Three Sigma Systems

In Tibetan, authentic presence is wangthang, which literally means, ‘field of power’… The cause or the virtue that brings about authentic presence is emptying out and letting go. You have to be without clinging.

Chogyam Trungpa

My wife is a Physical Therapist. She has explained to me that walking upright, which is a means of locomotion most fully expressed by human beings, is actually quite remarkable. The process is one of taking a stable system and intentionally driving it into a state of instability — falling — and then regaining stability, over and over again.

First we stand. Next we hurl ourselves forward into a fall. We then catch our fall and regain our stance. If you watch a human infant learning to walk, you will see this instinctual process unfolding quite clearly.

The process of knowing (of creating knowledge) is very similar to this. We construct a stable explanation of the world and stand on it. As the world changes beneath our minds, we fall. As we fall, we struggle to reconcile our explanation of the world in order to reassert a stable stance.

In ideology and dogma, we try to cling to a stable stance — a truth — from which we will no longer fall and from which we need no longer move forward. But the world does not comply with our attempts to avoid our fear of falling. The world changes beneath our clinging minds and, sooner or later, we must fall despite our best efforts.

Since the world is always changing beneath our minds,  the length of the fall we will take in knowing will be greater the longer we try to avoid falling. The danger of relying on ideology and dogma increases over time. History is filled with tales of fatal falls.

There is another option though. We can chose to master the art of knowing in much the same way we master the art of walking.

Like walking, the process of knowing — this falling forward —- goes unexamined in our everyday experience. To change this — to depart the habit and master the art —- we must be letting go in much the same way as the infant learns to walk by falling. To move forward, we must step off the brink of our belief, stepping into the fall, and trust that we will survive. In this way our knowing becomes more powerfully useful given our aims and intentions. Our journeying minds can then take us where we chose to go!

I call this process surfing the wave of knowledge creation.

THIS IS BIG, BIG, BIG! Believe it or not, on Saturday, December 5th, our very own DoD (Department of Defense) will be taking time off from their busy Afghanistan build-up schedule to launch ten 8-foot red balloons at various locations around the United States for the DARPA Network Challenge.

Are you up to the challenge?

BUT WAIT! That’s not all! They are offering $40,000 to the first person who locates their balloons and reports back to them with the correct latitude and longitude for each one.

You heard me right! I said $40,000. If you don’t believe me, click HERE to get the word from the bureaucrat’s mouth.

Read more…

My attention has been captured by the media conversation regarding the Fort Hood incident. Much of it has focused on two erroneous themes.

First there is the idea that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan committed a “terrorist” act.

The second is the idea that, through proper diagnostic methods, it should have been possible for this psychiatrist among psychiatrists, to have been recognized as a risk before the fact and thereby, prevented from embarking on his killing spree.

Of course, all of this talk is complete nonsense.

Nidal Malik Hasan

Hasan was no altruistic Jihadi terrorist, no Manchurian Candidate, long ensconced in the Armed Forces with the intention to systematically further some evil agency’s political or military ends by instilling fear in an enemy. His performance was simply a suicidal act, based in personal beliefs, values, and experience, in which he decided to take with him, as many of his real or imagined tormentors as possible.

So can such a suicidal act be predicted and thereby prevented? More nonsense.

Read more…

Matthew Stewart has written a truth-telling expose in which he explains that the high priests of business management, the MBAs, consultants, and other shamans, have no clothes! In a monumental act of misdirection he, or maybe his editors, choose to title his book, ”The Management Myth: Why the experts keep getting it wrong“. The title of this blog entry would have been more apt.

The Management Myth

Let me begin by saying that this blog entry is not a review of Stewart’s book, mainly because I haven’t read it! But I have read and reread his article in the June 2006 issue of The Atlantic, entitled more succinctly, “The Management Myth“, and if that article, which you can read online, is representative of the book, then I can recommend the book without hesitation. If its book reviews you want, try Jill Lepore’s in the October 12 issue of the New Yorker, “Not so Fast” and Andrew O’Connell’s in the August 13th, 2009 Harvard Business Review, “Why Business Theories are a Waste of Time“.

Now, on to the matters at hand.

Read more…

The September 28th issue of The New Yorker contains an article worthy of note. In “A Life of its Own – Where will synthetic biology lead us?¹“, Michael Specter, a New Yorker staff writer, leads readers along a yellow brick road  assessment of the potential risks and benefits of bioengineering. His description of Frankensteinian science  is fascinating,  but when it comes his analysis of the economics and practical risks of the technology,  I can only say, there are “risks”, and then there are “RISKS!”  ²

New Yorker illustration accompanying article "A Life of its Own", 9/28/09

Specter cuts right to the chase in explaining a reductive world view that dominates much of contemporary science. He implies that developments in decoding DNA can be likened to reverse engineering low level, machine language computer code. Once we have decompiled the code sequence, we can repackage the machine instructions into a higher level, user friendly, programming language, and begin piecing together new genetic variations that can serve our every wish and desire.

For those uncomfortable with computer language analogy, he offers up the idea of Lego blocks that can assembled in myriad ways to create new life forms. This digital imagery — blocks of code and Lego blocks — entails a problematic view of the world that I discussed in my post, “Reductive Hubris“, some months back. The reductive digital analogy of decoding the low-level building blocks of life in order to engineer synthetic life, is worse than fallacious reasoning, it is a dangerously seductive illusion that entails unknown and potentially catastrophic risks. Read more…

Many of the businesses I have visited have produced what they call a “Mission Statement”. These are typically pledges of goodness that come to be displayed prominently on a wall plagues and Web pages. Most are assertions of commitment to customers, quality, and and service, and all are inevitably festooned with meaningless superlatives like “best”, “world class”, “highest”, and “most”.

When I ask managers, workers, and even customers, about the meaning, believability, and usefulness of these pretty words, most reply, with a wink and a nod, that they are basically window dressing and have little with the business of business. Basically on par with Hallmark greeting card sentimentality, the reality of the workaday world soon makes it clear to all, that their sentiments as no more than “wouldn’t be nice if…?”

As is so often the case, the failure to understand theory renders the most powerful of tools, into useless decoration. Worse yet, the job that needs to be done remains undone.

Read more…

Who says that people in America don’t like to deal with theory? If that were true, the media would stop filling the airwaves and newspaper columns with an endless procession of pundits, each spewing a system for explaining and predicting the machinations of free markets — theories like “business cycles”, “leading and lagging indicators”, market “corrections”, “long haul investing”, “market reactions”, “animal spirits”, and “trickle down” economics.

The only theory you never hear on TV is the one that says “the game is rigged”.

Which reminds me…

When I was a kid growing up in LA, my extended family, all transplants from the East Coat, used to gather for weekend brunch. My recollection of those gatherings can be best described as scenes from a Woody Allen movie. Uncle Max stands out in my memory because he was obsessed and always talking about his “system” for handicapping the ponies. He loved betting on horse races, both on and off the track. He always had a racing sheet, notebook, and pencil  at the ready. The least hint of interest from another person would set him to explaining his “system” for choosing horses and betting. Within a few minutes, he would fill a few pages in his notebook with esoteric mathematical calculations and rapid fire talk, which he always concluded by saying, “I’m close—very close to a foolproof system that will make us all rich.”

Although I couldn’t understand the details of his system, I soon concluded that my uncle Max was certainly a genius on par with Albert Einstein. It wasn’t until many years later that I came to understand that every week, uncle Max gambled away all of his hard earned money to those whole really did have the system for making money on the ponies —- the track owners and the bookies.

Today, when I watch the economic pundits wagging their tongues on television, I am reminded of uncle Max and his “system”. Everybody loves a good theory but who is it that has the system that actually pays off? It wasn’t uncle Max.

“The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his bed and whispered the message in his ear. He thought it was so important that he had the herald speak it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those witnessing his death—all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs—in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forwards easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvelous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. Never will he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards through the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, through stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.”

———-Franz Kafka, “A Message from the Emperor”

“Information and entropy are not conserved, and are equally unsuited to being commodities.”
Norbert Wiener, “The Human Use of Human Beings”

In his book review “Priced to Sell” in this week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Outliers” and “Tipping Point”, reviews Chris Anderson’s “Free” . Gladwell roundly criticizes Anderson, characterizing him as a “technological utopian”. Evidently Anderson takes the position that the price of intellectual products must be reduced to zero (i.e Free). Gladwell is correct in arguing that Anderson is getting it all wrong, but he only manages a glancing blow at the challenges posed by the ubiquity, accessibility, and low cost afforded by the “new media”.

In his own way, Anderson is trying to deal with the observation that intellectual property rights are on the ropes under the new technological regime. The concept of intellectual property rights was founded on the model of tangible property rights that assigned legal ownership of land and material to individuals. When applied to intangible assets, some tortured logic is needed to draw the line between ideas that can be owned and those that are just “out there” in the ever-flowing stream of knowledge creation.

Prior to the electronic digital age, the principal means for controlling intellectual “property” fell to the publisher/gate-keepers who controlled the means by which ideas deemed by them as valuable  and/or  marketable, could be disseminated. The commercial alliance between publishers who controlled the means of dissemination and producers of ideas, is now being ripped apart.

The subject of ideas as property has long fascinated me as part of the puzzle of how humans continuously create new knowledge and how some new knowledge gains sway in certain circumstances. Rather than go into great detail regarding this process, I want to call to your attention to some very useful ideas put forth by Norbert Wiener in his book, “The Human Use of Human Beings” (1950). There is much to recommend in this book, but I want to direct attention specifically to Wiener’s discussion of the nature of information as a commodity (Chapter VII).

“There is no Maginot Line of the brain.”

The legalistic model of intellectual property rights is fast becoming untenable under the new technological regime. I believe that the new model will need to become one of “pay for performance”. This means that the producer of intellectual products becomes more like an hourly worker or the artisan. The idea creator gets paid for each performance and then moves on to the next performance. The ideas themselves, once created, have flown away to become part of the flow of human conversation. They become commingled and irrevocably transformed once they have entered the ever-flowing stream of knowledge creation.

In fact, as the Maginot Line between the “The Commons” and the multi-national corporation’s interests becomes increasingly fuzzy, this pay-for-performance model may pave the way to some new ways of looking at private ownership of “stuff” as well. (A complete reading of “The Human Use of Human Beings” will reward you with Norbert Wiener’s fascinating ideas about material “stuff” as information and message, as well.)

Long ago I travelled across Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, who’s borders belie a greater region once known as Persia. In its time, the Persian Empire was populated by a people distinct in language and culture from the nomadic Arabs. The Persians, as most Iranians I know still prefer to be called, were able to create a high culture in which learning and discovery were much revered. V. S. Naipaul, in his book “Among the Believers” suggests that the 1979 Iranian revolution was more of a revolt against the oppressive American-backed regime of the Shah, than a move toward Islamic fundamentalism.

As a traveler, my experience with Iranians, nee Persians, was that their culture is the most urbane in the region called the Middle East. Though they take pride and joy in their history, they are quick to embrace and improve upon modern ideas and methods. I have a strong sense that repressive Islamic theocracy is not viable in their long-term and current events may presage a change toward the re-emergence of the best in Persian character.

Omar Khayyam (Persian, born 1048 AD, Neyshapur, Persia, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and poet.)

Omar Khayyam, the Persian polymath, philosopher and poet born in 1048 AD, is credited with penning “The Rubaiyat” made famous by the English translator, Edward Fitzgerald. The Rubaiyat consists of a collection of short 4-line Haiku-like poems, called quatrains. I find many of Khayyam’s  quatrains evocative of some key systems thinking ideas. Some argue that Fitzgerald’s translation cannot be trusted, but given Khayyam’s remarkable contributions in Algebra and Astronomical theory, I am inclined to think that the ideas conveyed in the English translation are more consistent with the original than some critics suggest.

On the nature of knowledge, Khayyam wrote:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

This quatrain, among my favorites, always comes to my mind when I reflect on a blog entry that I have posted and then later, regretted. I ask myself if I should erase it from my blog with a tap on the DEL key but of course, like it or not, the DEL key cannot erase the ideas I have unleashed into the world. I have no power to erase the past, I only have the power to shape my future in doing what I do here and now.

You cannot undo the past you created. You cannot unlearn, unmake, or erase. What is passed is now committed within you, here and now. Make of it what you can.

In another of my favorite quatrains, Khayyam evokes the the idea of transcending the reductive mind through intentional action.

For I remember stopping by the way 
To watch a Potter thumping his wet Clay: 
And with its all-obliterated Tongue 
It murmur’d–”Gently, Brother, gently, pray!”

And  then the potter’s hot pipkin product—-a  quatrain about the coincidence of what is created and its creator.

Whereat some one of the loquacious Lot– 
I think a Sufi pipkin-waxing hot– 
“All this of Pot and Potter–Tell me then, 
Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”

The concept of evolution is often misapplied in discussions of social change. This is an obstacle to understanding and improvement. Although the process of evolutionary emergence articulated by Charles Darwin is continuous and ongoing, it is best understood as a “weak force” for change in the human circumstance. The “strong force” that propels change in human affairs is the interplay of socially constructed ideas about how the world works and how we can work our will upon the world.

Evolution refers to a process of random genetic variation, in which some genetically shaped phenotypes are “selected” in the context of a given environment. The characteristics that are “selected for” by an organism’s environmental circumstance, derive from a genetic pool of others who also vary, but in ways that are not quite as useful in terms of survival to reproductive maturity.The cornerstone of Darwin’s theory is that the process of evolution is devoid of intention.

When we seek an explanation for the emergence of the Homo sapiens as a phenotype, we are right to employ Darwin’s theory of natural selection. *Interestingly, I am currently reading a rather technical book entitled “The Superorganism”, in which the author’s put forth a Darwin-based explanation for the selection of altruistic genes over selfish genes in eusocial insects.) Although we should begin our explanation of the emergence of humans in terms of natural selection, the power of that explanatory framework for understanding socio-cultural change diminishes once humans have emerged as intentional beings. Darwin actually points the way in this regard in the first chapter of Origins, “Variation Under Domestication”, in which selection of animal phenotypes is determined by intentional human actors. In this case, randomness remains the engine of variation, but human intentionality becomes the selector. This might be called “unnatural selection”. Unnatural selection of phenotypes is ubiquitous in human affairs, and no more so than in the case of the selection of humans themselves. The selection criteria employed by intentional humans are culturally determined.

Understanding unnatural selection is useful, but even this understanding is insufficient for understanding the nature of change in human affairs. The most powerful change process at work in human society is the dialectical interplay of the ideas that shape our relations, our predictions, and our actions. This is the self-created symbolic world that uniquely defines what it is to be human. All to briefly, our consciousness emerges as a communal narrative which is generated in human interaction. The narrative must be communal because shared theory of the world is a necessary precondition for communication. But the communal narrative, like DNA, is never replicated exactly the same in every human actor. Each individual’s theory-based narrative (a predictive construction) varies on the basis of their individual experience as an actor in the world. In other words, we share the same symbolic/theoretical universe but we never share the exact same experience of that universe. We share a conception of the world but we are diverse in that conception. We vary.

As we act as predictive creatures in a theory-based reality, the efficacy of our actions is never perfect. As groups and as individuals, we observe that some of our ideas work better than others. It is the interplay of ideas, action, and observation that drives a conflictual/competitive process of knowledge creation in which anomalous outcomes force the revision of some ideas and overthrow of others. What is uniquely human is that we need not wait for random genetic variation to deliver solutions. Our collaborative intentionality drives a process of knowledge creation. (Interestingly, this interactive model of knowledge creation is mirrored in W. E. Deming’s PDSA, which is simply a rigorous application of the knowledge creating process.)

It should be clear that the process I describe above is idealized. Genetic evolution is messy and so too, is the dialectal process by which knowledge is created. The principle differences are:

— Evolution is driven by randomness and non-intentionality. The emergence of new characteristics in organisms is not a process of improvement but rather, an expression of what happens to work in a given time and place.

— Social change is driven by intentional actors who make theory based predictions., act on those predictions, and upon observing the efficacy of those actions, redefine, renew, and recreate their theory-based conception of reality.

The social change dynamic I describe here in idealized form, provides an answer to the question of WHY conscious social action was selected for in the process of evolution. As with all species, the process of selection is inherently inefficient. It produces very odd creatures who behave in very odd ways. The selection of social consciousness is part of a whole creature in which reside many paradoxes and contradictions. The contradictions produced by the reductive mind are emerging as particularly important in our time. Systems thinking represents one way of addressing the problems produced by the reductive mind. It is a product of the contradictions of reductionism that have arisen in our unique technological age in which the untempered technological power produced by our reduction threatens our survival as a species.

I always argue the we are products of our time and place in history. The meaning in our lives is made up from the story we continually strive to create among others out of the raw materials handed to us by our circumstance. This morning I revisited a little book that did much to shape my life’s journey.

In his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning” , Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist and survivor of the Holocaust, remembers that in order to survive the trials of the camps….

“We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and mediation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual”.

W. E. Deming spoke of meaning in terms of creating “aims”.

In 1997, television journalist Clare Crawford-Mason, gave a speech to the Deming Institute in which she discussed the philosophical discoveries she made since her interviews with Dr. W. E. Deming in the documentary, “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We“. She began,

” I met Dr. Deming in his basement in 1979, interviewed him there several times, understood nothing of what he said except the statement, ‘I taught the Japanese to work smarter not harder.’ However, I recognized that he was a prophet ignored in his homeland and knew that this was a story and reported it with Lloyd Dobyns in “If Japan Can,Why Can’t We?” the NBC White Paper in l980.”

Clare’s far reaching speech was new reading to me but her discussion of the “philosophical” implications of Deming’s work was right on target. It has been many years since I read Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. I recall being much impressed by their writings, though I regarded them at the time as a bit too mystical for my taste.

Deming’s work represents a theory of knowledge which he came to by way of wrestling with the problems of variation’s ubiquity. This theory of knowledge can be readily translated as a theory of the emergence and structure of human consciousness. Over the years I have found many avenues of approach to this subject in the literature of both science and philosophy. I assume that Deming also found similar sources. What is clear is the work of the arch Pragmatist, C. I. Lewis, figured prominently in the thinking of Deming’s mentor, Walter Shewhart and by extension, I conclude the same was true for Deming.

My blog features a sticky post in which I make an all-too-clumsy effort at explaining in lay terms, how control chart theory is based in a theory of human consciousness (http://www.3sigma.com/whats-so-special-about-3-sigma/ ). I continue to work on it.

In a nutshell, a theory of knowledge (or consciousness if you prefer) speaks to the nature of knowing—it’s potential and its limits. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky tackled this subject with ideas about other forms of knowing. Deming’s other form of knowing was “statistical” and he carefully avoided anything that rang of mysticism. I fall into the Deming camp in this regard.

Systems thinking comes down to developing methods and instincts for hearing the voice of the process, or if you will, the voice of the system. This is the opposite of the reduction that has become the common sense of by-the-numbers and just-the-facts thinking in Western enterprise. Simply put, reduction destroys the object of study. Systems thinking preserves the interacting whole so that we can hear its heat beat, breathing, meaning, and other vital signs. Hearing and understanding the voice is the means by which the intractable interactions that define a system can be brought within the grasp of the naturally reductive mind. Prediction improves. Decisions become more efficacious. Doors to understanding open continually.

Without leadership that understands this way of seeing and understanding, our future remains determined by the fundamental flaws of scientistic reductionism. This was why Deming said, “How could they know?” Without this understanding, they can’t even ask the right questions.

In the New Yorker, May 11, Adam Gopnik’s essay, “Reflections, The Fifth Blade”, puts some interesting wrinkles in the application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to the evolution of human thought and the technology that flows from that thought.

A Bad Idea - Gillette's 5-Bladed Razor

When times are bad, only those ideas that are useful can survive. No one has the money, time, or energy to waste on ideas that produce no benefit. Good times, on the other hand, leave us free to wallow in a world of bad ideas that go unchallenged by the test of their utility. Because they work, good ideas create value and from good ideas, everyone can profit. Bad ideas are those that are ginned up to mislead us into unwise or irrelevant actions that reward their authors at our expense. We will do better if we do not allow our appreciation of the entrepreneurial spirit and innovation to become an excuse for acquiescing when faced with bad ideas.

If our success as a species depends on our ability to generate ideas that work, how can we hope to survive and do better when we become ensnarled in culture rife with bad ideas?

SOME MORE BAD IDEAS

• 50 varieties of every commodity on supermarket shelves
• Square tomatoes
• Cereal boxes
• Designer water in plastic bottles
• Bottled air
• Mass market SUVs
• “What the market will bear” pricing
• Advertising that appeals to the gonads
• Roads to nowhere
• Politics as usual
• Sound bite news stories
• Usurious interest rates
• Creationism and Intelligent Design
• AI
• Everyone must compete with everyone else
• Fine print
• Legalese
• University curricula that elevate systems of belief to the status of science  (e.g. religion, business, and economics)
• Personal wealth is the measure of a man
• Greed is good
• History is cyclical
• Human nature
• Getting caught is the greatest crime
• God, Gods, and all other idolatry
• Astrological prediction
• Right and wrong ideas
• True value
• Grading primary school students
• Pheromone masking deodorants
• Pet psychiatry
• Psychoanalysis in general
• Private health care insurance
• Houses with too many rooms
• $4.00 designer coffee drinks
• Pay for performance
• Reality TV

What’s on your list?

I have often mentioned the idea that SUCCESS = FAILURE is a paradox of human endeavor. Gopnik’s collection of razors is testimony writ small to how bad ideas can sow the seeds of self-destruction.

“There is no substitute for knowledge”
W. E. Deming

3-sigma is about the process of emergence and the greatest treatise on emergence—the turning point in Western thought—came with the publication of Darwin’s “Origin of Species”.

The great debate of our time—maybe of all human times—is the “true” nature of the human species. Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection explains that those few who’s genes prevail through a process of random invention are naturally selected, while others must pass away into genetic ignominy. The happy accidents accrue to the few while the many wither on the evolutionary vine. The rise of Homo sapiens—man the wise, whom I now daub Homo predictus—-man the predictor (©Three Sigma Systems), was due to the genetic happy accident that favored  an intense sociality of intersubjective selves given to complex song, language, collaboration and love. From this accidental capacity of the many to work together toward imagined futures, awakened a creature who stepped over the leading edge of natural selection and entered the forward seeking domain of unnatural selection.

Linnaeus classified the domestic dog, including Poodles a species unto himself. But modern genetic technology has looked into the issue of Canis Familiaris (man’s best friend), and proven Linnaeus wrong. In 1993 the Smithsonian’s ”Mammal Species of the World” restored the Poodle and others of his ilk to their rightful place among the wolves, Canis lupus familiaris.

wolfish Poodle

A wolfish true nature lies in the heart of every Poodle. His genes are in no small part, those of a snarling predator capable of ripping open the throat of anyone in his way. But the Poodle is on the whole, no longer his primal self, bonded as he is, into the web of sociality called the human race who have brought him forth through a process of unnatural selection.

So what is the “true” nature of Poodles and men? Are they more truly wolfish? Or are they more truly altruistic creatures bound together as a collaborative whole?

It seems that in the age of Homo predictus, we get to chose.

Reading that Inspired this post:
“Darwin’s Ghost” by Steve Jones and “The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin