#58. The Rising Tide of Refugees [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

Paradigm: dispersal

Population pressure and dispersal

Currently, we are seeing a troubling increase in refugee numbers globally. I link this to ever-rising human population numbers, which will be loosely correlated with rising population densities. (Loosely, because population density also depends on area.) Population density, in turn, will be the governing psychological factor, because it can be appraised on the basis of local sensory signals (probably multimodal) whereas absolute global numbers cannot. The basis of this hypothesis is the results of Calhoun's rodent experiments on overpopulation that he carried out in the fifties and sixties, which I am here extrapolating to humans, probably as Calhoun himself intended. I postulate that refugeehood sub serves in humans the ecological function of dispersal. The underlying mechanism would be what was called "instinct" back in the day, a term that I think may still be useful in getting into one's argument quickly.

Do we have an instinct to disperse?

"Instinct-" governed behaviors are understood to owe nothing to learning and to be solely determined by the genes, and thus by evolution. In humans, of course, this position lacks credibility, so I am here speaking of that portion of the causation of our behavior that is due to evolution and can be assumed to play a biasing role rather than a determining one.

In refugee stories, there always seems to be a dichotomy between the nasty, evil bad buys and the hapless, innocent displaced persons, but, of course, this is naive. The most likely situation is that the refugee-producing adaptation has an aggressor subroutine and a victim subroutine, both in the same genetically determined program, and we all have a copy of both hard wired into our brains. Essentially by chance, one is activated in some people, and the other in others, when population density rises, and the ancient drama begins anew.

Now here's my plan

Because therapy can be expected to be more easily delivered to the victims than to the aggressors, I suggest that we start with them in seeking solutions. Their part of the dispersal program is likely to make them overly reactive to harassment and overly apt to conclude that they have no option but to flee, when this is simply not true. A related phenomenon that I have observed could be called "defensive overreaction," in which the person jumps to the false conclusion that an elaborate, expensive solution to their problem is required. A reasonable person, however, will try all the simple solutions first, one by one, evaluate the effectiveness of each, and proceed to the next more complex solution only if the less complex solution fails. I suggest that persons considering flight should be counseled and supported in this strategy, in the hopes of stemming the global tide of refugees.

Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash

#50. A Naturalistic Theory of Worship [Evolutionary Psychology, Population]

Anytown, Canada, Apr. 11.

EP     PO     

Red, theory; black, fact.

Preamble

As discussed in Post #48, religion has a theory part and an applied part. I have termed the latter the ‘pragma’ of religion, which is basically the modes of worship. Since our moral codes are held by at least the Abrahamic religions to be commands from God, it would follow that it’s pretty important to conform to them, and most of us have difficulty doing this all the time. To help us, religion has developed a behavior-modification role, the role of the pragma.

The behavior-mod role aims at mitigating the human form of the Calhoun Effect–a tendency to aggression linked to rising population density but not to actual want per se. (For an introduction to Calhoun's research, see paragraph 7, Post #37.) Population density would have been an issue even millennia in the past when the world population was a minuscule fraction of what it is today, when people began living continuously inside walled cities for protection from their enemies. Within the inflexible confines of such a city, you have the makings of a human Calhoun experiment. Not coincidentally, the city of Jerusalem, sacred to three world religions, was a walled city. Nowadays, at a world population of 7.5 billion, it can be said that the world is our walled city. What can religion now tell us about how to get along?

I focus here on the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which developed in that order, all in the Middle East, each of the last two acknowledging its debt to the previous. I suggest that these three religions form a series of progressively increasing effectiveness in mitigating the Calhoun Effect, by an accumulation of folkloric knowledge. Thus, to see how pragma works, the purpose of this post, we need only examine Islam, likely to represent the most efficient solution. Form generally follows function most transparently at highest efficiency.

The Human Calhoun Effect

In Post #40 I surmise that the natural human population density plot over time has a saw-tooth form, with linear increases alternating with abrupt decreases that return population density to some repeatable reset value. In Post #2, I surmise that the linear segments are created by a negative-feedback controller in the limbic system that controls rate-of-change of population density to a constant positive value, not absolute density. At this writing, the world is probably coming to the crest of one of these linear segments, which began in 1950. The sudden population-density decrease that ends the cycle is conjectured to have two phases: a first phase that produces population-density decrease by emigration, and a second phase that produces population-density decrease by mass murder, if the first phase does not take the system all the way to the reset value. The first phase accomplishes the biological function of dispersal, which is generally important for long-term species survival. The second phase guarantees overall stability on a multi-cycle time scale and wards off Malthusian catastrophes.

Both phases demand formally altruistic acts from individuals, but not of the warm-and-fuzzy kind. The first phase uses an exchange of anger signals (The “anger cycle,” see Post #41) to lock non-altruists out of the process so that the behavior is stable over evolutionary time. The second phase locks out the non-altruists using an asymmetric exchange of signals: contempt signals going one way and sadness signals going the other way. (See “The Sadness Cycle,” Post #41). The second phase culminates in the mass murder of the sadness signalers by the contempt signalers and the appropriation of all the resources of the sadness signalers by the contempt signalers. The last step guarantees that the contempt signalers will appear atrociously entitled to those outside the cycle.

Islam

Islam is conveniently summarized for our purposes as The Five Pillars of Islam, which are explained in the Quran, namely:

1) The Creed. (“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”)

2) Prayer.

3) Charity. (Concealed almsgiving is preferred.)

4) Fasting.

5) Pilgrimage.

The Theory

The creed is “The Great Why in the Sky” that people need for the control of their most difficult emotions. Strong emotion can be overridden by reason if that is required by a learned worldview, the validity of which the person is willing to bet their life on. (Here, I attempt to supply a worldview based on evolutionary psychology.) The creed, or “theory part” of a religion, also gets the rational mind cooperating with the behavior-modification program, which acts on the emotional self. 

04-03-2019: Rational override based on some creed may begin the work of extirpating someone's anger or sadness cycle, but behavior modification by pragma may be necessary to finish it and produce a lasting improvement in the person's circumstances. These cycles may have deep roots inaccessible to consciousness and capable of perpetuating self-defeating behaviors if not treated appropriately.

Prayer superficially is a deliberate wasting of time, which is not free in metabolic terms because the worshipper has a basal metabolic rate that must be supplied whether he/she works or not. Regular inactivity is surely a luxury of only those enjoying abundance. This is implicitly saying to the anger and sadness/contempt programs: “Food is still plentiful, so it’s not time to get nasty.” These cycles may be triggered by signs of high population density, not actual want, but they should still be sensitive to metabolic signals that speak to whether actual scarcity exists. High population density acquired its potent psychological effects, after all, because it usually predicted scarcity in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. <06-14-2021: Alternatively, prayer may work like meditation to turn off the internal voice and the unnecessary stress it causes (if unscripted).>

Charity, on the receiving end, that is, is for contempt signalers, who, as you will recall, are extremely entitled in the final stage of their emotional program. Accepting charity–goods that you did not work for–tells the contempt program that it has achieved its mission and can therefore halt. So, it does. In Islam, almsgiving is said to be best done in secret, an effect of which will be to spare the pride of the recipient. One tends to think that this will be an issue with contemptuous types. Clearly, we are dealing here with someone whose contempt-signaler role has caused them to become downwardly mobile.

Fasting–going without the necessities of life–is for sadness signalers and it tells their emotional program that they have given or lost all their resources to the contempt signalers, and therefore their program has achieved its mission and can halt. So, it does. <11-21-2020: On the other hand, based on my own experience with fasting, the practice may work by increasing the faster's energy level post-fast, and an increased energy level can solve a multitude of problems.>

Pilgrimage is where you tell the anger-cycle program (with your feet) that you have been driven out of your homeland forever and must resettle elsewhere. Therefore, the program has achieved its mission and can halt. So, it does. This idea was expressed as “giving something to the dispersal drive” in Post #35.

Thus, the task of much religious behavior-modification can be likened to persuading a devil to depart by showing him false evidence that he has accomplished his purpose in coming, knowing that he is myopic. However, prayer tells him that he doesn’t even have to come in the first place.

#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

#40. The 1950 Ramp [population, genetics, evolutionary psychology, engineering, neuroscience]

PO     EN     EP     NE     GE     

Red, theory; black, fact.

6-01-2018; Since about 1950, the world population has been increasing along a remarkably steady ramp function with no slackening in the rate of increase yet apparent, although one cycle of oscillation in the slope occurred during the Sixties. Malthusian reasoning predicts an exponential increase, which this is not. From several lines of evidence, I keep coming back to the idea that humans must have a subconscious population controller in their heads, and yet such a controller would have leveled out the increase by now. Until now, no theory has sufficed to explain the facts.

I here propose that the natural population curve for humans in good times is a saw-tooth waveform, with population ramps alternating with political convulsions that result in a large group being expelled permanently, resulting in the precipitous but limited drop in local population density that ends the saw-tooth cycle. This cycle accomplishes the ecological dispersal function to which I allude many times in these pages. The population must ramp up for a time to sustainably create the numbers needed for the expulsions. The WHO population curve shows only a ramp because it is a worldwide figure and therefore population losses in expelling regions are balanced by population increases in welcoming regions. This also implies that human population has been increasing in a way unrestrained by food or resource availability or any other external constraint since 1950, to now.

Clearly, human population is being controlled by instinctive factors, but not to a constant absolute density, but rather to a constant rate of increase. Population density would go up along the much faster, steeper, and more disastrous exponential curve of Malthus if there were actually no controller.

My formal training in engineering and neuroscience justifies a bit of speculation as to mechanisms at this point. Look first for such a controller in the hypothalamus, already known to control other variables, such as temperature, by feedback principles.

In school, I was taught that nature does not reinvent the wheel, which I understand to mean that once a brain structure evolves to serve a particular computational function, it will be tapped for all future needs for such a calculation. This process may make it grow larger or develop sub-nuclei, but additional, independent nuclei for the same computation will never evolve.

I will continue to assume that the controller is a conventional PID controller, as in previous posts. To make it control rate of increase rather than absolute population density, you put a differentiator in the feedback pathway. Look first in the amygdala for such a differentiator. If you are of the opinion that human population control is urgent, then you must knock out this differentiator and replace it with a simple feed-through connection. Fortunately, one common way for evolution to implement differentiation in mammals is to begin with such a feed-through connection and supplement it with an inhibitory, slow, parallel feed-forward connection. If this is the case here, then you just inhibit the feed-forward pathway pharmacologically as specifically as may be, and the job is done. Subjectively, the effect of such a drug would be to take away people's ability to get used to higher population density in deciding how many children to have. An increased propensity to riot should not occur.

I assumed in the last post that the political convulsions that produce dispersal are triggered by the value on the integrator of the PID controller rising above a threshold. However, in the above design solution, the convulsion would be triggered by the raw, undifferentiated population-density signal rising above some threshold. Look in the amygdala for this signal as well. Consistent with this, bilateral removal of the amygdalae and hippocampi in monkeys is known to have a profound taming effect accompanied by hypersexuality, known as the Kluver-Bucy syndrome.

6-17-2018: To be consistent, I would have to say that the differentiator for the population signal is more likely to be in the hippocampal formation by the argument of nature not reinventing the wheel, because in an earlier post, I interpreted the hippocampus as the site of four successive differentiations that carry out a Fourier transform by mapping sinusiodal waves back onto themselves at a particular best frequency, in the presence of a map of such best frequencies.

However, this setup would require the creation of two neuron-to-neuron connections for its evolution; a first connection to send the amygdalar raw population signal to the hippocampus, and a second to send the differentiated result back for further processing. At best, this would require two simultaneous mutations. Either change by itself would be at best useless and could never be selected. This appears to be another example of irreducible complexity requiring the bi-mutation mechanism described in the previous post. 

The mechanisms usually offered to explain cases of apparent irreducible complexity, such as spandrelling, exaptation, and scaffolding, all appear to lack time efficiency and processiveness. I previously said that in evolution there are no (absolute)  deadlines, but relative deadlines can easily be created by an interaction of processes. In the presence of relative deadlines, such as adaptive footraces to be the first clade to exploit a newly-habitable area or a new niche, time is of the essence and selection for speed and evolvability can be expected. Such selection will create mechanisms such as crossing over that enhance evolvability.

#3. AviApics 101 [population, engineering, evolutionary psychology]

PO     EN     EP     

Red, theory; black, fact.

Here, I go into detail about the human population controller introduced in the previous post.

I assume that, like everything in the natural (i.e., evolved) world, it is a masterful piece of engineering, as Leonardo Da Vinci declared.

The way to build an ideal controller is the inverse plant method, where the controller contains the mathematical inverse of a mathematical model of the system to be controlled.  To derive the model, you take the Laplace transform of the system's impulse response function. For populations, a suitable impulse would be the instantaneous introduction of the smallest viable breeding population into an ideal habitat.

What happens then is well known, as least in microbial life forms too simple to already have a controller: unrestrained, exponential population growth as per Malthus, with no end in sight.

This exponential curve is then the impulse response function we need, and its Laplace transform is simple: 1/(S - r), where S is complex frequency and r is the Malthusian constant, that is, percent population growth rate per year. The mathematical inverse is even simpler: S - r, which is calculated as set point X minus controlled variable Y. The result is summed with perturbation P and made equal to Y. The result is usually simplified to permit predictions about controller performance, but that is not needed in this discussion.

The control effort is E(S - r), which can be multiplied out as ES - Er. Remember that everything has been Laplace transformed in these expressions, and that ES becomes the time differential of e when transformed back into the real world. Multiplication by a constant such as r stays multiplication, however. Control effort in the real world is then rate of change of e minus r times e. (Lowercase variables are the un-transformed versions.) Since e = x - y, and since x is constant, x becomes zero when differentiated, and drops out of the expression. Control effort is then -dy/dt - er. <Corrected 5 Jun '16.>

I theorize that women calculate -dy/dt, and men calculate er. When they get together, the complete population control effort is exerted, resulting in stability, which the world rewards. However, on average, the men and the women will be pulling in opposite directions exactly 50% of the time, if we model population variation as a sine wave centered on the set point.

A prediction is that women unconsciously react to evidence of increased birth rate or decreased death rate by wanting fewer children. Men react to excess absolute population relative to set point by violence, and to breathing room under the set point by partying.

That negative sign in front of the male contribution was puzzling at first, until I realized that it must derive from the married state itself, and not from the base male response to population error. This could be the origin of statements such as: "Marriage is the exact opposite of the way you think it will be." 

The level of the noise produced so copiously by small children is probably the signal that women unconsciously integrate to estimate birth rate, and the wailing and long faces following a death probably serve the same purpose for estimating death rate, aided by reading the tabloids. [My (married) older brother once showed me the developmental time course of child noise in the air with his hand, and it looked like an EPSP, the response of a neuron to an incoming action potential. The EPSP is the convolution kernel by which a neuron decodes a rate code.] The men have to calculate absolutes, not rates, however. The male proprietary instinct causes them to divvy up the limiting resource for breeding (jobs in our present society) into quanta that can be paired off with people like pairs of beads on adjacent wires of an abacus. Excess people left over at the end of this operation spells trouble. Politicians are right to worry about jobless rates.