Chapter 32: The Volunteers of America / The Biggest Chess Game Ever:
If you’re insane enough—oops, I mean, smart enough—to try reading a third volume of my book, you must be serious about wanting to save the world.
Evolution is ruled by probabilities. I’ll tell you more about this in the Atheism chapter, but here’s simple example for now. If an animal is born with a genetic variation that makes it 1% more successful at surviving and reproducing within its living conditions than another member of its species, and it passes that 1% advantage on to all of its descendants, and those living conditions endure for 2,000 generations, that 1% advantage compounded 2,000 times will spread that genetic variation to all the members of the species in the area. Now that genetic variation has become a characteristic that defines the species. That means that the members of the species in the area, who live in certain living conditions and who have spread a new genetic variation that suits those living conditions well around to all the members of the species in the area, have now diverged from the rest of their species and become a sub-species or a new species, because they’ve evolved a new adaptation to their environment. That’s exactly what Charles Darwin discovered on the Galapagos Islands, among numerous species of animals.
In the Introduction to the first book I told you about cultural adaptation to available resources. At the moment people evolved human consciousness they gained the ability to wonder how the universe worked and to imagine that answering the question was important. So every group of people in the world figured out a way to give their lives a sense of meaning within their living conditions.
In the Instinctive Learning chapter I told you how childhood development creates cultural backgrounds. Then in the Civilization chapter in the second book I told you about the molecular history of the 20th century, in which people developed different brain-molecule patterns according to their life experiences, and then passed them around to each other, depending on which brain-molecule patterns were the best suited to people’s living conditions.
All of that adds up to social evolution. Individuals aren’t being born with genetic variations and then passing new genes around to each other according to which are best suited to their living conditions, but they are developing new brain-molecule patterns according to their life experiences, and then passing those around according to whichever are the best suited to the people’s living conditions. (Or at least, seem to be best suited to their living conditions, as far as the people can tell.)
Now President Bush is trying to conquer the world with military power and political strategies and economic initiatives and environmental policies. What a moron. If you take the time to learn how the world actually works before you embark on your campaign of world conquest, you learn how constants and variables fit together, how different components of the world interact, and how probabilities and changing conditions create social developments, then world conquest becomes just a gigantic game of chess.
I spent the first two books setting up the board.
Now it’s time to play the game.