Welcome to My Peeves Page

The Things I Know
(i think?)

(1)
I graduated from UCSD in June 1997 with a Bachelor's in Biological Anthropology, though most of my training fits under the category of behavioral ecology (particularly of primates, including ancestral humans), secondly under paeolontology, as well as some zoology/botany/entomology... In other words take me to the zoo and I start shouting out latin names and describing how the diversity of things we see frightened in their tiny cages are miserable representations of the tremendous variety of life which lived on earth long before the agricultural conquest of humans, especially before we began practicing and spreading around totalitarian agriculture...
I studied abroad in Australia at Monash University's Ecology and Evolutionary Dept. for the entire 1996 year...
I was an intern at the San Diego Zoo through a UCSD research project which examined Personality and Temperament in four species of endangered African rainforest monkeys (Cercopithecus neglectus, C. ascanius, C. l'hoesti, Allenopithecus nigroviridus).  My involvement with this project lasted from Jan. to June 1997, although it continues without me: here is a photo of a C. neglectus group (mother [Sprite] on left holding baby, son [Bobby], and adult male [Henry] on right), and a photo of an A.nigroviridus mother [Dixie] and daughter [Maxine].
 

(2)
People Strive to Distance Themselves from their Natural History

Whether plastic surgery, birth control, anti-aging creams, motorhomes, early stone tools, the slaughter of all wildlife which posed a threat to people, or supermarkets... since the origin of totalitarian agriculture people have been extremely reluctant to accept the laws of nature.  Every strive made by mass culture is a step away from our heritage, represented by the millions of species which led up to the present, and whose genes we all carry.

Try to imagine yourself having to truly deal with nature: having no technology (stores, cars, guns, houses, sunglasses, stoves, etc.)...
for one day... for a month... a year... now for a lifetime.
You wouldn't survive, would you?

(3)
People, as a species, unrightfully maintain an attitude of arrogance, anthropocentricism, selfishness, and especially anthropomorphism.

Firstly, people need to realize that there is a history of 3.5 billion years of life preceding the appearance of people-like species.  People do not appear on a calendar of the history of life until seconds before the clock strikes 12midnight on New Years' Eve. Here is another way of looking at it, too.
Secondly, people are not the ultimate pinnacle of evolutionary history.  The present is merely a freeze-frame in a long, relentless, and eternally continuous process called natural selection which will not even blink at the disappearance of people, much like it did not blink at the disappearance of 99% of species which have ever lived: each are now extinct forever, many of them long before anything resembling a mammal ever appeared on earth.
Thirdly, in no sense are humans superior to other forms of life.  Much like an annelid is not superior to a uniramian, each and every form of life which exists today is equally crucial to the ecosystems of the earth, even people. Some may argue that, since they are destroying all other species, this is proof people are much higher on the "evolutionary ladder."  However, there is no such thing as a "ladder of life" which has rungs devoted to differing levels of complexity: i.e. black men just above apes, who are just below laymen, who are just below politicians, who are just below religious officials, who are just below angels, who are the last thing below God.  You see, this hierarchal type of thinking leads not only to the mental confines of Christianity, but also to racism, elitism, and Biblical begat-ism, the worst of them all.  In reality, life consists of a branching bush which does not rise upward, but merely outward, in a random and non-directional fashion, producing branches angling off in thousands of ways to produce the species which make up the history of life.
Many people cringe at the sight of many arthropods (insects, spiders, etc.), saying "yuck" or whatever... well, if these animals could talk they would say the same about us!  Why should we, from a very early age onward, always repel at the appearance of the many diverse forms of life which have been designed to fulfill specific places in nature?  So many people will crush "bugs" or any other vulnerable animal which comes their way: Kill It!  But Why? This animal is clearly here in front of you.  That should tell you something.  Perhaps it's meant to be there; otherwise, why would it exist?  It serves a purpose in this world, unlike so many people I have met.
There was a great trend at the end of the last ice age (when totalitarian agriculture, and thus society, began), in which all of the large animals in the world (sloths, big cats, kangaroos, elk, elephants, etc.) underwent dramatic size reduction, down to "human size" {otherwise they went extinct}.  There has been much written asking "what happened to all of the big animals?"  Some theories proposed that this was in response to climatic change, but this shrinking did not occur during identical climatic conditions in the past.  The organization of people into society is left as the smoking gun.  Out of fear, logarithmically- expanding populations of ancestral people used tools to exterminate all animals they felt were threatening to humanity, because without the aid of technology, people (or even a group of people) are doomed when challenged by any predator.  We enjoy movies like Jurassic Park and the Lost World... for the reality they portray: in the face of most animals both past and present, people are helpless.  By simply mixing past with present, it becomes completely obvious who are the truly superior species: all except humans.  My studies in primatology alone have proved this: our closest living relatives, chimps, can regularly achieve acrobatic maneuverability beyond any human's capability.  Why then should we remain so arrogant?  Other forms of life are clearly more complex and amazing than us, maybe we should begin accepting this and start respecting them.

2 Lessons:

1. We can't just kill off the things in the world which happen to make us (God forbid) "uncomfortable", we have to instead realize they have a purpose we are simply too ignorant to recognize.

2. We should not destroy that which we cannot even create

People often wonder why chimps today don't evolve into humans, why people don't give birth to apes, and why ostriches don't learn to fly, etc.  Answering these questions requires an understanding of 'niches': they are the infinite number of occupable spaces existing in a given habitat.  For example, in deserts there are no niches for seals or fish, but there are many for reptiles.  As ecosystems change over time, so do their niches. This is the actual process of natural selection: simply, differing rates of genetical inheritance over time as the species who  adapt to the changing habitat (and niches) remain, while those who don't do not. This frequently results in species changing enough over time that they become defined as completely new species. A particular species may occupy several niches at once, or migrate to a new habitat and fill up empty niches by diversifying into several new species (Darwin's personal observation of this in turtles and finches on the Galapagos laid the foundation for his later theories). When a new animal fills a niche, this often creates more niches for other animals to live off of them (and for animals to live off of those animals), as well as niches for animals who can break down waste products produced by the new animals (via excretia and decay), as well as those who will once again introduce the materials back into the system once they've been broken down. This is the cycle of life, the reason why life exists today, and why it will exist tomorrow. Without relationships which allow for a cycling of nutrients, life ceases.  Each "natural" habitat we see today is a complex web of such relationships: some of them mutualistic (flowers & the insect species who pollinate them), some of them predator-prey (lynxes and hares), some of them still not recognized by humans, but all of them work splendidly.  Therefore, the reason why animals like chimps do not evolve into humans is largely because the niche for chimps still exists where chimps are found: there is no selection for chimps to become anything but chimps.
Another factor in ecology is the rate at which ecosystems change (and thus the rate at which animals evolve). This rate is so slow that it is nearly impossible for humans to witness in a lifetime, because that is the rate: lifetimes, or rather, generations.  Because natural selection can only affect genetic inheritance, it can only work at the rate at which new generations appear in a species, and on top of that the changes are small, since mutations (the only way to obtain new genetic material) occur so rarely... So geneticists use fruit flies (who have a generation time of only a few days) to conduct experiments quickly; if they used mammals, they could only do a few experiments in their whole lifetime. The biggest threat to the world's biodiversity is that people are destroying habitats faster than animals can evolve (how are they supposed to adapt to cow pastures and shopping malls anyway?).  Ecologists now know the removal of a single species can destroy the complex web of an ecosystem. This leaves no species "above" any other, as each is equally crucial to the ecosystems and food webs which, even today, exist at a level more complex than any NASA scientist could possibly hypothesize about.  
This brings up another point: people don't even know how may species are out there.  People know more about other planets and space than they do about animals living in their own backyard.  This is the tragedy which we are forever unable to erase from our minds: all over the world, animals striving to survive by feeding off of the wastes of the people who unawaringly (out of sight: out of mind) came and built houses on the habitat where these animals once found abundant food.  The people then hire other people who know more about killing these animals with poisons than they do about their behavior and ecology.
If the animals which lived where people decided to build were at all dangerous (with good reason), we can be sure they are either driven extinct through hunting, or put into a cage at a zoo to be made noises at and taken pictures of. When Micah was doing my behavior internship at the zoo, he would sorrow for every person (virtually all of them) who would: pass by the cage he was studying, stop long enough to snap a photo of the one animal which happened to be most visible, and keep walking...these oh so personal visits were usually accompanied by smooches, claps, and whistles at the animal to attempt to motivate the animal to suddenly entertain them just like they saw that type of animal do in a Disney movie (which was usually depicting a behavior atypical of the featured species).  The effects upon the individual from hearing these noises on the average of once a minute for 10 hours a day is unimaginable, and very cruel.  The greatest ignorance of people is their constant perception of animals as having human traits (a.k.a. anthropomorphism) such as desires, emotions, comforts, thoughts, beliefs, and of course morals.  They simply do not, because they are not: each species has evolved in unique habitats which have affected the development of their behavioral repertoires over millions of years, and for that reason alone people need to stop doing this... it is ignorance, pure and stupid.  People think an animal trapped in a cage is going to feel love if people clap or smooch at them 6million times a day: they don't: they just slowly become insane.  Meanwhile, people who go to the zoo, some of them because they love animals and care about their future, and spend enough money doing so in one year to save the endangered habitat of that animal 10 times over...yet the money never seems to help the real animals (the ones in the wild, not the psychologically disturbed ones bred by zoos).
That is why I have studied what I studied: we don't want to see every species left on the earth either driven to extinction or placed in small box at a zoo. I want animals to have the right to live like they could before people began taking that right away.  Equality beyond humanity.

(4)
I REALLY HATE SCHOOLS

School is one of the most inefficient forms of education or accumulation of knowledge known to man!  The main problem with school is that it caters to only 3 types of learning, when it has been clearly established that there are more than 11.  My old friends Jeff and Tyler Everett could surf, skateboard, bodyboard, and play guitar and piano better than anybody else he knew.  But at school they were placed in special-ed classes because no teacher trained and hired by this stinking country could comprehend their unique type of thought and learning processes.  So, these two kids who should have been out excelling in their talents, were forced by California law to spend more than half of their waking hours sitting in a classroom connecting the dots.  I have personally spent too many days of warm sun and big waves, sitting indoors studying pre-calculus or economics, meanwhile fragmenting our bodies' 4-million-year-old inherited adaptations to a life outdoors... there's much evidence that life indoors under artificial lighting poses significant threats to our health and inheritance of future genetic adaptations/resilience to the elements.
I feel all schools should work similar to universities: students at all levels should be able to pick the classes they want (and thus not waste other students' time by being stuck in classes they hate or cannot understand), and only go a few hours per day, leaving plenty of time for oudoor life. I learned more during 4 years at UCSD than I could have learned in 100 lifetimes of state-required education.  Besides, required schooling serves only one purpose: process the masses so they are barely able to do more than work minimum wage their entire lives, eternally producing and consuming, never exploring, excelling, or learning...it is simply the tool government uses to get away with forced childcare to the age of 18: gotta keep 'em off the streets, we don't want 'em sitting around surfing, skateboarding, creating art, using mind-altering drugs...gotta make some consumers out of these people... gotta make 'em real dumb and conformist, too!!!