/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19037590]

>It is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)

>Crucially, any attempt to escape this fatality — or, more realistically, any mere accidental and temporary reprieve from it — leads inexorably to the undoing of its work. Malthusian relaxation is the whole of mercy, and it is the greatest engine of destruction our universe is able to bring about. To the precise extent that we are spared, even for a moment, we degenerate — and this Iron Law applies to every dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic, individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic, and cultural. There is no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.

- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

[Anonymous No.19037626]

>>19037590
Everything good was forged in hell.

[Anonymous No.19037672]

>>19037590
>Malthusian relaxation

Does that mean a reduction in population? And it is an engine of destruction because it stops evolutionary 'progress'?

>There is no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell.

I don't really understand this either. Is this a comment on how evolution can cast aside anything, as he says in the first paragraph, by pure chance until eventually stumbling by chance on a negligible quality that may endure for some time? Why hell? Because that's where all the rejected qualities go?

[Anonymous No.19037684]

Darwin was a hack.

[Anonymous No.19037692]

>>19037672
Malthusian relaxation means happy time for the rats, reduced selection pressure via communism or some such madness.

Hell is the world. It is the constant meat-grinder of evolution. If you attempt to pull, say, a pretty bird out of the meat-grinder and keep it alive, it will quickly become obsolete and valueless, as it has been removed from the selection mechanism. Should you re-introduce the creature, it will prove itself incapable of survival, and without value. It will go extinct rapidly.
Therefore everything worth anything is forged in "Hell"

[Anonymous No.19037747]

>>19037692
Ah I see. I completely misinterpreted the hell bit. Thanks.

This was all written beautifully by the way, Darwin was a good writer.

[Anonymous No.19037784]

>>19037747
Darwin's prose is massively underrated, though quite dense

[Anonymous No.19037813]

>>19037784
>We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite.

This in particular is one hell of a sentence.

[Anonymous No.19037822]

>>19037692

You can artificially select for positive traits, the science isn't even far from zygote selection. Where parents can choose the best of the litter from a set of fertilized offspring. But that's unamerican and racist or something. "Weird science shit". So good luck lmao, normies prefer to crash civilization to the ground rather than do what's right

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dCZXXb7QINw

LOL

[Anonymous No.19037840]

>>19037822
Darwin predicted that response

>Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification. This is neither the preserved diversity of ordinary racism, still less the idealized genetic pooling of the anti-racists, but a class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector towards neo-speciation. It implies the disintegration of the human species, along largely unprecedented lines, with intrinsic hierarchical consequence. The genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different — and becoming ever more different — it is explicitly superior according to the established criteria that allocate social status. Analogical fusion with Cochran’s space colonists is scarcely avoidable. If SES-based assortative mating is taking place, humanity (and not only society) is coming apart, on an axis whose inferior pole is refuse. This is not anything that ordinary racism is remotely able to process. That it is a consummate nightmare for anti-racism goes without question, but it is also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake.

>Neo-eugenic genomic manipulation capabilities, which will also be unevenly distributed by SES, will certainly intensify the trend to speciation, rather than ameliorating it. On the sweetness-and-light side, racists and anti-racists can be expected to eventually bond in a defensive fraternity, when they recognize that traditionally-differentiated human populations are being torn asunder on an axis of variation that dwarfs all of their established concerns.

- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

[Anonymous No.19037847]

>>19037590
>All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages.

[Anonymous No.19038081]

>>19037840

You mean like the emerging caste system in America? The IQ 120+ Euro-sinno-semites into programming and finance, the IQ 90 average negro-spic-redneck vast consumer class, then some intermediary class for managing the negroid subhuman mass? Teaching the nigs to stop reproducing so much and stop getting face tats n' sheeit. I think the midwest protestant mind is equipped for that gross undertaking

[Anonymous No.19038089]

>>19038081

woops, forgot pic

[Anonymous No.19038117]

>>19037840
I can't find this quote in the book anywhere

[Anonymous No.19038127]

>>19038081
>Reads the Bell Curve once

[Anonymous No.19038132]

>>19038117
>>19037747
This is obviously not from Darwin, this is a quote from Nick Land. You guys are fucking stupid. The shallow edginess should have tipped you off.

[Anonymous No.19038135]

>>19038081
>>19038089
Yeah obviously but you're forgetting that assortative mating is just the prelude to gene-editing and upheaval of everything.

>>19038117
In my copy it's on page 408. Not sure which edition you are reading though, care to share?

[Anonymous No.19038138]

The good thing about humans is that unlike animals, we actually have the choice of whether to fight forever and run screaming into an evolutionary meat grinder or try and rise above muh natural order and make something of ourselves.

[Anonymous No.19038150]

Fuck all accelerationists.

[Anonymous No.19038206]

>>19038138
>unlike animals
lol

>>19038150
>Fuck all accelerationists.
there are no accelerationists. accelerationism as nick land defines it is not an ideology, just a concept of natural order

[Anonymous No.19038273]

>>19038132
I'm currently reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species and that really threw me for a loop for a sec lol. It read nothing like Darwin but then again I never read The Descent of Man or Selection in Relation to Sex so what can I say? Still, I do believe Darwin had similar concerns. According to Wikipedia, Darwin claimed to have never for a moment seriously considered atheism (further adding that there is nothing in his theory which could prevent a Christian from believing it) but the problem of evil (along with the death of his daughter) drove him to agnostism.
I wonder if he ever thought about this (though in less edgy, more convoluted, though still better prose)?

[Anonymous No.19038286]

>>19038273
>but the problem of evil (along with the death of his daughter) drove him to agnostism.
>I wonder if he ever thought about this (though in less edgy, more convoluted, though still better prose)?

That's very interesting. I want to read Darwin now. It's all nauseating to think about