Scientists’ Disclaimer:
A lot of scientists hate what I’m doing. Those are usually the same scientists who whine and complain about people not learning more about science. But your own science indicates that Homo sapiens learn about the world by adding new ideas to the ideas they already have, not by forgetting all the ideas they have and starting over from scratch. Your own science also indicates that learning is a process of people developing senses of cause and effect that they can use to deal with the world effectively enough to survive, reproduce, and a few other basic human desires that follow from those. Your own science also indicates that people attach emotional significance to new ideas according to how much they perceive the new ideas to benefit their chances of survival and reproduction. Taken together, all of that means that everyone in the world is a philosopher. I find it extremely amusing that ivory tower academics could’ve figured out this much about how people think and still can’t figure out how to attract more public support to science. On the other hand, if you’ve devoted a career to fictional art like I have, you learn that the effective communication of strange new ideas depends on the suspension of disbelief. Then you learn a few thousand years’ worth of techniques artists have discovered for getting their audiences to suspend their disbelief. As you seem to have discovered through direct observation, the suspension of disbelief is exactly what teaching controversial scientific discoveries to people depends upon. So rather than using the bottom-up approach of building up from Mendelian genetic inheritence like a typical high school textbook, I used a top-down approach, started with the two major conceptual landmarks that children inherit their characteristics from their parents and that evolution created us, broke evolution down from there, and figured out how to use well-established literary techniques to teach people about science using a philosophical approach to conflict resolution through evolutionary self-awareness. I break it all the way down to Selfish Genes and Evolutionary Development in Volume III. High school drop-outs have thanked me for my work, told me the world suddenly makes a whole lot more sense, and said they wish someone would’ve taught them something like that in school. You never met those people though, because they gave up on your education system long before they came to your universities. And in case you hadn’t noticed, scientists are competing for public support right now against religious fundamentalists who have thousands of years of practice at getting people to perceive the world they want them to perceive it. In a competition, those who can best adapt to their situation prevail. Does that ring a bell? So think twice before you criticize me for how little I seem to understand about science.
Back when I wrote this book, I assumed the first principles I was using were so obvious that official scientists must’ve discovered them already. That joke was on me. If you’d like to see how my approach to evolution led to my independent discovery of the first principle of evolutionary psychology, you’ll find the condensed version at the beginning of Volume II, and the extended academic version in my book The Theory of Evolutionary Relativity.