#38. The Fallacy of Justice [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EN     EP     NE     

Red, theory; black, fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

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

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

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

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

a. primordial condition

b. output distinction added

c. input distinction added

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

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

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

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

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy trails.

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

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

#32. Climate Change [engineering]

EN

Red, theory; black, fact.

Reading "Just Cool It!" by Suzuki and Hanington introduced me to the ancient terra preta agricultural technology, given as a possible solution, or part of the solution, to the global warming problem. The term is apparently Portuguese for "black earth" and the technology involves enriching the soil by ploughing it full of charcoal. Suzuki and Hanington make the point that this should sequester a lot of carbon in the soil, thereby taking it out of the atmosphere. Charcoal is nearly pure carbon. Moreover, charcoal, being indigestible to decay organisms, should stay in the soil for a very long time. The logical raw material for making the charcoal would be either wood from clearing the land for agriculture, or crop residues, the parts of the crop plant that people cannot eat.

I would add here that in modern pyrolysis plants, not only is charcoal produced, but also flammable off-gasses, which could be used for fuel directly in some future scenario, or catalytically reformed to a liquid fuel for running the tractors and combines. In gaseous form, the fuel could run a steam turbine to produce electricity to supplement that from wind farms, hydro, tidal, geothermal, thorium-nuclear, and photovoltaics.

However, the off-gasses are also used to fuel the pyrolysis plant itself. Whether any would be left over for other uses would depend on careful plant design for energy efficiency and on avoiding fuelled drying operations. Thus, the feedstock should be sun-dried.

Schemes like second-generation power ethanol are touted as carbon-neutral, but in terra preta with these additions, we have one that is actually carbon-negative.

However, the soil ends up black. No other color is as efficient at converting sunlight into heat, which we don't need more of at this point. This seems to be a problem with the terra preta solution. (The ideal color for avoiding heat production would be white.)

Note that the use of any terrestrial artificial mirror membrane has the drawback that the membrane will get dirty rapidly from dust, pollen, and plant parts, thereby reducing its efficiently. However, a living means of light reflection would renew itself, gratis, each year. Orbiting space mirrors have also been proposed as the solution to global warming. They wouldn't get covered in pollen anytime soon -- just shot full of holes by micrometeorites.

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

EP    GE    

Red, theory; black, fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#19. Explaining Science-religion Antipathy also Explains Religion [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

I will be arguing here that the Darwinian selective advantage to humans of having a propensity for religion is that it regulates the pace of introduction of new technology, which is necessitated by the disruptive side effects of new technology.

If this sounds like a weak argument, perhaps people have been chronically underestimating the costs to society of the harmful side effects of new technology, ever since there have been people. Take the downside of the taming of fire, for instance. You can bet that the first use would have been military, just as in the case of nuclear energy. Remember that everything was covered in forests in those days; there must have been an appalling time of fire until kin selection slowly put a stop to it. The lake-bottom charcoal deposits will still be there, if anyone cares to look for them. (Shades of Asimov's story "Nightfall.")

The sedimentary record does not seem to support the idea that the smoke from such a time of fire caused a planetary cooling event sufficient to trigger the last ice age. However, the mere possibility helps to drive home the point, namely that prehistoric, evolutionary-milieu technology was not necessarily too feckless to produce enough disruption to constitute a source of selection pressure.

Natural selection could have built a rate-of-innovation controller by exaggerating people's pleasure at discovering a new, unexplored phenomenon, until they bog down in rapture at that moment and never progress to the next step of actually experimenting or exploring. The latter activities would be just upstream of the nominally controlled process, the introduction of new technology. People's tendency for "rapture capture" would be causally linked via genetically specified neural pathways to the kinds of hardships caused by technological side effects, thereby completing a negative feedback loop that would work like a steam engine governor.

I conjecture that all present-day religions are built on this phenomenon of "rapture capture." This may explain why the most innovative country, the USA, is also the most religiose, according to Dawkins, writing in "The God Delusion." An Einsteinian sense of wonder at the cosmos that, according to Dawkins, most scientists feel, could be a mild, non-capturing version of the same thing. The unlikely traits attributed to God, omnipotence, omni this and that, could have instrumental value in intensifying the rapture.

Another possible name for what I have been calling rapture could be "arcanaphilia." A basic insight for me here was that religion is fundamentally hedonistic. I do not seem to be straying too far from Marx's statement that "Religion is the opiate of the people."

These ideas help to explain why some sciences such as astronomy and chemistry began as inefficient protosciences (e.g., astrology, alchemy): they were inhibited from the start by an excessive sense of wonder, until harder heads eventually prevailed (Galileo, Lavoisier). Seen as a protoscience, the Abrahamic religions could originally have been sparked by evidence that "someone is looking out for us" found in records of historical events such as those the ancient Israelites compiled (of which the Dead Sea Scrolls are a surviving example). That "someone" would in reality be various forms of generation-time compensation, one of which I have been calling the "intermind" in these pages. Perhaps when the subject of study is in reality a powerful aspect of ourselves as populations, the stimulus for rapture capture will be especially effective, explaining why religion has yet to become an experimental science.

By the way, there is usually no insurmountable difficulty in experimenting on humans so long as the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki are observed: volunteer basis only; controlled, randomized, double-blind study; experiment thoroughly explained to volunteers before enrollment; written consent obtained from all volunteers before enrollment; approval of the experimental design obtained in advance from the appropriate institutional ethics committee; and the experiment registered online with the appropriate registry.

Religions seem to be characterized by an unmistakable style made up of little touches that exaggerate the practitioner's sense of wonder and mystery, thus, their arcanaphilic "high." I refer to unnecessarily high ceilings in places of worship, use of enigmatic symbols, putting gold leaf on things, songs with Italian phrases in the score, such as "maestoso," wearing colorful costumes, etc. I shall refer to all the elements of this style collectively as "bractea," Latin for tinsel or gold leaf. I propose the presence of bractea as a field mark for recognizing religions in the wild. By this criterion, psychiatry is not a religion, but science fiction is.

It seems to me that bractea use can easily graduate into the creation of formal works of art, such as canticles, stained glass windows, statues of the Buddha, and the covers of science fiction magazines. Exposure to concentrations of excessive creativity in places of worship can be expected to drive down the creativity of the worshipers by a negative feedback process evolved to regulate the diversity of the species memeplex, already alluded to in my post titled, "The Intermind: Engine of History?"

This effect should indirectly reduce the rate of introduction of new technology, thereby feeding into the biological mission of religion. Religion could be the epi-evolutionary solution, and the artistic feedback could be the evolutionary solution, to the disorders caused by creativity. Bractea would represent a synergy between the two.

#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.

#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.

#2. The Iatrogenic Conflicts of the Twentieth Century [population, engineering]

The Edwardian era (1901-1911) in small-town Ontario, and La Belle Epoque will soon be over. (From a photo owned by Constance M. Mooney of Ottawa, Canada)

PO     EN     

Red, theory; black, fact.

Medical advances during a turbulent century

In 1911, the anti-syphilis drug salvarsan, invented by Paul Ehrlich, became widely available to the public, at a time when this disease was cutting a wide swath of morbidity and mortality. Three years later, World War I broke out.

In 1937, sulfa drugs, the first effective treatment for tuberculosis, became available to the public. Two years later, World War II broke out.

In 1945, both penicillin and streptomycin became available to the public, followed in short order by the first mass vaccinations, notably against smallpox. In that decade (1945-1955), the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union began. That one nearly finished us in 1962, the year of the Cuba Missile Crisis, when a nuclear WW III was narrowly averted.

My conclusions

In the human brain, there is a wholly unconscious controller for population density with a feedback delay of some two to four years, that answers every sudden downtick in the death rate with a brutal, reflexive uptick. Recently, these downticks in the death rate have been due to advances in medicine, hence my title for this post. "Iatrogenic" means roughly "caused by doctors."

Moreover, last year I noted that the headlines were all about ISIS, an unusually disruptive phenomenon of the Muslim world. I then checked to see what the main preoccupation of the headline-writers had been exactly four years previously. This seemed to be the Arab Spring, when many old governments in the Arab world were being thrown off. I concluded that these regimes had somehow been suppressing population growth.

An engineering model

I began to reason thus: if this controller is real, it should be just as analyzable as Watt's steam-engine governor, using standard engineering approaches. If it has a significant feedback delay, then a perturbation sufficiently rich in high-frequency harmonics (i.e., sufficiently sudden) should drive it briefly into a damped oscillation.

Evidence for the engineering model

In support of these conclusions, I present the US Census Bureau statistics on the percent growth rate of the human population for the 20th century, international yearly figures, aggregated to "World," and extended back to 1900 with decade-wise World data from the historical estimates table. At roughly the end of WW II, we see a huge jump in the growth rate followed by a sharp drop bottoming at 1960, followed by another sharp peak at 1962, followed by a leveling off superimposed on a gradual decline, the latter possibly due to increasing absolute numbers. This time series could be construed as showing a damped oscillation. See below.

The historical global population growth rate scaled to population.

11-07-2018

My surmise that the post-1964 decline in the plot would disappear if corrected for changing absolute numbers is confirmed by calculation based on US Census Bureau data. See below. Furthermore, the plot shown below appears to level off at 78 million new people per year, which is probably the upper trigger level for the controller. There is probably no formal lower trigger level, making this controller asymmetric. Oscillation begins well before this level is reached, however, reflecting the presence of a differential control term, as discussed in the next post. The sharp upstroke in growth rate that occurs at 1980 may be due to the eradication of smallpox over the decade 1967-1977. The downturn after 1988 was probably due to the AIDS pandemic. The data are coarse-grained before 1950 and do not show the upstrokes in 1911-1914 and 1937-1939 that I would have predicted from the two world wars.

World population growth rates in persons per year with no scaling. Note the reaction in 1960.

Center: a centrifugal speed governor familiar in 1914. The Steam Museum, Kingston, Canada, 2012.