The human compulsion to control uncertainty sets us apart from all other species

Unlike all other beings, humans didnt just flee or fight uncertainty, for a dominant minority has always sought to *control* it - even if they are only controlling it mentally.


(* I will call control-oriented humans ‘cons’ and those humans more willing to let go and let Nature flow, the ‘chills’.)


(Though I was awfully tempted to call the pair doms, for dominion, versus stews, for stewardship.)


 This compulsion has made our single species of humans the most successful single species in earthly history - in global range and in total biomass, our numbers expanding 1 million x from our population low point about 800,000 years ago. 


But now this unique drive among an aggressive minority of humanity to always control uncertainty, particularly by controlling it mentally, has brought them, us and the world to the brink of extinction.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

unlike plants & animals, humans seek never to be ‘seasonal’

Animals always, and humans until quite recently, preferred to make tools from abundant, easily worked, flexible wood —not difficult stone or metal. But the fossil record rarely indicates this.  Wonderful then for a major, major discovery of a wood structure built 500,000 years ago.  Particularly as it suggests it was built, at great effort, to overcome seasonal changes in the location of where land joins lake.  Changes most creatures would have accepted and gone with the flow, deciding to spent their energy on food and fun. These early humans instead used lots of their energy to haul trees to the current lake edge and notched them together to form an interlocking structure, to act as a year around dry platform over an area that would naturally be sticky mud or surging water, depending on the season. Half a million years ago, in present day Zambia, an early branch of humanity was already determined not to be controlled by Nature…
Read more

the last W in wartime penicillin’s W5

 It is no secret I have always had a tough time satisfying myself that I had fairly laid out the ‘why’ that successfully explains wartime penicillin happened just as it did.  So years can pass between blog posts about the subject.  But this parrot has been sleeping, not dead.  Or rather privately thinking and privately reading, rather than doing original research and public writing.  God knows there have been thousands of ground-breaking ‘overview’ histories of WWII, all promising and delivering unique viewpoints on its what and its why. I can only hope my efforts here can add a little more to the never ending search. And to be upfront : I am definitely a Chill, not a Con. But I hope I will be fair in seeking answers as to why Cons are the way they are, why they have been so successful over the last million years and what threats they now pose to themselves and others….
Read more

Man-made ‘controllable’ x-rays excited the world, Nature-made ‘uncontrollable’ uranium rays not so much

 It has long interested me why the global reception for two hugely important scientific discoveries, that happened with a few hundred miles of each other at virtually the same time, were so different.  Amateur or scientist, the world was instantly transfixed, December 28th 1895, when unknown scientist Wilhelm Roentgen, from the little known university of Warzburg, in the small Bavarian city of Warzburg reported to the tiny local catch-all scientific-medical journal that he had generated rays that could penetrate flesh to reveal the bones inside. With days, over the quiet Christmas holidays, that report was telegraphed via the mass media onto the breakfast tables of ordinary readers and scientists around the world. And with extraordinary speed, again over the quiet Christmas holiday period, science bodies met to discuss the event, while many other, much more prominent, scientists rushed to duplicate it.  One such prominent scientist was Henri Becquerel, working in a global...
Read more