IDEA
WHY A BOOK ABOUT SEXUALITY?
Initially, I wanted to write a book about the evolution of matter. When I wrote my first outline for a literary agent, I realized that the subject wouldn’t fit into one book. So I had to choose. What area of evolution is the most exciting?
Should I write about
- how the molecules came together to create something funny like life?
- how well-equipped and well-adapted unicellular organisms merged into poorly functioning multicellular organisms?
- why most ants don’t bother to reproduce, but work themselves to death?
- that there is evolution in culture?
- that there is mutation and selection in fashions, jokes and world views?
It’s all very interesting. But what to choose?
So, I had to think commercially. What is the most straightforward subject to find a publisher for? Exactly! So, a book about sex. But actually, it didn’t become a book about sex at all, but a book about how we have been formed by sex and evolution, about how the history of sex has shaped our bodies and our brains. The working title for a long time was: „What sexuality made of Us“. (What do you think of when you see the two harmless pears?)
WHY A BOOK ABOUT
EVOLUTION?
At first, I wanted to write a book about the evolution of matter. Why a book about the evolution of matter?
Just as you can only understand chemistry if you understand the physical particles, the atoms, you can only really understand culture if you understand the biological particles, the people.
We want a just, peaceful, prosperous, free, and sustainable society. Societies consist of power structures, a variety of ideas, and people. Power structures, ideas, and people are shaped by evolution – the evolution of power structures, the evolution of ideas, and the evolution of people. If you want to understand and influence societies, you have to deal with all three evolutionary histories.
EVO OLM
[evolurch]
PROJECTS
I have done much research and writing: The role of sexuality in history and society. What about patriarchy is evolutionary, and what is cultural? How can knowledge of our evolutionary past strengthen feminism? What can we learn from matriarchal peoples and bonobos?
In progress: Mind and spirit are also just matter. The emergence of construction types and the ontology of mind – Life, mind, culture, and technology as a thermodynamic special case.
- Mind is matter: deriving the concepts of data, information, and information processing from thermodynamics and physics.
- The evolution of information in culture. The evolution of jokes, fashions, views, structures, and societies.
- Emergences – the emergence of higher complex forms of matter and culture by self-organization. The evolution of matter starting from the Big Bang over the evolution of dust fluff and life up to ant states and human hordes.
- How art, humor, and language came into being. How evolution created our cultural brain.
- What is society? What drives the changes in society and culture?
The description of the evolution of culture and society based on the Evolutionary Structure Theory, which arises from the union of the meme theory of Richard Dawkins and the structure theory of Niclas Luhmann.
My dream: A thick, full-color illustrated book about the evolution of arthropods (spiders, crabs, insects, etc.).
