Dance Hall Days

We were drunk as fuck. Five quadruple vodkas-and-orange in different pubs around central Nottingham were as cheap a way to jump-start a Friday-night as we could find.

Don't get us wrong, we had class, we were just too poor to express it in our drinking habits. We were young then and always in a hurry - we drank as a means, rather than as an end in itself - a means of losing the part of ourselves that stopped us from taking risks; a means of eluding our self-consciousness, of drowning it out under a layer of cheap supermarket booze and a couple of ice-cubes. A means of becoming something both more and less than ourselves for one night a week.

And meeting women of course. Let's not get too poetic here. We drank mainly as a means to a leg-over.

The club we usually went was The Cookie Club - a couple of large rooms spanning the second and third floors of a back-street building just off the Council-House Square in the city-centre. Inside it was painted a utilitarian black with day-glow scrawls and garish insignia crawling every surface. A small bar outlined in twinkling rope-lights on the right, and a square dance floor wreathed in old cigarette smoke and sweat beyond. Upstairs a chill-out zone with a fag-machine and scattered chairs - warped wooden windows thrown open to let in the cool night air.

It was about eleven, the pubs had closed their doors and we were swaying on the stairs, queuing, laughing - jittery on our toes - expectant. Awash with stupidity and hope and wearing slack-jawed grins. Clumsy cigarettes in our hands and smoke dribbling from our nostrils; our ash feathered the heavy breath-filled air. The music from above throbbed in the cool metal of the hand-rail as we climbed the steps one by one.

It was Eighties night of course - even though Nineteen-Ninety had already come and gone. It was still too early in the decade for it to have aquired a musical flavour all of its own, and even though we were barely into our twenties, already we were nostalgic for the past. Maybe the familliar music made us feel somehow older, somehow wiser, more accomplished - the Eighties were something we'd done; somewhere we'd been; worn the tee-shirts for. And if nothing else, at least we knew how to dance Eighties-style - Adolescence had taught us that much.

We dumped our coats and lost eachother in the murk. Pubs were social but clubs were more of a singular pursuit. The music was always too loud to hear anyone below a scream anyway. I propped myself up against a pillar plastered in a sweating paisley patterns and watched girls dance. Waiting for a song that would pull me away from myself and onto the floor and into the many legged, many armed embrace of pissed humanity.

"We were so. in. phase.
In our dance. hall. days.
We were cool. on. craze.
When I, you, and everyone we knew
Could believe, do, and share in what was true -
An' ah said..."

There are some songs I still can't help liking. Even now - no matter how cheesey they may seem to my middle-aged ears - these songs tug at me and send me grinning back to the days when I could dance without inhibition, confident that the eyes watching me were indulgent. And then I pity the poor modern youth , so young and yet forced to pretend to be so old. Then I grimmace and smile and catch myself, and remember it was the same for us.

The gloom of the bar was ripped away in the blaze of strobes and ultra-violet arc-lights revolving overhead. The heat from the spotlights seared over my back as they passed. People's eyes glowed in the dry-ice and their teeth burned white-hot between their lips. Too soon the song ends and we who were so in phase one moment suddenly falter and break apart, drifting. Someone though, stays close and touches me fleetingly on the shoulder; feather fingers barely grazing my skin.

"Take your baby by the hair
And pull her close and there there there"

Her fingers flip the hair away from my face and I glimpse her face too - mottled and striped by the pinwheeling lights as we stand balanced on the very brink of the dancefloor - buffeted by shoulders on all sides as the music and the dancers change once more. She is pretty. And that is enough. She leads me upstairs.

"Take your baby by the ears
And play upon her darkest fears"

Whatever it is we do in the darkness of clubs it is not real communication. Whatever it is that bridges the gap between two pairs of whetted lips in the haze it is not words. While tongues twist and vocal chords twang in throats made hoarse by smoke and shouting the real conversation is being carried out by hesitant fingers, dragged back again and again from out of the darkness to touch briefly a cheek, a shoulder at the least excuse - just to make contact. In situations like these, we never trust our eyes. They've been fooled too many times, so we lower our lids and reach out. In situations like these, we never trust our ears. They've heard too many lies, so we let the words wash over us and reach out. In situations like these, only touch is real so we reach out and hope to feel love, however fleeting, however brief, beneath our fingertips.

"And you need her and she needs you
And you need her and she needs you"

...Continued...

Silence in Cacophony

It is a great pity that silence is not a tangible thing, rather than simply an absence. Imagine silence bottled, powdered, weaponized. Imagine riot-police hurling quiet-bombs at political rallies. Imagine immensely silent football matches, after mutually-assured-dumbness exchanges across the terraces by rival fans. Open-mouths endlessly filled with completely soundless curses; bruised lips stretched and tongues tie-twisted around syllables of taunt and chant. World-cup penalty shoot-outs acomplished in a divinely perfect hush.

I am a father, a husband and a teacher. Perhaps I value peace more than many.

I remember once, very early in my life here in Turkey, when I could neither speak nor understand the language, walking down the main shopping street near where I lived. It was possibly the first time I had dared to venture out alone. I remember the faces swarming around me, all human of course, but at the same time all subtley... different. The swells of brow and juts of bone; the curves of cheek and snarls of lip, all slightly alien, just enough to intermittently catch and fascinate the eye. It was like seeing all over again - a strange feeling when you sense your own thoughts quietly adjusting themselves within your skull: to feel them slip and slide like a knot of mating snakes across and around and over eachother as they expand to encompass the newness leaking in through your eyes.

The street was wide and crowded: streams of people all side-stepping and shoving and swerving; head-down and hell-bent; sniffing produce and price with equal fervour; a forest of elbows and knees and handbags and piled-high hand-carts. Little boys tanned deep brown in the sun darting like fishes in and out of the tea-shops with tiny glasses balanced on trays, or warm rings of sesame-bread piled high on their heads. It was noisy, loud like a packed theatre before curtain-rise is loud - hundreds of shuffling feet, coughs, conversational snippets just too juicy to wait, the crunch and crinkle of packets of sweets wrenched open, exhalations, exclaimations, sweat, meat-smell. People.

I walked open toed in brown leather and blue-jeans, long haired amongst the head-scarves, stared at, chuckled over, remarkable and remarked about. As I moved through them, the crowd opened and closed ahead and behind me like some living thing, cautious of this foreign body in its midst. I was acutely aware of how alone I was, how devoid of connection. It was like floating in a warm sea, with nothing but sky all around.

Of course the din was still incredible, both audio and visual (for every building was draped in signs declaring in a riotous confusion of font, colour and style what I could only assume were services and shops), rolling over my senses in great atonal waves. The sheer volume of chatter, street-barker patter, inquiry and retort would have been overwhelming had it been in English, but as it was in colloquial Turkish, and as such completely unintelligible to my foreigner's ear, it became as music, not soothing exactly but not drawing my attention either. And so I felt its buzzing pass, thrumming through my chest, felt the thrill of it in the lamp-posts as I leant against them - the only permanence in a moving world.

Alone and uncomprehending I was at perfect rest amongst a thousand people.

I think of this time when sometimes the baby cries once too often in the night, or my students grow overly restless in the Summer heat. I think of that place, that instant, when I found utter solitude in its absence, and a perfect silence within its total lack.

...Continued...

Dawkin's Legacy

The first thing to remember about evolution is that it doesn't exist. It's a none-independent term, like calling a place where two roads meet "the corner of 5th and main" or whatever. The road is only the fifth counting from some arbitrary starting place, the other is the main one because for some reason it's wider, the name would be meaningless without the roads, the roads undistinguished without a name and everything meaningless without cars or people to drive them. Nothing stands alone, it's all a bunch of dominoes piled one against the other.

The same with evolution. Evolution is the name we give to the point where life and death meet the enviroment and what happens there. It is a neutral term, it is not positive, or negative. It has no direction, it can go forward, or backward, or sideways. It does not care about sentience, TV or twinkies. Evolution loves the merest speck of shit-eating scum on the ring of a whale's ass just as much as it loves Shakira. Evolution is not God. It is not an it.

Ooh-ooh, I forgot mutation. That good ol' supposedly random mutation. Did you know that after heavy sunspot activity there is usually a flu epidemic somewhere in the world..? That's right, all those little flu viruses learning new genetic tricks after getting their brains knocked out by heavy radiation.

But hang on, a reliance on purely random mutation to solve your problems would require a whole lot of patience - tapping your fins while you wait for them to turn into feet. You'd have to be some kind of scaley ichthian saint. However, following evolutionary 'logic', a random mutation that then allowed life to generate its own 'purposeful' mutation would imediately become wildly successful, wouldn't it..? It would. Mutation, on a day to day basis, ain't random anymore. It's endogenous, a reaction of a species to enviromental conditions and change.

Your enviroment btw, is not just the green and brown bits: the trees and mountains. Nor just the moving bits like the mosquitos and pigeons and bears. Or the weather. Nope. It is also your neighbor, your mother, your lover, your dog, your toothbrush. Everything that is not you, including the bacteria that live in and on you, is your enviroment. Some of it you choose, most of it you do not, or at least you can't be bothered going to the effort that that choosing would require to implement.

The real enviroment starts from the gene up. In the big scheme of things I am single lily-pad on a very, very big pond which just happens to be the one that the frog of life is sitting on at the moment. When froggy hops to the next, I will sink from view, never to return. Only our genes move on in any physical sense, even then in the 'new blade, new haft - is it the same axe..?' sense of the word. Lonely little string of nucleotides in the big bad world. And the biggest threat from the enviroment is not so much the lions and tigers and bears, nor falling rocks or sudden ice-ages or drunken drivers. Just as in the modern macro-world the only real threat to man, is man - the biggest threat to our genes in the micro-world has always been other genes.

The gene. We've got lots and lot of them. Not just 'one-gene-one-job' either, but a web of inter-connections and inter-dependent functions that we are only beginning to percieve. Nothing wasted, nothing redundant. Diabetes is an adaptation to the last ice-age, still used by Eskimos. Sickle-cell anaemia protects against malaria, high cholesterol is an adaptation to increase high pigmentation vitamin D production. Nothing is black and white. Western Europeans are genetically adapted to beer. A gene for cystic fibrosis protects against tuberculosis. Nothing we contain is without use. Evolution allows no flab.

But if evolution allows no free lunches - why then is our genome is 97% shit..? Only about 3% builds and maintains our bodies. The rest rides for free down the eons, coding for nothing. Well, so the theory went anyway. We didn't adapt to many diseases, we integrated with them. We have married a whole bunch of viral and bacterial DNA on our way down the eons and now we have our own little genetic laboratory in every cell of our bodies. How else would we ever be able to produce the right antigen for every new bug that shuffles off the production line..? We have set thieves to catch thieves and now we cut and paste elements from this vast amount of stored genetic material to combat everything nature throws at us: Transposons - jumping genes - sample and remix the genome like frantic genetic DJs, trying desperately to find the newest groove.

It is more efficient this way. More robust. For example - You can chemically or radiolojically 'knockout' many of what were thought to be vital genes and absolutely nothing happens. You don't die. Why..? Because your genome treats this KO as a disease, as a 'problem' thrown at it by nature and works around it. Other genes borrow material from the 97% and utilize it to make up for the loss in protein production caused by the KO'd gene.

This oldest of methods of tweaking the production line is mirrored in our social reality: The business 'philosophy' of kaizen aims to eliminate waste (defined as "activities that add cost but do not add value"). It is often the case that this means "to take it apart and put back together in a better way." This is then followed by standardization of this 'better way' with others, through standardized work. ie - don't throw out the whole production line when a problem is encountered, tweak it till it works then make the tweaked version the new standard. Sound familliar..?

This internal panic button, that kicks your genome into hyper-mutation-mode, is pressed by stress. Which is good if you've got the latest strain of flu, or a glacier just moved in next door, but totally shit if it's just your boss bustin' your balls - because in the first case, mutation is necessary therefore potentially beneficial, and in the second unnecessary and potentially malignant: hello Mr. Cancer.

So - The human genome isn't really human. It incorporates bits and pieces from every virus and bug we ever conquered and/or got friendly with down the ages. HERV - human endogenous retro viruses - able even, it is thought, to breach the barrier between germ cells - sperm and egg - and body cells. ie. Able to pass on changes aquired within the parental lifetime to the next generation. We are not one pure thing but an alloy of the multitude. But what of the macro-world, the world we can see..? Cells, bodies - these must be discrete..? Separately evolved..? Mustn't they..?

Say on one area there are a couple of individuals who are just fucking great at one thing, but pretty mediocre at everything else: Joe can build a wall that'll stand for a thousand years with his eyes closed, but he couldn't put a roof on for toffee. Fred does great plumbing but electricity turns his head round in knots. Tony roofs and wires like an artist but builds walls like a drunken sailor.

On their own, they are doomed to live in half-finished houses, together, they would build works of art. The trick is to get them to co-operate. To trust.

Capitalism is much the same on a much bigger scale - Governments use the peaceful atmosphere the protection of an army and police-force to provide a system of commerce which allows networks of specialists to take something approaching mutual advantage of eachother, rather than all of them having to do everything for themselves. Would Picasso have had the time and energy to paint such nice pictures if he'd had to spend his days ankledeep in sheepshit growing all his own food..?

But capitalism goes all the way back.

Let us imagine the first cell. Let's call him Donald.

"Back in the day, when I was just a snot-nosed kid, I was a single cell with a floppy cell-wall and a really crappy generator. Luckily in the bit of sea next to me there was this little guy who did almost nothing but suck in the crap floating about and churn out exactly the kind of fuel I needed too. He got so good at it he made far more than he needed, and just excreted the rest. What was his name now..? Mito-Something, ah yes... Mitochondria. I stuck close by, siphoned what I needed, and put my feet up. Well - If I'd had feet, I'd have put them up anyway - I was a thinker. I had plans.

Lazy days. I took to a bit of DIY. Tried to fix up my cell-wall. I found I just sucked at building. As luck would have it in the pond around the corner there was this funny chap, foreign sounding name - Spirochaete I think - Greek maybe. Anyway - He looked like a frightened hedgehog - All spines made out of microscopic tubules. Sturdy. Rugged. Hirstute. I took to sticking to him like glue. I dragged him over to where Mitochondria and his family hung out and I was sorted. Lazy days under the veranda."

Note though, at this point, they are not a unified structure, they are three separate genomes, three separate entities who simply prosper better if they happen, at random, to be in close proximity to one another. One provides energy, one cover, one structure. Each supports the other. But if one divides then there is one too many, if one dies, there is one too few. Either way, it disrupts the pattern of symbiocy. The only answer is for then to begin to divide synchroniously. The easiest way for this to happen is for their genomes to fuse, become one, rather than three.

A mutation that achieved this would soon dominate the resources in the area. And so from three individuals with inadequacies, one supercell is formed. Good societies work under exactly the same principle.

Now we have cells, why build bodies..? The same principle. Arms race. Speed-trials. Diversification of appetite.

Perhaps in one area exist three types of single-cell lifeforms: One cell type is better at propelling itself. One better at digesting nutrients, different nutrients. One has a supertough cell wall, or produces chemicals that hinder rival cells.

Again, these cells would do better, thrive, if they exist in close proximity to one another. If they synchronize division, they do even better, if they clump together, adhere and eventually fuse genomes using special homeobox genes to regulate the number and location of cell types produced... They become kings of the castle.

Co-operation always makes sound evolutionary sense, wether or not the participants are sentient, or even communicative, it doesn't matter.

Of course direct fusion of genomes also derails any uncooperative behaviour.

Imagine if we only had 7 huge cells: Right leg, left leg, right arm, left arm, head, torso, and balls, all containing the exact same genome, though the individual genes of each are expressed and supressed in a slightly different manner to produce the relevant properties specific to each part.

Each body 'cell' works together in harmony to support the 'balls' to eventually produce a child with exactly the same genetic relatedness to each 'cell' - 50% if they reproduce sexually, a 100% if they simply clone. Each does exactly 1/7th of the work involved.

Now - Let us imagine a cell goes rogue: While the rest are sleeping, the left arm strangles the body and knuckles off into the blue. Then it grows some balls and finds a mate. Almost certainly a pity-shag. Produces a child. What has it done..? It has achieved exactly the same result as it would have if it had just been a good little arm and stayed attached, but - For a vastly increased expenditure of energy. It did all the work, rather than only 1/7th.

Duh. Was it a good idea..?

The co-operation of all the cells in our bodies, is not altruistic. They aren't doing eachother a favour. They are saving energy. Selfish little bastards.

So - basically the rule is: However many members you have in your body-colony, as long as all are 100% genetically related to the others, and each gene within that genome has an equal chance of being transmitted into the next generation, there will be no problems with cohesion of purpose.You can grow as big as you can, it doesn't matter. The biggest 'wins'.

Only gravity and the strength of your skeleton limit you. And resources/appetite/digestion - an army has always fought on its stomach. The reason why the dinosaurs were so damn big is the same reason old American cars were so damn big - there was enough fuel lying around to render 'economy-size' pointless. Our genes learnt the economy lesson the hard way, via a meteor and an iceage. Looks like we'll do the same. We're stupid you see, shortsighted, as genes, as their products. Live now, pay later, just so long as we live.

So, the clash of the Titans cannot go on for ever. A huge body is a great energy expenditure on the part of the lifeform in question's genome for the same result - offspring. It's a trade off - huge equals longevity and long fertile period, but a slow turnover of the generations, and a less dense population. A huge bodied species is slow to adapt to gross enviromental change - weather, drought etc. - but big bodies are strong and heavily defenced if the enviromental threat is another lifeform. Conversely - Small body = less biomass = quick turnover = high adaptability to gross enviromental change. So small bodies can be built in more diverse enviroments, allow higher population densities, but they are weak, easily killed by predators.

Simple, like stone/scissors/paper: Big beats small. Meteor beats big. Small beats Meteor.

Did I say small was weak..? I did. But only weak on their own.

Rather than have one giga-organism, co-operating through shared-reproduction-cohesion, 'all your eggs in one basket' so to speak - better to have a lot of 'separate bodies' acting in unison - a society - all your eggs with little legs of their own running about the place - that way, if some get stepped on, it don't matter too much.

The problem with a colony of truly separate bodies is recreating this unity of purpose that in a single bodied creature is policed through energy conservation and homogenuity. This is the problem evolution had to crack.

ie: Any species 'wanting' dominate all others, must find a way to produce a large-scale cohesive society. This is a rule of life and evolution just like any rule of chess or of mathematics. That man is a social animal, indeed the most social of animals, the most cohesive of social animals, and that man dominates the earth is no coincidence.

Insects in eusocietes manage to maintain and mimic a 'one-body' level of cooperation by concentrating the colony's means of reproduction into a single individual - the queen.

Human societies achieve the same end by setting themselves up so that it is easier to have children under the umbrella of that society than outside of it. All else, including technology, is on-going fine tuning to support, protect and secure resources for an ever growing population, the blessing and curse of societical success. This is why politicians kiss babies, because babies are the root of all society.

This ultimately makes social structures and abstract belief-sets as critical an adaption to the living portion of the enviroment as gills or lungs or legs were to the unliving enviroment.

ie: after a certain point, the 'fitness' of a society's infrastructure inevitably becomes more important than physical genomic fitness, more important than individual physical adaptations.

ie: Evolution does not need to remain solely in the physical realm to produce physical effect.

ie: Memes. Social concepts. Have real material effect by proxy of their living hosts, even if they are not alive themselves.

The gene is dead, long live the meme.

...Continued...

Sexual law.

There is something fundamentally wrong with using morality and sexuality in the same sentence.

Perhaps we should take things right back to the beginning and build from there..?

There was a bang, and a lot of energy got very energetic all of a sudden. It wasn't too happy about this. It decided to do something about it - all the concentrated energy in this baby universe decided to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity. Entropy. It came up with some ingenious ways to do this. Planets for example, suns. All wonderful ways to spread useful energy around in a thin layer of useless heat. And Life. In a large enough support medium, any event that does not contravene the extant physical laws inherrant to that medium, becomes inevitable. Amino-acids form spontaneously in-vitro, if the right chemical pre-cursors and conditions prevail. And later, replicators, DNA strands, single-celled lifeforms... And much much later - Us. Each wiggle and thrash of lifes' fledgling limbs and pseudopods adding a little more entropy to the pile. Complexity out of simplicity, bought at the price of increasing heat-death that much faster.

Life has only one prime-directive: To create more life.

To facillitate this end, it has two fundamentals precepts:
1) Self-preservation.
2) Reproduction.

It has no quality. It has no direction. It has no morality. It does not care about getting better, it does not know what better is. Evolution is just what happens to it when it interacts with the external world. Life creates life. End of story. Then life invented sex. And things got, quite literally, sticky.

Two sexes arose, and life got a drive to have sex, sex, sex, some sex, and after a break for its snackfood of choice, some more sex.

Sometimes however, life gets the whole sex business a little mixed up. Male has sex with male, female with female, and all the rest of our sexual predillictions.

This is because life's little programmers, genes, are very close mouthed "need to know" types. They give their progeny only the absolute instincts necessary to facillitate the 2 defining precepts. But that is all they are told. It is all they are born knowing. Any particular mind, animal or human, gets into the fleshy vehicle it is given, and instinctively knows how to use it. You don't have to learn how to breathe, but you can learn how to control it. You don't need to know how to send a nerve impulse to your muscles, but you get more refined in your movements with practice. You don't need to know how to get an errection. It just happens, usually in the presence of a naked lady, sometimes for absolutely no reason at all, on a bus.

For procreation to happen, there is no reason for us to instinctively know that sex leads to babies. Only for us to have an innate drive to have sex.

Indeed, a gene with coded instinctive 'knowledge' concerning the link between sex and babies would be at best redundant, as the sex drive ensures it will happen anyway, wether the lifeform concerned has the gene or not, and for evolution, minimalism is always the way to go, less is always more, if the same degree of efficiency can be achieved. Baggage hampers, baggage slows you down, however minutely, in a long enough time span, significance arises. A gene which carries redundant information would not be automatically conserved, and so would tend to die away.

And at worst, such a gene would be restrictive, non-promotional of sex. Think of it from the female POV: A gene which says by anology:

"Hey girl, would you like a cookie..? This cookie is a special cookie, eat it, and for a few minutes you will feel as if you've gone to heaven. Beware girlfriend, before you bite, of the side effect: After you've finished eating, and returned to Earth, your whole body and its chemistry will go through 9 months of upheaval, and for the last 2-3 of those months, you'll be near-incapacitated, and extremely vunerable. And finally, you will go through a period of agony as intense as anything you will ever experience, short of death, which, by the way, may well be the result. But on the other hand, you will produce another cookie-maker in the process... Now, wanna cookie..?"

A useful gene..?

No wonder then, if you could ask a primitive human where those little humans come from and why, and he'll say, "Well my woman just keeps making the damn things..." He's a smart chap, the penny will probably drop later on, but instictively-speaking, he hasn't a clue. It's better for him not too.

As far as life's concerned, sex is what matters, and babies are just what happen after. Sex has no conscious intent or purpose beyond the generation of pleasure and the fulfilment of need. It just is. Love is what creates the psycholgical link that exists before and after the event of sex, and goes some way to ensuring the survival of the infant by bonding parents and child in a triangulation of support. But love is another story. Love and sex are usually concurrent, but not necessarily so.

Life existed before it became so self aware as to be able to question its actions consciously. It was still driven to have sex. Life existed before the concepts of right and wrong were invented. It was still driven to have sex.

The sex drive pre-empts morality.

Sex is 'dirty', but we do it anyway. To not do it is to deny our basic humanity, our basic tenent of being a form of life. Life without sex is no life at all. Whatever form of sex you are driven to explore.

Life is sex.

Ask a gun if killing is ethically wrong, immoral, and if it could speak, it would say...
"But I'm a gun... I facillitate killing. It's... What I do."
"But killing is wrong..!"
"But, but, it's my function... My reason for being... I can't do anything else... I have... No choice."

And neither do we. Sometimes our choice of target is out of our hands. But we fire anyway. We have to, we are driven to. It's what defines us. No morality involved, morality comes after we come.

One must approach sex from the tangent of the animal, the evolutionary, the language of benefit to life plural. To approach it from rationality, is to talk about diets to a cheetah, you can impose a diet forcably sure, but don't expect him to go on one voluntarily.

Using this approach makes explaining the why's and how's of mankinds views of the more 'perverse' sexual practices have formed, and are now changing. (I use 'perverse' loosely, evolutionarily speaking, perversion does not exist, only what works, and what does not, in promoting life plural.)

For example: Homosexuality...

Very simply. In expanding populations, with enough resources, a shortish natural lifespan and the resultant high turnover of generations, a group with a high proportion of homosexuality, wether gene-led or meme-led, will tend to increase in numbers at a slower rate than a group which is more rigidly heterosexual. And therefore be at a numerical disadvantage in conflicts over territory and what have you.

In only this situation, is homosexuality a distinct liability with regard to group survival. And wether you like it or not, our basis for defining moral and immoral actions is deeply rooted in this concept. Our ideas of 'right action' and 'wrong action' well from the basic instinct to survive on an individual level, in the furtherence of your personal genetic line, leading naturally to the group level, because your group supports and protects you just as you do it. What is good for the group, what is good for its prolification, is good for you. Anything, any trait, any behavioural preference or prediliction that goes against group survival or numerical advantage, group coherrence or stability must become deemed 'immoral'. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the group that deems immoral these things (homosexuality amongst them) and forbids them, will prosper and dominate, and in doing so, eliminate other systems of morality as the adherrents to these moral systems are physically killed in conflict or begin to emulate what they see as a winning social strategy. Other moral systems must either get on the bandwagon or be crushed by it.

I'm not going to argue God's existance. But religion, the visible facet of the God concept, is man-made. A priest is also a man. He puts words that humans can understand into God's mouth. God says: "Go forth and multiply." To further this tenent, it is no surprise that the priest says, "a sodomite is an abomination against God". He has to, otherwise his group dwindles, and his version of God, (which he may have sublimated into his sex-drive, if his religion bans his actual chance of physical sexuality or procreation), dies with it.

But now our groups, our nations, have reached near-maximal proportions in the stable countries of the West, and in conflict, it is technology, rather than brute population that is the main effector. Beyond catastrophy, the survival of the group en toto is assured. ie: the ancient foundation for a bias against homosexuality has crumbled. We have 'gone forth' we have 'multiplied'. Mission accomplished Mr. God, sir.

Indeed, further multiplication will soon if not already become a factor detrimental to the well-being of the group.

And yet, love and sex remain as important human drives as ever. The satiation of human sexuality is a requirement fundamental to the stability and coherrence of the host society. Sexual frustration, wether homo or hetero, leads to acts of desperation, acts that break the consensual agreements of conduct and society's common criminal penalties, as one drive - the drive to sexual satisfaction overcomes a lesser drive, the drive to social conformity. Frustration --> factions and conflict --> unstable society --> readjustment of society's 'morals' --> Fulfilment --> stabilized society --> prosperous society.

Homosexuality as an inheritable genetic proness, is conserved within the genome, as it does not conclusively pre-empt procreation. Like any other behavior with a joy-buzzer at the end, it can be learned. It can also occur by accidental disruption of hormone levels within the foetus at the 6 week stage resulting in a 'female-type' brain in a male body. Homosexuality is a given within any society of humans. It cannot be 'stamped out'.

It does not matter that homosexual sex cannot lead to children, the conscious/subconscious mind, where sexual proclivity resides, may know this, but the body does not. As far as the body is concerned, pushing your penis into warm cosy cove, be it an anus or a vagina, is always a good idea. Sexual pleasure and procreation, have always been entwined. The body makes no distinction. There is no innate knowledge of the connection between sex and offspring.

"Go forth and multiply" only works when there is somewhere to "go forth" to. When the edge of the boundary is reached, it becomes "Stay put and stabillize."

Hence, the maximal population society which continues to deem homosexuality 'immoral' can only self-generate its own instability, and detriment. A pissed off gay with a gun can create just as much havoc as a pissed off hetero with a gun. The maximal society that is more tolerant to its fringe elements, within reason, will fair better.

Consensual Homosexuality loses its social stigma.

But does this also open the door for other, more overtly 'evil' sexual practices..? pedophillia for example, by linking sex only to the beast inside, will we allow all forms of 'sex' to run wild and rough shod, even over our children..?

Anyway, why is child-molestation so abhorrent..? Worse than rape, worse than murder..? Damage to the child, psychological or physical..? No, for evolution a sexually immature creature has no impact until it has shown itself able to reach maturity, and re-produce, that such damage occurs is true, but it cannot be the basis for a species-wide aversion.

Simply Pedophilla is evolutionarily/socially stupid. It's an immense (shared) risk for the momentary gain of (individual) pleasure. It's behavior almost certain to get you (and your genetic kin) killed.

A progression of 'sins':

*You trespass on my territory, I and my clan may welcome you, give you shelter and food. Or, if you catch us on a very bad day or you act disrespectfully, we may cut off your head and stick it on a post.

(A compulsive trespasser is a danger, mainly to himself, and a liability to his 'parent' group, in that he risks a small but increasing possibility of starting a conflict over territory.)

* Theft: You steal my cow. That was my cow, I fed it, raised it, looked after it, I invested my energy in it. It was mine. If I have a whole lot of cows, I may well give up on you after a bit of searching. If I have few cows, I'm likely to hunt you down and hang your thief ass from the nearest pole and use you as a scarecrow.

(A compulsive thief is a major risk to himself, and quite a risk to his 'parent' group, in that he runs the risk of revenge attacks on the possessions of his group.)

*You rape/kidnap a woman of my clan. She was ours, we had a great investment in her, she was under our protection. Her virginity, fertility and prospects for bonding with another were our assets. You took her, without our permission. You took her without paying us due tribute for our investments. You took her without extending your protection to her, and so relieving us of our duty. Depending on her age, beauty, 'marital' status and usefulness to our group we will expend varying degrees of effort in finding you and killing you slowly.

(A compulsive rapist is very likely to die early on in his career, and think Helen of Troy on a small scale, very likely to embroil his 'parent' group in major conflict. ie: Having a rapist in your group is bad for that group, and killing him yourselves before he gets you all into trouble is a good idea.)

*You rape my child. You hurt my child. You kill my child. My child is my most precious possession. It carries half my genes, it carries my legacy, it carries my only chance of something approaching immortality. Even more compelling than my drive to have sex, is my drive to protect my offspring, and the lives of my future offspring by removing any threat. Ergo: You are dead. And such is my outrage and grief, I will tar your entire genetic strain with the same brush of potential pedophillia, hunt down your family and friends and slaughter them all like cattle.

(A compulsive child-molester is a walking dead man. The family of a child-molester are living on borrowed time. The friends and associates of a child-molester are at serious risk. The only thing to do that makes any kind of social sense with a child-molester in a group is for that group to kill him, before his actions get them killed too.)

Natural law. Morals arising from group survival. Irrational behavior carrying no benefits, for extreme (shared) risk -> Immoral. Evil. Bad.

Of course now we don't really have to worry about these things. Retribution and revenge have been co-opted in the intrests of social stability by the state. The shared group risks of individual actions have been difused. Did anything happen to the wife and family of the Yorkshire Ripper..? Beyond a little social consequence..? A few less invitations to dinner..? Nope.

Only the extremely emotive crimes of rape, and child-rape will tempt a return to vigilantism, someone hurts a child, and the first reaction of even unrelated people, is to howl for revenge, think then, of the terrible instinctual tides of retribution occuring within the body and mind of the parent. But of course, the police, the guardians of social stability, will and must stop them from running amok. Seeing that the satisfaction of this revenge will only destabillize the group en-masse. lowering everyone's chances of survival.

No big surprise then, that slowly and timidly, the snakes begin to raise themselves from the dirt, and whisper that maybe it isn't so bad afterall.

Pedophillia, is a perversion in that it decreases the chances of survival of the exhibitor of such behavior, and his bloodline. All else is just modern-day intellectual frippery.

Homosexuality within a group large enough not to need to breed excessively to better it's chances of survival, is tolerable, and if it increases the social cohesiveness of that group, to be promoted.

Pedophillia can only cause dissention, retribution and instability within how ever large a group. And is to be abhorred. Now, then and always.

In conclusion, I hope I have shown that sexuality, despite being amoral with regard to human conscious rationality, and impossible to adequately judge or justify simply by this method, is not without its stopgaps and checks, it is policed by an older, more organic process, that of group dynamics and survival. There is an inevitability to sexuality that precedes and pre-empts human morality, and it will continue to do so, until we cease to be mortal, and evolutionary forces lose their grip.

...Continued...