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

EP     PO     

Red, theory; black, fact.

Seen in a hospital ward.

Updated 10-30-2024

The trickster type may really be a penetration tester. 

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

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

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

A biological precedent for penetrations testing?

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

Evolution of the trickster

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

A tangent about our evolutionary context

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

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

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

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

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

Paradigm: dispersal

Population pressure and dispersal

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

Do we have an instinct to disperse?

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

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

Now here's my plan

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

Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash

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

EV

Red, theory; black, fact.

KIRK MUST DIE! (cut to commercial.)

Astronomical observations and the Fermi paradox

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

My hypothesis is this:

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

Biospheres may not be permanent 

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

Biochallenge!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evil-ution

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

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

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

May 21, 2022 derecho-storm damage in Ottawa.

Wildfire smoke seen in Ottawa, Jun 2023.

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

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

PO     EP     

Red, theory; black, fact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by JJ Jordan on Unsplash

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

PO     EP     

Red, theory; black, fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#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.

#22. The Cogs of Armageddon [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

1-27-2017

This is a "just-so story" about how I believe everyday human behavior eventually accomplishes the all-important biological function of dispersal for the human race. A future post will attempt to explain how the "just-so story" got written in terms of natural selection and possible faster-acting proxies thereof needed by organisms with long generation times.

Dispersal is things like dandelions shedding airborne seeds, slime molds developing into spore cases on stalks and releasing the spores into the wind, territorial systems of birds and mammals forcing the unlanded young to seek widely for their own territories, and humans going into space because our science fiction writers keep scaring us about the possibility of meteor crashes wiping out life on Earth. To paraphrase the latter, a way to avoid extinction, long-term, is not putting all your eggs in one basket, geographically speaking.

The slime mold dictyostelium is triggered into its dispersal program by the food supply running short; I will adopt the assumption that the human dispersal program is also triggered by the end of the good times, that is, the price of bread rising relative to wages.

I conjecture that human neural pathways potentiate aggression when the hard times come, but of an elaborate kind adapted for ensuring efficient dispersal (i.e., with minimal loss of life). It begins with a two-person feud of the sort illustrated in cultural references too numerous to mention. In Canada, where I live, a cough accompanied by an angry expression plays the role of the instigation. The arbitrary stimulus, made offensive by some piece of Pavlovian conditioning, is traded back and forth with rapidly increasing energy. The process is remarkably like flirting, not surprising since the ultimate purpose has commonalities with reproduction--but of an entire society. 

However, the emotional component is strongly threatening rather than rewarding, because the participants must be induced to seek allies, which people do when threatened, until all of society is eventually polarized. The acts of provocation being traded back and forth become progressively more outrageous, as they must, to keep the polarization process going. Eventually, one side gets the upper hand and forces the other to flee.

The result is a diaspora, i.e., dispersal. Because of the long polarization process, an entire group is expelled, not single individuals one at a time. Thus, members of such a group can assist each other to survive and relocate, thereby reducing the mortality associated with dispersal, thereby making the dispersal event more efficient in terms of number of people relocated. The group who flees is then seen by the international community as the blameless victim, and the group who stays is seen as the unprincipled aggressor. This tends to elicit a sheltering of the refugees and an intimidation of the "aggressor," who is deterred from pressing his advantage, that is, pursuing the refugees and slaughtering them to the last man, which is what each side would dearly like to do to the other by this point. This, again, is an efficiency from the point of view of producing dispersal.

However, if each side is continually threatening the other, why don't they flee each other's presence during the very early stages? The answer seems to be that humans have a reflex that converts feeling threatened into a wish to injure the threatening party, possibly a behavioral leftover from some earlier adaptation, such as an anti-predation defense; to injure, you have to stick around. (Leftovers such as these form the building blocks of future just-so plots.)

Finally, settled refugees usually do not integrate completely into the host society, instead forming ethnic neighborhoods. This increases the resemblance to an entire society reproducing itself. However, the growth phase following reproduction in individuals seems to be lacking at the society level. However, being seen as ethnic by the host society, due to slow integration, could improve individual-level reproductive success of refugees because of disassortative mate-choice effects evolved to favor genes that produce dispersal.

2-24-2017

The dispersal-producing dynamic just outlined is fantastically powerful, as it must be to overcome all the reasons you would not leave your homeland forever at some arbitrary time: expense, risk of mortality in transit, opportunity costs, temporary loss of livelihood, need to learn a new language and customs, vulnerability to exploitation in the new country, etc., etc.

This dynamic is basically what theologians call evil, for which I propose the less judgmental, substitute term "dispersalism." If this is truly an insight, it should have a liberating effect on your life, even if you just remember that one word, but with the price of always being population-conscious: always trying to see what is happening at the population/zeitgeist level, and reading the paper every day at the very least.

At least one "just-so story" could probably be written for each of the pillars of the human species-specific objective function mentioned in previous posts, these being as follows: dispersal, genetic diversity, memetic diversity, and altruism. (The latter has not been mentioned until now.) Each of these must be optimized, not blindly maximized, for each comes at a cost. In terms of neurobiology, each pillar is probably a family of functionally related likes and dislikes wired up in the hypothalamus, but not obviously related to individual-level survival or reproduction.

#17. Hell's Kitchen [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

Ever since the assassination of JFK in '63, people of my generation have been wondering why the Americans kill off their best and brightest. It's not just the Americans, of course. The same thing happened to Gandhi and Our Savior no less.

I think a homey kitchen metaphor nails it. Once you have emptied the milk carton of all its milk, you can use it to dispose of the grease. That is, by the logic of "The Insurance of the Heart," once tremendous acclaim has been conferred on someone's name, the physical person no longer matters for the purposes of enhancing the name their descendents will inherit, and so can safely be used to draw the fire of the genetic undesirables; the resulting tremendous indignation will confer bad odor on the name of said undesirable for quite long enough to eradicate their meh genes in all copies.

Thus, Booth's genes were eradicated to make way for Lincoln's, and Oswald's genes were eradicated to make way for Kennedy's, without overall change in population density.

If the intermind could be said to have thoughts, this is what they would be like. Clearly, it's not God.

#16. The Intermind, Engine of History? [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

9-21-2016

This post is a further development of the ideas in the post, "What is intelligence? DNA as knowledge base." It was originally published 9-21-2016 and extensively edited 10-09-2016 with references added 10-11-2016 and 10-30-2016. Last modified: 10-30-2016.

In "AviApics 101" and "The Insurance of the Heart," I seem to be venturing into human sociobiology, which one early critic called "An outbreak of neatness." With the momentum left over from "Insurance," I felt up for a complete human sociobiological theory, to be created from the two posts mentioned.

However, what I wrote about the "genetic intelligence" suggests that this intelligence constructs our sociobiology in an ad hoc fashion, by rearranging a knowledge base, or construction kit, of "rules of conduct" into algorithm-like assemblages. This rearrangement is (See Deprecated, Part 7) blindingly fast by the standards of classical Darwinian evolution, which only provides the construction kit itself, and presumably some further, special rules equivalent to a definition of an objective function to be optimized. The ordinary rules translate experiences into the priming of certain emotions, not the emotions themselves, 

Thus, my two sociobiological posts are best read as case studies of the products of the genetic intelligence. I have named this part the intermind, because it is intermediate in speed between classical evolution and learning by operant conditioning. (All three depend on trial-and error.) The name is also appropriate in that the intermind is a distributed intelligence, acting over continental, or a least national, areas. If we want neatness, we must focus on its objective function, which is simply whatever produces survival. It will be explicitly encoded into the genes specifying the intermind, (For more on multi-tier, biological control systems with division of labor according to time scale, see "Sociobiology: the New Synthesis," E. O. Wilson, 1975 & 2000, chapter 7.)

Let us assume that the intermind accounts for evil, and that this is because it is only concerned with survival of the entire species and not with the welfare of individuals. Therefore, it will have been created by group selection of species. (Higher taxonomic units such as genus or family will scarcely evolve because the units that must die out to permit this are unlikely to do so, because they comprise relatively great genetic and geographical diversity.* However, we can expect adaptations that facilitate speciation. Imprinted genes may be one such adaptation, which might enforce species barriers by a lock-and-key mechanism that kills the embryo if any imprinted gene is present in either two or zero active copies.) Species group selection need act only on the objective function used by epigenetic trial-and-error processes.

In these Oncelerian times, we know very well that species survival is imperiled by loss of range and by loss of genetic diversity. Thus, the objective function will tend to produce range expansion and optimization of genetic diversity. My post "The Insurance of the Heart" concluded with a discussion of "preventative evolution," which was all about increasing genetic diversity. My post "AviApics 101" was all about placing population density under a rigid, negative feedback control, which would force excess population to migrate to less-populated areas, thereby expanding range. Here we see how my case studies support the existence of an intermind with an objective  function as described above.

However, all this is insufficient to explain the tremendous cultural creativity of humans, starting at the end of the last ice age with cave paintings, followed shortly thereafter by the momentous invention of agriculture. The hardships of the ice age must have selected genes for a third, novel component, or pillar, of the species objective function, namely optimization of memetic diversity. Controlled diversification of the species memeplex may have been the starting point for cultural creativity and the invention of all kinds of aids to survival. Art forms may represent the sensor of a feedback servomechanism by which a society measures its own memeplex diversity, measurement being necessary to control.

A plausible reason for evolving an intermind is that it permits larger body size, which leads to more internal degrees of freedom and therefore access to previously impossible adaptations. For example, eukaryotes can phagocytose their food; prokaryotes cannot. However, larger body size comes at the expense of longer generation time, which reduces evolvability. A band of high frequencies in the spectrum of environmental fluctuations therefore develops where the large organism has relinquished evolvability, opening it to being out competed by its smaller rivals. 

The intermind is a proxy for classical evolution that fills the gap, but it needs an objective function to provide it with its ultimate gold standard of goodness of adaptations. Species-replacement group selection makes sure the objective function is close to optimal. This group selection process takes place at enormously lower frequencies than those the intermind is adapting to, because if the timescales were  too similar, chaos would result. For example, in model predictive control, the model is updated on a much longer cycle than are the predictions derived from it.

12-25-2016

Today, when I was checking to see if I was using the word "cathexis" correctly (I wasn't), I discovered the Freudian term "collective unconscious," which sounds close to my "intermind" concept.

* 3-12-2018

I now question this argument. Why can't there be as many kinds of group selection as taxonomic levels? Admittedly, the higher-level processes would be mind-boggling in their slowness, but in evolution, there are no deadlines.

#15. The Insurance of the Heart [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

8-29-2016

We live in an uncertain world, the best reason to buy insurance while you can. Insurance is too good a trick for evolution to have missed. When food is plentiful, as it now is in my country, people get obese, as they are now doing here, so that they can live on their fat during possible future hard times. They don't do this consciously; it's in their genes.

However, eating has only an additive effect on your footprint on society's demand for resources; how many kids you have affects your footprint multiplicatively. Thus, the effectiveness of biological insurance taken out in children foregone during times of plenty would be greater than that taken out in food consumed. Such a recourse exists (See Deprecated, Part 8); how well and long remembered the family name you bequeath to your children affects your footprint exponentially. (I assume that a good or bad "name" affects the reproductive success of all your descendants having that name until you are finally forgotten.) Compared to exponential returns, everything else is chump change. ("Who steals my purse steals trash." - Shakespeare)

There remains the problem of food going to waste during times of plenty because social forces prevent a quick population increase. I conjecture that the extra energy available is invested by society in contests of various sorts (think of the Circus Maximus during the heyday of ancient Rome) that act as a proxy to evolutionary selection pressure, whereby the society accelerates it's own evolution. Although natural selection pressure is maximal during the hard times, relying on these to do all your evolving for you can make you extinct; better to do some "preventative evolution" ahead of time.

Postscript 3

Since future environmental demands are partly unforeseeable, a good strategy would be to accelerate one's evolution in multiple directions, keeping many irons in the fire. Indeed, in the Olympics just concluded, thirty-nine sports were represented.

The power of these contests is maximized by using the outcomes as unconditioned stimuli that are associated with the family names of the winners and losers: the conditioned stimuli. In this way, one acquires a good or bad "name" that will affect the reproductive success of all who inherit it, an exponential effect. To ground this discussion biologically, it must be assumed that the contests are effective in isolating carriers of good or bad genes (technically, alleles), and that the resulting "name" is an effective proxy for natural selection in altering the frequency of said genes. To keep the population density stable during all this, winners must be balanced by losers. The winners are determined and branded in places like the ball diamond, and the losers are determined and branded in the courts.

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

PO     EN     EP     

Red, theory; black, fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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