#62. Storming South [evolution, evolutionary psychology]

EP   EV

Red, theory; black, fact

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

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

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

Our large brains

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

Our rhythmic evolution

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

The fossil evidence for this theory

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

Pleistocene selection pressures

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

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

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

PO     EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Till Eulenspiegel, a classical trickster in European cultures

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

The type probably emerges in contexts of unequal power (Person A has the shotgun; person B doesn’t). Thus, an abiding fear is the soil out of which tricksterism grows, by the following positive feedback: A successful trick shows up the more powerful persons and shows them in a feckless light, which reduces the fear level of the trickster, which reinforces trick-playing. This is a short-term high that comes at the expense of worse relations with the more powerful persons and thus eventually even greater fear levels for the tricksters, which they try to remedy with still more tricks. An example of an unequal power relationship is between a foreign invader and the defenders. Invasion is such a common event in history that by now, countermeasures will have evolved. Tricksterism is likely to be a tile in the mosaic of any such adaptation. 

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

A biological precedent for penetration testing?

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

Evolution of the trickster

Modern human populations may have two independent axes of political polarization: oppressor-oppressed and trickster-control valuer. The first may subserve dispersal by generating refugee groups and the second may subserve building. Any built thing must serve in a complex world in which many constraints must be simultaneously observed. Thus, after the initial build, a long period of tweaking must typically follow. The role of the tricksters is to powerfully motivate this tweaking, for example, by cleverly making someone’s shelter fall down, before the complacency of the control-valuer builders leads to disaster. This may have been how engineering was done by an archaic version of Homo sapiens. Tricksterism may have evolved out of a previously evolved capacity for military strategy, which involves essentially putting one over on the enemy. 

Tricksterism today

The tricksters can also make mistakes, causing damage that cannot have a silver lining in any possible world, and moving to correct this is a natural role of the builders. If you are a builder, ask this: “What is the best use of my indignation?” It is to keep to a strict harm-reduction approach. 

Tricksterism can intensify into sadism, in which the protagonist takes pleasure in the victim’s torment and wants to make it last. However, if you make it last, you are giving the victim plenty of time and motivation to figure out solutions, like a patient old instructor giving his pupil his lessons one at a time, as he is ready for them, and this is how the wise victim will construct the situation. Such a victim will end up with information and know-how others will pay for. 

Before the trickster

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

Picture credit: Wiki Commons

#55. Gender is Pecking Order [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Gender is pecking order

Gender, social status, and testosterone are clearly interrelated, but exactly how requires clarification when the very nature of gender is in question, as now. One possibility is that the male pecking order sits directly atop the female pecking order, and there is no barrier between. Thus, a male who falls low enough in the male pecking order will undergo a reversal in gender identification from male to female (and maybe keep on going down) and a female who rises high enough in the female pecking order will likewise undergo a reversal in gender identification from female to male (and maybe keep on going up). The entire structure could be called "the" pecking order, with the statistical median of the status ranks, and possibly the ranked testosterone levels, always dividing females from males, at least in terms of gendered social signaling. This could be an example of what is called an exact theory replacing its approximate counterpart. In this case, the corresponding approximate theory would be the gender binary. ("You are either a man or a woman.") 

A limitation of this “median theory” is that no causative mechanism is provided.

Recent history of trans

Since the early Sixties, we have seen a trend of increasing media exposure of trans and non-binary individuals, and this was also a period of ever-increasing human population numbers. I conjecture that the latter trend caused the former. The population trend may have produced an upward trend in the average population density at which people are living, suburban expansion notwithstanding. This may have caused an increasing incidence of aggressive one-on-one interactions among humans due to the Calhoun effect, which is much discussed in these pages. See post #36. Aggressive, one-on-one interactions are well known to change the social status of the combatants, the winner enjoying increased status (i.e., a higher ranking in the pecking order) and the loser suffering reduced status. Overall, population density increases can thus be expected to increase the amount of traffic on the social ladder, both upward and downward, leading to increasing numbers of individuals crossing the median and becoming trans or nonbinary. The increasing numbers of trans and nonbinary individuals in society was then faithfully reflected in the content of the news stories of the day. QED.

Trans not genetically determined

Consistent with this, PLOS blogger R. Lewis, who has a PhD in genetics, found remarkably little evidence of a direct genetic causation in transgenderism. Moreover, out of 58 studies on "transgender" listed on clinicaltrials.gov, nothing worth mentioning was found about genetics. This could be an instance of the filing-drawer effect (negative results not published but left to languish in the filing cabinet).

How pecking-order dynamics may lead to dispersal and a mechanism 

I am indebted to Jordan Peterson for turning me on to the pecking-order idea. It can explain aspects of dispersalism, as follows: If people have no emotional memory of their social wins and losses, we would expect their distribution on the social ladder to be Gaussian (aka, a bell curve). However, if a win or loss leaves you with an emotional residue of optimism or pessimism (and, of course, it does), a positive feedback can set in if conflicts are coming faster than the emotional fallout from each can dissipate, so that the more you lose, the greater your pessimism, and the more likely you are to lose in the future. Moreover, the more you win, the greater your optimism, and the more likely you are to win in the future. (Following Peterson, this emotional fallout effect may be due to prolonged up- and down-regulations of serotonin concentrations in the brain.) This dynamic then splits the population into a bi-modal social distribution, resulting in dispersal when most of the underdogs become refugees. Those who remain conceal their potential to reproduce (and thus compete) in gay-trans relationships. The frequency of conflicts could be measuring population density, and the conflicts would not necessarily be over resources, but over proxies for these such as land or jobs. With the addition of these ideas, the splitting and separation of overcrowded rodent populations in the behavioral-sink phase of a Calhoun experiment is explained. To connect these ideas with my earlier idea of the sadness cycle, I conjecture that sadness and its attendant social signaling expresses anger colored by pessimism about winning, whereas contempt and its social signaling expresses anger colored by optimism about winning.

 

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

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

PO   EP

Red, theory; black, fact

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

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

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

Nevertheless, the modes of worship of Islam are the best place to look for such a signal or other remedy if it exists. In this connection, the Islamic prayer discipline has potential to alter brain physiology, based on variations in blood flow to this organ, known to be highly sensitive to same. The variations would come about as a result of the highly regimented posture changes occurring during Islamic prayer. I have coded these postures according to the probable effect on blood pressure measured at the brain, and the result looks like this:

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

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

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

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

PO    EP

Red, theory; black, fact

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

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

1 Corinthians 15:14, KJV

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

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

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

An Alternative Theory 

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

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

An Evolutionary Interpretation 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practices

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

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

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

#49. A Naturalistic Theory of Worship [evolutionary psychology, population]

 PO    EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Anytown, Canada, Apr. 11

Religion has a theory part and an applied part. The latter are 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 modes of worship.

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. See post #36. 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?

Jerusalem in 1972

I’ll focus 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 modes of worship work, 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

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. 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 may have two phases: a first that produces population-density decrease by emigration, and a second 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 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 to lock non-altruists out of the process so that the behaviour 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. 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 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 behaviour-modification program, which acts on the emotional self. 

Rational override based on some creed may begin the work of extirpating someone's anger or sadness cycle, but behaviour modification 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. 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. This will be an issue with contemptuous types.

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. 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. 

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.

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

PO   EP

Red, theory; black, fact

The hacker phenomenon may be psychologically and sociologically akin to what was once called witchcraft, and I think witchcraft is a scientifically accessible social phenomenon. 

The Past

However, the height of the witchcraft hysteria in Europe occurred during the Sixteenth century, when there were no computers. (I focus on Europe here because my ancestors came from there as did those of most people I know.) It was, however, a time of unprecedented scientific advance, and if science paced technology then as now, quite a few new technologies were coming into knowledge for the first time.

The Future

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

The Mystery of Witch Hysteria

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

A Contemporary Interpretation 

The defining idea of the witches/technology hackers may be viewing new technology as a possible means to increase personal power. After siege mentality sets in, fear of apprehension and punishment leads to a mad-dog rejection of all morality, like a gambler chasing the money, or in this case, the indemnity. 

A Contemporary Interpretation of Black Magic

A technology ideal for hacking/witchcraft must be usable without the identity of the agent coming into general knowledge, and is thus  similar to the ring of Gyges mentioned in Plato's Republic. The anonymity conferred by the Internet makes it one of our worst rings of Gyges.  More will be discovered in other realms of technology as the hackers branch out, perhaps in alliance with the currently popular Maker movement. 

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

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

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

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

Psychological Aspects 

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

Why were a majority of European accused witches female? It is probably relevant that the female-specific scold’s bridle was in use at this time. At the height of the anti-witch hysteria, the Catholic Church was pushing back against the Protestant Reformation, and yet Catholicism was relatively tolerant of witchcraft. The most witch trials per capita were in high-latitude or high-altitude countries (e.g., Norway, Scotland, Switzerland) that would have been most affected by the  “little ice age” of the 1600s. Other crimes like theft and murder surged when witchcraft did. I’m not sure what all this adds up to beyond a society under stress.

The Present

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

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

Photo by Daphné Be Frenchie on Unsplash

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

EP   NE

Red, theory; black, fact

Niccolo Machiavelli by Tito

The anger cycle and the sadness cycle may reach their full flower in wars of dispersal and wars of depopulation, respectively. 

The Function of the Sadness Cycle 

Wars of depopulation would 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 sadness signalers were fighting tooth and nail, the transfer of property would leave the contempt signalers 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. Moreover, the sad ones and the contemptuous ones are playing two roles within the same adaptation, and if you can play one role, you can play the other. 

The Sadness Cycle in Evolution 

Since no altruism can evolve in the presence of selfishness unless the altruists are only altruistic to each other, 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.

History Repeats 

Machiavelli 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 remachiavellianization of daily life. 

The Anger Cycle 

Much of human unhappiness comes from destructive, escalating signaling cycles, usually between two persons. Examples are arguments, feuds, schools of thought, gang wars, and 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."

The Function of the Anger Cycle

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 may be selected so as 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. 

Evolution of the Anger Cycle 

In ecological terms, the refugee phenomenon is clearly sub-serving 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 each other. That is why signaling is emphasized here. The reason why the signals are multimodal 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. 

The Bigger Picture 

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.

 

Picture credit: Wiki Commons

#39. The 1950 Ramp [population, evolutionary psychology, engineering, neuroscience]

PO   EN   EP   NE

Red, theory; black, fact

A schematic of a simple rate-of-increase controller mechanism

Historical 

Since about 1950, the world population has been increasing along a remarkably steady ramp function with no slackening in the rate of increase yet apparent, although one cycle of oscillation in the slope occurred during the Sixties. Malthusian reasoning predicts an exponential increase, which this is not. Several lines of evidence point to the idea that humans have a subconscious population controller in their heads, and yet such a controller would have leveled out the increase by now. Until now, no theory has sufficed to explain the facts.

Human Population is Being Controlled for Endless Trouble

The natural population curve for humans in good times may be a saw-tooth waveform, with population ramps alternating with political convulsions that result in a large group being expelled permanently, resulting in the precipitous but limited drop in local population density that ends the saw-tooth cycle. This cycle accomplishes the ecological dispersal function. The population must ramp up for a time to sustainably create the numbers needed for the expulsions. The WHO population curve shows only a ramp because it is a worldwide figure and therefore population losses in expelling regions are balanced by population increases in welcoming regions. This also implies that human population has been increasing in a way unrestrained by food or resource availability or any other external constraint since 1950, to now.

Clearly, human population is being controlled; not to a constant absolute density, but to a constant rate of increase. Population density would go up along the much faster, steeper, and more disastrous exponential curve of Malthus if there were actually no controller.

Neuroscience Aspects

Researchers should look first for such a controller in the hypothalamus, already known to control other variables, such as temperature, by feedback principles.

"Nature does not reinvent the wheel" [quote from my old Professor], which I understand to mean that once a brain structure evolves to serve a particular computational function, it will be tapped for all future needs for such a calculation. This process may make it grow larger or develop sub-nuclei, but additional, independent nuclei for the same computation will never evolve.

Engineering Aspects 

The population controller may contain a conventional PID controller. To make it control rate of increase rather than absolute population density, you put a differentiator in the feedback pathway. If you are of the opinion that human population control is urgent, then you must knock out this differentiator and replace it with a simple feed-through connection. 

Back to Neuroscience 

Fortunately, one common way for evolution to implement differentiation in mammals is to begin with such a feed-through connection and supplement it with an inhibitory, slow, parallel feed-forward connection. If this is the case here, then you  inhibit the feed-forward pathway pharmacologically with sufficient specificity and the job is done. Subjectively, the effect of such a drug would be to take away people's ability to get used to higher population density in deciding how many children to have. An increased propensity to riot should not occur.

The political convulsions that produce dispersal would be triggered by the value on the integrator of the PID controller rising above a threshold. The amygdala of the brain may mediate this. Consistent with this, bilateral removal of the amygdala and hippocampus in monkeys is known to have a profound taming effect accompanied by hypersexuality, known as the Kluver-Bucy syndrome.

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

EN   EP   NE

Red, theory; black, fact

A Nazi Enigma code machine (Canadian War Museum)

There are probably two basic biological uses for human anger: dispersal, and providing an emergency brake on population increase that avoids Malthusian disasters by triggering wars. The second kind of war ends life without being notably efficient in producing mass migration. 

The Past

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

The Coventry Blitz produced 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. 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 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.

A Sociological Theory

Wars brought on by population pressure may 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-derivative] 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. 

Calhoun’s Classical Experiment 

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.

An Engineering-inspired Theory 

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.

Philosophers May Have Noticed This

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

The Future 

A third and highest threshold of the control debt may exist, 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 (Zero Population Growth) fanatic and unable to change without pharmacological help. (Good old booze? It may not be that simple.)