Charles Brough
Can world history be
explained by means of Natural Selection? This book does, and
specifically avoids Social Darwinism. The work chronicles the whole
human story by showing how Natural Selection works on
societies.
It
defines “society” as “the
maximum sized group we all intuitively use a common world-view and
closed system of thinking to bind us into and which substitutes for
the small hunting-gathering groups which millions of years of
evolution evolved us to function in.”
The
work is remarkable for its objectivity. In order to avoid
institutional bias, the author re-interpreted
the social science theory consensus interpretation of the data
without using any of the twenty-one subjective word-use stratagems
(see Appendix) commonly used in academic social theory, also by using
key social science terms from a special Glossary in which all the
terms are defined only one way,
and most often functionally.
CHARLES
BROUGH passed the entrance exam to Stanford University, but instead
of attending, he spent six years in colleges studying biological,
medical, and natural sciences. He decided that the reason social
theorists were unable to explain how social evolution works---his
specific interest---had to be because of university system
subjectivity due to the nature of the subject. So, he spent the next
fifty-three years doing independent
research in more than twelve social sciences and related fields.
But
it was not all academic; he traveled to thirty-five nations, lived in
six, had marriages, two daughters, and a divorce. His first book,
“The Cycle of Civilization,” was edited by Dr. Linus Pauling.
Brough's
writing has appeared in Skeptic Magazine, the Chronicle of Higher
Education, and numerous newspapers. He has given speeches at the
Plato Society of UCLA, Missouri Southern State University, and the
Institute of Social Realism in Los Angeles.
PART
1
one --- NATURAL SELECTION
The
millions of years of evolution that preceded us shaped us into a
distinct social animal, one that has since then managed to accumulate
an immense cultural heritage that has helped us to rapidly populate
the Earth.
But
who are
we? We
are not just another “HOMINID” or a fellow Neanderthal---nor are
we just an evolutionary blur. The
anthropological consensus currently points to our emergence about
195,000 years BP (before present) because that is when we had
attained the same gross anatomy and gross genetic structure we have
today, but for the next 155,000 years, those archaic Sapiens
continued to have the same primitive and unchangingly static
Mousterian tool-weapon technology as the Neanderthals. Those
Sapiens were archaic; we are not. They were not “us.”
Speech
began to develop in our ancestral line millions of years ago, but its
development was mostly genetic. It evolved through the brutal and
ponderously slow process of biological natural selection. What is
most important to note is that snail's-pace biological
evolution essentially stopped
when the brain's speech center ceased to evolve further. Since then,
some small biological changes have occurred---such as a
slightly smaller brain case,
thiner leg bones and a better immunity to influenza---but none of
that in any way accounts for the since-then rapid improvement in our
technology and, hence, the rapid growth in our numbers here on Earth.
The biological evolution of further speech capability came to a halt
because no further biological evolution was needed. Fast-paced social
evolution had replaced it. It is that point of transition between
biological evolution to social evolutionary progress (see
Glossary) which separates us
from our simian predecessors. No matter how anthropologists classify
us within the various hominid species, what we are, what is
human, the human race, began at
the transition point when social evolution replaced biological
evolution 40,000 years ago. It is the least arbitrary
point.
Not
only is it proposed here that
the demarcation point occurred about 40,000 years ago, but
also that natural selection has increased the total human
cultural technological heritage ever since then.
The evolutionary natural selection process developed and describe
here also explains how and why societies and their
civilizations rise and fall. In 1896, Benjamin
Kidd's used the term, “Social Evolution” to explain that natural selection
occurred between societies based on major religions. His thesis had
important implications that seemed offensive to both the religious
faithful and to secular-system-based Free Thinkers as well. As a
result, the concept has been developed very little since then. Instead,
during the half century that immediately followed, such social
theorists as Arnold. J. Toynbee, Pitirum Sorokin, Ellsworth
Huntington and others tried in other ways to explain, for example,
why civilizations rise and fall. They and others theorized that
“great
men,” climate change, “free-will,” “Challenge and Response," . . .
