#48. Science and Proto-science [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

Why does religion continue to be so popular in today's supposedly enlightened age? In what category of things should we place religion for purposes of analysis? This is a very important question. The least bad answer that I have come up with is: "Religion is the last protoscience." (By this I mean "classical protoscience"; a contemporary field of study, string theory, has also been labelled "protoscience," a result I base on a DuckDuckGo search on "Is string theory a protoscience?" on 20 Feb, 2022.)

Protoscience is most easily defined by a few well-known examples: alchemy and astrology. These disciplines can be thought of as crude, primordial versions of chemistry and astronomy, respectively, and unable to quickly divest themselves of laughably bad theories, due to an over-reliance on aesthetics as a way to truth.

If religion is a protoscience, that then, is the corresponding science? Will religion someday transform into some kind of super-science, marvelous beyond all prior imagining, and capable of robustly duplicating all the miracles of Christ, just for starters?

08-03-2020: Formerly at this location, now deprecated: Religion is the protoscience of origins and Darwin's theory its successor via the clergyman Malthus. Malthus was one of Darwin's influences, as attested explicitly in the writings of the latter.

07-26-2020: The science that could replace the protoscience religion is likely to be the study of adaptive, distributed, and unconscious behavioral effects in human populations. <07-30-2020: This will be a division within sociobiology focused on human swarm intelligence acting on an historical time scale.> From my own examined experience, I have reason to believe that such things exist. I called them "macro-homeostatic effects" in the post "The Drill Sergeants of the Apocalypse."

Alchemy is thought to have become chemistry with the isolation of oxygen in pure form by Priestly, followed in short order by its recognition as an element by Lavoisier, who had met Priestly in Paris and learned of the new "air" direct from the discoverer. This clue led Lavoisier to a correct theory of the nature of combustion. Priestly published his discovery of oxygen (Lavoisier's term), which he called "dephlogisticated air" (an alchemical term), in letter form, in 1775.

06-28-2019: The corresponding intellectual hand-off from astrology to astronomy seems to have been from Tycho Brae (1546-1601), who seems to have been much involved with astrology, to his onetime assistant Johannes Kepler (1571-1630; "The Legislator of the Heavens"), who derived three famous mathematical laws of planetary motion from Brae's data.

While the former astrology continues to this day as basically a form of amusement and favorite whipping-boy of sophomores everywhere who are just discovering the use of their brains, and the former alchemy has utterly perished (as theory, not practice), religion continues to pay its way down the time stream as a purveyor of a useful approximate theory.

An approximate theory is useful to have if all you need is a quick and dirty answer. The theory that the Earth is flat is an approximate theory that we use every time we take a step. The corresponding exact theory, that the Earth is spherical and gravitating, is only needed for challenging projects such as travelling to the moon.

03-13-2020: Thus, the God hypothesis is the theory of natural selection seen "through a glass darkly." However, the experiences contributing to the formulation of the God hypothesis would have been due to any cause of seemingly miraculous events over the horizon or beyond the reach of individual memory. This would comprise a mixture of the fastest effects of evolution and the slowest effects of synaptic plasticity/learning (e.g., developmental sensitive periods). However, the capacity for learning is itself due to natural selection and learning is, like natural selection, a trial-and-error process. Thus, the two sources of biological order hinting at the existence of God should usually be pulling in the same direction but perhaps with different levels of detail. Modern skepticism about religion seems to be directed at the intellectual anchor point: the God hypothesis. Since I believe that they are best de-faithed who are least de-faithed, let us simply shift the anchor to natural selection and carry on.

I think it premature to abandon classical religion as a source of moral guidance before evolutionary psychology is better developed, and given the usefulness of approximate theories, complete abandonment may never be practical. However, in our day, humanity is beset with many pressing problems, and although atheism appears to be in the ascendent, it may be time to reconcile religion with science, so as not to throw out any babies with the bathwater.

The modes of worship in use in many modern religions may well confer psychological benefits on the pious not yet suspected or articulated by mainstream science. Scientific investigation of the modes of worship that many religions have in common seems in order, especially since they amount to folk wisdom, which is sometimes on the money. Examples of common practices that seem to have potential for inducing neurophysiological changes are prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, incense-burning, and even simple congregating.

Photo by JJ Jordan on Unsplash

#43. A Discovery of Hackers [population, evolutionary psychology]

PO     EP     

Red, theory; black, fact.

9-07-2018: I was saving this for the Sunday before Halloween, but decided that it couldn't wait. The basic idea of this post is that the hacker phenomenon is psychologically and sociologically akin to what was once called witchcraft. Let me hasten to clarify that I am talking about witchcraft the social phenomenon, because I don't believe in anything supernatural. However, the height of the witchcraft hysteria in Europe occurred during the sixteenth century, when there were no computers. (I focus on Europe here because my ancestors came from there as did those of most people I know.) It was, however, a time of unprecedented scientific advance, and if science paced technology then as now, quite a few new technologies were coming into knowledge for the first time.

I suggest that the defining toxic ingredient in black-hat hacking is new technology per se. We should therefore expect that with time, computer hacking will spread to new-technology hacking in general and that the computer-centric version must be considered the embryonic form. This is bad news because there has never been so much new technology as now, but at what point in history has this statement not been true?

Belief in and persecution of witches is so widespread across human cultures that it must be considered a cultural universal. Scholars focus on the persecution part, blithely assuming that there is absolutely nothing real driving it, and that the subject people of the study are, by implication, a bunch of blithering idiots, and sadists to boot. I find this stance elitist. Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. These people all have brains in their heads built to the exact same design as our own, and the role of education may be overrated when cultural universals are in play.

I suggest that the defining idea of the witch/technology-hacker (tacker) is viewing new technology as a possible means to increased personal power. To produce a tacker, this idea must be combined with a mad-dog rejection of all morality. 

A technology ideal for tacking/witchcraft must be usable without the identity of the agent coming into general knowledge, and is thus sociologically similar to the ring of Gyges mentioned in Plato's Republic. The anonymity conferred by the Internet makes it one of our worst rings of Gyges, but just wait. More will be discovered in other realms of technology as the hackers branch out, perhaps in unholy alliance with the currently popular Maker movement. Makers, wake up! It's not too early for a manifesto!

How common are Gygean technologies? Hard to say, but it may help to list some.

• Ionizing radiation was known from the work of Roentgen in 1895 (x-rays) and Villard in 1900 (gamma rays) and for the first time, a means to destroy healthy, living tissue silently and through walls solid enough to conceal all signs of the agent, had become available. (See my blog "Journalist's Progress," at (Link under reconstruction)https://xrra.blogspot.com )
• The lead pencil, introduced in the sixteenth century already alluded to, was originally made with actual lead metal (instead of graphite and clay mixtures), which we now know to be insidiously neurotoxic, especially to children--knowledge to warm the heart of any proper witch.
• In the time of Christ in the Middle East, the Roman occupiers knew of ten or so plant-derived poisons, including opium. The very concept of a poison could have been new in those days, and poisons are the classical hard-to-detect weapons. If the weapon is hard to detect, so is the agent. A crypto-technological explanation for some of the events of the New Testament seems possible.

Gygean weapons are doubly "invisible" when based on new technology because these modi operandi are not yet on any body's radar, so the first x number of people who spot them are likely to be disbelieved and their sanity questioned.

Witches have always operated in the zone of perceptual blindness to abuses that transiently opens up after the introduction of any new technology. The psychological invisibility of weapons based on new technology is probably the factor that led witches to become associated with magic. 

Moreover, since the technology is unprecedented in human evolution, the levels of resentment that become inducible in the victims are potentially unprecedented and unphysiologically intense, leading to grotesquely disproportionate punishments being meted out to discovered witches, and this for strings of crimes that would have been extremely serious even considering strictly proportionate punishments. I suspect that the historical accounts of witch-burnings have all been cleaned up for a squeamish readership.

Why were a majority of European witches female? At the height of the anti-witch hysteria, the Black Death was raging and the local human population was probably having trouble keeping its numbers up. On general adaptationist assumptions, all kinds of social forces would have been working to reduce women to baby-making machines, whatever their endowments or aptitudes. This would have created an inevitable push-back in the most intelligent women to reclaim some of their personal power, and witchcraft would have seemed an attractive option for doing this.

Today, the hackers (soon-to-be tackers) are mostly male and the demographic challenge is too many people, not too few. Calhoun's overpopulation experiments on rodents imply that people will become more aggressive if forced to live at higher population densities, and such a relentless increase in aggressiveness may be driving the current reemergence of the witch/tacker. 

It doesn't help that organized religion, the traditional great enemy of witchcraft, is withering on the vine in this country, probably due to the intellectual fallout from Darwin's theory of evolution combined with the failure of the public to understand that a scientific world-view is never finished.

9-08-2018: Proposed definition of "witch": a person in moral free fall under the corrupting influence of technologies that lend themselves to secret abuse for the increase of personal influence.

#23. Proxy Natural Selection: The God-shaped Gap at the Heart of Biology [genetics, evolution]

EV    GE    

Red, theory; black, fact.

2-06-2017

As promised, here is my detailed and hypothetical description of the entity responsible for compensating for the fact that our microbial, insect, and rodent competitors evolve much faster than we do because of their shorter generation times. In these pages, I have been variously calling this entity the intermind, the collective unconscious, the mover of the zeitgeist, and the real, investigable system that the word "God" points to. I here recant my former belief that epigenetic marks are likely to be the basis of an information storage system sufficient to support an independent evolution-like process. I will assume that the new system, "proxy natural selection" (PNS) is DNA-based.

11-20-2017

The acronym PNS is liable to be confused with "peripheral nervous system," so a better acronym would be "PGS," meaning "post-zygotic gamete selection."

2-06-2017

First, a refresher on how standard natural selection works. DNA undergoes point mutations (I will deal with the other main type of mutation later) that add diversity to the genome. The developmental process translates the various genotypes into a somewhat diverse set of phenotypes. Existential selection then ensues from the interaction of these phenotypes with the environment, made chronically stringent by population pressure. Differential reproduction of phenotypes then occurs, leading to changes in gene frequencies in the population gene pool. Such changes are the essence of evolution.

PNS assumes that the genome contains special if-then rules, perhaps implemented as cis-control-element/structural gene partnerships, that collectively simulate the presence of an objective function that dictates the desiderata of survival and replaces or stands in for existential selection. A given objective function is species-specific but has a generic resemblance across the species of a genus. The genus-averaged objective function evolves by species-replacement group selection, and can thus theoretically produce altruism between individuals. The if-then rules instruct the wiring of the hypothalamus during development, which thereby comes to dictate the organism's likes and dislikes in a way leading to species survival as well as (usually) individual survival. Routinely, however, some specific individuals end up sacrificed for the benefit of the species.

Here is how PNS may work. Crossing-over mutations during meiosis to produce sperm increase the diversity of the recombinotypes making up the sperm population. During subsequent fertilization and brain development, each recombinotype instructs a particular behavioral temperament, or idiosyncratotype. Temperament is assumed to be a set of if-then rules connecting certain experiences with the triggering of specific emotions. An emotion is a high-level, but in some ways stereotyped, motor command, the details of which are to be fleshed out during conscious planning before anything emerges as overt behavior. Each idiosyncratotype interacts with the environment and the result is proxy-evaluated by the hypothalamus to produce a proxy-fitness (p-fitness) measurement. The measurement is translated into blood-borne factors that travel from the brain to the gonads where they activate cell-surface receptors on the spermatogonia. Good p-fitness results in the recombination hot spots of the spermatogonia being stabilized, whereas poor p-fitness results in their further destabilization. 

Thus, good p-fitness leads to good penetrance of the paternal recombinotype into viable sperm, whereas poor p-fitness leads to poor penetrance, because of many further crossing-over events. Changes in hotspot activity could possibly be due to changes in cytosine methylation status. The result is within-lifetime changes in idiosyncratotype frequencies in the population, leading to changes in the gross behavior of the population in a way that favors species survival in the face of environmental fluctuations on an oligogenerational timescale. On such a timescale, neither standard natural selection nor synapse-based learning systems are serviceable.

2-07-2017

The female version of crossing over may set up a slow, random process of recombination that works in the background to gradually erase any improbable statistical distribution of recombinotypes that is not being actively maintained by PNS.

7-29-2017

Here is a better theory of female PNS. First, we need a definition. PNS focus: a function that is the target of most PNS. Thus, in trees, the PNS focus is bio elaboration of natural pesticides. In human males, the PNS focus is brain development and the broad outlines of emotional reactivity, and thus behavior. In human females, the PNS focus is the digestive process. The effectiveness of the latter could be evaluated while the female fetus is still in the womb, when the eggs are developing. The proxy fitness measure would be how well nourished the fetus is, which requires no sensory experience. This explains the developmental timing difference between oogenesis and spermatogenesis. Digestion would be fine tuned by the females for whatever types of food happen to be available in a given time and place.

8-18-2017

Experimental evidence for my proposed recombination mechanism of proxy natural selection has been available since 2011, as follows:

Stress-induced recombination and the mechanism of evolvability

by Weihao Zhong; Nicholas K. Priest

Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 03/2011, Volume 65, Issue 3

permalink:

http://ncsu.summon.serialssolutions.com/#!/search?bookMark=ePnHCXMwfV1NS8QwEC2yBz9-gxL0JgTytUl7EUQU767nkDQJeCgu7uLv903SVlEQepx0pmky8yaTvJx3G-StuZsLiKLydSpLO8QEx8Ry3J3QgR9Nmx6t2tAivxGcaNhOFw9qZd-fdXcv9bQER26Kr0yMMsQJ6WK1mCHPZoBIbMp0QvbtMLH3wjKm9GfjtwbEen163D088_lSAT4i9js-xgi_DdSQBplcwQhXIQSggNjHVEpwUlIlK-uSyJI4JMRspZKKymyzTfqiu27vXVy3n__6wQO9GARIQVXsqyZEbt7TWDl-hNEj1wHg2A5EOiqbwBIM_b6xS_iVR7h2mxcNpTtPN7vf_NIcIq2HjEeotopifT_8L_XDwNsmtZR_V_2ECDxpxqOr6m9j_wpDiOrp_r6N82bqPhW0uWxt6i7PtYGRhgh9lP4C2uagLw

Abstract:

"The concept of evolvability is controversial. To some, it is simply a measure of the standing genetic variation in a population and can be captured by the narrow-sense heritability (h2). To others, evolvability refers to the capacity to generate heritable phenotypic variation. Many scientists, including Darwin, have argued that environmental variation can generate heritable phenotypic variation. However, their theories have been difficult to test.

 Recent theory on the evolution of sex and recombination provides a much simpler framework for evaluating evolvability. It shows that modifiers of recombination can increase in prevalence whenever low fitness individuals produce proportionately more recombinant offspring. Because recombination can generate heritable variation, stress-induced recombination might be a plausible mechanism of evolvability if populations exhibit a negative relationship between fitness and recombination. Here we use the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to test for this relationship.

We exposed females to mating stress, heat shock or cold shock and measured the temporary changes that occurred in reproductive output and the rate of chromosomal recombination. We found that each stress treatment increased the rate of recombination and that heat shock, but not mating stress or cold shock, generated a negative relationship between reproductive output and recombination rate. The negative relationship was absent in the low-stress controls, which suggests that fitness and recombination may only be associated under stressful conditions. Taken together, these findings suggest that stress-induced recombination might be a mechanism of evolvability."

However, my theory also has a macro aspect, namely that the definition of what constitutes "stress," in terms of neuron interconnections or chemical signaling pathways, itself  evolves, by species-replacement group selection. Support for that idea is the next thing I must search for in the literature. &&