the secret computer code for privacy rights?

on the one hand you have people just using
communication media in the running of their
busy lives, and on the other you have
governments who want to know our every
move, because there might be a terrorist
in our midst, once a decade, of those they
didn't plant anyway.

the enablers of this "human soap opera"
are the coders and programmers. They
know if a program's code has a sleeper spy code
in it.
As a result, they're rather blase' about surveillance,
just because they know how it works.
Anyway, you'd think that admitting
that you're not surprised would be
coupled with advice on encryption.
But, you would be wrong.

Checkit: Code academy

The NSA, Code Literacy, and You

rushkoff June 17, 2013

Whatever we might think of Edward Snowden’s release of classified documents detailing the NSA’s snooping on America’s - well, everyone’s - communications, at least we all now know what’s going on.

Sure, most of us on the coding side of the screen already knew the deal. I haven’t found a programmer who was surprised by the news that our emails, text messages, and phone calls are being logged and stored. If anything, most of them are surprised that the general public seems so shocked. What were people thinking? That Google just gives us services like Gmail for free? We pay for this stuff - not with cash, but with our data.

None of our data may be so interesting in itself, but when it’s combined with everyone else’s it reveals a whole lot of information about us. Using factor analysis and other statistical techniques, big data can identify members of a population who might be about to purchase a new car, trying to have a baby, or even about to change political affiliations. No logic is required; the people and machines analyzing big data sets don’t care about why one set of data points might indicate some other data point; they only care that it does.

As long as corporations from Facebook to Twitter are collecting and using this data, why shouldn’t government get in on the act? Instead of looking for potential car buyers or new mothers, however, government is looking for potential terrorists. Or at least that’s what they say. In reality, the sample size of known terrorists is so small that it’s essentially impossible to draw statistical conclusions about their data. The only way to know what they’re saying is to listen to what they’re saying. Luckily (or terrifyingly, depending on your perspective) voice calls can be scanned for keywords as easily as a text document. The conversation can then be parsed by humans to determine whether there’s a threat.

The big news here, if any, is that now this stuff is public knowledge. Most of my friends and colleagues knew about government surveillance of digital communications, already. Some former students had even told me about installing switches at cell phone companies to be used for government snooping. Others helped write the database architecture for facilities that store voicemail long after it has been “deleted” by its recipients. Most of them were relieved that the information they were afraid to leak themselves is finally out.

But they aren’t the only ones who had foreknowledge of this recent leak. Pretty much anybody who knows how code works was prepared for this sort of revelation. Because becoming code fluent is about more than simply knowing enough javascript to get a job. It’s a way to become familiar with the operating system on which the human drama is playing itself out.

Monsatan takes a steak across the face

I thought that a vampire stake would be more
fitting, but anyway Monsatan, formerly Monsanto,
formerly Nunnery Seeds Ltd, has claimed to be
giving up on Europe, because of strong resistance.

Number one point about Monsatan is:

Never turn your back on Monsatan

#2 Monsatan lies and lies for a purpose

#3 it's not a coincidence that the British

Ministry for Payoffs was touting Monsatan's

work this week. The UK is the acknowledged

unguarded back gate of the EU.

#4 If we are not importing products that are

GMOs or that were raised on GMOs, then

we are getting them in foodstuffs

of the kind that have 50 ingredients, many having

'natural' written all over them.

checkit: Testosterone pit

Lobbying And GMO Giant Monsanto Buckles In Europe

Friday, May 31, 2013 at 6:49PM

The “March Against Monsanto” in 52 countries, an unapproved strain of its genetically modified wheat growing on its own in Oregon, cancelled wheat export orders.... A rough week for Monsanto.

But now it threw in the towel in Europe – where its genetically modified seeds have faced stiff resistance at every twist and turn. Even its deep corporate pockets and mastery of lobbying have failed: “It’s counterproductive to fight against windmills,” its spokesman told the Tageszeitung.

The propitious week started last Saturday with the “March Against Monsanto,” when people in over 400 cities in 52 countries protested against the company, its influence over governments, and its GMO seeds. Much of it was focused on the mundane issue of labeling. Protesters wanted GMO ingredients in food to show up on the label, just like fat or protein. A simple solution to the controversy: let consumers decide.

But a red line for the industry. It’s worried that consumers will read the label – and choose an alternative. So Monsanto continued to assure us through its minions that labeling would be too costly, that it would kill the cupcake shop down the street, that we don’t need to know anyway because GMO foods are safe for human consumption, etc. etc.

Ever in doubt about how you're being scanned?

leave it to the international Pirate man to set you
straight on the risks.

checkit: Falkvinge

centralised files

This night, news broke that the USA’s security agencies have been wiretapping essentially every major centralized social service for private data. Photos, video conferences, text chats, and voice calls – everything. We have been saying this for years and been declared tinfoil hat and conspiracy nuts; it’s good to finally see the documents in black on white.

This night, European time, the news broke that the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) has had direct access to pretty much every social network for the past several years, dating back to 2007, under a program named PRISM. Under the program, a number of social services voluntarily feed people’s private data to the NSA. In short, if you have been using/uploading

    e-mail

    video or voice chat

    videos

    photos

    stored data

    VoIP calls

    file transfers

    video conferencing

    (and more)

…from any of…

    Microsoft (incl. Hotmail et al), since Sep 11, 2007

    Google, since Jan 14, 2009

    Yahoo, since Mar 12, 2008

    Facebook, since June 3, 2009

    PalTalk, since Dec 7, 2009

    YouTube, since Sep 24, 2010

    Skype, since Feb 6, 2011

    AOL, since Mar 31, 2011

    Apple, since Oct 2012

…then you have been wiretapped, and still are.

This piece of news broke just after it was revealed that the same NSA is demanding phone records from one of the major telco operators in the USA, and presumably all of them.

In short, practically every single service you have ever been using that has operated under the “trust us” principle has fed your private data directly to STASI-equivalent security agencies. Practically every single one. The one exception notably missing from the list is Twitter (but Twitter uses broadcast messages – you shouldn’t write anything secret on Twitter in the first place).

Carefully note that this PRISM program is not unique to the USA: Several European nations have the same wiretapping in place, Sweden among them. Also, these agencies share raw data freely between them, trivially circumventing any restrictions against wiretapping the own population (“I’ll wiretap yours if you’ll wiretap mine”).

This piece of news practically detonated when it hit this night. We have been saying that this is the probable state of things for years – it’s good to finally get rid of those tinfoil hats, with facts on the table. Predictably, the social comms companies named in the NSA slides are out scrambling with statements and comments.

Google, for example, said in a statement to the Guardian: “Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a back door for the government to access private user data.”

As a politician, what strikes me is how carefully crafted this statement is to give the appearance of denying the allegations, without doing so. It stops exactly short of saying “the presented allegations are lies”.

For example, a system could be in place that continuously fed the NSA data from Google servers in accordance with the NSA documents, and the above Google statement would still be true (if Google feeds data to the NSA, rather than the NSA fetching it from Google).

Microsoft – whose motto is “Privacy is our priority”, the Guardian notes – was the first to join the PRISM program in 2007. On the other hand, that company was never trusted much, so I don’t see a lot of surprise.

the fountain of youth, or just more face cream?

As you know, the best way to use chemistry to make
money is to make something that aids humans to
maximise their vanity.

silicone, liposuction, hair implants, viagra

and some things which claim to add years to your
life or your face.

The latest one seems to be a small sea creature
that apparently doesn't die. It is eternal because it
morphs.

I suppose it will be hunted to extinction by crazed
millionnaires hoping to spread its sh*t on their faces.
Luckily it's translucent and small
and lives in the sea. Did I say it morphs?

Happy hunting.

checkit:  Mother nature network

Immortal jellyfish: Does it really live forever?

The Turritopsis nutricula jellyfish has displayed a remarkable ability to regenerate its cells in times of crisis.

By  Melanie Lasoff Levs

Wed, Apr 13 2011 at 1:33 PM

Photo: Peter Schuchert/The Hydrozoa Directory

While it is often joked that cats have nine lives, a certain species of jellyfish has been deemed “immortal” by scientists who have observed its ability to, when in crisis, revert its cells to their earliest form and grow anew. That means that these tiny creatures, 4 mm to 5 mm long, potentially have infinite lives.

The creature, known scientifically as Turritopsis nutricula, was discovered in the Mediterranean Sea in 1883, but its unique regeneration was not known until the mid-1990s. How does the process work? If a mature Turritopsis is threatened — injured or starving, for example — it attaches itself to a surface in warm ocean waters and converts into a blob. From that state, its cells undergo transdifferentiation, in which the cells essentially transform into different types of cells. Muscle cells can become sperm or eggs, or nerve cells can change into muscle cells, “revealing a transformation potential unparalleled in the animal kingdom,” according to the original study of the species published in 1996.

Since the Turritopsis’ virtual immortality was discovered, so have swarms of genetically identical jellyfish far from their original habitat, including in Japan, Spain and the Atlantic Ocean side of Panama. Researchers have concluded that these multiplying creatures are getting caught in ballast waters, water that is sucked into and pumped out of the long distance cargo ships. Polyps also could be growing on the ship’s hulls. Though genetically identical, these jellyfish seem to have adapted to their new environments. For example, specimens from swarms living in tropical waters have been found to have eight tentacles, while those discovered in temperate regions have 24 or more tentacles.

But Turritopsis can — and do — die. Their regeneration only occurs after sexual maturation, therefore they can succumb to predators or disease in the polyp stage. But because the jellyfish are the only known animal with this “immortality,” scientists are studying them closely, with the hopes of applying what they learn to issues such as human aging and illness.

to the left is the ocean, to the right Al Shabaab

With funerary prayers at the ready, Somalia Airlines
takes to the air, very slow and low over Somalia,
so as to avoid terrorist radar.

If you ever have the pleasure of flying with the
Scary Skies, take your own cardboard, cuz there
ain't any airconditioning.
On the good side, the flight's a smoker. the plane,
that is.

This is from voicesofAfrica blog. go check it
yourselves and witness a nation rising up and
demanding inflight movies.

checkit: Voices of Africa

Somalia: Pray before, during and after your flight

Taking a domestic flight in Somalia is an experience that can best be described as travelling to the brink of death and coming back. The airplanes on the domestic routes are commonly called express flying coffins and those who survive a flight on them are fittingly referred to as coffin dodgers.

Due to the appalling state of the country’s roads and poor road safety more and more Somalis are choosing to fly instead of drive.

 On a recent hot humid Thursday afternoon more than 150 of us gathered in the lounge of Mogadishu International Airport to take a flight to Kismayu, Somalia’s third biggest city.

 The passengers crowded around the few windows in the lounge, their eyes locked onto a sky-blue plane at the far end of the runway. Dark smoke, the kind that billows from burning tyres at protests, was coming out of the plane’s exhaust. We just knew that plane was going to be our ride for the 45-minute flight.

 (Pic: sxc.hu)

 When the gates at the departure lounge opened, everyone rushed towards the plane. I, along with some other quick-footed passengers, chose to run.

As with many domestic flights in Somalia, there are more passengers than available seats. If you don’t literally grab a seat on the plane, you’ll stand for the whole journey despite having paid for a seat.

I was lucky to be one of the first to get on the plane. Seats filled up fast and 25 unlucky passengers were left standing in the aisle.

 Competition for seats on a flight can be humbly described as fierce. If you leave yours to go the bathroom, another passenger will grab it before you’ve even negotiated your way through the packed aisle, and you’ll find yourself among those standing when you get back. On a Somali flight, when nature calls you don’t answer!

 Most of the seats on this plane were faulty. They had no seat belts and reclined 180 degrees if you touched them. Each passenger had to hold the seat in front of them with both hands. If we didn’t, the seat and the passenger in it would be in our laps during take-off.

 Once everyone was on board, a loud male voice pierced through the cacophony of noise. The voice asked all the passengers to be quiet for prayers before take-off.

 Then, in an impeccable Somali voice, the teenage-looking steward in a half-buttoned baggy pink shirt said “welcome on board” and proceeded to recite a prayer at the top of his voice (the plane had no PA system and the steward had no megaphone). It was the kind of prayer Somalis normally recite at the graves of their long-gone great grandparents.

 For a few seconds everyone was totally silent. Even the crying babies were quiet. I guess reality hit: we were on a plane not fit to fly.

 But instead of comforting and reassuring us, the prayer caused silent panic. A lady sitting a few rows in front of me was overcome by fear and the thick smell of sweat in the air. She threw up on the feet of a standing passenger.

 A few minutes later, two old, pot-bellied, sun-burnt, sweat-covered, cigarette-smoking, booze-smelling, Eastern European male pilots wearing only shorts climbed up the creaky metal ladder attached to the emergency exit. It had been left open to let air into the plane since the air conditioning had long since seized to function.

 Passengers who’ve been on this plane before – and survived – had come prepared with prayer beads and cardboard pieces to use as makeshift fans.

 Because of the intense heat and lack of air, babies started crying and parents shouted at the young steward to do something. Since the standing passengers were blocking the main exit, he rushed out of the plane through the emergency exit and returned with empty boxes. He ripped them into small pieces and started distributing them to passengers who did not bring their own cardboard. The situation calmed down a bit then and soon we were in the air.

 I was travelling with my colleague Awil and his three-year-old son Lil Abdi. Despite paying for three seats we had two. Children under the age of 14 aren’t allowed to have their own seats even though they are charged for one. They have to sit on one of their parents’ laps. If they’re travelling alone, they have to ride on the laps of strangers.

Lil Abdi was spoilt for choice compared to the other kids on the flight. He had the pick of two laps to sit on for the journey. But he preferred to sit on mine because I was seated next to a window, which had a small crack that let in cold air. The little things like a window crack are attractive bonuses when you’re on a Somali flight.

 I should mention that there were no cabins to store our possessions in. Everyone held their bags on their laps. If there’s a child on your lap – which will most likely be the case if you’re flying during the high season – then you leave your bag in the aisle. If there are passengers standing in the aisle, you have no other option but to hold your luggage over your head until you land.

 Somalis are usually not scared of death. In fact, death is treated like an intimate neighbour. Sitting on the seat in front of me was an old man who had returned from Milan. He had his grandchild on his lap. He wasn’t worried about dying, just about where his bones would end up if something fatal happened mid-air.

 “Do you think our bones will land on the ground or disappear in the air?” he asked the passengers around him. No one responded.

 A few minutes later he looked out the window, pointed to the green vegetation on the ground, and said: “Even if my whole clan went out there looking to collect our bones they will not find them.”

 By this time, forty-five minutes had already passed so I asked the steward if we should prepare for landing. Looking visibly irritated he said: “It will take us a further twenty minutes because the plane is overloaded and has to fly at slower than normal speed.”

 On hearing this, some passengers voiced their displeasure and asked that the plane fly faster. Frustrated with our constant complaints, the steward reminded us all that a few weeks ago another plane that was flying at high speed was targeted by the Islamist rebel group al-Shabaab as it prepared to land because they suspected the flight to be carrying government officials. Our hearts sunk and fresh panic set in again.

 Suddenly passengers were scanning the skies for incoming rockets. It was bad enough being on this plane without the fear of being struck down by al-Shabaab.

 Fahad, a passenger standing next to our row of seats, tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was married. “No,” I said. He wasn’t married either, he told me. “I’m not scared of death but I want to marry and have at least one son before I die. I want to leave something behind on this world.”

 I told Fahad the plane could have other plans for us and that al-Shabaab sheikhs may not want to wait for him to marry and have a son.

 Perhaps he was looking for reassurance but I just wanted to finish listening to the Dhaanto track on my iPod and then pray for a few minutes in case things went pear-shaped.

 With every word I uttered Fahad got more tense. Sensing this, Awil jumped in to comfort him: “If the sheikhs kill us up here we’ll be closer to heaven than if they killed us on the ground.”

 I guess the sheikhs were busy with other business that day because we landed all right.

 As soon as the plane touched down in Kismayu every passenger was on their feet, rushing for the exit. Some prayed enthusiastically on the dusty airport tarmac, thanking God for allowing them to survive the flight.

 As we exited, I told Awil I’d be writing about this experience.

 “If you do, we could get banned from future flights,” he said.

 “That might just extend our life expectancy,” I replied.

 Hamza Mohamed is an independent British-Somali journalist. Connect with him on Twitter.

microsoft must die

I still remember the early days of computers when Bill Gates
looked so smart, dropping out of Uni and getting handed
a freebee by IBM, the software rights.

What has followed is 30 years of a virtual monopoly.
And as with every monopoly, they make sh*t products.

Microsoft 8 is a new low. There was a time when
Microsoft would tweak things a bit and muddle on.
No. they could not do that this time.
Tablets were on the way. So M8 had to be for them
and concurrently for PCs.

I've got this product/virus on this computer. The
touchpad thinks it's a tablet, so I get whisked to
screens I do not want to see. This can start up the video
player without my wanting it. It's impossible to shut
off the video player. It just hangs around. The pdf
reader makes it impossible to copy text.
They still have not cured the tendency for the computer
to choose where to place the icons on the desktop.
There's no start button. I can just imagine the
standing ovation that the author of that f%&*k-up got
at the annual general meeting.

checkit: Rick Ackerman

Microsoft’s Slow Death

by Rick Ackerman on May 14, 2013 12:01 am GMT · 33 comments

I spent three hours online Friday with the Geek Squad’s best and brightest, attempting without success to fix two seemingly minor problems in Microsoft Outlook. The first is that Outlook has been forgetting the password every time it checks my e-mail server. This problem has been intermittent over the more than ten years I’ve used Outlook, a nettlesome glitch that has survived all versions, updates and security patches. Although there are thousands of web pages that purport to deal with the issue, and presumably tens of millions of PC users who have sought to resolve it, I’ve yet to find a fix. Although Outlook on a bad day duns users with endless “Remember this password?” prompts, it would be easier to teach an Irish Setter to remember the date of your wedding anniversary. Particularly maddening is that the prompts continue to pop up every three seconds, even when one keeps instructing Outlook to “Remember this password”. My other Outlook  problem is that a feature designed to test the e-mail account settings has stopped working. Activate a test and it simply locks up Outlook so that the program becomes unusable. The only way to get past this bug – until the next time — is to reboot the computer.
At the end of Friday’s tech-support marathon, Chris, a Geek Squad expert with a five-star rating, offered the same, useless suggestion that tech support personnel have been offering PC users for decades: reinstall Windows.  They do this, of course, knowing full well that it takes someone who knows his way around computers the better part of a weekend to do a complete reinstall, and the user another two or three weeks to re-install all of the third-party applications that get wiped out in the process.

A Thousand Layers of Buggy Code

I mention all of this because it buttresses a prediction I’ve repeated here many times before – that Microsoft as a company is destined for failure.  The Redmond behemoth seems well along this path not merely because of management’s breathtaking ineptitude, lack of vision and obliviousness to the needs of customers, but also because Windows has accumulated layer upon layer of buggy code atop an architecture that was never meant to handle a thousand patches, updates and iterations. How bad has Windows become?  So bad, in fact, that the latest version, Windows 8, has almost single-handedly killed off the PC business. With tablets on their way to becoming ubiquitous, PC and laptop sales were already falling sharply. The last thing in the world that Dell, Hewlett-Packard, ASUS, Lenovo et al. needed was a new version of Windows that almost no one wanted or needed.
There are so many gratutious changes in Windows 8’s interface, most of them geared toward touch-screen users, that system administrators and PC users have effectively boycotted the product rather than subject themselves to yet another time-wasting slog up the learning curve.  Microsoft, reacting with understandably little fanfare, has promised to ameliorate the global flop of this latest release with a new version of the O/S called Windows Blue. In the meantime, Windows 8 can only continue to garner negative press and the hostility of users everywhere. It were as though General Motors had introduced a jazzy new Chevy that lacked a “traditional” steering wheel, had a radio that played only hip-hop music, and brake and accelerator pedals whose positions were reversed.

‘A Lot of Ruin in an Empire’

To be sure, it is taking GM a very long time to go out of business, and the company has been in far worse shape than Microsoft for nearly two generations. There is a lot of ruin in an empire, as the saying goes.  In the case of Microsoft, with more spare cash than it knows how to deploy and an all but impregnable monopoly on PC operating systems, there is little hope that the company’s demise will come nearly as swiftly as deserved. But it seems inevitable nonetheless, since no company that does as many things – does everything – as badly as Microsoft can survive indefinitely. 

 

bark at the moon. humans & dogs

Thanks to Ozzy's big tune, we can see the effect of
dogs on humans. They teach some how to sing.

Other dog-culture achievements:
Dogging- (UK) public sex- cuz dogs ain't got motels,
doggy style- boinking like a dog,
fuckin' the dog- (North Am) being lazy


But more importantly, the relationship between dogs
and humans is complex but telling as regards how
dogs and humans developed.

I read a book called Rogue Primate which, if I remember
said that dogs showed humans how to survive in social
groups.
You know that animals tend to like a territory to themselves.
and we've always thought that humans have developed the
sense of being able to cancel the perceived threat of your
neighbours, so that you can survive in sanity.
You know that , from time to time, you're sick of all the
noise and people around, right? Well, that's the basic
need for a lack of threats. People need to be sized up
as to their threat to you, or ignored, so that you don't
go nuts, and pull knives on people.

We thought that dogs showed us how to live in packs
and cooperate. BUTT, new research from China, on
the genetic level, has shown how wolves hung around,
near human societies, benefiting from their garbage,
and changing slowly into dogs. It has to do with
serotonin which says so much for drug use in modern
society (leave that for another story).

anyway, checkit: Stowe boyd

Did We Domesticate Ourselves, Like We Did With Dogs?

Carl Zimmer reported recently on some interesting genetic research on dogs that tells us a great deal about their divergence from wolves, but also reflects back on the social mind of people.

Carl Zimmer, From Fearsome Predator to Man’s Best Friend

As they [Ya-Ping Zhang and others] reported on Tuesday [14 May 2013] in the journal Nature Communications, they found that the split started 32,000 years ago. Those early dogs would have encountered small bands of hunter-gatherers. People didn’t settle in villages to farm in East Asia until about 10,000 years ago.

After dogs split from wolves, their genes began to evolve in a new direction. Dr. Zhang and his colleagues were able to identify some of these evolving genes. A number of them, it turned out, are active in dog brains. (Dr. Zhang and some of his colleagues published some of these results last week in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.)

 Some of the genes that evolved early in dog evolution are involved in smell or hearing. Others are active in a region called the prefrontal cortex, where mammals make decisions about how to behave. Some genes are involved in growing connections between neurons. One gene, called SLC6A4, transports a neurotransmitter called serotonin into neurons.

 The results offer some tantalizing hints about how wolves first turned doglike. “The conventional view is that the hunter-gatherers go out and get a puppy,” said Chung-I Wu of the University of Chicago, an author of the Nature Communications study. If humans actually did breed early dogs this way, then dogs would have descended from a very small population.

 That’s not what Dr. Wu and his colleagues have found, though. Instead, it appears that a large population of wolves started lingering around humans — perhaps scavenging the carcasses that hunters left behind.

 In this situation, aggressive wolves would have fared badly, because humans would kill them off. Mellower wolves, by contrast, would thrive. If this notion turns out to be true, it means that we didn’t domesticate wolves — they domesticated themselves. SLC6A4 may have played a crucial part in this change, because serotonin influences aggression.

 To test these ideas, Dr. Zhang and his colleagues are gathering DNA from more dogs and wolves. They also hope to collaborate with cognitive scientists to see how variants of genes like SLC6A4 affect the behavior of dogs today. Their results may also help explain human evolution, because Dr. Zhang and his colleagues found that some of the same genes that evolved in dog brains, such as SLC6A4, also experienced natural selection in human brains.

 “Humans have had to tame themselves,” said Adam Boyko of Cornell University, one of Dr. Zhang’s collaborators on the Molecular Biology and Evolution study. “The process is probably similar to dogs — you have to tolerate the presence of others.”

 Turns out that the Clan of the Cave Bear theory is wrong. We didn’t nab a mating pair of wolves and domesticate them. Instead, lots of dogs — large packs — hung around with hunter gathers, who gradually culled the more aggressive members of the packs, leaving those that were more docile and pretty soon, those that fared best were those more willing to cooperate with humans. After a short time, the proto-dogs are learning to behave, and perhaps being rewarded by squirts of serotonin in the brain when interacting with humans. This chemical leads to binding and trust when present in human brains.

 The second part of the story also comes from Zimmer. Following the release of Ya-Ping Zhang’s paper, other researcher noticed that some of the genes being tracked in the study are related to serotonin production, but also on the list is MET, which is linked to cancers, but that’s not all.

… So, then, we have found that the same genes are linked to the foundation of human and canine sociability, although human sociability evolved earlier. But, perhaps there is a tantalizing glimpse of the evolution of how the social mind evolved in people, based on looking at what apparently happened with dogs. One group — nearly modern human hunter-gatherers — was decidedly social, and encounters a relatively non-social species — wolves — who began to wander with them, eating their leavings. The interaction leads to the wolves becoming dogs, because the humans kill the meanest canines, and exert an evolutionary pressure that selects for human-style sociality.

 Imagine two hundred thousand years earlier, when one small band of early humans shared a collection of gene mutations, leading to enhanced sociality, like MET, SLC6A4, and others. (Note that this also led to a higher incidence of autism and cancer, as side effects.) Imagine that other, less social hominins might have trailed those early humans around, and the social humans might have exerted the same evolutionary pressures that we later directed on canines. We may have domesticated ourselves into being human, into being social. And maybe we aren’t finished yet.