Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jenny's avatar

I'm curious, have you ever read Dr. Weston Price's book on Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. He was a dentist who lived a 100 years ago and discovered on his world travels that those native peoples who ate there natural diets, had wide dental arches with perfect teeth, wide noses, good health, the women easily had birith, etc. When they adopted western food, what they call a SAD diet, they developed first dental caries, then loss genetic integrity. Pottenger did studies with animals and discovered that on poor diets, their genetics degenerated. I can't remember the scientist's name, but he used an Agouti mother mouse and identical embryos to discover that on a poor diet her offspring was born albino and diabetic, but when fed well, had a healthy brown mice. It is the science of epigentics. Mutations? Just a lack of good diet. Which reminds me many of the native peoples fed their mothers and fathers to be a special diet.

Expand full comment
DangerousVariant's avatar

In the vein of 'Idiocracy', which seems to be playing out rapidly in real time, the dysgenic selection pressures of socially engineered - and technologically "nudged" (to put it mildly), manufactured anti-reality of the modern environment, plus the natural mutation factor you lay out here, have likely spiked (heh) up the shaken-not-stirred double helix cocktail to some exponent error rate.

Said another way, more fitting to my finger-painter credentials, the mutation rate is now on a social-environmental-technological e-ticket ride in which we may very well be seeing collapse-level mutations on our watch. Now, perhaps nature in her wisdom - and ruthlessness, will provide harsh doses of reality to pierce the manufactured anti-reality and correct some of the dysgenic inputs, but to your point, beneficial accretive mutations are something else entirely - that seem rather divine and not so easily sciency.

Anyhow, your metaphor reminds me of the game we played as kids called telephone. The initial phrase whispered into the first kid's ear was simple and quite clear. But by the time it was whispered ear-to-ear around the whole circle of kids and back to the start it was some kind of hilarious nonsense so divorced from the initial phrase that it just must be a function of someone purposefully inserting the nonsense.

But nope. The whisper-drift effect(TM) is real. This is true today in the 'meta' as the clowns say. It's how we get "Brawndo's got what plants crave; it's got electrolytes!". See also, "diversity is our greatest strength" and "climate change is real".

Expand full comment
28 more comments...

No posts