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Tagline: Honestly, I’m just a crank theorist. My ideas are not to be consumed but critiqued. I’m not your guru.
The Phenomenon
Something strange is happening online: the number of people declaring “my framework” or “my theory” has exploded. This isn’t just a vibe. Google Trends shows that searches for “my framework” and “my theory” were flat for years, only to surge by several hundred percent starting in mid-2024. Crucially, searches for “framework” or “theory” without the personal qualifier show no such spike. The growth is in people creating theories, not consuming them.
The timing is suspiciously precise: it lines up with mass adoption of high-capability LLMs. Correlation isn’t causation, but the coincidence is hard to dismiss. If skeptics want to deny an AI connection, the challenge is to explain what else could drive such a sudden, specific change.
The Mechanism
Why would AI trigger a flood of personal theorizing? The answer lies in shifting cognitive bottlenecks.
Before AI, the hard part was finding information. Research meant digging through books, databases, or niche forums. Today, access is trivial. LLMs collapse the cost of retrieval. The new bottleneck is processing: too much information, too quickly, across too many domains.
Human working memory hasn’t changed. Overload pushes the brain to compress complexity by forming schemas. In plain terms: when faced with chaos, we instinctively build frameworks. This is not a lifestyle choice or cultural fad. It’s a neurological efficiency reflex. AI simply raises the pressure until the reflex fires everywhere at once.
The Output
The result is not just more theories, but more comprehensive theories. Narrow, domain-specific explanations break down under cross-domain overload. Faced with physics, psychology, and politics all colliding, the brain reaches for maximally reductive explanations — “one framework to rule them all.”
LLMs supercharge this. They take vague hunches and return them wrapped in the rhetoric of a polished dissertation. That creates a feedback loop: intuition → AI refinement → stronger psychological investment → more theorizing. Hence the Cambrian explosion of amateur ToEs.
The Crisis
Our validation systems can’t keep up. Peer review moves in years. AI-assisted framework building moves in hours. That mismatch means traditional filters collapse.
The effect looks like a bubble. The intellectual marketplace floods with elaborate, coherent-sounding theories, but most lack predictive power. The signal-to-noise ratio crashes. Without new filters, we risk epistemic solipsism: every thinker locked in a private universe, no common ground left.
The Proposal
Instead of hand-waving this away, we should organize it. Treat the proliferation of frameworks as raw material for a new kind of intellectual tournament.
Step one is standardized documentation. Any serious framework should state its axioms, its scope, and its falsification criteria. No vagueness allowed.
Step two is cross-framework testing. Theories shouldn’t be allowed to stay safe inside their own silo. A physics-first framework must say something about mind. A consciousness-first framework must say something about neuroscience. Only under cross-domain stress do weaknesses appear.
Step three is empirical survival. Theories that make it through cross-testing must generate novel, testable predictions. Elegance and persuasiveness are irrelevant; predictive success is the only arbiter.
The Invitation
This essay is itself a framework, and so must submit to the same rules. If you think my analysis is wrong, bring a stronger account of the data. If you have a better framework, state its axioms and falsifiers, and let it face others in open combat.
If this interests you, I'd be happy to collaborate on defining the rules for disqualifying directly any framework (I have some criteria ready to be debated).
Chapter one is here.
Usual disclaimer: This is a toy model. I also think that, at this resolution, it resolves to a true one. Far too much is elided but this is the only way to get anywhere. Enjoy! And please feel welcome to complain if you feel so moved. I've been wanting to talk about this for a long time.
0106 - Thousand Flowers
Every island on Tidus is built along the same lines: A high peak with the best territory, slopes where life is still not so bad, and broad, tapering low zones scoured by the occasional murderous generational tide. But apart from that each island is different in its own ways, as we saw with the islands of the lizards a few chapters ago. This results in differences among their inhabitants, even given a common ancestor. So let’s begin with a thought experiment about otherwise-identical humans who ended up on two very different islands. The first island is equatorial, while the other lies far to the north, near Tidus' Arctic circle.
On the equatorial island, coconuts provide clean water and calories at an incredibly-prodigious rate, there are always plenty of fish in the lagoon, and tubers grow profusely wherever they are planted in the rich volcanic soil. From time to time wild game turns up too. These people never need to develop much of a concept of food storage or working beyond the bare minimum. Planning for the future is not a major concern. Any time they feel like not doing anything, they can pretty much get away with that. What excess they have is quickly shared out to kin, which makes sense anyway as given the heat and humidity it will swiftly rot. Nor do they typically have novel problems to solve. To the degree that anybody here does more than is necessary, it’s because some alpha male with a monopoly on violence has made it clear that their family will serve him by crafting twenty spears by the next full moon, or else as spear-testing dummies. If conditions ever get dire enough, say via overpopulation, there’s another island much like this one not so far away, and the men with the most to gain will paddle over there and settle the matter with the men of that island as they have ever done.
The island far to the north almost could not be more different. Here the growing season is relatively short and the soil poor. Islanders must work as hard as they can while they can to produce much more food than they immediately need and store it up for the winter. Nor do they get to rest in the winter! That time is for producing tools and, God willing, trade goods; that they might hopefully get enough of an edge in the next warm-time to survive the next cold. They are constantly being winnowed for the cognitive capacity to plan for the future and solve complex and difficult new problems. They form tight social bonds and develop all sorts of advanced, higher-order prosocial behaviours. They absolutely count on each other to survive, and have been strongly selected to do the right thing even when no one is watching (say while separated for half the year by heavy snows), because the margins of survival are so thin. Such people cannot believe, in their heart of hearts, that an idea like ‘the bare minimum’ can be anything but a fatal misunderstanding of how the world works: It is not how the world works where they come from, and this truth is riven deep into their instincts.
It’s not hard to see that people developing in such different environments are rapidly going to end up looking different, and behaving differently, and even perceiving the world differently.
The peoples who arise on each of the endless isles of Tidus blossom into a myriad of unique forms. Just like special little quirks about a person, the way he smiles, the way her eyes sparkle, that weird laugh, and so on. Some are dark, or fair; tall, or short; stocky, or gracile. Their hair is different not only in colour but in texture. Their teeth are different shapes and sizes and so are their skulls. Even their earwax is different (dry vs wet) and you can draw lines on a map where one sort ends and the other begins. They smell different. They have resistance to different diseases, and that time a plague wiped out 94% of a population, the allele responsible for saving the rest probably has other effects that basically everyone in that population shares now — a sort of founder effect.
They speak different languages, of course, and their brains are genetically-wired to support those different language types, even when their parents have moved to a new area and speak something else entirely. An ancestral language is likely to be easier to learn, even when they're smart enough to acquire an entirely foreign one. And from all of this we can deduce that their internal experiences are different too.
I do not call this a good thing or a bad one; I only say that it is so. Still it has to be recognized that after hundreds or even thousands of generations of divergence, among the peoples of different island chains, there are relatively enormous average differences in complex traits such as:
- cognitive ability
- impulse control
- sexual promiscuity
- parental investment
- inclination to plan for the future
- propensity to honesty (or conversely to bribery and corruption)
- perceived importance of blood ties
- general industriousness
- even favoured colours and proportions and aesthetics in art and music
...To name but a few of the most obvious and salient ones. Some of these peoples hit puberty younger and have higher levels of aggression and usually aren’t as bright. Some take longer to gestate their babies, and the infants have different developmental timings and even behave differently right out of the womb. So on and on.
Yet it would be a mistake to think that it was purely-environmental factors which led to such genetic differences. After all, the primary driving force in the apes was not contention with the natural environment, but with other apes. So with men. And this is what we call culture. While it’s true that different environments produced substantial initial differences between branches of humanity, it was culture which really accelerated the genetic process and led to the extremity of differences we see on display in Tidus today. Let’s take a look at how this plays out with just one complex trait, say, politeness.
Take an island. The people of this island have, on average, a fairly polite demeanor, just as some lizards are more aggressive than others for environmental reasons. The culture, then, naturally grows to expect a certain level of politeness. People who conform to the culture’s expectations of politeness do better than those who do not — say, people who can’t help but be curt and abrasive. And so the people with those frowned-upon traits are less likely to reproduce, which means the next generation will be even more polite, which means that the culture’s expectation of politeness drifts even further in that direction, which means that people who would have previously made the cutoff now fall outside of it, which means they’re less likely to reproduce…
You can insert pretty much any personality trait in place of ‘politeness’ and this works. No, the process can’t run away forever. Most traits trade off against other traits, and at some point someone is so polite he can’t bear the thought of upsetting a girl by asking her to dance and so the whole thing kind of hits a ceiling. But here, too, we can see individuals as sort of bids made by the population: Let’s push out some genetic personalities a bit more like this, or a bit more like that, and see what works. And if it does work, the population as a whole moves a little closer to that mean, ever probing the environment — which by now includes the culture — for feedback. A handy way to think of this is that humans exist not just on a physical landscape, but a social one as well. (One of the handy things about Tidus is that these happen to map identically in space, given that higher-status people actually live above lower ones.)
The really important point to understand here is that such differences between peoples are neither ‘just’ genetic nor ‘just’ cultural. Rather, genetics and culture work together to more-rapidly differentiate populations. Culture serves as a process to quickly and effectively select certain genetic proclivities in a population. This is called gene-culture coevolution. An island’s culture is reflective of its genetics; its genetics are reflective of its historical culture.
Suppose an island comes to value, say, the ability to do abstract math, or show up on time, or restrain one’s violent sexual impulses. Suppose that initially perhaps only twenty percent of the population is capable of this. But if the culture prizes and rewards this trait, then those with the trait will have higher status and better reproductive potential. Over generations, the trait will spread as the offspring of those who carry it displace those who do not. Most traits won't become absolutely fixed, of course, but they can reach a tipping point of ubiquity.
This in turn opens up new, higher potentials, founded upon the widespread abundance of lower ones in the population. Higher forms of cultural expression such as art, literature, and philosophy; public institutions which presuppose a certain level of individual intelligence, moral integrity, and responsibility; all uniquely-accessible only to the inheritors of those genetics and memetics. Foreigners might appreciate these cultural achievements to a major extent (and might not), but never as fully as those who coevolved with them, for the genes and the culture are tightly bound up in one another. E.g. a man might read the great literature of another culture and understand it passably-well, enjoy it, and even find it transformative — but in many cases simply doesn't have the mental texture to connect with it in the precise way that someone from the original culture might.
As we saw with the animals, physical traits, behavioural traits, and phenomenological traits are all bundled. And so what we are describing here is ethnogenesis. Put another way, race is real in Tidus, and broadly conforms to stereotypes about it, which is why those stereotypes exist. This is plainly real and staring everyone in the face at all times, and no one ever had a doubt about it up until very recently and for the most unlikely of reasons — but that’s a story for a future chapter.
It is true that a great deal of what forms a man is personal experience and culturally-transmitted knowledge and values. However, the way an experience strikes a person is rooted in his instincts. Some are exposed to new ideas and skills and take right to those, while others are not a good fit. No one is born with a knowledge of poetry or algebra or how to waltz, but some can learn these better than others, and some not at all, and that difference — that capacity — is genetic.
Perhaps we might think of culturally-transmitted knowledge as a house, built up over a person’s lifetime, one piece upon another starting in childhood. But that house rests upon a foundation without which it simply falls to pieces. The foundation, then, is genetic. Genetics is the substrate upon which culture is established. Without the right genetic foundation, cultural concepts cannot take hold. The house is shaky at best and swiftly devolves to a level its foundation will support. And if you don’t believe me, try to get a bonobo (or a human with a nasty FOXP2 mutation) to appreciate Shakespeare. What is the difference between us and them? Genetics.
(As a quick aside, some will be eager to object that life events such as early childhood trauma can have big effects here. Yes, absolutely, but only in one direction. It's possible to damage, ruin, or for that matter to kill a child; foundations can be irreparably damaged by things like severe malnutrition, as with cretinism caused by iodine deficiency, or even physical abuse such that beautiful houses cannot stand upon them. But practically-speaking a genetic foundation cannot be substantially improved once it is laid. And different is generally worse.)
Let's look at a couple more examples of divergence.
On one island — perhaps another far-flung arctic one — group sizes are smaller and parents are expected to spend a lot of time with their children, managing their behaviour and teaching them skills. Fathers in particular are expected to stay with a woman once she's pregnant and also stick around to provide resources and direction for his children. This behaviour is adaptive in such an environment, and over not so many generations the people of this island are selected for their inclination to parental investment. Also, men who abandon women after impregnating them end up on the wrong end of much social censure and so lose status (and you'd better believe her male relatives will have something to say about it). The result is men who, on average, pair-bond more naturally with women and instinctively provide for and instruct any offspring. Courtship among such people will be more careful, deliberate, and always with an eye to demonstrating mutual value and commitment. Average age of marriage is later as each partner holds out for another who has demonstrated virtue, while demonstrating the same in turn. Cultural norms will reflect this by placing great importance upon marriage and family. Complex institutions will form regarding inheritance and private property. Due to the Edwards Process phenomenological traits will also develop along these lines.
On another island — say a tropical one — things go in a very different direction. Here, courtship has much more to do with seduction if not outright rape. Men and women both are more promiscuous and tend to mate at younger ages and with a succession of partners. Kinship structures are more matriarchal while men tend to drift in and out, perhaps occasionally popping in to provide resources, and perhaps not. Society doesn't expect much of men in such regards and develops other solutions to those problems. The children range around with other children, having much less of a relationship with their father in those cases when they have any at all. Childrearing is more communal than familial. In many such cultures paternity isn't especially considered at all! Which we may understand as a practical adaptation, since it's often a mystery anyway.
In regard to the pattern described in this island and the last, later sociologists will speak of 'Dad cultures' versus 'Cad cultures'. Cad cultures select for men who are good at convincing (or forcing) a woman to mate with them and for women who don't expect much from the man before or after she complies. Those expectations simply aren't there in her phenomenology. And by now we understand that whether or not the genetics were responsible for creating such conditions, they'll rapidly follow suit to reinforce the dynamic.
(It's true that when a people with a dad culture meet a people with a cad culture, the former tends to stomp all over the latter for too many reasons to enumerate. But this only matters when such encounters become possible, which for most of the history of Tidus they were not. These things had a long, long time to develop in relative isolation.)
Or we can revisit the trait of 'politeness' by looking at two different islands. On the first, people are generally polite, defer to others, wait their turn, and so on. As long as most people follow suit this results in increased gains for everybody, and defectors are quickly corrected when they can be or expelled from polite society when they can't. Assertiveness can still be valued in the right circumstances, but forwardness, or even directness can be a great way to find one's road to social advancement blocked. Such a culture selects for those inclined to act accordingly. In one Tidan culture with which I am familiar, they've become so polite that they won't ever say 'no' but instead something like 'another time!' rather than risk offending another. So polite that they will not point directly at something but instead gesture generally toward it with an open hand. Because to do otherwise is to signal incompatibility with the culture's values, which makes their genes less-likely to recur. Even overt displays of wealth come to be considered gauche. Here, success is best displayed subtly. Quietly.
Meanwhile on the other island life is a perpetual free-for-all aside from considerations of physical punishment. The child who does not rush to take as much as he can for himself will not grow up to reproduce, and brawls at feeding-time are the norm. Friends and older siblings are likely to help each other, but this can't always be counted upon. The one who waits his turn will be trampled by those who do not. The man who does not signal his wealth as loudly as he can will be overlooked by the women in favor of the man who does. And in interpersonal interactions, directness, crassness, and even outright belligerence (up to and including actual physical assault) are the ways to get things done.
(It can be fun to ask what the future, downstream effects of each of these models will look like once people get behind the wheels of cars. Courtesy, safety, patient observation of traffic regulations? Or law of the jungle battles royale with jammed intersections, people veering onto sidewalks, and wholesale disregard of red lights? These things will play out on many axes.)
We might consider what it would look like for a child of any of the above ethnicities to find himself transported across the ocean and raised in its polar opposite. He'll still receive, or at least observe, the same cultural programming as the natives. And human beings are remarkably good at fitting in with strange social groups, especially given plenty of time to figure things out. But his natural instincts will constantly be at odds with the behaviour necessary for success. Proverbially, one can take the tiger out of the jungle, but one cannot take the jungle out of the tiger — at least not without so many generations of harsh selective breeding that the animal ends up unrecognizable.
Some will likely to be able to adapt, but many others will not. It depends upon the degree of difference between ethnicities and how representative the child is of his people. But even if adaptation is possible, a person's genes have been shaped by his ancestral culture, which is to say that he will inherit the genetic potential for all sorts of higher thoughts and expressions (linguistically, artistically, socially) which will not be satisfied by his adoptive culture. Part of him will always be missing the fulfillment of those potentials.
That can be hard for individuals, but what happens when whole peoples, once separated by great distances both geographically and genetically, migrate and settle down amongst each other?
Let’s take for example a people who have developed to be very honest. Instinctual honesty is obviously a complex, polygenic trait and plays out in many ways. A good example is propensity to avoid lies. So is feeling guilty about a lie afterward even when no one ever finds out. But another side of it is the keeping of promises, and to whom. Widespread social trust is an economic lubricant: If two strangers can shake hands on a deal and count on it to be carried forward as agreed, that is an enormous asset for that society. A society in which this is not the case must spend a great deal of extra resources on such matters as enforcement, for example, and the support of an entire class of people whose job it is to make sure that contracts will be carried out. Or, worse, not be able to use contracts at all, hampering economic advancement. And all of this is to say nothing of the effects of corruption among those in high-trust social positions.
As I said, honesty has deep genetic roots. So suppose that on one island in particular a culture arises which teaches its children about the values of honesty, and selects for honest people, and selects against dishonest people. (That is, variants on the population are always being tried out so bad apples do get born, and typically prevented from reproducing via cultural mechanisms such as social censure, refusal to trade and marry, or even exile.) Such a people may become more and more honest in isolation to the great benefit of the population at large. All good and well so far.
But suppose that one day a bunch of strangers shows up on boats. Their homeland has fallen, they say, and they ask to settle on some of the island's unoccupied marginal territory. Well, honest types such as the host culture also tend to be fairly generous and give others the benefit of the doubt — they can afford to, after all, as others cannot, since it less often turns against them — and agree to let the strangers settle. Only, the foreigners look different, and behave differently, and see the world differently. Let’s suppose that they’re mostly alike in most other ways, except the newcomers are just plainly prone to dishonesty, to whatever degree they can get away with it. Cheating others, petty theft, taking bribes, etc. just feels better to them. They don’t seem to have the same kind of internalized guilt about it. This will inevitably lead to major problems, and probably sooner rather than later.
Initially the foreigners may do their best to fit in and adhere to the practices of the host culture, but of course there will be a phenomenological mismatch, and before long they’re likely to mostly stop participating in the customs which don’t suit them. Or perhaps they never try in the first place. Regardless, this can only possibly play out in a few major ways.
The host culture may learn to start officially enforcing their previously-informal norms, which at least in the short term will incur an economic cost, but which will also rapidly select against the foreigners who don’t fit in. After all the foreigners, like the natives, exist on a genetic spectrum, and some of them are probably much more prone to honesty than others, even if most are not. Some substantial portion of the foreigners are probably naturally more-honest than the least-honest natives. So given draconian-enough enforcement, after a few generations, the average honesty level of the group which had been seen as foreigners will have approached the level of the host society, and at this point we can suppose that something like ‘integration’ has been achieved — at the cost of many or most of the foreigners being genetically culled via incarceration, execution, or economic sanction leading to starvation. Or even perhaps by simple expulsion, whether initiated by the hosts or by those foreigners themselves who are coming to realize that there is no future for them here. They came from somewhere, after all, and can now go somewhere else.
Alternatively, the host culture may fail to enforce their ancestral norms, in which case the cultural institutions of the entire island will collapse, degrade to the lowest common genetic denominator. The natives get absolutely fleeced and ruined until their only surviving children are as mistrustful and perhaps even as dishonest as the newcomers. I suppose we could also call this integration…?
But consider what such a process will look like from the point of view of a native in the middle of it. Like when we ran the Christmas tree in fast-forward to see the pulsing waves of light, we’ve been looking at this situation in super-high-speed. In fact it takes lifetimes to play out. Usually many lifetimes. And for someone living in the thick of it, it won’t seem so dire. Sure he’ll get the sense that people used to be more honest and there was a better sense of high social trust, but it’s not that much worse than it had been twenty years prior. There will still be pockets of community where things work the way they used to, even if fewer and fewer all the time.
For someone in the midst of the process, it would take an unusual degree of historical interest and big-picture speculation to realize what’s happening at all, and most around him are unlikely to bring themselves to care. By the time the (downward) integration is achieved it won’t even occur to the people within it as a major change from what they’re used to anyway. Few if any honest throwbacks will be left to mourn the loss, and they’ll mostly be lacking the language to express it, and no one will listen. Perhaps the old-timers will talk about how they used to know all their neighbors, and never used to secure their homes when going on journeys, now unthinkable. To their grandchildren, these will seem like nothing but amusing, if curious, ramblings about a long-bygone era, and not relevant enough to daily life to spend time musing over. They’ll be too busy trying to survive in a much darker world.
The point is, either the newcomers must change to become like the hosts, or else the hosts must surely change to become like the newcomers. Now the island is just like the one the foreigners came from, and pretty soon boats full of desperate refugees are launching to find new places where things hopefully work a bit better.
Of course, along the way, the ignorant-of-genetics hosts may have noticed that the foreigners don’t teach their children about honesty as much and decide this is the problem. They might put the foreign children in the honesty lessons with their own. And then they'll go absolutely insane trying to figure out why it’s not working, while their own children fail to get the education due to the foreign kids throwing everything off, which shifts the equilibrium even more rapidly toward dishonesty — but, as I said, that’s another chapter. And yes, the education might work to shift the foreign children ten percent further up the honesty spectrum, but if the native kids are getting that too, they’re also shifting up ten percent from a much higher starting point, and so the gap endures. In fact the education will likely be even less effective for the foreigners since it was probably developed to leverage the unique genetic psychological traits of the natives.
(Oh and hopefully, down the road, no one in the host society gets the bright idea of appropriating economic surplus from the honest, productive people to give extra resources to the dishonest ones such that they can have a lot more kids than they’d otherwise be able to support, thinking this might fix the problem. Can you imagine?)
A third strategy might be to simply designate separate living areas, even separate legal codes, for the natives and the foreigners, enforce the boundary, and not worry so much about whether they advance since at least they’re not pulling the native population down with them. This has worked historically, but runs the risk that as populations grow and cultural and genetic links are forged the situation should become politically untenable. And once segregation is ended, it must go one way or the other, as above.
Just like politeness, you can put pretty much any positive ‘cultural’ (actually substantially-genetic) trait in place of honesty and the above will mostly work, though details will vary. Even so it must be acknowledged that, outside of thought experiments, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that there is only one major difference between two populations. These things do tend to correlate on a massively complex scale, and human beings are pretty sharp at being able to spot where two different people groups are and are not societally compatible — even if we’re also excellent at blinding ourselves to the matter (or any matter) when there’s social advantage to be had in doing so, just like the apes who are truly, definitely not secretly building coalitions to overthrow the guy in charge. More on that in a couple chapters.
Of course, most of the time, when one kind interacts with another en masse it is rather less pleasant than mutually-agreeable migration. In the following chapter we'll see how things usually work and how the horrific engine operates at the scale of an entire world.
But first, as with prior chapters, I’ll take a moment to meditate on one particular aspect of the above.
Complex traits usually take so, so long to develop. Think of all the mutations which had to occur randomly the first time, and also be beneficial in the context of the current genetic loadout, or at least benign enough to not cause problems until some other mutation(s) arrive to unlock their potential. Yet as soon as selection pressure ceases, complex traits tend to be lost.
Recall our blind cave fish. It may have taken the fish tens of millions of years to evolve their eyes and visual processing system and all the instincts and behaviours which go along with those, but if they go into a cave and don’t come out, their species has typically become completely blind within a few hundred years, and coming back out into the light doesn’t magically mean it’ll only take them that long to get their vision back. Many of those mutations will have to occur again, and as time goes on fewer and fewer of those potentials remain dormant in their blood, waiting to be reawakened.
So it is imperative that we learn to distinguish between mutation and selection. A population consists of many genetically-diverse individuals, representing a sort of library of alleles. These have already evolved; already mutated. They are just hanging around for the selection. Most if not all of the individuals in the population are somewhat suboptimal for the current environment, which is short-term bad for the individual but long-term good for the population. Conditions may change at any time, after all, and it’s a great idea to have some individuals around who are better-suited to whatsoever may come.
Say, some snowshoe hares who turn brown earlier than the rest, who usually have a devil of a time during late winter when they stand out like sore thumbs against the snow, but do great in years when spring comes early. Mutations can take just about forever to occur, so it’s a good idea to keep them around for such occasions. In fact this is the main reason that individuals can carry alleles which they do not express but still pass on for possible re-emergence in future generations. Evolution never knows what may be useful tomorrow! (Many dormant alleles don't carry much if any selective cost, but even when they do, a population which keeps a few of those around is liable to outcompete one which didn't.)
Selection, on the other hand, happens as quickly as a fox nabs a rabbit. If you wanted a population of snowshoe hares that almost entirely turns brown early, that would be easy to accomplish: Kill, or prevent from reproducing, all the ones who don’t. Within three generations maximum that will be the new normal, though a few throwbacks will keep occurring for a while, less and less often as those variants fail to be passed on.
Actually let's stick with foxes and rabbits for a moment. Rabbits are swift, with excellent hearing and winsomely-keen noses. They have been granted all these virtues through their relationships with predators, in this case foxes. If you take rabbits and put them in captivity for several generations, they will lose all of these traits. Without the selection pressure to maintain them they will degrade, and more quickly than you might think. Reintroduce those domesticated rabbits back into the wild and it's possible that even if most don't last five minutes, the very best will survive and go on to re-embody the virtues of their forebears. But I wouldn't count on it.
The difference between mutation and selection can get confusing inasmuch as people describe both processes as ‘evolution’, which they are. But the distinction is important to comprehend.
An advanced trait is a priceless genetic inheritance, purchased at great cost over countless generations of extremely painful trial, error, failure, misery, and death. And yet, if a population finds itself in a situation where such traits are no longer especially advantageous — say, a very honest and coöperative people suddenly mixed in with others who are not this way and no means by which they might keep to themselves, or a system where people inclined toward a given virtue are penalized to provide for those who are not — such traits can be squandered, even eradicated from the population with astonishing rapidity. Recovering them is not such an easy thing, though perhaps not impossible if action is taken soon enough.
Next week: Chapter 07: The Race of Kings
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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: Thousand Flowers
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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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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