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
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Notes -
The Stranger
The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk—
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.
The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.
The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control—
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.
The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.
This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf—
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.
Rudyard Kipling
This post shows up as "deleted by user" and is not visible on the front page, btw.
Spam filter problem. Thought I'd be clear by now but the mods will have to do it manually I suppose. Thanks for your evidently-avid readership!
Top level posts must all be approved manually, no matter how long you've been posting. Unfortunately this has proven to be the only way to keep the site from being overwhelmed with botspam.
Fair enough and apologies if that came off as a complaint.
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