Human OS

Yesterday I skated down to the Science Library, an underground labrynth under the cold mountain ice that holds everything. I'm not kidding, every issue of Nature, everything Darwin wrote, it's like a hard-drive backup of all scientific knowledge. Let me keep a box of Cliff bars down there and I'll never come back.

Anyway, I wanted to grab a copy of Darwin's Descent of Man, and ran into an old friend/complication that I haven't seen in a while. Turns out she was looking for the book too. We found a couple copies in the back of the library, both published before the second-to-last turn of the century. The thing is exactly what you'd expect from Darwin, yellowed pages, refferences to scientists that have long been discredited, and wordy as all hell. All his books are brilliant tangents.

43 pages into it and I realize something fundamental about humans, how incredibly brainwashable we are. This isn't a slam on the media in any form, because the media is a product of this innate tendency within humans. Ultimately, we need an OS system, Christianity, Naturalism, Islam, Fox News, something to fill all of our values and tell us what to think. It's easy to shrug this off, but the very ability to do this is a result of existing methods of testing what information is worth retaining, and what should be discarded.

Grab a human when they are born, and throw them to the wolves (preferably from a competing tribe). If they will survive, they will act in ways condusive to their survival (a.k.a. conformity). If you grab them before they turn six, they will be able to be re-assimilated into "civilization", however if you wait a year, they are forever lost. They can't learn english, they can't grasp what we are trying to do, in many cases, they actively resist this (Davis, 2003). A neurologist independently came up with an explanation. The development of the human brain is not so much in building new synapses as destroying old ones. You start out with a pretty crowded brain, capable of recognizing many things. But, as certain stimulants (faces, foods, noises, etc.) are presented more, those neurons are strengthened. The unused ones simply atrophie. A couple of guys decided to test this out by torturing kitties. They would cover up one eye, and let the otehr one receive light. As predicted, the unused eye thalmic cells sucked it up and fell unused. The stronger parts not only were not just used, but actually grew in place of the unused eye! (LeDoux, 2002) Apparently, just as a gene tells us to stop growing adult teeth, a genetic clock is inplace that puts a stop sign up at 6 years of age.

But what this does mean is that we are not so independent and individual as we think, and that when we argue with each other we can't change each other's mind precisely because we can't rearrange ourselves biologically. Sorry, but radical change is just not plausible based on this data (I dare you to disprove it).

So what does this have to do with Darwin? He was just as entrenched as we, and I shudder at thinking of how much we've lost. This genious is defining between civilized and savage races of man (though he isn't as bad as most, and he often questioned those assumptions). But still, without evidence, without a testing mechanism (which he is famous for establishing), he fell into it. Do we do the same now?

If th is is true, then what is written history doing to this process, is it driving change or forcing stability in human OS systems?

Well, real people are showing up now, goodbye Mr. Pixel.

Refferences:
Davis, Kingsley, 2002, Extreme Isolation, in Down to Earth Sociology, 2003, pp. 133 - 142
Ledoux, Joseph, 2003, Synaptic Self, pp. 76 - 77