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

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Red, theory; black, fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Red, theory; black, fact.

Medical advances during a turbulent century

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

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

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

My conclusions

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

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

An engineering model

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

Evidence for the engineering model

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

The historical global population growth rate scaled to population.

11-07-2018

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

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

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