The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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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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The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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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 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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I wrote a long (~60k words) Motte post and am releasing it serially, one chapter per week. This is chapter two. Chapter one can be found here.
Last week's chapter was sorta obligatory foundation-work. This week we get to what I think of as the first really cool part. If you like this, let me promise that we are very much just getting started!
0102 - Horrific Engine
In the previous chapter we followed the first living organism and its descendants as they overcame various challenges and ultimately developed the killer tech known as the gender binary. Some ended up in forms which we'd call plants, worms, or fish.
In this chapter we’ll take a close look at a group which ended up in forms which we would recognize as bottom-feeding shellfish, rather like our Earth lobsters.
These shellfish live on an underwater mountain a few miles off the coast, the tip of which almost, but not quite, reaches the surface. (On the coast itself you might espy some ridiculous-looking fish who are starting to spend a truly alarming amount of time out of the water, but we’re not interested in them just yet.) The peak of the underwater mountain is the absolute best place to live: the deeper one goes there’s less light and less warmth and less food. Go down far enough and survival becomes impossible.
When these shellfish first colonized the sea-mount this wasn’t an issue. There weren't very many of them, there was plenty of space, and life was good for pretty much everyone for a generation or two. But no sooner did those first intrepid souls have offspring than they had a problem, because the peak is small and not everybody can fit.
The males know what to do: threaten and/or manhandle their weaker neighbors onto the next level down. And the females know what to do, too: hang out with the guys still on the peak, because obviously those are the ones you’d want fertilizing your eggs. After all, their offspring will be better able to secure access to primo territory and the resources that come with it. But this is still mostly okay. Life on the next rung down isn’t too bad, and there are plenty of females around still even if they’re not necessarily the most-attractive ones.
But then everybody has babies again and the problem is compounded. Not only do most of the babies spawned on the peak need to go, but the next level down is already occupied. So most of the offspring on the second rung are pushed to the third rung, and a lot of the offspring from the peak take over their dens, and a very happy, very few remain on the utmost peak.
That’s nice for them, but for everyone else it’s starting to become miserable. The males down on tier 3 are cold, hungry, overcrowded, and get only rare chances to mate, and with mainly-unattractive females. Those females aren’t happy either, since the males they want to be with aren’t interested in them. But life finds a way, and they more or less make it work.
Everybody has babies again. The ones on top mostly drop a level, the ones there mostly drop a level, and so on. This time life does not find a way; there’s simply not enough viable space. When all is said and done fully half of the new generation has ended up forced down into the darkness where they meet their end in cold starvation or in futile combat with each other for access to even the faintest glimmer of light. Even the ones on the second tier, where things aren’t so bad, are stressed because they know by deep monition that their offspring are likely to end up in that situation in a generation or two. This is because their offspring will likely be a little bit different, and different is generally worse. Since the parents weren’t able to make it to the top, this doesn’t bode well for the children. So everyone fights as hard as they can to hold on to their territory or even somehow, impossibly, to move up. The alternative does not bear consideration.
Equilibrium has at last been attained. It is painful and wretched and unbearable for most, but it also results in some really great shellfish! The mechanism is as follows:
Most of the males below the first two tiers stand practically no chance of moving up in the world. They are, after all, descended from those who couldn’t hack it at those levels. But mutations continue to accumulate, and sometimes they are beneficial, and at any rate the random recombinations of parental genetic material can still sometimes result in surprising boons. Different is only generally worse! So every now and then a lower-tier male is just born awesome, and he’s able to fight his way up to a higher level, get access to higher-quality females, and his special trait proliferates among the well-to-do. In the meantime, the descendants of all males but the best, and especially those suffering from high mutation load, rapidly sink to the bottom and die out within a few generations.
The females have their own games to play. The reproductive potential of a male is much greater than that of a female, but not entirely unlimited. The most successful males have their pick of mates and they have to choose somehow. The females directly vie for the attention of those males, while simultaneously attempting to bully each other away so as to reduce competition. If they’re not attractive (or confident) enough to get picked, they end up with the males on the next level down, which is progressively tantamount to genetic suicide the further they sink. Male shellfish don't invest in young and so aren’t as worried about mating with less-attractive females; they’ll get lots of chances to do better later. But females can only do it a few times, and they really loathe mating with low-value males.
Clearly ‘attractiveness’ is doing a lot of work here. What is it? What does it mean? It turns out that the males are looking for two primary traits: Low mutation load and the ability to produce healthy offspring (i.e. not too young, not too old, not significantly injured or debilitatingly-ill). Females are also looking for two primary traits: Low mutation load and the ability to seize and hold good territory.
Reader, it is of paramount importance that you appreciate the significance of mutation load, so please forgive what may seem a jarring diversion while I come at it again from another angle. Imagine a race of creatures, ‘walkers’, which stride perpetually across an endless grassland. Here and there, hidden in the grass, are plants which have heavy, cruelly-barbed, lead-dense ‘sticker’ seeds which embed themselves in the walkers’ flesh. They’re mostly minor annoyances, but some are bigger and heavier than others, and some just happen to work their way into sensitive and critical places on the body.
As they live out their lives, these walkers randomly run into anywhere between zero to a whole lot of these sticker-seeds. Most of the time the impact of any given sticker isn’t noticed, but sometimes a particularly nasty one is picked up which causes the walker to perish soon thereafter. Much worse, and more importantly, each of their offspring has a roughly 50% chance of inheriting each of the sticker-seeds from each of its parents. No, I don’t know how exactly. Dammit Jim, I’m a <redacted>, not a xenobiologist. But over generations, these accumulated sticker-seeds become a real problem. Babies with high accumulations often don’t make it to term, or else don’t survive childhood. Adolescents with high accumulation are weighed down, can’t move as quickly, require more calories to keep going, etc., and are less likely to reproduce. Perhaps they’re even born sterile in the first place, if the sticker-seeds were lodged in the relevant tender bits.
So each genetic line of this species can be thought of as having an ever-incrementing counter assigned to it, tracking the degree of impairment that has been accumulated. In a sense, each is living on borrowed time, since there is no way to shed the seeds (except for extremely rare fluke events which are, on this scale, so uncommon as to be irrelevant). Each walker lives under the doom passed onto it by its ancestors, and on average each parent passes half of that grudge on to its children in turn, such that between the two parents each offspring inherits a full load. What can they do? Only two things.
The first is obvious. Since offspring are likely to end up with roughly the average of their parents’ accumulated load, each of these creatures does its best to find a mate whose line has accumulated the least. Low-load individuals are prone to mating with each other and putting out low-load offspring, who naturally enough disdain higher-load individuals as mates. Thus in practice there’s what might be thought of as a core of low-load walkers preferentially reproducing with each other, and all the others are sort of slowly but surely degrading away from them, which process only accelerates with time, accumulated impairment/unattractiveness, and the corresponding reduction in number and quality of potential mates.
The other strategy is to simply have as many offspring as possible, trusting in probability to generate one or two who luck out and end up missing more than usual of their parents’ accumulated sticker-seeds. This doesn’t work if both parents have a sticker in the same spot, since the child will get that for sure, but a lot of the time the parents' sticker-seed distribution is diverse enough that less-burdened offspring are possible. And that minority of less-burdened offspring are then more capable of securing lower-mute-loaded mates for themselves than their parents could have done.
(This is another window into where 'different' can be a good thing. Inbreeding is a problem for reasons mentioned above, and a mate who is of roughly-similar quality but of a different line which has accumulated different mutations opens up the chance for offspring which will not be burdened with any given sticker-seed. Given enough offspring with a comparable but not-too-closely-related partner, some are likely to end up with lower load than either parent!)
All right, back to the shellfish on their underwater mountain. As we saw above, everyone wants the lowest-mutation-loaded mate they can get. Within that, baby-making is difficult and can easily go wrong, so males care a lot about a female’s age, focusing on her prime reproductive period. Females, in turn, care a lot about a male’s demonstrated ability to compete with other males, climb the slope, and secure territory. These things can outweigh perceived mutation load to a point, but only to a point, and both sexes always keep an eye to a potential mate’s perceived mutation load.
But how? Since they have no means of sequencing each other's DNA and are at any rate basically just sea-bugs, they must rely upon other proxies, such as visual cues. They’ve figured out a pretty elegant trick for this, which works as follows.
As we know, mutation load causes both perceptible and imperceptible changes. All else being equal, then, it’s probably the case that, the more visibly-divergent an individual’s features are from the population average, the more mutations that individual has accumulated. Unusual, aberrant features indicate deviation from the population average. There are other tells, such as asymmetry, bumpy/discoloured exteriors, and so on, but the big one is just conformity of an individual’s features to the population average. Even visually, different is generally worse.
What this means in practice is that there is a tiny, competent (good-adaptation-rich), attractive (low mute load) population on the peak. Some of the offspring born there belong and are able to take their place among those elite. Most are ever-so-slightly different from (that is, generally slightly inferior to) their parents, and so end up below them. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as they say, but it does tend to fall a little bit downhill. Sometimes, random recombination of traits on the next level down results in an individual who can climb a level or two, perhaps even all the way to the top. But for the most part, mobility is almost universally downward and one-way.
All of which leads to the point of this chapter, which is that I want you to be able to see these dynamics in your mind’s eye, because they are breathtaking and beautiful in their cruelty and perfection, and illuminate every part of the world around us. So please have patience and join me on a trip to the theatre of the mind.
Imagine, if you will, the population of shellfish on this underwater mountain. Think of each one as a single point of light, its brightness corresponding to its overall genetic quality. Now remove the mountain itself from the picture, leaving just the points.
What you should be seeing is something like the electric bulbs on an invisible Christmas tree; a cone shape covered in lights, dim at the bottom and getting brighter toward the top, until at the utmost peak (corresponding to the star or angel) there’s a brilliantly-glowing mass of luminescence.
Watch as a new generation is born: The cone-shape becomes densely populated all over as new individuals pop into existence, but almost all of them immediately begin filtering downward and dislodging others along the way, finding their level as it were. The ones near the bottom, already so much less bright than the ones at the top, rapidly fade down and out of sight.
More generations cycle, faster and faster. Pulses of light emanate from the top and spill down the slopes in cascading waves, innumerable motes springing into existence and precipitating downward, ever-dimming, eventually sliding into the eternal darkness and winking out entirely.
And sometimes — rarely, but sometimes — look! A mote of light, brighter than the surroundings of its origins, rising to take its place closer to the warmth and light and security of the peak. And if it had something special, that catches on, and the peak is forever after a little brighter than it had been before.
This is how the population adopts what is beneficial while holding to what is good. This is want and privation for almost all. This is children striving their hardest even against their own siblings, warring in futility to hold on to what meagre territory their parents had, knowing that most must fail and be diminished. This is despair and frustration for the great many, realizing that they’ll never have the mate that is their heart’s greatest desire, while sensing with every fibre of their being that to accept less is to embrace the void.
The clock can be hard to see but it's always ticking, and every time it does it’s down, down, down for almost everyone. Even the lucky few at the top are soon supplanted by younger, hungrier competitors and rapidly lose their place in the sun.
This is the horrific engine. It has given the shellfish everything they have that is good and worth having. Each generation is, on average, just a little bit better than the one that came before, as beneficial mutations accumulate and detrimental ones are cast into the outer darkness. But the cost in misery is staggering, both in each current generation and across the unspeakable chasms of time.
Or at least it would be, if we weren’t talking about a bunch of dumb crustaceans. Thankfully it doesn’t work that way for people, right?
Hold on to your hats.
Before we turn away from the shellfish and their underwater mountain I'd like to explore two further mechanisms of their development.
First, you might be wondering what constitutes an 'optimal' shellfish. It's an interesting question, actually, because perfection for these shellfish is defined both by the natural environment and by competition with their own kind. But the interesting part is that there are many such seamounts in the oceans of Tidus, and on each of them — quite independently! — organisms keep evolving into almost the exact same forms. That is, the form of the perfect shellfish continuously emerges organically from the process of life in environments which suit it. Two fairly different ancestors can migrate to two totally-unconnected seamounts and, many generations later, their descendants may look identical to all but the most-trained eye. This is called 'convergent evolution'.
Put another way, the process of life on any given seamount, the 'horrific engine', is precisely the process which generates the occurrence of the perfect shellfish. It is as though there were an ideal solution out there in the ether, and as though life naturally tends toward it, even if groping blindly. Do note, however, that near-identical results are only possible under near-identical selection pressures.
Second, recall the highly-variable and unpredictable tides for which Tidus is named. Every so often, the moons align such that a much higher tide than usual rolls in and is sustained for years or perhaps even generations at a time. When this happens, the vast majority of the shellfish population is wiped out, leaving only those few who manage to maintain their position atop the peak. Thankfully, these are also the ones which represent the treasure store of the population; that is, its combined accumulated good mutations and the well-preserved overall low mutation load, which were purchased with the suffering and death of, well, everyone else.
The tide could, in theory, get high enough to snuff out even those on the absolute peak. Such things have happened many times before, to other species. Most species that have ever existed, in fact. But it hasn’t happened to the shellfish (yet), or else we wouldn’t be talking about them.
Even so this cataclysm turns out to have a silver lining. Under normal conditions, the sea mount has reached its carrying capacity and is more or less maximally saturated with shellfish. Competition is fierce enough that practically zero deviation from optimal genetics or behaviour is tolerated. But when that very high tide recedes, for a few generations, it’s back to the way things were when the mountain was first settled. Plenty of room for everyone for the foreseeable future, and even less-than-optimal offspring have a solid chance to do well for themselves.
This represents a rare and wonderful opportunity. Unusual strategies, both genetic and behavioural, may be developed and deployed. They may even get the chance to be iterated and improved upon over a few generations before the vice tightens once again. And, thanks to the marvel of sexual reproduction, they can even be combined in new and surprising ways — for a little while. In this manner, new developments may have time to catch on and establish themselves where usually they wouldn’t have a chance. This is known as a ‘boom-bust cycle’, and is an integral factor in the continued evolution toward the more-perfect shellfish. Long may it scuttle beneath shallow waters!
Next week: Chapter 03: Colour Blue
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