Caveman Ancestors and Woke Politics

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After yesterday’s travel, today was a day of rest.  I decided to look around for something fun to think about.  I found an article from August that explored the relation of archaic humans to us and to each other.  A lot of it was a rehash of discoveries made over the last few years in Siberia concerning Neanderthals and Denisovans.  If you’ve read about this, DNA analysis has shown that several of the fossils they found have mixed Neanderthal and Denisovan parentage.  Even this discovery alone is revolutionary.  But the story gets more and more complicated.  Apparently modern humans cross-bred with both of these hominid cousins back before they went extinct.  Apparently, all non-African humans have small but significant amounts of both Neanderthal and Denisovan genetic heritage.  This is due to the fact that both these species left Africa before the dawn of Homo sapiens.  Modern humans caught up with them in Eurasia.  And also interestingly, there are three separate populations of Denisovans and they have each interacted with humans differently.  One group has a more significant genetic residue among Australian aborigines and neighboring islanders than with any other human grouping.  While the genetic trace of another Denisovan population is detected more strongly among East Asians.

Then there are the other archaic humans who have not yet been shown to have left any mark on the human genome but survived to very recently, barely missing historic times.  The diminutive species Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis lived in Southeast Asia and may have survived until as recently as ten thousand years ago.  No DNA evidence has been recovered yet for these species but the way things have been developing I would be surprised if it didn’t.

All of this stuff is fascinating just as science.  But what it also does is open a window on the complicated history of the human family.  By the standards of current biological science humanity is a series of populations that include varying genetic donations from different species.  At the very least we are a hybrid species.  And this is based on just the first few years of ancient DNA analysis.  And if we were unafraid of outraging the always outraged, we would refer to human races as subspecies as we do with every snake, frog or mouse species that has local variants.  After all every hill in a rain forest is allowed to have a separate frog subspecies based on color or how many spots they sport on their backs.  Either that or we should go the other way and eliminate subspecies from these other animals and just group all these creatures together.  But that would wreak havoc with the endangered species grift that the government uses to restrict people from draining the puddles in their yards for fear of wiping out the nineteen-spot salamander that lives adjacent to the eighteen-spot salamander in the next puddle.

But I digress.  The point is that humans are in no way, shape or form homogeneous.  Even in highly isolated populations people are individuals.  And they differ in a million ways.  Even within a family someone is smarter, taller, stronger, funnier or happier.  The bigger the family, the more obvious this is.

The fact that we haven’t been able to come to terms with this at the global level is pathetic.  This whole idea of equity is obviously dishonest.  The idea that somehow a secret society of white supremacists is keeping down everyone else is moronic.  What has happened is through propaganda and reverse racism we’ve disincentivized the under-class from applying themselves at honest work.  The fact that there are plenty of African Americans succeeding in various professions disproves the white supremacy trope.  And allowing this lie to exist is horribly destructive.

It occurred to me that if we found some corner of the Amazonian jungle where by some miracle of fate a last village of Denisovans had survived in isolation we would try to force them to become doctors, lawyers, engineers and tech company CEOs in the carefully calculated demographic ratio.  Even if they couldn’t fathom what a CEO was.

There’s a blindness that I assume is intentional.  And now we’ve extended it to such absurd ideas as allowing men to compete in women’s sports to keep up the pretense that transgenderism is a real thing.  Well, anyway, it was a good read.  Back to the salt mine.

Talking Family with Some Friends

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Today I went to visit some very good friends.  It was a pretty long trip but it was so good to spend time with people who speak my language.  We talked about many things.  We even talked about the political situation and I got some different points of view about the outlook for the mid-terms.  Apparently not everyone is as pessimistic as I am.  But the opinions on what’s wrong with the country were still very close to my viewpoint.

One thing that was brought up was the awareness by women in their thirties and forties that they’ve been tricked.  They’ve traded their most precious resource, their fertility, for ten or twenty years as corporate poster children.  The paradox is the women in their twenties will deny to the death that this is what is happening.  It’s only after the deal has been paid for that they understand what has happened.

But at the same time, it has to be acknowledged that our society has made the one salary middle class family a virtual impossibility.  And both millennial men and women have absorbed this as an unavoidable reality.  I countered that Hungary has begun the process of trying to provide a way out of this trap with tax incentives for couples that allows the wife and mother to stay at home with her kids in exchange for benefits that acknowledge the advantage to Hungarian society of providing new Hungarian citizens for the state.  I got some agreement that this would be highly desirable but there was also a lot of skepticism about any chance of it happening here.

And that’s true.  There’s no consensus among Americans that the stay-at-home mom is a necessity.  In fact, among young women, it’s exactly the opposite.  They’ve been proselytized to believe that only after they’ve achieved corporate success should they even think about getting married and starting a family.  The problem is no one wants to marry a thirty-five-year-old middle manager who makes more money than you and wants her husband to facilitate her remaining at the office to further her career after she has the one child, she thinks she has time (maybe) to produce.  So, we’re in a Catch-22 that neatly resists any fix.

So, I shrugged my shoulders and thought I should open a matrimonial agency and entice twenty something women to marry any men who are brave enough to try and raise families on one salary.  I’ll pitch it to these young women as a quixotic adventure that dooms them to poverty but provides the most enriched personal space in the known universe, the nuclear family.  And it’s true.  There is nothing more dynamic than a man and a woman struggling to provide a home and an upbringing for their own children.  What it requires is a man to spend his twenties saving up a stake to own a house and develop a career that he can use to sustain a family.

And it can be done.  I’ve seen it done.  Some military men have done exactly this.  And there are other career paths that can accommodate this goal.  And then he has to find a girl who’s interested.  But the real question is how many men of this type are left?  It may be a small number.

But this is what I was doing today.  And it was a stimulating discussion.  It’s good to get out and about when there are smart people to talk to.  I only wish there were ten thousand people like those I was talking to today.  If only those kinds of numbers existed.  I could see things getting done.  But when it’s handfuls it seems impossible to cause change.  Well, it was a good day.

17SEP2022 – OCF Update – This’N’That

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Busy day.  Had lots of yard work to get ready for the end of warm weather.  I even cut the grass today.  I didn’t notice how long the grass had grown on account of all that rain.  Man, what a mess the clippings made.  But soon enough all that will be done with.   It was nice to get out and look around the fields.  There were tons of honey bees on the goldenrod.  Now that I’ve renewed my interest in keeping bees, I was looking at the varieties of bees that were on the flowers.  And I noticed they were almost exclusively Italian bees.  These are a southern bee and they don’t fare well in cold winter areas.  But they’re the kind of bees that people get when they buy a package of bees from one of the big breeders down south.  So most likely these bees aren’t feral bees but some beekeeper’s hive.

Funny, I got a little annoyed that someone was encroaching on my goldenrod.  What the what!  The only advantage of the Italian bees is their mild tempers.  They’re the least likely race of bees to sting you even if you’re in their nest messing around with the frames full of honey and brood.  So, knowing there are a lot of apiary hives around me was a little bit of a downer.  I’m hoping to catch a swarm next spring.  But if there are a lot of apiary hives in the area chances are that the swarm will come from one of them.  That means the bees will be southern bees and most probably also bees that have been living under a regimen of chemicals to ward off varroa mites and other plagues.  I won’t be using those chemicals so the bees will have to depend on their natural robustness to survive.  But since they’ve been dosed with various chemicals, they may be quite weak.

That makes me think that I may as well purchase a bee package from a breeder who keeps northern bees under a natural beekeeping regimen.  I know there are several breeders in Vermont who have this type of bee.  I’ve read about these northern bees.  They’re known either as Russian bees or dark bees.  They are extremely cold hardy and are specialized to collecting a large amount of nectar in order to survive the long cold northern winter.  Of course, that might mean a very long drive back and forth to Northern Vermont.  That’s a hike.  It’s possible they’ll mail the bees but maybe not.  Anyway, interesting things to think about today.

While I was working on the garden, I saw both grasshoppers and katydids that were so worn out that I was able to go up to them and pick them up by the wing covers.

Even the few butterflies I saw, some fritillaries and painted ladies, were flying very slowly.  And they were much less skittish than normally when I approached them while they fed.  Of vertebrates, there were some turkeys in the yard, a few small frogs and a vole that shot out of the garden and headed into the blueberry bushes when I approached.  I managed to get some shots of the turkeys as they noticed me and retreated into the forest.

Then I walked over by the swamp.  It was looking very beat up.

But this time of the year has its charms.  A good day out in the air.