For the short months of summer, adieu

Moi

  Sethren, summer has come at last, and it is time for me to go on pilgrimage, to wend eastward from Huddersfield, beyond even Grimsby, further than the North Sea, to the lands of the Franks, the Lombards and the Slavs.  You may, if you will, follow, or you may choose to stay here, savouring the dust and oncogenic miasma of the ringroad, mumbling disconsolately about the clownish self-aggrandisement of the political class until, if you survive, I return in the Autumn.  Then I will attempt to complete what I have here started.  So far I have looked upon culture and its evolution as though it were a self-sufficient process, and the humanity which it inhabits merely a passive environment for that process.  Next, when the time comes, I shall investigate the human organism, and then finally attempt to derive, from the hypothesis concerning the co-operation of human organism and evolving culture, which more scientifically can be called their obligate symbiosis, a representation of what it is to be a human being among the whole set of human beings, all seven billion of us.

  Why do we do it?  For no purpose but to acquire knowledge.  And why do we acquire knowledge?  Because we are Homo sapiens.  That’s what we do.  Or, as Francis Bacon said of knowledge, it ‘is not onely the excellentest thing in man, but the very excellencie of man’.  Aye, and woman too, sether.  The queen he served could reflect upon the nature of things for three hours at a time, in Latin.

  Aye, bacon, sether Albert, we can smell the butties of it on the June breeze, even if it is beyond our depleted purses, and we must still make do with MadamMeMe’sMeatyBits, now dispensed in noisome slurry by ill-paid and angry semi-slaves coerced by the plump pink plutocrats into drudging for less than a working wage, so even this miserable condition of labour has to be subsidised by tax, so that the tax-free corporations can become even more hideously deformed by cancerous wealth.

  But it is not of dead pig that I speak.  It is of that prophet of the Enlightenment, of the way we who are at the leading edge of evoculture think and feel, Francis Bacon, who lived more than four hundred years ago.  He would have understood evoculture.  To hear him quoted is to get glimpses of our present seen from nearly half a millennium ago.  We could, maybe we will, take his sayings and of each one ask, and how does evoculture account for this?

  I leave you with some of them, sethren.  They are taken from a review, in the London Review of Books Volume 35 Number 3, by Keith Thomas, of The Oxford Francis Bacon Vol. I: Early Writings 1584-96, edited by Alan Stewart with Harriet Knight.

  Keith Thomas’s first quote for sure deals with something we will need to explain by cultural evolution.  Sethren, for the short months of summer, adieu.

  Bacon had a keen understanding of the bonds that held political societies together… :  ‘Relligion and Conscience restinge in the devine ordinaunce whereby princes raigne; Feare of the settled power of the present estate; Love in Recognition of benefittes enioyed, with apprehencion of the manyfolde evills of Innovacion; and Custome of obedience fortefying all the rest’.

‘The monumentes of witt survive the monumentes of power.’

  …acquire knowldege, ‘which is not onely the excellentest thinge in man, but the very excellencie of man’.

  The scholastics were men of ‘ great wittes, farre above myne own’, but they had produced nothing.  ‘All the learneinge that hath byne thiese many hundered years’ had not resulted in a single invention or brought to light ‘one effecte of nature before unknowne’, but the crucial inventions of printing, gunpowder and the mariner’s compass were ‘stumbled vpon and lighted on by chance’. The ‘Souerraignetie of man’ still lay ‘hidd in knowldege’.

  In Graies Inne Revells Bacon projects the in-the-world apparatus of the Enlightenment and the Encycopaedia to enable a  systematic exploration of  ‘what soeuer is hidden and secret in the world’.  This apparatus would include ‘a most perfect and generall librarie’; ‘a most spacious and wonderfull gardin'; ‘a goodlie huge Cabinett’ of ‘whatsoeuer the hand through exquisit arte and engine hath made rare in forme or motion’; and a ‘still-house’ or laboratory, ‘furnished with mills, furnaces, instruments and vessels’; all this for ‘the knowledge of Causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible’.

  ‘A contentious retayneinge of custom is a turbulent thing aswell as innovation.’

  And again, much later, ‘a Froward Retention of Custome is as turbulent a Thing as an Innovation.’

  And of all of us, sethren:

  ‘He doth like the ape that the higher he clymbes the more he shews his ars.’

What next?

  Sethren, that’s the Jeroan taxonomy dealt with.  So what? you will say.  Just stood up like that, it don’t amount to a can of beans.  Why you should say that in an American accent, sethren, I do not know, but you do, you do.  And I have no quarrel with a can of beans.

  Taxonomies are powerful things.  None more powerful than Linnaeus’s, who gave us the whole kingdom of biological life, laid out just so.  And from the other end of the telescope, Mendel, who gave us something just this side of nothing, but an infinitesimal so powerful that it can anatomise all that Linnaeus named.

Moi

  And then there is Jorge Luis Borges.  Here is his taxonomy of animals, which I’m sure you know, but has that strange quality, that every time you come across it, there seems to be something there that was not there before, while the list is no longer, and nothing is missing:

(a) belonging to the emperor,

(b) embalmed,

(c) tame,

(d) sucking pigs,

(e) sirens,

(f) fabulous,

(g) stray dogs,

(h) included in the present classification,

(i) frenzied,

(j) innumerable,

(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,

(l) et cetera,

(m) having just broken the water pitcher,

(n) that from a long way off look like flies.

  This may at first seem unscientific.  However its purport is to demonstrate that a constant of all taxonomies is fallibility.

  I have suggested

Demon    thing    act    concept    map narrative    praxis    Culture

and you, sethren, could well ask, but then, what kind of thing in your taxonomy is a scientific law, or a mathematical proof, or a rule of thumb such as that of a good man of Cork, John Punch: “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”.

  I could try, sethren, like the scholasticists of old, or like Procrustes, to fit these succinct, recognisable, bounded and coherent cells of the metaverse into the Jeroan taxonomy, thus:

  A scientific law is the sequential coupling and obligate linkage of  a series of concepts, any of which may and probably will themselves be composed of a series of concepts, possibly recursively until, once you get down to simple enough concepts, demons begin to appear; ergo, a concept (in the sense of the Jeroan taxonomy).

  Same goes for a mathematical proof.

  And for a rule of thumb.

  But that is all trivial circularity, sethren.  What we need to do next is to explore the ways in which the descriptees of this taxonomy, collectively evoculture, co-exist with and within the collective of human organisms.  The space that they configure is the metaverse, which is continuous, through the nexus of all functioning human neural substrates, with the rest of the universe.  Evoculture must account for not just stone knapping and sewing, but family, friendship, art and science, agriculture and warfare, love and hate.  All right, all right, sethren, do not flee.  Quite right, this is the work of ages, and I do not intend to even attempt it, especially as summer has now been deferred until at least July and we may all die of vitamin D deficiency before the sun shines again.  While our fuckhead Prime Minister talks of more wars and his soft pink lust for fracking.  Evoculture must account not only for the wonderful in humankind, but also for the criminals who have superseded bankers, and the political class.

  What I shall try to do, sethren, and that very briefly, is to delineate, not with a fine camel hair brush, but with a yard broom dipped in road grime, some ways in which evoculture might account for human nature a lot better than sociology or religion does.  And I am too pessimistic (though not about the political class), for tomorrow the sun shines.  A pic-nic, maybe, sethren.  Away with you, while I call up Fortnum & Mason upon my phone.

Neither group nor kin: how altruism arises in Homo sapiens

Moi - in altruisitic mode

  Sethren, I have spent the night in study.

  You must excuse me if I forego the usual honeyed pleasantries.  I'm fucked.

  Here is the final word on group selection.  The red herring is rotten, good only for compost.  Group selection is merely a convenient trope magicked up by sociologists and the religious.

  A group is not an entity.  It is a conceptual envelope, permeable and polymorphous, that bags up individuals, typifying them by certain shapes, behaviours or other categorising concepts.
What needs explaining:
  Population viscosity (low dispersal) can cause altruism (relatedness) but also intra-group competition (proximity).  Don't let it bother you that this seems opaque.  I have compressed an apparent contradiction, soundly expressed, until it is almost empty of meaning.  It is merely a flag for the sort of conundrum Groupies pretend can be explained only by Group Evolution.  In fact, all human behaviour which is not an expression of innate structures, ultimately genetically and epigenetically determined, is a derivative of culture (think the difference between blinking and wiping your arse, sethren).  Quite, sether Sampath.

How altruism arises in the Homo sapiens organism.
  Altruism is a misleading word, redolent of human sentiment such as “Greater love hath no man [sic] than this, that he will lay down his life for his friend”.

  When a prairie dog or whatever it is gives a warning of an approaching eagle, it is not laying down its life for its kin group.  It is merely genetically predisposed (variation) to shriek when it sees a predator coming.  That is all.  If the putative [shriek when you see a predator] gene is recessive, it may be carried by a large proportion of the shrieker's kin, who will adventitiously have benefited from its warning.  If the eagle then zaps it, the shrieker will not have died altruistically, it will have died from responding sub-optimally to a dynamic episode in its material environment.  But it may well not die anyway.  The eagle guidance system may be switched to vision, not hearing.  The shrieker may not be the closest dawg to the predator.  Also, the shrieker clearly saw it coming, and may have time to shriek and take evasive action.
  I don’t at the moment have to hand the several pages of equations that prove this.  I must tidy my desk.
  Of course all the dawgs in the shrieker's vicinity may not be kin, and they will benefit anyway.  The whole group benefits.   But it beats me, sethren, how you could possibly argue that selection on the shrieking trait is by the group.
So, how altruism arises in the Homo sapiens organism.
  Two Homo sapiens organisms lifting a stone — by the way, for this explanation, cultural evolution has to be taken seriously, not just as phatic gobshite. 

  Two Homo sapiens organisms lifting a stone.  There arises in one of them (variation) a genetic and epigenetic tendency with a [lift a stone when another Homo sapiens organisms lifts a stone, and make it the same stone] attractor (here is a place where mirror neurons might be useful); but the attractor, once the stone has been lifted, becomes part of evoculture, as an act in the metaverse (in the senses used in the Jeroan taxonomy of evoculture).  It is on the act that selection in the metaverse can be made.  The results of the act, which in this case can be made by, minimally, two humans, may become part of the physical environment; a shelter, an arrow head.  This alteration of the environment (result of an act which was the result of a predisposition in the organism) may in turn select on the organism, and other organisms like it.  But it is the act, which may become part of a praxis (in the Jeroan taxonomy) such as building or stone knapping, or indeed of a superordinate praxis, co-operation, which may differentially benefit any human organism whose ideoverse includes that act.

Note that it would be inexplicable if the concept (let’s lift the stone together) preceded, in evolutionary space, the act (one human lifts a stone when another lifts a stone, and it is the same stone).

  If you actually accept cultural evolution (see note on phatic gobshite above), then in Homo sapiens there is no necessity to explain cooperation as something evolving at the level of the group.  Reiteration and variation of ideas, behaviour, things, take place only at the level of the neural substrate.  The processes of each neural substrate are an individual ideoverse, and each ideoverse, in an E=mc² universe, is in a continuum with the metaverse and with the world.  The third evolutionary stage, selection, can take place in a number of spaces; the ideoverse where the reiteration with variation initially took place; another ideoverse; the solid world (a better mousetrap, perhaps).

  Anything else is sociology or religious bias.

  I realise that some new terminology may sound sci-fi/religious bonkers.  In fact it is, I hope, quite practical, and an attempt to get away from camouflaged essentialism.

The Pentecostal bicycle

  Sethren, I have gone up to the mountain. Not Sinai, but Malham Cove, where many pilgrims were gathered for Whit Sunday.  And I saw miracles of nature, the breeding Peregrine, skylarks, the mountain viola, and the great heights dominated by the silver limestone pavement.  I saw from afar the line, no wider than the span of your arms, sethren, where the argentine North West, with its limestone and emerald grass, becomes the dun of Yorkshire, millstone grit.  And from a young couple I heard one of those fragments of wisdom which exemplified, in that ancient landscape below its big sky, the difference between the culture of man and the culture of woman:

Eve:          …something that I can enjoy as well.

Adam:      Well as far as I’m concerned, it’s a can of bollocks.

Middle Craven Fault, right of ladder of fields up to horizon

  And on those heights I contemplated the big question, can evolution proceed at the level of the group? which as I’ve said on more than one occasion seems to me to be heresy.  And it occurred to me that what those heretics are in fact talking about is the horizontal transmission of culture, as it might be in biological life, in the incorporation of one form into another; as mitochondria into our own cells; or like gene exchange, the slicing and splicing of the chromosome.  And it bethought me this text, snipped and spliced, might be appropriate to Whit Monday, the season when the Pentecostal fire leapt across the multitude and across horizons, from disciple to disciple of the last Jewish Prophet, a case of horizontal culture transmission if ever there was one, but also vertical, since whence can this fire have come, save from the temples of Zoroaster:

  “Take the bicycle.  From the second half of the Nineteenth Century, the basic layout and structure of the bicycle has been unchanged.  And yet from then to now there have been a succession  of variations, thousands if not millions (depending on scale and how you count) which have led from the first mechanically propelled human powered two-wheel-in-line vehicle, to the huge spectrum of bicycles in the world today.  And one can plot divergent lines of bicycle descent.  One variant is for racing at speeds of 50 kph, another is for riding over rocks and tree roots, another for performing gravity-defying aerial tricks, and another for going shopping in an elegant dress; very different roles; all fulfilled by the same two wheels and triangular with beams structure.  All these can be put in one phylogenetic tree.

  However there is an area where these mutations are very different from most of those in biological life.  Though in the early evolution of life extraneous bits (such as mitochondria) were incorporated into complex organisms, the structural material did not suddenly change with the totality that it is inclined to in contemporary material production.  The airframes of aeroplanes were made of wood and fabric, with a few bits of metal.  Then aluminium predominated.  Now significant fractions are made of composite materials, fibres, ceramics.  Bikes were made of steel, and now they’re made of aluminium or carbon fibre.  No animal swaps the substance of its skeleton for another over a matter of years in this way.  The environment where the bicycle reproduces cannot be a merely passive matrix, as the real world is for biological life.

  As well as materials, substructures are suddenly imported.  Thus the environment where reproduction takes place must have within it active processes, proactive agents.  The change from the dandy horse, which you sat astride and ran with, to the velocipede with cranks and pedals attached to the front wheel, to the roller chain transmission, these were not small steps, they were, in evolutionary terms, unaccountable leaps.

  And that is the matter to be investigated, in the search for an  evidence-based case for Evoculture being an evolutionary process which lives in obligate symbiosis with homo sapiens; a symbiosis in which each partner has evolved in roughly alternate steps over a very short period of evolutionary time, each in turn hoisting the other up by the bootstraps; brain mutation, evolution of Evoculture, further brain mutation, further evolution of Evoculture, following each other in expansive, exponential succession and success.

  The line of descent, the variations that proceed in a certain order and not randomly, the divergence of lines (as between the all-terrain and road bike) suggest that when a mutated bike comes into the world, it is the product of another bike.  But what aspect of another bike is it a product of?  Clearly not of the physical, in-the-world bicycle.  We are quite clear that a bicycle does not produce another bicycle.  It is equally clear that the bicycle ridden by today’s champions could not have evolved  solely in the brains of human beings.  There would have been not the slightest chance of the modern race bike existing if the idea had merely been developed and refined in and between brains, without the parallel development of bikes-in-the-world.  There is something about bikes-in-the-world that reproduces further, and different, bikes-in-the-world.  It’s not the bike itself, not the physical thing.  So what is it?  The answer is going to be a formulation, a word denoting one of many bounded but open areas of the metaverse; a praxis.  What produces another bicycle from the bicycle-in-the-world is the praxis of the generic bicycle to which the ideoverse of the designer has open access.”

  Go in peace, sethren.  May the flames spread, and keep a drowsy emperor awake.