#74. Extended Theory of Mind [Evolution]

EV

Red, theory; black, fact.

Where is evolution going at the moment? Pretty good question. Let us 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? 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. 

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.

I would like to suggest that there is something higher than theory of mind, which not everyone possesses at this time: 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.

Photo by Le Vu on Unsplash

#72. Why There is Sex [evolution]

EV

Red, theory; black, fact.

The flower Coronilla varia L.

Sex is an evolvability adaptation

There are always two games in town: reproduction and evolution. Since we live on an unstable planet where the environment can change capriciously, species here have been selected for rapid evolvability per se to enable them to adapt to the occasional rapid environment changes and not go extinct. Apparently, mutations, the starting point for evolutionary adaptation, become more common when the organism is stressed, and stress may partly be a forecast of loss of fertility due to a developing genome-environment mismatch. Bacteria exhibit the large mutation of transformation under stress conditions, and 3 types of stress all increased the meiotic recombination rate of fruit flies (Stress-induced recombination and the mechanism of evolvability. Zhong W, Priest NK. Behavioral ecology and sociobiology. 2011;65:493-502). Recombination can involve unequal crossing-over in which changes in gene dose can occur due to gene duplication or deletion. However, since most mutations are deleterious (there are more ways to do something wrong than to do it better) many mutations will also reduce fertility, and at precisely the wrong moment: when a reduction in fertility is impending due to environment change. The answer was to split the population into two halves: the reproduction specialists and the selection specialists, and remix their respective genomes at each generation.

The roles of the two sexes

Females obviously do the heavy lifting of reproduction, and males seem to be the gene testers. So if a guy gets a bad gene, so long, and the luckier guy next to him then gets two wives. The phenomenon of greater male variability (Greater male than female variability in regional brain structure across the lifespan. Wierenga LM, Doucet GE, Dima D, Agartz I, Aghajani M, Akudjedu TN, Albajes‐Eizagirre A, Alnæs D, Alpert KI, Andreassen OA, Anticevic A. Karolinska Schizophrenia Project (KaSP) Consortium. Hum. Brain Mapp., doi. 2020;10, and I have never seen so many authors on a paper: 160.) suggests that mutations have more penetrance in males, as befits the male role of cannon fodder/selectees. What the male brings to the marriage bed, then, is field-tested genetic information. Male promiscuity can therefore be seen as a necessary part of this system, which allows many mutations to be field tested with minimal loss of whole-population fertility, because it is the females who are the limiting factor in population fertility.

Chromosomal mechanisms of greater male variability

Chromosomal diploidy may be a system for sheltering females from mutations, assuming that the default process is for the phenotype that develops to be the average of the phenotypes individually specified by the paternal and maternal chromosome sets. Averaging tends to mute the extremes. The males, however, may set up a winner-take-all competition between homologous chromosomes early in development, with inactivation of one of them chosen at random. The molecular machinery for this may be similar to that of random x-inactivation in females. The result will be greater penetrance of mutations through to the phenotype and thus greater male variability. 

Quantitative prediction

This reasoning predicts that on a given trait, male variability (as standard deviation) will be 41% greater than the female variability, a testable prediction. 41% = [SQRT(2) -1] × 100. Already in my reading I have found a figure of 30%, which is suggestive. 

Now all I have to do is reconcile all this with the laws of Mendelian inheritance. 

Mechanistic reconciliation with Mendel's laws

09-16-2021: This reconciliation seems to require an exemption mechanism built into the postulated chromosome inactivation process that operates on genes present in only one copy per parent. The effect of this mechanism will be to double the penetrance of dominant alleles at that gene. Therefore, in males, at single-copy genes, evolution of the machinery of sex is driven by the favorable mutations.

A lovers' heart drawn in dust

#66. Neuromodulators as Peril Specialists [Neuroscience]

NE

Red: theory; black, fact.

Solanum dulcamara, a plant with anticholinesterase activity.

“Life is Difficulty”

My PhD thesis was about a neuromodulator (acetylcholine) acting on mammalian brain. It was tough to decapitate all those rats; I never got used to it. But if you can’t stand the formaldehyde, get out of the lab.

The basic theory

I conjecture that the primordial function of any type of transmitter substance acting on the g-protein-coupled cell-surface receptors or nuclear receptors of neurons was to coordinate the whole-organism response to some class of perils.

 

Complications

Glutamate, GABA, and acetylcholine are usually considered neurotransmitters, not neuromodulators, but all three have G-protein-coupled receptors in addition to ionotropic receptors and are thus both.

In thermoregulation, hypothalamic glutamate and GABA act on the body via the serotonergic raphe pallidus nucleus. The implied connection with predation (See table) would be due to the fact that animals become torpid at extremes of temperature and thus easy prey. The larger predator would have a smaller surface to volume ratio and thus slower warming and cooling after leaving its refugium to hunt. The predator thermal advantage would have been the selection pressure for thermal sensitivity in the anti-predation system, which eventually became upstream of temperature regulation effectors generally. 

The functional assignments suggested in Table 1 would mostly pertain to a very primordial brain. The implication is that any modern biological function of the neuromodulator substance other than organizing the response to a specific type of peril was elaborated out of the primordial function over long-term evolution, which can act opportunistically to confer new functions on preexisting adaptations.

An example of such elaboration is shown for dopamine in the inferred social role. A pre-adaptation for this role split may have been breast-feeding.

Table 1.

Peril	Substance	Failure mode
Extremes of heat and cold	glutamate and GABA	?
Predator	serotonin	depression
Parasite	histamine	phobia
Rival conspecific	noradrenaline	paranoia
Social isolation

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

EV

Red, theory; black, fact.

KIRK MUST DIE! (cut to commercial.)

Astronomical observations and the Fermi paradox

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

My hypothesis is this:

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

Biospheres may not be permanent 

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

Biochallenge!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evil-ution

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

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

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

May 21, 2022 derecho-storm damage in Ottawa.

Wildfire smoke seen in Ottawa, Jun 2023.

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

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

PO     EP     

Red, theory; black, fact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#51. A Theory of Christianity [Evolutionary Psychology, Population]

EP     PO     

Red, theory; black, fact.

My gut told me that there is more to be said about Christianity than what I wrote or implied in Post #50. My doubts about the completeness of my work 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.

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 (See Post #50 for explanations of these terms.). This 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.

05-06-2022: 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. 

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 (See Post #41) 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.

03-25-2019: 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 wrongly identified as the end of time/history, but remember that we deal here with an approximate theory.

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,” for the sake of variety, one imagines. 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 signalling.

03-02-2024: 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.

#50. A Naturalistic Theory of Worship [Evolutionary Psychology, Population]

Anytown, Canada, Apr. 11.

EP     PO     

Red, theory; black, fact.

Preamble

As discussed in Post #48, religion has a theory part and an applied part. I have termed the latter the ‘pragma’ of religion, which is basically the modes of worship. Since our moral codes are held by at least the Abrahamic religions to be commands from God, it would follow that it’s pretty important to conform to them, and most of us have difficulty doing this all the time. To help us, religion has developed a behavior-modification role, the role of the pragma.

The behavior-mod role aims at mitigating the human form of the Calhoun Effect–a tendency to aggression linked to rising population density but not to actual want per se. (For an introduction to Calhoun's research, see paragraph 7, Post #37.) Population density would have been an issue even millennia in the past when the world population was a minuscule fraction of what it is today, when people began living continuously inside walled cities for protection from their enemies. Within the inflexible confines of such a city, you have the makings of a human Calhoun experiment. Not coincidentally, the city of Jerusalem, sacred to three world religions, was a walled city. Nowadays, at a world population of 7.5 billion, it can be said that the world is our walled city. What can religion now tell us about how to get along?

I focus here on the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which developed in that order, all in the Middle East, each of the last two acknowledging its debt to the previous. I suggest that these three religions form a series of progressively increasing effectiveness in mitigating the Calhoun Effect, by an accumulation of folkloric knowledge. Thus, to see how pragma works, the purpose of this post, we need only examine Islam, likely to represent the most efficient solution. Form generally follows function most transparently at highest efficiency.

The Human Calhoun Effect

In Post #40 I surmise that the natural human population density plot over time has a saw-tooth form, with linear increases alternating with abrupt decreases that return population density to some repeatable reset value. In Post #2, I surmise that the linear segments are created by a negative-feedback controller in the limbic system that controls rate-of-change of population density to a constant positive value, not absolute density. At this writing, the world is probably coming to the crest of one of these linear segments, which began in 1950. The sudden population-density decrease that ends the cycle is conjectured to have two phases: a first phase that produces population-density decrease by emigration, and a second phase that produces population-density decrease by mass murder, if the first phase does not take the system all the way to the reset value. The first phase accomplishes the biological function of dispersal, which is generally important for long-term species survival. The second phase guarantees overall stability on a multi-cycle time scale and wards off Malthusian catastrophes.

Both phases demand formally altruistic acts from individuals, but not of the warm-and-fuzzy kind. The first phase uses an exchange of anger signals (The “anger cycle,” see Post #41) to lock non-altruists out of the process so that the behavior is stable over evolutionary time. The second phase locks out the non-altruists using an asymmetric exchange of signals: contempt signals going one way and sadness signals going the other way. (See “The Sadness Cycle,” Post #41). The second phase culminates in the mass murder of the sadness signalers by the contempt signalers and the appropriation of all the resources of the sadness signalers by the contempt signalers. The last step guarantees that the contempt signalers will appear atrociously entitled to those outside the cycle.

Islam

Islam is conveniently summarized for our purposes as The Five Pillars of Islam, which are explained in the Quran, namely:

1) The Creed. (“There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”)

2) Prayer.

3) Charity. (Concealed almsgiving is preferred.)

4) Fasting.

5) Pilgrimage.

The Theory

The creed is “The Great Why in the Sky” that people need for the control of their most difficult emotions. Strong emotion can be overridden by reason if that is required by a learned worldview, the validity of which the person is willing to bet their life on. (Here, I attempt to supply a worldview based on evolutionary psychology.) The creed, or “theory part” of a religion, also gets the rational mind cooperating with the behavior-modification program, which acts on the emotional self. 

04-03-2019: Rational override based on some creed may begin the work of extirpating someone's anger or sadness cycle, but behavior modification by pragma may be necessary to finish it and produce a lasting improvement in the person's circumstances. These cycles may have deep roots inaccessible to consciousness and capable of perpetuating self-defeating behaviors if not treated appropriately.

Prayer superficially is a deliberate wasting of time, which is not free in metabolic terms because the worshipper has a basal metabolic rate that must be supplied whether he/she works or not. Regular inactivity is surely a luxury of only those enjoying abundance. This is implicitly saying to the anger and sadness/contempt programs: “Food is still plentiful, so it’s not time to get nasty.” These cycles may be triggered by signs of high population density, not actual want, but they should still be sensitive to metabolic signals that speak to whether actual scarcity exists. High population density acquired its potent psychological effects, after all, because it usually predicted scarcity in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. <06-14-2021: Alternatively, prayer may work like meditation to turn off the internal voice and the unnecessary stress it causes (if unscripted).>

Charity, on the receiving end, that is, is for contempt signalers, who, as you will recall, are extremely entitled in the final stage of their emotional program. Accepting charity–goods that you did not work for–tells the contempt program that it has achieved its mission and can therefore halt. So, it does. In Islam, almsgiving is said to be best done in secret, an effect of which will be to spare the pride of the recipient. One tends to think that this will be an issue with contemptuous types. Clearly, we are dealing here with someone whose contempt-signaler role has caused them to become downwardly mobile.

Fasting–going without the necessities of life–is for sadness signalers and it tells their emotional program that they have given or lost all their resources to the contempt signalers, and therefore their program has achieved its mission and can halt. So, it does. <11-21-2020: On the other hand, based on my own experience with fasting, the practice may work by increasing the faster's energy level post-fast, and an increased energy level can solve a multitude of problems.>

Pilgrimage is where you tell the anger-cycle program (with your feet) that you have been driven out of your homeland forever and must resettle elsewhere. Therefore, the program has achieved its mission and can halt. So, it does. This idea was expressed as “giving something to the dispersal drive” in Post #35.

Thus, the task of much religious behavior-modification can be likened to persuading a devil to depart by showing him false evidence that he has accomplished his purpose in coming, knowing that he is myopic. However, prayer tells him that he doesn’t even have to come in the first place.

 (05-23-2024: The tree is gone, apparently a victim of urban buildup. The nearest present-day address may be 179 Clarence, Ottawa.)

#47. Body-mod Bob's [evolution, evolutionary psychology]

EV     EP     

Red, theory; black, fact.

In the previous post, "Goddesses of the Glacier," evolution appears to be operating in cooperation with a general capacity for technology. Natural selection operates on the brain pathways underlying our aesthetic preferences concerning our own appearance and that of possible reproduction partners and then a technology is automatically developed to satisfy them.

As a first example, consider the oil and brush technology previously assumed for differentiating women from men by hair smoothness. A further step in this direction is to posit that hair color may have been used to code gender. The first step would have been selection for a blond(e) hair colour in both women and men. Since this is a very light colour, it will show the effect of dyeing maximally. Concurrently with this, the aesthetic preferences of men and women would have been differentiated by selection, resulting in blonde women who experience a mild euphoria from being blonde and blond men who experience a mild dysphoria from the same cause. The men would predictably get busy inventing hair-dyeing technologies to rectify this. The necessary dyes are readily obtained from plant sources such as woad and walnut shells. The result would be an effective blonde-female/nonblond-male gender code.

This style of evolution could be very fast if the brain pathways of aesthetic preferences require few mutations for their modification compared with the number required for the equivalent direct modification of the body. Let us assume this and see where it leads.

Faster evolution is generally favored if humans are typically in competition with other species to be the first to occupy a newly possible ecological niche. Such niches will be created in abundance with every dramatic change in the environment, such as a glaciation and the following deglaciation. Possibly, these specific events just slide the same suite of niches to higher or lower latitudes, but the amount of land area in each is likely to change, leading to under-capacity in some, and thus opportunity. These opportunities will vanish much faster than evolution can follow unless a diversity of phenotypes is already present in the prospective colonizing population, which might happen as a result of genetic drift in multiple, isolated sub-populations.

If technologically assisted evolution has general advantages, then we can expect its importance to grow with increases in the reach of technology. Today, we seem to be at a threshold, with male-to-female and female-to-male gender transitions becoming well known. Demand for this service is probably being driven by disordered neural development during fetal life due to contamination of the fetus by environmental pollutants that have estrogenic properties (e.g., bisphenol A, PCBs, phthalates, etc.). The result is the birth of individuals with disordered and mutually contradictory, gendered aesthetic preferences, which is tragic. However, it is an interesting natural experiment.

With further development of cell biology in the direction of supporting body-modification technology, who knows what bizarre hankerings will see the light of day on demand from some customer? Remember that in evolution, the mutation comes first, and the mutation is random. Predictably, and sadly, most such reckless acts of self-indulgence will be punished by reduced employability and reduced reproductive success, doubtless exacerbated by prejudice on the part of the normal, normative majority.

However, the very occasional success story is also to be expected, involving the creation of fortuitously hyperfunctional individuals, and thus the technologically assisted creation of a new pre-species of human.

If the engineering details learned by the body-modification trade during this process are then translated into germ-line genetic engineering, then a true artificial humanoid species will have been created.

After the Pleistocene, the Plasticine.

Photo by Дмитрий Хрусталев-Григорьев on Unsplash

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

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

EP

Red: theory; black, fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NE     EV     GE     

Red, theory; black, fact.

People get 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.

In other words, the mentally ill carry the unfavorable mutations that have to be selected out during this progress, and the mutation rate in certain categories of mutation affecting human brain development is elevated in modern humans by some sort of "adaptive" hot-spot system. "Adaptive" is in scare quotes here 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. I conjecture that there is no master program doing this coordination. Rather, I conceive of the human brain as comprising scores of tissue "parcels," each with its own gene to control the final size that parcel reaches in development. (This idea 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. This idea was outlined in post 10.

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. I have previously conjectured in these pages that the crossing-over phenomenon of egg and sperm maturation serves to create these linked pairs of mutations, where the two mutations are identified with the two ends of the DNA segment that translocates. (See "Can Irreducible Complexity Evolve?")

Most of the evolutionary expansion of the human brain appears to be focused on association cortex, which I conjecture implements 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.

Due to such tight coordination, I would expect that 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, you will have prefrontal cortex starved of sensory input. In the latter case, you will have sensory association cortex 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 can be seen as an attempt to compensate for weak nerve transmission with a tremendous 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 quite general.

In cases of genetically-determined frontal-parietal/temporal imbalance, I conjecture that the input-starved side develops something like denervation supersensitivity, making it prone to autonomous, noise-driven nervous activity.

If the growth excess is in sensory association cortex, this autonomous activity will manifest as hallucinations, resulting in a person with schizophrenia. If the growth excess is in the prefrontal cortex, however, the result of the autonomous activity will be mania or a phobia. Depression may originally have been an adaptation to the presence of a man-eating predator in the neighborhood, but in civilized contexts, it can get activated by the unpredictable (to the sufferer) punishments resulting from manic activity. If the mania is sufficiently mild to co-exist with depression, as in type II bipolar disorder, then the overall effect of the depressive component may be like a band-aid on the mania.

The non-overgrown association cortex might even 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.

#42. Corporate Sin [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact.

7-25-2018: A moment's reflection reveals that not all of humanly willed unhappiness is due to two persons interacting, either in a sadness cycle or an anger cycle. Wars of depopulation and wars of dispersal represent these interactions promoted to the level of entire societies. This promotion theory assumes that the same hard-wired wetware is being used for both levels, but with the addition of a few more bits of code to support the social level.

Theologians such as Bishop Baycroft, writing in "The Anglican Way," are well aware of this extra dimension of human misery, referring to it as "corporate sin," and admit that it is a more difficult problem than individual sin. The advice I give in "Signaletics for Salvation" (https://nightbull.blogspot.com) will not help you efficiently if your unhappiness has its roots in corporate sin (for example, if you are caught up in a military draft or are a slave), but it may be better than nothing. But let's see what we can surmise about those extra bits of code.

The basic design seems to be to transform a tiff between two individuals into a tiff between two leaders, then copy the emotions of the leaders into the heads of all the followers on both sides. Thus, a political leader is a kind of emotional conductor. This is why we have leaders.

By this theory, World War II was a tiff between Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, both famous for their speeches in which they inspired passions in their followers.

How do you get to be leader? The simplest answer seems to be that you just get famous and you are also someone who doesn't see a way to end his pain without involving the whole world. <07-21-22: As for how I ended my own pain, minding my own business and reaching out to family at times of need seems to have sufficed. I also had a talk with my federal MP at one point.>

An attractive theory about fame, in turn, is that all fame is 90% being-famous-for-being-famous, and 10% (or less) is being famous for something else, call it the predisposing factor. Human inter group interactions have the form we observe because these predisposing factors are not random but are due to natural selection. Furthermore, they are conditional upon prevailing conditions, such as the price of bread relative to wages. Finally, they already exist at the individual level. The process of garnering the absurd 90% of fame is the by-now familiar phenomenon of going viral, and its earlier historical equivalents. 

I imagine that this process is a positive feedback loop in the brain that involves the attentional system and Hebbian plasticity, the latter well known among students of neuroscience for having a built-in positive feedback. We also know that emotions are contagious (See: Hatfield E, Cacioppo JT, Rapson RL. Emotional Contagion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

The final bit of code we need to produce leaders and thus corporate sin is a tendency of this contagiousness to be potentiated by the famousness of the emoter one is observing. This mechanism of social control is distinctly different from the snowball effect that I likened to a black hole in an earlier post. It will take more thinking to decide which is more accurate.

#41. The Sadness Cycle [evolutionary psychology, neuroscience]

EP     NE     

Red, theory; black, fact.

7-20-2018: This post builds on "Signaletics for Salvation," a post in the companion blog, "Experimentalist's Progress, " at https://nightbull.blogspot.com. The theory part of that post is reprinted below with slight modification for the convenience of the reader.

The anger cycle and the sadness cycle reach their full flower in wars of dispersal and wars of depopulation, respectively. These were discussed in the post "Two Kinds of War" in this blog.

Wars of depopulation serve to prevent Malthusian disasters such as general famine. The sadness cycle is a form of altruism that facilitates this depopulation by making a portion of the population sad and suicidal and the remainder contemptuous and entitled. The contemptuous ones take everything the sad ones have, ultimately their lives, and the sad ones let them.

If the sacrificial lambs were fighting what is essentially a form of cannibalism tooth and nail, the transfer of property would leave the heritors with many injuries, which would defeat the purpose of the whole process, which is to leave the residual population stronger and healthier than before under conditions of restricted food supply. However, always bear in mind that the sad ones and the contemptuous ones are playing two roles within the same adaptation; if you can play one role, you can play the other. However, if you unfortunately carry some unfavorable mutation, you will be predisposed to the sad role. This is another way the adaptation leaves the population more robust than before.

Since no altruism can evolve in the presence of selfishness unless the altruists are only altruistic to other altruists, a signaling cycle is required to lock the altruists together to the exclusion of non-altruists. Thus, sadness induces contempt and contempt induces sadness, and so on in a vicious cycle leading to the complete destruction of the sad ones and the transfer of all their property specifically to the contemptuous ones. This dynamic could be the origin of elder abuse and clinical depression.

Macchiavelli wrote, "He is made contemptible who is held to be changeable, light, effeminate, pusillanimous, irresolute, and from these the Prince must guard himself as from a reef." The traits listed appear to be the symptoms of unacknowledged sadness, and were no doubt quite lethal in Macchiavelli's time. Due to the present skyrocketing of the world population with the concomitant "Calhoun effect" from crowding stress, we are no doubt due for a remacchiavellianization of daily life. For example, should I even be sharing these insights with you instead of keeping them to myself to my own advantage or at least posting them on a commercialized blog? Does my slowness to commercialize indicate suicidally self-giving tendencies that will one day prove fatal?

6-29-2018: The Anger Cycle (reprinted)

Much of human unhappiness comes from destructive, escalating signaling cycles, usually between two persons. Examples: arguments, feuds, schools of thought, gang wars, revolutions. The signals exchanged are initially personal expressions of anger. Importantly, these expressions are multi modal, and therefore highly redundant. (e.g., threatening utterances, tones of voice, facial expressions, gait, crashing and banging things, spying, following, etc.) Your anger comes out of you "through every pore."

These signals are too many and varied for conscious control, which is why most people remain enslaved by their signals and cycles. The anger cycle is presumed to escalate until one of the parties must leave the country. When people are threatened, they seek allies, so all of society eventually gets drawn in and polarized as the escalation proceeds apace, like a black hole. Therefore, it is a group that must eventually leave, not a single individual, which is the basis of the refugee phenomenon. 

In ecological terms, the refugee phenomenon is clearly sub serving the function of dispersal. However, dispersal-producing behavior is fundamentally altruistic in a backhanded way. The benefit to the supposed loser, the group that eventually gets driven out, is that occasionally they find a newly-emptied vacant habitat in which to settle and therefore can reproduce without competition. This is a tremendous benefit in evolutionary terms and may once have been great enough to redeem all the waste and suffering of human-style dispersal. 

However, altruistic behavior cannot evolve in the presence of non-altruists unless a signaling system is established to ensure that altruists are only altruistic to other altruists. That is why I lay so much emphasis on signaling here. The reason why the signals are so multi modal is that the altruism program probably breaks down occasionally because of the short-term advantages of being a non-altruist. This has probably happened many times in the past and the broken algorithm was repaired each time by natural selection with the addition of yet another signal component. 

Multi modality implies the existence of a neuronal OR-element somewhere on the sensory side, and the amygdalae could be these OR-elements. More precisely, the amygdalae could be specialized for providing OR-elements generally to the brain by virtue of a characteristic, unique amygdalar cytoarchitecture.

7-20-2018: The various signal cycles may reinforce each other. The four signal cycles that seem to form the framework of human life seem to have such an interdependence. These are: mother-child bonding, which could potentiate man-woman bonding, which could potentiate the anger cycle (via jealousy), which could potentiate the sadness cycle. These insights come from introspection and my own biographical data.