Chapter 14. Selection by arms race - can man stop it?

Chapter 14. Selection by arms race.

Contents:

1. Can we stop it?

2. A meditation over 250,000 copulations

3. Dog breeding.

4. 247.500 generations of natural selection in Africa.

5. Two thousand generations of migratory selection.

6. Five hundred generations of breedings of dogs and men.

A. An exercise in cynicism.

B. William Hamilton rules.

C. Results: The material weapons.

D. Results: The mental weapons.

7. Conclusion – towards “free will”.

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Chapter 14. Selection by arms race.

1. Can we stop it?

On January 19^th 2007 I put the outline of  chapter 13 of this study on my website. In it I asked if blind evolution now has resulted in an equally blind “arms race in external weapons between, say, capitalists and socialists, or in a little while, between the United States and China.”

Little did I expect that world media on the day after would report on a rather important step in this specific arms race, that the Chinese had succeeded with one space missile to shoot down another, a space satellite in an orbit where lots of American space satellites gather information. New York Times summarized its analysis thus: “China’s success in destroying one of its own orbiting satellites signals its intentions to contest U.S. supremacy in space.”

Only a few days later, on the 24^th of January, media informed us that the United States had announced its intention to put an important new part of an anti-missile umbrella in Poland and the Czech Republic, something which, of course, was bound to provoke Russia to participate in the game. And so it goes.

This is a perfect illustration to what I fear: that it is the arms race which is driving the behaviour of man, not man the arms race.

No phrase better explains the determinism of this process than “if I don’t do it, he will do it”. What is this “it”? It is a weapon that is, at least, equal and, preferably, somewhat better than that which our potential enemy has. Or a tool that is, at least, equal and, preferably, somewhat better than that which our potential competitor has.

In this case, too, we have a normal action-reaction scheme. The most proximate explanation for the Chinese action was the highly arrogant policy, announced by president Bush in the summer of  2006, that “space belonged to the United States”, that the USA had the right to act freely in space and also had the right to scare others away from doing what the USA was doing there, to develop a strong military space policy.

It is difficult not to connect this arrogance to the equally deep as vain desire of all adrenalinomaniacs to strive to become omnipotent Gods up in Heaven!

Half a year later came this Chinese challenge to the US arrogance.

Whatever it might lead to, this is a good example supporting my hunch, that ultimately it is the sixty million old blind arms race that drives the behaviour of competitive man.

This is true, I fear, however much man believes he is motivated only by his “free will” when he does what he does. However much he may try to justify the wisdom of his actions by pointing to valid proximate causes for his latest action, behind that one, I think, is the instinctive animal urge for an ever better weapon, necessary for winning also the next step in the eternal Malthusian-Darwinian struggle.

The central issue of this chapter can be illustrated with a couple of question:

Is this new arms race in space, this space race, only another step in an evolutionary cultural selection between organisms that consist of human individuals united with their external weapons? And, if so, is it likely to be helpful in giving reproductive success to the winners, the “fittest”, in this biologically driven scientific-technological circus? Or may it kill all of us, also the two now driving organisms, the United States and China?

And, most central, is man at all able to stop this dangerous animal arms race?

2. The Tragic Breeding of  Bush,  Beirut, you and me.

 A meditation over 250,000 copulations

To some of my readers I send out a “bimonthly meditation”. The one from August 2006 had the following content, somewhat edited and updated. It is, I hope, a somewhat relevant way to get at least negative evidence for an answer to the question if man can stop the old arms race.

(If you want to come on my list for getting future meditations, do send me an e-mail:  adler.karlsson@capri.it )  Here comes the text:

Experts have recently shown that new natures of dogs can be bread in thirty to ninety generations. Can this tell us anything about the breeding of human nature?

You know your parents. Most of you have known your grandparents. Some of you also met your great grandparents. But then, not very much more! Nobilities can count their forefathers to feudal times with perhaps thirty generations. But how many generations are there?

We could make children with the chimpanzees, it has been reported, up to some six million years ago. Then came the first prototypes of ourselves, of the Homo sapiens. Before the pill the average generation was less than 24 years. Six million years divided by 24 gives us the figure of 250,000 generations.

You and I are the results of some 250,000 successful sexual unions!

          Almost all of mankind’s evolution has taken place in Africa. 60,000 years ago we started migration out of that continent to fill up the rest of the earth. That had been done some twelve thousand years ago when, most likely, Malthusian crowdedness, caused us to develop agriculture and what we may call serious culture.

This knowledge tells us that out of the 250,000 sexual unions that resulted in you and me, some 247,500 took place in Africa, 2,500 took place since migration out of Africa, whereof 500 took place in the “cultural” period.

          Let us look at three important facts about each of these three periods.

         During our extremely long life in Africa, evolution played with about twenty different non-chimp, hominid “prototypes” for us who now live. When the Neanderthals disappeared some 25,000 years ago, only we, Homo sapiens, remained.

During this period a few “bottlenecks” almost annihilated human life.

The early growth of human population was very slow. 10,000 years ago, it is estimated, there were less than ten million inhabitants on the globe. The average growth of mankind thus had been less than one man and one woman per year. Can we imagine the intensity of sexual urge and competition?

These three facts support the idea that life was so extremely precarious that only those who had a very strong and aggressive will to survive, combined with a good capacity to adapt to new situations in nature, that is, only my “clever adrenalinomaniacs”, would survive.

Are we not then permitted to conclude that, most likely, aggressiveness and astuteness or intelligence have been important elements of natural selection during the life of the first 247,500 sexual encounters in the biological soup that is you?

           What about the nature in which the next 2,000 copulations took place?

           The first migration out of Africa 60,000 years ago went to Australia where the aborigines were isolated until England started to export their criminals in that direction.

Another wave of migrants went into Caucasus around 45,000 years ago. Some remained there and are still, since that time, defending their valleys  and mountain tops  against anybody, lately against Russians, British and, now, Americans and NATO. Tough people!

From there one group went to China, another to India and a third to Europe.

If it took 150,000 years for Homo sapiens to fill up Africa, it took only around 30,000 for those in Caucasus to fill up the rest of the world, more than double as big. Our forefathers must now have moved ten times as fast as they had done before.

New dogs were bread in 30 to 90 generations. Out of our African origin, Chinese, Indians and Europeans were bread by “migratory selection” during some 2000 generations. Ample time! We should thus not be surprised over what Carl von Linné crudely called “racial” differences or, as the politically correct now verbally try to hide, that “genetic distances” and “cognitive differences” are continental facts of life.

This migration consisted certainly of a harsh struggle against other predators, poisonous snakes, and unknown bacteria. The cold mountains between Caucasus and both China and India had to be climbed. All this and much more required intelligence. As could be expected, archaeologists have also found a flow of refined artefacts from this period.

Are we not, again, permitted to conclude that the life of mankind, also during these 2,000 sexual unions, was so hard that only serious fighters were likely to survive?

          Guessmates suggest that all of our globe could not support more than ten million hunters and gatherers, who require much land to live. That was the number we now were approaching, before the latest 500 copulations. Which were then the rules?

Kill every male enemy!

Kill every male neutral!

Fill every female victim!

That is a summary of the “morale” of our last period, with “cultural selection” among our 500 closest forebears.

Kill every male: “……as regards the towns of those people which Yahweh your God gives you as your own inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive..” 

That is the command of Moses when his people, who had been promised all land between the Nile and Euphrates, were to take Canaan. Is this command from Deuteronomy 20:16 possibly mankind’s first literarily documented holocaust?  In various other places in the Jewish Bible, Moses’ soldiers are ordered to kill all men and all male children among the enemies, but to take women and girls as concubines.

Kill every neutral: Greeks were not much different. In his famous “History of the Peloponnesian War” Thucydides tells us that one island, Melos, wanted to remain neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta. But no, said Athens, “who is not with us is against us”. After much vain persuasion, the Athenians killed all the men of Melos and carried away the women.

Fill every woman: The best example of this urge to fill female victims with your own seed is Genghis Khan. The most beautiful maidens conquered were given to him. A serious study shows that one in 200 of our present world population carry his genes, half a percent of mankind!!!

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         Having written the above lines in August 2006, it is with a certain glee and a bit of fear that I read a chimpanzee researcher who, in Science 2^nd February 2007, is reported to have found that the chimpanzee “ideal is to eliminate all the males in the rival group. The former group’s foraging territory and females will then benefit the prevailing group.”

I smile at all those who in their human hubris want to believe that we are so very different from chimps. And I fear that this “chimpanzee law” is what rules not only orthodox readers of the books of Moses but even all the brutal European rapists in almost all wars, also those of my past century.

This finding by the chimpanzee student, Richard Wrangham, indicates that we are even more primitive animals than I have thought until I read this. (added 070206).

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          If these have been the main “moral” rules guiding the cultural selection of our 500 closest generations of forefathers, should we be surprised over what we now see, say, in Darfur or West Asia? 

Should we be surprised that the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, concluded that if his people, after eons of suffering, wanted a state of their own, they had to rely on primitive power, because, as he believed, “might makes right”? The same says today a non believing Jew, one of the leading humanists in the United States, Harold Bloom. In a book on “JESUS and YAHWEH” he judges that the former is a weakling, the latter a strong God of Warfare.

Should we be surprised that some spit upon the hope of European culture that “right makes might”? This ideal was formulated by Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Nonetheless the 2006 American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, spits upon it, suggesting that it is “a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so.”

Should we be surprised that the Russian old secret police leader, Vladimir Putin, is forced to rely on pure might when his nation, which never had any democracy, is threatened by a take-over from the inside of closely American-related oligarchs?

Should we be surprised over the arrogant policies of George W Bush?  Isn’t he, like Herzl, Bloom, Bolton, Putin, and also like you and me, a result of a biological breeding during 250,000 generations? Isn’t it this breeding, with natural, migratory and cultural selection during 250,000 generations, which has created each one of us? Is what we in the summer of 2006 did witness in Beirut really a struggle between good and evil? Isn’t it, like most of history, simply the continuation of a few million years of breeding of  one damned human biological tragedy after another?

No, we shouldn’t be surprised. But if we want another 250,000 generations of great-great-great grandchildren to live, we cannot continue like this. As a minimum we have deeply to learn, and hopefully to teach others, to respect that “right makes might”. The belief that “might makes right”, is bound, via a new Hobbesian chaos, not to lead to Armageddon – which is a myth for fanatics - but to a final biological tragedy, the Annihilation of our species.

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That was the ending of my 2006 meditation. A number of e-mails told me I was quite right on the text, except the end. Several of them said: No, there is no hope. We are doomed….! I hope they are wrong, and I will continue to write, until I have given up hope or, more likely,  age has stopped my pen.

3. Dog breeding.

Let me briefly enlarge upon the observations in the above meditation and start by focusing upon the first lines above: “Experts have recently shown that new natures of dogs can be bread in thirty to ninety generations. Can this tell us anything about the breeding of human nature?”

What this research has shown us is that in thirty to ninety generations an Asian grey wolf, a Canis lupus[1] , can be turned into anything from a pet dog to a pit bull.

If the dog generation is three years, such changes of the dog nature thus takes between 90 and 270 years.

I am no specialist in breeding, but it seems to me to be a decent assumption that the same number of generations are required for changing human nature into something different from what it originally was. Human generations consist of 24 years, I suggested. How long time does it under these assumptions take to change human nature?  (I will be happy if any expert gives me more correct assumptions!)

Accepting the assumptions, the answer is between 720 and 2160 years. Food for thought? Especially for those who have loved the unrealistic bur murderous optimism of Condorcet, Lamarck, Lysenko and Sartre about how fast culture would be make a good man out of a bad animal!

Let us, with these figures in mind, speculate a bit more than in the meditation about what may have happened to human nature during the three periods that I used above, those of natural, migratory and cultural selection. In so doing, let me try to concentrate on the issue central in last chapter, that of the biological arms race.

4. 247.500 generations of natural selection in Africa.

What actually is happening from generation to generation during man’s first long long period?

In trying to explain the situation of the Afro-Americans in the United States, the mentor of my youth, Gunnar Myrdal, in his famous book on the American Dilemma, used a method that he called “circular causation with cumulative results”.

Assume two groups of 60 members each who generation after generation are engaged in Malthusian marginal fights against each other. The winners in each meeting kill two male soldiers of the enemy group. As is described both in the Bible, in the Peloponnesian War and in Virgil’s Aeneid, for a much later period, we are certainly permitted to assume that they rob some women for their own reproductive success. After a couple of generations, that gives them, say, 62 members, now fighting against only 58. Next time it will be 64 against 56, next 66 against 54, and so on. The chimpanzee ideal of eliminating all the males in the rival group will in time be realized and the conquest of the former group’s foraging territory and females will then benefit the prevailing group, as was said above.

The first results will, if weapons are unchanged and humans the same, in other words result in a circular causation of victory and defeat which, in a little longer while, will have the cumulative result that the second group will either be killed or made into slaves by the first, according to the rule that winners-take-all.

This is how circular causation with cumulative results work. And this is, most probably, how the first steps in integration, leading towards what we now proudly call globalization, took place.

To judge from the extremely slow growth of population during the first million years, so it may have gone on. The small population increase that did take place was essentially due to the new territory which the filling up of Africa gave to our forefathers.

As studies showed already in the 1970’s this continuous struggle for life led to a great genetic diversifications between present Africans in Africa, bigger than all such differences outside of Africa.

What does that have to do with the breeding of dogs and men?

The simple answer is that if for around six million years such conflicts have been the reality for generation after generation, doesn’t it seems more than likely that natural selection among our forefathers have chosen those equipped with a strong propensity for and ability to win in more or less violent encounters?

Isn’t it more than likely that the next generation of genetic researchers will be able to prove this hypothesis in the SNIPs of our DNA?

Yes, I believe it is.

But what here is truly important for my basic question is that in all this long history there is not the smallest trace of any conscious efforts to stop the primitive arms race of our African forefathers in Africa. This is a first negative evidence to my basic question: is man able to stop nature’s arms race before it is too late?

5. Two thousand generations of migratory selection.

In the beginning of the latest percent of our human history, some 60,000 years or 2,500 generations ago, some of the Africans started to migrate out of Africa. May it not be somewhat justified to assume that they belonged to those who by natural selection had got a more enterprising attitude to life, those who were willing, like our axons during our embryonic staged, to expand by trial and error out in an unknown territory?

As was described in chapter IV, the second big wave of migration went into Caucasus. From there they later expanded to China, India and Europe and, much later, into America. In these new geographical areas they met with new problems and a new climate. They may also have met with some earlier migrants of the Homo erectus type who probably tried to stop them for a while. The main obstacles in their expansion must, however, have been the already established other types of predators than man, well adapted to what for man was a new nature with a different climate.

During the latest two three million years in Africa, man’s brain had been growing. That the size of the brain, according to Jerison, was the essence of the arms race between predators and ungulates for sixty million years, we showed in the last chapter.

The idea that the size of the brain relative to the body volume is of relevance also for survival capacity has recently been supported by a study of  220 species of birds. It showed that those who have bigger brains in relation to their body size live longer than those with a smaller such relation.[2] A big brain does matter!

Mendelian knowledge now tells us that whatever the absolute average level of intelligence in a species, defined as capacity for abstract thinking, it is differently distributed from a relative point of view inside its group.

Most likely it was those with somewhat higher intelligence, already inside Africa during the first 247,500 generations, who were winning somewhat more often than those who had less of that grey matter. And now, during the expansion out over the world, it is equally likely that it was those with somewhat more intelligence – and thus with a greater capacity to invent new tools and weapons - who succeeded in overcoming all the new obstacles and, as such, had more children who survived.

What I am suggesting is that migratory selection was to a considerable extent concentrated to the so-called g-intelligence, that which is behind almost all other forms of intelligence.

The practical result of that, when seen from the point of view of the biological arms race, was that those who had been selected for higher intelligence also had the capacity to develop the best weapons. Do remember the definition of the “best weapons”: those a bit better than what the closest competitor or enemy has or might try to get.

From this period, the latest one percent of our existence, we also have ample archaeological   evidence of far faster changes in almost all forms of culture, that is, in almost all forms what I have called man’s external weapons.

Also the arms race can be divided into three types. The first was between animals. The second between men and animals. And the third is between man and man..

The more crowded the world became, with hunters and gatherers, the more the arms race turned into one between different capacities in improving old and inventing new arms in the struggle against other human beings.

Towards the end of our migratory and the beginning of our settled agricultural period the importance of body-external weapons certainly increased. Those kinship groups who had the better ones as well as the more clever and inventive engineering types, able to develop new and ever more murderous weapons, took over ever more territory. Thus they could give their children the reproductive success during our latest percent of human life.

Those were the types whose DNA we still can find in our own.

Indeed, it should be added that one leading hypothesis, trying to explain why man’s brain and thus his general intelligence has grown, is that it is a result of competition between ever more clever human groups.

The arms race has taken place not only in the externally visible weapons but also, and more important, in the internal, invisible but now somewhat measurable ability for that abstract thinking, which today has given us the thermonuclear bombs.

In this second, migratory phase of the existence of Homo sapiens praedator nobody can point to efforts to stop the arms race. On the contrary, it seems to have intensified. As in our first period, there is not a trace of such efforts. Man’s expansion out over the whole globe can be seen a result of nature’s blind arms race, giving man the means blindly to expand. However much we love to see these expansion as conscious choices by or free wills.

Is it any different in our latest and “cultural” period?

 6. Five hundred generations of breedings of dogs and men.

A. An exercise in cynicism.

Which were then the rules for the top rulers of latest 500 generations, I asked in the meditation above. And my answer was:

Kill every male enemy!

Kill every male neutral!

Fill every female victim!

That is a summary of the “morale” of our last period, with “cultural selection” among our 500 closest forebears. To specify a bit:

Kill every male enemy who challenge your leadership and superiority. But let those who accept slavery survive and make them into tools for yourself.

Make a cultural selection of all others men so that the gifted ones become as close as possible to very clever and inventive pet dogs and the strong to very obedient pit bull soldiers in your own physical and mental armies.

Kill the rulers of all other empires as soon as possible so that the number of sovereign rulers in the world goes down towards One, with only yourself remaining as an omnipotent God over all of humanity.

As for women, dissolve all former private property rules beloved by other machos, such as legal marriage and moral fidelity, and place as many as possible of them in your office harem close by your palace.

OK, OK, it is possible that this is a somewhat exaggerated summary of modern history. But, I would claim, these tendencies exist!

B. William Hamilton rules.

However much we may try to, we can never escape some form of selection. That was the conclusion of one of the most spectacular biologists in last century, William Hamilton: “….for any species even just maintaining its standards, there is no escaping control and selection of some kind.”[3]    

Breeding can be defined as a conscious attempt to guide the blind process of natural Malthusian-Darwinian selection with the aim of changing the Mendelian contents in some organism, plants or animals.

In understanding breeding, we should be clear about the time scale, normally a very long one.

We have now been informed, to repeat, that the new forms of dogs can be bred in thirty to ninety generations. Some types take shorter, some longer times to produce.

While dogs become reproductive after only three years humans need at least five times as long a time. Let us here play with two simple assumptions.

The first is that it takes one hundred generations to change human nature in some significant way, physically and/or mentally. The second is that the length of a human generation is twentyfour years.

Both of these assumptions are generous. Most probably changes come much faster than in one hundred generations. And during the long history behind us, childbirth has started much earlier than at twentyfour years.

What may these two assumptions tell us?

Most Chinese, European and Indians, to take the three biggest groups, are descendents of Africans who started to migrate out of Africa into the Caucasus about 48,000 years ago. The correct figure may be between forty or fifty thousand. But 48,000 divided by 24 give us the nice round pedagogical figure of 2,000 generations.

Two thousand generations is twenty times as long as it takes, we have assumed, to make significant changes in man’s physical and/or mental nature.

Surely, Africans, Chinese, Europeans, Indians and many others were biologically different from each other already before man invented agriculture some twelve thousand years ago.

These changes, it is fair to assume, did not have the nature of half conscious breeding but were the results of blind natural selections for some six million years. A somewhat more ethnically discriminating but still largely blind migratory selection came towards the end of this period.

Cultural selection can be seen as a increasingly conscious way of breeding both dogs and men. It has developed during the latest twelve thousand years. 12,000 divided by 24 gives us, as was pointed out already in the “meditation”, 500 generations. That is a time span that is five times longer than what it takes to make a significant change in already differentiated human natures. Observe the plural, as differences in human nature existed, as we just said, already before agriculture.

What then has happened to selection during the latest 500 generations? We may call it “cultural selection” but isn’t it, in reality and increasingly, more of a breeding to get hold of the “right” type of people?

What am I talking about?

Everybody knows that we are now eating gene manipulated – bred - bread. Some find it poisonous, others believe it is the only way to feed another couple of billion human beings.

Most know that professors have bred thousands of different mice (and pupils) in their laboratories, in the hope that they thereby, for instance by winning the arms race between resistant bacteria and antibiotics, will cure us from all illness and, perhaps, even give us eternal life, almost.

Few know, however, that some of these professors also want to manipulate our “germlines”, our inheritance from the first bacteria four billion years ago, in order to make all future generations much better than nature has made them. The famous James Watson, for instance, would like to manipulate our inherited level of intelligence, a most dangerous proposal.

Now, when we know how long time it takes to breed pet dogs and pit bulls from an old grey wolf, how long time might it take to get similar type of humans by the same methods? And is it really possible?

Remember William Hamilton! Of course it is!

Of course, breeding has been a much used tool during the latest 0.2 percent of our non-chimp existence. But breeding for what? For peaceful pet dogs that are trying to stop all arms race? Or for leaders of a generalized struggle for economic growth - the present saviour of mankind – which hardly is anything but a generalized arms race in all the different forms I mentioned in chapter 13, not least that for more money with which you can buy all other forms of tools and arms.

Let me just remind you of two of the more important institutions for this breeding. We have until recently had a clear conscious ethnic discrimination at the top of our pyramids, in both peace and warfare. Added to that, since at least five thousand years, those at the top have also utilized a conscious discrimination on the labour or, historically more correct, on the slave market.

C. Results: The material weapons.

A Canadian study of 1,587 arms races from 600 BC to AD 1960 gave the result that all but ten of them ended in warfare. Deterrence works for a little while, but does not result in peace. That is why we should be weary of the present US-Chinese arms race in space.

In a way it is very simple, too simple, to understand this arms race. We believe. But is it so?

The stronger physical weapons we have got, the stronger weapons our enemies have tried to get. The further our own weapons can hit, the further our enemy will try to hit.

The further your enemy can shoot, the even further you must be able to do it. On a given spherical planet the rest of the world will in due time become your potential enemy.

The minimization of A/P does continue in the direction of 1/oo, of one global adrenalinomaniac ruler, one A, over a global Population, P, striving toward an infinite number.

The further you can hit with physical weapons, the greater will be the fear you create. Out of the fear grows hate. Out of this hate life-contemptuous terrorist actions may increasingly tend to become a common occurrence. Giving the ruler the right, he will think, to continue the process of A/P even on the inside of our nations, controlling whatever a little P does during all his life.

Never forget that our emotional centre for survival and reproductive success is at least two hundred times older and probably deeper in us than man’s specific non-chimp intelligence! When fear and hate is growing, this fact may well help to explain why suicidal terrorism, the under-dogs ultimate weapon, will tend to spread. Especially so, when the hate is based upon religious or ideological dreams about changes in the power situation, dreams which seem to be true to the one million billion connections in our brains.

D. Results: The mental weapons.

All new religions are “counter-religions”. That is a truth that Jan Assmann has shown in his most thought-provoking study on Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism,[4] giving us one aspect of the origin of the Jewish religion.

We should now know why this is so, at least in West Asia and Europe. Considering the wars involved, we should, indeed, understand why the Jewish religion was a counter-religion to the Egyptian, the Christian to the Jewish, the Moslem to both, the Shiite to the Sunni Muslims, the Byzantine to the Catholic, the Protestant to both, our latest religions, also called ideologies, such as capitalism and socialism are at loggerheads and now, the strongest of all religions is modern natural science, which seems to be against everybody else.

This is so, of course, because religions are mental weapons.

With the help of William Hamilton we should now also understand why these religions, together with ideas such as law, chosenness, moral and ethics, emerged when they did. The explanation is simple biology: the social glue of kinship altruism which functions in the small groups doesn’t work when integration tries to unite too many groups. Some other glue is necessary. And as human forms of social integration never existed among our forefathers, there is no other natural glue in our genes. Thus we have to invent some cultural substitute for natural kinship altruism.

That is why various forms of religions have been born during the latest one thousand part of our existence as non-chimps. Many, if not most, have felt “superior” to all others. All of them have tried to establish laws for behaviour of their members and had leaders engaged in preaching and sermons to get this laws accepted by their masses. These have been attempts to modify man’s predatory nature with moral and ethics in order to keep peace and order inside the given territory of their groups. But outside, they have all been used as horribly violent instrument for the search of monotheistic omnipotency..

While this use of mental instruments may have started, say, some five thousand years ago, no period in human history has seen such a rapid integration of human societies as the latest 300 years. From 1700 we have ten folded the human population on the earth. And this to a large extent thanks to that integration which we also can call colonialism and imperialism.

In this period the remaining small rests of  kinship altruism has become less efficient pari passu with integration. The alternative glue of religion has increased in importance.

It might even be established as a law that the more integration progresses the more important becomes religion and similar mental tools for keeping societies together.

To me it thus seems a bit tragic that those who best should understand this, our biologists and evolutionary scholars, even Richard Dawkins, tend to believe in science as a new “counter-religion” against all other belief-systems. Even they seem to believe themselves as “chosen”, equally much as Jews since Abraham or Arians under Hitler.

We do have conflicts enough on this little globe and we certainly do not need a new one between science and religions.

If you look upon human societies as biological systems, also biologists might understand why the masses, who are pressed down at the bottom of huge social systems that they do not understand and that do not provide much “meaning” in their lives, yearn for some religion or some moral feelings uniting them at least on the inside of the social systems into which they, with no fault of their own, happened to be born.