Londoner Ross Milburn, an IT writer now living in Hong Kong, introduces his book Adaptive Society as follows: “The horror of war set me on a lifelong quest to discover why human government is so bad, in spite of the intelligence, morality, and loyal nature of most individuals, and the ceaseless advances of modern science.”
Since he moved to Hong Kong, Ross has witnessed at first hand the explosive growth of China and the rising living standards achieved by the Chinese people as a direct result of less government control that followed Deng Xiaoping‘s adoption of market principles.
“How different are these industrial heroes (speaking of the achievements of industrial workers, especially production managers and IT professionals, whose utilization of science and technology is key to rising living standards) from the politicians that provide warfare, huge wealth differentials, devalued currencies, mindless bureaucracy, constant surveillance of their host populations, and industrial and social over-regulation that is both unjust and unproductive,” says Ross.
Writing as a family man he believes that the normal human lifecycle is becoming much harder to complete in industrial societies, “…because all states act against personal autonomy and family values, and employ technology for futile inter-state competition. The distortion of normal human social organization is the ultimate cause of most of the systematic problems that confront humans today,” he emphasises.
Adaptive Society explains why current civilization does not “fit” human needs and what humans can do about it. Failures of fit are seen in such things as warfare, that 80% of diseases are caused by the industrialized lifestyle, exaggerated wealth differentials, the disruption of family life by divorce, greatly diminished birth rates, the widespread systemic corruption of governments, and the excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs.
In the Stone Age, the excellent “fit” between humans and their natural habitat resulted from evolution. In the 19th century, Charles Darwin explained the process of inheritance, variation and natural selection, by which all living things continually adapt to their environments. However, when the highly specialised human brain evolved, it gave rise to technologies such as stone tools, control of fire, clothing, and artificial dwellings.
In the modern age, human inventions are created so rapidly that Darwinian evolution cannot possibly alter humans fast enough to fit their habitat. That creates nearly all of the problems that humans face. However, in principle, nature has already solved the problem of creating an adaptive “fit” between humans and their technological civilization. Scientists have realized that industrialized society itself is evolving, and, for the most part, maintaining adaptive conditions.
We now can see that evolution has been “inverted” so that, instead of the human species evolving to adapt to its natural habitat, an artificial habitat, based on technology, is evolving to provide mostly adaptive conditions for humans. But there is one kind of technology that social evolution cannot cope with – the technology of government, in the form of the nation state.
Nation states were created by warfare, and are maintained today by brute force and propaganda. Under the state, the human freedoms and egalitarianism that existed in the Stone Age were replaced by hierarchical stratifications, including slavery. From a biological perspective, all modern governments are coercive parasites, practicing “tax-farming,” and exploiting their host populations as “human livestock.”
The solution is for all humans to unite and reverse the destruction of their biological heritage. “Adaptive Society” provides a scientifically based description of the crisis in human adaptation, and what must be done to remedy it.
Adaptive Society: Biology supports Global Law, Consensual Government, and Sustainable Technology
By Ross Milburn
Available both as a paperback and an eBook, from Amazon– November 11, 2014
http://www.amazon.com/Adaptive-Society-Consensual-Government-Sustainable/dp/9881311055
