The Wayward Axolotl

This is a response to a comment by Leonard Erasmus on Discussion: Fixing Modernity 2 : 46:12 “It’s interesting to think how exactly did we get here. Was it just prosperity alone? Was it Christianity plus prosperity? Was it, um, you know the Frankfurt school? Like to what extent did people act into culture to get us here and to what extent did we just flow down the stream of history and end up here.” Later on you said you have some ideas regarding the question. Would you mind sharing? OK, I’ll try. In that quote (from me) “here” referred to the state of the modern West, and specifically our current problems. First of all, modernity was a huge success. The industrial revolution and its consequences have not been a disaster for the human race. Modernity vastly expanded our control over nature and ourselves. Science expanded human knowledge. The industrial revolution gave us prosperity. Modern medicine eliminated the deadly childhood diseases. Birth control gave us cont...

If anybody does not want to admit that parental care is an example of kin selection in action, then the onus is on him to formulate a general theory of natural selection that predicts parental altruism, but that does not predict altruism between collateral kin. I think he will fail. — Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene , Chapter 6 Challenge accepted. And I will use Dawkins’ own concept of the extended phenotype to do it. In this essay, I will explain how parental altruism is selected for, without any assumption of kin altruism. In other words, I will explain that selection is based on reproductive fitness (the ability to reproduce), not on inclusive fitness. First, we do not see strong evidence of genetic altruism in nature. Organisms do not act altruistically toward one another based on either genetic similarity or degree of relatedness. This can be observed within any family. Parents are much nicer to children than children are to parents. Human children reward ...

I am going to review the various ways that establishment media deceive the public. These are all forms of the more generic cherry-picking fallacy. The establishment media rarely tell outright lies, but they often lie by selecting facts, images, interpretations, etc. to fit a preconceived narrative. The narrative comes first, and everything else is fit to the narrative. Selecting facts: Presenting facts or statistics that support one view, while omitting facts that support an opposing view. For example, reporting that blacks are shot by police in disproportionate numbers, while not reporting that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. Example: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/10/01/445026910/the-racial-dimension-of-new-york-polices-use-of-force-in-1-graphic Selecting images: Showing images of an event that support one view, while omitting images that support an opposing view. One example is showing of women and children in an article on refugees, ...