Tagged: evolutionary psychology

August 18, 2022

Philo 26 Le corps du moi : Etude transcendantale

FR-EN

« Par-delà le bien et le mal » : si les enfants de quatre ans formaient un parti politique, ce serait leur programme. Des enfants de quatre ans, on en trouve de tous les âges. Il y a des adultes qui sont des enfants de quatre ans. Ils n’ont pas le temps de lire Nietzsche, qui devait bien le savoir. Car lire de la philosophie, ce n’est pas précisément être par-delà le bien et le mal, mais devenir vieux.

Le droit de rêver

Le grand sommeil auquel j’ai droit après ma mort et le droit de rêver que j’ai dans cette vie.

(ii)

La perspective d’un grand sommeil n’est pas du tout réconfortante, car le sommeil est agréable seulement quand on est sûr de se retrouver au réveil. Ce sont bien plutôt ceux qui croient à la résurrection qui éludent le sérieux de la mort, en s’inventant un réveil après celle-ci. Mais ce sont des rêveurs, car dans la mort on se perd à tout jamais. Dormir dans ces conditions est pire que souffrir pour l’éternité ; c’est donc nous autres, en sachant tout cela, qui avons pesé le véritable enjeu. La peur de se perdre dans un sommeil sans réveil est plus grande que la peur de souffrir éternellement, à laquelle on ne peut croire un seul instant, même avec la meilleure volonté du monde, car il nous manque l’organe pour appréhender ce que veut dire le mot « éternellement ». C’est donc une peur véritable, tangible et pesée, virile, contre une peur puérile, une imagination d’enfant qui voit des monstres dans le noir. Ainsi, plus on jouit de la vie, plus on est content de soi, et plus l’enjeu est sérieux et la pensée profonde. Plus la vie nous est chère et plus sa perte est une affaire sérieuse. D’ailleurs, dans toute vie il y a des hauts et des bas, ce n’est pas un long fleuve tranquille ; c’est vivre pleinement qui compte et ce n’est pas donné à tout le monde. Que ceux qui vivent chichement, les médiocres, croient au paradis pour se consoler, c’est à nous de pleurer une si grande perte que notre moi et la vie qui va avec. Amen.

– Des larmes pour être sérieux ? Vous n’y pensez pas, cher ami ! C’est celui qui rit le plus fort qui prend la condition humaine le plus au sérieux. Une gaîté indéfectible est la preuve que la décadence n’est pas notre lot et que c’est donc une vie mâle et du meilleur alliage qui se dissoudra dans le néant fatal. Ce dont je ris aussi, bruyamment, parce que le rire aère les bronches des natures saines.

– Certes, mais entre deux rires toniques il est important de dire leur fait à ceux qui nous prennent pour des esprits légers alors qu’ils vivent dans les enfantillages et rendent toutes choses ridicules.

La remarque de Carl Schmitt selon laquelle une guerre au nom de l’humanité est le moyen de conduire une guerre complètement inhumaine, en déniant la qualité d’homme à l’adversaire, est, faut-il ajouter, un excellent moyen de se faire craindre, car c’est dire : « Je suis celui dont il faut attendre la plus grande inhumanité. »

« Der Krieg spielt sich dann in der Form des jeweils „endgültig letzten Krieges der Menschheit“ ab. Solche Kriege sind notwendigerweise besonders intensive und unmenschliche Kriege, weil sie, über das Politische hinausgehend, den Feind gleichzeitig in moralischen und anderen Kategorien herabsetzen und zum unmenschlichen Scheusal machen müssen, also nicht mehr nur ein in seine Grenzen zurückzuweisender Feind ist. » (Der Begriff des Politischen, 1932)

Prétendre qu’on n’a pas une foi absolue en la raison (absolute Vernunftsglaube) quand on n’est pas hégélien est ridicule car ce n’est pas forcément parce que Hegel professait une telle foi que son système est un résultat conforme à celle-ci plutôt qu’un amas d’absurdités. On peut avoir une foi absolue dans la raison tout en connaissant ses limites. En l’occurrence, ne pas croire à la possibilité d’un « savoir absolu », dans la mesure où l’on entendrait par ces mots ce qu’ils nous demandent d’entendre d’eux-mêmes, n’est pas accuser la raison d’insuffisance, car c’est croire à ce que disent ces mots qui est la marque d’un profond manque de discernement.

D’aucuns prétendent sauver l’expression hégélienne de « savoir absolu » en indiquant sa limite selon Hegel lui-même, mais alors que Kant dit clairement que la métaphysique peut être close, « absolue », au contraire de l’empirie, il est beaucoup moins certain que (1) Hegel ait écarté toute prétention à une clôture possible du savoir empirique à l’intérieur de son système et (2) que son idée du savoir absolu ait un sens en dehors d’une clôture complète de tout le savoir, car comment penser une fin de l’histoire si la connaissance empirique nous réserve peut-être encore et toujours des surprises ?

On ne le peut que si l’on décide a priori que les résultats empiriques n’ont aucune importance pour nos conceptions historico-politiques, c’est-à-dire n’ont aucune influence sur la pensée pratique, donc que la pensée dans sa dimension pratique est a priori. Le scientisme des élites politiques contemporaines, la légitimation censément scientifique de leur discours, est dépourvu de fondement et vise à déterminer a priori les résultats scientifiques admissibles, c’est-à-dire à lier la science empirique à des considérations exogènes à la praxis scientifique autonome. Les masses prennent la science pour la légitimation d’un discours technocratique qui décide en réalité de ce qu’est la science à partir d’une métaphysique occulte.

Les « Idées de la raison » sont au nombre de trois. Trois idées dont le matérialisme ne peut comprendre qu’elles figurent dans une même catégorie, à savoir le monde avec l’âme et Dieu. – Qui ose parler de kantisme français, de kantisme dans le pays de l’athéisme (Schelling : « der französische Atheismus ») ?

(L’expression de Schelling, tirée de son essai de 1809 Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, ne vise pas à distinguer l’athéisme français d’autres athéismes : il s’agit pour Schelling, dans le passage où il emploie cette expression, de dénoncer l’athéisme en rappelant d’où vient cette immondice, à qui nous la devons.)

Le corps du moi :
Étude transcendantale

(i)

C’est moi qui me donne un corps. Ce corps que « je suis » avant d’avoir une conscience n’est pas mon corps car avant d’avoir une conscience je n’ai pas de moi. L’animalité me précède. Est-ce un corps ? Avant d’être un corps que je me donne, je suis un corps manipulé par d’autres et l’animalité qui possède ce corps ; donc ce n’est pas moi qui me donne un corps. Mais la conscience précède le langage et dès que j’ouvre les yeux au monde je suis en fait conscient et me donne un corps. C’est donc après avoir ouvert les yeux que je me suis donné un corps ? Je nais corps parce que représentation – plutôt que représentation parce que corps, bien que la représentation suppose des sens, donc un corps ? Je crie et pleure et lève mes petits poings serrés vers le ciel au contact de l’air et de la lumière qui me particularisent parce que je leur donne par mon corps –que je me donne– le pouvoir de m’affecter. La conscience me vient dès que je sors du ventre. L’animalité me précède dans le ventre : c’est elle qui donne des coups de pied. Mais hors du ventre c’est moi. Mais c’est bien un corps qui sort du ventre, donc le corps précède la conscience ; pourtant, dis-tu, la géométrie ne le permet pas –la géométrie !– car elle montre que nous ne savons rien des choses et que les corps dans la nature, la nature elle-même n’existent que pour la forme de notre intuition. Or il m’est démontré que mon corps précède cette forme. Il existe des photos de ce corps peu après qu’il fut sorti du ventre, on sait que c’est ce même corps qui s’est mis à babiller, à marcher, puis à parler un jour. Tout est dans la nature.

Si ce corps m’a précédé, ce n’était le corps de personne ; d’où lui suis-je venu ? Ou bien encore, je n’étais personne, donc je n’étais rien, que j’avais déjà un corps. Ce corps a développé un moi. Un moi dont il n’avait pas besoin car les fougères, ces corps végétaux, n’ont pas de moi (que nous sachions) et remplissent les mêmes fonctions naturelles que ce corps mien, en envoyant des graines dans l’atmosphère pour donner naissance à de nouvelles fougères, avant de flétrir et de se décomposer. Ce corps-ci qui n’avait pas besoin de moi se serait donné un moi. Avais-je, moi, besoin de ce corps ? Si la réponse est oui, n’est-il pas plus probable que je me sois donné un corps, ayant besoin d’un corps, que le corps se soit donné un moi, n’en ayant pas besoin ? Et si les fins naturelles du corps ont leur propre dynamique, les fins propres que je me connais n’ont rien à voir avec celles-ci tout en ne se laissant pas concevoir autrement que dans un corps (car même quand je veux me voir en pur esprit je me vois seulement comme un corps invisible et flottant quelque part dans l’air, c’est-à-dire en fait comme un corps dans une nature disposée un peu différemment). Il semblerait donc que je sois bien plutôt le parasite de mon corps. Dès lors, les corps existeraient avant la représentation, mais afin que des « moi » se les approprient à leurs propres fins, même au point de ne plus leur laisser poursuivre librement ces fins qui sont celles des corps, comme la reproduction. Car que fait à ce moi la reproduction des corps ? Elle ne lui sert de rien puisque le moi disparaît, sort du monde avec le corps qu’il occupe. Pour la philosophie de la transmigration, il en sort et se réapproprie un nouveau corps mais, malheureusement pour lui, dans ce nouveau corps c’est comme un nouveau moi qui ne se connaît plus comme le moi qu’il était ; cela revient donc au même que s’il avait disparu.

Alors que ce corps ne veut au fond qu’une chose, se reproduire, je ne me reproduis pas. Ce corps est alors un rebut de la nature. Car ce corps a besoin d’un autre corps pour se reproduire, et cela demande des efforts, cela suppose de surmonter certains obstacles, une intelligence qu’on ne trouve pas ici. Que faut-il penser de cette intelligence ? Elle est la chose la mieux partagée au monde, la qualité la moins rare qui soit. Et ces trésors d’intelligence que recèle l’animal qu’on appelle, pour le distinguer des autres, raisonnable, lui servent à faire ce que font les fougères et les champignons, l’intelligence sert à se reproduire avant de se décomposer.

(Le malentendu possible, en parlant de reproduction, c’est que l’on peut reprocher à celui qui ne se reproduit pas de manière connue –et nous ne parlons plus ici que des individus mâles– de réaliser les finalités de son corps aux meilleures conditions en faisant subir les conséquences de ses actes de reproduction à d’autres en termes d’investissement parental, de se reproduire en faisant payer le prix de cet investissement à d’autres. C’est le fameux coucou, cette fascinante invention de la nature. Si l’on veut éclairer ce domaine des conduites par la notion d’intelligence, c’est bien à la pensée du coucou que l’on est conduit, et il peut arriver en cette matière qu’on prenne l’échec pour un succès et le succès pour un échec.)

C’est moi qui me donne un corps parce que la conscience indivisible en soi se donne un corps dans la représentation. C’est « moi, conscience indivisible », qui me donne un corps individuel, une vie individuelle. La vie se perpétue dans la nature par des germes et des embryons pour l’autoreprésentation de la conscience indivisible en soi, qui dans l’existence particularisée, dans la nature, est encore indivisible mais plus en soi car dans la représentation. En tant qu’indivisible elle se trouve en chaque individu à l’identique, d’où une forme universelle de la subjectivité, mais en tant que phénomène elle s’est individualisée dans des formes particulières. C’est pourquoi je dis « moi » du point de vue de l’universalité et comme phénomène je dis « elle », aussi bien que je dis « moi » comme phénomène et « elle » du point de vue de l’universalité.

(ii)
„Die Dinge an sich al affizierende Ursachen“
(Erich Adickes, Kant und das Ding an sich: Dritter Abschnitt)

La chose en soi agit sur nos sens, notre sensibilité. Or la sensibilité est le corps, présuppose le corps, donc l’espace et le temps…

Les phénomènes sont les objets des sens. Ce que je connais par les sens est inconnaissable en soi. Mon corps est inconnaissable en soi. Quand je parle des sens, d’où je conclus à l’inconnaissable des choses en soi, de quoi parlé-je donc ? Dire que les phénomènes sont les objets des sens, c’est dire qu’ils sont des objets pour le corps, lui-même phénomène. « La chose en soi agit sur ma sensibilité » : la chose en soi présuppose le corps plutôt que le corps la chose en soi.

Ce qui naît est chose en soi : un corps pour les intellects qui le voient naître, un corps pour ma propre conscience dès qu’elle est suffisamment développée. Il faut un corps pour avoir des sens. Il faut ce phénomène pour percevoir des phénomènes. Je ne nais pas dans l’espace et le temps, je ne nais pas dans la nature, autrement que comme phénomène pour la sensibilité de ceux qui me voient naître et pour ma propre sensibilité. La nature complète, fermée sur elle-même comme totalité –le monde–, tout peut s’expliquer par ses lois, hormis les jugements synthétiques a priori : la géométrie ! Il n’y a pas de nature sans la géométrie, et où la géométrie se trouve-t-elle sinon dans l’entendement pur ? C’est l’entendement qui donne ses lois à la nature. La géométrie est l’intuition pure, reine Anschauung, ce qui se ramène à la sensibilité pure, reine Sinnlichkeit, aux sens avant tout objet des sens. Tu dis : « La géométrie est une simple réflexion de la faculté naturelle de l’intuition conditionnée par la sensibilité, ce travail ne suppose aucun pouvoir législateur de l’entendement. » Donc, la causalité n’est que la généralisation empirique de l’habitude et n’existe pas de manière inconditionnelle : la science ne repose sur rien. Kant avait le plus grand besoin de la prémisse de la scientificité empirique car seule cette prémisse, en tant qu’inconditionnalité des catégories, pouvait emporter la conviction d’une aufgeklärte Menschheit, d’une humanité éclairée, quant au fait que la nature n’est pas le tout de l’homme. Il faut que la science repose sur quelque chose, et cela ne peut être que sur des catégories inconditionnelles qui ne se tirent pas de la nature par induction dans l’expérience mais fondent la nature en fondant l’expérience possible. La possibilité de la science est la preuve du surnaturel. « Que nul n’entre ici s’il n’est géomètre. »

(iii)
„Der Sinnlichkeit gemäß“

Le problème de la sensibilité reste entier, car autant les catégories sont des entités intellectuelles, « esprit », autant les sens sont la même chose que le corps. Dire que la chose en soi est pour nous un objet phénoménal « der Sinnlichkeit gemäß » (conformément à notre sensibilité), c’est dire qu’elle est un objet parce qu’il y a notre corps, que l’on veut voir lui-même comme un objet phénoménal alors que ce corps est ce qui conditionne la possibilité de la corporéité phénoménale des choses, « der Sinnlichkeit gemäß ». Le fondement de la géométrie est le corps dont la géométrie est censée réfuter, via les jugements synthétiques a priori, l’existence en soi en tant que corps, avec ses propriétés de corps. Par conséquent, pas de géométrie sans ce corps dans la nature avec sa sensibilité, plutôt que pas de nature sans géométrie. La géométrie repose sur la nature et non la nature sur la géométrie. – Donc la science ne repose sur rien !

(Nous avons en partie répondu, ou essayé de répondre, à ces raisonnements dans notre Apologie de l’épistémologie kantienne. La sensibilité est certes à distinguer de l’entendement et de ses catégories, mais la localisation cérébrale de la pensée permettrait de dire que la pensée, les catégories sont le corps, de même que nous disons ici que les sens sont le corps. Certaines expressions de Kant, comme ce « conformément à notre sensibilité » cité par Adickes, et d’autres du même acabit dans Schopenhauer, ne sont guère heureuses du point de vue de la philosophie transcendantale et prêtent facilement le flanc à la critique matérialiste.)

Athéna archaïque de Gortyne en Crète
(goddess-athena.org)

Le portrait de Duchmol Gray 2

« Le portrait de Duchmol Gray (Tw19) : Accusés de vol en réunion pour avoir décroché le portrait de Macron : « On risque quand même cinq ans de prison. » (France 3 Alsace) Il n’y a pas de vol quand on ne convoite pas l’objet pris et qu’on le tient à la disposition de la justice pour lui faire prendre la poussière à la Caisse des dépôts. »

C’est le principe général du droit connu sous le nom d’animus furandi. « The offense of theft consists of the dishonest taking of any moveable property out of the possession of another without his consent. Dishonest intention exists when the person so taking the property intends to cause wrongful gain to himself or wrongful loss to the other. This intention is known as animus furandi. » (bnblegal)

Comme il n’y a clairement pas de « gain pour soi » dans le décrochage du portrait présidentiel, l’accusation voudrait sans doute affirmer qu’il y a une « perte pour l’autre », à savoir la mairie d’où le portrait a été décroché. L’appréciation de cette perte ne peut dépendre, en l’occurrence, du point de vue des personnes privées en charge du fonctionnement de la mairie, elle dépend de celle des administrés, qui sont dans cette affaire « l’autre » qui subit la « perte ». Or, puisque le portrait n’est là que par la volonté de l’exécutif communal (« une coutume mais pas une obligation »), on ne peut présumer que les administrés soient plus heureux de voir ce portrait sur les murs de la mairie que de le voir décroché.

Child Tax System
(Continuation)

Continued from A Discussion of Dr Robin Baker’s Child Tax System (Nov 2015, here) which starts with the words: “In his book Sex in the Future (1999), evolutionary biologist Dr Robin Baker (University of Manchester, UK) advocates a ‘child tax system’ in which each male genitor, as determined by now available and satisfactorily reliable paternity tests, would be required on a systematic basis to provide financial support for each of his genetic children.”

(i)

My own view on the issue is resting on an old legal notion expressed in the Latin phrase “exceptio plurium (concubentium).” The exceptio plurium, namely the objection that the mother had several lovers at the time of child conception, is a legal impediment to paternity claims. Dr Robin Baker’s proposal amounts to dismissing this notion with the advent of genetic testing.

In a 1972 French law creating the possibility for a fatherless child to sue a man for maintenance if the child could convince a court of law that that man was his mother’s lover at the time of his (the child’s) conception, the possibility was still made void by the defendant (the lover) invoking the exceptio plurium. A child could even sue and get maintenance money from several men in cases like gang rape, in which case the exceptio plurium is no defense. Even allowing for such exceptions a paternity claim could always be rebuked through invoking the woman’s debauchery.

Dr Baker says each genetic father should be made to pay. To rephrase it along the line of legal studies, the exceptio plurium would be a case of “old law is cheap law” (De Geest): Back then we could not ascertain genetic paternity but now we can, so what the legislation and especially courts of law have to do is integrate genetic testing as proof in judicial proceedings and draw the consequences, rather than rely on intricate constructions based on ballpark estimates. I believe this is not so simple.

First, there is abortion. A woman who does not want a child can terminate her pregnancy, that’s her right, but in Dr Baker’s system a man who does not want a child would, if known as the genetic father, still have to pay for the child. Men have less room than women in his system. How is this fair?

Dr Baker’s system pampers women’s feelings and hurts men’s in yet another way. According to evolutionary psychology, men cheat on their legitimate spouses in order to replicate their genes without incurring the expenses of raising the offspring, whereas women cheat in order to carry babies with better genes than their men’s. Therefore, irrespective of their sexual activity being legitimate or not, women’s psyche is geared toward raising babies, whereas that of men is so geared only with their legitimate partners (in fact, with anyone the man himself finds legitimate, as he may legitimize natural children, which by the way is disguised legal polygyny as the man can thus have legitimate children from several simultaneous women). Dr Baker’s system is vexatious to men’s psyche. Again, how is this fair if each gender’s psyche being the result of natural evolution is per se neither fair nor unfair?

If we examine the rationale behind the legislator’s making an exception to the exception (to the exceptio plurium), we will reach the conclusion that it is not a case of “because genetic paternity could not be ascertained.” It is the exceptio plurium itself that is a result of this lack of certainty in the past and not the exception to it, which derives from an altogether different reason. The reason is that, in the case of gang rapes for instance, it doesn’t matter who the genetic father is, all men involved owe maintenance money to the child. This is because one may argue they had to form a gang to reach their end, the gang was the means to the end. In such cases it is Dr Baker’s proposal that would be “cheap law,” because it would subsume the exception under the same head again from which the legislator had wanted to distinguish it in order to take specific circumstances into account.

(ii)

I took the man and woman who cheat as example but Dr Baker have single mothers in mind. The successfully cheating wife keeps pouring her man’s wealth on her children anyway, so she doesn’t even need a child tax. But I took this example to show that when both parties do what they shouldn’t the law should do nothing. In the West criminal penalties for adultery have been canceled but adverse legal consequences remain in civil, namely divorce procedures, so we may keep saying that people shouldn’t cheat their spouses legally speaking. (Consideration of the civil negative effects of adultery –namely, that the adulterous spouse may be the loser in a divorce– should have precluded legalizing the legitimization of natural children, because this is legal polygamy by means of adultery, which is absurd.)

This leads to the conclusion that intercourse shouldn’t be had by unmarried people either, if the woman wants the man to invest in the child, that is, because outside a binding contract the law is not bound to see her as committed to one man, only marriage can have the law presume her bound to one man and clear her presumptively from exceptio plurium concubentium.

(iii)

In a recent exchange Robin Baker has reiterated that his proposal is simple, that it could be passed, if not for the floating notion of fairness, in any case for the sake of simplicity. I confess I had the faint notion that he was moved by a will of more fairness for single mothers, but all right let’s examine the argument of simplicity.

To be sure, filiation law is a mess. As I said, it’s all “intricate constructions based on ballpark estimates.” This describes among other things the guesses judges and legislators have to make about the “moment of conception.” They have had to refine presumptions about said moment in line with developments of biology, but refining here has actually meant to make their guesses more ballpark because they would take into account more and more exceptions to a basic 9 months computation! A serious taking of science into account seems to make things more intricate and this is consistent with the phrase I used, “old law is cheap law” – cheap because old law used to make gross assumptions about biological phenomena, rigidly excluding possible deviations which we know can occur and therefore must make room for. Will genetic testing make things easier rather than the contrary?

Exceptio plurium is an impediment to paternity claims, that is, it will prevent the court from looking further into the merits of the claim; it stops there. This is convenient and simple for courts.

Then there is the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision Michael H. v. Gerald D. (1989). “Primary Holding: A state can create an irrebuttable presumption that a husband is the father of a child born into his family.” (supreme.justia) The California law that prevailed against a DNA test is one of the oldest and simplest systems, encapsulated in the Latin phrase Pater is est quem nuptiae demonstrant (He is the father whom marriage indicates). Dr Baker’s system wouldn’t be as simple as this rule.

1/ Gerald and Carole do not want Michael’s money (child tax) if that means paternity rights for Michael. Therefore, in Baker’s system, the law would have to dissociate paternity rights and paternity duties, which entails a host of legal intricacies.

2/ Otherwise the right to child tax money would be actionable by single mothers only. The mother would name a man, whom the court and police would then compel to take a DNA test and if the test found a 98 per cent likelihood of paternity the man would be liable to pay the tax. Beside the fact that a 98% figure is not satisfactory because it means that 2% of such decisions will be miscarriages of justice (however, the figure has probably improved since 1989), the law would likely have to set limits on such name-dropping because it would find out a few of these single mothers have no clue who the father is and they name the man with the deepest pockets, hoping he’s the father, then the second best, and so on.

3/ If, then, Big Brother has the DNA signature of everybody and allocate individuals’ resources according to a grand child tax scheme whether common-law parents agree or not, then this is likely to impact family concepts, entailing there again a host of new legal questions, all fascinating but not simple.

What if the single mother names a foreigner, upon whom Big Brother has no jurisdiction? Even in the grand scheme there would be fatherless children unless the grand-scheme country cuts itself from the world. Besides, children born of incest will remain out of the program unless incest laws are abolished, because to date an incestuous father cannot claim paternity. There are also various issues with surrogacy, adding to the complexities that the child tax will not fail to raise from the lawyer’s point of view.

May 26, 2018

LI The Future of Media Illiteracy

Does the idea of too high a price to pay for achieving one’s biological goals make any sense? In Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, the main character Nora has achieved reproductive success, she has three kids and her husband has just become head of the bank so together they will bring up their kids in the best possible conditions. She nevertheless leaves house, husband, and children to work on her own because she does not want to fail her “duty to herself” any longer. Can a “duty to oneself” be jeopardized by the pursuit of biological goals?

According to biosociologist Brant Wenegrat, “motherhood in societies like ours does predict an increased risk of depressive disorders” (Illness and Power, 1995). Some scholarly confirmation of the playwright’s insight, then, as motherhood and parenting, i.e. biological success itself would lead to increased biological risk, in the shape of dysfunctional conditions for the children raised by a depressive mother. Or is it nonsense? This prediction is not confirmed in the book Darwinian Psychiatry (1998), by McGuire and Troisi, which states that male celibates are the most at risk of depression, precisely because of their biological failure (failed reproductive machines). Two opposite conclusions, then, from scholars of the same school of thought. For McGuire and Troisi women’s mental health is not as dependent on the success of biological reproduction as men’s, whereas for Wenegrat successful biological reproduction tends to affect negatively women’s mental health and not men’s.

Modern work, now, is not an evolved biological media for male competition (contrary to what evolutionary psychologists Tiger and Fox, 1971, claim), as for millenaries slavery was the rule and dominant males did not work (savanna-activity, i.e. hunter-gatherer environment of evolutionary adaptedness EEA-like hunting was aristocrats’ hobby throughout the world in the past of civilization). In this way, and, again, contrary to the views of some EP scholars, modern work goes against biological tendencies. If a duty to oneself exists and, if we take Nora’s example, opposes the mere pursuit of biological goals, then modern work may be the way to fulfill one’s duty to oneself instead of biological goals. Yet in evolutionary terms I see nothing that warrants nor could even possibly warrant this ‘literary’ conclusion.

Gustave Le Bon, in his Psychologie des foules, talks about women who throw acid at their lovers’ face as something frequent in his days. Today, the media talks about this, pointing the finger to men, mostly in Pakistan and other Muslim countries, throwing acid in order to oppress women because those men are Muslims. In fact, EP scholar David Buss also talks of Jamaican women doing the same with their female rivals nowadays. Yet talk about acid attacks these days, and you will find that people associate it with Muslim men. There is a Sherlock Holmes story by Conan Doyle about a woman throwing acid at her lover’s face too, to confirm Le Bon (The Adventure of the Illustrious Client).

Outline for a dystopian sci-fi novel. As a foreign body inside the societies where their communities live, the Lormocks have a perception of their own, the basic idea of which being that their community’s interest only partially overlaps with that of the host societies, which they seek to exploit. They are parasites. Neuroparasites. For a long time our knowledge of parasites was perfunctory; we knew lice and other pest that suction blood and weaken the body, and that’s about all. It took us decades to find out that rabies is a parasite that compels the dog host to bite in order to carry the parasite over to more hosts. Now we have a much broader picture of what parasites are doing: They control their host, sometimes they castrate it, sometimes they do not allow him to take food, they do as they please with their host. As the Lormocks achieve middleman-minority status due to their ingroup solidarity inside societies that they help make atomistic, they endeavor to control the channels of public expression, and of course they use these according to their community’s interest. Sycophancy toward the Lormocks, serving this foreign and parasitic body’s purposes, becomes a sine qua non of individual success –and fitness– in society.

Subliminal advertising: the elephant penis in the living room.

Since the July 2016 failed coup in Turkey, Erdogan has been conducting massive repression in the country. Thousands of civil servants are being sacked and their names published so they will never find jobs again in the country. Intellectuals are also targeted.

272 writers from all over the world have signed a petition against the judicial trials that will open against journalist Ahmet Altan and his brother, economist Mehmet Altan.

Both are accused by the government of having sent subliminal messages on TV about the impending coup. As far as I know, a world premiere! (Le Monde, Sep 21, 2016)

Turkey’s President Erdogan is thus giving support to my research. I am available as an expert at the trial.

Taco Subliminals

“There where similar charges [of the use of subliminal techniques, (like the “rats” in “democrats” in U.S. 2000 campaign trail, if you remember] by Andrés Manuel López Obrador against the right-wing candidate Felipe Calderón in the Mexican presidential elections of 2006, in which the color scheme for a popular soft drink and its publicity mirrored those of Calderón’s party. Opponent saw the similarity as a sneaky way to circumvent campaign spending limits by a corporate supporter of Calderón.” (Charles R. Acland, Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence, 2011).

Acland’s aim is to debunk subliminals as just another “urban legend.” Faced with such incredulity, it is really heartening to find support from intellectuals like Eric McLuhan [see Index for Professor Eric McLuhan’s contributions]. The example above shows that the use of non-verbal persuasion techniques is part of the public debate now, as it should be in media-literate constituencies. Information society must not amount to mass manipulation by mass media but to media literacy of the public.

The Age of Empathy (2009) by primatologist Frans de Waal talks of an experiment by Swedish professor Ulf Dimberg : When people are shown visuals of angry faces they tend to frown and of happy faces they tend to smile, and this is true also when the faces are subliminal! De Waal says Dimberg’s results have been met with resistance…

Dimberg, Thunberg, & Elmehed (2000), Unconscious facial reactions to emotional facial expressions. Psychological Science 11: 86-89.

Jacques Castonguay’s book La Psychologie au service du consommateur (1978), said by prefacer Nicolle Forget, the then chair of Canada consumers association, to put the limelight on subliminal advertising (« Il aura eu le mérite aussi de ramener dans l’actualité la question de la publicité subliminale »), is terribly disappointing. Albeit not in denial, Castonguay says Marshall McLuhan and Wilson Bryan Key’s views are “exaggerated,” so the topic is expedited in a couple of pages and he can devote the rest of his book to conveying the nauseating platitudes that business insiders wrote for the public.

Take Buddhism. Basically a personality cult (in the person of the Buddha).

The three following statements cannot be true taken together and studies show that 3/ is consistently true.

1/ The activity and development of the brain’s right hemisphere is not taken into account in IQ tests. (Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science, 1988)

2/ Asians are right-hemisphere people. (Ibid.)

3/ Asians (Northern Asians) have the highest scores in IQ tests.

Well, they may be true taken together but only if Asians are superior to Westerners even in the skills that are not Asians’ best (left-hemisphere skills), that is, if Asians are superior in everything.

Laws of Media’s ascribing several contemporary art forms to the brain’s right hemisphere, such as atonal music, finds some resistance. These forms appear much too much intellectual (left hemisphere) to me – professors’ experiments rather than art proper. If atonality is an expression of acoustic space (p.52), yet our ears (as evolved) want no part in the business of atonality. “As evolved”: According to evolutionary biology, that is, not since the phonetic alphabet, but in the African savanna. Atonal music is an intellectual, abstract, left-hemisphere business: Left-hemisphere radicalism.

Same with relativity theory. Not that I know to which hemisphere it belongs; but I find it inconsistent with Kant’s transcendental idealism, that is, if time and space are a priori forms of our perception I don’t think it makes sense to say time-space can be distorted by massive objects.

Same with psychoanalysis. It has been exploded. Randy Thornhill, for instance, has concisely demonstrated that an Oedipus complex makes no evolutionary sense at all. “The Oedipus complex proposed by Freud would never have been given any credence if anyone had considered the evolutionary fate of a trait that produced such incestuous desires (Thornhill and Thornhill 1987). Because of the reduced viability of offspring produced by mating of close relatives, close inbreeding is selected against. Thus, Freud postulated as fundamental to human nature a trait that simply cannot exist as an evolved human psychological adaptation.” (Thornhill and Palmer, A Natural History of Rape, 2000)

Same with Copenhagen interpretation. If the idea is that we should get rid of determinism in science, then it makes no sense, by definition. The uncertainty principle only tells us that our perceptual endowment allows us not to perceive all causes and determinations in nature – not that these causes and determinations do not exist in nature.

Electric telephone man

Electric man is discarnate (McLuhan). What about the man who is used to telling his friends: “I don’t use the phone anymore except for emails”?

He is both discarnate and dyslexic.

Email is discarnate nudism because electric man cannot conceal his dyslexia.

Yet we can. Electric man has by now invented the simplified writing system that Eric McLuhan envisioned for our dyslexic times. He has made it almost completely phonetic:

4 => for

2 => to

8 => -ate ex. contempl8

Same process in French: “c’est” becomes just “c” etc.

Some exploration of the fringe: Reverse Speech

First thing first, one interesting thing about Australian David Oates’s reverse speech theory is that it is debunked on Wkpd by the same sort of arguments that are used against subliminal perception, namely “pareidolia, the tendency of the human brain to perceive meaningful patterns in random noise.“

According to this theory, the unconscious mind expresses itself backward in our utterances.

When reading about this, I was reminded of a video I saw a few months ago (now withdrawn). In that speech by Obama, the President at some point says: “Let me express, let me express my faith &c.” Playing the passage backward, the author of the video hears, and convincingly so, for “Let me express, let me express”: “Serve Satan, serve Satan.” A creepy commentary about the President’s faith.

The author says he could not reproduce the same effect when recording himself saying these words, which is confirmed by Oates. Our utterances, when played backward, do not pronounce the same even when we pronounce the same speech. That leads to the question of the origin of pronunciation differences (accents &c). Why do some people never lose their local accent even after living many years in the capital city when others lose it very fast in the same transplant conditions?

The theory is fascinating at any rate. For one thing, it could never be designed nor tested before the invention of audio recording.

But above all, if the unconscious can understand reverse speech (words pronounced backward, as stressed by Bill Key: cf W.B. Key at the 1995 Judas Priest trial), why could it not express itself backward as well? Key’s research helps buttress Oates’s contentions.

Oates wanted to check the truth of evangelists’ assertions that rock music contains reverse satanic messages. He found some intentional reverse messages but also was led to the discovery that reverse speech can carry meaningful messages.

Using Jungian notions, he then says the word “Satan” occurs rather often in reverse speech because it’s embedded in the collective unconscious, and it serves to express negative feelings.

There is a school of thought that sees elaborate clothing as a way to conceal bodily imperfections and thus distort the choice of a mate. A few German racialists (Heinrich Pudor, Richard Ungewitter…) adopted such views, and nudism was considered sound and healthy in some Nazi circles (German Nazi nude photograph magazines are collector’s items today). Scanty clothing, in that view, such as that of contemporary American youth, boys and girls alike, would be close to that philosophy. In the absence of matrimonial intermediaries, who take a careful look at and check the physical condition of the future partners in arranged-marriage societies, people need to check by themselves. In free (as opposed to arranged)-marriage societies, nudism, or close substitutes, is in order.

Global Village’s Pizza Gate

(Posted as comment to a since then withdrawn YouTube video, Nov 2016)

The case is rather strong as here presented, however I don’t see ‘proof’ in the technical sense. Yet it definitely should be sufficient ground for the police to further investigate in that direction.

What is new about the so-called Pizza Gate is that it is a criminal investigation carried out by internauts. Being public, it can’t help being a smear campaign at the same time, and I guess this is the reason why several people involved in this new kind of investigation have been banned or shadowbanned on Twitter after the pizza parlor concerned asked Twitter to do something about it or be held accountable for the smear campaign.

Yet, as good ol’ Marshall McLuhan said, we have entered the ‘global village,’ meaning we really are back to village life. For one thing it means privacy will shrink to nothingness or almost nothing, like in a traditional village. It also means, from what I gather from public Pizza Gate investigation, that ‘villagers’ will take charge of law and order themselves. Remember these ‘investigators’ mainly work on the evidence brought to them – brought to everybody in the village – by WikiLeaks. Advancing a technicality according to which all evidence available in this way is void because the source is a ‘spy,’ a ‘traitor,’ a ‘renegade,’ whatever, as is common and perhaps sound practice in the traditional views of law courts, would seem extremely disconnected with the real world under the circumstances of the global village. And remember, these circumstances are here to stay.

The level of tax imposed on bachelors is indecent. I can’t even keep a mistress. One has to be a married man for that.

The beautiful people of adverts

Facial symmetry is more attractive than asymmetry and high-status people are more symmetric than poor people in general. Advertisers just pick attractive people (and usually airbrush the model according to systematic, technical rules): Turns out we associate these models with wealthy people.

Asymmetry can be due to adverse environmental conditions during development (deprivation) and betrays a less healthy phenotype –”wealth is health”– but the answer is not to torture our natural biases by trying to impose other, silly tastes on us, that would have us prefer crippled, perhaps sterile (in the case of obesity) persons.

Beauty is largely objective and a marker of health. Make all people healthier rather than trying, out of a misconceived sense of justice, to force unnatural tastes on people.

The beauty world of advertising systematically creates “supernormal stimuli” to which the real world can only be unequal. This is the true definition of the problem.

One result of behavioral science is that masturbation conditioning is particularly efficient. It even works with high psychotics – the least conditionable of all.

French journalists had once agreed they would make no news with politicians’ private lives. It shows they wanted no place for morality concerns in the public debate, which is an unjustified prerogative the journalists bestowed on themselves. This will not last, however. There have already been news on President Hollande’s affair with a B-rated actress a few years ago. They made news of it and the president’s popularity plummeted at once. Morality concerns ought not to be ignored.

McLuhanesque strolls

What’s the point of writing and publishing books, as literacy has ended? This thought brings me solace.

Also, in the literacy age, there was a public: It was made up by publishing houses and the press. Now the public has disappeared and thought is free.

Counter-culture is an ego trip now. Bad form. We’re the village.

The global village is already something real. Internet social networks are the village. The whole world on a “timeline” (Twitter jargon)! (English as single medium, all other languages due to be discarded?)

Thought becomes aphoristic: Think about the aphoristic-minded world of Twitter users whose every tweet cannot exceed 140 signs (280 now)! Literary heroes disappear. Academic scholars look awkward; the littlest rascal in the world can make fun of them and their ponderous knowledge in retweets as public as the original tweets. Journalists are corrected and insulted in front of their devoted readers. Comedians prove less funny than their followers. Actresses are less beautiful than their fans. Politicians receive sound advice from the administered herd.

We’ve all become sayers of sayings, each of us expresses the village wisdom. It’s tribal, deindividualized, exactly as predicted by McLuhan Marshall and Eric.

With the decline of the Gutenberg Galaxy, the written word is sheer lip service. It says whatever anybody wants to hear, upholds consensus. If the medium is the message, then the message is not even between the lines. It’s in quite another galaxy where literacy has no relevant use as such, only as distraction.

Libertarians defend personal liberty against the law but they seem to have nothing to say about personal liberty against mind control by big business, which has become a huge (muted) issue with the advent of scientific marketing. Against this control I see no other shield than the law, like Prohibition was a shield against the liquor industry’s endeavor to “break down sales resistance” by advertising and PR. The fake-news media opposed the Prohibition and contributed mightily to its inadequate enforcement (cf Upton Sinclair, The Wet Parade).

Mensa and GMAT

My correspondence from when I wanted to be a Mensa member without taking their tests.

Dear Sir or Madam, (to info@americanmensa.org)

On Mensa Website, qualifying score for the GMAT is “95% or above.”

At a second and last attempt after a crash course in 2004, I got 710 / 94%. My mother tongue is French and before taking my first GMAT test I only practiced English at school. Then, I took a second test after a few months in U.S.

Do you think that people having English as mother tongue are advantaged in the GMAT, or not at all? In case of a yes, shouldn’t the qualifying score for nonnative English speakers be adapted?

Given the time, and thus reflex, factor involved in the test, it seems English fluency (the test language) is important, which puts nonnative speakers at a disadvantage, although per se this fluency does not appear to be relevant to what Mensa membership is about. (July 5, 2017)

Hello,

Thank you for the email. Unfortunately, the only way we have to evaluate evidence that is sent in is based on the test publisher’s normative data. To be honest, I am not certain how the GMAC calculates the scores on the exam so I cannot speak to whether or not they make those kinds of allowances. We accept the 95th percentile on the exam based on the fact that their norms are somewhat skewed by the population that takes the exam. The population that attends graduate school is not necessarily a representation of the general population so we allow for more than just the typical top 2 percent.

(T. B., Mensa manager for membership and admissions, July 7, 2017)

Thank you very much for your reply.

Do you estimate that top 5% of graduate students population is an inclusive or rather restrictive approximation of top 2% of general population?

According to one source,

“Factors such as native vs non-native English speakers, US vs non-US, white vs non-white, etc – generally don’t affect one’s score too much. In terms of covariance analysis, the variation between these subgroups was always less than 1/4 standard deviation.”

I think we know the variation goes against nonnative speakers. In case you’d estimate the 95th percentile is not large already, would you be willing to take this variation into account too?

Now, according to Lawrence Rudner, GMAC’s chief psychometrician,

“Yes, the GMAT test is administered in English and is designed for programs that teach in English. But the required English skill level is much less than what students will need in the classroom. The exam requires just enough English to allow us to adequately and comprehensively assess Verbal reasoning, Quantitative reasoning and Integrated Reasoning skills.” (link)

That the test only requires “just enough English” doesn’t preclude a variation factor between native and nonnative speakers, due to mental reflexes ingrained in native vs nonnative speakers and more consequential in time-constrained tests than in classroom attendance. Such a variation may justify Mensa to accept a tolerance margin for its admissions based on GMAT scores in the case of nonnative speakers.

If the variation is not “too much,” “less than 1/4 standard deviation,” as I understand the phrasing it is not altogether negligible inside the scope considered (the above tolerance margin). (July 11, 2017)

Florent,

At this time, we do not take anything additional in to consideration for the GMAT. The 95th percentile score is the minimum we will accept. (T. B., July 12)

Thank you, T. I guess I’ll have to take the tests at Mensa France, then.

Yet I am curious how you get from “the population is somewhat skewed” to “2% translates into 5%”. Does the data support this? What does GMAC say about it? (July 12)

No more from T. Let’s ask GMAC (Graduate Management Admission Council):

Dear Sir or Madam, (to customercare@gmac.com)

Mensa International is an “organization open to people who score at the 98th percentile or higher on a standardized, supervised IQ or other approved intelligence test.“

People who score at the 95th percentile or higher on GMAT are, however, entitled to join in, and the reason is:

“We accept the 95th percentile on the exam based on the fact that their norms are somewhat skewed by the population that takes the exam. The population that attends graduate school is not necessarily a representation of the general population so we allow for more than just the typical top 2 percent.” (Email from T. B., manager of membership and admissions, Mensa USA)

According to your knowledge, does the data support this translation “98th=>95th”?

I took a GMAT test in 2004 and scored 710 / 94%. I asked Mensa if they took into consideration a tolerance margin for nonnative English speakers and they said they did not, so I have been asking them the exact same question as I am asking here, currently waiting for their answer. It is, however, my understanding that Mr B.’s phrasing above rather hints at a “guesstimate” on their part, a rule of thumb that should justify them to show some flexibility.

No answer. Between those who refuse considering a pinch of pliancy with their rule-of-thumb regulations and those who coldly disregard emails, talk of psychorigids!

Aristotle’s “prime mover” (as God) has been given the coup de grâce by Kant, with the latter’s antinomies, according to which it is beyond human reason to determine whether the world is finite or infinite, has begun or has been eternal. Each of both opposite conclusions on these two antinomies (there are four in the Critique of Pure Reason) is a contradiction in itself⁺. This being because our mental apparatus does not describe the thing-in-itself (which, presumably, could not have contradictions in itself without ceasing to exist). I find it a sound position to hold, with Kant, that no rational proof of God’s existence is to be expected in such conditions. The one proof would be the moral law, if it could be ascertained that it’s something true and not derived from the laws of nature (which, for Kant, is the case indeed, so in no way Kant can be called an atheist).

⁺Monotheisms answer one of these antinomies with a created world, and a prime mover, whereas Hinduism and Buddhism answer with an uncreated world, and both are convinced their position is rational.

There’s a passage in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where a ruthless slaveholder defends his practice and monstrous unconcern for the well-being of his slaves (his practice being to exploit them to the utmost, calculating that it would lead the slaves to death, and to new expense from buying slaves, after a few years and inscribing this computation as a mere data in his books) with the words: “This is a free country.“

You may find the same kind of situation elsewhere. I once scorned the Jesuits of Paraguay because they made their wooden statues ‘speak’ to the Indians through clever contrivances, but it makes no doubt in my mind that their Socialist form of government with Indians was much more humanitarian than the lay encomiendas of the time. Yet the encomenderos defended their prerogatives as the heritage of communal liberties, while the Jesuits were, before the king turned against them, the arm of central monarchy. For a long time, in the Middle Ages, government authority and coercion were grounded by theologians on the original sin and the resulting wicked nature of man.

Contra EP (Evolutionary Psychology)

Several studies seeking to verify Devendra Singh’s result on a universal preference for waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) of .7 could not confirm it. One was carried out in Peru and another in Tanzania among hunter-gatherers, whom EP claim are behavioral copies of our Pleistocene ancestors (although behavior of different groups of contemporary hunter-gatherers can vary greatly on many essential counts).

In Adapting Minds (2006), David Buller shows convincingly that most of the main EP studies are based on sloppy reading of the data. For instance, Daly and Wilson (The Truth about Cinderella, 1998) amalgamate physical and sexual abuse (!), yet obviously sexual abuse by a stepfather is no confirmation whatever of their view that stepparents tend to be hostile to stepchildren because the latter are only an evolutionary cost to them. Reading the data attentively in fact disproves their view. Buller presents the alternative hypothesis that marriage offers mating opportunities rather than paternity certainty; in such a case evolution would not have selected an averse feeling toward stepchildren, which Daly & Wilson’s data do not even show. Buller also says social workers have a bias against stepparents when they fill child death certificates. So the data D&W examined, mostly from social services, in fact is biased against stepparents, and even then these data do not show the overrepresentation of abusive stepparents D&W claim to have found. Most likely, now, their work has reinforced, if possible, the social workers’ bias, and I have done the same here on my blog, as I followed on D&W’s steps, taking their conclusions with no grain of salt.

I might as well let Buller talk.

On anecdotal evidence from infanticide among mammals:

“the discussion of infanticide-as-adaptation turns to be nothing but a red herring in the end. … Daly and Wilson state the record straight … ‘Human beings are not like langurs or lions,’ they inform us. ‘We know that sexually selected infanticide is not a human adaptation because men, unlike male langurs and lions, do not routinely, efficiently dispose of their predecessors’ young. … Child abuse must therefore be considered a non-adaptive or maladaptive byproduct of the evolved psyche’s functional organization, rather than an adaptation in its own right. … All told, we see little reason to imagine that the average reproductive benefits of killing stepchildren would ever have outweighed the average costs enough to select for specifically infanticidal inclinations.’” (p.411)

On mating as paternity opportunity:

“if a male can secure paternity opportunities from a female by providing care to her children, even if those children are the offspring of another male, the male enhances his chances of having children of his own and thereby transmitting his genes to future generations. So, another male’s child can make a contribution to a male’s fitness via the opportunities for paternity provided by that child’s mother in exchange for parental care provided to the child. The possibility of such fitness payoffs, however, means that we should not expect male psychology to be so unconditionally averse to investing in unrelated children.” (p.390) (Paternal care is primarily a mating effort and second a parenting effort: p.393)

iii

One of Satoshi Kanazawa’s main claims, and all the other EPs (hippies?) with him, is that high-status men have more sex partners than low-status men. Yet Kinsey has shown the exact opposite in his famous, pioneering surveys. Something happened in the mean time?

In fact, all this BS about high-status males being like gorillas males in gorilla harems is an atrocious regression of Western scholarship. A few decades ago, Darwinians used to talk of the “fertility of the unfit” (that’s the title of a book). There’s a Darwinian contradiction in terms in such a phrase (fertility, of course, means high fertility here), wich a Darwinian could not fail to see and yet they (eugenicists) fully endorsed the paradox. They saw something to which EP boys, with their gorilla model, are blind. What they saw, and what solves the contradiction, is homogamy. Call it unfitness homogamy, if you like.

The EP view of “powerful and famous” males is based on primatology and misleading.

1/ From the longitudinal Stanford Marshmallow experiment, we know that children high on self-restraint have high status later in life. How does it square with having more sex partners than people low on self-restraint?

2/ Polygamy tends to be in the form of serial marriage (powerful and famous men tend to have as a matter of fact several spouses serially, but the number of their affairs is gossip and, as a matter of fact again, unknown). (A view held, among others, by Robert Wright.)

3/ Traditional types of philanderers now make the news as rapists, à la Harvey Weinstein.

4/ Even the highest rates of cuckoldry known (30% in some working-class compounds –number of children whose biological father is another man unbeknownst to the man at home) do not support the view that high-status males have greater access to females. In fact, all these 30% “bastards” may have been sired by working-class neighbors for all we know. Also, Buller relevantly points that in countries where dowry exists the fact that wealthy men have more wives hardly supports the idea that this is a female preference.

The Fertility of the Unfit, 1903, by Dr. William Chapple (New Zealand)

First thing to take into account is the unprecedented fact of demographic transition. Unknown in nature, human populations have started declining as goods became more widely available (whereas in nature populations decline due to adverse environmental factors). This is seen as a confirmation of the moral restraint check on fertility posited by Malthus beside the two “natural” checks, vice and misery. Quotes:

“A rapid and continuous decline in the birth-rate of Northern and Western Europe, in contravention of all known biological and economic laws, has filled demographists with amazement.“

Whereas: “The tendency in the races of history has been to over-population, or to population beyond the food supply“

“The very qualities, therefore, that make the social unit a law-abiding and useful citizen, who could and should raise the best progeny for the State, also enable him to limit his family, or escape the responsibility of family life altogether; while, on the other hand, the very qualities which make a man a social burden, a criminal, a pauper, or a drunkard –improvidence and defective inhibition– ensure that his fertility will be unrestrained, except by the checks of biological law.“

“If moral restraint with the consequent limitations of families is the peculiar characteristic of the best people in the state, and the absence of this characteristic expressing itself in normal fertility is peculiar to the worst people of the state, the future of the race may be divined“

“Vice and misery are more active checks amongst the very poor, and abortion is practised to a very considerable extent, but the appalling fact remains, that the birth-rate of the unfit goes on undisturbed, while the introduction of higher checks amongst the normal classes has led to a marked decline.“

&, as another way of phrasing the above: “The defectives are more fertile than any other classes because of the very defect that makes them a danger to society. The defective restraint that allows them to commit offences against person and property, also allows their provocative impulse unrestrained activity.“

Please note that the phenomenon, also described as “rise of the Criminal,” predates mass immigration.

Chapple also alludes to homogamy among the unfit “which their circumstances necessitate.“

Last but not least, Chapple discusses mechanical contraceptives and considers that the least invasive technique is tubo-ligature, far preferable than vasectomy, as the latter “unsexes” males, leading to atrophy of the testes and impotence after some years. Ironically, today it is vasectomy that is more widespread (1 Englishman out of 5 is vasectomized, mark you). I have no doubt these vasectomies are practised on law-abiding citizens, according to their own will, as a moral restraint check on their fertility.

A consequence of demographic transition may be that marriage as paternity opportunity is now weak and that abuse of stepchildren has increased as a result (not as evolutionary adaptation)! Stepparent violence, if it’d be the result of demographic transition (stepparenting two kids from another bed entails a significant probability that the stepfather will have no kid of his own in a society characterized by the demographic transition, whereas it would have been no obstacle to siring a lot of children in the past), would be neither the result of evolutionary ADAPTATION nor, as in Daly & Wilson, a BYPRODUCT of evolution, a so-called “spandrel.”