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At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.
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Michael Pollan (Second Nature: A Gardener's Education)
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Humanity is a biological species, living in a biological environment, because like all species, we are exquisitely adapted in everything: from our behavior, to our genetics, to our physiology, to that particular environment in which we live. The earth is our home. Unless we preserve the rest of life, as a sacred duty, we will be endangering ourselves by destroying the home in which we evolved, and on which we completely depend.
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Edward O. Wilson
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when institutions conflate racial and gender diversity metrics with diversity of thought in their organizations, they implicitly reinforce the incorrect assumption that genetic characteristics predict something important about the way that a person thinks—the most fundamental assumption underlying racism itself.
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Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
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All my life I’d heard jokes about the links between royal misbehaviour and centuries of inbreeding, but it was then that I realized: Lack of genetic diversity was nothing compared to press gaslighting.
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Prince Harry (Spare)
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The values, first of all, of individual freedom, based upon the facts of human diversity and genetic uniqueness; the values of charity and compassion, based upon the old familiar fact, lately rediscovered by modern psychiatry - the fact that, whatever their mental and physical diversity, love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; and finally the values of intelligence, without which love is impotent and freedom unattainable.
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Aldous Huxley (Brave New World Revisited)
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human genetic diversity is highest in Africa; perhaps more-diverse humans would collectively produce more-diverse inventions.
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Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
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In fact, there’s more genetic diversity between two groups of chimpanzees living on opposite banks of a river in Central Africa than there is between humans on opposite sides of the world.
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Lewis Dartnell (Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History)
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For ages anthropologists lumped all African peoples into one ‘race,’ but the genetic truth is that the larger world’s diversity is more or less a subset of African diversity.
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Sam Kean (The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code)
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the genes of modern-day Africans are a treasure house for all humanity. They possess our species’ greatest reservoir of genetic diversity, of which further study will shed new light on the heredity of the human body and mind. Perhaps the time has come, in light of this and other advances in human genetics, to adopt a new ethic of racial and hereditary variation, one that places value on the whole of diversity rather than on the differences composing the diversity. It would give proper measure to our species’ genetic variation as an asset, prized for the adaptability it provides all of us during an increasingly uncertain future. Humanity is strengthened by a broad portfolio of genes that can generate new talents, additional resistance to diseases, and perhaps even new ways of seeing reality. For scientific as well as for moral reasons, we should learn to promote human biological diversity for its own sake instead of using it to justify prejudice and conflict.
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Edward O. Wilson (The Social Conquest of Earth)
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One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if ‘Scottishness’ or ‘Englishness’ were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations – like the United States of America or Australia – from diverse ethnic elements.
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Norman Davies (Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe)
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Did you know that only a tiny minority of viruses cause illness in humans? No one knows how many viruses there are, but their real role, when you get right down to it, is to aid in mutations, to create diversity among life forms. I've read a lot of books on the subject-when you don't need much sleep you have a lot of time to read-and I can tell you that if it weren't for viruses, mankind would never have evolved on this planet. Some viruses get right inside the DNA and change your genetic code, did you know that? And no one can say for sure that HIV, for example, won't one day prove to have been rewriting our genetic code in a way that's essential to our survival as a race. I'm a man who consciously commits murders and scares the hell out of people and makes them reconsider everything, so I'm definitely malignant, yet I think I play a necessary role in this world.
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Ryū Murakami (In the Miso Soup)
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Without this variation—without deep genetic diversity—an organism might ultimately lose its capacity to evolve.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
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Our present agriculture, in general, is not ecologically sustainable now, and it is a long way from becoming so. It is too toxic. It is too dependent on fossil fuels. It is too wasteful of soil, of soil fertility, and of water. It is destructive of the health of the natural systems that surround and support our economic life. And it is destructive of genetic diversity, both domestic and wild. So
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Wendell Berry (Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food)
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Jonathan Sacks; “One way is just to think, for instance, of biodiversity. The extraordinary thing we now know, thanks to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA and the decoding of the human and other genomes, is that all life, everything, all the three million species of life and plant life—all have the same source. We all come from a single source. Everything that lives has its genetic code written in the same alphabet. Unity creates diversity. So don’t think of one God, one truth, one way. Think of one God creating this extraordinary number of ways, the 6,800 languages that are actually spoken. Don’t think there’s only one language within which we can speak to God. The Bible is saying to us the whole time: Don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be. And you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation. When Moses at the burning bush says to God, “Who are you?” God says to him three words: “Hayah asher hayah.”Those words are mistranslated in English as “I am that which I am.” But in Hebrew, it means “I will be who or how or where I will be,” meaning, Don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you. One of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God’s presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. Don’t think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion.
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Krista Tippett (Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living)
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Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details
were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.
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Jean Genet
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The most recent estimates suggest that the vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs within so-called races (i.e., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) between racial groups (the geneticist Richard Lewontin had estimated a similar distribution as early as 1972).
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
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I could answer by telling you that such selective sweeps create a valley of genetic diversity around the site under selection, that they leave a deficit of extreme allele frequencies (low or high) at linked sites and an increase in linkage disequilibrium in flanking regions—but that doesn’t tell you much unless you’re a geneticist.
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Charles Murray (Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class)
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Africans carried more genetic diversity within their genomes than non-Africans, as a simple result of the fact that humanity had originated on that continent and spread outward. Non-African races had been founded by isolated groups of adventurers. Breeding among themselves, they had created gene pools that were necessarily limited to what they had brought with them: only a subset of what was to be found in Africa. This idea had been used to explain, for example, why Africa contained both the tallest and the most diminutive people in the world, and why so many top athletes were African. It wasn’t because they were naturally better athletes but because the bell-shaped curve of random genetic variation was wider.
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Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
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Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity. Nothing in the world was irrelevant: the stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds. Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.
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Jean Genet (The Thief's Journal)
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There are three major genetic observations that have been made about the diversity of people living on the African continent. First, Africa shows more genetic diversity than the other continents. Second, most of the genetic variation outside of Africa is a subset of the variation found within Africa. Finally, genetic diversity decreases with increasing distance from Africa.
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Ian Tattersall (Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth (Texas A&M University Anthropology Series Book 15))
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Under this hypothesis, genetically-grounded personality differences widen in the most gender-egalitarian societies for the simplest of reasons: Both sexes become freer to do what comes naturally.
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Charles Murray (Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class)
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The problem with racial discrimination, though, is not the inference of a person's race from their genetic characteristics. It is quite the opposite: it is the inference of a person's characteristics from their race. The question is not, can you, given an individual's skin color, hair texture, or language, infer something about their ancestry or origin. That is a question of biological systematics -- of lineage, taxonomy, of racial geography, of biological discrimination. Of course you can -- and genomics as vastly refined that inference. You can scan any individual genome and infer rather deep insights about a person's ancestry, or place of origin. But the vastly more controversial question is the converse: Given a racial identity -- African or Asian, say -- can you infer anything about an individual's characteristics: not just skin or hair color, but more complex features, such as intelligence, habits, personality, and aptitude? /I/ Genes can certainly tell us about race, but can race tell us anything about genes? /i/
To answer this question, we need to measure how genetic variation is distributed across various racial categories. Is there more diversity _within_ races or _between_ races? Does knowing that someone is of African versus European descent, say, allow us to refine our understanding of their genetic traits, or their personal, physical, or intellectual attributes in a meaningful manner? Or is there so much variation within Africans and Europeans that _intraracial_ diversity dominates the comparison, thereby making the category "African" or "European" moot?
We now know precise and quantitative answers to these questions. A number of studies have tried to quantify the level of genetic diversity of the human genome. The most recent estimates suggest that the vast proportion of genetic diversity (85 to 90 percent) occurs _within_ so-called races (i.e., within Asians or Africans) and only a minor proportion (7 percent) within racial groups (the geneticist Richard Lewontin had estimated a similar distribution as early as 1972). Some genes certainly vary sharply between racial or ethnic groups -- sickle-cell anemia is an Afro-Caribbean and Indian disease, and Tay-Sachs disease has a much higher frequency in Ashkenazi Jews -- but for the most part, the genetic diversity within any racial group dominates the diversity between racial groups -- not marginally, but by an enormous amount. The degree of interracial variability makes "race" a poor surrogate for nearly any feature: in a genetic sense, an African man from Nigria is so "different" from another man from Namibia that it makes little sense to lump them into the same category.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
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There is a power in accepting people the way they are—our friends, partners, workmates, children, siblings, and especially ourselves. People really are born different from each other and those differences persist. We’re shy, smart, wild, kind, anxious, impulsive, hardworking, absent-minded, quick-tempered. We literally see the world differently, think differently, and feel things differently. Some of us make our way through the world with ease, and some of us struggle to fit in or get along or keep it together. Denying those differences or constantly telling people they should change is not helpful to anyone. We should recognize the diversity of our human natures, accept it, embrace it, even celebrate it.
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Kevin J. Mitchell (Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are)
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The most surprising result to come out of these global genetic studies is that the human species is exceedingly uniform. Despite superficial regional differences in hair and skin colour, or skull shape, the genetic diversity among the 7.5 billion humans living in the world today is astonishingly low.30 In fact, there’s more genetic diversity between two groups of chimpanzees living on opposite banks of a river in Central Africa than there is between humans on opposite sides of the world.31
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Lewis Dartnell (Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History)
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The language of cancer is grammatical, methodical, and even—I hesitate to write—quite beautiful. Genes talk to genes and pathways to pathways in perfect pitch, producing a familiar yet foreign music that rolls faster and faster into a lethal rhythm. Underneath what might seem like overwhelming diversity is a deep genetic unity. Cancers that look vastly unlike each other superficially often have the same or similar pathways unhinged. “Cancer,” as one scientist recently put it, “really is a pathway disease.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer)
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As the Era of Stagnation began, the Soviet scientific establishment lavished resources on the immediate priorities of the state—space exploration, water diversion, nuclear power—while emergent technologies, including computer science, genetics, and fiber optics, fell behind.
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Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster)
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Culture is not genetic. Rather, culture is learned behavior that is passed down from generation to generation and changes
over time. Yet, we so often associate culture and diversity with one’s appearance rather than with this learned behavior that changes with time, place, and context.
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Snigdha Nandipati (A Case of Culture: How Cultural Brokers Bridge Divides in Healthcare)
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The thing that always impresses me about human beings is our diversity. Even when we are brought up in similar environments, we still somehow gravitate toward very different careers, hobbies. politics, manners of speaking and acting, aesthetic preferences, and so forth. Maybe this diversity is due to genetic variation. Or maybe, being naturally curious and adaptive creatures, we invariably tend to scatter all over the place, exploiting every niche we can possibly find. Either way, it's fairly obvious that we also end up all over the map when it comes to gender and sexuality.
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Julia Serano (Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity)
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Since no one can know everything, and most people know almost nothing, rationality consists of outsourcing knowledge to institutions that specialize in creating and sharing it, primarily academia, public and private research units, and the press. That trust is a precious resource which should not be squandered. Though confidence in science has remained steady for decades, confidence in universities is sinking. A major reason for the mistrust is the universities’ suffocating left-wing monoculture, with its punishment of students and professors who question dogmas on gender, race, culture, genetics, colonialism, and sexual identity and orientation. Universities have turned themselves into laughingstocks for their assaults on common sense (as when a professor was recently suspended for mentioning the Chinese pause word ne ga because it reminded some students of the racial slur). On several occasions correspondents have asked me why they should trust the scientific consensus on climate change, since it comes out of institutions that brook no dissent. That is why universities have a responsibility to secure the credibility of science and scholarship by committing themselves to viewpoint diversity, free inquiry, critical thinking, and active open-mindedness.
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Steven Pinker (Rationality)
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Diversity is necessary to healthy transformative survival: and diversity is also one of the underlying sources of social conflict on this hair-trigger nuclear stockpile we call Earth. It should be seen universally that the loss of cultural diversity is as threatening as the loss of genetic diversity to the maintenance and salvation of humanity on Earth and in space. Diversity allows the kinds of specialization and interdependence characteristic of a complex and highly evolved culture. Delight in difference will thus become necessary, like oxygen, if humanity is to survive. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations is a key to survival.
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George S. Robinson (Envoys of Mankind: A Declaration of First Principles for the Governance of Space Societies)
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Relatively homogeneous societies invest more in public goods, indicating a higher level of public altruism. For example, the degree of ethnic homogeneity correlates with the government's share of gross domestic product as well as the average wealth of citizens. Case studies of the United States find that multi-ethnic societies are less charitable and less able to cooperate to develop public infrastructure. A recent multi-city study of municipal spending on public goods in the United States found that ethnically or racially diverse cities spend a smaller portion of their budgets and less per capita on public services than do the more homogeneous cities.
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Frank K. Salter (On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration)
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Camara Jones, a prominent medical researcher of health disparities, explained it this way to bioethics scholar Dorothy Roberts: “People are born with ancestry that comes from their parents but are assigned a race.” People from the same ethnic groups that are native to certain geographic regions typically share the same genetic profile. Geneticists call them “populations.” When geneticists compare these ethnic populations, they find there is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups in Western Europe than to ethnic groups in Eastern Africa. Race is a genetic mirage.
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Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials))
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But what *is* "natural"? I wonder. On one hand: variation, mutation, change, inconstancy, divisibility, flux. And on the other: constancy, permanence, indivisibility, fidelity. Bhed. Abhed. It should hardly surprise us that DNA, the molecule of contradictions, encodes an organism of contradictions. We seek constancy in heredity—and find its opposite: variation. Mutants are necessary to maintain the essence of our selves. Our genome has negotiated a fragile balance between counterpoised forces, pairing strand with opposing strand, mixing past and future, pitting memory against desire. It is the most human of all things that we possess. Its stewardship may be the ultimate test of knowledge and discernment for our species.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
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Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvements? Very well, a fair question, but it’s been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt in detail with the question. There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom—commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present—all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as “Why wilderness?” To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.
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Edward Abbey (Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside)
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Most recently, the task of assembling the genetic story for specific phenotypic traits has begun. It is still in its early stages, but progress is accelerating nonlinearly. Hence the nervousness that has prevented open discussion of what’s going on in the geneticists’ parallel universe: the fear that we will discover scary population differences in what I have called cognitive repertoires.
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Charles Murray (Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class)
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a man named Dalton, a District 10 refugee who’d made it to 13 on foot a few years ago, leaked the real motive to me. “They need you. Me. They need us all. Awhile back, there was some sort of pox epidemic that killed a bunch of them and left a lot more infertile. New breeding stock. That’s how they see us.” Back in 10, he’d worked on one of the beef ranches, maintaining the genetic diversity of the herd with the implantation of long-frozen cow embryos. He’s very likely right about 13, because there don’t seem to be nearly enough kids around. But so what? We’re not being kept in pens, we’re being trained for work, the children are being educated. Those over fourteen have been given entry-level ranks in the military and are addressed respectfully as “Soldier.” Every single refugee was granted automatic citizenship by the authorities of 13.
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Suzanne Collins (Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3))
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Homologous recombination occurs naturally to create genetic diversity in our offspring and is also conveniently harnessed by scientists to introduce experimental DNA into cells or animals. We do not yet know if this occurs with the contaminating human DNA found in some of our vaccines, and if so, to what extent. Imagine the potential consequences of human DNA from a vaccine, a vaccine that is given to children at an average age of 15 months, being incorporated into a child’s developing brain. One does not need to be a rocket scientist to know that this potential has to be studied. In addition to the potential for homologous recombination, DNA is known to be a powerful immune stimulant. Diseases like graft versus host, juvenile (type I) diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lupus and some forms of arthritis are what are called auto-immune diseases. These are diseases driven by immune attack from our own immune system on our own organs, a system normally responsible to attack invading bacteria and pathogens. Targeted self-destruction, if you will.
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Kent Heckenlively (Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science)
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Women select short-term sexual relationships when men cannot improve their children’s survival, when there are too few men, or when their upbringing has signaled that men are unreliable investors in their progeny. Short-term relationships for women often amount to serial monogamy in response to a population of males, none of whom can or will provide sustained economic and emotional commitment. And if she can maintain her attractiveness in the face of her increasing age, decreasing looks, and the handicap (from a prospective partner’s viewpoint) of already born children, she can also gain the advantage of genetic diversity and perhaps better genetic quality in her children. But the most secure and stable route is to attract a male who will commit, providing the long-term assistance and resources that she needs to raise multiple offspring simultaneously. Unfortunately that idea has occurred to other women also and she is in a competitive market-place. The currency of the marketplace is what men want in a female partner. To trade successfully, she must advertise her assets by showing that she has more desirable qualities than her female rivals.
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Anne Campbell (A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women)
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The propositions that accompany most of the chapters . . . are not as snappy as I would prefer—but there’s a reason for their caution and caveats. On certain important points, the clamor of genuine scientific dispute has abated and we don’t have to argue about them anymore. But to meet that claim requires me to state the propositions precisely. I am prepared to defend all of them as “things we don’t have to argue about anymore”—but exactly as I worded them, not as others may paraphrase them.
Here they are:
1. Sex differences in personality are consistent worldwide and tend to widen in more gender-egalitarian cultures.
2. On average, females worldwide have advantages in verbal ability and social cognition while males have advantages in visuospatial abilities and the extremes of mathematical ability.
3. On average, women worldwide are more attracted to vocations centered on people and men to vocations centered on things.
4. Many sex differences in the brain are coordinate with sex differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior.
5. Human populations are genetically distinctive in ways that correspond to self-identified race and ethnicity.
6. Evolutionary selection pressure since humans left Africa has been extensive and mostly local.
7. Continental population differences in variants associated with personality, abilities, and social behavior are common.
8. The shared environment usually plays a minor role in explaining personality, abilities, and social behavior.
9. Class structure is importantly based on differences in abilities that have a substantial genetic component.
10. Outside interventions are inherently constrained in the effects they can have on personality, abilities, and social behavior.
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Charles Murray (Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class)
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In this section I have tried to demonstrate that Darwinian thinking does live up to its billing as universal acid: it turns the whole traditional world upside down, challenging the top-down image of designs flowing from that genius of geniuses, the Intelligent Designer, and replacing it with the bubble-up image of mindless, motiveless cyclical processes churning out ever-more robust combinations until they start replicating on their own, speeding up the design process by reusing all the best bits over and over. Some of these earliest offspring eventually join forces (one major crane, symbiosis), which leads to multicellularity (another major crane), which leads to the more effective exploration vehicles made possible by sexual reproduction (another major crane), which eventually leads in one species to language and cultural evolution (cranes again), which provide the medium for literature and science and engineering, the latest cranes to emerge, which in turn permits us to “go meta” in a way no other life form can do, reflecting in many ways on who and what we are and how we got here, modeling these processes in plays and novels, theories and computer simulations, and ever-more thinking tools to add to our impressive toolbox. This perspective is so widely unifying and at the same time so generous with detailed insights that one might say it’s a power tool, all on its own. Those who are still strangely repelled by Darwinian thinking must consider the likelihood that if they try to go it alone with only the hand tools of tradition, they will find themselves laboring far from the cutting edge of research on important phenomena as diverse as epidemics and epistemology, biofuels and brain architecture, molecular genetics, music, and morality.
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Daniel C. Dennett (Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking)
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People of all races generally prefer the company of people like themselves. Racial diversity is a source of conflict, not strength. Non-whites, especially blacks and Hispanics, nurture a strong sense of racial pride and solidarity. Whites have little sense of racial solidarity, and most whites strongly condemn any signs of it. Immigration from non-European countries is changing the United States in profound ways, many of which whites find disagreeable. To the extent that these statements are true, they have serious implications both for the country as a whole and for whites as a group.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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My view is that diversity is the breath of life, and we must not abandon that for any single form which happens to catch our fancy – even our genetic fancy. Cloning is the stabilisation of one form, and that runs against the whole current of creation – of human creation above all. Evolution is founded in variety and creates diversity; and of all animals, man is most creative because he carries and expresses the largest store of variety. Every attempt to make us uniform, biologically, emotionally, or intellectually, is a betrayal of the evolutionary thrust that has made man its apex. Yet
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Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent Of Man)
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Many kinds of animal behavior can be explained by genetic similarity theory. Animals have a preference for close kin, and study after study has shown that they have a remarkable ability to tell kin from strangers. Frogs lay eggs in bunches, but they can be separated and left to hatch individually. When tadpoles are then put into a tank, brothers and sisters somehow recognize each other and cluster together rather than mix with tadpoles from different mothers.
Female Belding’s ground squirrels may mate with more than one male before they give birth, so a litter can be a mix of full siblings and half siblings. Like tadpoles, they can tell each other apart. Full siblings cooperate more with each other than with half-siblings, fight less, and are less likely to run each other out of the territory when they grow up.
Even bees know who their relatives are. In one experiment, bees were bred for 14 different degrees of relatedness—sisters, cousins, second cousins, etc.—to bees in a particular hive. When the bees were then released near the hive, guard bees had to decide which ones to let in. They distinguished between degrees of kinship with almost perfect accuracy, letting in the closest relatives and chasing away more distant kin. The correlation between relatedness and likelihood of being admitted was a remarkable 0.93.
Ants are famous for cooperation and willingness to sacrifice for the colony. This is due to a quirk in ant reproduction that means worker ants are 70 percent genetically identical to each other. But even among ants, there can be greater or less genetic diversity, and the most closely related groups of ants appear to cooperate best.
Linepithema humile is a tiny ant that originated in Argentina but migrated to the United States. Many ants died during the trip, and the species lost much of its genetic diversity. This made the northern branch of Linepithema humile more cooperative than the one left in Argentina, where different colonies quarrel and compete with each other. This new level of cooperation has helped the invaders link nests into supercolonies and overwhelm local species of ants. American entomologists want to protect American ants by introducing genetic diversity so as to make the newcomers more quarrelsome.
Even plants cooperate with close kin and compete with strangers. Normally, when two plants are put in the same pot, they grow bigger root systems, trying to crowd each other out and get the most nutrients. A wild flower called the Sea Rocket, which grows on beaches, does not do that if the two plants come from the same “mother” plant. They recognize each others’ root secretions and avoid wasteful competition.
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Jared Taylor
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One important aspect of the Gita which remains is that even though it presents to us some diverse paths as a way of life, such as action, devotion, knowledge and meditation, it does not impose any of these paths on an individual. Rather, it leaves the choice to the people, because the followers of all these paths are essential for the smooth functioning of the world, and any en masse inclination towards only one of them would jeopardize the society by causing an imbalance in its system. The Gita also recognizes that the path that one should follow is determined primarily by the free choice of man as well as his inherent nature, which can be interpreted as a genetic inheritance he is endowed with.
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Nihar Satpathy (The Puzzles of Life)
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It is dynamic. In some cells, it reshuffles its own sequence to make novel variants of itself. Cells of the immune system secrete "anti-bodies"-missilelike proteins designed to attach themselves to invading pathogens. But since pathogens are constantly evolving, antibodies must also be capable of changing; an evolving pathogen demands an evolving host. The genome accomplishes this counter-evolution by reshuffling its genetic elements-thereby achieving astounding diversity)s...tru...c...t...ure and g...en...ome can be reshuffled to form an entirely new word c...ome...t). The reshuffled genes generate the diversity of antibodies. In these cells, every genome is capable of giving rise to an entirely different genome.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
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In this book, we will naturally be dealing primarily with the manifestations of the third level of immunity. I gather material on the biography of Homo immunologicus, guided by the assumption that this is where to find the stuff from which the forms of anthropotechnics are made. By this I mean the methods of mental and physical practising by which humans from the most diverse cultures have attempted to optimize their cosmic and immunological status in the face of vague risks of living and acute certainties of death. Only when these procedures have been grasped in a broad tableau of human 'work on oneself' can we evaluate the newest experiments in genetic engineering, to which, in the current debate, many have reduced the term 'anthropotechnics', reintroduced in 1997.
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Peter Sloterdijk (Du mußt dein Leben ändern)
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A more welcome fellow traveler on the modern human diaspora from Africa may have been the dog, the first known domestic animal. There is evidence that Aurignacian people living in Goyet Cave, Belgium, already had large dogs accompanying them about 35,000 years ago. The dogs were anatomically distinct from wolves in their shorter and broader snout and dental proportions, and isotope data suggest that they, like the humans, were feeding off horses and wild cattle. Moreover, ancient dog DNA was obtained, which showed that the Belgian dogs were already genetically diverse and that their mitochondrial sequences could not be matched among the large databases of contemporary wolf and dog DNA. These findings are important because they suggest that dog domestication had already been under way well before 35,000 years ago.
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Chris Stringer (Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth)
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This approach is flawed on multiple levels. First, when institutions conflate racial and gender diversity metrics with diversity of thought in their organizations, they implicitly reinforce the incorrect assumption that genetic characteristics predict something important about the way that a person thinks—the most fundamental assumption underlying racism itself. Second, this approach empowers entrenched managers to create the visible appearance of diversity in their organizations while avoiding the need to engage with true diversity of thought, including challenges to their incumbency. Third, when a narrow conception of diversity is implemented through affirmative action or other quota-based systems, that fuels racism and sexism by fostering tokenism in the workplace and animus among communities that fail to benefit from these programs.
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Vivek Ramaswamy (Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam)
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We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread
it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information. But being physically infected with a virulent strain of the Asherah virus makes you a whole lot more
susceptible. The only thing that keeps these things from taking over the world is the Babel factor - the walls of mutual incomprehension that compartmentalize the human race and stop the spread of viruses.
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.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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Among the Founders, Thomas Jefferson wrote about race at greatest length. He thought blacks were mentally inferior to whites and biologically distinct: “[They] secrete less by the kidnies [sic], and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a strong and disagreeable odor.” He hoped slavery would be abolished, but he did not want free blacks to remain in America: “When freed, [the Negro] is to be removed from beyond the reach of mixture.”
Jefferson was one of the first and most influential advocates of “colonization,” or returning blacks to Africa. He also believed in the destiny of whites as a racially distinct people. In 1786 he wrote, “Our Confederacy [the United States] must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled.”
In 1801 he looked forward to the day “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvements? Very well, a fair question, but it’s been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt in detail with the question. There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom—commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present—all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as “Why wilderness?” To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger
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Edward Abbey (Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside)
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But why, the questioner insists, why do people like you pretend to love uninhabited country so much? Why this cult of wilderness? Why the surly hatred of progress and development, the churlish resistance to all popular improvements? Very well, a fair question, but it’s been asked and answered a thousand times already; enough books to drive a man stark naked mad have dealt in detail with the question. There are many answers, all good, each sufficient. Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom—commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present—all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as “Why wilderness?” To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger.
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Edward Abbey (Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside)
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[L]et us imagine a mirror image of what is happening today. What if millions of white Americans were pouring across the border into Mexico, taking over parts of cities, speaking English rather than Spanish, celebrating the Fourth of July rather than Cinco de Mayo, sleeping 20 to a house, demanding bilingual instruction and welfare for immigrants, opposing border control, and demanding ballots in English? What if, besides this, they had high rates of crime, poverty, and illegitimacy? Can we imagine the Mexicans rejoicing in their newfound diversity?
And yet, that is what Americans are asked to do. For whites to celebrate diversity is to celebrate their own declining numbers and influence, and the transformation of their society. For every other group, to celebrate diversity is to celebrate increasing numbers and influence. Which is a real celebration and which is self-deception?
Whites—but only whites—must never take pride in their own people. Only whites must pretend they do not prefer to associate with people like themselves. Only whites must pretend to be happy to give up their neighborhoods, their institutions, and their country to people unlike themselves. Only whites must always act as individuals and never as members of a group that promotes shared interests.
Racial identity comes naturally to all non-white groups. It comes naturally because it is good, normal, and healthy to feel kinship for people like oneself. Despite the fashionable view that race is a socially created illusion, race is a biological reality. All people of the same race are more closely related genetically than they are to anyone of a different race, and this helps explain racial solidarity.
Families are close for the same reason. Parents love their children, not because they are the smartest, best-looking, most talented children on earth. They love them because they are genetically close to them. They love them because they are a family.
Most people have similar feelings about race. Their race is the largest extended family to which they feel an instinctive kinship. Like members of a family, members of a race do not need objective reasons to prefer their own group; they prefer it because it is theirs (though they may well imagine themselves as having many fine, partly imaginary qualities). These mystic preferences need not imply hostility towards others. Parents may have great affection for the children of others, but their own children come first. Likewise, affection often crosses racial lines, but the deeper loyalties of most people are to their own group—their extended family.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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Trust in the familiar seems to be matched by wariness of the unfamiliar. Jennifer Richeson of Northwestern University has conducted experiments in which white subjects had to interact in some way with a white or a black man before taking a mental test. Those who dealt with the black man got lower scores on the test, and their brain scans showed what Prof. Richeson called “heightened activity in areas of the brain associated with regulating our thoughts and emotions.” She interpreted this to mean that white subjects were struggling with the “awkwardness” or “exhaustion” of dealing with a black man, and that this interfered with their ability to take the mental test.
Researchers at Harvard and New York University had white and black subjects look repeatedly at a series of photographs of black and white faces, all with neutral expressions. Every time the subjects looked at one particular black face and one particular white face they got a mild electric shock. Lie detector-type devices showed that subjects would sweat—a typical stress reaction—when they saw the two faces they associated with the shocks. The researchers showed the photo series several times again, but without the shocks. White subjects quickly stopped sweating when they saw the white face formerly associated with the shock, but continued to sweat when they saw the black face. Black subjects had the opposite reaction, continuing to sweat when they saw the white but not the black face. Mahzarin Banaji, the study’s leader, concluded that this was a sign of natural human wariness of unfamiliar groups.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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It should be clear by now that whatever Americans say about diversity, it is not a strength. If it were a strength, Americans would practice it spontaneously. It would not require “diversity management” or anti-discrimination laws. Nor would it require constant reminders of how wonderful it is. It takes no exhortations for us to appreciate things that are truly desirable: indoor plumbing, vacations, modern medicine, friendship, or cheaper gasoline.
[W]hen they are free to do so, most people avoid diversity. The scientific evidence suggests why: Human beings appear to have deeply-rooted tribal instincts. They seem to prefer to live in homogeneous communities rather than endure the tension and conflict that arise from differences. If the goal of building a diverse society conflicts with some aspect of our nature, it will be very difficult to achieve. As Horace wrote in the Epistles, “Though you drive Nature out with a pitchfork, she will ever find her way back.” Some intellectuals and bohemians profess to enjoy diversity, but they appear to be a minority. Why do we insist that diversity is a strength when it is not?
In the 1950s and 1960s, when segregation was being dismantled, many people believed full integration would be achieved within a generation. At that time, there were few Hispanics or Asians but with a population of blacks and whites, the United States could be described as “diverse.” It seemed vastly more forward-looking to think of this as an advantage to be cultivated rather than a weakness to be endured. Our country also seemed to be embarking on a morally superior course. Human history is the history of warfare—between nations, tribes, and religions —and many Americans believed that reconciliation between blacks and whites would lead to a new era of inclusiveness for all peoples of the world.
After the immigration reforms of 1965 opened the United States to large numbers of non- Europeans, our country became more diverse than anyone in the 1950s would have imagined. Diversity often led to conflict, but it would have been a repudiation of the civil rights movement to conclude that diversity was a weakness. Americans are proud of their country and do not like to think it may have made a serious mistake. As examples of ethnic and racial tension continued to accumulate, and as the civil rights vision of effortless integration faded, there were strong ideological and even patriotic reasons to downplay or deny what was happening, or at least to hope that exhortations to “celebrate diversity” would turn what was proving to be a problem into an advantage.
To criticize diversity raises the intolerable possibility that the United States has been acting on mistaken assumptions for half a century. To talk glowingly about diversity therefore became a form of cheerleading for America. It even became common to say that diversity was our greatest strength—something that would have astonished any American from the colonial era through the 1950s.
There is so much emotional capital invested in the civil-rights-era goals of racial equality and harmony that virtually any critique of its assumptions is intolerable. To point out the obvious— that diversity brings conflict—is to question sacred assumptions about the ultimate insignificance of race. Nations are at their most sensitive and irrational where they are weakest. It is precisely because it is so easy to point out the weaknesses of diversity that any attempt to do so must be countered, not by specifying diversity’s strengths—which no one can do—but with accusations of racism.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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MRI testing again shows what may be the underlying brain mechanism. The amygdalae are two small lobes in the brain associated with fear, arousal, and emotions. When they are active, it is thought to be a sign of vigilance, meaning that the brain is wary and wants more information. A study at Massachusetts General Hospital found that when subjects looked at photographs of faces—half were white, half were black—MRI scans found high amygdala activity. This was considered to be a normal reaction to unfamiliar faces. When the subjects looked at the photographs a second time the faces were more familiar; only the other-race faces continued to provoke high amygdala activity. This was true for both blacks and whites, suggesting that encounters with people of different races keep the brain at a higher level of watchfulness.
Amygdalae notice race even when a person does not. William A. Cunningham of Ohio State University showed white subjects pictures of faces for only 30 milliseconds—not long enough for the subjects to be conscious of them—but black faces triggered greater amygdala activity than white faces. When he showed faces for a half a second—long enough for people to notice race—he found that black faces prompted greater activity in the pre-frontal areas, a part of the brain associated with detecting internal conflicts and controlling conscious behavior. This suggested the subjects were trying to suppress certain feelings about blacks.
Steven Neuberg of Arizona State University attributes instinctive bias to evolution during our hunter-gatherer past. “By nature, people are group-living animals—a strategy that enhances individual survival and leads to what we might call a ‘tribal psychology’, ” he says. “It was adaptive for our ancestors to be attuned to those outside the group who posed threats such as to physical security, health or economic resources.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.”
James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.”
The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution.
James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.”
Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”
His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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What are the implications of ethnic identity for multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies? Tatu Vanhanen of the University of Tampere, Finland, has probably researched the effects of ethnic diversity more systematically than anyone else. In a massive, book-length study, he measured ethnic diversity and levels of conflict in 148 countries, and found correlations in the 0.5 to 0.9 range for the two variables, depending on how the variables were defined and measured. Homogeneous countries like Japan and Iceland show very low levels of conflict, while highly diverse countries like Lebanon and Sudan are wracked with strife.
Prof. Vanhanen found tension in all multi-ethnic societies: “Interest conflicts between ethnic groups are inevitable because ethnic groups are genetic kinship groups and because the struggle for existence concerns the survival of our own genes through our own and our relatives’ descendants.” Prof. Vanhanen also found that economic and political institutions make no difference; wealthy, democratic countries suffer from sectarian strife as much as poor, authoritarian ones: “Ethnic nepotism belongs to human nature and . . . it is independent from the level of socioeconomic development (modernization) and also from the degree of democratization.”
Others have argued that democracy is particularly vulnerable to ethnic tensions while authoritarian regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Tito’s Yugoslavia can give the impression of holding it in check. One expert writing in Foreign Affairs explained that for democracy to work “the party or group that loses has to trust the new majority and believe that its basic interests will still be protected and that there is nothing to fear from a change in power.” He wrote that this was much less likely when opposing parties represent different races or ethnicities.
The United Nations found that from 1989 to 1992 there were 82 conflicts that had resulted in at least 1,000 deaths each. Of these, no fewer than 79, or 96 percent, were ethnic or religious conflicts that took place within the borders of recognized states. Only three were cross-border conflicts.
Wars between nations are usually ethnic conflicts as well. Internal ethnic conflict has very serious consequences. As J. Philippe Rushton has argued, “The politics of ethnic identity are increasingly replacing the politics of class as the major threat to the stability of nations.”
One must question the wisdom of then-president Bill Clinton’s explanation for the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia: “[T]he principle we and our allies have been fighting for in the Balkans is the principle of multi-ethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy. We have been fighting against the idea that statehood must be based entirely on ethnicity.”
That same year, the American supreme commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, was even more direct: “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
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The trends speak to an unavoidable truth. Society's future will be challenged by zoonotic viruses, a quite natural prediction, not least because humanity is a potent agent of change, which is the essential fuel of evolution. Notwithstanding these assertions, I began with the intention of leaving the reader with a broader appreciation of viruses: they are not simply life's pathogens. They are life's obligate partners and a formidable force in nature on our planet. As you contemplate the ocean under a setting sun, consider the multitude of virus particles in each milliliter of seawater: flying over wilderness forestry, consider the collective viromes of its living inhabitants. The stunnig number and diversity of viruses in our environment should engender in us greater awe that we are safe among these multitudes than fear that they will harm us.
Personalized medicine will soon become a reality and medical practice will routinely catalogue and weigh a patient's genome sequence. Not long thereafter one might expect this data to be joined by the patient's viral and bacterial metagenomes: the patient's collective genetic identity will be recorded in one printout. We will doubtless discover some of our viral passengers are harmful to our health, while others are protective. But the appreciation of viruses that I hope you have gained from these pages is not about an exercise in accounting. The balancing of benefit versus threat to humanity is a fruitless task. The viral metagenome will contain new and useful gene functionalities for biomedicine: viruses may become essential biomedical tools and phages will continue to optimize may also accelerate the development of antibiotic drug resistance in the post-antibiotic era and emerging viruses may threaten our complacency and challenge our society economically and socially. Simply comparing these pros and cons, however, does not do justice to viruses and acknowledge their rightful place in nature.
Life and viruses are inseparable. Viruses are life's complement, sometimes dangerous but always beautiful in design. All autonomous self-sustaining replicating systems that generate their own energy will foster parasites. Viruses are the inescapable by-products of life's success on the planet. We owe our own evolution to them; the fossils of many are recognizable in ERVs and EVEs that were certainly powerful influences in the evolution of our ancestors. Like viruses and prokaryotes, we are also a patchwork of genes, acquired by inheritance and horizontal gene transfer during our evolution from the primitive RNA-based world.
It is a common saying that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' It is a natural response to a visual queue: a sunset, the drape of a designer dress, or the pattern of a silk tie, but it can also be found in a line of poetry, a particularly effective kitchen implement, or even the ruthless efficiency of a firearm. The latter are uniquely human acknowledgments of beauty in design. It is humanity that allows us to recognize the beauty in the evolutionary design of viruses. They are unique products of evolution, the inevitable consequence of life, infectious egotistical genetic information that taps into life and the laws of nature to fuel evolutionary invention.
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Michael G. Cordingley (Viruses: Agents of Evolutionary Invention)
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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.
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Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
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Humanity, in other words, was not some genetically uniform stock that could be purged of a few defectives. Penrose saw our species as rich with genetic diversity, and forever falling short of genetic perfection. To eliminate imperfection would demand eliminating humanity itself.
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Carl Zimmer (She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become)
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This was because Moira was of African descent, and Aïda had become fascinated by the idea that Africans carried more genetic diversity within their genomes than non-Africans, as a simple result of the fact that humanity had originated on that continent and spread outward.
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Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
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In short: the spread of a uniform set of seeds across huge parts of the United States is encouraging monocrop farming and leading to the narrowing of seed diversity that scientists warn could lead to significant crop losses. Insects and weeds are developing resistance to ever-higher volumes of chemical poisons tied closely to the cultivation of genetically engineered crops. Partly as a result, the yield bonus that was promised when GMOs were introduced has not materialized. Serious concerns are being raised about the public health consequences of the chemicals used to sustain GMOs in the field—including the world’s most popular herbicide, glyphosate. And the technical requirements for creating a GMO seed are so capital intensive that the effect is to concentrate evermore power in the few companies which can afford to produce them.
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Mark Schapiro (Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply)
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This loss of genetic diversity extends to individual breeds, most dramatically in the Holstein. Through artificial insemination, a few bulls are responsible for the vast majority of Holstein pregnancies. Two bulls, a father and son, are responsible for 7 percent of the genomes of the entire American population of Holsteins; genetic diversity be damned.
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Richard C. Francis (Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World)
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Relatively homogeneous societies invest more in public goods, indicating a higher level of public altruism. For example, the degree of ethnic homogeneity correlates with the government's share of gross domestic product as well as the average wealth of citizens. Case studies of the United States find that multi-ethnic societies are less charitable and less able to cooperate to develop public infrastructure. A recent multi-city study of municipal spending on public goods in the United States found that ethnically or racially diverse cities spend a smaller portion of their budgets and less per capita on public services than do the more homogeneous cities
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Frank Salter (On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration)
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There are problems humans cannot solve, to wit: density dependent birth rates, loss of genetic diversity, the overturning of his population pyramid, traveling to the nearest star, and the extinction of Man.
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Bill Gaede
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Because that DNA is the whole reason we exist, still preserved long after most of humanity ascended into super-intelligent human-robot hybrids. Humans are just the legacy of that pre-Singularity time—the living museums that preserve the genetic diversity of what used to be the human race. In reality, we’re just a bunch of pathetic apes that evolution passed by. All
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Samuel Peralta (The Future Chronicles: Special Edition)
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Vaccination with a live-attenuated virus vaccine can be compared with the cross-species transmission of viruses that cause zoonotic infection. If the vaccine strain is an RNA virus, it can be expected that the vaccine inoculum will be made up of a population of genotypes representing the quasispecies which is created during replication and amplification of the virus in host cells. Furthermore, virus replication in the vaccine recipient creates genetic diversity, providing an opportunity for reversion of the attenuated phenotype. This is a real but rarely realized disadvantage of live-attenuated virus vaccines.
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Michael G. Cordingley (Viruses: Agents of Evolutionary Invention)
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Some Amazonian Native Americans descend partly from a Native American founding population that carried ancestry more closely related to indigenous Australians, New Guineans and Andaman Islanders than to any present-day Eurasians or Native Americans. This signature is not present to the same extent, or at all, in present-day Northern and Central Americans or in a 12,600-year-old Clovis-associated genome, suggesting a more diverse set of founding populations of the Americans than previously accepted.
[Quoting Pontus Skoglund]
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Graham Hancock (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization)
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The DNA sequence between humans is 99.5 per cent identical and it is the remaining 0.5 per cent which provides the diversity we see between individuals.
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Aysha Divan (Molecular Biology: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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India and rest of the world has already taken the sustainable development concept, here two important key problems are context specific solutions and unity in diversity. As world has become one, hereafter no one can stop any foreign visitors, investments or anything that happens within nation. But due to pollution an over population everywhere is succumbed. To reduce population china took one child policy but failed due to lack of genetic diversity and male - femaela ratio and also working population. to meet this problem key solution only sustainable development that touches all scienctific and technological aspects. No technical advancements ahold be stopped but they have to regulated into eco friendly aspects. Industries should evolve into eco friendly and sustainable solutions and also banking sector. They should and should and should minimize pollution at any cost otherwise this chaos will continue and will lead disintegration of society and may also lead to civil war in future. so billionaires should consider humans ans humans just like them not as robots. So try to reach SDGs and policies for any industries that pollutes the environment. And once population is getting stabilized by 2030 as predicted by UN, if it stabilized then obviously fine and if it is not stabilized then it ie better to dismiss the concept of marriage and run into future with science.
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Ganapathy K
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Consider the following: 1. This research paper demonstrates the absence of any significant outside genetic influence in India for the past 10,000 – 15,000 years [4]. 2. This research paper excludes any significant patrilineal gene flow from East Europe to Asia, including India, at least since the mid-Holocene period (7,000 to 5,000 years ago) [5]. 3. This research paper rejects the possibility of an Aryan invasion/migration and concludes that Indian populations are genetically unique and harbor the second highest genetic diversity after Africans [6]. These three research papers demolish the AIT. They conclusively and irrefutably prove that there was no Aryan invasion circa 1500 BCE.
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A.L. Chavda (The Aryan Invasion Myth: How 21st Century Science Debunks 19th Century Indology)
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Lewontin gathered measurements of seventeen different proteins in a wide range of human populations, from the Chippewa to the Zulu, from the Dutch to the people of Easter Island. When he sorted people according to their race, he found that the genetic differences between races accounted for only 6.3 percent of the total genetic diversity in humans. The genetic diversity within populations, such as the Zulu or the Dutch, contained a staggering 85.4 percent.
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Carl Zimmer (She Has Her Mother's Laugh: What Heredity Is, Is Not, and May Become)
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Viewed from the aisles of a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, plummeting nutritional diversity might seem like an overblown threat. We live in a time, after all, when you can find calzone in Tokyo, fajitas in Rome, and sushi in the Mall of America, and when high-end supermarkets stock organic beef, micro brews, heirloom tomatoes, kale, matcha smoothies, and once-exotic cereals like quinoa, amaranth, and spelt. But this apparent embarrassment of riches obscures a poverty of nutritional content and genetic diversity.
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Taras Grescoe (The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past)
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Still, the greatest damage to the national herd’s genetic diversity has been wreaked not by breeders like Pat Heitkam and the Koehnens, but by the varroa mite, which wiped out almost every feral colony in the country. Feral bees had broadened the gene pool by mating with managed queens. Now the vast majority of the nation’s beekeepers rely almost completely on mail-order commercial queens to supply new blood.
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Hannah Nordhaus (The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America)
“
Another significant factor in sexual attraction is scent. Th e other person’s smell—
that is, his or her natural body scent mixed with the lingering smells of the day—
plays a major role in drawing people together and finding optimal partners. Some
people report that they know right away from his or her smell that a person is the
one for them, and of course conversely some conclude that his or her body odor
is a “deal-breaker.” (For a discussion of pheromones, see Chapter 3.) Psychologist
Rachel Herz, author of the book Th e Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic
Sense of Smell (2007), states that “body odor is an external manifestation of the
immune system and smells we think are attractive come from people who are most
genetically compatible with us” (quoted in Svoboda, 2008). Interestingly, from what
we discussed above about symmetry, men and women whose body odors are judged
to be sexy by others are also more likely to have symmetrical faces. So, it seems
that finding a person with a pleasing body odor is essential. People who want to
find out their partners’ true scent can go fragrance-free for a few days. Th ey may
worry about their own scent, and some people may indeed not like it, but there
will always be persons who will be attracted to their natural body odor (Fisher,
2009; Herz, 2007; Martins et al. 2005; Moalem, 2009; Svoboda, 2009).
”
”
Bryan Strong (Human Sexuality: Diversity in Contemporary America)
“
But for those with eyes to see, the father of lies always gives himself away through his envy of others, seeking what he can gain from—not what he can give to—believers and religion, then pretending something is wrong with those he cannot control, those who get things done like Jesus did, disparaging them while he himself accomplishes nothing but division, diversion, and destruction.
”
”
Thomas Horn (Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald The Dawn Of TechnoDimensional Spiritual Warfare)
“
In their important masterpiece entitled When the Earth Nearly Died, Allan and Delair write: In Europe immense herds of diverse animals utterly vanished off the face of the earth for no obvious biological reason Coincident with this dreadful slaughter upon the land was the deposition of myriads of contemporary marine shells, and the stranding at great elevations of marine mammals, porpoises, walruses and seals In Siberia, the picture is everywhere one of appalling disorder, carnage and wholesale destruction, with countless animals and plants frozen in positions of death ever since the day they perished. As a result, their remains are amazingly fresh-looking and are frequently indistinguishable from those of animals and plants that have died mere weeks ago The magnitude of the biological extinctions achieved by the Deluge almost transcends the imagination. It annihilated literally billions of biological units of both sexes and every age indiscriminately. Only incredibly powerful flood waters operating world-wide could have achieved such results, and only a flood produced by the means previously suggested could have operated globally They comment on the preposterous Ice Age theories of their predecessors. Although these theories hold little water, they are accepted by supposedly intelligent people. ...it is astonishing that such an unscientific explanation ever came to be formulated, yet in a short time both it and the concept of immense thick ice-sheets descending from a hypothetical northern mountain system, to cover all of northern and eastern North America and western and northern Eurasia, was enthusiastically embraced...as virtually established fact The evidence is perfectly unambiguous. Along with the removal of an “Ice Age” like that which has been hitherto commonly envisaged, the evidence suggests that there is something seriously amiss with the last phases of standard geological chronology Evidence thus converges from numerous directions to support the conclusion that, on the testimony of radio-carbon and other dating techniques, immense physical and climatic changes occurred on earth some 11,000 years or so ago – when an Ice Age that probably never existed came to an end, and an apparently uniformitarian regime was abruptly terminated The gigantic worldwide tectonic disturbances of the ‘late Pleistocene’ times occurred almost simultaneously on a nearly unimaginable scale – precisely what could be expected from a powerful external influence but not from the ‘Ice Age’ conditions conventionally believed to have existed then They note the change in the magnetic fields that occurred during the cataclysmic period of Earth’s recent history: Significantly, a drop in the strength of the earth’s magnetic field appears to have occurred sometime between 13,750 and 12,350 years ago...attended by various other important changes, including earthquakes, vulcanism, water table fluctuations and large scale climatic variations. Of these, severe earthquakes in particular may even induce axial wobble, and polarity reversals
”
”
Michael Tsarion (Atlantis, Alien Visitation and Genetic Manipulation)
“
The first view, solidly anchored in popular linguistic theory, holds that language is a uniquely human phenomenon, distinct from the adaptations of all other organisms on the planet. Species as diverse as eagles and mosquitoes fly, whales and minnows swim, but we are the only species that communicates like we do. Not only does language differentiate us from all other animal life; it also exists separate from other cognitive abilities like memory, perception, and event he act of speech itself. Researchers in this tradition have searched for a "language organ," a part of the brain devoted solely to linguistic skills. They have sought the roots of language in the fine grain of the human genome, maintaining, in some cases, that certain genes may exist for the sole purpose of encoding grammar. One evolutionary scenario in this view maintains that modern language exploded onto the planet with a big genetic bang, the result of a fortuitous mutation that blessed the Cro-Magnon with the gift of tongues.
”
”
Christine Kenneally (The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language)
“
Enforced by genetics, sexual reproduction, perspective, and experience, the most manifest characteristic of human beings is their diversity. The freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested. By contrast, political power originates in top-down processes—governments, monopolies, regulators, and elite institutions—all attempting to quell human diversity and impose order. Thus power always seeks centralization.
”
”
George Gilder (Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World)
“
Language and material culture have greatly increased the mobility of the world's population, and some researchers believe that this will lead to an unhealthy and irreversible diminishing of variation in our genome. As more and more humans breed across the boundaries of genetic variation, we become a blander, more homogenous bunch than our diverse parent groups. This could be a problem because variation is important to the evolutionary health of a species, for the more we are the same, the easier it is for one single thing to make us extinct. Indeed, some genetic variants of the human species are disappearing altogether as small indigenous groups die out.
”
”
Christine Kenneally (The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language)
“
DNA analyses of modern people suggest that the human population declined dramatically, to perhaps only a few hundred. When we talk about all men and women being brothers and sisters, and people of all types being closely related, we are not just being poetic and romantic. Compared to other species, humans exhibit very little genetic diversity, a trait that stems back to that time, not too long ago, when a small band of survivors had to repopulate humanity. We
”
”
David Grinspoon (Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet's Future)
“
Two bulls, a father and son, are responsible for 7 percent of the genomes of the entire American population of Holsteins; genetic diversity be damned.73
”
”
Anonymous
“
Genetic determination and social learning are, however, fundamentally different processes. Tellingly, the cultural songs of the oscine birds are generally more complex, sometimes much more so, and more diverse than the genetically driven nonoscine calls.
”
”
Hal Whitehead (The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins)
“
Overall Neanderthals are estimated to have been only one quarter as genetically diverse as we are – and, as species go, our diversity is at the very low end: even endangered chimpanzees have more diversity.
”
”
Cosmo Magazine
“
We are biological beings, shaped by genetic inheritance and the organization and health of our neurological structures. We have rich inner lives of diverse dispositions, motivations, cognitive abilities and processes, intrapsychic dynamics, and reinforcement histories. We are also social creatures, affected by our social and cultural environments. Together these elements help us understand normal phenomena (like memory construction, neurological function, and social attraction) and abnormal psychological occurrences (such as pseudo-memories, Alzheimer’s disease, and dysfunctional relationships). Unfortunately, much of the work on the
”
”
David N. Entwistle (Integrative Approaches to Psychology and Christianity: An Introduction to Worldview Issues, Philosophical Foundations, and Models of Integration)
“
In one study that capitalized on a natural experiment, a genetically homogeneous human population straddles the national boundaries of Finland and Russia. The prevalence of type 1 diabetes is four times greater on the Finnish side than on the Russian side. This difference is accompanied by a striking difference in microbial diversity sampled from homes.
”
”
David Sloan Wilson (This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution)
“
REVERSAL
The reversal to mastery is to deny its existence or its importance, and therefore the need to strive for it in any way. But such a reversal can only lead to feelings of powerlessness and disappointment. This reversal leads to enslavement to what we shall call the false self.
Your false self is the accumulation of all the voices you have internalized from other people—parents and friends who want you to conform to their ideas of what you should be like and what you should do, as well as societal pressures to adhere to certain values that can easily seduce you. It also includes the voice of your own ego, which constantly tries to protect you from unflattering truths. This self talks to you in clear words, and when it comes to mastery, it says things like, “Mastery is for the geniuses, the exceptionally talented, the freaks of nature. I was simply not born that way.” Or it says, “Mastery is ugly and immoral. It is for those who are ambitious and egotistical. Better to accept my lot in life and to work to help other people instead of enriching myself.” Or it might say, “Success is all luck. Those we call Masters are only people who were at the right place at the right time. I could easily be in their place if I had a lucky break.” Or it might also say, “To work for so long at something that requires so much pain and effort, why bother? Better to enjoy my short life and do what I can to get by.”
As you must know by now, these voices do not speak the truth.
Mastery is not a question of genetics or luck, but of following your natural inclinations and the deep desire that stirs you from within. Everyone has such inclinations. This desire within you is not motivated by egotism or sheer ambition for power, both of which are emotions that get in the way of mastery. It is instead a deep expression of something natural, something that marked you at birth as unique. In following your inclinations and moving toward mastery, you make a great contribution to society, enriching it with discoveries and insights, and making the most of the diversity in nature and among human society. It is in fact the height of selfishness to merely consume what others create and to retreat into a shell of limited goals and immediate pleasures. Alienating yourself from your inclinations can only lead to pain and disappointment in the long run, and a sense that you have wasted something unique. This pain will beexpressed in bitterness and envy, and you will not recognize the true source of your depression.
”
”
Robert Greene (Mastery)
“
A gene segment has no more need of an imaginary mediation in order to reproduce than does an earthworm, any segment of which can reproduce autonomously as an entire worm. Any cell of an American chief executive officer likewise suffices to produce a new chief executive officer. Similarly, any portion of a hologram may become the matrix of a new complete hologram: each discrete portion of the original hologram contains all the information needed for reproduction (though a slight loss of definition may occur).
This is how the totality is eliminated. If all information is contained in each of its parts, the whole loses its significance. This means the end of the body also, the end of that unique object which we call the body, whose secret is precisely that it cannot be broken down into an accumulation of cells because it is an indivisible configuration - as witness the very fact that it is sexed.
Paradoxically, cloning is destined to continue producing sexed beings indefinitely - clones must, of course, remain identical to their model - even as it turns sex itself into a useless function; not that sex was ever a function: on the contrary, it is what makes a body a body, something which transcends all that body's diverse functions. Sex (or death) is something that transcends the entirety of the information that can be collected concerning a given body. The genetic formula, by contrast, contains all such information, but cannot transcend it. It must therefore find its own autonomous path to reproduction, independently of sexuality and death.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
“
Since the 19th century, medicine has focused on specific disease states by linking collections of signs and symptoms to single organs.... Systems biology and its offspring, sometimes called Network Medicine, takes a more wholistic approach, looking at all the diverse genetic, metabolic, and environmental factors that contribute to clinical disease. Equally important, it looks at the preclinical manifestations of pathology.
The current focus of medicine is much like the focus that an auto mechanic takes to repair a car. The diagnostic process isolates a broken part and repairs or replaces it.... Although this strategy has saved countless lives and reduced pain and suffering, it nevertheless treats the disease and not the patient, with all their unique habits, lifestyle mistakes, environmental exposures, psychosocial interactions, and genetic predispositions.
”
”
Paul Cerrato (Reinventing Clinical Decision Support: Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Diagnostic Reasoning (HIMSS Book Series))
“
We don’t need sperm to get pregnant! This is news to me,” Aïda said, with a sharp laugh.
Moira went on coolly. “There is a process known as parthenogenesis, literally virgin birth, by which a uniparental embryo can be created out of a normal egg. It’s been done with animals. The only reason no one ever did it with humans is because it seemed ethically dodgy, as well as completely unnecessary given the willingness of men to impregnate women every chance they got.”
(...)
“There is another problem with this version of parthenogenesis, which is, again, that all offspring are the same. Exact copies. To get some genetic diversity, we need to use something called automictic parthenogenesis. Look, it’s a long story, but the point is that in normal sexual reproduction there is crossing over of chromosomes during meiosis. It’s a form of natural recombination of DNA. It’s what causes your children to look sort of like you, but not exactly like you. In the form of parthenogenesis that I am proposing to use, there would be that crossing over. An element of randomness.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
“
Africa contains the most variation in the world in physical type due to the vast variety of genetic heritage. It has the shortest and tallest people, populations with the thickest and thinnest lips, and very wide differences in the widths of noses and skull dimensions. Populations thought to consist of a single ‘tribe’ show a continuous grading of gene frequencies, while populations thought to be biologically separate have much greater genetic similarity than previously thought. The genetic diversity of Africa is often regarded as analogous to the fact that its population speaks 2,000 different languages.
”
”
Ali Rattansi (Racism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
Let's imagine we're standing together on the launch pad at NASA's Cape Canaveral facility near Orlando, and staring up at the stars together. As I write this, the last constellation above the horizon is Centaurus. The centaur's front head is a bright star. In fact, it's three stars—a pair called Alpha Centauri A and B, and, dimmest of the trio, Proxima Centauri. Here, look through this telescope. See? You can tell them apart. But what we can't see is that there is, in fact, a planet circling the faint light of Proxima Centauri. Man, I wish we could see it. Because that planet, Proxima Centauri b, is the nearest known exoplanet to Earth.
[...]
If we were to board a spacecraft and ride it from the outer edge of our atmosphere all the way to Proxima Centauri b, you and I, who boarded the ship fit and trim, chosen as we were from billions of applicants, would die before the voyage reached even 1/100th of the intervening distance. [...] At a speed of 20,000 miles per hour—the speed of our top-performing modern rockets—4.2 light years translates to more than 130,000 years of space travel.
[...] So how will we ever get there? A generation ship. [...] the general notion is this: get enough human beings onto a ship, with adequate genetic diversity among us, that we and our fellow passengers cohabitate as a village, reproducing and raising families who go on to mourn you and me and raise new of their own, until, thousands of years after our ship leaves Earth's gravity, the distant descendants of the crew that left Earth finally break through the atmosphere of our new home.
[...] A generation ship is every sociological and psychological challenge of modern life squashed into a microcosmic tube of survival and amplified—generation after generation.
[...] The idea of a generation ship felt like a pointless fantasy when I first encountered it. But as I've spent the last few years speaking with technologists, academics, and policy makers about the hidden dangers of building systems that could reprogram our behavior now and for generations to come, I realized that the generation ship is real. We're on board it right now.
On this planet, our own generation ship, we were once passengers. But now, without any training, we're at the helm. We have built lives for ourselves on this planet that extend far beyond our natural place in this world. And now we are on the verge of reprogramming not only the planet, but one another, for efficiency and profit. We are turning systems loose on the decks of the ship that will fundamentally reshape the behavior of everyone on board, such that they will pass those behaviors on to their progeny, and they might not even realize what they've done. This pattern will repeat itself, and play out over generations in a behavioral and technological cycle.
”
”
Jacob Ward (The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back)
“
Our modern lives are very different from those of early humans, who hunted and gathered to survive. Their reverence for the natural world is evident in the early murals of wildlife they painted on cave walls and in the stylized visions of life they sculpted from bone and ivory. Our lives reflect remnants of our ancestral attachment to nature and the diversity of life - the concept of biophilia that was introduced early in this chapter. We evolved in natural environments rich in biodiversity, and we still have a biophilia for such settings. Indeed, our biophilia may be innate, an evolutionary product of natural selection acting on a brainy species who survival depended on a close connection to the environment and a practical appreciation of plants and animals. Our appreciation of life guides the field of biology today. We celebrate life by deciphering he genetic code that makes each species unique. We embrace life by using fossils and DNA to chronicle evolution through time. We preserve life through our efforts to classify and protect the millions of species on Earth. We respect life by using nature responsibly and reverently to improve human welfare. Biology is the scientific expression of our desire to know nature. We are most likely to protect what we appreciate, and we are mostly likely to appreciate what we understand. By learning about the processes and diversity of life, we also become more aware of ourselves and our place in the biosphere. We hope this text has served you well in this lifelong adventure.
”
”
Neil A. Campbell (Biology)
“
As strange as it sounds, it is no longer possible to determine how many human genomes have been sequenced. At present the strategy of choice is whole-genome re-sequencing (Chapter 3) whereby next-generation sequence data are mapped onto a reference genome. The results have been breathtaking. The recently concluded (and aptly named) 1000 Genomes Project Consortium catalogued ~85 million SNPs, 3.6 million short insertions/deletions, and 60,000 larger structural variants in a global sampling of human genetic diversity. These data are catalysing research in expected and unexpected ways. Beyond providing a rich source of data for GWA-type studies focused on disease, scientists are also using the 1000 Genomes Project data to learn about our basic biology, something that proved surprisingly difficult when only a pair of genomes was available. For example, a recent GWAS taking advantage of the 1000 Genomes Project data identified ten genes associated with kidney development and function, genes that had previously not been linked to this critical aspect of human physiology. In 2016, Craig Venter’s team reported the sequencing of 10,545 human genomes. Beyond the impressively low cost (US$1,000–2,000 per genome) and high quality (30–40× coverage), the study was significant in hinting at the depths of human genome diversity yet to be discovered. More than 150 million genetic variants were identified in both coding and non-coding regions of the genome; each sequenced genome had on average ~8,600 novel variants. Furthermore, each new genome was found to contain 0.7 Mbp of sequence that is not contained in the reference genome. This underscores the need for methods development in the area of structure variation detection in personal genome data. Overall, however, the authors concluded that ‘the data generated by deep genome sequencing is of the quality necessary for clinical use’.
”
”
John M. Archibald (Genomics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
Most of the notable features on the virus could be found in coronaviruses already identified in nature, including the furin cleavage site. So, in theory, all of its genetic diversity could have evolved through natural selection. The features didn’t necessarily need to arise from a lab, or from any special circumstance.
”
”
Scott Gottlieb (Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic)
“
Inbreeding is more prevalent on islands, and genetic diversity accordingly lower, as descent from a small founding population and isolation from the wider world reduces the likelihood of hooking up with someone who isn't a relative. Iceland, for example, is full of tall, blond, sexy people because most Icelanders are descended from a small group of migratory tall, blond, sexy people. There has been little further immigration to Iceland over the centuries because most people don't want to freeze on an isolated volcanic rock while being made to feel short, swarthy and unattractive.
”
”
David Hunt (True Girt: The Unauthorised History of Australia (Volume 1) [Standard Large Print 16 Pt Edition])
“
Ocean viruses are stunning not just for their sheer numbers but also for their genetic diversity. The genes in a human and the genes in a shark are quite similar — so similar that scientists can find a related counterpart in the shark genome to most genes in the human genome. The genetic makeup of marine viruses, on the other hand, matches almost nothing. In a survey of viruses in the Arctic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda, and the northern Pacific, scientists identified 1.8 million viral genes. Only 10 percent of them showed any match to any gene from any microbe, animal, plant, or other organism — even from any other known virus. The other 90 percent were entirely new to science. In 200 liters of seawater, scientists typically find 5,000 genetically distinct kinds of viruses. In a kilogram of marine sediment, there may be a million kinds.
”
”
Carl Zimmer (A Planet of Viruses)
“
Humans are terrible people. First they polluted Earth, then they turned Mars into a hot, stormy hellhole when they tried to terraform it. Now they want to do the same to Meru. They have no gratitude for the work alloys and constructs do to keep Earth clean and safe and livable or the work our tarawans do to maintain genetic diversity and adaptability. They’re stuck in the same old selfish gene-set they evolved from.>
”
”
S.B. Divya (Meru (The Alloy Era, #1))