Planet of the Apes.

My friend Labrys is ruminating on Pascal's Wager:

"Blaise Pascal made it famous…that bet on God; but he could never have conceived of the takers of that bet trashing everything in the here and now. His idea was that belief could not hurt….but acting as if an entire planet and anyone not agreeing with your belief is disposable? Even Pascal would have skipped THAT gamble! I walked away from dogmas that dismiss the world and ALL its people. But yes, I do believe it is the duty of love to fight FOR that world….and as pagans in daily life and action, both mundane and magical. And I would suggest that it is the invisible, the unseen attitudes and fear, that must change before the visible can be altered."

While I agree that eighty-sixing the notion that there's a magical Sky Daddy that has the power to take the worst of your crimes and "forgive" them

(and I should note that almost ALL religions add a little kicker about "go forth and sin no more" which is almost always ignored - the religious Get Out Of Jail Free card always seems to be used to allow the sinner to continue to, if not actually recommit the sin, to bloviate about his or her speshul snowflakery with regard to how the beam in their eye doesn't require them to be shutting the piehole about the mote in yours, especially if you are poor, or an uppity woman, or a negro wearing your pants down around the bottom of your ass, or a "taker", or...)

would be a good idea I'm not sure I agree that it would do much to mitigate the fairly amazing rate at which we're fucking up the only planet that will take us or the lives of our fellow humans.

Thing is, I'm afraid that the problem is as much to do with what we are as what we "believe".

And, basically, that's a sort of jumped up nasty little hairless monkey.

Us hairless monkeys still act like we're pretty much hardwired for monkey-thought: Grab the food, as much as I can, as quick as I can, ALL of it if I can. If there's a hole (or a pole) jump on it. Other-monkeys-are-scary. When in doubt, scream, jump around and fling poop.

That worked fine when were were just another omnivore trying to get by on the Serengti.

Hey, it's hard out there for a chimp.

But give us planet-cracking technology and the ability to change everything from weather to our own bodies?

We'll tend to use it, and not like gods or heroes, but like the gibbering little monkeys we still are above the neck.

I think the genius of the GOP (and the bible-humpers) has been to take this sort of monkey business - that (at least since the Enlightenment and/or the scientific revolution that accompanied it) we are supposed to be ashamed of and trying to suppress - and pull it out into the daylight, celebrate it, and make it acceptable.

Selfish? Greedy? It's OK - Ayn Rand says so! Hate the poors, uppity wimmens, gays, liberal poofies nagging you about being narrowminded, greedy, spiteful shitheads? Wonderful! Awesome! God says you SHOULD! Convinced that Big Gummint will take your FREEDOM but that Big Corporatism is FREEDOM? You're exactly right, my friend because...FREEDOM!

Not surprisingly, this appeal to the worst sorts of monkey-fuckery in human nature has won them the approval of...wait for it...narrowminded, greedy, spiteful shitheaded monkeyfucks.

Which still comprise a surprisingly large portion of humanity (if you're surprised that humans are like the meanest fucking chimp in the woods and not more like cheerful bonobos actually-fucking their cares away).

So while I agree that ditching religion and the nasty habits it reinforces wouldn't hurt, I'd still be surprised if that did much to make humanity better at long-term, humanist, sensible thinking.

The Inner Chimp will always tend make us reach for the poop first and think later.

TC Darwin

I'm always sort of amazed when I run into people who "don't believe" in evolution as the method of the origin of species.

First, because most of these people are "conservative". And, second, because if they would just look around, they'd see a wonderful metaphor for evolution at work in one of their (typically) favorite things; weapons.

I thought about this again because of my son's current favorite on-line game "World of Tanks".

The magilla behind this MMO game is that there's this imaginary world full of World War 2 tanks. It includes every possible permutation and variation of the breed, including tanks that were no more than prototypes or never fired a shot in anger between 1939 and 1945. Oh, and it includes self-propelled artillery, for some odd reason.

But they're all there, and you "buy" a tank or tanks and then you get tossed into battles where you drive around, shoot other people, and get shot. There's no infantry, or mines, or civilians, or politics, or messy wounds or deaths - it's WW2 in a pasteurized bottle, but it's big fun for nine years old.

But here's the catch; you have to start out with a light tank; the VK-31 Leichttraktor for Germany, the Soviet MS-1, or the U.S. T1 "Cunningham".

But you get pitched into battles with much bigger tanks, everything from mid-war mediums to 1945 superheavies. The Boy spends a lot of time getting shot into Swiss cheese, at which time I remind him that there are two types of light tanks; ones that hang around after the Big Kids show up to play, and live ones.

Which brings me back to evolution.

Because typically we can't "see" things evolve. Natural selection requires environmental change to occur, and that usually occurs over millenia. A type of critter produces several genotypes, and then some change occurs - temperature, salinity, rainfall, vegetation - where one genotype is more successful than the others. But the replacement of one with another often takes lifetimes, typically many lifetimes, to complete.

But in the World of Tanks, the real world of tanks, we've seen a process that neatly duplicates what happens in the evolution of species through natural selection in a single long human lifespan.

The major nations typically went to war in the late Thirties or early Forties with a full suite of armored vehicles;

Light tanks, for scouting,

Medium tanks, for general combat, and mobile action, and

Heavy tanks, for static defense or breaking through an enemy's defense.

(The only exceptions I can think of were the Chinese, who flat-out couldn't afford anything more than a rag-tag and bobtail, and the Japanese, whose armored force was as crude and unsophisticated as the rest of Japanese tactical doctrine.

I should really do a post about them - Japanese armor truly sucked pipe, kind of shocking for a nation whose ambitions were so great...)

Where are they now?

I'll tell you where; they're here, but the tank has evolved.

The deadly natural selection of combat was unpleasant to the light tanks; they were too small and too slow to fight through an enemy's screen of medium tanks, mines, and hand-held antitank rockets (the bazooka and the Panzerfaust were the small mammals that ate the light tank eggs...) and reconnaissance duties increasingly became the province of the aircraft.

And the heavies were just that; too damn heavy. Too slow, too expensive, too few. I don't agree with the old Soviet saying about "quantity has a quality of it's own" but it was true that unless the terrain was ideal the combination of infantry, artillery, tac air, and medium tanks could winkle out a platoon or so of heavies with a little effort.

The light and heavy versions of the species a. tankus converged on the medium to produce the "main battle tank". This vehicle has roughly the speed of a WW2 medium tank (or better) with composite armor and the main cannon of roughly a WW2 heavy tank. The current U.S. M1A1 has a 120mm cannon; the German Panzerjäger Tiger Ausf. B mounted the 12.8 cm PaK 44 L/55. The armor of the Soviet T-80 is comparable to the late-WW2 IS models or the German superheavies.

Modern tanks are clearly an evolution of the WW2 types, an evolution that converged on the medium tank at the expense of the heavy and light types.

Ground reconnaissance duties have now been delegated to other vehicles; light wheeled scout cars such as the U.S. M1126 Stryker or the Russian BRDM/BTR-types, or the tracked carriers such as the U.S. M3 CFV.

Even on the theatre scale the U.S. Army concluded after WW2 that reconnaissance and screening are the province of specialized units (armored cavalry regiments, or ACRs) but armed them with standard main battle tanks and infantry/cavalry carriers. Since the Third Gulf War in 1991 most of these ACRs have been converted to use the Stryker light wheeled AFVs.

Only the British insist that the light tank still has a place on the battlefield.

Their Scimitar AFV is the last of the Great Power lights, and I have a sneaking suspicion that its persistence owes more to the reluctance of the British cavalry to accept that in armored war a modern cavalryman in a light tank is as dead as their horse cavalry forebears were when they met the original armored columns in 1939.

(Oh, and I should note here that the Poles weren't really that stupid; it's a military urban legend...)

For the rest of the world experience has concluded that using a small tank to scout is expensive and unproductive; it is too small to outfight an MBT and too slow to outrun one. Its light armor cannot withstand modern artillery or infantry antitank weaponry. A wheeled vehicle can do the job just as well, and it's loss can be afforded better. Sorry, scouts; it's just not worth training you up to be a tanker.

The natural selection of battle has not chosen the light tanker and his little tank.

So my poor little man and his light tank are trying to fight against not just larger and stronger tanks, but forces that mimic the incredible power of natural selection and species evolution.

No wonder it's such a hard fight.

But he has an excuse; he's nine years old. And we've talked about "evolution" and he's seen the simulacrum happening in the World of Tanks. I tell him; if the tanks were "intelligently designed" the M1 would have been invented in 1916.

Instead, the tank "evolved" as the world's tank designers responded to the natural selection of battle by altering the phenotype of the tank over the course of the 20th Century. The analogy isn't perfect, of course...but it makes the point; "species" can change, do change, as the result of natural selection, and end up resembling something very different from the starting point.

I wonder; what the flamin' hell is the excuse for the "conservatives" who don't "believe in evolution"..? Can't they SEE?

So, all together now:

(For those of you non-German speakers, that's the Panzerleid, the "Tank Song" of the German Army of WW2. Interestingly, for all that the modern Bundeswehr has discarded almost all the old Wehrmacht trappings, the Wiki entry says that the German tankers still sing this song.)

(And I want to tip my hat to commentor "gruff", whose cogent arguments regarding tanks and evolution caused me to revise this post)

Extinction: Beat It Through Self-Hypnosis

Saw something the other day about pandas.

Seems that a Brit wildlife type made the suggestion that pandas are a sort of evolutionary cul-de-sac and that we should let 'em go.

Mind you - the critters were doing fairly OK until - imagine - humans came along and turned their bamboo forests into farms and timber tracts...

Now personally I'm fairly immune to the fabled panda "charm";...they always seem faintly silly to me.

But going in and fucking up their home and then blaming them for not doing their evolutionary best?

Seems pretty hypocritical to me.

This particular panda does seem like the poster panda for the shallow end of the panda gene pool.