A group of scientists called the Club of Budapest, from both sides of the Cold War,  started meeting in secret in 1987 to study how human psychology created different ethnicities, cultures, nationalities, and religions.  A lot of other scientists have been working on that also.  Their project was basically finished, and all that was left was to get people to learn about it.

I’m working on two video lectures right now.  One is about how the NAFTA caused the immigration crisis.   The other is about psychology and ethnic studies.

Every book, CD, audio book, and video on this site is a different presentation of the same material, according to what different activist groups are trying to do.  Each of them is a blueprint for where to find the information you need to take your struggle into the education system and prove how much of the problem is starting in the school system.

The two resources I have here now that are closest to the immigration/ethnic studies struggle are Zapatista University and Restoring Science to its Rightful Place.

Zapatista University is a full length book about how the NAFTA caused the intolerable living conditions in Mexico that some people are trying to escape and other people are struggling against there.  Anyone who’s worked on a farm can learn biology.  You can download the audio book for free and read the entire text here.  I’ve lived in South America, but my Spanish isn’t good enough to translate an entire book.  It’s simple enough writing that anyone who’s Spanish/English bilingual could translate it.  Si tu quieres ayudar con el transduccion, escribame por el Contact linque, por favor.  Click here to download: http://www.betterthanfaith.com/newbookforanewworld/Zapatista-University.zip

Restoring Science to its Rightful Place is my response to the promise President Obama made in his inaugural address, that we will restore science to its rightful place and transform our schools and universities to meet the demands of a new age.  In the video I show what the science IS, exactly, and what it means for immigration, the war, the recession, the greenhouse effect, and the anti-globalization protests.

In my next two videos I’m going to talk about how these big discoveries connect biology to psychology to culture to ethnic studies.  They’re being ignored in the education system in America for two basic reasons:

1:  A lot of people believe the project can’t possibly be finished already because no one has discovered a law that proves White people are supposed to dominate the world.  So they’re still waiting for that discovery to be made, believing we shouldn’t try teaching anyone anything new if it isn’t (their idea of) “the truth”.

2:  The U.S. is a post-industrial country, where only about 2% of people work in or around agriculture.  Biology is the study of the cycles of life, and in the U.S. not many people see all the parts of the cycle.

Well the scientists who pioneered the field that led to the discovery of global warming discovered that the way we’re using resources is going to lead to a lot of immigration, among other things.  The changes in rainfall patterns global warming is going to cause are going to reduce the productivity of farmland.  If farmers can’t grow enough food to pay their costs anymore, where are they going to go?

These discoveries were made almost 25 years before the NAFTA went into effect.  The people who wrote the NAFTA had college educations.  Instead of listening to the scientists who were trying to warn everyone, the people who wrote the NAFTA decided to make the economic system that was causing the problem even BIGGER.

So as a Certified Instructor, my question is:  If we know that the way the cycles of life are affecting us is going to lead to a lot of immigration, why don’t we teach that to the people who A: are doing the immigrating, B: already know about all the parts of the cycle, and C: want better educations?

If we’re going to globalize anything, why don’t we globalize education?

If we’re going to talk about immigrants’ rights, why don’t we talk about the right to not be driven out of your home in the first place?

A lot of people talk about how much the U.S. economy depends on immigrants doing the jobs nobody from the U.S. wants to do.  Apparently that doesn’t just mean farm labor, landscaping, and housekeeping anymore.  Now it looks like that means the next generation of biologists, climatologists, and civil rights leaders too.

I’ve been a high school teacher’s assistant, and I’m also a certified flight instructor, so I know a few things about science and education.  In my family we’ve been working on better approaches to education for about 75 years.   My grandfather also helped design the B17 and B25 bombers during World War II, back before there were computers.  Meaning, back when the engineer’s brain was the computer.

I was a volunteer in the War on Terror.  I trained as a helicopter pilot for civilian emergency services, since it was civilians who were being attacked.  But then the evolution versus intelligent design debate started up while I was taking my flight instructor training.  Between the two, I realized that I was volunteering to risk my life to defend my country just so a bunch of other people could stay home and keep on believing that people all over the world hate us for magical reasons no one will ever be able to understand.

That’s when I found out about evolutionary psychology.  Evolution is the biggest engineering project in the world.   In my family we’ve been talking about tradeoffs, adaptations, and efficiency around the supper table for generations, so now I’ve been an education activist for the past 5 years.

There are a lot of scientists who are looking for ways to use their new discoveries to make the education system more effective.  E.O. Wilson was the first to pioneer evolutionary psychology, which he referred to as sociobiology, and other people have been contributing to from various directions.  In Dr. Wilson’s book Consilience he talks about how the unification of all fields of science and humanities would make education a lot simpler because as I’m sure you know, unified concepts are a lot easier to learn than fragmented concepts.  That unification of knowledge would also go a long way toward making sure our political decisions get made based on evidence.

There are a lot of other people in the world who believe that political decisions should be based on evidence.  People like the protestors at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, and the protestors at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, and the protestors at the G20 meeting in London, and the protestors at the World Bank meeting in Washington DC.

So how big of a promise did President Obama actually make?

With all this talk of transforming the education system and making our political decisions based on evidence, here’s a couple pieces of evidence I haven’t been hearing anyone talk about.  The Constitution embodies a set of implicit assumptions about the world that, if true, and if applied in a certain way, should produce a certain result.  But the United States Constitution was written in 1787.  The Theory of Evolution wasn’t released to the public until 1859.  The Laws of Thermodynamics weren’t discovered until 1868.  The Constitution of the United States of America was written by people who had fundamental misconceptions about biology and physics.  That means human behavior, the environment, and economics.  Computer programmers call this Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Someone at the Origins conference at Arizona State University in April called the conference scientific shock and awe.  I understand the concept, but with all due respect, 70 scientists having a meeting is not shock and awe, even if it is broadcast on the internet.  Shock and awe requires a sufficient number of people to be sufficiently trained and sufficiently equipped to direct overwhelming force toward the achievement of an objective.  You force the enemy to understand that you have defeated him by forcing him to understand that you have eliminated every single asset he could use to fight.  The Nazis weren’t defeated because my grandfather designed bombers; they were defeated because people flew the bombers.  And of course, because someone trained the pilots.

So fasten your seatbelts, because this is scientific shock and awe straight from the front lines.  If at any point you feel like your brain is about to melt, don’t worry, it’s only temporary.

The Selfish Gene Theory is a perspective that unifies the chemical reactions of biology by identifying the end result of every chemical reaction.  Every chemical reaction in biology contributes, in one way or another, to the replication of the genes that started that chemical reaction.   Dr. Dawkins explained this in his book The Selfish Gene, and built upon it in his books The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, and The Extended Phenotype.

A gene is a molecule that makes copies of itself when it comes into contact with the right combination of other molecules.  In humans, the genes are stuck together into 23 pairs of chromosomes.  The 23 chromosomes in a sperm cell have to get paired up with the 23 chromosomes in an egg cell to start the chemical reaction.  Then they react with the other chemicals that are present in the egg cell.  Then more chemicals get added through the woman’s uterus, and then more chemicals get added from the milk and food and water the infant consumes, and so on for 18 years and 9 months, until that gigantic chemical reaction turns a fertilized egg cell into an adult human.

As an adult you’re sexually mature, so you can have children of your own and then feed them and otherwise raise them, and do all the things you need to do to keep yourself alive in the meantime, and then help raise your grandchildren, and keep making more copies of your genes.  If you’re lucky, your chemical reaction runs down after 80 years or thereabouts and you die of old age.  If you’re not lucky, something disrupts your chemical reaction prematurely and you die of some other cause.   The lifecycle of every animal, plant, fungus, virus, and bacteria is a variation on this basic process.

The Earth formed about 4 1/2 billion years ago, and life began on Earth about 3 1/2 billion years ago.  After a billion years of molecules floating around all over the Earth and getting hit with energy from sunlight, volcanic eruptions, lighting, and radiation, some carbon atoms hooked up with some other atoms and formed a molecule that started a chemical reaction that made a replica of itself.  And there’s a lot of carbon in the world, so those two molecules then started two more chemical reactions, and then there were four molecules.  And then eight, and so on.

With all those chemical reactions making things change, variation began.  Some of those chemical reactions would’ve happened under conditions that weren’t ideal, but were close enough to make something close to the chemical reaction happen.  The Earth is also constantly being bombarded by cosmic radiation, which added more variation to the chemical reactions.  Some of those chemical reactions didn’t produce perfect replicas of the original molecules, but molecules that were slightly different.  But those new molecules could still make replicas of themselves.  So they made replicas of themselves.  They didn’t make replicas of the original molecules.  So now there was more than one kind of self-replicating molecule in the world.

Now, after 3 1/2 billion years of that chemical reaction taking place all over the world, the chemical reactions that are the most stable are the ones that keep happening.  Each part of that chemical reaction is happening among all the other chemical reactions, so when one part of the chemical reaction changes, other parts are also affected.  Zebras eat grass and lions eat zebras.  The zebras that can run the fastest can escape from the lions most often, but the lions that run the fastest can catch zebras most often.   Zebras have genes that create bodies that can run fast, and lions have genes that create bodies that can run fast, because those are the kinds of genes whose chemical reactions are the most stable among the surrounding chemical reactions.

Evolution is natural selection, or, the adaptation to environmental pressures, because it’s an ongoing process of elimination in which whatever chemical reactions have gotten into an environment, and are the most stable in that environment, are the ones that keep happening.   So not only are we descended from apes, or fish, or worms, or bacteria, if you go back far enough, we are descended from ultraviolet radiation shining on muddy water.

We need a new perspective.  And that’s what evolutionary psychology is.

The first principle of evolutionary psychology is:  All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her genes by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.

With one rather complicated sentence, you have identified everyone’s goals for every action they ever take in life.  How the Mind Works, by Dr. Steven Pinker is a very thorough introduction to evolutionary psychology.  The Moral Animal by Robert Wright is a more philosophical introduction to the concept.

Now let’s break that sentence down.

A gene is a molecule that triggers chemical reactions that make more copies of the gene.  In the same way, a camera is a device that creates photographs.  Neither the genes nor the camera need to know what they’re doing or why they’re doing it.  When all the parts of the camera operate, a photograph gets created.  Protons, neutrons, and electrons are basically frozen droplets of energy that cooled off after the Big Bang.  Now they’ve fallen into patterns that created the Periodic Table of the Elements.  Those different combinations of subatomic particles connect to each other in various ways that create atoms and molecules.  Some of these mindless fragments of the Big Bang have fallen into patterns that create more patterns. When all the parts of those molecules operate, identical molecules get created.

If a gene made a copy of itself directly, that would be a stable chemical reaction.  But what if it started a chemical reaction that started another chemical reaction that made a copy of the gene?  That would still be a stable chemical reaction.  What if there were three steps to the process?   Or ten?   Or a million?

If you walk to the store and buy a loaf of bread and eat it, there are a lot of chemical reactions involved, but you keep the genes that started all those chemical reactions alive for another day.

If you meet the man or woman of your dreams, get their phone number, get a date with them, go to the store, buy groceries, fix a gourmet meal, fall in love, have sex, get married, and have a baby, there’s a lot more chemical reactions involved in that, but it results in your genes getting replicated.

Your life is the process by which your genes make more copies of themselves.  Each one of you is the product of 3 1/2 billion years of a process of elimination.  Each of you was born because half the genes that started the chemical reaction that created you also helped start the chemical reaction that created your mother, and that kept her alive, half of her genes helped create your grandmother and kept her alive and the other half helped create your grandfather and kept him alive, and the same on your father’s side, and so on, back through time.

Once upon a time, change and variation gave a microscopic worm a skin cell that was sensitive to light.  That worm acted differently when light was hitting its light sensitive cell than it did when light wasn’t hitting it.  That resulted in the worm being better able to orient itself to the rest of the world.  The worm didn’t need to know what it was doing or why it was doing it, it just did it.  And as a result of doing it, it survived and reproduced better than the other members of its species and passed more of its genes on to future generations.

This happened for the simple reason that the light hitting the photoreceptive cell started a chemical reaction in the cell that made some electrons move around and started an electrical current, and that electrical current made other chemical reactions happen in the worm that made its body wriggle differently than it would’ve otherwise.

As long as that process resulted in the worm acting in a way that made more copies of its genes than the other worms did, you have a self-replicating pattern that’s more stable than the self-replication patterns of the other worms.  Now you have a more intelligent worm because this worm is better able to process information.  The worm’s sensory input creates physical output that results in it replicating more copies of its genes, and that results in photoreceptive cells being passed on to some of its offspring.   The pattern creates more patterns.

If another worm got a photoreceptive cell in its skin but it didn’t act differently as a result, that wouldn’t be a more stable pattern because the worm wouldn’t be processing sensory input in a way that resulted in more of its genes being replicated.

Now fast forward to the southern tip of Africa about 7 million years ago.  Dr. Paul Erlich tells this part of the story in his book Human Natures.   A species of primate lived in the forest there.  When their forest got overcrowded, either by the forest shrinking or the population expanding, some of those primates wandered out into the grassland.

They already had hands and arms that were well adapted for grabbing branches as they climbed around in the trees, which made them one of the only species of mammal in the world whose front limbs were very different from their hind limbs.

Out in the grassland, standing upright let those primates see predators approaching over the top of the grass, which made the ones who stood upright the most, the most successful at passing their genes on to the next generation.  Eventually, all the genes for walking on all fours got eaten, which means those chemical reactions got terminated.  So that species of primate became the only mammal in the world to walk on two feet.

Now that those primates had hands that were good at grabbing things and didn’t need their hands for walking anymore, they started using more tools.  The use of tools let these primates turn inanimate objects into extensions of their bodies.  They could use clubs to help them kill other animals, they could use sharp rocks to cut through the hides of their prey, and so on, rather than depending entirely on parts of their own bodies to do those things.  But doing that also depended on their being able to recognize patterns of cause and effect that would make those things happen.  The ones whose hands let them use tools the best, and the ones whose brains could think of the most uses for tools, were the ones who passed on the most of their genes.

These were social animals, like all primates, who lived in groups for their mutual protection, but who competed against each other for mates.  Eventually, these tool-using primates got smarter than every other species in the world.  But they were still competing against each other for mates.  So changes were still happening, variation was still happening, and cumulative adaptations to environmental pressures kept happening.  People kept getting smarter because the ones who could best perceive patterns of cause and effect and anticipate the decisions other people were going to make were the ones who were most successful at surviving—and reproducing—in the group.

Meanwhile, the primates who didn’t leave the forest of southern Africa stayed in the trees and evolved into chimpanzees.

So here we are now with brains that can think that are each made up of lots and lots of molecules that can’t think. In effect, the human nervous system is made up of lots and lots of little cameras that exist as a result of stable chemical reactions making more copies of those sets of cameras than of any other set of cameras.  Those biological cameras—in other words, your senses—start different chemical reactions when different sensory input hits them.

Those chemical reactions create different electrical currents in your brain.  All those electrical currents in your brain mixed together create a replica of the outside world.  It’s not a replica in the sense of being a photograph; it’s a replica in the sense of it being a combination of electrical currents that correspond to a pattern of cause and effect in the outside world.  It results in your body acting in a way that keeps you alive and makes more copies of your genes.  We don’t need to know what we’re doing or why we’re doing it, we just need to do it.

Intelligence is the ability to recognize and act upon patterns.  It’s not simply the ability to make choices.  Making choices is just the only time you notice that you’re using your intelligence.  When one choice is obviously better than all the others, there really is no choice to make, so there’s really nothing to think about.  Every time you leave your house, you have the choice whether to lock the door or to leave it unlocked.  But one of those choices is obviously better than the other, so you make the same choice every time without thinking about it.  Then maybe you get halfway to wherever you’re going and can’t remember whether you locked the door or not. Your brain processes information that way all the time.  Those are subconscious decisions.

Sometimes the electrical currents in your brain create ambiguous replicas of the world, where two or more possible courses of action are fairly evenly matched in their predictions of the maximization of your genetic survival.  That’s when your consciousness gets involved.

If you are ever faced with a few choices and one isn’t obviously better than all the others, what do you do?  You start thinking about it.  You devote more brainpower to the problem, you might use your senses to try to get more information to use in making your decision, you might bring more information into your decision making from other parts of your brain, and you might start ignoring other things happening around you so you can focus your attention on making that choice.

If you see a hundred-foot cliff in front of you, your brain predicts that if you jump off it you will die.  So it doesn’t send signals to your body to make it do that.  Instead it sends signals to your body to make it avoid the cliff.  That’s how you make every decision in life.  That’s how non-intelligent molecules created the survival and reproductive instincts, and created the pattern recognition we use to act upon our survival and reproduction instincts.  We are not capable of seriously considering acting upon any ideas that we don’t perceive to maximize the survival of our genes in some way or another.  We think this way because that’s the pattern that 3 1/2 billion years of a self-perpetuating chemical reaction created—namely, a chemical reaction that would make itself keep happening.  Evolution had no way of creating a chemical reaction that could do anything else.

At the same time, since evolution is a chemical reaction and chemicals can’t think, evolution had no way of anticipating that our evolution was leading to some twists that could destabilize the self perpetuation of our chemical reactions.

The first is that we don’t naturally perceive the existence of our genes.  We just naturally perceive a desire to survive and reproduce.  We also perceive ourselves to have other desires, but one way or another, all of those desires helped our ancestors survive and reproduce.

Another twist is misinterpretation of our perceptions.  Sometimes the signals that our brains receive from the outside conflict with each other.  Sometimes information gets processed incorrectly and makes us perceive a future that appears to correspond to the maximization of our genetic survival, even though it doesn’t correspond to it.  In other words, sometimes we make mistakes and get ourselves into trouble.   We can make self-destructive decisions by accident.

Even a person who does jump off a 100’ cliff because he wants to kill himself perceives himself to be surviving and reproducing in the best way he can think of.  I don’t mean to make light of people committing suicide.  I’m simply pointing out the fact that when people voluntarily carry out self-destructive behavior they’re still acting upon the perception of maximizing their genetic survival.  So suicide doesn’t disprove the first principle of evolutionary psychology, it just proves that something has gone seriously wrong with those people’s perceptions.  That’s why suicide counseling depends on getting suicidal people to perceive their situation differently than they do now.

This is also the reason people can think about ideas that don’t maximize their genetic survival because they’re neutral to their genetic survival or even slightly self-destructive.  If I wanted to, I could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious right now and that wouldn’t have any effect on my genetic survival.  Or I could smoke ten packs of cigarettes in one sitting and harm my genetic survival.  Either way, I would perceive those choices to maximize my genetic survival, even though they didn’t really.

Another twist was that the genetic evolution of our brains eventually made itself obsolete.  Generation by generation, our brains kept getting better and better at recognizing and acting upon patterns, until they got so good at it that the predictions of the future that they could make and act upon could adapt so quickly that the brains effectively eliminated every threat to the survival of their genes.  People still die prematurely, and sometimes dictators even exterminate entire ethnic groups.  But the genes that create our brains are spread throughout the world.  Wherever some people survive, the genes still survive.  And the genes survive, and don’t continue to evolve, because now the ideas the brains create evolve instead.

The study of the evolution of ideas is called memetic evolution.  Every time you think of an idea and then think of a better idea, your ideas are evolving.  The idea that your brain perceives to maximize your genetic survival replaces the idea that it doesn’t perceive to maximize your genetic survival.  That’s still adaptation to an environmental pressure—meaning natural selection.

The point at which the evolution of ideas outran the evolution of genes once and for all was reached at least 40,000 years ago, or possibly 60,000, or 100,000, or maybe even 200,000, depending on which evolutionary psychologist you ask and what they’re using to define that point.  But 40,000 years is guaranteed, and that has the most evidence to support it.  The most dramatic piece of evidence is the Chauvet cave paintings in southern France.  They are great works of art by modern standards, but they are 30,000 years old.  Which means they were painted by people who had brains like ours.

That means we are all born with brains that evolved in the stone age.   We’re trying to use them to live in the nuclear age, the space age, and the computer age.  We got here because our ancestors’ ideas kept evolving after their genes stopped evolving.  With their evolving ideas, and by combining an ever-larger number of ideas with each other, they discovered more and more ways of interacting with the world that maximized their genetic survival.  They kept developing technology little by little that removed our bodies and our ideas from the stone age, but left our brains in the stone age.  So now when we act upon what we naturally feel to be true about the world, we make a lot of misperceptions and we make a lot of mistakes that turn out to be self destructive in the long run.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, for instance, President Kennedy faced a lot of opposition from people who thought we ought to just throw down with the Soviet Union and start a nuclear war.  Now that evolutionary psychologists like Dr. Pinker have gone back and looked at the decisions people kept trying to get President Kennedy to make, they can see that if it had been the Cuban Wooden Club Crisis, it would’ve been a perfect strategy.

Another twist in human evolution has been our process of outsmarting the environment.  The impact of any species on its environment is held in balance by all the other species.  Zebras eat grass at the same rate lions eat zebras, so the amount of grass, zebras, and lions in the environment stays stable.  But the impact of each species on its environment is held in balance by a combination of many, many things.

The evolution of human intellect threw our relationship to the environment out of balance because we don’t naturally perceive the world the way the world actually works.  We naturally perceive the world in whatever way of perceiving it made the most copies of our ancestors’ genes as of 40,000 years ago.  We best perceive the things that affected our ancestors most directly, we perceive more faintly things that affected them less directly, and we don’t perceive at all things that didn’t affect them or that affected them only very indirectly.

Over the course of history, as we have thought of the ideas and made the decisions that seemed best to us, we have been combining our stone age instincts with our current level of knowledge, to make plans for the future.  And it keeps getting us into trouble.

This brings me to Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Dr. Jared Diamond.  About 10,000 years ago, the plains of Mesopotamia were the most favorable environment in the world for human habitation.  There was so much food to hunt and gather that the people there could live in permanent villages.  So they made the best decisions they could think of and maximized their genetic survival.

But that meant using all the food they could get to feed as many children as they could have.  That meant population growth.  That meant more people hunting the local gazelle herds each year.  Eventually that meant the gazelle herds getting wiped out.

That meant a lot of Mesopotamians looking for new ways to get food.  Soon enough some of them noticed that food plants were growing out of their waste dumps from previous years.  Then they discovered that plants grow from seeds.  Then they started experimenting with planting seeds themselves.  Since they lived in permanent villages, they could tend their plants year round.  So began the agricultural revolution.  That same process played out later in other parts of the world.

But it still didn’t stop population growth.  All it did was to provide more food.  When the land couldn’t produce any more food, the population started spreading outward, looking for more land.  Since they had so many more people now, they hopelessly outnumbered their neighbors, so it was easy for them to take their neighbors’ land.   So began the empires of the Middle East, China, the Maya, and the Inca.

None of the first farmers had any way of knowing about the chemical cycles taking place in their soil that made it produce their food.  Over farming led to the depletion of soil nutrients and soil erosion.  Irrigation led to the salinization of the soil.  Which is why, as you may have noticed, the Middle East is now a desert.