Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
I tried to write a motte post and accidentally wrote a book. Chapter one is here.
User ID: 3846
A billions of years-long fusion explosion is ripping through space: Shattering, scorching, bleaching, blasting, boiling, evaporating, annihilating all that it glances upon. Even so, certain special materials, in just the right conditions, and for just a little while, do something other than curl up and die: They catch that hateful radiation; they harness it, even sweep themselves up onto it as a man might upon a horse. Endless beautiful complexities emerge and what's at their pinnacle does indeed verge upon divinity.
I'm excited to show you this chapter. Not because of its form; if anything, it has been a humbling experience to write this as it has embarrassed many of my failings as a thinker and as a writer. It needs work and I'm not kidding when I keep telling you that I want advice. But I think the substance is here, and I'll rest easier tonight knowing that this picture is playing out in many minds beside my own, as I did on the night when I first showed you the Christmas tree.
Join me now; please see the world through my eyes, for a moment, as together we look again upon these peculiar things; these human beings, who dance beneath the killing Sun.
(Chapter one is here.)
0108 - The Mountain
Here is an island. It is shaped much like the sea-mount of the shellfish, or the island of the apes. A very small peak, some lush land in a ring below that, and then worse and worse territory as it broadens and flattens toward the sea. We can divide it up into a few sections; for now let’s call them Peak, Ring, Slopes, and Shoals.
Upon the Peak, as you might expect, sits the grandest palace, and within it a King. This is interesting to me because believe it or not the Peak is high up enough that it’s actually starting to get cold and unpleasant up there. Whoever sits upon that throne has a great deal to worry about, because everyone else wants the position and he must be extraordinarily-talented indeed to hold on to his shiny hat. In fact I think the Peak is such a peculiar place that it’s actually a mistake to make too big a deal of it at this point in our analysis. Put it this way: though it brings with it the highest status and incredible opportunity, it also invites so much trouble that, on balance, occupying the position is often not clearly a reproductive advantage at all. Played correctly it certainly can be, but… overall I think it’s best that on our mental diagrams of the island we should put a little asterisk next to the peak, and regard it more as an epiphenomenal spot which comes and goes, rather than a permanent and vital fixture.
Far, far more comfortable to be situated in the Ring, in which resides the island’s elites, or its nobility. These are generally descendants of the northerners who came and conquered this island. These people have it all. Wealth, security, preferential access to mates, and control of territory which as often as not can even be superior to that which is held by whoever happens to be momentarily perched upon the Peak. The nobles jockey with each other for status, and advantageous marriages, and fight for ever-larger slices of the Ring. But they have children, too, and those tend to divide up their slices, so the whole thing more or less maintains an equilibrium. And when the time is right, yes, nobles have a way of making plays for the Peak, but only if they calculate that this is reproductively advantageous over holding on to their already-lovely positions.
The Peak is the attractor for all the island’s competent men and beautiful women — that is, the Peak is where they are all pointed when attempting to move upslope — but the Ring is where most of the magic happens. Where brilliant and powerful men tend toward ending up, who then claim the most beautiful women for lovers if not necessarily for spouses. And boy do these people ever have babies, which is a problem for the same reason that it was for the shellfish.
Below the Ring we have the Upper Slopes. Here we find something like a professional class. These people are, or are related to, minor children of minor noble families and will not inherit any sort of titles but do still have a fair amount of wealth and connections. Of course, they also tend to have a lot of children, and so there is another level down, and another, until we get to the Lower Slopes.
The Lower Slopes are the last place that families can reasonably expect to be able to hold on more or less indefinitely, provided that in each generation they have at least one son who isn’t substantially less-capable than his father. But of course, the farm is already about as small as it can get while still supporting a household, so additional sons will have to go somewhere, and unless they’re clever enough to pull something else off, that place is…
The Shoals. Life is short, nasty, brutal, and anxious on the Shoals. You may picture vagabonds, wanderers, makeshift encampments outside of town. Recall that this planet is named after the eccentric tidal patterns caused by its many moons. Someone living on the Shoals may get by for quite a while, making a living scrounging in the discards of, and occasionally performing some service for, his betters, but everyone down here knows that at any moment a generational Tide might rise (or even a lesser one) and when it does they’ll be the first to go, whereas someone more highly-placed will be much better-positioned to survive.
There is a saying in Tidus: "One man in ten is as good as his father. One in a hundred is better." Put another way, almost all men can be described as having been cobbled together from the broken pieces of better men, cursed with a wistful sense that they are almost but not quite what they were supposed to be. This feeling is usually accurate. Different is generally worse.
How many of each generation end up on the Shoals? Well, for one, there’s a big difference here between men and women. Women have far more intrinsic worth, as they are capable of making babies for a man who cares enough to support them, and they also tend to be more agreeable and better at social — ahem, let's call them 'games' — so as to secure their place. For a woman to end up on the Shoals she must be some combination of particularly unattractive and unbearable, or at least old, whereas to avoid this fate a man must be able to beat a lot of competitors to secure territory on the Slopes, which is rather a taller order. So let’s say about 15-20% of women end up there.
The specific percentage of men of each generation who end up on the Shoals varies from island to island. On this island, being as it is comparatively prone to monogamy, it’s about 50-60%. If that seems high to you, consider that each spot of viable territory is basically always claimed, and so if the average successful man has two sons, on average at least one will be demoted. And if a man is blessed with several capable sons (by however many women), then they’ll be replacing some other guy’s kids who weren’t as good. Competition is fierce on the Slopes.
War can help for a little while, but the only real major exception is in boom times, which most times are not. Though you and I, Reader, have grown up in the most outrageously-extended boom in history, so our perceptions about such things are liable to be miscalibrated. In fact on some islands the proportion of men which ends up on the Shoals is closer to 94%, or sixteen out of every seventeen. An island like that is more likely to be running a polygynous culture where the best men get almost all the women. Then again, these islands are much more vulnerable to invasion by a society which has sexually enfranchised more of its men, and so harnessed their productivity and marital-martial potential, if you will.
It must be admitted that some individuals, for any number of reasons, seem to prefer life on the Shoals. The Shoals simply suit them. In many ways life there is easier and better-aligned with certain proclivities such as misanthropy, addiction, and laziness. Denizens of the Shoals also tend to be far less visually-attractive for reasons which should by now be obvious. Ugliness correlates with high mutation load, which correlates with degenerated genes, which correlates with broken capacities such as higher-order positive personality traits including self-control, planning for the future, and so on. It might seem improbable that the odds of all these things breaking randomly are quite slim, which is true. But the odds of something important breaking randomly in even one generation are actually plenty high. An optimally-aligned person is fairly difficult to generate; most children aren’t quite as aligned as their parents, and, after all, in the game of musical chairs that is life in Tidus, one must only be ever so slightly quicker than the next guy. Or to put it another way, as with the two hikers and the bear, terminal degeneration only means not quite being able to outpace one’s neighbour with his slightly-fleeter feet.
It is rare, but not unheard of, to find really good-looking people on the Shoals, except that they are sojourning there for a bit in their youths as some kind of countersignal, a misguided rebellion against their much higher-tier parents, for example. But at the first sign of rising tides these kids will find the way back up held open for them.
On the flip side, the higher up the mountain we look, the more likely we are to find specimens of humanity approaching the local ideal of perfection. They will after all have better access to low-mutation load mates, and (at least their forebears) got where they did by embodying a whole host of positive traits. Especially in martial cultures, which all the ones worth mentioning are, these go hand in hand with combat ability. So we end up with tall, handsome, well-built, competent princes, and gorgeous, slender princesses. These people are angling to be paragons of what nobility, indeed royalty, divinity, ought to be.
The ideal King is the perfect man and must be able to serve as a faultless icon of his People. In fact, on many such islands, no man has historically been allowed to ascend to the peak unless his body is whole, not having lost any limbs or digits, for example. He must be the very Image of the People in their wholeness. And no matter how good a ruler he might be, any physical defects will absolutely be held against him in the popular imagination of his subjects; the topic of critical drinking songs and injurious cartoon depictions, and so on. People resent a crippled king. Believe it or not on many, might we say, more primitive islands there is a custom that the would-be-king must strip naked in front of his nobles for their inspection at the coronation. I found this behaviour endlessly bewildering and colourful when I discovered it as a child, but there is in fact an extremely good reason for it as we shall see later in this chapter.
Regarding the merits of hereditary nobility there are of course many exceptions. Plenty of sons who inherited their father’s position but not his competence, or instead their mother's softness and vacuity; plenty of daughters who take too much after their father and end up built like moustachioed linebackers with jaws over which one might hammer iron. And Dad mostly wasn’t selected for his looks, anyway, so her eyes are too close together too and the brow above them has no part in it. Excessive inbreeding can also cause serious issues in successive generations. But, for the most part, one will find that the people near the top are taller with prettier faces and straighter backs and higher intelligence and lower time-preference and so on. These things are all attracted upward, and seek their level to their degree of admixture with the opposite. On balance, good traits correlate with good traits and bad traits correlate with bad traits, so it is inevitable that those in the upper reaches who do not conform as well to the ideal will find themselves and their progeny more swiftly on the downward trajectory which awaits us all. [I can't do this on the internet or maybe even in print but imagine a literal hole in the page right here, just letter-sized:] ꙮ
Given this we’d expect, on average, beautiful people at the top and progressively-less perfect copies of the nobility on the way down, right? Well, yes, but in fact it's a little more complicated in a way that's worth looking into as we pass by. You see, the strategies required to succeed in a position vary from level to level. A good lawyer or accountant may make for a terrible farmer, and vice versa. And so we see a sort of specialization happen. Suppose a candlemaker’s son has very little potential, whether for social or genetic reasons, to rise a level and attain a higher position. In this case, rather than producing children which emulate the nobility, it is more adaptive if the candlemaker and his wife produce children ideally suited to the level they’re at. He'll be best-able to retain his position in the next round of the game.
This gives rise to terms floating around in our language such as “middle-class values” or “peasant virtues”. Yes, they are passed on culturally, but also genetically. If the candlemaker has two sons and one is content with his place in the world, he will outcompete the brother who instead whiles away the days dreaming of being a knight. Ambition is not an asset unless it also happens to be paired with substantially-higher than average capabilities and a lucky window into social mobility, which it very rarely is. Besides which, the discontented son experiences the world as a chandler, not as a noble. His genetic phenomenology is tuned for that, not governance. Not that he’d do well to be too unconcerned about his level, either, of course, lest he fall. Yes, many such men do end up with misaligned instincts and spend their lives miserably waiting for a chance to ascend. As we shall soon see this is not a bug but a feature. (Incidentally, for reasons I'll get to in the next chapter, I think it was probably a lot fewer than a modern person like you or I would naïvely expect.) The point is that once again we see generations oscillating around an equilibrium, the optimal amount of ambition constantly shifting along with environmental (including social) conditions, and varying from level to level.
Except get this: Both of the children of that candlemaker stand a real chance to outcompete their betters’ fallen offspring who has happened to land at their same level. The disgraced scion will have his head full of all sorts of instincts useless or even injurious at his new rung, and possibly be lacking certain lower-class virtues which would allow him success — though such a man is typically at least charming, provided he can manage to overcome his vanity. So it is that we even see certain facial types developing and persisting on different levels, such that we can sometimes identify a person as lower-class at a glance, or be struck by a man’s inherent nobility. Such occurrences are commonplace also in Tidan fiction, as when an endangered infant prince is spirited away and raised by shepherds, only for the huntsman who comes upon him later to realize at once that this boy is no peasant. Is this on some level propaganda? Yes, most certainly. It also happens to be how almost everyone actually believes the world works because, in Tidus, it does!
With the shellfish, basically any specimen from the peak can descend as low down the slope as he cares to and casually outcompete whomever he finds there. But with people, hanger-on strategies are much more likely to develop below the Ring. A high-class child who finds himself separated and cut off from his family and protection is liable to get absolutely trounced by the rude lower-class boys who know nothing of softness and much of the vulgar law of the jungle. So with the flawed descendants of high-status families who find themselves trying to make a living at lower levels. It is not uncommon that as soon as their inheritances (if any) run dry they are so without the graces needed to succeed at those levels that they rapidly find themselves even lower and floundering even harder.
So different levels of society develop their own idiomatic cultures, from facial features to patterns of speech to forms and styles of art. It's the place of the nobility to develop their aesthetic sensibilities above all other classes, because the nobility will be in charge of making crucial societal decisions without access to nearly enough information to do so in anything like what we might call an informed manner. In such cases, they must rely instead upon deeply-internalized principles and values; they must dig deep in their culture’s myths and doctrine and art. The warrior-king who spends hours practicing calligraphy in his immaculate garden does not do so as a means of escapism, but rather that he might attune himself to his culture’s particularly-evolved graces, such that in the moment of action his heart and mind have been trained to execute the characteristic choice without having to deliberate. It is for a similar reason that certain Northeastern Tidan cultures count the practice of flower arrangement in with the other martial arts — the idea being that the aesthetic pathways forged in the soul of the warrior will unfold themselves on the field of battle in decisive moments when rational analysis is impossible. But that same art may not be suitable for the social inferior, who has his own decisions to make at his own level, and whose phenomenology is at any rate much more likely to have him interested in what is, yes, rightly called 'lower' art.
Now, we have up until this point been throwing words like ‘social’ and ‘society’ around fairly casually. It's time to define what they mean. Put simply, in a human context, a society is any group of males which bands together for reproductive advantage; that is, to move up-slope together or maintain a position once they have it. (‘Socii’ literally means ‘allies’.) From time to time you will see a group of men — pretty universally always men — doing something rad like teaming up to build and crew a ship and sail over the horizon to either perish or else find great fortune in some undiscovered country. Or, having already established themselves, invent some sort of guild to collude and fix prices or prevent new competition from arising. (Incidentally, even in later eras where women can also start businesses, it comes to pass that while women start about as many ‘businesses’ as men, these are almost always sole proprietorships ((“I’m a photographer! Buy this makeup!”)) whereas almost every business with more than one employee has been started by a man.)
Men do this because it is inherent in the nature of men that in order to secure the highest-possible value mates for themselves, or often any at all, they must compete against other men. As the apes can tell you, the best way to do that is as a team. There is no comparable dynamic among women, who don’t have much at all to gain by teaming up to somehow attract men and are much more apt to view each other as competition at all times. Women are, after all, rarely motivated to take big risks to secure mates and have even fewer credible opportunities to do so. Any woman who is of the right age and not especially grotesque is likely to have a line of suitors out the door from whom she or her father may take their pick. And if she’s not satisfied by those men’s quality, there is precious little she can do to make herself more attractive to a higher class of men, especially in an era where physical fitness is a given. All she can do is try to sabotage potential competitors.
And so we understand society to be a peculiarly masculine pursuit. To a first approximation women are not peers of their societies; rather they are literally the intended payout of societies. Though once secured, tamed, and aligned with the society, such that both fathers and mothers share an interest in the cultivation of children, women do become social fabric; that core of support which enables the men and their sons to strike out even farther and win yet bigger rewards including, not to put too fine a point on it, more women. So, we may say that women are parts of their societies, but not part of their societies. And we may observe that bands of robbers, pirates, and so on are only nascent societies unless they manage to make the jump to the common defense and maintenance of a flock of women and children. (How 'bout them Sabine girls?)
(Yes, words can have more than one meaning and ‘society’ can also be generalized so far as to include any group of people or, for that matter, animals who gather together to chatter, ostensibly about one or another topic in particular; I consider this to be a degenerate, non-central, and misleading case. And since this book is about nothing if not trying to show you what you've been staring at this whole time, we will not use the word except as I have said, for in this capacity it is a window which reveals much indeed.)
Now, I've been giving a general overview of how societies work, but let me reach way back to chapter one's ancient ocean to illustrate something vital and, I think, amazing. Once upon a time a cell failed to divide completely into two and something really, stupendously spectacular occurred: The cells, which might have competed with each other, instead teamed up to coöperate. Thus was multicellular life born. At first they sort of stuck to each other for mutual advantage, each perhaps ready and even able to split off and go its own way when the time was right, c.f. Siphonophoræ. But over generations some became more sophisticated about it and, here’s the part that really astonishes me, some cells even started leaving it up to other cells to reproduce for them.
Here’s a deal: Instead of reproducing, I want you to give up your gonads and become a hard piece of armour for me, such that things which want to eat me can’t, or at least only eat you instead. But don’t worry! When the time comes, I’ll make one of you in addition to one of me. Trust me. I mean, you won’t have any choice at that point, and I could just not do what I said or fail entirely, but — trust me.
And they bought it. I think we can agree that's pretty impressive sales work! They bought it because it succeeded so well that soon it was everywhere, in incredible profusion, with so many variants it can make your head spin. And it leads to some really cool downstream effects:
We have mostly been speaking of traits as though a person either has them or doesn’t. But genes are much more complex. People always carry traits which do not express in their generation but might be passed on to offspring. Some traits may lie dormant for generations but emerge given certain environmental inputs, e.g. malnutrition or abuse in childhood resulting in shorter time-preference and much higher aggressiveness as an adult. Also, alleles have a property known as ‘penetrance’ — perhaps a certain allele is always passed on preferentially to the young, but only manifests itself in ten percent of individuals who carry it. These can and do combine and express in unexpected places and times, creating a rich array of potential personalities. And so in a sense each Tidan carries within himself an entire library of people, of members of society, there for recombination in future generations — so long as the people around him have a roughly similar genetic makeup to his own. Sort of, but not entirely like, the way the dead skin cells you’re sloughing off also contain the instructions to make your lungs, or even your brain, not quite the same as anyone else's. And this is what we call race.
A man may not reproduce directly; may even give his life for the People, as a soldier or sheriff does, and be pretty sure that someone very much like him will live again; probably even many someones. Of course, this ceases to be the case as soon as his society becomes admixed with others who do not produce individuals such as himself, comparable to a body suddenly adulterated by cells or whole organs containing someone else's DNA — aside from eating or mating, bodies really do not like this and are prone to violent reaction — but that’s not the point here.
The point is that the grand society of the island, from the King right on down to the wretches on the Shoals, may be thought of as one more-or-less unified organism. No, that doesn't seem especially original at first brush and yes there are a thousand caveats. Forget all that. Let me set this up before you insist on knocking it down.
Children generally take after their parents, but can as we all know be so very different, with long-buried and newly-combined traits manifesting seemingly out of left field. The organism does not only produce those people with the best chance of personal reproduction, but also those which may be thought of as sacrifices for the reproductive benefit of the society. Fearless frontline fighters who don’t do well between wars but otherwise lead the charge against the enemy or into the frontier. Total dorks who couldn’t get a date to save their lives, and might not even be interested in girls in the first place, but who hole up in towers and figure out how the planets move. Whores-by-nature who embarrass their highborn families but make a bunch of beautiful, low-mutation-load children with some awesome genes before getting murdered in fits of passion by their rich but ugly jilted husbands. I'm not describing individuals, here, I'm describing archetypes. Social organisms which turn out some percentage like these will outcompete those which do not, just like life in the ancient ocean figured out it’s better for some cells to specialize and serve the whole.
Let’s take it from the top. As I’ve mentioned previously the King is a special case for many reasons and we’ll get to him in due time, over and over again in fact, because much more is going on with that guy than you might think. But for now let’s look again at what the nobility, the people of the Ring, represent in the organism. The Ring is the fruiting body, the gonads, the reproductive organ from which all else springs. If you took a bunch of peasants and put them on a fresh island they might become their own thing but they would not reproduce the nobility, not least because they are more-wholly descended from the conquered original inhabitants of their home island rather than the race of kings. But the opposite is not nearly as true. The Ring generates new people, and these precipitate down the slopes and take their places as obligate members of the Body, specializing into the organs and vessels necessary to support the nobility and keep it reproducing. Such are the people of the Slopes, and even the Shoals, though these latter might instead be conceived of as keratinous hair or (as I'll soon explain) claws.
We can see this in our language. When we speak of the 'flower' of a nation falling at a battlefield, it is understood that we're referring to the newly-unfurled generation of the elite. We called the system a Christmas tree for its conical and illuminative properties, but this tree does actually bear fruit, and here is where the best of it lies. Generation upon generation, cascading. Trees and apples and orchards. Male and female.
And the nobility does reproduce the organism. Not just locally, but also carrying it to new islands. When the nobility of one island goes to war with that of another, they don’t for the most part directly replace the people of its Slopes, but they do replace the people of its Ring. Their second sons and cadet branches take over the estates and responsibilities of the vanquished, and over time the societal genes, both literal and figurative, trickle down and replace those which had been below. Once some socio-genetic vertical integration has cemented itself, men of the Shoals tend to be on board with joining in such ventures, since this will give them opportunity to make a place for themselves (by force) on some other soil, with some other women, but not only because of that! Even if they do not come out of this with a farm and a wife, it is still, by a subtle and circuitous route, their best chance of reproduction — for if the Ring of their society installs itself on a new island, men such as themselves will trickle down and live again.
A society not so organized is easily consumed by one which is, and so we find all sorts of fascinating and opaque behaviors of our ancestors suddenly making perfect sense.
The general terror behind class relations is that of one’s children not having a path to the next level up, such that they must surely perish in a few more time-steps, and this feels worse and worse the farther genetically removed are one’s superiors. People really do not like it when foreigners show up and occupy positions of high status in their society, because this is only distinct from losing a war in that actual lives and infrastructure have not been destroyed. But even those lives and infrastructure are only truly concerning in the short term. In the long run, unless you can organize to get the upper hand before you’re replaced, it’s curtains for you and yours. Your children’s children will be kindling pathetic twig-fires down on the Shoals while aliens cavort and caper about the Ring of the island which used to belong to your people.
The primary mechanism by which the elite coöpt the base is by assuring them (cynically or otherwise) that, if submission is tendered, the little people’s children will have the opportunity to advance up slope, or at least maintain their current position. It parallels the multicellular organism’s promise that when the time comes we will all be resurrected together. This hope is less likely to be extended by foreign invaders, and if it is, even less likely than that to be believed, which can make for real trouble.
Great emperors and generals have been said to have what is called the ‘common touch’. This is the specific capacity to assure those beneath that each is of the same kind, the same organism. “I am like you, we are the same thing, and though you may well die in my service, in my triumph you shall also live again.” And men will drop what they’re doing, maybe even leave their farms and families behind, to line up and take this bargain. They’ll do this even if they’ve only heard rumours that the leader is that way and never seen him in person. Because this turns out to be one of the highest male imperatives of all, and a better bet than standing by and letting one’s elite be replaced by foreigners, one’s sons deposited haplessly on the Shoals, one’s daughters made belly slaves for men whose manner and appearance occur to one as bizarre bordering on monstrous. In this phase of history the good men of Tidus' slopes are only too glad to serve, and even die for, their betters, giving rise to blossoms of loyalty, chivalry, and gallantry.
For a while now, in service of greater integration and enfranchisement, the fire-worshiping religion of the Nobles has been dying out and becoming replaced by a more generally-accessible civic religion. Shared gods of the city, of the island, of everyday life, worshiped by all for the benefit of the organism. (Anyone who does not share in this collective worship is naturally viewed with great suspicion and being charged with 'atheism' is no laughing matter.)
Humans hunger to be allowed to thrive at their appropriate level — that is, to be part of a body. A man is happy inasmuch as he understands himself to be a representative member of an organism, that is, a society, which has solid reproductive potential. He does not even have to reproduce himself, personally, to participate in this; in which case any number of societal honours will typically be awarded. But inasmuch as a man does not have this sense of belonging he must be unhappy. An otherwise-sterile cell may be quite content executing its cellular function in the body of an aligned organism which will reproduce it, but not in the stomach of an alien.
Here we come to the much-sneered-at propensity of the lower classes to engage in celebrity-fixation. The little guy is often completely at the mercy of those above him to determine his society’s direction and whether the whole enterprise sinks or swims. It’s a terrifying prospect and he understandably wants to know exactly how on board he should be. So he watches the highly placed with keenly-developed eyes. He wants to know every little thing about them. What sort of men they are; what sort of virtues they embody. Because he knows that as they go, so goes the future of the People.
Are the leaders good men, worthy of support? Will they generate good people like me? Or are they wicked and corrupt and consorting with foreigners, intent on replacing people like us with much less-deserving inferior versions? Exactly how much skin do we have in the game, here?
In this respect no figure can so capture the popular imagination as the King. In the grand scheme of things he may not actually be nearly as important as, say, the top two or three nobles, but our psyches do not get hammered for aeons into caring more about someone the higher up they are without becoming especially fixated on the guy at the top. This is why we have the term ‘figurehead’. Regardless of how much power the monarch might actually wield, it is vital that the people have a King to whom they can look and breathe a sigh of relief that, yes, here at least is a man I can get behind, a true-blood heir of the heroic founders of our society.
Of course, it doesn’t always work out this way. People want their leaders to be virtuous at every level, and will even serve evil men if those higher still seem good enough, but only to a point. And when men lose faith in their ostensible betters, the rules are simple: Those lower on the slope will band together and take up arms to try to muscle their way higher. The men above will resist this to the death. Those higher-up have the high-ground advantage in terms of better equipment and resources. For example, despite being outnumbered they can usually pay other slope-dwellers, perhaps from neighbouring islands, to fight and die for them.
These higher-up men also ought to be smarter, stronger, more capable, better organized, and so on, and often spend an unseemly amount of time reassuring each other that they are, but if there’s pressure from below it’s typically because rot has set in and the guys higher up have been getting fat, lazy, drunk, and generally abdicated their responsibilities. That is, they've gone temperate. In such cases they can actually collapse faster than anyone would have believed beforehand, and are swiftly replaced by the more-deserving men from below, who after all carry any amount of noble genetics which have trickled down over time even as they're still under selection pressures less often experienced by gentlemen.
The higher classes know this. On the one hand, their children will have enough competition from each other without letting lower-class kids get a leg up, and they’ll generally most fiercely guard the access to elite status, such as political offices and admittance to prestigious educational institutions. On the other hand, it is healthiest for the society, and often even for the elite themselves, to give such ambitious up-and-comers a path to climb and so benefit all rather than blowing a gasket. A relief valve, if you will. Societies which have such mechanisms built in tend to outlast those which do not.
Such systems arise naturally anyway because the thing about being military aristocracy is that war is hazardous! And so, in situations where demand for nobility exceeds recently-diminished supply, the finest men of the Upper Slopes, who as we have already noted are quite naturally heavily-laced with noble genetics, may find themselves swept up into the peerage. (In the next chapter we'll see what happens to a society when this phenomenon occurs at an even larger scale.)
As for the King himself, it is obviously a rare man who can marshal such powerful and haughty peers as the nobles to follow him in the first place. This may be compared to the most successful of CEOs. In the company of such men, one must be built just right to rise to the top, and it is unlikely that the sons of this man will happen to be so fortunate, though often they are at least good-enough to hold on to the reins of the societal beast their forebear has saddled. They do carry much of his genetic code, even if not necessarily expressed, and will at any rate be mating with the best of the noble daughters. So, the genetic character of a Founding King will shortly be lost in the interbreeding with his noble peers, but those traits will generally accumulate among the Ring, which will in turn produce such men ever more often and raise its own contenders when the sitting King grows soft.
The Ring glows brighter and brighter, the whole mountain pointed toward some hypothetical perfect man, and a succession of societally-collaboratively-generated images of that man takes its place upon the stage of the Peak.
The general mechanism of keeping a societal organism fit is the war of King against King, or at least Ring against Ring. The best fight it out amongst themselves and reap the greatest rewards, while all else sloughs away over generations. The lower classes are generally sort of dregs and less competent, and must be organized by their betters in the war of betters against betters. But lower individuals retain glimmers of value; shards of quality. A superior culture shapes these people to maximize these things. A lower-tier man may still be virtuous! Due to the particulars of his social stratum he may even be under pressure to evolve virtues which are not yet present in his betters, but which may rise to the top as such things are wont to do, at least in societies built to allow this to happen. And then these rain back down over everyone else, resulting in ever-better people living in an ever-better society.
Such a society has every incentive to think in the long term because war is the ultimate adversarial test of societal fitness. The sort of People which is the type to have figured out that it should plant trees now because it’ll need masts for warships in three generations will generally triumph over the sort which is not.
Therefore it is not good for the organism to grow too fat, nor too unpressured by armed conflict. But on this island, and in the rest of its greater island chain, society eventually becomes so incredibly amazing at what it does, and the people of its Slopes so unprecedentedly virtuous, that this is precisely what happens. Even more troubling, the way in which they pull it off leaves them in such a position that they're mostly-unable to make sense of what has gone wrong — or the very real danger in which they today find themselves. (In the grass there lies a tiger. Some can see the colour orange; others, like the deer that they are, cannot.) This will be the topic of the next chapter.
That was a long one! Here's a short chaser.
The above was pretty entirely about men, even if for entirely-justifiable reasons. So I'd like to give a brief treatment to women.
We talked about what causes a man to be happy or unhappy with his society. Women work differently, but not so differently. A woman is basically content if she feels that she is in the care of a strong society which will protect her from indignities and in which she can expect her children to have a solid chance. If the women feel that their keepers are undeserving they will become usurpatious in a thousand and one plausibly-deniable ways in the hopes that some more-competent group of men comes along and takes over. The main difference with men is that we tend to be more direct about it.
Another substantial difference which jumps out at me is the differing intentions and methods of male versus female bullying.
For boys the goal of bullying is to polarize potential socii, allies, into either manning up and becoming reliable team members or else dropping out of the group (fatally if necessary) so as not to hold everyone else back. It can, actually, be a loving and constructive activity, even if arguably necessarily cruel, since male coalitions tend to succeed or perish as a unit. But the preferred outcome is generally a capable new friend and ally. A strong man is secure in his strength; he wishes to make those around him strong so that they can work together.
With girls, on the other hand, the two goals of bullying are to, 1), so fully destroy a potential competitor’s self-confidence that she makes no attempt to compete for the bully’s desired mate, and 2) establish the bully as the alpha-female such that others know better than to cross her for the attentions of her intended without any further effort being necessary. Better, after all, to prevent such attempts rather than trying to stop them once they're already underway.
One word; two very different phenomena. Though males can engage in bullying for feminine purposes as well and this will generally be recognized as ugly and womanish — not the sign of a real man.
Next week: Chapter 09: Beautiful Lie
Chapter one is here.
So this chapter turns out to be one of my surprise favourites. Here we're going to jump entirely off the mainline tracks of culture warring and come at things from a nearly-, and I daresay undeservedly-extinct perspective which I think ought to enjoy itself another day in the sun.
By the way, comments have been far less constructive than I'd hoped. Sneering remains permitted (and perennially popular) but, if you will, I'd like to offer instead a challenge: Take any piece of this and show me how to replace it with something more illuminative in the same number of words, or fewer. And if that doesn't work, at least show me a way to say things more beautifully. We do not, after all, live in Tidus, and I prefer to believe that beauty has its own justifications. This goes for the whole project and is, as I understand it, rather the purpose of this site in the first place.
Also, one of my dependents took a hatchet to this chapter when I left a screen open earlier today and some hasty reconstruction was required. In keeping with the above, please consider this a general invitation to critique structure and form, and if any splinters should have missed my smoothing hands please do be so kind as to point them out to me. The use of red markers and expletives is hereby approved.
Finally, if you're lurking and enjoying The Mountain, please consider making an account to drop me a line in private. Some people's minds are fastened tight against these patterns, and I don't expect to alter them even by tapping directly upon the knot (in forthcoming chapter 9 but a little bit in this one as well); but I know the rest of you are out there. I know this because a happy intercourse has already sprung up with a few readers who have both eyes to see and ears to hear and thought to tell me so directly. When I'm done posting here I'll probably put together a substack or something and we can all hang out in a discord somewhere and have some truly excellent conversations.
Oh — and I can't recall whether it's @self_made_human or @Primaprimaprima but at least one of you should enjoy this chapter immensely. Bon appétit to whichever of you; or both. <3
0107 - The Race of Kings
When we spoke of shellfish it was easy to think in terms of 'superior' and 'inferior'. The ones near the peak are stronger and more beautiful. When it comes to apes, we can add 'smarter' and 'better-coördinated' to that list. We spoke in terms of each species undergoing processing by the horrific engine which, despite the many miseries it causes, also results in more-'perfect' specimens.
At this point in our story, humanity and a few of its close cousins have spread out across the primary archipelago of Tidus, occupying islands which range from the arctic to the tropical, the arid to the humid, the barren to the fertile. Some of these are very near to each other and the peoples there are in regular close contact, their genetics and cultures blurring into each other over time. Others of these island groups are separated by wide expanses of ocean, leaving different branches of ape-descendants free to develop in relative isolation.
Humans (and their cousins) mainly pursue three distinct lifestyles. The first is little-changed from the way the hairless killer apes lived, though semi-permanent villages are popular. These are the hunter-gatherers, who sometimes manage to stay in one place for long periods of time but are always fairly open to picking up and moving along as seasonal cycles alter the availability of their forage and prey. This way of life suits them well but is fairly limited in terms of how many people it can support.
Some of the hunter-gatherers notice that not only do useful plants seem to grow in the same places every year, but also that they can facilitate the process, and pretty soon they become agriculturists. These are the second kind. Permanent settlements and food storage become key to their way of life. If their diet is not nearly as varied and nutritious as it used to be — they tend to grow up shorter, weaker, sicklier, and almost certainly less-intelligent — at least calories are less of a problem, and much larger, more-stable populations become possible. They still hunt for incidental meat now and again, and many do cultivate animals, but the average man has greatly-reduced access to it.
The third and final lifestyle into which humans specialize best suits islands upon which agriculture is limited by environmental factors. These ones become pastoralists, adept at herding and breeding animals such as sheep and goats. They are obligate nomads for the simple reason that their herds must regularly move to fresh grazing territory.
Agriculturist societies tend to be inwardly-focused, as their path to growth generally lies in the development and effective management of territory they already hold. Pastoralist societies tend to be outwardly-focused, as they're always on the lookout for new pasture for their growing herds (and the multiple sons who will soon need territories of their own) and so skirmish with each other constantly. Grazing lands don't need to be developed; they simply need to be cleared of their current inhabitants, typically other pastoralists. The hunter-gatherers, meanwhile, mainly try to stay out of the way of the other two, retreating to ever-less-desirable regions in the face of the more populous, better-coördinated farmers and the hungry, warlike herders.
Before long the demi-human cousins, only ever suited to hunter-gatherer life, are displaced entirely, leaving only H. sapiens standing, though in many cases temporary cross-breeding has meant that a lot of those extra-human genetics have been incorporated into certain specific human populations and not others; this is fascinating but I won't harp on it except to acknowledge that humans can apparently mate with lots of strange creatures and get viable offspring which, one can't help but note, does undermine the category somewhat...
But even among the humans there is a tremendous amount of variation, physically, behaviourally, and phenomenologically. Needless to say these different conditions and ways of life bring about substantial psychological changes among the different kinds. The herders look down upon the settled farmers as small, weak, and cowardly, subsisting on porridge and having lost the instinct to fight. The farmers regard the herders as terrifying brigands, almost a force of nature, prone to sweeping in at any time, taking the accumulated fruit of the farmers' labour (and any pretty girls), and burning the rest.
Neither the farmers nor the herders think much of the hunter-gatherers, who are generally so few and so poorly-coördinated that they fade into the background of history; their only defense is to recede into territory that no one else is going to bother with. The farmers and herders leave them there, as we shall too in our narrative, even if some of them do persist to this day in obscure corners of Tidus and perhaps even in the margins of this book.
This leaves the herders and the farmers. Their relationship recalls that of predator and prey, or even plant and animal. Quite literally, if only generally, carnivores and herbivores. These kinds are in an arms race with each other as the farmers seek to safeguard their own existence — once the idea of walls is invented it rapidly becomes enormously popular — while the herders are hard at work figuring out ways to crack those eggs and get at the juicy fruit within. Put another way, one kind specializes into collective productivity and defense, while the other specializes in martial excellence and offense. One favours the slow, safe, relatively-stable path, while the other takes great risks in pursuit of great rewards. Male and female, if you will.
The two do eventually become united, however, creating the thing we call 'civilization', and here is how it happens.
Far in the cold, arid north of Tidus, in an island chain where the climate makes agriculture difficult, a tribe of men arises along the usual pastoralist lines. Countless generations of development in this setting, in constant competition with others like them, has forged them into something special. They are consummate warriors, prizing honor and courage above all else. They call themselves, in their own language, the 'Kings' or the 'Nobles'. They're tall and strong and beautiful, of course. They're also, to be blunt, simply more mentally-acute; more prone to the trait we now call 'openness to experience.' Rather than sort of passively existing, they notice new patterns and start to put all sorts of pieces together.
These are the first to tame and ride horses, including into battle. They are the first to invent the wheel. They invent chariots for combat and wagons for hauling goods and families with them as they roam. And, perhaps most importantly for our purposes, they also invent the first boats capable of more than minor inter-island hops. Instead of sending a few warriors in canoes, these people can travel long distances and show up overnight with huge warbands, horses, chariots, stores of weapons, food, supplies, and their women and children too, practically without warning.
Breeding horses turns out to have a beneficial upshot: the patriarchs responsible for such things notice that traits are passed on from generation to generation and they even work out some of the rules. In a hitherto-unprecedented leap of intuition and self-reflection, they realize that people work the same way. They begin selecting mates carefully and prizing the bloodline traits of their ancestors.
Indeed, from here on out, the Nobility's preöccupation with pedigree will come off as borderline-obsessive to ignorant commoners, who scoff at such apparent pretentiousness even as they couple randomly in the gutter. The Nobles can tell that there are major phenomenological differences between them and the conquered. For this reason royalty is also prone to inbreeding to a degree which often occurs to moderns as unseemly: they realize that such precious things might be lost by admixture. (Incidentally, if you've ever wondered why the breeding and racing of horses is 'the sport of kings', well, now you know. And judicious inbreeding yet remains a commonly-deployed tactic in that domain.)
This gives us a good vantage point from which to briefly survey the Nobles' unique religion. Each family has a 'sacred fire' in its hearth, an ancestral flame passed on from father to eldest son, tended carefully lest it go out. When it does there are special rituals by which it might be reïgnited, which call upon one's forefathers to participate. Maintaining the flame is but one part of a man's duty to perpetuate the spirit of his male ancestors, as is having a son who might one day take up the mantle in turn. Women in this society leave off worshiping the fire of their father and are instead inducted into worship of the fire of their husband. In a symbolic sense the fire is the family, is the male line itself. (And when you read about ancient peoples' obsession with 'the hearth', you'll see now that it was much more to them than the place where they happened to cook their food.)
So you will understand the aptness of the simile when I say that the next thing to happen is that these people sweep the world as a wildfire. An eldest son might inherit his father's herds and grazing rights, but his younger brother must carve out a place for himself; kindle a new flame. Excepting the sudden death of the firstborn the only way he's going to manage this is by banding together with a whole lot of other second sons and striking out into the world to find land and wives.
When the Nobles encounter agriculturists they only notionally recognize them as belonging to the same category of being as themselves; as 'people'. It's not hard to see why. We've already covered how the farmers are smaller, weaker, and generally slower; lacking in martial excellence; and have mainly lost any sort of spirit of valour or the impulse to conquer — the very attributes which the Nobles would recognize as virtue (lit. 'manliness'). A Noble would sooner die in battle or take his own life than live in servitude to another man, his dignity and reproductive potential curtailed in exchange for the 'privilege' of continued existence.
Yet, when the Nobles take an agriculturist area by force and kill or drive off whoever was in charge before, the conquered population generally just goes along with it. (The lioness yawns.) And at any rate the agriculturists lack the strength, intelligence, skill, or inclination to do much about it, excepting in cases of the most intolerable abuse; though even those generally have more to do with the spectre of starvation than anything involving dignity. So here again we see an icon of male and female: the conquered people lose some liberty, yes; but they weren't as phenomenologically interested in that in the first place, and indeed they sleep a lot better with Nobles on top of them to fend off other invading males. The next generation, also, is likely to have some of the best of both 'parents' — more on that in a moment.
One thing which may surprise the modern reader is that the Nobles are not universalist with their culture and customs. Which is to say that, once they become élites in an area, they're unconcerned about whether the subjugated aboriginals practice their same religion, or tell their same stories, or even speak their same language (except to interact with superiors). They understand themselves as fundamentally different, and these things as being right for them. Why should a field labourer have a sacred fire in his hearth? He is not descended from the race of kings. And when Nobles develop writing and philosophy, they've no expectation that these things will be common in the population, due to the Nobles' entirely-correct assumption that most of the proletariat won't even possess the required mental capacities! They even develop separate legal codes such that, for example, it's legal for a Noble to strike or kill a prole, but never the other way around.
The Nobles have a real passion for hunting. Today, when this is mentioned at all, it tends to be framed as something to do with preserving martial virtue, or conspicuous consumption, or status games involving the commoners who after all are not allowed to participate, with the best game reserved for the tables of the rich — and, yes, all of that is true. The Nobles really do eat a lot more meat than anyone else. But all these things are beside the actual point, which is that the Nobles understand hunting as a sort of sacrament. It is a symbolic exercise of their perceived place in creation. Like the eagle, or falcon, which rises above all life below and chooses which to take and which to spare, the Nobles understand themselves as husbands, arbiters of those beneath. They kill; they cultivate; they tend; all from a position of not just unquestionable but morally-evident superiority. Those who exist below them in the great chain of being are reliant, after all, upon such predation for their own good. And so Nobles are also prone to taking such apex predators for their personal, and corporate, heraldic devices.
(Indulge me in another sidebar here; as usual I simply can't help my own fascination. Nobles consider themselves to be above the nitty-gritty details of labour and support. As descendants of warrior-aristocracy, they're never short on subjugated labour to do the little things for them. In time they'll refer to themselves as 'gentle', by which they mean they are free from having to get their own hands dirty with such indignities. And even to this day, 'gentlemen' are prone to hunting sports: preserving, across so many generations, this connection to their roots; this psychological window into their societal rôle. I should appreciate it if when you hear the word 'gentleman' you would glimpse, if only for a moment, the ancestral horse-nomad sitting atop a pile of skulls in his recently-bloodstained keep, walls being scrubbed by fresh slaves and concubines.)
From island to island, chain to chain, this race comes, conquers, establishes itself at the top of the social hierarchy, and sends many of its own sons to go forth and do the same. And, while women of the Noble race are of course most highly prized as wives, plenty of admixture does occur. It's not uncommon for lesser sons to take as wives the most beautiful women of the conquered territory; often they even marry the now-available wife of the prior ruler. As we know, such a woman functionally is a storehouse of the very best genetics of her own people.
In short, synthesis occurs! Over time, the lines between ruler and ruled blur in the middle as the Noble genetics of the rulers trickle down into the general population and the best examples of the conquered people find their way higher in society. The universal habit of high-status men to have their way with lower-status women only accelerates this process. And in the long run even households of the lowest status are served by inheriting some genetic components of their betters.
New peoples are forged. Their elites are mostly-genetically Noble and have much in common with each other; their proletariats are mostly-genetically aboriginal and vary a lot from place to place except that they are generally pretty dim. This never changes much for the simple reason that the traits required to survive as such an elite — mainly, ruling and organizing one's population to defend against, or conquer, the domains of other elites — have more to do with the cognitive and phenomenological adaptations of the Nobles than of labourers. But genes do transfer from one set to the other, up and down, and in time the ruling classes of various islands may come to understand themselves as more united with their land and people than with their far-flung Noble kin. Given how broad an area the the Nobles conquer, how geographically-separated they become, and how many generations go by, the Noble-descendants become much less recognizable to each other.
As an aside, the Nobles don't conquer nearly the whole world. Far enough to the east as to make travel or commerce impractical, a similar story is playing out with the herders and farmers of that region; here the farmers become experts at incorporating the incoming waves of Nobles without losing as much of their own identity. And, to the south, the ancestral vale of humanity turns out to be so geographically-isolated that it will also mostly be left alone for a very long time in what can rightly be called tepid instagnation. For that matter, on the other side of the world is a whole great archipelago inhabited by its own peculiar peoples, entirely cut off from the rest for most intents and purposes; but the Nobles do end up in possession of a great swathe of the planet's islands, and when their descendants manage to solve the problem of getting to those other places, they will find no real competition. We'll get there soon.
International politics takes a new shape within the geographical area conquered by the main body of the Nobles. Each area has an elite class of nobility which exists upon a much larger body of aboriginal labourers. These rulers recognize the rulers of other nations as nobility but do not consider themselves kin unless literal marriage pacts are made, which often happens such that alliances are forged against other elites. The elites have two main problems. One is that they need to keep their subject peoples docile enough to not cause trouble internally. The other is that they need to maintain their own martial virtues in order to compete with the elites of other polities and the still-wild Noble cousins who have a way of showing up on the border from time to time.
Militaries, then, are typically built about of a core of elite warriors, raised from birth to embody the excellence of their ancestral martial tradition and make use of any modern innovations. However, quantity has a quality all its own, and in some eras the winning strategy is to arm and equip as many common soldiers as possible without sowing the seeds of one's own downfall. It's no surprise that commoners are, as a rule, led by noblemen. Besides Nobles being better-suited to it for both genetic and educational reasons, letting armed aboriginals lead themselves is obviously not such an attractive idea. (Later on this will very gradually evolve into the modern distinction between officers and enlisted men.)
When two peoples meet one must always be subjugated by the other. Trade is possible only so long as each side imagines that it is gaining more by detente than it would by war; that is, that the trade balance benefits it more than its economic competitor. If a polity trades with its neighbour and this makes the neighbour substantially stronger, it can only be a matter of time before said now-stronger neighbour is looking for territory and wives for its extra sons and transitions to a war footing. Therefore, a nation finding itself in such a position is ever well-advised to make military alliances against its future competitor before it becomes capable of striking first. The only historically-attestable partial exception is when two peoples manage to unite long term against a common enemy, though even here one almost always ends up dominating the other economically, socially, and genetically.
So far so good. A huge portion of the surface of Tidus is now occupied by combined polities consisting of Nobles on top, focusing on martial excellence and intellectual pursuits, and an aboriginal proletariat on the bottom, focusing on labour ('civilization'). Such systems are mostly internally stable, but face threats from without. Not only from the expansive elite classes of other polities, but also from that same genetic pool of herders which remains out there, beyond the frontier, developing yet more powerful strains of human and occasionally disgorging enormous warbands of horsemen armed to the teeth, looking for a comparatively-feminine nation to conquer and call their own.
We have noted before how the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, but it does usually fall a little bit downhill: Without the selection pressure of nomadic, perpetually-violent pastoralist life, the elite classes of these polities degrade exactly as would be expected given a much more secure, luxurious existence. Defensive forces of Noble-descendants who have grown up surrounded by silks and banquets find themselves facing off against hordes of hard men who grew up sleeping outside and hunting from horseback from childhood. Sometimes the advantages of agriculturally-based civilization are enough to offset such disparities — some of those walls get really, really big! — and then again it must be admitted that sometimes they are not.
Over and over, then, we see the following pattern: An agriculturally-based society with Nobles at its head establishes itself in a fertile, temperate area. The nobility makes all sorts of intellectual and technological progress, but by degrees loses many of the virtues which made its initial conquest possible; aboriginal admixture is also a factor here. And then invaders sweep in from the Nobles' far-ancestral homeland and absolutely wipe the floor with the incumbents, installing themselves as the new ruling class of the area. These northerners push into warm lands as though a demon were lashing at their backs, which often is indeed the case — the next tribe of northerners, from even farther north, even stronger and better put-together.
Just like when we watched the genetics cascading down the Christmas tree, we can now imagine the Nobles' ancestral homeland as a sort of planetary pole from which pulses emanate and wash over much of the surface of the globe. This process iterates across millennia and innumerable generations. It results in a world much like our own was up until fairly recently.
In the coming chapter we'll zoom in on a typical Tidan society of that era to see how it operates in practice, and also discover our first clues as to how all of this — the understanding of this entire system of the world, which was once so commonplace as to not bear mentioning — has become all but lost, such that most modern people struggle to wrap their heads around it even when it's explained directly to them. Indeed; how it has come to pass that they've developed a practical cognitive blind spot about the matter.
Hey, let's take a quick minute to talk about peacocks. Male peacocks are best known for their large, iridescent, geometrically-patterned plumes.
On the surface this might seem kind of crazy. Those tails are very heavy, and demand a lot of resource investment, and are generally as a stone around the neck of these jungle fowl who after all must be able to whisk about hither and yon and escape from predators. But it is precisely for this reason that peahens find them so attractive! The peacock's plumes are a signal to the ladies that, look, I am so otherwise-fit that I can even afford to do something this ridiculous and impressive and get away with it.
This is a common pattern across many species, with males putting enormous amounts of time, effort, and energy into elaborate displays which tell the females exactly whose sperm they should accept. Once everyone is fit enough to merely survive, the competition, and fitness, becomes instead about comparative status. Any male heard grumbling about how absurd and pointless the whole dynamic is will rightly be recognized as a loser who can’t compete. The only thing less-attractive than failing, is failing and then complaining about the system.
Of course, there is such a thing as too big a plume, even for a peacock, but in a prolonged boom time there might actually be so much slack that the plumes grow larger than is long-term sustainable: When the limits snap back to normal, it may paradoxically only be the smaller, ‘uglier’ males who are so unencumbered as to be able to survive, provided that any can at all. Species do, after all, go extinct all the time, and believe it or not this is one way that it happens!
There can even be a sort of death-spiral effect toward the end: The worse the situation gets, the stronger a signal is being sent by maintaining or even doubling down on the practice. Ever more outsized rewards until it's far too late and the axe is well and truly laid at the roots of the tree.
Humans also peacock, obviously. Some of the ways they do it are apparent, such as conspicuous consumption of expensive luxuries. But there are quieter ways to do it, too. We'll get to that soon.
Next week: Chapter 08: The Mountain
Chapter one is here.
Usual disclaimer: This is a toy model. I also think that, at this resolution, it resolves to a true one. Far too much is elided but this is the only way to get anywhere. Enjoy! And please feel welcome to complain if you feel so moved. I've been wanting to talk about this for a long time.
0106 - Thousand Flowers
Every island on Tidus is built along the same lines: A high peak with the best territory, slopes where life is still not so bad, and broad, tapering low zones scoured by the occasional murderous generational tide. But apart from that each island is different in its own ways, as we saw with the islands of the lizards a few chapters ago. This results in differences among their inhabitants, even given a common ancestor. So let’s begin with a thought experiment about otherwise-identical humans who ended up on two very different islands. The first island is equatorial, while the other lies far to the north, near Tidus' Arctic circle.
On the equatorial island, coconuts provide clean water and calories at an incredibly-prodigious rate, there are always plenty of fish in the lagoon, and tubers grow profusely wherever they are planted in the rich volcanic soil. From time to time wild game turns up too. These people never need to develop much of a concept of food storage or working beyond the bare minimum. Planning for the future is not a major concern. Any time they feel like not doing anything, they can pretty much get away with that. What excess they have is quickly shared out to kin, which makes sense anyway as given the heat and humidity it will swiftly rot. Nor do they typically have novel problems to solve. To the degree that anybody here does more than is necessary, it’s because some alpha male with a monopoly on violence has made it clear that their family will serve him by crafting twenty spears by the next full moon, or else as spear-testing dummies. If conditions ever get dire enough, say via overpopulation, there’s another island much like this one not so far away, and the men with the most to gain will paddle over there and settle the matter with the men of that island as they have ever done.
The island far to the north almost could not be more different. Here the growing season is relatively short and the soil poor. Islanders must work as hard as they can while they can to produce much more food than they immediately need and store it up for the winter. Nor do they get to rest in the winter! That time is for producing tools and, God willing, trade goods; that they might hopefully get enough of an edge in the next warm-time to survive the next cold. They are constantly being winnowed for the cognitive capacity to plan for the future and solve complex and difficult new problems. They form tight social bonds and develop all sorts of advanced, higher-order prosocial behaviours. They absolutely count on each other to survive, and have been strongly selected to do the right thing even when no one is watching (say while separated for half the year by heavy snows), because the margins of survival are so thin. Such people cannot believe, in their heart of hearts, that an idea like ‘the bare minimum’ can be anything but a fatal misunderstanding of how the world works: It is not how the world works where they come from, and this truth is riven deep into their instincts.
It’s not hard to see that people developing in such different environments are rapidly going to end up looking different, and behaving differently, and even perceiving the world differently.
The peoples who arise on each of the endless isles of Tidus blossom into a myriad of unique forms. Just like special little quirks about a person, the way he smiles, the way her eyes sparkle, that weird laugh, and so on. Some are dark, or fair; tall, or short; stocky, or gracile. Their hair is different not only in colour but in texture. Their teeth are different shapes and sizes and so are their skulls. Even their earwax is different (dry vs wet) and you can draw lines on a map where one sort ends and the other begins. They smell different. They have resistance to different diseases, and that time a plague wiped out 94% of a population, the allele responsible for saving the rest probably has other effects that basically everyone in that population shares now — a sort of founder effect.
They speak different languages, of course, and their brains are genetically-wired to support those different language types, even when their parents have moved to a new area and speak something else entirely. An ancestral language is likely to be easier to learn, even when they're smart enough to acquire an entirely foreign one. And from all of this we can deduce that their internal experiences are different too.
I do not call this a good thing or a bad one; I only say that it is so. Still it has to be recognized that after hundreds or even thousands of generations of divergence, among the peoples of different island chains, there are relatively enormous average differences in complex traits such as:
- cognitive ability
- impulse control
- sexual promiscuity
- parental investment
- inclination to plan for the future
- propensity to honesty (or conversely to bribery and corruption)
- perceived importance of blood ties
- general industriousness
- even favoured colours and proportions and aesthetics in art and music
...To name but a few of the most obvious and salient ones. Some of these peoples hit puberty younger and have higher levels of aggression and usually aren’t as bright. Some take longer to gestate their babies, and the infants have different developmental timings and even behave differently right out of the womb. So on and on.
Yet it would be a mistake to think that it was purely-environmental factors which led to such genetic differences. After all, the primary driving force in the apes was not contention with the natural environment, but with other apes. So with men. And this is what we call culture. While it’s true that different environments produced substantial initial differences between branches of humanity, it was culture which really accelerated the genetic process and led to the extremity of differences we see on display in Tidus today. Let’s take a look at how this plays out with just one complex trait, say, politeness.
Take an island. The people of this island have, on average, a fairly polite demeanor, just as some lizards are more aggressive than others for environmental reasons. The culture, then, naturally grows to expect a certain level of politeness. People who conform to the culture’s expectations of politeness do better than those who do not — say, people who can’t help but be curt and abrasive. And so the people with those frowned-upon traits are less likely to reproduce, which means the next generation will be even more polite, which means that the culture’s expectation of politeness drifts even further in that direction, which means that people who would have previously made the cutoff now fall outside of it, which means they’re less likely to reproduce…
You can insert pretty much any personality trait in place of ‘politeness’ and this works. No, the process can’t run away forever. Most traits trade off against other traits, and at some point someone is so polite he can’t bear the thought of upsetting a girl by asking her to dance and so the whole thing kind of hits a ceiling. But here, too, we can see individuals as sort of bids made by the population: Let’s push out some genetic personalities a bit more like this, or a bit more like that, and see what works. And if it does work, the population as a whole moves a little closer to that mean, ever probing the environment — which by now includes the culture — for feedback. A handy way to think of this is that humans exist not just on a physical landscape, but a social one as well. (One of the handy things about Tidus is that these happen to map identically in space, given that higher-status people actually live above lower ones.)
The really important point to understand here is that such differences between peoples are neither ‘just’ genetic nor ‘just’ cultural. Rather, genetics and culture work together to more-rapidly differentiate populations. Culture serves as a process to quickly and effectively select certain genetic proclivities in a population. This is called gene-culture coevolution. An island’s culture is reflective of its genetics; its genetics are reflective of its historical culture.
Suppose an island comes to value, say, the ability to do abstract math, or show up on time, or restrain one’s violent sexual impulses. Suppose that initially perhaps only twenty percent of the population is capable of this. But if the culture prizes and rewards this trait, then those with the trait will have higher status and better reproductive potential. Over generations, the trait will spread as the offspring of those who carry it displace those who do not. Most traits won't become absolutely fixed, of course, but they can reach a tipping point of ubiquity.
This in turn opens up new, higher potentials, founded upon the widespread abundance of lower ones in the population. Higher forms of cultural expression such as art, literature, and philosophy; public institutions which presuppose a certain level of individual intelligence, moral integrity, and responsibility; all uniquely-accessible only to the inheritors of those genetics and memetics. Foreigners might appreciate these cultural achievements to a major extent (and might not), but never as fully as those who coevolved with them, for the genes and the culture are tightly bound up in one another. E.g. a man might read the great literature of another culture and understand it passably-well, enjoy it, and even find it transformative — but in many cases simply doesn't have the mental texture to connect with it in the precise way that someone from the original culture might.
As we saw with the animals, physical traits, behavioural traits, and phenomenological traits are all bundled. And so what we are describing here is ethnogenesis. Put another way, race is real in Tidus, and broadly conforms to stereotypes about it, which is why those stereotypes exist. This is plainly real and staring everyone in the face at all times, and no one ever had a doubt about it up until very recently and for the most unlikely of reasons — but that’s a story for a future chapter.
It is true that a great deal of what forms a man is personal experience and culturally-transmitted knowledge and values. However, the way an experience strikes a person is rooted in his instincts. Some are exposed to new ideas and skills and take right to those, while others are not a good fit. No one is born with a knowledge of poetry or algebra or how to waltz, but some can learn these better than others, and some not at all, and that difference — that capacity — is genetic.
Perhaps we might think of culturally-transmitted knowledge as a house, built up over a person’s lifetime, one piece upon another starting in childhood. But that house rests upon a foundation without which it simply falls to pieces. The foundation, then, is genetic. Genetics is the substrate upon which culture is established. Without the right genetic foundation, cultural concepts cannot take hold. The house is shaky at best and swiftly devolves to a level its foundation will support. And if you don’t believe me, try to get a bonobo (or a human with a nasty FOXP2 mutation) to appreciate Shakespeare. What is the difference between us and them? Genetics.
(As a quick aside, some will be eager to object that life events such as early childhood trauma can have big effects here. Yes, absolutely, but only in one direction. It's possible to damage, ruin, or for that matter to kill a child; foundations can be irreparably damaged by things like severe malnutrition, as with cretinism caused by iodine deficiency, or even physical abuse such that beautiful houses cannot stand upon them. But practically-speaking a genetic foundation cannot be substantially improved once it is laid. And different is generally worse.)
Let's look at a couple more examples of divergence.
On one island — perhaps another far-flung arctic one — group sizes are smaller and parents are expected to spend a lot of time with their children, managing their behaviour and teaching them skills. Fathers in particular are expected to stay with a woman once she's pregnant and also stick around to provide resources and direction for his children. This behaviour is adaptive in such an environment, and over not so many generations the people of this island are selected for their inclination to parental investment. Also, men who abandon women after impregnating them end up on the wrong end of much social censure and so lose status (and you'd better believe her male relatives will have something to say about it). The result is men who, on average, pair-bond more naturally with women and instinctively provide for and instruct any offspring. Courtship among such people will be more careful, deliberate, and always with an eye to demonstrating mutual value and commitment. Average age of marriage is later as each partner holds out for another who has demonstrated virtue, while demonstrating the same in turn. Cultural norms will reflect this by placing great importance upon marriage and family. Complex institutions will form regarding inheritance and private property. Due to the Edwards Process phenomenological traits will also develop along these lines.
On another island — say a tropical one — things go in a very different direction. Here, courtship has much more to do with seduction if not outright rape. Men and women both are more promiscuous and tend to mate at younger ages and with a succession of partners. Kinship structures are more matriarchal while men tend to drift in and out, perhaps occasionally popping in to provide resources, and perhaps not. Society doesn't expect much of men in such regards and develops other solutions to those problems. The children range around with other children, having much less of a relationship with their father in those cases when they have any at all. Childrearing is more communal than familial. In many such cultures paternity isn't especially considered at all! Which we may understand as a practical adaptation, since it's often a mystery anyway.
In regard to the pattern described in this island and the last, later sociologists will speak of 'Dad cultures' versus 'Cad cultures'. Cad cultures select for men who are good at convincing (or forcing) a woman to mate with them and for women who don't expect much from the man before or after she complies. Those expectations simply aren't there in her phenomenology. And by now we understand that whether or not the genetics were responsible for creating such conditions, they'll rapidly follow suit to reinforce the dynamic.
(It's true that when a people with a dad culture meet a people with a cad culture, the former tends to stomp all over the latter for too many reasons to enumerate. But this only matters when such encounters become possible, which for most of the history of Tidus they were not. These things had a long, long time to develop in relative isolation.)
Or we can revisit the trait of 'politeness' by looking at two different islands. On the first, people are generally polite, defer to others, wait their turn, and so on. As long as most people follow suit this results in increased gains for everybody, and defectors are quickly corrected when they can be or expelled from polite society when they can't. Assertiveness can still be valued in the right circumstances, but forwardness, or even directness can be a great way to find one's road to social advancement blocked. Such a culture selects for those inclined to act accordingly. In one Tidan culture with which I am familiar, they've become so polite that they won't ever say 'no' but instead something like 'another time!' rather than risk offending another. So polite that they will not point directly at something but instead gesture generally toward it with an open hand. Because to do otherwise is to signal incompatibility with the culture's values, which makes their genes less-likely to recur. Even overt displays of wealth come to be considered gauche. Here, success is best displayed subtly. Quietly.
Meanwhile on the other island life is a perpetual free-for-all aside from considerations of physical punishment. The child who does not rush to take as much as he can for himself will not grow up to reproduce, and brawls at feeding-time are the norm. Friends and older siblings are likely to help each other, but this can't always be counted upon. The one who waits his turn will be trampled by those who do not. The man who does not signal his wealth as loudly as he can will be overlooked by the women in favor of the man who does. And in interpersonal interactions, directness, crassness, and even outright belligerence (up to and including actual physical assault) are the ways to get things done.
(It can be fun to ask what the future, downstream effects of each of these models will look like once people get behind the wheels of cars. Courtesy, safety, patient observation of traffic regulations? Or law of the jungle battles royale with jammed intersections, people veering onto sidewalks, and wholesale disregard of red lights? These things will play out on many axes.)
We might consider what it would look like for a child of any of the above ethnicities to find himself transported across the ocean and raised in its polar opposite. He'll still receive, or at least observe, the same cultural programming as the natives. And human beings are remarkably good at fitting in with strange social groups, especially given plenty of time to figure things out. But his natural instincts will constantly be at odds with the behaviour necessary for success. Proverbially, one can take the tiger out of the jungle, but one cannot take the jungle out of the tiger — at least not without so many generations of harsh selective breeding that the animal ends up unrecognizable.
Some will likely to be able to adapt, but many others will not. It depends upon the degree of difference between ethnicities and how representative the child is of his people. But even if adaptation is possible, a person's genes have been shaped by his ancestral culture, which is to say that he will inherit the genetic potential for all sorts of higher thoughts and expressions (linguistically, artistically, socially) which will not be satisfied by his adoptive culture. Part of him will always be missing the fulfillment of those potentials.
That can be hard for individuals, but what happens when whole peoples, once separated by great distances both geographically and genetically, migrate and settle down amongst each other?
Let’s take for example a people who have developed to be very honest. Instinctual honesty is obviously a complex, polygenic trait and plays out in many ways. A good example is propensity to avoid lies. So is feeling guilty about a lie afterward even when no one ever finds out. But another side of it is the keeping of promises, and to whom. Widespread social trust is an economic lubricant: If two strangers can shake hands on a deal and count on it to be carried forward as agreed, that is an enormous asset for that society. A society in which this is not the case must spend a great deal of extra resources on such matters as enforcement, for example, and the support of an entire class of people whose job it is to make sure that contracts will be carried out. Or, worse, not be able to use contracts at all, hampering economic advancement. And all of this is to say nothing of the effects of corruption among those in high-trust social positions.
As I said, honesty has deep genetic roots. So suppose that on one island in particular a culture arises which teaches its children about the values of honesty, and selects for honest people, and selects against dishonest people. (That is, variants on the population are always being tried out so bad apples do get born, and typically prevented from reproducing via cultural mechanisms such as social censure, refusal to trade and marry, or even exile.) Such a people may become more and more honest in isolation to the great benefit of the population at large. All good and well so far.
But suppose that one day a bunch of strangers shows up on boats. Their homeland has fallen, they say, and they ask to settle on some of the island's unoccupied marginal territory. Well, honest types such as the host culture also tend to be fairly generous and give others the benefit of the doubt — they can afford to, after all, as others cannot, since it less often turns against them — and agree to let the strangers settle. Only, the foreigners look different, and behave differently, and see the world differently. Let’s suppose that they’re mostly alike in most other ways, except the newcomers are just plainly prone to dishonesty, to whatever degree they can get away with it. Cheating others, petty theft, taking bribes, etc. just feels better to them. They don’t seem to have the same kind of internalized guilt about it. This will inevitably lead to major problems, and probably sooner rather than later.
Initially the foreigners may do their best to fit in and adhere to the practices of the host culture, but of course there will be a phenomenological mismatch, and before long they’re likely to mostly stop participating in the customs which don’t suit them. Or perhaps they never try in the first place. Regardless, this can only possibly play out in a few major ways.
The host culture may learn to start officially enforcing their previously-informal norms, which at least in the short term will incur an economic cost, but which will also rapidly select against the foreigners who don’t fit in. After all the foreigners, like the natives, exist on a genetic spectrum, and some of them are probably much more prone to honesty than others, even if most are not. Some substantial portion of the foreigners are probably naturally more-honest than the least-honest natives. So given draconian-enough enforcement, after a few generations, the average honesty level of the group which had been seen as foreigners will have approached the level of the host society, and at this point we can suppose that something like ‘integration’ has been achieved — at the cost of many or most of the foreigners being genetically culled via incarceration, execution, or economic sanction leading to starvation. Or even perhaps by simple expulsion, whether initiated by the hosts or by those foreigners themselves who are coming to realize that there is no future for them here. They came from somewhere, after all, and can now go somewhere else.
Alternatively, the host culture may fail to enforce their ancestral norms, in which case the cultural institutions of the entire island will collapse, degrade to the lowest common genetic denominator. The natives get absolutely fleeced and ruined until their only surviving children are as mistrustful and perhaps even as dishonest as the newcomers. I suppose we could also call this integration…?
But consider what such a process will look like from the point of view of a native in the middle of it. Like when we ran the Christmas tree in fast-forward to see the pulsing waves of light, we’ve been looking at this situation in super-high-speed. In fact it takes lifetimes to play out. Usually many lifetimes. And for someone living in the thick of it, it won’t seem so dire. Sure he’ll get the sense that people used to be more honest and there was a better sense of high social trust, but it’s not that much worse than it had been twenty years prior. There will still be pockets of community where things work the way they used to, even if fewer and fewer all the time.
For someone in the midst of the process, it would take an unusual degree of historical interest and big-picture speculation to realize what’s happening at all, and most around him are unlikely to bring themselves to care. By the time the (downward) integration is achieved it won’t even occur to the people within it as a major change from what they’re used to anyway. Few if any honest throwbacks will be left to mourn the loss, and they’ll mostly be lacking the language to express it, and no one will listen. Perhaps the old-timers will talk about how they used to know all their neighbors, and never used to secure their homes when going on journeys, now unthinkable. To their grandchildren, these will seem like nothing but amusing, if curious, ramblings about a long-bygone era, and not relevant enough to daily life to spend time musing over. They’ll be too busy trying to survive in a much darker world.
The point is, either the newcomers must change to become like the hosts, or else the hosts must surely change to become like the newcomers. Now the island is just like the one the foreigners came from, and pretty soon boats full of desperate refugees are launching to find new places where things hopefully work a bit better.
Of course, along the way, the ignorant-of-genetics hosts may have noticed that the foreigners don’t teach their children about honesty as much and decide this is the problem. They might put the foreign children in the honesty lessons with their own. And then they'll go absolutely insane trying to figure out why it’s not working, while their own children fail to get the education due to the foreign kids throwing everything off, which shifts the equilibrium even more rapidly toward dishonesty — but, as I said, that’s another chapter. And yes, the education might work to shift the foreign children ten percent further up the honesty spectrum, but if the native kids are getting that too, they’re also shifting up ten percent from a much higher starting point, and so the gap endures. In fact the education will likely be even less effective for the foreigners since it was probably developed to leverage the unique genetic psychological traits of the natives.
(Oh and hopefully, down the road, no one in the host society gets the bright idea of appropriating economic surplus from the honest, productive people to give extra resources to the dishonest ones such that they can have a lot more kids than they’d otherwise be able to support, thinking this might fix the problem. Can you imagine?)
A third strategy might be to simply designate separate living areas, even separate legal codes, for the natives and the foreigners, enforce the boundary, and not worry so much about whether they advance since at least they’re not pulling the native population down with them. This has worked historically, but runs the risk that as populations grow and cultural and genetic links are forged the situation should become politically untenable. And once segregation is ended, it must go one way or the other, as above.
Just like politeness, you can put pretty much any positive ‘cultural’ (actually substantially-genetic) trait in place of honesty and the above will mostly work, though details will vary. Even so it must be acknowledged that, outside of thought experiments, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that there is only one major difference between two populations. These things do tend to correlate on a massively complex scale, and human beings are pretty sharp at being able to spot where two different people groups are and are not societally compatible — even if we’re also excellent at blinding ourselves to the matter (or any matter) when there’s social advantage to be had in doing so, just like the apes who are truly, definitely not secretly building coalitions to overthrow the guy in charge. More on that in a couple chapters.
Of course, most of the time, when one kind interacts with another en masse it is rather less pleasant than mutually-agreeable migration. In the following chapter we'll see how things usually work and how the horrific engine operates at the scale of an entire world.
But first, as with prior chapters, I’ll take a moment to meditate on one particular aspect of the above.
Complex traits usually take so, so long to develop. Think of all the mutations which had to occur randomly the first time, and also be beneficial in the context of the current genetic loadout, or at least benign enough to not cause problems until some other mutation(s) arrive to unlock their potential. Yet as soon as selection pressure ceases, complex traits tend to be lost.
Recall our blind cave fish. It may have taken the fish tens of millions of years to evolve their eyes and visual processing system and all the instincts and behaviours which go along with those, but if they go into a cave and don’t come out, their species has typically become completely blind within a few hundred years, and coming back out into the light doesn’t magically mean it’ll only take them that long to get their vision back. Many of those mutations will have to occur again, and as time goes on fewer and fewer of those potentials remain dormant in their blood, waiting to be reawakened.
So it is imperative that we learn to distinguish between mutation and selection. A population consists of many genetically-diverse individuals, representing a sort of library of alleles. These have already evolved; already mutated. They are just hanging around for the selection. Most if not all of the individuals in the population are somewhat suboptimal for the current environment, which is short-term bad for the individual but long-term good for the population. Conditions may change at any time, after all, and it’s a great idea to have some individuals around who are better-suited to whatsoever may come.
Say, some snowshoe hares who turn brown earlier than the rest, who usually have a devil of a time during late winter when they stand out like sore thumbs against the snow, but do great in years when spring comes early. Mutations can take just about forever to occur, so it’s a good idea to keep them around for such occasions. In fact this is the main reason that individuals can carry alleles which they do not express but still pass on for possible re-emergence in future generations. Evolution never knows what may be useful tomorrow! (Many dormant alleles don't carry much if any selective cost, but even when they do, a population which keeps a few of those around is liable to outcompete one which didn't.)
Selection, on the other hand, happens as quickly as a fox nabs a rabbit. If you wanted a population of snowshoe hares that almost entirely turns brown early, that would be easy to accomplish: Kill, or prevent from reproducing, all the ones who don’t. Within three generations maximum that will be the new normal, though a few throwbacks will keep occurring for a while, less and less often as those variants fail to be passed on.
Actually let's stick with foxes and rabbits for a moment. Rabbits are swift, with excellent hearing and winsomely-keen noses. They have been granted all these virtues through their relationships with predators, in this case foxes. If you take rabbits and put them in captivity for several generations, they will lose all of these traits. Without the selection pressure to maintain them they will degrade, and more quickly than you might think. Reintroduce those domesticated rabbits back into the wild and it's possible that even if most don't last five minutes, the very best will survive and go on to re-embody the virtues of their forebears. But I wouldn't count on it.
The difference between mutation and selection can get confusing inasmuch as people describe both processes as ‘evolution’, which they are. But the distinction is important to comprehend.
An advanced trait is a priceless genetic inheritance, purchased at great cost over countless generations of extremely painful trial, error, failure, misery, and death. And yet, if a population finds itself in a situation where such traits are no longer especially advantageous — say, a very honest and coöperative people suddenly mixed in with others who are not this way and no means by which they might keep to themselves, or a system where people inclined toward a given virtue are penalized to provide for those who are not — such traits can be squandered, even eradicated from the population with astonishing rapidity. Recovering them is not such an easy thing, though perhaps not impossible if action is taken soon enough.
Next week: Chapter 07: The Race of Kings
Chapter five is here and this is where the rhythm really drops. (Chapter one link).
Before we go into this let me issue a general reminder that I'm painting with a broad brush so as to actually get somewhere for once, even at book-length. And actually from here on out we suffer from far too much trying to fit in too small a space. I've elided much in the interest of brevity. Real life is as always much more complicated but I think if you take what I'm giving you here (and a grain of salt) you'll be much better off than you were before.
0105 - Women and Men
In the previous chapter we tracked the development of apes into proto-humans. Or, we got a fair amount of the way there. At the end something like modern humans showed up on the scene, but how they got to be that way was left as a bit of a mystery. In this chapter then we shall attempt to close the gap!
At some point a band of apes started spending less time in the trees and more time on the ground, ranging further and further from its ancestral environment. No one is sure why, exactly. Some say it was simple population pressure. Others say it was some sort of event like a natural disaster or cataclysm; a volcanic eruption perhaps. But most agree that one way or another the culprit probably had to do with climate change.
Climatic conditions shifted and over time the once-abundant cloud forests of the apes started drying up. Certainly viable pockets did remain in this or that hidden valley but, for many, the ape way of life was at an end. Those who could were obligated to find new ways to survive in a more arid environment in which the trees were too far apart to serve as a highway.
So these apes have to learn to get around on the ground, hence bipedalism. And they have to transition to obtaining a substantial portion, or even a majority, of their calories from endurance hunting — running down prey not by being faster, but simply by being able to keep going past the point that their targets collapse from exhaustion or overheating. To better assist in this, they shed most of their body hair and develop the ability to sweat, that they might remain cool while their prey does not. (Their skin had previously been pale beneath the fur, but rapidly takes on a darker hue to protect them from the harsh sun coming through what used to be the canopy).
Much has been said elsewhere about all of the above. But the really striking transition, in my book, is the way this radically upends gender relations.
It’s no longer viable for coalitions of males to secure nice groves of fruit trees and let the females come and go as they please. Instead, bands of combined males and females are obliged to rove around together, moving from site to site, following prey and forage with the seasons. This presents a new problem for the males. Heretofore they hadn’t been of much specific use to females, and it’s still the case that females are basically free to wander off and find some other males if they are so inclined. Except now, more females cannot be expected to show up at any moment as had previously been the case while in possession of a nice fruit grove.
Troops of males, then, are suddenly under pressure to cater to females. (Treating them as property works acceptably-well too but is generally less-preferable for the usual reasons having to do with slaves, which plays out in many ways as we shall see later in this book.) They do this by sharing food and offering protection from the many predators which can no longer be avoided by hanging out in trees all the time. Thankfully this is made more pleasant by another upshot, which is that the children of the females who have been with the troop for a while (as well as any still gestating) can be pretty reliably counted upon to be the offspring of that troop’s males.
Nor can females continue to entirely outsource their task of evaluating potential mates. Yes, every now and then a competing troop of males comes along and wipes out the males the females had been with before, and incorporates the females into their own group, and that’s pretty grand when it happens — a freebie, if you will — but such providence can’t be counted upon, and in the meantime hard feminine decisions must be made.
To some degree it’s still useful for the females to sit back and observe which male ends up in command of all the others. But in the new environment resources are scarce, and it’s not practical for that alpha-male to provide food and protection for 70%, or even 10%, of the females. A handful at a time, at most. Nor can he freeze the vast majority of other males mostly out of sexual access: food is no longer free and their assistance is required to feed everybody, which necessitates enfranchising them as it were. So, given that most females can’t count on being taken care of by the best male in their world, how should they determine which male to mate with? And how to entice him to become invested in them during the vulnerability of their pregnancy, and in their newborn children?
The recursive intellectual arms race of the male apes has granted females enormous social acuity, even if mainly as a side-effect. They’re able to evaluate potential mates directly, by observing which males are successful hunters, as well as indirectly, by paying attention to how each potential partner carries himself in the assembly of males. Does he seem respected? Admired? Scorned? Pitied? Their basic strategy of letting the males sort such things out is modified a bit, but doesn't fundamentally change. Though, as a failsafe, females also come to be hyper-sensitive to how other females evaluate a male. If most seem to think he’s a desirable mate, she should quickly agree this is the case or else lose out on her chance to secure his attentions.
The females can’t simply hunt for themselves. They’re smaller, and their body structure is built around carrying and birthing ever-larger-headed babies, which makes them unsuitable for chasing, and their musculature is much weaker than that of the males, which makes them less suited to killing. Their pelvises are comparatively-prone to breaking while running under any kind of load. They’re that much more vulnerable to the megapredators which are likely to be encountered away from home. Also, while males are all about taking big risks for big rewards so as to secure reproductive access, risk-aversion is fixed deep within the female psyche. Like it or not, the females are dependent upon the males, and live or die based upon how emotionally attached a competent male becomes to them.
And so females become lovely and likable, locked in a new arms race with each other to appeal to high-value males. Given the outsized returns on reproducing with the highest-value males, the more arousing their physical forms can be, the better. Low mutation load (mostly) can’t be faked, and reliable indicators of being in their prime reproductive period (glossy hair, clear skin) are rapidly selected for. Every facet of the female body becomes fine-tuned to maximize its attractive impact. E.g., by definition, all female mammals have mammary glands, but it is telling that these specific ape-offshoots are some of the only ones ever to develop breasts, structures whose function has little to do with milk and much to do with announcing reproductive readiness and driving males just absolutely crazy.
This arms race is even more intense because, as should be clear by now, they’re not competing with each other simply for a good mate, but for the best mate. As such, fascinating tradeoffs are made. Women evolve to be extra-beautiful in their prime years and then rapidly visually age beyond those. Intuitively this might seem like a bad idea — wouldn't it be better to look young longer?
But if you consider the situation from the perspective of the standard alpha-male, this is precisely the problem. A female who only looks amazing during her prime reproductive period is sending an expensive signal that yes, she is in fact of ideal breeding age. That’s attractive! A female who visually pretends to be in her prime period whether she is or not, well, who can say? Smart money is on mating with the first female. That second female will perhaps have more children over the course of her life with mediocre males. But by that point the best males have given the first female a few very high-quality children. And even if not as many, they’re going to outcompete the children of the second female in the coming generation for all the old reasons the shellfish know so well.
An extremely powerful strategy for females is to secure the protection and provision of a competent but not-especially-high-value male, get the highest-value male in her world to impregnate her, and then convince her pair-bonded male that the child is his. Females are in fact so (understandably) driven to conceive the children of the highest-value male that they’re apt to do so before they even have the next step (finding support) figured out. And the highest-value males sense this, making them comparatively unwilling to commit. At which point refusal to commit becomes, itself, attractive in a male. A male eager to commit is signaling that he’s grateful for the opportunity, whereas the sort of male who has great genes and knows it also knows that in a couple years the next newer model will be along and he can have her too. (Yes, a male who is both high-value and willing to commit is like catnip to females, but hard to find in the wild, and she’ll still be aroused by the ones who act like they can do better.)
Females won’t generally allow mediocre males anywhere near their reproductive systems without commitment, but they quite justifiably consider reproduction with the highest-value male to be enough of a prize as to make such considerations secondary. And when a female does build a pair bond with a provider-male, the implicit bargain is that he’ll good-naturedly help take care of her prior children as well — for as long as they’re ‘together’, at any rate. This makes “have sex with the male who excites you during your peak reproductive period, then trade sex to the male who will take it in exchange for raising the first guy's children” an eminently reasonable plan, except in societies where males coördinate to put a stop to it.
In addition to attractive, females must also become pathetic, in the original sense of the word. Even as males are evolving to care about their children, females start evolving to take on attributes evoking those of children, pointedly including neotenous facial features. Big eyes, small noses, full lips, and so on. A female must push as many of a male’s “protect and provide for” buttons as possible, or else lose out to another who did. And should a female find herself with child but without a provider, or — much worse — past her reproductive age, she had better be as pleasant and sympathetic as possible, in the hopes of receiving charity from those who can spare it. (Indeed the plight of elderly widows will be a perpetual social dilemma for many, many later societies.)
Their dependence upon males notwithstanding, this transition does put pressure on females to become competent in their own right. The sire of their offspring might take seriously his implied obligation to provide for them, and then again he might not. For that matter he might be traumatically gored to death by a wildebeest at any moment. Far better for females to be able to supply some of their own food by foraging, or give any surfeit to others to establish reciprocal obligations. Far better for them, in their older age, to have skills to bring to the table, such that a conquering troop might have use for them.
Meanwhile, switching over to a meat-based diet has been so effective at winning calories that the brains of these things — now radically unlike other apes across several dimensions — are now accounting for as much as 20 or even 25% of their daily energy budget! Because the social games are getting more intense and the calories are there for the successful.
This lifestyle increasingly selects for the ability of males to coördinate. A group where the males can coöperate to take down large game (and share out the excess) is vastly more fit than one in which each male can only individually attempt to bring home a rat or a bird. Similarly, they can work together to secure the clan’s defensible homestead (sure let’s call it a cave) and achieve projects, etc.
But males, being larger, are even more calorically-expensive to feed than females. And, while there are several compelling reasons to keep lazy females — especially young and smooth ones — around, no one has patience for males who don’t pull their own weight. As such, young and adolescent males are subjected to any amount of hazing, hardship, and initiation, to screen out and dispense with losers as quickly as possible. Less-fit males are persecuted mercilessly, their status continuously eroded, until they end up killed for impertinence, driven into exile, or uniformly shunned by all females and thereby cleansed away genetically.
The inferior male who skulks about the edges of the clan, staring thirstily at the prime young females on display, represents a very real threat to those females. Unable to earn affection or even grudging provider-sex on his own merits, his best reproductive chance is to try to catch such a young female alone and have his way with her, which can monopolize one of her few, precious reproductive windows, not to mention the burden of caring for the resulting child. Females rapidly and understandably develop extreme disgust responses and paranoia about such males. Their revulsion toward low-status and especially physically-aberrant males is isomorphic to, and probably re-uses some of the existing neural circuitry regarding, their aversion to rotten food — something so harmful or even potentially fatal if it gets inside of you that it’s not worth eating, no matter how hungry you are. When future women describe men as ‘creeps’ there can be no doubt about what they mean. (No directly-corresponding term will ever arise among men to describe unattractive women. How could it?)
The status of ‘male in good standing’ is extended as readily as possible to the deserving, but jealously guarded nonetheless, for the life or death of the clan hinges upon competent males working together effectively. Over time, there is enormous selection pressure on these males to build instincts and social technologies which allow them to efficiently coöperate to achieve ambitious goals. And, leveraging the gigantic socially-inferential brains granted them by their ancestors, and the ever-greater energy budgets made available by hunting, males begin to develop a system of vocalizations to communicate facts and strategies to each other.
Never underestimate the potential impact of a single mutation. One day, just like any other, an infant is born with an oddball de novo variant of the Tidan equivalent of the FOXP2 gene. His intelligence is about a third again as great as that of his parents. The muscles of his lower face and mouth, associated with speech, are much more nimble. Most of all, he finds himself capable of dazzling fluency in communication, easily mastering the primitive language his clan has developed and bounding effortlessly beyond it, introducing new inventions and concepts that rapidly catch on among his less-comparatively-retardèd peers. He invents all sorts of new names for things.
The first Tidan human has finally arrived on the scene. Or at least this is as good a place as any to draw that line for purposes of our narrative.
Perhaps he merely assumes that everyone else is like him on the inside and simply isn’t interested in expressing it. Perhaps he lives an achingly lonely life looking for the missing light in the eyes of his friends and loved ones. Personally, I like to imagine that he recognizes it at long last when meeting his first child. Or, I don’t know, maybe he just thinks it’s great to be the best ever and leverages his advantages to the hilt, eventually dying with a smile on his face beneath a pile of pregnant beauties. We’ll never know. What we do know is that he or his immediate descendants are wildly reproductively successful and make short work of all their competition.
His unique FOXP2 variant spreads like wildfire first up, then down, the slopes of the island. The massive boost in intelligence is itself a great asset, of course, but fully-syntactic language is yet another killer tech per se. Not only does it allow for precise communication and planning, but it also allows abstract concepts to be passed down from generation to generation.
Tidans start telling stories. The stories are under the same selection pressure for attractiveness and utility as anything else, and rapidly converge upon a few optimal forms that can be found in all later cultures. One type of story is what we’d today call ‘The Hero’s Journey’, which is a blueprint for young men to become suitable contributors to the tribe and, if really successful, even score outsized reproductive results. If telling such stories to boys results in even a 5-10% improvement in the average fitness of men, that is a massive advantage over competing tribes who don’t.
Another (but occasionally-overlapping with the first) type of story is the Story of Identity, of belonging. This story reifies the social unit as not just a clan but as a Tribe, with a shared history, values, and destiny. If this type of story becomes compelling enough, it can even convince others to join, provided they can make the case for why they’re worthy of adoption into the People. Stories of this nature are often what we would identify as religious, and acting out their precepts to, e.g., construct megalithic monuments may have been the original impetus for mass-human-organization, ages before the first cities.
A third type of story is a parallel to the hero’s journey, but for girls, found in most if not all cultures. It's called ‘The Maiden’s Tale’. The basic outline of the maiden’s tale is this: A girl becomes lost or kidnapped or otherwise separated from her tribe. Then a man/some men happen upon her and impregnate her. She finds her place as a mother in her new tribe. Fin. [[*Nota bene: This was entirely real and exactly as I have described, but woe to anyone who attempts to google it in these benighted latter days.]]
The final type of story pertinent to our narrative is that of kleos (“CLAY-oss”), or what we might term ‘glory’. These are stories of great deeds, especially in battle, which serve at least three major purposes. The first, as with the hero’s journey, is to prime young men for the sort of behaviour that will be adaptive (to the tribe) in adulthood; e.g. stripping naked, painting themselves with mud, and flinging themselves bodily into a mass of their enemies. The second is to serve as yet another mechanism by which fitness can be translated into status and therefore greater representation of those genetic variants in the next generation. Picture the women looking on as a man's courage in battle is lauded around the fire. The third, much more interesting purpose is to allow for individual men to accumulate sufficient reputation to transcend the old ape social-bond-numerical-limit trap.
So long as a somewhat-shared language is in place, men can now develop parasocial bonds with leaders they rarely get to encounter or possibly have never even met. This allows for dramatically-larger numbers to band together for the purpose of wiping out a competing tribe and absorbing their women/livestock and accumulated material goods.
All these types of stories come together (or at least the first, second, and fourth do) to create a powerful cocktail indeed. Religions and states — insisting upon the distinction is entirely asinine, about which I’ll have much more to say later — rapidly develop social technology to keep larger groups of men aligned and stable, eventually incorporating such tools as statues, monuments, and so on to better-maintain such parasocial relationships; such imagined communities and distant rulers. Eventually these nations become so large and complex that they can engage in multiple campaigns at a time: not one raiding party, but multiple armies setting out to take what belongs to genetically- and socially-inferior groups of men.
But some things never change. The typical motivation for a low-status male to join such a coalition is precisely to get unfettered access to conquered females who will, at least temporarily, not be under the protection of organized men. Risking death in battle for such a prize is vastly better than being relegated to resentful hate-reproduction and too-probable cuckoldry with the less-attractive females at home.
But can the women who just watched their husbands and sons slaughtered before their eyes possibly be any more pleasant to lie with? Well, yes, actually. By a very wide margin. Consider the lioness.
Tidan women have been selected for rapid acculturation, wholesale adoption of social consensus, and agreeability — going along with the decisions and demands of others — for a long time now, to put it lightly. They've been appropriated by violent, conquering males and incorporated into foreign social structures since before they were human. Understandably enough they don’t like their kids getting killed, but this often just ends up being a bargaining chip which encourages them to conform as tightly as possible to the desires of their new keepers. And certainly, along the way, innumerable numbers of them did hate and reject the men who killed their husbands. Their descendants are mainly no longer with us. The descendants of the ones who embraced their conquerors, whose knees buckled when their wrists were grabbed, who successfully convinced themselves that ‘actually, this is fine’, are.
Terror and arousal are physiologically indistinguishable in Tidan women. Simply witnessing an act of violence, even between animals, causes them to experience arousal. They’re substantially more likely to orgasm during sex with conquering males, especially in the early, uncertain days of their captivity, than they ever were with any but the highest-status men of their native tribe. The stress of their indeterminate social status and lack of protection by any man who cares about them trigger powerful responses within. They experience an irresistible upswell of affection, loyalty, and arousal. Similar to, and perhaps even indistinguishable from, love — except often so much stronger.
No one likes to imagine for a moment that such things can be true of his wife or mother. This well-documented and self-evidently-necessary female capacity will later be excised from discourse or, when it can’t be avoided, described as a ‘syndrome’ as though it were somehow a bug rather than a feature. (Here we call it ‘Stockholm’). For women, admitting to such spectres lurking in their fantasies is obviously not socially-advantageous, nor would their current providers take kindly to the thought, and so women are normally quite insistent that nothing of the sort is the case. In keeping with the grand achievement of ape self-deception, they even believe it.
In time, as a conquered woman’s place in her new tribe becomes secure, recalibration of her understanding of her social status is inevitable and she will very likely come to wish she’d ended up with a higher-status mate. But by that point her story, and that of her husband, will be near its end, and his sons will be going forth and doing likewise. And it is the case that older women, once past the point of reproduction, often do feel real loyalty to their tribe, as unlike younger women they will not be served by their only existing offspring being wiped out by an invading male coalition.
It is inevitable that one social group should eventually secure total control of the island. But other islands were always dimly visible across the water, and it will rapidly become evident that some of those cousins wiped away by the high tides, long assumed extinct, in fact washed up elsewhere and rekindled their own, parallel development. Some have achieved near-parity with the civilization on the mother island. Some have greatly exceeded it. Some are, frankly, minimally-progressed since that now-ancient FOXP2 mutation. Some are just outright weird, and seem to have split off from the race even before that. (Exciting opportunities for admixture abound in such cases!)
The great wheel keeps turning, now on the scale of the archipelago. Superior (in whatever capacity) peoples encounter others, exterminate or marginalize them, steal their most-attractive women, i.e. repositories of low mutation load and useful adaptations, and incorporate their technological and biological distinctiveness.
But of course, the longer they've been separated, and the less-similar the environments in which they've developed, the more they've diverged genetically. And this means that the world occurs to them differently, and they think and behave differently. You can tell this at a glance because they look different, too.
One little thought here — did you know that, on Tidus, human facial (and for that matter bodily) features correlate with psychometric traits? The study of this is called physiognomy. And, of course, humans are well-evolved to notice facial minutiae and draw great inferences therefrom. Walking down the street someone can often tell, at a glance, a great deal about another man's personality from his face. Some are better at this than others, naturally, given that it's an evolved capacity.
Lest you wonder whether this is merely confirmation bias, later Tidan computer facial recognition software will more than settle the question. Given a large-enough set of faces and a corresponding database of measured traits, including many you'd expect and others as abstract as 'propensity to follow rules', programs will do pretty well at predicting any number of things about a person based on facial features. Responsiveness, assertiveness, genuineness, achievement-striving, deceptiveness, trustworthiness, risk-taking, propensity to 'dry' humour, fear of heights... the list goes on and on.
This shouldn't be a surprise to us. After all it works that way for every other kind of animal, and it's an observable truth that children take after their parents both behaviourally and facially. But if facial features correlate with personality traits, and also vary much more across ancestral groups than within, what does this imply about the variation of psychological traits across ancestral groups?
When someone makes the offensive claim that ''they' all look alike', what horror is actually being suggested?
Next week: Chapter 06: Thousand Flowers
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
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
Recap for new readers:
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
Submission Statement:
Welcome to the first installment of the longest Motte-post ever.
Some years ago, when we were still on reddit, I was reading a comment expressing confusion about, iirc, wokeness in media and wanted to explain the shape of reality to the person who was asking. But as I tried I realized the inferential gap was too great and I'd need to make a whole effortpost. Then realized even more context was required and so figured it'd be a series of three posts or so. I was so excited, thinking it might even win comment(s) of the year, back when we were still doing that.
...So anyway we're over 55k words now and at this point I'm pretty sure this is just the first book of four...
Each chapter is written as a motte post, so with the (already granted) permission of the mods I will be releasing one per week for about the next three months. Once this thing is finally birthed I'll be able to start on the subsequent books.
This first book is called The Mountain. In effect, it's the natural history of an alien world not so unlike our own. I'm using this motif so that I can paint a broad-strokes account of the rise of Man and how we got to where we are today.
Let me be very clear up-front that everything in this book is a toy model. Real life is spectacularly more complex! I'm consciously using this format so as to sidestep what would normally be reasonable demands for rigor, that I might paint the forest instead of getting hung up on trees. My apologies in advance and on my honour I'm trying to be responsible with it.
Also one final note: Test readers love the book but several have informed me that this first chapter is a somewhat brutal gate. Lots of nested hypotheticals, etc. It gets much more readable afterward but I don't really expect this crowd to struggle too much, and the information here simply must be understood to move forward.
Thank you all very much, and without further ado...
0101 - Mutation Game
'Different' is generally worse. Allow me explain this to you.
I'm going to paint a picture of an alien world called Tidus. This world is much like ours and by illustrating how things work there I hope to be able to illuminate some things about our own world as well.
Come with me to Tidus' ancient ocean; to the place where life has first developed. We're looking at the first living thing. It's something like a cell. Pretty much just a little blob that floats around in the current, since it has no distinguishing features or even the ability to move under its own power.
When it happens to collide with raw material that it can use to sustain itself, it absorbs that matter and keeps its own body stable long enough to collide with more. Probably organisms like this have come into being countless times before, until they went too long without sustenance and their bodies became irreparably disrupted, but our little friend here is special.
When it's collected enough raw material, something amazing happens. It splits! Now there are two of them, identical, each being half of what had previously been one whole. This is a really big deal. Even if one of them goes too long without getting enough raw material, and its body breaks up, part of it will still be around and have a chance to keep going.
The two drift their separate ways, continuing to absorb raw materials, until they split again — the luckiest one splitting first. This goes on for quite a while and soon there are a whole lot of the things.
Over time the environment has strange effects on some of them. Maybe some are struck by cosmic rays that rearrange their insides just a little. Maybe some drift into waters where there are bits of new substances that happen to get stuck inside them in surprising ways. The point is that, over time, some of them end up not-so-identical to that original organism, or to each other. That is, they end up different.
Most of the time this is bad for them and the organisms with significant differences die. This is because they have to be fairly finely-tuned to do the things they need to do to survive and reproduce. If the changes make it too hard for them to absorb raw material, or break their mechanism for splitting, they're pretty much out of luck. But not all changes are fatal. Sometimes, the organisms continue on mainly as before, only slightly impaired. Some few do remain essentially indistinguishable from their original progenitor, just by dint of not happening to be exposed to change. And, sometimes, every so often, one changes in a way that actually makes it better at absorbing raw materials and splitting.
Even so, there are three major problems with this setup.
Problem one is that even if some of the changes are good, most of them aren’t, which means that by the time an organism gets a good change, it’s probably already built up a lot of lousy changes that collectively outweigh the good change’s advantage.
It might play out like this: Two organisms drift into an untouched food-rich area. The first is essentially identical to the original, having accumulated no significant mutations. The second has accumulated a lot of changes that make it worse at absorbing raw materials. It can eat well enough to stay alive, but it takes a long time to do so, and it splits only rarely compared to the first, which is of course still as good at eating as the original. But the second is also graced with a cool trick, which is the ability to nudge itself ever-so-slightly in the direction that its food contacts it. Since food is often in clusters, heading that way should be a big advantage in collecting more.
But when the second organism has managed to process its first unit of food, the first has eaten, split, eaten, split, and so on, and has already exploited most of the food in the area. The second organism only split once, and neither of those copies is lucky enough to find now-scarce food, so their cool new trick is lost to time. Even with such an advantage, they were simply too burdened by the buildup of too many slightly-negative mutations, or 'mutation load'. Think of snow load on a roof. Different is generally worse.
Problem two is that some changes are basically useless by themselves, but could be really great when paired with others. Let’s turn now to another variant of these things. This one is a rare example of an organism with little to no mutation load which has been lucky enough to get a cool new ability. This should be an unalloyed good, right? Unfortunately, what it got is the rudimentary ability to see its surroundings, and nothing else.
It watches the struggle play out between the two organisms from the previous scenario. But because it doesn’t have the second organism's trick of motility, this doesn’t count for much. You might think it’s useless, but in fact it’s worse than useless: maintaining that ability costs it resources, which means it’s also slower to reproduce than the first organism. And so the story goes.
Problem three is that it’s extremely unlikely for such an organism to end up with multiple good mutations. If one somehow ended up with the ability to see and the ability to propel itself, that could be a really great thing! But what are the odds? And even if it did, that advantage might not be enough to overcome the disadvantages of the high mutation load that has probably been accumulated along the way. After all, it wasn’t the lack of vision that hampered the second organism.
This is the status quo for a very long time. The holy grail for these things would be to find a way to adopt beneficial changes while preserving what is good. And finally, after countless generations, a stupendous evolutionary badass comes along who has worked out how to do it.
At first glance it looks a lot like the original. It eats pretty well, and splits fairly often, and nothing unusual seems to be afoot at all. But one day two of this new kind happen to bump into each other and, instead of just wandering off, they momentarily open up to each other, swap some of their insides back and forth, and then split back apart. Because they’re nearly identical, this wouldn’t seem to be a big deal, and in fact this time it actually isn't.
But next time, one that’s happened to develop motility and one that’s happened to develop vision do the same thing, and magic happens. Well, that’s how it must seem to the one who goes away with both traits. The one who’s left with neither must feel rather put out. But that first one — oh, that first one! It propels itself into cluster after cluster of rich nutrients, splitting endlessly, and before long, there’s almost nothing around but its descendants, because they’re eating all the food before anything else can get to it.
From time to time they collide with each other — much more often as they grow more common — and do the swapping thing again. It’s a relatively blind process for now, as the results of any given mating are unpredictable: the organism with which one is mating might have some cool new abilities, or none at all, or even a pile of bad mutations, but one is going to lose part of oneself regardless. This is a good deal for low-quality organisms and a bad deal for high-quality organisms. Over time it does work out, since the lucky pairings go on to fill the environment with copies of themselves, but it’s still quite the dicey proposition for any individual. After all, the ones who get dealt the inferior hand of cards are likely to perish in short order, and without reproducing themselves.
But now that the organisms can see, they start to randomly develop preferences as to which others they desire to bump into and swap material with. An organism might prefer a bluish mate over a reddish mate, or perhaps a bumpy exterior over smooth. Sometimes these are meaningless; the blue versus red debate is a matter of a single mutation that does nothing else and has no real effect on fitness. But it turns out that bumpiness tends to correlate with high mutation load. Over time, the ones that like bumpy partners lose out to the ones that like smooth partners. So pretty soon almost everyone is as smooth as they can be, and those unusual bumpy types are avoided because they’re generally worse.
So far, so good. Look at how much better-off these ones are than the original! And the process is only accelerating. Because now, when an organism gets a good trait, it can be pretty sure that it’s getting it from a low-mutation-load individual. The best of both worlds!
Things get better and better for a long time. Our organisms become much more complex as they keep what is good and adopt beneficial new changes. Eventually one of them hits upon the trick of growing a new copy without splitting. Instead, it uses raw materials to construct another copy on the outside of itself. And — here’s the cool part — it can do this in tandem with another of its kind; each of them contributing not just raw materials but also their traits.
This is possible because much of what’s being swapped back and forth during mating is actually sets of instructions for building these organisms. See, part of what made the original able to exist long enough to reproduce itself was that it knew how to repair damage caused by its environment. Inside of it was a set of instructions that said things like ‘when you get a piece of raw material x, and there’s no x in slot y inside of you, fill slot y with x.’ This was useful to have, if something bumped into you and knocked a piece loose and you needed to rebuild that part of yourself.
But what to do if your set of instructions is what gets damaged? Better to keep a spare copy on hand, just in case. Not only that, but it’s a good idea to learn how to compare the two copies and transcribe information from the undamaged one into the damaged portions of the other (since different is generally worse).
So what these things are doing now is jointly contributing resources to the new organism, while each contributing a (fresh) copy of their internal instructions. The offspring randomly takes some of each set of instructions — which are mostly-identical between the parents, of course — and ends up with its own, unique set.
This new breed can reproduce again and again without losing themselves in the process, as they would if they were just randomly recombining with another organism. This means that each of them can have multiple offspring that are all partly based on the same unchanging parent, and partly based on a succession of mates. This strengthens their all-important ability to adopt beneficial new changes while keeping what is good. It is such a coup in fact that they give up on splitting themselves altogether, going all-in on sex, rather than division, to reproduce.
As is often the case, this solution leads to a new problem. Recall that, to reproduce, each partner must tender a packet containing a copy of their internal instructions as well as some raw materials for building the offspring. But such investment in raw materials is expensive; it takes a long time to replenish their stores to make another one afterward. So if they can get away with skimping, and instead rely upon their partner to furnish most of the resources, that would be a big win. However, this is taking advantage of those who invest fully, who must quickly follow suit (which ruins the whole strategy and results in substandard offspring with no chance of survival) or else learn to protect themselves from being so exploited.
No one is exactly sure what happens next, but when the dust settles the situation stands as follows:
Some of the new organisms specialize in creating large, dense, resource-rich packets. They can’t make many of these and so are extremely choosy about who gets access to them. Others specialize in creating many small packets, very cheaply, and try to get access to as many of the first group’s packets as possible. Probably there were some in-betweeners along the way, but for whatever reason it worked better to just go to one extreme or the other. We’ve reached equilibrium again.
An interesting dynamic is now at work. It takes at least one heavy investor for each new organism to be created, since they’re the ones who put up most of the resources. But one opportunistic cheap-packeter can easily provide the missing material to get a great many heavy investors going.
This feeds into what turns out to be the main problem our organisms face. It’s important that change keeps happening, because that’s where improvements come from, but also because the environment keeps changing. Today’s optimal organism may not be suitable for tomorrow. But most changes are detrimental or at best neutral and those need to be guarded against somehow. So how to adopt beneficial new changes while holding on to what is good? What's the optimal strategy?
One thing about this planet, Tidus, is that it's a planet of many moons. Their interactions are difficult to predict, but sometimes gravitational forces stack up in such a way as to produce extreme outlier high and low tides.
Suppose that during a millennial-high tide some of these organisms get washed up into two separate inland seas. In the first sea, the heavy-investors — let’s call them ‘females’ — become prone to rapid change, i.e. heavy mutation, and take big risks to display whether the mutations they carry are beneficial. Meanwhile, the cheap-packeter ‘males’ will play it safe, avoid risk, and only try to mate with the females who have demonstrated fitness or, ideally, superiority.
Obviously this doesn’t work at all. Many of the females have new traits that suck, and so die or else aren’t fit for reproduction. Even some of the awesome ones end up dying before reproduction because they’re so prone to taking risks to show off. And because they’re the bottleneck, the next generation is much smaller, and the one after that, and so on. By the time the sea reëstablishes contact with the ocean, none are left.
Thankfully the population in the second sea goes the other way. Their males are prone to higher rates of mutation and therefore variability, both physically and mentally. They take big risks in competition with each other to demonstrate whether their mutations are beneficial. Meanwhile, females hew closer to the average, are risk-averse (so as to preserve reproductive ability), and select the best males to father the next generation.
Most males aren’t selected, but the few who are get to spread their traits across the offspring of many females. It's almost adorably democratic if you think about it. Each male can be thought of as a prototype for the next generation, and each female votes with her eggs.
This second population not only survives to return to the sea, but is much quicker to distribute positive changes throughout itself, since good-mutation-havers, which will mainly be male, also have outsized numbers of offspring, and mostly with females which have hewn close to the optimal genetics from the prior generation.
In other words, they've hit upon that long-sought evolutionary holy grail: The males are responsible for generating and demonstrating beneficial new changes at great personal risk and with a high rate of failure. Meanwhile the females are responsible for preserving that which has worked before and carefully selecting which males to award disproportionate mating access, all while staying risk-averse so as to safeguard their capacity to incubate the next generation.
When this kind regains access to the ocean they rapidly supplant any others who haven’t yet figured this out. As time passes, individual populations specialize and differences accumulate and eventually their descendants are completely unrecognizable, even to each other. Some become plantlike, wormlike, fishlike, etc. But, outside of a few bizarre edge cases, pretty much all of them are running that same key strategy worked out in the second inland sea, because in such a world as Tidus, binary gender turns out to be the killer tech.
And this is our first window into where 'different' is only generally worse: If another organism is different because it’s the sort of thing you’re designed to mate with, and the differences make it better for that, that’s a good thing!
In summary, male variability and promiscuity lead to better uptake of positive mutations (adopting beneficial new changes). And female invariability and selectivity wards against uptake of negative mutations (keeping what is good). But what happens when a population approaches the carrying capacity of its environment instead of having an apparently-infinite primordial ocean to exploit?
More importantly, what happens when these organisms are people?
Two afterthoughts.
Firstly, much is made of 'reproduction' above and it bears looking into why. In short, organisms optimize for reproduction for the simple reason that optimizing for anything else leads to extinction. Reproduction must always be the first priority. Organisms could spend a lot of time having fun, or making beautiful art, or thinking deep but pointless thoughts — but all else being equal these will be outcompeted by those which prioritized reproduction, and soon cease to exist. Rather like that example organism early on who gazed thoughtfully upon its more-able cousins as they consumed all the food in the area and left it to die.
But reproduction doesn't actually have to happen at the level of the individual. Suppose an organism gives its life to benefit a population which will generate more organisms such as itself. By doing so, even if it does not reproduce directly, it reproduces indirectly. Perhaps it may be said that the population reproduces as a 'body', in many ways like your own.
Consider that most of your cells (skin, bone, muscle, etc.) don't reproduce directly, but do sustain you such that you can reproduce and create a new person made of cells like them. This turns out to matter a lot, especially because 'complex' organisms are often able to wield unique advantages and outcompete more simple ones. This is true at both the level of the individual and at the level of the population, or even the ecosystem. More on that in later chapters.
Secondly, we've seen that 'different' can be a good thing when it comes to mates. As a man myself I happen to feel greatly appreciative of certain specific feminine differences! But even among potential mates, 'different' is still often a bad thing.
Consider the position of an organism looking for a partner. First it encounters a potential mate which is different in terms of being noticeably inferior. This is obviously a bad deal, especially for females, who have sharply-limited reproductive potential. Mating with an inferior organism will produce inferior offspring — quite contrary to the entire point of the reproductive exercise! But then it encounters a potential mate which is different in terms of being noticeably superior. Great, right?
Alas, no. At least, not usually.
This new potential mate isn't interested in coupling with our prospective organism. Why would it be? We just saw that this wouldn't make sense. So instead, the superior organism will go on to find another superior organism, leaving ours alone and very probably heartbroken. Ours may, in time, find something at its own level — but if there are superior ones reproducing out there, their offspring are likely to supplant and thus extinguish those of our organism. The following chapter is substantially about this.
Next week: Chapter 02: Horrific Engine