Full Circle

Thanks for your attention

It’s been exactly three years since I started keeping track of the results of my ongoing science reading by summarizing those results from time to time by writing them down in this Substack. My original reading intent was to use the scientific literature to try to make rational sense of the increasing strength and frequency of human irrationality that became no longer possible to ignore (i.e., “kicked down the road”) in 2020-2021.¹

An apt model of the course of my reading over the last three years.

Generally speaking, it became clear to me, after this past three years of reading, that modern man is much like an old house with – as realtors often like to say – “good bones”.  Above the ground, we are still structurally sturdy, and rest on a solid and firm foundation below the ground, but our old house is in urgent need of renovation on the outside and inside if it is not to collapse into a wet jumble of decaying lumber, broken shingles, and delaminating, sodden wallboard. 

The solid and firm foundation I speak of is, of course, our evolved genome – that gift passed onto us during the Pliocene, Pleistocene, and the current Holocene from our Homo mothers and fathers who, in turn, inherited it from their own Miocene forebears.  The house itself is what our minds and bodies have managed to construct and then preserve from one generation to another when those same minds and bodies weren’t being sidetracked and otherwise distracted and deluded by acute and chronic bouts of mental and physical illness – and consequent self-destructive behavior.

Fortunately, it is entirely certain that we still have all of the tools on hand necessary to conduct a thorough home renovation – those tools that our forebears bequeathed us. We only need, I think, to intentionally and consciously clear our minds to be able to get (back) to work.

According to Wikipedia, this is the “First known representation of the ouroboros, on one of the shrines enclosing the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun.”  According to the same source, “The ouroboros is often interpreted as a symbol for eternal cyclic renewal or a cycle of life, death and rebirth; the snake's skin-sloughing symbolizes the transmigration of souls. The snake biting its own tail is a fertility symbol in some religions: the tail is a phallic symbol and the mouth is a yonic or womb-like symbol.”  This symbol is an appropriate model of the evolution and action of humankind (and those of the other forms of life on earth) through time and space.

In that last regard, please note, once more, that science has quite recently and inadvertently come up with a very timely, comprehensive diagnosis (and a simple and easily applied answering prescription) of the root cause of the modern mental, physical, and behavioral illnesses that hinder, confuse, and disorient us.

For explanation, see:

1. My reading indicates, however, that this destructive irrationality has very likely been festering in Homo sapiens, side by side with its constructive rational accomplishments, ever since the Agricultural Revolution at the end of the Pleistocene.