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.

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.

Running ape meets Evoculture

Knuckle, senescent white male

  Time, sethren, to consider the organism.

  The organism.  Raise your right index finger where you can see it clearly.  Keep it there, and rotate it clockwise as seen if you were looking out along your arm, which you aren’t, thus demonstrating the potential independence from the real  world of the ideoverse, where you are looking along your arm.  Dogs can’t do this, and only in part because of anatomical shortcomings.  Now rotate that finger about the metacarpophalangeal joint, the proximal knuckle, sether, bottom, bottom, no, not your arse, sether, and the wrist, and then about the elbow.  Just watch those interdependent hierarchies of concepts whizzing past in your ideoverse.  Metacarpophalangeal doesn’t often get much of an outing.  It’s hardly a familiar demon, but look how it’s hogging the limelight here.  Alas, in vain.  What chance does metacarpophalangeal (its last desperate mememe) have of ousting knuckle from any gang of demons.  Not room for both, I’m afraid, and anyway, there’s only one metacarpophalangeal joint in the human hand, there are fourteen knuckles.  Without the praxis of anatomy, I guess the metacarpophalangeal joint would be long extinct in the metaverse.

  With luck, your finger tip is now in contact with your nose, or thereabouts.  Or maybe your mouth.  Whatever, you are touching the human organism.  So are you sether Albert, but I should stop if I were you unless you want to be taken away for a good talking to by yon community police person.

  Try to imagine this organism upon which you have your finger, without Evoculture.  If you had been raised by a pack of wolves, or dogs, or even dolphins, were you sufficiently aquatic, that is exactly how you would be.  Totally devoid of Evoculture.  You would be a wolf, or a dog, or a dolphin but, in all categories, physically very ill-equipped.  If you were a wolf or a dog, you might be able to compensate for your inadequacies with the evolved hand, pulling out thorns for instance.  Your vastly superior processing power might prove useful in some situations, but that’s doubtful.  It, your brain, has access to very little of the stuff it has evolved over three million years to process, so the possibility of, say, doing a little building work round the lair may well not occur in the neural substrate, and would probably not be socially rewarded even if it it were translated into action.  To dolphins you would be even more useless, even though dolphins might have a developed but wholly proximate ideoverse, unlike dogs.  By wholly proximate, I mean the ideoverses are wholly organism-based.  Such ideoverses could for instance result in complex social interactions, games, hunting cooperation, even meeting groups of Evocultured-up human organisms for joint ventures, hopefully involving killing third parties, fish, rather than the humans killing the dolphins, as found among the Faroe- and Japanese.  But nothing uses the environment of the dolphin’s brain to evolve.  Nothing.  The downside of flippers, maybe.  On the other hand, put a human baby in a dolphin’s environment and the downside of everything else, including hands, becomes apparent.

So, the organism without Evoculture.  Homo sapiens with nothing but the brain and the real world, the world before the hominins.  Little more than a running ape with a good cooling system.  That’s what you would have your finger on, sethren, if it wasn’t for Evoculture.

  I want to call this human organism something that differentiates it from what we know the human being + Evoculture to be.  I want to call it the Ho!?, but Ho!? In our street culture, and that’s where we fucking are, sethren, has connotations.  Ma ‘ho.  Not good.  But Ha!?.  I like Ha!?.  The grunt of surprise, followed by that hardest concept, that concept at the heart of Evoculture, the question.

  The question goes back through evolutionary history.  An African Hunting Dog asks questions.  Want to hunt?  Tougher than me?  Scared?  But the repertoire is limited.  The Ha!? asks the question thus.  The two of us are looking in the same direction.  Concerning that which is before our eyes, what is the case?

  Or rather, it’s not the Ha!? that asks that question.  It’s the Ha!?-Evoculture symbiosis.    

Our Story

A thing

A bit of prophecy, you put a finger on the source of doom, and they block their ears, turn their backs on you and shamble off.

  Nothing for it but reason.  And what is reason?  It is a praxis, sethren.  Like bicycles, and we shall come to bicycles and reason later.  First, the narrative.

Demon    thing    act    concept    map narrative    praxis    Culture

  It said map there, but I’m torn between a map and a narrative.  They have much in common.  But I think the narrative is the bigger, so I’ll go for that.

  Let us quickly glance at the relationships so far.

  We know what a demon is, an irreducible blah blah blah.

  Next, thing.  A thing is everything out in the world that is perceivable, exemplified by remarking the things in the semi-circle a metre before your own eyes, as it might be pencil, notebook, cd, mug, elegant little tin box with hinged four-faceted lid, black white and bronze.

  An act is a kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of alliances of demons.  Its kinesis can be strongly inhibited, as in the high-jumper’s run-up in her head before, to the eye of the observer, she moves a muscle.

  A concept is a derivative of a thing or an act, and so has two forms.

First, the derivative of the thing.  The thing from which the concept can be derived can either be in the world, or a demon in an ideoverse.  There is no in-the-world red triangle here, but you still have no difficulty in apprehending a red triangle as a locus of irreducible difference which is the summation of two other loci of irreducible difference, red, and triangle.

  Second, the concept that is the derivative of an act.  The act may be either kinetic as to mass in the world, or kinetic as to energy in an ideoverse and its neural substrate (but, with the given that we live in an E=mc² universe, this either… or… is only superficial).  The one might be the archer’s concept of the flight of an arrow (Vygotsky’s natural concept), the other the mathematician’s concept of the flight of an arrow (Vygotsky’s scientific concept).

  A concept that is the derivative of an act rather than a thing 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.  If this sounds complex, that’s because it is.  Education is a process of the development and integration of concepts which are hierarchically interdependent.  That is why most three year olds will not only be unable to prove that the diagonal of a unit square is incommensurable, they will also be incapable of worrying with Pythagoras’s ghost that this might be the case.

  That is as far as we have come at the moment, sethren.  Now, the narrative.

  The narrative is a distributed locus of stability.  It is a structure that inhibits variation.  The praxis, just so we keep our bearings, has the reciprocal function.  The praxis is the biggest possible alliance in Evoculture, where variation can be prolific, and the selective processes themselves variable. 

  A narrative is an agglomeration of acts in the metaverse from which stories can be derived.  A story is an evolved selection from a narrative, arranged along one or several related time lines, with a coherence selected by its environment as a recognised conformity, at least partial, to the social, political, economic, technical and ethical situation at the time of its telling.  If I said, sethren, tell me about Romeo and Juliet, you’d probably come up with a story.

  The acts recounted in a narrative are disposed far more at random.  They are only loosely connected to any time line, and their beginnings and particularly their ends are inchoate.  They contain stories, often repeated in different forms, with variations, often inversions, often in your face contradictions.  They may contain tropes of extraordinary beauty.  Between the stories is a huge amount of what appears to the recipient who is not of the culture of origin of the narrative to be junk.  Within a narrative is often identifiable a claim of exceptionalism, ownership or being absolutely right about something.  Examples of narrative are the Old Testament, British  neo-liberal, in fact all neo-liberal Economic Policy, American foreign policy, Mein Kampf, The Book that shall be Nameless, any collected folk tales of a single ethnicity— particularly English, Facebook, any Imperial History, Bollywood, "African Culture", Coronation Street.  Some of these would be better company on a desert island than others.  Anybody who tells you the Old Testament is a great work of literature hasn’t read it.  It has the odd beautiful trope, and a few good stories.  Most of it is junk.

  As in the genome, narrative junk may not actually be junk.  It will have some complex quasi-epigenetic function in the evolution or the originating culture.  It’s just that if the originating culture has no presence in your ideoverse, the junk won’t function because it is unattractive to resident subset of Evoculture.  It does not signal to enough resident demons any potential for alliance and proliferation.  This in no way discourages Bible study classes of a fundamentalist bent all over the world, where instructions as to the necessity of genocide merely set a big screen flashing; Jesus Saves, Kill Sodomites.

  The evolved function of a narrative is to fix, in a photographic sense, and make permanent a landscape; a landscape either social, geographical, historical, political, economic, ethical, religious, or various combinations of all these things. 

  Narratives relate strongly to the survival of the originating and onward-transmitting hosts, their human population.  The more complete and coherent a culture is, and the more the case that a human carrier of that culture can be fully educated in every part of it, the more these components of the narrative can all be present and fused.  I know very close to nothing of the Australian Dreamtime before the interlopers arrived, but it sounds like the most complete narrative that has survived so far.

  Luncheon, my dears.