Group selection poleaxed

Not a red herring - Britannica 1911

  Sethren, there is a little more to say on Praxis, but there is a beast lurking beyond the ringroad, a lumpen beast, shapeless, miasmic, rough, slouching towards us, to be born again and again in each ideoverse if we only let it in, for that is the way of the evolution of culture; not truth, but successful reproduction; and that beast is not the AntiChrist, nor Baal nor Beelzebub, but group selection.  Or what is often known as group selection, in the same way as any heresy can be called by an innocuous name, Intelligent Design or Christianity (if you’re Jewish, sether, if you’re Jewish).

  Group selection is okay as long as you know what's being inferred.  If people operate in groups by which they are to an extent definable, then the aggregate of the evolutionary processes in that group may result in it being selected over another group.  Though to demonstrate that with any degree of detailed accuracy would be a long and complex task.  In principle it would be thus:  (GP is a praxis that has evolved in or been adopted by the group)

The four possible outcomes

   GP (e.g. scientific medicine) is selected, and increases the competitive survivability of its host Homo sapiens population.

  GP (e.g. Messianic religion with added suicide) is selected and decreases the survivability of its host Homo sapiens population.

  GP (e.g. Messianic religion with added suicide) is not selected and its absence increases the survivability of its host Homo sapiens population.

  GP (e.g. scientific medicine) is not selected and its absence decreases the survivability of its host Homo sapiens population.

  I will not go into the caveats which should apply when describing this immensely powerful feature of cultural evolution as “group selection”.  Fucking obvious, so elegantly and correctly put, as always, sether.

  No, the heresy is when the term “group selection” is used to suggest that the evolutionary process takes place at the level of the group.  And there are much wiser and even more learned men than me who make this mistake, sethren.  No, no, please, spare my blushes.  I know, I know, seemingly boundless.  But you must stretch your credulity (no, no, sether, not there) to the extent that it can encompass the knowledge that there are those beyond the Huddersfield ringroad who think I am an uneducated twat.  If that.  Enough.  I will now, with a brief wave of my wand (no, sether Albert, for fuck’s sake), demonstrate the illusion of evolution at the level of the group.

  We shall start with that unimpeachable source of scientific data, the BBC nature programme.  You know, sethren, the generic one about life in the oceans, whales slapping their tails, an Orca skim-boarding out of the surf, grabbing a baby seal, and retiring again to the foam to play catchy with it.  And then the shoaling sardines, attacked from the air and from the deep, gannets, whales, porpoises exploding with gaping maws from every direction.  And the sardines shoal, tighter and tighter, breaking formation radially at just the last moment.

  The Group Selectionists say, shoaling only works as a group activity, by definition.  Therefore it must have evolved as a group thing.  (it’s useful to spot the place where a well camouflaged “and then a miracle happened” can lurk.  By definition is just such a cover.)

  Here’s a model of the actual process.  There are something like twenty seven members of the herring family in European waters that can be called, for commercial purposes, sardine.  We’ll take the red herring.  It is a pelagic species, feeding on drifting shoals of small organisms.  It used to forage on its own, oh Best Beloved, but one day an algorithm evolved in a red herring’s brain which caused it to swim more or less in the direction of the nearest other red herring.  This was annoying for the other red herring, but the first red herring didn’t notice it had become an irritant.  And by and by it mated, despite its social awkwardness, and there is the advantage that a herring can produce a lot of eggs, and in the next generation this following-the-closest behaviour proved productive, because a dispersed but coherent group of herrings can search more efficiently than a lone individual.  You see where we’re going here.  Clearly the algorithm has to be just right.  Shoulder to shoulder is no good.  On the other hand you don’t want to get out of sight of everybody else.  Now I suggest that that algorithm has a good chance of being selected in subsequent generations of red herring.

  Then come the predators, as in the BBC nature programme.  Within an individual red herring the original mutation mutated again (okay, there must be a difference between “a miracle happened” and accepting a given.  No, sether, have you not been listening at all.  How that given occurred is what I’ve been on about all through the dark months of the winter which is not the summer winter.  Okay?)  So then the mutation mutated, and there was added a distance/velocity/size vector.  (Because there fucking was.  That’s how.)  And the bigger the distance/velocity/size vector, the closer you got to the nearest other red herring.  Okay, it was more complicated than that, routines were running that would require complex mathematics to reproduce, whereby the algorithm took into account all other red herrings within sight.  And while we’re about it, we’ll add another.  When the distance/velocity/size vector was coming straight at you, at the very last moment (additional algorithm, sether) you turned a pre-set number of degrees, (I don’t know, 45, 90, selection would have defined it) away from the axis of the vector.  (I don’t now whether a vector can have an axis, sether, I’m an unlettered twat, remember).  I don’t know that, either.  If the vector is pointing straight up your own axis, you just guess.  Any which way is better than the way you’re going.

  That’s how the behaviour of a group evolves sethren.  Always and invariably.  Tomorrow back to praxis.    Okay, off you fuck.

Praxis, the root of theory

  Sethren, winter is back again and where I have been I know not.  My robes are stained, I have a copious and hacking cough, my mouth is dry, I shiver, I have a significant contusion on my left temple, a headache, and my hernia and piles are not at their best.  All thought, all remembrance, of what I might have been going to say about Othello and myth has vacated my ideoverse, leaving not one huddled, hypothermic demon behind.  But I am delighted to see you foregathered, and in no lesser numbers than before.  Your faith is a modern-day beacon, one LED pricking through the moorgrime that swirls down from the grey brown dereliction of Holme Moss and wuthers round the ring road.

  Let me try to gather what is left in and about my abused neural substrate.

  I leapt too far ahead with the myth.  First we must deal with the praxis.  And praxis is primarily about things.  How things evolve.  All of evoculture is dependent on the evolution of things, myth as much as anything, the cross, the swastika.  The original Palladion, a wooden carving of Athene, of numinous antiquity, was carried by Aeneas to new-found Rome, and when Constantine completed the relocation of Roman power to Byzantium he took the Palladion with him and buried it under an eponymous (with Constantine, not Athene) pillar in the new forum.  So let us turn back to the bedrock for a while, to the evolution of things.

  Praxis precedes theory, because the thing, the flint blade, the bone needle, precedes the concept.  That infinitesimally fine-grained progression of cultural evolution that started maybe three million years ago was located in things, in in-the-world praxis, and it was the Ha!?’s pondering upon how things behaved in the world that began the expansion of the metaverse to encompass what we traditionally call ideas.  But, fuck me, sethren, it was a slow process.  Too slow to be noticeable over a lifetime, or a hundred or a thousand lifetimes.  Nonetheless, look at the continents, what speed they move apart at or together, measurable in millimetres per year, and yet it is a fair swim today from Luanda to Buenos Aires.  Even when things speeded up, when the modern neural substrate was more or less up and running, maybe 200,000 years ago, there wasn’t a noticeable burst of speed, no smoke and burning rubber down the drag strip.  Cultural evolution of the earliest antiquity would make a snail look like Usain Bolt.

  When we gaze at one of the bedrock praxes, flint knapping for instance, we see something fully human, and fully part of evoculture.  Things have moved beyond the furthest horizons of a chimpanzee.  Things have also moved beyond mere acts and concepts.  Acts and concepts will account for the adventitious flake which might be used to cut or scrape.  But think of the barbed flint arrowhead.  Think of the knowledge that must never be lost — because as we have seen if it is lost for a micro-second it is lost for ever, or at least until it has re-evolved — that is the tradition of making barbed flint arrowheads.  The quarry of suitable mineral substance must be located, either by way of the metaverse or by searching with intent in the world, the core excised from the quarry, sometimes carried a distance to the work site, prepared, and only then the flake struck off and knapped, with a manual skill greater than most found today, into a complex shape.  And the next bit is where the evolution of things is crucially different from the evolution of life.  The next bit is where the praxis emerges.  The next bit is where the arrowhead is attached to the shaft, either with an adhesive, or a binding, or both.

  Suddenly, the immense power of evoculture is there before our eyes.  In the attachment of the arrowhead to the shaft, two, three, four complex traditions are combined in one thing, the barbed mineral-headed arrow.  These four complex traditions parallel the evolution of four things, the stone, the stick, the cord and the glue.  We see in an instant how, once up to speed, like now, today, on the Huddersfield ringroad, evoculture can outpace the evolution of life by orders of magnitude, until it may consume complex life itself, sparing only the scorpion and the sand viper.  It is this combination of things that were once separate, and the parallel combination of on the one hand traditions, and on the other of the operative Ha!?s who are the hosts of those traditions (the flint knapper, the fletcher, the cord maker, the bitumen or vegetable gum specialist, the bow maker) that is the praxis.  It is the praxis, sethren, which, beyond acts and concepts, is the supercharger, the afterburner of cultural evolution.

  But sod all that for a lark:

…Aprille, with his showres soote

Has perced every droghte to the roote,

And drowned every vein in swich licour

By which vertue engendered is the flour…

  And now it’s May, whan the swete byrdes shulde singe, but we are chilled to the swyving bone, sethren.  More praxis anon, but mine very own sether wenden from afar on pilgrimage tomorrow, and I have stuff to do.

Charisma

Quick aside, sethren, nowt to do with Othello.  Natural pedagogy, in fact.  Aphorisms, like.

A charismatic human being is the best environment Evoculture can exploit.  The charisma is part of the organism, not of Evoculture.

When a bad teacher teaches, they just repeat the required segment of Evoculture.  They rehearse, drily, the content of the physics lesson.

When a good teacher teaches, they enact part of the metaverse.  They say, look, this is me, doing physics.  At this moment, I am physics and physics is me, are you not enraptured?  Be like me.

Unfortunately it may not be physics.  It could be pyramid selling.  It could be fascism.  Evoculture’s not bothered. 

Dual inheritance, Sir Isaac Newton and the tale of Nob

  The myth at the centre of Shakespeare’s Othello is that of the cuckold, the husband with horns on his head whose wife is playing elsewhere.  There is a deep biological root here.  A child has two parents.  A woman always knows whether a child is hers.  A man never knows.  Okay, now with genetic testing we do.  But I mean knows sether, deep down in the ideoverse knows.  There is monogamy throughout the animal kingdom, but it’s never incompatible with a quicky behind a rock, uh?!, don’t know how it happened, over before I realised what was going on.  Yea?

  Human beings are not as lions.  A male lion when it drives out the master of the pride and becomes the alpha nob will kill all extant cubs and start again.  Thus its genes have a clear run.  Human males are often quite happy to bring up the male offspring of their mate that they themselves have not begotten, and can do it with kindness and affection.  I was brought up by such a man, sethren.  When he married my mother he did not put the five year old me to the sword.  So it would seem that the biological imperative, so persuasive among lions, is weak in men.  What’s going on?

  Dual inheritance, sethren.  What breeds in the metaverse is not genetic.  Isaac Newton had no children, but we are all his heirs.  Now it so happens that in Isaac’s village of Woolsthorpe by Colsterworth there also lived a strapping lad called Nob the Nob.  The guy was a legend.  There was no virgin for miles around he did not deflower, no buxom wench he did not inseminate, no matron he did not move to transports of ecstasy behind the potting shed, no menopausal chatelaine he did not plunge into one last bout of child-bearing.  Poor Isaac, on the other hand, was born so small his mother said he would fit into a quart pot, probably was on the spectrum, never married, and has no recorded offspring.  Whereas, in the same way all of us are descended from Charles ll, at least one Neanderthal ancestor and Jenghis Khan, there is nobody born in Britain, unless your Mum arrived in the last year already pregnant, whose genes, or some of them, have not passed through the nob of Nob the Nob.

  And yet, do we boast of poor Nob?  We have never even heard of him, you say.  Prove that he ever existed.  Exactly.  Like God, Nob’s existence or non-existence makes absolutely fuck-all (a category that must have existed long before an Indian accountant invented zero) difference to any of us.  Whereas our cultural inheritance from Isaac Newton is immeasurable.  And the cleverer you are (not in a Blair/Cameron sort of way, but in a Jim al-Khalili sort of way) the more you owe Sir Isaac.  On the shoulders of giants.  Of course we have to be aware that differential calculus, like everything else, evolved over aeons.  But there’s no denying that some ideoverses bring a lot of evolution together in a fusion event that produces a flash of light to illuminate the world considerably more than the glow of Nob’s nob after a hard day’s work.

  So, sethren, another paradox.  The more talented (and I won’t go into meandering lucubrations about what that word might mean, think Jay-Z, Richard Dawkins) you are, the more cultural descendants you will have.  Genetic descendants are often a problem, on the other hand.  Think of our poor dear Queen.

  Shakespeare is one of the greatest cultural ancestors of them all.  Yet cuckoldry had a prominent place in his ideoverse.  Why?

  Culturally, cuckoldry is not about loss of genetic inheritance.  It’s about scorn.  And of course, sether, it is not just men who feel it, why should it be.  It’s a human ill.  That you are being made a fool of.  That people are laughing at you, or even worse pitying you, behind your back.  Impotent rage, where all that you can do is kill the one who has created this situation, is not about the chance that is not being given to your genes.  It’s about metaversal humiliation.

  And of course the more noble, dignified and imperious the cuckold, the greater the humiliation.  But you are hungry, sethren.  What we will look at tomorrow is the evolution of a micro-myth, just between Iago and Othello.  Madam MeMe is absent from the layby opposite.  Now her waggons, brimming with the slop of mechanically recovered carnage, go straight to the beyond-hope.  They stand in line, mouths open, while the slurry is hosed along the level of their heads.  Not efficient, most of it goes elsewhere than down the throats of the destitute, but they can wipe it off and smear it in in their own time; and now Madam Meme is part of the Big Society, has juicy government contracts under the cheeks of her massive arse, her concern is not nutrition, but accumulation.  The rigour of the market applies.  No gain without pain.  But what shall we feast on today, sethren?  M&S prawn and avocado is rumoured to be good.  Off you fuck.

Mythrule

  Consider this paradox, sethren.  We are, as far as we know, the most intelligent species in our universe.  The history of our evolution goes back nine billion years, older than our sun.  I say this not from any religio-sci-fi-weirdness, but in the light of the speculation of Gordon and Sharov, who have applied Moore’s law to the evolving complexity of life and extrapolated back to its beginning, nine billion years ago.  Not exactly proven, but if so we got an early start in the cosmic evolution race.

  So, possibly the most intelligent species in the universe.  And we are the sole medium of all the great works of the metaverse, art and science, you know what I’m saying here, sethren, rational thought, all the big stuff.  We did all that.  Everything.  And yet we behave like fuck-heads.  Look, we have, in this land, huge wealth, of nature, of industry, of North Sea Oil.  Our political economy could be the happiest, a healthy well-educated nation, with the distinction of being populated from all the corners of the earth, living at ease with itself, none too rich and none too poor.  Whereas what are we?  A nation where more and more food vouchers are being handed out to the desperate, where those in semi-slavery have to do three jobs, with little food and sleep, just to feed their children (oh Madam MeMe, the time for corporate MeatyBits is at hand), while we give the place over to global criminals who can spend £30 million on a house, can commission pathetically hideous plastic yachts with three heli-ports and an attack submarine in the hold which they never even use.  I say this not to be contentious, heaven forefend, sethren, nor to imply that the holders of the great offices of state are the simpering wankers of kleptocrats too steroidally pumped up to wank themselves, but to point the finger at us, ourselves, at our willing complicity in this dystopia.

  That’s the paradox I will explain, sethren.  Our intelligence.  Our idiocy.

  We are governed by myth.   It evolved way back in the evolution of Homo sapiens.

  When we lived in small bands, the metaverse was small.  Our potential for variation in behaviour was constrained by the physical presence, gestures, acts, caresses, shoves and blows, smiles and glares, of the whole band.  Then, in our day to day lives, we might smell and touch everybody we knew of.

  But the human group cannot increase above a certain size, probably the size where everybody can smell and touch everybody else, until superordinate control mechanisms evolve in the metaverse, or at least the zone of the metaverse that flows into the ideoverses of that group.  Without these control mechanisms there will be no co-ordination or cooperation beyond the immediate, the proximate, the contiguous where sight, sound and touch orchestrate action.

  Once the control mechanisms have evolved and are a stable feature of the local metaverse, then individuals will be influenced and guided by them, and conditions will exist that allow such things as modes of production, division of labour, social hierarchies, to evolve.

  The myth can do that.  Let us remember William Shakespeare’s fascination with the person and the office of the king.  The person — cut the crap, sether, you know as well as I do who William Shakespeare is, this pretension to sturdy working-class complete-fucking-ignorance-of-absolutely-everything is beginning to seem like an affectation.  Oh.  Okay, the Earl of Southampton if you will.  The person of the king is the Homo sapiens bit.  The office is the metaverse bit, enacted through the H sap organism.  If this is hard to understand, consider our kingly equivalents.  Consider Tony Blair and David Cameron.  The office of Prime Minister channels great power.  The H saps T Blair and D Cameron are, I think we would agree, as exemplars of the species, fairly negligible.  If that.

  The evolved control mechanisms which allow the group to develop from the hunter-gatherer band to the mature nation state (okay, I’m telescoping here) are the praxis, the narrative and particularly the myth.

  What a myth is, sethren, I will demonstrate, again with Shakespeare, in the interplay between Othello and Iago.  But it may take some time. The sun is here, for a day or two at least, and no more does snow and moor grime make more material the car-fart born with a  boreal buffeting about our ears and noses around and around the Huddersfield ringroad by winds from Greenland’s charmless fells.  For a day or two at least.  The first Swifts have arrived, those closest descendants of dinosaurs which can only endure a few short weeks of our British summer.  And I am kept busy in the Refuge garden, our Abbot knows no mercy.  Othello and Iago may have to wait a day or two.