The Tax Man

How Homo sapiens took 10% of everything to conquer the world

This work deals with four key issues.

1. The author has traveled through more than fifty countries, and the worst aggression he has ever suffered was being pushed off a swing when he was four years old. No wild animal would permit a strange member of their own species to penetrate its territory without a fight, and usually without a fight to the death, yet male humans put up with this outrage many times a day.
2. Human population is higher than ever, and higher than for any other large mammal, yet human history seems to involve wars, disease and famine which result in death.
3. Human civilisation has developed in the most unlikely places, starting in the desert of Mesopotamia; and following quickly in the deserts of the Nile basin and India. The rich, lush jungles of the Congo and the Amazon, supplied with year-round food and drink, have yet to furnish history with a great empire.
4. Even those who are against religion and circumcision have to admire the success of those who practice either; and those who practice both are even more impressive in their success; yet both these practices have been persecuted for centuries.

To explain these inconsistencies, this book proposes that Modern Man’s place as supreme predator comes only from his almost unique ability to avoid killing strange same-sex members of his own species. He replaces this mammalian instinct designed to protect his genes with a 10% tax which is far more effective in increasing his offspring. Man enforces this tax with a sense of guilt which is actioned unless certain specific conditions are met. All civilisation stems from, and cannot exist without, this simple genetic change effected about 70,000 years ago in the evolution of later Homo sapiens. This gene still drives all human interactions, including those with Homo sapiens who left Africa before this genetic change took place.

For full details of the work in progress, please see the pages below.