Human nature is artificiality.

Humankind has co-evolved with the civilizations we have built and inhabited. Under the pressures of these artificial habitats (which include not only what we live in, but live with and use), we have biologically evolved and become capable of rebuilding our civilizations in new ways — within which, and with which, we further biologically evolve.

Human beings as we are now have never existed apart from civilization, and would be incomplete alone and in the wilderness. The belief that we’d be better off without civilization is artifice, but artifice discordant with our true artificial natures.

*

Humankind and civilization are the twin children produced by humankind and civilization, who will parent the next twins. We belong to an interminable double-helix chain of bio-artifice incest stretching behind us and before us. We blind ourselves with Origin stories of perfection lost and regained.

*

Don’t even try to make arguments based on what is and is not natural. In human existence, nothing is natural. The best we have is second-nature: some things seem or feel natural, and other things can come to seem or feel natural, and these second-natures vary from individual to individual. If you take this fact (the pluralistic fact) seriously enough to make attempts to learn the specifics of varying experiences of naturalness, which differs from psychic economy to psychic economy, you’ll approach truth instead of shrinking from it.

*

Conservatives who hate the idea of evolution should take extreme care to avoid understanding the concept of co-evolution. Evolution is training wheels for the shock of its logical progression to co-evolution.

We’d better protect the sanctimony of our individual marriage customs, because collectively we are a polygamous, incestuous, bestial, technophilic monsters, marrying and mating with animals, household appliances and anything that moves (or fails to move fast enough to escape our embrace) for dozens of millennia.

We’ve done all sorts of crazy things to ourselves as a species, and who’s to judge what ought to or ought not to have happened? Actually, we will, and in the process we will do yet more crazy things to ourselves.

*

My new definition of design: humans artificing and doing crazy things to ourselves.