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
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