#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

#75. The Broad Context of Religion [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

[Quotes indicate metaphor.]

• Organized religion may have arisen as a counter-adaptation to the anti-invasion adaptations  of a neighbouring, powerful country that included sorties.  For the Abrahamic religions, that powerful but geographically vulnerable country would be ancient Egypt. For the Eastern religions, the powerful but vulnerable neighbor would be ancient China.

• People are "amphibians": each of us has a collectivist part existing in genetic superposition with an individualistic part. In systems that officially celebrate the former, the latter cannot be owned and must be pushed into the Jungian Shadow. And vice versa. In Freudian terms, the unacceptable wishes emerge in disguised form: religion in individual-celebrating systems, and hero worship in collective-celebrating systems.

• The longstanding debate in philosophy between rationalism and empiricism is a false dichotomy resulting from a narrow focus on one or the other of the two legs by which scientific knowledge advances: theory and experiment.

• If religion is the last protoscience, then the corresponding science that is to come could be called security science. 

• The incredible disunity of Protestantism could mean that Protestantism is the laboratory of Christianity.

• The crucial step in going from a protoscience to a science appears not to have been experimentation, but quantification. Examples of early quantifiers were Tycho Brae (astronomy) and Antoine Lavoisier (chemistry). If religion is a protoscience, what would its quantification look like? “Reminder: It’s time to bring up your prayer checklist, tick the boxes that apply under each heading (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication), and upload it to the diocesan office. The results of statistical analysis will be announced at Vestry, at which time parishioners may suggest further research questions. This activity parallels and does not replace traditional prayer. All submissions are protected by best-practice data security.”

• The first step in graduating to security science may be compiling a glossary of religious terms and their non-supernatural, parallel interpretations. For example, the Jewish ban on eating pork can be interpreted in this spirit as a measure to prevent trichinosis (a disease transmitted by eating under-cooked pork or wild game). As another example, the four prayer headings enumerated above could be identified in terms of a longitudinal study as control, exposure, favourable outcomes at followup, and adverse outcomes at followup. As a third example, the three persons of the Trinity could map onto the three sources of security science: study of the individual, the society, and the evolutionary history of both (Son, Holy spirit, and Father, respectively).

• Science has to be for everyone.

• We don't have free will in the big things; we have free will in the little things. However, one of the little things can be "planting a seed" that may one day grow into one of those big things and be more to our liking than the big things we see now.

• Should security science take on the task of predicting the unintended consequences of innovations, or is that task so large as to require another new science?

• On the answers to the big questions, the sources of authority are the size of the database and the degree of regulation of the original inquiry. Writing things down would be one rule of inquiry; using a set process would be another; making well defined measurements would be another; the experiment form would be yet another. The degree-of-regulation parameter takes us smoothly from protoscience to hard science via the qualitative study, which has legitimacy today.

#69. Role of Personalities in the Human Swarm Intelligence [population]

PO

Red, theory; black, fact

Each of the Big Five personality traits may be a dimension along which people differ in some socially important behavioral threshold. These are, respectively: openness > uptake of innovations; conscientiousness > uptake of taboos; extraversion >  committing to collectivism*; agreeableness (-) > becoming militant; neuroticism > engaging in/submitting to persecution. The personality trait is written on the left of the ">" and the putatively impacted social threshold is on the right.

These threshold spectra may enable social shifts that are noise-resistant, sensitive to triggers, and rapid. Noise resistance and sensitivity together are called good “receiver operating characteristics,” a concept often used in the scientific literature.

A metaphor that suggests itself is lighting a camp fire. The spark is first applied to the tinder. Ignition of the tinder ignites the kindling. Ignition of the kindling ignites the small sticks. Ignition of the small sticks ignites the big sticks, and everything is consumed.

Orderly fire-starting appears to require a spectrum of thresholds for ignition in the fuel, as may orderly social shifts. To further extend the metaphor, note that the fuel must be dry (i.e., situational factors must be permissive).

Social novelties may spread upward to higher-threshold social strata by meme propagation reinforced by emotional contagion. The emotional energy necessary for emotional contagion would come from the individual’s interaction with the novelty, which would feature a positive feedback.

The governing neuromodulators of personality may be as follows:

• Acetylcholine-Openness
• Noradrenalin-Neuroticism 
• Serotonin-Agreeableness 
• Histamine-Conscienciousness
• Dopamine-Extraversion 

Our capacities for all of the enumerated social shifts were selected in evolution and most can be assumed to be still adaptive when correctly triggered. In today’s world, shifts to persecution are probably the least likely to still be adaptive, and could be a holdover from our Homo erectus stage. Persecution leads to refugee production, and refugee production could have been the reason that guy was such a great disperser.

As the geologists say, “The present is the key to the past.”

* A possible anti-invasion adaptation and predictable from geography. The sociological term for the corresponding failure mode may be siege mentality.

#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.