The current edition of Discover Magazine includes an article titled “Days of Dysevolution.” The subheading reads:
Heart disease. Diabetes. Lower back pain. Athlete’s foot. Today’s humans are afflicted with ailments that virtually didn’t exist for our nomadic forebears. Can we adapt our way out of them?
The term “dysevolution” was coined by the scientist whose theories the article features: Biologist Daniel Lieberman. It refers to the mismatches between the conditions our bodies evolved for, over millions of years, and the sedentary lifestyle most Westerners lead today.
While it would be hard to argue against his basic premise, I got the impression that the article’s author, Jeff Wheelwright, was hobbled by political correctness – and a desire to adhere to its tenets while, at the same time, delivering some measure of truth.
Take this paragraph for example:
Although human beings are still evolving, Lieberman doubts that natural selection can overtake our quicksilver culture and rectify our health problems. “I care about my children and grandchildren. I’m not going to wait for natural selection. It’s not that rapid,” he says. He favors fighting dysevolution on its own terms, by cultural means. Unhealthy habits and products will be passed down the generations as long as the advantages – convenience, low cost, appealing taste – are seen to exceed the disadvantages. What he calls cultural buffering, from protective clothing to antibiotics, screen the body from the harshness of the environment and of evolution. “Lack of selection, because of antibiotics, say, leads to an increase in [human] variation. People who might have been filtered out won’t be. They’ll pass on their genes,” he says.
In a society free from the chains of political correctness, this would be a natural segue to a discussion of the pros and cons of eugenics – for what he describes comes very close to dysgenics.
The article includes large illustrations depicting Australopithecus afarensis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens (hunter-gatherer), Homo sapiens (farmer) and Homo sapiens (industrial/post-industrial). I found the last three very telling.
Homo sapiens (hunter-gatherer) is shown as an athletic young man who could be Australian Aborigine or black African. He is described, in larger print on the heading, thus:
… Dark-skinned, narrow-hipped and fleet-footed. A rounder head had a face tucked below the brain.
Four text boxes describe the evolutionary highlights of this hunter-gatherer. All positive, they include, in bold: Long vocal tract, dexterous tongue/ Athletic/ Energy storage/ Adaptable.
The next illustration shows Homo sapiens (farmer). He is shown as a less athletic young man of European type. The heading reads:
… They settled down and began to raise crops and domesticate animals. This departure from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle led to most of the mismatch diseases from which we currently suffer, Lieberman says.
The three text boxes include (typed in bold) Shorter/ Sicker/ Paler.
The last one, Homo sapiens (industrial/ post-industrial) features a middle-aged white couple. The heading reads:
The past 250 years have seen more change in culture than the previous 250,000 years, dwarfing the changes to the human body. The world’s population booms, straining the world’s natural resources.
The illustration includes six text boxes titled, in bold: Smaller jaws and faces/ Vision/ Bad backs/ Reproductive cycle changes (leading to an increase in cancer)/ Foot problems/ Less athletic. Four of the six are presented as negative traits.
I would argue that these illustrations have crossed the line from science, and into propaganda. Why do I say this?
The progression is presented as going from good to worse, and as this happens, the samples shown are whiter and whiter. The implication is clear: Dark is good/ light is bad. While it’s true that most hunter-gatherers were probably dark-skinned – so are most industrial/post-industrial humans today. Furthermore, there were plenty of light-skinned hunter-gatherers in Europe prior to the agricultural revolution. As a matter of fact, all evidence suggests that Europe’s hunter-gatherers were lighter than its farmers, the latter having come from the Middle East.
While all the other subjects are shown in the prime of their lives, the sickly white couple, shown at the end, appear to be in their fifties. One might argue that, since people live longer in industrial societies, this makes sense. However, the article itself states:
It’s not true that hunter-gatherers died young, before heart disease and the like could manifest themselves. Those who survived infancy could live to around 70.
The fact that overpopulation is brought up only when showing white people is particularly galling – considering that all white populations, worldwide, are in decline. Whites aren’t even having enough babies to replace themselves. If overpopulation is to be brought up at all (and if it is, it should be explained how this fits into the context of the article), then it should be coupled with a depiction of black Africans; almost all of the highest fertility countries are located in sub-Saharan Africa.
One gets the impression that the author and illustrator made a special effort to depict white people as pathetic, weak and sickly. At the same time, by depicting more “advanced” humans as white, they’re making a backhanded admission that it was whites who invented modern society as we know it.
Here’s the opening illustration for the article. It’s obvious that the centrally positioned dark-skinned hunter-gatherer is considered as close to the “perfect human” as possible. He’s centrally positioned, with his primitive inferiors to his right, and his degenerate successors to his left. The old and tired white man looks as if he’s ready to collapse and die:
Heart disease. Diabetes. Lower back pain. Athlete’s foot. Today’s humans are afflicted with ailments that virtually didn’t exist for our nomadic forebears. Can we adapt our way out of them?
How can he be so certain about that? Can we compare Tinactin sales figures from today versus 10,000 BC?
I’m posting in the midst of the Ethopian riots in Israel.
Despite the fact that Freddie Grey’s feces are gold, there IS other news.
I know that the Ethopien citizens in Israel consider themselves
second class citizens, and that MANY wanted them to undergo ritiual
baths.
There is a worldwide satanic/Marxist push to destroy civilization using
grievences from “opressed” minorities. What is your take?
Here you go again, hunting witches. If you don’t like seeing that stuff then don’t go out of your way to look at it. I don’t watch TV. I don’t read magazines or newspapers. I almost never watch movies. I’m a happy person, because if I see stuff like that, I simply stop looking at it. Your witch hunting is distracting from actual issues that negatively impact white people, like affirmative action. Affirmative action is unconstitutional. People drawing pictures that depict white people in a way that you dislike is not unconstitutional. If you want to live in a place where people can only say stuff that you like to hear, you can found your own version of North Korea.
Negative depictions of whites feed hatred toward whites. This, in turn, helps support the very policies we both find unjust.
If the article worried more about intelligence and innovation then it would be on the right track. From what I can gather from this post, the article is more about losing our body health than losing our intelligence, and losing our body health is inevitable as we do less exercise in order to survive (because of the society we created). So although it’s nice to see an article on this topic in a magazine, it’s barking up the wrong tree.
What are you going to do about it? There are negative depictions of every group of people out there: Whites, Blacks, males, females, rich, poor, disabled, not disabled, Catholic, Jewish, Atheist, Muslims, Hindus, etc.
Good find JAY. At first I thought “wow this is good, talking about dysgenics, good to see”, but by the end of it I had this impression that the author would ideally want us all to revert back to 80 IQ’d cavemen just because we wouldn’t need anti-biotics. We are living in an industrial, civilised society precisely because certain humans (Europeans primarily, as well as east Asians and Middle-Easterners) created a society intelligent and efficient enough to work and create, within the confines of the (high) intelligence and (innovative) personalities of the particular populations. (That is why industrialisation doesn’t work in every continent – the populations are mentally different.)
The pictures depicting the sickly looking industrial couple and the depressed looking farmer are pure propaganda – what the pictures could instead show are the scientific and artistic achievements of white people (which quite frankly, are nothing short of astonishing), as well as showing graphs about whites’ changing demographics in their own countries.
This article makes good points about “dysevolution” and the diseases and physical problems it creates. But regardless of what this article points out, civilisation and industrialisation are in fact a good thing, as over centuries and millennia they cause chemical adaptations in the brain whereby humans with not only higher intelligence, but a greater level of societal-trust and willingness to co-operate in a broad society, breed more, and hence over many generations, create a new type of human. Europeans and east Asians are examples of the results of this actually happening, over millennia. Australian Aboriginals and Africans and even Afghanis are peoples/races who have not had this happen. Hence (generally speaking) they find it difficult to thrive in a Western or Asian society.
Actually, the author does conclude that he’d rather live in today’s society, and enjoy its benefits – but you’d actually have to READ the entire article to see this. The average person, browsing through it in the doctor’s waiting room, would only look at the pictures.
Nobodys is forcing you to even open the pages of that magazine.
America is coming apart at the seams. And we are in the midst
of a full court Satanic/Marxist revolution.
Watch out Baltimore TONIGHT. Watch EVERYWHERE.
The black and the Muslim will join forces. The hit teams are here NOW.
Say goodbye. Blood will darken the street.
Re: Anonymous, who wrote: “There are negative depictions of every group of people out there: Whites, Blacks, males, females, rich, poor, disabled, not disabled, Catholic, Jewish, Atheist, Muslims, Hindus, etc.”
Show me ONE negative depiction of a non-white group, recently published in a “mainstream” outlet. If there’s even so much as a hint of something negative, the publisher is called out, threatened with boycotts or lawsuits and forced to recant and apologize.
Have you ever seen the Daniel Tosh show? Half his jokes make fun of Black people for being overweight, low IQ, and for speaking ebonics. He is also occasionally known to make fun of overweight Hispanic people.
To talk of dysevolution implies a direction to evolution, and thereby reveals the speaker’s ignorance of what the process of evolution involves. There is nothing teleological about it. to quote Konrad Lorenz:
“Natural selection gives no preference to what, in the long run, could be advantageous, but blindly rewards whatever momentarily affords greater procreative success.”
If a small brain and a slavish subservience to the powers that be promotes reproductive success, mankind will in time evolve (not dysevolve) to the mental status of the tape worm.
Good point. I think the point the author was making is not that we’re “evolving in the ‘wrong direction,’ but rather that the changes we’re now subject to are happening so fast that the process of evolution has no chance to keep pace.
But the small-brained subservience of Europeans and Euroamericans to the demands of their elites as promulgated by the MSM and enforced by police and administrative action amounts to acquiescence in genocide, specifically, self-genocide by means of anti-family and anti-natalist (e.g., mass abortion) policies, mass non-European immigration and multiculturalism, all made acceptable by the relentless denigration of Europeans and European civilization.
Richard Lynn calls it dysgenics. Probably because of the similarity to eugenics this taboo word can not be used by other people. Instead they invent “dysevolution”.
It is worth watching Richard Lynn’s speech on dysgenics on YouTuble.
The manipulative gossip in this article is terrible. No substance, no science, but manipulatively raising the value of Black aborigines.
I remember my dentist telling me that all the old pre-historic people hat terrible teeth, worn down by hard food and sand, and otherwise quite damaged. Imagine you can not fix your teeth when you have a cavity.
I wonder why the author did not mention that to live the wonderful old hunter gatherer life style we also need this minute population density. Africa is going the wrong way.