On what planet?

On what planet are superheroes born? Perhaps the answer is a lot closer than the fabulists would have us assume.  The function of heroes flying around, doing nice stuff, or not so, their function, in an economy of human energy consumption and output is a real question. Our answer is not meant to be definitive, but an arrow for further cerebral revolutions. And it is this:

As mankind, men and women, have become more engrossed in their imagination, (an aspect of modernity) the place of physical activity has decreased, in human life; it has literally become smaller, as you can estimate from the shift from a farmer's life to the profile of an office worker.

What does such a shift mean for the world people create, in their heads. Interestingtly, that world is now not consumed with stories of Paul Bunyan like heroism, with feats like chopping down lots of trees. That may be implausible, but now, such heroes are even less tethered to any likely scenario. Now the hero in our imaginings of the physical world have wings, or capes, and the whole alarerial dimension, as opposed to a dirt filled real outdoors, is the setting for human heroism.

And notice the place of sex, or lack of it, in such narratives.

Just interesting.

This displacement of energy from the physical to the mental, that may be getting larger, has one outcome: for a tiny minority, it results in greater mental capacity-- as in Stephen Hawking. For most, the numerically disabled, it still results in changes, apparrent in the figments we mention above. For, the mind, less connectedd to the body, still has to have pictures of some sort. And these pictures tell their own story.

For some reason the tune to this is "I'm getting married in the morning"

For the article titled

Cross Species Transfer of Genes Has Driven Evolution

click this link

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/697075/?sc=swhn

although I cannot resist excerpting
......

“Jumping genes, properly called retrotransposons, copy and paste themselves around genomes, and in genomes of other species. How they do this is not yet known although insects like ticks or mosquitoes or possibly viruses may be involved – it’s still a big puzzle,” says project leader Professor David Adelson, Director of the University of Adelaide’s Bioinformatics Hub. 

“This process is called horizontal transfer, differing from the normal parent-offspring transfer, and it’s had an enormous impact on mammalian evolution.”

....

Ding dong the bells are going to ring