"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..."
Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 1951
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 Divine 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 the 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 PTB 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 rationale 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 succeed, 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
