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

We could make children with the chimpanzees 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 ten to 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 me give you three important facts about each of these three periods.

  During our extremely long life in Africa, evolution played with about twenty different non-chimp “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 “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 lands against anybody, lately against Russians, British and, now, Americans. 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 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 artifacts 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!!!

 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?  

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 migth”, for instance the present American ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, who has said 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 strongly 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 just have witnessed 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.

 Stockholm in august 2006.

 Gunnar Adler-Karlsson

 www.philosphicalpark.org