Official: Single people need to LOWER their EXPECTATIONS

Re: Technology

"Technology can only progress if the culture permits it."

The first person to make a spear, arrow, fire, etc. didn't have to worry too much about culture saying no and that's especially true if it meant that person was able to provide more food or food that lasted longer. Any culture that tries to inhibit technology does so because they can wield the current technological weapons whether that is spears, rockets or politicians. Either way the bits of culture that have historically held people back have been the powerful institutions that felt threatened by technology that disagrees with their desires but seldom does that extend to all technological progress.

Let's be honest, religion is about controlling people. The examples you give are exactly that. Contraception reduces the number of potential inductees and therefore revenue. Scientific advancements are seen as "playing god" and we can't have people knowing how "god works". Some of it stems from tribal knowledge that becomes transmuted into faith in a deity's words. Take the dietary restrictions of many religions: poorly cooked pork often led to trichinosis and it was important to keep the "flock" healthy so pork was banned but now we know to cook it properly and that bacon is delicious.

Re: Technology

>>The Roman Catholic Church still attempts to prevent the use of artificial

>>contraception in wider civil societies.

I would be interested in your account of how contraception accelerates evolution.

Anonymous because a defense of the Church in the database of everything will get you burned at the stake soon.

Re: Technology

You had me right up until:

"Opposition to GMO crops etc are culturally driven attempts to prevent technological changes."

Actually, it's driven by the realisation that technological progress has been accompanied by plenty of technological disasters and they are most common when knowledge is recent and scanty. Remember 'junk DNA'? Oh, what's that, it isn't junk after all? Who knew? Nobody knew until very recently. And it gets affected by viruses and bacteria? Wow! So caution is defininitely indicated in this area which is racing ahead so large agricultural conglomerates can contiue to make big money. It would be a pity if the main use of seed banks wasn't to repair the planet after a meteor strike, but to replace crops poisoned by some half-arsed GM catastrophe.

Re: Technology

Tech is loved by the young because they are naive. It rarely changes things fundamentally, it merely amplifies what people were trying to do before.

Some people oppose tech because it hurts them personally (Luddites, Wapping). However, many people often oppose tech because they know people are stupid and greedy. Whenever people (especially profit-motivated people) get involved in something on a large scale, there are foul-ups.

Opposition to GMO is not usually cultural. GMO is commercial above all else. Companies like Monsanto don't do it to feed the world. We can already feed the world, we just choose not to allocate resources in that manner. GMO is designed to make crops resistant to specific poisons so that poisons can be sprayed all over them. That kills all the insects. Its the poison that the companies want to sell. In the US, they have to bus bees around the country to different crops because they've killed them all, so there's nothing left to do pollination. Think about that implications of that. No pollination for plants. What could possibly go wrong?

GMO is also seems to be used to make things larger. Fruit sold by the kg/lb is more profitable if you can make it soak up more water and be larger. Non-organic fruit tends to be larger than organic fruit and yes, nutrient content has fallen since the 60's. Intensive farming sucks all the nutrients out of the soil leaving it dead. Have you ever noticed that non-organic tomatoes tend to be redder than organic ones? How convenient if customers can't tell unripe fruit from ripe fruit. Pick them early, you've got longer shelf life, maybe get another crop in. Never mind that they don't taste nice and aren't as good for you. Monsanto was trumpeting the protein-enhanced potato, in India, the land of the lentil. Why?

Not all of this GMO is about gene-splicing either. Selective breeding has gone on for ages. Now we have wheat with such high gluten content and a surprising number of people can't tolerate it, but it makes bread so much softer and able to hold so much more air, so it looks more substantial than it is. Its great to be able to sell air.

Cane toads in Australia to control the pests? What could possibly go wrong? Tonsil removals for everyone - pesky evolutionary left over... oh wait, it does have a use in controlling infection? Sorry we didn't know. Bah, you don't need that evolutionary left-over called an appendix, it might burst and hurt you... oh, it might help in rebalancing the gut after you've been ill? Sorry we didn't know. Junk DNA? We can cut all that out.... ooops, actually there isn't any junk after all, we just didn't know what it did so we *assumed* it did nothing.

It doesn't even have to be commercial. Billions of pigeons in the US wiped out. Millions of bison, not really just for profit either. That violent stupidity which have been so much more limited in effect with bows and arrows than with gun tech.

When it comes to messing around with genetics, scientists really don't know what they are doing. They've certainly identified some bits which do certain things, but they really don't know the long term effects of what they are doing. They can't know, they haven't been doing it for long enough. The scientists are playing God, but since they don't know how life works, they are just playing, without fully understanding the design.

So what did those "primitives" of 3000 years ago know from their deity? Don't farm the same piece of land every year - give it a break after six years to allow it to recover. Don't cross-breed your animals of different types. Even something as close as a horse and a donkey gives you a sterile mule. Don't farm right to the edges of your fields (you'll need the wild-life) and be a little inefficient in your reaping (don't go back to get the bits you missed), so that very poor people can come into your fields after you've taken your main crop and there'll still be some left for them. Look at the "clean" and "unclean" animals to eat - the clean ones are basically vegetarian. Bacon maybe tasty, but pigs will eat anything and they are usually fed rubbish. Eating things concentrates the nutrients and the poisons from whatever is eaten. How did we get BSE? Feeding meat to cows. It isn't their natural food, but a product of industrial farming. Large scale farming and industry is enabled by tech. Large scale industry can produce great wealth but it also often provides great incentives for corruption and doing the wrong thing.

I'm not at all saying we should shun tech, but we do need to recognise that it does not create utopia. In the past, there was a strong belief through society that humans were designed by an intelligence that understood how they work. Having abandoned that world-view, there is a desperation to vindicate its replacement by Science. The problem is that Science gets it wrong, a lot. That wasn't a problem in the past. It was merely a limited man's investigation into what God had made, but now Science has taken the place of God, it has to be right. Despite the Piltdown man, "Lucy", "junk DNA", and (according to the editors) 75% of what is published in "Nature" being wrong, those promoting Science-as-a-God have to give it more credence than it deserves because no-one will stick with a god who's priests "don't know" the answers.

Three-person fertility treatments are a convenient stick-in-the-eye to God, which makes it culturally popular. It sounds like a threesome which is fun, rather than human genetic engineering which is scary. Interestingly, many of those who promote threesomes say don't do it with friends because it wrecks relationships. Some fun that is.

But back to the article. What if fails to mention in its evolutionary politics is that things are probably not better than they used to be. Reducing expectations seems a little sad. We've become consumers of relationships. The concept of "love" has been reduced to sentimentalism and sex. Neither is going to keep a couple together when the going gets tough and other options are available. It never did and it doesn't now. You need principled devotion to stay together. Hormones and emotions can help, but they can't be relied on.

In the past, those vows, "for better, for worse" meant something, or at least society pretended they did and punished those who skipped out, if somewhat unequally. There was at least a pledge of going all-in, 100% of me and mine is granted to you, and vice-versa. Now its 50-50 and if I don't like how things are going, I'll walk away. Now we have "reduced expectations." People don't even bother making the promises any more, but they are still hurt when the one who never promised to "forsake all others" goes away. Hurt, financially disadvantaged and left with children who do worse in an unstable environment.

Relationships fail because those in them think more of themselves than they do of their partner. Its almost a commercial deal and if I'm not getting value-for-money all the time, I'm terminating the contract. That's greed. That's lack of respect for your partner - putting them on the same footing as a cable-tv contract. In the Christian model, yes, one side is supposed to take leadership responsibilities but at the same time, he's supposed to be willing to die for the good of his wife. That seems like a good balance to me - better than straight patriarchy or matriarchy and better than the evolutionary-consumer model of relationships. I'm not saying this attitude is the exclusive preserve of Christians, merely that evolution doesn't have a philosophical-requirement under-pinning it. To behave like that would be nice, but irrational.

Re: Technology

Opposition to GMO crops is about trying to stop mega-corporations having the right to tell us 'pay royalties or starve'