addiction itself is a symptom, depression is a symptom), but "how do we help people develop out of these conditions?" In other words, it is not a medical question, purely, but a developmental question. And development always requires the right environment. Now, if you're a gardener you know that. If you are growing plants in your backyard and you want them to grow into healthy, functioning beings, botanical beings, you want to provide them with the right nurturing, the right nutrition, minerals, water, sunlight and so on. So the real question is how do we provide the conditions for further development for people whose development was impaired in the first place? Now we know how to do that. We are just not doing it.

These genetic malfunctions are unlikely to produce schizophrenia in an individual unless they are stimulated by environmental conditions. By far the most causative environmental factor is stress, especially during gestation in the womb, early childhood, and adolescence—stages in which the brain is continually reshaping itself, and thus vulnerable to disruption. Stress can take the form of a person's enduring sustained anger, fear, or anxiety, or a combination of these. Stress works its damage by prompting an oversupply of cortisol, the normally life sustaining “stress hormone” that converts high energy glycogen to glucose in liver and in muscle tissue. Yet when it is called upon to contain a rush of glycogen, cortisol can transform itself into “Public Enemy Number One,” as one health advocate put it. The steroid hormone swells to flood levels and triggers weight gain, high blood pressure, heart disease, damage to the immune system, and an overflow of cholesterol. Stress is likely a trigger for schizophrenia.

Human evolution is not over, but the chances of natural selection adapting our species in dramatic, major ways to common non-infectious mismatch diseases are remote unless conditions change dramatically. One reason is that many of these diseases have little to no effect on fertility. Type 2 diabetes, for example, generally develops after people have reproduced, and even then, it is highly manageable for many years.8 Another consideration is that natural selection can act only on variations that affect reproductive success and that are also genetically passed from parent to offspring. Some obesity-related illnesses can hinder reproductive function, but these problems have strong environmental causes.9 Finally, although culture sometimes spurs selection, it is also a powerful buffer. Every year new products and therapies are being developed that allow people with common mismatch diseases to cope better with their symptoms. Whatever selection is operating is probably occurring at a pace too slow to measure in our lifetimes.

Near the exit to the blue patio, DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin Stick stand by a concrete scale model of the Jungfrau, ... socking the slopes of the famous mountain with red rubber hot-water bags full of ice cubes, the idea being to pulverize the ice for Pirate's banana frappes. With their nights' growths of beard, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, miasmata of foul breath, DeCoverley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier. Elsewhere in the maisonette, other drinking companions disentangle from blankets (one spilling wind from his, dreaming of a parachute), piss into bathroom sinks, look at themselves with dismay in concave shaving mirrors, slab water with no clear plan in mind onto heads of thinning hair, struggle into Sam Brownes, dub shoes against rain later in the day with hand muscles already weary of it, sing snatches of popular songs whose tunes they don't always know, lie, believing themselves warmed, in what patches of the new sunlight come between the mullions, begin tentatively to talk shop as a way of easing into whatever it is they'll have to be doing in less than an hour, lather necks and faces, yawn, pick their noses, search cabinets or bookcases for the hair of the dog that not without provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last night. Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast:flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which-- though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off--- the genetic chains prove labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations. . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects. . . .

Five Hundred Years of Solitude The rise of modern science and industry brought about the next revolution in human–animal relations. During the Agricultural Revolution humankind silenced animals and plants, and turned the animist grand opera into a dialogue between man and gods. During the Scientific Revolution humankind silenced the gods too. The world was now a one-man show. Humankind stood alone on an empty stage, talking to itself, negotiating with no one and acquiring enormous powers without any obligations. Having deciphered the mute laws of physics, chemistry and biology, humankind now does with them as it pleases. When an archaic hunter went out to the savannah, he asked the help of the wild bull, and the bull demanded something of the hunter. When an ancient farmer wanted his cows to produce lots of milk, he asked some great heavenly god for help, and the god stipulated his conditions. When the white-coated staff in Nestlé’s Research and Development department want to increase dairy production, they study genetics – and the genes don’t ask for anything in return.

In contrast, ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have been able to change their behaviour quickly, transmitting new behaviours to future generations without any need of genetic or environmental change. As a prime example, consider the repeated appearance of childless elites, such as the Catholic priesthood, Buddhist monastic orders and Chinese eunuch bureaucracies. The existence of such elites goes against the most fundamental principles of natural selection, since these dominant members of society willingly give up procreation. Whereas chimpanzee alpha males use their power to have sex with as many females as possible – and consequently sire a large proportion of their troop’s young – the Catholic alpha male abstains completely from sexual intercourse or raising a family. This abstinence does not result from unique environmental conditions such as a severe lack of food or want of potential mates. Nor is it the result of some quirky genetic mutation. The Catholic Church has survived for centuries, not by passing on a ‘celibacy gene’ from one pope to the next, but by passing on the stories of the New Testament and of Catholic canon law.

When I go running through the forest on hot days, if I stop for any reason, in that very moment mosquitoes will attack me. If I keep moving, they do not bother me. This motivates me to continue without resting. Imagine how wonderful it would be if every time we stopped being active in life the Universe would send us a signal that would push us to carry on. Guess what, it does. When the life we lead does not align with our passions, depression bites at us so we will change our ways. If we eat poorly and live sedentary, we are often afflicted with a serious health condition. We do not get sick, or become ill so that we can blame God, curse our genetics, or give up on life. These conditions arise to motivate us so we will correct our errors and clean up our mistakes. The reason why we are confronted with failures on our mission to obtain happiness is not so we can dwell in misery, but rather for us to reshape our desires and go after what we are destined to succeed with. The Universe is working in our favor, not against us. It is okay to rest at times, but if we do not want to get bit by misfortunes, then we must remain active in our pursuit of a better life.

What is it about the ancients,’ Pinker asks at one point, ‘that they couldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?’ There is an obvious response to this: doesn’t it rather depend on which corpse you consider interesting in the first place? Yes, a little over 5,000 years ago someone walking through the Alps left the world of the living with an arrow in his side; but there’s no particular reason to treat Ötzi as a poster child for humanity in its original condition, other than, perhaps, Ötzi suiting Pinker’s argument. But if all we’re doing is cherry-picking, we could just as easily have chosen the much earlier burial known to archaeologists as Romito 2 (after the Calabrian rock-shelter where it was found). Let’s take a moment to consider what it would mean if we did this. Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a rare genetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type of dwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous in his community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitude hunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of his pathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health and nutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains to support this individual through infancy and into early adulthood, granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, and ultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial.15 Neither is Romito 2 an isolated case. When archaeologists undertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from the Palaeolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities – but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death (and beyond, since some of these funerals were remarkably lavish).16 If we did want to reach a general conclusion about what form human societies originally took, based on statistical frequencies of health indicators from ancient burials, we would have to reach the exact opposite conclusion to Hobbes (and Pinker): in origin, it might be claimed, our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short. We’re not suggesting we actually do this. As we’ll see, there is reason to believe that during the Palaeolithic, only rather unusual individuals were buried at all. We just want to point out how easy it would be to play the same game in the other direction – easy, but frankly not too enlightening.

Nobody is ever made happy by winning the lottery, buying a house, getting a promotion or even finding true love. People are made happy by one thing and one thing only – pleasant sensations in their bodies. A person who just won the lottery or found new love and jumps from joy is not really reacting to the money or the lover. She is reacting to various hormones coursing through her bloodstream and to the storm of electric signals flashing between different parts of her brain. Unfortunately for all hopes of creating heaven on earth, our internal biochemical system seems to be programmed to keep happiness levels relatively constant. There's no natural selection for happiness as such - a happy hermit's genetic line will go extinct as the genes of a pair of anxious parents get carried on to the next generation. Happiness and misery play a role in evolution only to the extent that they encourage or discourage survival and reproduction. Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that evolution has moulded us to be neither too miserable nor too happy. It enables us to enjoy a momentary rush of pleasant sensations, but these never last for ever. Sooner of later they subside and give place to unpleasant sensations. (...) Some scholars compare human biochemistry to an air-conditioning system that keeps the temperature constant, come heatwave or snowstorm. Events might momentarily change the temperature, but the air-conditioning system always returns the temperature to the same set point. Some air-conditioning systems are set at twenty-five degrees Celsius. Others are set at twenty degrees. Human happiness conditioning systems also differ from person to person. On a scale from one to ten, some people are born with a cheerful biochemical system that allows their mood to swing between levels six and ten, stabilising with time at eight. Such a person is quite happy even if she lives in an alienating big city, loses all her money in a stock-exchange crash and is diagnosed with diabetes. Other people are cursed with a gloomy biochemistry that swings between three and seven and stabilises at five. Such an unhappy person remains depressed even if she enjoys the support of a tight-knit community, wins millions in the lottery and is as healthy as an Olympic athlete (...) incapable of experiencing anything beyond level seven happiness. Her brain is simply not built for exhilaration, come what may. (...) Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry. They can startle it for a fleeting moment, but it is soon back to the set point.

There are many examples where species share common plastic traits. What appears to be convergence may just be the plastic response of the organism to its environment. Examples include the following: Limbs that protrude from an animal’s body have more surface area per unit mass than the rest of the body. In cold weather the animal loses more heat per unit mass from these limbs than from other parts of the body. In many species the tails and legs are shorter for those living in colder climates and larger for those in warmer climates. Gulls’ wings are shorter in cold climates than in warm. Hares and foxes also have shorter ears in cold climates than in warm. Eskimos have shorter arms and legs than do people living in warmer climates. . . . Jodan’s rule: Many species of fish tend to have more vertebrae when they live in cold water than do the same species living in warm water. These differences have been shown to depend on the temperature at which the fish have been reared. What these rules show is not convergence. They show that different species adopt the same anatomical strategies when they have to cope with the same environmental conditions. We have seen that these strategies cannot come from random mutations. It is much more reasonable to say they come from environmental cues acting on the genetic program.

end of the continuum are the ineffective people who transfer responsibility by blaming other people, events, or the environment—anything or anybody “out there” so that they are not responsible for results. If I blame you, in effect I have empowered you. I have given my power to your weakness. Then I can create evidence that supports my perception that you are the problem. At the upper end of the continuum toward increasing effectiveness is self-awareness: “I know my tendencies, I know the scripts or programs that are in me, but I am not those scripts. I can rewrite my scripts.” You are aware that you are the creative force of your life. You are not the victim of conditions or conditioning. You can choose your response to any situation, to any person. Between what happens to you and your response is a degree of freedom. And the more you exercise that freedom, the larger it will become. As you work in your circle of influence and exercise that freedom, gradually you will stop being a “hot reactor” (meaning there’s little separation between stimulus and response) and start being a cool, responsible chooser—no matter what your genetic makeup, no matter how you were raised, no matter what your childhood experiences were or what the environment is. In your freedom to choose your response lies the power to achieve growth and happiness.

Hence the term “voluntary muscle” is in many ways a figure of speech. I can consciously command a movement, but I cannot consciously command the recruitment of every muscle fiber which must be used, nor the precise order of their contractions and lengthenings which actually produce the desired effect. This is to say that every consciously willed movement is always conditioned by two things: genetically established organization and habitual usage. Our genetic organization is quite plastic, open-ended, filled with potential variations in behavior; on the other hand, habitual usage can become just as limiting as it is convenient, and can become a tyrant to exactly the degree that it becomes practiced, automatic, unconscious. We are free to train ourselves to act differently, but it is very difficult to suddenly act differently than we have been trained. The tendencies in our motor behavior created by genetically determined patterns and by habitual usage do not lie within the muscle cells, nor even in the motor neurons that unite them into motor units. The search for the organizational factors of purposeful muscular control—whether it be action or relaxation—takes us deeper and deeper into the central nervous system, where we find that every muscular response is built up, selected, and colored by the totality of our neural activity, both conscious and unconscious.

Genes can be activated or turned off by factors in the environment. In the Cree population of northwestern Ontario, for example, diabetes is found at a rate five times the Canadian national average, despite the traditionally low incidence of diabetes among native peoples. The genetic makeup of the Cree people cannot have changed in a few generations. The destruction of the Crees’ traditional physically active ways of life, the substitution of high-calorie diets for their previous low-fat, low-carbohydrate eating patterns and greatly increased stress levels are responsible for the alarming rise in diabetes rates. Although heredity is involved in diabetes, it cannot possibly account for the pandemic among Canada’s native peoples, or among the rest of the North American population, for that matter. We will see that in similar ways changes in society are causing more and more children to be affected by attention deficit disorder. It is easy to jump to hasty conclusions about genetic information. Some studies have identified certain genes, for example, that are said to be more common among people with attention deficit disorder or with other related conditions, such as depression, alcoholism or addiction. But even if the existence of these genes is proven, there is no reason to suppose that they can, on their own, induce the development of ADD or any other disorder. First, not everyone with these genes will have the disorders. Second, not everyone with the disorders will be shown to carry the genes.

In effect, we know from Darwin that there are only four characteristics necessary in order to get adaptive evolution, right? If you have reproduction, variation, differential success, and an environment of limited resources, you're going to get adaptive evolution. When we set up an economic system, or a political system...*it evolves*. Things evolve within it. And if we don't anticipate that what we write down in our documents about what we're trying to accomplish does not have the capacity to overwhelm whatever niche we have set up and that we will ultimately see the creatures that are supported by the environment that we created, then we will never get this right. Because we will always be fooled by our own intentions, and we will create structures that create predators of an arbitrary kind. So we need to start thinking evolutionarily, because that's the mechanism for shaping society into something of a desirable type rather than a monstrous type. [...] So let's say we're talking about a political structure...and we know we don't like corruption...and we're going to set a penalty for attempting to corrupt the system. OK, now what you've done is you've built a structure in which evolution is going to explore the questions, 'What kind of corruptions are invisible?' and 'What kinds of penalties are tolerable from the point of view of discovering how to alter policy in the direction of some private interest?' Once you've set that up, if you let it run, evolutionarily it will create a genius corruptor, right? It will generate something that is capable of altering the functioning of the system without being spotted, and with being only slightly penalized -- and then you'll have no hope of confronting it, because it's going to be better at shifting policy than you will be at shifting it back. So what you have to do is, you have to build a system in which there *is no selection* that allows for this process to explore mechanisms for corrupting the system, right? You may have to turn the penalties up much higher than you would think, so that any attempt to corrupt the system is ruinous to the thing that attempts it. So the thing never evolves to the next stage, because it keeps going extinct, right? That's a system that is resistant to the evolution of corruption, but you have to understand that it's an evolutionary puzzle in the first place in order to accomplish that goal. [...] We sort of have this idea that we inherited from the wisdom of the 50s that genes are these powerful things lurking inside of us that shift all of this stuff that we can't imagine they would have control over, and there's some truth in it. But the larger truth is that so much of what we are is built into the software layer, and the software layer is there because it is rapidly changeable. That's why evolution shifted things in that direction within humans. And we need to take advantage of that. We need to be responsible for altering things carefully in the software, intentionally, in order to solve problems and basically liberate people and make life better for as many people as possible, rather than basically throw up our hands because we are going to claim that these things live at the genetic layer and therefore what can we do?

Multi-generational sexual child abuse is such a common cause of the proliferation of pedophilia that Hitler/Himmler research focused on this genetic trait for mind control purposes. While I personally could not relate to the idea of sex with a child, I had parents and brothers and sisters who did. I still believe that George Bush revealed today’s causation of the rapid rise in pedophilia through justifications I heard him state. The rape of a child renders them compliant and receptive to being led without question. This, Bush claims, would cause them to intellectually evolve at a rate rapid enough to “bring them up to speed” to grasp the artificial intelligence emanating from DARPA. He believed that this generation conditioned with photographic memory through abuse was necessary for a future he foresaw controlled by technology. Since sexual abuse enhanced photographic memory while decreasing critical analysis and free thought, there would ultimately be no free will soul expression controlling behavior. In which case, social engineering was underway to create apathy while stifling spiritual evolution. Nevertheless, to short sighted flat thinking individuals such as Bush, spiritual evolution was not a consideration anyway. Instead, controlling behavior in a population diminished by global genocide of ‘undesirables’ would result in Hitler’s ‘superior race’ surviving to claim the earth. Perceptual justifications such as these that were discussed at the Bohemian Grove certainly did not provide me with the complete big picture. It did, however, provide a view beyond the stereotyped child molester in a trench coat that helped in understanding the vast crimes and cover-ups being discussed at this seminar in Houston.

Gian Pero Frau, one of the most important characters in the supporting cast surrounding S'Apposentu, runs an experimental farm down the road from the restaurant. His vegetable garden looks like nature's version of a teenager's bedroom, a rebellious mess of branches and leaves and twisted barnyard wire. A low, droning buzz fills the air. "Sorry about the bugs," he says, a cartoonish cloud orbiting his head. But beneath the chaos a bloom of biodynamic order sprouts from the earth. He uses nothing but dirt and water and careful observation to sustain life here. Every leaf and branch has its place in this garden; nothing is random. Pockets of lettuce, cabbage, fennel, and flowers grow in dense clusters together; on the other end, summer squash, carrots, and eggplant do their leafy dance. "This garden is built on synergy. You plant four or five plants in a close space, and they support each other. It might take thirty or forty days instead of twenty to get it right, but the flavor is deeper." (There's a metaphor in here somewhere, about his new life Roberto is forging in the Sardinian countryside.) "He's my hero," says Roberto about Gian Piero. "He listens, quietly processes what I'm asking for, then brings it to life. Which doesn't happen in places like Siddi." Together, they're creating a new expression of Sardinian terreno, crossing genetic material, drying vegetables and legumes under a variety of conditions, and experimenting with harvesting times that give Roberto a whole new tool kit back in the kitchen. We stand in the center of the garden, crunching on celery and lettuce leaves, biting into zucchini and popping peas from their shells- an improvised salad, a biodynamic breakfast that tastes of some future slowly forming in the tangle of roots and leaves around us.

Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions. We probably adopt this strategy not so much because of any lack of interest or power but because of a longstanding conviction that for much of human behavior there are no relevant antecedents. The function of the inner man is to provide an explanation which will not be explained in turn. Explanation stops with him. He is not a mediator between past history and current behavior, he is a center from which behavior emanates. He initiates, originates, and creates, and in doing so he remains, as he was for the Greeks, divine. We say that he is autonomous—and, so far as a science of behavior is concerned, that means miraculous. The position is, of course, vulnerable. Autonomous man serves to explain only the things we are not yet able to explain in other ways. His existence depends upon our ignorance, and he naturally loses status as we come to know more about behavior. The task of a scientific analysis is to explain how the behavior of a person as a physical system is related to the conditions under which the human species evolved and the conditions under which the individual lives. Unless there is indeed some capricious or creative intervention, these events must be related, and no intervention is in fact needed. The contingencies of survival responsible for man’s genetic endowment would produce tendencies to act aggressively, not feelings of aggression. The punishment of sexual behavior changes sexual behavior, and any feelings which may arise are at best by-products. Our age is not suffering from anxiety but from the accidents, crimes, wars, and other dangerous and painful things to which people are so often exposed. Young people drop out of school, refuse to get jobs, and associate only with others of their own age not because they feel alienated but because of defective social environments in homes, schools, factories, and elsewhere. We can follow the path taken by physics and biology by turning directly to the relation between behavior and the environment and neglecting supposed mediating states of mind. Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not need to try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, or the other perquisites of autonomous man really are in order to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior.

What is scarce? Surely time is scarce? This is true in the sense that we get only one life, but yet again there are ways in which competition and how we use our time can make us feel an artificial sense of time scarcity. Each time we are able to build on the work of others with confidence, each time we use the elements of life pulled from our commonwealth of agricultural knowledge, we bundle time, and so get the benefit of having multiple lifetimes. Each time nature uses genetic code that has been developed over millions of years, millions of years of development are collapsed into something that works in our lifetimes. Each time we add to that collection, we are putting our lifetimes' work into a useful form for the benefit of future generations. At the same time, yes, we each have only our own single lives in which to pursue happiness. The goal is to spend as much of that time in a framework of sharing abundance rather than having it squeezed into a life of scarcity and competition. In contrast, we need not look far to find lots of frustrating examples in which our time is treated as abundant when we would rather have it be valued as scarce. It happens each time we must stand in line at the DMV, fill out redundant forms at the hospital, reproduce others' efforts by spending time searching for knowledge or data that already exists somewhere, create a report that no one reads. In those cases, we are creating and living in artificial and unnecessary time scarcity. Time is indeed one of the most curious elements of life, especially since our lifetimes and those of plants and animals all move at different rates. We know, for example, that the urgency to address climate change is really on our human scale, not geologic scale. The Earth has been through greater upheavals and mass extinctions and will likely go through them again, but for the narrowest of narrow bands of human history on Earth, we require very specific conditions for us to continue to thrive as a species. To keep our planet within a habitable and abundant balance, we have, as Howard Buffet noted, only 'forty seasons' to learn and adjust. That is why building on one another's work is so important. One farmer can have the benefit of forty seasons and pass some of that experience down, but if 1,000 farmers do the same, there is the collective benefit of 1,000 years in a single year. If a million people participate, then a million years of collective experience are available. If we are then able to compound knowledge across generations and deepen our understanding of human and natural history, we add even greater richness. It is in this way of bundling our experiences for continual improvement, with compound interest, that time shifts from a scarce resource to being far less of a constraint, if not truly abundant. However, for time to be compounded, knowledge must be shared, and real resources, energy, and infrastructure must exist and function to support and grow our commonwealth of knowledge.

Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name. In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling. The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.

that hormones seek balance and when you disrupt the endocrine system that governs them, you’ll present with a symptom, then another, then another, until you have a condition. The conditions that women exhibit might be different from one female to the next, based on your genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors, but focusing on the symptoms and/or the conditions is less valuable than addressing the underlying causes.

Even if a certain tendency is dominant, that doesn’t mean it becomes widespread throughout the population. There are quite a few rare disorders where genetically there is a dominant gene, but these conditions don’t, as a result, become common. Thankfully, in most cases these are checked at a fixed number, and remain rare disorders. Dominant genes are nothing more than one among many elements in tendency distribution. Other elements would include the survival of the fittest, natural selection, and so on. This is personal conjecture, but I think six fingers are too many for human beings.

A huge percentage of all doctor visits today are a direct consequence of lifestyle choices that are misaligned with the environmental and survival conditions that shaped our primal genetic makeup.

The primary human endowments are 1) self-awareness or self-knowledge; 2) imagination and conscience; and 3) volition or willpower. The secondary endowments are 4) an abundance mentality; 5) courage and consideration; and 6) creativity. The seventh endowment is self-renewal. All are unique human endowments; animals don’t possess any of them. But they are all on a continuum of low to high levels. • Associated with Habit 1: Be Proactive is the endowment of self-knowledge or self-awareness—an ability to choose your response (response-ability). At the low end of the continuum are the ineffective people who transfer responsibility by blaming other people, events, or the environment—anything or anybody “out there” so that they are not responsible for results. If I blame you, in effect I have empowered you. I have given my power to your weakness. Then I can create evidence that supports my perception that you are the problem. At the upper end of the continuum toward increasing effectiveness is self-awareness: “I know my tendencies, I know the scripts or programs that are in me, but I am not those scripts. I can rewrite my scripts.” You are aware that you are the creative force of your life. You are not the victim of conditions or conditioning. You can choose your response to any situation, to any person. Between what happens to you and your response is a degree of freedom. And the more you exercise that freedom, the larger it will become. As you work in your circle of influence and exercise that freedom, gradually you will stop being a “hot reactor” (meaning there’s little separation between stimulus and response) and start being a cool, responsible chooser—no matter what your genetic makeup, no matter how you were raised, no matter what your childhood experiences were or what the environment is. In your freedom to choose your response lies the power to achieve growth and happiness.

What holds cells in this teetering position? In 2006, a group headed by Eric Lander at the Broad Institute in Boston, found at least part of the answer. A key set of genes in ES cells, the pluripotent cells we have come to know so well, were found to have a really strange histone modification pattern. These were genes that were very important for controlling if an ES cell stayed pluripotent, or differentiated. Histone H3K4 was methylated at these genes, which normally is associated with switching on gene expression. H3K27 was also methylated. This is normally associated with switching off gene expression. So, which modification would turn out to be stronger? Would the genes be switched on or off? The answer turned out to be both. Or neither, depending on which way we look at it. These genes were in a state called ‘poised’. Given the slightest encouragement – a change in culture conditions that pushed cells towards differentiation for example – one or other of these methylations was lost. The gene was fully switched on, or strongly repressed, depending on the epigenetic modification

There is a small ncRNA called BC1 which is expressed in specific neurons in mice. When researchers at the University of Munster in Germany deleted this ncRNA, the mice seemed fine. But then the scientists moved the mutant animals from the very controlled laboratory setting into a more natural environment. Under these conditions, it became clear that the mutants were not the same as normal mice. They were reluctant to explore their surroundings and were anxious37. If they had simply been left in their cages, we would never have appreciated that loss of the BC1 ncRNA actually had a quite pronounced effect on behaviour. A clear case of what we see being dependent on how we look.

Our model of savant abilities suggests that our brains operate at two levels, the quantum and the classical. These two levels are no more exclusionary than classical (or Newtonian) physics and quantum mechanics. One major difference between them is that the forces in classical physics operate locally, whereas forces in quantum physics operate nonlocally. Both types of forces operate in our brains, which is why our brains can process consciousness both locally and nonlocally. Some people have conditions such as autism that shift the balance between local and nonlocal processes by knocking out the functioning of the neocortex. The rest of us can decrease this classical dominance by such mind-quieting practices as meditation.

The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy.

I do not believe ADD is the almost purely genetic condition many people assume it to be. I do not see it as a fixed, inherited brain disorder but as a physiological consequence of life in a particular environment, in a particular culture. In many ways one can grow out of it, at any age. The first step is to discard the illness model, along with any notion that medications can offer more than a partial, stopgap response.

A person is not an originating agent; he is a locus, a point at which many genetic and environmental conditions come together in a joint effect.

A rise in acidity increases the excitability of neurons in these areas, making them more responsive to threats.98 Hypersensitivity to acid in the brain has been proposed as a genetic predisposition to panic disorder,99 consistent with Klein’s suffocation alarm theory of panic (see Chapter 3).100 Given that the rodent research suggests that changing acid levels in the amygdala and BNST alters the response to external as well as internal stimuli, research on acid-sensing receptors might be pertinent to a broader range of conditions involving fear and anxiety. New pharmacological tools are becoming available for altering acid levels, and these may offer yet another approach to treating problems with fear and anxiety in people;101 studies of extinction in animals would be an ideal place to explore this possibility.

There but for the... good choices I've made, genetics, psychological conditioning, and 10K random elements, go I.

miRNAs play major roles in control of pluripotency and control of cellular differentiation. ES cells can be encouraged to differentiate into other cell types by changing the culture conditions in which they’re grown. When they begin to differentiate, it’s essential that ES cells switch off the gene expression pathways that normally allow them to keep producing additional ES cells (self-renewal). There is a miRNA family called let-7 which is essential for this switch-off process

But if ncRNAs are so important for cellular function, surely we would expect to find that sometimes diseases are caused by problems with them. Shouldn’t there be lots of examples where defects in production or expression of ncRNAs lead to clinical disorders, aside from the imprinting or X inactivation conditions? Well, yes and no. Because these ncRNAs are predominantly regulatory molecules, acting in networks that are rich in compensatory mechanisms, defects may only have relatively subtle impacts. The problem this creates experimentally is that most genetic screens are good at detecting the major phenotypes caused by mutations in proteins, but may not be so useful for more subtle effects.

In conditions where there are an abnormal number of chromosomes, for example, it won’t just be protein-coding genes that change in number. There will also be abnormal production of ncRNAs (large and small). Because miRNAs in particular can regulate lots of other genes, the effects of disrupting miRNA copy numbers may be very extensive.

Conversely, in Judeo-Christian faith, the human body is not an ill-designed “meat sack,” as transhumans so often deride. We were made in God’s image to be temples of His Holy Spirit. The incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ and His bodily resurrection are the centerpieces of the gospel and attest to this magnificent fact. While in our fallen condition human suffering is reality,

The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.¼ The final stage [will have] come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning,