611
cultural noumena, like ancient Egyptian cattle cults, provide no actual clues to what
Brian Fagan has described as our present discernment of “a divergence between
cattle as numinous – symbols of power and sacrificial victims – and their more pragmatic role as draft animals pulling plows and transporting loads, and as sources
of meat.”
3
The “divergence,” as with all transition, not in a moment, is measured against
that metric, solely human, which also assumes the lifespan of a neutron to be 14+
minutes. The kinesthetic timepiece by which we seek to circumscribe the multidimensionality of H. sapiens is only rudely rooted to any specificity in mind. This
mental constellation of an imprecise nature that condemns all so-called “knowledge” to a neural purgatory, a tenebrous penumbra with neither center nor circumference, resembles all those simulacrums of espoused faiths in the myriad medieval
definitions of God. They are mathematically ephemeral delusions and aberrations
instinct with every evolutionary fallacy. That would include what is, in fact, a
merely fickle fitness, a melodrama of mutations, and the genetical parade that
hoists its unanimous flag. That war cry and its banner are blind and malevolent,
loyal to a single lineage of large vertebrates whose biomass and evolutionary
instincts have been perverted by presuming to predicate learning and “success”
upon our own species’ unnatural selection. Natural or unnatural? That is the only
question worth seeking something approaching legitimate context for; a distillation of all that we have experienced, thought, projected, internalized, into the most
pellucid of explanations. Ecological clarification. A metacontext for human deep
history (Fig. 65.2).
65.2 Natural, Unnatural?
At the conclusion of her recent study, Unnatural Selection, Katrina Van Grouw
argues on behalf of every form of selection, natural, artificial, unnatural, gradual,
each one providing invaluable evidence and information; each highlighting Darwin’s
own obsessions with domesticated animals, with the mysterious neural accumulations of change (showing no phenotypic exposure to discernible mutational change
and thereby surprising us time and again). Most interestingly, she answers the challenge, in her beautifully conceived work by describing an urban encounter near her
home with a silver fox that feeds out of her hand. One of countless examples, she
argues, that lends logic to an entirely new notion regarding the evolutionarily positive trends of interspecies domestication, even self-domestication, a behavior that
for many wild creatures has given them an advantage in seeking and obtaining food
from the wild human neighbors, as in the case of the red (and silver-red) fox.
4
3 See The Intimate Bond – How Animals Shaped Human History, Brian Fagan, Bloomsbury Press,
New York, London, 2015, p. 86.
4 See Katrina Van Grouw, Unnatural Selection, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and
Oxford, UK, 2018, Chapter 12 – “Between Dog & Wolf,” pp. 266–278.
65.2 Natural, Unnatural?
cultural noumena, like ancient Egyptian cattle cults, provide no actual clues to what
Brian Fagan has described as our present discernment of “a divergence between
cattle as numinous – symbols of power and sacrificial victims – and their more pragmatic role as draft animals pulling plows and transporting loads, and as sources
of meat.”
3
The “divergence,” as with all transition, not in a moment, is measured against
that metric, solely human, which also assumes the lifespan of a neutron to be 14+
minutes. The kinesthetic timepiece by which we seek to circumscribe the multidimensionality of H. sapiens is only rudely rooted to any specificity in mind. This
mental constellation of an imprecise nature that condemns all so-called “knowledge” to a neural purgatory, a tenebrous penumbra with neither center nor circumference, resembles all those simulacrums of espoused faiths in the myriad medieval
definitions of God. They are mathematically ephemeral delusions and aberrations
instinct with every evolutionary fallacy. That would include what is, in fact, a
merely fickle fitness, a melodrama of mutations, and the genetical parade that
hoists its unanimous flag. That war cry and its banner are blind and malevolent,
loyal to a single lineage of large vertebrates whose biomass and evolutionary
instincts have been perverted by presuming to predicate learning and “success”
upon our own species’ unnatural selection. Natural or unnatural? That is the only
question worth seeking something approaching legitimate context for; a distillation of all that we have experienced, thought, projected, internalized, into the most
pellucid of explanations. Ecological clarification. A metacontext for human deep
history (Fig. 65.2).
65.2 Natural, Unnatural?
At the conclusion of her recent study, Unnatural Selection, Katrina Van Grouw
argues on behalf of every form of selection, natural, artificial, unnatural, gradual,
each one providing invaluable evidence and information; each highlighting Darwin’s
own obsessions with domesticated animals, with the mysterious neural accumulations of change (showing no phenotypic exposure to discernible mutational change
and thereby surprising us time and again). Most interestingly, she answers the challenge, in her beautifully conceived work by describing an urban encounter near her
home with a silver fox that feeds out of her hand. One of countless examples, she
argues, that lends logic to an entirely new notion regarding the evolutionarily positive trends of interspecies domestication, even self-domestication, a behavior that
for many wild creatures has given them an advantage in seeking and obtaining food
from the wild human neighbors, as in the case of the red (and silver-red) fox.
4
3 See The Intimate Bond – How Animals Shaped Human History, Brian Fagan, Bloomsbury Press,
New York, London, 2015, p. 86.
4 See Katrina Van Grouw, Unnatural Selection, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and
Oxford, UK, 2018, Chapter 12 – “Between Dog & Wolf,” pp. 266–278.
65.2 Natural, Unnatural?