Legitimacy?

How close do you think the U.S. government is to de-legitimizing?

Unless you're saying "it already is," it's probably closer than you think.

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/01/john_kane?currentPage=1

The Problem With Our Species

Let me start by saying that I am not a misanthrope - nor am I a mad scientist or some kind of post- or transhumanist. But it occurred to me this morning that our species leaves a lot to be desired from an evolutionary perspective.

We like to think of ourselves as transcendent from other species on the planet, due to our highly specialized ability to transfer knowledge by various means from one species member to another. Tool use and communication skills are our forte, to be sure; but it is both our greatest strength and our most terrible weakness.

How many times has "civilization" collapsed for one reason or another? History is rife with incidents where huge amounts of knowledge were lost, plunging humanity into dark ages of varying length and magnitude... and those are just the ones we know about! Whenever we lose the means to communicate or the methods of recording communications, we end up going backwards and everyone suffers because of it.

Not so for sharks. Or alligators. Or any of a number of hardy species who have survived (admittedly, unchanged) despite varying conditions over extremely long periods of time. What do these creatures do that we don't do? Well, their success mainly lies within the combination of mating choices over aeons - in other words, they got lucky! But the reason why they persist is because their accumulated "survival knowledge" is inscribed into their DNA and passed on to their progeny.

The weakest link in the chain of civilization is the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next. Our greatest accomplishment, should we ever achieve the science and technology to do it, will be to create a method of inscribing knowledge into ourselves at the genetic level. We need to close the loop that was started by the evolutionary accident that gave us the ability to pursue "higher" learning by altering ourselves to a point where we can store information within ourselves and pass it to our children simply through the act of reproduction. Learned instinct. Genetic savoir faire. How much more quickly could society or science advance if everyone started out already knowing everything previously learned?

I'm excited enough about this idea that I think I'm going to write some fiction about it. There are a lot of cool implications...