Re: virus: Re:Fahrenheit 9/11 (Meta)
« on: 2004-07-14 22:08:58 »
Snip
There is a point in evolutionary terms to having your mind captured into a rabid mode the way we have seen on this thread.
It was a good idea when hominids lived in little hunter-gatherer tribes. That's something we did for a *long* time, in fact hunter-gatherer cultures took over the whole planet.
However, having your rational abilities suppressed by being in "war mode" may not be an effective approach at higher levels than hunter-gatherer culture. "War mode" and trying to kill off the males in competing tribes resulted in about 90% of the Southwest corn farmers dying and their ecological niche being left open. The few groups that didn't die out were still killing each other more than 200 years later.
The basic problem that is generating all those Islamic warriors is falling income per capita over much of the Islamic world. That in turn is the result of slow productivity growth and fast population growth.
A rational view of what is needed to get the population into line with productivity sounds far more rabid and is certainly less politically correct than the worse rantings we have seen here.
Actually, that is exactly what is being done. Replacing theocratic and totalitarian swamps with democratic gardens will boost trade and productivity, and drain the morasses of oppression and poverty which spaw= n jihadis - plus, as per capita income goes up, birth rate goes down. But meanwhile, the jihadis that are already around are busily trying to kill = as many infidels (translation, you and me) as possible. While the proper policy of long-term swamp-draining is proceeding apace, some short-term shooting of the alligators presently biting us in the ass is still necess= ary =0D =0D -------Original Message-------=0D =0D From: virus@lucifer.com=0D Date: 07/14/04 21:15:55=0D To: virus@lucifer.com=0D Subject: Re: virus: Re:Fahrenheit 9/11 (Meta)=0D =0D Snip=0D =0D There is a point in evolutionary terms to having your mind captured into = a=0D rabid mode the way we have seen on this thread.=0D =0D It was a good idea when hominids lived in little hunter-gatherer=0D tribes. That's something we did for a *long* time, in fact=0D hunter-gatherer cultures took over the whole planet.=0D =0D However, having your rational abilities suppressed by being in "war mode"= =0D may not be an effective approach at higher levels than hunter-gatherer=0D culture. "War mode" and trying to kill off the males in competing tribes= =0D resulted in about 90% of the Southwest corn farmers dying and their=0D ecological niche being left open. The few groups that didn't die out wer= e=0D still killing each other more than 200 years later.=0D =0D The basic problem that is generating all those Islamic warriors is fallin= g=0D income per capita over much of the Islamic world. That in turn is the=0D result of slow productivity growth and fast population growth.=0D =0D A rational view of what is needed to get the population into line with=0D productivity sounds far more rabid and is certainly less politically=0D correct than the worse rantings we have seen here.=0D =0D Keith Henson=0D =0D =0D ---=0D To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/= virus-l>
At 09:28 PM 14/07/04 -0500, you wrote: >Actually, that is exactly what is being done. Replacing theocratic and=20 >totalitarian swamps with democratic gardens will boost trade and=20 >productivity, and drain the morasses of oppression and poverty which spawn= =20 >jihadis - plus, as per capita income goes up, birth rate goes down.
That's the observation in some populations. But which way (if either) does= =20 the causal arrow go? And why?
20-30 years ago without a significant change in the economy, the Irish=20 birth rate (Northern Ireland anyway) fell to about half the previous=20 rate. It is clearly a memetic driven event, but what caused=20 it? Eventually as slower population growth worked its way through the=20 population the per capita income went up. I think I have a causal reason=20 for this rooted in the stone age, for the rising per capita income being=20 the reason the steam went out of the IRA. But the business of women=20 cutting the number of kids they have in modern society is without precedent= =20 in human evolutionary history. (As EO Wilson says we are incredibly lucky.)
>But meanwhile, the jihadis that are already around are busily trying to=20 >kill as many infidels (translation, you and me) as possible. While the=20 >proper policy of long-term swamp-draining is proceeding apace, some=20 >short-term shooting of the alligators presently biting us in the ass is=20 >still necessary.
Perhaps I should not object since a solution does not pop out of this=20 evolutionary psychology model. But I suspect that invading Iraq and=20 putting their population into "non-thinking war mode" (just as the 9/11=20 attack put the US population into non-thinking war mode) was a move that=20 will create far more problems than it solves. And that's freely=20 *admitting* that much of the population is better off Saddam gone.
In the Stone Age wars functioned to cut back a population of hominids that= =20 had grown beyond what the ecosystem could support. The usual mechanism was= =20 for the wining tribe to kill the loser males and take the women as=20 booty. The last big time example was Genghis Khan in the 12th century.
June 22, 2004 =97Genghis Khan left a legacy shared by 16 million people alive today, according to a book by a Oxford geneticist who identified the Mongol emperor as the most successful alpha male in human history.
Killing the male half of the population may be our evolved legacy. It=20 isn't politically correct, but if the root cause of the problem is too many= =20 people for the resources . . . .
Nanotech, if it gets here soon enough, would solve the resource part of the= =20 ratio. Or perhaps we will get lucky and the bird flu will carry off 20% of= =20 the population.
As I said, an ecological/evolutionary view of how wars went down in the=20 elder days is really rough.
Keith Henson
PS. What might be needed is a female Iman whose meme set to free the women= =20 could sweep the Islamic world in a few years. Know of anyone who would=20 qualify?
> >-------Original Message------- > >From: <mailto:virus@lucifer.com>virus@lucifer.com >Date: 07/14/04 21:15:55 >To: <mailto:virus@lucifer.com>virus@lucifer.com >Subject: Re: virus: Re:Fahrenheit 9/11 (Meta) > >Snip > >There is a point in evolutionary terms to having your mind captured into a >rabid mode the way we have seen on this thread. > >It was a good idea when hominids lived in little hunter-gatherer >tribes. That's something we did for a *long* time, in fact >hunter-gatherer cultures took over the whole planet. > >However, having your rational abilities suppressed by being in "war mode" >may not be an effective approach at higher levels than hunter-gatherer >culture. "War mode" and trying to kill off the males in competing tribes >resulted in about 90% of the Southwest corn farmers dying and their >ecological niche being left open. The few groups that didn't die out were >still killing each other more than 200 years later. > >The basic problem that is generating all those Islamic warriors is falling >income per capita over much of the Islamic world. That in turn is the >result of slow productivity growth and fast population growth. > >A rational view of what is needed to get the population into line with >productivity sounds far more rabid and is certainly less politically >correct than the worse rantings we have seen here. > >Keith Henson > > >--- >To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to=20 ><<http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/vir= us-l> >____________________________________________________ ><http://www.incredimail.com/redir.asp?ad_id=3D309&lang=3D9>7c2d52.jpg=20 >IncrediMail - Email has finally evolved -=20 ><http://www.incredimail.com/redir.asp?ad_id=3D309&lang=3D9>Click Here
Keith, this will sound rather negative, but feel free to correct me if I misinterpreted something in your theory of war. There is no issue of politically correctness.
First, I wonder if the facts really allow for a useful evolutionary theory of war based on getting the enemy's women. Applying such a theory to the current wars requires too elaborate inferences and ad hoc additions. Take Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia..., for example. Where do the enemy's women get into the picture?
Second, these wars did not get started by "all the tribesmen" under the influence of an evolutionary pressure, so it seems that the theory fails to take into account the internal structure of the contemporary "tribes."
Third, in the case of a war of retribution (if we assume that the Iraq war is one): isn't it still a war, where the same evolutionary arguments should apply, or should we be satisfied with a different ad hoc hypothesis for wars of retribution?
There is still the argument of a falling per capita product, which seems worth examining. Since it is not likely that concepts such as "per capita product" are programmed into the genes, simpler statements of the theory may be able to handle this better. When you want more firewood, for example, you attack whoever has firewood to take it, if you can afford this action. When someone takes your firewood, you attack him to stop him. On the way, you put together cultural constructs such as religions, stories, or media campaigns to rally support within your "tribe." Such simple traditional theories can also allow for misidentifying "the enemy" -- attacking someone out there when "the enemy" is actually somewhere within the structure of your own tribe.
On the whole, I think that many different agents, structured superagents, motivations, and cultural (memetic) constructs stand behind war, and this can be a hard problem for a unified theory of the causes of war free of extreme reductionism. It's a multiagent game -- an economy.
At 04:23 AM 16/07/04 +0300, you wrote: >Keith, this will sound rather negative, but feel free to correct me if I >misinterpreted something in your theory of war. There is no issue of >politically correctness.
Don't worry about it being negative, evolutionary psychology can be a profoundly depressing subject and it surely is not politically correct either.
>First, I wonder if the facts really allow for a useful evolutionary theory >of war based on getting the enemy's women. Applying such a theory to the >current wars requires too elaborate inferences and ad hoc additions. Take >Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia..., for example. Where do the enemy's women get >into the picture?
For a starter, the evolution of our psychological traits that are behind wars happened over a *long* period, perhaps more than 7 million years or whenever the hominid line split from the ape line. Reason that's likely is that chimps do something much like making war. They *wipe out* other tribes of chimps so the trait for genocide may predate the split.
The women aspect of it is just bizarre. It was common human tribal practice to treat women of a loser tribe as booty, extra wives. This carried on through biblical times and in fact up to at least the 12th century if you read the Genghis Khan story here:
So if the alternative was for a weak tribe was for all of them to starve or for the men to attack a stronger tribe and most likely all of them get killed, their *genes* did better if the human were inclined to taking chances in a war not much different from suicide. (Copies of the warrior's genes were shared by the related female children who became wives in the stronger tribe after their male relatives were killed.) Read "inclined" as "had gene constructed psychological traits inducing this behavior."
>Second, these wars did not get started by "all the tribesmen" under the >influence of an evolutionary pressure, so it seems that the theory fails >to take into account the internal structure of the contemporary "tribes."
No theory using evolutionary psychology can be understood by contemporary tribes or anything else contemporary. The proposed mechanism requires "looming privation," indications that the resources to get your hunter-gatherer family though the next season are going to be hard to get. Awareness of "looming privation" sets up conditions for xenophobic memes to increase in effective copies (behavior influencing copies). If the circulation of these memes reaches the point where "enough" of the tribes warriors are infected with an appropriate xenophobic meme, the tribe attacks a nearby tribe--dehumanized by the memes.
>Third, in the case of a war of retribution (if we assume that the Iraq war >is one): isn't it still a war, where the same evolutionary arguments >should apply, or should we be satisfied with a different ad hoc hypothesis >for wars of retribution?
I am not sure what you mean by "wars of retribution." A psychological trait for attacking back when your tribe is attacked, even to the point of killing every male in the attacking tribe is something that evolutionary psychology would expect to evolve. Peoples without this trait are not much represented in the gene pool today.
To be specific about the Iraq war, it was indeed a war in response to the 9/11 attack. Totally unjustified on that basis of course. And the resistance to the US in Iraq is *also* a response to being attacked. Attacking someone other than the immediate attacker is nothing new. Japan attacked the US, but the US went after Germany which had *not* attacked the US first. (And the rise of xenophobic/nazi memes and the following war was due to "looming privation." A lot of people in Germany thought they were going to starve during the rise of Nazism.)
>There is still the argument of a falling per capita product, which seems >worth examining. Since it is not likely that concepts such as "per capita >product" are programmed into the genes, simpler statements of the theory >may be able to handle this better. When you want more firewood, for >example, you attack whoever has firewood to take it, if you can afford >this action. When someone takes your firewood, you attack him to stop him.
Since some of this evolution happened *before* fire became a factor, the origin was food or the territory to harvest food rather than firewood. That's what chimps look like are doing when they kill each other--though I dare say they don't understand what they are doing.
>On the way, you put together cultural constructs such as religions, >stories, or media campaigns to rally support within your "tribe."
This is along the idea that *any* xenophobic meme (or set of them) will do. On Easter Island, the war that reduced the population on the badly damaged island was fought between the "long ears" and the "short ears." Everyone of the 20,000 or so people on the Island was related by being descended from some 20 founders (there were perhaps 1000 left when the environment started to recover and the population bottomed out). The Hutu/Toosi society fractured along existing social group lines, but if these had not existed the population would have fractured in other ways or the fighting would have been outward directed.
>Such simple traditional theories can also allow for misidentifying "the >enemy" -- attacking someone out there when "the enemy" is actually >somewhere within the structure of your own tribe.
Of course. The actual source of the problem is reproduction in excess of the environmental carrying capacity. But a tribe that restrained reproduction to the capacity of its territory would shortly lose that territory to tribes that made more young warriors. It's a Red Queen problem. How *part* of the world has moved to replacement birth rates is a major mystery.
>On the whole, I think that many different agents, structured superagents, >motivations, and cultural (memetic) constructs stand behind war, and this >can be a hard problem for a unified theory of the causes of war free of >extreme reductionism. It's a multiagent game -- an economy.
A lot of problems become simple when you look at them with the right model in mind. I am not talking about the details of how various cultures go about wiping out others, just what lies behind the part time predatory nature of human groups. Wars are not something that goes on all the time so you have to account for why that time and not some other time.
Overloading the environment is *not* a new human trait. *Chimps* do it. I think any animal whose numbers are not checked by predation is going to have wars--you have to be your own part time predator when the environment gets overloaded. And the key to this is a behavioral switch. We *know* that genes can switch behavior on the basis of environmental signals. For example we know exactly what stimulation switches the solitary grasshopper into the migratory locust developmental pathway.
One question this raises is about bonobos. They are not known for systematic killing. Do they have some feedback loop to limit populations that humans and chimps lack? Or have we just not watched them long enough?
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