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
Yes, thanks.
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.
There seems to be some kind of quality of 'general alignedness' which breaks across low-pressure generations. I just wrote a more technical post about this here though it's speculative.
So you can lose a large amount of fitness without massive regression on any single trait, just by minor regressions or variations on multiple traits, which aren't inherently linked but are selected for together in a wild environment.
Yes, that's a major component. And, this compounds rapidly until selection pressure is turned back up.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
1d ago
Do let me know what you decide, and also why.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
1d ago
Short answer, I can definitively say that you've broadly misunderstood me here, and just as definitively guess that this is at least 80% my fault. For one, I have a known bad habit of tacking tangential afterthoughts onto other statements without being clear that they're tangential. In this case your fixation on mutation load occurred to me as strange until I realised that you got there through a very reasonable (but unintended) interpretation of something I said upthread.
Also, while I try to be precise in the chapters, in the comments I'm mostly just shooting from the hip while trying to ignore the yapping of sassy male stewardesses etc, or distracted by the guy next to me in the terminal who's having a spectacularly-loud heart to heart with whoever's on the other end of his phone, or sitting dead-tired on a rock-hard bed in a room I've never been in before and will never enter again. Which is to say: I've admittedly been sloppy here and there, and probably conflated some things I shouldn't have, either due to inattention or just from being lackadaisical.
Pretty much agree with your criticisms of what you understandably thought my position was. Will try to get back to you tomorrow. Can't promise it. Thanks for the questions.
I hear you. I don't know what the mechanism is exactly but can observe the same thing happening over and over again. It's so commonplace in my circles that no one even talks about it. We all just understand, and wordlessly operate under the assumption, that it works this way. (Though we're not working with pigeons and the phenomenon I'm describing is easier to see in our case.)
I have ideas. I try to gesture at them in the book. It's not any one trait. Perhaps it's a sort of weighted basket. But one way or another there's something like 'general fitness alignedness' which just slides over time without selection pressure.
With the multi generational pigeon example it's even weirder - allele frequency shouldn't shift substantially across a few generations with minimal selective pressure in a large flock.
I don't think it does! It's more like certain combinations work better than others and, even if the cards in the deck aren't changing much, as it were, the more times shuffling happens the worse things get. Let me try to lay this out (and take it with a grain of salt; as I said I'm not actually a geneticist by training):
As we know, during meiosis homologous chromosomes pair up and exchange corresponding segments of DNA. Where those crossovers occur is stochastically distributed, but not perfectly random along the chromosome.
Now,
- Each chromosome pair usually undergoes 1–3 crossovers, mostly according to its length.
- Crossovers are regulated so that at least one occurs per chromosome pair (to ensure proper separation), but usually not too many; nearby crossovers interfere with each other.
- Importantly, the location of those crossovers is biased. It's not a truly random walk! They tend to occur in specific 'hotspot' regions where the chromatin is more open and accessible. Other regions of the genome are recombination cold spots (like near centromeres or certain heterochromatin areas).
- Hotspots are largely determined by a gene called PRDM9, which encodes a protein that binds to specific DNA motifs and initiates recombination there. Tellingly(?), PRDM9's ability to recognize DNA sequences evolves very quickly, such that recombination hotspots differ significantly even among closely related species.
- That PRDM9 sequence-recognition evolves so rapidly implies to me that it breaks fairly often as well (but that's a guess and I don't know how to find out).
Therefore, crossing over is 'random', but within critical constraints. It’s like shuffling a deck where certain 'chunks' of cards are more likely to get swapped than others.
So far, so good. I'm 99% certain that no one is going to argue with any of that, though @Chrisprattalpharaptr feel free to jump in.
But my guess, and I stress again that I'm just grasping here, is that in the first generation certain whole chunks which go well together are more likely to get transposed intact, but as the mating game continues they become prone to getting fragmented and their constituent pieces ending up in weird combinations that don't work as well with each other. To be clear the resulting offspring still 'works', it's just not as optimally-aligned.
(If any actual geneticists are reading this please let me know whether that's plausible or if you have a better explanation. If I just rederived someone's thesis I'll be more relieved that I'm not crazy than disappointed that I won't get credit, I promise.)
And if that's not what's happening, I bet it's at least a partial metaphor for whatever is happening.
In nature, including in competitive human societies, this doesn't have as much of a chance to show up in obvious ways except perhaps in protracted boom times. You'd have to be doing something like I'm doing, where specimens bred in captivity over generations are then directly compared with freshly-caught ones in complex trials, and sometimes even released into the wild and observed (where they pretty uniformly do terribly), to notice this. I just don't think there are many eyes on this phenomenon. Which is a shame as it has, to radically understate the matter, serious implications for sociology if true.
Allow me paste a little from chapter six's coda:
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.
...
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.
I think you see now where I'm coming from.
Also, I'm sure that some of this is just regression to the mean. Above-average parents are more likely to mate but less likely to have children of the same quality, which can explain some of the substantial first-generation drop we see.
Something else on my mind:
In humans, oogenesis generally has more crossovers per meiosis than spermatogenesis. The distribution of crossover sites differs too: Male crossovers tend to cluster near telomeres, while female crossovers are more evenly spread across the chromosome. But there’s no consistent directional bias; it's not like 'this gene is more likely to be inherited from the mother' at least afaict. It’s more about where and how often recombination happens in each sex.
I don't know yet how this is pertinent but I feel that it is. A major theme in this book is how different men are from women and I'm prone to becoming fascinated by any little hints along these lines.
Edited: As I read over this the following morning, all I can think is, goodness, but I do sound like an American when I talk about work.
Great questions! Though nobody I know is bothering with zygotes, and I don't think the problem has anything to do with captivity per se except as it relates to a general lack of selection pressure.
Let's talk pigeons. To answer your question, suppose we take wild pigeon eggs and raise them (which I have done many times).
The parents are pigeons which managed to reach adulthood and mate successfully in the wild, which is to say that they are already very heavily selected. Probably they had many siblings, of the same parents, who did not make it. I think most people have no idea how many wild babies fail to make it to adulthood, and how many fewer have successful offspring of their own. It's hell out there.
Their eggs, then, follow the same pattern. Say we have four eggs. (Pigeons generally lay two at a time but we're saying four for illustrative purposes.) Of those, I'd expect one which is of the same quality of its parents, two which are not far off, and one which has deviated to a much greater degree. And different is generally worse.
Now suppose these are in a captive flock which has a healthy population size such that inbreeding isn't a major problem. Even so, each generation continues to slide a little more. Without wild-level selection pressure a whole lot of (generally worse) variants are doing just fine even if, again, more than you'd think fail to make it to adulthood even with ample resources and in a predator- and parasite-free environment.
Let me clarify here that we're not just talking about de novo mutations which at this scale aren't actually much of a problem. It's a question of the random recombination of their parents' genetic material.
Let's say (and this is an extremely crude and oversimplified thought experiment) that there are four 'personalities' possible from each parental pairing. Maybe easier to imagine two human parents with four children with different personalities and arguendo that's entirely genetic (yeah I know it's not, but a lot of it is). Some of those mental, phenomenological loadouts are better-aligned and will be more successful in life. Suppose one does as well as his parents, two do just fine, and the last one... gets an art degree. If they have to succeed the problem works itself out as the less-successful reproduce at lower rates. Give them infinite resources across generations, however, and the problem can get really, really bad, resulting in genetic meltdown and any number of people who are dependent upon charity and couldn't support themselves or a family if their lives depended upon it. They'll also be accumulating weird physical problems along the way, and will get uglier.
In other words, and to bring it back, suppose we take a bunch of the eggs from the multi-generation captive flock and swap them into wild pigeons' nests such that they're raised by top-tier parents. It'll be a massacre. They won't be as strong, fast, healthy, intelligent, etc. Even if nothing is apparently wrong they're just not put together as well. They'll fail to cope with the harsher conditions, get snapped up by predators, die in random collisions, fail to attract mates, and so on at much worse rates than the eggs we just swapped from their adoptive parents would have.
Does that answer your question?
Yes, thanks, was hoping you'd show back up.
Let me mull on this and get back to you tomorrow; I'm in the air.
In the meantime may I ask your favour that, if you manage to connect some dots about me, you confine your guesses to DM? I'm fairly nervous about how much entropy I'm shredding with each statement though let me be clear I don't have any ethical or legal concerns about what I'm doing. It's just a small world and my opinions need to remain private, especially as they relate to humans.
I have some experience also with breeding horses, hounds, and pigeons, which may be easier to talk about since those are a lot more common and also I'm not really associated with any of them. Then again those were also more hobbies and passing fancies than anything. But the principles hold across everything I've ever done. Decline in quality from wild-caught to F1 isn't so bad but drops off very rapidly after that even if up to about F4 most of the output is 'good enough for government work.'
Also, as I'm sure you can tell, I'm not trained specifically as a geneticist. I have the same basic education there as the next guy in this world, though over time I've had the occasion and interest to dig deeper. I'm a lot happier speaking from practical experience.
My education had to do with ecology more generally and my work has revolved more around psychology, particularly as it relates to heredity. There isn't actually a ton of academic literature on the subject. A lot of the most important things I know have been pointed out to me by old timers who learned the honest way any number of things that I'd never have been taught in school.
So let me clarify your question:
The general problem with mutation load in small populations is very well and very widely understood, such that I'll be a bit surprised (but happy to help) if you'd just like to know more about it. But that's not the impression I'm getting. What would you like from me, specifically?
Thank you for the comment! Happily, these questions are easier to answer directly than your last ones. Also as you said there's some overlap and true to my word I've been processing for you, which helps.
Instead of quoting line by line let me answer in a few general ways.
- I've been having a hard time trying to figure out how to talk about my personal experiences without giving myself away, but a little anecdote (read: 15+ years of hands-on experience in excessively-well-documented conditions) might go a long way. This is going to be intentionally vague. So, there are these animals we take from the wild. They have a certain level of general quality, usually very high. They are well-aligned. They are excellent at what they do. We breed them in captivity. The next generation, maybe half of them are as good, and — it's funny to me that I've never actually run the numbers — offhand I think it's more like 35-40%. Generation after that, there are a few decent specimens. Generation after that, it's maybe one solid specimen in a sea of screwballs and even that one has some kind of noticeable flaw and possibly can't get a female pregnant. So then we go back to the wild to get more. There are some practices in which we engage to mitigate this, but they amount to extreme selection pressure and carefully-controlled breeding. It's actually pretty difficult to keep a captive population from sliding into catastrophic mutation load. Takes a gene pool of several hundred creatures and a hellacious amount of stress upon them to achieve, which is not feasible in this case for reasons I can't get into, though I've heard of an outfit in another part of the world with some strange funders which seems to be making a go of it.
-
- So from all this I would propose that there is a stat, if you'd like, which we might call 'general quality', just like there's 'general intelligence'. Which, actually, my next point was going to be about that. In rationalist communities we tend to fixate far too much on IQ. Yes, it's important. No, it's not the end of the world. We all know what it looks like when someone is very high-IQ but, shall we say, deficient in other major respects. Are the Aristocratic Horse Warriors higher-IQ than the people they're conquering? Sometimes yes I'm pretty sure. Sometimes no; definitely not. This is beside the point. What they are is aligned. Physically and mentally as well. And I'm pretty sure that alignment does tend to correlate with IQ. Which is really important, because:
- I'm saying this is an icon of male and female. On the subject of Mongols, picture a horse nomad —ah, can I say this here — having his way with the sister of the sweatiest, chubbiest, most-effete, half-infertile, most frighteningly-intelligent Mandarin you can imagine. Don't give me that look; you know the one I mean. The one who's just a little bit too excited about foot binding. Point is, the conquerors don't need to be higher IQ: They just need to be better. And the children of the next generation etc. etc., so ever upwards and onwards amen.
- So on balance I think it works out this way. Sometimes two tribes fight and due to externalities the 'wrong' one wins. But with enough trials over a large-enough timescale, it works out.
This mountain may be a metaphor but it is certainly a bizarre one. A 60% unemployment rate! The structure reminds me more of something like South Africa than Uruk. Where are the slaves, the working class? Only a very prosperous society could afford to keep a ”shoal” alive.
This is just a misunderstanding which is naturally upon my own head as the author.
We should probably call a lot of the people on the Shoals 'partially-employed'. That right there might answer your question. Migrant seasonal laborers. Camp followers. Part time retail jobs with food stamps. Anyone who can't afford to miss a few weeks' pay and whose options for asking for financial assistance are dwindling faster than the tide is coming in. Also full-time workers who are subsisting on such narrow margins that one bad year means curtains for them and their kids. Those higher up have the resources to weather a bad storm; some people just don't. A lot of people just don't. This can be hard for the modern Western mind to comprehend but it's the truth.
All slaves are always on the shoals unless they somehow have opportunities to mate with women of a higher class, which strikes me as unusual. A slave purchasing his freedom might secure a spot upslope. Does that make sense?
Meanwhile, I should think many of the traits and virtues highly valued in modern societies, and which you ascribe to the warrior nobility, probably ended up on the tip of a high pole.
Forgive me but I don't follow here your turn of phrase. Let me take a shot in the dark:
Refer to the 'male and female' above. Many of the best traits in the nobility do not originate in the nobility but from the matter, the, uh, indigenous substrate upon which they maintain themselves. Let me quote a snippet. (You have already read this so I must be misunderstanding you or else I just need to fix the line)
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.
It would be a mistake to think that, in my male-female metaphor, the mom's genes don't matter. They really do! And 'she' (proles) may have been evolving certain traits (perhaps ability to restrain aggressive impulses e.g.) which 'he' (Nobility) hasn't quite got the hang of. Some of their children will have the best, or worst, of both. Then selection kicks in. The whole system gets a little brighter. See?
Probably you asked something else but I'm tired.
My greatest thanks to you as always.
<3
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
5d ago
By the way, should have mentioned this sooner, but I recommend to the utmost that everybody immediately go watch Life in Colour with David Attenborough, available on Netflix and elsewhere.
I think it's the most sublimely important documentary ever made about politics and the best part is that the creators have no idea what it is that they even made.
Thank you! I cannot rate the quality of your complaints highly enough. Your object-level points combine collectively to probe at some real subtleties in the Pattern, including some I'm not sure I've looked at very closely yet. Overall I find your questions comfortable but exciting.
However, I am traveling and will probably be functionally offline for about a day and a half. Even after that I'm not sure how quickly I'll be able to answer you. I really want to chew on this for a while. As in, I totally see what you mean, and I'm pretty sure I'm on the right side of this, but to explain how would require drilling deeply indeed, such that I may need to invent some new (internal) language to do it. Next week's chapter describes some of the idea at its peripheries. To be honest I think I might need to pull in some concepts from book two, which would be difficult for many reasons.
Suppose I shouldn't be surprised. This is in retrospect an obvious sticking point (structurally) and I don't think there's an obvious way around it without saying, essentially, "Yeah that might sound crazy right now but if you keep reading it'll eventually click." (Which I think is only true for some people anyway, which is also part of the thesis...)
Then again, that's a major reason I'm framing everything fictionally in the first place. I'm trying to point out some higher patterns, truths, which illumine much of the world around us but which seem to be ungraspable without slipping ever so slightly into poetry.
This makes intuitive sense to me. I believe our ancestors (or at least the ones phenomenologically-comparable to us) were leading much richer, fuller lives than we do today, and if nothing else I'm trying to recapitulate their worldview for a modern audience so as to point out some of the valuable truths which might easily be missed without it. And also to suggest that unless we get intentional about such things, much more will be lost.
Anyway, thank you, truly. This experiment of putting the book up to get some feedback and even internal clarity is going swimmingly.
And, as always, it's the people one meets along the way.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
9d ago
Let me first reiterate how grateful I am for the good conversation. But I don't think there's a gap here. At some point we're just talking about history, not prehistory. The pattern is consistent and runs strong. In fact this pattern is so universally-understood that I hadn't imagined anyone might object. "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below."
The values, the selection pressures, the endogamy, the conquering, the degeneration, the replacement by more powerful strains -- all of this looks plain as day to me. Is there any particular thread that occurs to you as doubtful?
I abide contentedly in blessed singleness, nor have ever had a husband
Truly?
this kind of attitude makes me very glad that God made me as I am, freed from the desire for the desire of others
That is indeed the correct set for one's sails at such a latitude and I'm glad that you have discovered it for yourself, even if I consider it a pity that our children should not be afforded the enjoyment of this same argument.
But I think you misunderstand me, paloma mía. I feel nothing but affection for you and am entirely sincere when I mention how you brighten my day. Please enter future chapters as my invited guest. In fact, it is belatedly occurring to me that I might benefit from your perspective as a proto-reader, so if you'd like early access I'd be happy to grant it.
Tidus will remain regrettably short-staffed re: girlbosses but the world in book two won't, and by book three... well, I think you'll find what goes on there more amenable to your palate.
I think there's been a misunderstanding here. I'd bet a lot of money on pretty much everything I'm talking about in this chapter, and I'm not the betting kind. The evidence is copious. It's just anathema to the academy, and so scattered and denigrated.
I think that theory has been successful because it's flattering to the people who made and received it and because it's aesthetically or narratively compelling. It's in your very title here - 'The Race of Kings'.
I don't think it's controversial that the Aryans existed (but don't any more), that they called themselves Aryans (which means 'Nobles' or 'Kings'), that they were a distinct race, and that they behaved essentially as portrayed here. King Tut had red hair and blue eyes. The only detail I've really changed is that boats were a lot less pertinent to them in practice because they didn't actually live in an island chain.
I'm not an Aryan. Why would I have a personal stake in propagating the narrative of a functionally-vanished People? But I'm pretty sure this happened, and I think you would be too if you dug into it. Just, as I said, don't bother asking the relevant departments at universities, or reading academy-approved authors.
Razib has some good material but I'm old enough to have a hard time finding it. Searching his substack for 'Aryan' should do it, I hope.
Point is, I'm not telling a story I enjoy. I hate almost everything about how all of this, from genetics to race to sex to society works. I just happen to believe it's true, and wish to paint a picture for others of what I'm seeing in front of me all the time.
I'm not going to mod you for the comment you deleted, but you are kind of being an asshole here.
Fair!
people are allowed to push back on your thesis ( isn't that what you want? To get responses, including criticism?) and responding to a critic with a patronizing "know your place, woman" isn't acceptable in this forum.
Oh but I didn't. I responded to her critique amicably, by quoting a publicly-available source, and offered a helpful interpretation.
Then she kept talking, and so did I.
The assholery was in response to her repeated and ongoing pattern of bad-faith, low-effort, antagonistic, disrespectful sneering, which I had up to that point ignored pretty entirely. Hence the placement after her quote where she arrogantly suggested that my work here is on par with 'a fantasy novel' and that I had better try actually learning something instead of just describing how I want things to work. Only problem being, I know a lot about this, actually, and she doesn't. I wouldn't talk to anyone on this site the way she's been talking to me. Including her, thus that response.
Maybe that's how you'd like it to be and think it should be, but it's not how it is.
For what it's worth, though we won't see eye to eye on this, I consider what I said to her to be both true and kind. Your opinion is the one that matters, but at least know where I was coming from. I didn't think it correct to respond to her in kind.
Actually I think that in this context you're responsible for her behaviour, at least to the degree that you are for mine. So are you intending to do anything about that? I enjoy her liveliness and unselfconscious declarations, but the lack of a civil tongue in her mouth is becoming disruptive. She might at least double-check what she thinks she knows before telling me I'm an ignorant hack.
(EDIT:) Anyway I think what you're asking for here is an indication on my part that I'll refrain from such responses in the future, which I hereby affirm.
Pretty well actually, the "blond beast" and "Aryan noble" conceptions are perfectly compatible; martial virtue vs. base savagery.
An important dimension is that of how people behave among others within their own society. We can speak of high trust and low trust, etc. But I don't think that what we see in modern European countries, even among genetic Europeans, can mostly be traced back to the Aryans. Aryans went all sorts of places and most of them turned out differently.
I don't think Aryans exist any more, and if they did I wouldn't expect them to conform to my standards of intra-society conduct. (Tropicals are definitely still with us and they generally behave as I expect them to.)
Their spark, though; the phenomenological 'shining' which made the Nobles so different from others, has been exploded outward into innumerable populations in which it reconstitutes itself among the generations at variable frequencies. Next week's chapter sheds some light on this.
I'll be happy to read your own take on these matters when you write it. Just be sure to cover the same amount of ground, explore every nuance you feel that I've inappropriately missed, and document all the sources from which you've drawn insight over a multi-decade career, including the ones you can't divulge without doxxing yourself, entirely. I look forward to cheering you on as you rise to your own standards.
The last thing I remember was the professor talking about how gluttony is good actually, because Christianity says it's never okay to enjoy food, but Nietzsche shows us how actually it is all right to enjoy food sometimes and so frees us from religious bondage.
And I thought, this guy clearly doesn't have any kind of handle on English, history, culture, Christianity, philosophy, or probably even Nietzsche himself for that matter. What am I doing in this place? So I left.
The ruin, the destruction of higher people, of strangely constituted souls, is the rule: it is horrible always to have a rule like this in front of your eyes. The manifold torment of the psychologist who discovered this destruction, who first discovered and then kept rediscovering (in almost every case) the whole inner “hopelessness” of the higher person, the eternal “too late!” in every sense, throughout the entirety of history
Gotta say this is hitting the nail on the head. Inasmuch as The Mountain has a standalone message, apart from the context of the series, this is it. But I'll wait to elaborate until the epilogue.
And yes, Nietzsche is clearly being put before me to read. Thanks for the quote and the rec.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
11d ago
Jawohl! Thanks for stopping by. I hope for another chance to join you in the old country.
specifically this paragraph from chapter 6 ... I don't think you've demonstrated that the struggle of divergent prototribes to assimilate in IIRC the bronze age directly maps to what can't be read as anything other than a criticism of modern welfare states.
Yeah, and actually my best test reader also advised me to remove that. I'm thinking I should have listened. The lesson is implicit, there's some temporal whiplash, and in general it feels like a cheap throwaway sort of shot. Probably I'll sand it off in whatever the next iteration of this book is.
I'd be willing to bet that in pre-Confucian Chinese states with both large Imperial harems and absolute proprietorial control of commoner women in monogamous marriages with their husbands, the commoners actually had much lower rates of infidelity simply because they could actually keep an eye on/meaningfully restrict their women
I don't have leanings on this one way or the other (though by the way you might look into the treatment of women in Ancient Greece for comparison). What I do think is that human beings are understandably extremely driven to exercise agency in mate selection, and from certain perspectives it is only morally correct for a person who, due to societal externalities, is forced into mating with low-quality partners, to find a way around that problem by hook or by crook.
When I described women cheating on their partners a few chapters ago, I did so dispassionately; even compassionately. Who among us could survive such judgment? Though for asymmetrical reasons the same is not true for creepy rapists. Feminine enthusiastic consent is worth a lot more evolutionarily than the thirst of an undesirable male.
We could all write fantasy worlds where it just so happens very conveniently that evolution works exactly the way we want it to bring Our Guys out on top.
Just last week someone was mad at me for my (imagined) assertion that 'Europeans' are peaceful innocents while tropicals are bloodthirsty savages. How well would you say that take has aged?
Imagine complaining about the ending of a movie when you're 2/3 in, and also deciding that the director (about whom you know nothing) must obviously be sublimating his tawdry sexual anxieties into the narrative because there's simply no other way we might get to such a point. One might begin to ponder the nature of projection.
if every 'white' land is echoing to the call of the muezzin, that will be the 'winning' race.
I will prefer to avoid entanglements with someone who thinks that Islam is a race.
You know what, this is some appropriate meta-criticism. Thanks for the opportunity to respond.
It's a war of memes, and it's being argued on that level.
It is a war of memes. Of maps. The territory is implicitly inaccessible, and all we're left with is debating the merits of various subjective reconstructions. Within that, what I'm writing here is my best, most honest, good-faith interpretation of what actually happened, given certain necessary constraints such as brevity and with an eye to showing yet more interesting things down the road. Any part of this could be expanded fractally, but then we'd still be debating how the first cell got its start and nothing of import would have been said of anything else at all.
Meanwhile, HereAndGone's contribution is not good faith, not honest, not her best. It's buffoonery, calculated to mock and offend. It's a sneer. It's a pigeon strutting around knocking over pieces on a chessboard and then acting upset when it's not taken seriously. (The assertion about hearthfires was the first salient one she's made. She was wrong about that, but I'll acknowledge the validity of the attempt and wish more would follow that example.)
Probably this sounds like I'm upset. I'm not; actually I've worked a lot with pigeons and am quite fond of them. Subtly-amazing creatures, and I sincerely do enjoy having her around. What's beginning to irritate me is the people who can't seem to distinguish the difference here; who suppose that my declination to 'argue' with her is tantamount to an admission of defeat. Perhaps that's on me for expecting too much, even given the themes upon which I'm writing.
But if what you want is to know how the human race and human civilisation actually developed...
Go somewhere else. None of this is that.
If you want that, abandon all hope, because it's not to be found anywhere at all.
The best that can probably be done is for someone to spend a long, long time trying to put the puzzle together, then turn around and offer you his cliff notes. Ideally several such people would do this and compare and argue. Will you go next?
this is in fact going to get much weirder and more interesting.
Oh my yes. What tipped you off? Or are you a friend in disguise, to whom I may have offered a hint as to where this is going?
I did intentionally let the weirdness drip through a little more in this chapter, just a touch.
But as I've alluded to previously, book one is fairly prosaic foundation deployment. For the later books to work I need sex and race to be at least somewhat as intelligible to the reader as they would have been to an ancient pagan, but at this point in Western history we're several generations deep into a titanic project aimed at preventing exactly that.
For this reason chapters nine and ten especially are culture war central and probably exactly as egregious as everyone is anticipating. But my intent with them is quite apart from that. I just need to complete the narrative so as to answer several implicit questions, and also because unless I show people exactly why they can't see certain things they probably never will.
Of course, it'll all be laid out from what I hope is a fresh and innovative perspective, and hope also to delight and amaze you with some angles I can pretty much guarantee you've never considered before.
And along the way I'll be better and better able to offer some glimpses through the cracks at the things on the other side. Or perhaps I should say, hold up the occasional tiny mirror such that the reader gets an impression of the things casting shadows on the wall.
To be honest book two is already so weird that I fear I'll lose most readers within a couple chapters, and it only takes off from that point. Weaving moments of pertinence in among the flights of abstract world building is proving to be a challenge. But the payoff is so worth it, provided I can manage to get us that far.
So bear with me. I do need to sew up race and sex, at least at Tidus' level of resolution, but this is less a culmination than an obligatory step on our way to somewhere much more interesting. And strange.
Earendil
Then over Middle-Earth he passed
12d ago
That's a remarkably quick turnaround for a gender inherently programmed to oppress women. What's going on there?
I get into this a bit more throughout the series (later books) but I just don't think men and women have each other figured out yet. If anything, by nature, I think men are fairly happy to indulge women and children in their stated preferences even to a fault, especially when we think it's likely to get us what we want in the moment, whether that's their presence or their absence. We can be pretty short-sighted about this both individually and corporately.
Thanks, I appreciate some constructive feedback.
he doesn't address at all societies which practice 'hard' arranged marriages, which would mean women have pretty much no say at all in their mates, and we would expect to lessen, or at least change the form male peacocking takes, as well as cease to force women through a hypergamous darwinian selection process.
Totally fair. All I can really say is that more material than you'd probably believe is on the cutting room floor. I do gesture at what you're talking about in places, but the deeper truth at which you're pointing here is more the sort of thing that will be important in later books. Then again the crescendo of gender (in book one at least) isn't until chapter 10, so I suppose you'll have to wait and see.
One thing I'll suggest for now though is that 'hard' control of women pushes them, if anything, further toward adultery, since they're shorter on less-objectionable options. Who has harder control of his women than the Emperor? Yet he's also the guy deploying eunuchs to manage them.
In addition, I find his insinuations his fairly convincing view of how stone-age tribes slugged it out explain modern racial politics pretty risible.
Would you mind elaborating? I don't really remember doing that and this may be a case where I implied something accidentally. Related to the below?
By the time of the last serious elite-supported defense of pure hereditary elitism - De Gobineau's age - the claims European Elite Human Capital represented nearly pureblooded Aryans ruling over potato people peasants were completely false. Warfare had simply gotten too lethal by the Middle Ages, to the point nearly all European nobility represented former commoners raised to knighthood and eventually higher rank to replace some Aryan conqueror unceremoniously stuck through with an Ottoman crossbow bolt or whatever.
Yes, well-said. We do get to that next week and then again the week after. Only so much development can be covered in each chapter and only in so many dimensions. I think you're slightly overstating things here but you'll need to let me know down the road whether I end up scratching this itch for you.
I'm busy and not going to answer this unless I do it really quickly, so here we go.
A lot of people are clearly downvoting the idea rather than the argument; I've been perhaps too quick to assign you to this general category. Your questions scanned to me as a fairly impressively-polite phrasing of 'are you full of shit' (sincere appreciation there; it's an art) and to be blunt I just didn't experience any desire to satisfy you about that.
But I think you are appropriately calling my attention to something that I'd stopped noticing by force of habit. To wit, I'm using the term 'mutation (or 'mutational') load' in a way that is new to you and must appear very screwy. It occurs to me that I am indeed being loose with the term; I simply don't think we have better language for what I'm talking about. Most readers won't have that problem, never having heard of the concept, but you do and I apologize for not offering you more consideration.
What I'm talking about is kind of a broader sense of mutation load. Like, abstract it up a level or three; I'm not sure how many. It's a general concept, and principle, and with yesterday's post I bet you can see where I'm suggesting the pieces might be tied together. If you do have any suggestions as to what else to call this, I'm all ears. And of course the real holy grail would be a reference to a paper describing and naming it. But in the meantime I am, as it were, going to war with the army I have.
I'm really glad that you called this out specifically because the answer is no. I've always chafed beneath that aphorism and part of the project of the book is to explain how it's incorrect. Unfortunately, I do not yet have a replacement which is anywhere near as pithy. Bear with me as I scratch in the dirt here, but,
An isomorphism is indeed present between the two, but they're not quite the same thing. And "good" is of course as troublesome a concept as always, but we can't seem to help ourselves, can we?
A larger sort of synthesis is going on in human history. Finely-tuned people conquer an area populated by indigenes. Admixture occurs. The product generations are generally less-finely-tuned but contain some new beneficial adaptations as it were. The superstructure crumbles beneath the pressure of another finely-tuned people, even given all the defensive advantages of agricultural society. The system climbs higher and higher across iterations.
So looking at it that way, I think the divergence comes in line three: "Good times make weak men." Yes, but also no! Good times make new men who are better in some ways and worse in others. Then comes the winnowing. See?
Less a trait than a sort of index, and... yes.
No, I don't think so either. This was a correct objection on your part and I hope I've answered it satisfactorily in general in the comments of this chapter. Mea culpa for playing too fast and loose with my English. I don't actually expect F5 to be mostly-infertile; I was just gesturing at it as an example of the sort of odd, nebulous, systemic issue that I do expect to have popped up somewhere by that point.
Entirely correct, and I understand why you think that's at issue, but it's not. We can control for this as it were via experiments such as the one I described with pigeon eggs elsewhere.
No comment but I applaud your sharp eyes. This doesn't bother me either.
The rest seems to circle back around.
Thank you for the rigour. Please keep it up if you don't mind, even considering that I've been a less-than-stellar host to you thus far.
Edit: Oh and @faul_sname
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