The Origin of Political Species

A NEW BOOK BY Robert Haston

About the Author

Pardon me for not having the standard turtleneck and tweed glamour shot. All my pictures seem to come from when Uncle Sam sends me on vacation. This was Afghanistan,  Spring ‘07.

One of the fringe benefits is lots of time to research and write. I started another book in Iraq back in ’03, which I will finish in Afghanistan in ‘09.

While The Origin speaks for itself regarding scientific merit, you can clearly see it’s author  hasn’t been raised amongst the ivory towers of liberal academia, but amongst staunch conservatives.    

My E-mail: robert at this domain name
Text Box: Useful Cranks and Gentleman Scholars In Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free Charles Pierce opens with the story of his favorite crank, Congressman Ignatius L. Donnelly. Donnelly gained fame in 1882 when he wrote Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, resurrecting the idea of humanity’s origin from a lost continent. Peirce uses this as an example of how back before millions of people could stare at a 2 dimensional moving image of someone and emotionally connect with them, the weight of your idea was more important than your emotional charisma. Ideas can be verified or debunked in an objective scientific manner; thereby expanding human knowledge step by step. Pierce bemoans how celebrity is the new truth. The number of true believers who listen or watch you to the exclusion of others is the new standard. Unfortunately this is invading science itself, and scientists are being told to sell themselves as media personalities. I plead guilty as charged (it is hard not to under your own glamour shot video) but in my defense, this book isn’t about me (the product of my parents genes) but the content of my ideas (memes) which I’ve recently constructed from other’s memes —a tradition that started about 80,000 years ago. So I hereby present myself as a useful crank, helping to open what may become one of the most important topics of our time: We already accept that genes profoundly shape our innate emotions, and these genes came from somewhere. So if my theory of the origin of political species doesn’t hold water, what does? Whatever Happened to the Gentleman Scholar? Wizard of OZ: Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the earth—or slinks through slimy seas has a brain!   From the rock-bound coast of Maine to the Sun…oh-oh, no----ah –Well, be that as it may. Back where I come from we have universities, seats of great learning—where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts—and with no more brains than you have…But! They have one thing you haven’t got! A diploma!    (The Wizard reaches back and obtains several diplomas—selecting one and presents it to the Scarecrow as Dorothy, Tin Man and the Lion look on)   Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitatus Committeeatum e plurbis unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Th.D.   Scarecrow: Th.D.?   Wizard: Yeah—that, that’s Dr. of Thinkology!   Scarecrow: The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side. Oh joy, rapture! I’ve got a brain!      Supposedly we are living in the age of an internet driven renaissance of the individual thinker and artist. TIME magazine declared "YOU" (meaning YouTube, Wikipedia, bloggers, etc.) as "Man of the year"—complete with mirrored cover reflecting your face.   This makes perfect sense. Around the time America was founded, most great minds were centered in seats of learning, but thanks to the printing press, men arose from humble backgrounds to become not just some of our most renowned minds, but founders of our nation. Alexander Hamilton, bastard child and orphan from the West Indian Colonies became “The Father of Our Constitution” along with our currency and banking system which fostered the American Industrial Revolution. When asked why there is no monument to Hamilton in our capitol one historian said that is because we are living in his monument. So now that everyone is plugged into most of the information that once only scientists had access to, there should be a renaissance of outsiders, the heirs of lay scholars like Darwin. Or more specifically, where are the heirs of individuals like Alfred Russell Wallace, the impoverished species collector whose similar theory stirred Darwin to finally publish his? If we truly live in an age of open source meritocracy, then why was the last famous book from a lay scholar Eric Hoffer’s True Believer in 1951? While this doesn’t apply to fiction writing, we see a near polar opposite in non-fiction, where your credentials are more important than your ideas. It also appears that whether your credentials actually involve your current work don’t matter much. Many renowned experts (like Jared Diamond) hold degrees in unrelated fields. They get to become “autodidacts”, while anyone else without a professorship is simply a yahoo. In an age where there are innumerable new aids for those who missed the boat to catch up and come aboard, an invisible barrier has pushed them all back for decades. Not that there aren’t some who are clearly reaching out to lend a hand. Professor John Hibbing welcomed the efforts of a creative writer to our joint endeavor.   Such an effort makes perfect sense with this topic, which labors under a paradox. Such a straightforward and inevitable theory has probably been waiting in the wings for a major academic, but espousing a theory that not only separates our politics by genes, but gives older genes to one side is what academics call a CLM (career limiting maneuver). The phrase “there is no such thing as bad publicity” applies to writers but not academics. So much of fields such as evo-politics and neuropolitics are left to “gentleman scholars” and members of the wiki generation like me and Charles Brack. Hopefully this book will usher in more than a rising sub-political and therefore post-political consciousness. Hopefully it will help reopen the long closed path for gentleman and gentlewomen scholars.

 

 

TV Interview  September ‘09

 

This video is from a documentary done by an Orlando Florida Television Station. They did interview me about my book, but that didn’t make the cut. I hope to get that video soon.

 

I do think that this would be a nice way to show that if I am a crank, I’m at least a very high functioning one. They  let me teach pilots how to poke airplanes for gas and pluck people up with 200 foot cables. They even let me appear on TV!