Analogous or Homologous: like how did two different
methods of procreation, placentals and marsupials, come up with so many similar
life forms? By filling an ecological niche, eating the same foods, running from
similar enemies some say. Maybe this expresses a limit or template to carbon-based
animal forms, and extraterrestrials may look somewhat human, or at least cute.
This article, published in 1973, covers way too
much ground analogous to today. I share with Dr. Lorenz the social context of
his thoughts that paraphrase Hippie mantras of the time. Much comes to us from
Hinduism and other Eastern thought on dualities, i.e. on the necessity of both
creation and destruction, to destroy something to create something else. Devo
sang of these "New Traditionalists." As the counter-culture Revolution of the
60s progressed, young baby-boomers responded to the idiocy of War and rejected
the conformist values of the 1950s. They became hippies and draft-evaders that
looked for something, almost anything else, to promote Peace, Love, and Understanding,
too often through cheap "consumables" or "ingestables" that promised to "open
their Doors of perception" and give them a glimpse of God, or at least have
fun trying.
I also see his homologous male chauvinism, i. e.
"respect for a father-figure" because that thought we inherit as an artifact
of Western Civilization.
I see danger for humankind when academics take these
analogies too far. I did a paper recently on a UT Prof (a very famous controversial
author of "Evolution of Desire" and "The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy is
as Necessary as Love and Sex" called "How to Teach Children to become Sexual
Iguanas: Professor Dr. David M. Buss and his Evolutionary Psychology" where
I wrote "If Buss really thinks that jealousy, passion, love, and commitment
represent mere feelings, he most certainly errs. This statement may help illustrate
the flaw in his Academic "Yellow Journalism," and how it fits one definition
of pornography, to portray things like sex and violence without a realistic
human context, to titillate. Why doesn't anyone break their finger bones, their
metacarpals, in movies and TV when they batter people's faces? The cheek bones
are pretty thick.
Brittanica: "Ethologists start with the persuasive
argument that study of animal warfare may contribute toward an understanding
of war as employed by man"
Is animal behavior analogous to human activity?
I believe he misses the boat on his references to some vague, general Human
Culture. I conclude that REAL, Authentic Human Culture must exist as man's relationship
to his environment in a sustainable way. Most human cultures pass that test,
except Consumerism. We modern "First World" humanoids (which Lorenz suggests
will drown in their own shit) tend to live Urban lives, divorced from their
(our) common interest in the biosphere. Towards Nature, they feel fear, deprecation,
and develop a hostility toward it, usually as a resource to be exploited (raped
is another word for it) for personal profit. The bank account becomes the only
meaningful "Natural Selector" of Amerika's brand of Fascist Social Darwinist
Republicans. Their imperialist military adventures exploit extra-national natural
resources as the means to growth and continued stock dividends.
Maybe our wars stem not so much from an analogous
state of an animals' territoriality in overcrowding. Perhaps the US manifests
a homologous trait we inherited from the most successful barbarian hordes of
Northern Europe.
