#69. Storming South [Evolution]

EV

Red, theory; black, fact.

This is a theory of the final stages of human evolution, when the large brain expansion occurred.

At least, they did. Sorry, I don't belong to this species. The Linnaean binomial literally means "wise man." What would be the Latin for "wise guy"?

Homo sapiens: created by ice

H. sapiens appears to have arisen from Homo erectus over the last 0.8 million years due to climate instability in the apparent origin area, namely East Africa. During this time, Europe was getting glaciated every 0.1 million years because of the astrophysical Milankovitch cycle, a rhythm in the amount of eccentricity in the Earth's orbit due to the influence of the planet Jupiter.

However, I am thinking of the hominins who had settled in Europe (or Asia, it doesn't matter for this argument) during the interglacial periods (remember that H. erectus was a great disperser) and when the ice began advancing again, were now facing much worse cooling and drying than in Africa, and thus much greater selection pressures. At least during the last continental glaciation, the ice cap only extended to the Baltic Sea at the maximum, but long before the ice arrives, the land is tundra, which can support only a very thin human population. In any given glaciation, the number of souls per hectare the land could support was relentlessly declining in northern Europe/Asia, and eventually the residents had to get out of Dodge City and settle on land further south, almost certainly over the dead bodies of the former owners. This would have selected Europeans or Asians for warlike tendencies and warfaring skills, which explains a lot of human history. 

Our large brains

However, our large brains seem to be great at something else besides concocting Games of Thrones: that is, environment modification. It's a no-brainer that the first thing someone living in the path of a 2-km wall of ice needs is to keep from freezing to death, and this would have been the first really good reason to modify environments. Unlike chipping a stone axe, environment modification involves fabricating something bigger than the fabricator. Even a parka has to be bigger than you or you can't get into it. This plausibly would have required a larger brain to enable a qualitatively new ability: making something you can't see all at once when it is at working distance.

Our rhythmic evolution

After parkas, early northerners might have evolved enough association cortex (maybe on the next glaciation cycle) to build something a little bigger, like a tent or a lean-to. On the next cycle, they might have been able to pull off a decent longhouse made of wattle. On the next, a jolly good castle surrounded by cultivated lands and drainage ditches. These structures would have delayed the moment of decision when you have to go and take on the Pleistocene-era Low-brows to the south. This will buy you time to build up your numbers, and I understand that winning battles is very much a numbers game. Therefore, environment modification skill would have been selected for in tandem with making like army ants.

Where is the fossil evidence for this theory?

Why do we not find fossil evidence of all this in Europe or Asia? <05-19-2022: Actually, we do: the Neanderthals and Denisovans, who have been difficult to account for in terms of previous theories of human origins.> My scenario can be defended against the inconvenient fossil evidence for a human origin in East Africa in general terms, by citing the well known incompleteness of the fossil record and its many biases, but, of course, I want details. Note, however, what else is in East Africa: the Suez, a land bridge to both Europe and Asia via the Arabian tectonic block, which was created by plate tectonics near the end of the Miocene, thus antedating both H. sapiens and H. erectus. Not only can hominins disperse through it to other continents during interglacials, but they can come back in, fiercer and brainier than before, when the ice is advancing again, to then deposit their fossil evidence in the Rift Valley region of East Africa. The Eurasian backflow event of 3000 years ago may be a relatively recent example of this. The Isthmus of Suez is low-lying and thus easily drowned by the sea, but the probability of this was minimal at times of continental glaciation, when sea levels are minimal. I assume that early hominins expanded like a gas into whatever continent they could access. Increasing glaciation/tundrafication of that continent would have recompressed the "gas" southward, causing it to retrace its path, partly back into Africa. 

Pleistocene selection pressures

To reiterate, this process would have been accompanied by great mortality and therefore, potentially, much selection. Moreover, during the period we are considering, temperatures were declining most of the time; the plot of temperature versus time has a saw-tooth pattern, with long declines alternating with short warming events, and it is the declines that would have been the times of natural selection of hominins living at high latitudes.

Plebius sapiens.

A limestone block in Canada showing scratches left by stones
embedded in the underside of a continental glacier.
The rock has also been ground nearly flat by the same process. Scary.

Glaciated boulder by night. Have a nice interglacial.

# 59. Disaster Biology [evolution, evolutionary psychology]

EV     EP     

Red, theory; black, fact.

• The habitat is a unit of selection, leading to group selection.
• Much of evolution proceeds by an accumulation of founder effects, especially altruism in sexually reproducing species.
• Opportunities for colonization of recently-emptied habitats are ephemeral.
• Under disaster-prone conditions, this leads to selection pressure for migrant production and evolvability (i.e., a high rate of evolution, especially founder-effect evolution).
• Language diversification in humans is an evolvability adaptation.
• It works by preserving genetic founder effects from dilution by late-coming migrants, whose reproduction is held back by the difficulties of learning a new language. 
• Xenophobia and persistent ethnicity markers (PEMs) can be explained in the same way.
• The spread of linguistic and  PEM novelties in a population is predicted to be especially fast in newly colonized, previously empty habitats. <09-17-2020: Alternatively, the linguistic novelties may start as a thick patois developed by an oppressed group in the home habitat prior to becoming refugees, as a way to make plans under the noses of the oppressing group.>
•  Refugee-producing adaptations sub serving dispersal can be called "tough altruism."
• Populations producing more refugees are more likely to colonize further empty habitats, a selective advantage.
• Disaster biology may be what is conceptually missing from theories of the origin of life (abiogenesis). 01-02-2020: i.e., the forerunners of the first cells may have been spores.>
• Photo by Purnomo Capunk on Unsplash

#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.

#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.

#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.

#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.

#37. Two Kinds of War [evolutionary psychology, engineering, neuroscience]

EN     EP     NE     

Red, theory; black, fact.

3-17-2018: In my post "The Pilgrim and the Whale", I propose that much human conflict sub serves dispersal.

12-28-2017: There are probably two basic biological uses for human anger, the other one being an emergency brake on population increase that avoids Malthusian disasters by triggering wars. This kind of war ends life without being notably efficient in producing mass migration. This is the use discussed in my post "The Iatrogenic Conflicts of the Twentieth Century." Mention of the destruction of Coventry was struck out because it looks better suited to population reduction than to triggering mass migration.

3-12-2018: I have long wondered why the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seem to include two gentlemen both in charge of warlike matters. Why the apparent duplication? The above postscript may give the reason: one (the guy with the bow) represents wars of (absolute) depopulation and the other (the guy with the sword) represents wars of displacement (relative depopulation).

The Coventry Blitz did, however, produce so much mass migration into the countryside surrounding that city that it was an embarrassment for the British government, calling into question Britain’s willingness to fight. This got me thinking: was Coventry some kind of watershed, before which the conflict was of the displacement type, and afterward, of the depopulation type?

The facts bear this out, considering Nazi treatment of the Jews as a litmus test of the zeitgeist of that time. After coming to power in 1933, the Nazis aimed at forcing the Jews to emigrate, and by the outbreak of hostilities in September, 1939, 250,000 of Germany’s 437,000 Jews had done so. The Coventry Blitz was in November, 1940. The Holocaust began, in terms of men, women, and children all being targeted for execution, in August, 1941, nine months later. The German zeitgeist, and perhaps that of the world, seems to have shifted gears in the fall of 1940, aiming at depopulation rather than displacement. I am obviously assuming that the evolutionary, selectionist justification of the Holocaust given at the time, in forums such as the 1942 Wannsee conference, was a rationalization.

I conjecture that wars brought on by population pressure begin as the displacement type, and if this does not result in sufficient local reduction in population pressure after a certain time, the hostilities shift gears to the depopulation type of conflict. If human population is under PID [proportional-integral-differential] control by the subconscious, the event causing the shift could be the amount of signal accumulated on the integrator rising above some threshold. This may actually be a second threshold, with the first and lower threshold controlling the outbreak of a war of displacement.

A paradoxical outcome of Calhoun's overpopulation experiments on rodents can be explained in terms of such an integrator. By providing unlimited food and water to a founder population of rats or mice, with regular bedding changes and exclusion of predators and parasites, the rodents were allowed to increase their population to fabulous numbers. However, the rodents were given no extra space. As the population soared to incredible densities, all kinds of pathological behaviors appeared along with a great deal of violence. Birth rates plummeted after a "behavioral sink" developed, and remained low, never recovering, as the population decreased all the way to zero.

My interpretation of the behavioral sink is that it is integrator windup, a pathology of humanly engineered PID controllers, and possibly natural ones too. The signal accumulated on the integrator has been building for so long, and the population crash is so sudden, that not enough time is spent at population densities below set point to cancel the "control debt" on the integrator, so it continues to insanely command a zero birth rate even as the population is heading for zero.

George Santayana wrote that "Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." [source, Wiki quotes, accessed 06-11-2018] Sounds like integrator windup to me.

3-17-2018: To clean up some loose ends, let us postulate a third and highest threshold of the control debt, which, if crossed, leads to the human behavioral sink and the possible destruction of the human race due to essentially psychological causes. In the behavioral sink, I postulate that everyone would be a ZPG fanatic and unable to change without pharmacological help. (Good old booze? May not be that simple.) 

I myself may be a "ZPG fanatic", and produced in exactly this way, because I was born in 1953, just before suburbia became important, and may represent what most people in this country would now be had suburbia not been invented to take down the population pressure. At only 2 months from retirement age, I continue to be a virgin with no plans to change my ways, and I may be a straw in the wind, a harbinger of worse to come.

11-26-2019: I can testify from my own experience that the human behavioral sink is more like passive-aggressive personality disorder than anything else, but with particular attention to punishing the opposite sex by ignoring them.

3-22-2018: Correction: the modern suburbs were invented in London 200 years ago, but underwent explosive growth in North America after WWII. By 1950, half the American population was suburban.

#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?