#66. Neuromodulators as Peril Specialists [Neuroscience]

NE

Red: theory; black, fact.

Solanum dulcamara, a plant with anticholinesterase activity.

“Life is Difficulty”

My PhD thesis was about a neuromodulator acting on mammalian brain. It was tough to decapitate all those rats; I never got used to it. But if you can’t stand the formaldehyde, get out of the lab.

The basic theory

I conjecture that the primordial function of any type of transmitter substance acting on the g-protein-coupled cell-surface receptors or nuclear receptors of neurons was to coordinate the whole-organism response to some class of perils.

 

Complications

Glutamate, GABA, and acetylcholine are usually considered neurotransmitters, not neuromodulators, but all three have G-protein-coupled receptors in addition to ionotropic receptors and are thus both.

In thermoregulation, hypothalamic glutamate and GABA act on the body via the serotonergic raphe pallidus nucleus. The implied connection with predation (See table) would be due to the fact that animals become torpid at extremes of temperature and thus easy prey. The larger predator would have a smaller surface to volume ratio and thus slower warming and cooling after leaving its refugium to hunt. The predator thermal advantage would have been the selection pressure for thermal sensitivity in the anti-predation system, which eventually became upstream of temperature regulation effectors generally. 

The functional assignments suggested in Table 1 would mostly pertain to a very primordial brain. The implication is that any modern biological function of the neuromodulator substance other than organizing the response to a specific type of peril was elaborated out of the primordial function over long-term evolution, which can act opportunistically to confer new functions on preexisting adaptations.

An example of such elaboration is shown for dopamine in the inferred social role. A pre-adaptation for this role split may have been breast-feeding.

Table 1.

Peril	Substance	Failure mode
Extremes of heat and cold	glutamate and GABA	?
Predator	serotonin	depression
Parasite	histamine	phobia
Rival conspecific	noradrenaline	paranoia
Social isolation

#64. The Drill Sergeants of the Apocalypse [evolutionary psychology, population]

EP     PO     

Red, theory; black, fact.

Seen in a hospital ward.

Updated 10-30-2024

The trickster type may really be a penetration tester. 

The type probably emerges in contexts of unequal power (Elmer Fudd has the shotgun; Bugs Bunny doesn’t). Thus, an abiding fear is the soil out of which tricksterism grows, by the following positive feedback:

A successful trick shows up the Fudds and shows them in a feckless light, which reduces the fear level of the trickster, which reinforces trick-playing. This is a short-term high that comes at the expense of worse relations with the Fudds and thus eventually even greater fear levels for the tricksters, which they try to remedy with still more tricks.

An example of an unequal power relationship is between a foreign invader and the defenders. Invasion is such a common event in history that by now, countermeasures will have evolved. Tricksterism is likely to be a tile in the mosaic of any such adaptation.

A biological precedent for penetrations testing?

Evidence for a biological precedent may be the many retroviruses integrated into the human genome. Presumably, one of these becomes active now and then at random and kills the host cell if the anti-viral defenses of the latter have become weak due to some somatic mutation. The red team-blue team strategy seems to be too good a trick for nature to miss (TGTNM).

Evolution of the trickster

09-27-2020: Modern human populations may have two (independent?) axes of political polarization: oppressor-oppressed and trickster-control freak. The first may sub serve dispersal by generating refugee groups and the second may sub serve building. Any built thing must serve in a complex world in which many constraints must be simultaneously observed. Thus, after the initial build, a long period of tweaking must typically follow. The role of the tricksters is to powerfully motivate this tweaking before the complacency of the control-freak builders leads to disaster. <03-12-2021: This may have been how engineering was done by an archaic version of Homo sapiens.><12-02-2022: The tricksters can also make mistakes, causing damage that cannot have a silver lining in any possible world, and moving to correct this is a natural role of the builders. If you are a builder, ask this: “What is the best use of my indignation?” It is to keep to a strict harm-reduction approach.><01-08-2024: Tricksterism can intensify into sadism, in which the protagonist takes pleasure in the victim’s torment and wants to make it last. Well, boy, if you make it last, you are giving the victim plenty of time and motivation to figure out solutions, like a patient old instructor giving his pupil his lessons one at a time, as he is ready for them, and this is how the wise victim will construct the situation. Such a victim will end up with information and know-how others will pay for.>

A tangent about our evolutionary context

Our evolutionary forebears may have been champion dispersers for a long time <12-21-2020: i.e., Homo erectus*> before the ice age** forced some of them to become champion builders (initially, of shelters and warm clothing). <12-31-2020: "champion environment modifiers" may be closer to the mark than "champion builders"> It is an interesting fact that physically, humans exceed all other animals only in long-distance running, which can be read as dispersal ability. Our carelessness with preserving the local environments and our propensity for overpopulation can be read as typical r-selected disperser behavior. <12-21-2020: The r-selecting niche was probably big game hunting. H. erectus sites indicate consumption of medium and large meat animals. Overhunting would have occurred routinely, due to the slow reproduction rates of large animals and the high hunting efficiency of H. erectus due to tool use, so that dispersal of the hunters to new habitats would likewise have been routine.>

* H. erectus: lived 2 million years ago to 100,000 years ago. H. sapiens: earliest fossils, 300,000 years old. Evidence of behavioral modernity: 100,000–70,000 y ago.

** that is, the Pleistocene ice age, itself a sequence of 5 successive continental glaciations (by oxygen isotope evidence) separated by temperate periods, starting 2.6 million years ago and thought to be not over yet. Over the past 800,000 y, continental glaciation has happened rhythmically on a 100,000-y cycle due to astronomical factors (Milankovitch cycle). Selection for building skill may therefore have occurred in multiple successive episodes over the course of the Pleistocene.

#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

#57. Where are All the Space Aliens? [evolution]

EV

Red, theory; black, fact.

KIRK MUST DIE! (cut to commercial.)

Astronomical observations and the Fermi paradox

Contemporary exoplanet research keeps turning up extra-solar-system planets that seem to be promising abodes of life of the Earthly variety (never mind the completely weird biochemistries that may exist on other planets). In the habitable exoplanets catalogue (HEC), kept by the Planetary Habitability Laboratory (University of Puerto Rico) at Arecibo, the list of planets found orbiting in the conservative habitable zone now has 17 entries, and a 2013 paper by Petigura et al. ("Prevalence of Earth-size planets orbiting Sun-like stars") placed the percentage of stars in our galaxy with potentially habitable planets at 22 ± 8. Accumulating evidence suggests that life is common in our galaxy, yet SETI research—the search for extraterrestrial civilizations that send out radio signals that bear some stamp of intelligence—has drawn a complete blank, as far as I know. (And if it did find something, it would make such a sensation in the media that no-one could help knowing.) So I ask you: where are all the space aliens? (This question is generally attributed to 20th-century physicsmeister Enrico Fermi and has since become known as the Fermi Paradox.)

My hypothesis is this:

Life is one thing; intelligent life is quite another. This is a form of the Rare Earth hypothesis, which is one of the avenues that has been explored through the years in the search for a resolution of the Fermi Paradox.

Biospheres may not be permanent 

No doubt there are many, many planets in our part of the galaxy that have some form of primitive life, and many, many more "graveyard planets" that once had life but are now sterile. Mars may well be an example of this kind of planet in our own solar system.

Biochallenge!

I conjecture that if we seem to be alone in this part of the galaxy, based on the negative SETI evidence, it is because we are, and this is because we have evolved to the level of intelligence first in this galactic neighborhood, because evolution on the Earth is egregiously rapid. It has taken us four billion years to get this far, which doesn't sound so fast, but everything is relative. This rapid evolution is plausibly a response to challenges: all the various natural disasters we are subject to here on Earth, examples being bolide (meteor) crashes, continental glaciations, drifting continents, droughts, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, long climatic warm spells, tornadoes, tsunamis, volcanism, wild weather, wildfires, and winter.

Sept 23, 2018: Tornadoes knock out primary transformer station in Ottawa.

Case in point: a large bolide strike is believed to have triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs, making way for the rise of the mammals, and we ourselves are the descendants of those mammals. <03-21-2020: The bolide may have killed the dinosaurs indirectly, by touching off a climate shift in our dangerously unstable world. This would explain the temporary presence of dinosaur fossils above the Cretaceous/Tertiary iridium anomaly, which has been a problem for the bolide hypothesis.>

Case in point: the rise of modern humans seems to have coincided with the end of the last continental glaciation. The rigorous, cold-climate conditions prevailing then might have selected our ancestors for high ability in building shelters and sewing protective clothing. These skills might have required the rapid evolution of a high ability to process spatial information, which we then leveraged into the building of civilizations upon the return of temperate climatic conditions. (See: #24, "The Pictures in Your Head," this blog.)

To contrive a planet that is so challenging and difficult, yet has not succeeded in destroying life altogether in four billion years, may require a very rare combination of parameters (e.g., our distance from the sun, the size and composition of the Earth, the presence of the asteroid belt, the presence of the Oort cloud), and this rarity has led to our emerging into intelligence before it happened anywhere else in this part of the galaxy.

01-08-2020: These parameters may well have special values at which critical behavior occurs, such as the onset of positive feedbacks leading to heating or cooling. Earth may be simultaneously close to several of these critical points, a rare circumstance, but one that does not require extreme, atypical values of any given variable.

My take on the Rare Earth hypothesis therefore emphasizes what are called "evolutionary pumps" (e.g., glaciations, bolide crashes, etc.) in discussions of this hypothesis, as well as the anthropic principle.

August 28, 2011: An Ottawa sunset inflamed by a recent hurricane in the USA.

Evil-ution

I further conjecture that the difficulties of our past have left their mark on us, and we call it "evil." (Some will deny that this concept has any construct validity, saying, "It's not a thing," but I think that it is an approximate version of something that does, which I term "dispersalism" in this blog.) This is because a basic strategy for surviving disasters is dispersal, which I have previously linked to evil in these pages (See: #35, "The Pilgrim and the Whale," and #37, "Two Kinds of War," this blog).

To recapitulate, our planet's predilection for disaster has deeply ingrained dispersal tendencies into most species here, by the mechanism of natural selection. Humans now get their food from agriculture. However, agriculture requires a settled existence and is therefore in opposition to dispersal, so the plot thickens.

This characteristic of agriculture results in the psychological pressure for dispersal relentlessly building, pressure-cooker fashion, across time, until a destructive explosion occurs (war or revolution), thereby accomplishing the long-delayed dispersal.

May 21, 2022 derecho-storm damage in Ottawa.

Wildfire smoke seen in Ottawa, Jun 2023.

#53. Advanced Human Depopulation Model [Population, Evolutionary Psychology]

Picture 1: A four-stage model of a human depopulation event. C = cycle; growth = growth phase; depop = depopulation

PO     EP     

Red, theory; black, fact

I present in Picture 1 a four-stage model of human depopulation events that is intended to account for more data. The same two emotional programs, the anger cycle and the sadness cycle (see post #41), occur in two "generations," with the second generation having greater violence and using modified signals.

• Stage 1: depopulation by emigration; accomplishes dispersal of the human species; coordinated by an exchange of anger signals;
• Stages 2-4: depopulation by mass murder: accomplishes long-term population density confinement within limits;
• Stage 2: coordinated by an asymmetric exchange of contempt and sadness signals; has similarities with cannibalism;
• Stage 3: total war program; coordinated by an exchange of anger signals with mimicry added;
• Stage 4: loss of civilization; triggered by a repudiation of the social contract by trusted elites with grudges: coordinated by increasing paralysis on the part of victims and increasing cynicism on the part of perpetrators. May be too recent an evolutionary development to have an efficient halting signal.

Nevertheless, the modes of worship of Islam are the best place to look for such a signal (06-02-2019: or other remedy) if it exists. 

In this connection, the Islamic prayer discipline has extraordinary potential to alter brain physiology, based on variations in blood flow to this organ, known to be highly sensitive to same. The variations would come about as a result of the highly regimented posture changes occurring during Islamic prayer. I have coded these postures according to the probable effect on blood pressure measured at the brain, and the result looks like this:

Picture 2. The inferred brain physiology of Islamic prayer. Source of data: YouTube, "Time to pray with Zacky," accessed 05-23-2019.

 Shown are my inferred variations in brain oxygenation during two rakat, or units of prayer. Bowing is coded the same as sitting, namely 1. Prostration is coded as 2 and standing is coded as 0. Some forms of Islam prescribe up to 19 rakat per day. Special procedures (Sujud Sahwi) exist for fixing prayers performed erroneously due to "forgetfulness" but this "forgetfulness" I find suggestive of temporary brain dysfunction due to lack of oxygen from getting up too quickly, possibly at about minute 2, above.

06-02-2019: Unprompted revision for clarity and sensitivity: The above observation is to help establish that Islamic prayer manipulates a variable that matters, always an important issue at the outset of a research project. You don't want to waste taxpayer money blindly researching variable after variable and concluding at great expense merely that none of them was relevant.

#51. A Theory of Christianity [Evolutionary Psychology, Population]

EP     PO     

Red, theory; black, fact.

My gut told me that there is more to be said about Christianity than what I wrote or implied in Post #50. My doubts about the completeness of my work began with this statement by Saint Paul:

“And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”

1 Corinthians 15:14, KJV

I was struck by the clarity and insistence of this impossible claim. What is going on here? We as theoreticians need to drill down here.

“Risen” means having come back from the dead, which is still an impossibility for modern medicine. However, Paul explains that what dies is a “natural body,” whereas what rises, or is “resurrected,” is a “spirit body,” which is “incorruptible.” The word “resurrection” does not appear in the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), making its first appearance in Matthew, the first book of the New Testament. All things considered, the concept is obviously central to Christianity.

Postulate 1: Resurrection theology is an approximate theory, and as such, is allowed to contain an impossibility.

Postulate 2: Christianity is focused on taming a third stage of depopulation that follows the anger cycle and the sadness cycle if neither of these has returned population density to the reset value after a certain time (See Post #50 for explanations of these terms.). This is the total war stage, and it takes place on an international scale. Examples are WWI and WWII, which would be the international phases of national conflicts between a central-European majority and Serbs and Jews, respectively. Total war is arguably altruistic because each of two alliances or countries is helping the other with their population problem. The required signaling cycle seems to be that of the anger cycle but with the exchanged signals doing double duty as liquidation tactics. This is not just a fight, where the only consideration is what would be the shrewdest blow; there is a strong tendency to ape the opponent’s latest gambit, as expected in an exchange of signals "designed" to lock non-altruists out of the process. This psychology is called “sending back the bullet” in battlefield situations and “poetic justice” in everyday life. It is satisfying and it is a signal and it is illegal in peacetime, no matter that the other guy started it. In peacetime, you have to search elsewhere for your solutions than in mimicry and cooperation with a dangerous emotional program.

Furthermore, if you allow yourself to be drawn into a vendetta, you just wrote an “ = “ between yourself and the person you take exception to.

05-06-2022: The old, skeptical explanation of the resurrection, namely that the crucifixion was a fraud, deserves mention here. The New Testament mentions particular Romans and Pharisees sympathetic to Jesus. Extrapolating, I posit a pro-Jesus faction spanning all segments of that society and including many influential Romans and Pharisees, who would have had the resources necessary to pull off such a deception, but who could not openly interdict the crucifixion for lack of the necessary influence. Thus, the seeming miraculousness of the resurrection would in reality be a measure of the power of the illusion that groups identified as “The Enemy” are implacable and unitary. 

The total war program is well known for its destructiveness to the infrastructures of civilization, which suggests that the program evolved recently and is still being refined by natural selection. It may not even be older than agriculture, the last quantum leap in our ability to increase our numbers. That new ability may have generated the selection forces that brought forth the total war program.

Christian theology works a rational override on the anger cycle (See Post #41) by reassuring believers that they will be resurrected and therefore need not fear death. Since anger is fear in disguise, this reassurance undercuts the anger-cycle-like dynamics of the total war program.

Postulate 3: the corresponding exact theory of Christianity is that depopulation events always leave survivors and Christianity enhances your probability of being one of them. When population density has declined to the reset value, this should trigger a dramatic turnaround in the Zeitgeist from death-producing attitudes to nurturing ones, to start the population-density curve on its next long, slow upward climb. The resurrection of “spirit bodies” may refer to the re-establishment of life-valuing attitudes in Society.

03-25-2019: It follows that the human race is being selected for a predisposition to Christianity, and probably other religions as well.

The book of Revelation, the last book in the New Testament, appears to describe the sudden depopulation event that ends the population-density cycle. This is wrongly identified as the end of time/history, but remember that we deal here with an approximate theory.

Christian worship activities revolve around the Eucharist, a communal sharing and consumption of bread and wine. Its purpose is to eradicate the deepest roots of the fear of death, a fear that leads to the hatreds of the total-war emotional program. How does it work?

The Eucharist pacifies people by exposing them to the halting signal of the total war program. So, it halts. How did the consumption of bread and wine come to be the halting signal? Because they are made by people “playing with their food,” for the sake of variety, one imagines. However, this comes at the cost of caloric content (not caloric density) because the yeast always takes its cut. This practice will only make sense under conditions of plenty, which return with sufficient depopulation. Thus, alcohol (which I assume to be the active signaling ingredient) and leavened bread now signal to the human limbic system the return of abundance. I conjecture that these signals have a subtle pacifying effect, making it easier to resist tit-for-tat total-war signalling.

03-02-2024: Alternatively, Jesus may have been medicating the disciples with food and alcohol to keep their arousal level out of the panic zone at a time of peak emotion so that they could continue to function adaptively.

#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.

 (05-23-2024: The tree is gone, apparently a victim of urban buildup. The nearest present-day address may be 179 Clarence, Ottawa.)

#42. Corporate Sin [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

7-25-2018: A moment's reflection reveals that not all of humanly willed unhappiness is due to two persons interacting, either in a sadness cycle or an anger cycle. Wars of depopulation and wars of dispersal represent these interactions promoted to the level of entire societies. This promotion theory assumes that the same hard-wired wetware is being used for both levels, but with the addition of a few more bits of code to support the social level.

Theologians such as Bishop Baycroft, writing in "The Anglican Way," are well aware of this extra dimension of human misery, referring to it as "corporate sin," and admit that it is a more difficult problem than individual sin. The advice I give in "Signaletics for Salvation" (https://nightbull.blogspot.com) will not help you efficiently if your unhappiness has its roots in corporate sin (for example, if you are caught up in a military draft or are a slave), but it may be better than nothing. But let's see what we can surmise about those extra bits of code.

The basic design seems to be to transform a tiff between two individuals into a tiff between two leaders, then copy the emotions of the leaders into the heads of all the followers on both sides. Thus, a political leader is a kind of emotional conductor. This is why we have leaders.

By this theory, World War II was a tiff between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, both famous for their speeches in which they inspired passions in their followers.

How do you get to be leader? The simplest answer seems to be that you just get famous and you are also someone who doesn't see a way to end his pain without involving the whole world. <07-21-22: As for how I ended my own pain, minding my own business and reaching out to family at times of need seems to have sufficed. I also had a talk with my federal MP at one point.>

An attractive theory about fame, in turn, is that all fame is 90% being-famous-for-being-famous, and 10% (or less) is being famous for something else, call it the predisposing factor. Human inter group interactions have the form we observe because these predisposing factors are not random but are due to natural selection. Furthermore, they are conditional upon prevailing conditions, such as the price of bread relative to wages. Finally, they already exist at the individual level. The process of garnering the absurd 90% of fame is the by-now familiar phenomenon of going viral, and its earlier historical equivalents. 

I imagine that this process is a positive feedback loop in the brain that involves the attentional system and Hebbian plasticity, the latter well known among students of neuroscience for having a built-in positive feedback. We also know that emotions are contagious (See: Hatfield E, Cacioppo JT, Rapson RL. Emotional Contagion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

The final bit of code we need to produce leaders and thus corporate sin is a tendency of this contagiousness to be potentiated by the famousness of the emoter one is observing. This mechanism of social control is distinctly different from the snowball effect that I likened to a black hole in an earlier post. It will take more thinking to decide which is more accurate.

#41. The Sadness Cycle [evolutionary psychology, neuroscience]

EP     NE     

Red, theory; black, fact.

7-20-2018: This post builds on "Signaletics for Salvation," a post in the companion blog, "Experimentalist's Progress, " at https://nightbull.blogspot.com. The theory part of that post is reprinted below with slight modification for the convenience of the reader.

The anger cycle and the sadness cycle reach their full flower in wars of dispersal and wars of depopulation, respectively. These were discussed in the post "Two Kinds of War" in this blog.

Wars of depopulation serve to prevent Malthusian disasters such as general famine. The sadness cycle is a form of altruism that facilitates this depopulation by making a portion of the population sad and suicidal and the remainder contemptuous and entitled. The contemptuous ones take everything the sad ones have, ultimately their lives, and the sad ones let them.

If the sacrificial lambs were fighting what is essentially a form of cannibalism tooth and nail, the transfer of property would leave the heritors with many injuries, which would defeat the purpose of the whole process, which is to leave the residual population stronger and healthier than before under conditions of restricted food supply. However, always bear in mind that the sad ones and the contemptuous ones are playing two roles within the same adaptation; if you can play one role, you can play the other. However, if you unfortunately carry some unfavorable mutation, you will be predisposed to the sad role. This is another way the adaptation leaves the population more robust than before.

Since no altruism can evolve in the presence of selfishness unless the altruists are only altruistic to other altruists, a signaling cycle is required to lock the altruists together to the exclusion of non-altruists. Thus, sadness induces contempt and contempt induces sadness, and so on in a vicious cycle leading to the complete destruction of the sad ones and the transfer of all their property specifically to the contemptuous ones. This dynamic could be the origin of elder abuse and clinical depression.

Macchiavelli wrote, "He is made contemptible who is held to be changeable, light, effeminate, pusillanimous, irresolute, and from these the Prince must guard himself as from a reef." The traits listed appear to be the symptoms of unacknowledged sadness, and were no doubt quite lethal in Macchiavelli's time. Due to the present skyrocketing of the world population with the concomitant "Calhoun effect" from crowding stress, we are no doubt due for a remacchiavellianization of daily life. For example, should I even be sharing these insights with you instead of keeping them to myself to my own advantage or at least posting them on a commercialized blog? Does my slowness to commercialize indicate suicidally self-giving tendencies that will one day prove fatal?

6-29-2018: The Anger Cycle (reprinted)

Much of human unhappiness comes from destructive, escalating signaling cycles, usually between two persons. Examples: arguments, feuds, schools of thought, gang wars, revolutions. The signals exchanged are initially personal expressions of anger. Importantly, these expressions are multi modal, and therefore highly redundant. (e.g., threatening utterances, tones of voice, facial expressions, gait, crashing and banging things, spying, following, etc.) Your anger comes out of you "through every pore."

These signals are too many and varied for conscious control, which is why most people remain enslaved by their signals and cycles. The anger cycle is presumed to escalate until one of the parties must leave the country. When people are threatened, they seek allies, so all of society eventually gets drawn in and polarized as the escalation proceeds apace, like a black hole. Therefore, it is a group that must eventually leave, not a single individual, which is the basis of the refugee phenomenon. 

In ecological terms, the refugee phenomenon is clearly sub serving the function of dispersal. However, dispersal-producing behavior is fundamentally altruistic in a backhanded way. The benefit to the supposed loser, the group that eventually gets driven out, is that occasionally they find a newly-emptied vacant habitat in which to settle and therefore can reproduce without competition. This is a tremendous benefit in evolutionary terms and may once have been great enough to redeem all the waste and suffering of human-style dispersal. 

However, altruistic behavior cannot evolve in the presence of non-altruists unless a signaling system is established to ensure that altruists are only altruistic to other altruists. That is why I lay so much emphasis on signaling here. The reason why the signals are so multi modal is that the altruism program probably breaks down occasionally because of the short-term advantages of being a non-altruist. This has probably happened many times in the past and the broken algorithm was repaired each time by natural selection with the addition of yet another signal component. 

Multi modality implies the existence of a neuronal OR-element somewhere on the sensory side, and the amygdalae could be these OR-elements. More precisely, the amygdalae could be specialized for providing OR-elements generally to the brain by virtue of a characteristic, unique amygdalar cytoarchitecture.

7-20-2018: The various signal cycles may reinforce each other. The four signal cycles that seem to form the framework of human life seem to have such an interdependence. These are: mother-child bonding, which could potentiate man-woman bonding, which could potentiate the anger cycle (via jealousy), which could potentiate the sadness cycle. These insights come from introspection and my own biographical data.

#38. The Fallacy of Justice [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

4-04-2018: In my treatment of evil and criminality so far, I have tried to show that they sub serve either dispersal or preemptive population reduction, both valuable biological processes that tend to prolong the survival of species. 

The algorithms for achieving these ends would have been created over time by some form of evolution, with probably a large component coming from a hypothetical, fast form of evolution I call post-zygotic gamete selection (PGS), where gametes -- individual cells -- are effectively the units of selection. In general, the smaller the unit of selection, the faster the adaptation. PGS may have accelerated evolution to the point where it could be detected by simple record-keeping technologies, which may have led to the first record-keeping peoples eventually realizing that "someone is looking out for us," leading to the invention of monotheism.

The genetically inherited parts of our behavior enter consciousness as emotions, and can therefore be easily identified. The main outlines of civilization are probably due to the inherited behavior component, and not to the reasoning, conscious mind, which is often just a detail-handler. How could civilization rest on a process that can't even remember what happened last weekend?

Thus, humans have a dual input to behavior, emotion and reason. The above arguments show that evil and criminality come from the emotional input. Yet the entire deterrence theory of justice assumes the opposite, by giving the person a logical choice: "You do this, we do that, and you won't like it. So you don't do this, right?"

I'm not so sure. People commit crimes for emotional reasons. As usual, the criminal's reasoning faculties are just an after-the-decision detail handler. The direction that this detail handler then takes is fascinatingly monstrous, but this does not mean that crime begins in reason.

Conclusion: the deterrence theory of justice is based on a category error.

Religion, with its emphasis on emotion, was all the formal "law enforcement system" anyone needed up until only about 200 years ago, at the industrial revolution. We may be able to go beyond where religion takes us by means of a disease model of criminality.

It does make some sense to lock criminals up, because with less freedom they cannot physically commit as many crimes. Many prisons become dungeons, however, because of the public's desire for revenge. However, all revenge-seeking belongs to the dispersal/depopulation dynamic and is thus part of the problem. A desire for revenge may follow a crime very predictably, but logically, it is a non-sequitur.

4-30-2018: A more nuanced theory of crime prevention is possible, where logical and technological constraints on behavior complement efforts to reduce the motivation for committing crimes at the source: the individual's perception of the fairness of society. However, I originally wrote as I did because I don't think that the former is the squeaky wheel at the moment.

#35. The Pilgrim and the Whale [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

12-26-17: Just as the whale must hold its breath to obtain its food from the sea, so must a human restrain his or her anger to obtain a paycheck from society. Don't laugh, for the analogy is exact.

The ecological niche occupied by the whale places two of its drives in contradiction: the drive to eat and the drive to breathe. In humans, the contradictory drives are eating and dispersal.

Dispersal is a biological process tending to expand the geographical range of a species. Left to itself, the range shrinks inexorably because of natural disasters such as fire, frost, famine, drought, and pestilence wiping out all members of a given species in a given habitat. When each habitat occupied by the species has had its disaster, the species will be extinct if it has not been dispersing all along. Dispersal re-populates the devastated habitats as they become able to support life again, thereby staving off extinction.

Unfortunately, human dispersal begins with fraught political contests. As soon as one side gets the upper hand, the other must flee. Result: mass migration, i.e., dispersal. Most human anger is really dispersal hunger. However, when people get mad, they break stuff. Stuff like buildings, airports, factories, railway lines, etc. This is the infrastructure on which we all depend for our survival. Because our ecological niche is in a fragile built environment, we are required to compromise between eating and dispersal. And there you have my analysis of the biological roots of our unhappiness.

This contradiction in drives is the ultimate reason why every able-bodied Muslim must make the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime: it mellows them out by giving something to the dispersal drive. The same effect would explain the fact that first-generation immigrants are generally more law-abiding than the natives.

Other institutions that may exist to relieve dispersal hunger are: tourism, the fitness movement, Seeing the World, conference-going, joining the Navy, going away to university, visiting faraway relatives for the holidays, companies moving their employees around a lot, and others I'll think of tomorrow morning.

Happy trails.

2-14-2018: Catholicism is also famous for its tradition of pilgrimage, to such places as Jerusalem, Rome, Lourdes, and Santiago de Compostela, the latter still popular today. Protestantism has no such tradition, however.

3-12-2018: Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism all have strong traditions of pilgrimage, and the practice is so universal that it has been proposed as a Jungian archetype by Clift and Clift. I myself walk a lot, because I cannot afford a car or a downtown apartment close to all the amenities. But is that the ultimate reason? 

#34. Emotions [evolutionary psychology, genetics, neuroscience]

EP    NE    GE

Red, theory; black, fact.

12-17-2017: In previous posts, I theorized that humans, along with all other sexually-reproducing species, have a long-range guidance system that I called proxy natural selection, or preferably, post-zygotic gamete selection (PGS), that is basically a fast form of evolution in which individual cells, the gametes, are the units of selection, not individuals. Selection is conjectured to happen post-zygotically (i.e., sometime after the beginning of development, or even in adulthood) but is retroactive to the egg and sperm that came together to create the individual. Each gamete is potentially unique because of the crossing-over genetic rearrangements that happen during its maturation. This theory explains the biological purpose of this further layer of uniqueness beyond that due to the sexual mixing of chromosomes, which would otherwise appear to be redundant.

Our emotions are conjectured to be programmed by species-replacement group selection and to serve as proxies for increases and decreases in the fitness of our entire species.

A further correlate of an emotion beyond the cognitive and autonomic-nervous-system components would be the neurohumoral component, expressed as chemical releasing and inhibiting factors that enter the general circulation via the portal vessels of the hypothalamus, blood vessels which are conventionally described as affecting only the anterior pituitary gland. These factors are theorized to reach the stem-like cells that mature into egg and sperm, where they set reversible epigenetic controls on the level of crossing-over that will occur during differentiation. Large amounts of crossing-over are viewed as retroactively penalizing the gametes leading to the individual by obfuscating or overwriting with noise specifically the genetic uniqueness of said original gametes. In contrast, low levels of further crossing-over reward the original gametes with high penetrance into the next generation. Here, I believe you have all the essential ingredients of classical natural selection, and all the potential, in a process that solves problems on an historical timescale.

Crossing-over happens only between homologous chromosomes, which are the paternal and maternal copies of the same chromosome. Human cells have 46 chromosomes because they have 23 pairs of homologous chromosomes. The homologous-chromosome-specificity of crossing-over suggests that the grand optimization problem that is human evolution has been broken down into 23 smaller sub-problems for the needs of the PGS process, each of which can be solved independently, without interactions with any of the other 22, and which involves a 23-fold reduction in the number of variables that must be simultaneously optimized. In computing, this problem-fragmentation strategy greatly increases the speed of optimization. I conjecture that it is one of the features that makes PGS faster than classical natural selection.

However, we now need 23 independent neurohumoral factors descending in the bloodstream from brain to testis or (fetal) ovary, each capable of setting the crossing-over propensity of one specific pair of homologous chromosomes. Each one will require its own specific receptor on the surface of the target oogonia or spermatogonia. Check this out in the literature, and you will already find a strange diversity of cell-surface receptors on the spermatogonia. (I haven't looked at oogonia yet.&&) I predict that the number of such receptors known to science will increase to at least 23. None of this is Lamarkism, because nervous-system control would be over the standard deviation of behavioral traits, not their averages.

1-09-2018: Naively, this theory also appears to require 23 second messengers to transfer the signals from cell surface to nucleus, which sounds excessive. Perhaps the second messengers form a combinatorial code, which would reduce the number required by humans to log2 (23) = 4.52, or 5 in round numbers. This is much better. Exactly five second-messenger systems are known, these being based on: cyclic AMP, inositol triphosphate, cyclic GMP, arachidonic acid, and small GTPases (e.g., ras). However, many mammalian species have many more than the 32 chromosome pairs needed to saturate a 5-bit address space.

1-10-2018: If we expand the above list of second messengers with the addition of the calcium/calmodulin complex, the address space expands to 64 pairs of homologous chromosomes, for a total ploidy of 128. This seems sufficient to accommodate all the mammals. Thus, a combinatorial second-messenger code representable as a five- or six-bit binary integer in most organisms would control the deposition of the epigenetic marks controlling crossing-over propensity.

If the above code works for transcription as well as epigenetic modification, then applying whatever stimuli it takes to produce a definite combinatorial second-messenger state inside the cell will activate one specific chromosome for transcription, so that the progeny of the affected cell will develop into whatever that chromosome specifies, be it an organ, a system, or something else. And there you may have the long-sought key to programming stem cells. You're welcome.

Each pair of homologous chromosomes may correspond to what in an earlier post was called a "PNS focus." The requirement that the evolution of each chromosome contribute independently to the total increase in fitness suggests that a chromosome specifies a system, like the nervous system or the digestive system. We seem to have only 11 systems, not 23, but more may be defined in the future.

A related concept is that a chromosome specifies an ancestral, generic cell type, like glial cells (4 subtypes known) or muscle cells (3 subtypes known). The great diversity of the neurons suggest that they must be reclassified into multiple basic types, perhaps along the lines suggested by the functional classification of the cranial nerves: general somatic, general visceral, and special somatic (i.e., specific senses).

1-09-2018: A third concept for function assignment to homologous pairs of chromosomes postulates a hypothetical maximally divided genome in which each cell type has its own chromosome pair, a state conjectured to seldom occur in nature. Co-evolution of clusters of cell types (e.g., neurons and glia; bone and cartilage) would create selection pressure for the underlying cell-type-specific chromosomes to become covalently linked into the larger chromosomes that we see in the actual karyotypes. Thus, each observed homologous pair would correspond to a few cell types that are currently co-evolving, which seems to return us to the system or organ concept. 

01-08-2019: The system specified by a chromosome may be called a cooperation system, and these may be organized in a hierarchy, following the general principles of spatial organization outlined in my post: "The Pictures in Your Head." Chromosomes activated earlier in development will specify system-like entities and those activated late in development will specify organ-like entities. Only the first-activated chromosome will apply to the entire organism.

Humans depend on complex social structures for their survival, and this comes out of our individual behavioral tendencies. Probably, most PGS adaptations to environmental fluctuations involve modifying these structures, which would come out of subtle modifications of individual behaviors. I think I am just repeating E.O. Wilson here. Our hard-wired species-fitness definitions would give rise to the primary emotions, perhaps in the hypothalamus or limbic system, by connecting specific stimuli to primary emotions in the manner of an if-then rule. 

Further out on the cortex, the specific stimuli being connected would get progressively more complex and learning-dependent, and progressively less concerned with the "what" of behavior (i.e., our species-specific taxes) and more with the "how" of behavior. In "how" mode, the complex stimuli become more like signposts to be consulted on a journey. PGS adaptations of our behavior would affect the hardwired aspects of this hypothetical transition zone. The primary emotions would then be like the highest hierarchical level of our motor program, or like the least-indented instructions of a conventional high-level computer program.

I conjecture that religion is important because it goes straight for this highest level. We all know that religion is kind of an emotional business, what with the organ music and the stained glass and all such as that, and this is why. I therefore conjecture that words spoken often from the pulpit, such as God, sin, forgiveness, devil, angel, soul, salvation, etc., all enclose a secret that writers such as Dawkins do not grasp: the emotions are the message. To illustrate this, let us attempt an emotional definition of the master symbol, "God."

God: feeling loved and secure to the point of invulnerability; feeling small in an agreeable way, as in the presence of mountains; feeling brotherly/sisterly towards one's fellow humans; blossoming in confidence into one's full potential; fearing nothing.

Perhaps that's enough to give the general idea. No doubt a whole dictionary could be compiled along these lines. When the priest strings these emotion-words together, he creates an experience for the congregation that could fairly be called a form letter from "God," assuming that the word "God" points to the PGS process itself. The job of the priest is to help the congregation relate on a deep level to the sacred texts and to see/feel how they apply to the challenges of the here and now.

7-05-2018: Another term for PGS would be "Yahwetion," from "Yahweh," the conventional modern spelling of the name of the god of ancient Israel, and the "tion" ending indicating a process, like evolution. This neologism advantageously steers people away from category errors like attempting to worship it, or appease it, or what have you.

The conventionally religious will complain that this would make prayer to God impossible, but not if prayer itself is re conceived as "auto socialization," following the educational theory of prayer. Then prayer becomes a fantasy conversation with anyone, living or dead, that you would like to have as a mentor, if it were possible.