The Philosophers' Pea Shooter

Chronicles of a Baby Boomer - Gypsy

2011-10-25T19:51:00.000-07:00

I am very glad I decided to buy a GPS unit on the first day of my cross country camping trip to visit my daughter in Oregon. It was a concession to the fact that the paper maps I had were, well, pretty much useless. Not to mention the fact that trying to follow lines on a map while driving is, after all, the twentieth century equivalent of DWT (Driving While Texting.) So, modern gadgetry here I come.

The first thing I noticed was the voice. I guess since techno trifles are mostly the domain of men, the unit comes out of the box in default female voice mode. Or mine just happened to be a girl; there was a 50-50 chance, after all. The female voice is supposed to be soothing, perhaps. I was thinking of calling her Gypsy (the literary construction of GPS and an ‘ey’ soundy phoneme at the end.) Unfortunately, my device sounded more like Mrs. Steven Hawking than anyone named Esmeralda, so I decided to call her ‘Stephanie’ instead. I can reserve Gypsy for the familiar voice.

Whatever the name, Steph (I eventually shortened it) became a constant, and jealously guarded, companion. One on whom I would come to rely for all things expeditious, from my morning quest for a local greasy spoon, to her pin point accuracy in locating the next KOA for the evening’s camp food (make mine spam!) and fireside meditation. Though she did possess some endearing quirks, like the comical mispronunciations of common words. ‘St. Clair Avenue’ became ‘Street Clair Avenue.’ An honest mistake, I grant, but there is simply no excuse for ‘Kingshighway Boulevard’ becoming ‘Kings-shy-way Boulevard.’ Though maybe that’s the Hungarian accent coming through, eh Gypsy? And now, thanks to Steph’s street semantics, the William L. Wilson Freeway in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, is forever rechristened the ‘William the 50th Wilson Freeway.’ It is catchy. But you have to feel sorry for all those Williams, the first through the 49th, doing nothing deserving a freeway until number 50 came alone.

Steph really showed her longitudinal latitude on my trip into Washington, DC, for which I forever forgive her endearing mispronunciations. It was a test of our friendship, nonetheless. To all who have not had the pleasure, nay, privilege, nein, agony, nyet, torture, of driving into the governing center of our republic, I have this one thing to say. Don’t. Ever. Under any circumstances. Whatever negotiating may go on in the halls of government, negotiating the thoroughfares orbiting it is nearly impossible.

The geography around our capital is a snarl of highways, interstates, HOV lanes, access roads, streets that appear to have been designed by Dali, US Routes numbered by typewriter banging monkeys, highways which are east bound in the morning, west bound in the evening and entirely bound at all times: A veritable aneurysm of avenues. An angry chimp with a can of silly string could have designed a more intelligible system.

I think this was all too much for Steph. She started mumbling, and then I’m sure I saw a slight twitch from her suction cup perch on my windshield. I had only had her for a few days and, so far, the hardest navigational task I had set before her was: “Find me a battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.” Not a stretch, by any means.

“Turn right on Sully Avenue,” she said, slightly terser than was necessary, I noted. Before the theatre of the absurd which was my driving field of vision I saw signs advertising several roads: Virginia 29, US 66, Route 110, Highway 50. But, alas, no Sully Avenue. No clear right turn anywhere, for that matter. Just an acre of concrete with road signs dangling above it. So I did the saner version of closing my eyes and pointing, that is to say I stayed pretty much where I was, did not change lanes, let my auto mechanical companion do the driving, and hurtled into one of the options.

Steph sighed. I know she did. She denies it, of course, but I could hear it in the surly way she snarled “Recalculating!” I didn’t need the requisite ‘jerk’ added to know that I was in the navigational doghouse.

“Oh, yes. Yes. Do. Please! Recalculate to your silicon hearts content,” I muttered, wondering if she was planning on having Stephen reimagine the time and space around my head. “I plugged you into my cigarette lighter, Missy. I can unplug you, too, you know,” I feigned to say, but thought better of it. By now she was my only hope of escape. Better play it safe. Maybe if I humor her she will still bring me to a Wi-Fi hotspot later.

“In point one miles, turn onto Washington Boulevard on left, then drive point one miles and turn right onto Lizzie Borden Lane and drive straight to Donner Party Circle across from Okefenokee Swamp Meadows and while you’re at it, turn yourself in at the state police station for all those speeding ‘incidents’ I’ve recorded over the past few days.”

“Ya? Fine. We can do that. And I can set you to metric! And by the way, it’s point one MILE! Point three MILE! Anything one mile or less is SINGULAR.”

“Recalculating! Recalculating!”

“Uh, oh. She said it twice," I thought. "That’s a bad sign,” There was a pause, then the screen squelched and blinked a few times. I’m sure I heard a grumble and I think something obscene flashed on the monitor.

After a very pained pause, she continued.

“Drive point five MILES and turn right on the Lee Boulevard,” she said, matter of factly.

"Ok, then. You’ve got that out of your system. Maybe we are starting to understand each other." I determined to charge her batteries extra-long that evening. Just get me back to my cozy tent.

One thing about using an electronic aid to navigation is that it leaves you with enough time to get very, very bored. I started poking around in the various menus to see what other options for mischief I could find for Steph. Hmm, there’s a setting to show how much money I’m spending on gas and one that shows my elevation. I won’t need that since I left my hover car at home. It can display time, direction, longitude and latitude, feet till impact… Don’t know if I want to know the last one. I wonder if it can tell if I’m falling asleep and shout “WAKE UP!?” That’s probably the deluxe model.

A few days later, after numerous trips to Wal-Marts, rib joints, various battle fields, monuments and merriments, I set out on a long day’s drive. All day, as a matter of fact. I was going from the Buckaloons National Park in Pennsylvania (Nasty place. No Internet) to Granite City outside of St. Louis. (Street Louis, Steph would say.) It was then that I noticed one little piece of information I had ignored before: The estimated arrival time. At 9:30AM I was informed that I would arrive at my destination, indeed, at my actual camp site, at 7:17PM.

“Well,” I thought. “I bet I can better that.”

Then began the game of shave the minutes off the ETA. “Let’s see. I’ll have to take at least one break for gas, bathroom and to shake the blood clots out of my legs. I’ve got granola and a bottle full of camp water in the front seat, so food’s covered. Sure. I can get that back to before 7:00PM. No problem.”

So began my quest for minutes. And it went well, too. By 1:00 I was down to 7:05. Then 7:03. “I’ll be in the six-something-somethings in no time!” I thought, confident in my casual breaking of numerous interstate traffic laws. Then, after a break, it was back up to 7:08. “Darn! Five minutes. No bathroom next time!”

I would have made it, too, had it not been for those 50 miles of one lane traffic in Indiana.

“What’s with those people, doing all that road repair on my time?” I tossed at Steph while angrily stuffing granola into my mouth. She merely recalculated my arrival time further into the future, like a whittler chipping off flakes from a bit of wood.

“And what’s wrong with a one lane road?” I demanded. “We can still do 80. 45MPH is just a suggestion!”

Steph cooed a patronizing, “Mmm, hmm,” and clicked the arrival time back up to 7:17. She was enjoying this.

“Don’t patronize me,” I thought. The final ETA catapulted to just about 7:30.

Oh, and Steph had one more nasty little pay back in mind for ‘that whole Washington thing.’ The 7:17PM ETA? Central time. I reached what I thought was the last exit before the camp site, sure I’d be sipping beer and frying sausages in no time, and found myself on another freeway.

“Drive 100 miles on I270,” Steph demurred, smugly. Now that was cruel.

It was actually 8:30 Eastern time by the time I got there. Eleven hours in the driving seat. All I had time for, on assembling my tent, was a tin of herring, some crackers and a beer. Then bed. It was actually quite good. A meal, a rest and a fully inflated air matress can do wonders for the recollection of injuries past. Steph had come through in the end, after all. She brought me to that day’s ‘home’ safe, sound and without incident. I could thank her for that.

I think I can get the hang of this. We definitely made a good team, after all, Steph and me. The next morning, after breaking camp, the morning shower and mildly scorched camp coffee, I was ready for adventure.

“So, Gypsy. What have you got for me today?”

“Calculating…”

Well Governed Sharks

2011-05-04T09:45:00.000-07:00

"Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned…”

"Well done, old Fleece!" cried Stubb, "that's Christianity..."

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

On February 16, 2009 in Stamford, Connecticut, a 14 year old chimpanzee named Travis attacked his owner’s neighbor, brutally mauling her. The attack was unprovoked. Travis had gotten out of his cage and his owner asked her neighbor, someone who Travis would have known and not feared, to help her get him back in the cage. The result was an enraged chimp, a disfigured neighbor and a traumatized police officer. Despite the fact that humans and chimps split off from one another six million years ago and that they look and appear to act remarkably like us, they are wild animals.

People have domesticated cats, dogs, pigs, cows, sheep, horses, wheat, barley, teosinte, beer and wine yeasts, bed bugs, body lice (the last two unintentionally) and probably countless other plants, animals, fungus, yeasts and bacteria simply by the expedient of choosing members of a given species which are favorable, flavorful, docile or dutiful, to humans and allowing them to thrive.

Chimps are not one of them.

When chimps hunt, they sometimes come upon a solitary chimp from a neighboring community. When this happens, the chimp gang murders the solitary chimp. There is no repercussion for this hostile behavior. There are no courts of appeal. No council of elders whose job it is to try offenders and execute the guilty. No remorse on the parts of the perpetrators or provocation on the part of the victim. No standers by wringing their hands and bewailing the disintegration of civilized chimp society. No cries of “Things were different in my day…” No candlelit vigils or monuments to cause passersby to pause and reflect upon the cruelty of Chimp vs. Chimp. There is no Devine retribution, no ‘barrenness of the land’ due to the polluting sin of Oedipus-Chimp. There are also no next of kin who will seek out the murderers and kill them for revenge and no Sharks vs. Jets rivalry underpinning this round of violence. It is simply an opportunistic murder. It is just an expression of the amorality of evolution. Eliminate some competition and there will be more for us. It’s not even a conscious act. It’s just the expression of fitness. Murder evolved because it works.

There are also no chimp messiahs to deliver sermons on the blessedness of chimp peacemakers and the efficacy of turning the other jowl. No chimp Fleece to preach governance of chimp sharks. No great spiritual traditions which teach ‘Love thy neighbor’ and ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ No appeals to chimp Karma or divine warnings that you reap what thou sew. The most aggressive chimps live to pass their genes on to the next generation and the anger marches on: Evolution's meat packing line.

But humans evolved to remember and speculate on things like right and wrong. We have something called a moral sense, also called the knowledge of good and evil or, at its simplest, a sense of fair play. This, at least, we do share with animals. Chimps can tell when they are getting the raw end of a deal and react with indignation. They just have not refined that from, “I'm being treated unfairly and should get redress.” to “That chimp over there is being treated unfairly. Maybe he deserves redress, as well.” We can empathize, for some strange reason. Why is that?

Animals can’t be evil any more than they can serve out justice. Justice requires evil. Not just the practice of evil. That’s everywhere. We need a definition of evil. Evil is the recognition of behaviors that have evolved over billions of years of time, from when the first single celled organism surrounded and digested the second single celled organism and thought that was really cool. Now we have awaked to the fact that that action can, under certain circumstances, be called murder.

So justice requires the recognition of an act as evil. Justice also requires empathy. Ergo, evil requires empathy. The chimp hunting party above did not commit murder. They killed. From the standpoint of evolution, the killers were more fit than the killed. After all, you have to be alive to pass on your genes.

An agent can't truly be evil if it is not aware of its action’s impact upon another creature. The worst it can be is opportunistically cruel. The concept of good and evil is an evolutionary construct that appeared in the brains of humans only. Along with the evolution of a mental vocabulary with concepts like fight or flight, recognition of friend or foe and the drives for survival and reproduction, more complex definitions like loyalty, fidelity, altruism among extended groups of people and the categorization of actions into classes of right or wrong evolved as well. These are as arbitrary as the gag reflex and evolved due to the same force: Random mutation. AKA, chance.

We have a moral sense because our ancestors had a moral sense. Where did they get that from? Flip a coin. But wherever they may have come from, they still got selected through the same process. This is called fitness. In other words, if it works, it stays. So evolution is ambiguous and, quite bluntly, a cruel joke. A random process produced brains that look for patterns in other random processes. Right vs. wrong. Good vs. evil. Noble vs. ignoble. Brave vs. coward. Nice concepts all, and we are all better people for believing in them. But ultimately they are meaningless constructions of the mind which is itself constructed from nothing.

Courts do try murderers and brothers avenge brothers. Sometimes brothers murder brothers, too. In this case society must decide how this is to be judged. In some other cases, society is the one doing the murdering. We just rationalize it with labels like ‘war’ or ‘capital punishment.’ For thousands of years, human societies have used violence when expedient for the good of the group and punished it when it has been detrimental. Wars are good, necessary and justified when our clan needs to take something that belongs to someone else and bad, unnecessary and evil when cooperation, peace and trade agreements are more beneficial. Kill or cooperate. Evolution does not have a preference. Whichever one works is fine. Whatever survives is selected. There are no preferred genes in evolution, only those left to express themselves.

This judicial tug of war over hundreds of thousands of years has had the net effect of pruning the most violent members from society. In other words, when an angry human kills another human for his own benefit, there is a chance that another human, who might not himself be that disposed to murder, will kill him. Either through revenge, or a tribunal of humans, governed by an arbitrary code of conduct, might execute capital punishment. Either way, the most violent are ostracized from society (like Cane) or executed (like countless others.) In the case of chimps, this disposal is random, but for humans there has been a conscious, though unintentional, bias. Over thousands of years, this sieve of justice has removed the most egregious offenders from society and insured that members in good standing fall somewhat below the high water mark of purely opportunistic aggression, yet still in the realm of useful aggression. The effect has been that, although modern civilized humans are just as violent as subsistence farmers, hunter gatherers, and, indeed, chimpanzees; the violence has been augmented by some form of social control. It has been somewhat ‘goberned.’

Taming the Chimp

What do we call it when we eliminate undesirable members and encourage those with certain characteristics to flourish? Domestication. When violent members kill others and are then themselves eliminated by some court system or vendetta, the effect, over millennia, is to slice away at the most violent. The top of the rage pyramid, as it were. Those who think human society is violent now and that violence defines society are mistaken. Violence is one factor in the shaping of society. Pruning is another. Sometimes the most violent members serve to prune themselves.

Civilization is the same as domestication. Melville’s ‘shark well governed’ is the same as Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden or Enkidu’s education in the temples of Sumer. And they all end up the same. People are required to give up some of their (so called) baser instincts to embrace the benefits of society. Those who can’t do it are excluded. Those who possess the most docile characteristics are welcome. Just like sheep. The most calm, docile and easily managed are allowed to live, exploit the benefits of civilization and produce more members conducive to living in that society. Oh, sure. Barnyard males can be aggressive and belligerent, but only those remotely governable by humans are kept. And then only a few with the worst ones being tonight’s stew. The rest? Well, they can live their desperate lives, making more desperate masses. Evolution doesn’t care how you feel about anything. All that matters is numbers

Why do we call citizens who won’t speak up for themselves ‘sheeple?’ Why do we love conspiracy theories about TPTB or the Bilderberg group plotting against the masses? Why do we bemoan those quietly desperate masses? Why do we look for shadowy scapegoats lurking behind every atrocity? Why do we cheer on Luke in Cool Hand Luke and McMurphy in One Flew over the Cookoo’s Nest even though we know they will be crushed by the impersonal machine at the end? For that matter, why do we view our society as an impersonal machine in books like The Trial or 1984?

Would you really like to live with feral humans? Would you like to live in a world without ‘The man’ telling you what to do? Do you think we could live in a society where a walk in the next neighborhood could result in an unavenged, indeed unnoticed, murder? The fact is that we just can’t stand the idea that things happen randomly, so we make up clever fairytales and urban legends to fill in the void of chaos with artificial meaning. JFK was killed by one bullet fired from the guns of a waiting army of scheming villains and the price of oil is set each year by the Trilateral Commission as dictated by Reptilian impersonators running the world’s governments. Everything is a plot against the sheeple. These sheeple, by the way, are everybody except my gnostically inspired group.

Every social, religious and political system ever designed is there to keep the civilized, civilized, just like locks are there to keep honest people honest. Governments, and by extension social and religion systems that anthropologists love to study, are arms of the auto-domestication machine. They are all made up but we can’t live without them. Every morality tale, every origin myth, every Aesop fable or campfire villain, every story of every dying god or preaching savior, indeed, all of our legal, moral and ethical codes, are just made up stories which serve to define our lives and padlock our pens. As Winston Churchill said, “People get the government they deserve.” Well, we have gotten the civilization we deserve, too.

We have been, and are, unconsciously directing our own evolution. That self-domestication machine is itself human society. There is no separating the two. We have seen the enemy and it is us. We know how animal husbandry works. Well, human husbandry works the same way. Domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild feed stock. This is due to the fact that human provenance has relieved them of the task of survival, so they don’t need to do it for themselves. Individuals who would never have survived in the wild flourish in the pen. As we select for acceptable behavior, we are also selecting for reduced brain power. Domesticated animals slowly succumb to group amnesia, forgetting the wild sharks they once were. Dogs may dream of being wolves, but if they do, those dreams are forgotten when they wake and smell the food bowl.

Thoroughly domesticated animals can no longer survive on their own. Well, the human brain has been shrinking for the past 100 thousand years, as well. And for the same reason. We now rely on our social organ to supply our needs. Taking that away would be as bad as removing any other major organ. Indeed, it is a major organ: The Superior Civility-gland. It is the only organ in the body composed entirely of all of the other cells in the body, yet totally separate from all of them.

It’s all around us. We rely on it every day. We can’t live without it. And we hate it.

So we have evolved to be conducive to civilizing. That simply means that those who, due to random mutations in genes, were docile and agreeable to building social networks did better in our evolutionary past than those who were more closed and clan like. They, by virtue of their cunning and planning, passed on their genes to a larger and larger descendent domesticated population. It has been suggested that the Neanderthals were unable to function in groups greater than around 25 individuals: The extended family. They could form family groups but not societies. Beyond that number they were unable to sort out who you could trust and have safe interactions with and who you couldn’t. Our ancestors, to the contrary, were able to function with, conduct interactions with, and generally tolerate up to 300 or so individuals: A village.

Our ancestors’ brains had evolved the internal tracking system necessary to index and negotiate a greater number of people, and therefore they could determine who they could trust and how to insure adequate interactions in the future. They were genetically better able to function in groups that were, by their size, better able to support division of labor and large scale cooperative projects, and with it agriculture, architecture, mathematics, philosophy, religion and, of course, politics.

Politics is, after all, the delicate art of keeping societies functioning just shy of murder.

Neanderthals couldn’t do that. They couldn’t learn the rules of playing nice with others and suppressing the natural urge to slap someone who annoys you. There were no tribal councils of Neanderthals.

It’s All about Opposites

This suggests that there are two poles to human social behavior: Those who genetically resist domestication and those who genetically embrace it. Sharks and angels. But there is a third, far more vast, segment of the population: Those who possess genes of aggression and hostility but who can also be manipulated. Governable genes, in other words.

Think of a thermostat on a wall. Now imagine that there are two people trying to adjust it. Let’s call them Hot and Cold. Mr. Hot thinks the room is too warm and wants it cooler. Ms. Cold thinks the room is too cool and wants it warmer. These two struggle against each other. Sometimes Ms. Cold manages to turn it up a little bit, but sometimes Mr. Hot manages to turn it down. Assume that the result is a house that is livable. Well, it has to be livable. If one of them were to win out they would both die of heat or cold. They need each other to survive. Not only that, but they need each other to be their own opposites. Do you think this analogy unlikely? Well, there is just such a process going on in our bones every day. Some organelles dissolve calcium and release it into the blood. Others take calcium and fashion it into new bone. Both of these processes, dismantling and constructing, are going on simultaneously and constantly. The result is healthy bone. I think you can imagine what would happen were one process to stop. You'd become a statue or a jellyfish. We are not so much tuned to operate a certain preprogrammed way. Instead, we and our interactions with the outside world are the results of many conflicting forces. We live in the nexus of these forces.

Anthropologists talk about something called ‘The free rider problem.’ Societies can tolerate a certain number of members who take more than they give. The common pot is there for everybody to contribute to and take from. Some take more than they give. Some give more than the take. As long as the two forces are balanced the system survives. It would be nice to eliminate those who take more than they give, but you can’t. Why not?

Say, for example, that a village of 200 people has 20 free riders. That is ten percent. These can be outright freeloaders and beggars or just people who put in what they must while clandestinely extracting more than their share. The brother-in-law on the couch, or the welfare abuser, for instance. Let us say that a society decides to crack down of its free riders. If you try to compel them to work or refuse to tolerate their lack of industry, the end result is that everybody is suspect. Everyone is a potential drain on society. After all, who decides who is contributing and who is not? Where do you draw the line? A society that is too intolerant can’t trust anybody, including the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. It becomes impossible to have any transactions with anybody outside your immediate family if you don’t trust anybody. The greater sphere of the village collapses and we are back like the Neanderthals. The fact that our ancestors evolved to live in villages is precisely due to the fact that they could tolerate a certain amount of exploitation, with the expectation that the returns would be greater than the expenses, on average. I call this the Annoyance of the Commons. Everyone works together towards a common good except for those few who we all know don’t but we can’t get rid of anyway. Whatcha gonna do?

On the other hand, a society that is overly tolerant or simply overrun with free riders risks collapsing from a lack of discipline. We have to exist in a vapor lock between Polyanna naiveté and lock down belligerence. If everyone starts thinking they deserve a free lunch then the lunch wagon will deplete. Those who still believe the morality tales about ants and grasshoppers will start getting furious with the burgeoning grasshopper population around them, real or imagined, and eventually lose faith and trust in their village. Just like above, cooperation will be replaced with suspicion and the delicate balance of trust and tolerance will falter. Once again, the Commons becomes tragic. Once in a while an Apostle Paul or Rush Limbaugh may stand up and say ‘He who doesn’t work doesn’t eat.’ Yet for every one of those there is an equally annoying voice saying ‘Sell all you have and give it to the pour.’ We can call these two forces: Mr. Justice and Ms. Mercy. Just like Mr. Hot and Ms. Cold, they perpetually struggle with each other. Same balance of opposites. Same consequences should one prevail over the other.

Society evolved out of social hooks mutated into our psyche to manipulate us. Some of us may hate being controlled by society but we would hate being on our own, too. We admire the rebel and want to be like him or her; but we want the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker to act reliably, provide for our needs and not put their thumbs on the scale, too. Of course we can’t have it both way, but we wish we could. In some perverse way, we think we should, as well. Or even worse, we think that we should be allowed to be the rebel while expecting everyone else to behave. Even super villains have to shop at the market.

Mark Train once said that man is the only animal who blushes, or needs to. I would add to that that man is the only animal who can’t control his socially ingrained conflicts, though I’m sure he would have said it better. Chimps can lash out violently and then go back to the community for a nap. But they can’t build cities and invent technology. That takes self-governance. That takes self-control or, if not self-control, at least control by someone or something. And in order for that to happen, there have to be people who are controllable.

That takes civilizing. We are conflicted, malleable and resentful. We know the beast within rages and we can’t control it. But we are the beast within. We can be used and we know it. We are used by society and we use it, as well. We exploit and we are exploitable. That, too, is Melville’s Christianity.

But what makes a community of people different than a community of chimpanzees? Or a hive of ants, for that matter? Why are we in this contradictory, even neurotic, human condition? We are being pulled in two directions, metaphorically expressed by good and bad angels on our shoulders or a struggle between the spiritual man and the carnal man. Pity poor Apostle Paul, who wailed “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.” Paul was our own bi-polar saint. Emotions implanted in his genes pulled him one way, but equally powerful and conflicting emotions also implanted in those same genes pulled him in the exact opposite direction, inching that social thermostat up and down within a band of societal acceptability. If either side were to slip the results would be disastrous. If he had been a chimp there would have been no such quandary. The commands would have bubbled up from his brain stem unchecked, unedited and immediately obeyed.

From Many, One

One of the biggest questions pondered by philosopher kind over the millennia has centered on this issue. How do people live together in groups? How do you put up with that noisy neighbor or annoying baker that you hate but have to buy his bread, anyway? We have to put up with our relatives, after all, “Blood is thicker than water.” They are the jerks we can’t just walk away from. Our genes were already encoded to accept our immediate relations so we grudgingly accept their quirks, just like our Neanderthal cousins. But what about those further way on the family tree? Why put up with those idiots?

As long ago as the story of the scattering at the Tower of Babel or the domestication of Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh this issue has been pondered. What makes people live together in harmony? Or, and here is where a lot of the neurosis comes from, if we don’t always live in harmony, at least we are compelled to live in tolerance of each other. Social rules tell us how to put up with our neighbor. Our genes make us grudgingly capable of accepting those social rules. ‘Put up with thy neighbor’ does not make for as good a sound bite, though. In other words, as far as our social upbringing is concerned, we don’t have to like it. We just have to do it. Capiche?

There is certainly an advantage to living in villages and getting along with your neighbor, even if it is in a Prisoners’ Dilemma, Mexican Standoff kind of way. Division of labor, separation of responsibilities into castes that need each other, submission to a ruling intellectual/priestly class and the creation of a support network for the needy are all valuable things which are worth the sacrifice in personal liberty and ‘wildness.’ They are even worth the oppressing ruling class, if by ‘worth’ we mean ‘statistically superior.’ Evolution doesn’t care what the genes are feeling, only that they are reproducing.

But ‘It’s a nice thing to have and worth the effort’ is not an explanation of where it came from in the first place or why it was selected out of the other random behaviors. In the world of philosophy, that would be what’s called a teleological explanation for the observed facts. Teleological, in the context of evolution, means that a trait evolved ‘in order to’ accomplish some useful task. Priests evolved ‘in order to’ compel the masses to obey. Kings evolved ‘in order to’ enforce order on an unruly population. That’s putting the cart before the horse. There is no ‘in order to’ in evolution. Evolution doesn’t work that way. Things happen randomly. Thus, if a randomly created trait (mutation) just happens to do something useful, or if it allows the possessor of that trait to live longer or experience more opportunities to breed (fitness), then that trait will be passed on to the next generation (selection.)

There! Evolution in a grain of sand. Eternity in an internet post.

Darwin, Have at It

So the first principle of the Theory of Evolution is that everything is here by chance. It’s called ‘Random Mutation’ but the meaning is the same. Chance, accident, the rolling of the dice, random interactions of phosphates, acids and sugars in a strand of DNA, that’s the only driver. Nothing happens ‘in order to’ do anything else. There is no architect guiding evolution. No God of evolution, male or female. No preferred path.

No gene, and therefore no allele, is more or less likely to exist than any and every other. As a matter of fact, every gene is equally improbable. Every gene is equally unlikely. Everything that exists has an equally slim chance of existing. There are about one hundred thousand amino acids in a human gene, give or take. The chance of any single gene coming into existence is one in four to the one hundred thousand power. This is true of every gene. It’s true for genes to make your eyes blue and it’s true for genes to make you think twice about killing the guy snoring in the next cave. Yes, there is more to it than that and genes work together making the odds even greater, but the point is still valid. Every gene or gene combination is equally improbable. There are no preferred genes, only selected genes out of those that already mutated randomly.

The only difference between, say, a gene for making us want to eat something that is nutritional and one to make us want to eat sand is that the sand eating gene will be unable to keep it’s possessor alive and ‘fit.’ The sand eaters will die and there will be no more sand eating people. (Unless, of course, eating sand is beneficial to that organism; an anaerobic bacterium, for instance.) But both genes are equally unlikely to exist at all. Any behavior, or gene, can evolve. It may look bizarre to us and may die out in a few generations, but its existence is not premised on profitability or history. It is premised on chance. And its usefulness can’t be assessed until it comes into existence. So useful genes and useless genes must evolve equally. Indeed, there are many more useless genes than useful genes, so there should be many more of them produced. The useful ones just manage to persist due to fitness and selection. A trillion copies of a useful gene are no more likely than one useless gene. The useful gene just managed to stick around long enough to be copied endlessly.

Further, more genes come into existence all the time. Evolution has not stopped. Traits evolve, genes pop into existence and are evaluated by the editor of fitness constantly. And not just new genes. Every existing gene, no matter how old, how successful or how many times it’s been copied, is exposed to the same editor each time it is expressed. Nothing is certain, nothing is predestined and nothing is guaranteed.

The Gene Machine

People talk about environmental ‘pressures’ shaping organisms along evolutionary paths. This is one of the unfortunate misrepresentations in evolution. It implies that the environment influences evolution to produce creatures with favorable traits. Nothing could be further from the truth any more than one random number in a random number generator is more or less likely to occur based on which numbers came before or after it. In the same way slot machines are never ‘due.’ Each pull has the same odds: Overwhelmingly against the puller.

Consider the following thought experiment to make this process more clear.

Imagine a geodesic dome. Inside the dome is a device in the dead center that resembles the projector in a planetarium. But instead of projecting images of stars, it projects projectiles. Tennis balls, as a matter of fact. And instead of running according to a preset program for the evening’s show, the tennis ball projector is on a yoke that swings around in three dimensions randomly. All we can say with certainty is that every spot on the ceiling has an equal chance of being hit by a tennis ball. Over a long enough period of time every point on the ceiling will have been hit an equal number of times. Now, further imagine that there are shutters in the surface of the dome. These can be opened and closed at any time, also randomly.

An outsider observing this might be tempted to think that there is a one to one correlation between open shutters and a steady stream of tennis balls. The balls seem to radiate outward from the dome in beams or streams. And if one shutter closes and another opens, another stream will immediately appear to come out of that door. For all the world, the dome behaves like shutters on a lamp, shining light equally powerfully in any direction simply with the switching of a shutter.

The open shutters represent environmental niches and the tennis balls represent genes.

This is how evolution works. There is no evolutionary pressure. There is only random heaving of amino acids and the persistence of those that are successful. To you or I this may seem inefficient since so many of the balls just bounce off the wall and fall back into the dome, but it really is quite so. If less than one hundreth of one percent of the tennis balls actually make it out of the dome and do something useful, it doesn’t matter. The other 99.99% that fail are recycled by that 0.01%. Nature eats the failures.

Behind Every Great Mutation

So what do tennis balls have to do with human civilization? And what do they have to do with Christianity, for that matter? How did our well governed sharks evolve? By chance, of course, but exactly what path did they follow? We can see how our ancestors domesticated certain species by simply selecting the most desirable members and using their seeds, kids, pups, eggs, spores or whatever for the next year’s batch, but who domesticated us? Who selected for humans that could form complicated alliances based on division of labor and acquiescence to authority, willingly or otherwise? Who created castes that work together instead of small family units that are tightly bound and violent to outsiders? How turned us noble, free men into sheeple? Unless you are one of those people who believe that aliens did it, there must be a natural explanation.

It has been suggested that this separation of function began when women started sharing child raising chores. It just so happened, at some point in our past, that female humans found the babies of their sisters and cousins and daughters as attractive as their own. They then began sharing nursing and pre and post natal care between those currently pregnant or with babies and those who were not taking care of their own needs. This added vital support allowed for the evolution of infants that required a lot more care before they were autonomous. Babies exploited this additional care. In other words, babies that could grow larger brains ‘fit’ the environment of additional nursery care. This, in turn, allowed for the evolution of larger brains and longer time to develop things like social skills and communication skills that would be handy to the next generation of caretakers in their tasks of taking care of even more complex and dependent babies. A kind of Jevon’s Paradox in evolution. This makes a lot of sense (but happened by chance, none the less) and suggests that civilization is a female creation. I can think of how this may have happened.

A long time ago, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors lived pretty much like the rest of the great apes. I would suggest that our ancestors were more like the Bonobo than our common angry chimp friend up above, for reasons I will discuss shortly. This suggests that sex was common and unrestricted with female leadership of the community. So as human young came of age, they began mating with any and all members of the community. The females got pregnant, had their babies and those babies grew up to have the same sexual drives as their mothers and fathers. Evolution marched on apace.

Some of the females would be more hardy and more fertile than the rest. A select few would live into their twenties and thirties and still be able to reproduce and have more offspring. Evolution should dictate that those more robust females have as many offspring as possible and that those offspring gradually expand to fill the population until all its members were hardy and long lived like their few, long living and long breeding matriarchal ancestors of old. Given several generations the bulk of the population would be descended from those hardier, more prolific matriarchs. That ‘should’ have happened. However, evolution is not driven by ‘should’ or what we human beings think is best. Evolution is driven by chance only.

So what did happen? Let me take a guess. Bear with me.

As the older females aged, a whole new population of 12 and 13 year olds would be coming of age. These younger females would have the sex drives of their mothers and would be in competition with the older females for access to males. The males were more likely to be attracted to the younger, seemingly healthier females, since the older females were relatively rare. Evolution would not have had time to instill into the sex genes of a male that an older female equals healthier genes. (If you think that males ‘automatically’ seek out young females, remember that there is no ‘automatic’ in evolution. Evolution is driven by chance and every gene, therefore every trait and drive, is equally improbable. Males evolved to favor young females because that’s what was mostly available and healthy. Clearly we see this prejudice today. The site of an older man with a younger woman does not surprise people as much as the opposite. There is even a derogatory term for the older woman. Cougar. More on that later.)

So females were competing with females for access to the genes carried by the numerous males. (By ‘numerous’ here I mean that there are more than are required. Nature may produce as many males as females, but most of them are superfluous. Some species only produce males when they are required. Ants and bees, for instance, only create males so that the aging queen can donate some of her genetic material to another, young queen from a different colony. Males originally were simply delivery devices; genetic material bundled up with a wind up motor attached and enough instructions to find another female and deliver the cargo of his mother’s genes. This is the origin of a male. Prior to that, single celled organisms simply swapped (and still swap) genes when they encountered each other like some kind of Internet file sharing system. This is a proto-sex. As organisms grew in complexity, this ability to swap genetic material needed some other mediator. Bundling up some genetic material and conveying it to a sister organism was the perfect solution. And so the male creature is simply a female form modified for a different task. The first delivery boy.)

It is essential to see this as a competition between females in order to understand what happened next. At some point evolution produced what might be called the nanny gene. Females volunteered to assist other females in taking care of their young. They provided nursing services, care of the sick mother and child and nursery care as the children got older. But this apparent altruistic service required a payback to make it worthwhile. If evolution is about exploitation of environments, then what were the altruistic genes exploiting? If genes for altruism increased one’s fitness, then what exactly did they fit? They ‘fit’ the evolving society. In other words, people exploit the greater social structure that they, themselves, are a part of. Altruism is the very thing that was being exploited. If groups of people form social orders, then those people both create the order and take advantage of it. There is no need to make any appeal to group selection.

An Aside about Villages

Let me digress for a moment. Think of the old rhyme: The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker… Or consider the play Fiddler on the Roof. These are perfect pictures of the quaint village that has existed for millennia. If we look at human history as the evolution of the village, then human history has been remarkably stable. We, on the other hand, tend to view only large scale events like wars, huge civilizations, epic tales of famines, floods and plagues; great leaders and critical dates. But that’s not humanity. Humanity is small groups of people living small lives one day at a time: The village. In a village, each member plays a role. People interact, intermarry, do business together, play together, trust and mistrust each other; all according to invisible rules that are reinforced by the local gods and superstitions. The village can be said to ‘hum’ at a certain frequency. That frequency is composed of all of the interaction between all of the people. Well running villages are invisible and certainly never celebrated in history, except as a back drop to something grand and exciting. Villages are boring, as they should be.

Now, let’s suppose that some of the humming gets overloaded. Let’s say that people become less trusting of each other. Then it becomes harder to deal with those upon which you rely for your existence. If you can’t trust the milk man, or if your word is not trustworthy to others, then you can’t conduct your daily business and village life breaks down. If, on the other hand, people become too trusting, then you leave yourself open to exploitation. Both courses lead to the breakdown of the socio-economic system. The hum of the village must remain within a certain band. Villages are fine-tuned just like Mr. Hot and Ms. Cold.

What’s this got to do with anything? Well, altruism, which is the frequency of the village, must operate at a certain level. Have you even heard the expression: “The good news is…. but the bad news is…” where both the good news and the bad news are the same thing? Well, the good news is that people have to have a certain level of trust in each other in order to create a functioning society, but the bad news is that people have to be gullible enough to let themselves be taken advantage of once in a while. If that balance strays too far in either direction the system collapses. Even seventeenth century pirates had a code of conduct amongst themselves. It wasn’t all Hedonism and murder.

So in order for altruism to evolve as a trait people must do two things that are mutually exclusive. One, be trusting and cooperative enough to constitute the village and two, exploit the village thereby created. If someone were to plan such a thing it would be impossible. Thankfully, random events produce impossible things. I would suggest that it is only through chance that such a thing could evolve.

Now, Back to the Proto-Village

So, by some random process the women of the burgeoning community-cum-village were sharing child caring duties. In return for services from the female hierarchy, those receiving the services were asked to abide by a few rules. First and foremost, you could only have sex with an approved mate. Girls had to wait until a certain age to have sex, and then they must be paired with that person for a period of time, perhaps for life. This arrangement insured that as females aged, they would continue to have access to a mate as well as social services from the developing community-The Greater Village. If older females were in competition with younger females, then the older females would fight back using whatever tools were at their disposal.

And what tools were those? The older females had a devastatingly effective weapon in the war of adult woman against girl. Being the caretakers of the community did the trick. By limiting the sexual availability of their competition, it insured that the older females were not snubbed. They had a mate to supply sperm and provide for them and their greater number of healthier children. There’s the payoff for adhering to a sexually based morality. Give up some fun now and you will be rewarded later. Those who were sophisticated enough to appreciate the bargain would, in the long run, have more offspring who survived than those who did simply what their sex genes commanded. More children equals selection.

If evolution is about exploitation, then there was plenty going on. Older women were exploiting younger by providing them a carrot and requiring their submission in return. Younger women were exploiting the older by accepting their added support. Both were exploiting men by ensuring that they were available for impregnating and providing care for a longer period of time. Men were exploiting the same system by having their offspring live longer and healthier. Infants were exploiting the whole system by extracting more energy for a longer period of time, allowing them to grow larger and with more sophisticated brains. Everywhere you look was evolution at its finest.

The female hierarchy was in a position to dictate rules like this because of the sharing of child rearing responsibilities. Instead of mothers caring for their individual children, there were nurseries composed of all of the females of the tribe caring for all of the children. This had the added effect of allowing children to be more dependent on their caregivers for a longer period of time, since the mother had some freedom of movement during the extended period of total dependence we see in humans. No other species requires so much care for their young for such a long period of time after birth. In order to do this, greater involvement was required, both from the parents and from society in general. I don’t think it would have been possible for the human brain to grow so big without the far greater caregiving system afforded by a community. The greater womb, as it was. And, of course, the matriarchy had a great deal of influence on how that next generation thought.

They were the hands that rock the cradle. They could make up pleasant stories and morality tales. They could tell their children that women are holy and virgin girls are pure. Menstrual blood is considered sacred and taboo in many non-western societies. We tend to think that taboo means something bad, but it doesn’t. Taboo means holy, not cursed. The gods came down to earth and invested you girls with the fertility of the universe. You are the embodiment of the Mother Goddess. And here is how you are going to use it….

This religious propaganda has been fed to children for millennia in order to control them. Or, more specifically, to control girls. These are among the techniques used to control society. These are some of the techniques for auto-domestication. Society is about women controlling other women.

At this point some might say that men control women. I would suggest that this is flatly not true. In most other species males have to vie with each other to get the attention of a female. They build elaborate nests, put on displays, and evolve plumes and intricate dances and songs. All so that the all too many males can attract one of the precious females. So what’s different in humans? Nothing. However, in the process of females controlling other females and having males assigned to them, sexual dynamics evolved differently. Evolution is cunning. Actually, evolution is blunt and stupid, yet cunning things evolve.

Purity

Part of the controls exerted on young females is what is called limits to mobility. Girls are kept tightly controlled. Their virginity is repackaged as something magical and, therefore, not for retail use. For that matter, why elevate female virginity to begin with? What’s so special about it? Nothing, except as a form of control. Men certainly don’t care, except where they have been programmed to care. Men are a tool used by women to control other women.

Female circumcision, where it is practiced, is not imposed on girls by the men of the village. It is imposed by the grandmothers and matriarchs in the name of purity. Virginal girls are ‘pure’ and must be strictly controlled, wear white and display their chastity. Pure is another word for controlled. Every society has some form of female control of other females, from the most extreme foot binding and FGM to corsets, makeup and high heels, which is mostly symbolic.

I mentioned women being called ‘cougars’ as a derogatory term above. There are lots of derogatory terms for women who are promiscuous and don’t follow the female body politic. Slut, tart, skank, whore. These are some of the tamer words. And these are not the men calling women that. These are from women denigrating other women. The Madonna has some pretty catty language for the Whore. Males naturally filled in the gap and pretended that it was their authority at work. They built their own mythology of control. None the less, it was never males controlling females. Females control females and males capitalized upon that dynamic. Females surrendered to males in the interest of controlling each other. Just look at the language of the battle of the sexes. The way men and women talk to each, lie to each other, assume certain roles with each other, and use common tactics in an effort to manipulate each other. It’s a game in which women are the more clever combatants.

Societal terms of acceptance and rejection are powerful forces at governing sharks. After all, once you lose your independence, you are hooked. Very few people can just walk away from civilization. We’re here. We are not just living in it. We are it. We are in a devil’s bargain with a social machine, a bargain that we did not even negotiate. It was ingrained into our genes before birth. Society owns us. Rationalize it all you want. At the end of the day, we are all Villagers. We’re all well governed sharks.

Costs and Benefits

But in order for evolution to produce a system like this, all parties must statistically benefit (as defined by evolution, benefit merely means you get to pass your genes on to the next generation. ‘Benefit’ is used here purely mathematically. By statistically I mean that a high percentage must benefit-higher than otherwise. It can be argued that celibate members of society don’t benefit according to the rules of evolution. Fair enough, but those members are consequences of the wider dynamics. Outliers and unintended consequences. Odd spots on the thermostat. Random events are often ‘fuzzy.’)

The fitness of enough members must increase. Otherwise, a system like this, though it could come into existence due to random mutations, just like any other tennis ball impacting the ceiling or like that sand eating gene, would not be selected. Selection requires that these traits, no matter how bizarre, provide greater benefit to those possessing them than to those who do not. Each side loses something in order to gain something of greater value. This is true of the females, as well as their gene delivery mechanisms, males. What is that?

To the young girls, they have to give up access to numerous males. They can only be pregnant once at a time, so a lot of sex does not increase the number of their offspring anyway. A lot of sex doesn’t increase their ability to have offspring at all, for that matter. All it does in increase they ability to attract males, only one of which will impregnate them at a time. Males, on the other hand, would evolve to take any opportunity to deliver their cargo to any female that is available. Male promiscuity makes more sense than female promiscuity. Males are the fire hoses that are always on full. Females are the valves that open them as needed.

So, the girls are asked to give up, or at least suspend (or hide), egregious promiscuity. In return, they get the support of the Church ladies in their village and a guaranteed provider of sperm, food and protection in their old age. The girls who are willing (read: Genetically predisposed) to accept this kind of control and who believe the propaganda of their grandmothers will have more children which remain healthy and grow up to have children of their own. Some day they can become the match makers and midwives of the village and exert their control on the next generation.

And this is key.

Having a lot of children is not going to lead to selection of your genes if most of them die before having offspring of their own. Having children, who themselves grow up to have children, will. Lobsters lay one thousand eggs at a time. Only two or three of them survive to maturity. This is true of the males, as well. Having a great deal of offspring is of no use if they are a great deal of dead offspring. Fewer healthy offspring are more valuable than many that don’t survive.

So what’s the alternative? Let us suppose that some of those girls rebel. This system certainly did not drop into everyone’s genes overnight and it doesn’t fully control us even today. Like I said, evolution is ‘fuzzy.’ It evolved randomly and, like every other trait, had to demonstrate its fitness and diffuse through the population over many generations. Perhaps it still is, as Melville, St. Paul and the propagandists of Sumer note. People are neurotic for this very reason.

So some of the girls would be resistant to having their sex lives handed to them by a bunch of old ladies. What recourse does the developing female control system have? Well, they can deny any rogue girls access to their resources. “You want to play, then play. Just don’t come to us when you are old and nobody wants you around.”

So we have two kinds of girls: The Pure and the Promiscuous; the Madonna and the Whore. Good girls go to church, listen to their elders, believe the morality tales, play by the rules, engage in female politics during coffee hour and have support for life. The wild girls flirt, play around, carouse with the boys and get pregnant and spend a life on their own. Picture poor Hester Prynne living on the edge of the village with Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. We know which side of the Madonna/Whore line she fell on.

This is one interpretation of how the females of the species would fare in a matriarchal control system. It would produce the promiscuous girl and the chaste virgin, each trying to exploit whatever environment they find themselves in. Though some might contain more of one trait than another, all women possess both. But how would males respond to this kind of self-domestication?

If males originally evolved to allow one female to deliver some of her genetic material to one or more other females, then it is understandable that the most energetic males, who would be able to deliver their payloads to as many females as possible, would be selected. But again, it is not the number of offspring. It is the number of offspring who, themselves, grow up to have offspring. The first part is fitness, the second part is selection.

So let’s consider two males: one who accepts to teaching of his female caretakers (he, after all, grows up in the same nursing environment, is descended from the same females, benefits from the extended caretaking time and possesses the same genes) and one who rebels. The girls are being pressured to accept a mate for life, selected by the match makers of the village. So are the boys. Those who accept this arrangement live a long life, are productive members of society, are guaranteed a place in heaven, have as many children as possible, are elected village elders and told things like ‘A man’s house is his castle’, keep his wife locked up in a pumpkin shell and get to feel smug and superior. His children have access to the same support structure and cultural and religious conditioning. Evolution marches on apace. Some refuse, or try to have it both ways, running around with the easy girls and getting married to Susie Homemaker. Those may have more offspring, but again, how many will live to have children of their own? Some will, of course. After all, Susie Homemaker may be the one fooling around. The tug of war pulls both ways. But, of course, if you get Miss Easy Girl pregnant, society may impose its strongest control measure: Marriage.

Who invented marriage, anyway? Not men, that’s for sure. Marriage is all about women.

The sieve of evolution sifts through both behaviors by letting them play out and simply counting the results. In evolutionary strategies, whoever has the most children, wins. But not quite. Evolution does not completely prune away poorer performing genes. They continue in the population and vie for attention, just like the hot and cold thermostat turners. And sometimes there is no clear winner in conflicting genes. With the dueling thermostat warriors, sometimes one gets the upper hand, sometimes the other. If one gets too aggressive it ends up killing them both. Satan and Christ are brothers.

The tapestry of evolution resembles more the psychotic smearing of a Van Gogh than the clockwork precision of a da Vinci. Sometimes playing by the rules gets the most benefit. But sometimes those genes to break the rules come into play. The Madonna and the Whore genes sit on every girl’s shoulders. The evolution of civilization has only intensified this, since a major part of civilized behavior is repressing visceral behavior: Governing those genes. That’s Christianity. That’s civilization. But governed genes don’t go away, they just wait.

Unfortunately, governing those genes merely means that we suppress them, not that we eliminate them. Hence the neurosis that is mankind. Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Just another expression of this dichotomy. Hyde may have been shrunken and distorted from millennia of suppression, but he was not destroyed. It would be easier if all of our genes were fully expressed. Then the worst behaving ones would be eliminated. But instead, they vie with each other. Some genes are never fully expressed because they are being throttled by their adversary genes. That means they can never be de-selected. Or, the fact that they are governable is what makes them selectable.

Or maybe some genes only need expressing once in a while. We may go on glibly thinking we are civilized, moral, upstanding members of the community. But if a tragedy occurs, as has been all too frequent in our past, the beast within is let loose. We just don’t know what lurks in the hearts of men.

Explaining the Unexplainable: The Well Governed Shark and the Lie We Live By

Human genes possess the chimp like properties of our ancestors. They also possess regulatory processes that are expressed as arbitrary philosophical systems of religion and ethics and even science. In the question of which came first, the philosophy or the behavior, behavior wins every time. Our philosophy merely supports what we already do. We are in a tug of war where neither side is ever completely pulled into the middle. Both struggle against each other throughout life.

A man mocks the gods and then, sometime later, has something bad happen to him. Coincidence? Of course. Everything is driven by chance. But, as with the JFK conspiracies, the human brain abhors a meaning vacuum. There will be some observer who will seize upon that accident and claim divine intervention. God gave you that mouth sore because you blasphemed him. The brain that evolution created is very good and pattern matching. So good that it doesn’t even matter whether a pattern is there or not.

A child fusses and his mother tells him bad things will happen to him. Maybe this succeeds in quieting him down. After all, something bad is bound to happen to mocking men and fussy children eventually. That reinforces the morality tale. Evidence which, though statistically indistinguishable from noise, contains emotional validation. And when something bad happens to reverent man and well behaved children? Then we just shake our heads and say, “God only knows.” Not too many people point out that the same God is active in each mysterious event. The same god that visited shame and punishment upon some mocking men and fussy children also visited it upon some of all of the others.

And this God? His name is Chance. Take every occurrence of the words ‘God,’ ‘Divine Providence,’ ‘Karma,’ ‘Purpose,’ ‘Destiny,’ ‘Lord,’ ‘Savior,’ and any other word or phrase denoting agency and substitute the word ‘Chance.’ What do you get? Chance bless you. Chance bless us, everyone. But for chance, there go I. It was chanced to be. Chance only knows. The Good Chance made them all.

Still, the tendency to create moralistic explanations for chance events is one of the things that helped humans domesticate themselves. Chance events create both meaningless tragedies and blessed events in our lives. Chance events also produced our drive to find that meaning and, thereby, order, control and submission in our fellows and our children, who then grew up with conflicting views of a universe on which there can be no non conflicting views. There’s just no sense there. And our attempts to find sense there are equally senseless, equally the product of chance.

It is important to realize that both of these behaviors are coming from the same source: Genetics. There is no higher vs. lower nature. No spiritual man vs. carnal man. No battle of angels and devils manifest in human society. No Prometheus giving fire to man and then being chained to a rock for his indiscretion. No incarnate gods bringing the war of Good vs. Evil to the plain of Time. No PWB manipulating us ‘Sheeple.’ They are all just genes vying for expression: One pulling you one way, one pulling you another. Whichever one wins at the moment gets to direct your response to the outside world, but only for that moment. Our religions and great stories are just commentary on a baffling process over which we have no control. We are the spectators in a sport where we are also the players, the managers, the trainers and the promoters. It’s all us.

What’s the greatest lesson we can take from this, if any? That society, all of our philosophy, literature, religion, love poetry, pickup lines, funeral dirges, feast days and fast days; in short, all that makes us human, are our attempts to make sense of the random things that evolved to make us human. There is no reason for any human endeavor or philosophy in a teleological way. These are just things that happened that then allowed other things to happen that prevented other things from happening that then produced us in no particular order and for no reason. Truth, meaning, beauty. Just words that come from vocal chords, the existence of which thousands of years ago allowed our ancestors to have more children to make more meaningless noises. Those who made those noises and those who interpreted them that way were selected.

Our philosophies and societies are just alleles, traits that exist with no more meaning than a bee’s sting or a flower’s petals. Our genes are random and the urges that pull us in all directions are merely the balance of forces making us somewhat neurotic.

By somewhat I mean largely and by neurotic I mean schizophrenic.

We do not control our own lives. We, the conscious little bit of us, that is, merely sits above the maelstrom of emotions and makes up pleasing tales to explain why things happen the way we do. Some of these tales we call myth, culture, refinement, civilization, breeding (funny, that) and a proper upbringing. Some we call science. I call these things ‘The Lie we Live By.’ A lie in the sense that there is no ultimate authority upon which they rest for validation. They are things we make up. Not a lie in the malicious sense, but the lie we live by. We use these lies to organize our lives according to the governing rules applied to sharks. There is no justification for our philosophies or science. No Truth, just expedience. Science is not Truth. It is functional. Our Myths are not Truth. They are functional, as well. Our governments and religions are all about bolting our pens at night and keeping the stock in line.

Unfortunately, the same can be said for this article and my own rambling. Evolution is premised on chance alone. The way our minds work, including our science, also evolved to perform a function. And that function was not to create pragmatic and somewhat fatalistic articles like this one. Science makes no claims to authority; it merely states that things are self-evident. The epistemology of science makes no claims to a higher authority or a rational for its existence. Evolution is just as prone to produce a delusional mind as it is a rational one, so long as the results conform to the rules of evolution. In other words, if it works, it gets selected. Insane minds, if they success, will soon outnumber sane ones. Come to think of it, whichever mind succeeds is by definition ‘sane.’ True of opposable thumbs, true of minds, as well. Instead of angry chimps, we have become domesticated humans. So what do we make of our philosophies?

The only conclusion to which a sane person can arrive is that the human race is, indeed, insane.

And?

I had wanted to end this article here. Actually, I wrote the last line first and spent the past two years backfilling from there. It’s true, there’s no meaning, and therefore no benchmark against which you can measure the moral fiber of life, it is a circle with neither center nor circumference. Life is about what works, not about what things seem to be or should be. Seemings and shoulds are the things we fill in later. Still, that’s not a good way to end an essay. If that’s the case, then why bother? Just eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

If there is meaning in the world, I can’t find it. The world just seems to be ‘here.’ If you believe in chance, then every other possible world has to be ‘somewhere’ too. We are just one particular expression of the state space of all possible worlds. Plato, except that our world of pure forms includes more than just the perfect ones. Still, I just can’t accept the Hedonistic view. My genes won’t let me, I suppose. After all, I could be wrong. The state space of the randomly created brain harboring this mind is not infallible. Not by a long shot. So I remain a ninety nine percent atheist. Everything seems to suggest that the universe and everything in it is an accident. But maybe that’s not so. Will we ever know? I certainly don’t know, but I’m willing to take what comes and accept my own fallibility. It’s really quite pleasant when you realize that anything can happen.

So, here we are. The world exists. Life exists. We exist. It’s a wonder, no doubt. A splendor of possibilities. Enjoy it. Appreciate it. Find your own peace. Wherever it came from, the Universe is a stupendous thing. Don’t miss it! You’ll hate yourself.

Surfing PI

2011-04-11T12:51:00.000-07:00

Never put random and infinite together. The results are just too weird.

The universe is a huge, random, unpredictable place with huge, random unpredictable things happening in it all the time. Many of them are meaningless. Most, actually. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of most are meaningless. Some, however, have meaning. Occasionally something happens that contains information that is intelligible and meaningful. These occasional anomalies have meaning even though they are still random events. This is what drives evolution: The fact that random is not the same as meaningless.

Take PI for instance. You know PI? The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter? 3.1415somethingorotherforever? We were all taught that PI is an irrational number. That means that it cannot be expressed as the dividend of two whole numbers, a/b. In other words, the digits of PI go on forever and they are random.

Infinite and random. Here comes trouble.

Let’s take a look at the random part first, shall we? Random means that there is no reason for something to be. It is the product of chance. Chance can be expressed as a probability, as in, the probability of any given digit in PI being any single digit (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 or 9) is one in ten. The next digit in the sequence also has a one in ten chance of being any of those digits, regardless of what the digit before or after it is. In other words, the fact that the first digit to the right of the decimal point is a one does not mean that the chance of the second digit being also one is diminished. Every digit has an equal probability of being any number between zero and nine. After all, the digit “1” occurs twice in the first three digits. Coincidence? Yes, coincidence.

If the chance of any single digit appearing in any given position is one in ten, then the chance of two specific digits occurring together is one in 100. I.e., one in ten times one in ten. So, someplace in the digits of PI you will find two 1’s, two 2’s, two 3’s, etc. As a matter of fact, you will find repeating digits every 200 positions or so. How about the string 1234567890? What is the chance of that string appearing anywhere in PI? Well, the chance is one in 10x10x10x10x10x10x10x10x10x10. Or 1 in 1 followed by 10 zeros. 10,000,000,000. So every 100 Trillion digits on average you will find the string 1234567890. The same is true for any and every other string of ten digits. In every 100 trillion positions of PI you will find every possible combination of the digits 0 thru 9 in a string. Most are meaningless but some appear to have meaning. Or at least some kind of symmetry.

So what? Well, that’s where the infinite part comes in. Since PI is infinite the same logic can be applied to any arbitrarily long but finite string of numbers. For instance, somewhere in PI there exists a string of a billion zeros. Somewhere else is a string of a billion ones. These sudden strings of the same number are separated by vast light years of chaotic and meaningless numbers, but they exit none the less. They have to exist since the chance of them existing is greater than zero and the domain in which they can exist in infinite. In an infinite set of random things, anything that can exist must exist. They exist due to chance.

Take another example. What are the odds that, somewhere in PI, there are digits which, when evaluated as sets of three, never exceed 127? In other words, somewhere in PI is a string of digits that look like this: 067097108108032109101032073115104109097101108046. The odds of that specific string occurring anywhere in PI are one in one followed by 48 zeroes. This is highly improbable, but finite none the less. Again, in an infinite string of random numbers, a one in ten to the 48 power event is a certainty. Since these odds are finite, albeit huge, then in an infinite number of random digits, this string must occur. Not only that, but it must occur an infinite number of times.

What is the significant of these specific numbers? Well, if you treat them as ASCII characters and translate them into readable type, they read: “Call me Ishmael.” Somewhere in PI is the opening sentence of Moby Dick. And not only the opening sentence, the entire book, as well. Somewhere in PI is the complete works of William Shakespeare, Dante and Homer. The entire Bible plus all apologistic writings for and criticisms again it. All of the world’s great literature, past present and future, plus all variations therein. Anything that can be written, whether it makes sense or not, exists somewhere in PI.

In other places there are strings of just the digits zero and one. Some of these, if run through an MP3 player or a DVD player, will play all of the world’s music and every movie or play that ever was, is or could be. There will be different versions, as well. In one Tara burns and Rhett stays with Scarlet. Some will be completely absurd like War and Peace done with sock puppets or Macbeth on unicycles. Everything that could be, can be, may be or might be, must be encoded somewhere in the random digits of PI.

And this game doesn’t have to stop there. Somewhere in PI is a string of digits several billion long that are just the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4. If you interpret these as amino acids, you will find the DNA of all living things. It seems that PI has something for everyone.

All of these things contain meaningful information yet are purely random. The universe in the arc of a circle.

Of course, these unexpected strings of meaning are rare. Extremely rare. For every string of meaning there are vast spaces of numbers that mean nothing whatsoever no matter how you interpret them or what encoding system you employ. These expanses are so vast that the meaningful bits are less than grains of sand in the ocean. Yet they must be there. This is the chaos from which worlds spring. Kind of. That is a nice, poetic way of making PI look like Plato’s world of pure forms. The reality is more like clouds which occasionally look like something real.

The universe is a huge, random, unpredictable place with huge, random unpredictable things happening in it all the time. Most of them are meaningless. Indeed, most of the universe is so meaningless that it is actually empty. Just void for unimaginable tracts of space. Every so often something happens. Galaxies, clusters of galaxies and super clusters of galaxies exist as sprinkles in the void. Within galaxies, between more vast empty spaces, are stars and clusters of stars. Some stars have planets. Some are habitable. Some are inhabited. Some have random structures called advanced brains that are capable of creating things like Shakespeare, the Bible and sock puppets. Meaning in the universe is about as scarce as it is in PI, which seems fitting.

And here we are. One small section of a mind numbing void with a clustering of random meaning. Just like PI.

Never mix random with infinity. You never know where it’ll get you.

The Prisoners' Dilemma: An Evolutionary Approach

2010-08-06T12:09:00.000-07:00

Group Strategies and the Prisoners’ Dilemma
Or
Making it Real: The PD when Death is on the Line

Abstract

This is a rewrite of my masters dissertation from the University of Connecticut, 2001.

The Prisoners’ Dilemma has been modeled on many computer simulations in an attempt to determine under what conditions cooperation might arise. The simulation employed here adds a dimension to the Prisoners’ Dilemma by allowing whole populations to compete against each other under more realistic conditions. The rewards and penalties are not merely points accumulated, but are translated into real benefits whereby members of a population can have offspring or die prematurely from starvation depending on how they perform against competing strategies. Each player in a simulation starts out with a base amount of ‘life points.’(1) From there the simulation is played a number of times (iterations) and the players allowed to interact with each other. With each iteration, two players are selected at random from the total population and allowed to engage in one Prisoners’ Dilemma game. The results are added to or subtracted from each player’s life points. After accumulating a certain number of life points, a player is allowed to have an offspring which inherits his parent’s strategy. Lose too many points and the player dies.

Further, the possibility of group strategies emerges as populations can behave differently toward outsiders than they do toward members of their own group. Successful behavior not only benefits the individual, but insures greater representation of one's group in the next generation. One strategy in particular, which cooperates with members of its own group but defects against all outsiders, has proven to be remarkably successful. I have named this strategy ‘Cunning Neighbor’ (CN.) Two other group strategies, Wise Neighbor and Good Neighbor, are also successful, though not as much as CN.

Introduction

Strategies like Tit for Tat and PAVLOV do not take into account membership in a group. In an environment governed by natural selection, group strategies could be a powerful force incurring more fitness for an individual group member than for an individual acting solely in his own interest, thereby sustaining the requirement that natural selection be about the individual inheriting the genes while allowing for the evolution of group strategies. By using the simulation developed to incorporate more realism into the Prisoners’ Dilemma game (Loux, 2001) the possibility of some unique group strategies has emerged. There can be strategies that treat outsiders differently than members of ones own group or which learn about the outside world and then communicate that learning to members of the group. Learning and cooperating strategies should do well in a simulation where knowledge learned can be shared and not just used for one’s own future reference. Three group strategies that this simulation employs are Cunning Neighbor (CN) (2), Wise Neighbor (WN) and Good Neighbor (GN).

In Cunning Neighbor, a member will always defect against members of an outside group but always cooperate with members of his own group. This is a hybrid of All-C and All-D. Within group, the code of conduct is to always cooperate. When interacting with outsiders, however, the code is to always defect. CN proved to be surprisingly effective at invading and dominating a population(3). In one simulation three populations compete. These employ the strategies Tit for Tat (TFT), All-D and All-C. As is expected, after one hundred iterations All-D dominates the population (See figure 1.)

At this point a group of Cunning Neighbors migrates into the game. Five CN enter a population of eight TFT, 21 All-D and seven All-C. After 100 more iterations, All-D still dominates with 34 members (See figure 2.) TFT is five and All-C is five. The original five CN have grown to ten. At one thousand iterations All-C and TFT have gone extinct (at iteration 471 and 565, respectively. See figure 3.) CN stands at 77 members and All-D at 82. By iteration 1,009 CN dominates the population by 81 to 80 All-D. By iteration 2,000 CN has grown to about two thirds of the population. By iteration 10,000 CN has overwhelmed the environment with 2,138 individuals to 233 All-D going from an initial population density of twelve percent to ninety percent (See figure 4.)

Figure 1. After 100 iterations between Always Cooperate, Always Defect and Tit For Tat. All-D is clearly dominating the population.

Figure 2. Cunning Neighbor enters the population at iteration 101. After 200 iterations Cunning Neighbor has taken the number two place over TFT and All-C.

Figure 3. After 1,000 iterations CN is beginning to overtake All-D.

Figure 4. After 10,000 iterations CN has established an overwhelming dominance of the population.

In a straight contest between TFT and CN, CN proved to be very effective (See figure 5.) The balance quickly tipped in CN’s favor and TFT was driven to a minority by iteration 200. CN continued to overwhelm the population but was unable to completely eliminate TFT(4). After 1,000 iterations, CN represented 338 members to TFT’s three.

Figure 5. This table only shows the first 100 iterations. Beyond that TFT is no longer visible on the chart.

Good Neighbor (GN) is a strategy that always cooperates with other neighbors, just like CN. When it comes to outsiders, a GN will try to be nice at first. But unlike TFT that must learn on a case by case basis who is friendly and who is nasty, a GN can make a judgment about the outside population as a whole. He does this by keeping track of how many times he receives the prizes, R, S, T and P. Lots of R's and T's indicate a friendly environment. Lot's of S's and P's indicate a hostile environment. (See Appendix A. Good Neighbor for a discussion on how GN functions.)

In a friendly environment, a Good Neighbor will cooperate. In a hostile environment, he will defect. This is true even against players that a GN has not encountered before. This makes GN less naïve than TFT, which must learn this lesson anew with each and every new player encountered and then remember the outcome for future reference. This is obviously memory intensive. Creating a ‘prejudice’ based on past experiences with a group as a whole requires less information processing then having to keep track of each and every interaction with every individual.

Good neighbor operates similar to Cunning Neighbor except that it tries to be cooperative with outsiders while maintaining a demeanor of ‘niceness’. A Good Neighbor will cooperate first, but if he senses a hostile world, he will switch to defection. If while defecting he senses a switch to cooperation on the part of an outside group, he will switch back to cooperating. This makes GN a better learner than Pavlov which goes solely by points earned. In a hostile environment Pavlov jumps back and forth from the frying pan into the fire by switching from C to D. GN will detect that the outside world is hostile and cut his losses by sticking with defection. He wants to be a nice guy, but won’t be taken to the cleaners, either.

As could be expected, Good Neighbor will do less well than Cunning Neighbor in a nasty environment. In a contest between GN, All-D and TFT, TFT does the worst. All-D does better than GN, but GN is able to function (See figure 6.) Notice the stepping stone characteristic of the graph. This is due to the fact that each Good Neighbor must learn for himself what the outside environment is like. Since the outside world consists of defectors and Tit for Tatters, it is an ambiguous environment and requires a number of interactions to form an opinion. Add to this the fact that newborn members must start from scratch and create their own impression of the outside world.

Figure 6. Good Neighbor, Always Defect and Tit For Tat compete.

In a contest between GN and All-D, Good Neighbor will not do as well as All-D, but will be able to survive (See Figure 7.) Each Good Neighbor begins by being friendly, but immediately switches to always defecting.

Figure 7. Good Neighbor and Always Defect.

Wise Neighbor (WN) is like GN, except that he has the ability to pass on experiences to the rest of its group (See Appendix B. Wise Neighbor for a discussion on how the simulation calculates Wise Neighbor’s responses.) Experiences with the outside world are recorded for the whole group and not just for each individual. In a population of five Wise Neighbors, the first four can learn about the outside world. When WN number five has his first encounter with an outsider he will cooperate or defect based on how well the other four have fared. This overcomes the problem of isolation and youthful naiveté of GN. With GN, each neighbor must learn for himself what the outside environment is like. New entities born into the WN community can learn from the past experiences of the group. Knowledge can be encoded in the wisdom of the group, in other words.

Figure 8. Wise Neighbor and Always Defect

Wise Neighbor does very well against Always Defect (See figure 8.) It very quickly detects the hostile environment and defends against it. It is also able to transmit this information on to other members of the group, including newborn members, thereby preparing members of the next generation for their first encounters with the outside world.

Not surprisingly, Cunning Neighbor does very well against individual strategies like Tit for Tat. Even when a game is played for one hundred iterations and has grown in size from the original players, CN is able to infiltrate it and quickly dominate. By 10,000 iterations it represents 90 percent of the population, up from 12 percent when it first entered the population.

Good Neighbor and Wise Neighbor do poorer. They are able to detect a hostile environment and defend themselves against it. They are also able to live peacefully in a nice environment. The problem with these strategies is in an ambiguous environment. In a three way game with Cunning Neighbor and All-C, it takes a while for GN or WN to decide which strategy to pursue: Cooperate or Defect. Since these strategies shun the Temptation, they bounce back and forth between Cooperating and Defecting until the outside environment becomes mostly hostile at which point they fall into a pattern of All-D, even against the remaining nice outsiders.

Wise Neighbor is better off than Good Neighbor. Once one WN determines that the outside environment is hostile, every other WN will defect. With GN each neighbor will cooperate first and then decide what the outside environment is like.

Figure 9. Cunning Neighbor, Always Cooperate and Wise Neighbor

Figure 10. Cunning Neighbor, Always Cooperate and Good Neighbor.

Some Implications

Interestingly, Cunning Neighbor proved to be a highly effective strategy as well as being very information efficient. All it requires for a CN to decide on a strategy is one piece of information: Friend or Foe? Tit For Tat, on the other hand, requires a lot of information processing. Since the simulation operates in a population that can easily grow into the hundreds of thousands, each player must have a photographic memory of every other player and how that player responded in the past.

The simulation program creates a record for each game played. It records the ID's of the two players, the iteration of the game where this encounter takes place and the decisions of the two players. This is a very small record stored in a database. The next time a player like Tit For Tat or Tit for Two Tats plays, the simulation must search that database looking for records of an encounter between these two players in the past. If a simulation has run for ten or twenty thousand times, it must search ten or twenty thousand records. As simulations get bigger, the amount of time to execute grows longer with the increased risk of mistaken identify causing an inappropriate response. With an empty database, the best time for 10,000 iterations was about one minute. With a larger database containing a much bigger history, the maximum run time was over an hour and ten minutes(5).

From the standpoint of information processing this is significant. It also suggests that a strategy that requires personal recognition is costly in information processing terms. Something like Cunning Neighbor is much easier to encode. All that is needed is a recognition system based on the most general of criteria. A secret handshake, tell tale sign or Shibboleth is much easier to process than having to remember every past encounter with every potential partner.

For the other group strategies, a slightly more sophisticated technique is needed, but not nearly as data processing intensive as Tit For Tat. What is needed is the same recognition mechanism, plus a general memory of the overall responses of the opponents as a whole. Instead of individual opponents, opponents are lumped together into a collective 'them' and an overall impression formed.

Cunning Neighbor is deterministic: Us against Them. The other strategies develop prejudices and can become biased. They react to new outsiders based entirely on how they have viewed them in the past. If members of a certain outside group tend to be friendly, future encounters will be treated favorably. If not, a ‘once burned, twice learned’ approach will be used instead.

Has this proven selection of group strategies? Possibly, but only in that loyalty to ones group can ultimately increase the fitness of the individual. Loyalty to ones group makes it possible for the individual to exploit that group. Since ‘fitness’ is a measure of ‘exploitation,’ this is a well understood and accepted principal of evolution(6). By identifying with ones group and working toward the good of that group one can exploit the resources available only in association with that group. The memory of past interactions can play a powerful role in shaping future decisions. Not just regarding interactions with ‘outsiders’ but those within ones own group as well. You do not cheat your neighbor just because he is your neighbor, but because he will remember and that will cloud his interactions with you in the future. None the less in different circumstances you may try to get more than you deserve in the hopes that you can get away with it. This balancing act between cooperation and self indulgence, between being nice and trying to get away with something, forms the basis of civilization’s teeter tooter existence.

Furthermore, a group loyal strategy is still only one strategy in the toolkit of individual survival. Sometimes an individual might be loyal to their group and sometimes he may act with total selfishness. It all depends on what’s appropriate and what that individual thinks will work at that instant. Each is a possible tool of interaction which can be employed equally as is necessary. Civilizations might be noble or they might be savage. Or they might just be the collection of both noble and savage behaviors that have come together and seem to work at this moment in history.

The balancing act between altruistic and selfish impulses swings back and forth. Too selfish and a social group falls apart due to a lack of trust. Too trusting and it becomes vulnerable to outside invasion. This balance of selfish and altruistic must self regulate between set extremes to persist.
After all, every culture has its myths of man’s higher and lower natures struggling with each other, good vs. evil, angels and demons, gods pushing stones up impossible mountains but never giving up, neither side relenting or overcoming the other, nor ever ceasing the struggle. Humanity is forever in the grips of his internal contradictions. For in both directions lies destruction.

In this paper I have tried to layout some conditions under which members of a group, a tribe or a village may form group identity and a loosely formed, though delicate, cooperation as well as a framework of interaction with outside groups. This may help illuminate, if not explain, the checkered past of human interactions within our species.

The tools of genetic behavior provided by evolution are varied and contradictory. What makes sense in one interaction might not in another. What may be considered savage in one context is perfectly acceptable in another, even if justifying that savagery requires belief systems beyond belief.

Yet not all encounters between divergent cultures end in war, though war and conquest is one strategy. Sometimes trade, cooperation and alliances based on mutual enlightened self interest and the promise to cooperate can be as powerful, though not as memorable, as conflict. It all depends on what works. There is a reason why mediators between nations, groups, families and individuals labor to help us ‘get along.’ Contention and cooperation coexist in the same heart.

Appendices

Appendix A. Good Neighbor

Good neighbor can recognize members of its neighborhood and automatically cooperates with others of its own kind. Members are entered into the simulation in groups which are flagged as members of the same group. When a Good Neighbor interacts with outsiders, he cooperates first and then subsequently relies upon his memory of past interactions. GN’s memory consists of four counters that record the frequency that it has received each of the four possible payoffs. These counters are indicated as f(R), f(S), f(T) and f(P). The GN will cooperate in this case.

For example, if on its first interaction with a member of another population the opponent defects (GN always cooperates on its first move) GN will receive the sucker payoff. At the completion of this interaction, the outcome is tallied as usual with the points added to the entities vitality, etc. In addition to this, an incremental count is made of what prize was received. So if the GN cooperated and the opponent defected, a 1 is added to the counter for sucker prizes received. At the end of this iteration, the counters for f(R), f(S), f(T) and f(P) are 0, 1, 0 and 0, respectively. This will give this entity an overall negative view of the outside world. The actual algorithm for when to cooperate is: if f(R)+f(T) >= f(S)+f(P), then cooperate. When all counters are zero, f(R)+f(T) will be equal to f(S)+f(P), so a GN will cooperate on the first round automatically.

The next time this entity plays a game with someone from outside of its group, it will defect. If on this occasion the outsider cooperates, then the GN will receive the temptation. A 1 is added to the counter for temptation prizes received. At the end of this iteration, the counters for f(R), f(S), f(T) and f(P) will be 0, 1, 1 and 0, respectively. Since the algorithm that GN uses in evaluating the outside world is, if f(R)+f(T) is greater than or equal to f(S)+f(P), then cooperate, this entity will now have a positive impression of the outside world. The next time it encounters an outsider, it will cooperate.

Good Neighbor attempts to be nice in that it shuns the temptation. It considers cooperation to be preferable to defection, but will stick with a strategy of defection if it encounters a hostile world.

Appendix B. Wise Neighbor

In the case of wise neighbor, counters are kept for how well the group fares against outsiders. Information is shared, so it is not recorded at the individual level, but at the group level. There are four counters for all of the members of one group of WN’s. At the beginning of the simulation the counters are all set to zero. When the first member of the group encounters an outsider, it cooperates if f(R)+f(T) is greater than or equal to f(S)+f(P). Then the outcome is counted. Suppose that the outsider also cooperated. A 1 is added to the counter for f(R), the reward for cooperating. The next time a member of this group encounters an outsider, it can look at the experience of the group as a whole. So if a different member of the group encounters an outsider, it does not have to rely solely on its own experience. The group has already had one positive experience with outsiders, so this entity will cooperate in the new situation: f(R)+f(T) = 1, f(S)+f(P) = 0.

Suppose this time the outsider defects. This entity receives the sucker prize. A 1 is added to the counter for f(S). Since this is a group tally, this information is available to the next member of this group who encounters an outsider. This time, f(R)+f(T)= 1 and f(S)+f(P)=1. Since f(R)+f(T) is greater than or equal to f(S)+f(P), the next encounter will result in a member of this group cooperating. The overall impression of the outside world is positive or ambiguous at best. WN will try to cooperate whenever possible, just like GN. WN’s extra benefit is that it can share information among members of the group.

References

Axelrod, Robert and Douglas Dion
1988 The Further Evolution of Cooperation. Science, Vol 242, p. 9 December
1988, 1385-1389.

Axlerod, Robert
1984 The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books, A subsidiary of Perseus
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Barkow, Jerome H, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby
1992 The Adapted Mind. Oxford University Press, New York.

Bendor, Jonathan, Roderick M. Kramer and Suzanne Stout
1991 When in Doubt… Cooperation in a Noisy Prisoner’s Dilemma. Journal of
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End Notes

1. For the purposes of this simulation, the reward structure has been changed from the traditional 3,0,5,1 to 2,-1,3,0. This allows the results to have a positive, neutral or negative effect on the players.

2. This is similar to Macy and Skvoretz (1998) neighbors except that there is no embeddedness. Each encounter is totally random.

3. Game simulations referenced herein use the following characteristics: Entities are entered in groups of five. The mortality and noise rates are set to two percent. Game executions are anywhere from one hundred to ten thousand iterations. Final results are displayed as number of live entities remaining at the end of the simulation.

4. This is an artifact of the simulation. Players are picked randomly from the population of living entities. As this pool of available players increases and one group’s representation in the pool shrinks, members from that group get selected less and less often. One attempt was made to remedy this by having the first player chosen in a round robin manner from the pool of living entities and then its partner chosen randomly from the rest. At the end of each run the entity number of the last player played was stored on the database so that the next time the game was run it would start up with the next player and continue through the pool. However, this created a different dilemma. Those groups of players which were entered into the game first were all chosen one after the other to play the game, giving that group an advantage over the rest of the population. The simulation gave a slight bias according to entry. The selecting algorithm was switched back to purely random choices for both players.

5. This is not intended to be a precise comparison. Time of day and system overload is not taken into account. This simulation runs on a multi user IBM mainframe along with all other major systems at the University of Connecticut. The processors involved are VM-ESA and OS/390 systems running DB2 for a database engine.

6. Fitness refers to how well an organism ‘fits’ its environment, not how ‘physically fit’ it is. This is one of the most misunderstood concepts in evolution. Fitness really measures the ability of an organism to exploit an environment by whatever means; good or bad, through strength or guile, moral or immoral. These, after all, are all human values, invented by human beings to compel others to act in a certain, exploitable, way. The fact that we humans talk in terms of these arbitrary values is, itself, an adaptation which allows us to fit our environment. Our environment being large groups of humans acing together. To evolution, anything can be an environment and any activity which allows something to extract resources from that environment can be considered 'fit.' The only criteria is that it works, not what we may think about it.

The Causality Buffet

2010-07-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

Good evening and welcome to the Universe Café! My name is Jonathan and I will be your waiter tonight. We are very glad that you chose our universe for your dining experience tonight.

If you look ahead through the dining room you will see that we have two lovely buffets this evening. To your left is what we like to call our causality buffet. All items are lovingly crafted of choice ingredients handpicked, specially engineered and, indeed, created ex nihilo by an Active Agent, sometimes called the Higher Power chef, Prime Mover primal, Universal Life Force or just plain ‘God’ for short. You can see Him at the end of the buffet carving the roast Karma on the Wheel of Fortune. Please don’t ask the chef where He came from. We did that once and He expanded into an infinite series of causes, each one more deterministic and less free than the last. We decided to just collapse them all into One Uncaused Causality and leave it at that.

On your right we have our random buffet. No causal agents were harmed in the making of these foodstuffs, or invoked at all, for that matter. All ingredients are mindlessly crafted and blindly assembled due to chance alone. You can clearly see our random mutation mutton, roll of the dice roulades and accidental salad under the glow of the blind watchmaker’s wall clock. No fates decide what you eat at this luck of the draw luncheon!

But don’t bother taking too long deciding which buffet to pick. They are both the same thing.

Why, you say? Surely a willful agent, a God if you will, would do a better job at creating meaningful dishes than blind chance, but it really comes down to one simple question: “If God created the buffet, who created God?” The usual response from people who speak for causality is that God was not created, He has always existed. He is eternal. That is one of His divine attributes. You know what I'm talking about, the ‘omnis’: Omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient. That is: All powerful, ever present and all knowing.

But of course that was not the question. We are not asking, “What are the attributes of God,” but, “Why does He exist at all?” The answer is usually something like, “He just is. He is his own reason to exist. God is the great ‘I am’ which is the precursor of existence, the prime mover, the underpinning of everything else, etc.”

That is very poetic, but it raises another question: What do we call something that ‘just is’ with no reason to be? We call it a random event. God is the product of chance. He is an accident. The fact that God exists at all is causally connected to chance. He just is, which means we can imagine a universe in which he just isn’t. So instead of the causal buffet being the product of chance, the cause of the casual buffet is itself the product of chance. We have just taken the question and pushed it further up. Instead of, “Why is the buffet here?” we say, “God did it.” But why is God here? There is no answer to that question, which means the existence of God is just as likely as the non existence of God. Either one could have happened. After all, why does anything exist? Why space and time, matter and energy, mathematics and physics, or God, for that matter? Why does anything exist at all? Why are there any buffets, causal or otherwise? Why not nothing?

Chance, that’s all.

Furthermore, if God does exist, then He must be the most pitiable creature in existence. Getting back to the attributes of God, the ‘omnis,’ there is one that is most disturbing. We are told that God is omniscient. He is all knowing. God knows everything, every single thing in the universe or any other universe. God knew, trillions of years before it happened, that He would create the causal buffet and that the chafing dish called ‘earth’ would go astray. The Adam and Eve soufflé would fall. And every single event in the evolution of this universe over the past 13 billion years was already common knowledge to God for an infinite amount of time before it happened. Every event, every choice, every roll of the dice, every mental struggle and tough choice, every artistic endeavor, every creative genius struggling with his own demons and straining to hear the whisper of his own muses for that one vibration of inspiration, every single thing that ever was, is or will be is common knowledge to God in the omnipresence of his omniscient mind.

There is no changing God’s mind. God cannot think better of something; He can’t make a decision or allow himself to be persuaded to a different course. Nothing surprises Him. Long before Abraham bargained with God, God knew exactly what the outcome would be. God can’t be shocked or taken by surprise; He can’t exercise creativity or make mistakes. He can’t look forward to something and be delighted at an unexpected outcome. He doesn't mull things over and make a decision. There are no unexpected events in the mind of God. If more universes will exist after this one burns itself out, God is already aware of them. If universes have existed for ever in the past, God is aware of them, too. God can’t ‘decide’ to do anything. He already knows everything He will do as if it’s done already. The buffet is already finished, soup to nuts.

If universes consist of trillions and trillions of seemingly random events and if God has actually predestined each and every one of them, then He has been aware of all of them forever, too. For that matter, if trillions and trillions of seemingly random events are indeed random, God is already aware of how they will turn out even if He had no part in any of them. To God, every event is eternally Now. He is equally aware of and intimate with everything.

God’s existence is utterly boring.

In short, God is incapable of doing anything. He is merely a passive consciousness eternally aware of everything but incapable of influencing anything. He is locked, trapped, incapable of motion, turning or changing, utterly immobile, a statue standing in His own temple carved from the marble of all events everywhere. It never began and it will never end. In short, God is an absurdity. Either this, or God caused everything everywhere at all times and places, like a painter who created his entire catalog of work in an instant. In this case there is no free will. God is the artist who paints time and space and utterly controls every detail. The causal buffet was not created by God. It IS God. And so are we.

And the alternative? Let us consider the right buffet. That would be the random buffet. All things there, from the chafing dishes to the soufflés to the steam tables and heat lamps themselves are all the product of chance. The buffet just happened to spontaneously leap into existence all at once with no plan or pattern, no exercise of will or intelligent decision. Absurd? No more than the absurdity of God. Unlikely? Also, no more unlikely than the existence of God.

Consider this simple statement: Our universe exists. I think we can all agree on that. This fact means that there is a chance that our universe can exist. This seems pretty obvious but it is critical. We know that the chance of a universe like ours existing is greater than zero. Why? Well, because here we are. Our universe exists, so, therefore, before our universe existed there was a chance that our universe could exist. Even if you insist on a creator, we can still say that the chance of our universe existing is greater than zero in that there was a chance that the Creator would create this universe. So, what chance? We can imagine that the chance of our universe existing is quite small, on the order of a decimal point, followed by a mind numbing number of zeroes and then a one (0.0000…….000001, with the …… being lots and lots of 0’s... More than that... Yup, even more than that... OK. Well, maybe a trillion more... That will do for now.) This is a very small number, indeed, and a very slight, slight, slight chance. Still, it is greater than zero. The chance of our universe existing is ever so slightly greater than zero, but it is non-zero. That’s the key.

This means that eventually, based on chance alone, a universe like ours must exist. In other words, given enough time the chance rises to one hundred percent. (I understand that time itself may have come into existence along with the universe and may cease to exist with its demise. Still, it is safe to say that the chance of a thing existing must exist ‘before’ the thing itself existed. ‘Before’ here means simply ‘outside of’ or ‘independent of.’ Chance, in other words, takes the place of God. Chance is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent.)

So for instance, suppose that there is a one percent chance of having a 1938 type of hurricane in the U.S. northeast, where I live. In any given year the chance of such an event is small; one in a hundred. But after a hundred years it becomes a certainty. The chance of a hurricane of that magnitude in any given year is small, but the chance of one happening in any given century is certain. Chance eventually becomes certainty. Either there is a zero chance of something happening, or it will happen an infinite number of times. There is no in between.

Or to put it another way, given infinite time, anything that can happen will happen, and it will happen an infinite number of times. It’s somewhat like a chess board where two players are randomly moving the pieces. As long as they follow the rules of chess eventually they will play every possible game of chess, even though they may be unaware of anything other than the rules governing each piece. Every possible game ever played will be played. This would be true if the players were replaced by robots that were only programmed with the rules of the game and had no consciousness at all. Simply through chance, every possible chess game would be played over and over again.

So, from statistics alone, every universe that hypothetically can happen and every event that hypothetically can happen must happen eventually, and since there is no end to eternity, they will keep repeating over and over again. This universe has existed before and it will exist again. Every other universe has existed before and will exist again. Every variation of every possible universe must exist over and over again infinitely. Universes are broken records that never stop replaying themselves.

The world with God is absurd. And so is the world without God.

Both buffets are absurd here in the Universe Café. Are you ready to be seated?

The Fermi Paradox as an Exercise in Social Engineering

2008-05-07T07:21:00.000-07:00

The Fermi paradox poses some very interesting societal questions which are even more important than the technological ones. Basically, the question is: Will an alien civilization that has developed a high level of technology and mastered a potent source of energy use that power to colonize space? And if so, where are they?

The question that I find more interesting is: What kind of social or political organization would be required to accomplish the task of colonizing the solar system? We were barely able to sustain the American public’s attention long enough to put a man on the moon, and that was more due to hubris over competition with the Russians than any innate pride of discovery or advancement of human civilization. After all, all other voyages of exploration were done for monitory gain or to escape persecution. The British did not hold onto Jamestown despite terrible losses just because, in the words of JFK, ‘it is hard.’ What could amount to a multiple lifetime project would be unsustainable if done by popular consent and voluntary sacrifice, not to mention requiring a change in disposition from a war like economy to one willing to pour ones energies into a project of this scale.

To do this would require an absolute authority comparable to the Egyptian pharaohs’ building of the pyramids. The boss says it, it gets done. I wonder if this is possible on a planetary, not just a national, scale? If some other civilization ‘out there’ developed a society governed by a technological elite where the masses of farmers, craftsmen and engineers just did what they were told, instead of a self gratifying civilization manipulated by unenlightened self interest, maybe it would be possible. Of course, we did not evolve that way and would probably consider such a culture fascist and its citizens slaves laboring in a hive if we were to encounter them. What they would think of us is anybody’s guess. That may make great science fiction, but it’s really the only way a project of this scale could be undertaken.

It is safe to say that evolution operates on other worlds as it does on ours. So we can imagine a lot of social structures that alien races may evolve into, but that doesn’t make them possible. Through random mutation and selection, a form of cooperation has evolved on our planet, but that’s a very complicated phenomenon. Prior to the evolution of population centers dependent upon farming and animal as well as human labor, humans apparently lived in small extended families of 25 to 30 or so members. Somewhere along the line we evolved the ability to psychologically index and manage a larger body of people, around 250 or 300. That’s the average village. Seemingly magically, at that point we were able to diversify functions and greatly improve efficiency. But it also required a greater level of order and control and a much more complicated culture with stricter rules, harsh punishments and ruling classes. We lost the Garden of Eden, but we gained civilization.

One somewhat popular theory (world systems theory) states that human social behavior is shaped by ecological and economic factors. A culture evolves according to what the population needs to do to eat and live. People then invent mythologies and religions to reinforce and teach the underlying structure of their civilizations (all subconsciously, of course.) For example, ancient Chinese culture rose or fell on the state of its irrigation systems. Since it was imperative for the full functioning of the society for the canals and dams to be working correctly, it was also imperative for individual members of the population to fulfill each his own role in the economics of irrigation. Mobility was a detriment to the system. Farmers had to farm. Engineers had to design complex canals, terraces and dams, and etc. all the way up to the emperor. So, a system of philosophy evolved in Confucianism to enforce the idea that you are assigned your role on earth by heaven. Your highest goal on earth is to faithfully fulfill the duties of the role into which you were born. (A similar example is the Protestant work ethic, which evolved during the English industrial revolution. Factory owners needed thrifty, sober, hard working factory workers, and the local religion obliged with sermons on sobriety and hard work.)

Let us assume that an alien species decided to forge out into space and colonize other worlds. Under what circumstances would an ET civilization decide to do this? Would this be a spontaneous democratic decision or the decision of an oligarchy? If the former, then what evolutionary pressures would produce this trait? According to evolution, for a mutation to be selected it must increase the fitness of the individual possessing it. That’s the only requirement. Evolution does not operate on the group level. A gene for massive group efforts that benefit a small segment of the population several generations hence is not likely to be selected.

If the latter, then we are back to a ruling benevolent elite in control of a domesticated lower class. Incidentally, a trait for following a charismatic leader does increase the fitness of the individual. If you play by the rules you are allowed to live and pass on those ‘sheeple’ genes to your descendents. If you are particularly aggressive, you are eliminated or, if you happen to be a part of the ruling elite, you may become emperor some day and pass on those Caesar genes (also true if you happen to be lucky enough to win an insurrection. You can establish the next ruling elite.) We have been evolving as city dwellers for only about 10,000 years. Apparently this has not been enough time to fully domesticate humans into autocratic but benevolent elites ruling over submissive and obedient workers. Too bad we stumbled upon the ‘oil yolk’ now instead of in ten or twenty more thousand years. Our descendents might have evolved into a culture able to use it wisely.

If you think that an enlightened group of learned individuals (a technological, intellectual oligarchy) might be able to instruct the remaining population and make them understand and, therefore, change their behavior, then you are incredibly naïve. The Mensa Club and other ‘think tanks’ believed that world leaders would consult them in issues requiring a high IQ response. Of course, world leaders don’t want a resolution to the species’ burning issues. World leaders want to remain world leaders, thank you very much. You can keep your tank of brains to yourself.

Can we imagine an ET civilization where this would be different? Sure. But we would still expect them to have a philosopher king. Common people (and ET’s) everywhere would have common problems to deal with. It would be much easier for them to just follow their leaders than to think for themselves. Mass populations that do think for themselves tend to become factious, not harmonious. If people come in from the fields to protest the government, then nobody gets fed. This is what mass manipulation and propaganda are all about. Our perfect civilization would be massively bureaucratic.

Any ET civilization would have to evolve a natural ability to cooperate (or to obediently accept programs mandated to them.) Since the laws of evolution presumably apply on every other world just like they do on ours, billions of years of evolution are going to produce creatures that preserve themselves, their family and perhaps their extended family or their village (what we see on this planet.) Any individual beyond that small circle is a competitor, not a potential partner. To create a society based on cooperation, division of labor, etc, beyond that you need coercion (laws plus enforcement, international treaties, wars) or propaganda (religion or nationalism.) Or both.

Look at the earliest legal systems from Mesopotamia. They deal with boundary marker placement, proper weights and measures, clashes between farmers and herders, taxes and the penalties for their neglect. Can we imagine a civilization that evolved to conduct fair and even transactions with everyone they met, generously and voluntarily fund their government and treat every stranger as an honest friend? Evolution pretty much guarantees against it. Someone else will evolve to take advantage of gullible people like this. ET’s will have their own ‘E.T.’ Barnum’s.

To build anything (a dam, a bridge, an ocean liner or a space ship) takes an infrastructure. Steel and aluminum don’t refine themselves. Copper wire doesn’t leap from the ground. Dry docks aren’t built by forces of nature. You need miners, smelters, ship builders and riggers. You need transportation networks and farmers to grow the food to feed the people to smelt the steel to roll it into usable products. You need engineers, not to mention the long history of philosophical development and experimentation necessary to provide the engineering expertise to design such a thing and creative vision to imagine it in the first place, plus the trades and training necessary to build it and the will and imagination of the ruling class to authorize it. All of these workers need housing, food, schools for their families, gas for their lawn mowers, local sports arenas and the bar up the street. And all of these things need a similar support structure, et cetera. No, it takes a village to build a space ship.

The question really is: Is it possible for a culture to evolve that is creative enough to invent the structure required to colonize space but also cooperative enough to do it? It is certainly possible to imagine, but that society would still be extremely foreign to us, perhaps even abhorrent.

If you are going to tell the farmers that they need to grow food to support an effort to establish permanent settlements in the solar system for, what, maybe one percent of the current population? Yes, but some day your descendents will live among the stars. Well, not your descendents, of course. Just the descendents of someone who lives in the ET equivalent of Washington. What is his incentive to do so?

Evolution, which we can safely assume works the same way on other worlds as it does on ours, only operates on individuals, not on groups. So any randomly mutated trait that benefits that one individual and can be passed on to its offspring gets selected. Some people have pointed out that hives work together for the good of the group. But members of a hive are not individuals since they derive their genetics from one fertilized egg laying machine (cruelly referred to as a queen.) It is more appropriate to consider them cells in a single organism than individuals that could evolve by themselves and pass on independent genes to their own offspring. This is not possible. A hive species of intelligent individuals is unlikely due to physical constraints. (I wouldn’t want to be that queen.)

One other possibility is a species that reproduced asexually. This is nearly as good as a hive since every member is identical and traces her origin back to one distant matriarch. An individual that mutated to think in terms of the group instead of the individual, and then flooded her niche with copies of herself, crowding out more selfish members, could easily conceive of space travel and the need to work together to colonize other worlds. Unfortunately there are health issues involved with asexually reproducing species that make them impractical. Gene mixing through sexual reproduction is more robust.

But if it was possible to create such a society, it could work, even though these possibilities appear pretty weird to us. We want our independence but we want a massively coordinated and self less engineering and social experiment as well.

In short, I don’t think you can have this level of cooperation and the American Dream at the same time.

Be Careful What You Ask For…

2008-01-31T09:58:00.000-08:00

…you might get it, as the saying goes. There is much discussion these days about the impending collapse of civilization, along with ample evidence to support this inevitability and legions of well engineered and self evident suggestions guaranteed to avert or mitigate said disaster. I have read many articles and seen several documentaries which say something to the effect, ‘If people were made to understand X, then they would surely do Y.’ X is allowed to be any of a set of a priori assumptions about the universe, such as ‘This or that technology will save us’, ‘The moon is a sponge of green cheese saturated with Helium-3’ or the equally ludicrous ‘Oil enters the earth’s crust through a white hole connected via pipeline to a black hole in an alternately fueled universe entirely composed of hydrocarbons.’

Conversely, other candidates for argument X include, ‘We are all doomed, anyway’, ‘The cheap energy carnival is caput’ and the ever popular ‘It’s all a hoax propagated upon us by THEM.’ (Being interested in anthropology, I would definitely like to know more about those THEM. Maybe an ethnography of the Bilderberg Group would make a good read. What sorts of islands do they prefer for their post apocalyptic slave labor camps? How many cases of Russian caviar must each bomb shelter contain? Where do I send my request for membership? But I digress.)

The Y portion of the equation is populated with ideas guaranteed to fix the problem. Things like, ‘Laminate Arizona with solar panels’, ‘Grow legumes in that spot in your back yard where you used to change the oil in your riding mower’, ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die off’ and ‘Just keep drilling until the drill bit melts.’ Dick Cheney’s favorite, I might add. Personally I prefer, ‘Take a stick of petroleum wax and apply directly to the forehead.’ Why not? It works just as well for headaches.

The problem is that people are notoriously reticent to change their opinions, let alone their behavior, when someone pretending to know more than they do tells them how to behave. Like the old saying goes, People who think they know it all really make life miserable for those of us who do. Jimmy Carter couldn’t even get the conversation going thirty years ago, let alone outline his own plan Y, and that was when the memory of gas lines was still fresh in our minds. Arguments like those outlined above (admittedly presented in a Mad Libs format) have more to do with social engineering than any other kind of engineering. The jist of these arguments seems to be, ‘If everyone just does what I say, everything will be fine.’ This line of reasoning is always flawless to the reasoner, if nobody else.

Let us consider a thought experiment. Suppose that you had in your possession the absolute best plan for the post oil future of mankind. Your muse, higher power or perhaps a fortune cookie laid it out for you in blinding alacrity. You cannot convince anyone to espouse your wonderful plan because, well, because people are not hotwired that way (see above.) Now, for the sake of the thought experiment let us further suppose that you are the supreme ruler of the world (why not? If talk is cheap, than surely thought must be nearly worthless.) You are either a philosopher king with absolute authority and power as well as a perfect, selfless and incorruptible grasp of what is right and wrong or a member of a beneficent and like minded oligarchy. More on that later.

So you create your five year plan-oops, I mean absolute best plan for humanity, and implement it. To do this you have to just plain force people to do what you know is right, gosh darn it. You organize work camps-no, that’s not right. Living camps-no, that’s not right, either. I know. Fun camps where people can live while laminating Arizona or blasting off to the moon to mine magic beans or whatever. Other segments of the population are busy growing food on the strips of land between the rail road tracks of the mass transit systems that they are also building from the left over corn stalks.

If there are too many people for all of the available farm land, minus that used for bio diesel, well, you are the king of the world. You can enforce population control (that sounds better than the more fascist ‘depopulation’) via some sort of technique that you are rather nebulous about and don’t really want to discuss. A smaller human footprint with fewer useless eaters (got to get a better phrase for that one. Maybe later) will benefit mankind in the long run. It will be like culling the herds. Some of our grandchildren will live in a technological world with mass transit and Disney World, only not as many. You are willing to make this sacrifice even though the world will despise you and place your name at the head of all lists of tyrants. What else can you do? You are insuring that there will be a (smaller) human population in the future to hate you.

I think you can see from this thought experiment that the one thing that might stand a chance of actually insuring a bright future for the earth and for some members of the human race, as opposed to obliteration for all, is the very thing that we fear the most. Big Brother, through some shadowy secret society, creating a New World Order for a privileged elite, whereas the rest of humanity (the superfluous part) is culled from the herd or placed into labor camps. Come to think of it, if one super rich person consumes as much resources as one thousand of the poorest, wouldn’t we get more bang for the buck were we to ‘depopulate’ that one person? Better not go there. I’m sure Henry Kissinger would not be impressed by this analysis.

Of course, I don’t want to see this happen, nor do I believe that it will actually happen. Even if it might work and even if it would be less cruel than what is actually going to happen, you will never get a secretive group of social engineers, no matter how shadowy, to go along with it. Not because it is too horrible, we are talking about mass euthanasia, after all, but because of the ‘If X, then Y’ dilemma above. You just can’t get a group of people working together toward some single goal, no matter how important, unless you are the king of the universe. Herding cats comes to mind. Not to mention the fact that this is far beyond anything that Alexander the Great attempted in his Hellenization of the mid east. Even Sargon II did not engage in what we today call ‘ethnic cleansing.’ He only relocated the population in an attempt to control them.

I personally don’t believe that there is any sort of secret society ruling the world, not because someone might not wish for this to happen or even attempt to make it happen, but because he will never get that many people to agree to any single master plan. Philosopher kings are in short supply, you know. Philosopher kings with standing armies even less so. Just look into any town zoning board meeting. Your belief in secret societies ruling the world will collapse faster than western hegemony. Though it does make for a good conspiracy theory.

Since making a concerted effort to decrease the surplus population (Dickens’ reference intentional) and to conserve is too hideous to contemplate, then that leaves collapse. Nature will do all that for us, in other words. She can be the bitch that killed off most of the population. She’s done it before and doesn’t appear to mind.

So what might that entail? At the risk of sounding like our last legitimately elected president, it all depends on what the definition of the word ‘collapse’ is. Unless something catastrophic happens I expect to see the United States continue to weaken, just like it has since the 70’s, and then simply crack up. What has been called ‘the Balkanization of the United States.’ Until that time, there will undoubtedly be a patchwork of government run soup kitchens, under bridge condos, clever tax rebates and Bush bergs sprouting up everywhere, complete with moon shine stills, a booming sex trade and pot patches strangely ignored by the local strongmen. You’d be amazed at what you might come across in national forests. Just watch out for the booby traps.

The media will tell those of us with radios and TV’s how well things are going, and they will be true. Some segments of the economy will be functioning, albeit at an increasingly smaller and smaller pace all the time. The rich will stay just ahead of the oil supply. The poor will be ignored, as usual. At least they are not being ‘culled.’ Or, if you notice them at all, you will assume that this is just a problem in your area. After all, everywhere else is doing better, right? They will tell you this right up to the point where static is all you pick up on the air waves. The haves will continue to have and the rest of us will continue to not count. Depopulation will occur right before our eyes and we will never see it. David Copperfield does social engineering. Collapse, in short, will be banal. How can I be so sure? Because it is happening right now.

I often hear people compare the decline of this empire to the fall of the Roman Empire. What they miss is that Rome didn’t really ‘fall’ in any sense of the word. At least not during the fifth or sixth centuries, when it is usually considered to have done so. Rome was downsized when the emperor Constantine wrote off the western empire in the forth century, with all of its red ink, pesky barbarians and high military expenses, and created a new city in the eastern empire (which he modestly named after himself, by the way. It is good to be emperor, philosopher king or otherwise.) The eastern, Byzantine Empire went on strong for another thousand years. The western empire just did not have the good graces to realize that it was doomed for a few more centuries. I think a similar trend will occur here with wealthier areas consolidating and disavowing any knowledge of poorer ones. This will give the illusion that everything is OK in that empire while the rest of the world falls apart. If I don’t see you, then you are not there.

I expect to see California secede from the union at some time in the future, probably merging with Mexico. It is something like the nineteenth largest economy in the world and has its own supply of oil, food and movie stars. Once it realizes that the federal government has no more Jedi mind tricks with which to control it, California will flip a dismissive avocado in our direction and go it alone. My native Connecticut will rejoin a northeastern block from perhaps Philadelphia to southern Maine. The southern states never really accepted defeat, so any appearance of political kinship between them and the rest of the country over the last one and a half centuries was merely cosmetic, anyway. And the remainder of North America? Well, go ahead and rebel amongst yourselves, will you? Just keep away from my pot plants. Instead of going backwards, as some people suggest, I expect civilization to simply shed what it can no longer sustain as rapidly as Greenland sheds icebergs.

Every year I go to the local agricultural fairs in eastern Connecticut and muster up some hope that at least some people out there will actually know what to do with seeds, tools and livestock. Those people are called ‘farmers.’ Those of us who talk about permaculture and backyard farming obviously have never gotten manure on our shoes. I look at the fairground stalls (you have to go past the midway) and marvel at the people who keep alive the small farm, raise rabbits, can vegetables and show horses right here in snooty, urbane Connecticut. How well will they survive in the post peak compost heap? I wish them well and hope they remember us kindly.

And Me? I have a little square of land in my back yard where I used to change the oil in my riding mower. I fill it with weeds and a few cucumbers each summer. They make good pickles. Being not much use in the sex trade I have already checked out my Fodor’s guide for the homeless and staked out my place under the bridge.

Say, while we are on the subject of social engineering, how many anthropologists does it take to change a light bulb? Why, none, of course. We just study the light bulb tribes objectively in the interest of scientific inquiry, without intervention. If we did get involved, though, we’d need a linguist to translate their language, an ethnographer to record their oral traditions, a medical anthropologist to, you know, ‘discuss health issues’ with them and several hundred grad students to keep notes. Oh, and don’t forget the social workers (and soldiers) to assist in their ‘relocation’ when oil is discovered under Lightbulbia.

Creative Living Arrangements

2008-01-31T09:51:00.000-08:00

There is a lot of talk these days about making different arrangements as the economy continues to decline, and even accelerate, over the next several years and decades. Dick Cheney assures us that the American way of life is ‘non-negotiable.’ I guess that means that we can just sit back and watch it drain away, grain by grain, like some thermodynamic hour glass. Since we can no longer negotiate the steady passage of time and entropy (when could we ever?) we must ‘make other arrangements.’

What might those other arrangements be? Some people have suggested that the twentieth century will run in reverse as each of the more expensive components of our lives becomes prohibitively expensive. First, air travel goes away, followed by no longer cheap gadgets, then fast cars, fast food, all but rudimentary health care until we are left driving our Ramblers home from our second jobs just in time to catch The Honeymooners on our black and white TVs. It will be the Big Crunch following the twentieth century’s consumerist Big Bang, only not chronicled as such by any social or political commentators. Our spacious living arrangements will collapse and grow closer and closer to those around us until we are forced to rely on our neighbors and family members to survive.

But why did we build suburbia in the first place? Because we can’t stand living near other people. That’s right. We are anti social. Or at least anti large society. Forget communes. Forget bands of Pilgrims clinging to their bibles and sea tossed boats while searching for the New Jerusalem. Forget Shangri-La, El Dorado, Teaming Masses, Workers’ Paradises, Peoples’ Republics, Noble Savages and Enlightened Self Interested People (sorry. I haven’t gotten a clever sounding title for those yet.)

Forget permaculture communities (back in the old days these were called ‘towns.’) Forget George Bailey and his “…your money is in Bill’s house, and your money is in Fred’s house…” We’re all just happy neighbors paying each others’ bank account interest with our safe and secure fixed rate mortgages, while building a better world for our children, right? Not on your life.

People have a really hard time living close to other people. And not just Americans, either. It was true in the very old days when our ancestors first experimented with agricultural communities. They had to psychologically deal with such abrasive problems as division of labor, crowded living conditions, sod busters vs. ranchers, fair market values for bartered commodities, inequalities between rich and poor, and “Hey, who moved my boundary stone?” types of complaints, etc. And in all of this mischief, people were in closer proximity that they were accustomed. Much closer.

Your average hunter gatherer living in his Edenic community had a population density of about one person per square mile. This does not mean that he was five thousand two hundred eighty feet away from his closest neighbor, of course, but it does mean that there were a lot fewer people rattling around in his social zone. With farming communities and villages, that number got a lot bigger. Hunter gatherers are not as bucolic as some might think. They are as violent as anybody else (more, actually) but their population is sparser and so the opportunities for friction fewer, though sometimes dramatic when they do occur. As they are compressed together into villages of farmers, herders and tradesmen, pressures build up generating a lot of heat. Conflicts are unavoidable. Skills to deal with them are non existent.

Early people dealt with these problems with rules, religions and God dispensed legal codes. From the Code of Hammurabi to your local zoning board, legal systems have evolved to force people to do what they can’t do naturally: get along. Just do what you are told and you can be a nice villager. We will even give you some wheat, no?

For the past hundred years or so, prosperous human populations have been expanding, each person growing farther and farther away from every other person in his universe like galaxies stretched on a rubber sheet. Maybe we are subconsciously trying to regain that ‘one person per square mile’ perfect proportion. Our gadgets and technology should be able to give us the benefits of civilization and the psychological distance of primitives. I’ll stay in my cave, you stay in yours, and we’ll just text each other. Why, it’s the best of both worlds! Nice work if you can get it.

I always loved the Carrousel of Progress in the 1965 New York World’s Fair, now permanently housed at Disneyland (Walt Disney World in Orlando has one, too.) You may remember it. There is a central circular theatre with fixed stages and seats arranged in a mobile ring around the central theatre. The audience sees a five minute show and then the auditorium portion revolves to the next theatre, taking the audience with it.

Each little show captures a slice of American rural life in the twentieth century. In the earlier ones, life is depicted in small communities where family members are making their own costumes for local masquerade and Halloween parties and the father talks about going down to the drug store for a sarsaparilla. Later, with the introduction of electric appliances and ‘the rat race’, local activities seem to just drop away, making the earlier ones look quaint. The end depicts a modern world, mostly centered on video games and gadgets, with little reference to an outside world at all. Except, of course, that it contains ‘a great big beautiful tomorrow…’

So what exactly will happen if we spin our carrousel backwards? We will find that, like horses, progress does not like to go into reverse. We cannot shrink our houses or our mortgages. We cannot easily move back to mill towns and cities and rebuild trolleys and put up theatres, diners and five and dimes in the center square. When I was a child my mother would bring me to doctors in the eastern Connecticut city where we lived. They had their practices (and also lived, for all I knew) in the upstairs offices above businesses in the center of town. We actually lived slightly outside of the city by that time, but most of the activity was still down town. It really was like Bedford Falls.

As the carrousel goes in reverse, I expect soon we will see more and more adult children moving back in with their parents. This happens already. A friend of mine had to allow her daughter, son-in-law and two children to move back in with them so they would not loose their house. Imagine that for a living arrangement? They went from three people to seven over night. I expect this to get a lot more common.

Do you have borders? No? How about empty rooms in your house? That McMansion is mostly empty. You could easily take someone in on a weekly or monthly basis. Of course, you should know something about the person you are renting a room to. So now you will have to know more about your community and you neighbors. You will need to develop a network of trust and a source of information. “So-and-so needs to rent a room? Is he trustworthy? Oh, a cousin of yours, huh? Is he willing to do some work around the house? No? Well, the room will cost more, then. Just don’t move my boundary stone.”

We will have to learn what it means to be in a community. Grudgingly, of course, since we built suburbia to get away from community in the first place. Maybe we are in the new age of community re-evolution, like those early Holocene hunter gatherers trying to figure out how to live in villages without killing each other. Well, they did it, why can’t we? We just need to get out of our caves, abandon our lifeless iPods and say hello to our neighbors. Oh, and whip up a nice divine Code of Conduct, while you’re at it.

Who knows? We may even start making our own Halloween costumes again.

Chronicles of a Baby Boomer - Part 1

2008-01-31T09:18:00.000-08:00

I admit it. I am a product of the baby boom. Not quite a boom myself, being more of an acoustic anomaly off to one side. At least I was making a noise. I was born in the nineteen fifties, which puts me pretty much in the middle of that noisy clutch of booming babies. I don’t quite remember Howdy Doody, but I do remember the Kennedy assassination and the original run of Star Trek. And, of course, I saw the Beatles’ first performance on the Ed Sullivan show. Didn’t everybody?

Not only that, but we were suburbanites. I grew up in the state of Connecticut. For you in the bio fuel ready Midwest, we are one of those little states on the east coast. You know, the ones that look like pixilated bad guys in news videos? Not quite as small as Rhode Island, which is normally used as a cartographical unit of measure (as in, “That iceberg is the size of Rhode Island.”, or “An asteroid the size of Rhode Island (in 3-D, presumably) struck France last week.”) but not as big as Massachusetts, either. Connecticut is comfortably known for very little in the popular vernacular. Where I live is known for even less.

I live in the eastern half of the state, affectionately known as ‘The Other Connecticut.’ ‘Other’ as in, ‘Not the one where Paul Neumann and Mia Farrow live.’ That half of the state, the rich half, is pretty much the cork screw on the Swiss Army Knife which is New England. Our purpose in the Appalachia of the northeast is to serve as a counterweight, I suppose. Or a first line of defense should Rhode Island, with their cartographical superiority, decide to invade. We would absorb the blows while ‘The Primary Connecticut’ was annexed by New York. At least we would not have to put tomatoes in our clam chowder.

A lot is said about what baby boomers do and don’t do and what we are and aren’t. How unlike the previous and the current generations we are, for good or ill, how selfish or iconoclastic we are, etc, etc. Personally, I don’t think we baby boomers are any different than anybody else. A little less mercury in our environment growing up, perhaps, and a little more mercurial in personality, but then again we still had lead in the gasoline, so the assault on our neurotransmitters was just as robust. And anyway, with all of the random geology found in Connecticut, I think the water was naturally effervescent with radon gas. It is great with scotch. All in all, we were just brought up in an environment where the expectations were different than they are today, that’s all.

My father was a WWII vet. He joined the navy during the depression because, what else is a farm boy from Kansas to do when the farm belongs to the bank now? My mother worked in NYC during the same time, getting “Fifteen dollars a week, and that was good money!” as she told us later. During the war my aunt worked on a rationing board, and you couldn’t get an extra stick of butter out of her, no matter how much flattery you applied to the problem. My mother went to work for a defense contractor for the war effort. Though she did not get a chance to sling any hot rivets around, she did work in the office. Rosie the Filer. They also serve who stand and clerk.

We all have/had certain expectations in our lives. We in the post Sputnik era grew up with different expectations. I remember the 1965 World’s Fair in New York. I did not recognize it for the post modern, post art deco circus that it was. I actually believed all of the propaganda about houses of the future and talking Mr. Lincoln. And I’m still waiting for my flying car and electricity too cheap to meter. Our children are growing up with even different expectations, mostly to do with computerized gadgets that will save or rule the world, I can’t remember which. Maybe both. Who will be more disappointed, I wonder? Well, the computers won’t be disappointed, that’s for sure.

My mother’s parents owned a farm out in the country. ‘Country’ defined by Connecticut standards, that is. So it was small and had some vegetable gardens, dairy cows, pigs, chickens and used to have horses at one time in its past. No longer self sufficient, in other words. They were already retired when I came on the scene, having gained consciousness some time in the sixties, but they still retained some of the old routines out of habit, I suppose. These were a few quaint things that came with them from the Old Country and didn’t quite catch on here. What may be of interest to the Peak Oil brigade is that they, even back then, already grew their own bio fuel. Yes they did. It grew right out of the ground without the need of natural gas based fertilizers or diesel powered irrigation booms like those crop circles you see out in the Midwest. It just grew right out of the ground all by itself.

Two or three times during the summer, we would help my grandfather in the processing and storing of this miracle bio fuel. (By the way, when I refer to myself as ‘helping’, by that I mean running around with my other younger cousins trying not to get run over by a truck or chopped into silage by the sickle bar on the tractor. And yes, we used some fossil fueled vehicles for harvesting and transportation, but surely that was mitigated by the enormous quantities of bio fuel gathered in the process.)

We would gather the hay, I mean bio fuel, and load it onto a big flat bed truck. We would then drive it to the barn which was set into the side of a hill not too far from the farmhouse. Barns were always set into the sides of hills, the reason for which will become obvious to anybody who has stood on the down hill side of a cow. Someone would back the truck into the barn between the enormous lofts on either side. Then my grandfather would climb up onto the mound of hay, I mean bio fuel, and set this huge metal fork deep into it.

We used to call it the Devil’s fork and only my grandfather was allowed to work it. He would set it into the hay, I mean-Oh, never mind. He had to open the fork with both arms stretched out fully like Batman about to plunge over Gotham City. Instead, he just plunged the tines of the fork deep into the hay. He signaled a group of men by the entrance to the barn. A length of rope followed a complicated path from one side of the loft to the ceiling down to the fork then back up to the ceiling and over somewhere else. Eventually, it came down from the very top of the barn and went through a pulley set in the floor by the entrance. Rupp Goldberg would be bewildered.

I always found this amusing. Here was an old wooden pulley on the ground with a rope going through it extending all the way up to the ceiling of the barn and disappearing into one of the lofts. The free end of the rope was tied to a tractor, or sometimes even a car, which was driven slowly away from the barn, gently lifting the Devil’s fork along with its wad of hay up to the very apex of the roof. Some times the hay would all fall out and the forks would swing together, empty and dangerous. Those tines could pierce your head and meet in the middle, should your head get in the way. In the case of fork failure, my grandfather would shout down and have the car back up and start over again, resetting the fork into the jumble of hay. He was skilled enough so that, more often than not, he managed to get a thick misshapen lump of hay firmly set in the tines of the fork.

When it reached the top of the barn he would signal to the four men standing at the entrance of the barn by that hysterical pulley in the floor. They would pick up the rope and pull as quickly as they could, four men frantically pulling for all their might. This caused the Devil’s fork, which was already at the apex of the roof, to catch a trolley hanging in a rail, unlock it and fly left or right along the ridge of the roof, depending on how it had been set up. The fork brought the hay all the way to the edge of one of the hay lofts. My grandfather, who was holding a thin piece of clothesline, gave it a tug. It went all the way up to the roof and over to the fork, releasing it and dumping the hay into the loft.

A couple of good harvests and the help of sons in law and grandchildren and the barn was full. Hay was all they stored by the sixties. They used to keep a higher quality bio fuel in a storage tank called a ‘silo’, but the hurricane of 1938 turned that into wood planks, which were then used to build a porch around the house. Anyway, they didn’t need nearly as much home grown silage or fodder by then. You could just buy it, you know.

The hay was used as fodder for the three or four cows they still kept into the nineteen sixties. By then my grandparents were in their eighties so they were slowing down quite a bit. It’s bound to happen to the best of them. You try living into your late eighties and working hard the whole time. I’d rather not, thank you.

Looking at it this way puts some things into perspective. If it takes this much work and this much land to produce enough vegetative matter to keep a few cows going for a year (and cows don’t exactly have to run an Indy 500), then how much would be needed to power a horse? A horse conveniently produces one horse power of work, so the math is easy. Scale that up to your several hundred horsepower suburban tractor and I think you will agree that a tremendous amount to vegetation equivalent is required. At this point you may be tempted to say, “Oh, but we’ll use oily things like rape seeds and sunflower seeds and leftover grease from Elvis impersonators’ hair. This all has much more energy than hay. Much!” I would point out that oil contains slightly more than twice the energy of an equal weight of carbohydrate. This means that, instead of keeping four cows, we could have kept nine, assuming they could eat nothing by Brylcreem. I’m not exactly sure how many horse power we could count on, though. As a unit of comparison it serves to show just how much work you can expect to get out of a certain amount of roughage. There’s that concept again: expectations.

I don’t know what went first, the chickens, the cows or the pigs, but eventually they got rid of all of them. No more staying with the grandparents over a few days, getting up early with my grandfather and watching him feed and milk the cows at five in the morning. No more removing the loose plank in the barn and hoeing the manure down into the pit in the hill bottom foundation of the barn. No more pails of milk in the separator, spinning out every grade of dairy from sinfully heavy cream to barely palatable skim milk. We had an aunt who demanded that the milk be pasteurized. They didn’t really know how to do it properly, so they tended to overheat it. That made the milk taste scorched, but we went along with it, anyway. Science, you know.

At the end of a visit we would go back to our home, watch Walter Cronkite and the latest escapades of Colonel Hogan and his heroes. See the latest goings on in Disneyland (I was convinced that Walter Cronkite and Walt Disney were brothers. They had the same name and looked alike, after all.) Our own expectations for the future were that we would grow up, go to college and get a job making-get this-ten thousand dollars a year! And that would be good money! That was expected to set us for life. A life of luxury, no less.

My expectations didn’t work out quite that way. Now I think things like, “How frugal will I have to become in the future?”, “Should I be thinking about getting a second job some day?” and “How is my daughter going to make out in her future?” I think about putting solar panels on my house and have resuscitated a garden in my back yard that my daughter and I used to play around with when she was young and the garden was not necessary. I am proud to say that I can, throughout an entire growing season, produce enough food to feed myself for about a week (provided I buy something for the main course, of course.) Next I’ll work on feeding cows and horses.

If the absolute worst happens, then we are all toast, unless you happen to live high up in the mountains of Peru and don’t have a word for ‘petroleum’ or ‘hideous collapse’ in your native language and are already feeding yourself and your animals with bio fuel. Those who successfully avoided the Christian missionaries (or just ate them) may have the last laugh after all, though it may be less of a laugh and more of a, ‘Just what was that, anyway?’

I don’t know how I would answer that question.

The Oilman’s Dilemma (2/27/07)

2008-01-31T09:09:00.001-08:00

People in Anthropology and Economics departments at universities like to use thought experiments and goal based games to explore human interactions and perhaps explain, or at least model, why people behave the way they do. Some of them are quite clever, such as the object of this discussion: The Prisoners’ Dilemma. Without going into detail about the origin of this thought experiment, let me just explain how it is used today.

Two people enter into some kind of cooperative arrangement. This has to be a single interaction. In its simplest form, there are two options for each of the participants, and therefore four possible outcomes to the entire interaction. The options are: You can live up to your end of the bargain (cooperate) or shirk your responsibilities (cheat.) When two people enter into an exchange like this, they can both cooperate, they can both cheat or some combination giving a total of four outcomes.

The reward structure is based on points gained. The amount of points that a player can earn depends upon how much cooperation occurs according to certain rules. Suppose both parties cooperate. In this case, each party gains three points. If both cheat, they each gain only one point. So far, cooperation seems to make the most sense. However, it gets more interesting when one cooperates and one cheats. In this case, the one who cooperates gets nothing (called the Suckers prize) while the one who cheats gets five points (called the Temptation).

So, if you enter into a Prisoners' Dilemma game with one other person, this is how you will reason: If I live up to my end of the bargain (cooperate) and so does the other person, I will get three points. However, if I cooperate and he doesn’t, I will get nothing, which is the worst case for me. If he cheats then the best strategy is for me to cheat, too, as a defensive strategy. In this case I will get only one point, which is better than nothing. Furthermore, suppose that he cooperates. If I cooperate also, I will gain three points, but if I cheat, I will get five points, which is obviously better for me.

In both cases, the safest strategy is to cheat. Cheating in the first case is defensive whereas cheating in the second case is opportunistic. Unfortunately, your opponent is thinking the same way. Ironically, when viewed in total, the greatest outcome only comes when both parties cooperate. In this case, the total gross number of points is amassed: Six points. If one cheats and one cooperates, that total is five. The worst case, where both parties cheat, results in only two points. Even though the best strategy for both parties taken together is for both to cooperate, the most likely outcome seems to be for both to cheat, which results in the worst outcome for all involved.

The Prisoners' Dilemma has been applied to many cooperative ventures, such as OPEC pumping quotas, cooperative farming and contributing to Public Radio. The reward structure reflects the difference between how much you put in and how much you take out (EROI.) Cheating gives you a greater reward since your investment is less. There may be less to go around because you haven’t put in your fair share of the work, but you personally get more out of it. Your own personal energy returned on energy invested is greater. Of course, if nobody contributes then there is even less left over to share. This model works great with an enterprise that requires investment of labor, such as a shared garden. It also works with other shared resources.

Let’s look at the OPEC example.

If two countries agree to production limits and honor those agreements, they will collectively produce the most profit on a per barrel basis. The reward, instead of being points won in a game, is actual money. Now, let’s suppose that I decide to cheat and pump more oil than is allowed by my quota. Since there is more oil mysteriously on the market, the price goes down. I get more money in total because I am pumping more oil at a reduced price, but the profit per barrel goes down. My partner, assuming that he is adhering to the quotas, suffers the reduction in revenue due to the inexplicably lower price of the oil but does not gain any extra revenue. Indeed, his revenue goes down since he is selling fewer barrels of oil at a reduced price. I get the Temptation while he is stuck with the Suckers prize.

If we both violate our pumping quotas, there is even more oil in circulation. The price goes down even more and the total profit for both of us, on a per barrel basis, goes down even further. We may get more money by pumping more oil, but at a lower profit margin. We both loose equally.

The temptation comes from the fact that two people can both share some common resource or one can benefit spectacularly at the expense of the other person as well as the degradation of the total system output. The cheater is milking the system which depletes the total while maximizing his own little portion.

Now let us take this game and apply it to the Peak Oil problem. As the availability of oil goes down and the price goes up, forces will dictate that we use less. Using less is a form of cooperation in the PD game. If everyone conserves, the supply will rise and the price will go down, such as we saw last fall going into winter (2006-2007.) Everyone wins. However, as soon as the price drops and supplies rise, the temptation will be to grab some more and hope that someone else keeps up the good work of conservation. I cancel that Prius order, schedule my winter vacation in the Bahamas and gleefully say, “Whew. Thank God that’s over!" What I in effect am doing is cheating while hoping that the other guy cooperates. However, if I conserve, turn down the thermostat and stuff newspaper under the doors of my modest house while my next door neighbor rolls into the driveway of his McMansion with his new Jeep Grand Cherokee towing a barge, then I’m the one stuck with the Suckers prize. My conservation has made it possible for someone else’s excesses.

So whatever the price of oil is, the safest and most opportunistic strategy is to use as much as I possibly can, whether that is great or small, and hope that someone else is conservative. Conservation is great, only not in my gas tank. From the reward structure of the Prisoners' Dilemma, conservation makes no sense whatsoever.

Musical Chairs (2/7/07)

2008-01-30T12:42:00.000-08:00

We are all playing a game of musical chairs with the world’s oil supply. Every time the price of oil goes up five dollars or so, one chair gets moved away and someone, or some entire country, is politely escorted out of the oil game. Just kidding about the politely part.

Since my country, the United States of America, actually consists of two societal decks not quite randomly shuffled together, we actually have our own first world and third world coexisting in parallel universes. There is a dividing line above which you are affluent and below which you are poor. We used to designate a section as ‘middle class’, which sandwiched in nicely between first class and the cattle cars in the rear, but that distinction is going away. We just can’t afford it anymore. Sorry.

Each time an oil shock, a hurricane, a tornado, an energy adjustment on our electric bill, an increase in college tuition, health insurance or an inflation wedgie hikes up our pants more tightly against our nether regions, someone slips below that line. Someone who was struggling to survive now struggles but does not survive. Someone who was struggling to get by now struggles to survive and the rest of us tighten our belts. When the dust settles, those of us still standing reasonably well sigh in relief and exclaim, “Well, xx dollar a barrel oil isn’t that bad, is it? After all, the economy is still making that buzzing and sparking noise that means its working, right?”

I discovered Peak Oil in the summer of 2003. I had just installed a new efficient oil fired HVAC system in my house the year before. Boy did I back the wrong horse. I did ask Mr. Oil Man about exotic things like heat pumps and wood furnaces, over concern for some possible future energy problems that might occur some time down the line eventually by and by. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “With a Bush in the white house, we’ll always have plenty of oil.” The wisdom of that false association is in serious doubt today.

So, what can an average baby boomer like myself expect of the near future? Being a reasonable and rational human being, I like to know what my options are so I can plan for them adequately. Peak Oil, I am informed, actually occurred over a year ago and we are starting to more than wobble on the edge of that path of civilization cut into the cliffside of resource availability. The path narrows and fewer and fewer of us will be able to walk abreast along it for much longer. The view is great, by the way.

Having read all of the literature, insulated my house and replaced all of the windows with energy efficient ones, including that spray foam stuff you can squirt between the shims and the window frames, I am wondering what to expect next? Should I install photovoltaic cells on my rooftop? Should I begin amassing stockpiles of condoms and vodka? Salt might be a reasonable thing to have plenty of in the post peakalyptic world. I hear you can trade a tablespoon of salt for some meat or sexual favor. Well, maybe not, but it sounds good on paper. Will we enter the horrifying world of Mad Max? More likely it will be the desperate world of an Astonished Max as things get worse and that imaginary event horizon between impoverished and affluent creeps inexorably in our direction. Prepare to be politely escorted across that line. Just kidding about the politely part.

To adequately plan, or even to futilely plan for that matter, one must know what to expect. In other words, what is the worst case scenario, the best case scenario and what can one reasonably plan for? Well, the worst case scenario is too horrifying to consider. And here it is: That line between starvation and affluence rockets directly to the ninety ninth percentile and most of us are politely escorted out of the game. Just kidding-well, you get the idea.

The elites of our society, as is true of all elites everywhere and at all times, hold onto their positions. Paris Hilton will not wear a gunny sack, at least not involuntarily, and Brittany Spears will not want for clean underwear, should she want it at all, that is. If we do engage in oil wars, they will only have the effect of destroying large segments of the population but not providing any more oil for any more people. There will be a scramble to keep some framework of economic structure going at whatever cost. Even with dwindling supplies and a wealthy class that is only out for themselves, you still need some functioning peasant class to provide the goods and services for the noble born. Futuristic robots will not tend the fields and pour the wine for the idle rich. The poor you always have with you. And for good reason. Someone has to do the work.

The Amish and some Amazonian tribes people living comfortably away from missionaries and iPods won’t notice a thing. Except for the odd weather, that is, and the fact that it seems to be a lot quieter for some reason. Few people will be interred in Halliburton brand concentration camps, except as spontaneous communities of homeless people. The Federal government will be lucky to keep the lights on, let alone exercise any kind of jurisdiction over any kind of Orwellian state. Think ‘the Balkanization of North America’ meets Gilligan’s Island. The rest of us (if you are reading this, you are probably one of ‘us’) will be better occupied building shelters out of highway billboards and cutting up telephone poles for firewood, while looking longingly forward to our evening meal of rat tartare.

The good news is that this only applies to the survivors.

Well, that was pleasant. How about the best case scenario? In the best case, things will only gradually get worse. The so called ‘soft landing’ scenario, though the difference between a recession and a depression depends entirely upon which side of that imaginary line you have been escorted to, politely or otherwise.

With each increase, each chair removed from the game, people will have less to spend and, therefore, they will spend less. The airline industry becomes, as it was originally, a plaything for the rich. People in rural communities are forced together. There is a resurgence in local activities like dances and socials at the local grange hall. People carpool with their neighbors, after being properly introduced, of course. Church attendance increases along with Sunday picnics, quilting, canning, gardening, local sports and live theatre. Boy and girl scouts and 4-H clubs become more than quaint childhood distractions. These things happen gradually until, suddenly, they are cool again. As we know, the invention is ninety nine percent PR. Forget about that perspiration stuff. It’s all about appearances. Once we are forced to live together, it will become fashionable again. Kind of like lava lamps. Who would have thought that they would be in style again? Well, a coup in the driveway, chicken coop, that is, may be the new way to keep up with the Joneses.

Local diploma mills, like the southern New England state university where I work, may remember that they were originally agricultural land grant institutions long before they had cooperative ventures with the likes of United Technologies, Pfizer and the Department of Defense. They might start offering weekend classes on gardening, raising chickens and rabbits, tanning and making your own real for real jam from berries you picked yourself from these things called bushes.

The bad news is that this only applies to the survivors.

My fear is that something in between will happen. Things will continue to get more expensive and worldwide tensions will rise as they have since the time of John the Evangelist. It will happen fast enough to be noticeable but not fast enough to prompt people to do anything reasonable like take any kind of action or make preparations. That line will keep creeping up until there is a snap. People like to use the words ‘tipping point’ today, as if our society is playing see-saw with the elements of nature. This is going to be more like the tipping point that happens when a speeding car encounters a rock wall. Guess who tips?

The people in my country, I am afraid to say, have somehow gotten the impression that we deserve the finest things in life, no matter from where, or from whom, we get them. The last president to tell the American people to stop acting like spoiled brats and to take some responsibility for our lives was replaced by an actor. Point taken. All subsequent politicians from then on understood that the American people wish for entertainment, not reality.

When the snap finally comes the audience will not like how the film ends. In this case, it would not be wise to be a member of a community where you are ‘making do’ while the surrounding tribes are starving, scrambling for scapegoats and looking for some excuse to do what they’ve been doing all along, anyway, just not so obviously. That is, take for themselves at the expense of others. Mad Max is just hungry and self insufficient, after all. And he may have a gun.

There is an old saying. Those who will not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. This is usually uttered by someone who has some pet lesson of his own that he wants to lend credibility to, accompanied by knowing looks and ominous music. Well, I am no exception. Only I like to cut to the chase. I feel that, if history teaches lessons, then what is the greatest lesson? Of all of history’s textbook cases that we have been offered from Herodotus to Doris Kerns Goodwin, what is the one that I should not leave the classroom without learning?

The greatest lesson of history is that people don’t learn lessons from history. Interestingly, the people who learn this lesson are the most successful, provided they can pack up their wagons and escape just before the tar pot and feather pillow comes out, that is. Politicians, snake oil salesman, shale oil salesman, hydrogen salesman, Oh, a whole host of charlatans selling something will grapple with each other to get our attention first, thus squandering our resources and taking our lunch money until it is far past the time when we could have actually done anything to prepare at all. A historian, it seems, is born every minute. Then, when the fresh scent of boiling tar perfumes the air, they will be gone and some other unfortunate, probably someone who used to regularly post on Peak Oil websites, will be blamed for the misfortune. And anyway, we have all this tar. It would be a pity to waste it.

History’s great lesson, then, is that we are all being had. Those of us that aren’t having, that is. As Sweeney Todd sings in the Sondheim musical of the same name, “The history of the world, my sweet--Is who gets eaten, and who gets to eat!” I think I’ll go back to uttering platitudes and pretending that history has something inspiring to teach me.

So how can we effectively plan? Maybe the best we can do is to brace ourselves for the shock and hope for the best. Pay off our debts. Watch our backs. If we do have it better than others, keep a low profile. Think both more highly and more suspiciously of our fellow man. Make peace with our neighbors. Darken the doors of our local town hall, grange or church. Have an ample supply of clean undergarments, in case Brittany stops by. And keep that salt shaker full.

Of course, while we are waiting, the natural tendency for human beings to joke about their situation will kick in. It is only a matter of time, really, before some crude individual introduces black humor into the Peak Oil debate. After all, people have been making light of bad situations for as long as there have been stand up comics and tragedies to either laugh or cry over. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already. So I’ll start.

How many post oil dwellers (PODs) does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to put the pitch pine torch into the empty socket and one to strike flint to tinder.

OK. That was in poor taste. How could I say something like that in the face of such a dire future? Here’s another one. Why did the POD cross the 27 lane super highway? He was out for a leisurely walk. All right. I’ll stop. I promise.

At least, don’t get me started on knock-knock jokes.