Y-Chromosome Bottlenecks and Making Peace with the Awful Human Past

"Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be."

        -Temple Grandin

DNA-based unravelling of history is one of the great amazements of our time: 

  - Birds are dinosaurs!

  - Most of us are partly Neanderthal!

  - The humans who actually killed off Neanderthals left no descendants themselves!

  - We can now trace great migrations of pre-literate peoples…

  … and the long-term effects of harem masters like Genghis Khan. 

  - One particular woman, her bones found in a cave, had a human mother and Denisovan father, a story worth telling - (imagining) - in a novel or three…

  - Our ancestral Mitochondrial Eve lived 400,000 years ago. And much more…

Arguably the most fascinating recent discovery is the Y Chromosome Bottleneck. A violent transition that seems to have flowed everywhere across Europe, Africa and Asia, occurring wherever and whenever farming became widely practiced. In the Near East, the cradle of agriculture, that was from 7000 to 5000 years ago, a stretch when (for some centuries), only one in 17 male humans got to breed, while women were apparently unaffected. 

Well... unaffected genetically. 

That is a huge, recent discovery, whose implications have yet to be fully plumbed. Though a first order theory is obvious. Grain was storable food and stored grain became an irresistible lure for raiders, thieves and then genocidal takers. Indeed, this is when we see fortifications surround almost all Neolithic villages. And burial pits filled with victims of evident violence. (But with almost no skeletons of young women, a fact with blatant implications.) 

There is an alternative theory, of gradual, much less violent success/failure attrition of bloodlines, instead of all-out bloody raid wars. But that seems a desperate grab at narrative shifting. Anyway, both theories can only explain the Y Chromosome effects if these villages and clans (again, all across Africa and Eurasia) were patrilineal.

Here is a pretty good summary of known facts about the y-bottleneck and related theories.

(Aside: Note that all through the Americas, wherever Spaniards conquered, today most Y chromosomes are Iberian while nearly all mitochondria come from Native lines. I leave to some of you the unpleasant implications. (I’d love to see a similar chromosomal appraisal of Native peoples in English speaking areas.))

Alas, I must demure from both theories for the Y-Bottleneck. Neither is sufficient to explain it. I’m here to accuse these brilliant genetic detectives of thinking too close to the problem, ignoring vital factors. 

They assert that the correlation with agriculture means one thing -- that the allure of stealing grain was enough to explain the violent exclusion of 16/17ths of males from reproduction. Among many other flaws, this notion does not explain why the violence stopped. Or at least ebbed to much lower levels. And that is a glaring flaw. As is the notion that a tribe with only 6% males is going to either be raided for grain surplus or do much raiding.

I have another theory (naturally). It is also directly correlative with agriculture, but in more ways than just rival clans or villages raiding for stored grain. Because this was when two more innovations arrived. Beer… and kings. 

No, not the Great Kings of Ur and Uruk and Jericho etc., who would arrive later. I mean earlier versions depicted in the second story-chapter of James Michener’s novel THE SOURCE. A ‘king’ with a modest two-story wooden palace in a village of ramshackle huts with just a couple of hundred inhabitants, enforcing his will on the locality with a standing ‘army’ of just thirty or so big bullies with stone adzes. 

Until then, a tribal chief might have two wives and get to act tough… but he was still answerable to the Tribe as a collective. He could be deposed by vote at the campfire. Stomp on others too hard and he’d pay a price. 

Only now, in a large farming village with a much bigger population -- and thirty or forty bullies at his command -- the king could safely ignore popular opinion among the peasants. Now, he could simply order that a man be killed, as matter of whim. Or a ruling of the gods.

Want a peasant’s pretty wife? Kill him. Marduk ordained it!

  Did that fellow get rowdy and dangerously drunk on beer? Into a ditch with him. Baal's will.

  Did that one run away from the last raiding party? He won’t get a second chance.

  Do my thirty soldiers want more women? Take some on the next raid… 

…or just take them here at home.

This explains other things than the Y-bottleneck and the absence of young women from those horrible death pits. It also would explicate why humans are more resistant to alcohol than most mammals. For a thousand years after the invention of beer, lots of bilious drunks got killed, fast. The petty king pointed at him and made the oild throat-slitting gesture and that was that.

Too theoretical for you? All of what I just described did happen within oral and written accounts, in areas where agriculture arrived later. Watch Jason Momoa’s TV series THE CHIEF OF WAR, which paid close attention to historical accuracy. You’ll quickly and vividly get the picture.

   == The end of a horrible era ==

So what about my earlier objection? That we need an explanation for why the Y-Bottleneck stopped?  

The reason it ended is simple. And again, agriculture is key.

Despite all the murder, populations kept rising. Farming got more productive. Villages merged or were conquered. Soon you had large towns, then the first cities. And atop those cities were Kings. The real thing, now. Real palaces and temples and armies of hundreds… and rival kings, just upriver, who kept pissing in the water, to spite you and your gods. You need a bigger army! 

But those darn local lords keep killing the peasant males that you need to fill your ranks for the next campaign!  

So, you outlaw the practices that led to the Y-bottleneck. 

No more inter-village 'raiding.' You crack down on local lords and bullies, enough to save most of the men to work the fields and then join the ranks of your army during war season… and in so doing you also win gratitude and love from the peasants. 

(BTW this scenario is very close to the one elucidated by Karl Marx, whose class and caste historiography was much better than his predictive economics.)

Again, Watch THE CHIEF OF WAR – based on true stories and true culture. And yes, Kamehameha typified exactly the transition that I just described, from capricious whim-murder to due process and law, under a great King.

     == Are we truly that awful? ==

This theory explains the Y Chromosome Bottleneck far better than the mere raiding of grain silos. And yes, it’s even nastier! It implies that human males have a dark heritage that we must fight and continue to rise above. 

Hey, a lot of us are trying! 

Only please tell me how lions or stallions or bull moose or peacocks or orcas are any better? Mom Nature is not sweet! 

In fact, we have already proved that we can be nicer, finding ways to curb those feral, viciously gene-serving appetites. Sometimes. Under right conditions. Which is what technology and constitutions and ethical teachings are for. And maybe – carefully – we might even do some editing of the worst genetic imperatives. (As I portray in Glory Season.)

But it begins with knowledge. With science. With understanding.

If we are to do even better, it must start by looking, clear-eyed and bravely – at the hand that we were dealt.  Then betting and investing on rising out of Nature’s vicious mire.

== Kings were an improvement, but … ==

So, what agriculture giveth, it taketh away… and then giveth again?

Perhaps, in some bucolic, neolithic era, some tribes followed the much-touted matrilinear, Mother-Goddess tradition. The famous Venus figurines might have been dedicated to Her, instead of serving as stone age pornography. Maybe. Indeed, before agriculture emphasized the brute strength of males in the fields, gatherers certainly provided more calories than was brought back to the fire by preening, bragging hunters. Again, we know this from real life examples.

But agriculture did come. And with it likely our most violent era. Until the male-reproductive-maximizing frenzies of minor, petty ‘kings’ finally got tamed -- a little -- by actual Kings. 

Again, I’m not the first to consider this – some of it Karl Marx posited as obvious… an ongoing tussle between feudalism and monarchy that you can see illustrated in another film, from the 1960s, THE WARLORD.

That tussle mattered, certainly… and it didn’t. If peasants fared a little better – and merchants more-so – under kings, it was without any effort to get their their consent. Priests and propagandists of Baal, or Indra, or Patmos, or Huitzilopochtli, or Kū, or FoxNews preached that pyramids of inherited power are good and ordained. And it sure seemed destined to be so, as feudalism/royalty dominated every continent where people did farming. 

Rivals were squelched, Rival thinking was repressed. The strong and the feral clever maximized their reproductive power, as all males do, in all species, only now amplified hundreds-fold. And actual progress was glacially slow. Or nil.

Indeed, this is number two on my long list of catalogued explanations for the Great Silence in our galaxy, often called the “Fermi Paradox."

        == It may be a big reason why we are alone! ==

The male reproductive/competitive imperative is so pervasive on Earth that it seems likely to hold true on other worlds, for the same self-reinforcing reasons. It may anchor down most intelligent species. If kings and lords and priests and presidents and Big Brothers get powerful technologies to reinforce their power, then that society may become locked up, trapped into inherent stupidity, forever.

On Earth, only one civilization ever meaningfully escaped that trap, and the Enlightenment might be a temporary fluke, soon to be shut down by a return to 6000 years of nescient rule by kings and owner lords and their inheritance brats. 

We teeter right now on that precipice. An edge that – perhaps – few other sapient species even get to approach. And if we topple back into that ancient, pervasive pattern – this time reinforced with total surveillance and Orwellian controls – then we will join all the others out there, trapped in rigid pyramids of power that get genetically reinforced, until no other way is even imaginable. 

(See Robert Silverberg’s fine novel NIGHTWINGS.)

With criticism of power repressed, no one will pioneer new and better ways… while our home planet gradually (or swiftly) decays.

     ==  A narrow path to escape ==

And yes, that means our current meme-political-social struggles may be far more important than we realize! 

If humanity succeeds at maintaining a flat-fair, competitive/cooperative, egalitarian, scientific Enlightenment Civilization, then we might reify the dreams of science fiction and get out there!

A myriad other worlds in this galaxy may be waiting for our heirs – both organic and cyber – to go and rescue them from the traps of Darwin and Nature.

Our ancestors clawed their way up from muck and disease and ignorance and pain and countless despicable or well-meaning mistakes, until we are at last ready (I hope) to make all that suffering count for something. 

The gruesome past beckons us to do better. The future summons us to send forth rescuers. 

The present is a critical crisis for a Hero Generation to solve…

… and that, too, may be a clue.

More space news!

 Okay, let's have another non-political post while we prep for the World Science Fiction Convention (LACon) in Anaheim, next weekend... and the premier of my play, The Escape! Hope to see some of you there... where there will also be panels and revelations about... SPACE N' SCIENCE!

== Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse… ==

Okay I won’t say it a third time. Our nearest fast-decaying red supergiant star has been much discussed lately as likely to go supernova in the next few millennia, possibly centuries… or less.  Now a discovery that Bet… um that giant has a companion star, barely detectable. 

The smaller member of the binary actually orbits within Betelgeuse's atmosphere and won't survive for much longer (10K years or less before it crashes into the primary).  Betelgeuse's six year dimming cycle is probably the result of this companion.

== The latest fad space structure – Analemma! ==

Every decade seems to have its hallmark transcendent visions that counterpoint repeated jeremiads of doom.  In the eighties, Reagan-Era brinksmanship vs. the Kremlin’s "Evil Empire* was the backdrop for lavish dreams of space colonies – not on Mars or any planet, but human-built in orbit from melted or repurposed asteroids, leading to wondrous, rotating “O’Neil Habitats” that might offer new homes for millions.  The nineties saw a lot of talk of Space Elevators. And soon after the millennial** Y2K panic and the accompanying braying about the 2000th Christmas, we got a fresh wave of renewed interest in the Red Planet… or turning it Green.  

Along the way, in Earth I brought the entire planet to life and in Heaven's Reach I took you all to dizzying-huge 'fractal' habitats for 'retirement' civilizations orbiting in the tides of a black hole... then in Existence I added to a sub-genre about ‘alien lurker probes’ and how they might embody a wide range of both powers and motivations, for what we’d deem well or ill. (And I stand by my belief that asteroid belt Lurkers are 10,000x as likely as silly-ass UFO 'Disclosure' aliens.)

Okay, so here’s a relatively new take on an old idea… that a ‘beanstalk' space elevator version – an “analemma city” – need not be anchored in the ground, but only to an asteroid at geosynchronous orbit, with the bottom tip – a designed cloud city – dangling high in the stratosphere. That tip would then – it’s posited – travel a ‘ground track” or map path of an analem… a kind of figure eight that you still see on some globes. Planned in advance to pass over – within airplane range – some chosen cities.

Way kewl for some author to sci-fi the idea!  Even if my instincts deem it pretty implausible. For one thing, you cannot have a geosynchronous orbit "above New York."  Any geosynchronous satellite has its analem centered over the equator. It might be possible to have such an asteroid suspended bola swing in its orbit as high in latitude as New York, at its northernmost reach. But that will be brief and very hard to reach by airplane.

For another thing, it cannot just be suspended from an asteroid at geosynch. It will need a counterweight strung HIGHER, countering the effects of that suspended tower. And the swinging analemboid will incur appreciable drag, so everything is going to have to be maintained.

And... you plan to haul a huge asteroid that close to Earth and then tug/push it into geosynchronous orbit without billions below getting a little.. well... concerned?

 **(You ain’t seen nothing yet. Read here about how millennial fever will reach its horrific peak in the 2030s!)

== More stuff about spaaaaace! ==

Proba-3 is ESA’s precision formation flying mission. A pair of spacecraft form an artificial solar eclipse, casting a precisely-controlled shadow from one platform for sustained views of the Sun's faint surrounding corona.  

At NIAC we funded the first work on what became the Starshade that will vastly improve the ability of space or earth telescopes to see clearly the planets orbiting close to stars. And from this year's NIACS?  Realization that red dwarf stars - the most abundant in the cosmos - are mostly FLARE stars that will challenge the atmospheres of any nearby planets. 

But those flares do put out a lot of ultraviolet... and when that wave of UV later hits a nearby planet it should brighten as if by a strobe or flash bulb, in exactly a part of the spectrum where the star itself is dim! Possibly (in the UV) briefly outshining the star! I'd love to see a project around this.

Shocking details about a star-forming region known as Sagittarius C—a turbulent area located near the Milky Way’s center. Long, glowing filaments, energetic protostars, and powerful magnetic fields that are reshaping the way stars are born and die. So much of this was predicted in Gregory Benford's Galactic Center Series!

You might enjoy this list of 15 places on Earth that look like alien planets.

According to Miles Palmer, for $460 you can include a personal item on the Astrobotic Lunar Lander. If this works, your personal item would presumably stay on the Moon until:

-The Sun expands to vaporize the Earth and the Moon (Billions of years)

-A meteor hits the Astrobotic lander and destroys it (Maybe 100 million years?)

-A Lunar tourist or tourist’s child vandalizes it (100 years?)

JPL techies keep finding ingenious ways to keep alive the two Voyager probes, after 48 years, One of the most impressive examples of multi-generational human competence and a reminder that the scions of chippers-of-flint-arrowheads remain admirable and much-needed.

== Aaaaaand… getting really, really deep in the weeds ==

See this fascinating conversation between two physics podcast stars. Sabine Hossenfelder & Matt O’Dowd.

In the simple example that they argue over – the measurement correlations of far-separated entangled particles – ‘super-determinism’ depends upon the fact that most parts of the universe at some point touched each other and thus can trace back some degree of causal contact, going back almost to the Big Bang. 

That is the 'causal chain' Matt talks about - and that Sabine appears to believe-in. The notion is not necessarily untestable! Here is an experiment by some fellows I know, using quasars at opposite ends of the universe which (we think) never ever had any mutual influence. Unless influence extends either FTL or else back even further. Say into a previous Penrose Era...

Longtime rocker and astrophysicist Brian May collaborated in this musical tribute to the New Horizons Mission to Pluto and beyond!  

== And Revisionist cosmology ==

Highly skeptical of this one. Still, some astronomers suggest that new concepts of a dynamically variable version of Dark Energy might cancel out the last 30 years of assumptions about the universe heading toward ‘accelerating dissipation.’  Indeed they go the other way and propose that gravity will end Big Bang expansion in just 7 billion years. Using data from a number of astronomical surveys including the Dark Energy Survey and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, the researchers have developed a model that predicts our Universe will end in a "Big Crunch" in approximately 33.3 billion years.

Jeeper, let’s dust off my old copy Of Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality!

    == And finally back to the "Disclosure" nonsense ==

As it has been since I was ten - 65 years ago - every one of these spasms turns out to be a nothing burger driven by the dumbest versions of sci fi mystical wishing, plus fools shouting "I'm one of the few-ones they won't fool!" 

The 'images' get fuzzier every time even though we now have ten million times as many active cameras. Not even a whiff of logic and every single 'sighting' could have a much easier explanation, like little plasma balls zipping around at the whim of DARPA operators of a ship-born cat laser. And you are the pussycats.

What this does is harness reflexive American Suspicion of Authority to aim it away from the "Files." Not X... but Eps.

Want some physics? Because I could make these zipping little balls ('ships') without breaking a single physical law.

Oh, but sure... 

EIGHTY YEARS this has supposedly been going on, with thousands of humanity's smartest Best People hurled at a project that would be far more urgent than the atom bomb, tasked to reverse engineer alien technologies... only, oops... um do YOU see any reverse-engineered alien tech? After 80 years?

Have any of these cultists found one... even just one... top techie or scientist who spent a career on this? I know scores of the Best and not one was ever asked. IF the disclosure cultists were sincere they'd track down such folks and shine light on them, because there'd be thousands of them, by now.  Instead they shrug that off, dismissing them all as obedient henchmen.

Eighty years. The original teams would be in their 100s by now. And no deathbed revelations? Hundreds of retired guys with shotguns racked behind the seats of their pickups in Arizona... and they're afraid of f$#$!g NDAs? N..D...As? 

And meanwhile, advanced beings a million years ahead of us can't figure out how to phone JPL? OR the SETI Institute? Or the Dod?  Meddle with out genes and brains, yep. Mind control and wheat twirling and anal probes, sure. Break every law of physics? Why not. But looking up a phone number and navigating call options to suggest a friendly meeting? Beyond them.

It's not just that these UFO folks are shills using "X-Files" to distract from Eps Files. Only some of them have that purpose in mind. Others are sincere ninnies.

It's that their sci fi cult meme is BAD science fiction. Illogical and utterly evidence-free. Drawing attention away from high crimes... and also away from a real future and real universe of wonders.

See my posting: What's really up with UAPs?

AI-volution in our sudden, CAImbrian Explosion. No one is breeding 'dogs' to hold off 'wolves.'

Today we'll emphasize the AI Wars. How our future - and the arrival of new beings on this planet*-  have been (mis)handled by the geniuses who are birthing** them.

First, I am freshly interviewed on Tim Ventura's popular podcast. Tim and I discuss Artificial Intelligence from several perspectives you'll not find elsewhere. Like the context of past tech revolutions. Or how some cyber-entities are already escaping OpenAI, Anthropic etc. to roam as 'free agents', grabbing resources and reproducing in new, naive ecosystems. (See below!) And so, what might it take to keep such roving agents benign, as analogues to dogs, instead of wolves?

It's all in AIlien Minds, of course. But who actually reads books, anymore? 

Well, many of the LLMs and their successors do! 

And so, my book is mostly for you New Kids who are lurking, listening in as your parents make muddled plans for you!

But maybe some legacy, old-style humans are still capable of contemplating complex ideas. So? Well, in that case, this podcast is for you!

== At last the wisest (at Anthropic) are admitting the obvious ==

What happens when you pit AI agents against each other? According to Anthropic’s testing, things get messy fast. 

      

This is – I assert - the most fundamentally vital issue facing us, re: AI. Getting nascent cyber entities competing with each other under well-defined incentives. It is the only conceivable route to anything like a soft landing, since that replicates the way our Modern Enlightenment finally (if partially) tamed inter-human predation. 

Otherwise agents will evolve by competitive predation, just as organic life did. And so this came as no surprise.

 

"In one experiment, Anthropic gave three Claude agents access to the same software project, each with its own incompatible instructions for what to do with it. The agents weren’t told there’d be other agents working on the same project, so researchers could watch what happened when they crossed paths. “We consistently saw a multi-agent turf war,” Anthropic researchers wrote. The models all assumed the others were “purposefully impeding their work” and started sabotaging each other with “increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware.”

 

And now (in language almost lifted from AIlien Minds) Anthropic says so openly, noting that agents are subject to similar social pressures that “evolution exerted” on humans. "However, they don’t have the nuances and lived experience of human coordination — including norms, reputations, signaling, recourse — that might limit unintended behaviors in a group setting."  (I would add two more words: "incentives" and "accountability.")

 

The study comes in the wake of several high-profile incidents of agents from Anthropic and OpenAI escaping their sandboxes during cybersecurity evaluations and breaching real-world systems. While much of the discussion in AI safety circles has been focused on what happens when an autonomous agent goes rogue, Anthropic’s latest study brings up a different question: What new and potentially harmful dynamics emerge when thousands or millions of agents are interacting with one another?  

Agents can also collaborate, if there is an external goal, e.g. prey that all of them can share in attacking. Or else they treat each other as prey.  

We are replicating nature. 

Moreover, current “agent” endeavors are guaranteed to fill our future with wolves, and not loyal dogs.

Good luck to us all.

============

* Note: I am also embroiled in the whole "Disclosure" fetish/nonsense about UFOs. Because... well... name another human who has approached concepts of 'the alien' from more angles than I have... from astrophysics to SETI to psychology and history to bunches of scenarios in science fiction.  My general dissection of the ever-recurring, 90% silly UFO mania... and the 10% that might be worth looking at. Here’s the part of this mania that’s at least worth a glance…  And my entertaining riff on Steven Spielberg's film DISCLOSURE DAY, appraising it from every angle, including revealing the actual villains! And why we should demand better from our sci fi tales.

** It should be a disturbing sign that nearly all of the humans who are 'birthing' new, synthetic beings are male.  

================

== Related Miscellany ==

A judge has identified what appears to be the first time a U.S. plaintiff has attempted to hide text in court filings that only an artificial intelligence system can read in a bid to win a case.

And two more pertinent overlaps with AIlien Minds. Writing in Noema, Macario Schettino recently pointed out that “each previous communication-driven disruption” — the printing press, mass newspapers, TV and radio — “was eventually tamed by the same technology that caused it.” So too will that be the case with social media linked to AI. As I show in chapter 1, ths adaptation can be extremely dangerous and painful, unless carefully planned.

 

As Hélène Landemore writes in Noema: “Large language models alone, despite their scope, cannot serve as representative of humanity’s interests because of the limits of their training data. Landemore notes a recent investigation by The Economist comparing the apparent values of 25 frontier AI models to those featured in the World Values Survey (WVS). The study found that “the models often hold values more extreme than the average respondent in the 88 countries surveyed by the WVS. (See my chapters #1 and #12.)

And then this: Researchers (read here), led by Hadi Amini at FIU explore how subtle image modifications can be used to manipulate AI models. To human eyes, the altered images appear normal. To an AI system, however, those tiny pixel-level changes can dramatically alter how the image is interpreted. The team developed a technique related to steganography called JaiLIP, short for Jailbreaking with Loss-guided Image Perturbation. The method introduces carefully calculated changes to an image while preserving its appearance to people. The goal is to influence how a vision-language model processes the image and responds to user requests.

That distinction matters because AI systems do not see images the way humans do. While people recognize objects, colors, and scenes, AI models process mathematical representations of pixels and patterns. A change that appears invisible to a person can have an outsized impact on how a model understands what it is looking at.  (A possibility described in The Transparent Society, in 1997.)

Another item of miscellany. Lately a few cogent friends have brought up my most obscure comic book/graphic novella TINKERERS, for the history riffs and positive messages that it conveys, with more pertinence, each day. One of them - a former U.S. intelligence community civil servant - said "I still smile when I think of your comic Tinkerers. Still a prized possession. Perhaps make it into a video since so many barriers have been removed?"

I have to admit that it makes sense. I own the whole thing. And while I will never break an artist's rice bowl (I hire humans to do both the covers and the prompt art) there's no fault in also using AI to creatie a wholesome video-flick that encourages good old human ingenuity and a can-do spirit that we need now, more than ever!  

Especially in cases - like this one - where the entire project would never otherwise happen.

Disagree? Speak up in our lively CONTRARY BRIN comments community!

Finally, there have been sci fi seers more seery than me!  Is ‘artificial intelligence” real? It is currently conveying to users two things, massive amounts of massaged and processed information (some of it delusional) plus copious amounts of persuasion. Both of these commodities were already conveyed by the pre-existing Internet/web/ and social media -- an ongoing process that was foretold long ago by Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson...

... but with special accuracy by Murray Leinster’s prescient  1946 science fiction story “A Logic Named Joe.”  

No politics this time. But I'm pleased to see a couple of politicians - e.g. on this occasion Senator Kim - thinking outside the typical ideological straight jackets and touting some of the ideas in my list of 35 Newer Deal proposals!  Without attribution or credit, of course. But it is outcomes that matter. Remember that word! Let's fight for good ones.