Jun 02
What Europe and America call science and philosophy began in Greece. Are you a Platonist or an Aristotelian? In my experience, a Platonist who condescends to read my more worldly thoughts, spilling out in exhaustively parenthesised arguments, will become frustrated when my mind leans to Aristotle’s pragmatism. And I defend myself, according to my kind, …
Apr 01
By ecological reasoning alone our 20th Century Democracy was broken from the start because it didn’t take into account the ecological reality that a technological ‘species’ must comprise diversely specialised individuals. What this means in terms of electoral democracy is that human beings cannot speak with a fully intelligent majority voice. Hold on! I am …
Feb 05
[WonkPauseBreakthrough-2.0]: Unlike any genetically coadapted species, technologically adapting Human kind must comprise many variously specialised individuals, and this has profound implications for how we do politics. Genetic evolution works both upon a population’s physical traits as well as upon its behavioral traits, and we must look very closely at behaviours when we come to talk …
Dec 16
Our ‘inner-life’ has a stronger resemblance to our ‘outer reality’ than Nature’s genes have to their outer reality (organisms); so much so that our imaginations even spill over this presumed inner-outer divide as overt ‘playfulness’. Is this why we become easily ‘attached’ to our thoughts? And why we humans, as a species, cannot be trusted to merely ‘think …
Dec 13
I was at a local Green Party meeting the other day1 where we were all asked to identify ourselves and to say something about why we wanted to be involved in the upcoming election campaign. (I’m the sign delivery volunteer.) I tried to respond thoughtfully, which takes time as you know, but when this Old-Guy, …
Nov 22
As you can see from reading other postings on this website, my understanding of population evo-ecology doesn’t allow me to see humans as having a ‘place’ within coevolving Nature, not just because of the faster-than-Nature evolution of technology but mostly because of technology’s niche-transcending capacity.1 Modern humans are not a species (hence the quotation marks …
Jun 10
In this perilous decade of transition, for both Humans and Nature, an awakening mind must not underrate the evolutionary value of a wandering and occasionally fixating mind. A human mind cannot be creative if it doesn’t wander freely, and regularly; and must even hold onto hypotheses long enough to ignite the curiosity, and ultimately the …
Feb 27
Fourteen reasons to view humankind as separate from the co-evolved Natural World: Principles of population evo-ecology to which humans do not conform 1. — genetic structures evolve only in response to a functional shift. That is, structures do not change until environmental change calls for intergenerational adaptation by Natural Selection. https://www.extremophilechoice.com/2022/06/20/young-buddha-part-1-overturning-the-mortal-conformity-of-structure-and-function/ 2. — opportunism means behavioral flexibility, but …
Nov 11
In case you’re wondering why I haven’t posted on my https://www.extremophilechoice.com/ blog lately, it’s not because I’ve lost interest in species conservation, rewilding, or looking at any other issues through the lens of Natural History. I just don’t have anything to say lately that I haven’t already said in these pages. I know most blogs …
Feb 09
“The devil of complacency is in the ignorance of detail.” This is another post that I’ve resurrected, and updated, from four years back, because it places the Extremophile Choice hypothesis in the context of the broader, and not the currently fashionable, ecological discussion. The original has earned more attention from ecological nerdom than many of my other blogposts, so …
