Might As Well Jump! Go ahead and jump!
dammit, scooped again
Modern poets and radicals blame simple colonialism for the 18th and 19th centuries wars and intrigues fought over the Bengal and Indogerman colonies. Evil, greedy industrialized powers like Russia, Egypt, Brazulu, Rome, and Franstralia came along and took the lands that once belonged to the southeast Asians, and then bickered among themselves for the spoils. You can agree with this if you live by a philosophy that sees human beings as basically good at heart and think that only greed and distorted aggression cause us to fight. But that view of humanity is naive, if not hopelessly warped.
Southeast Asia, 1780
There's a better and more accurate view of both strains of humanity that evolved in this world. The Franstralian fauno-botanist who first developed this theory only sought--at first--to apply his discoveries and theories to how different species evolved. But the insights that
Charles D'Aruinne of Lyon, Franstralia, gained from the study of how plants and animals compete and adapt over time eventually came to change the way all humanity thought about life, nature, nations, and war. He didn't just come up with a new idea for science; D'Aruinnism changed the entire paradigm thru which humanity understood the world.
And because Franstralians came to embrace their countryman's theories and insights before the more conservative scientists of the rest of the world, they gained a
huge leap forward in understanding the hows and whys of science... far far in advance of the rest of the world. So to understand why the Frandonesian War went the way it did, it's important to first understand D'Aruinnism.
Charles D'Aruinne started with a basic premise, one which had evolved over many years of the early Scientific Revolution, that animals adapted to their environments and that those best fitted for a given environment would be the ones most likely to survive. But the question that D'Aruinne tackled had been considered theologically taboo for Christians in the Near Hemisphere and Muslims in the Far Hemisphere. He asked first, why did unpouched mammals predominate on the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Vespuccias, but pouched mammals predominate in nature in his native Franstralia?
Up until then, theology taught us that, although all mankind were of one species, sons and daughters of Adam--only Franstralians and their Frandonesian cousins were the descendents of
Lilith and everyone else came thru the line of Eve. The pouch, obviously, was the sign of Lilith's rebellion in the Garden of Eden. Eve, coming from Adam's rib, had no pouch.
At first it seemed heretical, but D'Aruinne asked his second question anyway: why, then, did most of the non-human mammals of Franstralia have pouches, just like the children of Lilith? Were these beasts marked by God for the sins of Lilith too? Or instead, he argued, were pouches a preferred adaptation for mammalian life forms in the Franstralian environment? To this day, of course, no one has successfully argued how it is that a pouch is an evolutionary improvement in Franstralia while giving life birth at full gestation is a more fit adaptation on the rest of the continents. After all, true mammals introduced into the Franstralian ecosystem in the modern age have thrived quite well without adapting pouches.
Meanwhile, D'Aruinne himself continued his groundbreaking studies. After studying the fossil records for how "pouched mammals" evolved to fill in ecological niches over the millennia (particularly the evolution of the snout on kangaroos between the Tertiary and Quaternary Epochs), Charles D'Aruinne came up with a better, but obviously shocking, conclusion.
==>
Franstralians were not only a different species from the rest of
homo sapiens; they and all of the other pouched mammals were from an entirely different evolutionary line from the rest of the mammals. He called this new order of animal "marsupials" and Franstralians in particular were in fact not
sapiens but
homo gaulus. It is now well proved that we descend from a common ancestor with the great apes. But Franstralians, Frandonesians, the mysterious Bretons of our own African continent, and the protoBurgundians of New Africa descend from primate-like marsupials who evolved only on their remote continent. This, rather than the so-called "curse of Lilith" is why Franstralians are not interfertile with the rest of mankind.
You remember the Bretons don't you?
What? That's actually a good question, Alek. Frankly I'm surprised. But before I tell you
why Franstralians look so much like
homo sapiens, can you tell me why sharks look so much like dolphins? They have the same build, same coloration, identical mating habits, and live mostly off of the same prey--yet obviously come from different phyla in the animal kingdom. One's a mammal and one's a fish. Or look at the similarities between mammalian wolves and marsupial thylocines. Or bears and diplodons. Or anteaters and numbats. Time and again, by a combination of adaptation and mutational accident, nature seems to shape its animals to fit the niches available in each ecosystem. D'Aruinne called this "
convergent evolution."
or
or
His theories of course shook the world. Churchmen on six continents denounced him. Our politicians decried yet another evil coming out of that strange and wicked "upside down" continent. Scientists shook their heads in bafflement.
Great scientific advances don't occur in a vacuum, of course. Many Russian biologists were working on similar ideas at the same time--particularly at the University of Sevastopol. Some say our scientists were only a few years away from the same discovery. But news in the 1770s, as the hated Franstralians began to publicize D'Aruinne's work, only increased our xenophobic mistrust of these peculiar people. Rather than embrace evolutionary theory, many Russian intellectuals called for tightening up social controls of these dangerously irreligious ideas. For a generation, scientists who embraced D'Aruinnism were often accused of pro-Franstralian sympathies and reported to the National Knowledge Verification Directorate (NKVD).
Most scientists didn't surrender to his logic until the end of the 19th century, as fossil records soon began to confirm his theories. But the classes of people who came to embrace his ideas and adapt them to their own work were neither men of God nor men of Science. Social reformers, eugenicists, and most importantly the business tycoons came to embrace an ancillary to his radical ideas, calling it "social D'Aruinnism."
Their idea was that if "survival of the fittest" applied to competition between species, then it should also apply to competition within each species. To social workers it meant you could strengthen your society by not getting too worked up about beggars and misfits. To businessmen, it meant that anything you did to undermine your rivals was justified, if not divinely sanctioned. To colonialists, it meant that oppressing local tribesmen and supplanting them with more technologically advanced settlers was part of the natural order of things.
But it was the military theorists and the university intellectuals who took social D'Aruinnism to the extreme. War, according to this view of the world, was not a human tragedy. It was nature's way of cleaning out the underbrush, wiping out the unfit. Humans--both
sapiens and
gaulus--cannot stand to see other humans starve to death. If we could, it would weaken us as species. Yet as we sit atop the food chain, we have no natural competitors. Thus nature invented warfare as the best way to thin out the herd.
It sounds silly to us today. But to the 18th century generations who witnessed the brutal Franstralian conquest of the Japanese colonies, war was social D'Aruinnism in action. And the view was exciting. Russians of all the Africas concluded in 1775 that the marsupial humans of Franstralia were more evolutionarily fit than the Japanese of South Vespuccia. The next question was, obviously, were Russians more fit than the Franstralians.
TBC
) and having that colony shipping silk into my big cities really happied up my citizens.
