#67. The Trembling-Network Theory of Everything [physics]

PH

Red, theory; black, fact. 

I continue to mine the idea that the world of appearances is simulation-like, in that how we perceive it is strongly affected by the fact that our point of view is inside it, and illusions are rampant.

The slate-of-givens approach is intended to exploit consilience to arrive at a simplified physics that attributes as many phenomena as possible to historical factors and the observer's point of view. Simplified physics is viewed as a stepping-stone to the one, true TOE. The existence of widespread consilience implies that such exists.

The basic theory

The underlying reality is proposed to be a small-world network, whose nodes are our elementary particles and whose links ("edges" in graph theory) are seen collectively as the fields around those particles.

This network is a crude approximation to scale-free, but is structurally only a recursion of three generations (with a fourth in the process of forming), each comprised of two sub-generations, and not an infinite regress. The first generation to form after the big bang was a bunch of triangular networks that we call baryons. In the next generation, they linked up to form the networks underlying light atomic nuclei. These, and individual protons, were big enough to stably bond to single nodes (electrons) to form the network version of atoms. Above the atomic/molecular/electromagnetic level, further super-clustering took on the characteristics of gravitation, whose hallmark seems to be rotation. At the grandest cosmological scales, we may be getting into a fourth "force" that produces the foamy structure of galaxy distribution. The observations attributed to the presence of dark matter may be a sign that, at the intra-galactic scale, the nature of the "fields" is beginning to shift again.

I conjecture that throughout this clustering process, a continuous thermal-like agitation was running through all the links, and especially violent spikes in the agitation pattern could rupture links not sufficiently braced by other, parallel links. This would have been the basis of a trial-and error process of creation of small-world characteristics. The nature of the different "forces" we seem to see at different scales would be entirely conditioned by the type of clusters the links join at that scale, because cluster type would condition the opportunities for network stabilization by cooperative bracing. 

Reconciliation with known science

Formation and rupture of links would correspond to the quantum-mechanical phenomenon of wave-function collapse, and the endless converging, mixing, and re-diverging of the heat signals carried by the network would correspond to the smooth, reversible time-evolution of the wave-function between collapses. The experience of periodic motions would arise from resonances in closed paths embedded in the network. When you see the moon move across the sun in an eclipse, <11-27-2020: no net links are being made or broken; the whole spectacle somehow arises by an energetically balanced creation and rupture of links.>

The photoelectric effect that Einstein made famous can be given a network interpretation: the work function is the energy needed to simultaneously break all the links holding the electron to the cluster that is the electrode, and the observation of an electron that then seems to fly away from the electrode happens by calculation in the remaining network after it has been energized by heat-signal energy in excess of that needed to break the links, reflecting back into the network from the broken ends.

How distance would arise

All the ineffably large number of nodes in the universe would be equidistant from each other, which is possible if they exist in a topological space; such spaces have no distance measure. I think it likely that what you experience as distance is the number of nodes that you contain divided by the number of links connecting the cluster that is you with the cluster that you are observing. It remains to figure out how some of the concomitants of distance arise, such as delay in signal transmission and the cosmological redshift.

Reconciliation with the finite speed of light

11-01-2020: The time-delay effect of distance can be described by a hose-and-bucket model if we assume that all measurements require link breaking in the observer network. The energy received by the measuring system from the measured system is like water from a hose progressively filling a bucket. The delayed overflow of the bucket would correspond to the received energy reaching threshold for breaking a link in the observer network. The fewer the links connecting observer to observed relative to the observer size (i.e., the greater the distance), the slower the bucket fills and the longer signal transmission is observed to take.

11-02-2020: The above mechanism cannot transmit a pulsatile event such as a supernova explosion. It takes not one, but two integrations to convert an impulse into a ramp function suitable for implementing a precise delay. Signal theory tells us that if you can transmit an impulse, you can transmit anything. The second integration has already been located in the observer cluster, so the obvious place in which to locate the first integration is in the observed cluster. Then when the link in the observer cluster breaks, which is an endothermic event, energy is sucked out of both integrators at once, resetting them to zero. That would describe an observer located in the near field of the observed cluster. In the far field, the endothermic rupture would cool only the observer cluster; most of the radiative cooling of the observed cluster would come from the rupture of inter-cluster links, not intra-cluster links. Thus, hot clusters such as stars are becoming increasingly disconnected from the rest of the universe. This can account for the apparent recessional velocity of the galaxies, since I have conjectured that distance is inversely proportional to numbers of inter-cluster links.

Predictions of the fate of the universe

We often hear it said that the reason the night sky is black is that the expansion of the universe is continuously creating more space in which to warehouse all the photons emitted by all the stars. However, the network orientation offers a simpler explanation: inter-cluster links at the grandest scale are being endothermically destroyed to produce the necessary cooling, and the fewer these become, the longer the cosmological distances appear to be. I suppose that when these links are all gone, we all cook. The microwave background radiation may be a harbinger of this. [Pun not intended, but then it was.] Clearly, my theory favors the Big Rip scenario of the fate of the universe, but a hot Big Rip.

Accounting for the ubiquity of oscillations

05-01-2021: At this point, an improved theory of oscillations can be offered: Oscillating systems feature 4 clusters and thus 4 integrators connected in a loop to form a phase-shift oscillator. These integrators could be modeled as a pair of masses connected by a spring ( = 2 integrators) in each of the observer and observed systems ( = 2 x 2 = 4 integrators).

Motion and gravity

11-30-2020: Motion would be an energetically balanced breaking of links on one side of a cluster and making of links on the other. This could happen on a hypothetical background of spontaneous, random link making and breaking. Acceleration in a gravitational "field" would happen if more links are coming in from one side than the opposite side. More links will correspond to a stronger mutual bracing effect, preferentially inhibiting link breaking on that side. This will shift the making/breaking equilibrium toward making on that side, resulting in an acceleration. <12-11-2020: The universal gravitational constant G could be interpreted as expressing the probability of a link spontaneously forming between any two nodes per unit of time.>

Dimension and direction

01-13-2021: It is not clear how the direction and dimension concepts would emerge from a network representation of reality. If distance emerges from 2-way interactions of clusters, perhaps direction emerges from 3-way interactions and dimension arises from a power law of physical importance versus the number of interacting clusters in a cluster of clusters. This idea was inspired by the fact that four points are needed to define a volume, three are needed to define a plane, and two are needed to define a line.

02-13-2021: Alternatively, angle may be a matter of energetics. Assume that new links form spontaneously at an unalterable rate and only link rupture rate varies. The heat injected by link creation must be disposed of by a balanced rate of link rupture, but this will depend in detail on mutual bracing effects. If your rate of rupture of links to a given cluster is minimal, you will be approaching that cluster. The cluster with which your rupture rate is highest is the one you are receding from. Clusters with which you score average rupture rates will be 90 degrees off your line of travel. The distribution of clusters against angle is predicted from geometry and the appearance of the night sky to be proportional to sin(θ), but a random distribution of rupture rates would predict a bell curve (Gaussian) centered on the average rupture rate. Close, but no cigar. The tails of the Gaussian would produce a sparse zone both fore and aft. Moreover, since there must always be a maximum and minimum, you will always be heading exactly toward some cluster and exactly away from some other: not what we observe.

03-06,07-2021: That the universe is spatially at least three-dimensional can be reduced to a rule that links do not cross. Why the minimum dimensionality permitted by this rule is the one we observe remains to be explained. 

Momentum

Momentum can be explained by attributing it to the network surrounding a cluster, not to the cluster itself. Heat must flow without loss (how?) from in front of a travelling cluster around to the rear (I hope eventually to be able to purge this description of all its directional assumptions), suggesting closed flow-lines through the larger network reminiscent of magnetic field lines. (This is similar in outline to Mach's explanation of momentum, as being due to the interaction of the test mass with the distant galaxies.) It seems necessary to postulate that once this flow pattern is established, it persists by default. An especially large cluster in the vicinity will represent a high-conductivity path for the heat flow, possibly creating a tendency for links to form perpendicular to the line of travel and offset toward the large cluster, which might explain gravitational capture of objects into stable orbits. Finally, the overall universal law would be: heat of link formation = heat of link rupture + increases in network heat content due to increases in network melting point due to increases in mutual bracing efficiency. A simple concept of melting point is the density of triangles in the network. Still to be explained: repulsive forces.

Repulsive forces

04-04-2021: Repulsive forces are only seen with electromagnetism and then only after a local network has been energized somehow. When particles said to be oppositely charged recombine, neutral atoms are re-formed, which creates new triangles and thus increases melting point. The recombination of particles said to be of like charge creates relatively few triangles and is therefore disfavored, creating the impression of mutual repulsion.

 

More on the origin of momentum

Inter-cluster links are not individually bidirectional in their heat conductivity, but a (usually) 50:50 mixture of unidirectional links going each way. Momentum and spontaneous First Law motion become prevalent in classically-sized networks due to small imbalances in numbers of cluster A to cluster B links versus cluster B to cluster A links. This produces a random pattern of spontaneous heat flows across the universe. Converging flows burn out links (and are thus self-limiting) and diverging flows preserve links, causing them to increase in number locally. This process nucleates the gravitational clumping of matter. A directional imbalance in the interior of a cluster causes First Law motion by spontaneously transporting heat from front to back. Front and back are defined by differences in numbers of inter-cluster links (to an arbitrary external cluster) among subsets of cluster nodes.

Case study of a rocket motor

For a rocket motor to work, we have to assume that one of these asymmetrical links can only be burned out by heat applied to its inlet end. During liftoff, the intense heat down in the thruster chambers burns out (unidirectional) links extending up into the remainder of the craft. This leaves an imbalanced excess of links within the rocket body going the other way, leading to a persistent flow of heat downward from the nose cone. This cooling stabilizes links from overhead gravitationally sized clusters ending in the nose cone, causing them to accumulate, thereby shortening the "distance" from the nose cone to those clusters. Meanwhile, the heat deposited at the bottom of the rocket progressively burns out links from the rocket to the Earth, thereby increasing the "distance" between the rocket and the Earth. The exhaust gasses have an imbalanced excess of upward-directed asymmetric links due to the temperature gradient along the exhaust plume that serves to break their connection to the rocket and create the kind of highly asymmetrical cluster required for space travel. <04-11-2021: The details of this scenario all hang together if we assume that link stabilization is symmetrical with link burnout: that is, it is only responsive to what happens at the inlet (in this case, cooling).> Since kinetic energy is associated with motion, the directional link imbalance must be considered a form of energy in its own right, one not sensible as heat as usually understood.

Future directions

05-28-2021: To make further progress, I might have to assume that the links in the universal network are the real things and that the nodes are just their meeting places, which only appear to be real things because this is where the flow of energy changes direction. I then assume that all links are directional and that pairing of oppositely-directed links was actually the first step in the evolution of the universe. Finally, I decompose these directional links into an inlet part joined to an outlet part. With this decomposition, a link pair looks like this:

⚪⚫

⚫⚪

Notice the interesting ambiguity in how to draw the arrows. A purely directional link recalls the one-way nature of time and may represent undifferentiated space and time. A final decision was to treat a repulsive force as a link whose disappearance is exothermic, not endothermic, because this indirectly allows the formation of more of the default kind of link.

#66. Neuromodulators as Peril Specialists [Neuroscience]

NE

Red: theory; black, fact.

“Life is Difficulty”

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 nuclei. 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

#65. Baryogenesis [physics]

PH

(Part 5, Deprecated)

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

EP     PO     

Red, theory; black, fact.

A drill hall of the Apocalypse?

If you are:

• amused by abuse of trust
• amused by subversion

you may have what might be called "subversion complex" (SC). Other evidence of this may be:

• hacking
• pedophilia
• enjoyment of sick jokes
• trust issues

Social role of  the trickster

I conjecture that the evolved role of SC (tricksterism) is to harden a population against natural disasters such as famine and pestilence. In this regard, persons with SC are analogous to white-hat hackers, or penetration testers, that the military or a large corporation may keep on staff to harden their systems against hacking for real by outsiders. Spontaneously formed, cooperating groups of persons with SC would be analogous to corporate "red teams" or "tiger teams."

Tricksterism as a subroutine of the human swarm intelligence

SC is probably transmitted intergenerationally by child abuse. The prevalence of SC in a population may rise with increasing population density because of adult carriers encountering and victimizing solitary children more frequently. If the SC prevalence rises high enough, carriers encounter each other often enough to form social groups ("red teams") that cooperate in subversion to amplify their social effect. This is adaptive, because the risk of famine and pestilence to a population increases with population density. <06-19-2020: this can be called a "macro-homeostatic effect," or maybe a "population homeostatic effect," but is usually called "the hand of God.">

There may also be a complimentary subversion-victim complex (SVC), also induced by childhood abuse, but involving a milder disturbance that spares the victim's ability to influence and harden a network of friends against adversity. <03-27-2020: This may be where priests come from.>

An SC carrier or red team of same will appear to the victim to:

• accurately imitate the essential features of microbial pathogens
• accurately imitate the essential features of a famine
• "not be doing a very good job" of killing the victim, because their evolved role is essentially instructional.

Of value would be a psychometric test to detect SC and SVC, but the test authors will need to do much field testing to bullet proof the SC test against cheating.

Schizophrenia may be a disease of persons with SVC who fail to learn fast enough to defeat the threats posed by their local "red team." 

The evolved emotional reactivities underlying tricksterism

05-14-2020: The toxic factor that induces the SC/SVC may be unavoidable stress experienced in childhood. This factor is also linked to depression. In adulthood, the dynamic would be between the Till Eulenspiegels (SC) and the control freaks (SVC). The angrier the control freaks get because of the tricks of the Tills, the more fearful the Tills get because the control freaks signal their desire for disproportionate retribution. However, the Tills have learned that by cleverly subverting the control freaks, thus making them look feckless and by implication, no real threat, they can reduce their own anxiety levels, resulting in negative reinforcement of the subversion behavior (and a vicious interpersonal cycle). <05-17-2020: These emotional reactivities underlying full-blown SC may also underlie the cultural phenomenon of humor.>

06-09-2020: The victims of Till Eulenspiegel's tricks were often craftspersons, which supports the present theory because such people are in the best position to devise technological solutions to external threats to society, which are one possible output of the SC/SVC adaptation that led to its selection in evolution. Recall that both Jesus of Nazareth and Paul the Apostle were craftspeople (carpenter and tent maker, respectively). However, the worst mass murderer in Canadian history to date was also a craftsperson (denturist). Keep calm and make something.

12-24-2020: Evolution has raised up a number of supporting roles for the builder-trickster interaction: the humorist, the madman, and the suicide. The humorist makes the trickster role appealing to young people and serves as recruiter. The madman runs to the police with tales of nonexistent persecution, thereby obfuscating attempts by the tormented builder to explain his problem and be believed, and get help, due to a poor signal-to noise ratio, thereby allowing the tricksters to do their work unimpeded by social controls. The suicide obfuscates the question of whether someone has been murdered. If the tricksters decide that some builder must be murdered to keep the party going, they just have to pin a suicide note on the body to get away scot-free.

12-25-2020: The final stage in the builder-trickster program is making public the findings of the builder, for which an attention-getting emotional explosion will be needed, e.g., the crucifiction of Jesus, or the Gabriel Wortman massacre. However, this is probably simplistic. <01-26-2022: Other mechanisms for propagating design improvements can be imagined, such as the emulation of high-status individuals.>

A biological precedent for penetration testing?

Evidence for a biological precedent may be the many retroviruses integrated into the human genome. Presumably, one of these becomes active now and then at random and kills the host cell if the anti-viral defenses 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 (TGTNM).

A field observation

06-18-2020: Don't assume that all persons with SC are necessarily grinning and leering all the time. I strongly suspect that the ones who have done time are unsmiling, taciturn, and given to complaint--and still up to their tricks.

Evolution of the trickster

09-27-2020: Modern human populations may have two (independent?) axes of political polarization: oppressor-oppressed and trickster-control freak. The first may sub serve dispersal by generating refugee groups and the second may sub serve 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 before the complacency of the control-freak builders leads to disaster. <03-12-2021: This may have been how engineering was done by an archaic version of Homo sapiens.><12-02-2022: 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.>

A tangent about our evolutionary context

Our evolutionary forebears may have been champion dispersers for a long time <12-21-2020: i.e., Homo erectus*> before the ice age** forced some of them to become champion builders (initially, of shelters and warm clothing). <12-31-2020: "champion environment modifiers" may be closer to the mark than "champion builders"> 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. <12-21-2020: The r-selecting niche was probably 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.>

* H. erectus: lived 2 million years ago to 100,000 years ago. H. sapiens: earliest fossils, 300,000 years old. Evidence of behavioral modernity: 100,000–70,000 y ago.

** that is, the Pleistocene ice age, itself a sequence of 5 successive continental glaciations (by oxygen isotope evidence) separated by temperate periods, starting 2.6 million years ago and thought to be not over yet. Over the past 800,000 y, continental glaciation has happened rhythmically on a 100,000-y cycle due to astronomical factors (Milankovitch cycle). Selection for building skill may therefore have occurred in multiple successive episodes over the course of the Pleistocene.

#61. Stress and Schizophrenia [neuroscience]

NE

Red, theory; black, fact.

Introduction

The main positive symptoms of schizophrenia, namely hallucinations, word salad, and loosening of associations, all seem to be variations of the latter, so loosening of associations will here be taken as the primary disorder. Stress and the brain's dopaminergic system are strongly implicated in the causation of schizophrenia. In connection with stress, psychologists speak of "the affective [emotional] pathway to schizophrenia." 

Stress and madness in culture and history

For an example of this from literature, recall that Shakespeare's King Lear "went mad" when his lofty status disintegrated as a result of his mishandling the succession to the throne. In the film Little Big Man, General Custer becomes delusional on the battlefield during the debacle for which he is famous, immediately before taking an arrow from an equally disturbed Pawnee character. It must be even more humiliating when an animal brings you down, as happened to Captain Ahab, who was not notably on an even keel towards the end of the story. In real life, one suspects a case of stress-induced madness in Adolf Hitler toward the end of WWII.

Organismal responses to stress

Stress is known to increase genetic variability in bacteria, a process known as transformation. Stress is likewise known to increase the meiotic recombination rate in sexually reproducing organisms such as fruit flies. (Stress-induced recombination and the mechanism of evolvability. Zhong W, Priest NK. Behavioral ecology and sociobiology. 2011;65:493-502.) It seems that when an organism is in trouble, it begins casting about ever more widely for solutions. If evolution is the only mode of adaptation available, this casting about will take the form of an increase in the size and frequency of mutations. In conscious humans, however, this casting about in search of solutions in the face of stress may well take the form of a loosening of associations during thought. Should the person find the solution he or she needs, then presumably the stress levels go down and the thought process tightens up again, so we have a negative feedback operating that eventually renormalizes the thought process and all is well. In optimization theory, this process is called "simulated annealing."

Disorder of a cognitive stress response

But what if the person does not find the solution they need? Then, presumably the loosening of associations gets more and more pronounced ("reverse annealing") until it begins to interfere with the activities of daily living and thus begins to contribute net stress, thus making matters worse, not better. Now we have a pernicious positive feedback operating, and it rapidly worsens the state of the sufferer in what is known as a psychotic break, resulting in hospitalization. That these psychotic breaks are associated with tremendous stress is made clear by the fact that post-traumatic stress disorder is a common sequel of a psychotic episode.

 

Stress: Molecular aspects

01-06-2020: Messenger substances (i.e., hormones and neuromodulators) known to carry the stress signal are: CRF, ACTH, cortisol, noradrenaline, adrenaline, dopamine, NGF, and prolactin. The well-known phenomenon of stress sensitization, <05-31-2020: which may be part of the disease mechanism of schizophrenia,> probably inheres in long-term changes in protein expression and will not be apparent in a simple blood test for any of the above substances without a prior standardized stress challenge. (Could that be the process of getting the needle itself? In that case, you would install a catheter through the needle to permit repeated blood sampling and collect the baseline sample long after the intervention sample, not before, as is customary in research.)

Take home 

If you are under stress and noticing a loosening of associations, see a doctor, take a valium or whatever he prescribes, and focus intently on solving that problem; you may not have a lot of time to solve it. Don't go off and paint pictures, as Van Gogh did. We all know what happened to him.

02-15-2020: Is society as a whole becoming "schizophrenic" at this time, by the mechanism of stress-induced reverse annealing? (The stress in question would be coming from overpopulation.) Food for thought.

Other mental illnesses

05-31-2020: Bipolar disorder may result from an analogous positive feedback affecting another problem solving adaptation of the brain, which would be modelled by the alternation of brainstorming sessions (mania) with sessions in which the brainstormed productions are soberly critiqued (depression).

Brain mechanisms

12-04-2020: How does the loosening of associations of schizophrenia arise? I conjecture that one activated sensory memory represented in the posterior cortex does not activate another directly, but indirectly via an anatomically lengthy but fast relay through the prefrontal cortex, which has a well known dopaminergic input from the ventral tegmental area of the midbrain. Imagine that a higher vertebrate has a free-will spectrum, with machine-like performance and high dopaminergic tone at one end, and at the other, a carefully considered performance verging on overthinking, with low dopaminergic tone. Persons with schizophrenia have presumably pushed past the latter end of the spectrum into dysfunction. Dopamine could orchestrate movement along the free-will spectrum by a dual action on the prefrontal cortex: inhibiting associational reflexes passing back to posterior cortex while facilitating direct outputs to the motor system. Dual actions of neuromodulators are a neuroscientific commonplace (e.g., my PhD thesis) and dopamine is a neuromodulator. It remains to be explained how the NMDA receptor, which is also strongly implicated in schizophrenia, enters the picture. <03-07-2021: It could simply be the source of excitation of the ventral tegmental area.>

Photo by Ameer Basheer on Unsplash

#60. 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.")

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 #37.) 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 and development

By the status-is-gender theory, the occurrence of trans and binary individuals should run in families, since a large part of social status is hereditary, although it is not necessarily determined directly by the genome. Status may be influenced by multimodal acquisition of a status "calibration" from caregivers early in life that is synaptically mediated yet resistant to change after a critical period is past. A similar and well established phenomenon would be the early maladaptive schema, and this may amount to the same thing by a different name if status defaults to maximal at birth and is then adaptively reduced by experience.

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).

Tangent: how pecking-order dynamics may lead to dispersal

02-29-2020: 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. <08-29-2020: 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 of oppressors and oppressed, and the latter soon join some refugee stream, resulting in dispersal. 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.

A false-flag strategy?

20-08-2020: Another idea about trans is that it is a false-flag strategy used by low-status males and females to reproduce without punishment. Pair a gay woman with a trans woman and you have a potentially fertile couple able to fool the oppressors until the deed is done. Likewise a gay man and a trans man.

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

# 59. Disaster Biology [evolution, evolutionary psychology]

EV     EP     

Red, theory; black, fact.

• Refer to torture-planet theory (TPT), post #57.
• The habitat is a unit of selection, leading to group selection.
• Much of evolution proceeds by an accumulation of founder effects, especially altruism in sexually reproducing species.
• Opportunities for colonization of recently-emptied habitats are ephemeral.
• Under disaster-prone conditions, this leads to selection pressure for migrant production and evolvability (i.e., a high rate of evolution, especially founder-effect evolution).
• Language diversification in humans is an evolvability adaptation.
• It works by preserving genetic founder effects from dilution by late-coming migrants, whose reproduction is held back by the difficulties of learning a new language. 
• Xenophobia and persistent ethnicity markers (PEMs) can be explained in the same way.
• The spread of linguistic and  PEM novelties in a population is predicted to be especially fast in newly colonized, previously empty habitats. <09-17-2020: Alternatively, the linguistic novelties may start as a thick patois developed by an oppressed group in the home habitat prior to becoming refugees, as a way to make plans under the noses of the oppressing group.>
•  Refugee-producing adaptations sub serving dispersal can be called "tough altruism."
• Populations producing more refugees are more likely to colonize further empty habitats, a selective advantage.
• Disaster biology may be what is conceptually missing from theories of the origin of life (abiogenesis). 01-02-2020: i.e., the forerunners of the first cells may have been spores, that is, a dispersal mechanism. <11-21-2020: The spores could form initially as rebound droplets occurring when raindrops fall on a scum-covered body of water, or as a powdery evaporation residue rich in calcium sulfate.>
• Photo by Purnomo Capunk on Unsplash