Come along to People Know How, first floor in Ocean Terminal from 6pm to listen to Mike tell us about his theory of evolution as based on football…

Title of talk:

HOMO PASSIENS: Man the Footballer

 
Bullet points of what you would like to talk about:

Homo Passiens is a book that claims man evolved bipedalism to play football. Crazy – yes, but good fun for sure?

The exchange between Yuvel Noah Harari (SAPIENS) and Professor Gordon P. Smith of St Andrews University may provide a quick introduction:
Evolution did not endow humans with the ability to play football. True, it produced legs for kicking, elbows for fouling and mouths for cursing, but all that this enables us to do is perhaps practise penalty kicks by ourselves. To get into a game with strangers we find in the schoolyard on any given afternoon, we not only have to work in concert with ten teammates we may never have met before, we also need to know that the other players on the opposing team are playing by the same rules.
Other animals that engage strangers in ritualised aggression do so largely by instinct – puppies throughout the world have the rules for rough-and-tumble play hard-wired into their genes. But human teenagers have no genes for football. They can nevertheless play the game with complete strangers because they have all learned an identical set of ideas about football. These ideas are entirely imaginary, but if everyone shares them, we can all play the game.
Yuval Noah Harari: SAPIENS, A Brief History of Humankind.
Never in the history of evolutionary science, both before and after Charles Darwin, has an eminent and respected academic of evolutionary history been so erroneous in his or her analysis of the underpinning, founding seed and driving forces of the evolution of the genus Homo. A penalty kick, Professor Yuval, requires a goalkeeper and a goal; the species Homo exists as a socially and environmentally constrained species, or it is simply not human. A penalty kick, far from being a solitary and introverted illustration of human conduct, is actually one of the highest expressions of bipedal neotenous culture and behaviour of the genus Homo.

If an elbow is not an anatomical and physiological instrument of high value fouling, what may it be? A Steven Jay Gould spandrel or exaptation, an evolutionary by-product, or an adaptation for which there is no clear fitness or survival advantage? No. The elbow of the Homo species is not some kind orphan anatomical offshoot without significant function, rather an exquisitely engineered evolutionary skeletal instrument for violently inhibiting opponents during open bipedal neotenous football play.

A recent and seminal paper, published in the Journal of Passienic Sciences, and conducted at the Sep Blatter Faculty of Forensic and Passienic Anatomy at the University at Visp, in the canton of Valais, found, in a series of elegant studies, that a set of related elbow and hip genes and gene sequences correlate to both elbow and hip hitplasias (ELB HIT Alpha 1, and HIP HIT Beta 2), and these are expressed in both Homo sapiens, Homo passiens, and Femo passiens teenagers, most potently in Homo passiens professional football players, with the highest expression in those defenders who have secured most yellow and red cards during highly charged contests, and in particular during Derby matches between local rivals. Yes Professor Yuval, since you raise the question, evolution did produce elbows for sophisticated gain of function fouling, and now we have the genetic information that beautifully confirms just that.
With the greatest respect, and in honour of his excellent work in a number of fields, it must be stated that Professor Noah Harari’s attempt to intervene in the field of bipedal neotenous football is indicative of a degenerative and profoundly unfruitful adherence to a Homo sapiens mindset that is out of date, and denies bipedal neotenous football, the generative seed, and driving force of human evolution.
With a view to finally establishing if indeed Homo passiens is the original founding species of the genus Homo, from 2.5 million years ago, and Homo sapiens is a recent and derivative species, from 200,000 years ago, I challenge Professor Yuval Noah Harari to a debate in the town of Stenhousemuir, Forth Valley, Stirlingshire, Scotland. A suitable time would be during the Forth Valley Festival of Passienic Culture and Arts, held annually in Stenhousemuir, which attracts many thousands of football fans, academics and student visitors from around the world. Stenhousemuir is a World Archaeology Heritage Status Area, and spiritual home of prehistoric football archaeology and artefacts, and is therefore a highly appropriate venue to hold an international forum and public discussion on whether bipedal neotenous football is the true seed and driving force of Homo evolution, so that this question may be finally settled, for all time.
Gordon P. Smith
Professor of Archaeology and Paleoanthropology,
St Andrews University,
St Andrews,
Fife,
Scotland

A few paragraphs about you:

Mike McInnes is a retired pharmacist with an interest in cerebral energy metabolism, and its modern impairments. The book Homo Passiens evolved from this research, and may be quite easily followed in the FORWARD by Irvine Welsh below:

 
FORWARD

Irvine Welsh

Now I finally get it. Homo sapiens is a recently arrived imposter in the evolution of the genus Homo, a mountebank, a charlatan, a confidence trickster, a fraud, a fraudster, a rogue, a villain, a scoundrel, a quack. All that academic stuff about consciousness, language, civilisation, farming, technology, science, philosophy, music, literature, poetry, art and so on, emanating exclusively from, and created by, Homo sapiens, is evolutionary hogwash.
It all came, not from Homo sapiens, as this recently arrived pathological lying subspecies claims endlessly and repeatedly in schools, in text books, in literature, in countless evolutionary and cultural journals, and in all institutions of higher learning, but from the original and founder species Homo – Homo passiens – from man the footballer.
Bipedalism as a locomotive strategy is frankly nuts – no sentient species would voluntarily choose to adopt such a ludicrous hodgepodge of anatomical features, with a ground speed of less than half that of a lazy geriatric predator, with no effective body armour or protection, with no offensive claws worthy of the name, with lettuce crunching teeth that would be rejected by even the most docile herbivore, with such a narrow pelvis, and hinged legs below, which ensures bipedal locomotion is a form of translocation so shaky, so wobbly and unstable, that an anatomical engineer would consider that this form of locomotion had been perversely designed to stagger, to stumble, to collapse, to topple over or fall down, in any chase to catch a prey, or escape from a predator, and in any evolutionary design school, would be rejected as the work of an indolent evolutionary student, who had spent his or her study time in the cafes, betting shops, bars and dancing clubs of his or her university town.
Bipedalism is so stupid and unstable, that humans have actually invented games to take advantage of this, and to effect falls, such as in rugby league, rugby union, and National League football. If we had four or even three legs, these games could not exist. Infants fall down, toddlers fall down, children fall down, juveniles fall down, adults fall down, and elderly humans frequently die from such falls.
No sensible architect would design a building with only two supports. In war zones mines are laid, not to kill, rather to disable one limb and render the subject immobile, and therefore impose a burden on the opposing forces. If we had chosen to sacrifice only one leg and become tripedal, we would have significantly improved our survival chances.
The people and ancients in the Isle of Man, Sicily and Japan, have a long and noble association with tripedalism, and if you go there you will learn exactly how much superior is that form of locomotion, compared with our witless evolutionary selection of bipedalism. Since there is a long and successful industry of manufacturing sticks into extra third legs, known as walking sticks – actually stability sticks, for bipedal humans to improve locomotive efficiency – why was it that we did not select a tripedal or quadrupedal solution, to improve survival and locomotive efficiency and safety?
Four legs are better than three.
Three legs are better than two.
Why have we, the Homo species – Homo passiens, most bizarrely selected for locomotion on two legs only?
Football!
No other explanation, no other reason for our absurd, derisory, farcical anatomical mix of primate foetal features interwoven with, bundled with, such a patchwork of semi-adult characteristics that result in a neotenous half foetal/half man complex – a clownman – Homo passiens – but a clown so beautifully engineered and so exquisitely formed to express bipedal football, flat brow, domed head, opposable goalkeeping thumbs, knock knees, flat and levered foot, outstep and instep, and finally and beautifully – a non-opposable big toe, with a big greedy bipedal brain of such absurd and poetic linguistic and sensorimotor beauty, that billions of fans will follow their dreamteam, enter the lucid REM dreamgame, sing their dreamsongs, call their dreamchants, and neuropower their gamma wave electrophysiology, fire their mirror forward and reverse neuromodulations, seek both dopamine reward facilitation and opiate emotional homeostasis via transcendence, and lucidity suspension of entropy, at every available opportunity.
Now I get it about the evolutionary nonsense I was taught in biology class, a romantic fiction about the clever intelligent species Homo sapiens that appeared suddenly from nowhere around 200,000 years ago, and supposedly gave rise to the big brain, and to consciousness, language, farming, civilisation, technology, science, literature, art and poetry.
Rubbish.
Homo passiens – we the neotenous, upright, bipedal species, with narrow pelvis, opposable thumb, knock knees, flat cushioned and levered foot, and non-opposable big toe, are the nominate superspecies that gave birth to the big intelligent and embodied bipedal brain – an evolutionary anatomical joke, but an evolutionary poetic joke, an anatomical frankenfreak, an anatomical frankenclown, and a weird evolutionary farce that made us what we are and what we do, every Saturday of every week, when the dreamgame is played, and which we miss every alternate Saturday. We opposable-thumbed, we two-legged, we two-footed, we non-opposable big toed, and we neoteny brained evolutionary absurdity, we are the true source of human consciousness, intelligence, and cognition.
As Gordon P. Smith has indicated, we may be on the lower rungs of evolutionary science, but we are rapidly ascending, and with our eyes firmly on the prize of the Premier Division, and recognition as the true founder and future species of the genus Homo – Homo passiens, and we are happy to include Homo sapiens as our fellow partner in all future evolutionary developments – with one absolute rider – that they recognise Homo passiens as the original and nominate founder species, and bipedal neoteny as the driving force of Homo evolution.
We are also happy to share our knowledge of neoteny, of the lucid REM wake dreamgame, of the dreamsong and dreamchant physiology, of dopamine, opiate, vasopressin and hypnoxytocin hormone metabolism, and of the consciousness of the football, expressed as precociousness.
If not, Homo sapiens will rapidly degenerate and disappear from the evolutionary record, just as suddenly as that subordinate species appeared, and as surely as the thousands of species and subspecies that have come and gone, in the many extinction events of the past.
 
What free internet knowledge resources would you recommend to others if they wish to explore your chosen theme further?

Further information: http://www.homopassiens.com/

 

Click For Event Listing