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Chapter five is here and this is where the rhythm really drops. (Chapter one link).
Before we go into this let me issue a general reminder that I'm painting with a broad brush so as to actually get somewhere for once, even at book-length. And actually from here on out we suffer from far too much trying to fit in too small a space. I've elided much in the interest of brevity. Real life is as always much more complicated but I think if you take what I'm giving you here (and a grain of salt) you'll be much better off than you were before.
0105 - Women and Men
In the previous chapter we tracked the development of apes into proto-humans. Or, we got a fair amount of the way there. At the end something like modern humans showed up on the scene, but how they got to be that way was left as a bit of a mystery. In this chapter then we shall attempt to close the gap!
At some point a band of apes started spending less time in the trees and more time on the ground, ranging further and further from its ancestral environment. No one is sure why, exactly. Some say it was simple population pressure. Others say it was some sort of event like a natural disaster or cataclysm; a volcanic eruption perhaps. But most agree that one way or another the culprit probably had to do with climate change.
Climatic conditions shifted and over time the once-abundant cloud forests of the apes started drying up. Certainly viable pockets did remain in this or that hidden valley but, for many, the ape way of life was at an end. Those who could were obligated to find new ways to survive in a more arid environment in which the trees were too far apart to serve as a highway.
So these apes have to learn to get around on the ground, hence bipedalism. And they have to transition to obtaining a substantial portion, or even a majority, of their calories from endurance hunting — running down prey not by being faster, but simply by being able to keep going past the point that their targets collapse from exhaustion or overheating. To better assist in this, they shed most of their body hair and develop the ability to sweat, that they might remain cool while their prey does not. (Their skin had previously been pale beneath the fur, but rapidly takes on a darker hue to protect them from the harsh sun coming through what used to be the canopy).
Much has been said elsewhere about all of the above. But the really striking transition, in my book, is the way this radically upends gender relations.
It’s no longer viable for coalitions of males to secure nice groves of fruit trees and let the females come and go as they please. Instead, bands of combined males and females are obliged to rove around together, moving from site to site, following prey and forage with the seasons. This presents a new problem for the males. Heretofore they hadn’t been of much specific use to females, and it’s still the case that females are basically free to wander off and find some other males if they are so inclined. Except now, more females cannot be expected to show up at any moment as had previously been the case while in possession of a nice fruit grove.
Troops of males, then, are suddenly under pressure to cater to females. (Treating them as property works acceptably-well too but is generally less-preferable for the usual reasons having to do with slaves, which plays out in many ways as we shall see later in this book.) They do this by sharing food and offering protection from the many predators which can no longer be avoided by hanging out in trees all the time. Thankfully this is made more pleasant by another upshot, which is that the children of the females who have been with the troop for a while (as well as any still gestating) can be pretty reliably counted upon to be the offspring of that troop’s males.
Nor can females continue to entirely outsource their task of evaluating potential mates. Yes, every now and then a competing troop of males comes along and wipes out the males the females had been with before, and incorporates the females into their own group, and that’s pretty grand when it happens — a freebie, if you will — but such providence can’t be counted upon, and in the meantime hard feminine decisions must be made.
To some degree it’s still useful for the females to sit back and observe which male ends up in command of all the others. But in the new environment resources are scarce, and it’s not practical for that alpha-male to provide food and protection for 70%, or even 10%, of the females. A handful at a time, at most. Nor can he freeze the vast majority of other males mostly out of sexual access: food is no longer free and their assistance is required to feed everybody, which necessitates enfranchising them as it were. So, given that most females can’t count on being taken care of by the best male in their world, how should they determine which male to mate with? And how to entice him to become invested in them during the vulnerability of their pregnancy, and in their newborn children?
The recursive intellectual arms race of the male apes has granted females enormous social acuity, even if mainly as a side-effect. They’re able to evaluate potential mates directly, by observing which males are successful hunters, as well as indirectly, by paying attention to how each potential partner carries himself in the assembly of males. Does he seem respected? Admired? Scorned? Pitied? Their basic strategy of letting the males sort such things out is modified a bit, but doesn't fundamentally change. Though, as a failsafe, females also come to be hyper-sensitive to how other females evaluate a male. If most seem to think he’s a desirable mate, she should quickly agree this is the case or else lose out on her chance to secure his attentions.
The females can’t simply hunt for themselves. They’re smaller, and their body structure is built around carrying and birthing ever-larger-headed babies, which makes them unsuitable for chasing, and their musculature is much weaker than that of the males, which makes them less suited to killing. Their pelvises are comparatively-prone to breaking while running under any kind of load. They’re that much more vulnerable to the megapredators which are likely to be encountered away from home. Also, while males are all about taking big risks for big rewards so as to secure reproductive access, risk-aversion is fixed deep within the female psyche. Like it or not, the females are dependent upon the males, and live or die based upon how emotionally attached a competent male becomes to them.
And so females become lovely and likable, locked in a new arms race with each other to appeal to high-value males. Given the outsized returns on reproducing with the highest-value males, the more arousing their physical forms can be, the better. Low mutation load (mostly) can’t be faked, and reliable indicators of being in their prime reproductive period (glossy hair, clear skin) are rapidly selected for. Every facet of the female body becomes fine-tuned to maximize its attractive impact. E.g., by definition, all female mammals have mammary glands, but it is telling that these specific ape-offshoots are some of the only ones ever to develop breasts, structures whose function has little to do with milk and much to do with announcing reproductive readiness and driving males just absolutely crazy.
This arms race is even more intense because, as should be clear by now, they’re not competing with each other simply for a good mate, but for the best mate. As such, fascinating tradeoffs are made. Women evolve to be extra-beautiful in their prime years and then rapidly visually age beyond those. Intuitively this might seem like a bad idea — wouldn't it be better to look young longer?
But if you consider the situation from the perspective of the standard alpha-male, this is precisely the problem. A female who only looks amazing during her prime reproductive period is sending an expensive signal that yes, she is in fact of ideal breeding age. That’s attractive! A female who visually pretends to be in her prime period whether she is or not, well, who can say? Smart money is on mating with the first female. That second female will perhaps have more children over the course of her life with mediocre males. But by that point the best males have given the first female a few very high-quality children. And even if not as many, they’re going to outcompete the children of the second female in the coming generation for all the old reasons the shellfish know so well.
An extremely powerful strategy for females is to secure the protection and provision of a competent but not-especially-high-value male, get the highest-value male in her world to impregnate her, and then convince her pair-bonded male that the child is his. Females are in fact so (understandably) driven to conceive the children of the highest-value male that they’re apt to do so before they even have the next step (finding support) figured out. And the highest-value males sense this, making them comparatively unwilling to commit. At which point refusal to commit becomes, itself, attractive in a male. A male eager to commit is signaling that he’s grateful for the opportunity, whereas the sort of male who has great genes and knows it also knows that in a couple years the next newer model will be along and he can have her too. (Yes, a male who is both high-value and willing to commit is like catnip to females, but hard to find in the wild, and she’ll still be aroused by the ones who act like they can do better.)
Females won’t generally allow mediocre males anywhere near their reproductive systems without commitment, but they quite justifiably consider reproduction with the highest-value male to be enough of a prize as to make such considerations secondary. And when a female does build a pair bond with a provider-male, the implicit bargain is that he’ll good-naturedly help take care of her prior children as well — for as long as they’re ‘together’, at any rate. This makes “have sex with the male who excites you during your peak reproductive period, then trade sex to the male who will take it in exchange for raising the first guy's children” an eminently reasonable plan, except in societies where males coördinate to put a stop to it.
In addition to attractive, females must also become pathetic, in the original sense of the word. Even as males are evolving to care about their children, females start evolving to take on attributes evoking those of children, pointedly including neotenous facial features. Big eyes, small noses, full lips, and so on. A female must push as many of a male’s “protect and provide for” buttons as possible, or else lose out to another who did. And should a female find herself with child but without a provider, or — much worse — past her reproductive age, she had better be as pleasant and sympathetic as possible, in the hopes of receiving charity from those who can spare it. (Indeed the plight of elderly widows will be a perpetual social dilemma for many, many later societies.)
Their dependence upon males notwithstanding, this transition does put pressure on females to become competent in their own right. The sire of their offspring might take seriously his implied obligation to provide for them, and then again he might not. For that matter he might be traumatically gored to death by a wildebeest at any moment. Far better for females to be able to supply some of their own food by foraging, or give any surfeit to others to establish reciprocal obligations. Far better for them, in their older age, to have skills to bring to the table, such that a conquering troop might have use for them.
Meanwhile, switching over to a meat-based diet has been so effective at winning calories that the brains of these things — now radically unlike other apes across several dimensions — are now accounting for as much as 20 or even 25% of their daily energy budget! Because the social games are getting more intense and the calories are there for the successful.
This lifestyle increasingly selects for the ability of males to coördinate. A group where the males can coöperate to take down large game (and share out the excess) is vastly more fit than one in which each male can only individually attempt to bring home a rat or a bird. Similarly, they can work together to secure the clan’s defensible homestead (sure let’s call it a cave) and achieve projects, etc.
But males, being larger, are even more calorically-expensive to feed than females. And, while there are several compelling reasons to keep lazy females — especially young and smooth ones — around, no one has patience for males who don’t pull their own weight. As such, young and adolescent males are subjected to any amount of hazing, hardship, and initiation, to screen out and dispense with losers as quickly as possible. Less-fit males are persecuted mercilessly, their status continuously eroded, until they end up killed for impertinence, driven into exile, or uniformly shunned by all females and thereby cleansed away genetically.
The inferior male who skulks about the edges of the clan, staring thirstily at the prime young females on display, represents a very real threat to those females. Unable to earn affection or even grudging provider-sex on his own merits, his best reproductive chance is to try to catch such a young female alone and have his way with her, which can monopolize one of her few, precious reproductive windows, not to mention the burden of caring for the resulting child. Females rapidly and understandably develop extreme disgust responses and paranoia about such males. Their revulsion toward low-status and especially physically-aberrant males is isomorphic to, and probably re-uses some of the existing neural circuitry regarding, their aversion to rotten food — something so harmful or even potentially fatal if it gets inside of you that it’s not worth eating, no matter how hungry you are. When future women describe men as ‘creeps’ there can be no doubt about what they mean. (No directly-corresponding term will ever arise among men to describe unattractive women. How could it?)
The status of ‘male in good standing’ is extended as readily as possible to the deserving, but jealously guarded nonetheless, for the life or death of the clan hinges upon competent males working together effectively. Over time, there is enormous selection pressure on these males to build instincts and social technologies which allow them to efficiently coöperate to achieve ambitious goals. And, leveraging the gigantic socially-inferential brains granted them by their ancestors, and the ever-greater energy budgets made available by hunting, males begin to develop a system of vocalizations to communicate facts and strategies to each other.
Never underestimate the potential impact of a single mutation. One day, just like any other, an infant is born with an oddball de novo variant of the Tidan equivalent of the FOXP2 gene. His intelligence is about a third again as great as that of his parents. The muscles of his lower face and mouth, associated with speech, are much more nimble. Most of all, he finds himself capable of dazzling fluency in communication, easily mastering the primitive language his clan has developed and bounding effortlessly beyond it, introducing new inventions and concepts that rapidly catch on among his less-comparatively-retardèd peers. He invents all sorts of new names for things.
The first Tidan human has finally arrived on the scene. Or at least this is as good a place as any to draw that line for purposes of our narrative.
Perhaps he merely assumes that everyone else is like him on the inside and simply isn’t interested in expressing it. Perhaps he lives an achingly lonely life looking for the missing light in the eyes of his friends and loved ones. Personally, I like to imagine that he recognizes it at long last when meeting his first child. Or, I don’t know, maybe he just thinks it’s great to be the best ever and leverages his advantages to the hilt, eventually dying with a smile on his face beneath a pile of pregnant beauties. We’ll never know. What we do know is that he or his immediate descendants are wildly reproductively successful and make short work of all their competition.
His unique FOXP2 variant spreads like wildfire first up, then down, the slopes of the island. The massive boost in intelligence is itself a great asset, of course, but fully-syntactic language is yet another killer tech per se. Not only does it allow for precise communication and planning, but it also allows abstract concepts to be passed down from generation to generation.
Tidans start telling stories. The stories are under the same selection pressure for attractiveness and utility as anything else, and rapidly converge upon a few optimal forms that can be found in all later cultures. One type of story is what we’d today call ‘The Hero’s Journey’, which is a blueprint for young men to become suitable contributors to the tribe and, if really successful, even score outsized reproductive results. If telling such stories to boys results in even a 5-10% improvement in the average fitness of men, that is a massive advantage over competing tribes who don’t.
Another (but occasionally-overlapping with the first) type of story is the Story of Identity, of belonging. This story reifies the social unit as not just a clan but as a Tribe, with a shared history, values, and destiny. If this type of story becomes compelling enough, it can even convince others to join, provided they can make the case for why they’re worthy of adoption into the People. Stories of this nature are often what we would identify as religious, and acting out their precepts to, e.g., construct megalithic monuments may have been the original impetus for mass-human-organization, ages before the first cities.
A third type of story is a parallel to the hero’s journey, but for girls, found in most if not all cultures. It's called ‘The Maiden’s Tale’. The basic outline of the maiden’s tale is this: A girl becomes lost or kidnapped or otherwise separated from her tribe. Then a man/some men happen upon her and impregnate her. She finds her place as a mother in her new tribe. Fin. [[*Nota bene: This was entirely real and exactly as I have described, but woe to anyone who attempts to google it in these benighted latter days.]]
The final type of story pertinent to our narrative is that of kleos (“CLAY-oss”), or what we might term ‘glory’. These are stories of great deeds, especially in battle, which serve at least three major purposes. The first, as with the hero’s journey, is to prime young men for the sort of behaviour that will be adaptive (to the tribe) in adulthood; e.g. stripping naked, painting themselves with mud, and flinging themselves bodily into a mass of their enemies. The second is to serve as yet another mechanism by which fitness can be translated into status and therefore greater representation of those genetic variants in the next generation. Picture the women looking on as a man's courage in battle is lauded around the fire. The third, much more interesting purpose is to allow for individual men to accumulate sufficient reputation to transcend the old ape social-bond-numerical-limit trap.
So long as a somewhat-shared language is in place, men can now develop parasocial bonds with leaders they rarely get to encounter or possibly have never even met. This allows for dramatically-larger numbers to band together for the purpose of wiping out a competing tribe and absorbing their women/livestock and accumulated material goods.
All these types of stories come together (or at least the first, second, and fourth do) to create a powerful cocktail indeed. Religions and states — insisting upon the distinction is entirely asinine, about which I’ll have much more to say later — rapidly develop social technology to keep larger groups of men aligned and stable, eventually incorporating such tools as statues, monuments, and so on to better-maintain such parasocial relationships; such imagined communities and distant rulers. Eventually these nations become so large and complex that they can engage in multiple campaigns at a time: not one raiding party, but multiple armies setting out to take what belongs to genetically- and socially-inferior groups of men.
But some things never change. The typical motivation for a low-status male to join such a coalition is precisely to get unfettered access to conquered females who will, at least temporarily, not be under the protection of organized men. Risking death in battle for such a prize is vastly better than being relegated to resentful hate-reproduction and too-probable cuckoldry with the less-attractive females at home.
But can the women who just watched their husbands and sons slaughtered before their eyes possibly be any more pleasant to lie with? Well, yes, actually. By a very wide margin. Consider the lioness.
Tidan women have been selected for rapid acculturation, wholesale adoption of social consensus, and agreeability — going along with the decisions and demands of others — for a long time now, to put it lightly. They've been appropriated by violent, conquering males and incorporated into foreign social structures since before they were human. Understandably enough they don’t like their kids getting killed, but this often just ends up being a bargaining chip which encourages them to conform as tightly as possible to the desires of their new keepers. And certainly, along the way, innumerable numbers of them did hate and reject the men who killed their husbands. Their descendants are mainly no longer with us. The descendants of the ones who embraced their conquerors, whose knees buckled when their wrists were grabbed, who successfully convinced themselves that ‘actually, this is fine’, are.
Terror and arousal are physiologically indistinguishable in Tidan women. Simply witnessing an act of violence, even between animals, causes them to experience arousal. They’re substantially more likely to orgasm during sex with conquering males, especially in the early, uncertain days of their captivity, than they ever were with any but the highest-status men of their native tribe. The stress of their indeterminate social status and lack of protection by any man who cares about them trigger powerful responses within. They experience an irresistible upswell of affection, loyalty, and arousal. Similar to, and perhaps even indistinguishable from, love — except often so much stronger.
No one likes to imagine for a moment that such things can be true of his wife or mother. This well-documented and self-evidently-necessary female capacity will later be excised from discourse or, when it can’t be avoided, described as a ‘syndrome’ as though it were somehow a bug rather than a feature. (Here we call it ‘Stockholm’). For women, admitting to such spectres lurking in their fantasies is obviously not socially-advantageous, nor would their current providers take kindly to the thought, and so women are normally quite insistent that nothing of the sort is the case. In keeping with the grand achievement of ape self-deception, they even believe it.
In time, as a conquered woman’s place in her new tribe becomes secure, recalibration of her understanding of her social status is inevitable and she will very likely come to wish she’d ended up with a higher-status mate. But by that point her story, and that of her husband, will be near its end, and his sons will be going forth and doing likewise. And it is the case that older women, once past the point of reproduction, often do feel real loyalty to their tribe, as unlike younger women they will not be served by their only existing offspring being wiped out by an invading male coalition.
It is inevitable that one social group should eventually secure total control of the island. But other islands were always dimly visible across the water, and it will rapidly become evident that some of those cousins wiped away by the high tides, long assumed extinct, in fact washed up elsewhere and rekindled their own, parallel development. Some have achieved near-parity with the civilization on the mother island. Some have greatly exceeded it. Some are, frankly, minimally-progressed since that now-ancient FOXP2 mutation. Some are just outright weird, and seem to have split off from the race even before that. (Exciting opportunities for admixture abound in such cases!)
The great wheel keeps turning, now on the scale of the archipelago. Superior (in whatever capacity) peoples encounter others, exterminate or marginalize them, steal their most-attractive women, i.e. repositories of low mutation load and useful adaptations, and incorporate their technological and biological distinctiveness.
But of course, the longer they've been separated, and the less-similar the environments in which they've developed, the more they've diverged genetically. And this means that the world occurs to them differently, and they think and behave differently. You can tell this at a glance because they look different, too.
One little thought here — did you know that, on Tidus, human facial (and for that matter bodily) features correlate with psychometric traits? The study of this is called physiognomy. And, of course, humans are well-evolved to notice facial minutiae and draw great inferences therefrom. Walking down the street someone can often tell, at a glance, a great deal about another man's personality from his face. Some are better at this than others, naturally, given that it's an evolved capacity.
Lest you wonder whether this is merely confirmation bias, later Tidan computer facial recognition software will more than settle the question. Given a large-enough set of faces and a corresponding database of measured traits, including many you'd expect and others as abstract as 'propensity to follow rules', programs will do pretty well at predicting any number of things about a person based on facial features. Responsiveness, assertiveness, genuineness, achievement-striving, deceptiveness, trustworthiness, risk-taking, propensity to 'dry' humour, fear of heights... the list goes on and on.
This shouldn't be a surprise to us. After all it works that way for every other kind of animal, and it's an observable truth that children take after their parents both behaviourally and facially. But if facial features correlate with personality traits, and also vary much more across ancestral groups than within, what does this imply about the variation of psychological traits across ancestral groups?
When someone makes the offensive claim that ''they' all look alike', what horror is actually being suggested?
Next week: Chapter 06: Kindred
My planned review of The Worm Ouroboros became an unreadably long compendium of the book's entire contents, viewed from multiple angles and dissected far too much detail, and I still had far too many TODOs open that I felt I had to include to do it justice. It was madness, so I hereby scrap it all and instead of any of that I give you this: An exhortation to read the book itself. It's a marvelous work, and existing reviews and summaries do not do it justice. You can also read it or listen to it entirely for free, in all its wholesome faux-17th-century Scots-English glory. The language of the book might appeal to me personally because much in it that might seem archaic to an anglophone simply sounds roughly German to me. And the plot too has a German quality - it is gracefully straightforward.
HTML Text:
- https://sacred-texts.com/ring/two/index.htm
- https://www.gutenberg.org/files/67090/67090-h/67090-h.htm
Ebook:
Audiobook, read and quite excellently read by one Jason Mills:
The Worm Ouroboros is a novel. It is usually called a romance or fantasy, neither of which is wrong. Some point out that it is in the tradition of norse sagas, which I cannot judge. In my opinion it is above all an epic, and while many reviewers express puzzlement at the presence of the Greek pantheon on a fantastical Mercury, I think it makes perfect sense - what other gods would homeric heroes worship? It is, in my unqualified foreigner's opinion, a beautiful book, written with prodiguous excess of skill and care. It contains so much, and yet I wish there were more of it, and then again I suppose its author already gave a great gift and more cannot be asked. I have many, far too many things to say about it, and am stumbling over myself trying to express them all at once. So instead I will cut myself off right now and return to the only statement I think I am qualified to make:
If you haven't read the book, please read it.
If you have read it, please read it again.
Then come back here and tell me what you think.
As for myself, I just read it twice back-to-back. C.S. Lewis asked for a copy of The Worm Ouroboros when he went to a nursing home, and I might understand him - it is a book I would not mind reading as my last. Its world and characters are beautiful, and beautifully described. E.R. Eddison's other books are less known yet than this one, but I intend to give them a look next.
To aid you in your reading, please take the following.
Map of Mercury:
Map of Demonland:
And now off you go. I hope to hear back from you.
Long time lurker, first time writer.
Apologies in advance if the request has been made. I’m wondering if logged in users can select a dark mode to help with reducing blue light exposure? I realize that the UI can be modified with custom code, but a setting to toggle would be nice.
Thanks in advance.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
I will be at Gebhard's Beer Culture in the upper west side, today (Saturday 8/30) at 5pm. Happy hour runs until 6. I will stay until at least 7. First round's on me.
I'll be in a black tshirt with shrodinger's cat on it.
Edit: I'm at a table in the back left (if you are looking at the bar), by a wood barrel.