Human Iterations

(#1: Biology's constructs and dichotomies are not useful.)

An Anti-Primitivist Essay

With the onset of the Industrial Revolution came a serious blossoming of cosmology-through-taxonomy. In many ways the new engines of society eradicated the quasi-shamanic, more personally intuitive behaviors of old medicine so that in its place it could forge yet another hierarchical monopoly. The traditional myth of Animal/Vegetable/Mineral founded new sub-Parthenons. Phyla, Compound, Infraclass and a host of other cognitive divisions were canonized. It was a profound and expansive campaign of centralization and itemization and, like all others, it was about control.

Just as has been true since the very first person mucked around with Language. Naming is power.

It was not enough to build a massive technological infrastructure by which to ingrain social-hierarchies. Humanity itself had to be broken down and controlled. The greatest tool of coercion and control that had ever been available, the needs and frailty of our bodies, was to be so thoroughly itemized as give charge to the second greatest tool of coercion and control: a religion.

Biology mediated the legitimacy of science into the social realm. Even as forests were clearcut and species exterminated, Europe's expanding ecosystem of social hierarchy launched a barrage of taxonomy to convince the people that it best understood their interactions, place and role within the world. We may not understand the processes killing you, but we can pick its name off a chart.

Though it gave no strength, such taxonomic knowledge provided a numbing security. A sense of personal control over the world through the ingestion of structure.

The fundamental synchrony of this pursuit of taxonomy with the valuation of position and power can of course be seen in the vigorous construction applied to Race and Sex. Yet it was about more than just bringing the classifications of material world into the social plane with elaborate internal taxonomies of humanity. Social Darwinians justified social stratification by adopting strict biological identity in the place of more common metaphysical assumptions. Rather than discrete individuals, they argued, we were, in fact nothing more than the product of our categorizations. Throughout history this thinking has set off all kinds of horror and, with the increasing popularity of Biological constructs, such horrors flourished mightily. But such strands of Social Darwinism also built from a fine-tuned sense of continuity within the greater biological ecosystem.

That's not to say that they sought out ecologically harmonious hippie lifestyles, but rather that they saw themselves as fulfilling their role within the ecosystem. And the fulfillment of one's participation in the game of life was asserted as the primary good. Thus homosexuality, for example gets attacked for being “unnatural” just as often as it hears the “unholy” crowd or plain faced cultural distaste. The root of this biological imperative stuff grew out from the reductionist empiricist movement, but it quickly adopted a mystical spirit of its own.

The religion of biology and biological life excelled in layered complex arcana, rituals and miracles. What it needed was a touch of divinity, something that could be personally mystified until it swallowed up all existential questions. And then it would be possible to draw lines and slice up whatever was left on the metaphysical level. “Life” begins at conception. Because that was the taxonomic simple.

The churches bought in real fast.

Even through the imperialist explorers' clumsily demarcation of “species” from “species,” Biology, at root, was built rife with arbitrary constructs. It's divisions and interpretations of structure were deeply influenced by the surrounding memetic environment and power myths. And most fundamental of all, the popularly mystified presumption of a cosmological division between 'biological life' and 'inert matter' doesn't exist. The layered constructs of Biology are very much a social and cultural creation.

If self-replication is somehow an entropy-breaking signature of a divinely separate force, what of the stars? They grow, collapse and, in doing so, seed their own re-growth among the nebulae. Every piece of matter around us is part of that cycle. Likewise, a mystification of the information patterns of DNA breaks down in the form of RNA and quasi-nucleaicacid carriers on the frayed edge of what's a complex molecule and what was declared easily recognizable by a lab technician.

It can seem an inane difficulty, but the reality behind it is sharp.

The informational constructs Biology declares around the vast agglomerations of particles are arbitrary.

There is no such thing as self-replication, for example, because the new creature is a completely different set of molecules with completely different relationships to the rest of the universe. The connection we see between the original creature and second creature is just a matter of symbolism. It's us creating structural simplifications and taxonomic declarations in our minds and then imposing them over our actual experience.

Significant abstraction based in such taxonomy is useless. There can be just as much, say, fundamental "diversity" between a given spotted owl & lemur as between two lemurs. Narrowly focused in such directions as informational similarities between patterns of DNA or macroscopic physical trends in physiology, our concept of "diversity" might even be applicable in the way we want it to be. But it won't give us anything other than another pile of information inconducive to meaning. And it won't get us beyond the mental and social hierarchies that taxonomic approach is couched in.

Abstractions of any moral, cosmological, ontological or existential significance that are built out of Biology's constructs will be deeply fucked up.