Mostly Hairless Apes

This is just one answer to the question: Are you civilized? Civilization is a higher order function than society. We need to decide as a species what we want as our global civilization. We have a global economy. We have (sort of) a global government. We definitely do no have a global belief system.

But what if we did? What if we all belonged to the Church of Science? What if we said, 'Gods are nice ideas, but we can't trust any of them'. Since we don't have any evidence that any specific deity exists, what if we just ignore religion as a justification for behavior?

What if to be member of a new global civilization you just have to embrace one idea: We are all evolving social primates trying to survive on the only planet we have. We accept the knowledge derived from science that tells us about our evolutionary history.

We can accept the knowledge we get from science, and figure out how to make the world a better place for all of us.

We are at the end of an era - The Colonial Era. We had monarchs and plutocrats guiding us through the last 500 years as western European nations expanded over the globe. We established two amazing social adaptations to regulate our societies: Democracy and Capitalism.

Now we have to decide which one is more important. Do we want democratic Capitalism (DC), or capitalist Democracy (CD)? DC gives us the ability to vote on things, up to the point where we intrude on peoples right to own things. CD gives us the ability to vote on everything, while preserving a degree of ownership.

The question is how many resources should one individual be able to control? We have to share the planet - so what is a reasonable limit on how much any one individual should own? A few acres and a mule? A bed and a warm place to go to the bathroom? $10,000,000? An entire nation?

We'll just have to see how it plays out...

The core theology of The Church of Science. How did humanity evolve with consciousness and artificial selection? This episode provide the 'gospel' truth, according to Science, for a history of humanity.

'Being professional' captures an idea about different things to different people. Maybe we could use those ideas as a new standard for civilized, social behavior. Professionals are rewarded economically, are granted certain social status, and have a say in running their segment of society. Isn't that what citizenship is about? How would society change if we started requiring 'professional behavior' out of all adult citizens?

Could professional sports be a model for social organization? They combine the ideas of biological fitness, intellectual planning, and economic viability to social systems that use regulated combinations of cooperation and competition. Hmmm.

It's been crazy, but things finally came together. It seems to me when you look at life from the perspective of evolution, with three major social adaptations, it all makes sense....

What would a political party based on science look like? Would it be any worse than the current systems?