Objects

• Cultures evolving as genes, a thought I recently had while collecting Gaelic folklore. I was reading one tradition that “a serpent should be killed whenever one was encountered, otherwise it was a sign of evil, and that the head should be smashed in and removed from the body, otherwise the snake would not die. It was said that the head would reattach itself to the body, and would then become a beithir, the deadliest and largest kind of snake to be found.” It seems that customs mutate into existence in cultures like genes, and those which prove helpful to the survival of a culture multiply and persist. A story that crushing snakes everywhere and absolutely to prevent their recovering from their wounds—told in a tale involving a mythical beithir—seems helpful to a culture’s propagation and is thus probably the reason the “gene” survived. I know this is nothing new—that, in the field of memetics, the evolution of ideas is seen through a kind of genetic lens—but this was the example most recently apparent to me. There is no questions that memes in cultures can affect their survivals. Such is the reason that there are 17 million Mormons (being natalist) and 3 Shakers (being antinatalist), though the Shakers are almost a century older.


• Evolution of the human hand: the role of throwing and clubbing, a 2003 study found in the National Library of Medicine that suggests we are not only right about the tool as a fundamentally human item, but that it seems to have guided our own genetics through antiquity, pushing the human wrist to tilt laterally. Game designer and author Tynan Sylvester—a subject of his own, as he has also written several essays on linguistics and sociology—included the tidbit when discussing primitive weapons in his storytelling simulator RimWorld: “Evolutionary biologists say that a major reason humans can tilt our wrists side-to-side (instead of just forward-and-back like other primates) is to be able to better swing a club.” I was led to the study when I recalled the tidbit after our discussion on tools; I had played RimWorld some time ago!


• Why Korea is Dying Out, a 13-minute Kurzgesagt video released on 4 October on the future decline of the human population. I cannot believe they released something so soon after we discussed it! It is complete with visuals of countries plunging into a dark pit, declaring the Chinese demographic collapse as irreversible and brandishing daunting statistics about the decline of South Korean youth populations by 96% by 2100, given the country now has a fertility rate of an unbelievably low 0.8 children per woman. They mentioned one startlingly sharp adjustment; Nigeria, when we were young, was once thought to be the next country to reach 1 billion people, and I recall predictions that it would do so by 2100. A few years ago, the United Nations instead estimated a population of 733 million Nigerians by 2100. Now, it estimates 546 million. Kurzgesagt rightly observes that shrinking populations are not a problem in themselves, but that the composition of them would be: young people would be forced to care for exponentially larger older populations, placing an enormous strain on the economy and advantaging nations with large populations of young immigrants. The New York Times again hit this shifting demographic landscape home with an article on 28 October indicating that, by 2050, one third of the human youth will be African—an enormously higher percentage than the 8% of the population that was African in 1950.
  
  I have had time to fully weigh the consequences of a nation of elders—of the destination of our current course. I now hold that having fewer children than two and yet opposing immigration is an unthinkably hypocritical act. Doing anything to contribute to a smaller next generation is profoundly selfish, laying on them the burden of the ballooning pension costs of an increased lifespan and outnumbering them as a voting demographic, graying the government and choking the innovative youngness of past times to give way to an idle, complacent gerontocracy. If one manages to have two or more children yet still opposes immigration, one must make oneself an ardent supporter of at least three things: free public euthanasia, as nobody who suffers and wishes to free themselves should continue to have their wishes denied at great personal and public cost; extensive tax breaks and subsidies for working married or widowed parents; and free public daycare.


• List of hoaxes on Wikipedia, a list of hoax articles on Wikipedia sortable by size, duration until deletion, et cetera. It is amazing how many completely false articles there were on the site—perfectly normal in appearance—that existed for more than a decade without discovery. The Morris–Putnam point article described a fictitious economic concept for over 14 years and 5 months; fictional Cold War soldier Teddy Temish lasted for over 14 years as well. No subject is safe—a fabricated ancient Chinese system of aesthetics, an Australian shipping company and not just one, but two mountains in the Philippines all lasted for over a decade.


• Is South Korea Disappearing?, another article in The New York Times laying out how severe the South Korean demographic crisis threatens to be. From a geopolitical standpoint, it was related to North Korea; Kim Jong-un gave a speech lately encouraging prospective mothers to keep up faltering birth rates, though in North Korea the birth rate is still double that of the South. The author eventually teases a worst-case scenario: a South Korea collapsing so fundamentally that it can no longer staff its military and becoming badly vulnerable to a Northern invasion.

Conclusions

TBA