HIDESIGHT Paula Bennett recently identified a modern day Genghis Khan. Her solution is to toss in free contraception. That's to go with the free housing, the free food, the free booze and the free drugs. Good luck with that.
HIDESIGHT
You and I are here to today because because 100,000 of our ancestors stretching back in direct line survived and successfully raised their children.
It can’t have been easy.
70,000 years ago, the number of humans dropped below 10,000.
At times it was clearly touch and go. Our close hominid relatives the Neanderthals did not make it. They survived for 200,000 years but died out 30,000 years ago.
Survival and success are not guaranteed.
We have lived for our entire history as hunter-gatherers in small bands of less than 150 souls.
The bands would disintegrate above 150. That splitting of bands, and their need for considerable tracts in which to roam, saw humans spread across the globe.
Only one band of humans successfully made it out of Africa 50,000 years ago. Within 10,000 years H. sapiens had made it to Australia.
If one band encountered another they would likely fight. There were no prisoners. There is a reason why so-called primitive peoples could often best better-armed and better-equipped professional soldiers: they were well practiced in warfare.
If you ran human history down a rugby field, our recorded history would be just 20 cm.
Our genetics, our physiology, our psychology, are that of a hunter gatherer. It’s little wonder that socialism is the dominant and most potent political force in the world today. It’s entire emotional appeal, and hence its political appeal, is that of the extended family.
Our capitalist experience interacting with people we never know or meet has proved explosively productive but is but a blip in our genetic history. We have to think, and to reason, to understand the order the market provides.
The emotional appeal of socialism requires no thinking or reasoning. It’s imprinted deep within our genetic makeup and our hunter-gatherer psychology.
The pair-bond and the privatisation of sex occurred early in our history. The pair bond enabled men to co-operate and to hunt with the knowledge that their wife’s children were most likely theirs. The pair bond meant women did not get to mate with the best kid on the block but had at least a mate who would bring home the bacon and defend them and their children.
Interestingly, modern genetics shows a small proportion of wives have always had children to men other than their husbands. The present rate in the United States is between five and ten percent. There’s an evolutionary logic for a woman to have one man to look after her and another to father her children.
In past times the selection pressure was for a mate that was useful. Men who could not hunt and defend their family did not get sex, did not have children, and their genes disappeared. Our forebears were the winners, against all odds, in a tough environment, with violent neighbours and ferocious food.
There were some reproductive stand outs. Genghis Khan did more than conquer and rule. Over two million men in former Mongolian lands carry his Y-chromosome. He had hundreds of wives and so too did his sons.
Our Minister of Social Development Paula Bennett recently identified a modern day Genghis Khan. Our very own Genghis has fathered children to eight different women. But our Genghis is no conquering war lord. He sits insteads within the benefit system. He doesn’t feed his children, he doesn’t shelter them, he doesn’t protect them.
100,000 generations. Then this guy.
The Minister’s solution is to toss in free contraception. That’s to go with the free housing, the free food, the free booze and the free drugs. Good luck with that.
