- This section mostly contains a list of essays by Blithering Genius about Biological Realism and Evolution, which I consider to be the best material in the world for fully understanding Evolution and its implications.
- Debunking the Selfish Gene by T. K. Van Allen | Book Summary
This book debunks the Richard Dawkins' concept of the selfish gene, which situates biological purpose in genes, rather than the organism as a whole. The author presents an alternative theory of biological purpose that is more consistent with the evidence: the phenocentric view.
- Biological Realism | Text Summary
People ignore many aspects of human biology nowadays for moral reasons: the inherit violence and selfishness of life, sex realism, race realism, dysgenics/eugenics, and social/psychological realism. Most ideologies are therefore incongruent with reality.
- Life is Violent | Video Version
Violence is inescapable from life due to the war, disease, and famine that are inevitably caused when a population reaches its carrying capacity. Eliminating violence within a society simply pushes the violence outwards.
- Altruism and Selfishness | PDF Version | Video Version
People will use and define "altruism" and "selfishness" in confusing ways, but the most coherent definition of "altruism" always loses to the most coherent definition of "selfishness", energetically, biologically, and psychologically.
- Why Kin Selection Theory is Wrong | PDF Version
There is little evidence of kin altruism in nature, other than parental care of offspring. Altruism between siblings is better explained by the extended phenotype. There are multiple problem with Hamilton's Rule, such as the free-rider problem. Kin Altruism is a myth used to justify collectivist ideologies.
- Bees Are Not Social
Explaining how bee reproduction works. Bees are not altruistic, and the primary unit of selection for bees is the Queen since all genes flow through her. Beehives are multi-body organisms.
- Family & Society | PDF Version | Video Version
How net energy flows from father to mother to children; and the evolution of exchanges of labor within human tribes (moral accounting systems).
- Pathological Altruism | Text Version
Pathological Altruism is a phenomenon of collective irrationality caused by social delusion, and a virtue-signaling tragedy of the commons.
- We Cannot Transcend Evolution | PDF Version
| Video Version
We can never escape from the evolutionary process that creates and maintains the human form. We can change the environment in which this process operates, but we cannot escape from the process itself.
- Evolution and Morality | Video Version
Evolution has many implications about morality. The simplest resolution to the conflicts between evolution and morality is to discard morality, but unfortunately it is easier for most people to reject the truth about life than to reject morality.
- Sex, Death, and Complexity | PDF Version
Sex, death, and complexity are all linked. Death is a consequence of entropy and evolution. The dynamics of sexual reproduction force the cells of the body to work together, rather than competing against each other. This is arguably the most important reason why sexual reproduction evolved.
- Diet and Human Evolution | PDF Version
The key traits that set humans apart from other great apes (bipedalism, tool use, social organization, and a larger brain) are all linked to changes in the human diet and the evolution that resulted from it.
- Evolution And Its Implications
Some musings about evolution, memetics, and biology. All the thoughts in this file are grouped together under one page because I didn't have enough to say to make them separate posts in their own right.
- Evolution Simulator: The Life Engine
- Why r/K Selection Theory is Bogus | PDF Version
r/K Selection Theory is fallacious and has no explanatory power. The second half of this essay explains how evolution actually works.
- Debunking The Revolutionary Phenotype | PDF Version | Video Version
The Revolutionary Phenotype by J.F. Gariepy has many conceptual errors that arise due to misleading metaphors and sloppy thinking. This essay quotes paragraphs from the book and explains their fallacies.
- At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity by Stuart Kauffamn
- Talk Origins: A Comprehensive Debunking of Creationism
Many of the rebuttals that are shown on this site are featured in the Counter Creationism Handbook.
- Wikispecies: Free Species Dictionary
- Phylogenetic Biology by Casey W. Dunn
- The 7 Realms of Biogeography - Atlas Pro
- Philosophy of Race FAQs | Related Video
Addressing the common misconceptions and implications of race, race realism, race-mixing, and ethnostates from a biological realist perspective. Race realism is a scientific position that acknowledges evolutionary differences and does not imply racism nor tribalism.
- Why Most Racial Disparaties Are Probably Mostly Genetic | PDF Version
Blithering Genius argues why the environmental factors affecting racial disparaties are highly dependent on genes, especially since most people in the Modern West are not lacking any important environmental input to their development.
- Race, Genes, & Intelligence: An Empirical Test of the Hereditarian Hypothesis
This four part series definitively clarifies, defines, and argues for the Hereditarian Hypothesis with an empirical analysis of reliable data.
- The Difference Between Race Realism and Race Idealism
- Does Evolutionary Theory Imply Genetic Tribalism? | PDF Version
Evolution creates reproducing machines, not entities with genetic interests. Cooperating with others can create a bigger machine (a society) that benefits its members, but every individual's participation in that machine is conditional and selfish, not an expression of a greater purpose. Racial tribalism does not fit the biological or historical evidence.
- Race 101: What is Taxonomy? - Thuletide
This page gives an introduction to taxonomy, Aristotle's taxonomy, the modern approach to taxonomy, and a clarification of how and why the phenotypes of organisms are the primary basis for classifying taxa.
- A Race-By-Race Breakdown of Human Genetic Diversity: Illustrated Guide for Novices - Thuletide
This webpage gives a background on human taxonomy and explains how human races can be defined with K-Cluster Analysis with graphs and pictures.
- The IQ Question | PDF Version
Most of misconceptions about IQ revolve around misunderstanding what it measures, what affects it, and how it is calculated, but IQ is indeed a useful metric since it has predictive power for measuring things such as educational attainment, income, health, criminality, etc.
- Race And Intelligence (Explanations) - Psychology Fandom Wiki
- Visualized 3D Component Analysis Mapping Of Human Races
- Collection of Information Related to Population Genetics - The Untangler
- The Genetics of Prehistory - WhatIfAltHist
The evolution of modern humans, human migrations, and prehistorical human genetics.
- How Race and Genetics Affect Athletic Performance - B4 FleX
- The Genetic History of South Asia - Thuletide
- The Genetics of Latin America - Thuletide
- SNPedia
SNPedia is a wiki investigating human genetics. It shares information about the effects of variations in DNA, citing peer-reviewed scientific publications.
- Ancient GEnome Selection (AGES) Database | Study - David Reich
This database and study used thousands of ancient and present-day genomes to track the changing frequencies of genes in Western Eurasian human populations. The findings verify that increased intelligence, lower body fat disposition, fewer psychotic disorders, and paler skin color were naturally selected in European populations over the past 10,000 years. The data is free to download.
- A Harmonized Public Resource of Deeply Sequenced Diverse Human Genomes
- Emergenesis Studies Links - Gwern
Many human traits are highly genetically-caused, while being extremely rare and unpredictable, and not fitting the standard infintesimal model. Emergenesis is a proposal for resolving this: such genetic traits are highly nonlinear and non-additive (epistasis or dominance/recessive), depending on many traits simultaneously, and failing otherwise.
- Myths About Human Genetics
Most human traits are polygenic, and are rarely determined by only one gene. Many of the typical examples used to teach genetic differences in K-12 biology classes also have no scientific basis to back them up.
- Taking Mutational Load Seriously - Sebastian Jensen
In general, if the mutations that cause infant morality generalize to other traits, then they should also be selected against in miscarriages/sperm/mating, which will cause their proliferation in the gene pool to decrease.
If the genes do not generalize, then genes that cause infant mortality may increase due to a lack of purifying selection, but that will not generalize to intelligence and other traits.
Overall, mutational load probably isn't a huge problem.
- The Case Against The Mutational Load Hypothesis
This three part series analyzes the premises, implications, and historical data relating to the "Spiteful Mutant" / Mutational Load Hypothesis. The MLH may partially explain the rise of Wokism, but it can't explain it for a majority of people. It's more likely that most woke people are affected by environmental factors.
- Human BioDiversity Fundamentals - JayMan
- Environmental Hereditarianism - JayMan
- All Human Behavioral Traits are Heritable - JayMan
- Recent Human Evolution - Wikipedia
This Wikipedia article talks about some ongoing selective pressures on the human genome. Most of the citations are probably true, but some should be taken with a grain of salt.
- Familial Natural Short Sleep - Wikipedia
Natural short sleepers have rare genes that enable them to sleep for fewer hours without any consequences of sleep deprivation.
- Why The Dyslexic Brain Is Misunderstood
- The Mathematical Reason You Should Have 9 Kids - Eternal Anglo
- Overpopulation and Demographic Transition Theory FAQs
The only ways to avoid overpopulation are mass death or low birth rates (population control). Overpopulation is otherwise inevitable. Once there's overpopulation, it's game over for civilization.
- Fertility and Destiny | Text Version | PDF Version
Demographic Transition Theory makes false assumptions, contradicts historical patterns, and ignores population dynamics. There are better explanations for why wealthier countries currently have lower fertility rates.
- The Paradox of Low Fertility
The conservative, leftist, and liberal perspectives on low fertility are blinded by their value judgments, which prevents them from understanding that birth control causes low fertility and other truths. The paradox of low fertility disappears when one understands that human nature is an evolved mechanism, and our values are generated by that mechanism.
- Interactive Graph of the World Population
This graph shows the estimated human population by continent, country, or region. The graph's timeline can be edited to show any timespan within the last 12000 years.
- Brood Size and Ancestral Premature Death Rate - Brittonic Memetics
The Ancestral Premature Death Rate (APDR) is useful as a mental shorthand because it captures several characteristics of a population. It is directly related to ancestral brood size, and it reflects the intensity of the selective pressure a species was under in the ancestral environment. As a consequence, it also determines the level of genetic noise we should expect in a population.
- Social Mobility - Brittonic Memetics
The paradox of meritocracy explains why meritocratic societies often fail to be completely meritocratic in the long-term. There is a stabilizing feedback loop between meritocratic norms, genetic stratification, and genetic homogenization, and it's also affected by the fertility rates of the society's social classes.
- The Case Against Mass Immigration
Blithering Genius makes the case that mass immigration can break down social structures, cause cultural instability, weaken competitiveness with other countries, increase a country's dysgenics, increase unsustainable population growth, and create economic imbalances. BG also debunks several popular arguments in favor of mass immigration.
- Don't Be A Racist Jerk!!
This satirical video explains what would happen if pro-immigration and pro-diversity arguments were taken to their most logical conclusion.
- The Thermodynamics of Globalization
Why the West has Mass Immigration, even though it causes so many problems.
- Wrecking the Laboratories of Democracy - Arctotherium
Statistics show that domestic migration flows shift the federal balance of power in the United States towards the Republican Party, since red states have better living conditions. If it weren't for foreign immigration, we'd thus expect the United States to become conservative. This hasn't happened because New York and California don't have to be better than Florida and Texas to retain national influence; they just need to outdo Mexico and India.
- Where Countries Should Source Their Immigrants - Eternal Anglo
This webpage explains and calculates that immigrants have the potential to reduce or increase GDP, depending on whether they meet an IQ threshold relative to the recipient country. It also has a fun interactive map that highlights where countries should and shouldn't source their immigrants.
- The End of American Greatness
The founding of the United States created a country ripe with many freedoms, abundant natural resources, and whose location away from europe selected for innovative people who had to be looking for the best location to start their life. Those conditions have since deteriorated, in large part due to the Thermodynamics of Globalization.
- What is Wokism?
Wokism is a collection of left-wing ideologies that mostly consist of virtue signaling and claims that certain identity groups are systemically oppressed. Wokism inverts natural values, denies biology, rejects rational discourse, and is often allied with institutional powers.
- A Rational Analysis of Wokism
This page features a response to Why We Need to Talk about the Right's Stupidity Problem by Nathan Cofnas. It goes on to talk about the origins and rise of wokism, the nature of discrimination, the origin of diversity equal representation, racial "oppression", transgender people, etc.
- Responding To Nathan Cofnas's Email Response
Wokism is motivated by emotions, mental gymnastics, and propaganda more than anything else. It's absurd to believe that wokism is driven by rationality. The justifications for systemic racism and demographics quotas have irreconcilable contradictions.
- Soulism: An Analysis of Humanist Values | PDF Version
Humanism is the Post-Christian Religion of the Modern West. Soulism is another word for Humanism that emphasizes the individual soul and the human spirit. Soulists situate value in subjectivity. Worldists situate value in objectivity. Humanism is a soulist religion, which has replaced a theist religion.
- Dissecting Humanism | Text Summary
Why the Humanist outlook on the world is vague, naive, self-deceiving, and anti-philosophical.
- The Sixties | Video Version
The 1960s were the main cultural turning point in the Modern West. The counter-culture was primarily a result of the baby-boomers' search for meaning after growing up in a stable, predictable environment everyday for years. The big problems of existence were relegated to obscurity again, handed back to the philosophers and the poets, and people went on with their lives.
- The Case Against The Mutational Load Hypothesis
This three part series analyzes the premises, implications, and historical data relating to the "Spiteful Mutant" / Mutational Load Hypothesis. The MLH may partially explain the rise of Wokism, but it can't explain it for a majority of people. It's more likely that most woke people are affected by environmental factors.
- What is Feminism? | PDF Version
From a purely biological perspective, Feminism is a memetic disease that denies biological realities and decreases reproductive success. Feminism does not demand true equality of outcomes between the sexes (the West has already achieved that). Instead, it is a utopian ideology that women can use to claim power, social status, moral superiority, and moral credit as oppressed victims.
- Alienation and Art | Video Version
This essay describes how evolutionary mismatch and the abundance of information and art in the modern world have created a new environment in which humans pursue entertainment and behaviors that simulate the emotional responses of their ancestral environment, due to being emotionally detached (alienated) from reality.
- Reproduction & Masturbation | Video Version
Every emotion drives some behavior that is instrumental to reproduction. However, human emotions that worked in the ancestral environment are less adaptive in today's world. We can metaphorically describe emotion-driven engagements that have no reproductive utility as "masturbation".
- Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski (Hosted On This Website)
Sections 2-6 and 26 explain most of Ted Kaczynski’s theory on the origins of wokism, with section 4 "Over-Socialization", section 5 "The Power Process", and section 6 "Surrogate Activities" being the most important.
- Whiteness and the West - Aporia Magazine
White identity is justified, even if most people oppose it for irrational reasons. White identity will be necessary to fight against anti-white identity. Promoting white identity is not illiberal nor anti-Western, nor will it intensify racial conflict anymore than the promotion of other racial identities.
- The "Right" Amount of Concern about Racism - Aporia Magazine
This article presents eight examples of how the West's concern with anti-racism has gone too far, to the point of being counter-productive: cancel culture, self-censorship, the media's Great Awokening, responses to police shootings, hiding the race of suspects, hugging people during a pandemic, not profiling terrorists, and ignoring grooming gangs.
- The Myth of Human Fragility - Aporia Magazine
Humans are not fragile creatures. They are resilient. And trauma is almost certainly not a widespread cause of mental illness.
- Murder as a Measuring Stick - Arctotherium
Murder rates are a good proxy for tracking crime rates for multiple reasons. Advancements in medicine have masked a colossal rise in crime and disorder since the 1960s. The best way to reduce crime rates is to lock criminals up, rather than viewing them as victims of society.
- Understanding Left-Wing Rhetoric (Downloadable Infographic)
- Racial Crime Statistics: A Series of Infographics on Globally Consistent Trends (Downloadable PDF)
- Blacks are not 35 Times as Likely to Attack Whites as the Reverse - Eternal Anglo
- Blacks are not Equally as Likely to be Attacked by Whites as the Reverse - Eternal Anglo
- 700 Politically Incorrect, Yet True Facts, with Links to Studies and Statistical Data
- Black Invention Myths .com
- Modern Civilization Is Irrational
Modern civilization is based on rationality, but it's not rational as a whole. Modern civilization is akin to a forest fire that is growing out of control. Future civilization can only become rational if humanity develops a collective understanding, purpose, and a sustainable plan.
- Freedom of Speech | PDF Version | Video Version
Freedom of speech is the principle that coercion should not be used to suppress ideas. It is necessary for social rationality. Freedom of speech is often censored by corporations, the academy, and lone individuals (e.g. doxxing, threats, etc). Politeness and tragedies of the commons can sometimes conflict with free speech, and the best resolution to these concerns is to have separate spaces with different rules.
- The Will to Power or the Will to LARP?
The key to opening the Overton Window is to have good arguments and present ourselves as reasonable, intelligent people acting in good faith. This is the best way to fight the Culture War.
- A Guide to Fixing Receptive Leftists - Brittonic Memetics
Brittonic Memetics: Rational People are a scarce resource. This article gives some tips on how to dissuade open-minded leftists from their worldview.
- Squaring the Circle: Surviving Modernity - Brittonic Memetics
Brittonic Memetics lists some ideas for communities to combat evolutionary mismatch, and some recommendations for a community that wishes to survive if modern civilization collapses.
- Rational Feminism - Brittonic Memetics | PDF Version
- Rational Humanism
A Proposed Replacement Ideology for Today's Humanism, Religion, and General Nonsense
- Rational Humanism Discussion
A really interesting discussion about how to promote better memetics and rationality for society.
- Creating An Ideal Designed Culture | PDF Version
Brittonic Memetics posulates the best memes for building an ideal culture, how memes compete for real estate in people's brain, and so much more.
- God is a Telomeme | Video Version
Memes can be divided into Traditions and Fashions / Cults, based on how they usually spread from one person to another. This is a useful framework for memetic theory.
- Adaptive Coherence | Video Version
Genes and memes work together hand-in-hand, and different biologies will produce different kinds of societies.
- Traditionalism is the Future | Video Version
Those who have lots of children will replace those who don't, thus eventually causing humanity to return to traditional gender roles and traditional ways of life.
- Status Pyramid Schemes
Blithering Genius describes how fad movements grow, radicalize, and decline. Everybody wants to lead the herd, and everybody who isn't a leader wants to jump on the next bandwagon before anybody else. Purity-spiraling, radicalization, and declining growth eventually cause a feedback loop that causes bandwagon movements to shrink.
- Social Delusions | Video Version
Human group behavior tends to follow a predictable pattern, and people who interact on a regular basis tend to synchronize their beliefs.
- The Modern Problems with Conformity
Conformity was a good heuristic for survival and prosperity in the past. In the modern world, conformity is now an unreliable heuristic because most people have maladaptive behavior, people can choose which social circles they want to conform to, and we're constantly exposed to artificial media.
- Social Media as Social Control - Luke Smith
Every social platform and most political system effectively function akin to skinner boxes. They give people the illusion of believing that they're free thinkers, when everybody's information and thoughts are actually being constrained by the designs, censorship, and social nature of the platforms.
- The Normification of YouTube
YouTube had high connectivity as a social network in 2013, until numerous changes were made to the platform that reduced the propagation of information and centralized Google's centralized control over what people watch.
- Philosophy of Activism & Optics: Figuring Out What Works (Work In Progress)
TBA.
- The Story of Us: The Full Series - WaitButWhy
- Forbidden Knowledge - Brittonic Memetics
Forbidden Knowledge gives the illusion of power and intellectual superiority. Adding an aura of secrecy and layered information to a memetic system can greatly improve its virulence.
- The Rhetoric of Exploitation | PDF Version
| Video Version
Rhetoric is a common tactic used by ideologues to replace rationalist thinking with rhetoric and self-righteous nonsense. The key is to use selective metaphors and phrases and portray the "oppressors" as having agency and the "victims" as having no agency.
- The Art of Propaganda
Effective propaganda must resonate with the lowest mental common denominator of its target audience. It does so by limiting itself to a few simple themes that appeal to feelings and are presented repeatedly, in order to put a matter clearly and forcibly into the minds of the people. This video also displays footage of Hitler and Nazi propaganda for analysis and comparison.
- Fake News Tactics Used By The Media And Establishment | Video Version
The establishment media rarely tell outright lies, but they often lie by selecting facts, images, interpretations, etc. to fit a preconceived narrative. The narrative comes first, and everything else is cherry-picked to fit the narrative.
- George Floyd and the Madness of Crowds | PDF Version
| Video Version
This essay covers the numerous social reasons why the death of George Floyd caused so much protesting and rioting throughout the United States and around the world, even though police brutality is so statistically rare.
- Smokescreens - Brittonic Memetics
Advances in AI are making deepfakes more abundant and harder to notice than ever in the modern world. This has serious implications on the renewed importance of being able to distinguish what's true and what's fabricated.
- Are We Running Out Of Ideas?
The supply of good ideas is likely finite. Once all the good ideas have already been claimed and published, i.e. humans have passed Peak Idea Production, there aren't many good ideas left to discover.
- Parasites, Emotions, and Identity | PDF Version
| Video Version
Parasites bring up interesting questions and thought experiment regarding values, emotions, and who we are.
- The Alternative View on Homosexuality - Commander Waldo
Homosexuality is maladaptive, plausibly environmental, and it does not provide people with any health or biological benefits compared to heterosexuality.
- The Pathogen Hypothesis For Male Homosexuality
The causes of (male) homosexuality are not fully understood, but one possible cause that hasn't been explored very well is intestinal pathogens. This essay details the reasons in favor of this hypothesis, and how it's more compatible with evolutionary theory than other hypotheses.
- Sapir-Whorf Theory: How Language Influences Thought
An overview of Sapir-Whorf theory, gavagai semantics, classical conditioning, selective attention, and examples where language influences thought and vice versa.
- Mathematical Methods for Modeling Phonetics & Phonology
Language phonology can be modeled using set theory, string theory, combinatoritcs, finite-state transducers, and calculus-based statistics. When I have more time, I plan to make a major expansion to this paper to talk about more modern and complex models of phonology.
- A Better Way To Think About Morphological Typology
The traditional system for classifying language typology conflates many different morphological characteristics into a 1D or 2D spectrum that does not descriptively characterize language morphology. I explain the more modern approach to classifying language morphology, as well as my own similar system of parameters for classifying language morphology.
- Maximum Entropy Phonotactics by Bruce Hayes and Colin Wilson
Maximum Enropy Phonotactics uses more advanced mathematics than Optimality Theory, but it also models language phonology with even greater accuracy.
- An Introduction to Acoustic Phonetics
- Heuristic Strategies for Identifying Etymology in English and Various Other Languages
Heuristics for recognizing pronunciation, spelling, syllables, morphemes, grammar patterns can identify the etymology of a language's lexicon with high accuracy.
- The Implications of Adopting a Constructed Universal Auxiliary Language (Worldlang)
The effects and implications of adopting an Universal Auxiliary Language (worldlang), and why it would be a better solution than universal translators.
- Advantages And Disadvantages To Logographic Writing Systems
Logographic writing systems draw their advantages from linking meanings to writing, rather than sounds to writing, as a phonetic writing system would. From a linguist's perspective, they both have their strengths, and neither is better than the other.
- The Best Way to Learn Logographic Writing Systems: Heisig's Method
Heisig's Method is the best way to learn Hanzi and Kanji since it separating the learning process into two phases: memorizing the characters themselves and their semantics, and learning how to pronounce the characters and their various connotations.
- Subjunctive Verb Conjugations In English
Many foreign language teachers and English speakers are unaware that English has subjunctive verb conjugations, which is one reason why many English speakers struggle with using subjunctive conjugations in foreign languages. This page gives many English examples to help with this.
- Spelling Reform For General American English - Zompist
- Playlist: The History and Evolution of the English Language
- The Lojban Wiki
Lojban is a conlang based on Loglan, which is designed to eliminate syntactic ambiguity by structuring its grammar according to predicate logic, albeit at the cost of increased semantic ambiguity, due to its limited ~2000-word vocabulary.
- Ithkuil: A Philosophical Conlang That Eliminates Semantic Ambiguity
Ithkuil uses a matrix of grammatical concepts intended to express deeper levels of human cognition more overtly, logically, and precisely than natural languages.
- Book Summary: Through the Language Glass
StateOfTheNihil gives a summary of the book, Through the Language Glass, which is probably worth reading, unless you have a linguistics degree.
Hello and welcome to my philosophy website.
My name is Zero Contradictions, and this place is a hybrid between a blog for my own writings (highlighted in red) and a compendium of external links to works by different authors that have influenced my own philosophy and/or are worth reading (highlighted in blue) as well as links to videos, channels, or audio recordings (highlighted in green).
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