on the rationalities of individuals & populations

We are animals. All the signs are there, we are warm blooded mammals, everyone knows this. To think otherwise in the West is to be religious or insane. Humans have suppressed and sublimated their animal instincts and have distanced themselves from their creative & destructive tendencies. To deny instinctual thinking and behavior is to rebel against animal nature. Just what is and isn't 'instinctual' is impossible for me to know, but I do believe that in many situations it is possible to act 'otherwise.' And if this were not the case, or believed to not be the case, law would lose nearly all meaning. Also, guilt.

Human society as biopolitic can be understood as a tangled, rhizomatic web of law and biology. Multiple species can be studied as subject to the laws of human society. Postmodernists like Foucault understand societal behavior through a biopolitical framework. Our status as animals and as species changed the way institutions treat human subjects and subsequently how researchers and philosophers conceive of history and freedom.

In a way, evolution can explain every event and no event. Evolution as a mechanism of life exists in cells, organisms, species, up to life itself. Freud theorized we instinctually crave our mother's libidinal energy: her attention. For those conscious of such possible instinctual motives, the past has a definite influence on our behavior. Consciousness is in many ways based on the past.

Human societies develop rhizomatically and so evolutionary thinking is limited in this regard. Whereas we can draw linear geneologies for individuals and species, cultural events have multiple meanings. We can trace the development of species based on fossil records and observed behavior, but we cannot with any certainty completely understand a rhizomatic event. We could go along with E.O. Wilson and say that everything can be explained evolutionarily, but wouldn't we then just be repeating Hegel's mistake by subsuming everything into a single system? In this case it may be Godel's incompleteness theorem that offers us a way out.

Bioart is the genetic & aesthetic creation & integration of biology into artwork. One of bioart's aims is to offer a different perspective and set of values to the advancements of science. We read into Kac's luminescent bunny & DNA-synthesizing Genesis project. We can also ask: is a necessity such as food a cultural force and creative impetus? If so, we can understand agriculture & selective breeding as cultural forces that altered our lives before history in our uncharted genetic pre-Mendelian past. Any attempt at an evolutionary theory of, say, ancient Egypt would be nearly impossible to verify. Evolutionary theory does not bring us close to an understanding of historical forces. Evotheory does give us a better understanding of our place on the planet by providing the tool of species-thinking. We can consider thoughts & modes of behavior as representative of a species, but understanding which ones is very difficult. This is because many meanings are attached to an action, and all understanding of meaning is relative. I can only speak for myself.