One reason why I do not succumb to despair

[janekane (imported)]

The following caught my attention:

http://news.yahoo.com/colorado-school-d ... 37070.html

For all I can tell, it may be that human society is evolving, and, in the process of evolving, beginning the process of allowing for "us" a safe (meaning, truthfully decent) place within human society.

[~Tiamat~ (imported)]

The juvenille comments (and the number of likes on each) are the reason I do.

I really think this is something society is hardwired not to accept, just as you and I are hardwired not to accept society's pigeonholing of us. It's been around in enough shapes and forms in enough societies. Things don't get better and we're not approaching enlightenment. The current set of laws paying us lipservice, bought by decades of fighting from better people than myself, are just another fluctuation :/

[janekane (imported)]

Years ago, in the days of RTL digital logic, and before the days of DTL before the days of TTL, I built digital logic things for medical research purposes. Before that, I worked with another college student, programming the first digital computer the college we were attending had on campus. Programming that computer was accomplished with wired program plug-in jumper boards. While the programming was hard-wired, removing the board and re-wiring it changed the hard wiring.

Human brain hard wiring, in my view, is somewhat like those plug-in hard wired boards, environmental factors (like that other student or me removing the board and changing its wiring pattern) can change hard wiring. In human genetics, the changing of hard wiring can be labeled epigenetic. Much of human hard wiring is readily modified when environmental factors change. For many decades, what was thought to be junk DNA between codons was not understood accurately; much of that DNA functions as switch genes which modulate the activity of genes that code for messenger RNA and such.

So, while I am quite content to agree that society (meaning, I surmise, most people {methinks there really is no most people}) is hard wired merely inspires me to find practical ways to change said hard wiring as a response to simple kindness and decency.

I agree that people are not approaching enlightenment. That does not mean that enlightenment is not approaching people.

I find that punctuated equilibrium is a useful way to make sense of macro evolution, changes collect and are not observably significant until enough of them stick together and form a new biological function. Such events may be rare, but so is every event when studied in isolation from all other events.

So, I find that atrocities happen, and happen sadly often. However, when enough atrocities have happened, some of them can be understood using biological pattern recognition, and such recognized patterns lead to new scientific paradigms.

The end of human warfare clearly requires a paradigm not yet in sufficient use to have already brought about the ending of human warfare.

However, nothing that actually has yet to happen has already happened.

Please point out to me my errors.