#78. My Thinking on Evolutionary Psychology: Summary to Date

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Darwin's first diagram of evolution

The behavioral innovations occurring in the evolutionary sequence leading to ourselves may have been, in chronological order:

• H. habilis:  tool manufacturing and gender roles.
• H. erectus: systemic refugee production, dispersal, ethnicity, and language.
• Early H. sapiens: warfare, shelter building, and tricksterism.
• Late H. sapiens: siege resistance and religion.

General hypotheses: 1) The earlier the innovation, the less modifiable it will be; 2) The dominant neuromodulators that organize the innovations emerging post-H. habilis will be noradrenalin (primordial organizer of responses to intraspecific competition) and serotonin (primordial organizer of responses to predation). 3)  Siege resistance is the adaptive form of the corresponding failure mode siege mentality.

Picture credit: Wiki Commons

#76. Next Niche [evolution]

EV

Red, theory; black, fact

Safdie’s Habitat 67 in Montreal 

In terms of our evolution, where did Homo sapiens come from and where are we going? The fossil evidence shows that we evolved from a wandering big-game hunter called Homo erectus. Where are we going? What shall be our next ecological niche? 

Reef former.

Examples of reef formers are the species of coral polyp that built the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Think of such a structure transposed to a land environment and covered in solar panels like the leaves on a tree, and that, I think, is our distant future. The overall form would be designed to maximize the sum of wind and solar energy harvested per year.

Multiple works of science fiction have predicted something like this, such as Asimov’s pre-collapse Trantor, or the world of JG Ballard’s “Build-Up.” 

However, a reef does not cover an entire planet as in those imaginings, only those places where all its necessities of life are available. The non-reef-forming descendants of H. sapiens would occupy some or all of the remaining land area.

Photo by philippe collard on Unsplash

#72. The Restricted Weathering Theory of Abiogenesis [chemistry, evolution]

EV   CH

Red, theory; black, fact

Urban lichen in the original ecological niche

Starting at the Start

When the early Earth, which was initially molten, had cooled sufficiently to acquire a solid crust and allow liquid water to accumulate on the surface, the formation of the oceans presumably began.

The Original Energy Source: Weathering

Seawater forms from steam outgassing from volcanic vents, which simultaneously emit acid gasses such as hydrochloric acid. Therefore, the first rain would have been highly acidic. In the normal course of events, volcanic rain falls on surface rocks that contain sufficient alkalinity to completely neutralize the acid, contributing cations such as sodium in the process and producing salt water. 

Key Original Difference

However, shortly after the formation of the Earth’s crust, the surface rocks may have been mostly encapsulated in carbonaceous pyrolysis residues originating from carbon-bearing gasses in the atmosphere. How is the acid rain supposed to get to the rocks?

The Germ of an Idea

I postulate that sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn’t, leading to a scenario of nascent crust covered in interconnected puddles in which a broad range of pHs were simultaneously represented. At the connecting points, a pH gradient would have existed, which recalls the pH gradient across the mitochondrial membrane that powers ATP synthesis. So, that's basically my angle.

Second-iteration Theory

More simply, a lump of lava coated in a capsule of pyrolysis residue and immersed in acid rainwater will have a proton gradient across the capsule with the correct direction to model the inner mitochondrial membrane with its enclosed matrix.

The carbon-bearing gasses in the atmosphere would have been methane, carbon monoxide, and the result of their combination with water (formaldehyde),  nitrogen (cyanide and cyanogen), and sulfur (DMSO, only plausible), all triggered by solar ultraviolet. This suggests that the pyrolysis residues will contain sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen heteroatoms, as does coal. An imaginary pore through the capsule will be lined with such heteroatoms, which are candidates for playing the role of the arginine, lysine, aspartate, and glutamate residues in the ATP synthase catalytic site. Protonation-deprotonation reactions would be available for powering the formation of polyphosphate (a plausible ATP precursor) from orthophosphate. The conformational changes so important in the modern ATP synthase do not appear to be available in this primordial system, so we need to demonstrate the presence of an equivalent. Conceivably, the phosphorus-rich chemicals diffuse up and down in the pore, producing proton transport as they do so that is linked to phosphate condensation reactions. Judging by the modern ATP synthase, coordination of phosphate to magnesium ions may also be part of the mechanism. Mafic rocks such as basalt, a likely early surface rock, are rich in magnesium.

Third-iteration Theory

The flux of acid through the pore will dissolve orthophosphate out of some minerals in the rock such as apatite. If we suppose that the pore is lined with carboxylic acid groups modelling glutamate and aspartate side chains, then at some depth in the pore the pH in the pH gradient will equal the pKa of the acid, and the acid groups will spend half their time protonated and half ionized, resulting in general acid-base catalysis in a narrow zone in the pore. Magnesium-complexed orthophosphate will be catalytically converted to an equilibrium mixture containing some pyrophosphate in this zone and then proceed to diffuse out the exterior opening of the pore before it can be converted back. As a result, the condensing agent pyrophosphate will be available in the early oceans for catalyzing the formation of organic macromolecules such as early proteins and nucleic acids, which are forerunners of important building blocks of modern life forms. 

The efficiency of the pyrophosphate synthesis would be enhanced by a high phosphate concentration, which would be due to the restricted, under-film spaces in which the weathering processes were occurring.

Fourth-iteration Theory

The gradual expansion of the under-film weathered pockets eventually undermines the local pyrolysis film, causing a flake to detach. The remaining rock surface will be largely coated in the first organic polymers created by condensing agents at low temperature. The process then repeats, leading to successive generations of biofilm creation and detachment. At this point, an evolution-like biofilm selection process can be postulated. Polymer chain elongation from outer layer to inner layer would be likely. The outermost sub-layer will be at acidic pHs, which will cleave the outermost polymer into fragments. Some of these fragments will diffuse inward to the polymerization zone and influence events there, leading to a crude form of heredity. The programmed insertion of abscission points would have been an early development, and these may have prefigured the base pairing of modern polynucleotides. The sand produced as a byproduct of rock weathering will end up enmeshed in the polymer and will come off at abscission. 

Fifth-iteration Theory

Could all this happen inside narrow fissures in the rock? Not likely, because the pH gradient would be present only at the opening, a much smaller niche than the area under a surface film. However, the in-fissure microenvironment would be at alkaline pHs, where alkali-requiring reactions would be possible. An example would be the formose synthesis of C5 and C6 sugars from formaldehyde. A C5 sugar, ribose, is an essential ingredient in RNA synthesis. Fissures opening into the under-film spaces could supply sugars to the polymerization zone.

#68. A Tripartite Genetic Code [genetics]

GE

Red, theory; black, fact

The filamentous alga Cladophora.

There are three genetic codes, not one. Conventional thinking holds that there is just one code, which encodes the amino acid sequence of proteins into DNA. Here are the two new ones:

A morphology code for the multicellular level

In the context of a growing embryo, control of the orientation of mitosis is arguably at the origin of organ and body morphology. For example, all cell division planes parallel will result in a filamentous organism like Cladophora. Planes free to vary in only one angle (azimuth or elevation) will produce a sheet of cells, a common element in vertebrate embryology. Programmed variation in both angles can produce a complex 3D morphology like the vertebrate skeleton. Thus we begin to see a genetic code for morphology, distinct from the classical genetic code that specifies amino acid sequences. 

The nucleus is tethered by cytoskeletal elements such as lamin, nesprin, actin, and tubulin to focal adhesions on the cell membrane, non-rotatably, so that all angle information can be referred to the previous mitotic orientation.

Observational Support 

The nucleus is usually spherical or ovoid and is about ten times more rigid than the surrounding cytoplasm, features which may be related to the demands of the morphology read-out process. Consistent with this, blood is a tissue without a morphology, and the nucleated cells of the blood have nuclei that are mostly irregular and lobate. The lymphocytes found in the blood have round nuclei, however, but these cells commonly form aggregates that can be considered to possess a simple morphology.

A morphology code for the single-cell level in cells with nuclei

A third genetic code would be a code for single-cell morphology, and cell morphology can be very elaborate, especially in neurons. This will probably involve storing information about cytoskeleton morphology in DNA. Neurons express especially many long noncoding RNAs (lncRNA), so I suggest that these transcripts can carry morphological information about cytoskeletal elements. This information could be read out by using the lncRNA as a template on which to assemble the cytoskeletal element, then removing the template by enzymic hydrolysis or by some enzyme analogous to a helicase. Greater efficiencies could be achieved by introducing some analog of transfer RNAs. LncRNAs are already implicated in transcriptional regulation, and this might be done indirectly by an action on the protein scaffolding of the chromatin. Moreover, as predicted, lncRNAs are abundant in cytoplasm as well as in the nucleus, and the cytoplasm contains the most conspicuous cytoskeletal structures. The template idea is similar to but goes beyond the already-established idea that lncRNAs act as scaffolds for ribonucleoprotein complexes. Since cytoskeletal elements are made from monomers of few kinds, we would expect the template to be highly repetitious, and lncRNAs are decidedly repetitious. Indeed, transposons and tandem repeats are thought to drive lncRNA evolution. See https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-23334-1, in Results, subsection: "Repetitive sequences in lncRNAs," p. 4 in the PDF.

Why Three Codes?

The issue driving the evolution of the two additional genetic codes may be parsimony in coding (advantageously fewer and shorter protein-coding genes).

Disclaimer 

This next paragraph was written for researchers, not for patients or those at risk for cancer who may be seeking a cure outside the medical mainstream. 

Cancer Research May Be Held Back by the One-Code View

Mutations in the proposed cytoskeletal genome could be at the origin of cancer. Cancer cells will proliferate in a culture dish past the point of confluence, unlike healthy cells. If the cytoskeleton is required to sense confluence, as seems likely, a defective cytoskeleton incapable of performing this function could lead directly to uncontrolled growth and thus cancer. It is not clear how the immune system could detect a mutation like this, since no amino acid sequence is affected. Possibly, a special evolved system or reflex exists that telegraphs such mutations to the cell surface where the immune system has a chance of detecting them. The clustering of antigens on the cell surface is already known to enhance immunogenicity, so this hypothetical system may output a clustering signal on the cell surface that talks to the cytoskeletons of circulating immune-system cells. Alternatively, the immune-system cells may directly interrogate the body cells’ ability to detect confluence. For these ideas to apply to blood-borne cells such as leukocytes, the failure event would have to happen during maturation in the bone marrow while the cell is still part of a solid tissue.

YAP1 protein, which promotes cell proliferation when localized to the nucleus, may be gated through the nuclear pores by some kind of operculum attached to the lamin component of the nuclear envelope. The operculum would move down from the pore, thus unblocking it, when a region of nuclear membrane flattens in response to a localized loss of tensile forces in the cytoskeleton. The flattening causes a local excess of lamin area, which leads to buckling and delamination, which is coupled to operculum movement. A mutation that makes the operculum leaky to YAP1 when closed could lead to cancer. This mutation could be in an lncRNA that scaffolds key components of the nuclear membrane’s supporting proteins. A more subtle mechanism would be for the buckling and delamination to happen on a molecular scale and lead to a uniform regional increase in the porosity of the lamin layer, which would gate YAP1 permeation.

Loss of tissue adjacent to the cell would cause a loss of cytoskeletal tension on the nucleus not only on that side of the nucleus, but also on the side opposite. If these two slack regions directly dictate centriole placement on the next round of mitosis, then the new cell will automatically be placed to fill in the tissue hole. (This may constitute an important mechanism of wound healing and suggests a link between morphology and carcinogenesis.)

Evolutionary Considerations 

The multicellular morphology code was postulated to arise from precise control of the orientation of the plane of mitotic division. It now seems likely that this control will be implemented via bespoke cytoskeletal elements, since complex single-cell morphology and its genetic code probably preceded complex multicellular morphology in evolution. 

Mechanism of Multicellular Morphology Readout

These bespoke elements might be inserted into a cytoskeletal apparatus surrounding the nucleus that has commonalities with devices such as gimbals and armillary spheres. The centrioles are likely to be key components of this apparatus. Each centriole may create a hoop of microtubules encircling the nucleus, and the two hoops would be at right angles, like the centrioles themselves when parked outside the nucleus between cell divisions. During mitosis, in-plane revolution of one of the hoops through 180 degrees would be responsible for separating the centrioles. After this, both centrioles must be on this same hoop. Alternatively, the centrioles may move by synthesis at the new locations followed by disassembly of the old centrioles. Each hoop then forms a circular track for adjusting azimuth and elevation, respectively, relative to anchor points left over from the previous round of mitosis. The bespoke elements would lie along these tracks and function as variable-length shims. The remainder of the apparatus would translate these lengths into angles. The inner hoop would pass through two protein eyelets connected to the outer hoop and the outer hoop would pass through an eyelet connected to the anchor. The shims would fix the along-track distances between an inner eyelet and the outer eyelet and between an inner eyelet and a centriole (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. A hypothetical cytoskeletal apparatus for orienting mitosis; C, centrioles; zigzag, shims; dotted, a nuclear diameter; double line, anchor to cell membrane; EL, elevation; AZ, azimuth 

Top picture credit: Cladophora flavescens, Phycologia Britannica, William Henry Harvey, 1851.

#67. Extended Theory of Mind [evolution]

EV

Red, theory; black, fact

Where is human evolution going at the moment? That is a good question. Let’s look around, then. I am writing this in a submarine sandwich joint where one sandwich maker is serving two customers. The radio brings in a ballad by a lady vocalist at a tempo suggestive of sex. Now a DJ (Mauler or Rush) is amusing the listeners with some patter. The window shows that rush hour is over and only a few home-bound stragglers are in the street. If I crane my neck, I can see the green beacon on the new electric charging station. 

That will do for starters. Sandwich maker, pro singer, DJ, bureaucrat, electrician—I couldn’t do any of that. We are a society of specialists, and such societies feature differentiation with integration. So, how far back does this go? At most, nine millennia; about 450 generations. Time enough for evolution? It doesn’t matter; we want direction here, not distance.

Contemporary natural selection of humans will therefore reward differentiability and integratability.

Differentiability: vocational choices often begin in childhood with hobbies, and there is a certain frame of mind associated with hobbies called “flow.” I therefore suggest that we are being selected for a susceptibility to "flow state." 

Integratability: society is held together by our ability to coordinate with others, and the key ability here is thought to be theory of mind, or the ability to infer the mental states of those with whom we interact. Likewise, we are being selected for theory-of-mind ability.

There may be something higher than theory of mind, which not everyone possesses at this time, that could be called "extended theory of mind": inferring the mental states of those not present, and whose very existence is itself inferred. A society strong in this trait will appear to be communicating with one another through solid walls, as if by ESP. 

Who are these Chosen? Probably military generals, politicians, and the executive class. Go figure.

However, the human cranium is probably as voluminous as it can get and still allow childbirth, so the gray matter subserving the new ability will have to be included at the expense of some other, preferably obsolete ability, like accuracy in spearing game animals.

So challenge your mayor to a game of darts and see how he does. This theory is falsifiable.

#62. Storming South [evolution, evolutionary psychology]

EP   EV

Red, theory; black, fact

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

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

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

Our large brains

However, our large brains seem to be great at something else besides warfaring: that is, environment modification. It's clear that the first thing someone living in the path of a 2-km wall of ice needs is to keep from freezing to death, and this would have been the first really good reason to modify environments. Unlike chipping a stone axe, environment modification involves fabricating something bigger than the fabricator. Even a parka has to be bigger than you or you can't get into it. This plausibly would have required a larger brain to enable a qualitatively new ability: making something you can't see all at once when it is at working distance.

Our rhythmic evolution

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

The fossil evidence for this theory

Fossil evidence of all this in Europe or Asia may exist in the form of Neanderthal and Denisovan discoveries, hominins who have been difficult to account for in terms of previous theories of human origins. My scenario can be defended against the fossil evidence for a human origin in East Africa in general terms by citing the well-known incompleteness of the fossil record and its many biases. Moreover, a detailed explanation begins by citing what else is in East Africa: the Suez, a land bridge to both Europe and Asia via the Arabian tectonic block, which was created by plate tectonics near the end of the Miocene, thus antedating both H. sapiens and H. erectus. Not only can hominins disperse through it to other continents during interglacials, but they can come back in, fiercer and brainier than before, when the ice is advancing again, to then deposit their fossil evidence in the Rift Valley region of East Africa. The Eurasian backflow event of 3000 years ago may be a relatively recent example of this. The Isthmus of Suez is low-lying and thus easily drowned by the sea, but the probability of this was minimal at times of continental glaciation, when sea levels are minimal. This argument has similarities with the Beringia theory of how North America was populated. Early hominins may have expanded like a gas into whatever continent they could access. Increasing glaciation/tundrafication of that continent would have recompressed the "gas" southward, causing it to retrace its path, partly back into Africa. 

Pleistocene selection pressures

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

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

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

PO     EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Till Eulenspiegel, a classical trickster in European cultures

The trickster type may really be Nature's penetration tester who tests our defences against adversity. 

The type probably emerges in contexts of unequal power (Person A has the shotgun; person B 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 more powerful persons 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 more powerful persons 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. 

Tricksterism also seems to be a form of play. A result from animal ethology is that the play of young animals is a form of learning. The thing learned in playing tricks may be how to manage power inequalities.

A biological precedent for penetration testing?

Evidence for a biological precedent may be the many retroviruses integrated into the human genome. One of these may become active now and then at random and kills the host cell if the anti-viral defences 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.

Evolution of the trickster

Modern human populations may have two independent axes of political polarization: oppressor-oppressed and trickster-control valuer. The first may subserve dispersal by generating refugee groups and the second may subserve 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, for example, by cleverly making someone’s shelter fall down, before the complacency of the control-valuer builders leads to disaster. This may have been how engineering was done by an archaic version of Homo sapiens. Tricksterism may have evolved out of a previously evolved capacity for military strategy, which involves essentially putting one over on the enemy. 

Tricksterism today

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. 

Tricksterism can intensify into sadism, in which the protagonist takes pleasure in the victim’s torment and wants to make it last. However, 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. 

Before the trickster

Our evolutionary forebears may have been champion dispersers for a long time before the ice age forced some of them to become champion builders, initially, of shelters and warm clothing. (Champion environment modifiers may be closer to the mark.) 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. The r-selecting niche may have been 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.

Picture credit: Wiki Commons

# 54. Disaster Biology [evolution, evolutionary psychology]

EP    EV 

Red, theory; black, fact

The habitat may have been a unit of selection in early hominins, leading to group selection, and much of our evolution may have proceeded by an accumulation of founder effects.

Opportunities for colonization of recently-emptied habitats are ephemeral. Under disaster-prone conditions, this plausibly leads to selection pressure for migrant production and evolvability (i.e., a high rate of evolution, especially founder-effect evolution).

Language diversification in humans may be an evolvability adaptation. Language diversity would work by preserving genetic founder effects from dilution by late-coming migrants, whose reproduction would be held back by the difficulties of learning a new language. Xenophobia and persistent ethnicity markers can be explained in the same way. The spread of linguistic and cultural novelties in a hominin population is predicted to be especially fast in newly colonized, previously empty habitats. Alternatively, the linguistic novelties may start as a thick patois developed by an oppressed group in the home habitat prior to becoming refugees, as a way to make plans "under the noses" of the oppressing group.

Refugee-producing adaptations sub-serving dispersal can be called "tough altruism." Populations producing more refugees are more likely to colonize further empty habitats, a selective advantage.

Disaster biology may be what is conceptually missing from theories of the origin of life (abiogenesis). i.e., the forerunners of the first cells may have been spores that formed by budding from the surface of bodies of water.

Photo by Purnomo Capunk on Unsplash

#53. Where are All the Space Aliens? [evolution, evolutionary psychology]

EP    EV

Red, theory; black, fact

Canada's remote Algonquin Radio Observatory,

which took over SETI duty between 1988-91.

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, 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 physicist 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 my town.

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. 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.

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.

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.

Evolution

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. 

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.

Wildfire smoke seen in Ottawa, Jun. 2023

#51. Advanced Human Depopulation Model [population, evolutionary psychology]

PO   EP

Red, theory; black, fact

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

Picture 1 shows a four-stage model of human depopulation events that is intended to account for more data than heretofore. The same two emotional programs, the anger cycle and the sadness cycle 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 or other remedy if it exists. In this connection, the Islamic prayer discipline has 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.

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

#50. A Theory of Christianity [evolutionary psychology, population]

PO    EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Continuing from Post #49, doubts about the completeness of my assessment began with this statement by Saint Paul:

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

1 Corinthians 15:14, KJV

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

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

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

An Alternative Theory 

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

Postulate 2: Christianity is focused on taming a third stage of depopulation that follows the anger cycle and the sadness cycle if neither of these has returned population density to the reset value after a certain time. 

An Evolutionary Interpretation 

This third stage is the total war stage, and it takes place on an international scale. Examples are WWI and WWII, which would be the international phases of national conflicts between a central-European majority and Serbs and Jews, respectively. Total war is arguably altruistic because each of two alliances or countries is helping the other with their population problem. The required signaling cycle seems to be that of the anger cycle but with the exchanged signals doing double duty as liquidation tactics. This is not just a fight, where the only consideration is what would be the shrewdest blow; there is a strong tendency to ape the opponent’s latest gambit, as expected in an exchange of signals "designed" to lock non-altruists out of the process. This psychology is called “sending back the bullet” in battlefield situations and “poetic justice” in everyday life. It is satisfying and it is a signal and it is illegal in peacetime, no matter that the other guy started it. In peacetime, you have to search elsewhere for your solutions than in mimicry and cooperation with a dangerous emotional program. Furthermore, if you allow yourself to be drawn into a vendetta, you just wrote an “ = “ between yourself and the person you take exception to. 

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

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

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

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

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

Practices

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

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

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

#44. The Denervation-supersensitivity Theory of Mental Illness [neuroscience, evolution, genetics]

NE  EV  GE    

Red, theory; black, fact

Midplane section of human brain annotated with the Brodmann areas, which are related to different functions

People contract mental illness but animals seemingly do not, or at least not outside of artificial laboratory models such as the unpredictable, mild-stress rodent model of depression. A simple theory to account for this cites the paleontological fact that the human brain has been expanding at breakneck speed over recent evolutionary time and postulates that this expansion is ongoing at the present time, and that mental illness is the price we are paying for all this brain progress.

The Evolution of the Human Brain

In other words, the mentally ill may carry the unfavorable mutations that have to be selected out during this progress. The mutation rate in certain categories of mutation affecting human brain development may be elevated in modern humans by some sort of "adaptive" hot-spot system. "Adaptive" is in scare quotes to indicate that the adaptation inheres in changes in the standard deviation of traits, not the average, and is therefore not Lamarkian.

In brain evolution, the growth changes in the various parts very probably have to be coordinated somehow. There may not be any master program doing this coordination. Rather, the human brain would comprise scores of tissue "parcels," each with its own gene to control the final size that parcel reaches in development. This is consistent with the finding of about 400 genes in humans that participate in establishing body size. All harmonious symmetry, even left-right symmetry, would have to be painstakingly created by brute-force selection, involving the early deaths of millions of asymmetrical individuals. 

Assuming that left and right sides must functionally cooperate to produce a fitness improvement, mutations affecting parcel growth must occur in linked, left-right pairs to avoid irreducible-complexity paradoxes. The crossing-over phenomenon in egg and sperm maturation may create these linked pairs of mutations, where the two mutations are identified with the two ends of the DNA segment that translocates. Since the two linked mutations are individually random, linkage per se does not eliminate asymmetry. That must be done by natural selection, as previously stated, so there is a subtlety here. Natural selection could equally well create adaptive asymmetry. The human heart and the claws of the fiddler crab are examples.

Functional Human Brain Anatomy 

Most of the evolutionary expansion of the human brain appears to be focused on association cortex, which would implement if-then rules like those making up the knowledge bases familiar from the field of artificial intelligence. The "if" part of the rule would be evaluated in post-Rolandic cortex, i.e., in temporal and parietal association cortices, and the "then" part of the rule would be created by the pre-Rolandic association cortex, i.e., the prefrontal cortex. The white matter tracts running forward in the brain would connect the "if" part with the "then" part, and the backward running white-matter tracts would carry priming signals to get other rules ready to "fire" if they are commonly used after the rule in question.

Possible Disorders of Brain Growth

Due to such tight coordination, the ideal brain will have a fixed ratio of prefrontal cortex to post-Rolandic association cortex. However, the random nature of the growth-gene bi-mutations, perhaps at mutational hot-spots, permitting human brain evolution will routinely violate this ideal ratio, leading to the creation of individuals having either too much prefrontal cortex or too much temporal/parietal cortex. In the former case, prefrontal cortex will be starved of sensory input. In the latter case, sensory association cortex will be starved of priming signals feeding back from motoric areas.

Denervation supersensitivity occurs when the normal nerve supply to a muscle is interrupted, resulting in a rapid overexpression of acetylcholine receptors on the muscle. This is an adaptation to compensate for weak nerve transmission with a re-amplification of the signal by the muscle. Analogous effects have been found in areas of the cerebral cortex deprived of their normal supply of sensory signals, so the effect seems to be general.

In cases of genetically-determined frontal-parietal/temporal imbalance, the input-starved side would develop denervation supersensitivity, making it prone to autonomous, noise-driven nervous activity.

Differential Growth-Related Brain Disorders 

If the growth excess is in sensory association cortex, this autonomous activity will manifest as hallucinations, resulting in schizophrenia. If the growth excess is in the prefrontal cortex, however, the result of the autonomous activity will be mania or a phobia.

The non-overgrown association cortex might secondarily develop the opposite of denervation supersensitivity as the result of continual bombardment with autonomous activity from the other side of the Rolandic fissure. This could account for the common observation of hypoprefrontality in cases of schizophrenia.

Picture credit: Wiki Commons