Is progress real?

[ziegenpeter]

'Progress' is a modern construct about how newer is better which is BS. Things just change with time, it can go either way.

Uhm... Source?
No seriuosly, where you got that from?

[ziegenpeter]

I'd like to know what leads you to the assertion "'Progress' is a modern construct about how newer is better which is BS. Things just change with time, it can go either way." because I think this is highly debatable.
Is this a) an empirical observation you did yourself or b) do you have a source fo that? If a) I wonder what your definition of progress is, why this is a modern construct and how progress can make things worse.

[WinsingtonIII]

I'd like to know what leads you to the assertion "'Progress' is a modern construct about how newer is better which is BS. Things just change with time, it can go either way." because I think this is highly debatable.
Is this a) an empirical observation you did yourself or b) do you have a source fo that? If a) I wonder what your definition of progress is, why this is a modern construct and how progress can make things worse.

Well, it all depends on how you define progress. Here are a couple definitions I found:

"the development of an individual or society in a direction considered more beneficial than and superior to the previous level."

"developmental activity in science, technology, etc., esp. with reference to the commercial opportunities created thereby or to the promotion of the material well-being of the public through the goods, techniques, or facilities created."

Now, the first implies that progress is a development that is "considered more beneficial," which does not mean that everyone agrees with that claim. It means that the dominant culture of society considers it beneficial, not necessarily everybody. For example, when the French Revolution occurred, a lot of people benefited and received rights, but a minority (the nobility, who I realize it is difficult to feel sorry for) got screwed. If you agree with the conflict theory of social change, then social change will inevitably lead to winners and losers, and "progress" certainly isn't beneficial to the losers.

The second definition is more specific, but I think it's actually more useful because it shows modern, Western society's bias in assigning the term progress. Here, progress is improvement in material well-being. That says a lot on it's own. What about social, mental, or spiritual well-being? They aren't included, what we call progress is an improvement in the public's economic position. Marx's view of the progress made in the transition from feudal to capitalist society fits in here well. He acknowledges that the proletariat are actually in a better economic position as workers then they were as serfs, but he says they are socially alienated from their work and their fellow workers. He also says that though everyone's position will improve in capitalist society, inequality will also increase, so the relative position of the poor will be even worse than before. It's not just Marx either, plenty of people view economic and technological "progress" as detrimental to their way of life.

I think ASM is right on some accounts. Progress is a subjective word, we cannot say whether it is inherently good or bad, because someone is (almost) always going to be hurt by what society considers progress. As for empirically testing whether progress in it's entirety is beneficial or not, I wish you luck, that's an extraordinarily vast sociological undertaking.

If you want a source, read Capital by Karl Marx, or The Division of Labour in Society by Emile Durkheim. I'd like to point out that though Marx is of course a famous socialist, it is not only socialists that take this view of what we call "progress," but in fact many other sociologists, such as Durkheim, who is actually considered to be conservative in some aspects.

[antisocialmunky]

I'd like to know what leads you to the assertion "'Progress' is a modern construct about how newer is better which is BS. Things just change with time, it can go either way." because I think this is highly debatable.
Is this a) an empirical observation you did yourself or b) do you have a source fo that? If a) I wonder what your definition of progress is, why this is a modern construct and how progress can make things worse.

K... You introduce mechanized agriculture to a developping country. You can now grow more food. However tons of people are now out of work since 1 guy can now do the work of 100. They flock to the cities, can't find jobs, and set up shanty towns.

Congrats you are now like 70% of the world.


You set up a massive irrigation network in the desert. You grow massive amounts of food for 4 years before you destroy the soil due to salt and mineral build up. The land is now useless.

Congrats, you are now Sonora, Mexico.

[bobbin]

You invent Penicillin and save the lives of millions of people...

People have always been trying to better their situation, its certainly not a modern concept.
I suppose the problem is that the term "progress" implies that there is a final goal to be reached which when you apply to human civilization as a whole is a pretty vague ideal of making people safer in the long run, there is no real scale to measure our achievements against.

[antisocialmunky]

Since everyone seems to have an imprecise definition. The closest definition to what I'm defining progress is the one on Wikipedia.

Progress is a change in ideologies, technologies or methods which allows mankind to engage in activities which it was previously unable to engage in or allows it to engage more efficiently in existing activities.

Its hard to not do a circular definition. I would define it more broadly as working towards a preceived benefit. In modern western society, this is unconditionally good. Progress will fix everything. However, back in the day progress was more of a neutral thing.

The old attitude was something along the lines of:
"Your new method might be better but and we can already do that just fine."

Its not until you have capitalism + humanism that you have the idea of comparative advantage and the notion that A is better than B so we should do A now because we can make more money or do more X or make more Y and humans are the masters of our own destiny and humans can decide what's best on their own.

There's a reason why none of those totally awesome inventions back in the days of Heron and Archimedes were adapted for common use. There's a reason why China innovated so many things and didn't take them any further. There's a reason why Europe took over the whole freaking world and capitalism owns all previous forms of economies.

[WinsingtonIII]

You invent Penicillin and save the lives of millions of people...

People have always been trying to better their situation, its certainly not a modern concept.
I suppose the problem is that the term "progress" implies that there is a final goal to be reached which when you apply to human civilization as a whole is a pretty vague ideal of making people safer in the long run, there is no real scale to measure our achievements against.

It is a modern concept in that the philosophical idea of progress was introduced in the Enlightenment. Before that, the philosophy was that God(s) makes society and we can't do anything, mere mortals that we are, to improve it. That doesn't mean change didn't occur and ideas and tools were not invented or used to benefit people, it was just that people didn't really think of these instances as being a progression towards a better society. That part of the idea came later.

The problem is that we are so used to the term "progress" that we tend to use it as a word meaning "change." But it doesn't really mean that. It's an abstract philosophical idea created by modern, Western society that encompasses far more than simply change, it's also the accompanying idea that society itself has been "improved" in the process. What ASM is arguing (and also what I was arguing in my earlier post at the bottom of page two) is that this intellectual position, that technological, scientific, and capitalist economic advancement tends to improve society, is not always true. However, there are other modern ideas of progress (namely the socialist idea of progress towards a socialist utopia) that do not follow this model. But this model (the neo-liberal model) that puts a lot of emphasis on technology, science, individual liberties, and unregulated capitalism as the basis of a better society, is the vastly accepted model in the Western elite (and hence the definition we see in the dictionary), and is driving the movement for globalization and global economic liberalization, which is in turn screwing over small farmers worldwide.

That is not to say that the neo-liberal model of progress does not introduce much good into this world, as in the case of Penicillin. But it also can produce bad outcomes, which is why saying "progress" is universally good doesn't compute. It has its good moments and its bad moments.

The old attitude was something along the lines of:
"Your new method might be better but and we can already do that just fine."

I don't really think that's true ASM. Sure, many ancient and medieval societies were conservative, but others were more open to change, and it's not like new ideas and inventions were never accepted into pre-modern societies. What about the development of the three-field crop rotation in the early Middle Ages? That was certainly the introduction of a new idea, and people (especially nobles) jumped to incorporate it, because it made them more rich. The distinction is that when these introductions occurred, there was no idea that society was going to be improved or perfected by the introductions. That's the difference between modern "progress" and the earlier introduction of inventions and ideas, it's not that nothing new was introduced into society before the Enlightenment, it's just that this idea of social progress did not accompany that introduction.

[bobbin]

It is a modern concept in that the philosophical idea of progress was introduced in the Enlightenment. Before that, the philosophy was that God(s) makes society and we can't do anything, mere mortals that we are, to improve it. That doesn't mean change didn't occur and ideas and tools were not invented or used to benefit people, it was just that people didn't really think of these instances as being a progression towards a better society. That part of the idea came later.

Ah I see now, very good point.

That is not to say that the neo-liberal model of progress does not introduce much good into this world, as in the case of Penicillin. But it also can produce bad outcomes, which is why saying "progress" is universally good doesn't compute. It has its good moments and its bad moments.

I wasn't arguing that "progress" is always good as its plain to see it isn't in many cases.

While this is all very fascinating, I'm wondering how all this is directly related to the question whether female warriors will be depicted in nomadic units in EBII?

Yes it has gone a bit OT, but I think the question was answered a while back (not definitely though)

I'm not one of these factions historians, so I could be wrong. But I believe they agreed not to make a female unit but potentially have a rare female within a unit.

[antisocialmunky]

I don't really think that's true ASM. Sure, many ancient and medieval societies were conservative, but others were more open to change, and it's not like new ideas and inventions were never accepted into pre-modern societies. What about the development of the three-field crop rotation in the early Middle Ages? That was certainly the introduction of a new idea, and people (especially nobles) jumped to incorporate it, because it made them more rich. The distinction is that when these introductions occurred, there was no idea that society was going to be improved or perfected by the introductions. That's the difference between modern "progress" and the earlier introduction of inventions and ideas, it's not that nothing new was introduced into society before the Enlightenment, it's just that this idea of social progress did not accompany that introduction.

True people accepted those things because they were better. However, that's a pretty simple one to implement because it wasn't very esoteric.

But when you get into the zone of medical science, machines, physics, chemistry, and other complicated things. You usually have periods of innovation in the lifespan of one person and then everyone just copied that one person instead of realizing that they should take it further.

So I guess I should clarify that to:
"Your new method might be better but its too complex to implement and we can already do that just fine."

While this is all very fascinating, I'm wondering how all this is directly related to the question whether female warriors will be depicted in nomadic units in EBII?

Something about boobs quite possibly.

[Brennus]

It all depends if you consider yourself a Modernist or Post-Modernist philosophically speaking. Was the 20th Century a great period of human advancement (silicon chip, internet, anti-biotics, UN, space travel, unlocking the genome etc.) or was it a period when we realised that no matter how many technological advancements we made we were still stuck in a quagmire (c. 20,000,000 dead in WWI, c. 60,000,000 dead in WWII, destruction of the environment, new and efficient methods of killing each other, mass unemployment due to increased mechanisation and industrialisation etc)? If you think the former then you are Modernist and hence believe in the inevitability of progress, if you follow the latter you are Post-Modernist and thus do not believe in progress.

NOTE: I am an Archaeologist not a Philosopher or Sociologist so people mre qualified than me in these matters please feel free to correct me.

[machinor]

Well, while your point is valid, I personally do not like that kind of strict dichotomies. Progress is not either good or bad, it's ambivalent. There is a very interesting essay by Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist and philosopher, which deals partly with the self-understanding of Modern civilisation (basically Europe from the Early Modern Period on) as a civilisation that tries to force the world to become different than it is (in the sense of improving it). This is of course a noble goal on one hand, on the other hand it is also one that is very violent in its consequence.

[antisocialmunky]

I've always thought that isms are bad. They can pigeon hole you into a corner because each ideology comes with its own prepackaged barrel of monkeys. That and they are a rather limitting way of analysing something. Maybe for just looking at something from a certain perspective but getting stuck in those mindsets can do more harm than good.

Also, don't you think that 'post modern' is kinda a silly adjective?

[WinsingtonIII]

It all depends if you consider yourself a Modernist or Post-Modernist philosophically speaking. Was the 20th Century a great period of human advancement (silicon chip, internet, anti-biotics, UN, space travel, unlocking the genome etc.) or was it a period when we realised that no matter how many technological advancements we made we were still stuck in a quagmire (c. 20,000,000 dead in WWI, c. 60,000,000 dead in WWII, destruction of the environment, new and efficient methods of killing each other, mass unemployment due to increased mechanisation and industrialisation etc)? If you think the former then you are Modernist and hence believe in the inevitability of progress, if you follow the latter you are Post-Modernist and thus do not believe in progress.

Your philosophy seems sound to me, but I would agree with Machinor in that we cannot universally label something as huge as "progress" as good or bad inherently, or decide whether it exists or it doesn't. In my opinion, it's obvious that "progress" has lead to great things (the eradication of smallpox, awesome TW mods like EB) and also terrible things (nuclear weapons, DRM technology). I also think it's pretty silly to deny that any good things have happened simply because other bad things have happened too, that's just the nature of change. I think it's more useful to look at the issue from a sociological perspective instead of a philosophical one. The philosophers tend to try to put huge labels of "good" and "bad" around things like this, while sociology is much more objective. Remember that even Marx, who is remembered as the world's most vocal critic of what is considered progress by modern, capitalist society, still admitted that in many areas, the workers had been benefited by the switch from feudal to capitalist society. He just maintained that in other areas, things were worse than before. Of course, Marx has his own idea of progress (inevitable progress towards a socialist utopia) that goes completely against the neo-liberal theory of progress we are discussing here and just complicates the discussion even further. Marx is weird in that his critique of modern, capitalist society and its idea of progress is fairly objective and scientific, but in his creation of his own model of progress he is extremely philosophical and idealistic.

[Parallel Pain]

Progress is real all right.

Basically there's three view of world history and trends

Cyclical: everything repeats and repeats. This is the sort-of Confucian theory of dynastic cycle

Unchanging: it never changes. This is the sort-of middle-ages concept that they exist in a time between the first coming of Christ and the Second and nothing else matters.

Linear: This is the sort-of "modern" concept in which everything changes and build on previous changes (now precieved to often be for the better).

All three are true in their own rights. History is changing and unchanging and cyclical and not. It's just which aspect of history a culture chooses to emphasize. Modern culture (itself a human construct in relatively recent times) choose to emphasize Linear aspect.

This does not mean there is no "progress" or one direction change taking place in the cultures with the other two views, but that they simply regard it as another piece in their puzzle, as modern culture regards the other two views the same way.

As for whether or not progress is a good thing, it is perfectly debatable. Good for what, to who/what, in what time frame and in what way.

To me progress is good because I know
- the life expectancy of my fellow countrymen is over 70 years as opposed to 25~35
- if I every have children the chance of they dying before age 7 due to disease is miniscule (as opposed to over 50%)
- famine and a sudden new disease would not combine to wipe out half the population
- that unemployment even in a recession wouldn't sky rocket to the point of causing a revolution (at least in my country) but is actually quite low (relatively speaking)
- No one, not even the leader of my country, can take away my belongings by force or extort me into giving away my property
- There are government and other institutions designed to help me survive and live a normal life no matter what my condition is
- That in my country there is a great deal of social mobility. My parents don't have to be an aristocrat and I don't have to go onto the battlefield and fight with distinction to obtain power if I shall ever wish to do so (and I'm not interested)
- That the government controls minimum wage and price of necessities strictly so that even at minimum wage a full time worker do not have to spend every single penny just to get by (unless spent unwisely).
- That I do not have to be extremely powerful or rich or trying to spread religion to travel to other places in the world, and I can do so for leisure purposes.
- That before the law all my countrymen are (in theory) equal. If I am convicted the same crime as my dying father, the general-in-chief, or the Queen I could be expected to recieve similar sentences instead of they paying a $1000 fine and me getting executed.

And lots more.

[Moros]

I think the problem is just that progress, good, bad, real, unreal, true or false ... is presented here as black and white. And that's simply never the case. There's nothing that's purely good. We all know that. So what's OP's point?

[A Terribly Harmful Name]

Actually, I say that there has been both progress and degeneration since the year 1700. The most obvious facet, of course, is that of mass factory production generating more and cheaper goods.

[king of thracia]

Progress is real. We are far better off than in the Stone Age. Spare us that Marxist claptrap

I thought this was gonna be accusing EB II of being vaporware. (lol)

[antisocialmunky]

Are we really better of with 2 Girls 1 Cup?

[Ibrahim]

Are we really better of with 2 Girls 1 Cup?

well, at least you have a point-that flick was just..wrong (I never saw it, but I knwo the story)


anyways: "Progress" in so far as science** and technology is concerned, is real. problem is that it trickles down, from the scientists to the laymen, and it does so in a way that laymen can't observe the change, often because it takes years for that trickling to be complete.

for example, I still get people who think Diplodocus mated/lived underwater (wth?), or that Coelurosaurs weren't feathered; one guy called me an idiot for telling him (correctly) that tyrannosauroids have been found with feathers-I of course wipped him like a baby for that reply, and he canned it and clsed his account (it was that bad). recently some of you rember my rebuking of another member for mentioning-even jokingly, that dinosaurs are cold-blooded.

and of course, some people still can't accept evolution and/or punctuated equilibrium.

now I know that I'm using paleontology related things to explain this, but its all I care about

whether progress is "evil" or "good": well for science, its definitely good, as it opens up new potential for improvement and technology. in technology's case, its neither. now one can argue that progress in science is neutral, since bad can also come of it (e.g atom bomb), but I lump that with technology, which is the systematic application of science. either interpretation is fine.

thus, to me, the ideas and theories science produces are good, but the application is ambiguous, and highly dependant.

as to social progress/progress outside science: that concept is complete bull. afterall, we are making the same exact mistakes/decisions our forefathers have made (heck, even socialism* is older than Marx). thus, in this regard, I do not think there is social "progress"; only social change, and of course natural tendencies in our history, both combined. whether this change/tendencies is good or bad depends on the society it occurs in. why not call it progress? because it can be bad as well as good.


thus, in science I am linear, and in other matters a cyclist. or in short: I find the entire concept of "progress" in the west to be meaningless.


*whther that is a mistake or not is up to you.
**this include medicine, and from their, life expectancy/its quality.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Progress is real. We are far better off than in the Stone Age. Spare us that Marxist claptrap

Are we really better of with 2 Girls 1 Cup?

I was going to ask what this has to do with EB, but now I want to announce that I will find a way to put this in my sig.

[madbriton]

I remember a history professor telling me that for any given 100 year period back to several hundred years BC, he could find at least ten sources saying 'we are in a period of great progress and enlightenment' and another ten saying 'the country is going to the dogs, it was much better a few decades ago'.

So while you can confidently define scientific progress, social and cultural progress is most definitely relative and subjective.

[antisocialmunky]

Yeah pretty much which is why I brought it up in the boobs in EB Skythian Women thread to show that the simplistic idea that progress = always good therefore modern society is better is ignorant.

[king of thracia]

EDIT: Nm. I agree

[WinsingtonIII]

Yeah I think the name of this thread is a little misleading.... I know that I was certainly not arguing that progress has not been made, the distinction was that the idea that progress as Western society sees it is always good is ridiculous, because bad outcomes can result from what we consider progress.

Progress is real. We are far better off than in the Stone Age. Spare us that Marxist claptrap

By the way, King of Thracia, I am not a Marxist, and I was only using Marx as a specific example of a theory that claimed progress was not always good. There are many others, I just figured that everyone has heard of Marx so he was a good choice of example. Also, I never said we are not better off than in the Stone Age, and I never implied it. Saying that progress can be both good and bad is very different from saying that we are far worse now because of it.

[Azathoth]

recently some of you rember my rebuking of another member for mentioning-even jokingly, that dinosaurs are cold-blooded.

Aren't dinosaurs a mix of cold-blooded and warm-blooded species?

[Foot]

Aren't dinosaurs a mix of cold-blooded and warm-blooded species?

Only when you do a poor job of categorising Dinosaurs.

The Dimetrodon is not a dinosaur, though it is often assumed to be so (I know I did). It is a lizard and is cold-blooded (one theory states that the sail was used help heat the blood).

The Dinosaurs are, however, true warm-blooded creatures with fast metabolisms and all that jazz. They were traditionally classed as lizards (hence -sauros) and so were presumed to be cold-blooded. But nowadays Dinosaurs are viewed as warm-blooded (if they ain't warm-blooded they aint dinosaurs).

Foot

[antisocialmunky]

Cold/Warm blooded is a little outdated. Great White sharks are one of many animals that shares traits of both. Really the only difference is one generates it own heat, the other relys on external heat. Great Whites use muscle generated heat to keep its body temperature above the surrounding water's.

Same with dinosaurs. The only ones that are usually considered warm blooded are therapods - evidence isn't particularly supportive of either bloodedness for most dinosaurs.

[Ibrahim]

Cold/Warm blooded is a little outdated. Great White sharks are one of many animals that shares traits of both. Really the only difference is one generates it own heat, the other relys on external heat. Great Whites use muscle generated heat to keep its body temperature above the surrounding water's.

Same with dinosaurs. The only ones that are usually considered warm blooded are therapods - evidence is directly or indirectly supported for endothermy/homoiothermy/I can never remember the diff .

much better. now on with the rest of this post :

correct regarding the classification, metabolism wise; specifically, an animal's metabolism is devided in 3 grades:

ectothermy/endothermy: where the metabolism comes from
Homoiotherm/poikilotherm: the level of variation in an animal's metabolism
bradymetabolic/tachymetabolic: how high or low the resting metabolism is. I can't remember which is which.


as to dinosaur metabolism? what you said is incomplete: its now known that all three were fairly high: high metabolism, low to medium variation, and self generating heat. the reason we know this are as follows:

1)the animals most certainly had 4 chambered hearts; all living archosaurs (Birds and Crocodiles) do as well*. and genetic and embryological research has shown that the Crocodilians were natively warmblooded, then became cold blooded-like the naked Mole rat did. 4 chambered hearts are more powerfull/efficient than 3, so more metabolic energy is available for the dinosaur.

2) knowing what we now know about Sauropod and Theropod anatomy, they also had an avian respiration system-in fact this is the most efficient respiratory system possible. Ornithischains may have had it too, but no hollows in the vertebrae have been found in such animals (that's because in birds, the airsacs are in vertbrae as well as in the body cavity). this doesn't mean that they ornithischians had none: embroyologically, the airsacs in birds at first appear outside the bone, in the chest and abdominal cavity only.

3)its well know that theorpoda, especially Coelurosaurs, had feathers. even T-rex was likely a fuzzy fellow (at least as a hatchling/juvenile; after 1 ton mass, the feathers are no longer needed).

4)growth rates in Dinosaurs were closer to that found in warm blooded than cold blooded animals. that said, it was unusually slow**-closer to marsupial rates of growth than birds or mammals.

5)ecologically, it makes no sense that cold blooded animals would dominate warm blooded animals (in this case dinosaurs suppressed mammals, preventin them from occupying the larger niches). this doesn't even happen today. the only reason Komodo Dragons are dominant in their islands is because there are no warm blooded predators, and the now extinct Megalarnia prisca was rare, slow, and ecologically worthless. cold blooded animals do however have a good hold on semiaquatic environments, but as non-avian dinosaurs were almost totally terrestrial, I only worry about the Komodo.

6) more energy is required for the active, erect legged, bipedal stance of the T-rex or the Coelophysis than being squatted, as in a lizard's case (believe me, erect legs really are energy wasting), and the physics of many dinosaurs-especially the small and the early, are built in a cursorial manner-or great for running and agile moves. Crocodiles are a partial exception.


*However, Crocodiles also have a valve that allows the heart to act as a 3 chambered heart, especially when under water.
**this paper touches on the presence of growth rings as well as fibro-lamellar bone, which collectively indicate this. it also covers more stuff, but I invite you to read it


EDIT: I think the dinosaurian parts ought to be moved to the science forum, in the dinosaur thread.

[WinsingtonIII]

Hahaha and it appears that the thread Ludens created because it started as an off-topic conversation in another thread has now turned into another off-topic conversation about dinosaurs...

I'm not making fun of you guys, I love dinosaurs and I think it's an interesting topic, I just think it's great that this thread that derailed another thread has now been derailed as well. Where will it end?!?

[Cyclops]

Moral progress is highly debatable, but "Progress" (sic) makes more people, who get to live longer, eat more and work less, so they can debate morality.

...anyways: "Progress" in so far as science** and technology is concerned, is real. problem is that it trickles down, from the scientists to the laymen, and it does so in a way that laymen can't observe the change, often because it takes years for that trickling to be complete...

**I would note that the narrower idea of scientific progress is based on free sharing of information: the Internet is the most powerful tool yet in this progress, and ideas of copyright remain one of its greatest threats (along with fundamentalist teaching that truth comes from only one guy or one book).

Does the modern paradigm of progress has its roots in the 18th century enlightenment? When the study of God was well and truly sidelined in favour of the study of Man?

Certainly the European culture of contestable systematic though that really took off in 17th century Europe created an awareness of an increasing body of checkable knowledge, as opposed to the Medieval idea that there was an available pool of God-given texts-The End.

This idea of a sequence of events leading up to "the best of all possible worlds" was projected onto British history by whig historians ("our regime is not the result of a series of unfortunate accidents, it was meant to be!") and coincided with the material plenty of the industrial revolution.

The notion of progress (including moral, material, politcal and scientific improvement) seemed/seems to fit the times especially in Britain and France. Its a very empowering idea that we are inevitably moving toward a better state of things: it inspired complacent superiority (eg ignoring the economic effects of European industrialisation/colonialism on say India and China) but also some really good things like banning slavery and real medical improvements.

We're still riding the wave of science, popular politics and capitalism. Its not all good. There have been disasters, throwbacks, alternative experiments and plenty of horror, but the basic mission statement of us as a species (reproduce) is being met better than ever. It remains to be seen if we will overcome all other obstacles only to reproduce ourselves to death.