Click on the above banner for full image and description
A new article is in preparation.
We sang America The Beautiful in church last Sunday and it made me think how the gist of that patriotic song was to celebrate the invaders to North America. It was both inspiring and disappointing.
The following is taken from a circular letter, addressing many topics, written to three friends and co-workers in the conspiracy against Hitler, on the tenth anniversary of Hitler's accession to the chancellorship of Germany.
"Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.
"If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.
"Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what the people really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity.
"But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom."
"We are all Africans" could be taken as a statement of solidarity with African Americans in these recent times. But however you take it, it's really a statement of biological fact that should unite us all as one people. According to scientists, we humans evolved over a long time in Africa, and more recently evolved over nearly the entire planet to become what we are today. There are no "Races of Mankind", as some people may still assume, as if different segments of the humanity had different roots. According to scientists, our true ancestry points back to a common root and a single subsequent history.
THE IDEA OF “RACE” represents one of the greatest errors, if not the greatest error, of our time, and the most tragic. What “race” is everyone seems to know, and is only too eager to tell.
- Ashley Montegu in "Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race"1, 1945.
What scientists know today is that all modern humans around the world, without exception, can trace their ancestry to Africa, and Africa only. The genomes of all humans outside of Africa look like a subset of the genomes of today's Africans.
Our species evolved in Africa from earlier, or archaic, human forms2. At some point, maybe 300,000 years ago, across the African continent there began a continuous process of interbreeding, or gene flow, between groups of similar archaic human populations. Gene flow, the exchange of genetic material, continued between human populations even as humans spread out of Africa and throughout most of the world. And this includes the important interbreeding with the Neanderthals and Denisovans, other forms of humans who had already dispersed from Africa perhaps 400,000 or more years ago. This program of continuous and widespread gene flow between human groups seems to be the thing responsible for us being the only kind of human in the world today.
According to Jean-Jaques Hueblin, Director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, throughout all of Africa perhaps beginning 500,000 years ago there was a great diversification of hominins showing various anatomical characters many of which are now part of our physical constitution. According to CARTA4, "Available evidence indicates that all humans living today are derived from a relatively small population that arose in Africa beginning over 200,000 years ago, spreading throughout Africa and eventually the rest of the planet."
Africa is a big continent three times the size of the United States of America. Yet these earlier versions of ourselves seem to have spread their influence, technology, and themselves, throughout Africa. Hueblin and his colleagues have added a big chunk of data for this view coming from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco in Northwest Africa. Dated to about 300,000 years ago, this site of early modern human occupation yielded examples of symbolic behavior such as shell beads and many examples of stone tools which look much like beads and tools around the rest of Africa at the time.
I would summarize the situation as a continent-wide culture spread throughout Africa. And because these various peoples exchanged genes, there seems to have been a continent-wide emergence of a new type of far ranging human, namely us.
And of course it need hardly be pointed out that we are spreading ourselves still over the globe and sustaining intermarriages between people of different cultures. And we do this big time. It's a thing.
And I might add, as far as the human male is concerned, there seems to be little in terms of breeding requirements beyond bipedality and female. (And then not necessarily female. And again not necessarily bipedal! And thereby hangs a tale, I'm sure.)
The most recent migration of modern humans out of Africa has been dated at from 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. This latest out of Africa migration, see the figure at the right, is thought to be more or less the point in our evolution that set us up as the single surviving species of humans and the most successful throughout the world.
There are evidences of earlier migrations of earlier human types, such as the Neanderthals and the Denisovans at about 400,000 years ago. But also, even before, it is known by the fossil record that some Homo erectus migrated out of Africa at some much earlier time, perhaps one million years ago.
Homo sapiens, us, reached Australia about 45,000 to 50,000 years ago, and reached Europe by 40,000 to perhaps 45,000 years ago. And lastly, we migrated to the Americas by 13,000 to 15,000 years ago.
And here the plot thickens, for here modern humans in Europe came into contact with the Neanderthals and Denisovans and interbred, exchanged genes, with them. And also the moderns directly competed with these archaic types for resources. Homo sapiens created rock art paintings and clearly symbolic artifacts that were part of a wider culture of much more modern tool making, and the extension of long trade routes. We have always kept in touch with each other over long distances in technology, language, and genetics.
At the same time, you'll see by examining the dispersion map above, that there were also migrations back into Africa, apparently adding to the gene flow in all directions. For example, Neanderthal genes are widely detected in European populations and are now being found in lesser degree within African populations today. And so for many reasons we are today a single species of highly related individuals.
Homo sapiens is the only surviving species in the genus Homo. That is a very odd thing in the world, according to scientists. Most usually, any Genus contains multiple species. There are several species of the genus Pan, the chimpanzees and bonobos. Most genera have many species. How did we become the only species of Homo? It's as if our evolution proceeded at the genus level and not at the species level. I suspect we took off on a new path of evolution when we welded together various earlier species and gained from them new and successful genes. We simply absorbed all the other species, as least in part, and out competed all of the remainder.
Humans are proud of civilization. So proud that many of us today think that whatever came before does not count for much. That view would be completely wrong on two counts. First, humans developed high intelligence long before civilization. And second, the past is surely not empty of world changing revolutions in thought, culture, and technology. Although we may no longer be aware of many of them.
While we may find cruelty and tribal war at any time in the long human past, racism as we know it today is a product of civilization and not an inherent part of human nature. Racism, the belief in the existence of superior and inferior identifiable biologically determined races of human beings, came about only within the last 500 years or so, during the period of increasing colonialism and imperialism. But it was a political, not a scientific biological, impulse.
Driven by greed, our racism grew along with slave trading and cotton and sugar cane growing. And it took an insidious turn during the earliest parts of the 20th century under the guise of improving the human race in the new pseudo-science of Eugenics5,6,8. These new ideas of race were widespread in the United States and Europe, and played a commanding role in the Nazi quest for a pure Germanic race. That of course led to the holocaust.
Real science, meanwhile, since the 1930's, had been increasingly aware of the fallacy in racist thinking. But that has not been enough to wipe out the practice.
So today we are charged with the final wiping out of racism. It is to the reunification of all the people on Earth that we are now called to dedicate ourselves.
We need to return to our true roots, born in Africa.
Simulated Heliacal Rising of Sirius 3000 BC Close ×
A simulation of the rising star Sirius (on the right), looking east from Memphis, Egypt, on 15 July, 3000 BCE. In those days Sirius would rise just before the sun on about 1 July. This was a signal to the Egyptians of the coming flooding of the Nile river, the event on which Egypt's economy was based. The other bright object, next to the pyramids, is the planet Venus. Humans and other animals have probably always used the motion of the Sun and stars to tell the time of day and night and season, all in their own native ways. This astronomical event and its observation is one of the beginnings of our timeline of recorded history. And nowadays we have learned how to extend our timeline into the deep past by methods such as archeology, paleontology, and cosmology.
Credit: astronomer Bob King. Visit his Website here. Read his article on Sirius in Sky and Telescope Magazine here.