805
92.3 Old Sagas, Novel Futures
Endless feuds were played out on battlefields and relationships guided by a reckless
counterbalancing of self-interests and the overreaching burden of chieftains. In the
“Vápnfirðinga Saga,” detailing the murder of a relative of Eric the Red and the subsequent and retaliatory horrors, the location of every farm in northeastern Iceland,
where the action occurred, has been long memorized by locals.
12
This facet of
Icelandic society reached a most palpable flash point with Nobel Laureate Halldór
Laxness’ novel Independent People (1935) in which the indiscriminate details of the
slaughter of a lamb by a desperate farmer’s wife in the early twentieth century must
strike grief and horror into readers: but no differently than all the bloody battles of
the Hundred Years War, commemorated by continuing factions with their own tortured views of the drama in question, or all the other endless confrontations throughout the history of Western and Eastern civilizations, from the horrendous Battle of
Cannae, during the Second Punic War (August 2, 216 BC) in which Hannibal’s
legions defeated the huge army of the Roman Republic to the Battle of Gettysburg
(July 1–3, 1863), with its approximately 50,000 casualties.
Such recollections are not easily equipped to inculcate Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin, writing in his book, The Future of Mankind (1949), the notion of “transhumanizing” oneself. However, more recently, numerous biological futurists have
projected mutational inroads, the opportunism of doomsday to forge new evolutionary paradigms (evolution in harsh places, or the logical end of a Moore’s Law
applied to artificial intelligence [AI], robotics, cyborgs, and other conflations), a
point we would underscore as the only foreseeable option, whatever it might mean,
for an otherwise lost species.
13
In the case of certain gene drivers, genomic imbalances, “segregation distorters” that natural selection would otherwise have eliminated or suppressed before distortion destroyed the host, persisting for “perhaps
hundreds of thousands of years,” researchers have posed what they describe as “a
major evolutionary paradox.”
14
It is a lose-lose that portends of a mirroring of the Anthropocene, the human
genetic fall-out of a species that carries on just long enough to distort and uproot
every natural support system in its arsenal, before itself disintegrating. No individual, not even the theoretically all-compassionate person, has ever come upon the
12 See Medieval Iceland – Society, Sagas, and Power, by Jesse L. Byock, University of California
Press, Berkeley, CA, 1988, p.209.
13 See Jeffrey Kevin McKee’s The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human
Evolution, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2000; See also, “The Evolution
of Transcendence,” by Gregory Gorelik, Evolutionary Psychological Science, December 2016,
Volume 2, Issue 4, pp. 287–307, Springer Link, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806016-0059-3, Accessed February 9, 2020.
14 See “Ancient gene drives: an evolutionary paradox,” T. A. R. Price, R. Verspoor, and N. Wedell,
Published: 18 December 2019, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2267, Proceedings of the Royal
Society B, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.2267, Accessed February 9,
2020.
92.3 Old Sagas, Novel Futures
92.3 Old Sagas, Novel Futures
Endless feuds were played out on battlefields and relationships guided by a reckless
counterbalancing of self-interests and the overreaching burden of chieftains. In the
“Vápnfirðinga Saga,” detailing the murder of a relative of Eric the Red and the subsequent and retaliatory horrors, the location of every farm in northeastern Iceland,
where the action occurred, has been long memorized by locals.
12
This facet of
Icelandic society reached a most palpable flash point with Nobel Laureate Halldór
Laxness’ novel Independent People (1935) in which the indiscriminate details of the
slaughter of a lamb by a desperate farmer’s wife in the early twentieth century must
strike grief and horror into readers: but no differently than all the bloody battles of
the Hundred Years War, commemorated by continuing factions with their own tortured views of the drama in question, or all the other endless confrontations throughout the history of Western and Eastern civilizations, from the horrendous Battle of
Cannae, during the Second Punic War (August 2, 216 BC) in which Hannibal’s
legions defeated the huge army of the Roman Republic to the Battle of Gettysburg
(July 1–3, 1863), with its approximately 50,000 casualties.
Such recollections are not easily equipped to inculcate Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin, writing in his book, The Future of Mankind (1949), the notion of “transhumanizing” oneself. However, more recently, numerous biological futurists have
projected mutational inroads, the opportunism of doomsday to forge new evolutionary paradigms (evolution in harsh places, or the logical end of a Moore’s Law
applied to artificial intelligence [AI], robotics, cyborgs, and other conflations), a
point we would underscore as the only foreseeable option, whatever it might mean,
for an otherwise lost species.
13
In the case of certain gene drivers, genomic imbalances, “segregation distorters” that natural selection would otherwise have eliminated or suppressed before distortion destroyed the host, persisting for “perhaps
hundreds of thousands of years,” researchers have posed what they describe as “a
major evolutionary paradox.”
14
It is a lose-lose that portends of a mirroring of the Anthropocene, the human
genetic fall-out of a species that carries on just long enough to distort and uproot
every natural support system in its arsenal, before itself disintegrating. No individual, not even the theoretically all-compassionate person, has ever come upon the
12 See Medieval Iceland – Society, Sagas, and Power, by Jesse L. Byock, University of California
Press, Berkeley, CA, 1988, p.209.
13 See Jeffrey Kevin McKee’s The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human
Evolution, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2000; See also, “The Evolution
of Transcendence,” by Gregory Gorelik, Evolutionary Psychological Science, December 2016,
Volume 2, Issue 4, pp. 287–307, Springer Link, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806016-0059-3, Accessed February 9, 2020.
14 See “Ancient gene drives: an evolutionary paradox,” T. A. R. Price, R. Verspoor, and N. Wedell,
Published: 18 December 2019, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2267, Proceedings of the Royal
Society B, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.2267, Accessed February 9,
2020.
92.3 Old Sagas, Novel Futures