On very rare occasions, I write posts covering biological or medical subjects and breakthroughs that are either:
a) Groundbreaking, but entirely unrelated to a hair loss cure, or:
b) Potentially related to a hair loss cure (and grey hair reversal) in the long run.
This post on Dr. George Church falls under the second category.
Dr. George Church
I have discussed Dr. George Church a few times on this blog before. In my opinion, there is a good possibility that he will be known as one of the 10-20 greatest scientists the world has ever witnessed when all is said and done. Interestingly enough, Dr. Church got an F on one of his graduate program college courses at Duke University in 1976, and he has proudly posted that letter of rejection from Duke on his current Harvard University website.
Dr. Church was adopted as a child. In his own words, he has had “early-onset health problems (insurance companies take note): heart attack, carcinoma, narcolepsy, dyslexia, pneumonia, motion sickness.”
Several days ago, a new interview (more like a speech) of Dr. Church was posted on YouTube, and I was very impressed by the range of subjects that Dr. Church covers in this video. The title of this video is “The Augmented Human Being.” Hopefully, this augmentation will imply a full head of hair for all, even though that is probably the last thing that Dr. Church is thinking of when he discusses things such as CRISPR and genetic therapy in the video.
It is quite revealing that the above video only had a little under 500 views when I embedded it in this post, despite being online for two days. In sharp contrast, the one week old gorilla enclosure video now has close to 11 million views. Dr. George Church could bring back that now dead gorilla back to life, just like he will the extinct woolly mammoth.
Dr. Church is currently 61 years old, but from the looks of it, I doubt that he will retire anytime soon despite his health problems. He is a vegan dyslexic narcoleptic workaholic.
During the past few months Dr. Church has been all over the news almost every single day. Some highlights:
Human evolution. Loss of body hair, loss of scalp hair and gain of weight. Source: Economist cover page December 2003.
This lengthy post is not meant to be a race baiting attempt, even though that is exactly what the title and content suggest. Moreover, while most people take the phrase “more evolved” to be complimentary and take the phrase “less evolved” to be insulting, I am not so sure.
What if so called “more evolved” higher intelligence humans destroy earth in the coming years via: nuclear wars; environmental destruction; newer chemical/biological/nanomaterial/gene based weapons; low birth rate/negative population growth related self-destruction; and so on?
Can we even say that something is more evolved than something else without knowing for certain the definition of more evolved?
In any case, going back to the subject matter of this post, I used to have a caucasian workmate some years ago who told me many times that he thought Asians were the most evolved of all human races. By Asian, he primarily meant East Asians, which includes Chinese, Japanese and Koreans (along with the diaspora of these groups across the world).
My ex-workmate’s definition (with some minor additions on my part that I am sure he would agree with) of “more evolved humans” includes among many other characteristics: generally peaceful daily behavior; emotional outburst control; less crime and homicides; cleanliness; delayed gratification; lack of religiosity; high IQ; herbivore men; extensive use of technology, often in unusual socially frowned upon ways in less evolved societies.
I find this whole concept very interesting, and I agree with many parts of it. I also think that much of the “less evolved” world is headed in this direction (i.e., we are evolving into Asia in many respects, with: homicides falling globally; virtual lives increasingly important; men becoming more feminine/less savage; religiosity decreasing; technology becoming highly addictive and omnipresent; birth rates falling globally; and isolationism increasing in spite of people having many online friends.
However, lack of daily violent confrontations does not necessarily correlate with lack of major genocidal violence potential. It is quite possible that China will go to war with some of its Asian neighbors in the coming years even though you would never get that idea from seeing daily largely very peaceful life throughout Asia.
Animal cruelty in Asia is also astounding and the region dominates world demand for shark fin soup, tiger bones, ivory and much more. I think that more evolved human societies will have a much larger proportion of the population being some combination of vegan, vegetarian and synthetic lab grown meat eaters.
Animal rights will continue to become increasingly important as more advanced countries deem animals to be sentient beings. It is also highly debatable whether higher IQs and test scores in the Asian world are more important for a society to thrive compared to much higher rates of creativity and invention in the western world (at least historically speaking).
I think that a more evolved society will entail significant behavioral elements of both modern Asian and, to a lesser extent, Northern European peoples and societies. Both of these groupings are often accused of having less emotional and outburst prone people. In terms of racial diversity, I think that Northern European based societies are more evolved and fairer than Asian societies.
It is interesting to note that Native Americans, with similar genetics to mongoloid Asians, have vastly different behavioral patterns and cultures. This would seem to favor “nurture” in the “nature” versus “nurture” debate and make the subject of this whole post (related to genetics) a moot point. But perhaps native Americans are not as genetically similar to say the Chinese or Japanese as we think?
Body Hair and Evolution
The part of this whole theory of my ironically very hirsute (excess body hair) caucasian ex-workmate that interests me the most is the lack of body hair in Asians phenomenon. Over the years, I have noticed that people with excessive body hair (especially back hair and chest/stomach/abdomen area hair) tend to go bald much faster and more extensively than people with less to no body hair.
Asians and Native Americans in general tend to have less to no body hair, and in my opinion, less extensive balding patterns. So is the book “The Naked Ape” more applicable to Asians than to the other major races that still have a lot of body hair?
To end this somewhat rambling post, here is a video that shows that even Asians can sometimes surprise you when it comes to body hair quantity:
