"Wholly Holistic Evolution, Mr. Darwin"
Or: The Basis of The Quantum Theory Of Godly and Human Behavior
Preface
Back Next
Karl Eklund
If you have come here looking for a reference given in the essay "A Quantum Theory Of Godly and Human Behavior" you have come to the right place. If you have come here because of a reference found someplace else, you probably want to look at that essay first. It can be found at http://qt.karleklund.net . It is shorter and less complicated. You can always come back here to look up the things that are stated without argument there.
There are some things here that are ignored in the Quantum Theory essay in order to make it shorter. Some of them were not in the direct line of development but were necessary for me to convince myself that I was going in the right direction.
There is another essay at http://whatnow.karleklund.net that is sort of intermediate but has some arguments that are a bit different than the ones here. There is still another essay that can be considered a preliminary draft of the Quantum Theory one, it is at http://ub.karleklund.net . One of these days, when I don't seem to have any new ideas any more I may try to combine everything into one coherent presentation.
What I have to ask you is to remember that this essay, while it gives arguments in fuller form, doesn't have a fully coherent idea to present. Give it some slack.
I have to apologize to those who have read versions of this preface in the last year or so. I missed the point badly. Since the 1950s I have been trying to survive in the world by being reasonable, and since the 1960s I have been putting together a science of behavior based on reasonable ideas, and it was only within the last few weeks that I understood why I never got any substantive comments from my "peers".
"Peer review", as we will see, is an important aspect of science and I was never entirely satisfied without it. But a recent essay in The New York Times explained my mistake. Evolutionary theory is not a science, it is an ideology.
In the New York Times of January 13, 2007, Michael Tomasello, the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology wrote:
"Evolutionary theory tells us that, in general, the only individuals who are around today are those whose ancestors did things that were beneficial to their own survival and reproduction".This is a weak form of Spencer's "Survival of the Fittest". He also wrote:
"We are still a long way from figuring out why humans evolved to do so many complicated things together: from building houses to creating universities to fighting wars."There is a distinct difference between science and ideology. Ideology starts with something that is accepted as inherently true: a creed, a theistic myth, a bible. Ideology attempts to reason, starting with that truth, to things that are normal experiences. If that reasoning fails to connect the creed and the experience it is called a "mystery" and it is accepted that the connection is there but invisible. This is the connection that Dr. Tomasello describes between Spencer's doctrine and cooperation.
Science, on the other hand, works the other way. Science starts with the experiences and, by reasoning backwards to their presumed causes, erects a ladder of reason that ends at some general principle or "Law of Nature". At least it does that in principle. More often it starts with the insight of some individual like Darwin, and reasons from that insight until it explains the experience. If it does not explain the experience it throws out the insight and starts again with something else. In the situation described by Dr. Tomasello a scientist would throw out Spencer's dictum of "Survival of the Fittest" and look for something else.
If fact, as I will show, Dr. Tomasello would not have to look far. If you start with Darwin's original insight, "non-survival of the unfit", you quickly come to an explanation of cooperation. But that is only possible if evolution is a science. If evolution is an ideology then throwing out Spencer's insight in favor of Darwin's is a heresy and unthinkable.
But if evolution started as a science how did it become an ideology?
Since the 1500s we have been going through a transitional period characterized by upward mobility of a layer of the lower middle class through the acquisition of money. We call that the Industrial Revolution and the acquisition of money and status is highly competitive. Spencer's dictum made this competition seem "natural" and provided a biological justification for the status of the elite.
Academia, being inherently hierarchical, clings to the idea that academics are superior to ordinary people. They not only cling to the idea that ordinary people are inferior but they insist on having the power to teach the children of ordinary people that evolution brands them as being inherently inferior.
Of course ordinary people resent that and object to it, but they have no counter-arguments that insist on the equality of their children except the obsolete religions that served the first agricultural villages in the neolithic. Luckily we can provide an explanation of the evolution of cooperation that can replace the false reasoning of the Spencerians.
This conversion of a scientific insight into an ideology doesn't only happen in biology. I can even happen in Physics, the "hardest" of the sciences.
A little over 50 years ago I attended a seminar at Columbia University in which Tsung-Dao (T.D.) Lee and Chen-Ning (Frank) Yang reported that there had never been any experimental proof that Parity was conserved. Roughly, Conservation of Parity meant that a physical phenomenon would be indistinguishable from its mirror image. This is very often the case.
There had been a general consensus on the conservation of Parity ever since Lev Landau had enunciated the principle in the 1930s. Lee and Yang thought that particular dogma might be wrong, and suggested a couple of experiments that might be done to decide the issue. The experiments were simple in principle but difficult to execute. The audience (including a couple of Nobel laureates) was too polite to laugh but everyone was absolutely certain that Parity was conserved. Nobody except Lee and Yang thought seriously about it.
Luckily Lee and Yang were so highly regarded as theorists that they could pursuade Chen-Shung Wu to do one of the experiments. Parity turned out not to be conserved and Lee and Yang won the Nobel Prize the next time it was given. (What was conserved was the combination of parity and time reversal--i.e. the combination of direction and handedness. Not at all intuitively obvious.)
In a few months an experiment was performed with equipment that could have been found in a good high school physics laboratory and it, too, showed that parity was not conserved. But interpreting that experiment involved a calculation so difficult that nobody would have considered doing it unless they were pretty confident in the answer.
Physicists believed Parity was conserved for twenty years on no evidentiary basis but they had no egregious conflicts with ordinary reality to consider. Evolutionists have had faith in Spencer's rule for more than a century no matter how egregious the conflicts with reality.
Having experienced the Parity Revolution gave me a certain freedom from scientific dogmata so when I decided that the world was too crazy for me to deal with rationally, "Survival of the Fittest" was one of the first things to go. If Spencer's rule was true the establishment would have been correct about Vietnam and my bosses would have known how to run a university.
Things are even more crazy now, but at least I can explain why.
Between the World Wars in the last century, Arnold Toynbee composed an analysis of the rise and fall of civilizations he titled "A Study of History". In the stage just before the collapse a typical civilization will go through a stage in which the government becomes a military dictatorship and it struggles with the people Toynbee called the "external proletariat"; people who are under the influence of the civilization but are alienated from it.
The Bush administration is claiming that as long as we are facing hostility from alienated Islamic Jihadists and South American populists the President's War Powers as Commander-In-Chief give him the status of a military dictator, even if the "War" is a rhetorical device.
Toynbee also said that in that period of decline there emerge cults of various kinds. His best example was the emergence of Paul's Christian cult as the Universal Religion of Western Civilization. The most notable theological dispute of our time is between Christian Fundamentalists who believe in a literal creator and the academic evolutionists who believe in Spencer's encapsulation of the dynamic of evolution as "Survival of the Fittest".
The two kinds of crisis, geopolitical and intellectual, are connected in an unexpected way. The geopolitical crisis has been brewing for 50 years, since the "Managerial Revolution" created a bureaucratic establishment in which status is displayed by wasting resources. There aren't enough resources for everyone to waste them at the rate westerners do, so the upward mobility we saw between 1500 and 1950 was cut off before it could be enjoyed by women and people of color.
The resentment that the external proletariat feels is reflected in the hostility expressed by Latin American populist movements and the guerilla warfare practiced by Islamic Fundamentalists and other terrorist groups.
Contrary to the facts, Western commercial art has to pretend that upward mobility still exists in order to provide some scope for action heros and to market imitation status symbols to low-level bureaucrats. This exacerbates the resentment of both the external and internal proletariats.
At the same time academic scientists are fighting a desperate battle to retain their belief in Spencer's version of evolution: "survival of the fittest". They are firm in their belief because all the scientists who are at the top of their professions, and are, in their eyes, intellectually "the fittest", share that consensus.
They are particularly concerned that they have the exclusive right to teach that dogma to the children of people who are not in the establishment and who, therefore, by Spencer's rule, are "unfit" or biologically inferior.
The academic Spencerians are surprised that most of the general public prefer to believe in some variation of Creationism, which says that God (or some nameless Intelligent Designer) created them and loves them equally. A New York Times poll says more than 80% have that preference. This bothers academics even though any reasonable person, offered a choice between two equally unbelievable myths, would certainly prefer one that said they were equal and loved to one that said they were biologically inferior to the members of the establishment.
Both crises, the intellectual crisis about the relative biologically inferiority of ordinary people, and the political crisis of having to keep the proletariat impoverished so the Western Establishment can affirm status by wasting resources, are justified by Spencer's version of Natural Selection: "survival of the fittest".
Luckily for the survival of our species, Spencer's version is simply bad pseudoscience. It does not explain the common phenomena we regard as evolutionary. Its only use is facilitating the claim that the elite deserve their position because they are biologically superior. Darwin's original rule for Natural Selection, "the non-survival of the unfit", not only provides a good explanation of evolutionary phenomena but is consistent with egalitarianism.
The difficulty is that in order to fully apply Darwin's rule we need to apply the mathematical techniques involving vectors and matrices. I will go into that in more detail later in this book, but for our immediate purposes I will use a graphical method that only uses vectors implicitly.
Vector analysis only became popular after Josiah Willard Gibbs wrote his book fifty years after Darwin's, so one couldn't expect Darwin and Spencer to have used the terminology I will use later; but they could have understood the graphic argument I use on this page. Vectors and matrix operators have been useful in physics and essential to quantum mechanics for a century or more so I am surprised that no one else has noticed that living beings have the kind of group of characteristics that can only be represented by something like a vector.
That is probably because not many academics have spent much time doing animal husbandry.
A few years back Sally and I maintained a herd of dairy goats. One year we entered one of our goats, Petunia, in a 24-hour milking competition. The rules of that competition required us to bring her to a testing barn to be with the officials and all the other local competitors and stay with them for 24 hours during which she would be milked twice. The volume of milk she produced would be measured by a judge and a sample sent to a certified laboratory to be tested for butterfat content. We would sleep with a barnfull of goats.
Somewhat to our surprise we found Petunia was the second best dairy goat in the United States according to that test. Petunia never got a blue ribbon in 4H goat shows because she was a mixture of Nubian and Toggenberg and didn't perfectly have the appearance of either variety. But she did spectacularly well in the milking test, so if you wanted a goat to milk, rather than look at, Petunia was outstanding.
There were many goats in the United States who produced more volume of milk than Petunia did, and there were goats whose milk had a higher butterfat content than Petunia's did. But the scoring of the competition was based on a weighted combination of both quantity of milk and butterfat content. The other goats who produced more milk had less butterfat, and the ones that had more butterfat produced less milk. The weighting of the two factors may well have been arbitrary, but it was a way of combining two statistical distributions, of yield and butterfat, into a single number that represented the goat's standing in the competition. But because the weighting had no natural basis, choosing a different arbitrary weighting would have affected the ranking of all the goats in the competition.
In a sense this is what we do all the time. In Western Civilization we value everything in terms of money, so if something has more than one characteristic quality we have no rigorous way of considering all of them. We have to combine them in some arbitrary way to be able to characterize the value in a single amount of money.
And this is exactly what Spencer did when he coined the phrase "survival of the fittest". He assumed that one could combine all the qualities of an entity into one number which could be arrayed into a unique sequence with a maximum value. That number is called "fitness" and the one with the highest number is called "the fittest". Of course nature doesn't operate that way. An entity has a number of characteristics (limited only by the number of gene combinations it has) and each of those characteristics has a range that may, or may not, affect its chance of survival in the evolutionary sense. This is like the goats in the competition, each of which had a value of total milk produced in 24 hours and the average butterfat content of that milk. In the competition, an arbitrary formula was used to combine these values into a single score; and Spencer assumed that something similar could be done with the survival qualities of any living entity.
If you do not create an arbitrary "fitness" number, but deal with the qualities of the individual with the proper ('vector") mathematics, you get quite different results. Darwin actually intuited this at first.
Darwin first noted that living beings could evolve if nature had a process like the selection process that farmers used. Take, for example, a dairy farmer. If he is careful he will have records of the product of each of his cows: the total volume of milk, the amount of butterfat, the length of the period of lactation, the taste of the milk and the health of her calves. He will notice if any of his cows are sufficiently "unfit" in any of these qualities (or some balanced combination) as to make it economically unprofitable to spend the cost of food and the time and energy of care to keep that cow as a permanent member of the herd. If the cow doesn't produce enough, in terms of quantity or quality, to justify her keep and attention, he will cull her: sell her to a slaughterhouse or some similar organization for whatever she will bring. Over the long run the farmer will find that he has tended to keep the better producers so that the average performance of the herd increases.
Darwin suggested that, in the wild, natural processes served much the same function. Those animals that were less "fit" were less likely to have offspring that were themselves "fit" enough to have offspring and thus contribute to the future populations. But, as we noted in the case of milk cows or dairy goats, "fitness" is likely to be a combination of more than one quality.
Let us consider a rabbit in a snowy environment. The closer the color of the rabbit to the average color of the environment the less likely it is to be seen by predators. But if the rabbit is albino in an area of dirty snow or with a tan coat in new snow it is equally likely to be seen. However, even if it can be seen more easily it can escape predators if it can run faster than they can. On the other hand a rabbit that has an overdeveloped running ability will require more carbohydrates to maintain that ability and thus will have to expose itself to predators for a longer period of time.
The net result is that if we define a space whose dimensions are the qualities the rabbit needs for survival, there will be a region in which the rabbit has one of the combinations of qualities which make it possible to survive. That survival domain (shown as green in the figure below) will contain all those individuals who are just barely fit enough to survive, or fitter. That displays Darwin's Rule for evolution: "non-survival of the unfit" in an easily visualized way.
Incidentally, the set of two numbers, (skin color, running speed) is a "vector".
Every occupied location in the survival area is occupied by an individual whose ancestors also occupied locations in the survival area. On the average the whole survival area will be populated, and breeding can happen between any particular pair. If their offspring land in the survival region they will contribute to future populations, if they don't their characteristics won't be represented. But on the average, the offspring of the population in the survival zone will constitute the population of the survival zone in future generations. Where the particular offspring of a particular couple land in that zone doesn't matter because it gets averaged out.
Unfortunately Darwin was convinced by Herbert Spencer that evolution needed a more positive image. Darwin adopted Spencer's rule: "survival of the fittest". This doesn't really work that well, so it is mostly used in reverse: those who thrive must have been "the fittest" which justifies their thriving. In other words the Western Establishment were given an argument that they were biologically superior to the lower classes (and, of course, people of color) because they ended up as the top layer of society by the force of natural selection. That seems to make sense, but let's look at it in terms of the example we used for Darwin's rule: "non-survival of the unfit".
Applying Spencer's rule the dairy farmer compares the fitness of all his cows and selects out the one that is most "fit" depending on the particular criterion he chooses to use. Then he gets rid of the rest because they aren't the fittest and don't deserve to survive. The fittest cow gets bred, presumably to the best bull that can be found and, when the calf matures she is compared with her mother and the better of the two is kept and the other slaughtered. This may well select out the cow related to the fittest cow in the original herd, but the Spencerian scheme assures that there will never be but one cow in the herd. Even if the calves are cloned from the mother cow rather than born naturally, there can never be more than one "fittest" so the Spencerian herd never has more than one member.
Spencerians might well reply "of course the herd needs more than one cow. We don't really mean just the fittest individual, we mean the group that are almost the fittest, the ones that are the obvious top group. They, not just the single best one constitute the fittest".
Unfortunately, the Spencerian rule doesn't have a clear boundary between "The Fittest" and the "Fit Enough To Survive But Not Fit Enough To Be Included In The Elite".
Darwin's rule has a clear boundary: between the ones who do survive and the ones who don't. So if we want to concentrate on the survivors in the Spencerian style we can say that Darwin's rule is: "Survival-of-the-Just-Barely-Fit-And-Fitter". All we have to do is use the survival diagram as the device to tell us who survives.
Spencer's rule is either what it says, "survival of the solitary fittest individual", which is ridiculous, or it reduces to Darwin's rule, "non-survival of the unfit". There are no intermediate natural boundaries between "the fittest" and the "fit enough to survive even if we don't like to think they are good enough to be in the elite". Any given individual either survives (in the evolutionary sense) or it doesn't, and the Spencerian top dog isn't the only one who survives. The survival diagram (which is actually a way to represent the vectorial character of fitness), rather than Spencer's rule, is the thing that governs evolutionary survival.
We also have to remember that diagrams like the one above are two-dimensional representations only because that's all we can conveniently show on a flat page. The actual survival region may well be a multi-dimensional volume in a multi-dimensional space. But, as it happens, there are enough interesting things happening with a two-dimensional survival space to give us new insights into evolution.
Even a two-dimensional survival diagram provides an opportunity for striking results. We can look at the various possible situations where natural selection might come into play and see what happens when we apply Darwin's Rule. That has not, to my knowledge, been done before.
We can look first at a case where both Spencer's and Darwin's rules have the same kind of result. We can postulate a situation where the environment is very intolerant so that only a narrow range of characteristics would correspond to survival. This is illustrated in the diagram below. Then any significant change in the environment will cause the existing population to be outside the survival region. The species represented in the diagram will go extinct.
This is a well-understood conclusion, but its implications are seldom mentioned. If evolution was determined by Spencer's rule we would have to say: "The only species that can possibly have survived until today are those who lived in environments that never changed". I suspect that only Creationists believe that the environment has never changed from the way God created it, and even they believe in the Flood. Thus when you apply Spencer's rule to the contemporary population of living beings it simply doesn't make sense.
But compare that with the diagram below, which represents a more tolerant environment. Under Darwin's rule there will be some surviving individuals who may be less than perfectly adapted to the original environment, but are also less than perfectly adapted to the changed environment. Their offspring will fill the new survival region.
If the environment continues to change, there will be some individuals who are less than perfectly adapted to that environment but who will have offspring that fill the new survival region. This process will continue to happen as long as the environment doesn't change more than the tolerance range in one generation.
If the environment changes enough over the time of several generations, so that there is no overlap between the old environment's survival region and the final one, the survivors of the process can be so different from the original population that they can be considered to be a new species.
Under Spencer's rule the fittest, those that were best adapted to the original environment, would not be "the fittest" in the changed environment so they would not survive. Spencer's rule has no provision for the evolution of new species by a changing environment.
The individuals in the original group who were at least barely able to survive in the old environment and continue to be able to survive in the changed environment are those who used to be called "hopeful monsters". "Monsters" because they weren't perfectly adapted to the old environment, "hopeful" because they could still survive in the new one. But both terms are misleading.
They were not "monsters" because they and their offspring were able to survive in the original environment. They may not have won any "Iron Man" competitions, but they got along. They were not "hopeful" because they did not do anything to anticipate the change in the environment: they just happened to carry the variation that may not have had an advantage in the intermediate environment, but at least created no major difficulties.
A cave fish, for instance, that had a skin patch sensitive to infra red radiation, might not be confused by a crack that admitted some visible light and still have offspring whose skin patch had some sensitivity to the visible spectrum. Had the change been in another direction, such as an increase in the mineral content of the cave water, a change in color sensitivity might have been irrelevant.
The point is that under the Spencerian rule the slightest change must be advantageous to be preserved, while under Darwin's rule a change merely needs to be not significantly harmful.
Since a complex organism has more potential for variations that may not be advantageous but are not significantly harmful, Darwin's rule gives complexity an evolutionary advantage, while Spencer's rule makes complexity a disadvantage because there are more ways to be less than perfectly adapted.
To understand the role of altruism and cooperation we need to look at the survival region in more detail. A position on the graph represents a combination of two characteristics that affect evolutionary survival in some way. We can assume that these are inherited characteristics so they can also be considered to represent the effect of two sets of genes. But the genes do not affect the survival boundary--that represents environmental factors. If, for instance, the amount of predation increases or the food supply decreases, the survival region will shrink.
On the other hand, if a group of females shares in watching children the freed females can gather more food and effectively increase the survival region. In general, altruism and cooperation may not obviously affect individual survival, but it will increase group and species survival by acting to decrease the effect of environmental hazards.
In the case of Homo Sapiens Sapiens the use of abstract mouth-noises for communication permits a highly sophisticated level of cooperation so that only cultures that are deliberately maintained in a primitive state are even aware of non-survival as a common occurrence.
Thus any argument between the Spencerians and the Creationists is completely irrelevant: Spencer's rule simply doesn't fit reality as well as Darwin's rule, and is therefore rejected on scientific grounds.
At the same time there is no necessity for invoking an Intelligent Designer to create complex organs and organisms because complexity is an advantage under Darwin's rule.
Thus the Spencerians and Creationists are free to disagree with each other all they want because all of their ideas are irrelevant to a scientific theory of evolution.
Now that we understand how Darwin's rule is better at explaining phenomena like extinction and the creation of new species like Darwin's finches, it is useful to look at a phenomenon that Spencer's rule doesn't explain at all.
Let us suppose that the ecological niche that contained our breeding group expands. That can happen if a small pond connects to a bigger lake during a flood, or a land connection opens to a new island, or an icecap or glacier melts, or a predator has a population crash. Then the survival region will open up and the normal Darwinian process of variation will fill the new environment with every kind of variation that can just barely survive in the new environment.
This can explain the surge of variant forms found in the Burgess Shale. This kind of phenomenon can not be explained by Spencer's rule because none of the variants are "the fittest" in the original environment and only one can be "the fittest" in the new environment, so Spencer's rule allows for only one new variant. This shows again that Spencer's rule of "survival of the fittest" simply is not a good rule to use in real, observable evolutionary processes.
The evolution of the behavior of Homo Sapiens Sapiens, while too difficult to discuss using Spencer's dictum, is not that difficult if we use Darwin's rule. But it has some unexpected consequences. The first surprising thing we notice is that there is no preferred region within the survival zone.
The population within the survival region will have much the same physiological characteristics from generation to generation. What will cause a change is the effect of the physical (and social) environment which changes the boundary of that region.
We can't anticipate what changes the environment may take on, so we can't predict which inhabitants of the survival zone are more likely to have offspring that will survive to the future. From the standpoint of species survival all the existing individuals have the same potential value. Darwin's rule is as inherently egalitarian as Spencer's rule is inherently hierarchical.
Spencer's rule says that the status quo is what it is supposed to be; that the elite deserve their status and ordinary people should accept their inferiority gracefully. Darwin's rule says that we are all inherently of equal value and to the extent that we don't treat each other that way we are risking the survival of our species.
Homo Sapiens Sapiens has one noticeable difference from the other primates: we exhibit that kind of complex behavior that we call "culture". Culture allows us to exhibit a tremendous variety of behavior without having to wait for biological processes that operate on a genetic timescale. This allows us to evolve adaptations to ecological changes that happen in much less than a generation and even cope with environmental changes that we create ourselves by migration or overconsumption. But we are not entirely unconstrained.
We can migrate to regions where a unique culture will allow us to survive in environments with little tolerance: the arctic, isolated islands, high mountains, deserts. In these areas there is little in the way of surplus resources and the culture we choose to practice has to have characteristics that allow us to take the most benefit from our situation. The primary such characteristic is cooperation.
One person can bring some leaves for a bed into a cave and have a shelter from inclement weather, but two or more people are better than one at building huts from natural materials. One person can set traps or fish with a spear, but it takes a group to corral a herd. Cultures that do not encourage cooperation are less than optimally functional, so almost all pre-agricultural cultures exhibit cooperation.
In addition to cooperation, altruism is a positive factor for species survival, especially when we are dealing with species that have a sophisticated culture. Altruism, like cooperation, makes the survival region larger and the environment effectively more tolerant. With sophisticated culture, altruism gives the possibility of allowing people with special talents to mature.
The Greeks understood that when they made their God of technology, Hephaestus, a cripple. If someone had not spared the effort to raise him, or nurse him through a crippling event, the community would have lost the technological advantage of his creativity.
Creativity is another survival factor for species like ours. From the invention of tools and the discovery that fire could be controlled, creativity has expanded the boundaries of the survival region to the point that most individuals are hardly aware of them.
But even technology can work two ways. Cultures that are too rigid have typically collapsed under the impact of some kind of technological change. Most recently the inability of the political culture of the Soviet Union to cope with the technology of fax and copier, and our current attempt to adjust to the internet by resorting to government by executive order and torture by secret police, demonstrate that we have to be as creative socially and politically as we are technologically or our infrastructure is too brittle to last.
One more characteristic has become important in the last century or so: ecological responsibility.
If we destroy one area by over use of the ecological resources the survival region in that area decreases and, if possible, we have to move somewhere else. In our time that is demonstrated when we build cities in place of productive land and have to build in the suburbs; or when refugees flee drought or war-stricken areas.
But when we essentially cover the globe and there are no more places to flee to we have to learn to manage the resources we have. Some of us can escape that problem by greedily using resources quickly so there will be none left for our own children and those who find themselves with less access to resources, but that is not a tactic that leads to species survival. Species survival is facilitated by ecological responsibility which causes us to manage our resources for the benefit of the species.
In general, then, Darwin's rule will be that species survival is facilitated by species-wide egalitarianism, cooperation, altruism, creativity and ecological responsibility. Darwin's original concept of evolution favored democracy as much as Spencer's concept favors hierarchical authoritarian rule.
As we shall see later, the basic dynamic of human behavior is constrained by the use of abstract mouth-noises to communicate. That is unique to homo sapiens sapiens and it allows us to cooperate in ways that are more varied and complex than any other species.
Darwinian evolution provides the same kind of respect for ordinary people that Creationism does, while still staying within the bounds of science. It also shows that nothing that exists or existed could not have evolved by Natural Selection so it eliminates the need for an Intelligent Designer.
But if Mathematical Darwinism says evolution favors egalitarianism, cooperation, altruism, creativity and ecological responsibility; why don't we have a global infrastructure that embodies those qualities? The answer is that we used workarounds (including religion) that solved local problems in the early Neolithic and we are only now facing up to the fact that those social workarounds are unstable.
In the long run we will probably evolve an infrastructure that conforms to Darwin's rule or go extinct; but nothing guarantees that we won't experience a lot of trauma in the process. What may help is if we understand those mistakes and why we made them so we can avoid making similar mistakes in the future.
It should not be felt that a Darwinian infrastructure is impossible. A recent U.N. report noted that 85% of the worlds wealth is held by only 10% of the population. This would indicate that we could increase the wealth of 90% of the population by a factor of five by only inconveniencing 10% of the population. Adjusting a redistribution to be relatively uniform would only be a slightly greater complication.
It has also been claimed that egalitarianism is "against human nature", but, as we will see later, if "human nature" was not conducive to species survival we would not have survived the paleolithic. It is only the surplus brought by agriculture that allows us to temporarily maintain stratified societies in the face of inherent instability.
We are now in the period where the neoconservatives have attempted to create a military dictatorship to maintain the existing imbalance of wealth. It is inevitable that fighting against 90% of the world's population to keep them poor is going to bleed the resources of Western Civilization to the point of collapse. Exactly how we manage to survive that trauma and evolve an infrastructure that is egalitarian, ecologically responsible and consistent with altruism, cooperation and creativity is not predictable and may not even be very important. We will either do so or go extinct and let some other species give it a try. But however we manage that evolution, it can't hurt to understand how we got to the situation we are now in. That is what we will be doing in the remainder of this book.
Using Darwin's rule we notice that homo Sapiens Sapiens is the only one of the primates that communicates by using abstract mouth noises. This enables us to cooperate at a much more sophisticated level than any other animal and thus gives us a much more tolerant survival region. However, as we learn from the parable of the Tower of Babel the mouth-noises are useless unless our group uses them in the same way, so we are constrained to a high degree of conformity. At the same time, unlike ants, bees and schooling fish who are born as groups of clones, we do not contribute to the group economy for the first few years. This is a significant investment so we need a significant amount of individuality to survive childhood. This can be represented by a Van der Waals force in a behavior phase space or a Fermi-Dirac distribution in a cell-quantized space. That limits the paleolithic tribe to about a dozen members and it fissions and migrates when it gets larger. This explains why we cover the globe and have bred ourselves into "races".
We also need individuals who are functionally nonconformist, the shaman and the warchief; who use spirit guides or "Muses" to give them permission to be nonconformist. When we invent agriculture we convert these Muses into the deities of popular religion.
The post neolithic city-culture or "civilization" normally follows the cycle of rise and fall described by Arnold Toynbee. About 1500 technology allows members of the lower middle class to be upwardly mobile into the establishment along with descendants of the warchiefs of the anarchy after the fall of Rome. This cycle passes through the traders, colonial planters, industrial entrepreneurs and their clerks and mechanics who become the bureaucrats of the "Managerial Revolution" of 1900-1950.
Since then we have shut off upward mobility, particularly for women and people of color from the "Third World". The establishment has attempted to convert the Western democracies into military dictatorships and to keep the proletariat, both internal and external, impoverished. According to Toynbee this condition leads to the collapse of the civilization that establishes it, so at best we can expect a rocky time ahead until we find a stable successor to Western Civilization.
This historical analysis merely uses the dynamics of a behavior matrix in a multidimensional phase space. When we want to look at the details of how the matrix results in actual behavior patterns it is useful to create a "black box" model. This can be explicitly described in simple cases like a doorbell or thermostat, and described with a block diagram in the case of entities that are "hard wired" or act instinctively. We can also create a black box model for a robot that will pass the Turing test of pretending to be human. That black box corresponds to the mind-models suggested by Freud and Chomsky. This provides a synthesis of Behaviorism and Analytic Psychology. The conflict between the drives for individual survival and for the use of language to facilitate species survival produces the size limitation of the paleolithic tribe. In post-Neolithic cultures it produces a gender-independent "Oedipus Complex". In the early post-neolithic cultures that is resolved by belief in an authoritarian religion; but when that proves incapable of dealing with a complex industrial society belief fragments and produces an "Age of Anxiety".
When a close approach to death weakens the effect of the superego to produce conformity it can produce unusual creativity or bodhisattvas like Jesus and Gautama. This is what Maslow called "transcending self-actualization" and what writers about Zen call "satori".
This provides some hope that the trauma associated with the decline and fall of Western Civilization will produce a "Creative Minority" (in Toynbee's sense) that could establish a global infrastructure that is consistent with egalitarianism, cooperation, altruism and ecological responsibility. In the meantime it is useful to have available a weltanschauung that is consistent with those values and with creative science so we describe a model religion that will serve that purpose.
This analysis, which provides a synthesis of behaviorism and analytic psychology, and an explanation of our social history and worldview, is all based on replacing Spencer's rule of "survival of the fittest" with Darwin's rule of "non-survival of the unfit". That would seem to be easy enough to do, but "survival of the fittest" is the basic weltanschauung of Western Civilization and it is very difficult to reason unemotionally about a heresy of that magnitude. To summarize, if we recognize that the contemporary consensus on evolutionary biology is a classist ideology rather than a science, and return to Darwin's insight on natural selection, we can not only provide a reasonable explanation of human social evolution from the paleolithic to the current day, but we can provide a coherent theory of the development of human psychology from infancy to Maslow's transcdencence. It has taken me 50 years to work that out and there are plenty of valid insights I have never heard of that can find places within that structure.
The difficulty will be that Darwin's insight will not be acceptable to the establishment of a hierarchical society because it is inherently egalitarian. I am afraid that my approach will be proscribed by the establishment and not generally acceptable until after the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, when it can be used as a basis for rebuilding civilization.
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