Happiness

What is happiness? Zoologist Desmond Morris defined as the sensation you feel when life gets better. As a zoologist and darwinist, what he means by life getting "better" is that the organism that is experiencing happiness has had something happen or done something that improved their chances of survival and reproduction. What the science of positive psychology has shown is we have set points for our level of happiness which we later return too. This means that whether you win the lottery or become an amputee you will eventually return to the level of happiness you were before. This is called hedonic adaptation. If you didn't return to a set point level of happiness the organism would become complacent in improving its chances of survival. What makes an organism happy are the achievement of biological imperatives, a job you cannot retire from. Their called biological imperatives because they coorelate highly with biological fitness. 

They are;
Survival
      Food, water, and safety.
Territorialism
      Property, money and/or purchasing power.
Competiveness
      Achievement, respect, popularity, attractiveness, displays of wealth.
Reproduction
        Marriage, children, grandchildren and sex.
Group forming
        Community, family, friends and identity.
Quality of life seeking
        Leisure and emergency preparedness.

Think about the things that make you happy. Do the sources of your happiness coorelate with the above biological inperatives?

The reason that they do is because happiness like all emotions are products of you nervous system. Your nervous system is a product of your genes. Grass isnt happy because it doesnt have a nervous system because it doesnt have the genes to build one.

Humanity as a species has been around for around 10,000 generations. For 9,700 of those our ancestors lived as hunter gatherers. More recently in the last 10 generations marketers and businessmen were able to find products that produced the sensations of achieving biological imperatives without making any effort. Drugs that trigger the craving and pleasure centers of the brain that in the stoneage was produced by things like sex or achievement. Calorie dense foods that have no nutrients which didnt exist in our ancestors calorie scarce world. Instead of gathering nutritious plants we have retail therapy. Instead of supportive tribes we have divisive identity politics.

Marketers have figure out they can make money of us by providing the experience of low effort happiness. They've put us on a hedonic treadmill that instead of benefitting our children as it did in the stoneage it benefits their bank account.

As Nietzsche said in Thus Spoke Zarathustra " What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of your greatest contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becomes loathsome to you, and so also your reason and virtue. The hour when you say: 'What good is my happiness? It is poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency. But my happiness should justify existence itself!"

Arete

The great philosopher Aristotle introduced to me the meme of Arete from his book the Nicomachean ethics. Aristotle taught that Arete which means moral virtue and also means effectiveness or excellence of any kind.. The virtue of a knife would be how well it cuts. The virtue of a car is how effectively it gets you to work for its cost. For Aristotle the virtue of a person would be how effectively does he employ his reason to the world. He saw humanity as being distinguished by its capacity to use reason. We know however nature selected for our reason because better quality decisions made us better parents and better parents pass on more genes.So I would add to Aristotle, and say that the arete of a human is how effective of a parent are we. We use reason to be good parents. The good parent is one who raises children to be smarter, healthier and more resilient than themselves. This is what nature has bred us to do. We are the means the end is the health and resilience of our children. When it comes to our children we should be Machiavellians. What good is a prince without heirs?

Consider this moral dilemma.  Their is a fork on a train track. Down one side of the fork the best man at your wedding. Down the otherside of of the fork is your 4 year old daughter. The train is going toward your daughter and to save her you have to activate the switch and change the track. The thing is the train will now kill your best man instead of your daughter. This is quite a dilemma. Murder your best man to save your daughter. On one hand you've known you best man longer, and his loyalty and friendship is valued. On the other hand you love your daughter in a way you could not love a friend. From a gene's eye view the obvious choice would be your own children. Even if you are punished for murder everyone would understand maybe not from the gene's eye view, but emotional reasoning would make it very hard for you not to save your daughter. Your spouse and family would be happy and you know what, I think the family of your best man may even accept your reasoning. When it comes to our children the ends justify the means.

You're stranded on a life raft. Help is on its way, but it will take 7 days. You have enough water for 7 days, but there is you and your child. You both will surely die, unless one of you takes their own life or one murders the other. We all know what most parents would choose.

How could morality have ever evolved if it didn't make us better parents?

What good is your happiness if it burdens your kids?

What truer love is their than that of a parent towards their child?

What good is government that can’t finance its “just society” without borrowing money from those who are yet to be born?

Why should equality and diversity be a bigger priority than passing on every advantage you can to your children?

My mission in life is to raise children that are healthier, smarter and more resilient than myself. Your either with me or your distracting me.

Your Ethnicity

You began as a single cell, which multiplied to eventually be 37.2 trillion cells. The experience of yourself as a unity is actually produced by 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections. All working together in harmony not because they are nice and compassionate cooperators, but because it is in each cells self interest to work together because they share the exact same genes. By specializing and differentiating they create synergies and emergent abilities that help them increase there share of the gene pool. The cell is a survival machine - robot vehicle following instructions from genes so that these genes can be reborn in the next generation and experience another life. The organism is trillions of cells working to get their genes reborn in the next generation. Your parents in this perspective is your genes previous life. Your children will be your genes next life. This process has been going on for more than a trillion generations. You owe your existence to the fact that every single one of your ancestors had at least one child before they died with out fail for more than a trillion generations. This to me is an profound and awe inspiring truth.

You are the latest incarnation of your lineage. In ever generation your genes were reborn in new bodies. Each body mostly identical, but slightly different and unique. Imagine if you were a book. This book would have more than a trillion pages and you would be on the last page. Unless you have kids then you would be the second to last page. One page  before you is your parents page. All your genes are split between your mother and I. I was born in Ontario in 1978 and your mother was born in Edmonton in 1983. I hope we were able to set a strong enough example for you that enabled you grow up to be smarter, healthier and more resilient than we were. A strong enough example that you in turn will set an even better example for your children. So that the pages yet to be written are of those that have so surpassed that we are to them in abilities as chimpanzees are to us. Adult chimpanzees can do some finger painting and simple math, mental feats preschooler humans can do. Imagine our descendants being the same degree more intelligent we are from chimpanzees, to being that degree more intelligent than us. Instead putting little Johnny's kindergarten finger painting project on the fridge your putting little Johnny's kindergarten calculus homework on the fridge.

The page before your parents is your grandparents. All your genes were shared among 4 people. My father Johan (John) Abrams born in a Mennonite colony in Chihuahua Mexico in 1952, he spoke low German and English was his third language after Spanish. He learned English in Canada when he moved here at 14 years. He died in 1983 in an car accident. Your mothers father Norbert Stiebritz was born in British Columbia in 1955. My mother Valerie Ferguson was born on a farm in Saskatchewan in 1953. Your mothers mother Debra Korun was born in Quebec in 1958.

On your great grandparents page you share all of your genes among eight people. My fathers parents both Mennonites born in Mexico are  Peter Abrams born in 1925 and died in 2012 of leukemia age 87. My grand mother Sara Dueck born 1925 and is till alive at this time 2016 and celebrated her 90th birthday. Both my paternal grand parents were type 2 diabetics. Your Opa Norberts parents were both born in Germany and came to Canada after the second World war which Peter-Horst Stiebritz fought. Peter was born in 1930 and died of I believe colon cancer which spread to his lungs in 2006 at age 75. Your Ur Oma Rosemarie Stoll was born in 1931 and is still alive. My mothers parents were both born in Saskatchewan. David Ferguson born in 1908 and died of various cancers in 1996 at the age of 88. My grandmother Bertha Stevenson was born in 1914 and died in 1995 at the age of 81 of cardiovascular disease. Your  grand mother Debra father Boris August Korun was born in Sovenia in 1924. He too moved to Canada after the second world war in which he fought. I believe he even spent time as a POW in Italy. I don't know how he died but he was diabetics and he was 74 when he died. Your great grandmother Eva Gertrude Dimock was born in Canada in 1932 and died of heart issues at the age of 61 in 1995. The average life span of your great grand parents is 80 years. You live a healthy lifestyle and you could reach 100. If they made it to 100 you would have met more of them. If you live to be 100 you may meet your great great grandchildren. Despite knowing next to nothing about nutrition and the importance of a healthy lifestyle they still lived pretty long lives.

Anthropologist and geneticists have this concept called Consanguinity. Anthropologists studying all cultures noticed that the more people are closely related the more they are willing to invest in each others welfare. Consanguinity is Latin for "blood relation" . They use a consanguinity table to determine the relatedness of the people they are studying.  They found that tracing back any further than great great grandparents resulted in no more kin selective behavior than with the general population. I guess simpler put would be any one you share at least one great great grand parent with would be your blood relation any more degrees further in relatedness is indistinguishable from the general population. So this generations are the progenitors of your kin group. All your genes were distributed among these sixteen progenitors;

1. Johann M Abrams a Mennonite who was born in Manitoba Canada in 1905 and died in 1980, he was married to Helena R Friesen also a Mennonite who was born in Manitoba Canada in 1905 and died in 1972. Johann was the grandson of Heinrich Abrams and Maria Heinrichs who was a teacher and pioneer featured in this article http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Abrams,_Heinrich_(1832-1910)
2. Johann G Dueck  a Mennonite who was born in Manitoba Canada in 1896 and was married to Anna G Penner also a Mennonite who was born also in Manitoba Canada in 1895 and died in 1959.
3. Leonhard Friedrich Stiebritz was born in Germany in 1901 and died in 1971 and was married to Berta Olga Seib also in Germany in 1901 and died in 1986.
4. Arthur Stoll was born in Germany in 1901 and died in 1960 he was married to Frieda Minna Tobschall who was born in Germany in 1907 and died in 2002.
5. David G Ferguson was born in Ontario Canada in 1861 and was married to Hanna Mervyn born also in Ontario in 1882. I know very little, in the Canadian census David described himself as a Scotsman. In my Grandmothers notes mentioned Hanna ancestors come from Armagh Ireland.
6. Norman Stevenson was born in Lyn Ontario Canada in 1890. Lyn is town founded by refugees of the American Revolutionary war. He was married to Katherine Campbell who was also born in 1890.
7. Ivan Korun was born in Slovenia in 1889 and was married to Hilda Hertz born also in Slovenia in 1898.
8. Albert Dimock which we know very little other than the surname Dimock is earliest mention is found in Gloucestershire in South England. He was married to Annie Trites  who was born in Canada in 1900. She is believed to be the descendant of the "Father of Moncton" New Brunswick Jacob Treitz  http://www.ourgenealogy.ca/ps01/ps01_341.html

Following book analogy of describing your lineage we will skip to the 8th page before your page. These ancestors are your 6th Great Grandparents. Some of them were descendants of one notable ancestor Jacob Hoeppner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Hoeppner a Mennonite who lead the Mennonites out of Prussia to the Ukraine at the invitation of Catherine the Great. Some of your 6th Great Grandparents were British Empire loyalist fleeing the United States towards Canada, because they sided with Britain in the American Revolution. As subjects of the British Empire (English culture) we inherit the English type of  Science, Industrialization, Constitutional Monarchy, and Capitalism. Institutions which have made English culture one of the most influential and powerful cultures to have ever existed. 

On the 20th page before your 18th great grandparents were living mostly in Northern Europe of the 1500's. The Protestant Reformation was underway. Your Frisian ancestors are becoming Mennonites and moving to the Vistula Delta to get away from the Catholic Spanish leadership. They speak Low German of the Hanseatic League and live as traders and farmers. Abrahams (Abrams) surname becomes fixed and passed on from father to son. 

The 32nd page before yours is the generation of the hypothetical identical ancestry point of all people with European descent. The point in your lineage where all people in Europe living at this time around 1000 AD are either ancestors of all Europeans or none. This is estimated because of the mathematical fact that every generation preceding you the number of ancestors in that generation double. You have two parents, four grandparents and 8 great grand parents. If you continue this for 32 generations you will have 4,294,967,296 ancestors on this page. Since their 300 million people on the Earth at this time and maybe 30 million in Europe and not every one would have had children. There has to be a high degree of relatedness among populations. This is explained using whats called pedigree collapse. Pedigrees collapse when cousins have children. If your parents are cousins then you will have 6 great grand parents instead of 8. All of humanity are cousins on the genetic level. People whose ancestors are from North Western Europe are genetically equivalent to 6th cousins of each other. People whose ancestors are from the Balkans are 7th cousins from North Western Europeans (NWE), from India they are 8th cousins from (NWE), East Asia they are 9th cousins from (NWE), the Amerindians are 10th cousins from (NWE), Australian Aborigines are 11th cousins from (NWE) and the Khoisan from southern Africa are 12th cousins from (NWE).  This maybe difficult for some to understand, but genetically all of humanity are descended from a source population of about 20,000 people. This fact makes us all cousins.

This is the generation that is the progenitors of your ethnicity. I think it is the most appropiate generation to use for this generation because it represents an convergence between DNA base pairs numbers and maximum number of lineages. You cannot have more lineages than base pairs. According to genetic testing I have done with Family Tree DNA most of our ancestors lived in the following places at around 1000 CE;

• 32% are from the North European Plain
• 32% are from the British Isles
• 24% are from Scandinavia
• 12% are from Eastern Europe

My Y Chromosome (Ydna) belongs to the R1b lineage with my latest marker being R-L51. Genetic Genealogist Kenneth Nordtvedt places it in the Frisian/Saxon branch of R1b. My Mitochondrial DNA belongs to the Scottish U4 branch which Genetic Genealogist Bryan Sykes says was brought to eastern Scotland by Viking homesteaders. You would have inherited your mothers Mitochondrial DNA (mtdna) which is from the H branch.

Your 30th great grandparents were mostly Christian, but some may still have been Viking Pagans. Warfare and slave raids were endemic among our ancestors. Some of your ancestors were slaves of your other ancestors.  We get the holiday Christmas which is the celebration of the birth of Jesus from these ancestors.

65 pages before yours most of your 63th great grandparents were participating in the migrations in Northern Europe.The more advanced military of the Romans had previously limited the ability of our ancestors to expand. When the Roman Empire fell at around 450 CE some the limits to our ancestor expansion were removed. A large group of these ancestor were known as the Ingaevones by the Romans, or Ingwine in Old English. They later split into the Frisians, Angles, Saxons and Jutes. They were pagans, but what has always fascinated me and what I admire about them is that despite 1500 years of anti pagan Christianity some of their cultural legacy has been passed on to us. Like genes cultural features are also passed on to future generations and are subject to natural selection. I speak English whose ancestor languages are Old English a child language of the Ingaevonic language. My Father spoke Low German whose ancestor language is Old Saxon also a child language to Ingaevonic language. Holidays like Easter which in this generation celebrated the goddess of spring named Easter whose symbols were rabbits and eggs. Easter was later Christianized to be the holiday that celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. It still bears the name of the pagan goddess Easter to this day. Some of the names of the days of the weekend are named after the pagan Gods of this generation such as;

• Tuesday is named after the god of war Tiw or Tiw's day.
• Wednesday is named after the god of knowledge Woden or Woden's day.
• Thursday is named after the god of thunder Thunor or Thunor's day.
• Friday is named after the goddess of love and fertility Freya or Freya's day.

150 pages before your page your at around 2500 BCE your 148th great grandparents were living in mostly Northern Western Europe, but they were coming into contact with a group of our ancestors which were establishing themselves as the ruling elite in Europe and as far as NorthWestern China (Tocharians) and India. They were the original speakers of the Indo European parent language from which all Indo European languages are descended. They replaced our ancestors native languages with their own. They are known as the proto Indo Europeans ( PIE ). The PIE ancestors come from the pontic steppe in Ukraine where they domesticated the horse and lived as herders. They drank milk and the allele of the LCT gene that allows me to drink milk is inherited from them. Herding cultures often have a military ethos to protect their herds and raid their neighbors herds. A military ethos with the productive advantages of herding with horses (larger herds) and the military advantages of mounted warriors allowed them to become the dominate culture in Europe. Ydna lineages of R1b and R1a were non-existent in Western Europe prior to the spread of PIE, had after the spread of PIE replaced many of the native Ydna lineages. The mix of mtdna lineages and ambi-lineages  remained more or less unchanged.  Conflicts are fought among men at this time, so turn over in Ydna of the less advanced militaries would be replaced by the more advanced militaries and ought to be reflected in the genetic record in this way.

225 pages before page around 4500 BCE our 223rd great parents in NWE were encountering our 223rd great grandparents whose ancestors were the first farmers from the Levant. They were descendants from the people who domesticated sheep, goats and grain. This more reliable source of food allowed their population to increase and become more dense. The genetic record shows that the direction of immigration flowed from the Levant to North Western Europe. From these ancestors we get sedentary living as opposed to mobile hunter gathering. We inherited the genes that allow us to tolerate gluten found in grains. Our ancestors grain based diet though it seems to have more than doubled the amount of children they had it also seems to have negatively health when you compare the remains of farmers versus hunter gather remains. Hunter gather remains have less evidence of disease, are taller and have less tooth decay. Grain based diets provide more reliable calories, but less micro nutrients.

385 pages before your page around 9500 BCE our 383 great grand parents were living as hunter gatherers all through out Europe and West Asia. Our most Northernly 383 great parents however had likely originated the genes for depigmentation of our hair, eyes and skin. There may have been a reproductive advantage to not having to make melanin to block UV radiation. I've noticed people whose ancestors are from regions closer to the equator have lighter pigmentation on the palms of their hands and soles of their feet, as if their genes didn't want to waste melanin on parts that are rarely exposed to UV radiation. The more resources used pigment bodies to protect from UV radiation is less resources used for growth and reproduction. Blue/green eyes, blonde/red hair, and lighter skin were all inherited from these ancestors. All people and if even one of their ancestors with these traits share these northern European ancestors with you.

530 pages before your page around 18,000 BCE our ancestors were living in a global ice age. In Europe the ice sheets had reached there maximum extend and the only habitable areas known as refugia were in the Franco-Cantabrian region, the Levant, the Balkans and the Ukraine region.Our 528th great parents were ice age survivors. It is from these ancestors we inherit our cranial and facial dimensions. Cranial facial dimensions/indexs such as;

• Head Length
• Head Width
• Total Facial Height
• Upper Facial Height
• Nasal Height
• Nasal Bread
• Cephalic Index
• Facial Index
• Upper Facial Index
• Nasal Index
• Zygo-Frontal Index
• Zygo-Gonial Index
• Fronto-Parietal Index

Can be put into five very broad categories. These dimensions can categorized skulls without hair/skin/eyes correctly with a 90% accuracy. These categories highly correlate with ancestral geographic origins and are as follows;

Australoid which is characteristic of Australian Aborigine population.
Capoid which is characteristic of populations in Southern Africa.
Caucasoid which characteristic of populations from Northern Africa, West Asia and Europe.
Congoid which characteristic of populations from West Africa.
Mongoloid which is characteristic of East Asia and North/South America.

	Caucasoid race
	Congoid race
	Capoid race
	Mongoloid race
	Australoid race

Our 528th great grandparents fell into the Caucasoid category. Typical Caucasoid cranial features include:

• An orthognathic profile, with minimal protrusion of the lower part of the face (little or no prognathism).
• Retreating zygomatic bones (cheekbones), making the face look more "pointed".
• Narrow nasal aperture, with a tear-shaped nasal cavity (nasal fossa).

The genes that produce the caucasoid category of cranial facial dimension are shared among populations from Northern Africa, West Asia and Europe.

On page 1002 before your page you 1000th great grandparents were living in Europe and West Asia in 32000 BCE. Genetic evidence shows some of them were Neanderthal. They were tall around 6' feet for a male, robustly built and muscular. They were dark haired/skinned/eyed. They were not as well adapted to the ice age our Neanderthal ancestors, but they had advanced clothing technology through the invention of the sewing needle which allowed them to extend their range beyond the Neanderthals. Their also had better hunting weapons/snares which made them more competitive hunters. Despite not being as well adapted to the ice age our ancestors eventually replaced the Neanderthal, with the exception of the ones who had children with our ancestors.

On page 2202 before your page your 2200th great grand parents lived in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula during what is called the Toba Catastrophe




It is in this generation we were quite possible a single unified people with the same language. They because of the super volcano eruption number no more than 10,000. It is from them all humanity shares ancestry with.