Implicit and explicit knowledge – sex, squirrels, Victorians and Darwin

Here’s something interesting: we’ve been selectively breeding crops and animals for thousands of years before any formal theory of evolution was written.

Not only do we act on knowledge we don’t realize we have and would struggle to put into words, it’s often knowledge we would angrily deny and oppose if someone else put it in words: people who were perfectly happy to pick their daughters’ husbands based on their breeding publicly ridiculed Darwin for his “Godless theories”. 🤔🤔🤔 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Their comparably creationist comrades today, the “social justice” IQ and heredity denialists and blank slatists, are in practice picky about whom they let into their knickers, and make sure to reward any lapse in their own judgment with a rape accusation. Though in their case, it’s not so much a lack of a formal theory – which they are very familiar with – as doublethink.

Theory follows practice more often than the other way around.

People dropped rocks on mammoths’ (and each others’) heads for tens of thousands of years before Newton formalized the law of gravity.

Thinking about it a bit more carefully, there is one more level before even implicit knowledge – instinctual. Even squirrels choose the hottest squirrels.

So the hierarchy goes like this:

1) Instinctual knowledge. Animals pick fit mates.

2) Practical, implicit knowledge.. We selectively breed cows and corn and ourselves, because heredity is self-evident.

3) Theoretical, explicit and formal knowledge.

I’m keeping a lookout for this stuff from now on.

You implicitly know that it’s good to support Wisdomination, so let’s make it explicit and act on it.