#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 (acetylcholine) 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

#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.)

#46. The Goddesses of the Glacier [evolutionary psychology]

Sorry, not found on Unsplash. (Spirits are flying in bearing mukluks and a parka.)

EP

Red: theory; black, fact.

This post is about long hair, of all things (which I totally dig; I was in high school during the Sixties and the girls looked like Shetland ponies), and I will argue that humans evolved the trait to keep them warm during geologically recent continental glaciations. (Please pardon the teleological phrasing; I use it here only for the sake of brevity.)

Can having long hair really confer such a benefit under cold conditions? The anecdotal evidence supporting this idea seems abundant. For example, go to the site shown below

for a near-unanimous list of affirmative replies to the question: ‘Does long hair keep you warm?’ One respondent in particular (#32), from Sweden, seems to have exactly reproduced the method for ensuring this that must have been used in eras of glaciation, assuming that our distant forbears could at least make themselves simple parkas out of animal skins.

They would have supplemented this protection by tucking their long hair down inside the parka. Leaving it outside would have been good fashion but bad engineering, since the locks would have been quickly parted by the first gust of wind and precious, life-saving body heat lost.

I began this with mention of goddesses, but of course the males would have had long hair too, probably a meter long, in outrageous violation of Sixties cultural mainstream gender expectations concerning hair length. I can still hear my Dad fuming about the Beatles.

I find that this situation suddenly makes better aesthetic sense if you imagine this long hair as tousled in the males and smooth and perfect-looking in the females (and perhaps only in the portion showing above the neckline.) Seen this way, both males and females look gorgeous in the imagination and the aesthetic problem is solved. I call this the "rock-star solution." The females could have smoothed their hair by lubricating it with oil and brushing, and a brush is not hard to make. Meanwhile, the males would only need their fingers for cultivating a charming, insouciant look.

Of course, I am thinking here of Mick and Keith and the guys.

While moderns socially code gender as hair length, this parameter was unavailable to our glaciation-era forebears (the last glaciation maximum occurred 26,000 years ago) because they would have been unwilling to cut their hair, knowing at some level of insight that they needed it for survival and mating success. Therefore, they might have coded gender as hair smoothness as described above. 

I assume that these people were living in some glaciation "refugium," as such terrain is technically called, which is a fortuitously ice-free zone surrounded by continental glacier.

While writing this, I was struck by the amount of detailed information I was able to retrieve from my own aesthetic preferences, some of which would have evolved under stringent, cold-climate conditions to produce mate choices favoring traits with survival value. 

The heart may have its reasons that reason knoweth not, but reason is learning*.

11-26-2019 I have not mentioned beards yet and the main question there is why women do not have them. The answer seems to be that a long beard would interfere with breastfeeding, whereas long scalp hair can be pushed back. Moreover, women have more subcutaneous fat than men, so their thermoregulation problem in a cold climate would not be as severe. (Not to be outdone, my niece insists that she has a beard hair.  Go figure.)

*Based on a famous saying by the philosopher Blaise Pascal.

#44. Sunshine in Covey's Gap [evolutionary psychology, neuroscience]

EP     NE     

Red, theory; black, fact.

Who has not felt frustration at the difficulty and seeming impossibility of making a disagreeable emotion go away before we weaken and act it out, to our detriment? Techniques of true emotional control, i.e., making the bad feelings disappear rather than white-knuckle, open-ended resistance to acting them out, are not impossible, just non obvious. You just have to persuade yourself that this bad is good and believe it.

For the modern person, that second part, the believing, is difficult to achieve robustly if one is using religious solutions to the problem, the domain of soteriology (being "saved"), easier with psychoanalytical solutions, and, I am here to say, easiest of all with scientific solutions. "Believing," for me, means being prepared to bet your life on the truth of a proposition.

Steven Covey writes in "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" that between stimulus and [emotional] response, humans have, somewhat metaphorically, a "gap" in the causal chain and animals do not. In the gap, you find such things as imagination, self-awareness, conscience, and self will. He correctly lays tremendous emphasis on this point. George Santayana seems to have grasped this truth when he wrote: "Our dignity is not in what we do but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things." [source, Wiki quotes, accessed 11-06-2018]

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has even elucidated what could be the neural pathways that make Covey's gap possible. A direct pathway from the thalamus to the amygdala mediates the basic fear response but an indirect pathway that leads from thalamus to cerebral cortex to amygdala provides a more nuanced, intelligent amendment to the first response. Full cancellation of the direct pathway by the indirect would account for Covey's gap, and in principle, this could be done by a cortical relay through the inhibitory interstitial neurons of the amygdala that terminate on the amygdalar projection cells.

The doctrines of classical religion probably lead to such cancellation of emotions such as hate and fear by activating the same circuits that are used by a parent to reassure a needlessly fearful infant.

Apparently, classical religion is all about getting people to do the right things for the wrong reasons. When the discipline of evolutionary psychology is sufficiently developed, we can look forward to the age when people do the right things for the right reasons.

#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.

#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.

#36. The Thought Process Through the Ages [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

2-01-2018: An alternative title of this post could be: "Where religion possibly fits in the big scheme of things."

If politics and science seem like strange bedfellows, consider that ancient rulers used to consult astrologers before making major decisions.

In the beginning, there was theology. At some point, intellectual endeavor split into wrestling with reality questions vs. morality questions. Then they had to figure out when to go with your gut and when not to.

Thought sources	Inputs	Outputs (all insights):
		Reality (What is)	Blend	Morality (Thus…)
PGSd+sensory data	Emotion	politicsc		religionc
	Blend	astrologyb ^ v	< theologya >	Jewish lawb ^ v
Education+sensory data	Reason	sciencec		lawc

a. primordial condition

b. output distinction added

c. input distinction added

d. “post-zygotic gamete selection,” amateur theory of accelerated evolution purporting to explain God. See “Emotions” post on this blog.

2-23-2018: Just as emotion must not be allowed to contaminate scientific thought, is it equally true that reason must not be allowed to contaminate religious thought? Is failure to observe this restriction the cause of religious schisms?

08-03-2019: Thought-like processes dominated by emotion are believed to exist, e.g., the "emotional processing" of traumatic memories.

#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.

#28. The Origin of Consciousness [neuroscience]

NE

Red, theory; black, fact.

After perusing Gideon Rosenblatt's blog at the prompting of Google, I finally saw the need for this post.

I theorize that we begin life conscious only of our own emotions. Then the process of classical conditioning, first studied in animals, brings more and more of our environment into the circle of our consciousness, causing the contents of consciousness to become enriched in spatial and temporal detail. Thus, you are now able to be conscious of these words of mine on the screen. However, each stroke of each letter of each word of mine that now reaches your consciousness does so because, subjectively, it is "made of" pure emotion, and that emotion is yours.

Some analogies come to mind. Emotion as the molten tin that the typesetter pours into the mold, the casting process being classical conditioning and the copy the environmental data reported by our sense organs. Emotion as the bulk on one side of a fractal line and sensory data the bulk on the other side. Emotion as an intricately ramifying tree-like structure by which sensory details can send excitation down to the hypothalamus at the root and thus enter consciousness.

The status of "in consciousness" can in principle affect the cerebral cortex via the projections to cortex from the histaminergic tuberomamillary nucleus of the hypothalamus. Histamine is known to have an alerting effect on cortex, but to call it "alerting" may be to grossly undersell its significance. It may carry a consolidation signal  for declarative, episodic, and flash memory. Not for a second do I suppose all of that to be packed into the hippocampus, rather than being located in the only logical place for it: the vast expanse of the human cerebral cortex.

#27. Why Organized Religion? Theory Two [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

My last post about proxy natural selection (PNS) has directed me to emphasize emotion more in seeking explanations for human behavior. I now think of emotions as an "endophenotype," to use a term from functional magnetic resonance imaging, that provides a useful stepping stone from evolutionary arguments to explanations of our daily lives. I recently applied this insight to obtaining a second explanation of religion, alternative or parallel to the first one that I give in a previous post.

What is the mood or feel as you enter a place of worship and participate in the ceremonies conducted there? More than anything else, the mood is one of great reverence, as though one is in the presence of the world's most powerful king. Kings are supposed to "represent their race." However, I want to translate that statement into a sociobiological function assignment. My discussion "Proxy Natural Selection from the Inside" suggests a problem: if the emotional outlines of people's behavior is being partly randomized in each generation by recombination-type mutations, a consistent moral code seems impossible if we assume that morality comes mostly from peoples' inborn patterns of emotional reactivity, that is, the sum total of everyones' betes noir. The purpose of a king may be to find or at least coincide with societies' moral center of gravity, around which a formal, if temporary, moral code can be constructed. In a complex society, everyone must be "on the same page" for efficient interaction. 

The same problem no doubt recurs each time organisms come together to form a colony, or super-organism: the conflict between the need of a colony for coordination of colonists and the need of evolution for random variability. Such variability will inevitably affect the formulation and interpretation of the coordinating messages that the colonists exchange, like all their other inborn characteristics. 

Kingship comes the corrupting influence of personal power, leading to destructive, tyrannical governments. Replacing a real king with a pretend-king named "God" would seem to be the solution that accounts for organized religion, but then one loses all flexibility, the flexibility that goes with having a flesh-and-blood king who can change his predecessor's laws based on current popular sentiment.

However, human nature may well have a core-and-shell structure, with an "unchanging" core surrounded by a slowly changing shell. The former would be the species-specific objective function previously alluded to in post #16, and produced by species-replacement group selection within the genus, and the latter would be due to PNS, and would represent the stratagems hit upon by our ancestors to meet the demands of the objective function in our time and place. This shell part may account for cultural differences between countries. The core may be implemented in the hypothalamus of the brain, whereas the shell may be implemented in the limbic system. The core, being unchanging, could be taught by organized religion, whereas the shell could be codified by the more flexible institution of government. Though the core is unchanging overall, specific individuals will harbor variations in it due to point mutations (not part of PNS), necessitating the standardizing role of religion. Synaptic plasticity would then be used to cancel the point-mutational variation in the objective function.

This core  consists of four pillars, or themes: genetic diversity, memetic diversity, altruism, and dispersal. Our energetic investment in obtaining each item is to be optimized. To produce this, the church of my acquaintance is continually emphasizing, respectively, tolerance, creating beautiful things, charity, and justice. It's almost too neat, especially if we adopt the deeply cynical-sounding position that the demand for "justice" only polarizes groups to the point of schism and diaspora.

#25. Proxy Natural Selection from the Inside [evolutionary psychology, genetics]

EP    GE    

Red, theory; black, fact.

My first post on proxy natural selection (PNS) left open some questions, such as what it should feel like, if anything, when one is fulfilling the species objective function and being deemed "proxy-fit" by one's own hypothalamus.

I conclude that it's just what you would think: you feel joy and/or serenity. Joy is one of Ekman's six basic universal human emotions, the others being fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise. I think that emotions collectively are the operations of the highest-level human behavioral program. (That is, the program in its broadest outlines.) The unpleasant emotions force you to get off the couch until they are taken care of, and joy lets you get back on. Thus, the unpleasant four are the starting emotions, and joy is the stopping emotion. 

Surprise may be a meta-emotion that tells you that your threshold for experiencing one of the other emotions is too high, and immediately lowers it. I also think that each activation of an emotion tends to lower the threshold for activating it next time, which implies a positive feedback loop capable of changing the personality to suit suddenly changed circumstances, especially if the emotion eventually begins issuing with no trigger at all.

To relate this to the mechanism of PNS, the crossing-over events that went into making the sperm cell that made you would theoretically affect brain development more than anything else, specifically connecting some random stimulus to one of the unpleasant primary emotions. This creates your temperament, and thus your personality, which is the unique quality which you have to offer the world, and on which you are being tested by history. If the actions to which your own, special bete noir propel you are what the species objective function is looking for, you succeed, feel joy and serenity, and experience an altered methylation status of the DNA in your spermatogonia, if you are male, which (I conjecture) suppresses further crossing over in the manufacture of your own sperm, so that your personality type breeds true, which is what the population needs. 

PNS is quickie evolution to respond to challenges that come and go on less than a multi-thousand generation timescale, and I conjecture that it explains the complexities of sexual reproduction. You may object that trees, for example, have no behavior, much less personalities, and yet they have sexual reproduction. However, trees probably adapt quickly not by behavioral change, but by changes in their chemistry. The chemistry in question would be the synthesis of pesticidal mixtures located in the central vacuole of each plant cell. In terms of such mixtures, each tree should be slightly unique, an easily testable prediction.

Here is my own self-analysis in terms of PNS theory. My special emotional novelty that is potentially my gift to the world is a morbid fear of social rejection. This has motivated much more than the usual self-criticism of my own creative productions before they are communicated to others, for fear of rejection, leading to the kind of thing you are now reading. Social rejection/criticism hits me like a wall of flame that burns for days, or like some kind of rays coming out of the other person's head. The rejection that goes with the dating game has made it intolerable to me, leading to a lifelong celibacy that has freed all my resources for scientific pursuits. 

My father was a general in the Canadian Armed Forces, and was most unlike this, but my older brother takes after him somewhat. What happened to sour my father's life so radically before my birth in 1953, so that his recombinotype (coined word) no longer bred true? I conjecture that it was the failure of the defeat of Nazi Germany to produce a true, lasting peace, only ushering in the nuclear cold war with the USSR. With this, "God" was telling us: "Don't study war no more."

Each of the four unpleasant "starting" emotions may sub serve one of the four pillars of the species objective function already listed in The intermind: Engine of History?. Thus: sadness, altruism; disgust, genetic diversity (due to point mutations; what is motivated here is the screening of such novelties, screening always being the expensive part); fear, memetic diversity (or motivating prescreening of memetic novelties); anger, dispersal. Each of these emotions seems to have another use, in preserving the life of the individual, as opposed to the entire species. Thus: sadness, unfavorable energy balance; disgust, steering one away from concentrations of harmful bacteria; fear, avoidance of injury and death; anger, driving away competitors for food and mates. 

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

EV    GE    

Red, theory; black, fact.

2-06-2017

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

11-20-2017

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

2-06-2017

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

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

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

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

2-07-2017

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

7-29-2017

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

8-18-2017

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

Stress-induced recombination and the mechanism of evolvability

by Weihao Zhong; Nicholas K. Priest

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

permalink:

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

Abstract:

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

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

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

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