All life, including human life depends on the DNA’s ability to copy (replicate) itself.

The second step was intelligence and speech, where hominids and early humans who randomly invented new things could explain and teach it to each other, thus copy the idea from their own heads to other people’s heads.

(This is why I don’t think the Yudkowsky/LW model of intelligence is right. A species could have infinite technological progress by random brute-force tinkering, by trying everything in every combination, as long as they have enough capability to write down what worked and in every generation to learn all that and then tinker some more. Thus, intelligence is more about teaching and learning than about figuring things out, although of course model-building could be seen as a process of copying, of the most important features of a thing, too. “Intelligo” means “I understand”, i.e. “OK, thanks, I managed to copy your idea into my head”.)

The third step was writing and literacy, where ideas could be copied forever and widely distributed. Thus, culture, religion and science became possible.

The fourth step, Gutenberg. The fifth step, the Internet.

Everything that matters rests on copying.

Reproduction is copying (genes) and thus sex is about copying. Fighting a war is about copying, first in the training and drilling and weapons manufacturing way, but even battle strategy depends on copying the enemy commander into a model in our head and trying to predict his moves that way. Religious faith depends all on copying, holy books, social traditions, it is remarkable that in Christianity only God does not copy, but creates ex nihilo, but according to René Girard’s mimetic violence theory, even Jesus’ role can be interpreted as way to put an end to a particulary vicious form of copying: vengeance-escalation, mimetic violence.

There is hardly anything that would not rest on copying.

Philosophy professor Ruth Millikan’s insight that everything that gets copied from an ancestor has a proper function or teleofunction: it is whatever feature or function that made it and its ancestor selected for copying, in competition with all the other similar copiable things. This would mean Aristotelean teleology is correct within the field of copyable things, replicators, i.e. within biology, although in physics still obviously incorrect.

Darwinian Reactionary drew attention to it two years ago and I still don’t understand why didn’t it generate a bigger buzz. It is an extremely important insight.

I mean, this is what we were waiting for, a proper synthesis of science and philosophy, and a proper way to rescue Aristotelean teleology, which leads to so excellent common-sense predictions that intuitively it cannot be very wrong, yet modern philosophy always denied it.

The result from that is the briding of the fact-value gap and burying the naturalistic fallacy: we CAN derive values from facts: a thing is good if it is well suitable for its natural purpose, teleofunction or proper function, which is the purpose it was selected for and copied for, the purpose and the suitability for the purpose that made the ancestors of this thing selected for copying, instead of all the other potential, similar ancestors.

If the proper function of a horse is to carry riders or draw carriages, sorry, open sleighs, it’s December, and look pretty while doing so and be docile and so on, because breeders selected their ancestors for these traits, then a good horse is one that is good in these because these ware what a horse was selected and copied for.

And the same way we have better and worse citizens, and better and worse women and men in general.

What was humankind selected for? I am afraid, the answer is kind of ugly.

Men were selected to compete between groups, the cooperate within groups largely for coordinating for the sake of this competition, and have a low-key competition inside the groups as well for status and leadership. I am afraid, intelligence is all about organizing elaborate tribal raids: “coalitionary arms races”. The most civilized case, least brutal but still expensive case is arms races in prestige status, not dominance status: when Ancient Athens buildt pretty buildings and modern France built the TGV and America sent a man to the Moon in order to gain “gloire” i.e. the prestige type respect and status amongst the nations, the larger groups of mankind. If you are the type who doesn’t like blood, you should probably focus on these kinds of civilized, prestige-project competitions.

Women were selected for bearing children, for having strong and intelligent sons therefore having these heritable traits themselves (HBD kind of contradicts the more radically anti-woman aspects of RedPillery: marry a weak and stupid but attractive silly-blondie type woman and your son’s won’t be that great either), for pleasuring men and in some rarer but existing cases, to be true companions and helpers of their husbands.

We can, of course, try to revolt against nature, but at least understand what it makes – a replicator going against the function it was selected for… something I would not take lightly.

I suppose a revolt against nature would work if you would 1) change the environment, so adapted behavior is no longer functional 2) change the selection mechanism 3) wait a long time.

In other words, if we were transhumans or a humanoid race descended from the homo sapiens but evolved away from it, living in space habitats, we could and should behave really differently. But we feel any sort of romantic attachment to living on this Earth the way we were meant to, or if we want to fix the decline here and now that technology gets any chance to get to that kind of level, we have to work within the natural framework.