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Chapter five is here and this is where the rhythm really drops. (Chapter one link).
Before we go into this let me issue a general reminder that I'm painting with a broad brush so as to actually get somewhere for once, even at book-length. And actually from here on out we suffer from far too much trying to fit in too small a space. I've elided much in the interest of brevity. Real life is as always much more complicated but I think if you take what I'm giving you here (and a grain of salt) you'll be much better off than you were before.
0105 - Women and Men
In the previous chapter we tracked the development of apes into proto-humans. Or, we got a fair amount of the way there. At the end something like modern humans showed up on the scene, but how they got to be that way was left as a bit of a mystery. In this chapter then we shall attempt to close the gap!
At some point a band of apes started spending less time in the trees and more time on the ground, ranging further and further from its ancestral environment. No one is sure why, exactly. Some say it was simple population pressure. Others say it was some sort of event like a natural disaster or cataclysm; a volcanic eruption perhaps. But most agree that one way or another the culprit probably had to do with climate change.
Climatic conditions shifted and over time the once-abundant cloud forests of the apes started drying up. Certainly viable pockets did remain in this or that hidden valley but, for many, the ape way of life was at an end. Those who could were obligated to find new ways to survive in a more arid environment in which the trees were too far apart to serve as a highway.
So these apes have to learn to get around on the ground, hence bipedalism. And they have to transition to obtaining a substantial portion, or even a majority, of their calories from endurance hunting — running down prey not by being faster, but simply by being able to keep going past the point that their targets collapse from exhaustion or overheating. To better assist in this, they shed most of their body hair and develop the ability to sweat, that they might remain cool while their prey does not. (Their skin had previously been pale beneath the fur, but rapidly takes on a darker hue to protect them from the harsh sun coming through what used to be the canopy).
Much has been said elsewhere about all of the above. But the really striking transition, in my book, is the way this radically upends gender relations.
It’s no longer viable for coalitions of males to secure nice groves of fruit trees and let the females come and go as they please. Instead, bands of combined males and females are obliged to rove around together, moving from site to site, following prey and forage with the seasons. This presents a new problem for the males. Heretofore they hadn’t been of much specific use to females, and it’s still the case that females are basically free to wander off and find some other males if they are so inclined. Except now, more females cannot be expected to show up at any moment as had previously been the case while in possession of a nice fruit grove.
Troops of males, then, are suddenly under pressure to cater to females. (Treating them as property works acceptably-well too but is generally less-preferable for the usual reasons having to do with slaves, which plays out in many ways as we shall see later in this book.) They do this by sharing food and offering protection from the many predators which can no longer be avoided by hanging out in trees all the time. Thankfully this is made more pleasant by another upshot, which is that the children of the females who have been with the troop for a while (as well as any still gestating) can be pretty reliably counted upon to be the offspring of that troop’s males.
Nor can females continue to entirely outsource their task of evaluating potential mates. Yes, every now and then a competing troop of males comes along and wipes out the males the females had been with before, and incorporates the females into their own group, and that’s pretty grand when it happens — a freebie, if you will — but such providence can’t be counted upon, and in the meantime hard feminine decisions must be made.
To some degree it’s still useful for the females to sit back and observe which male ends up in command of all the others. But in the new environment resources are scarce, and it’s not practical for that alpha-male to provide food and protection for 70%, or even 10%, of the females. A handful at a time, at most. Nor can he freeze the vast majority of other males mostly out of sexual access: food is no longer free and their assistance is required to feed everybody, which necessitates enfranchising them as it were. So, given that most females can’t count on being taken care of by the best male in their world, how should they determine which male to mate with? And how to entice him to become invested in them during the vulnerability of their pregnancy, and in their newborn children?
The recursive intellectual arms race of the male apes has granted females enormous social acuity, even if mainly as a side-effect. They’re able to evaluate potential mates directly, by observing which males are successful hunters, as well as indirectly, by paying attention to how each potential partner carries himself in the assembly of males. Does he seem respected? Admired? Scorned? Pitied? Their basic strategy of letting the males sort such things out is modified a bit, but doesn't fundamentally change. Though, as a failsafe, females also come to be hyper-sensitive to how other females evaluate a male. If most seem to think he’s a desirable mate, she should quickly agree this is the case or else lose out on her chance to secure his attentions.
The females can’t simply hunt for themselves. They’re smaller, and their body structure is built around carrying and birthing ever-larger-headed babies, which makes them unsuitable for chasing, and their musculature is much weaker than that of the males, which makes them less suited to killing. Their pelvises are comparatively-prone to breaking while running under any kind of load. They’re that much more vulnerable to the megapredators which are likely to be encountered away from home. Also, while males are all about taking big risks for big rewards so as to secure reproductive access, risk-aversion is fixed deep within the female psyche. Like it or not, the females are dependent upon the males, and live or die based upon how emotionally attached a competent male becomes to them.
And so females become lovely and likable, locked in a new arms race with each other to appeal to high-value males. Given the outsized returns on reproducing with the highest-value males, the more arousing their physical forms can be, the better. Low mutation load (mostly) can’t be faked, and reliable indicators of being in their prime reproductive period (glossy hair, clear skin) are rapidly selected for. Every facet of the female body becomes fine-tuned to maximize its attractive impact. E.g., by definition, all female mammals have mammary glands, but it is telling that these specific ape-offshoots are some of the only ones ever to develop breasts, structures whose function has little to do with milk and much to do with announcing reproductive readiness and driving males just absolutely crazy.
This arms race is even more intense because, as should be clear by now, they’re not competing with each other simply for a good mate, but for the best mate. As such, fascinating tradeoffs are made. Women evolve to be extra-beautiful in their prime years and then rapidly visually age beyond those. Intuitively this might seem like a bad idea — wouldn't it be better to look young longer?
But if you consider the situation from the perspective of the standard alpha-male, this is precisely the problem. A female who only looks amazing during her prime reproductive period is sending an expensive signal that yes, she is in fact of ideal breeding age. That’s attractive! A female who visually pretends to be in her prime period whether she is or not, well, who can say? Smart money is on mating with the first female. That second female will perhaps have more children over the course of her life with mediocre males. But by that point the best males have given the first female a few very high-quality children. And even if not as many, they’re going to outcompete the children of the second female in the coming generation for all the old reasons the shellfish know so well.
An extremely powerful strategy for females is to secure the protection and provision of a competent but not-especially-high-value male, get the highest-value male in her world to impregnate her, and then convince her pair-bonded male that the child is his. Females are in fact so (understandably) driven to conceive the children of the highest-value male that they’re apt to do so before they even have the next step (finding support) figured out. And the highest-value males sense this, making them comparatively unwilling to commit. At which point refusal to commit becomes, itself, attractive in a male. A male eager to commit is signaling that he’s grateful for the opportunity, whereas the sort of male who has great genes and knows it also knows that in a couple years the next newer model will be along and he can have her too. (Yes, a male who is both high-value and willing to commit is like catnip to females, but hard to find in the wild, and she’ll still be aroused by the ones who act like they can do better.)
Females won’t generally allow mediocre males anywhere near their reproductive systems without commitment, but they quite justifiably consider reproduction with the highest-value male to be enough of a prize as to make such considerations secondary. And when a female does build a pair bond with a provider-male, the implicit bargain is that he’ll good-naturedly help take care of her prior children as well — for as long as they’re ‘together’, at any rate. This makes “have sex with the male who excites you during your peak reproductive period, then trade sex to the male who will take it in exchange for raising the first guy's children” an eminently reasonable plan, except in societies where males coördinate to put a stop to it.
In addition to attractive, females must also become pathetic, in the original sense of the word. Even as males are evolving to care about their children, females start evolving to take on attributes evoking those of children, pointedly including neotenous facial features. Big eyes, small noses, full lips, and so on. A female must push as many of a male’s “protect and provide for” buttons as possible, or else lose out to another who did. And should a female find herself with child but without a provider, or — much worse — past her reproductive age, she had better be as pleasant and sympathetic as possible, in the hopes of receiving charity from those who can spare it. (Indeed the plight of elderly widows will be a perpetual social dilemma for many, many later societies.)
Their dependence upon males notwithstanding, this transition does put pressure on females to become competent in their own right. The sire of their offspring might take seriously his implied obligation to provide for them, and then again he might not. For that matter he might be traumatically gored to death by a wildebeest at any moment. Far better for females to be able to supply some of their own food by foraging, or give any surfeit to others to establish reciprocal obligations. Far better for them, in their older age, to have skills to bring to the table, such that a conquering troop might have use for them.
Meanwhile, switching over to a meat-based diet has been so effective at winning calories that the brains of these things — now radically unlike other apes across several dimensions — are now accounting for as much as 20 or even 25% of their daily energy budget! Because the social games are getting more intense and the calories are there for the successful.
This lifestyle increasingly selects for the ability of males to coördinate. A group where the males can coöperate to take down large game (and share out the excess) is vastly more fit than one in which each male can only individually attempt to bring home a rat or a bird. Similarly, they can work together to secure the clan’s defensible homestead (sure let’s call it a cave) and achieve projects, etc.
But males, being larger, are even more calorically-expensive to feed than females. And, while there are several compelling reasons to keep lazy females — especially young and smooth ones — around, no one has patience for males who don’t pull their own weight. As such, young and adolescent males are subjected to any amount of hazing, hardship, and initiation, to screen out and dispense with losers as quickly as possible. Less-fit males are persecuted mercilessly, their status continuously eroded, until they end up killed for impertinence, driven into exile, or uniformly shunned by all females and thereby cleansed away genetically.
The inferior male who skulks about the edges of the clan, staring thirstily at the prime young females on display, represents a very real threat to those females. Unable to earn affection or even grudging provider-sex on his own merits, his best reproductive chance is to try to catch such a young female alone and have his way with her, which can monopolize one of her few, precious reproductive windows, not to mention the burden of caring for the resulting child. Females rapidly and understandably develop extreme disgust responses and paranoia about such males. Their revulsion toward low-status and especially physically-aberrant males is isomorphic to, and probably re-uses some of the existing neural circuitry regarding, their aversion to rotten food — something so harmful or even potentially fatal if it gets inside of you that it’s not worth eating, no matter how hungry you are. When future women describe men as ‘creeps’ there can be no doubt about what they mean. (No directly-corresponding term will ever arise among men to describe unattractive women. How could it?)
The status of ‘male in good standing’ is extended as readily as possible to the deserving, but jealously guarded nonetheless, for the life or death of the clan hinges upon competent males working together effectively. Over time, there is enormous selection pressure on these males to build instincts and social technologies which allow them to efficiently coöperate to achieve ambitious goals. And, leveraging the gigantic socially-inferential brains granted them by their ancestors, and the ever-greater energy budgets made available by hunting, males begin to develop a system of vocalizations to communicate facts and strategies to each other.
Never underestimate the potential impact of a single mutation. One day, just like any other, an infant is born with an oddball de novo variant of the Tidan equivalent of the FOXP2 gene. His intelligence is about a third again as great as that of his parents. The muscles of his lower face and mouth, associated with speech, are much more nimble. Most of all, he finds himself capable of dazzling fluency in communication, easily mastering the primitive language his clan has developed and bounding effortlessly beyond it, introducing new inventions and concepts that rapidly catch on among his less-comparatively-retardèd peers. He invents all sorts of new names for things.
The first Tidan human has finally arrived on the scene. Or at least this is as good a place as any to draw that line for purposes of our narrative.
Perhaps he merely assumes that everyone else is like him on the inside and simply isn’t interested in expressing it. Perhaps he lives an achingly lonely life looking for the missing light in the eyes of his friends and loved ones. Personally, I like to imagine that he recognizes it at long last when meeting his first child. Or, I don’t know, maybe he just thinks it’s great to be the best ever and leverages his advantages to the hilt, eventually dying with a smile on his face beneath a pile of pregnant beauties. We’ll never know. What we do know is that he or his immediate descendants are wildly reproductively successful and make short work of all their competition.
His unique FOXP2 variant spreads like wildfire first up, then down, the slopes of the island. The massive boost in intelligence is itself a great asset, of course, but fully-syntactic language is yet another killer tech per se. Not only does it allow for precise communication and planning, but it also allows abstract concepts to be passed down from generation to generation.
Tidans start telling stories. The stories are under the same selection pressure for attractiveness and utility as anything else, and rapidly converge upon a few optimal forms that can be found in all later cultures. One type of story is what we’d today call ‘The Hero’s Journey’, which is a blueprint for young men to become suitable contributors to the tribe and, if really successful, even score outsized reproductive results. If telling such stories to boys results in even a 5-10% improvement in the average fitness of men, that is a massive advantage over competing tribes who don’t.
Another (but occasionally-overlapping with the first) type of story is the Story of Identity, of belonging. This story reifies the social unit as not just a clan but as a Tribe, with a shared history, values, and destiny. If this type of story becomes compelling enough, it can even convince others to join, provided they can make the case for why they’re worthy of adoption into the People. Stories of this nature are often what we would identify as religious, and acting out their precepts to, e.g., construct megalithic monuments may have been the original impetus for mass-human-organization, ages before the first cities.
A third type of story is a parallel to the hero’s journey, but for girls, found in most if not all cultures. It's called ‘The Maiden’s Tale’. The basic outline of the maiden’s tale is this: A girl becomes lost or kidnapped or otherwise separated from her tribe. Then a man/some men happen upon her and impregnate her. She finds her place as a mother in her new tribe. Fin. [[*Nota bene: This was entirely real and exactly as I have described, but woe to anyone who attempts to google it in these benighted latter days.]]
The final type of story pertinent to our narrative is that of kleos (“CLAY-oss”), or what we might term ‘glory’. These are stories of great deeds, especially in battle, which serve at least three major purposes. The first, as with the hero’s journey, is to prime young men for the sort of behaviour that will be adaptive (to the tribe) in adulthood; e.g. stripping naked, painting themselves with mud, and flinging themselves bodily into a mass of their enemies. The second is to serve as yet another mechanism by which fitness can be translated into status and therefore greater representation of those genetic variants in the next generation. Picture the women looking on as a man's courage in battle is lauded around the fire. The third, much more interesting purpose is to allow for individual men to accumulate sufficient reputation to transcend the old ape social-bond-numerical-limit trap.
So long as a somewhat-shared language is in place, men can now develop parasocial bonds with leaders they rarely get to encounter or possibly have never even met. This allows for dramatically-larger numbers to band together for the purpose of wiping out a competing tribe and absorbing their women/livestock and accumulated material goods.
All these types of stories come together (or at least the first, second, and fourth do) to create a powerful cocktail indeed. Religions and states — insisting upon the distinction is entirely asinine, about which I’ll have much more to say later — rapidly develop social technology to keep larger groups of men aligned and stable, eventually incorporating such tools as statues, monuments, and so on to better-maintain such parasocial relationships; such imagined communities and distant rulers. Eventually these nations become so large and complex that they can engage in multiple campaigns at a time: not one raiding party, but multiple armies setting out to take what belongs to genetically- and socially-inferior groups of men.
But some things never change. The typical motivation for a low-status male to join such a coalition is precisely to get unfettered access to conquered females who will, at least temporarily, not be under the protection of organized men. Risking death in battle for such a prize is vastly better than being relegated to resentful hate-reproduction and too-probable cuckoldry with the less-attractive females at home.
But can the women who just watched their husbands and sons slaughtered before their eyes possibly be any more pleasant to lie with? Well, yes, actually. By a very wide margin. Consider the lioness.
Tidan women have been selected for rapid acculturation, wholesale adoption of social consensus, and agreeability — going along with the decisions and demands of others — for a long time now, to put it lightly. They've been appropriated by violent, conquering males and incorporated into foreign social structures since before they were human. Understandably enough they don’t like their kids getting killed, but this often just ends up being a bargaining chip which encourages them to conform as tightly as possible to the desires of their new keepers. And certainly, along the way, innumerable numbers of them did hate and reject the men who killed their husbands. Their descendants are mainly no longer with us. The descendants of the ones who embraced their conquerors, whose knees buckled when their wrists were grabbed, who successfully convinced themselves that ‘actually, this is fine’, are.
Terror and arousal are physiologically indistinguishable in Tidan women. Simply witnessing an act of violence, even between animals, causes them to experience arousal. They’re substantially more likely to orgasm during sex with conquering males, especially in the early, uncertain days of their captivity, than they ever were with any but the highest-status men of their native tribe. The stress of their indeterminate social status and lack of protection by any man who cares about them trigger powerful responses within. They experience an irresistible upswell of affection, loyalty, and arousal. Similar to, and perhaps even indistinguishable from, love — except often so much stronger.
No one likes to imagine for a moment that such things can be true of his wife or mother. This well-documented and self-evidently-necessary female capacity will later be excised from discourse or, when it can’t be avoided, described as a ‘syndrome’ as though it were somehow a bug rather than a feature. (Here we call it ‘Stockholm’). For women, admitting to such spectres lurking in their fantasies is obviously not socially-advantageous, nor would their current providers take kindly to the thought, and so women are normally quite insistent that nothing of the sort is the case. In keeping with the grand achievement of ape self-deception, they even believe it.
In time, as a conquered woman’s place in her new tribe becomes secure, recalibration of her understanding of her social status is inevitable and she will very likely come to wish she’d ended up with a higher-status mate. But by that point her story, and that of her husband, will be near its end, and his sons will be going forth and doing likewise. And it is the case that older women, once past the point of reproduction, often do feel real loyalty to their tribe, as unlike younger women they will not be served by their only existing offspring being wiped out by an invading male coalition.
It is inevitable that one social group should eventually secure total control of the island. But other islands were always dimly visible across the water, and it will rapidly become evident that some of those cousins wiped away by the high tides, long assumed extinct, in fact washed up elsewhere and rekindled their own, parallel development. Some have achieved near-parity with the civilization on the mother island. Some have greatly exceeded it. Some are, frankly, minimally-progressed since that now-ancient FOXP2 mutation. Some are just outright weird, and seem to have split off from the race even before that. (Exciting opportunities for admixture abound in such cases!)
The great wheel keeps turning, now on the scale of the archipelago. Superior (in whatever capacity) peoples encounter others, exterminate or marginalize them, steal their most-attractive women, i.e. repositories of low mutation load and useful adaptations, and incorporate their technological and biological distinctiveness.
But of course, the longer they've been separated, and the less-similar the environments in which they've developed, the more they've diverged genetically. And this means that the world occurs to them differently, and they think and behave differently. You can tell this at a glance because they look different, too.
One little thought here — did you know that, on Tidus, human facial (and for that matter bodily) features correlate with psychometric traits? The study of this is called physiognomy. And, of course, humans are well-evolved to notice facial minutiae and draw great inferences therefrom. Walking down the street someone can often tell, at a glance, a great deal about another man's personality from his face. Some are better at this than others, naturally, given that it's an evolved capacity.
Lest you wonder whether this is merely confirmation bias, later Tidan computer facial recognition software will more than settle the question. Given a large-enough set of faces and a corresponding database of measured traits, including many you'd expect and others as abstract as 'propensity to follow rules', programs will do pretty well at predicting any number of things about a person based on facial features. Responsiveness, assertiveness, genuineness, achievement-striving, deceptiveness, trustworthiness, risk-taking, propensity to 'dry' humour, fear of heights... the list goes on and on.
This shouldn't be a surprise to us. After all it works that way for every other kind of animal, and it's an observable truth that children take after their parents both behaviourally and facially. But if facial features correlate with personality traits, and also vary much more across ancestral groups than within, what does this imply about the variation of psychological traits across ancestral groups?
When someone makes the offensive claim that ''they' all look alike', what horror is actually being suggested?
Next week: Chapter 06: Kindred
My planned review of The Worm Ouroboros became an unreadably long compendium of the book's entire contents, viewed from multiple angles and dissected far too much detail, and I still had far too many TODOs open that I felt I had to include to do it justice. It was madness, so I hereby scrap it all and instead of any of that I give you this: An exhortation to read the book itself. It's a marvelous work, and existing reviews and summaries do not do it justice. You can also read it or listen to it entirely for free, in all its wholesome faux-17th-century Scots-English glory. The language of the book might appeal to me personally because much in it that might seem archaic to an anglophone simply sounds roughly German to me. And the plot too has a German quality - it is gracefully straightforward.
HTML Text:
- https://sacred-texts.com/ring/two/index.htm
- https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67090/67090-h/67090-h.htm
Ebook:
Audiobook, read and quite excellently read by one Jason Mills:
The Worm Ouroboros is a novel. It is usually called a romance or fantasy, neither of which is wrong. Some point out that it is in the tradition of norse sagas, which I cannot judge. In my opinion it is above all an epic, and while many reviewers express puzzlement at the presence of the Greek pantheon on a fantastical Mercury, I think it makes perfect sense - what other gods would homeric heroes worship? It is, in my unqualified foreigner's opinion, a beautiful book, written with prodiguous excess of skill and care. It contains so much, and yet I wish there were more of it, and then again I suppose its author already gave a great gift and more cannot be asked. I have many, far too many things to say about it, and am stumbling over myself trying to express them all at once. So instead I will cut myself off right now and return to the only statement I think I am qualified to make:
If you haven't read the book, please read it.
If you have read it, please read it again.
Then come back here and tell me what you think.
As for myself, I just read it twice back-to-back. C.S. Lewis asked for a copy of The Worm Ouroboros when he went to a nursing home, and I might understand him - it is a book I would not mind reading as my last. Its world and characters are beautiful, and beautifully described. E.R. Eddison's other books are less known yet than this one, but I intend to give them a look next.
To aid you in your reading, please take the following.
Map of Mercury:
Map of Demonland:
And now off you go. I hope to hear back from you.
Long time lurker, first time writer.
Apologies in advance if the request has been made. I’m wondering if logged in users can select a dark mode to help with reducing blue light exposure? I realize that the UI can be modified with custom code, but a setting to toggle would be nice.
Thanks in advance.
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This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
I will be at Gebhard's Beer Culture in the upper west side, today (Saturday 8/30) at 5pm. Happy hour runs until 6. I will stay until at least 7. First round's on me.
I'll be in a black tshirt with shrodinger's cat on it.
Edit: I'm at a table in the back left (if you are looking at the bar), by a wood barrel.
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Recap for new readers:
I wrote a long (~60k words) Motte post and am releasing it serially, one chapter per week. This is chapter four. Chapter one can be found here.
Has it really already been a month? Thanks for coming along so far. Things are about to get very exciting.
Also note: Just edited to change the chapter title from "Cloud Forest" to "Almost Human" since test readers and our first commenter here keep suggesting to me that I'm not being clear enough that we are still talking about non-human ancestors from millions of years ago.
0104 - Almost Human
Now that our lenses are properly constructed we may observe the emergence of the human race. In this chapter we're going to stick with a species which we’d recognize as primates, perhaps comparable to the last common ancestor between Earth’s humans and chimpanzees. Not yet humans! Let's just call them apes.
These apes develop on a large island shaped pretty similarly to the sea-mount of the shellfish. A broad, low base, tapering up to a relatively high and narrow peak. This island happens to be in a region where rainfall is scarce. The entire island is forested; thinly and sparsely on its lower slopes, but with increasing density as altitude is gained. The mid-section benefits from being high enough to catch many of the regular marine layers (fog) that roll in, which provide enough water to support a thriving and diverse ecosystem. The highest reaches of the island get watered most consistently of all, and there do the trees give forth abundance in such profusion as to make life pleasant indeed for any who can hold the territory. While crude subsistence is possible on the lower slopes, about once a generation a tide high enough to cover the area rears up and washes away any apes unfortunate enough to be caught on the low ground.
The apes arrange themselves up and down the slopes more or less as would be expected by anyone who is familiar with chapter two's shellfish. Higher genetic quality individuals at the top, dregs down below. But we have a few key differences here.
Compared to the female shellfish, female apes are almost counterintuïtively non-selective. At least, not in the way we’d expect. Believe it or not, they don’t bother much with choosing good males for mating. Instead, their instinct is simply to go where the fruit is best and most abundant, and nonchalantly allow themselves to be mounted by whichever males happen to be around, who are necessarily high-quality by dint of their ability to hold such territory against other males. This strategy is almost glorious in its simplicity. Instead of spending lots of time and energy evaluating potential mates — never mind the sheer impracticality of mutating the complex ability to do so — all females have to worry about is taking the best fruit they can find and leave to the males the vicious business of sorting each other into worthy and unworthy.
Meanwhile, unlike the solitary male shellfish, male apes have worked out something devastatingly important: the biggest, strongest male there is will get his tail absolutely handed to him by a somewhat smaller male and his two buddies so long as they work together. Very rapidly it becomes clear that winning isn’t about being the biggest or the most threatening any more. It’s about convincing others to support you, maintaining their loyalty, and doing all of this under the nose of whoever’s currently holding the territory you want before they notice what you’re up to and tear you to shreds with their own allies. These are political apes.
And so the basic social unit of the ape is the troop. One male, typically powerful enough in his own right to inspire deference and loyalty, but also gifted with the social instincts to capitalize upon that, successfully assembles a ruling coalition. He is rewarded with, shall we say, 70% of the mating opportunities with females in his domain. Pretty much all this guy does is have sex and maintain his social position. His closest allies are collectively rewarded with perhaps 25% of the mating opportunities which, to be clear, still means multiple females per ally. The remainder of the troop is made up of males who don’t care to challenge the existing administration and know that, if they’re patient and just a little bit lucky, they’ll occasionally get the chance to make a pass at the remaining 5% of available mates. This is still a better deal than getting exiled downslope to drown in the next high tide, or summary execution for conspiring against the leader.
It is imperative to comprehend that females are not part of the troop. They range from grove to grove as they please. If and when a current ruling coalition of males is bloodily uprooted and replaced by interlopers, the nearby females don’t care, to the extent that they notice at all. If anything it’s a blessing for them: their infants will now be sired by males who are, quite evidently, superior to those who were in charge before.
In the same vein, when an incoming conquering coalition establishes itself, it might kill off the previous males, but wouldn’t harm the females any more than it would damage any other natural resource; any more than it would destroy the fruit trees themselves. Securing access to females is the whole point of coalition-building in the first place! Male apes are also substantially larger than females for this reason. Size doesn’t help so much in obtaining food, but males must engage in violent physical combat with each other in a way in which females simply don't have any interest.
Something strange comes about now, perhaps for the first time in the history of Tidus. While brawn is still very much necessary — for none will throw his lot in with a weakling — brains become arguably as important. Prior to this point, intelligence was a mixed enough blessing as to be maladaptive in most cases.
Consider the humble shellfish. A baby shellfish might be born with a larger, more powerful, more complex neural network than any that has come before, but running that system costs extra calories. If it costs more marginal calories than it enables the shellfish to gain, it’s not a beneficial mutation at all! It’s an impairment. A slightly-better ability to model its species’ social dynamics avails it not in the face of the buff cousin who’s on his way over to cast our brainy crustacean into the depths. Sort of like that early unicellular organism who could do nothing but watch its blind cousin eat all the food. A smarter shellfish is generally a worse shellfish.
Ah, but not so with the apes. Every functional male wants to be a coalition leader, or at least wants the perks that come with the position. But to become a leader requires the ability to model not just the near-future, but the minds of potential allies and enemies, and especially how those minds will interact with each other. What do I mean? Check this out.
"If I ask my buddy to ask his buddy to team up with me, will he do it? Will his other friend rat me out to the current ruler of the roost? Or even if he doesn’t, will he tell his best friend about the idea? If so, will that guy give our scheme away? Or might he want to join? And even if that part works, what about those other guys who look like they might be forming their own coalition? Will they let us do the heavy lifting, then attack us while we’re still weak? And what if my friend is only pretending to support me, but actually intends to betray me and take the top position for himself?" (Sounding human yet? The aptly-named 'reality' shows are substantially about this and they enthrall us for a reason.)
Gaining and keeping the top position is a tall order indeed. Mutations related to the capacity for social modeling and manipulation pile up quickly as all contenders are in a perpetual arms race with each other.
At some point tradeoffs related to physical fitness might even become viable. An ape who doesn’t have that special something which makes others amenable to the idea of supporting him as leader may yet be a skillful enough kingmaker so as to surf the incoming and outgoing administrations, orchestrating the changeover from behind the scenes, always second in command and enjoying the reproductive access that comes with the position. His children might do even better, developing instincts to always keep their own hands clean. And their offspring will mate with the offspring of the leaders they supported such that some end up with the best of both worlds. So on and on, toward the more-perfect ape atop his mountain.
A shellfish’s neural network probably accounts for a negligible portion of its daily caloric expenditure. But as the average intelligence of the apes continues to radically accelerate, their brains start eating up five, ten, even fifteen percent of their overall caloric expenditure. This would be an absurd amount for almost any other kind of animal, but social games are if nothing else complex, and every single slight advantage in the ability to engage in this sort of thought is almost certainly worth its weight in the fruited vales of the upper island, where the question is less “Are there enough calories?” than it is “Who controls them?” And control is achieved by political machinations.
New mental faculties are being built one atop the other in a way paralleled by the physical development of the ape brain. At the very bottom of the stack is a shockingly-simple system comparable to that found in the shellfish. In fact it is as self-aware as the average shellfish; which is to say, not particularly if at all. Still it is the root of the mind inasmuch as there is any such thing.
Over time additional systems have accreted around this kernel. Some to interpret sensory input, some to track comparative status, some to maintain a hard-coded library of stimuli and appropriate responses (Smell a certain pheromone? Time to mate. Hear a certain sound? Flatten yourself against the ground. See a snake? Back away. etc.). As well, there are many layers which have no particular purpose per se but to mediate between higher and lower layers. The brain and the mind grow more and more sophisticated, but ultimately all is fed back into that unseeing, unknowing kernel. Like the processor of a computer, it has no idea what’s going on at higher layers. Music? Games? Home video of a loved one? All for higher layers to parse, break down, and pass on useful results. All incomprehensible to the processor, which dumbly accepts the input it’s given and blindly, slavishly, acts as it’s programmed to do — as evidently benefited its ancestors, given that it exists.
So far we’ve described the core of the mind as well as what is sometimes called the ‘reptile-’ or ‘hind-brain’ above it. But such sophisticated animals as apes start growing amazing additional layers and bolting them atop what has come before. Greater visual acuity, propensity to attribute agency to events in their environment, and, of course, social perception and manipulation above all. (Though let’s note that the lower layers do continue to evolve over time to better-interface with and support those around them: it’s not as though there’s a literal 1:1 lizard brain inside the larger brain of the ape.)
At some point a faculty has developed which is capable of taking in huge amounts of information, modeling it internally, simulating possible futures, and plotting a favorable course further into time. It knows to whom it should kiss up, whom it should snub, and whom to avoid pissing off, that it might get what it wants — that sweet, sweet, reproductive advantage. This is all well and good, and the apes we’ve discussed up until this point mostly have this faculty.
But then the really game-breaking development occurs. Atop this already-incredibly-sophisticated mind forms a whole extra layer. This new layer has one job, which is to fabricate narratives which explain why the previous layer isn’t being self-serving, isn’t being cruel, isn’t being Machiavellian (even though it of course is, and must be, else it and those like it will cease to exist).
See here: One thing to competently plot the downfall of the current leader. Another thing entirely to be able to do that without knowing you’re doing so, and to be able to look anyone in the eye and swear that you have no such ambitions. And mean it. And if you suddenly start grooming that strong-lookin’ fella over there, it’s not because some hidden part of your mind has calculated that he’s the key to reproductive advantage. It’s because you like him! You’ve always liked him.
Haven’t you?
These primates can coördinate; can plan and execute with each other without even realizing they’re doing so. (Now that's what I call a killer ape.) Let not the left hand know what the right is doing. Let the ambitious ape have a million and one wholly-honest justifications for his underhanded, opportunistic kicking of his low-status former ally while he’s down. Let him do any number of things that simply feel right even if all his explanations as to why are more-or-less transparent excuses. After all, it’s for the best that he doesn’t look at them too closely in the first place.
One ape probably develops this before anyone else has. Before long most of the females in his region are pregnant with his children. Not long after that, most of the rival troops have been replaced with those led by his descendants. Not long after that, the final males who don’t think this way find themselves camping out along the rocky shores of the island, staring uncomprehendingly at an impossibly-high incoming wall of sheer water.
(Females almost never end up in such a position unless they're old or exceptionally unattractive. Why in the world would they? They have a very important job to do — gestating and tending to the young — but they already know how to do it and there’s not much room for improvement, nor therefore selection pressure. In fact, almost none of the advances in the male sphere are directly relevant to them. To the degree that females are getting smarter, it’s because their male children are advantaged by having mothers with those mental components, that they might be passed along. This means that the females do tag along for the ride during the males’ meteoric mental ascent for the most part, even if for now it’s mainly incidental to their lives.)
Successful troops expand and divide. Each ruling coalition is ephemeral, and is likely to be supplanted in the near future by some younger, hungrier group of males, or even by some lieutenant of the current ruler who’s decided he’s tired of playing second fiddle. And once that coalition has seized control of its little valley and the next valley over for good measure, well, it has a difficult time maintaining the group cohesion required to hold on to both.
Larger troops can field more males to attack and defend against rival troops. In that sense, a larger group size is better. But tracking all those social relationships (and their second, etc.-order interactions) is incredibly difficult work for even the smartest ape. Beyond, say, a few dozen males, bonds cannot be effectively maintained and the integrity of the troop breaks down. Such a weakened troop is easy prey for a smaller but better-coördinated competitor, just as a solo big powerful male is easy prey for some smaller but organized contenders. Any troop (or individual, whose adaptation might propagate throughout his troop) which solves this problem in a scalable manner would be as successful as the first which learned to lie to themselves.
Regrettably, none of these apes ever does solve the problem. By the time one of their distant descendants manages to, it is barely recognizable as even belonging to the same phylogenetic group. The thing has lost most of its hair. It walks upright, and would have a terrible time attempting to swing from tree to tree. It’s much less physically-formidable than its progenitors — not even able to rend its enemies limb from limb with its bare hands!
Yet when it shows back up in the long-forgotten ancestral vale with a thousand or so friends at its back, it recognizes the ape troop there not as competition, but as an occasionally-convenient source of bush meat.
Some astonishing development has clearly taken place, but not in the cloud forest. Whatever else can be said, one thing is for sure: This story isn’t anything close to over.
For this chapter's coda we'll take a quick look at how things play out among some of Tidus’s big cats, comparable to our lions.
In some ways the picture is similar to that of the apes. There are clusters of females for the taking, and males — usually brothers — form coalitions to compete with each other for access to them. And males are again larger than females, and even grow thick neck hair for protection during combat with their own kind.
But in other ways the picture is very different. Tidan lionesses have their own bands of sisters and cousins, and these compete with each other for territory. These female bands (prides) go out of their way to cater to powerful males for a couple of reasons.
For one, the substantially-larger males are useful when taking down the biggest game, even if lions generally prefer to lie about and eat the kills of their lionesses most of the time, conserving their energy for their other purpose.
You see, when a new coalition of lions supplants the previous one, the first thing it does is eat all the extant cubs. This makes perfect sense as they have no use for the progeny of other males, and also because a lioness raising cubs is not fertile for impregnation with their own cubs.
We might expect the females to be extremely upset about this, but the most that can typically be said is that they prefer that it not happen too often. They are heavy-investors, after all, and have a sharply-limited number of reproductive windows. Most of the time they prefer that their cubs don’t get eaten by new males, and so take care to maintain the health and fitness of their current males such that they can fight off interlopers.
But suppose that the interlopers are powerful enough to defeat the prior males anyway? Do the females get upset with them for eating the cubs?
Well... on some level they surely cannot enjoy listening to those crunching sounds. But on a practical level, they usually seem to get over this almost immediately and in fact go into a state of intense aroused fertility — 'heat' — to more quickly conceive the cubs of these newer, obviously-superior males.
This is easy to understand. Suppose that there had been two types of female: one which gets upset with the new males and refuses to mate with them, and another which doesn’t mind as much and quickly offers herself to the conquerors. The latter will out-reproduce the former in short order, and this will again be selected for in every generation. In a sense females are even in a sort of genetic race with each other to enjoy being conquered and their children eaten.
In wrapping up, I wish to be as fair to these females as I can, and note that the situation isn’t entirely one-sided. There are tradeoffs involved and at times defending a cub from new males can be a viable strategy. Sometimes it's even deployed! But in keeping with the general ethos of this book, let us not miss the forest for the trees.
Next week: Chapter 05: Women and Men
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I wrote a long (~60k words) Motte post and am releasing it serially, one chapter per week. This is chapter three. Chapter one can be found here.
This chapter is, as they say, the part where the tyre finally contacts the road. Or at least it gets us into position. After this it's off to the races!
0103 - Colour Blue
Humans do eventually arise on Tidus, of course, but we're not quite there yet. Before we can get to them we're missing one last very important (and incredibly fascinating) piece of the puzzle. This is a longer chapter and might seem to ramble a bit but I promise the payoff is worth it.
Much is made of the physical aspects of evolution. Fish 'develop' fins and gills; snakes 'lose' their ancestral legs. The nose of whale-ancestors slowly 'moves' from the front of the face up to the top of the head and becomes a blowhole. This is understandable. It's easy to see such things in the fossil record and easy to imagine how the process works. Excellent for teaching the basic idea of evolution to children.
But comparatively little is popularly understood about the evolution of the mind; of consciousness, of instinct. And, especially, of phenomenology. Phenomenology is the study of what a being experiences. How the things around it occur to it. Debating the finer points of how complex eyeballs developed is popular in some circles. Far more interesting to me, though, is the development of the internal capacity to perceive vision, not to mention the experience of consciousness itself. Phenomenology.
Consider your own perception of the world. You have eyes, which are genetically-coded to grow a certain way and very like the eyes of most other humans, and other animals related to us. You also have nerves which transmit the information from your eyes to your brain. And finally, you have the brain itself, which interprets the data from the nerves and 'paints' a picture in what we'll call your consciousness. If any of those things goes wrong, so does your ability to see. And they all must evolve somewhat in parallel with each other or else each is severely functionally limited.
A baby deer is born not just physically able to walk, but mentally prepared to as well. Getting up and moving feels right to it. It already knows how. A baby bird needs time to get ready to fly, but that knowledge is mostly already within it and only needs to be activated once its fledgling body has caught up. At some point jumping out of the nest will feel right to it. However, it's certainly born already knowing how to eat and beg for food from its parents.
This is related to something called, in evolutionary science, the Edwards Process. In short, it posits that the same kinds of pathways in our brains which form when we learn new things can also be 'coded for' during development, such that creatures with different genetic code are born knowing different things and to different degrees. First a creature mutates the genetic code to instinctively kinda-sorta do the thing, whatever the thing is. It then has an advantage in figuring the thing out, which means it's more apt to reproduce, and its children have the opportunity to mutate further advancements upon the instinct.
We may speak of a creature’s phenomenology the way we speak of its mind or its consciousness. Each creature experiences phenomena, and the way those phenomena occur to it depends upon not just its sense organs but also (at least) upon the array of sense-making equipment in the neural network. That is, two creatures with fairly similar eyes but different ancestries might look upon the same object, and their eyes may pass identical information through the optic nerves to the brain, but the consciousness within the brain may experience, that is, see, two fairly different results. It all depends upon what was adaptive in their ancestral environments; how their minds are genetically built to make sense of those inputs.
Consider two small islands in Tidus' ocean. They lie very near each other, close to the equator, and are both pretty warm. But they’re situated such that one gets a nearly-constant cooling breeze while the other mostly bakes in the sun. Both are densely jungled and get enough rainfall that their foliage is more or less equivalent for our purposes.
There are no people here but what these islands do have is lizards. These are exothermic. When it’s cool, they’re somewhat sluggish. When it’s warm they can move pretty freely. One of their favourite things to do is bask on rocks warmed by the sun such that they’re a bit more limbered up to go about their business.
In the future, when human naturalists come upon these islands they'll initially notice that the ones on the warm island look a little different than the ones on the cool island. The differences are fairly minor and perhaps only really apparent under close examination. But when some of each are scooped up as samples another difference rapidly becomes salient: The ones from the warm island are substantially more aggressive, being prone to biting their handlers and each other, while the ones from the cool island are rather more docile and make great pets. This holds true even when they’re kept in the exact same environment and at the exact same temperature. What has happened here?
Simply this: on the warmer island, aggression works a bit better as a life strategy than it does on the cooler island, perhaps because it’s just that much easier to move around. Therefore, the average evolved instinctual personalities are different for the lizards on each. How near will one tolerate a competitor’s encroachment before running him off? How committed should one be to the battle? How long to pursue violence before deciding one’s point is made? Subdue the competitor? Wound him? Kill him? Many considerations go into this and they are roughly the same for both populations of lizards. But the one thing that differs is the relative energy cost of such actions, and this means that one population has hit a stable equilibrium of greater aggression, and the other, lesser.
When I say that an equilibrium has been reached, what I mean is this. On one island there is an, on average, optimum level of genetically-coded irritability/aggression. Lizards which conform most closely to this level are more fit and out-reproduce those which tend away from it, either up or down. On the other island, that optimum level is different. So each population tends to hew to its island’s respective optimal level. If the climate changes a bit, the ideal level changes, and so the population shifts on average toward the new optimum. Each newly-created lizard can be thought of as a bid: “Let’s tune this one a little bit this way or that and see if it works better.” Mostly it does not, because different is generally worse.
All of this is coded for in the genes. If some of each population of lizard were introduced to a new island without competitors but for each other, they’d continue behaving the way their ancestral environment programmed them to behave. Over many generations, it would work out better for one set than the other and pretty soon one or the other strategy would have mostly vanished. Possibly, interbreeding will result in a strategy which lies between the two, but it’s just as likely that the optimal equilibrium on the new island is even more or less aggression than on either of the original islands, in which case the genetic contribution of the less-fit group will be very small if not necessarily nil.
Now, the details here aren’t super-important and if the next few paragraphs make your eyes glaze over feel free to skip down a little; it may be easier to grasp this concept through the list of examples I'm including afterward. If so look for the bullet points.
But something we should really get around to distinguishing is the difference between genes and alleles. Barring freak and usually-fatal mutations, pretty much every member of a species will have the same genes, but different variants of those genes. Variants are called alleles (uh LEELS). Genes consist of strings of genetic code such as …CCTGTGGA… Each letter can read either A, C, G, or T, which represent the four building blocks of DNA. Most members of any species are likely to have the same variations of most genes. But in any individual, a letter in a given spot may be different due to mutation (usually in an ancestor).
The typical go-to example in humans, on the gene known as the 'beta-globin gene', is responsible for the condition known as sickle-cell anæmia. One section of this gene typically reads …GAG… whereas in some individuals it has mutated to read …GTG…, a single-letter mutation. In this case, if the human carries one mutated copy of this gene but the other copy is normal, he is granted substantial resistance to malaria, which is a really big win in tropical places swarming with mosquitos. A man with one normal and one mutated copy may reproduce very successfully there.
But if he inherits two such mutated copies from his parents, he ends up with sickle-cell anæmia, which can cause pain, propensity to infection, strokes, stunted growth, vision problems, leg ulcers, and other health problems. We can see how a population which incorporates this adaptation is making a sort of deal with the devil. Perhaps a bit like double or nothing. Some of their children won't stand a chance and are basically sacrifices, but the rest will be amazingly fit for that environment, and so win out over other men. Which will a given child be? It depends upon which variants (alleles) he inherits of that one gene.
In the case of propensity to aggression, rather than there being one specific allele that makes the difference, which one population has and the other doesn’t, aggression is a complex, polygenic trait. Basically no gene does only one thing and they all interact with each other in massively complex ways. A typical single-gene variant (allele) might, for example, make the tail 2% shorter, make the lizard 7% more aggressive, minutely impact its ability to process certain nutrients, give it a slight aversion to the smell of the ocean, etc. Another allele (on a different gene) might make the scales slightly glossier and more blue, instill a minor fear of heights, a preference for rounded basking-rocks over flat ones, make certain bugs taste a little better, and shift its perception of light (colour) a tad, and so on — But then when both are present, they interact with each other in unforeseen ways, amplifying or canceling out each other’s effects basically at random and also leading to whole new effects which neither causes in isolation. A third allele (also on a different gene) might be by itself almost purely advantageous, but in the presence of the first two results in a universally-fatal heart defect. And so on. There are thousands of genes, and effectively countless variations upon them.
This sort of polygenic interaction is almost impossible to keep track of. Computers help a lot, since even with genetic sequencing no one could possibly track the myriad interactions with pen and paper, but the thing is that the horrific engine doesn’t need to keep track of them. Each individual is loaded up with a fresh set of variables, shoved into the world, and what works, works, and is more likely to occur again (reproduce). What doesn’t, is less likely to occur again.
The important takeaway from the lizards is that if we control the two environments such that the only change is a small difference in average temperature specifically leading to different optima for trait aggression, we don’t get otherwise-identical lizards which merely happen to be more or less aggressive. They also behave differently along other axes, and look different, and — this is the important part — experience the world differently. Sense data occurs to them differently. They feel differently about things. (That may seem a big leap so more on it in a moment). And you know this about them at a glance if they look different, since many genes which code for behaviour or anything else also code for physical appearance. In other words, you couldn't genetically edit an embryo to change its adult appearance without also changing its behavioural proclivities. Likewise, you couldn't change the behavioural proclivities without changing the way it ends up looking, even if only a little. This is a major part of why children take after their parents not just in looks but in personality, even if raised by someone else. Appearance and behaviour are downstream of many of the same genes.
Of course, in most cases environments vary much more than a slight difference in temperature. There are different nutrients in the soil, and patterns of rainfall, and amount of daily sunlight, and seasonal weather variation, and other organisms present, so on and on and on. This means that one species which branches out into two different environments is likely to end up looking different, acting differently, and thinking differently in each.
I want to give several more examples of this extremely important principle. As usual I beg your forbearance; there is a point here and also I just find this unbelievably fascinating so excuse me if I seem to be clobbering you over the head with it. Suppose:
- A species of grasshopper lives in a forest with many fresh and dry leaves about. Some of these grasshoppers match the green leaves better while some match the tan leaves better. Grasshoppers aren't smart enough to understand the concept of camouflage. Instead, the alleles which cause the green grasshoppers to be green also end up bundled with alleles which cause them to prefer to hang out in green places. And vice versa for the tan grasshoppers. Green, or tan, environments simply feel right to them as appropriate. And those who deviate from this scheme are more likely to get eaten.
- One population of beetles branches out into three different environments. In their ancestral environment they would lay eggs and wander off to whatever is next in life. In the first new environment, this is still the best thing to do and little adaptation is required. But in the second, some of them develop a raft of preferences which leads them to stick around, drive off potential predators, and maybe groom the eggs to clear them of certain locally-occurring fungus spores. And despite the enormous amount of investment this requires, it turns out to be more advantageous than just walking away. The third branch ends up in such an impoverished environment that those which end up with the trait of dying while laying eggs — normally not great, I'd agree — end up providing, via their carcasses, the nutrients that will allow their freshly-hatched young to succeed. In fact this is so useful here that even the ones that don’t die by accident, but come to prefer hanging out in a torpor while waiting for their young to hatch and eat them alive, end up on top. They feel best doing this, you understand. It feels right to them. They like it, and I shouldn’t be surprised that they also evolve to flood with something like endorphins when the time comes such that it’s even more pleasant.
- Two branches of a species of albatross. These spend most of their lives alone, surfing the wind on the waves, ranging incredible distances across the open seas. But each year, at mating season, they meet up in the place that feels right to them for reproduction. A quick aside — consider this. No one has taught them what to do. The light of the sun, the smell of the wind, the phase of the moon, nutrients in the seasonal diet, fluxes in the planet’s magnetic field, who knows what else? These things trigger a response in the bird and it feels that the time is right to travel thousands of kilometers in a direction which also feels right to it. And that's genetic. Isn't that amazing? Anyway let’s say these split into northern-hemisphere and southern-hemisphere populations. In the south, every year, the albatrosses meet up and the males engage in courtship competition, each to impress his female for the year. Then they split up again and pick a new mate next time, if they can. But in the northern hemisphere, they experience feelings of love and loyalty, and when mating season comes around they steadfastly wait for their spouse to return and meet them. They will wait as long as needed. If the mate never shows up, perhaps some will, after some years, take a new mate. Some will not. Whether they do is coded for in the genes.
- Then again, some doves will ‘mate for life’ except be very open to adultery when the incentives are right. Also genetic. These behaviours will be selected for depending upon environmental optima. Adultery feels good to them, or not, or they’re conflicted to the precise degree that has been optimal, or close enough to it.
- Two divergent species of falcons end up in different environments with different prey. One of them evolves a hunting style where they see their prey (other birds) and just fly directly at it, overtaking it with speed and endurance. The falcon’s musculature, its skeletal structure, its feathers, and even its claws are all honed toward perfection of this style, snatching the prey right out of the air. And, of course, hunting that way feels right to it. The other species specializes in a style where it first flies up to a great altitude, from which it observes all living things below, then dives stupendously quickly down to strike the prey with enormous force at high speeds with its balled-up claws, a hammer from the heavens. The prey often dies on impact, its bones shattering, and the falcon circles down to feed on the prey where it lies broken upon the earth. The rising, the consideration of opportunity, the decision to strike at the right time — these all feel right to these falcons.
- Arboreal rodents, squirrels, live in a warm forest with plenty of food year-round. They squabble with each other for territory, mate access, and the usual, but have no need to store food. Then some of them range up into a colder, less-hospitable clime. Many do not survive, but some develop an instinct to gather food overtime and store it up for the winter. It just feels right to them. This sort of energy expenditure would be maladaptive in the ancestral environment, but the first type of squirrel couldn’t survive the cold winters if he found himself here. On the flip side, take those workaholic squirrels and put them back in the first environment and they’ll keep storing up food all day regardless of whether it makes any sense or not, until the horrific engine curbs this behaviour over generations. Or, who knows? Maybe they take so much food and store it up that their warm-weather cousins are unable to find enough and are swiftly replaced.
- Baby sea turtles hatch from their leathery eggs beneath the sand. It can take them days to dig their way to the surface, but when they get there, they wait for nightfall before emerging. The temperature of warm sand, or the sight of a blue sky, fills them with feelings of foreboding, an urge to be still and wait. Even in the egg they tremble at the ancestral memory of the hungry gull. When darkness falls they ignore the night sky and instead specifically make their way toward the reflections of the moon and the stars on the ocean. Of course some of each generation might be 'different', and get it backwards and feel the urge to move away from the ocean, or even expend effort trying to get up to the sky; these are unlikely to reproduce.
- For the first time a monkey is born with eyes that can see the colour red and a brain that knows how to display it. This is very useful for assessing the ripeness of fruit at a distance and pretty soon these traits are fixed among the entire population — none are left but his descendants.
- A species of fish ends up separated into two different environments. In one it's advantageous to be alone most of the time so as to have less competition for prey. These fish feel best on their own and become stressed when there are too many more around. In the other environment predators make it necessary to pack together closely in schools for protection. These ones become extraordinarily nervous when they're not in a crowd.
- A species of snake which loves to eat little frogs does very well for itself until a new kind of frog shows up. This one is bright yellow. Some of the snakes eat it and do not reproduce. Others have a basically-random aversion to that colour, and very soon the entire population shares this trait, plus the distinguishing physical markers that came with it.
- Two ticks sit in a clump of grass beside a deer path. One of them likes the look of the stalk of grass which goes straight up. The other is drawn irresistibly to the stalk which bends way out over the trail. In its little tick head, through its little tick eyes, that one has the tick equivalent of sunshine and rainbows all over it.
- With last chapter's shellfish we have already covered how certain physical traits can drive mate selection. Perhaps for a while females are very attracted to the male with the largest claw, only, it turns out that they can actually grow too big and this becomes non-viable. So a desire for a certain proportion of claw size to body size develops.
- Some meerkats begin to live in denser and denser colonies. Accumulation of waste, that is fæces and remains of meals, becomes an ever-greater vector for infectious disease. In some of the colonies a trait is developed where the meerkats will instinctively use one area for defecation and avoid it otherwise, or even dig little spots to deposit waste and then bury it.
- Crows on a particularly-isolated island find themselves in a situation with no natural predators. This allows a new life strategy to develop: Babies will take longer and longer to mature, and in exchange end up with much higher levels of adult intelligence. Such a tradeoff had previously been non-viable but it works here, in the absence of predation, and soon these are the smartest birds in the world, able to solve all kinds of complex problems which their mainland cousins would take much longer to work out, presuming they could at all.
- Beavers, raised entirely in captivity without ever having met another beaver, will instinctively drag objects into hallways to block them and so build 'dams', despite never having seen one.
- Birds are born knowing how to build nests, though they do improve with practice.
- Some kinds of spiders know how to make perfect geometrical webs, one step at a time, based entirely upon what feels right in the moment.
- Jumping spiders, which do not build trap-webs, spend their entire lives in solitary isolation except when the time comes to reproduce. Then, the male will approach a female and execute a complex and involved mating dance, making all the right moves at all the right times, all without being taught. If he makes even one mistake she's likely to eat him. (She's going to eat him afterward anyway, but at least he'll have reproduced.) Each carries a copy of the dance in their genes; the one to perform and the other to judge.
This litany could go on and on, and it would be a fun book to write, but it is not this book. So let me wrap up with the very convenient illustrative case of domestic dogs. Tidan humans will eventually get around to breeding them for specific purposes. Yes, training is always important, but what it comes down to is that traits such as obedience, impulse control, complex problem solving, scent-based tracking, retrieving downed birds from ponds but not eating them, general aggression, fixation on one master in particular, desire to stick close to home or go far-ranging, and so on, are primarily rooted in the blood.
The dogs are an especially useful example because they demonstrate how phenomenological traits, once latent in the population, can be selected for over only a few generations, and lost just as quickly if the selection pressure is not kept up. A breed may be very protective of children and hell on intruders, but if an individual backslides genetically and bites a child even once, it must not be allowed to spread that trait back into the gene pool. And, while just about any breed may be trained toward any of these tasks, it is the same couple of closely-related breeds which consistently win all the competitions of agility and intelligence. Others are pretty consistently chosen for racing, or tracking, or, say, hunting bears. Between breeds there are gaps in complex physical and mental traits for which training simply cannot compensate. And no matter how one trains a collie, it will have the urge to herd.
One more note about the dogs. At some point whimsical Tidans will decide to domesticate foxes, too, just because they think it's cool. They'll select for reproduction the foxes which are most tame, obedient, house-trainable, etc., and over the generations several interesting things will happen. The foxes’ ears will become droopy like domestic dogs'. Their coat patterns will change to more-closely resemble those of domestic dogs. They'll wag their tails. And so on. Not only do they behave differently, and does the world occur to them differently, but it's not hard to tell which kind is which at a glance, even without breeding for visual traits in particular. These things go together.
So, simply by looking at the animal world, we’ve established that proclivity toward, at minimum,
- Hygiene
- Aggression
- Orderliness
- Sexual fidelity
- Impulse control
- Industriousness
- Courtship behaviour
- Parental investment
- General energy levels
- Emotional response to colour
- Population density preferences
- Attraction to certain body proportions in a mate
- Aesthetic preferences for environments in which to hang out
…and many others have deep genetic roots. Yes, a fish might learn that certain prey taste bad and stop eating them before accumulating too much toxin. But the phenomenological fact that they tasted 'bad' in the first place was genetic — some other kind might find the same prey entirely palatable, having also evolved resistance to those toxins. Those ones will probably look different too. And yes, a falcon might demonstrate for its young the finer points of hunting. But it will only work if the young’s innate instincts are close enough to correct, and if the bird is amenable to being taught. Many will deviate; these are less-likely to reproduce, such that perhaps only 25% of each generation of falcons survives its first year and goes on to mate while the rest starve or get eaten. (There’s that horrific engine again. Different is generally worse.)
Now, as we have seen, alleles which affect behaviour also affect appearance and vice versa. But several times now I have mentioned how they furthermore affect the organism’s internal experience. Organisms with different alleles are experiencing different subjective realities. And this is a really, really big deal which deserves the spotlight for a moment, so please bear with me while I grasp at something almost too close to see.
The senses of conscious organisms are not built to accurately, 'literally' portray material reality. Let me unpack that a bit. One quick-and-easy example is that of blind animals. They exist in the same world we do, only, there is an entire domain of it unavailable to their perception. Vision simply isn’t something they need, especially if they live in, say, a cave, and so they don’t have it. A sighted cave fish is a worse cave fish, because it is spending resources on a useless system. So from this we may conclude that animals perceive that which is relevant to their reproductive prospects, and if anything else gets noticed, that’s a fluke and is likely usually screened out by the same sort of process which had you unaware of your tongue until just now.
But even beyond that, there has almost certainly never been any animal which accurately perceives material reality. Say you look around the space you’re in. Do you see the waveform underlying everything, splayed out across eleven-plus dimensions; i.e. what is ‘really’ there? Of course not. You see a rug, a wooden ceiling beam, a door, etc.; and then in only three dimensions. But of course these things are all abstractions, fit for the level at which you interact with the world and make decisions. It is vital that you be able to perceive doors even if one could not chop up a door and put it under a microscope and find ‘door’ there; even if there is, reductively speaking, no such thing as 'door'. One might find wood, but at finer resolutions what one would actually find is organic molecules, and then carbon atoms, and then protons, neutrons, and electrons; all the way down into quarks, and then-
More on this much later. But for now it is enough to consider that what we see — and hear and touch and smell and so on — has about as much to do with the world around us as the taskbar and mouse cursor and rolling green hills on a desktop computer user interface, have to do with finely-wrought silicon and transistors and logic gates and infinitesimal pulses of electricity. Which is to say that, no, they’re not wholly independent of each other, but one could make a user interface look and function in many entirely different ways without changing the underlying hardware much at all. Change one character of the interface’s code and now the taskbar is yellow. Change another and the whole thing breaks and becomes unusable.
So in one sense a seagull may be living on the same planet as a hermit crab, but the worlds they actually inhabit are likely so different that they may as well have nothing to do with each other, even though the two interact. And the difference between the two is, say it with me, genetic.
Even among creatures with identical physical 'equipment', e.g. eyes, the subjective experience of the external world will vary enormously. And, of course, different creatures have different sensory organs in the first place, and many types of eyes can see whole colours that ours cannot. Did you know that flowers and butterfly wings have all kinds of invisible-to-us ultraviolet patterns on them? It’s not our sort of eye which they’re intended to please. And some creatures have entire senses that we don’t at all, as certain eels can feel electrical fields, and likely there are others we do not know about and cannot imagine in the slightest, experiencing whole modes of reality beyond our ken.
This goes for everything. A creature’s phenomenology is genetic, and each genetically-unique creature lives in its own phenomenologically-unique universe. And creatures with gene variants which cause them to perceive differently will also behave differently, and look different.
Getting the picture? Good. Because now I’d like to talk about you.
Yes, you. Do you have any idea how special you are? Though, in a way which also means that you are more tragically alone than you’ve probably ever imagined.
It has long occurred to me as strange that we will talk about things like colour blindness, that is the idea that some other people just literally can't see entire colours that we can, or taste cilantro differently, or struggle to a greater or lesser degree with addiction, and we know this is because they are genetically different from us, yet we do not stop to consider the wider implications of how differently we are all experiencing, well, everything! Only the most obvious, salient differences tend to come up in conversation. But there are so many more!
How should a girl smell? What is more important in a pie — the crust’s flavour or its firmness? What defines the sensation of stepping outdoors on a perfect autumn morning? How messy must a room get before the urge to clean it becomes overwhelming? What sorts of noises are soothing, or irritating? Do you like hugs or hate them? Do you want to be surrounded by others all the time or do you prefer plenty of space to think? What makes art beautiful? How long to go without bathing? Monogamous, or monogamish, or not at all? Raise a child as a single father, or split the instant you get someone pregnant? Keep faith, or shaft the rube dumb enough to trust a stranger? Are the seasons in your heart, or do your genetics expect an eternal summer day? Stock up resources against future contingencies or take life easily, as it comes? Do the bare minimum at work, or push hard and then go home and do the same with an array of frighteningly-demanding hobbies? How easily does learning vocabulary come? Abstract mathematics? Baseball? Etcetera! Etcetera of etceteras!
Reader, when was the last time you found yourself unaccountably repulsed by something others don’t seem to mind? Do you like to look out the window when you drive, or stare straight ahead? Morning person or night owl? What is your favourite piece of music? How does the colour blue make you feel?
Take a look at the world around you. You are the only one who lives here.
And yes, culture and life experiences absolutely do play into this, but that is not where the difference begins, nor even where most of it lies! We will have more to say on this in a few chapters.
Regarding your loneliness, I’d like to suggest that if you want to find the person who lives in the world most like your own — your nearest neighbour, so to speak — you should look to an immediate same-sex relative. But I don’t have to tell you that while you are likely to find much of yourself in your father, he is also, ha, clearly living somewhere else at the same time.
Of course, most people do share much in common. But the less-closely related you are to someone genetically, the stranger his world would seem to you, could you but inhabit it for a moment. You might be able to imagine yourself in his shoes, but you can't imagine what it's like to be him in his shoes, nor he you in yours. And this doesn’t stop with other people, but carries right on through to animals of all sorts, and who knows what else. You will have heard how we share almost all of our DNA with, say, monkeys, but I can assure you that what a female mandrill experiences in the presence of a full-coloured adult male is wildly different than what you or I would, even if the light and sound and airborne organic compounds haven't changed. And by now you should understand that not only is a dog’s nose better than yours, but more fully appreciate than you ever have how differently those same scents occur to a dog. Why, he likes sniffing all sorts of things you’d rather not, and seems to get something very different out of it — ah, but so with your fellow man. And your not-so-fellow man, too.
We'll get to that soon enough.
Next week: Chapter 04: Almost Human
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A few weeks ago, I completed a bikepacking route in Switzerland: The Hope 1000. It’s an interesting country to visit and I believe my method of travel provided a unique perspective. I’m an American who has occasionally traveled to Europe (Italy, UK, France) in the past and generally enjoys it.
Rural Switzerland: Lawn Mowers who Don’t Eat Cows
The route primarily traverses the foothills of the Alps through smaller towns. The first thing to strike me was how neat and precise forest management is in comparison to the US. Treelines are as crisp as a paper fold, and caches of firewood exist everywhere. I counted 4 pieces of litter in 14 days across these trails. Most of the forest is owned and managed by the federal government. In so much of the flatter countryside, there are roads everywhere. By this I mean there seem to be roads between every field and micro-town, allowing walkers and cyclists a level of route granularity that’s bafflingly inefficient.
After a certain level of elevation, my close-at-hand scenery became exclusively dairy farms. Switzerland has a complex direct-payment subsidy program that rewards these tiny outfits with around 75% of their income (based on elevation, acreage, land management, and eco practices). It’s a hugely influential system, naturally resented by leftist city dwellers. The machinery and effort these farmers put in, though, to maintain these landscapes is significant. I have seen people mowing meadows at grades and elevations you simply wouldn’t believe unless you see them for yourself. Cows essentially won’t eat grasses of a certain age/toughness, and the alpine herbs that make some of their diet unique require all of this effort.
Unfortunately for me, this meant that I had significant dietary challenges for much of the route. Beef is my favorite protein and the Eastern Swiss essentially don’t eat it because their income is tied to the cows staying alive. There’s no side dish at any restaurant that’s not a potato. The main dish is pork schnitzel. Maybe chicken nuggets if you’re lucky? Even the grocery stores are just the size of a small American apartment and almost exclusively stock pork and dairy as calorie sources. I expected great things from the Swiss potato chip company given their reverence for the tuber, and can only tell you that it was truly amazing how unpalatable almost every single one of their products were.
Most of us know first or secondhand that summer in Europe is mostly the entire continent being on vacation all the time. The rural Swiss are at another level. Restaurant? Closed. Hotel? Closed. A restaurant-hotel marked as open Google Maps? Definitely closed. The Swiss expect you to call and see if they’re there, I guess, but that wasn’t realistic for my mode of travel.
There are massive advantages to Switzerland as a location to bikepack, though, and why I selected it for the trip. Clean running water is unbelievably ubiquitous. In the dead of summer, a 2-bottle margin was sufficient for almost every distance. The train travel app and infrastructure systems are mostly great.
Some of the highlights of my trip were provided by an obscure social network ( warmshowers.org ) populated by cycling tourers. These are people who intimately understand what you’re going through and know you’ll want a shower first, then probably food, and then probably laundry. The hosts that allowed me to stay with them were excellent: A super-leftist Unix/Network admin whose eclectically decorated house full of punk rubber ducks and a soviet-era state-produced folding cycle produced the best cup of coffee I had in Switzerland. A kind family of 4 in a suburb of Lucerne, who’d (pre-kids) spent almost two years traveling the world by bicycle and (post-kids) were planning to withdraw them from school to spend a year pedaling to Morocco. They fed me curry, for which I was supremely grateful, given my diet for the rest of the trip.
My greatest single regret was underestimating my rate of travel when organizing Warmshowers hosts. It meant that 2/4 I had organized had planned for me to arrive at a later date, and so were unable to let me stay. My focus on the physical achievement aspect of the journey meant I missed out on more chances of personal connection that I won’t get back.
Bikepacking
It’s exactly what it sounds like. I’m a huge enthusiast of this method of travel stateside. It combines the best aspects of hiking, camping, and cycling together. My excursions into the deep, isolated portions of America with friends where we can carry comforts like beer and folding chairs to our sites for the night are some of the most fun I’ve ever had.
But as a solo, multi-week trek in a foreign country, I think it has some serious drawbacks. Bikepacking has a bit of a competitive and race-driven spirit. Routes have suggested times and metrics. They’re meant to be challenging distances between two points, not the most direct. When you’re exerting yourself at this level and then camping with minimal changes of clothes, you aren’t fit to sit down inside near people (much less at an enjoyable tourism activity like a wine tasting). The line between bikepacking and homelessness isn’t very clear – perhaps it’s just the quality of the machine you’re riding or the power level behind your credit card.
My ad-hoc meetings with Swiss people were excellent across the board. They’re, of course, naturally reserved in comparison to Americans, but I expected that. As a general cyclist, you’re background noise. But I was noticed and engaged with at a few distinct points where my heavy mountain bike was clearly not where it “should” be.
- A beautiful, delicate Roadie on the famous climb to Grindewald, who effortlessly passed me on the way up. I expressed jealousy of her Huge Cassette (entendre not intended) and she waited to congratulate me and briefly chat when I arrived.
- A mechanical engineer, Hans, who was exceedingly proud of his work for the likes of Nestle’s Nespresso division and Lego. He opened our conversation on the hand-over-hand climbing trail with a very polite “It is quite unusual to see a bicycle here” (“You’re a fucking idiot”). We spoke of raising children without dependence on television and how to handle retirement.
- A shirtless backpacker cresting a summit behind me after a gut-wrenching early morning climb was very hardcore. I had downed a pounder beer at 9:30 AM for calories and hydration (swiss farmers often leave fridges/cabinets/cold-water receptacles full of things to purchase via the honor system with cash or twint [equivalent of venmo]). He was armed with simply a paper map and a small pack on a shorter but similarly challenging route. There’s always a bigger man on the mountain. Right after this, we both chucked down the same ridiculously technical footpath, with me on an empty-stomach buzz.
I don’t think I represented the level of American extroversion and chattiness that people expected. This was partially by design because I find our volume level internationally to be profoundly irritating, but also because I felt like shit.
The Physical Challenge.
I took a total of 14 days to complete the route, with 12 being “par”. Per day, I averaged:
- 72 kilometers
- 2050 meters of elevation gain
- 5,000 calories of energy expenditure
A marathon runner will generally use around 2,600 calories for a race. Given, they do it only over 5 hours ; ) whereas my progress was stretched across 7 hours of dedicated pedaling.
Going up was as brutal as you would expect. With camping being the theme of the day, I became acutely aware of the amount of energy I had in my Garmin, cell phone, and everything else. The back 3/4 of the trip was “raw dogged” sans music to save battery after I ran dry early on, and I took fewer pictures to save even more. Historically, I’ve pooh-poohed the use of dynamos for bike touring, but I’ll be integrating one into whatever my next build is. I was hoping for deep introspection, inspiration, and contemplation. Instead, my mind looped around worthless songs and sentences over and over again, a black hole of blankness only interrupted by decision-making to manage water and calories.
Downhill was surprisingly intense. I pushed my bogged-down hardtail to its limits down hiking trails with stone steps. Managing traction across dew-soaked meadows, loose gravel, concrete, and the aforementioned cow shit was a challenge. Some of the fast carving down alpine roads were once-in-a-lifetime experiences. My brand-new tires are probably 75% consumed, and I burnt out a set of pads and my rear rotors a third of the way through the trip – my only major mechanical issue that required a scrambled train ride to a metro with a bike shop that would actually be open.
I had a fairly even split of luck over the two weeks. The first 3 days were cursed by rain. In combination with an unceasing supply of moist cow shit, my drivetrain and hygiene suffered. The final 2 days were affected by an intense GI infection, which is putting it very politely. It persisted for another 2 days of travel home via train and plane.
I ended up losing around 15 pounds. When I reached the endpoint Freddy Mercury statue in Montreaux, I took a picture before walking to the corner of a park and breaking down discreetly for a few moments. I’ve never experienced so much intense and near-continuous suffering for this long. I’m still processing it, days later. I don’t think I’ll do something at this level again.
I finally took a real bath in Lake Geneva for the first time in a week, shivering in the cool water as hundreds of tourists passed by and the sun began to set. It felt good.
For those interested in the scenery, a selection of images. Not a photographer, they don’t do it justice, etc. etc.
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