#41. Corporate Sin [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

Not all of humanly willed destruction 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" 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. What about those extra bits of code?

The basic code 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. 

An attractive theory about fame, in turn, is that fame is 90% being-famous-for-being-famous, and 10% is being famous for something else, the predisposing factor. Human intergroup interactions have the form we observe because these predisposing factors are not random but are due to natural selection. Moreover, 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 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).

#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.

#38. Can Irreducible Complexity Evolve? [genetics, evolution]

EV   GE

Red, theory; black, fact

2 x 2

The Key Insight

Sexual reproduction may allow the evolution of irreducible complexity by increasing the intrinsic complexity of the basic building block of change, the mutation.

Irreducible Complexity 

Influential biologist Richard Dawkins wrote in "The God Delusion" that a genuine case of irreducible complexity will never be found in biology. A case of irreducible complexity would be some adaptation that would require an intelligent designer because it could never evolve one mutation at a time, and Dawkins believes there is no such intelligent designer in biology.

In classic natural selection, each mutation must be individually beneficial to its possessor in order for selection to increase its prevalence in the population to the point where the next incremental, one-mutation improvement becomes statistically possible. In this way, all manner of wondrous things are supposed to evolve bit by tiny bit. You have irreducible complexity if an advantageous evolutionary innovation requires two mutations,  but neither confers any advantage in isolation and so cannot be selected up to a sufficiently high frequency that the second mutation is likely to happen in the background of the first.

However, I am seeing irreducible complexity everywhere these days. 

Possible Cases of Irreducible Complexity

For example, your upper-jaw dentition must mesh accurately with that of your lower jaw or you can't eat. Thus, the process of evolutionary foreshortening of the muzzle of the great apes to the flat human face could never have happened, assuming that a single mutation affects only the upper or lower jaw. 

Furthermore, how can any biological signaling system evolve one mutation at a time? At a minimum, you always need both the transmitter adaptation and the receiver adaptation, not to mention further mutations to connect the receiver circuit to something useful.

The evolution of altruism presents a similar problem. The lonely first altruist in the population is always at a disadvantage in competition with the more selfish non-mutants unless it also has a signaling system that lets it recognize fellow altruists (initially, close relatives) and a further mutation that places the altruistic behavior under the control of the receiver part of this system. Thus, altruists would only be altruistic to their own kind, the requirement for altruism to be selected in the presence of selfishness. Finally, the various parts of this system must be indissolubly linked in a way that the non-altruists cannot fake.

A Solution   

Consider the crossing-over events that occur during meiosis as complex mutations: two changes to the genome from a single event, each corresponding to one end of the DNA segment that translocates. In crossing over, two homologous chromosomes pair up along their length and swap a long segment of DNA, a process requiring two double-chain breaks on each end, and their corresponding repairs. A very far-reaching change to the genetic information can occur during crossing-over that is termed unequal crossing-over. This form of the process arises because of inaccuracies, sometimes major, in the initial alignment of the homologous chromosomes prior to crossing-over. When the process is finished, one chromosome has been shortened and the other has been lengthened. This is the major source of gene duplication, which, in turn, is a major source of junk DNA, the part that is classified as broken genes.

A Mechanism for the Evolution of Complexity 

Anatomical features such as jaw length and axon targets may be controlled by variations in gene dose that originate in unequal crossing-over.

In this way, a concerted change affecting multiple distinct sites becomes possible. The two ends of the recombinant segment can in principle be functionally unrelated initially. They become related if both are affected by the same complex mutation and the entire change increases fitness and is thus selected.

A single complex mutation could in principle produce a communication channel at one stroke because of the number of simultaneous changes involved. 

Statistical Issues

The probability of a combination of simultaneous local changes being beneficial to the organism is much smaller on mathematical grounds than is the probability of a given single-nucleotide change being beneficial. However, these unfavourable statistics are at least partly offset by the existence of a dedicated system for producing complex mutations in large numbers, namely meiosis, part of the process of maturation of egg and sperm cells.

The Big Picture 

Complex mutations provide a way for a species to discontinuously jump into new niches as they open up, possibly explaining how a capacity for this kind of mutation could spread and become characteristic of surviving species over time. This idea also provides another explanation for the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record.

#37. The Fallacy of Justice [evolutionary psychology]

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

The Biology of Badness

Evil and criminality may sub-serve either dispersal or preemptive population reduction, both valuable biological processes that tend to prolong the survival of species. 

The algorithms for achieving these ends would have been created over time by some form of evolution.

Evolution and the Role of Emotion

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

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

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

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

Past and Future Responses to Badness

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

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

A more nuanced theory of crime prevention is possible, where logical and technological constraints on behavior complement efforts to reduce the motivation for committing crimes at the source: the individual's perception of the fairness of society, which will be due to a combination of objective realities and the filters through which they are viewed. However, I originally wrote as I did because I don't think that logical and technological constraints are the squeaky wheel at the moment.

#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.)

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

EP

Red, theory; black, fact

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

_________________

Thought sources	Inputs	Output insights
		Reality (What is)	Blend	Morality (Thus…)
PGSd+senses	Emotion	politicsc		religionc
	Blend	astrologyb ↕	← theologya →	Jewish lawb ↕
Education+senses	Reason	sciencec		lawc

a. primordial condition

b. output distinction added

c. input distinction added

d. evolution; see post 22

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

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