GENETIC ENSLAVEMENT: A CALL TO ARMS FOR INDIVIDUAL LIBERATION

Prologue

Introduction

Outlaw Genes in 1962, Uncrossed Paths in 1963,

Book Overview

1 Reductionism

Universe Rigid, F= ma, No Room for Spirit Forces,

Dreiser's "No Why, Only How"

2 Spiritual Heritage

Primitives Need Spirits, We Must Resist the Backwards Pull

3 Genetics Tutorial ‑ Part I

Review of Earth Life, Competition is Between Genes, Which

Genes Compete, Gene Interaction Effects, Trade‑Offs

and Compromises, Individual Welfare Irrelevant,

Inclusive Fitness

4 Genetics Tutorial ‑ Part II
Pre‑adaptation, Species‑Shaping Forces, How Many Genes

Compete, Pace of Evolution, Unintended Deleterious

Effects, Dangers of Fast Evolution, Lag and

Regression, Mutational Load, Reverse Evolution,

Pleiotropy and Polygenes

5 Genetics Tutorial ‑ Part III

Remote Sensing Metaphor

6 Evolution Concepts and Humans

GEP, Men Bear Greater Burden of Selective Forces,

Takeover Infanticidal Males, Monogamy and Cuckolding,

Men and Women Shape Each Other, Birth Order,

Duality of Morality, Emotions Control the Rational,

Consciousness

7 Brain Anatomy and Function

Vertical organization, Cerebral Lobes, Function, Laterality

8 The Brain's Role in Evolution

Prefrontal is Recent, Modules and Genes, Competing

Modules, Result‑Driven Thinking, Niches, Individual

Ontogeny & Species Phylogeny

9 Artisans Set the Stage for Civilizations - Part I

Tool Making Artisans go Full‑Time, New Artisan Niches

10 Artisans Set the Stage for Civilizations - Part II

Co‑Evolution of Niches and Genes, LB‑Driven

Rise of Civilizations

11 Lessons from Sailing Ships

Co-evolution of genes for Altruism/Selfishness and

Intolerance/Tolerance (Group Selection Theory)

12 Levels of Selection, Rise and Fall of Civilizations

Gene Selection, Group Selection and Individual

Selection, New Measure for Strength of Selective

Forces, Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Oscillations

as a Transitional Mode

13 The Origins of Two Cultures ‑ Part I

Evolution of a New Left Brain, "Resentful" Right Brains,

LB/RB conflicts

14 The Conflicts of Two Cultures ‑ Part II

Example Newspaper Articles, Example Books, Eastern

Thought, Fiction and Art, Spiritual Scientists

15 Factors Influencing Fate of Civilizations – Part I

Natural Catastrophes, Group Selection Theories

16 Factors Influencing Fate of Civilizations – Part II

Producers/Parasites, RB/LB Conflicts, Sexual Selection

17 Factors Influencing Fate of Civilizations – Part III

Troubadours, Women Speed Civilization’s Fall

18 Factors Influencing Fate of Civilizations – Part IV

Turning Inward, Mutation Load (dysgenia)

19 Factors Influencing Fate of Civilizations – Part V

Fascism Causing Collapse of American Empire

20 Dating the Demise of Humanity

New Time Scale for Humanity, Doomsday Argument and

Anthropic Principle, Probabilities of Population Collapse

21 A Global Civilization Crash Scenario

Tribalism's Starring Role; Communism & Fascism

as Twin Gene‑Driven Enemies of Artisan‑Created

Civilization, Genetic Entrenchment and Culturgens,

Conformism, RB's Revengeful Victory Over LB

22 Living Wisely ‑ Seeking Positives

Mount Cognoscenti, Life Dilemmas, Eschewing the

Crowd, Activity Categories, Emphasize Positives,

Brief Encounters

23 A Call to Arms ‑ Identifying Outlaw Genes

Prospects for Replacing Gonad Man After the Crash,

Genetic Pitfalls

24 Utopias

Isolated Communities, Cognoscenti Societies, Platonic

Aestheticism

25 Repudiation of the Foregoing

Ultimate Meaninglessness of Everything, A Hierarchy

for Dealing With Reality, Existentialism

26 A Free Man's Worship

Annotated Version of a Bertrand Russell Essay

Your Odyssey

Appendix A: Reductionism

Appendix B: Human Virus Examples

Appendix C: Remote Sensing Analogy

Appendix D: World Population Equations

Appendix E: More Repudiation of the Foregoing

References

Index for Authors

Index for Words

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

PROLOGUE

"Generally speaking, it is quite right if great things ‑ things of much sense for men of rare sense ‑ are expressed but briefly and (hence) darkly, so that barren minds will declare it to be nonsense, rather than translate it into a nonsense that they can comprehend. For mean, vulgar minds have an ugly facility for seeing in the profoundest and most pregnant utterance only their own everyday opinion." Jean Paul, as quoted by Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, 1872.

Dear reader, you normaloid idiot!

Well, maybe you deserve an explanation for that greeting.

A perceptive alien visitor to Earth might report home that humans are the dumbest and most despicable creatures on the planet!

At least the other animals don’t claim to know things which, in fact, are absurd nonsense. Only humans believe in such imaginary things as heaven, hell, guardian angels, telepathy and all kinds of gods. Only humans maintain that the world was created by some imagined godly entity just for them and that this God continues to watch everything and tests humans so that He may reward or punish them in accordance with how pleased He is by their behavior. Only humans believe that they are so different from non-living things that their “consciousness” exempts them from the laws of physics. But the most incriminating human trait is that homo sapiens is the only species that has itself for its most dangerous enemy, and a revealing irony is that most killing is done on behalf of this thing they call “religion.”

Human conceit and imagination is so poor that people cannot imagine themselves as automatons that are assembled by genes. Even those few humans who do accept that they were assembled by genes seem unable to imagine that these genes have achieved longevity in the species gene pool by assembling automatons that serve those very genes instead of the individual. This saves them from the indignity of realizing that they are foolish slaves to tiny lifeless molecules that use them for aimless ends.

The humans, these aliens might conclude, are hopeless!

So now, dear reader, we must have a delicate conversation about you in relation to this book. If you are like that clueless 99% of humans, those I call “normaloids,” then let me suggest that you abandon this book and resume your pathetic, unthinking life! You may do so now! Please do so now!

Are you still reading? Are you a normaloid pretending to be one of that 1% of thinking humans? I give you one last chance to feel the guilt of reading something not meant for you.

Cognoscenti

The following was written for the diminishing numbers of “the cognoscenti.” And to the cognoscenti who may be holding this book, I apologize for writing things that are inherently self-evident. You may have already thought of them yourself, and gone beyond my modest collection of thoughts. But if, by chance, you have not already discovered the self-evident ideas in this book then I hope you enjoy the following.

Reductionism and Hypocrisy

I'm a robot! So are you! This book views people as robots assembled by genes for the "purpose" of serving them by behaving in ways that have led to genetic prosperity in the ancestral environment. Only this “reductionist” viewpoint provides insight into the many bizarre aspects of human nature.

Every thinking person should be disappointed in humanity! Indeed, every thinking person should become a “misanthrope.” In youth it is easy to idealize human nature, to believe what people say about themselves. Later, perhaps in the teen years, human hypocrisy is discovered. The so-called “pursuit of Truth” becomes a hollow promise. Adults who continue to believe in childish notions of human nature look foolish.

I’m more disappointed than bitter. I can say that with each year's accumulation of disappointment in human nature my interest in writing this book wanes. Among the plethora of book publications there are only a handful for the reader who knows how to think. Even most of those intended for serious reading are fundamentally flawed. Why, I keep asking, are so many people incapable of thinking!

Alas, there is an explanation; an explanation, indeed, for all the flaws in human nature! We are the way we are because the genes have constructed us this way because it serves them!

The genes that assemble us were survivors in the "ancestral environment" (AE). Not only did they make fools of us in the AE, but in the modern environment our inherited tendencies make new fools of us in ways that were not even anticipated by the genes.

Anyone who occasionally glimpses humans this way has the opportunity of choosing a path leading to a belief that humans are victims of genetic enslavement. Life takes on new meaning for the person who then wishes for liberation from that enslavement. This book is dedicated to that rare person already on such a journey of liberation.

The mind is a terrible thing to trust

Humans are severely handicapped at comprehending such things as sub‑atomic strings vibrating in 11 dimensions, a universe that will expand forever and cause all matter to "evaporate" in 10¹⁰⁰ seconds, or even the everyday experience of seeing a commercial jet airplane that appears to be 35 degrees ahead of where the sound is coming from. The list of things we are ill-equipped to understand is immense!

We cannot readily understand these things because they never affected the survival of our ancestor’s genes. How many more aspects of our world are inherently elusive because they never mattered to genetic survival? Or worse, how many things are hidden from us because they belong to a category of knowledge that would have adversely affected the survival of the genes our ancestors carried, even though this insight might have enlightened the individual?

The layman seems stubbornly committed to the belief that our minds can be trusted to have an intuitive understanding of all things. Both the layman and professional alike will instinctively object to any suggestion that our genes construct brains that "intentionally" handicap our ability to comprehend the way the genes have enslaved us. To put it bluntly, I am suggesting that our minds are designed to steer us away from Truth when alternative false beliefs safeguard genetic enslavement of the individual, even when this blinded vision diminishes individual well‑being.

Humanities versus Physical Sciences

Don't expect humility from humans. Just as every serious thinker must become exasperated with others, so should he become exasperated with himself (I use "him" instead of "him/her"). Even within the physical sciences, where I earned a living for 43 years, it is necessary to consciously maintain vigilance against well‑meaning, intruding intuitions. Imagine how difficult the task must be within the humanities, which are blatantly undisciplined compared to the physical sciences. Physical scientists deal with quantifiable predictions which can be tested by observations. In the humanities, on the other hand, practitioners seem more concerned with loyalty to charismatic leaders, and their beliefs, than to the pursuit of objective truth. Imagine, then, how easily investigations in the humanities can go astray.

And gone astray they have! The long endeavor to understand "human nature" has had more false leads from well‑meaning professionals with social agendas than probably any other field. For example, some people contend that "human nature" doesn't exist, believing instead that our minds are "blank slates" at birth, ready to be written upon for the creation of whatever mental structures conform to the external world. Others state that “human races” don’t exist, yet insist on affirmative action preferences for non-existent minority races. Such beliefs are congenial to those who secretly wish to fiddle with the social environment for the purpose of correcting social injustices. Marxist minds are naturally attracted to the humanities, and have tried for nearly a century to hijack anthropology and distort it for their purposes.

In spite of the odds against progress, and in spite of energetic people who seem bent on leading others astray, there are achievements to be proud of in the study of human nature. Anthropology and psychology may have a sordid record of undisciplined meddling by people with political agendas, yet uphill progress in these fields has surely occurred.

Academic Quarrels

I recognize that most readers will object to this misanthropic portrayal of human nature and my cynical description of "human behavioral scientists." They may be inclined to agree with some of it, but they will quibble with specifics, or insist on different ways of approaching the subject. Just as tribes need to fission when they become too big, major subject areas within academe need to splinter to form "schools of thought" that go their separate ways by maintaining petty quarrels. For example, evolutionary psychologists complain about sociobiologists not having the proper "nuance" concerning adaptation versus optimization, and they use this minor complaint to build a wall of separation when as a practical matter the two fields are essentially one.

I am mindful of the need for petty carping by academics, or the inevitability of it, but I deplore the loss of vision that it inflicts upon those caught‑up in it. Sometimes a professional becomes so involved with argument over petty differences, and concern over whose grant request will be funded, that he forgets to stand back from day‑to‑day controversies in his field to see it in the larger perspective. The preoccupation with professional details may render the professional practitioner blind to bigger visions that can only be seen from a distance. An outsider, looking in, will occasionally be worth listening to, for he brings with him that distant "big picture" perspective. I claim to bring a "big picture" perspective to the subject of sociobiology, and this should interest the serious lay reader as well as the professional sociobiologist.

This book asks a lot from the reader without a background in sociobiology, and I realize that few, if any, will read it through. The professional sociobiologist will readily understand most of my message, but he will be troubled by the fact that he does not recall reading other articles by me in sociobiology journals. The lay reader will not be bothered that my publications are in a totally unrelated field, but he will find much of the material unfamiliar and will be repelled by it.

I will not be disappointed if neither the sociobiologist nor the lay person reads what follows. My life-long romp in the realm of ideas, and my writing of essays that appear in this book, has been more fun than what I imagine it would be like to have positive reader feedback or book sales. Indeed, as of this Second Edition writing (2006 January) fewer than a dozen of the first edition have been sold.

When I’m optimistic I recall Henri Beyle (Stendhal), who believed that his writings would escape notice until a century after his death. His forecast was amazingly accurate. Such a fate could in theory happen to this little book, but I now realize that the process of creating it was reward enough. I had more fun writing it than any reader could possibly experience in its reading. Like any creation, this book was written for the author.

─────────────────────────────────

INTRODUCTION

─────────────────────────────────

BEGINNINGS OF AN IDEA AND BOOK OVERVIEW

Washington, DC in 1962 was an exciting place. President Jack Kennedy created a “Camelot” aura that fed hope for unbounded progress. But the Cuban Missile Crisis brought a sobering chill to the country, especially to residents of Washington, DC. On my way to work I'd look north at the Capitol Building and wonder if it would be blown‑up by a Soviet missile while I was looking at it.

My first job after college was at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, where I worked as a radio astronomer specializing in Jupiter's radiation belts. Freed of time‑consuming college coursework, I was able to broaden my reading. A few years earlier, the double‑helix structure of DNA had been discovered. Perhaps stimulated by this, or maybe from the sheer momentum of a childhood fascination with the way genes influence behavior, I stumbled upon a thought which I now believe is the second‑most profound one of the 20th Century: “outlaw genes.”

1963 Identification of Outlaw Genes

On February 23, 1963 I was imagining the possibility of categorizing gene mutations as either promoting or subtracting from their ability to survive into the future and I needed terminology for this gene attribute. "Gene Survival Value" came to mind. Given a sufficiently well thought out measurement protocol any gene could theoretically be placed on a GSV spectrum, with endpoints labeled PGSV and NGSV - standing for "positive GSV" and "negative GSV." (I recall being dissatisfied with such awkward terms). At about the same time I was also struggling to devise theoretical concepts that might guide an individual in choosing a "rewarding life path," as ill‑defined as such a concept can be in youth. Longevity was one factor, so given the GSV example I invented ISV, for Individual Survival Value. The ISV extremes, of course, were PISV and NISV. At this critical juncture, it seemed right to draw an X‑Y coordinate system, representing GSV and ISV. (In retrospect, "individual well‑being” would have been a better parameter to adopt than Individual Survival Value.) The figure on the next page is a rendition of this scatter diagram.

In theory, any gene could be "placed" in such a diagram (I hadn't encountered the concept of polygenes or pleiotropy at that time, to be discussed in a later chapter). I imagined genes for this and that, and placed them in the diagram. I recall thinking that there had to be more dots in the upper‑right quadrant, corresponding to PGSV/PISV.

I realized that there shouldn't be many dots in the opposite corner since NGSV/NISV mutations should quickly disappear. Likewise, there shouldn't be many dots in the upper‑left NGSV/PISV quadrant, though wouldn't it be nice if genes flourished when they promoted individual happiness regardless of the cost to themselves. But it was the lower‑right corner that awaited me with a surprise! Gene mutations of this type would "by definition" flourish while "punishing" the individual carrying them! And nothing could be done about it, short of replacing the forces of natural selection with artificially created ones. This gene category has fascinated me ever since!

Figure 1.1 An X‑Y matrix of "genetic survival value" and "individual survival value" with hypothetical markings of the locus of individual genes (as conceived in 1962).

Why hadn't I read about such genes? Surely others knew about the inherent conflict between the individual and some of the genes within! I looked forward to someday reading about these "outlaw genes," and the philosophical dilemmas they posed. I stashed these original diagrams and writings on the matter in a file, which remained closed for decades. Nevertheless, I did not forget about these genes and during the past four decades I have written about the subject in my spare time.

Coincidences

In the Fall of 1963 I enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley for graduate studies in astronomy. As the prospect of taking required courses on such topics as stellar spectroscopy sunk in, I realized that my career path had taken a wrong turn, of sorts, since my heart was with the humanities. I managed to add classes in psychology and anthropology as a consolation for the dry astronomy stuff. (I quit before semester's end, and have been gainfully employed in the physical sciences ever since.)

Although coincidences can shape lives, more often they don't. While I was at Berkeley a little‑known biologist, George C. Williams, was using the school library to write a manuscript that would be published in 1966 as Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought. He was making a case for the view that selection forces work at the level of the genes, not the individual (and definitely not the species). Although this perspective was inherent in my thinking I failed at the time to grasp its novelty. I assumed that somewhere in the humanities was a field in which everyone believed this. Of course I was wrong, for Williams was engaged in creating such a field.

In this same year, 1963, William D. Hamilton prepared manuscripts describing "inclusive fitness" (Hamilton, 1964a,b), which is an essential part of understanding how gene competition drives evolution. The work of both Hamilton and Williams were essential footings, one decade later, for Edward O. Wilson's milestone book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Wilson, 1975). In my opinion, sociobiology is the most important idea of the 20th Century.

I sometimes wonder how my life's path might have differed if I had met Williams at Berkeley in 1963. A conversation with him could have clarified for me the emerging nature of the new field, and the opportunity for a role that I might have played in that emergence. Although the field was closer to my heart than astronomy, I never ran into G. C. Williams, and I never realized that he was helping to give birth to "my" field.

Overlooked Idea

Even now, four decades later, no one has written clearly about the mischievous genes (to my knowledge). The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins (1976), comes close; but it never explicitly states that genes "enslave" the individual for their selfish advancement while harming the enslaved individual. Mean Genes (Burnham and Phelan, 2000) comes even closer, but its emphasis is on practical steps for resisting self‑defeating behaviors rather than the theoretical origins of the genes responsible for those behavioral predispositions.

Why is there such a paucity of discussion about the philosophical implications of such a profound flaw in our origins and present nature? Why have the professional anthropologists, philosophers and others been so slow to address a subject that captured my unwavering attention 40 years ago, when I was fresh out of college and struggling to establish a career in an unrelated field? Sociobiologists have written about conflicts between competing gene alleles carried by individuals of various relatedness (Hamilton, 1964a,b), between parents and offspring (Trivers, 1974), and between siblings (Sulloway, 1996), but not between the individual and his genes! If any field has a mandate to ask the questions I stumbled upon in 1962 it is the new field of sociobiology!

If my idea has merit then sociobiologists have simply overlooked an obvious “next step” in the unfolding of implications for the basic tenet of the field. The history of science has many examples of simple yet profound new ideas being overlooked by the professionals. Every idea has many discoverers, and probably most of them only half realize the import of their discovery. The oft‑discovered idea remains out of the public domain until it is grasped by someone having the energy to push it into the mainstream.

Some of the genes within us are enemies of the individual, in the same sense that outlaws are the enemies of a society. This thought should challenge the thinking of every sentient being. The discipline of philosophy should be resurrected, and restructured along sociobiological precepts. If this is ever done the new field would have as its major philosophical dilemma the following question:

"What should an individual do with the mental pull toward behaviors that are harmful to individual welfare, yet which are present because they favor the survival of the genes that create brain circuits predisposing the individual to those behaviors?"

In other words, should the individual succumb to instincts unthinkingly, given that the gene‑contrived emotional payoffs may jeopardize individual safety and well‑being? Or, should the individual be wary of instincts and thoughts that come easily and forfeit the emotional rewards and ease of living in order to more surely live another day - to face the same dilemma? Should some compromise be chosen? How can any thinking person fail to be moved by these thoughts?

Overview of This Book

In writing this book I have wrestled with the desire to proceed directly to the matters of outlaw genes, and how an individual might deal with them. But every time I returned to the position that a proper understanding of the individual's dilemma requires a large amount of groundwork. For example, how can I celebrate the artisan way of life without first describing why the genes created the artisan?

In the first edition of this book I included the many groundwork chapters in their entirety before the culminating chapters. The first person to read the book (Dr. M. J. Mahoney) stated that “Once I hit Levels of Selection [Chapter 11] I couldn't put the book down.” That’s when I realized that I had violated the first principle of writing, which is to “quickly engage the reader before you lose them.” In this edition I have shortened the groundwork chapters by moving most of that material to appendices. The groundwork chapters have become a primer for the paradigm that leads inevitably to the positions of the main message of this book.

The remainder of this introduction is a précis for the book chapters.

There is no guiding hand in evolution; the natural process of the genes acting on their own behalf leads to individuals who are mere "agents" for these genes. This is the perspective of "sociobiology," also called "evolutionary psychology," and presented most effectively for the general public by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976). To understand the "blindness" of evolution one must first understand that the universe is just a "mechanism," that every phenomenon reduces to the action of blind forces of physics acting upon dumb particles. This outlook is called "reductionism," and is the subject of Chapter 1.

Lest the reader surmise that this book is about the physics of life, I attempt an impassioned appeal, in Chapter 2, for an embrace of modern man's scientific approach to understanding life, and a rejection of the primitive backwards pull that captures most unwary thinkers. This appeal provides a foretaste of the spicy sting of chapters found in the second half of the book.

Since genes are such an essential player in everything, I found it necessary to include tutorial chapters on genetics. The first of these genetics tutorials, Chapter 3, presents general properties of genes, such as how they compete and cooperate with each other, and have no concern for individual welfare beyond what serves them. The second genetics tutorial, Chapter 4, explores some subtle properties of genes that will be needed by later chapters. For example, since in every new environment some genes will fare better than others, it is useful to think of genes as being "pre‑adapted" and "pre‑maladapted" to novel environments. This will be an important concept in considering artisan niches in the modern world.

Chapter 5 is not necessary for the development of the book’s theme, but for those who understand it the chapter will provide a deeper insight into the mathematics of pre-adaptation and pre-maladaptation.

Chapter 6 pulls together some of the genetics ideas and applies them to human evolution. Certain insights are needed for a person to intelligently deal with emotions that control or attempt to discredit intellect. For example, how can a person handle jealousy without understanding cuckoldry?

Chapters 7 and 8 are devoted to the brain. The most recent advance in the evolution of the human brain is the refashioning of the left prefrontal cortex. It is important to view the brain as an organ designed by the genes to aid in gene survival. Rationality is a new and potentially dangerous tool created by the genes, and it must be kept under the control of "mental blinders" to assure that the agendas of other genes are not thwarted. Competing brain modules, cognitive dissonance, and self‑deception, are just a few concepts that any sentient must know about when navigating a path through life's treacherous shoals.

In Chapter 9 I write about the first artisan, whose precarious role as a full‑time tool and weapon maker may have begun 60,000 years ago. When the climate finally warmed 11,600 years ago at the start of our present "interglacial," called the Holocene, the small number of existing artisan roles served as a model for an explosion of new ones. The new artisans made high‑density populations possible and eventually led to the creation of civilizations (Chapter 10). Since I will celebrate the artisan way of life it is necessary to understand how it came into existence and why others in society are likely to view it warily. I will outline a theory for "anti‑intellectualism" and suggest that it may play a role in a civilization's decline.

Group selection still attracts controversy, and I use it argue that tribal warfare led to ever‑larger tribes, which required that its membership be ever‑more subservient to "tribal requirements" since the entire tribal membership had a shared destiny. But, as I argue in Chapter 11, when group selective forces were at their maximum during the Holocene, something new happened that heralded the first‑ever "individual selection" dynamic. The artisans assumed a leadership role in molding culture, governance, and opening opportunities for individual expression of creative and productive labors that led to a state that we now call "civilization."

But a civilization is vulnerable to outside attack by societies that remain uncivilized, that foster religious fanaticism. These stay‑behind societies harbor resentment of the material wealth of the civilized society, and instead of achieving wealth for themselves by surrendering their group‑serving grip on the individual, they instead mobilize the individual to discredit their rich neighbor and declare cultural warfare on them. Religious zeal serves these super-tribes by fostering fanatical, suicidal attacks on those societies that respect the individual. But since individuals in the civilized society think first of themselves, the civilization's defense is half‑hearted and ultimately ineffective.

It is inevitable that civilizations arise with an ambivalent self‑hatred. This is because people whose thinking style is overly influenced by their "primitive" right brain are naturally resentful of the world created by those new left‑brain artisans. The new world order favors the left‑brained artisan (engineer, scientist and other rational thinkers) and relegates to some vague periphery the contributions that can be made by the old‑style people. Thus, every civilization should have "two cultures" that are in conflict, and this is treated in Chapters 12 and 13.

Chapter 14 begins to address the matter of what factors might contribute to the decline and fall of civilizations. One theory invokes a back‑and‑forth dominance of artisan "producers" versus opportunistic "parasites." Another suggests that the two cultures war, or the “War of the Brain Halves,” is eventually won by those who succumb to the primitive pull. Gingerly, I also suggest that dysgenia might undermine our genetic vigor and sap societal energies.

I discovered the Anthropic Principle (and learned that it had been written about and published obscurely a few years before my discovery of it). I use this idea to predict the approximate date range for a significant crash in the human population. In the process of calculating this horrific event, I show that the rate of technological innovations exhibits a trace over time that foretells population patterns. From this analysis it appears that we are now in the second major "rise and fall" pattern of innovation rate and population, the latter pattern being displaced a few centuries after the first. This is described in Chapter 15.

I attempt to survey some possible population crash scenarios in Chapter 16. However, I conclude that the future is so difficult to predict that it is prudent to only present possibilities.

In Chapter 17 I begin my "call to arms" for individuals to emancipate themselves from the genetic grip. All previous chapters are preamble to this one and those that follow. My appeal must be qualified by some nitty‑gritty facts of genetics, such as pleiotropy and polygenes. Nevertheless, I present a litany of "genetic pitfalls" that any emancipated person should wish to avoid.

Because any reader will expect a book such as this to give specific suggestions for how to use insight to live wisely, I feel obligated to present in Chapter 18 my feeble attempt to address the subject. It is an attempt to describe ways that an individual may live wisely in a world wracked with defects caused by outlaw genes. Some genes are our enemy because they lead to dysfunctional human societies, while other genes are our enemy because they lead us as individuals to want the wrong things. The individual's task is to liberate oneself from the genes, and choose wisely. The IQ form of intelligence allows insight, and this insight must be placed into the service of an enlightened "emotional intelligence" to arrive at new personal values to live by. The questing person will understand the wisdom in the saying, which applies to the unthinking person: "If you get what you want, you deserve what you get." However, I readily acknowledge that my attempt to realize this chapter's goal is feeble, and the reasons for this are developed at the end of the book.

Chapter 19 follows naturally from the previous chapter, since an individual who wishes to pursue an individual‑emancipated life must do so within the constraints of living in a society where individual liberation is difficult. When a sufficient number of people awaken to their enslaved condition, thoughts may turn to a way for them to coalesce in a shared search for a winning place. I describe utopias and prospects for isolated enclaves as a path toward a stable community where individual liberation may be sought. However, I warn that the world is becoming too "small" for enclaves to remain safe from meddlesome outsiders. Since the door of feasibility for creating isolated space communities has shut, and since the earth is already "too small" for self‑sustaining communities to remain secret, there are no feasible refuges for utopias. I conclude that today's world will not tolerate the formation of an enlightened society of liberated individuals, and that those who might wish to live in such a society must be content with learning how to live a good life as individuals with secret dreams while being surrounded by an ever‑increasing number of primitive hoi poloi. The "society of the cognoscenti" will remain dispersed, and may only occasionally recognize each other during normal encounters.

Chapter 20 is supposed to be a surprise, but the subtitle sort of gives it away: Repudiation of the Foregoing. I will say no more.

Chapter 21 is an annotated version of Bertrand Russell's essay, “A Free Man's Worship.” It is an excellent example of how a liberated person thinks, and I use it to illustrate the point of the preceding chapter. Namely, once a person is liberated from genetic enslavement and free to choose values to live by that are compatible with the cognoscenti's insights, an aesthetic and poetic attitude toward "existence" can be achieved. The existentialist need not be a sourpuss, nor must he become a passive esthete. The thoughtful existentialist may end up a compassionate humanist with a lust for existence!

So now dear reader, if you exist, do take the following speculations with a light heart; hopefully your thoughts will be led in directions that are as congenial to your inherited ways of thinking as the following are to mine.

─────────────────────────────────

CHAPTER 1

─────────────────────────────────

REDUCTIONISM

An intellect which at any given moment knew all the forces that animate Nature and the mutual positions of the beings that comprise it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit its data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom: for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain; and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. Pierre Simon Laplace, Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814).

The highest object at which the natural sciences are constrained to aim, but which they will never reach, is the determination of the forces which are present in nature, and of the state of matter at any given moment ‑ in one word, the reduction of all the phenomena of nature to mechanics." Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, 1865.

The idea that all movement could in theory be reduced to simple laws of nature was first recorded for posterity by Democritus of Abdera in 4^th Century BC Greece. This reductionist outlook was also expressed by the Roman philosopher Lucretius during the 1^st Century BC. After the Dark Ages, when Greek and Roman ideas lost favor, disillusionment with religion grew among thinkers and they became curious about the ideas of those ancient challengers of piety and ritual. Isaac Newton wrote about the forces of nature as a basis for understanding movement during the 17^th Century. The Philosophes of 18^th Century France restored rationalism as the ultimate guide to Truth. Scientific discoveries continued to provide support to the reductionist notion, as shown by leading 19^th Century scientists such as Laplace and Kirchhoff.

During the early 20^th Century the reductionist paradigm came under challenge by Quantum Physics. The new physics does not claim to require divine intervention or primitive spirits, but it does appear to require randomness for events at physical scales the size of the atom and smaller. The so-called Newtonian physics is correct as far as it goes, but it cannot explain a category of physical events associated with the atom and its interaction with light. At some future time it may be possible to portray quantum physics with the same deterministic quality as Newtonian physics, but for now it is prudent to assume that some events are subject to random outcomes. The strict form of determinism called for by Newtonian physics should be replaced by a probabilistic form of determinism. However, both forms of determinism are reductionist since they are based on the notion that the movements of all particles, and their interaction with light, conform to the laws of physics. This last phrase is key, “conform to the laws of physics,” and it is dealt with at greater length in Appendix A.

"Reductionism" either angers people or delights them. The entire enterprise of science is based on reductionist tenets. Whereas all scientists practice their profession in accordance with the reductionist paradigm, there’s a part of the brain that is so opposed to it that ~40% of scientists claim to not believe in reductionism. These conflicted scientists are found mostly in the humanities, where muddled thinking is less of a handicap; within the physical sciences there is almost universal belief in reductionism (especially among the most esteemed scientists).

The end-point of reductionist thinking can be most easily described by the following analogy: the universe is like a giant billiard table, in which all movements are mechanical ‑ having been set in motion by the explosive birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago! Of course this analogy neglects quantum physics, but nothing essential to our understanding of the evolution of life, and of human nature, is lost by this simplification. The march of events, from one moment to the next, is captured by this simple-minded, deterministic view. Since this version of reductionism is essential to the rest of this book, and since it is a fascinating subject in its own right, I devote the rest of this chapter to a brief description of reductionism and an appendix to its fuller treatment.

A Rigid Universe

"The Universe Rigid" was possibly H. G. Well's most important manuscript. It languished with the publisher, who didn't understand it, and eventually it was lost. Instead of reconstructing it, Wells turned its central idea into a story, The Time Machine (1895).

Two dozen years later, Albert Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity (1920), which expanded upon the idea, already familiar to physicists of the day, of time as a fourth dimension. This concept was treated in "The Universe Rigid" essay with unusual insight, especially for a non-physicist. The following is a brief summary of it that appeared in The Time Machine:

"... Suppose you knew fully the position and the properties of every particle of matter... in the universe at any particular moment of time:.. Well, that knowledge would involve the knowledge of the condition of things at the previous moment, and at the moment before that, and so on. If you knew and perceived the present perfectly, you would perceive therein the whole of the past. ... Similarly, if you grasped the whole of the present, ... you would see clearly all the future. To an omniscient observer ... he would see, as it were, a Rigid Universe filling space and time ‑ a Universe in which things were always the same. He would see one sole unchanging series of cause and effect... If ‘past' meant anything, it would mean looking in a certain direction; while ‘future' meant looking the opposite way. From the absolute point of view the universe is a perfectly rigid unalterable apparatus, entirely predestinate, entirely complete and finished... time is merely a dimension, quite analogous to the three dimensions of space."

This passage describes the underlying principle of what is referred to in today's parlance as "reductionism." It leaves no room for spirits, mysticism or gods. Most intellectuals use the term "reductionist" as a disparaging epithet, but I believe that reductionism is the crowning achievement of human thought.

Mechanical Materialism

Reductionism is the belief that complex phenomena can be "reduced" to simpler physical processes, which themselves can in theory be reduced to the simplest level of physical explanation where elementary particles interact according to the laws of physics. The ancient concept of Mechanical Materialism captures the essence of reductionism, but relies upon the outdated concept that at the most basic level the particles are like stones, and interact by hitting each other like billiard balls.

Nevertheless, reductionism is the fulfillment of what Democritus and Lucretius dreamed about, a mechanistic world‑view that as a bonus could also deliver people from the tyranny of religion. Lucretius would agree with the statement: "There is no need for the aid of the gods, there is not even room for their interference.... Man's actions are no exception to the universal law, free‑will is but a delusion." (Bailey, 1926, describing how Lucretius viewed the world).

It will be instructive to review mechanical materialism before describing the version of reductionism required by modern physics.

Imagine a game of billiards photographed from above, and consider frames redisplayed in slow motion. After the cue sends one ball into motion, the entirety of subsequent impacts and bounces are determined. If this were not so, if the balls had a mind of their own, or if some mysterious outside force intervened, then consistently good players would not exist. Now imagine a very slow replay of the motions of the billiard balls; millisecond by millisecond the movements unfold with an undeniable inevitableness. A careful analysis would reveal that sustained momentum and elastic collisions govern the placement and velocity of each ball in the next millisecond.

Given two successive "frames," an observer would know the positions and velocities of every ball, and he could calculate their placement, velocities and future impacts for any arbitrarily short instant later. He could thus predict the following frame, and the process that allowed the prediction of frame 3 from frames 1 and 2 could be repeated for frames 2 and 3 to predict frame 4. And so on, for all future frames. In this way, the observer could predict all future movements (don’t worry about the fact that we've ignored friction).

By a similar process the observer could infer a previous frame from any two neighboring frames. Thus, frames 1 and 2 could be used to predict frame 0, etc. Therefore, by knowing any two frames, all future and past frames could be inferred. This is the thought H. G. Wells captured with his unpublished Universe Rigid essay.

Reductionism as a Basis for Physics

The 19th Century saw a de‑mystification of various science disciplines. The reshaping was done by rationalists, building upon the legacy of the 18th Century philosophes. The rationalists firmly placed science on a footing that has endured throughout the 20th Century. Like the machines of 19th Century inventors, the paradigm developed by 19th Century scientists was "mechanistic."

Ernst Mach forced metaphysics out of physics (Holton, 1993, pg. 32). Chemistry was changed from a floundering quest for transmuting common elements to gold, into a physics‑based understanding of atoms and molecules. Darwin displaced God from the creation of life by presenting his theory of evolution, even though this may have saddened him personally.

By the end of the 19th Century, when Wells began to write, the intellectual atmosphere was congenial to ideas that reduced mysterious happenings to a juxtaposition of commonplace physical events. Each event in isolation was conceptually simple. It is the mere combining of many such events that cause things to appear incomprehensible.

Reductionism is based on a concept taught in college Physics 101. I remember well that without fanfare the physics instructor stated that there are only four forces in nature (gravity, electro‑magnetism, the nuclear force and the weak force), and that these forces act upon a finite number of particles that are pulled this way and that by the summation of all forces acting upon each particle. In laboratory experiments where the number of relevant forces can be confined to only 1 or 2, motions are observed to be governed by a simple law: F = m•a, or "force equals mass times acceleration" ("acceleration" is the rate of change of "velocity vector"). It is easier to understand this law of nature by rewriting it in the form: a = F/m, which states that a particle's acceleration is proportional to the sum of forces acting on it divided by the particle's mass. Mathematically, a and F are vectors, which is why these symbols are written in "bold" typeface, and "m" is a scalar (no orientation is involved); thus, the equation a = F/m keeps track of the 3‑dimensional orientation of forces and accelerations. Since forces can originate from many sources, they must be added together to yield one net force.

At every instant a particle is responding to just one net force. It responds by accelerating in the direction of that force (which has a magnitude and direction). The particle's velocity vector changes due to its acceleration. Since the time history of a particle's velocity specifies where it goes, the particle's "behavior" is completely determined by the forces acting upon it. This description is called Newtonian physics, and it reigned supreme throughout the 19^th Century.

Quantum Physics

During the late 19^th Century a disturbing number of laboratory measurements were made that defied explanation using Newtonian physics. Radioactivity was a puzzle, for it seemed that atoms of certain (radioactive) elements would spontaneously, and at random, emit a particle. There was also the puzzle of atoms absorbing and emitting light at only specific wavelengths, producing a unique spectral pattern for each atomic element. Newtonian physics had no way to accommodate these and other puzzling phenomena.

Quantum physics was developed in response to these puzzling measurements, all of which were related to mysterious phenomena inside the atom. The new physics expanded upon the idea that everyday objects were constructed from electrons orbiting a nucleus composed of protons and neutrons (now known to be constructed from 12 elementary building blocks of matter). It was proposed that electrons could be thought of as a wave, with a wavelength such that the only permitted orbital circumferences around a nucleus were those with an integer number of wavelengths. Changes in an electron’s orbit involved changes in energy, so if an electron moved to a higher energy orbit (farther from the nucleus and larger in circumference) it must absorb energy from somewhere (such as a photon of light) that had an energy corresponding exactly to the difference in the electron’s energy in the two orbits – hence the quantization of spectral absorption features for each atomic element.

As quantum physics developed to explain more laboratory experiments related to the atom, the theory became weirder and weirder. Quantum mechanics (QM) was developed to deal with particles, and quantum field theory was developed to explain radiation and its interaction with particles. Quantum physics has been described as inherently probabilistic, or indeterminate, and has been characterized as having so much "quantum weirdness" that our minds are intuitively unprepared to comprehend it. Quantum physics “works” in the sense that it gives a better account than any other theory for atomic scale physical phenomena. Contrary to popular belief, it does not discredit Newtonian physics, which is still valid for large scale phenomena; rather, it is more correct to say that quantum physics supplements Newtonian physics. Almost every physical situation can be easily identified as requiring one or the other embodiment of physical law.

It now seems that two of the aforementioned four forces can be "unified" (the weak and the electromagnetic). One of the main goals of physics today is to create a “unified” theory that incorporates all the explanatory power of the four forces plus the weird but useful explanatory power of quantum physics.

One of the most counter-intuitive properties of quantum physics is the notion that events are not strictly determined but are only probable, and that particles are not tiny things at a specific location but are probability functions in 3-dimensional space. When a particle moves the probability function describing its location moves. In the laboratory it is impossible to measure a particle’s position without changing its velocity; and it is similarly impossible to measure a particle’s velocity without changing its position. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle quantifies the partitioning of position and velocity uncertainty.

Einstein believed, but could not prove, that although we didn’t know of a way to measure a particle’s position and velocity simultaneously with great accuracy, the particle nevertheless has a well-defined position and velocity, and it interacts with other particles as if this is so. His speculation was described as needing a “basement level” of physical laws, which had not yet been discovered. With a “basement level” of physical laws the apparent “unknowableness” of a particle’s properties would be just that, apparent “unknowableness.” The particle “knows” where it is located and how fast it is going, and in what direction relative to the rest of the universe - even if humans can’t know.

This “quantum weirdness” is often cited to discredit the idea that events are “determined.” But we cannot rule out the possibility that future physicists will discover a basement level of physical law, and that this will restore Newtonian physics as a complete theory for all size scales. The new Newtonian physics would have the old Newtonian physics as a first approximation, valid for use with the vast majority of physical phenomena dealt with on a daily basis.

Starting here I will present only brief summaries of chapter sub-sections that have been moved to Appendix A for this Second Edition of Genetic Enslavement.

Levels of Physical Explanation

The matter of “levels of physical explanation” must be dealt with for the reader who is not prepared to accept the existence of a basement level of physical law.

In the physical sciences it is common to treat a physical process at a “higher level” than atoms interacting in accordance with the most basic level of physical law, a = F/m and quantum physics. Instead, other “laws” are constructed for everyday settings, either derived from the basic level of laws or derived from experiment and deemed compatible with the basic laws. One example should serve to illustrate this.

Consider the atmosphere, which consists of an immense number of molecules. Any thought of using a = F/m applied at the level of molecules for the purpose of predicting the weather would be silly because of its impracticality. There is no way to know the position and velocity of all the molecules in the atmosphere at a given time for establishing the "initial conditions" required for subsequent calculation using a = F/m. The meteorologist employs a “higher level of physical explanation” by inventing “laws” that govern such aggregate properties as "atmospheric pressure," “temperature,” and "wind speed."

In each case the invented property and rules for using it can be derived from a = F/m, so these handy properties and rule for usage are “emergent properties” of the basic level of physical laws. Every atmospheric scientist would acknowledge that whenever a meteorologist relies on a handy rule, such as “wind speed is proportional to pressure gradient,” what is really occurring in the atmosphere is the unfolding of an immense system of particles obeying a = F/m.

Just because scientists find it useful to employ "emergent properties" does not mean that the emergent properties exist; rather, they are no more than a useful tool for dealing with a complex system. A "pressure gradient" doesn't exist in nature; it exists only in the minds of humans. Model idealizations of an atmosphere can be used to prove, using a = F/m, that the thing called a "pressure gradient" is associated with wind. But these very proofs belie the existence of the concept, for they "invent" the concept of a pressure gradient for use in a model that then uses a = F/m. The handy meteorology rules, and their "emergent property" tools, are fundamentally redundant to a = F/m.

The refinements of modern physics do not detract from the central concept of materialism, which is that everyday (large-scale) phenomena are the result of the mindless interaction of a myriad of tiny particles in accordance with invariant laws of physics. Reductionists acknowledge the importance of the many levels for explaining complex phenomena, but they insist that all levels higher than the basic level of physical explanation are fundamentally “unreal” and superfluous, even though the higher level of explanation may be more “useful” than a lower level of explanation.

Science embraces what might be termed the "first law of reductionism," that whenever a phenomenon can be explained by recourse to a more basic level of physical law, the “higher level” explanation should only be used when it is drastically simpler to use and unlikely to be misleading. Whenever a higher level of explanation is used, there should be an acknowledgement that it is being used for convenience only.

Living Systems

Reductionists view living systems as subject to the same physical laws as non-living systems. Therefore, the behavior of a living system is an emergent property of a complex physical entity. A living thing is thus an automaton, or robot.

The thing we call "mind" is an "emergent property" of an automaton’s brain. The brain consists of electrons and protons, and these atomic particles obey the same physical laws as inanimate electrons and protons.

Such things as "thoughts, emotions and intentions" are mental constructions of the brain that in everyday situations are more "useful" than the laws of physics for the study of behavior. In spite of their usefulness, they are not actually causing the movement of particles in the living organism, and they don't exist at the most fundamental level of understanding. Even “free will” must be shorn of its essential features, and recast as another "emergent" product of real causes.

“Consciousness,” like “free will,” is also an emergent property of automatons, just as the "wind" is an emergent phenomenon of the atmosphere. I don’t object to the use of “consciousness” for the same reason that I don’t object to the use of “wind” when an atmospheric science problem is to be solved.

It has been argued that the physicist exhibits "faith" in extending what is observably true in simple settings to more complicated ones. This assertion of faith is true, but the faith follows from the physicist's desire to invoke a minimum of assumptions for any explanation.

Some Practical Considerations Concerning Levels of Explanation

The brain evolved, like every other organ, to enhance survival of the genes that encode for its assembly. It should be no surprise, therefore, to find that it is an imperfect instrument for comprehending reality. If it is more efficient to construct brain circuits for dealing with the world using concepts such as spirits and prayer, rather than reductionist physics, then the "forces of evolution" can be expected to select genes that construct brain circuits that employ these pragmatic but false concepts. Since no tasks pertaining to survival requires the a = F/m way of thinking, the brain will find this to be a difficult concept. It is a triumph of physics to have discovered that a = F/m and quantum physics rule everything!

A naive person might believe that the primitive person, viewing everything in terms of spirits, is thinking at a higher level than the scientist. This would be a ludicrous belief. A primitive is a lazy and unsophisticated thinker. He is totally oblivious to reductionist "levels of thought." As I will describe later, he uses a brain part that is incapable of thinking rationally: the right prefrontal cortex. Human evolution's latest, and possibly most magnificent achievement, is the left prefrontal cortex, which evolution uses to usurp functions from the right prefrontal cortex when rational thought is more appropriate (i.e., feasible). Too often contemporary intellectuals will unthinkingly succumb to the pull of primitive thought, as when someone proudly proclaims that they are “into metaphysics" (an oxymoron).

A fuller exposition of this topic cannot be given without a background of material that will be presented in later chapters. For now, I will merely state that mysticism is a natural way of thought for primitive humans. It is "easier" for them to invoke a "wind spirit" explanation than the reductionist ones, such as a = F/m, or higher level derivative physical concepts. They do this without realizing how many ad hoc assumptions they are creating, which in turn require explanations, and this matter is never acknowledged (as with invoking God as an explanation, without explaining "God"). Their thinking may seem acceptable from the standpoint of a right prefrontal cortex (or "efficient" from the perspective of the genes that merely want to create a brain that facilitates the gene's "goal" of existing in the future), but it is terribly misguided from the standpoint of the thinker endowed with a functioning left prefrontal cortex, that demands rational explanations with a minimum of assumptions. This unthinking proliferation of ad hoc assumptions bothers the reductionist, but it doesn't bother the unsophisticated primitive.

Reductionism is for the Few

H. G. Wells must have understood the issues of this chapter. The reductionist paradigm was an important part of intellectual thought during the 19th Century, and Wells grasped it more surely than even many scientists today. Scientists, engineers and inventors must have been held in high esteem during the second half of the 19th Century, and the first half of the 20th. The per capita number of significant discoveries and innovations, as measured by Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery (Asimov, informally distributed in the 1980s, formally published 1994) peaked at about the middle of this period (actually, 1910 AD, as described in Chapter 15, and specifically Fig. 15.12).

Late in the 19^th Century, after Darwin’s evolution by natural selection instead of divine guidance had time to register with intellectuals, the idea of “humans as automatons” was part of the climate of opinion. Thomas Huxley was intrigued by this idea, and Darwin humored him by signing letters with a reference to it (Sagan and Druyan, 1992, pg. 70). Reductionism requires that all living things be viewed as automatons, or robots created by evolution. Yet none of today’s academics seem brave enough to defend this idea.

Ernst Mach (1893) deserves mention as an early champion of the idea that all branches of science will eventually be viewed as unified. He was a continuing inspiration for those who attempted to advance this perspective (Holton, 1993) throughout the first half of the 20^th Century. His was one of the most important in a series of “flame-bearers” for keeping alive an idea that came out of ancient Greece with the writings of Democritus of Abdura (Sagan, 1980).

Reductionist ideas were at least understood by literary people during the early 20^th Century. In 1931 novelist Theodore Dreiser, for example, wrote "I have pondered and even demanded of cosmic energy to know Why. But now I am told by the physicist as well as the biologist that there can be no Why but only a How, since to know How disposes finally of any possible Why." (Dreiser, 1931).

Sadly, we cannot expect today's intellectuals to have the same profound understanding of the nature of reality as was exhibited a couple generations ago by such writers and social commentators as Wells and Dreiser. The quality of thought over time, in a specific subject area, is not always progressive. As with civilizations, there is a rise and fall in the sophistication of world views. Indeed, as the 21st Century begins we are in the midst of a renewed interest in returning to the comforts of primitive outlooks, as described in the next chapter.

─────────────────────────────────

CHAPTER 2

─────────────────────────────────

RESISTING THE BACKWARD PULL

TOWARD OUR SPIRITUAL HERITAGE

"O miserable minds of men! O blind hearts! In what darkness of life, in what great dangers ye spend this little span of years! ... Life is one long struggle in the dark." Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, ca 60 BC.

"It does no harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?" Richard Feynman, Lectures in Physics, Vol. 1, Addison Wesley, 1963.

The term "New Age" is a misnomer, and an insult to better ages. It is a misnomer because it is a regression to primitive ways of thinking, ways which should have remained buried, yet which have resurfaced due to a mysterious mental pull toward the primitive. This pull is unfortunately endemic to the flawed human mind. "New Age" embraces the occult, a belief in angels, spirits, astrology, magic and life after death. It is a return to the kinds of enslaving thoughts which Lucretius urged his disciples to be rid of 2000 years ago.

The Primitive's Reliance on Spirits

The environment of our primitive ancestors, including both the physical and social aspects, rewarded genes that constructed brains that could deal with the world, which is profoundly different from stating that their environment rewarded brains that could understand the world. As I argue in a later chapter, primitive people did not employ the full powers of a modern left prefrontal cortex, but instead relied upon a more primitive right cerebral cortex design for both cerebral hemispheres. To the extent that "producing grandchildren" (a convenient measure of genetic success) became more dependent upon mastery of a world of human relationships instead of mastery of the natural world, the architecture of the human brain evolved in ways that favored comprehending the social world at the expense of the natural one.

The social arena is less predictable than the natural one, so different mental abilities were rewarded in an environment requiring social skills. When a brain that evolved for the social setting addresses matters in the inanimate world, it should not surprise us to find that such a brain employs "weird logic" in this neglected realm. The primitive's vision of the world, being unguided by rational thought, was filled with spirits that behaved like people. Primitive people have gods for lightning, wind, rain, light, dark, and whatever seems important to a primitive's precarious life. Thus, when the sun god loses a conflict, according to this weird logic, it follows that there shall be wind, rain and lightning.

Today’s common belief systems provide evidence that for our ancestors the need to competently deal with human affairs was more important to the evolving human genome than the corresponding need to competently deal with the inanimate world. In high‑tech modern Japan, for example, the indigenous Shinto cult and religion remains popular. Shinto worship centers on "a vast pantheon of spirits, or kami, mainly divinities personifying aspects of the natural world, such as the sky, the earth, heavenly bodies, and storms. Rites include prayers of thanksgiving; offerings of valuables..." (Encarta Encyclopedia, 2000). Even well‑educated Chinese still believe in Feng Shui (the need to please spirits by a proper placement of furniture, entrances, etc). American Indians, who crossed the Bering Strait 13,000 years ago, brought with them a burdensome need for believing in spirits that demanded ritual obedience. There seems to be an abundance of depressing examples from every culture.

The Dyads of Primitive Thinking

Dyads abound in primitive thinking. Night and day, good and bad, friend and foe, birth and death ‑ they all contribute to a "yin and yang world." It is not surprising that when primitive men floundered to explain the world, they relied upon a dyadic competition. Thus, night and day are engaged in a daily struggle, literally; and at sunrise the "day" has become victorious over "night," and so on. But it gets complicated, for during winter the stronger competitor is night, whose exhaustion gives day the upper hand during summer.

Conflict permeates a primitive's thinking, because conflicts between tribes define primitive life. Nevertheless, men battle upon a stage set by even stronger forces than themselves. The weather is overwhelmingly strong, as is the ocean, the occasional earthquake, tsunami and volcano. There must be gods in heaven who unleash the thunderstorm and lightning, that punishes and rewards men. Since powerful men can be appeased, or slightly influenced, so might the gods. Man's quest for control over his fate led him in false directions, for gods cannot be appeased when they don't exist.

We should laud the primitive's urge to explain, even though it seems to be only weakly motivated by an urge to understand. The human claim for nobility rests upon this urge. But let us also not be mistaken about the explanations created by primitive men: Primitives have been stupendously wrong in almost every instance!

Their explanations were wrong because they arose from a primitive right brain. Only recently, with the ascendance of the aforementioned, fast‑evolving left brain, with its logical mode of thought and lack of traditional "wisdom," has it been possible to conjure up correct explanations. But, so strong is the irrepressible right brain that even many contemporary "intellectuals" still believe that primitive explanations contain some profound and subtle wisdom that makes it "just as valid."

Thinking men of every age seem to have sensed a pull toward primitive thinking, and worse, toward primitive behaving. The decay of civilization has been an ever‑present concern for those who live in a civilized state. This concern was expressed by ancient Greek philosophers, just as it is in today's world.

We know that the civilized state is not secure, because we sense the presence of that insistent and primitive right brain. To use the primitive's own metaphor, we are engaged in a struggle between good and bad, between light and dark, and it is now "late afternoon." Some of us who worry about the approach of evening, and a long night, admonish our contemporaries to resist the "primitive pull," to stay the course that brought us to this glorious noon, atop the highest mountain, by keeping the new faith as it struggles with the old. It has become a battle between the two titans of human history: the two brain halves!

The Modern's "Spiritual Cleansing"

The primitive way of thinking is more efficient to implement than the modern physicist's cumbersome a = F/m and quantum physics way of thinking.

We moderns smile at those faltering attempts to see order in nature. From our 21^st Century perspective, we see that their "explanations" are pathetically simple‑minded, and emphatically wrong!

Yet most people today feel comfort in being pulled in this primitive direction. It's as if the more complicated and up‑to‑date explanations require too much effort, resisting as they must the objections of old brain circuits. The result, for most people, is that the brain maintains old and new understandings side‑by‑side. The human brain is amazingly adept at compartmentalizing thought, and allowing the most irrational beliefs to coexist beside enlightened ones. "Cognitive dissonance" is minimized by insulating brain circuits from each other.

More than a few scientists surrender rationality on Sunday. I once worked with a scientist, a master of magnetic fields on planets in our solar system, who believed in the many levels of heaven taught by the Mormon Church. I give more examples of this in Chapter 13.

During Humanity's long march to the present, we have progressed from "magic" explanations to "rational" ones. Those brave thinkers who led the march have shed the magic and embraced the rational. Rationality led to reductionism, which I believe is Humanity's greatest intellectual achievement! The march forward has been led by people whose style of thinking adheres to the values of our left cerebral hemisphere, or left brain. The regressive, backwards pull is from a majority of "neurologically primitive people" whose thinking style remains right‑brained.

Humanity's path to reductionism has been "forced" by necessity. Imagine the consequences of taking your car to a minister for its repair, instead of a car mechanic; or seeking medical help from a shaman medicine man instead of a medical doctor or nutritionist. Our primitive ancestors had no need for car mechanics, and in their time medical doctors didn't exist, so they had less to lose by adhering to magic. With the unfolding of time, and the accumulation of technology, there has been a growing need to distinguish between spiritual and rational explanations.

Not all aspects of modern life require rational explanation. My friend who believed in many levels of heaven was unencumbered by this belief during his work hours. His spiritual beliefs might, in fact, have had a stabilizing effect in his personal life. It is relatively inconsequential whether a person believes they will go to heaven when they die, or dissolve to dust! It is more important that they know about family budgets, cars, computers, and nutrition.

Whereas it may not matter to a person's success at living whether all remnants of spirituality have been purged from his intellectual outlook, it does matter to the person engaged in a serious endeavor to understand "the nature of reality." Every serious thinker is obligated to undertake a lifelong vow to cleanse away all vestiges of spirituality!

We must control the impulse to regress to a world of spirits, no matter how comforting it may be. As argued by Lucretius, we must move forward, abandon belief in personal guardian angels and protecting gods, and replace them with understandings based on rational thought.

Are We Making Progress?

During the past 80 years scientists have slowly aligned their personal beliefs with rationality. In 1916 Leuba surveyed the beliefs of 1000 randomly selected scientists and found that 42% of them believed in God, whereas a similar survey conducted in 1996 showed only a modest decline to 39%. The belief in immortality declined by a slightly greater amount, from 51% to 38%. Perhaps more revealing, the more accomplished scientist is less likely to believe. Leuba (1914) surveyed 400 "greater" scientists and found belief in God to be 28%, whereas Leuba (1933) found that 19 years later the belief rate declined to 15%.

Today, Larson and Witham (1998) report that among 517 American scientists who belong to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences only 7.0% believed in God. Considering a belief in immortality, the above studies report that for 1916, 1933 and 1998 the belief rate was 35%, 18% and 7.9%. Among the general population of non‑scientists, 96% believe in God!

There appears to be a decoupling of what people of accomplishment believe and what the hoi poloi believe. Thus, among "greatest" and "accomplished" scientists the rates of belief in God and immortality are low and declining dramatically, among the ranks of scientists as a group the belief rates are less than half and declining slowly, whereas among the general population the belief in God is high and remains unchanged. Only the intellectuals are abandoning God!

Faltering Progress

As my chapters on the brain explain, I believe that the right prefrontal cerebral cortex finds mysticism and religion congenial to its way of thinking, whereas the left prefrontal cerebral cortex is inclined to think rationally. There is little doubt that the left cerebral cortex is a more recently evolved brain area than the right, as it is responsible for speech, conceptual thought and logical thinking. The practice of science requires a well‑developed left brain, although a well‑functioning right brain is also required in a supporting role. I speculate that scientists typically have left brains that "dominate" their right, in the sense that the left brains use the right brains as "tools" in the pursuit of left‑brain‑directed activities. The scientist values things that the left brain values, and the scientist's approach to studying a problem, and the standards of proof, are consistent with the style of thought of a left brain. Among the others, it is the right brain that employs its left as a tool, keeping it subservient to right‑brain values and goals. This more common style is a phase humanity must continue to "evolve through" if it is ever to reach a winning place as a sentient species.

As I look back upon the recorded history of the human groping for an understanding of who we are I discern good and bad eras. The first good era was 5^th Century BC Greece, when the Ionian philosophers articulated the reductionist paradigm, as described by Sagan in his book Cosmos (1980, pg. 175). Democritus was the shining star of that era. The next era would be 1^st Century BC Rome, when Lucretius wrote his famous poem On the Nature of Things. There followed a Dark Ages millennium during which anyone who thought rationally had to keep their thoughts secret. Stirrings of rationality started in 17^th Century Denmark. The 18^th Century Philosophes in France produced a full-bloom resurgence of interest in Greek thought, but this rebirth was short-lived due to the French Revolution. During the 19^th Century European discoveries buttressed support for rationalism and the reductionist paradigm in particular. The new physics of the early 20^th Century began to discredit reductionism, unfairly in my opinion, though rationalism continued to prevail. The global depression quieted many independent thinkers (like H. L. Mencken), and this marked the beginnings of a slow return to spiritualism. At this writing, in 2006, I see only a downslide of critical thinking that cannot compete with the primitive appeal of religion and an excess of politically-correct embrace of diversity of thought, no matter how irrational. A new Dark Ages might be approaching.

Laying a Groundwork of Understanding

The prospects are poor that during the next century the general public will embrace a rational outlook. Most people, even most intellectuals, are inclined to use the term "reductionism" disparagingly. This can be understood if their belief systems are influenced by a primitive, right prefrontal cortex. Rationality, which is a left prefrontal cortex creation, is in conflict with the old right pre‑frontal cortex. A fuller explanation of this will follow chapters on human evolution, the brain's role in human evolution, the appearance of the artisan, his role in the rise of civilizations, and the resentment of the artisan's rapid rise to power.

These chapters, in turn, will be preceded by a tutorial on genetics, using the sociobiological paradigm. This will be our task for the next three "genetics tutorial" chapters.

If, dear reader, you find the genetics tutorial chapters tedious, then skip them if you must. You merely risk not having some tools for understanding the "micro‑motives" underlying the "macro‑behaviors" under discussion. The genes, after all, underlie everything pertaining to life!

The chapters describing human evolution (Ch. 6) and the brain's role in human evolution (Ch 8) are intended to illustrate reductionist ways of thinking about the evolution of human nature, and should not be skipped. They provide a background for understanding the following speculations on the rise and fall of civilizations.

The utopias and living wisely chapters will resume the main theme of this book, which is concerned with the individual's predicament of living with "outlaw genes." The intervening chapters present a story of how humans came by the weird human nature we're stuck with, and I see no way of resuming the main topics without the preparation of these intervening chapters.

─────────────────────────────────

CHAPTER 3

─────────────────────────────────

GENETICS TUTORIAL ‑ PART I

"...organisms die but their genes pass on ‑ often mutated and redistributed, it is true, but genes nevertheless; and it is difficult, therefore, to escape the conclusion that the design of the organism is merely to provide for gene multiplication and survival..." Carl Sagan, "Radiation and the Origin of the Gene," Evolution, January, 1957.

People once believed that the universe was created for Mankind and all other life was placed here for our use. This was gradually replaced by the harsher belief that our species competed with other species, and that Human Nature was designed to do what was good for the species. Anyone who acted selfishly was aberrant, and would be punished in a later life. Darwin believed that individuals competed with each other, and the victors of individual conflict shaped human nature. But now, the level at which competition occurs has descended one more level: sociobiologists argue that gene alleles compete with each other for positions on chromosomes (W. D. Hamilton, 1964a,b; G. C. Williams, 1964; E.O. Wilson, 1975; R. Dawkins, 1976).

If the combatants are the genes, then what are we individuals? We are the "lumbering machines" carrying the genes that assembled us for the genetic competition (Dawkins, 1976). An individual is like a puppet, whose behavior is directed by strings that are pulled, ultimately, by tiny genes (please excuse the poetic license and anthropomorphism of this phrasing). The demotions our egos suffered during the past couple centuries continues into the 21^st, as people must now deal with the thought that we are created by our genes for gene battles, and the genes do not care about the individual's welfare.

If the genes are this important then we should know their story, from the beginnings of life to the present. I shall present a recapitulation of the evolution of life on earth, with a proper emphasis on the role of genes. Some of these descriptions are speculative, yet illustrate ways that I believe the subject should be approached. The essence of every speculation is, of course, mechanistic reductionism!

A Brief History of Life

When earthly life started, 3.5 billion years ago, tiny replicating molecules resembling DNA (or maybe RNA) must have competed with each other for incorporating their molecular building blocks into copies of the replicating molecules. In time those molecules that accidentally created a protective "coating" survived longer. This crucial event might have been hastened by the existence of water droplets that would naturally form surface layers of like‑charged molecules with hygrophobic ends (Donaldson et al, 2004). A droplet with such a covering is a rudimentary cell, as the cell "wall" may have protective properties.

Approximately 2 billion years ago, a well‑functioning one‑celled form appeared which housed cell‑creating DNA floating inside (prokaryote). Later, a variant of the prokaryotic one‑celled life form had the several DNA molecules confined to a cell nucleus (eukaryote). This represented one more structural level of protection of the DNA. Whereas it must have helped the DNA survive it also required that a solution be found for the slightly more complicated replication process.

A trend is evident, and it has continued throughout the long story of life on Earth. To compete better, DNA molecules have had to wrap themselves in an ever‑more complex structure, devise ever‑more complex methods for replication, and retain control of their protective structures for competition with other life forms.

Multi‑celled creatures did not appear until about 1 billion years ago. Each cell contained a nucleus with an identical set of genes inside. It is possible that initially all cells in a multi‑celled life form were identical. A grouping of cells has a smaller "surface area per mass" exposed to the watery environment than one‑celled forms, and this added protection may have rewarded the forms that tended to stick together.

Specialization of some cells in a many‑celled creature may have been the next step in the evolution of life. With a reliable association of cells having the same DNA, there existed a reward for any gene mutations that helped the outermost layer of cells to specialize in protective matters. Since all cells had the same nucleus, it could still be argued that the sacrifice of a few cells to become mere "protective skin" while forsaking reproduction themselves nevertheless enhanced the reproductive prospects of the identical genes inside the cells that were being protected. This concept is a kernel for "inclusive fitness," described below.

In this way, skin might have been the first "organ" to evolve. Once a method had evolved for guiding a cell's properties to be responsive to its surroundings, the path lay open for the evolution of any number of organs. Organisms competed with differently constructed organisms in seeking food - and perhaps in consuming each other. Although the organisms competed with each other for food, and perhaps attempted to destroy or devour each other, since the fate of this competition was determined by the properties produced by the genes within, it is more insightful to view the competition as occurring between the various gene groups than between individuals.

Gene Competition Within and Between Species

Specifically, only the genes that differed were in competition. Identical genes in competing organisms might appear to be in competition, but only because they were part of an organism that had different genes. Since the fate of identical genes in different organisms was not in question, they were not competing with each other. If organisms had chromosomes that differed at only one gene location, and only two gene forms (alleles) existed at this location throughout a population of organisms, then it would be the two genes (gene alleles) that were in "competition."

The casual observer who thought that two kinds of organisms existed that were competing with each other (for food, let's say) would be misunderstanding the situation. A deeper understanding shows that two genes were competing with each other.

The word "competing" is a human‑invented concept. It is important to remember that the entire process of genes competing, with one gene mutation slowly yielding to another, is purely mechanistic. Obviously, the genes are unaware that they are "competing." Only a human observer would remark "these two genes are in competition."

Individuals within a species may "compete" with each other, and so may individuals belonging to different species. The underlying dynamic is the same: every gene acts as if it wants to proliferate and last forever. Again, a gene does not "want" to proliferate. Rather, those that in fact proliferate are the ones that express themselves as individual characteristics that the human mind will identify as "wanting" to proliferate. Thanks to our primitive right brain (that evolved for dealing with social settings) it is helpful to use social metaphors for explaining mechanical processes.

It is theoretically possible that two species could exist in competition with each other while having no genes in dispute within each species. In other words, all individuals of one species would be genetically identical, and the same for the other species. Yet, since we are supposing that they are competing for the same resources in their environment, for example, the two species are in competition with each other. We should further specify that the two species hold some of the same genes (this is very likely, since they have common ancestors). For this hypothetical situation, two large chunks of genes are in competition with each other and the "winner will take all" after one species is exterminated (which is common for species that occupy identical niches).

This is one extreme of a continuum of situations. At the other end is a situation in which there is no between‑species competition, but there is competition between genes within the single species. In other words, some gene loci on the chromosomes have two or more alleles, and these alleles are in competition with each other. The simplest case would be one gene locus with two alleles, and the two alleles are competing with each other for exclusive presence at one locus on the chromosome.

This simple situation is likely to end with a complete win by one of the alleles. However, there are special cases where there will be a steady‑state percentage representation of both gene alleles (i.e., an evolutionarily stable strategy, or ESS, as described originally by J. M. Smith and later by Dawkins, 1976).

In the real world there will be some within‑species competition of counterpart gene alleles and some between‑species competition between all the genes that are different between the two species. For the between‑species competition, large chunks of genes are involved; but only some of these will be under the influence of selection pressures.

Thus, for the typical situation, some gene alleles will be changing their representation frequency within the species gene pool due to "other species" selection forces, while other gene alleles will be changing their representation frequency within the species gene pool due to "within species" selection forces.

Appendix B presents examples of the ruthless nature of gene competition using human virus examples.

Inclusive Fitness

The individual organisms called humans should be forgiven for seeing everything in terms of what they're good for to the individual organism. Dawkins (1982) describes an aberrant period in biology when the paradigm shifted from a "selfish organism" perspective (starting with Darwin) to "adaptation for the benefit of the species" paradigm (during the mid‑20th Century). Given that many (unsophisticated) people believe that people do things that benefit the species, the level at which people perceive evolutionary competition to occur should shift in the other direction, leading eventually to the "selfish gene" paradigm.

In other words, if we seek insight into how evolution works we should not ask "what good are genes to individuals?" but "what good are individuals to genes?"

An example will serve to show how ridiculous an imperfect paradigm can be. A graduate student, who must still retain remnants of the belief that adaptation is for the good of the individual, studied the Australian redback spider. She describes how the male positions himself during copulation so that the female can eat his body during a leisurely insemination process, thus satisfying her into not seeking another male. This assures that the sacrificing male's sperm will not be competing with the sperm of another male. To sum up the article, the magazine author presents the following astounding quote attributed to the student: "Sexual cannibalism has always been thought of as a conflict between males and females, in which males are just being overpowered. It's important to realize that it can be advantageous for the male."

Only someone handicapped by the "good of the organism" paradigm could say such a ridiculous thing! The benefactor, clearly, is the gene that causes the male to behave in this bizarre manner, not the individual male. He is a victim, more than the female. What's missing in this summarizing statement is an acknowledgement that genes produce behaviors which can manipulate and victimize individuals with behaviors that benefit only the genes that create the behavior?

Inclusive fitness states that genes tend to produce individual behavior which maximizes the presence of the behavior‑producing gene in succeeding generations (Hamilton, 1964a,b). Since biological relatives are likely to be carriers of the same genes as the behaving individual, the fate of the genes in relatives matters as much as the genes in self. For social animals that live among relatives the merit of an action must take into account the consequences upon those "genetically related" carriers of the genes.

The mathematical treatment of inclusive fitness is straightforwardly presented in many places. I shall simply give a feeling for it by repeating a traditional example. A gene will reward a self‑sacrificial act if it saves at least two cousins, or at least four second cousins, etc., as in each case the same number of identical genes is preserved (on average).

Inclusive fitness provides an explanation for "altruism" by the argument that an altruistic act promotes the proliferation of genes generating the act. Sometimes these altruistic acts are at the expense of the individual; but that's OK from a gene's perspective, for the individual is merely a tool created by the genes for gene proliferation!

The inclusive fitness paradigm is useful in many other situations, some of which will be dealt with in the following chapters.

─────────────────────────────────

CHAPTER 4

─────────────────────────────────

GENETICS TUTORIAL ‑ PART II

"Thus the earliest vertebrates, like the earliest amphibia, the earliest mammals, and the earliest primates, were small predators. Over and over again in evolution, the originators of new modes of life were small predators, and the key innovations at each stage conferred a selective advantage in predation." John Morgan Allman, Evolving Brains, 1999, p. 73.

In this chapter I continue describing some basic principles of evolution that apply to all living things. It will serve as a foundation for the more speculative and interesting evolutionary results found in human nature.

Pre‑Adaptation

Some genes are "pre‑adapted" for new environments. A gene is pre‑adapted if there was a negligible reward for its presence in the genome at the time some new environmental challenge appears for the first time, and for which the gene then confers a significant genetic benefit.

Modern society provides many examples. Computers didn't exist before the mid-20^th Century, yet we find that many individuals are naturally talented for computer programming, design, networks, and other aspects of computer use. These people have genes that are pre‑adapted for the computer environment.

Pre‑adaptations are always present, as the following thought experiment illustrates. Imagine any task, and a procedure for reliably measuring performance of that task. The task could be jumping as high as possible, or remembering a sequence of numbers ‑ any task will do provided performance can be measured objectively, producing a continuous range of scores (a binary result, such as pass/fail, does not meet this "continuous range of scores" criterion). After two people have performed the task, there will invariably be a "better" and "worse" performance. After many people have performed the task, the test scores may form something resembling the Gaussian, or "bell curve" distribution, with many scoring near a middle region, and fewer scoring really well and poorly. The top scorers can be described as "pre‑adapted" for the task (provided the task is novel or evolutionarily "new").

In real‑world situations, whatever the change in environment, whatever the change in job opportunities, whatever new sporting games are invented, there will always be new consistent winners and losers. Winners in the new task might have been mediocre performers in the old ones (and old winners may become the new losers).

"We are what we're good at," and the forces of selection measure us by what we're good at in the context of our times. Whereas the computer whiz is pre‑adapted to this era, so might a “nobody” of today be pre‑adapted to some future era. We should be careful in judging others, for they might have shined outstandingly in past settings, or be examples of a type that will shine in future ones. Faceless nobodies of times past might have rivaled the best of today's stars, if only given the chance by a change of environment. Chance is everything!

Pre‑Maladaptation

But if the winners are pre‑adapted, the losers are "pre‑maladapted." It may seem "unfair" to a civilized mentality to believe that "pre‑ordained" winners and losers will exist when new opportunities appear, but every species has been molded by this unfair rewarding of individuals through abrupt environmental change. We may not like it, but this is the way things work.

Anyone feeling gratitude for evolutionary accomplishments should also feel thankful for the diversity of individual performance. Thanks to "inequality" evolution proceeds! But while we celebrate inequality, and rewards for the pre‑adapted, let us also have compassion for the pre‑maladapted, the world's ill‑fated losers, for they cannot be responsible for the changes that doom them.

Over and over, in this book, we shall encounter repugnant examples in nature. Our lesson is to accept that Nature doesn’t care about individuals, only the genes! And the genes have no qualms about wasting individuals for their sake. Fish lay thousands and millions of eggs, so that on average one or two will survive. Several insect species produce male brains that are programmed to allow the female to make a nutritious meal of him after copulation ‑ to postpone her mating with a competitor or for nourishing his offspring! The historical record shows that humans will send legions of young men to battle, like fodder, who in the prime of their life become maimed or killed. The victors in battle rape the vanquished men's women, then march home as heroes, with greater rights for domestic breeding. In all these settings, the individual is "sacrificed," for he is engaged in risky behaviors with benefits that accrue reliably to only the genes.

Humans who ponder the consequences of what I'm calling a pre‑maladaptation have grounds for bemoaning their bad luck. I like the thought that each person "has their time," a time when they would have some maximum of pre‑adaptation, and since people are born into times "at random," they most often are "out of their preferred time." Imagine how frustrating it would have been for Beethoven to have been born before pianos existed, and before orchestras. Or for Einstein to have lived before the preliminaries of 19^th Century physical theory had been set. Delay Darwin's birth a century; would he have become the giant we know today? Bring to the 21^st Century such notables as H. G. Wells, Lucretius, Democritus, Shakespeare, Homer, and others; what would become of them? We cannot know how fortuitously attuned to their age these giants were, or what nobodies they might have been had the "roll of their genes" occurred at some other time.

Species Shaping Forces

Pre‑adaptation is a useful concept calling attention to the fact that whatever an organism's make‑up it will have some kind of “match” to every hypothetical new environment, and the match of some individuals will be adaptive. It might be adaptive whether or not the environment in question has ever existed before, and whether or not any of the organism's ancestors have been exposed to that environment. In such cases, we should not say that the organism has become adapted to the environment in question, just because it fares better than some of its cohorts. Rather, it is adapted due to a pre‑adaptation.

Most organisms will be pre‑maladapted to the new environment. Thus, most individuals will fall behind, watching a minority of pre‑adapted individuals leap forward. The greater the number of changes to the environment, the greater will be the disparity in relative rewards between the pre‑adapted and pre‑maladapted. A species should evolve "faster" at such times.

When I refer to changes in the "environment" I mean to include not only the climate for a region, and the disappearance of a food staple (plant or animal), or appearance of new foods, but also the appearance of a new predator, the invasion of a new parasite, or the adoption of a new element of "culture" (in the case of humans, and perhaps chimpanzees).

There is a special case, unique to humans, in which culture has created an entirely new environmental condition: the removal of most of the natural threats to survival.

An advanced civilization shields people from diseases, animal predators, and, in some cases, the need to work. It even shields people from each other to a great extent, by reducing the frequency of outbreaks of "tribal warfare." In this environment genes that in harsher, unforgiving environments would be maladaptive would now be neutral. Only the most severe genetic defect will be eliminated from a human genome shielded this way.

Under these conditions we might want to think in terms of "potential pre‑adaptation" and "potential pre-maladaptation." Today's genome is accumulating a large reservoir of potential pre‑maladapted genes, carried unknowingly by individuals who may be reproductively successful only because they are not subjected to selective forces.

At the risk of getting ahead of my story, I believe that such genes will become apparent only after natural forces of evolution are restored, and put "the squeeze" on our burgeoning global population. Winners and losers in this new environment will not be close‑call winners and losers, they'll be clear‑cut winners and losers. The disparity between those now destined to win and those destined to lose is greater than ever, and growing faster than ever. The complexion of Humanity could change dramatically apre le deluge.

To understand a species we must consider the selective forces that have "shaped" it. In other words, we must learn what kills individuals before they reach reproductive age, what factors determine which individuals reproduce after reaching maturity, what foods are eaten, and how precarious is the supply.

For example, if our ancestors 5 million years ago were eaten by lions the survivors would have been good at avoiding lions. This might have rewarded the evolution of bipedality, which would have enabled standing tall and running fast. It might also have rewarded the capacity for social cooperative strategies, a precursor to intelligence.

Another theory speculates that our ancestors had to learn how to find and store root plants that would have grown on the grasslands (Wrangham and Peterson, 1996). This would have rewarded the creation of digging tools, and the ability to carry extra roots to a storage place at a home base, which in turn would have rewarded bipedalism and a self‑control that provisioning requires.

Whichever environment accompanied the branching of bipedal chimpanzees from their jungle‑dwelling forebears 5 million years ago, we can be sure that the forces of selection rewarded individuals carrying genes for dealing with whatever were the causes of mortality in their new environment, whether they were escaping from lions or digging and storing roots.

Perhaps 500,000 years ago some humans migrated to the edge of constantly‑moving glaciers. Mortality in this new setting would have been climate‑related, such as cold and hunger. We may presume that genes for planning and foresight were rewarded. To the extent that large animals were hunted, and meat became an essential food source, genes for a strategic type of cooperative hunting would also have been rewarded.

After the last glacial cold period, that peaked 19,000 years ago, humans had to adapt to an ever‑warming climate. For some, this meant adopting an agricultural lifestyle. Those who were pre‑adapted for farming would have prospered, provided they could also band together for mutual protection from raiders. Others remained nomadic, and targeted the new farmers. Thus, the main killer of Man became other men (it probably has been "other men" for the past 100,000 years, at least). As farming achieved unprecedented success, urban living became possible, sometime after 3000 BC. This created opportunities for microbes, which competed with Man as the main killer of men. Our ancestors are the ones with immune systems that afforded protection against "urban" diseases.

In every step of this evolution toward modern Man, the change in what killed people was a principal selective "force."

H. G. Wells made the point, 100 years ago, that long‑lived life forms cannot adapt to fast changes of conditions, unlike short‑lived forms, that can adapt. This leads more often to the demise and replacement of long‑lived large creatures by other large creatures, both of whom are competing with small, short‑lived creatures. He warns that humans, with a long life span, are vulnerable on this account.

The looming threat to Humanity posed by viruses and bacteria may become a classic example of this evolutionary dynamic. How ironic if our demise, or loss of greatness, which is most often portrayed in terms of dramatic events, such as global thermonuclear war, instead is dealt by tiny viruses!

If in fact viruses produce large‑scale human die‑offs during the 21^st century (Garrett, 1995), the survivors will be those with pre‑adapted immune systems; not the physically strongest or most intelligent. This possibility illustrates in dramatic fashion the principle that "a species is shaped by what kills its members."

How Many Genes Can Compete?

Human tribes are supposed to have numbered 50 to 100 individuals throughout much of our prehistory. The number of adults in such a tribe would have been about half this number, half of whom would have been adult males (12 to 25 in number). It is tempting to think that fewer than this number of genes can be evolving in the tribal genome. But such an assumption is erroneous, as I will illustrate.

When a man goes into the world "to be measured," it is his phenotype that is being measured. And his phenotype could be the result of many genes (interacting with each other to produce a unique phenotype). Consider the extreme case where each of the men in a tribe differs from "an average" by just one allele. Consider 4‑year intervals, during which each woman of child‑bearing age bears one baby. During each 4‑year interval, if only one man prospers and is accorded sole breeding status, then every 4 years one allele can be declared a winner over it's competitor(s). In a lifetime, 10 alleles can be declared winners (where we imagine the environment places great importance upon different aspects of phenotype each 4‑year period). After 80 years, 20 alleles could be declared winners, etc.

Even though this is a thought experiment, it proves that there is no fundamental, mathematical reason forbidding the number of gene sites for allelic competition to exceed the number of adult males in a self‑sufficient tribe, or the total number of tribe members. (A "multiple regression" statistical argument is also possible, and more persuasive for me, but I shall spare my readers of this daunting argument.)

Every individual is a carrier for many genes that are competing with allele counterparts. The number could be 50, or 500; and it doesn't matter if the individual is a member of a tribe with only 50 or 100 members.

Migration, New Gene Competition, and Pace of Evolution

The number of gene loci hosting allelic competitions has undoubtedly increased in number since the advent of urbanization, and the more recent globalization of our species. A tribe of Africans may be homozygous for genes influencing skin color, but if they were captured and brought to America as slaves their ancestors would find that those same genes influencing skin color had become a factor in determining individual welfare in the non‑African society. The same argument would apply to many genes.

The inescapable conclusion is that the more diverse a population becomes, due to migration, the more genes there are in competition with each other. Does this mean human evolution is progressing faster today, or slower? If a person's "measure" is affected by more genes, it must take longer for all genes to have their measure taken. Stated another way, when more genes enter the fray of competition, those already in competition may feel a decrease of selective pressure influencing their fate. Aspects of a person which were important in the tribal setting suddenly recede in importance, as other genes, which had been firmly established many generations earlier, resume their competition with alleles they had never before encountered, or had encountered long ago and had triumphed over. The coming together of ethnicities must introduce major changes to the set of genes that are subject to evolutionary forces, in terms both of which genes are in competition and the relative strength of selective forces upon specific genes. These considerations suggest that the pace of evolution has slowed in modern times.

Another slowing influence is the declining rate of infant and childhood mortality. Unless something important has been overlooked, these arguments suggest that the pace of evolution has slowed in modern times (Kondrashov, 1988).

Conservation of Selective Pressures: Pleiotropy and Polygenes

When selective forces suddenly reward a new capability the species undergoes a quick disintegration in other, more recently‑acquired capabilities. This is due to the random, unintended deleterious effects that any mutation produces, which places a brake on the speed with which new capabilities can be acquired.

To understand this, recall that a gene has many effects, referred to as pleiotropy. This is most dramatically illustrated when a mutation occurs that has no redeeming consequences. For example, one mutation causes its carrier to have 6 fingers, short stature and heart murmurs (Ellis‑van Creveld syndrome). These phenotypic effects are seemingly unrelated, yet they are caused by just one allele. Mutations that are adaptive, judged by the fact that they have been selected during the course of evolution, will also have many effects, with perhaps just one of them being adaptive to a far greater extent than the numerous, small negative effects. Thus, whenever a mutation occurs and confers an increment of adaptive advantage, its future in the gene pool will depend not only on how well it performs its adaptive task, but also upon how many unintended, deleterious effects come with it.

Assuming for the moment that there are only 40,000 genes in the Human genome, since there are more than 40,000 properties defining a human, each gene must have more than one beneficial effect. This implies that after a gene is "in place" it can be modified over time to produce more desired effects. An "old gene" may thus have several beneficial effects, in addition to a few small negative ones. The selection of a modified, dual‑purpose (or multi‑purpose) gene must occur with "painful slowness" since the original function of the gene should not be disturbed appreciably, and since every mutation is likely to produce other unwanted effects. To get things "just right" must require many generations and many small compromises.

Whenever a new selective force becomes important, the other selective forces must lose importance, else the population will drop to dangerous levels. This "partitioning" of selective pressure leads to a more conservative behavior of our genome, causing already established gene alleles to remain longer than otherwise.

By the same reasoning, a recently‑established gene allele is more likely to be disrupted with deleterious effects than a long‑established gene allele. This "genetic entrenchment" is due in part because of the rewards of redundancy for genes that are important enough to respond to selective forces for long periods of time. A task that must be done by a gene will be less vulnerable to mutation to that gene if it has been exposed to mutations and selection for a long time. In addition, genes that exist for a long time may become "depended upon" by other genes that are selected after the first gene and which in some way depend upon the presence of the first gene for its new effect to be expressed properly. When two or more genes must be present to produce a specific phenotypic trait that has adaptive value, those two or more genes are referred to as a "polygene" group. Genes that are members of a polygene are more difficult to get rid of, provided they have not become harmful. New genes have not had this opportunity to achieve robustness, or become entrenched, and they are thus more likely to be lost by random mutations because they are likely to have small phenotypic consequences. The concept of "genetic entrenchment," and a culturgen counterpart to this concept, is treated at greater length in Chapter 16.

Brain Genes

For humans it has been estimated that at least 20% of the genome influences the brain. This is not to say that 20% of human genes are present exclusively for brain wiring, since many genes will exist mainly for other purposes which have "acquired" brain wiring roles. If one of these genes mutates it is more likely to affect its new brain task than the older, original task. Undoubtedly some genes are mostly brain‑related, and probably some genes are exclusively brain‑related. Whether a gene is partly, mostly, or exclusively brain‑related, if it recently acquired this role it is likely to be more vulnerable to random mutation than the other parts of the genome, or to older genes that mostly affect anatomy or physiology.

Parts of the modern human brain evolved during the past 100,000 to 200,000 years, and some people speculate that for the past 40,000 years little has changed. I will argue later that brain genes continue to evolve in response to changing social conditions, which add in subtle ways to the repertoire of human behaviors. For now, I merely claim that behaviors which are uniquely human, and which are recently evolved, are most vulnerable to disruption by the appearance of new selective forces.

If a new adaptation has been selected for strongly, it might acquire robustness even in a relatively short time. Human language, which may have appeared 200,000 years ago, is a candidate example. Language played such a crucial role during its evolution that the genes that code for it are probably already robust.

The capacities for reading and writing have a briefer evolutionary history, and the genes that code for these abilities are more vulnerable. Until recently, few people engaged in reading and writing. These genes provided a niche to only a small fraction of the population during the past 4000 years. It is therefore not surprising that dyslexia affects several percent of the population, whereas verbal language impairment is virtually unknown.

Unintended Deleterious Effects

I suffer from occasional 20‑minute blind spells, called "scintillating scotoma." It is an impairment produced by a gene that in women produce migraine headaches. As I type with difficulty through a flashing zig‑zag blind‑spell pattern, it occurs to me that I am paying a penalty for some genetic mutation that is doing good somewhere else. Every mutation does many small bad things for every big good one, and the sum of bad ones found in most people must be worth their penalty; otherwise the gene allele would not have evolved.

In the case of my blind‑spells a dilated blood vessel is putting pressure on a nerve fiber carrying signals from my eyes to my brain's occipital lobe. What if the dilation occurred elsewhere within my brain? I might not know that it was occurring since I could not see it. But it might nevertheless have subtle effects upon mood or thought. There must be people, probably many people, who do indeed experience mild mental afflictions, lasting 20 minutes for example, which are counterparts to my scintillating scotoma. We should be prepared, then, for the possibility that a certain amount of irrational human behavior is caused by genes that are conferring a greater adaptation benefit in some other behavioral realm, with the unintended side effect that behavior is mildly irrational in a different realm.

I frequently think about the penalties that are paid when evolutionary pressures for one trait rise above the others. Sure, you can quickly evolve skin color in response to latitude migrations, but you'll pay with other unintended defects that accumulate, until the new skin has been achieved and a better balance of evolutionary forces has been established.

Only 12,000 years ago, just after the climate warmed but before the glaciers had melted enough to raise the world's sea level, people in Siberia migrated across Beringia to the new world. As they moved south, generation after generation they would have lost their need for light skin. Central American Indians are dark‑skinned, and this must have been achieved in less than 10,000 years. But those who continued their migration southward, past the equator, they would have needed to re‑achieve light skin. Perhaps at each migration juncture those who were best adapted to the latitude stayed behind and the others continued the migration. This could have minimized the risks of unintended deleterious mutations, but it is more likely that the southward migration was so hurried that skin color played no role.

Such fast adaptations must have produced defects in other aspects of the American Indian. Perhaps they lost the ability to metabolize alcohol; we shall probably never know what compromises the genes had to make to adapt quickly to the need for a different skin color.

Cancer may afflict humans more than most other species because we have recently undergone a rapid evolution under strong selective forces that rewarded brain re‑wiring (to accommodate behavioral adaptations) and immune system enhancements (to fight pathogens seizing the opportunities offered them by the newly evolved super‑tribe human lifestyle). To achieve these new traits, genes must have been selected that would normally not be acceptable because of their unintended deleterious effects, and a defense against cancer may have been one such compromised ability.

The Dangers of Fast Evolution

Species evolve at different rates. Even a given species may remain genetically static many generations, then respond to an abrupt change in climate by evolving fast. Rates of change must vary by orders of magnitude, with long eras of equilibrium punctuated by short periods of disruptive change. Mammals lived throughout most of the dinosaur era, and flourished only after the meteorite impact of 65 million years ago (which killed the dinosaurs because of a brief, disruptive climate change lasting several years).

The equilibrium periods are available for "clean up" of unintended deleterious effects created during the fast evolving times.

The great diversity of human anatomy, relative to other animals, testifies to the great potential for fast human evolution. Strong selective forces must have superceded such things as head shape, for example.

When a species is suddenly subjected to a strong selective pressure, a few gene sites will suddenly grow in importance. More than two alleles may exist at each "hot" site (if only one allele exists, it won't be a site for selective pressure). Other sites, being relegated to lesser importance, are likely to accumulate mildly deleterious mutations with less consequence than before the fast evolution (to use a metaphor, it's as if no one is "minding the store" when a new one appears). Humans, who have been evolving fast for the past 7 million years (since separating from the chimp lineage) must have many multi‑allelic gene sites. The more alleles that are in competition, the greater the fraction of maladaptive offspring. Thus, the faster evolution occurs in response to some new selective pressure, the greater the likelihood of a low offspring survival rate in order to prevent a proliferation of the unfit.

Is it not ironic that today, after coming out of a phase of extremely fast evolution in several traits, humans have just achieved what must be the highest offspring survival rate ever? Does this not mean that humans also must be exhibiting the greatest rate of survival of maladaptive individuals? How long can this last? This topic will be returned to in Chapters 6 and 8.

Lag and Regression

An abrupt environmental change, such as those at the onset of an interglacial (occurring every 120,000 years, typically), must set evolution in motion in new directions. Until a new "optimum" has evolved, producing stasis (and genetic consolidation), there will be "lag." Some things are easier to evolve than others, and they will lag less. Skin color may be one example.

Because adaptation takes time, there could be a lag in many traits after an environmental change. Present aspects of human nature should "make sense" only in the Pleistocene context, not necessarily in that of the Holocene (the past 12,000 years). For this purpose it has been useful to create the term "environment of evolutionary adaptation" (EEA), also referred to as the Ancestral Environment (AE). Common behaviors that were adaptive 20,000 years ago need not be "adaptive" today (Symons, 1979).

The Yanomamo Indians of South America appear to be more "primitive" than their Asian stock who began migrating to the New World ~12,000 years ago. How can this happen? Could the forces of evolution actually cause a population to regress? Yes! And maybe this happened with the Yanomamo. Their regression is only in relation to what was adaptive in their former setting. By definition, they must be better adapted to the Venezuelan jungle than were the original Siberian stock, or even the partially modified Central American Indian stock.

The longer the race, the greater the disparity between the contestants – especially between winners and losers. This is certainly true for a foot race, but is it true in evolution? Consider that our ancestry traces back to a chimpanzee‑like animal 7 million years ago, or 2 billion years ago to a one‑celled life form, and 3 or 4 billion years ago to strands of DNA. Things like those early DNA strands may exist today, as do many one‑celled life forms that may resemble those in our ancestry. So "yes," the longer the race, the greater the spread between the evolutionary contestants (note that all extant living forms are "winners").

In human affairs there is a discernible spreading in the quality of life of winners and losers. The most prosperous people of today have a higher standard of living than the most prosperous of yesterday, yet there are people living today who are no better off than the worst off yesterday. Can there be stability in a world where the rich get richer, and the poor stay poor? This is a topic for Chapters 11, 14 and 16.

Evolutionary Reversal

Random mutations rarely produce benefits to the individual organism (i.e., for the ability of the organism to stay alive, out‑compete its contemporaries and to out-reproduce them). A mutation that alters a gene is likely to have effects on many phenotypic traits (pleiotropy), and usually all or most traits suffer from random mutations. For a mutation to succeed, it must confer some advantage that outweighs damage done to many other traits. "Forward" evolutionary change is thus difficult.

After a genetic mutation spreads throughout a gene pool, it becomes part of a genetic setting that new mutations must deal with. If a new mutation relies upon the presence of the first one, and if this second mutation also spreads throughout the gene pool, then the first gene has a more secure future. This occurs because any challenge to the first gene must confer an advantage that outweighs the contributions of two genes ‑ the first one and the other gene that relies upon the first one for it's proper expression. The longer a gene stays within a genome the greater is the chance that other genes will become dependent on it and therefore provide it with additional security. When this happens, the gene has become "entrenched."

Consider the situation of environmental change that reverses itself at some later time. The first change may lead to the appearance and widespread acceptance into the genome of a mutation. Let us assume that this new gene, which has almost completely displaced an older one, confers an adaptive advantage in the new climate. Suppose, now, that before this new allele has time to become entrenched, the climate changes back to the original state. The few individuals who carry copies of the original gene allele will become a source for the quick re‑emergence of the original allele. Evolution can be said to have "reversed" itself.

If the second climate change occurred much later, however, this evolutionary reversal might not be feasible. First, the original allele may have disappeared, and second, other genes may have become dependent upon the presence of the new allele, making it more difficult to dislodge from its entrenched location. In theory, both difficulties for an evolutionary reversal can be overcome, but they may constitute an insurmountable obstacle to the reversal.

Laboratory evidence exists for "reverse evolution" (Teotonio and Rose, 2000). Fruit flies from a standard stock were selected for various experiments over the course of 20 years (200 generations) and were subjected to new environments to produce variant strains. When fruit flies from these new strains were subjected to the original environment, in every case reverse evolution was observed. In two cases, the reversal was almost complete after only 10 generations; others required 50 generations. In some cases the amount of reverse evolution was small.

At every instant of a species evolutionary history, the most vulnerable genes are the most recently‑acquired ones. This concept will be returned to in later chapters.

Culture can be thought of as a collection of "culturgens" or "memes" ‑ similar to a genome being comprised of a collection of genes (Lumsden and Wilson, 1981). Although some similarities exist between genetic and cultural evolution, the differences are striking. This topic will also be dealt with in a future chapter (Chapter 16), as a unifying theory for understanding the rise and fall of civilizations.

Mutational Load

Although the idea of "mutational load" was described by Kondrashov (1988), we owe H. G. Wells it's first brief expression (ironically, in the same journal, almost 100 years earlier). In 1895 Wells wrote: "Has anything arisen to show ... that where the life and breeding of every individual of a species is about equally secure, a degenerative process must not inevitably supervene?" (Wells, 1895).

Primitive people today produce about 7 offspring per woman. Allowing for slightly shorter life spans in past times, about 6 offspring per woman was normal. On average, only 2 survived to adulthood. Is it possible that some of the 4 who died were genetically inferior? Yes, of course.

Approximately half of all conceptions fail to produce a live birth. It is speculated that the half that die are genetically defective due to some incompatibility between the paternal and maternal alleles. It is a small step to suggest that there will be a residue of live births that are also destined to fail to survive childhood due to genetic defects. If this is true, then what would be the genetic consequences of intervening medically to sustain all live births through childhood and into adulthood?

If some of the 2/3 of live births that formerly died were due to genetic defects (a fraction derived from the ratio of childhood mortality rates in primitive and modern societies), and if all live births now live a full and reproductive life, then surely the genetic defects which they carry will be contributed to the gene pool in larger numbers than would have occurred in the ancestral environment (AE). Our gene pool must inevitably accumulate these defective genes at a higher rate than in the past. This phenomenon is called "genetic load" (Kondrashov, 1988).

It may be impossible for a species to average only one offspring per adult for a long time. With no excess of births, the downward pulling force of “genetic load” would degrade the gene pool of the species. Therefore, the survival ratio must be kept well below one if humanity is to maintain a healthy genetic future! We who survive without serious genetic defects should be grateful to those less fortunate, whose deaths in the past made us possible.

I feel sorry for the bent masses of future people, for they will suffer from cruel disabilities that were traditionally weeded out by the neglect of less benign times in the AE. Humanity reaps what it sows, and it is sowing the wrong genes ever more often and preserving defective offspring with an excess of unthinking compassion.

Compassion can be a double‑edged sword. What seems laudable for one generation may in fact create unlaudable consequences for many future generations. I shall return to this moral dilemma in Chapter 11.

─────────────────────────────────

CHAPTER 5

─────────────────────────────────

GENETICS TUTORIAL ‑ PART III

Adapting to Novel Environments

I want to distinguish between "outlaw genes" and those that are innocent by virtue of a changed environment. The genes that reward eating sweets are usually mal‑adaptive in today's setting, but in the ancestral environment (AE) they were adaptive. If we moderns lived in the AE we would categorize the sweet‑tooth genes as helpful to individual welfare as well as genetic welfare. This concept can be illustrated using something that is well known in the remote sensing field called statistical retrieval theory. This is described in Appendix C; a very brief description is given here.

Figure 5.01 The filled square region contains environments, physical and social, that have been encountered in the past by our ancestors, and for which we are adapted. The open square symbols represent modern world environments which humans are experiencing for the first time, and for which we may not be pre‑adapted. This is a mere 2‑D representation of a many‑dimensioned world environment.

The basic concept is that evolution creates organisms that are relatively well-adapted to their AE, and when the environment abruptly changes to something that the species has never experienced the individuals are likely to be mal-adapted in ways that cannot be easily imagined. In theory the individuals could be better off in the new environment, but it is more likely that they will be worse off.

In the above figure, think of the region in which the solid square symbols are found as corresponding to one climate regime, such as a jungle environment, and think of the open squares outside that region as representing the environmental conditions for another climate regime, such as the glacier's edge. When our human ancestors migrated northward from Africa into Europe they were moving from one environment to another, and some of their genes had to “adapt” (be replaced). One of the genes that adapted controlled skin pigmentation. Others were nose length, eye color, hairiness, stature, etc. After the adaptations were essentially accomplished, the new set of genes achieved a better performance in the new reality space. It could be said that the new race of people were comfortably within the environmental regime indicated by the dotted circle and solid squares in the above figure.

Adapting to Changeable Environments

There is also the matter of having to adapt to a climate that has greater annual variations. At mid‑ and high‑latitudes the seasons are more pronounced than in the tropics; a tribe of people who must endure climate extremes during the course of a year will have to adapt to a wider range of conditions than a tribe that lives in the tropics. Cro-Magnon man, who evolved adaptations for the mid‑latitude climate extremes in Europe, must have made the compromises that rendered him less than perfectly adapted to hot summers and cold winters, yet able to survive in both. A region that is subject to periodic climate changes, which occur faster than the time needed for the gene pool to evolve a new adaptation, is in effect a region with a bigger reality space to which the genes must adapt.

For another example, El Nino weather patterns repeat every 4 to 7 years, creating at some mid‑latitude regions shifting amounts of rain, temperature and other seasonal properties. It is unclear how long El Nino/La Nina cycles have been occurring, but this is a convenient example for illustrating how our ancestors who had left the jungle may have had to deal with wide ranges of reality space. When the genes adapt to climates that shift back and forth on timescales that are shorter than evolution can track, the adaptation will have to be for the entire range of climates and fauna. However, if the range of settings is large, penalties will grow for life within each setting.

Tolerating Diversity as a Solution

One way the genes may have solved this problem is to "tolerate diversity." In any diverse population some individuals are likely to be pre‑adapted to never‑before encountered environments. This is a "group selection" argument. Populations that are relatively isolated compete without coming in contact by merely surviving or perishing when environmental conditions change wildly. We can speculate that those that survived will be the ones that tolerated diversity, given that some of their members were pre‑adapted for future conditions. Such populations would be especially pre‑adapted for climate changes that had never occurred in the past. The drastic climate fluctuations that occurred during the transition from Pleistocene to Holocene (18,000 to 10,000 years ago) would have been relatively unprecedented (a similar period of climate change occurred at about 120,000 years ago). Thus, the introduction to the Holocene may have favored those tribes that were inherently more tolerant of diversity.

Evolution of Behavior Repertoires

Most environmental changes are repetitive, such as the El Nino/La Nina cycles. Environments that occur at intervals of less than 10,000 years, for example, are candidates for another genetic solution, described next.

When an environment changes wildly a person may take a reading of present conditions, which could be climate, population density, food scarcity, or social setting, and then change behavior in response to the perceived change of setting. Humans have a larger repertoire of behavioral responses to situations than any other animal! Humans whose ancestors have encountered a variety of distinctly different environments may have unknowingly prepared their descendants for a faster “within a lifetime” adaptation to any of these environments compared with humans who have never encountered the same range of environments. This is asking a lot from natural selection, for we are assuming the creation of individuals who are pre‑adapted in a very sophisticated way to environmental change. These people are capable of instinctively responding to a specific environmental change by changing their behaviors in a specific manner that is adaptive. Is it asking too much to invoke the evolution of this capability?

In essence, we're asking if natural selection can evolve a human brain that has circuits that do the following: "IF (this setting) THEN (employ that behavior or lifestyle)." These circuits are analogous to the human immune system's large repertoire for doing "IF (this pathogen) THEN (employ that immune response)," as pointed out by Gazzaniga (1997). We know that the human immune system is immense, so the evolution of the capability is apparently possible. Its evolution may have been forced by the coming together of tribes to form large settlements, and eventually urban centers. Some diseases flourish when population density is high, or when the population size is large. These new diseases would reward people with more capable immune systems.

I am suggesting that humans today are prepared to read their setting and shift their behaviors, and even their group's lifestyle, in a way that is adaptive. An extreme example would be a tribe that is sedentary when the environment produces abundant supplies of food, but switches to a hunter/gatherer mode when the environment is less bountiful. When the switch occurs, requiring a new lifestyle, many things related to behavior might have to change ‑ such as marriage customs, property ownership, status hierarchies, etc. The genes would simply code for a switch‑over in many behaviors in response to a new perceived setting.

Our ancestors probably encountered many environmental changes, especially during the Holocene, presenting many opportunities for the genes to develop a reliance on requiring lifestyle mode changes based on a perception of "conditions." The adaptation to variable environments would simultaneously have rendered us physically adapted to no one environment in particular, giving us the appearance of inferiority to other animals, which are well adapted to narrower range of environments. The human brain, on the other hand, has become capable of switching between a large repertoire of behaviors, and when a mode switch is made correctly, the new lifestyle can be well adapted to the new environment. These factors are ideal for the creation of "culture" ‑ which allows for quick behavioral "adaptations" to environmental changes.

How lucky for humans if a fluctuating environment produced mental abilities for adjusting behavior that were made available to the challenges of non-environmental changes. It must be common for a mental “tool” to be created in response to one challenge and only later become useful for other tasks.

Risks of Behavior Repertoires

How unlucky for humans if this same capability for achieving adaptive changes in lifestyle by “taking readings” of one’s setting could render civilizations vulnerable to “opportunist” individuals. This speculation is dealt with in Chapter 11, 14 and 16.

The mismatch between the modern brain, evolved for an ancestral environment, and the modern world, recently shaped by Man himself, is treated (but not from a rigorous sociobiological perspective) in the book New World, New Mind: Moving Toward Conscious Evolution, by Ornstein and Ehrlich (1989).

Later chapters will come back to this point, so for now just remember that the modern world is a man‑made environment with very little of the ancestral environment to provide assurance that our living in it will appear to be adaptive, or even stable.

─────────────────────────────────

CHAPTER 6

─────────────────────────────────

EVOLUTION CONCEPTS AND HUMANS

"In a very real sense human beings are machines constructed by the nucleic acids to arrange for the efficient replication of more nucleic acids. ... We are, in a way, temporary ambulatory repositories for our nucleic acids." Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Connection, Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1973.

Having described some basic tenets of genetics in the previous two chapters, we are now ready to undertake theoretical understandings of human behavior. It is important to keep in mind throughout the rest of this book that all behavior is the outcome of a competition among gene alleles for representation at specific locations on chromosomes. Thus, the "macro‑behaviors" at the individual level, which will be the subject of the rest of this book, are the result of "micro‑motives" at the gene level.

GEP

An individual's "phenotype" is "the way it is" ‑ its anatomy, physiology and behavior. An individual's "genotype" (inherited genes) interacts with environment to produce the "phenotype." Thus, a person's phenotype is who the person has become, as opposed to who they might have become had their environment been different. This powerful concept (Symons, 1979) can be referred to by the equation: G + E = P, or GEP.

Anatomy includes, for example, stature, the height a person achieves in adulthood. In a society where food is plentiful, as for most people in the United States, stature is determined almost entirely by the genes. But in a society where food is scarce for some people and plentiful for others, stature is determined most strongly by food availability (the environment, unless the genes determine access to food).

Consider the case of Japanese stature before and after World War II. Children after the war grew taller than their parents. Between the generations the disparity in the availability of food was large, and this diet difference was large "in relation to" the genetic variation between individuals. Stature differences were determined almost entirely by environment. This example illustrates that if the variation of environment is large, environment can be the dominate cause of phenotype variation, whereas if the variation of environment is small, making the variation of genotype more important, genotype can be the dominate cause of phenotype variation.

Physiology includes, for example, immune response. The genes create an immune system that includes a repertoire of responses to specific pathogen stimulations. A virus will elicit an immune response that is appropriate if our ancestors were survivors of the same (or similarly‑shaped) virus. The repertoire is limited by ancestor experience, so an individual is likely to be vulnerable to new viruses with novel shapes.

If the environment harbors the same viruses and bacteria that our ancestors survived, and if we are considering a stable population with no immigrants from other regions, then essentially all people who get sick will recover, and it will not be apparent that genotype is affecting phenotype (vulnerability to disease). But if the population includes immigrants from distant places, where there has been a different virus exposure history, there may be dramatic differences in who recovers and who dies from local sicknesses. The immigrants will be at a disadvantage when infected by local viruses and the native population will be vulnerable to any viruses brought by the immigrants. For dramatic illustration, old world explorers came to the new world and brought diseases that killed most people in the new world (Diamond, 1996).

The "behavior" component of phenotype is the most interesting, and the most challenging to understand. The "immune system's response repertoire" is a useful starting analogy for understanding behavior (Gazzaniga, 1992; Gazzaniga, 1997; Jerne, 1967). A "stimulus" in the environment can produce a "behavioral response," as when an abrupt approach of something to the face produces an eye blink. We blink our eye because we have ancestors who survived more successfully than those who didn't have the eye blink response.

A reductionist will want to employ the "stimulus/response" (S/R) explanation for behavior as much as possible. With effort, this approach at understanding behavior is broadly successful more often than is conventionally acknowledged. Since it is the simplest possible explanation type, it should be invoked as a first hypothesis.

S/R fails to account for behaviors that are self‑initiated, i.e., motivated behaviors. For example, this morning I decided to hike in the mountains in the afternoon. Planning a day's activities, as with life goals, requires something that in humans is identified as "prefrontal" cerebral activity, and a general sub‑cortical "drive" mediated by a "reticular activating system" (as described in Chapters 7 and 8). The prefrontal cortex initiates broad goals, such as a career path, it initiates behavioral programs, such as preparing a speech, and it also initiates specific behaviors, such as talking.

I will argue that the "shape" of behavioral programs, and the "shape" of life paths, are initiated by brain circuits that we inherit. The specific behavioral programs, and specific life paths, are the product of an interaction between inherited brain circuits and the environment.

Not only is an individual's environment a changing thing (career opportunities, available books, current beliefs, etc), but the human environment can change dramatically from one generation to the next, and especially from one millennium to another. It is very likely that everyone was capable at birth of adapting to a hunter‑gatherer lifestyle, as was common in the AE (ancestral environment).

A human trait that seems to be common, such as "greed," may be expressed in only specific environments. A person born into a tribal hunter‑gatherer setting, where there are few possessions (because it's hard to carry things from camp to camp) may grow up without expressing greed. The same person growing up in an agrarian society might be greedy. In other words, the person's "genotype" will interact with "environment" to produce a lesser or greater amount of "greed" (phenotype), which illustrates G + E = P.

There are limits to an environment's influence. This is easiest to illustrate using dramatically different genotypes, such as individuals of different species. We cannot make a snake behave like a cat just by cuddling it while it grows up. The snake is limited in what it can become. No amount of environmental adjustment will ever make a snake cat-like, because snake genes do not have cat behavior in their repertoire. Instead of Gsnake + Ecat = Pcat we are limited to Gsnake + Ecat = Psnake. Although snakes and cats are different species, the GEP equation still holds. Illustrating this concept using such different critters the point is easier to understand.

In any population there is a variation of genetic predispositions, or genotype. Thus, given a fixed environment, there will still be a variation in phenotypes, and in this case it will be due entirely to the variation of genotypes. Where there is wide variation in the environment, even a uniform genotype will produce a variation of phenotype, and such variation will be due entirely to environment. The normal situation, of course, is for variations in both genotype and environment, which obscures the sources of observed phenotype variation.

Every population must have unfortunate cases of bad genotype coupled with bad environment. Whereas either one might produce a bad adult, together they could produce a really bad adult. (Do you think Attilla the Hun may have been the product of bad genes and a bad environment? Was he maladapted from the perspective of his genes?)

IF/THEN Brain Circuits

It is reasonable to assume that each person inherits genes that pre‑wire their brain to recognize situations that elicit appropriate behaviors (S/R) for situations that our ancestors repeatedly encountered and survived. Like any computer program with many IF/THEN sections of code, some of the IF/THEN code will not be used during normal experience. Indeed, most IF/THEN code that exists may only be used in response to rare experiences, especially so for humans, who have an unusually large repertoire of conditional behaviors and personality development paths.

Once a specific piece of IF/THEN code comes into existence, in response to a sustained period of selective pressure in which a recognizable situation occurs and responses have reliable benefits or costs, this piece of code can remain in the genome almost forever. If it later comes into conflict with a similar situation requiring different responses, then this old code will be modified or may disappear. Since the code that elicits a behavior is almost always produced by a combination of genes, if any of these genes are modified in response to other adaptive pressures the original code could inadvertently be modified. If this occurs, the gene pool would have to be exposed to the original adaptive pressures again to restore the original, or equivalent, IF/THEN code.

If it someday becomes possible to list the IF/THEN circuits in a typical human brain, we may wonder when and where each evolved. If this were possible it would probably turn out that most code sections were created during specific eras in our ancestry, with few (or no) recurrences. Each distaste may thus owe its existence to a time when we lived among a specific inedible plant. The plant might have existed for only a few centuries, during the past 2.5 million years of the human past, yet its IF/THEN legacy stays with us.

Many of our ancestors were nomads, living in wandering tribes. Behaviors required by nomadic tribal life are part of our repertoire, and if a "modern" non‑nomad were raised in nomadic setting he might develop with the same nomadic functionality as present‑day nomads. Settled farmers, living as single family units, are also part of our ancestry, probably confined to parts of the past 10,000 years. Each of us probably has the code necessary to grow up into fully functional, single‑family farmer. Large settlement living must have been a part of some other of periods of our ancestry, confined perhaps to the past 5000 years. Each of us is presumably capable of becoming functional urban dwellers. Our large brains are "ready" for many lives that cannot all be lived!

Men Bear More of Evolution's Burden

Paternity success, as measured by offspring per male, exhibits a wider range than maternity success (offspring per female). Every tribe will have some males who don't reproduce, whereas it is rare to find women who are childless. For sexually mature women, after weaning an offspring she is likely to become pregnant soon after menstrual cycles return.

As with any species, whenever a dominant male controls access of other males to females, there will be a large disparity in breeding success among males. Harems were common in human history, and presumably pre‑history as well. Even when males do not dominate other males, females are prone to prefer to breed with specific males.

Whereas women typically give birth to about 6 or 7 babies during their lifetime, with little difference between women, men may sire from zero to hundreds of babies! Why is there such a disparity?

The human ancestral environment is presumed to have been exclusively tribal. The men of most tribes, it is thought, engaged in hunting expeditions. It was also probable that they engaged in brief raids of neighboring tribes, as well as more dangerous inter‑tribal warfare. Such male activities entail an extra burden of mortality. A man could die not only from combat, but from a mismatch of anatomy or physiology to climate. A man could also die by formulating less successful strategies in warfare, or by not adhering to a planned strategy requiring careful social coordination.

An extreme view of this situation is to state that the purpose for men is to go out and be measured. Those who come back, and especially those who come back as heroes, will have survived the measurement test, and the women shall deem them more valuable as potential fathers for their children. All women will prefer to mate with heroes than with the others. (It goes without saying that they won't mate with those who died in the process of being measured.)

Any man who refused to "play this game," to go out and be measured, could expect to be shunned by women ‑ as well as by men. Such a man may even have been banished from the tribe (leading eventually to death). It has only been during the present interglacial (during the past 12,000 years) that alternative niches proliferated for the less adventurous man. Although there might have been a small, exempt class of weapon makers, most men could not have escaped the high‑mortality life style.

Consider the first people who migrated from Africa to the mid‑latitudes. Dark‑skinned men would have fared less well, all other things being equal, than slightly lighter‑skinned men, as the dark‑skinned men would not synthesize as much Vitamin D. Vitamin D deficient men would be at higher risk of succumbing to the physical demands of traveling, hunting and warfare. On average, the lighter‑skinned men would be more likely to return from exploits. The women, who stayed home, would be less affected by lowered Vitamin D, so their mortality would have been less affected than their male counterparts. After no more than 200 to 400 generations (based on the New World immigration experience), the entire group's skin would have evolved to a new, more adaptive color. This process would have been achieved by a differential survival of men, combined with a differential breeding success of men. Thus, the burden of adapting would have been borne more heavily by men.

Takeover Infanticidal Males

Male lions kill a female's young lion cubs after they overpower the male lions in a pride. Not only does this remove lion competitors for the male's offspring, but the female soon stops nursing, becomes fertile, and is available for mating with the killer male. We humans might think that a female lion would be upset to see her cubs killed by the new males, but amazingly, the female quickly makes the best of a bad situation by becoming coquettish with the killers. By these actions, the female increases the prevalence of the very genes that thwarted her initial reproductive investment; by favoring this behavior, which humans find so repugnant, the lioness helps shape the male genotype.

Infanticide by males has been documented for species of birds, fish, insects and mammals ‑ such as rodents, carnivores and primates (Wrangham and Peterson, 1996). The following description is for primates.

"Hrdy noticed an invading male charge after a mother, attempting to snatch away her baby. For several days, the other females in the group tried to defend the mother and her baby. But the male persevered, and finally managed to deliver a slash to the infant's stomach that left the intestines exposed. Taking the wounded infant to her breast, the mother looked up at the sky, as though in despair. 'It was the only time in my professional career that I wept.' // Because females are usually outmatched in the physical war between the sexes, they are helpless to protect their offspring against an infanticidal male. // Female gorillas respond to infanticide ... they leave the father who allowed their baby to be killed and run off with the murderous male. Infanticide, along with various female defenses, has been seen in 13 primate species. (Angier, 1983.)

We humans find such behaviors repugnant, so surely men do not act this way. Alas, they do! Studies of infanticide in Canada (Daly and Wilson, 1988a) and the United States (Daly and Wilson, 1988b) reveal that step‑fathers are 75 and 100 times more likely to commit infanticide than are biological fathers.

In any species where males "take over" a female by overpowering the resident male and kill the offspring, females should evolve an aversion to males who cannot protect her and her offspring from takeover males. Thus, women should find weak and low‑status males unattractive, in relation to strong and high‑status males. This should be especially true for attractive women, who are more likely targets for takeover males. These predictions are borne out by "common knowledge."

Monogamy and Cuckolding

Monogamy, and the associated female faithfulness which monogamous husbands require, give every man a more or less equal influence on the next generation's genetic pool. This must retard the potential speed of evolutionary adaptation of that gene pool. Thus, the stronger the forces of evolution, the greater the reward for polygamy.

It would be surprising if the genes have remained blind to this. Women, for example, should sense when evolutionary forces are strong, and in response, they should seek consort with men who are "successful." If monogamy were the norm (which would have been more likely only during the past 12,000 years), then women should be expected to try to cuckold their husband (secretly mate with a man who is not the husband) in order to bear children carrying the more "adapted" man's genes. Since monogamy was probably rare before 12,000 years ago, in the human ancestral environment the need to cuckold was also probably unimportant before that time. Cuckolding, I suggest, is therefore a "recent" tool in women's behavioral repertoire.

Blood tests of Canadian and American families reveal a cuckoldry rate that ranges from 15% to 25% (see Christenfeld and Hill, 1995 for additional material). Presumably, cuckoldry rate varies with time and conditions in accordance with some optimizing algorithm created during the AE.

Knowing the optimal time for a wife to cuckold her husband would have evolved during the time that societies became monogamous. Refinements in a woman's cuckolding wisdom would have improved the most when evolutionary forces were greatest. If a gene pool underwent a period of polygamous evolution, the previously gained cuckolding wisdom would have remained "ready" but not expressed until monogamy was restored. This is similar to the way an immune system accumulates a repertoire of immune responses, each specific one of which remains "ready" for expression when exposed to a pathogen that is "recognized."

Recent studies (Hazelton, 2006) show that women have a heightened interest in cuckolding their husbands when they are most fertile. This logical female strategy is matched by an equally logical male strategy of exhibiting a higher level of mate-guarding at the same time. The real challenge for women is to recognize when it is appropriate to cuckold, and with whom. As for “when,” being in a monogamous relation is one precondition. Sensing that "times are tough" would be another (i.e., evolutionary forces are strong).

As for “with whom” a woman must be capable of measuring her husband against other men. One measure of the successful man is "fashion"; the man who is sought by other women is likely to produce boys who will grow up to also be sought by the next generation of women ‑ regardless of the intrinsic worth of the type. Another way to identify a good candidate is to determine who is dominant over whom. Men live much of their life within a male society, and the men who are most successful in male activities, such as the cooperative hunt, will be accorded privileged positions by other men. Women are sure to notice how men sort themselves while establishing the male hierarchy, and those who are esteemed by other men are good candidates for a cuckolding episode. Women who are fascinated by men’s sporting events might be “doing their homework” for optimizing their future cuckolding.

The main effect of this increased attention by women to male worth is to increase the imbalance of reproductive activity among men; fewer men will account for a greater fraction of a generation's paternity. A secondary effect of this enhanced reward for whatever the forces of evolution deem important is to reduce genetic diversity. In a one harem society all offspring will resemble the harem master. If he is vulnerable to a specific disease, most children of the next generation will be similarly vulnerable.

Thus, there are risks to tribal organizations that give excessive reproductive rewards to small numbers of men. It is in a woman's genetic interest to not succumb totally to fashion; but it is always in a man's interests to be the most successful man and to dominate male reproductive activity.

Women understand that husbands should be loyal "producers" even though they should favor other men for cuckolding. There are "husband material" men, and then there are "exciting affair" men. Women are attracted to both types, but in different ways. A faithful husband type is attractive at the time a commitment is to be made, and the exciting affair type is less attractive at this time. Some time after marriage, however, women's interest in "affair men" should increase. Thus, women regard some men as good on long timescales, serving as loyal husbands and fathers, whereas some men are good for short timescales, serving as cuckold consorts to provide offspring with genes specialized in victimizing the next generation.

Men likewise automatically categorize women as good for the long term, serving as loyal wives and mothers, while other women are good for short‑term consort. Men and women must automatically categorize each other as belonging to one or the other category.

Men and Women Shape Each Other

Men and women have made each other what they are!

Men have a greater variance in IQ, and we men also exhibit higher incidences of genetic deficiencies. For example, dyslexia (reading and writing problems) is most common among boys. This may merely be an effect of males exhibiting a greater genetic variance of recently‑evolved traits (i.e., men dominate both ends of the spectrum of most measures). Thus, there are more men geniuses, as well as more men among the learning disabled. Men are burdened by "high risk" mutation experiments that eventually benefit the larger population. Men appear to be more "expendable" than women.

To what extent are women responsible for making men genetically "fragile"? Women prefer men who "go out to be measured," and who come back with good measures. When women cuckold their husbands, they assure their male offspring a greater likelihood of being a cuckolding partner in the next generation. These women also assure that they will produce daughters who are prone to cuckolding their husbands. This occurs because the cuckolding males are likely to carry genes which predispose their girl offspring to cuckold when they are women, since they are likely to have been the result of women who cuckolded (this is a subtle argument).

Women shape men with every preference they express. If women favor men who are "travelers" (i.e., vagabonds, minstrels, pirates), then each succeeding generation of men will tend to resemble travelers.

Why would women be attracted to travelers? When diseases are a principal cause of mortality, traveling men that women encounter are the ones who have immune systems with the best immunity to diseases beyond the village. This may account for girls going crazy for pirates, traveling musicians, and other itinerate roustabouts who have no long‑term parenting value.

Birth Order

Frank Sulloway (1996) has presented an immensely well documented case for the influence of family birth order on specific personality traits. The theoretical argument for such an influence begins with the fact that in the ancestral environment children often died before reaching adulthood (approximately 2/3 of children perished). Surviving childhood requires that the child adopt strategies for maximizing parental investment. By this logic, firstborns should ingratiate themselves to their parents, and gain their favor by appearing to be good prospects for their investment. Firstborns should be obedient, conscientious, hard‑working, and they should internalize the values of their parents.

Laterborns, noticing that there already exist firstborns who have acquired parental confidence by becoming what the parents want, must create for themselves a different identity. They must distinguish themselves from their older sibling by excelling in another endeavor, for if they tried to compete in the same arena, and became equally successful at comparable age, they would be destined to always be a worse investment prospect due to their age disadvantage. All other things being equal, older children are a better investment option because they've already survived more of the childhood risks, and they are closer to childbearing age. Thus, laterborns try to excel in things untried by the firstborn, and perhaps unfamiliar to the parents. Laterborns are more open to new experiences, and are more adventurous. As stated by Sulloway (pg 98), "...the addition that each child makes to the parents' inclusive fitness will tend to be proportional to the development of skills not already represented among other family members."

Firstborn boys followed by a laterborn girl are a congenial combination, since the girl is naturally inclined to have different interests than the boy. From the parents’ perspective, both children are like first-borns and represent good investments.

Firstborn boys feel threatened by a laterborn boy. They are likely to fight, and the younger brother must become proficient with wit, words or some other clever strategy to compensate for his smaller body. The older boy will become accustomed to dominating his younger brother, whereas the younger brother will become adept in the use of social skills for minimizing the disadvantages of being dominated by the older brother. These effects appear to be maximum when the age difference is about 3 years (close enough in age to be competing for similar age‑related niches, yet different enough that the younger is weaker and can be successfully dominated). Sulloway writes (pg 79) "Like the alpha males of primate societies, firstborns covet status and power. They specialize in strategies designed to subordinate rivals."

To the extent that Sulloway's birth order correlations are correct, women should prefer men who happened to be firstborns with younger brothers. They are more likely to be "masculine" and capable of protecting their wives from "takeover" males. On the other hand, these men are less likely to tolerate cuckolding wives, rendering cuckoldry a more dangerous option for the wife of a firstborn husband.

How confusing (at a subconscious level) this birth order "environmental monkey wrench" must be to women! Men who appear to be strong and domineering may be so merely because they had a brother 3 years younger. They can probably be counted on to protect them and their children from takeover males, but they will not necessarily provide "domineering" and "high status" genes to her offspring. Do women have methods for identifying "genotype‑produced" versus "birth order‑produced" dominant men? We await further studies in this young field.

Sexually Specific Morality

Women complain that men can philander with less consequence than women who cuckold. They attribute this disparity to the fact that men can get away with dominating women due to their greater physical strength.

The real reason for this duality of morality has to do with the difference in natural consequences for out‑of‑marriage mating. A philandering husband does not necessarily diminish his "paternal investment" value for his wife's children, whereas a cuckolding wife who produces illegitimate offspring necessarily does cause her husband's "paternal investment" to be squandered.

If it Feels Good, Beware!

What is the purpose of emotions? They are meant to influence behavior!

In the particular case of humans, emotions are meant to influence behavior in situations where rational thought is also likely to subvert the genetic agenda. Some behaviors are too important to be meddled with by rationality. The Australian redback spider, in which the male is prone to allow itself to be eaten by the female during copulation, is incapable of rational thought. A simple, automatic instinct suffices to assure that his gene‑serving deed be done. But what about humans?

Humans think, and are theoretically subject to influence by rational thought. The genes, in their infinite wisdom, have created emotions to safeguard behaviors that serve their interests. Emotions are employed to protect behaviors that are threatened by rational considerations of individual welfare!

Emotions symbolize the conflict between "outlaw genes" and a thinking, rational individual. Therefore, if something has a feel-good emotional payoff, beware!

This theory implies that only intelligent creatures have emotions. It suggests that emotions were "invented" by the genes as a quick solution to a fast evolving human intellect. The genes could not know what rational threats lay ahead, in untried environments, or even newly endowed rational brains, yet they "learned" from past experience that certain actions were at risk of being overturned by individuals who cared more for individual welfare than being an obedient tool of the genes (of course the genes didn't "know" anything; it merely happened that those that safeguarded important behaviors from the influence of other gene mutations prospered.)

We will return to this subject in a later chapter.

Consciousness

It is difficult, at this point in my argument, to avoid the problem of "consciousness." It is tempting to speculate that C, as consciousness gurus refer to it, was invented by the genes to mediate conflicts between an old instinctual brain, and a new rational one. To the extent that C grew in power, emotions must also grow in strength.

A common sense theory for C is that it “exists” whenever a novel situation demands that brain modules compete for control of understanding and behaving. C almost certainly is generated by the prefrontal cortex, possibly on the left side. Measurements of brain activity show that this area is active when a novel task is being confronted, whereas tasks that have been mastered during previous encounters are not associated with the same level of activation. These cortical activity measurements may have been detecting something produced by C.

Are humans more conscious than chimpanzees? There is growing evidence that chimpanzees "think" ‑ in the way that people commonly think of thinking (Goodall, 1986, and Wrangham and Peterson, 1996). Chimpanzees appear to have something called “theory of mind,” or knowing what other chimpanzees are likely to know, and this also would imply that they have C, at some level.

It is important that thinkers with a sociobiological approach address the consciousness problem, as most of the C literature is devoid of an appreciation that 1) genes construct brains, and 2) genes exist because they're good at surviving. Anyone else who tries to investigate C is handicapped at the outset.

Books that treat consciousness with an adequate respect for the reductionist paradigm include Consciousness Explained (Dennett, 1991), The Illusion of Consciousness (Wegner, 2002) and The Quest for Consciousness (Koch, 2004).

In the next chapter we will return to this issue, which deals with neuropsychology and evolution

─────────────────────────────────

CHAPTER 7

─────────────────────────────────

BRAIN ANATOMY AND FUNCTION

“…intellect arose merely to serve the will [genes]. Most men … are incapable of any other employment of their intellect, because with them it is merely a tool in service of their will and is entirely consumed by this service…” Schopenhauer, Aphorisms (1851).

"Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and desire." Spinoza, Ethics (1677).

The brain is an organ meant to help genes survive, and in this respect it is no different from the heart, liver, and reproductive organs. A thinking brain may not like this assessment, and it may prefer to view the body and its organs, as well as the genes, as existing to serve the brain. But modern science, spearheaded by sociobiological insights, is once again forcing Mankind to move further down from his pedestal by discrediting another cherished belief. This chapter will describe brain anatomy and function. The next chapter will address their evolution.

Part of my intent for this chapter is to remove some of the "mystery" from how the brain works. I want to convey a sense that the brain functions like a "machine," and that living things are automatons, consistent with this book's reductionist approach.

Brain Anatomy: Vertical, Horizontal and Front/Back Layout

The human brain consists of a primitive hindbrain, a small mid‑brain section, and a large and complicated forebrain.

The hindbrain, which began its evolutionary existence ½ billion years ago, resembles the entirety of a reptile brain, and has been referred to as our "reptilian brain." The hindbrain's "stem" connects to the body; it receives information from sense receptors and issues commands to muscles and body glands via the spinal cord. The hindbrain's cerebellum stores motor commands and produces smooth movements.

The mid‑brain has a minuscule function, and won’t be described here.

The forebrain, on the other hand, is where uniquely human attributes are generated. It includes a limbic system, thalamus, basal ganglia, and two large cerebral hemispheres. The limbic system has many components; it maintains homeostasis (body temperature, heart rate, blood sugar, etc), and controls emotional state (things like hunger, anger, fear and sexual arousal). The limbic system's pea‑sized hypothalamus performs many of these functions using electrical commands, some of which activate hormone producing glands in the brain. The thalamus and basal ganglia control conscious state and initiate movement, respectively.

The cerebral cortex, comprising 70% of human brain volume, consists of a left and right cerebral hemisphere, with an interconnecting corpus callosum. Although the cerebral cortex is only 1/8‑inch thick, its surface area is about 1 ½ square feet, and it has evolved a folded configuration to allow the surface to fit within the human skull. The inside surface of the cortex (gray matter) has an immense number of nerve fibers (white matter) providing connections to other parts of the cortex, the limbic system and other brain components.

The cortex is the most recently evolved part of the brain, and fortunately it is also the most accessible to study. The left cortex and the right cortex each consist of 4 lobes: occipital, parietal, temporal and frontal. The occipital "sees," the parietal "feels," the temporal "hears," and the "frontal" thinks and commands! The "see/hear/feel" lobes are referred to as "posterior lobes" (since they comprise the rear half). They can be thought of as "receptive lobes" since they receive input from the body and environment. The "see/hear" lobes receive "remote sensing" information (visual and auditory input), while the "feel" lobe receives in situ information (touch, temperature, pain and body part position). The frontal lobes, the front half of the brain, receives input from the posterior lobes, and they “think” about the situation, formulate action plans and issue commands to muscles.

Figure 7.01. Brain lobes: Frontal, Parietal, Temporal, Occipital. View is of the left side, front is toward the left.

The corpus callosum (not shown) connects all four lobes of one side to the corresponding lobes on the other side. This nerve bundle is located underneath the frontal and parietal lobes, at about the same level as the temporal lobe.

Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Cortical Areas

Each of the 4 lobes, the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital, consists of 3 cortical areas: primary, secondary and tertiary. These are shown in Fig. 7.02 using the numbers 1, 2 and 3.

The part of the parietal lobe bordering the frontal lobe, area P1 in Fig. 7.02, is the "sensory cortex" (or "somatic cortex"). This strip of cortex is where in situ sensory signals from the body arrive. Next to the somatic cortex P1 is an area, F1, located in the frontal lobe and called the "motor cortex" or "motor strip." The motor cortex issues commands for movement (requests, actually, since sub‑cortical regions may "veto" the requests).

Figure 7.02. Approximate boundaries for cortical primary (1), secondary (2) and tertiary (3) areas in each lobe.

There's a one‑to‑one mapping of body location to position along the sensory cortex strip, P1, and motor cortex strip, F1. Starting from the part of the strips closest to the center‑line (top of brain) and going outward, body positions are allocated in the following sequence: leg, neck, head, arm, elbow, etc, to face, lips, teeth and tongue.

For the posterior lobes raw sensory information arrives at the primary cortical areas, which deliver processed versions to the secondary areas, which in turn deliver even further processed versions to the tertiary areas. The 3 posterior lobe tertiary areas border each other, and this is where the most "conceptualized" versions of perceptions are inter-compared and elaborated.

Figure 7.03. Flow of nerve activity when something is "felt."

For example, when something is "felt" the flow of nerve activity "flows" according to the depiction of the figure above. When something is "heard" the flow of nerve activity "flows" according to the depiction of the following figure.

Figure 7.04. Flow of nerve activity when something is "heard."

When something is "seen" the flow of nerve activity "flows" according to the depiction of the following figure.

Figure 7.05. Flow of nerve activity when something is "seen."

For each posterior lobe the pattern of nerve activity is the same: primary activity leads to secondary activity, which then leads to tertiary activity. The next step is for tertiary activity in adjoining areas to “compare notes,” or interact with each other.

Tertiary Cortex Convergences

When a familiar object is recognized a small set of tiny nerve circuits are set into "resonance." For example, when a coffee cup is seen, there's a flow of activity in the occipital lobe from primary to secondary to tertiary. When it reaches secondary cortex, i.e., O2, there will be sub‑features such as handle, rim, steam, etc "active" at their respective locations in O2 (created from interaction with the environment in childhood). These interact in O3 (occipital tertiary), setting into resonance a tiny circuit corresponding to "coffee cup seen."

Figure 7.06. Nerve activity when a "coffee cup" is seen.

The same coffee cup can be felt. In this case the nerve activity will be as shown in the next figure.

Figure 7.07. Nerve activity when a "coffee cup" is felt.

The coffee cup may be heard, as it is set down on a table. In this case activity will occur in the temporal lobe, such shown in the next figure.

Figure 7.08. Nerve activity when a "coffee cup" is heard, as for example being set down upon a table.

The concept "coffee cup" consists of the simultaneous activation of any, or all, of the three tiny regions in the three tertiary cortices of the posterior lobes. This is shown in the next figure.

Figure 7.09. Nerve activity corresponding to "coffee cup."

The activity pattern corresponding to "coffee cup" depicted in Fig. 7.09 is said to be "generalized." That is, there are many specific ways a coffee cup can be perceived, and indeed there are many variations of coffee cup shape, appearance and sound, yet they all end up creating the one, generalized pattern "coffee cup."

Frontal Lobes

The brain not only perceives, it also generates movement. A movement that is thought about and later commanded is the result of nervous activity in the frontal lobes. There's a "reverse" pattern for this activity; the process starts in tertiary cortex, and proceeds in the direction of primary cortex. This is depicted in the next figure.

Figure 7.10. Flow of nerve activity when some activity is planned and performed. The flow in this case is from tertiary to primary.

The frontal lobe architecture is analogous to that of the posterior lobes, in that the most conceptualized of ideas and plans are created in the frontal tertiary cortex, which delivers vague "executive" directives to the frontal lobe's secondary cortex, which formulates more specific action commands and delivers them (as necessary) to the motor strip. The motor strip requests permission from the sub‑cortical "reticular activating system" (RAS), and if the RAS approves the request it is acted upon by sub‑cortical brain areas (Luria, 1973), which carry out specific actions (orchestrated in detail by the cerebellum).

The frontal lobe's secondary and tertiary cortices are also referred to by the two terms "prefrontal" cortex and "pre‑motor" cortex. The prefrontal cortex has undergone the greatest amount of recent evolution, according to arguments based on the increase in frontal lobe size versus phylogenetic location (i.e., ratio of frontal lobe size to total cortex is greatest for humans, next greatest for chimpanzees, etc). Functions performed by the frontal lobes in humans are often unique, or most advanced, in humans, whereas most areas in the posterior lobes have pre‑human analogues. The prefrontal lobes also reveal their evolutionary recentness by continuing to undergo rewiring until the age of 5 to 7 (Thatcher, 1997), and even the "late teens." Giedd and Thompson (2001) write "In late teens, the prefrontal cortex is the area that's changing the fastest..." (according to neuro-imaging studies). This is consistent with the general principal that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."

Laterality

The right side of the body is commanded to move by the left cerebral hemisphere's (frontal lobe) motor strip. Likewise, the left side of the body is commanded to move by the right cerebral hemisphere. This left/right crossing‑over architecture is also adopted by sensory input; sensory information from the right side maps to the left brain, and visa versa. The reason for this is still a subject for speculation. The corpus callosum, which interconnects the left and right cerebral hemispheres, allows for the coordinated movement of both sides of the body, and also allows for some of the computational results of specialized areas on one side to be exchanged with related areas on the other side.

Proto‑humans probably had left/right symmetry, in the sense that the right and left cerebral hemispheres had identical capabilities, being mirror images of each other in layout. This would have provided redundancy in case one side was injured (by a fall or blow to the head). Modern humans have asymmetric brains: the left and right cerebral hemispheres, LB and RB, are somewhat different, and are "specialized" for certain types of tasks. RB has more long‑distance inter‑connections than LB, whereas LB has many areas that are highly intra‑connected, which in turn are connected to other highly intra‑connected regions within LB.

The best known of LB's highly intra‑connected areas are Wernicke's Area (language comprehension) and Broca's Area (language production). Wernicke's Area is located near the interface of the three posterior lobes, in LB only (right-most pattern of dots in Fig. 7.11, upper). Broca's Area is located in the frontal lobe's secondary cortex, in LB only (left-most pattern of dots in Fig. 7.11, upper). There's a discernible pattern for the tasks performed in these specialized, highly intra‑connected LB areas: namely, these tasks are inherently sequential, which means that the temporal order of events is crucial! For example, both receptive and productive language involves the processing of sequential events (sound perception and production). Changing word order can profoundly change meaning ("Ed ate the bear" versus "The bear ate Ed."). In contrast, RB tasks are holistic; they resemble those that a parallel computer processor (neural network) performs, such as instantaneous image recognition.

Figure 7.11 Upper panel shows location of language comprehension area, Wernicke's Area (right-most pattern of dots), and speech production area, Broca's Area (left-most pattern of dots). The lower panel shows the location of the inferior parietal lobule, IPL, which monitors the spatial relationship of body parts in relation to the immediate environment.

It is interesting that RB's counterpart to Wernicke's Area, shown in Fig. 7.11 (lower panel) is devoted to the task of monitoring the location of body parts in relation to each other and the immediate physical environment. This area, called the "inferior parietal lobule," or IPL, plays a critical role during manual interactions with the environment, such as reaching out to pick fruit from a nearby branch.

It is tempting to conjecture that before humans were capable of speech the left hemisphere's IPL counterpart region also functioned like the present‑day IPL in RB. Because reaching out to pick fruit had sequential components, it would have been natural for mutations to modify what once was an LB IPL in a way that later presented an opportunity for further modification that led to a simple form of language capability. This region must have been built-upon to produce our present‑day Wernicke's Area, which plays a critical role in language comprehension. This task consists of monitoring the relationship of sound percepts to each other over time, somewhat similar to the way the RB's IPL monitors body part relationships over time. As Wernicke's Area evolved in LB, it must have gradually displaced the former IPL function.

A great deal of public interest was generated during the 1970s and 1980s by reports of LB and RB differences, or lateralization. For example, RB is described as being intuitive, holistic, inductive, timeless, visuo‑spatial, non‑verbal and pessimistic, whereas LB is described as being verbal, analytic, logical, rational, time‑oriented, deductive and optimistic.

Traditional psychologists must have resented the newcomers to their field who used instruments to measure things, and who used rigorous techniques to study long-standing matters that had been the subject of arm chair speculation. The old-fashioned psychologists accused those who studied split brain patients, and found LB and RB differences, as suffering from “dichotomania” – as if the new investigators were over-interpreting their data due to an excess of enthusiasm. But the data is convincing, and often dramatic.

When LB is damaged (or when it is temporarily disabled by sodium pentathol injected into the left carotid artery) the patient's speech capability is almost non‑existent. Curiously, though, the still‑functioning RB does what it's able to do speechwise: the patient can swear, utter emotion‑laden pat phrases, sing songs with the right words, and recite the alphabet. RB cannot (usually) put together a sentence, since grammar capability resides in LB.

Occasionally, a patient whose corpus callosum has been cut can still manage to communicate in a simple way using the rudiments of grammar. These cases offer very interesting insights into the differing "personalities" of LB and RB. One famous example was reported by Gazziniga (1978) which suggests that LB and RB can have different goals in life. Their oft‑used subject P.S. was questioned about his job choice in an experiment that allowed only RB to answer, and "automobile race" was spelled out. As Gazziniga writes "This is most interesting, because the left hemisphere frequently asserts that he wants to be a draftsman" (p. 143). How poignant!

Chicken Claw Experiment

My favorite illustration of the independent operations of LB and RB has been referred to as “the chicken claw experiment.” This experiment was conducted by Michael S. Gazzaniga and Joseph E. LeDoux using patient P. S., who had undergone a full callosal surgery (cutting of the corpus callosum, interconnecting LB and RB) to control seizures. I shall quote from descriptions appearing in two books: Gazzaniga and LeDoux (1978) and Gazzaniga (1985).

Two problems are presented simultaneously, one to the talking left brain and one to the non-talking right brain. The answers for each problem are available in full view in front of the patient. Gazzaniga and LeDoux (1978).

Figure 7.12. “Chicken claw experiment.” The “task” (top) has two parts, presented to a brain half. The answer choices, below, are in full view to both brain halves.

...the experiment requires each hemisphere to solve a simple conceptual problem. A distinct picture is lateralized to one hemisphere: in this case, the left sees a picture of a claw. At the same time the right hemisphere sees a picture of a snow scene. Placed in front of the patient are a series of cards that serve as possible answers to the implicit questions of what goes with what. The correct answer for the left hemisphere is a chicken. The answer for the right hemisphere is a shovel.

After the two pictures are flashed to each half-brain, the subjects are required to point to the answers. A typical response is that of P.S., who pointed to the chicken with his right hand [controlled by the left brain] and the shovel with the left [controlled by the right brain]. After his response we asked him, "Paul, why did you do that?" Paul looked up, and without a moment's hesitation said from his left hemisphere, "Oh, that's easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken coop."

It is hard to describe the spell-binding power of seeing such things.

My interpretation is that the normal brain is organized into modular-processing systems, hundreds of them or maybe thousands, and that these modules can usually express themselves only through real action, not through verbal communication. Gazzaniga (1985).

... a basic mental mechanism common to us all. We feel that the conscious verbal self is not always privy to the origin of our actions, and when it observes the person behaving for unknown reasons, it attributes causes to the action as if it knows, but in fact it does not. It is as if the verbal self looks out and sees what the person is doing, and from that knowledge it interprets a reality. Gazzaniga and LeDoux (1978).

Frontal Lobes

The frontal lobes play a key role in orchestrating behaviors associated with LB/RB specializations. For example, RB prefrontal (RBF) originates emotional outbursts, whereas LB prefrontal (LBF) works to produce socially responsible behavior. The limbic system appears to be more strongly connected to RBF, and uses it to elaborate emotionally driven behaviors. LBF, on the other hand, appears to be the seat of the "conscience" and inhibits any RBF desires for socially inappropriate behaviors.

This was dramatically illustrated by the famous case of Phineas Gage, who suffered a railway construction accident in 1848 that caused a metal tamping rod to explosively penetrate and destroy his LBF (and a small part of RBF). Without the inhibiting effect of LBF upon RBF, his behavior was "fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity... at times pertinaciously obstinate... he has the animal passions of a strong man." (Harlow, 1868). This old example illustrates the well known finding that RB's language ability is usually limited to profanity, songs and other memorized verbal material, such as the alphabet. A wealth of studies show that LBF is the site of the most advanced and human traits, such as conscientiousness, positive social behavior, rationality, strategic planning, and positive affect (mood). LBF is often referred to as the site of "executive function." RBF, by contrast, is associated with lack of inhibition, anti‑social behavior, emotionality, and negative affect. RBF is more closely connected to the sub‑cortical limbic system, the source of emotions.

If RBF and LBF could take positions concerning the idea that "the genes enslave us for their sometimes pernicious activities, and that individuals should rise up and become liberated from this genetic enslavement," it is obvious which side LBF and RBF would be on, and they wouldn't be on the same side! More on this in a later chapter.

This chapter's brief description of cerebral architecture, and the functional relationships of components, is part of the accepted neuropsychology literature. Every normal person's brain functions this way. If the brain was a "blank slate," as Francis Bacon initially suggested, and philosopher John Locke systematically expounded, then how amazing it would be for the blank slate to form itself into the same well‑defined areas, with corresponding functions, in all people ‑ regardless of their individual upbringing and environmental experiences! This old idea is best forgotten. Even Bacon and Locke would probably disown the outdated notion if they were alive today and could know about recent neuropsychology findings.

The genes assemble brains with the same architecture, modules and functional relationships, and this process occurs automatically ‑ shall I say "mechanistically." This view of the brain is consistent with the reductionist theme found throughout this book. The next chapter is more speculative as it treats the brain’s role in evolution.

─────────────────────────────────

CHAPTER 8

─────────────────────────────────

THE BRAIN'S ROLE IN EVOLUTION

"Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain people." Will Cuffy.

The brain is assembled by many genes. Each gene has had to establish itself within a species genome that, by definition, was successful at the time the new gene competed for a place in the gene pool. We should assume that each brain‑affecting gene established itself in the human genome at a different time from all other brain‑affecting genes. Obviously, all genes achieve their success without the benefit of how well it might work with any future gene. Each successful gene has had to compete with existing genes, or at least provide a benefit that exceeds penalties from incompatibilities with existing genes. From the perspective of the gene, the individual's brain has the responsibility of spreading the gene widely into future generations. This is another way to express the unavoidable tautological assessment that a gene's job is to try to infiltrate the species genome and persist forever.

When a new gene modifies the hardwired neural connections of some brain region (by creating new connections between neurons or by changing the size of synapses of existing connections), the function of the modified brain region is likely to be in conflict with other brain regions. Since the purpose of the brain is to influence behavior on behalf of the genes, brain regions necessarily are in competition with other brain regions for influencing behavior. Rarely is the individual aware of this conflict. When the conflict is extreme, when it affects emotional state, we might say that the brain is in an unsettled state of "cognitive dissonance." Almost all competitions for influencing thought and behavior are worked out peacefully below conscious awareness.

The Brain as a Mechanism

The brain is a mechanism, albeit a "wet chemistry" mechanism. Just as all chemical interactions are merely physical interactions at the atomic and molecular level, so are all brain interactions ultimately the working out of physical relationships between atoms and molecules. When we say that current flows along a neuron's axon, we refer to a physical process of the axon's membrane becoming more permeable to sodium atoms, allowing charged atoms to enter the axon from the surrounding fluid, etc. Every motion of every atom is governed by a = F/m and quantum physics (as explained in Chapter 1). It would be cumbersome to try to understand brain function by invoking this basic level of physics since such a task would be incomprehensibly difficult. Wet chemistry is a less cumbersome level, but still too daunting for most brain studies. A more tractable, and hence powerful, level for understanding brain function is to think in terms of neural networks.

A neural network is a partially interconnected group of neurons. One network may also have connections with other neural networks. The term "partially interconnected" is important, for it is the genes that determine the overall pattern of which connections exist. A "fully connected" network is impractical when the number of elements (neurons) exceeds a few hundred, since the number of possible connections between elements grows as "N‑1 factorial." Synaptic connections between neurons are either excitatory or inhibitory. In the brain a neuron may have many synaptic connections to a specific target neuron, and absolutely no direct connections to most other neurons.

Consider all neurons in the network that are connected to one individual neuron. At any moment some of them will be in the process of "discharging," causing their synaptic connections to other neurons to become active (releasing neurotransmitters across a synaptic gap). Each target neuron sums the excitatory and inhibitory discharges on its cell body, and if this sum exceeds a threshold it in turn discharges, causing neighboring neurons with which it has output connections to possibly also discharge by the same process that led to its discharge. A neural network can be made to "resonate," which is a way of stating that a pattern of firings within the network continues for many clock cycles (tens of milliseconds in the brain) once triggered by an appropriate stimulation from the connections that the neural network has with neighboring neurons (or neural sub‑networks). All of this is well understood by neural network specialists, and I provided a brief introduction of it here to give the reader a taste for the mechanistic, or reductionist nature of brain phenomena.

An even more useful level for understanding brain function is to speak of brain regions in terms of their function. When we use such terms as "the reticular activating system" (RAS) we know that the elaborate neural network explanation for the region's function is theoretically possible but at the present state of brain understanding these a = F/m ways of accounting for a regions function are not very feasible or even useful. So we proceed by saying, with blatant anthropomorphism, that a cortical region sends a "request for activation" to the RAS, and if RAS "grants the request" this originating cortical area becomes more active, and this activity enables it to increases it's inhibition of "competing" cortical brain areas, allowing it to succeed in "achieving behavioral expression." Even that way of speaking is cumbersome, but it captures the flavor of the mechanistic competition of one cortical neural network, having gene‑directed hard wirings, with a neighboring cortical neural network, having other gene‑directed hard wirings.

In any description that attempts to achieve brevity, such as this one, there are many unmentioned details about which a specialist could complain when they are left out. Sure, I didn't mention neurotransmitters, and their re‑uptake, or their breakdown, and dozens of other things going on, but they are all mere elaborations of the same basic physical mechanism. Additional details are too numerous to mention, but also too similar in terms of their ultimately physical action to warrant mention for present purposes.

I have risked boring you with some physics of the brain in order to show how in principle brain function can be understood as coming under the influence of the genes. For it is the genes that direct the process of "pre‑wiring" the brain. Initially, too many connections are created, and for several years after birth approximately half of the neurons and their connections wither and are lost. But the starting point at approximately birth and some years later (depending on the brain region), the overall placement of neuron type and the majority of connections from each neuron to others, is supervised in a general way by the genes. Some genes influence one region (i.e., a neural network) and not others, while other genes influence several different specific regions. Any single neural network is most likely the result of several genes.

This way of viewing brain development, emphasizing as it does the role of evolutionary forces on the architecture and interconnectedness of the brain, leads to a perspective in which overall brain function is the working out of a competition of mental modules, each endeavoring to express itself by maximizing its influence over behavior. The "modularity of mentality" perspective, in which modules compete with certain others, is still controversial (for reasons I don't understand). And the idea of connecting specific modules to specific genes is so amorphous a speculation that it is not yet a sub‑discipline of the brain sciences. Evolutionary psychologists adopt this view (see Barkow et al, 1992), and it seems inevitable to me that sometime in the 21st century neuropsychologists will also, and maybe late in the 3rd millennium people who call themselves psychologists will come aboard.

Recent Evolutionary Hotspots in the Human Brain

In humans the prefrontal cortex is proportionately larger than the rest of the brain compared with all other animals. Thus, there's an evolutionary trend revealing that the prefrontal cortex has been the focus of recent human evolutionary adaptations. This makes the prefrontal cortex one of the most interesting brain areas to understand.

Comparison with other mammals reveals that the tertiary cortices of the posterior lobes are also proportionately larger in humans, indicating that they also have been undergoing rapid evolution in recent evolutionary time. The most obvious example is Wernicke's Area, located in the temporal lobe's tertiary cortex. So add LB posterior lobe tertiary cortical areas to the list of interesting human evolutionary "hotspots."

Are there any evolutionary hotspots in the human right brain posterior lobes? The short answer is "no." It therefore seems that the left brain has evolved more during human history than the right. It is even tempting to suggest that what distinguishes humans from other animals is their left brain.

Note one qualification that applies to most usages of the terms "left brain" and "right brain": about 2% of the population has laterality reversed. In these people language and other sequential tasks are performed by areas in their right brain, and holistic functions are performed by their left brains. Most of these people are left‑handed with the unhooked writing position. Neuropsychologists use the terms right brain and left brain to refer to the specializations found in that 98% of the population with "normal" lateralization. So, whenever the terms LB and RB are used, think of the left and right brains of the 98% of people who possess the normal lateralization.

Why is the Left Brain Evolving Faster?

What is it about the left brain that gave it the greater burden for advancing human evolution? One clue comes from the microscope. The left brain isn’t as "white" because fewer neurons are coated with an electrical insulator composed of a whitish, fatty substance called myelin. The greater myelinization of the right side is required by the greater proportion of right side neurons that connect with distant neurons through long axons. In contrast, neurons on the left side are more often connected to nearby neurons, and therefore require less insulating myelin.

But what does this mean? The left brain is characterized by a neural architecture in which isolated neural networks perform their specialized tasks and then communicate their results among themselves through a smaller network of interconnections. Functionally, this is a better architecture for performing sequential tasks. Language is a good example. A sentence co

Bruce L. Gary

Evolution of a New Left Brain, "Resentful" Right Brains,

LB/RB conflicts