Image Credit & Copyright: Roberto Colombari
science documentary - Wild Child: The Story of Feral children
Yet another book I've had laying around for way to long, "The Tree of Knowledge" mentions "Wolf Children" in India. They grew up with wolves in the early 1900s. And, they learned the language and behavior of wolves. Amala and Kamala seem get mentioned alot. The video documentary I found above says the first documented examples of this occurred in the 1800s. But, this "Feral Child" wiki suggests mainly 1600s, and a few mentions back in B.C. timeframe - from none other than Herodotus. --> Feral Child Wiki
The famous example perhaps is that of Romulus and Remus in Roman legend. This is the story of the beginning of Rome. I mention this a little bit in my Gospel of Truth as historical proof of conditioned people. Saint Augustine points this out as a reason why people believe what they believe. This suggests, on the one hand, that those who are raised amongst humans generally take on the cultural traits of their culture, and those who get raised by animals take on animal behaviors, and are today, called Feral children
I of course have been pointing out the harm of people not questioning their social conditioning; but, these Feral children bring up another issue - the nature of human intelligence and the dangers of civilization collapse.
Alvin Toffler was famous(he died almost forgotten, just a few months before President Trump was elected. I actually wrote in Alvin Toffler for president) for generalizing cultural shock with Future shock. Cultural shock would be like a person born in one country, who then relocate to a radically different culture, and don't know all the social cues and languages and so on. Future shock would be a kind of science/technological acceleration so bad, that people have a hard time adapting. There's a certain amount of worry about this with the coming A.I./Nantoech/Quantum Computers revolution. Of first note, the scientists/engineers who make these technologies will not feel this future shock nearly as much as the non-scientists/mathematicians and so forth. Most of these technologists are working to ease the transition to the new era - giving people an allowance to buy things from which they can't get a job anymore because everything is automated in an A.I./Nanotech world. Getting back to Feral children . . .
A fun scenario that people like to point out is "what happens if civilization collapses?" There was a American T.V. series about this. I forget what it was called. They made many episodes. They pretty much showed that without human maintenance, all the technological relics would degrade back into the ground. Some future intelligence would have a hard time fitting the pieces back together!
As James Burke opens his "Connections" series with a "what if some technical glitch happens". He points out, "do you know what seeds are poisonous?" "Do you know what time to plant the seed, and when to harvest?" Do you know how to fit a ploy to a cow and be able to farm?" And all these things a person grows up knowing how to do at a given time of a cultures development. When a civilization moves to a new state of development, like from agricultural to industrial, a whole new set of social cues and understandings and physical/emotional/mental fitness to survive and keep that civilization maintained . . . which otherwise, all those technological relics and the scientific knowledge would all go crumbling back to the ground . . . the previous understandings becomes of more archaeological interest. Especially, if a dark ages preceded the development of a new stage of civilization more advanced than the previous one - such as what happened with with the European Renaissance compared to the Roman empire that preceded it. In between was the the European "Dark Ages." But, can we go further, and suggest that human intelligence can take a step back?
The discovery of Feral children suggest to me that if civilization collapsed, and people were brought up in an environment that doesn't communicate the mathematics and science, then, human intelligence could go back to being wild animals, and would have to go through the cultural develoments that mankind has had to for tens of thousands of years since the invention of agriculture.
I've actually been meaning to read this one book about the beginning of numbers since cave painters days. But, I haven't gotten around to it. And, I found this Feral children stuff just today. The question is "Does number get created randomly?" Or "does number get created in one place get past down generation after generation - culturally?" The example of Feral children suggests that number, mathematics in general, and natual language, and lets say the right attitudes to do science and mathematics, the intellectual culture gets passed down generation after generation.
I've pointed out before that the Romans didn't create any mathematicians; if they wanted a mathematician, they held a Greek at sword-point.
- As of right now, it appears that science/technology is on auto-pilot. No amount of complaining about ethics by either the anti-science or the scientists can stop the scientific future from happening. I'm not too worried about civilization collapsing to the point that we have re-start our journey and relearn all this mathematics. The future will be confusion. It is right now.
