Elaine Meinel Supkis
Very interesting genetic code-news: humans have 3 different lice on our bodies and each evolved seperately from each other but we traded these lice with gorillas and chimpanzees at several key points in our evolution. It also shows when humans began wearing sheep-based clothing.
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: March 8, 2007Three kinds of louse call Homo sapiens their home, but each occupies a different niche on the human body. The head louse, Pediculus humanus, lives in the forest of fine hairs on the scalp. Its cousin, the body louse, lives not on the skin but in clothes. And the exclusive territory of the pubic louse, Phthirus pubis, is the coarser hairs of the crotch.
Lice are intimately adapted to their hosts and cannot long survive away from the body’s blood and warmth. If their host evolves into two species, the lice will do likewise. So biologists have long been puzzled over the fact that the human head louse is a sister species to the chimpanzee louse, but the pubic louse is closely related to the gorilla louse.
*snip*
The number of DNA differences between the gorilla louse and the pubic louse indicates that they diverged some 3.3 million years ago, Dr. Reed and colleagues report in today’s issue of the journal Biomed Central Biology. Among people, the pubic louse is usually spread by sexual contact, but the gorilla louse could have been contracted in some other way.
“We’ll never know if it was sex or something more tame,” Dr. Reed said.
Perish the thought! Humans having sex with other creatures? Um---earth to Dr. Reed: men, just for example, will have sex with a hole in a tree. Ask the tree nymphs. Men will have sex with cows, sheep, dogs, vacuum cleaners, rubber duckies, you name it, someone has had sex with it.
Wome are barely better. We giggle and blush but we will fill with a rush of hot blood if anything gets into our pubic places. Male and female humans are closer in attitude to the bonobos who like to have sex a lot. The idea that some early males in our species ran off and hopped onto the backs of gorilla females is not only not far-fetched but is nearly totally expectable!
Many scientists are scared of what they learn so they act all prudish. I thought, with the sexual revolution started by the Viennese artists and professionals 100 years ago had finally opened our eyes to our own lusts. This reminds me of white slave owners pretending they would never go off and have sex with their male and female slaves!
The ever-lighter skin color of each generation was mysterious. Thomas Jefferson's 'family' to this day are unable to embrace the offspring of the slaves he had sex with back then! Rule of thumb of humans: they will have sex if they can and they really don't give that much a hoot, with whom. Protecting the children is a different matter, though! This is where evolution works: it isn't who eats the most or who has the most sex, it is all about the babies.
The babies that are protected and have desirable traits survive and pass on the genes to the next baby. Thinking of all this as adults fogs the mind. Thinking about evolution as baby-production schemes is better.
I am assuming humanoids had sex with whoever they met if that other party was either willing or unable to fight back. Since gorillas are big and dangerous if irritated and since they are very, very strong and have huge, sharp teeth, I am assuming the sex was mutually desired. Since females are nervous about the dangers of a male killing her, I doubt it was female humanoids initiating sex.
I am also assuming the gorillas who had sex with human males were often females that were in obvious heat. And probably a group of humanoid males used their new-fangled ability to use rocks and sticks creatively to chase off gorilla males seeking sex and then had a fun, gang-bang encounter. Then these guys went back to home base and spread the fun.
Humans and gorillas also shared deadly diseases at this same time frame: such as eubola.
Reuters
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science CorrespondentSocial contact helped the Ebola virus virtually wipe out a population of gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, French researchers reported on Monday.
A 2004 outbreak of the virus, which also kills people, killed 97 percent of gorillas who lived in groups and 77 percent of solitary males, Damien Caillaud and colleagues from the University of Montpellier and the University of Rennes in France reported.
Overall, it wiped out 95 percent of the gorilla population within a year, they reported in the journal Current Biology.
*snip*
It also may shed light on how early humans evolved, they suggested. The findings may show that pre-humans were slow to live in large social groups because disease outbreaks could wipe out those who did.
Ebola hemorrhagic fever is one of the most virulent viruses ever seen, killing between 50 percent and 90 percent of victims. The World Health Organization says about 1,850 people have been infected and 1,200 have died since the Ebola virus was discovered in 1976.
WHO and other experts say people probably start outbreaks when they hunt and butcher chimpanzees. The virus is transmitted in blood, tissue and other fluids.
Some of us, cynical as we are, believe that the thing that set humans off from other primates is our tendency towards cannibalism. Chimpanzees are also cannibals as well as eating monkeys. All over the world, where humans live in jungles, they eat monkeys, too. We know that humans and the other primates were nearly wiped out by disease long ago and we all evolved since then with some of the same antibodies even when we were different species.
If people first became nudists 3.3 million years ago, when did they start to wear clothes? Surprisingly, lice once again furnish the answer. Though humans may long have worn loose garments like animal skin cloaks, the first tailored clothing would have been close-fitting enough to tempt the head louse to expand its territory. It evolved a new variety, the body louse, with claws adapted for clinging to fabric, not hairs.In 2003, Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, estimated from DNA differences that the body louse evolved from the head louse about 107,000 years ago.
We really don't know when humans 'went naked.' We have many assumptions about that change. No one can give a sane evolutionary explanation for our lack of long hairs on our bodies. Actually, we do get long hair: when we go into sex mode. The underarm hairs and hairs around the sex organs suddenly becomes quite luxurious and long. On women, it is the underarms but on men, the face itself.
Sexual desire is triggered mostly by the nose. All mammals like to sniff to see if it is time for sex. Large mammals like horses and cows sniff the female's rump to see if she smells ready for sex. If she isn't, she lashes out with vicious kicks.
We do not know when our ancestors began to change the pattern of body-hair cover from its original ape-like form to the modern one. Apes have a lower density of body hair than humans, and their hair is longer than ours. If you look at an orang-utan, you will see that the hair is really quite sparse, but very long and orange – brown in colour. The hair of gorillas and chimpanzees is black, intermediate in density, and intermediate also in length. In man, hair colour varies from pale to dark, and it varies from one part of the body to another. It is characterised by very high density, especially on the head, and is of course extremely short over most of the body, although this varies from place to place, the Ainu of Japan being well known for their long body hair, and the well covered Europeans coming, in many cares, a close second, Africans and of her Asians are the least hairy of humans today.There is another characteristic of human body fat, which is the sex difference in tat deposition. Women have, at least since the Willendorf Venus and doubtless well before that, accumulated fat around the buttocks and thighs, and on the breasts, to an extent matched neither by other primate species nor by male humans. This fat is of’ the same kind as other body fat. What is responsible for the extra deposits in particular peripheral locations in women? Caroline Pond suggests that sexual selection may be responsible, as well as natural selection. In other words, selection would favour not only fatter women at times of pregnancy and lactation, but also selective mating by males with women with these extra reserves. The buttocks, thighs and breasts may have been the most convenient or least costly places for such storage to occur.
We are the short-haired apes, not the naked apes. And our head hair is much longer than any of the other great apes. We can only guess why this is so. I really wonder if our cannibalistic past has caused some very odd mutations? Few animals are cannibals! Most seek food elsewhere.
I really wonder, going back to the story above about early humans and gorillas sharing the same ticks: humanoids, after they move back into the edges of the jungles, find gorillas. And they figure out, the females will have sex with them when in heat. And a very easy way to get food and sex is to have sex with her and then murder her and eat her! So there is no genetic mixing because there are no babies but the lice end up with the early humanoids!
To this day, men will have sex with women and then kill them. Rape/murder is all too common to be an
aberration. Just the other day, a man murdered the mother of his own children and then he dismembered her body. The cannibal past is so strong, human mothers can and have murdered their own children.
Humanity's early ancestors did not walk fully upright, but probably scooted along on their knuckles, much like chimpanzees and gorillas do today.That is the conclusion drawn by two scientists who studied the wrist bones of Lucy, a hominid known as Australopithecus afarensis, and found that she had stiff wrists.
Probably humanoids and the great apes moved the exact same way until both sides began to evolve differently: humanoid hands, increasingly limber and dexterous and apes, their hands used as crutches to scuffle along the ground at a high speed while the babies (the all-important babies!) rode on mommy's back.
Humanoids sacrificed this easy way of carrying the precious little ones and used their arms instead. One wonders how this happened! Carrying babies is very tricky, they are slippery. So I am assuming the humanoid babies had very dexterous hands for hanging onto mommy's fur which was, at this time, fairly long, not short. I bet, since we have more hairs than any ape, we were the FURRIEST apes, not the naked ape at all!
And the fact that lice love us is proof of this. Small harmonal changes due to mutations can cause super-hairy humans even today. The division between the long hair-genes for the hair versus the short-haired genes in the other places should be explored more intensely.
Perhaps our ability to survive the many hazards of the age of transition was due to being very, very hairy. Not because of the heat but because of the COLD. We evolved in places where the land lies lower than sea level, we are Rift animals. Several times, we spread across the whole of Asia, Africa, Europe. And each time, went nearly extinct!
The eruption of Mt. Toba nearly wiped us out 72,000 years ago. This corresponds with the evolution of the clothing lice: the very few survivors were the ones who could make clothes. These survivors went on to ruthlessly kill any other survivors who were members of the great apes. Only the ones hidden deep in the jungles escaped.
On a side note, here is an article with a movie, showing how bonobos walk erect only when in water:
They very rarely stepped into the moat that surrounded their enclosure, only ever doing so if the food which children threw to them fell short. This amounted to only 28 seconds in two hours of focal study (where an individual is tracked non-stop.) But when they did go in it was almost always on two feet, even if the water was shallow enough to go in on all fours. One of the workers there, who had tracked the bonobos every day for two months told me that my observations were no fluke. He had seen individuals go into the water every day and always bipedally. These findings are exactly what the model for a wading origin for bipedalism would predict. Only once were they seen to go in on all fours.
Probably we lost our lengthy hair when the tiny tribe we descended from lived in these rift valley environments in Africa. Namely, it being in the hottest areas, the need for fur at night was no longer a necessity. And fur gets in the way of moving around in water. Long fur on the head would not so it remained.
This is probably when we evolved sweat glands. One might suggest, humanoids are swampy/shoreline animals. Who eat each other. Which explains why our species had to move out of the rift zones and start colonizing all other areas.
There has been a very big broo-ha-ha in Britain over this genetic study:
IAN JOHNSTONSCIENCE CORRESPONDENTA MAJOR genetic study of the population of Britain appears to have put an end to the idea of the "Celtic fringe" of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
Instead, a research team at Oxford University has found the majority of Britons are Celts descended from Spanish tribes who began arriving about 7,000 years ago.
Even in England, about 64 per cent of people are descended from these Celts, outnumbering the descendants of Anglo- Saxons by about three to one.
The proportion of Celts is only slightly higher in Scotland, at 73 per cent. Wales is the most Celtic part of mainland Britain, with 83 per cent.
Previously it was thought that ancient Britons were Celts who came from central Europe, but the genetic connection to populations in Spain provides a scientific basis for part of the ancient Scots' origin myth.
The Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, following the War of Independence against England, tells how the Scots arrived in Scotland after they had "dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes".
HAHAHA. I come from there, and Germany. My family tree has a number of rather violent, ill-tempered, lusty invaders in it. They lived by the sword and swore at meals and raped women. Do note that part of the deal.
The first British people came from Spain, they ate/killed all the Neanderthals. Being irritable humans, they had to go to great lengths to avoid each other so a large group walked over to the British Isles which just then, finally was melting and the ice was going rapidly in the New Springtime.
Later, other groups thought to come there, too. Each one killed a fair number of the natives and then proceeded to do what all invaders do: have sex with the native women, the cattle, the sheep and anything else including holes in trees. Being drunk helps.
The Vikings did this. The Normans, who were half-viking, half-french, did this. Everyone does this. Slave owners did this. Each group mixed it up with the natives. The language and culture changed much more than the genetic drift of the population. The Romans had sex a lot but their culture also was very attractive and spread until the Empire fell. Then is ceased spreading and disappeared while the tribes reverted to previous lifestyles including human sacrifices, etc.
Then the Christians changed the culture. Without killing many people. Nor even having any sex at all.
Each wave did this: the culture proving to be much more maleable than the genetics. And this is what sets the Irish and Scots as well as the Welsh apart from other Brits.
On another related topic, germs fueled our evolution.
Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
March 5, 2007Viruses and bacteria have sped up the process of evolution by rapidly transferring DNA from one species to another, a new study suggests.
Gene-mapping projects over the past decade have already shown that genes can move between species via tiny microorganisms.
Now a team of scientists at Texas' Rice University believes that microbes are accelerating evolution by constantly transporting whole chunks of DNA that may represent new and beneficial functions—like resistance to disease.
This process—called horizontal gene transfer (HGT)—may allow life-forms to evolve more quickly than they would by occasional, random mutations alone, the scientists say.
"We know that the majority of the DNA in the genomes of some animal and plant species—including humans, mice, wheat and corn—came from HGT insertions," said Michael Deem, a genetic engineer at Rice, in a press statement.
All life forms on earth owe their complexity to the humbler forces of nature. As scientists gleefully play with genetic alterations, we have to be aware that germs and other organisms will return the favor and things will rapidly get out of control. They are splicing human genes into all sorts of plants and animals. This inter-mixing is more dangerous than sex with tree holes. We will see in the wretched end, just how dangerous this alchemy really is.
Evolution, as most scientists understand the process, has been getting faster and more complex over time.Fossil records indicate that single-celled organisms appeared on Earth some 3.5 billion years ago. It took a further 2.5 billion years for the first multicellular life-forms to evolve.
The two wheels of Evolutions' chariot are genetic change and environmental change and we are driving Her chariot forwards at breakneck speed now.
Culture of Life News Main Page
If we assume humans originated in Africa, and just spread out from there, some apparently obvious, but interesting results follow. Mostly, moving out of Africa meant moving north. We could leave the gorillas and chimpanzees behind, because we had fire! (Very bad for fur!) We also left many insect disease vectors behind, as well. Humans migrated all the way from Africa to Argentina, leaving the diseases behind, until the easy ice passes melted.
Then, much, much later, came the ships from Europe and Scandinavia. Bearing many of the older European diseases, which the people in the Americas were no longer immune to. So many of them suddenly died. Most of the new diseases come from Africa. And Asia is becoming a major source of the newer cold-weather resistant viruses.
Basic biology. You have your protozoic one-celled animals, like malaria. There are plant-like single-celled yeasts, and multi-celled fungi, like ringworm. There are simple cells too small to do anything much beyond cause infection, like anthrax, although some fix nitrogen for the roots of legumes. And there are viruses, two kinds: DNA and RNA, which are just pure nucleic acid strands with protein 'jackets'. Smallpox (very scary) is a DNA virus. The AIDS virus is an RNA virus. DNA is stiff and straight, while RNA is exactly the same, except that it is limp and squiggly. There are also mitochondria, which are like little rings that turn sugar into 'pure' chemical energy (ATP). They are much like the green chloroplasts in plants, which have a very complex parabolic antenna shape, which focuses sunlight onto a magnesium atom in their middle. They resemble hemoglobin, which has iron instead of magnesium. I don't think these latter components utilize any nucleic acid action at all.
Disease loves to travel. Lao Tzu sad many thousands of years ago: Remain steadfast in your own village always, and do not seek new lands to conquer. Let your wagons travel only in old ruts! War is travel, and travel is disease. I keep telling people: fire is you friend. Burn the old hospitals to shed the new diseases. Toss the airliners into the sea, and stop all air travel and jet-setting around! People 'know' I'm nuts when I demand an end to aviation. Well, If any major pandemic occurs, the people who know the score also know they will have just three days to shut down all air travel!
Americans thought they had arrived in some great new promised land, so they abolished the sustaining sense of balance. They cannot accept that the fininitude has caught up with them now. Today is real, tomorrow and yesterday are just abstract concepts. Having a sense of values involves having emotional ties to the past and future. So now we have the very nice, smiling people, who expect that we will forget how they stabbed our backs yesterday, and to ignore that they lack any compunction about shooting us in the head tomorrow. That is the definition of collective psychopathy. It will kill us all if we keep pretending it isn't real.If we assume humans originated in Africa, and just spread out from there, some apparently obvious, but interesting results follow. Mostly, moving out of Africa meant moving north. We could leave the gorillas and chimpanzees behind, because we had fire! (Very bad for fur!) We also left many insect disease vectors behind, as well. Humans migrated all the way from Africa to Argentina, leaving the diseases behind, until the easy ice passes melted.
Then, much, much later, came the ships from Europe and Scandinavia. Bearing many of the older European diseases, which the people in the Americas were no longer immune to. So many of them suddenly died. Most of the new diseases come from Africa. And Asia is becoming a major source of the newer cold-weather resistant viruses.
Basic biology. You have your protozoic one-celled animals, like malaria. There are plant-like single-celled yeasts, and multi-celled fungi, like ringworm. There are simple cells too small to do anything much beyond cause infection, like anthrax, although some fix nitrogen for the roots of legumes. And there are viruses, two kinds: DNA and RNA, which are just pure nucleic acid strands with protein 'jackets'. Smallpox (very scary) is a DNA virus. The AIDS virus is an RNA virus. DNA is stiff and straight, while RNA is exactly the same, except that it is limp and squiggly. There are also mitochondria, which are like little rings that turn sugar into 'pure' chemical energy (ATP). They are much like the green chloroplasts in plants, which have a very complex parabolic antenna shape, which focuses sunlight onto a magnesium atom in their middle. They resemble hemoglobin, which has iron instead of magnesium. I don't think these latter components utilize any nucleic acid action at all.
Disease loves to travel. Lao Tzu sad many thousands of years ago: Remain steadfast in your own village always, and do not seek new lands to conquer. Let your wagons travel only in old ruts! War is travel, and travel is disease. I keep telling people: fire is you friend. Burn the old hospitals to shed the new diseases. Toss the airliners into the sea, and stop all air travel and jet-setting around! People 'know' I'm nuts when I demand an end to aviation. Well, If any major pandemic occurs, the people who know the score also know they will have just three days to shut down all air travel!
Americans thought they had arrived in some great new promised land, so they abolished the sustaining sense of balance. They cannot accept that the fininitude has caught up with them now. Today is real, tomorrow and yesterday are just abstract concepts. Having a sense of values involves having emotional ties to the past and future. So now we have the very nice, smiling people, who expect that we will forget how they stabbed our backs yesterday, and to ignore that they lack any compunction about shooting us in the head tomorrow. That is the definition of collective psychopathy. It will kill us all if we keep pretending it isn't real.If we assume humans originated in Africa, and just spread out from there, some apparently obvious, but interesting results follow. Mostly, moving out of Africa meant moving north. We could leave the gorillas and chimpanzees behind, because we had fire! (Very bad for fur!) We also left many insect disease vectors behind, as well. Humans migrated all the way from Africa to Argentina, leaving the diseases behind, until the easy ice passes melted.
Then, much, much later, came the ships from Europe and Scandinavia. Bearing many of the older European diseases, which the people in the Americas were no longer immune to. So many of them suddenly died. Most of the new diseases come from Africa. And Asia is becoming a major source of the newer cold-weather resistant viruses.
Basic biology. You have your protozoic one-celled animals, like malaria. There are plant-like single-celled yeasts, and multi-celled fungi, like ringworm. There are simple cells too small to do anything much beyond cause infection, like anthrax, although some fix nitrogen for the roots of legumes. And there are viruses, two kinds: DNA and RNA, which are just pure nucleic acid strands with protein 'jackets'. Smallpox (very scary) is a DNA virus. The AIDS virus is an RNA virus. DNA is stiff and straight, while RNA is exactly the same, except that it is limp and squiggly. There are also mitochondria, which are like little rings that turn sugar into 'pure' chemical energy (ATP). They are much like the green chloroplasts in plants, which have a very complex parabolic antenna shape, which focuses sunlight onto a magnesium atom in their middle. They resemble hemoglobin, which has iron instead of magnesium. I don't think these latter components utilize any nucleic acid action at all.
Disease loves to travel. Lao Tzu sad many thousands of years ago: Remain steadfast in your own village always, and do not seek new lands to conquer. Let your wagons travel only in old ruts! War is travel, and travel is disease. I keep telling people: fire is you friend. Burn the old hospitals to shed the new diseases. Toss the airliners into the sea, and stop all air travel and jet-setting around! People 'know' I'm nuts when I demand an end to aviation. Well, If any major pandemic occurs, the people who know the score also know they will have just three days to shut down all air travel!
Americans thought they had arrived in some great new promised land, so they abolished the sustaining sense of balance. They cannot accept that the fininitude has caught up with them now. Today is real, tomorrow and yesterday are just abstract concepts. Having a sense of values involves having emotional ties to the past and future. So now we have the very nice, smiling people, who expect that we will forget how they stabbed our backs yesterday, and that we will ignore that they lack any emotional compunction about shooting us in the head tomorrow. But at this moment they are really nice, smiling people, really, for this particular moment. That is the definition of collective psychopathy. It will kill us all if we keep It will kill us all if we keep pretending their sweetness is durable.
Posted by: blues | March 08, 2007 at 02:13 PM
Jesus God - body lice. That's why I love reading this thing, Elaine - I have no idea what you're going to write about next.
"Um---earth to Dr. Reed: men, just for example, will have sex with a hole in a tree."
I disagree. That sounds like it might cause chafing and abrasions.
"The Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, following the War of Independence against England, tells how the Scots arrived in Scotland after they had "dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes"."
AMONG the most savage tribes?? Who are they trying to kid? The Scots WERE the most savage tribes!
"Toss the airliners into the sea, and stop all air travel and jet-setting around! People 'know' I'm nuts when I demand an end to aviation."
Humans have never been a stay-in-one-place sort of animal - so I doubt we'll accede to your demand. You may want to join forces with George Monbiot: he doesn't like aviation either, but for different reasons.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/12/16/a-weapon-with-wings/
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9814
Posted by: JSmith | March 08, 2007 at 04:07 PM
Jesus God - body lice. That's why I love reading this thing, Elaine - I have no idea what you're going to write about next.
"Um---earth to Dr. Reed: men, just for example, will have sex with a hole in a tree."
I disagree. That sounds like it might cause chafing and abrasions.
"The Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, following the War of Independence against England, tells how the Scots arrived in Scotland after they had "dwelt for a long course of time in Spain among the most savage tribes"."
AMONG the most savage tribes?? Who are they trying to kid? The Scots WERE the most savage tribes!
"Toss the airliners into the sea, and stop all air travel and jet-setting around! People 'know' I'm nuts when I demand an end to aviation."
Humans have never been a stay-in-one-place sort of animal - so I doubt we'll accede to your demand. You may want to join forces with George Monbiot: he doesn't like aviation either, but for different reasons.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/12/16/a-weapon-with-wings/
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9814
Posted by: JSmith | March 08, 2007 at 04:07 PM
Whoops - sorry! That shouldn't have gotten up there twice.
Posted by: JSmith | March 08, 2007 at 04:08 PM
Tis OK. Repetition doth teach even the fool his letters.
Heh. Some guys like rough sex, Smith. Don't probe why. Arf.
As for this new piece of information: I am very amused by it all. And the battles between the Brits: you should read the comments at the article's site! Wow.
As I keep saying, nobody hates anyone more than within families.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | March 08, 2007 at 04:48 PM
Also, Smith, have you ever lived with a Spanish flamenco dancer? Hahaha. Savage indeed. Fun, too. In obvious ways. I suppose after getting their feet smashed over and over again by ladies wearing dagger-heeled shoes, the Scots wanted nothing more than to flee back home to their sheep.
As I keep saying, we have sex with anyone and especially at home with the home flocks.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | March 08, 2007 at 04:50 PM
The Scots came from Ireland about 4AD, the language is the same, they even stick Mac, or Mc in the front of their surname. The migration from Spain was much earlier.
Posted by: Big Al | March 08, 2007 at 06:01 PM
Everyone put a Mac in the name. Native or recent invader. And of course, there were them thar WOMEN: sex was had by all and sundry so the genes got passed along, everyone's genes, all mixed up.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | March 08, 2007 at 08:27 PM
It's real nice that we have a bunch here that can discuss sex without having to undergo pre-teen reversion. My plan was to just trot nonchalantly around that quivering bush. But fuck it. Just for the record, I had a brief relationship with a lady who went on to rob a convenience store with a shotgun. So I am not pure and all, like you folks would like to think.
Posted by: blues | March 08, 2007 at 08:56 PM
You don't want to pry into my sex past.
Or maybe you do! Heh. Hippie dippy times were fun while they lasted.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | March 09, 2007 at 05:55 AM
It doesn't bother me at all when these little snotty-nosed twenty-somethings realize that I come from a time before people were domesticated. I tell them about watching the guy at the corner get his throat cut as I go by on the bus in NYC. And the shootouts at my old commune. (They always think everything was peaceful and all.) How the ice cracked thunderously beneath my feet in the middle of the mile-wide lake. A majority of the kids I grew up with managed to die before they were thirty. After that, they seemed to know how to hang on to the strap. I am still hippy and dippy. The world, however, has been overrun with smart talking grazing animals. I mean, they have websites where people are actually worried about trolls. Give me a frickin break!
Posted by: blues | March 09, 2007 at 07:58 AM
"And the shootouts at my old commune."
Arguing about how the choicest chicks never wanted to make it with the scuzzy guys, no doubt.
Or whose turn it was to shovel out the outhouse...
Posted by: JSmith | March 09, 2007 at 10:10 AM
Actually, we had a corporation with lawyers and accountants and all. I was even its president. The gun guys had just returned from Vietnam, and were a tad violent. Most of the shooting was done by people who were not really awake. We even had special forces types to deal with that. But it was a tricky deal all the way around.
Posted by: blues | March 09, 2007 at 10:29 AM
Ah, and you guys loved Shakespeare which is why you tried to kill all the lawyers, eh?
One commune I was in had all guys except for myself and then I moved into an all-women's commune. Both were interesting.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | March 09, 2007 at 06:13 PM
I have discovered that there are, roughly speaking, two kinds of communes. There are the egalitarian ones that attempt to suppress the follower-leader instinct. I like their spirit, but they have a hell of a time trying to pull it off. They even have an association of egalitarian communes!
Then there are the openly autocratic, or oligarchic communes. They have an virtually all-powerful leader or in-crowd, and everyone else just goes along. I used to have an intense dislike for the autocratic arrangements. But I view things from more subtle angles these days. These autocratic communes can have sinister, manipulative masters. But many of the have very benign and helpful rulers.
Now I understand. Some people can only prosper in egalitarian settings. The other people cannot really function at all with the guidance of some Big Kahuna.
One must figure out what type one is, and join an appropriate group. The egalitarians have been dead set against the autocrats forever, and vice versa. This should not be. these various groups must come to grips with the reality that different kinds of people have different needs. If one needs an autocratic ruler, it pays vastly to have the ability to choose a benevolent one.
As far as I know, the best quasi-egalitarian commune is at:
http://www.aherbs.org/
These people have a whole lot in common with Elaine, I think.
«GOVERNMENT Our system of government remains a primordially soupy, slippery slop of democracy and labor aristocracy. The majority has great moral authority but those who do more will have more authority--and more corporation shares--than those who get less done. We like free market competition between different methods and ideas: you stack the wood your way, we stack it our way, pretty soon we'll see which stack falls down. That is clearly better than consensus compromise, at least we'll have one good solid wood stack. In many situations, however, we can't take the chance to try different ways. We want you to back into the driveway when you come in, and drive forward when you leave the house. I know that most people drive in and back out of their driveway. Problem is that they can cause accidents, and would tick off the neighbors when they see some dumb jerk backing onto the roadway. We can't wait till the snow crushes the roof you are building, just to be able to say, "We told you so." The roof has to be done right the first time, and those who are here and who have the experience will have to make sure you do it right. The same holds true when we deal with issues of waste and of the environment. We can see the catastrophic results of doing it in the standard way: this time we have to do it the smart way, which has not been set in stone yet. For example, we have tried five different methods of heating our houses with recycled fuels . They all worked well but we keep looking for the cleanest and most efficient method.»
«We try to develop a less wasteful lifestyle. We have observed our Amish neighbors. They seem to have a very sensible approach to life, and we can learn a lot from them. For example, they use winter ice refrigeration, which means that their food stays cool during blackouts. Still, like everything else, also the old ways of doing things can be improved: instead of dragging muddy ice from the pond, we thought of making it on location, inside the walk-in cooler. That can be done by opening a door and blowing cold air in. By the way, we do not plan to stop using refrigerators and freezers, but we could use a winter ice cooler for our apple crop.
«Regards, Matt
«Adirondack Herbs Galway, NY 518-762-8082 518-835-6887 518- 883-3453»
Posted by: blues | March 09, 2007 at 07:06 PM
Um, I ended up running more than one thing. From communes to families: guess who had to organize the chores, fix things and make sure everything worked?
Ahaha! So I became the benevolent dictator who lost her temper if things weren't done more or less. (CLEAN YOUR ROOM NOW!). Heh.
Somehow, everyone survived. That was the whole point: survival. Now I have just husband and the animals. But even when living in a TENT, we had commune members living with us. I always wanted everyone to prosper. Never turned anyone out.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | March 09, 2007 at 07:49 PM
Being a woman was never enough for you, was it Elaine? You had to go out there and do all the stuff that males traditionally do. Then again, you are not at all a typical Americanized woman. I automatically think of you as European, and you remind me of some ladies who graciously showed me the sights around Geneva, Switzerland. They were so willing to show this bumbling American the wonders of the place.
I am like that a little bit. Always pushing myself into situations that made no sense in relation to the person people automatically assumed me to be. But I was always a bit out of place, everywhere. 'People can never quite bring themselves to believe that there is a blues present', somebody once said.
And I had to do the electrical wiring, do soldering on the copper plumbing, negotiate when people in the restaurant downstairs would roll on the floor screeching when someone let the tub overflow upstairs. ('I learned a lot about myself'. And I use British punctuation too!)
You might want to get to know the Adirondack Herbs people (above), since they seem to be doing a lot of innovative things. Innovation will become all the rage when the whatever hits the fan. I am not certain I will survive. At least I don't live in South Carolina, where they have millions of wacko thugs who would love to light a cross on my lawn for not joining up with the clan.
Something tells me maybe you should make time to visit THESE FOLKS:
http://www.nativeamericanchurch.com
/welcome.html
But you would have to forgo your visits to the dark side for maybe six months to do that properly.
Posted by: blues | March 10, 2007 at 09:00 AM
"Then there are the openly autocratic, or oligarchic communes. They have an virtually all-powerful leader or in-crowd, and everyone else just goes along. "
There's a word for outfits like that: Cult.
Posted by: JSmith | March 10, 2007 at 09:59 AM
Well, I have been involved with autocratic communes, egalitarian ones (always an iffy label) and actual cults. These things are just different. I was involved with Lux Alba, which was really a very pleasant cult, where people were doing UFO vigils, constant channeling, and always consulting dictionaries for divination. They had fancy (for the time) computers, massive printers, and gave interesting lectures at places like IBM. (The top execs need to justify their multi-million-dollar salaries somehow.)
That sort of thing is much different than an authority-figure based intentional community, where the emphasis is usually on overt primitivism, farming, and maybe some kind of meditation.
The cult is more like an unorthodox religious retreat. The autocratic commune is basically a tribal situation. They are quite distinct.
Posted by: blues | March 10, 2007 at 10:35 AM
Your basic human being is a tribal animal. Left to their own devices, ordinary humans will form tribes. Maybe half of these tribes will be relatively (if not 'formally') egalitarian. The other half will be autocratic (again, the formal structures are of little relevance). And they will constantly be at war with one another, and will eventually be colonized by an empire, unless they form a nation.
The modern state seeks to disrupt this tribal instinct, artificially inducing atomization, alienation, and helplessness. It breaks up tribes into 'families', that's why they demand 'family values'. All power then concentrates into the sweaty hands of the mega-government, and the preachers, lawyers, etc. The people become sheep-like, and plantationized, and exploited, and all of the people's industry gets sold overseas, and then they are all killed off.
So yeah, Shakespeare, whoever she, he, or they were, knew about the lawyers. They will gladly help you to sue your neighbor if you fall on their sidewalk.
Posted by: blues | March 10, 2007 at 12:42 PM
Tribes: belief systems plus genetics. They are very confining and harsh on the individual.
Most families fall apart rapidly. Most that I have known, the longer they are here, the more they fall apart. The only ones that don't are the very uppermost elites: the drones need the help of the ones with power to keep sucking down loot for themselves, the Bush clan being a typical example.
Note how each generation is more drunk and more stupid.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | March 11, 2007 at 05:52 PM
«Tribes: belief systems plus genetics. They are very confining and harsh on the individual.»
Not sure I should agree on this one. Belief systems are strange entities. Do note that I have pointed out the difference between cults and other intentional communities. I would guess that some of these arrangements could be harsh, and some not harsh. Some could be relatively egalitarian.
As far as the genetics, I have read much of a phenomenon of marriage tending to be external to one's 'tribe'.
The most powerful forces will ultimately be national education (which really is not a gross quantity, like cheddar cheese), and spiritual adaptation. There are certainly some examples I would not care to emulate. The Japanese example does not cheer me up at all, for example.
But maybe 'tribes' is not quite the right word. 'Close community' might be preferable. Physical proximity is an amazingly weak force. I have read time and again about people moving out of 'gated communities' because of social isolation. This phenomenon has been said to be the driving force for the creation of the new 'mega-churches'.
Personally, I get along best with certain kinds of artists. And maybe some open-minded physicists.
Posted by: blues | March 11, 2007 at 07:04 PM
Pegasus's church is a stable and lots of open fields surrounded by apple trees. Keeping my horse, Sparky, out of the apple orchard is a chore.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | March 11, 2007 at 11:15 PM
I lived on a family farm for awhile. The cows could never get enough corn! I mean not just the kernels, but the whole cobs. There was something satisfying and pleasant about watching them contentedly munching down the whole cobs. They had a lot of space in their barn, and a big field, in Stepney CT.
I learned how to ride a bicycle then. The bastards promised they would hold the back fender, but they reneged, and I flew down the hill into the brier patch. They laughed and laughed. But after that, I lost my fear of riding.
Posted by: blues | March 12, 2007 at 12:28 AM
Other gorilla species may not have it so it has to be studied further.
Posted by: head lice shampoo | March 24, 2011 at 04:21 AM