The foreword for Man the Footballer: Homo Passiens by Irvine Welsh.

Now I get it! Homo sapiens is a recently arrived imposter in the evolution of the genus Homo – a mountebank, a charlatan, a confidence trickster, a fraud, a fraudster, a rogue, a villain, a scoundrel, a quack! All that academic stuff about consciousness, language, civilisation, farming, technology, science, philosophy, music, literature, poetry, art – and so on – emanating exclusively from (and created by) Homo sapiens is evolutionary hogwash!

It all came, not from Homo sapiens – as this recently arrived pathological lying subspecies claims endlessly and repeatedly in schools, in text books, in literature, in countless evolutionary and cultural journals, and in all institutions of higher learning – but from the original and founder species Homo passiens – Man the Footballer!

Standing on two legs – bipedalism – as a locomotive strategy is frankly nuts! No sentient species would voluntarily choose to adopt such a ludicrous hodgepodge of anatomical features, with a ground speed of less than half that of a lazy geriatric predator, with no effective body armour or protection, with no offensive claws worthy of the name, with lettuce-crunching teeth that would be rejected by even the most docile herbivore, and with such a narrow pelvis and hinged legs below – which ensures that bipedal locomotion is a form of translocation so shaky, so wobbly and unstable, that an anatomical engineer would consider that this form of locomotion had been perversely designed to stagger, to stumble, to collapse, to topple over or fall down in any chase to catch a prey, or escape from a predator, and in any evolutionary design school it would be rejected as the work of an indolent student of evolution who had spent their whole study time in the cafes, betting shops, bars and dancing clubs of their university town.

Bipedalism is so stupid and unstable that humans have actually invented games to take advantage of it – and to effect falls – such as in rugby league, rugby union, and National League football. If we had four, or even three legs, these games could not exist. Infants fall down. Toddlers fall down. Children fall down. Juveniles fall down. Adults fall down. And elderly adults frequently die from falls. No sensible architect would design a building with only two supports!

In war zones, mines are laid not to kill, but rather to disable one limb and render the victim immobile, and therefore impose a burden on the opposing forces. If we had chosen to sacrifice only one of our four legs and become tripedal, we would have significantly improved our survival chances. The people and ancients on the Isle of Man, Sicily and Japan have a long and noble association with tripedalism; if you go there you will learn exactly how much superior is that form of locomotion compared with our witless evolutionary selection of bipedalism. Since there is a long and successful industry of manufacturing sticks into extra third legs (known as walking sticks – actually stability sticks) for bipedal humans to improve locomotive efficiency, why was it that we did not select a tripedal or quadrupedal solution to improve survival and locomotive efficiency and safety?

Four legs are better than three. Three legs are better than two. So why have we – the Homo species – most bizarrely selected for locomotion on two legs only? The reason? Football!

No other explanation, no other reason for our absurd, derisory, farcical anatomical mix of primate foetal features interwoven with – bundled with – such a patchwork of semi-adult characteristics that result in a neotenous half-foetal/half-adult complex – a clownman – Homo passiens – but a clown so beautifully engineered and so exquisitely formed to express Bipedal Football: flat brow, domed head, opposable goalkeeping thumbs, knock-knees, a flat and levered foot with outstep and instep, and finally – and fantastically – non-opposable big toes and a big greedy brain of such absurd and poetic linguistic and sensorimotor beauty, that billions of fans will follow their dream-team, enter the lucid REM dream-game, sing their dream-songs, call their dream-chants, and neuropower their gamma-wave electrophysiology, fire their mirror forward and reverse neuro-modulations, seeking both dopamine-reward facilitation and opiate emotional homeostasis via transcendence and lucid suspension of entropy, at every available opportunity.

Now I get it about the evolutionary nonsense I was taught in biology classes, a romantic fiction about the clever intelligent species Homo sapiens that appeared suddenly from nowhere around 200,000 years ago, and supposedly gave rise to our big brain, and to consciousness, language, farming, civilisation, technology, science, literature, art and poetry. RUBBISH!

Homo passiens – we, the neotenous, upright, bipedal species, with narrow pelvis, opposable thumbs, knock-knees, flat cushioned and levered foot, non-opposable big toes, are the nominate superspecies that gave birth to the big intelligent and embodied bipedal brain – an evolutionary anatomical joke, but an evolutionarily poetic joke, an anatomical franken-freak, an anatomical franken-clown, and a weird evolutionary farce that made us what we are and what we do, every Saturday of every week, when the dream-game is played (and which we miss every alternate Saturday).

We opposable-thumbed, we two-legged, we two-footed, we non-opposably big-toed, and we neotenously brained evolutionary absurdity – we are the true source of human consciousness, intelligence and cognition.

We may be on the lower rungs of evolutionary science, but we are rapidly ascending, and with our eyes firmly on the prize of the Premier Division, and recognition as the true founder and future species of the genus Homo. We are happy to share our knowledge of neoteny, of the lucid REM-wake dream-game, of dream-song and dream-chant physiology, of dopamine/hopamine, opiate/ hopiate, vasopressin and hypno-oxytocin hormone metabolism, and of the consciousness of the football, expressed as pre(pro) consciousness.

If we fail to do this, Homo sapiens will rapidly degenerate and disappear from the evolutionary record, just as suddenly as that subordinate species appeared, and as surely as the thousands of species and subspecies that have come and gone in the many extinction events of the past.

Discover more from Homo Passiens – Man the Footballer here.

Order our latest quarterly – featuring an interview with Sepp Blatter, Puskas’ big night in south east London and much more – Issue 37.

Support The Squall and read Issue One, Issue Two and Issue Three for a recommended £3.