Escaping the Trap that Comes With the Evolution of Civilization – Part 3/5

October 9, 2010

Guest Post by K. D. Koratsky – Originally published at Living With Evolution. Due to its academic nature, this version has been edited, revised and serialized with permission from the author.

What we see within human populations is that those who rise in status through skill and industriousness, whether in good times or bad, will tend to have an increasingly easier time of it than the competition.

Indeed, the higher one’s status—and the greater one’s access to resources and protection from threats of all kinds—the easier life becomes.

However, this is when dysfunctional mutations increase, as there is little or no culling force to keep them from doing so.

Indeed, unlike the deliberate pace at which this can be expected to occur for nonhuman species that are much more or entirely dependent on genetic modification for adaptation, humans are able to modify their behavior more rapidly via decision-making and cultural behavioral modification—for better or worse.

Therefore, it is typical within a family that a highly successful generation may not keep up the same high behavioral standards that led to success.

Whatever the case, those in the next generation will almost certainly have an easier time of it than their parents, and are less likely, on average, to develop the same levels of talent, motivation to succeed and drive that their parents had.

For this reason, it is rare for highly successful parents to produce offspring that perform at the same level, let alone at a higher one.

In fact, this second generation tends to more or less keep the momentum created by their parents going. By the time the third generation rolls around, the performance ethic of the first generation will have suffered a second round of deterioration.

By the fourth generation it is common for the regression to be complete.

Return to Escaping the Trap – Part 2 or go to Escaping the Trap – Part 4

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K. D. Koratsky is the author of Living With Evolution or Dying Without it: A Guide to Understanding Humanity’s Past, Present and Future. Koratsky also writes a Blog on this subject at Living With Evolution.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar. 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Escaping the Trap that Comes With the Evolution of Civilization – Part 2/5

October 9, 2010

Guest Post by K. D. Koratsky – Originally published at Living With Evolution. Due to its academic nature, this version has been edited, revised and serialized with permission from the author. 

The way individuals or civilizations compete for survival differs due to the circumstances.

Taking the tough times first, it isn’t difficult to see that when resources are short and aggression is intense, only those with the very best economic and combat skills, on average, will avoid extinction within any given niche.

In short, there will be strong selection pressure against all characteristics that lack a high degree of functionality and/or adaptivity.


America: The Coming Collapse? You Decide!

This pattern is illustrated by human history and within the fossil record at large.

In contrast, we also find that good times produce the opposite effect.

That is, instead of there being strong selection pressure for only the most functional and adaptive of characteristics to survive when resources are plentiful and are increasing rapidly, those who are not skilled economically (work or business) or in combat  may well be able to still make a living.

Hence, it is in good times that we can expect to see an increase of nonfunctional and even dysfunctional mutations in humanity that would typically be trimmed away with normal rates of evolutionary attrition.

Return to Escaping the Trap – Part 1 or go to Escaping the Trap – Part 3

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K. D. Koratsky is the author of Living With Evolution or Dying Without it: A Guide to Understanding Humanity’s Past, Present and Future. Koratsky also writes a Blog on this subject at Living With Evolution.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar. 

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Escaping the Trap that Comes With the Evolution of Civilization – Part 1/5

October 8, 2010

Guest Post by K. D. Koratsky – Originally published at Living With Evolution. Due to its academic nature, this version has been edited, revised and serialized with permission from the author.

 

 

Study enough history and you will see that even the greatest, most powerful civilizations vanished. One example are the Mayans.

The Aztecs, Incas, Romans, Greeks, Persians and Egyptian civilizations all came to an end, so will the powerful empires of today.

In fact, the America empire specifically and the West generally have been in an unmistakable state of decline over the last several decades.

Meanwhile, China specifically and the East generally have risen over the same period.

In fact, Chinese civilization has collapsed and been reborn several times.  The earliest known dynasty, the Xia (2205 to 1783 B.C.), survived for more than 400 years before collapsing.

Today, We appear to be witnessing the latest examples of empires rising and falling in inevitable fashion according to some immutable law.

However, while there is indeed a tendency for empires to fall once they have arisen, this tendency can be overcome.

Repetitive Regress

Generally speaking, the falls of empires typify a regression to the mean that is the standard not only for empires, but for human families, individuals, and even nonhuman species as well.

This phenomenon is a natural outgrowth of greater evolutionary dynamics.

To understand why, we must examine the way cycles of good times and bad affect species and those within them as all compete for survival.

Go to Escaping the Trap – Part 2

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K. D. Koratsky is the author of Living With Evolution or Dying Without it: A Guide to Understanding Humanity’s Past, Present and Future. Koratsky also writes a Blog on this subject at Living With Evolution.

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China questions the dollar’s value – Part 2/2

October 7, 2010

In the second half of Al Jazeera’s Inside Story, the commentator asks Max Keiser in Paris what it would take to replace the U.S. dollar with an IMF managed global currency.

Keiser says, doing this would cause risks for the U.S., which has extraordinary privileges–writing checks that are never cashed since the U.S. just prints new dollars to pay the bills. This has been going on since the end of World War II.

Because of this, Max Keiser says, America has everything to lose and will resist China’s proposal to have a more stable global currency managed by the IMF. 

He points out several instances of the U.S. using its military to solve these types of problems when another country wants out of the U.S. dollar.

Then Robert Scott in Washington D.C. was asked if this new global currency would work. He said the U.S. has the deepest financial markets in the world– about 40 trillion dollars making the dollar the currency of choice.

Andrew Leung said that a global currency managed by the IMF using SDRs would be more stable as a global currency. However, it is a bold vision that requires extraordinary political courage from Beijing. We can’t get there soon.

Back to Paris, Max Keiser gives an opinion that China doesn’t have enough gold to make this happen.

China has about 600 tons of gold while the U.S. has 8,000 tons.  To be taken seriously, China would need to buy more gold and boost its reserves.

See The Reasons Why China is Studying Singapore or return to China questions the dollar’s value – Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

China questions the dollar’s value – Part 1/2

October 7, 2010

I find Al Jazeera English, the 24-hour, Arabic-language satellite television news network, an interesting place to find an objective view of China.

The history of Al Jazeera is also interesting.

This Al Jazeera “Inside Story” from 2009 is about China questioning the value of the American dollar.

In fact, the Chinese prime minister blamed the U.S. financial system for the 2008 global recession and said a new world currency was needed to replace the dollar.

The Al Jazeera commentator questioned if China was just playing politics challenging U.S. dominance of the global financial system.

China suggested that it would be better if the dollar was replaced with the IMF’s (International Monetary Fund) Special Drawing Rights called SDRs.

The value of the SDRs would be based on a basket of currencies. China said that basing economic reserves on a group of currencies would prevent a financial crash like the 2008 economic meltdown from happening again.

Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People’s Bank of China said, “The outbreak of the crises and its spillover to the entire world reflects the inherent vulnerabilities and risks in the existing system…”

There is a clip of President Obama speaking in defense of the U.S. dollar.

Al Jazeera’s “Inside Story” had a panel of guest experts from around the globe.  There was Robert Scott of the Economic Policy Institute in the U.S., Andrew Leung, an economist and a China specialist in London, and a Paris based financial analyst, Max Keiser, who writes for the Huffington Post.

Read about China’s economy

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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