Walt Hampton
2014-01-10 21:15:03 UTC
MULTIPLEX MAN
Civilized human beings have long been puzzled by the
mysterious diversity of human beings. It is possible,
indeed, that mystery was part of the process by which
some people were able to rise from barbarism to
civilization.
The perception requires mental powers that are by no
means universal. The aborigines of Australia, for
example, who are probably the lowest from of human
life still extant, have a consciousness so dim and
rudimentary that they multiplied on that continent
for fifty thousand years without ever suspecting
that sexual intercourse had anything to do with
reproduction.
Most savages, to be sure, are somewhat above that
level, but no tribe appears to have been aware of
its own diversity, let alone capable of thinking
about it.
Human beings capable of reflective thought, however,
must have begun early to marvel, as we still do,
at the great differences obvious among the offspring
of one man by one woman. Of two brothers, one may
be tall and the other short; one stolid and the other
alert; one seemingly born with a talent for
mathematics and the other with a love of music.
Many were the theories that men excogitated to explain
so strange a phenomenon. One of the principal grounds
for the once widespread and persistent belief in
astrology was the possibility of explaining the
differences between two brothers by noting that,
although engendered by the same parents, they were
conceived and born under different configurations
of the planets.
In the Seventeenth Century, indeed, Campanella, whose
plan for a Welfare State is the source of many of our
modern "Liberal" crotchets and crazes, devised a whole
system of eugenics to be enforced by bureaucrats who
would see to it that human beings were engendered only
at moments fixed by expert astrologers.
Again, the doctrine of metempsychosis, once almost
universally held over a wide belt of the earth from
India to Scandinavia, seemed to be confirmed by the
same observations; for the differences between brothers
were understandable if their bodies were animated by
souls that had had far different experiences in earlier
incarnations.
There were also some theoretical explanations, such as
the one that you may remember having read in the stately
verse of Lucretius, that were sound bases for scientific
inquiry, but they were not followed up. Until the last
third of the Nineteenth Century, men learned nothing of
the basic laws of heredity.
Darwin's knowledge of the subject was no better than
Aristotle's, and Galton's enthusiasm for eugenics was
no more firmly founded than was Plato's.
It remained for a humble and too modest priest, Father
Johann Gregor Mendel, to make one of the most important
scientific discoveries ever made by man.
Visit Us At www.soaringeaglesgallery.com or www.zundelsite.org
*
Civilized human beings have long been puzzled by the
mysterious diversity of human beings. It is possible,
indeed, that mystery was part of the process by which
some people were able to rise from barbarism to
civilization.
The perception requires mental powers that are by no
means universal. The aborigines of Australia, for
example, who are probably the lowest from of human
life still extant, have a consciousness so dim and
rudimentary that they multiplied on that continent
for fifty thousand years without ever suspecting
that sexual intercourse had anything to do with
reproduction.
Most savages, to be sure, are somewhat above that
level, but no tribe appears to have been aware of
its own diversity, let alone capable of thinking
about it.
Human beings capable of reflective thought, however,
must have begun early to marvel, as we still do,
at the great differences obvious among the offspring
of one man by one woman. Of two brothers, one may
be tall and the other short; one stolid and the other
alert; one seemingly born with a talent for
mathematics and the other with a love of music.
Many were the theories that men excogitated to explain
so strange a phenomenon. One of the principal grounds
for the once widespread and persistent belief in
astrology was the possibility of explaining the
differences between two brothers by noting that,
although engendered by the same parents, they were
conceived and born under different configurations
of the planets.
In the Seventeenth Century, indeed, Campanella, whose
plan for a Welfare State is the source of many of our
modern "Liberal" crotchets and crazes, devised a whole
system of eugenics to be enforced by bureaucrats who
would see to it that human beings were engendered only
at moments fixed by expert astrologers.
Again, the doctrine of metempsychosis, once almost
universally held over a wide belt of the earth from
India to Scandinavia, seemed to be confirmed by the
same observations; for the differences between brothers
were understandable if their bodies were animated by
souls that had had far different experiences in earlier
incarnations.
There were also some theoretical explanations, such as
the one that you may remember having read in the stately
verse of Lucretius, that were sound bases for scientific
inquiry, but they were not followed up. Until the last
third of the Nineteenth Century, men learned nothing of
the basic laws of heredity.
Darwin's knowledge of the subject was no better than
Aristotle's, and Galton's enthusiasm for eugenics was
no more firmly founded than was Plato's.
It remained for a humble and too modest priest, Father
Johann Gregor Mendel, to make one of the most important
scientific discoveries ever made by man.
Visit Us At www.soaringeaglesgallery.com or www.zundelsite.org
*