Sci Tech update! But first a few non-science items:
* In sci fi news: today and (I'm told) for a week, the newly edited and refreshed edition of GLORY SEASON - with a lovely new cover - is available for $2.99 (e-version) from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and the rest. One of my favorites.
* Political snippet alert: I'm told Stephanie Miller's radio show is comparing Donald Trump to Howard Beale of the classic flick NETWORK... as I have been doing for more than a year. No doubt because his followers seem entranced by his ongoing, raving breakdown. But will the comparison go farther? I still take bets - if offered odds - that certain oligarchs are watching the last ten minutes of that flick over and over again...== Onward to great SCIENCE!! ==
How sad that so many of our fellow citizens derive so little joy from this amazing scientific age. Even if you aren't in the adventure directly, we citizens pay for it and boy are we getting our money’s worth!
Van-sized robots lowered by parachute--> rocket --> crane to roam Mars with tiny helicopter companions. Giant telescopes that unfold like origami, perfectly, to reveal basic patterns of Creation. Using DNA from millions of living humans to reveal the ebb and flow of migrations and populations and even behaviors, from tens of thousands of years ago. Feathered dinosaurs? Trickster octopuses and grateful elephants and boat toppling orcas? Who'd a thunk it?
Moreover, unlike every other priesthood across time, our sages hurry enthusiastically to share it all with us, on PBS or YouTube or social media. And the theological implications... as we rapidly unroll the blueprints of Creation... are stunning, as I describe in my play The Escape.
The rapid sagacity of the fact professions spurs a reaction. So many of the oligarchs who want a return of feudalism now dig lavish prepper compounds and spread hatred of nerds, hoping for the scenario of A Canticle for Liebowitz. But if an "Event" happens, nerds will save everyone. And every prepper hideaway will become a luscious nut to crack.
Folks know, deep down, who their friends are.
So, let’s dive into our latest updates! Like…
Fascinating that we are learning the cerebellum – at the back of the brain – appears to be about a lot more than control of movement.
Want to live longer with replacement organs? Never underestimate Peter Diamandis, whose XPrize work was world-changing and whose book (Abundance: The Future is Better than You Think) and blog are badly needed tonics against the modern, masturbatory fetish of gloom and sanctimony-pessimism. (Only a people with confidence can take on today’s challenges!)
So, here’s Peter’s latest prediction that we’ll grow complete replacement organs by 2030! (I deem it quite plausible. Especially since this piece of news involves another of my heroes, Dean Kamen!)
== Straight outta SciFi ==
This news item about varied forms of life blending together has some folks writing to me: "It reminded me of Heaven's Reach." Well-well, here’s what the article in Popular Science (popsci.com) says: “For the first time in one billion years, two lifeforms truly merged into one organism!” Ahem… well… "For the first time" means during the last 100M years. Not great journalism. (That's not an 'eyeblink"!)
Still it’s very interesting. And pertinent to my novel! In Heaven's Reach the blending is violent and mooshes together all forms of life – combining them at the edges of black holes!
Even weirder…
First broached in Stanley Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey … and later in Star Trek… is the notion that living organisms can be persuaded to make silicon-carbon bonds—something only chemists had done before. Now, scientists at Caltech claim to have "bred" a bacterial protein to have the ability to make the man-made bonds, a finding that has applications in several industries. We now know that nature can adapt to incorporate silicon into carbon-based molecules, the building blocks of life.
Tardigrades! Resilient and a bit like the Trisolarians in The Three Body Problem, they can survive heat, cold, radiation and desiccation in space. Now scientists have injected human cells with the factor that lets tardigrade cells go gel-like when under stress… and it worked! On the single cell level, that is. But with implications that are rife for sci fi…
Is the Y Chromosome disappearing? Or is it essential in some of the ways I speculated, in Glory Season? (As I post this, the e-version is on sale for a week for $2.99!)
== More notions outta sci fi that just might… ==
Laser excitation of Th-229: “Physicists have been hoping for this moment for a long time: For many years, scientists all around the world have been searching for a very specific state of thorium atomic nuclei that promises revolutionary technological applications. It could be used, for example, to build a nuclear clock that could measure time more precisely than the best atomic clocks available today. It could also be used to answer completely new fundamental questions in physics”.
Now that experimentalists can provoke long lived oscillations in nuclei with lasers. Might a NUCLEAR CLOCK be possible, vastly more precise than today’s mere atomic clocks? Miles Palmer asks: “Is the accuracy of a nuclear clock relative to an atomic clock relatable to the ratio of the strong force to the EM force? Would this technology also impact gravitational wave sensing? Measuring changes in fundamental “constants” of nature?”
(The accuracy might be increased much more than the ratio of the force strengths (137). The frequency of the transition is more that 200K times that of the Cs clock.)
== More science! ==
The tachyon cosmological model is unlikely to pass rigorous experimental tests, given the unlikely nature of tachyons - particles that (in a weird aspect of relativity) might (notionally) move only faster than light. And if they interacted with regular matter could hence (as in Greg Benford's novel Timescape) conceivably violate causality. Now this study suggests that a background flood of tachyons could explain both dark matter and dark energy effects. Well, it has survived a first-order, very preliminary check. One of many more before the idea is taken as more than a quirky side thought.
As for AI and causality and quantum… one of you opined: "Of course, quantum computers may make a mockery of any encryption schemes we have currently. I also have a sneaking suspicion they may make a mockery of causality, if they work as predicted... but I get ahead of myself."
Is biology already applying this? The first half of Penrose/Hameroff 's notion of quantum effects in neurons is blatantly correct... it's likely there are bits inside neurons that use quantum, just like chloroplasts do, during photosynthesis. Moreover, shutting off those bits with anesthetic does correlate with loss of consciousness! I am further convinced by one subjective fact, how vividly we dream. Jeepers, that spectacular, cinemascope nightly drama must require prodigious computational power to spare.
The other half of the Penrose/Hameroff theory is a bit woo-woo... that consciousness happens when we connect with some cosmic quantum order that mere machines will never be able to reach? Hm, well. I've played with that in Sci Fi. But yeah, we're getting way ahead of ourselves.
My friend - and 25-year host of the Closer to Truth sci-philos TV series - Robert Lawrence Kuhn - has just published a comprehensive article on theories of consciousness — A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications — in Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. A most-enlightening and balanced survey of the core philosophical issue of our time, especially at a moment of potentially emerging AI.
== Physics is the weirdest science ==
Schrödinger’s Cat illustrates the problem of superposed quantum states that collapse into a single ‘real’ state when observed. Is the observer (which can be you) some kind of all powerful being with reality-enforcing powers, as in Greg Egan’s great novel Quarantine? I’ve long suspected that’s kinda mystical and that systems of particles (e.g. that famous cat) do it all by themselves by interacting with each other, collapsing the state all the time. New models on quantum theory suggest it, as said in this article: “For large systems, spontaneous collapse occurs frequently, rendering them classical in appearance. Subatomic objects interacting with these systems become part of them, leading to rapid collapse of their state and the acquisition of definite coordinates, akin to measurement.”
Want some more gosh-wow? Here’s Sabine with one of her mind-blowing riffs on ‘coincidences in physics.’
== Earth in balance ==
“Natural iron fertilization of the Southern Ocean by windblown dust has been suggested to enhance biological productivity and modulate the climate.” Now comes strong evidence for this.
In fact it seems that around a third of the fecundity and life productivity of the Southern Ocean comes from iron deposited by dust. Supporting this separately, a hugely indicative single event was the clouds of soot a couple of years ago, from Australian wild fires, that was followed immediately by huge plankton blooms and surges of fish populations. And then... whales!
Hm. Well I heard a large part of this cycle is whale poop! Saving the whales may have helped to keep the oceans thriving.
You'll recall in EARTH I had tide powered bottom stirrers sending plumes of silt into fast ocean streams, fertilizing them. What is clear is that the fanatics who have sued and prevented simple experiments in ocean fertilization have been harmful to the good of the world. This needs carefully graduated experimentation now!
== On and on about poor Tesla… ==
A terrific science explainer goes into Nikola Tesla's wonderful induction motor, one of many mighty inventions by a creative genius... though one who is betrayed, daily, by the insipid/raving cult that now surrounds his name. A cult that's desperate to transform a modern, successful, appreciated, collaborative - and psychologically troubled - corporate scientist into some kind of archetype of a persecuted, isolated wizard in his tower, hoarding mighty secrets and powers that were never-since replicated, even today. Nikola Saruman!
What utter, romantic hogwash. What a silly cult. Dig this. Tesla got tons of backing, was moderately rich most of the time, and even his crazier notions - the disproved fantasies - got heaps of $ invested into them. Did he have ups-and-downs? Sure, and it's quite a story with genuine lessons. But some kind of magical seer? Oy, what a load.
Above all, today's tens of millions of bright science minds - yes, standing on the shoulders of such giants - are even more brilliant, possessing instrumentalities roughly a quadrillion times more sensitive than anything Nikola had.
They... are... not... missing any magical wizard-wonders that he supposedly, cryptically hinted at.
Even the underlying reason for this cult - our western-enlightenment notions of romantically boosting underdogs and authority-questioners - that I talk about in Vivid Tomorrows - is so obsolete when it comes to Tesla, who now is *the* establishment cult figure on everyone's lips, like Edison used to be.
Geez I could name dozens of other, far more under-appreciated geniuses, ripe n' ready and deserving of the next cult-revival, instead of this silly and ultimately bo-ring herd-lemming mob that's chanting hosannahs around Nikola Tesla...
...who would have been appalled.
152 comments:
A couple of interesting podcasts from David 'Volts' Roberts (possibly at the 'wild enthusiasm' stage of development, but interesting):
- with enough energy, electrolysis can do a *lot* more than split water.
- perovskite solar cells may be (maybe!) ready to go.
In the TASAT department: 'boat wrecking orcas' was foreshadowed, not only by Melville, but by Robyn Williams' "2007" (that's the Aus science broadcaster, not the actor), and Damien Broderick's "Dreaming Dragons" dipped into the cosmic consciousness idea. On that matter, I find the spiritual 'embedness' with which traditional aboriginal culture regards country is a bit like that.
re: tardigardes and freezing cells, Robert 'Gaia' Lovelock was involved in experiments in hypothermia in hamsters. It worked quite well ("They were frozen. You could whack 'em on the bench then thaw them out with no ill effect..."), but clearly couldn't scale up to human size. Maybe with gel as well...?
'Dark matter is tachyons?' wasn't quite on my bingo card, but it has occurred to me that it might be a sort of echo from matter already swept into a black hole: sort of like lumps under the space-time carpet manifold. (An idea offered with no backing whatsoever!)
The two above tie in a bit with those pesky 'sophon' particles that were sent to afflict Humanity in the 'Three Body Problem'. I don't think the Trisolarians fully thought through the consequences of introducing a third player...
OK. Enough from me. Enjoy the rest of your weekends.
That's James Lovelock, I believe.
Great read, thanks!
Dr. Brin, your mention of living things merging from the PopSci article and "Heaven's Reach" made me think of a sci-fi story I read recently that impressed me in terms of seriously thinking about how evolution could make the process of colonizing other worlds pretty nightmarish. The story is called "Down Among the Mushrooms" by William C. Tracy, and if you have time to read for fun, it might be worth your time. It's only around 60 pages, so that makes it a novelette, or something like that.
On a somewhat similar note, I created an amphibious species in which all individuals are egg-layers. They lay their eggs in ponds, and compatible surface proteins (or glycoproteins, if they came from this planet) match pairs of eggs and merge. Thus you have sexual reproduction without having separate sexes.
Referring back to the previous thread, keep in mind that we are looking at both cortisol and testosterone, and that T-levels can vary to the point that some women have higher base levels than the average man, and some men lower base levels than the average woman. I thought it was very interesting that on Helen Fisher's map of neurohormone levels by US state, only six states came out testosterone dominant. Serotonin dominates by far the most states, and unsurprisingly these tend to be Red states. Rather than getting sanctimonious and proposing the replacement of one sex or the other, it might be best if we took advantage of those big old frontal lobes and just stopped teaching males that to be a "man" you have to be a troglodyte. Attempts to manipulate base T-levels in human males haven't been too successful.
Paul SB
Oh, I forgot to provide a link to that story. Here goes: https://www.amazon.com/Down-Among-Mushroom-Exploration-Biomass-ebook/dp/B0C471LLFX
A cult that's desperate to transform a modern, successful, appreciated, collaborative - and psychologically troubled - corporate scientist into some kind of archetype of a persecuted, isolated wizard in his tower, hoarding mighty secrets and powers that were never-since replicated, even today.
No doubt "The Prestige" had an influence on that. It is still a good movie, I think.
The archetype of magic-hoarding wizard is prominently featured in Jack Vance's Dying Earth series (and later Dungeons & Dragons), where it is hinted at that magic spells might once have been a type of semi-intelligent algorithm. Go, figure.
I assume that magical, mystical, cultish wizard-worship is fairly high on the Fermi Paradox solutions list. Rationalism is hard because it comes so late in the evolutionary trek, all the reptilian and romantic stuff gets baked in first.
While it is clear that the D&D magic system is based on Vance's work, I don't recall it being 'semi-sentient', although one of the Dying Earth tales does mention the lost art of mathematics as a basis.
Pratchett's Discworld had the semi-sentient stuff. One spell, in particular, had the foresight to get impressed into a wizard's brain so it could be cast at an appropriate moment. The timing of that moment was an ongoing topic of debate between spell and wizard.
It is ironic that the satire contained in a magical flat earth set on the back of a giant turtle (via a brace of elephants) needed a fairly rational mind with a firm grasp of logic to pull off successfully.
Tony thanks for the excellent capsule riffs on the post topics. Yeah Lovelock’s tale of the Hamsters was amazing.
There is one readily available method to alter male behaviors and indeed reverse affecting T and other levels. All it would take is a 6th feminism that admitted it had a duty to study the science of mate selection and thereupon teach girls and women how to do it scientifically, only augmented by intuition. Hollywood rails against the very idea, relentlessly and fifth feminists get enraged by even the possibility of paying attention to the one thing that 90% of women want – happy marriage to a loving and supportive partner.
But if that happened, the abusive males and those primed to abandon their families would be culled from the mating pool and replaced as attractives by good husband types. And a 2nd order effect would be that those on the borderline – who are currently imitating the guys who’re getting laid, would see this shift and start imitating the Good Guys.
I believe all it would take is a few dynamic female leaders in science and in memes. I can think of nothing else that would have more profound positive effects.
N Korean and Iranian missiles killing Ukrainian civilians. I truly wonder why Ukraine doesn't issue letters of marque to privateers to seize or sink ships from all three aggressors, under the laws and rules of war. Russia's 'shadow fleet' of semi-illegal, uninsured tankers would be great targets.
Dr. Brin, have you read Eve yet? That may be exactly what we are seeing the beginnings of. I'll post some excerpts from there, too, later. Take a look at its Amazon ranking: Best Sellers Rank #3,087 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals)
#7 in Biology (Audible Books & Originals)
#10 in Evolution (Audible Books & Originals)
#17 in Gender Studies (Audible Books & Originals)
Hopefully this, and other good science out there, will start to percolate in the culture before too long, but beating off the MAGA maggots is going to take a long, long time.
But there's another issue that Sanderson excerpt brings up. The actions of high-T men (and presumably high-T women would have the same effect if anyone bothered to study them) destabilize economies. The highly aggressive extremely competitive people who are most attracted to the power and thrill of finance are exactly the worst people to have running it. It's like what you say about power and corruption. It's not so much that power corrupts as power attracts corruptible people. It's aggressive competitiveness that fuels the ego of corruption. Promoting competition in business is a way to end civilization. Promoting competition in science, sports, the arts and any arena that leads to growth and improvement is good for society, but competitive money-grubbing is a failure mode, right down to human biology.
Paul SB
Tony,
4 elephants support Discworld. (There used to be a 5th, but there was an...accident.) As I recall, a brace=2. Sorry to be a stickler on this, but you'd need at least 3 load-bearing elephants to stabilize a flat world on the back of a giant turtle. It's just science.
Pterry was a journalist writing about, among other things, nuclear power before he found his groove. There was always a hard edge of reality in his world - literally: the most dangerous sword in Ankh-Morpork was the one with absolutely no magic.
Pappenheimer
Dr. Brin,
The bearers of letters of marque were found, in earlier centuries, to often not be the kind of people to be picky about their targets. Remember, Kidd started out as a pirate-catcher. I know Poul Anderson's novel had a government issue letters of marque and reprisal to starships, but he did not delve into the consequences, and I KNOW the US Navy wouldn't be thrilled to have to deal with shady ships attacking other, also shady, ships but being able to claim 'friendly' status.
Pappenheimer
P.S. Ran into a YT yesterday that goes some way to explaining to me why there are conservatives who like Star Trek, considering that the Federation is the epitome of Gay Space Communism. One of the answers is built in - Starfleet is, but pretends not to be, a military organization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNNWWdsEYGg
Pappenheimer
"There is one readily available method to alter male behaviors and indeed reverse affecting T and other levels"
Yup. It's why male reindeer seldom fight, and forms the basis of the plot of "The Gate to Women's Country" by Tepper
Pappenheimer
The shrill Panic-threats spewing from Lavrov and other Kremlin mouthpieces are quite different from their giggles in the Oval Office, when Trump had him & Kisliak over for jubilation, days after his inauguration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj6pdwFioTs
Pappenheimer:
Starfleet is, but pretends not to be, a military organization.
That's hardly a secret. It has captains, ensigns, admirals and such. Wasn't Gene Roddenberry a naval officer?
Pappenheimer:
The bearers of letters of marque were found, in earlier centuries, to often not be the kind of people to be picky about their targets
"By my hand, and for the good of the state, the bearer has done what has been done."
According to hour 1:05 on this Hal Sparks video, Ukraine did indeed inform the US before making an incursion into Russia. For whatever that's worth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrNIH0bBWNc
Larry,
wiki says Gene was an Army Air Corps pilot and flew B-17's in the Pacific, but close enough. He flew out of Oahu, which had (and has) a ton of Navy personnel to interact with.
Re: letters of marque, Ukraine has a lot more to gain by being seen as playing by the rules than any minor advantage gained by raiding Russian shipping, which might very well be sailing under other countries' flags. Cough Panama cough. Now that the Russian navy has relocated to either the seabed or the Sea of Azov for the most part, it's almost entirely a land and air battle.
Pappenheimer
P.S. There's a Trek movie where a Klingon diplomat sarcastically notes how many phasers and photon torpedoes an 'exploration and research' organization mounts on its vessels.
@Pappenheimer re: 'brace' I claim a letter of poetic marque! As for the Fifth Elephant, I think that was intended as a riff off a movie title (although some dwarves profited.) That leaves three or four elephants for optimal load balancing. Such is Life...
Letters of marque on oil tankers sounds a bit risky. John Sweeney, watching Putin's declaration of a 'terrorist emergency ' in Kursk, noted that it was first time he's seen Putin stammer.
... as well he might. Kursk is demonstrating a rapid evolution in drone warfare, that is forcing Russia to play catch-up.
This guy offers a LOT of detail and balancedperspective on the Ukraine war. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kndAdLxnasM
Tony & Pappenheimer, the important question RE: the Fifth Elephant, is always the percentage of BCBs available.
Paul SB
I might be violating copyright law, but I clacked out a sizable chunk from Bohannon's book to share here. It came up a few weeks back, and as I remember, someone had read the book but thought it was irrelevant because it was talking about events in the distant past. The thing is, evolution doesn't work like a computer operating system. At no point can you uninstall something and install a totally different system. Genetic mutation is mainly an additive process. New additions build on top of old ones, so what you end up with is a mix of old and new in the spaghetti code. That's why humans have code that is literally half a billion years shared in common with things like trees and mushrooms, but also have newfangled features like lungs and brains that the trees and fungi never got. So instincts that evolved 2 million years ago are still very much a part of the lives and motives of humans today.
Paul SB
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
by Cat Bohannon 2023
Excerpt pages 577 - 596 (Large Print Edition - sorry, all other copies were checked out from the library)
WRITTEN ON THE BODY
For all the storied wisdom of King Solomon, the man lived at most three thousand years ago, his body and its songs made of clay already long evolved.
If our ancestors were mostly polygynous - like gorillas and King Solomon, with one dominant male mating with many females - then our bodies should tell that story. If we were promiscuous, like our closest primate cousins - with everyone pretty much having sex with anyone they wanted to - we’d have traces of that history written on our bodies instead.
Because male mammals are usually the ones who compete for sex with females, male bodies are often the best places to look for telltale signs of mating strategies. Among our fellow primates, there are two physical traits usually tied to polygyny: teeth and body weight. The males have big canines - the eyeteeth, or “fangs” - and their bodies are significantly larger and heavier than the females’. This is as true of baboons as it is of gorillas. Male chimps and bonobos, meanwhile, are also bigger than the females, though the size difference is less significant. And while their canines are smaller than those of gorillas or baboons, they’re still far more intimidating than any hominid’s. No one in their right mind would want to be on the bad side of a full-grown male chimp - that’s two hundred pounds of muscle and pointy-toothed rage.
Aside from shedding food, big canines are mostly for threat displays. males threaten other males when competing for females. They also bare their fangs to compete for social dominance. So most scientists think these teeth are the way they are because that species has a lot of male-to-male competition for females. This seems to be as true for modern-day mammals as it was for our pre-mammalian ancestors: fossils going back 300 million years also have these sexy “show teeth,” better designed for flashing a lusty (competitive) smile than for eating.
Male primates usually have these huge, scary, pointy-toothed bodies precisely because it’s better not to fight. Better to make a lot of noise. Beat your chest. Yell a bit. Flash your face-weapons. Looking scary is generally good enough.
In the biology of sex differences, this is a general principle: the harder it is for males to get a chance to reproduce, the harder they compete with one another for the chance to have sex. Developing bigger, intimidating bodies with bigger, more intimidating teeth is a proven strategy for winning those competitions, ideally without having to lose an ear for it.
So, are humans more like the promiscuous chimps? Or the harem-style gorillas?
Let’s start with weight class: human males are only 15 percent heavier than females on average. By way of comparison, adult male chimps are 21 percent heavier than females, male bonobos are 23 percent heavier,, and silverback gorillas are a whopping 54 percent heavier. Mandrill males, who don’t live in a troop and show up only when the females are fertile, are nearly 163 percent heavier.
In other words, despite whatever you might have seen in bodybuilding competitions, human women aren’t that much smaller than men.
But it wasn’t always that way. Looking back in the primate fossil line, males were usually significantly bigger than females - it’s one of the ways paleontologists can tell the bones apart when they don’t have a fossilized pelvis. By the time hominins arrived, however, the males were getting smaller and the females were getting larger. This is fairly recent news: a paper in 2003 finally determined that male and female Australopithecus had about the same body size ratio as modern humans. That is, females such as Lucy were only about 15 percent smaller than the males.
And the males were already losing their big canines. If you line up the hominin skulls over time, the male canines keep getting smaller and smaller, until finally the biggest male canine you’ll find is the sort you now see in the grins of men like Tom Cruise: a bit longer, a bit pointier, but not very different from a woman’s. Tooth size seems to be modulated by a mutation on the Y chromosome, and human men still tend to have larger teeth. But the show canines are mostly gone.
So, if our ancestors did have harems, they were probably very distant ancestors. Maybe even further back than when we split from the chimps and bonobos. That means Solomon and his wives, and any other harems you’ve heard of, represent a very recent innovation in our sex lives. The trend, if anything, is convergence: men’s bodies getting lighter and less intimidating, and women’s getting bigger.
But what about promiscuity? Were ancient hominins having tons of sex with one another, like the chimps and bonobos? And if we were promiscuous, why didn’t our bodies settle somewhere closer to the chimps, whose males still have nasty-looking teeth?
Looking at the fossils, it’s hard to say. For one thing, teeth are also what we use to eat, and many early hominins were in the habit of eating starchy tubers, nuts, even tree bark, and the occasional grasses - hard stuff to chew. (We weren’t regular meat eaters until much later in our evolutionary history.) Have you ever broken a tooth on something? Imagine breaking your big, fancy show canines on a hard nut and dying of a tooth infection. In the long run, that’s not going to work for preserving long-tooth genes.
It’s possible our teeth evolved to be good at heavy, regular grinding, rather than slicing. Likewise, if food was especially scarce, smaller bodies with bigger fat stores made more sense, rather than large bodies with a lot of bone and muscle. Though our bodies do tell a story about our hominin ancestors reducing male competition and aggression, some other factors could have pushed those features, too.
Like testicles.
Promiscuous primates have gigantic balls. This is a fairly universal trait - chimps have them, and baboons, and so do bonobos. That’s because in promiscuous societies, females have sex with more than one guy, so the sperm of individual males have to compete with one another. If you want your sperm to win out, you basically have to blitzkrieg the female’s cervix with huge numbers. To make huge numbers, you need huge testicles.
Gorillas? Tiny little balls. Peanuts. But silverback gorillas don’t have to worry much about other males having sex with their harem. What’s more, the females aren’t in estrous for very long - only two or three days a cycle, compared with chimps’ ten to fourteen days - which means male gorillas don’t have to make as many sperm. So if you don’t need as many, why waste all that energy on growing big balls?
In primates, testicle size is so deeply linked to male competition that sometimes their size will even change depending on the social status of their owners. When Mandrills compete with each other for dominance, the winner’s balls increase markedly in size, and his face markings become more colorful. Loser’s testicles gradually shrink over a few years of defeats, and their faces become less colorful.
Human males, as a rule, have medium-size balls. A bit like Goldilocks: not too big, not too small. Since there’s currently no way to determine how big ancient hominin testicles were, we don’t know if modern men’s testicles are bigger, smaller, or about the same size as they used to be. But given the changes we can establish, it’s not hard to imagine that our forefathers’ balls were quite a bit larger than testicles are now. Regardless of how they got that way, having medium testicles now does imply that our ancestors weren’t especially promiscuous, or at least not as much as the chimps.
And there’s another count against promiscuity hidden in our bodies. Produsing more sperm, via larger testicles, isn’t the only thing competitive males do. When male mammals want to make sure the females they’re having sex with will have their babies and not some other male’s, they sometimes produce a clumpy, sticky seminal fluid that “plugs” or blocks the female’s cervix against later intruders. Among primates, at least, the more promiscuous the species, the thicker this seminal plug. Chimps have the thickest of them all: inside the female’s vagina, the fluid in the male chimp’s semen turns into a four-inch long piece of clear, rubbery spunk. Primatologists know this because they’ve watched such plugs fall out of a female’s vagina, usually when they’re dislodged by another male’s penis. Many scientists gather these from the forest floor like prized gems.
Human semen also thickens, but not as much as a chimp’s does. And it’s only thick and sticky at first, liquefying about fifteen to twenty minutes after the male ejaculates. Still, it’s not hard to imagine that it might stick to a female cervix and block any other semen from getting through. Except that human females produce a lot of cervical mucus when they’re fertile, good for getting sperm up and through the cervix, should a woman so choose, and also really good at flushing out excess material from the vagina during that period. When in contact with a woman’s fertile cervical fluid, human semen can liquefy more quickly than it does in air.
And then there’s the fact that we walk upright. A goodly portion of a man’s partially dissolved semen plug could fall out not long after the woman stands up. No need for another man’s penis to dislodge it. Which means a woman’s vagina is pretty much good to go for a male competitor within a handful of minutes. Thus, unless our female ancestors were in the habit of lying on their backs for hours after sex while they were ovulating, it’s unlikely that modern human semen evolved to block other men’s sperm.
Medium balls, runny sperm, short teeth, smaller bodies - that doesn’t sound like King Solomon to me. Doesn’t sound like King Chimp, either. If ancient hominins had a lot of male-to-male competition going on, our bodied are pretty good at hiding the story.
But there is one other way ancient hominin males could have tried for reproductive success: he could always try raping his way to fatherhood.
This is one of the most taboo subjects in the science of human sexuality - whether human males evolved to be prolific rapists. It’s not hard to see now why we’d ask the question: right now, everywhere in the world, men raping women is common. It’s especially prevalent in times of war and violent social conflict - the Congo is rampant with rape; ISIS uses it as a primary weapon; and after Russia invaded Ukraine, reports immediately began to emerge accusing Russian soldiers of committing rape as a war crime.
All rape is horrific. Sadly, it’s not unique to our species, either. So does the human body tell a story of a rape-filled evolution? Instead of Solomon, should we look to Zeus?
Better to look at our closest relatives. Given that there’s very little rape in chimp society, there was probably even less among ancient hominins. For one thing, it was dangerous: a fully-grown female hominin could beat the bejesus out of anyone who tried, and so could a female chimp. Though chimp males can be absolute jerks to females in their troop, they rarely engage in violent forced copulation. That’s likewise true among bonobos, baboons, mandrils, and even gorillas. Aggression, coercion, general harassment, yes, but rape is incredibly rare.
In fact, when it comes to sex, chimp males are typically more cajoling, solicitous, even friendly. Or they employ tactics remarkably similar to what human domestic abusers do. Male chimps will physically and vocally harass females, often in an attempt to socially isolate them, stress them out, and wear them down. They put their aggressive male bodies between the female they’re targeting and the rest of the troop. They do their best to prevent the female from associating with other males - and if they do observe the female hanging out with other males, they’re more likely to back-hand them later. Primatologists call this “mate guarding,” and it does seem to give male chimps a reproductive advantage: while dominant males still get the best chance to pass on their genes, less dominant males who mate guard have a better chance than those who don’t beat up females regularly.
But remember that chimps are, by and large, a male-dominated society. Bonobos are female dominated. When a male bonobo tries to backhand a female, he incurs not just her wrath. All the members of the troop are liable to descend on him. Bonobo females have an incredibly tight-knit, interdependent social web, and they use that web to defend one another from any male who gets out of line. They might even chase a too-aggressive male out of the troop entirely. So bonobos don’t do a lot of mate guarding.
We don’t know if human ancestors were more like the chimp or the bonobo. Genetically, we’re equally related to both. We do know that sometimes male domestic abusers are also rapists. But not always. And while we don’t seem to have any reliable data on whether abusive human men have more offspring than non-abusers, it does seem to be the case that males with significantly less money and social status are more likely to be violently abusive toward toward their partners than men who don’t have those problems. So maybe human men have evolved to use violent mate guarding as a reproductive strategy. or at least, as primates who are incredibly similar to chimps, maybe our bodies and our brains were abuse ready: given a social scenario in which less dominant males have the option of using mate guarding as a strategy, it wasn’t that much of a stretch for our ancestors to start doing it. Maybe that’s part of why some men still do it today.
It’s a sobering thought. But it still doesn’t quite answer the rape question. Human abusers, while predominantly male, aren’t always rapists, just as rapists - also usually male - aren’t always domestic abusers. There is one thing both categories of men have in common, however: extremely boring penises.
Assume that male bodies “want” to pass on their genes. Assume that female bodies want to as well. Let’s also assume that male bodies want the best females, and likewise want the best males. But the game isn’t equal. Not at all. Though females can technically “rape” males, they can’t exactly rape males in a way that would force them to father their children. That’s because male bodies don’t actually contribute that much to reproduction - as a rule, males have testicles, but they don’t have a womb. Females usually do. So if males can can somehow manage to force their sperm into a female’s reproductive tract, they get a chance to pass on their genes. It’s a reasonable ploy. But given enough time - the sort of evolutionary scale that allows some genes to be favored in response to environmental pressure - the female body is likely to produce counterploys. So if ancient hominins were particularly rapey, it’s reasonablt to think some trace of that history would be written ion our bodies.
Think of it as a weirdly sexy Cold War. Rape is common across the animal kingdom. But species that commonly use rape as a reproductive strategy are often the ones with the more elaborate penises, such as the mallard duck’s curlicue. That’s because the vaginas they’re raping have their own agenda, or at least the genes that produced those vaginas do, which generally “aim” to be passed on in the most competitive way possible. But human vaginas are only a tiny bit foldy. For the most part, it’s a straight path to the cervix. The human penis is likewise straightforward: long, medium girth, no bells or whistles to speak of. It doesn’t corkscrew. It doesn’t knot. It doesn’t have any obvious structural weapons. Hell, it doesn’t even have a baculum - that little bone that other animals use to prop up their erections. That means a man who regularly tries to forcefully shove his turgid weapon into an area of a woman’s body inconveniently housed between two muscular, flailing limbs - not to mention the proximity of her very real and very strong pubic bone - is likely ti break the thing. And human penises do break, even when they’re not trying to rape. Left untreated, the injured member is far less likely to be able to transfer sperm to any female in the future.
So if the human penis and vagina evolved in a rape-fueled competition, our current anatomy doesn’t betray that history. If anything, our bodies reveal a lot of consensual sex without very much violent male competition, and maybe even a continually reduced competition over time, with our older ancestors being more competitive, and our more recent ancestors getting less and less so.
There are two features of our sex organs that support this idea. Chimp penises don’t have any obvious head, but they do have penile spines. Human penises, meanwhile, have that classic arrowhead design, and the shaft is completely smooth. Both traits might have come about because our ancestors changed the way they went about mating.
Let’s start with the head. The chimp penis - which isn’t very long, by the way - is thicker at the base and narrower at the head, forming a kind of elongated wedge shape. The human penis has the glans - the fluted arrowhead - which is typically thicker at the flared end than the shaft.
There is one good reason why chimps don’t have a wide head and narrow shaft - it would be really lousy at dislodging another guy’s seminal plug. If you want to try to dislodge a rubber lump from inside a capped tube, your best bet is a narrow wedge: something that manages to get inside the vagina to the side of a competitor’s plug, and then, by thrusting quickly, help draw it out. Trying this with a wide penis head would just drive the silly thing in there deeper, potentially bruising our own penis in the process.
One theory about the shape of the human penis goes as follows: so long as the competitor’s sperm isn’t too thick, maybe the human penis head is good at scooping it out. One lab even created an artificial vagina and a range of artificial penises. Then they filled the vagina with a semen-like runny oatmeal puree. (No, really.) The penises with the most humanlike head shapes that slightly fluted glans, thicker than the shaft — were the best at clearing the vagina of the most pseudo-semen. Thus, the paper concludes, the human penis evolved its particular shape in order to help men with sperm competition.
It might have gone that way, sure. But like many such papers, the authors ignored one key feature: the incredible unlikelihood of an ancient woman lying on her back being continually inseminated at a rate that exceeded three men per hour. Remember, human semen things out after twenty minutes, gradually dribbling out of the vagina like any other fluid. What’s more, being upright means we have even more seminal fallout than our primate cousins.
So what else could the glans be good for? How about sucking out fertile cervical mucus? Thought the human penis doesn’t fit so perfectly into the vagina cavity that it makes a total vacuum seal, most do produce a slight sucking force during thrusting. So each time the penis draws out, a small amount of suction draws away material from the upper vagina down the fluted rim of the penis head and along the shaft.
The acidic vaginal environment is actually toxic to human sperm. The pH is too high. Sperm die inside the vagina rather quickly. Fertile cervical mucus, however, is the right pH for sperm. It also has a useful structure that helps swim through the cervix toward the uterus and fallopian tubes. So the more fertile mucus that surrounds the upper vagina and cervix when a man ejaculates, the better chance his sperm have to get the hell out of there through the cervix before the pH of the vagina kill them all. The very best position to be in, actually, is to ejaculate as close to the cervix as possible, with a lot of cervical mucus around and behind the sperm at the moment of ejaculation, shielding the tiny bubble of semen for a few crucial minutes while they swim desperately toward their north star.
A penis shape that was particularly good at getting them as close to the cervix as possible, with any potential barriers cleared and “docking station” usefully sealed, would be a benefit.
To do that, however, you can’t just thrust once or twice with your fancy new arrowhead penis. It’s gonna take more work. And we do work: human males take, on average, more than four times as long to ejaculate during sex as chimpanzees. And part of how we manage to pull that off, sadly, may be that the human penis became less sensitive.
Chimp penises, like many other primates’, have little spines on them made out of keratin, the same material as your hair or fingernails. These mammalian penile spines come in all shapes and sizes. In cats, they’re proper spikes. In chimps, however, they’re more like nubby polka dots. The bigger they are, and the more a male has of them, the faster he’s able to ejaculate when he has sex. That might be because nerves in the chimp’s penis are responsive to signals from those little bumps. In other words, they likely feel really, really good when they’re rubbed.
Of course, having a sensitive penis is a reward in itself. When sex feels good, you’re more motivated to have it - enabling your genes to get out there and carry on. Also, in the competitive chimp world, there isn’t a ton of time for long bouts of sex. With all the males competing with one another for access to females’ sex organs, if you’re going to get something done, you’re probably going to want to get it done quickly. Having a sensitive penis could be one way to do that.
Having sex feel less good would have to be especially rewarding, from an evolutionary perspective, in order for that trait to survive. If our ancestral penile spines really did feel good, there’d probably need to be a decent reason why the hominin line lost them. By comparing the genomes of chimps, humans, and Neanderthals, geneticists are just starting to suss out which parts of our DNA have been deleted over our evolution. Thus far, it looks like about 510 deletions. One - an androgen receptor that triggers certain kinds of development in male bodies - is probably responsible for the loss of our penile spines. And men lost them fairly recently: somewhere after we split from the chimp line, but before we split into ancient human and Neanderthals 700,000 years ago. We also lost the genetic makeup that gave us sensitive facial whiskers, which might also be part of how we lost the sensitive penile spines.
Either way, they’re gone, and they’re not coming back. We most certainly lost them by genetic accident, but given how important sex is for evolution, it’s possible their loss had some sort of advantage. Maybe longer bouts of sex lead to greater male-female pair-bonding. Or it helped suck out more fertile mucus to protect the guy’s sperm. Nobody’s really sure.
But for whatever reason, it wasn’t as big a deal for males to take longer to ejaculate, which does imply that there was less immediate threat from other males.
In a rape-driven reproductive environment, you’d expect all sorts of violent male competition, both in men’s bodies and in women’s reproductive organs. Human beings don’t have those signs. There’s no evidence of invisible mechanisms, either: whether a man forces a woman or they have consensual sex, he still has a roughly one-in-four chance of producing a child. Among mallard ducks, a raping drake has only a 2 percent chance of having offspring - far less than if the female were willing. A proliferation of duck rape has been around long enough, in other words, that the female’s body evolved to compensate - not true for hominins. So, no matter the prevalence of rape in modern times, our human ancestors probably weren’t very rapey, they probably didn’t have a lot of violent competition for mates, and they were only about as promiscuous as you’d expect from a medium-balled primate.
Okay, that's it. If you want the exciting conclusion you'll have to get the book yourselves.
Bon apetît
Paul SB
Pappehneimer:
There's a Trek movie where a Klingon diplomat sarcastically notes how many phasers and photon torpedoes an 'exploration and research' organization mounts on its vessels.
And yet, on the opposite side, I was amazed (in a bad way) watching the movie Captain Phillips at the complete lack of even rudimentary defensive weapons on an American cargo ship in international waters. They had no way of repelling a motorboat containing a handful of terrorists with rifles. The average rural American farmhouse is better able to defend itself.
True. Switching to the series 'Firefly', it's made clear that the good ship/rustbucket Serenity mounts no weapons, though it does have a 'public relations specialist' who has a friend named Vera. Compare that to the ships of the British East India Company, who routinely mounted cannon on an actual gun deck in case pirates or the French showed up. The practice lapsed after the RN achieved dominance, because cannon are expensive and take up cargo space...
Pappenheimer
Paul SB,
RE the Eve excerpt.
Interesting. Without reading beyond what you posted, I'd guess that the practice of male circumcision has to be part of the plot--given the stretched out surface area and number of nerve endings on the foreskin.
Slim, I vaguely remember the author talking about it, but I only actually own the audio edition, so I can't look it up in the index. Maybe somebody who has a hard copy could check?
Should I have prefaced it with a trigger warning? I'm used to this kind of stuff, but I can imagine other people getting squeamish.
Paul SB
Larry,
There might be some old rules governing how ships on the open ocean fight with each other so everyone can distinguish pirates from good guys. Weren't those pirates essentially a business entity too?
Then you've got to work out how to pay and train a crew to fight. That blurs the lines at some point. Are they sailors? Merc's? Pirates?
More importantly, though, remember how Phillip's ship actually DID fight? If the water hoses had been better maintained, they could have sunk the pirates without firing a shot.
Heh. Oof. That hydrovoltaic cell article was VERY click-bait-y.
Here is the journal article it references. Sorta.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435120303330
Alfred Differ:
some old rules governing how ships on the open ocean fight with each other so everyone can distinguish pirates from good guys
I wasn't suggesting that commercial vessels all have cannons and ship-to-ship missiles. But I would expect the crew to have access to rifles or handguns for personal protection. It seemed inconceivable to me that the rules of engagement prohibited them from being able to defend against any armed men who walked onto the ship.
And yes, in that context, "pirates" is a better term than "terrorists".
Heard on Stephanie Miller's radio show:
"J.D. Vance makes me want to have a beer with Jeb Bush. And I don't like beer or Jeb Bush."
Alfred, that hydrovoltaic paper looks promising, but it makes me wonder about scale effects. I think I was 11 when I first saw Star Wars, and I remember thinking that if Tatooine was covered in vapor farms that sucked moisture out of the sky, maybe that's why it's a desert planet. The evaporative process the paper talks about sounds good, but if it goes to a very large scale it could effectively shut down the water cycle. Cars were seen as an unequivocal good back in Henry Ford's day, but now that there are billions of them we can see the downsides, and maybe even be driven to extinction by them.
Paul SB
In my continuing effort to better grasp the American psyche, I've been reading and listening to Heather Cox Richardson. She reminds me of Hari Seldon.
In Noema Magazine, Nathan Gardels edits one of the top sites for truly insightful intellect, online. (Highly recommended. https://www.noemamag.com/) Which makes it especially ironic and fun when I get to disagree... and thus prove we truly are the open-minded, creatively argumentative ones. As when, sorry, I assert that the following is baloney:
“The ongoing populist surge of recent years did not cause the crisis. It is a symptom of the decay of democratic institutions that, captured by the organized interests of an insider establishment, failed to address the dislocations of hyper-globalization, the disruptions of rapid technological change and the attendant creep of widening cultural cleavage. Too many were left behind and struggled while others prospered and played.”
Bah. It is NOT the poor who are flocking to the populist right. Most of those doing so are at least somewhat comfortable, with middle class jobs and lives. The actual poor are not in their coalition.
That is not to say they don’t have grievances! But is it possible to actually listen to their complaints instead of patronizingly assigning the wrong causes?
Sure, it is true that every phase of the recurring US Civil Conflict – going back to 1778 – featured alliances of aristocracy with ill-educated lower middle class whites. Cornwallis found more royalists, loyal to the King, in the South. In the 1860s a million southern whites marched to fight and die for their plantation-lord class oppressors. Mark Twain diagnosed this romanticism brilliantly. There are always would-be feudal lords seeking to manipulate it.
But those who blame ECONOMICS or RACISM are truly chasing their tails. U.S. economics have measurably improved (as always) under Democrats, with today’s massive re-industrialization of US manufacturing happening faster than at any point since WWII.
All you have to do is actually watch a few hours of Fox or other MAGA-inciting outlets to see what’s happening. While they rail against woke-ism and lie about economics and blow racist/sexist dog whistles, by far the largest share of air time is spent denouncing … nerds. Fact professions that range from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror.
HOW can they do this, when scientific civilization has wrought the cornucopia that red-folks take for granted?
I assert that the hostility was already there. Because Blue America, with its universities and bright city lights, has spent 140 years offending Red America *by stealing its children!*
If you haven’t yet, look at a few paragraphs of what Robert Heinlein said about this ongoing tendency toward know-nothing righteous anti-intellectualism.
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2017/03/looking-back-at-heinleins-future.html
“...partisans of Donald Trump have turned their attention to slashing the powers of what it calls “the administrative state” — “
This is consistent. While many – NOT a majority – of red Americans are racist or troglodytic, most express resentment toward being looked down upon. This is exploited by oligarchs who have no personal interest in racism or sexism. Their aim is restoration of feudalism and rule by inheritance brats
And ONE force stands in their way. 20 million skilled professionals, civil servants etc who enforce rule of law and the science nerds who keep saying “That’s not true.”
Only by crushing those 20 million boffins can feudalism be restored. And THAT is the core purpose of Project 2025.
https://www.noemamag.com/
"I also want to remind you that there is a truly high danger that this election will not be decided by the vote of the people. Trump, Maga, Republicans have been for a year, and perhaps more, working across the country from the city and county level up through state legislatures to install people who will refuse to certify ANY election result. if even one of those people follows through on what they have publicly promised to do, there is a real risk the election will be given to the US House of Representatives to decide = Trump presidency.
"...and you notice that Trump has stopped campaigning almost at all, and tells his minions that they do not need to vote - that “he has the election all worked out”. "
https://youtu.be/ZSM7LJgKXAo?si=A8WJiE3vGFUJdEjb
Paul thanks for those very informative excerpts. The 2nd half, about penises and such, was quite fascinating. The first half was also fact-rich… but highly tendentious and wrongheaded in its conclusions and that’s the part I’ll now discuss. Starting with: “Developing bigger, intimidating bodies with bigger, more intimidating teeth is a proven strategy for winning those competitions…”
“Let’s start with weight class: human males are only 15 percent heavier than females on average…”
Yeah, yeah, yeah I’ve heard all this before. The party line is that it means human males have become tamer and more monogamous. Sure. Both are true in many ways… plus especially the trend toward NEOTENY or retention of childlike traits like curiosity and adaptability and re-programmability… all of which I discuss here: https://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/neoteny1.html
But does that translate into lessened COMPETITIVENESS? Nor does it mean human males aren’t opportunistically polygynous.
“So, if our ancestors did have harems, they were probably very distant ancestors.”
Say Whaaaaaat? Jeepers, *Look at human history!* EVERY time a small clade of human males got maximalist enforcement power they too other men’s women and wheat. Find exceptions?
BTW male female size difference still translates to an *average* of 1.3 wives per successful male. But 8000 years ago there WAS the Y-chromosome bottleneck.
Then why aren’t human males much larger with bigger canines? Because our styles of competition have rendered those displays obsolete! At least 10,000 years ago and likely 150,000, it became about persuading a bunch of allied males to battle beside you to suppress others.
The author gets a lot more cogent when discussing rape. Which is likely declining as a strategy among human males and likely has been for a long time… and even now is generally about psychological oppression, rather than physically forced intromission.
===
“ I was amazed (in a bad way) watching the movie Captain Phillips at the complete lack of even rudimentary defensive weapons on an American cargo ship in international waters. They had no way of repelling a motorboat containing a handful of terrorists with rifles. The average rural American farmhouse is better able to defend itself.”
That’ partly guild protection… militaries not wanting merchantmen to edge into their job… and also “Don’t make them mad enough to kill you!”
Dr. Brin, I think you're making the same mistake that a lot of people do in terms of how you conceive of instinct. The bigger the animal's brain, the less instinct acts like computer software and the more it operates like a set of capacities. Sure, harems are all over human history. That's just historical fact. But is that fact explained by the existence of some instinctive drive to create harems, or is opportunity more the case. Chimps and gorillas form cooperative groups to batter other males out of the reproduction game, though they never developed guns and knives to do it with. Genetics gives humans far greater behavioral flexibility than anything else out there. That's why humans have been to the Moon while the rest of the Animal Kingdom rarely crosses a biome.
Instinctively, humans seem to be more inclined toward a pair-bonding strategy, like marmosets or tamarins, than a harem strategy like gorillas. The fact that harems happened after the rise of civilization, but likely much less so than before, illustrates two things. One is variability, the other is the effects of scale.
Now sexual drive appears to be largely a function of testosterone, if you only have instinct to work from and absolutely no influence from social norms and expectations. One thing testosterone consistently does is increase muscle mass, which increases the size and density of the bones that support them. If you look back into the paleontological record, you see an important trend. After about 100,000 years, H. sapiens started losing bone density, becoming less robust (muscular) in both sexes. Within 50,000 years of this we get the great awakening, when humans start to create art, show some signs of maybe having religion, bury their dead, all sorts of behaviors we think of as being especially human.
con't.
continued.
Of course there's the correlation between testosterone and competitiveness. The bones show that as humans became more human, their T-levels dropped. Less bone mass, less muscle mass, increasing size of social groups (thus more cooperation), more complex, brainy behavior. That's the trend. Remember Sapolsky's quote about giving monks testosterone and they get more competitive over who can do the most random acts of kindness? Competition can come in many forms and be expressed in many ways. Take two men who have exactly the same base level for T, and they can be completely different people. One thinks his masculinity makes him superior to women, for which he has nothing but contempt and would have no problem raping and/or killing them. The other one sees himself as a protector of the weak, obligated by his strength to help those who are not as strong. T-level is an important piece of human instinct, but it doesn't program humans to perform specific acts, it only actually drives them to continue doing those acts they succeed at. Measure T-levels of two football teams before, during, and after a game, and what you see is that whichever team is in lead at any given time, their T-level rises and the other falls. This mechanism encourages those who win to keep doing what they have succeeded at, and discourages those who failed.
Now let's look at your harems. In the transition from chiefdom to state, the biggest, wealthiest people find themselves having increasing resources as the population rises. Social inequality begins with kinship obligations, so people who have more kin who owe them labor, gifts, or whatever is valued, have more power and wealth. As population rises, these people's power and wealth snowballs. Once they have a solidified, inherited social position, they have the ability to command people, including soldiers, to do their biding. Certainly many of these people will use that power to acquire harems. Others use that power to fight wars and acquire territory and subjects. Many will do both. Humans do not have an instinct that drives them to build harems, but some humans certainly have the ability to do that, and you can bet quite a lot of them will choose to. That's not the same thing as genetic determination, especially when you start factoring things like social norms and values, and the prestige that one culture awards to men who gather harems but other cultures denigrate men for not being strictly monogamous.
Paul SB
If you think that's ironic, or even surprising, you haven't delved sufficiently into the Prachett/Cohen/Stewart collaborative subseries _The Science of Discworld_, which goes rather deeply into the interrelationships and strange loops of fact and fantasy and how they interact in sophont brains. "Narrativium" is one of the most broadly applicable explanatory concepts I've ever run across.
Dr Brin:
...discussing rape. Which is likely declining as a strategy among human males and likely has been for a long time… and even now is generally about psychological oppression, rather than physically forced intromission.
The very concept of rape has changed over time, and I suspect over cultures even at this particular moment.
In the not-so-distant past, rape was a property crime against the woman's rightful male owner, her husband or father. In the former case, it was unlawful use of his property; in the latter, it was devaluing the worth of the daughter he expected to marry off. In both cases, though one more indirectly than the other, it was a reproductive strategy which the culture considers "unfair" in the sense of using something that belongs to someone else.
For most if not all of my adult lifetime in the US, the term rape has come to mean "sex against the other's will", whether the other is male or female. And "sex" in that sense has become a much more fluid term (no pun intended), not limited at all to that which produces offspring. Donald Trump has been adjudicated to have raped E. Jean Caroll, even if it was his finger rather than his member which penetrated her. Bill Clinton is said to have had sex with Monica Lewinski with a cigar, which would have been considered rape had it been against her will. Men can be said to "rape" other men, despite there being 0 chance of producing a zygote in the process.
So yes, the modern usage of the term "rape" seems more about dominance and/or humiliation that about reproductive advantage, even as the motive of the perpetrator.
Sorry, I'm confused, I still thought we were still currently on fourth-wave feminism? And refusing to engage with the basic supportive-marriage paradigm sounds like third-wave to me? Fourth-wave doesn't seem unwilling to pay attention, they just insist on not centering that paradigm (out of a not-unreasonable fear that doing so would assist patriarchists' assaults on every other paradigm).
Maybe I'm just looking at it from my experiences in places where even third-wave feminism is still being digested; places where, in the words of Mrs. Catfish, the culture is still "being dragged into the twentieth century."
Paul you clearly think that you are making a cogent argument.I tell you that you are not. You say several true things, like - "Instinctively, humans seem to be more inclined toward a pair-bonding strategy"... Agreed. But for you to ignore - or wave away - the blatant fact that male leaders ALWAYS are strongly tempted and almost always dive right into harem building is just plain PC driven weirdness.
Nor could you - likely - even parse out WHY you are so driven. Because it makes no sense even at a moral level.
Think. Ending rape and encouraging family loyalty among males is not gonna happen by waving away the hand we were dealt by primitive ancestry. Cold blooded understanding of that dealt hand is exactly what's needed in order to design both social and genetic remediations to end practices that are harmful to our further progress toward what we want to become.
In Heinlein's Future History, while political and social events start diverging earlier, the technological point of divergence is the invention of the Douglas-Martin Sunpower Screen, a cheap and easily manufactured high-efficiency solar panel... which is mass-produced in such vast quantities that solar-electric "rolling roads", a mechanical Interstate Highway system, are in widespread use in the 1960s!
Once I made that connection, the series' neglect of biotechnology in favor of advances in physical and chemical engineering made much more Watsonian sense for me. (The Doylian explanation, of course, was Heinlein's own areas of expertise and the era in which the tales were scribed.) It's impressive that he came up with the idea in 1940, when the possibilities of atomic power were just dawning on even the well-informed.
My headcanon has always been that Douglas and Martin lucked into a perovskite solar cell formula way before anyone should logically have been able to develop any solar cell technology at all.
I always thought of Starfleet as a mixture of the concepts of the National Guard, the NOAA Corps, the Public Health Service, and the Coast Guard. They're a military when the Federation really needs such a thing, and thus have all the tools, logistics, organizational structure, etc. to act as such. But since the Federation only goes to war when forced by circumstances, 90%+ of all Starfleet missions are non-military in nature.
This goes back to the American Founders' notion that a sizable military with idle hands was to be avoided -- but a means of rapidly mobilizing one was essential. Thus, Starfleet studiously avoids centering its culture in its military nature, even as it just as studiously maintains its military capabilities. The tendency is probably kept prominent by the counterexamples of their neighbors; the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians are all vivid illustrations of various failure modes of a militaristic culture.
N
ETA: Now if only the UFP had come up with just as clever a means of dealing with the institutional rot inherent in intelligence agencies....
Very few Klingons are able to appreciate the power inherent in the first half of Teddy Roosevelt's "speak softly and carry a big stick" notion. To a traditional Klingon, the idea that avoiding militarism could improve military readiness makes about as much sense as taking the square root of a blood oath and dividing by Shakespeare.
One of the main reasons that Worf, son of Mogh, achieved such vast influence in the Empire despite severe handicaps was that he could comprehend such ideas.
We learn not much about Star Trek civilian society - it could well be "communist" (as in building a classless, nationless world civilization). Near limitless energy, free healthcare and education, instant transport, and of course the replicator technology make holding on to capitalism look silly at best. If that society has a need at all, it is the constant generation of capable and talented persons who run the society, and maybe motivates people through fierce selection processes. You are dilligent and creative and in the top ten of thousands? Welcome to the Star Fleet Academy*. Not so? Welcome to the Terran Replicator Maintenance Training Facility. Hooray. At least, there are always the colonies you can go to.
Personal reputation and the need for a personal legacy are the only currencies that remain. It is intangible, and may foster rivalries - how to keep that in check? Maybe with an army of counselors, and continuously expanding the number of colonies and star ships you have. Maybe the Federation IS an old-style empire, the Romulans, Klingons and Cardassians are just more honest about it.
On top of that, there are several instances in TNG where one could at least suspect that there is some kind of patronage (Riker and his father, Admiral Satie in "The Drumhead") and some remainders of old world aristocracy in this "New Society" (Picard).
But what if someone thinks he is unjustly barred from the halls of federation** power or service even as a lowly crewman on a Star Fleet ship? There might be millions, if not tens of, who could... make political demands? Are they all pacified by replicator rations, holosuit adventures and weekly counselor sessions?
*And may that's where the real competition starts. Even the lowliest unnamed red shirt who dies during the first minute by not wearing a safety belt during a space battle, being electrocuted by a computer terminal, or eaten by a xeno, once was the best of the best Earth had to offer.
** With effectively a meritocracy in place, it is not hard to imagine that political offices might not be gained through means of democracy as we know it. Maybe a polit bureau declares who is fit to be a candidate
Hi Paul
I have read that excellent book - and I agree with Dr Brin
The "instinct" or "drive" towards Harems may not be as strong in humans as it is in Gorillas - but it's still present!!
And history shows it's still working.
Der Oger:
We learn not much about Star Trek civilian society
In TOS anyway, I thought that was a feature, not a bug. The writers didn't want to be bound to any particular history back home. The focus of the adventures was on the Enterprise and its crew.
But what if someone thinks he is unjustly barred from the halls of federation
It seems important to remember that Starfleet and the Federation, while bound together, are not the same thing. Later versions of Trek, most notably the movie First Contact and the series called Enterprise have Earth as a latecomer to an existing Federation* much the way our planet is portrayed in Dr Brin's "Uplift" stories. In the latter series, Earth even bristles at the Vulcans keeping us in the kiddie pool, so to speak.
Starfleet, on the other hand, is always an earth-based institution, what with its headquarters in San Francisco and all. It's like Starfleet was Earth's contribution to the Federation.
* In TOS, it felt different. There, humans seemed to be the default normal in the Federation (similar to white Christian men in America) and a Vulcan like Spock, while represented, was treated like an immigrant who hasn't proven himself in America. Even TNG ("The Best of Both Worlds") signals Earth's importance by locating it in "Sector zero-zero-one".
Course, one might reasonably counter that I'm describing Starfleet, rather than the Federation.
@Catfish the irony of 'The (rational) Science of (fantastical) Discworld' is not lost on me, but it might be on someone who doesn't appreciate that detailed world-building requires a soucon of believability in order to engage an audience. The Discworld series was always a satire on rationality. Starting with Rincewind falling to idly speculate, like Stoppard's Rosencrantz, how novel technologies like Twoflower's imaging device *might* work, if there wasn't a little demon inside, with an easel.
ETA: Now if only the UFP had come up with just as clever a means of dealing with the institutional rot inherent in intelligence agencies....
...*AND* Admirals!!
@Duncan
The "instinct" or "drive" towards Harems may not be as strong in humans as it is in Gorillas - but it's still present!!
And history shows it's still working.
... and (I suspect) providing a strong incentive for beta males (not just hominids) to work out effective cheating strategies... which brings us back to the problem of how to implement a fair economy.
----
Another point occurred to me about Ukraine's little Russian adventure. There are doubtless other objectives, like railway supply lines and promoting popular dissent, but one thing they *have* achieved is the seizure of the main gas meter supplying Russian gas to Europe. Ukraine has no need to do this if they just wanted to disrupt supply (it flows through Ukraine anyway). But consider how Russia can go about taking it back...
Duncan, what you are basically saying is that the book - and all the years of research that went into it - is effectively useless.
Paul SB
Not at all. If you remove the PC-weighting that human males are not male mammals - declaring that we have none of the drives that the author herself shows to be pervasive in nature, but are somehow vanished from human males(!!) - then the rest of the excerpts you shared with us seemed very cogent and informative.
Okay, here we go again,
Dr. Brin,
If someone throws a ball to another person, and that person fails to catch it, is the failure the fault of the catcher or the pitcher?
My (and Sanderson’s) arguments don’t seem cogent to you, but do seem cogent to us. Is that our fault or yours? Or a bit of both? As far as I known (and I could be wrong about this, since I’ve been out of the academic world for a long time), anthropology is the only scientific field which makes a point of making its practitioners confront their own ways of thinking. The #1 most salient feature of humans is that their thoughts and behavior are very heavily influenced by the time and culture in which they live. If that were not the case, chances are the species wouldn’t have made it through the Pleistocene. But that is every bit as true for us as it is for anyone we chose to study, so it is just as important to understand ourselves as our subjects. Otherwise the sweeping generalizations we make about the nature of humans are not really about humans at all, they are only the views of our own times and tribes.
Let’s try a little exercise. I never asked how old you are, but based on what you looked like when I met you, I’m guessing you are at least 10 years older than me, maybe closer to 15. According to the official generations, that would make you a Baby Boomer, while I’m Gen X, although I got in fairly close to the border between. Generation, location, ethnicity, religion, and a host of other conditions of any space/time location that contains humans, all build up the expectations, values, and assumptions that are broadly shared among those humans. Both of our generations were very much sculpted by the Cold War, and the detritus of WW2. When I was young I knew quite a few old WW2 veterans, many of whom worked in hardware stores and built things out of wood in their garages, keeping whole neighborhoods awake with their power tools.
The Cold War narrative that everyone who grew up on the West side of that conflict was embedded in went something like this: The big deal in everyone’s life is the conflict between Communism and Freedom (or, equally, democracy). We in the West are on the right side of that conflict, because we believe in Freedom and Democracy, and we hate the evil Commies and must destroy them. They are en existential threat to all that is decent and good. However, the evil Commies are constantly trying to fool people, especially young people, into thinking that Communism is better. They say that in Communism there is no inequality. Everyone is equal and everybody has all they need to live a good life, unlike those damn Imperialist Capitalists, who allow rich people to steal from the poor. Of course, this is all a lie. Communism is really just dictatorship, and all Commies are evil scumbags who will kill you in a minute because they don’t believe in God so they have no morals, eat babies, (yada yada basic dehumanizing the enemy).
to be con.t
When I was old enough to be aware of such things, most of the Hippies, who were commonly accused of being Commie traitors, had shrugged off their Hippie status and become Yuppies. There were still a few here and there in their bell-bottoms, smoking their weed and “making love, not war”), but they had ceased to be a significant cultural force. They were a thing of the previous generation, and slowly going extinct. But being at least a decade older than me, you saw the Hippies in full flower, and even though they are working on edging out the Dodo, your schemata still contain those ideas. Your assumption that people are naturally bad is a huge feature of all the Abrahamic religions, and that idea really gave the Western side of the Cold War a superiority complex. The West is the home of freedom, and the smart people who haven’t fallen for Commie propaganda get that humans can never be as nice and cooperative as the Commies say they can be. You have expressed exactly this assumption on many occasions, most especially in the form of your emphasis on competition, one of the most sacred principles of Capitalism.
I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War, in a generation that was beginning to question the narrative. For you, the creative wonders of competition are a no duh, and anyone who questions that is some kind of gibbering PC moron. The fact that you even use the term, when it is clear that it has never been anything more than an attempt by right-wing trolls to excuse their bigotry, is a solid indicator. “PC” fits perfectly into the old Cold War stereotype of the dumb hippie who has been fooled by Comintern lies, and stupidly believe that human beings are in any way better than vicious animals, deep down. And it is exactly when you get that feeling that you should start questioning how your own background might be influencing your reasoning.
“But does that translate into lessened COMPETITIVENESS?”
Yes, it does. You don’t like the idea because it goes against your programming. I got some of that programming, too. Maybe I recognized it as programming because I grew up at the tail end of it, or maybe, as my doctor has told me, I’m borderline for OCD, with my obsession not about germs but about morals and honesty. So yeah, I question my own assumptions all the time.
to be con.t
Now let’s talk about the science of humans. The fact is, you humans are biocultural animals, which means that they are not mere slaves to their instincts. Context, as they say, is everything. If human behavior were as limited by instinct as right-wing demagogues want us to think, the species would have never survived the last glaciation. Extinct without issue. They would not have been able to adapt to not only the changing climate of the world overall, but migrating from one biome to another, settling into environments as different as the Amazon is to the Arctic tundra. No other species has been able to do this, precisely because human brains allow them to bypass instinct in favor of reasoning.
On top of that, instincts simply don’t work the way most people think they do. They are not simple, straightforward programs. There is no gene for harems. Back when we were taking high school biology, they assumed that humans are so complex they must have hundreds of thousands of genes. Of course, that was only an assumption, and one that was definitively blown out of the water when we had the technology to actually sequence entire genomes. It turns out that humans have no more genes than a chicken. There is no gene for appreciating sunsets, or writing poetry, or composing bawdy tavern songs, and there is no gene for building harems. There simply aren’t anywhere near enough genes in the human genome to determine the great variety of human behaviors.
What there are genes for is manufacturing testosterone in the gonads, manufacturing testosterone in the adrenal glands, genes to make multiple types of receptor molecules for testosterone, genes for transporter molecules, and epigenetic markers to determine where which molecules are built in what quantity and in what cellular contexts. In the context of skeletal muscle, receptor molecules will pick up testosterone molecules and transfer them into the cytoplasm, where they activate the genes to make actin and myosin molecules. The more testosterone, the more actin and myosin, the more muscle grows. That, in turn, activates osteoblasts, which secrete more calcium phosphate onto the bones directly connected to the muscles that are growing. If the testosterone signal stops, the osteoblasts stop maintaining the bones (this is why if a man gets a sex change and removes the organs that produce 75% of his testosterone, his muscles and bones slowly shrink).
Back in the ‘90s I worked with several Muslims - exchange students from several countries. One fellow from Nigeria was asked if he wanted to have four wives, since the Quran allows it. He shook his head vigorously, and explained that if you have multiple wives, you are required to treat them exactly equally. If you give a necklace to one, you have to give exactly the same necklace to the others, and if you smile at one, you have to smile with equal sincerity at all the others. I asked other Muslims, both male and female, and they all confirmed that his was a very common attitude. Most thought that having multiple wives was just not worth the trouble. The cultural norms and expectations overrode the presumed instinct. And Karim came from a pretty well-to-do family, so he had the financial resources to support four wives, but he had no desire. One was good enough.
to be con.t
Now look at Dr. Fisher’s website, and scroll down to the map of America. The map is color coded to show the dominant neurohormones found in each state. How many states are dominated by testosterone? Six out of fifty. About half the states are serotonin dominant, which is quite consistent with the conservative tendencies of serotonin dominant people. (My dominant chemical only has five states, but interesting enough, Colorado and California are among them).
https://helenfisher.com/personality/
Now what, exactly, does testosterone do in the human brain? It’s kind of obvious what it does in most of the body - big muscles, broad shoulders, deep voice box, ugly hair all over, and ironically, baldness. What it does in the brain is less obvious, which is why most people’s assumptions are dead wrong, and it took decades of solid scientific work to figure out what is actually going on in there. I used to show my students a National Geographic video called The Testosterone Factor to shake up their assumptions and give them the idea that nothing is as simple as people want it to be. Being a short Nat Geo film, it oversimplifies a lot, but it has a sequence which really makes the point about how testosterone fundamentally works. The took blood samples from the members of two rugby teams before their match, at the half time, and at the end. (You can tell it’s a bit old, since these days we usually get T-levels from saliva samples rather than going vampire for science.) At the beginning both teams had high T levels. At half time, one team was way ahead of the other. They were feeling great, and their T levels were much higher than the team that was losing. In the second half of the game, however, the low T team caught up, pulled ahead, and bat the other team. In the post-match samples, the T levels of the team that had won had shot way up, and the T levels of the losing team had dropped off a cliff.
What you see here is testosterone behaving much the same way as other chemicals in the brain. It isn’t determining anything at all. What it does is reward people with a good feeling when they are succeeding, and is withheld to cause uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms when people fail. In other words, the function of testosterone in the brain is not to make people do anything, it’s to encourage people to continue to do what they have already been successful doing. It works in a very similar way to dopamine. The human brain operates largely on addiction mechanisms. That’s why some high-T people become police or firefighters, and others become crime bosses and thugs. And some become chess masters. The hormone doesn’t tell you to do any specific thing (except, probably, to have sex), it tells you to keep doing what you are good at.
So no, there is no gene for harem building. If a person successfully builds a harem, and he (or she) is relatively sensitive to testosterone, that person will be motivated by instinct to maintain, grow, and especially to show off that harem. If a person is particularly successful at writing science fiction novels, and has average or high sensitivity to T, that person will feel an instinctive urge to write more science fiction novels.
This isn’t some hippie-dippy hand waving. This is the science.
Paul SB
Paul SB
That was an excellent book - making a LOT of excellent points
HOWEVER - NONE of those points were that Humans were immune to the harem seeking behaviour!!
They did show that Humans are a long way from the end of that spectrum - lots of biological evidence showing that
Which means that it's not as strong a drive in Humans as it is in Gorillas - but NOT that it is not a strong drive
Paul SB
You are STILL misunderstanding the argument
There is no "Harem Gene" - but the genes that build our minds have been selected over billions of years to build certain "Drives" into us
Those are not blueprints for behaviour - more like recipes
And it's a LOT more complex than the amount of Testosterone in the blood - although that "may" be a useful indicator
But for you to ignore - or wave away - the blatant fact that male leaders ALWAYS are strongly tempted and almost always dive right into harem building is just plain PC driven weirdness.
I am unconvinced for one reason.
If I turn the observation around I get "Males strongly tempted to build harems seek leadership roles."
The first way sounds like instinct.
The reverse sounds like a selection effect. Of course they'd try to be leaders.
My point is this. Are you SURE which is cause and which is effect? Why? Because the other great apes build harems? Well… we are also closely related to bonobos.
———
As for the science, is there a way to discern from experiment which is cause and which is effect?
There's data, and then there's interpretation of data.
Alfred, I don't think you should assume that OGH was implying any particular cause and effect relationship. He may have been, but grammatically speaking his statement does not necessarily imply any.
Logic, and thus inference, are not absolute Truths. Read Wolfram. Or Hamlet.
Um, Duncan?
"There is no "Harem Gene" - but the genes that build our minds have been selected over billions of years to build certain "Drives" into us
Those are not blueprints for behaviour - more like recipes"
That is exactly the point. There is no harem gene. The genetics of human behavior does not make rigid programs at all. Instincts are nudges, not unchangeable forces directing human behavior. The one modification I would make to your statement is that the only "drive" that testosterone seems to actually regulate re: reproduction is libido itself. Testosterone does appear to make humans want to have sex, but not necessarily with multiple partners. Links between genes and human behavior are nowhere so iron-clad.
Consider the first gene that was definitively shown to influence human behavior - the MonoAmine Oxidase A (MAO-A) gene. I could point to another Nat Geo video I used to show to my students, this one called "The Warrior Gene." They interviewed a number of people to get an idea of how violent their lives were, then tested them to see if they have the reduced variant - the mutation that presumably drives violent behavior. The result was that some of the people who had the gene were, indeed, very violent people. Others were not (including a couple monks). Some of the people who had the normal version of the gene led peaceful lives, while some had extremely violent lives. Genes don't make behavior. Genes influence behavior.
Naturally if the DNA makes harem building possible, there will always be some people who will be inclined to do it, presuming the social environment also makes it possible. And this is likely the explanation for the Y-Chromosome Bottleneck. It came at a time of increasing social hierarchy that accompanied increasing population. That made the option available, and when an option is available to a population that is very large, it's virtually inevitable that it will happen at least on some level. Given that harems seem to have been a new idea at that time, no doubt it caught on as a prestige marker, as it still is in many societies today.
The is, and always was, that humans are not mere slaves to instinct. Some instincts can nudge you pretty damn hard, the reason celibacy is not a popular option anywhere, even though celibacy is common among religion specialists, even in very small populations, and priest is a very high-status position. No PC hand waving, no naïve hippies pretending that humans are really angelic deep down inside. It's about variability, opportunity, and choice. Even if 80% of the population of East Asia are genetically descended from what may have been the world's most prolific rapist - Ghengis Khan - does not mean that 80% of East Asian people are natural-born rapists. The fact is just not that relevant, and certainly not deterministic. The whole point of human brains is to give options, menus of action to choose from.
Paul SB
Alfred, I love how your comment about which is the cause and which is the effect parallels something our host has often said about the relationship between power and corruption. It's not so much that power corrupts as power attracts corrupt people.
As to other primates that make harems, it's not even a majority strategy: gorillas most famously, some species of baboons, all the macaque species, and a few others. The bonobos make the point that, even in non-human primates, there isn't just one way to express testosterone. They don't form harems, they have sex with pretty much everybody.
And Duncan's comment about there being more to it than just testosterone is apropos here, too. The more you complicate the genetic picture, the more complex the expressed phenotype options. Having epinephrine, oxytocin, dopamine, and who knows what else play a role just means it's less likely that any one strategy will even approach universality.
Paul SB
Paul, you are erudite, well-read and informative and I am not complaining about your drop-in missives, which are generally interesting to read… but when you draw conclusions, they are often so desperate to reach a PC outcome that you twist yourself (not your sources) into knots. For example:
“I asked other Muslims, both male and female, and they all confirmed that his was a very common attitude. Most thought that having multiple wives was just not worth the trouble.”
Well duh? Very few men are in a position for multiple wives to be at all practical. It takes a LOT of money and influence, and then far more in order to ensure your status sticks… and VASTLY more if you want to try it in a country with western norms. (Where it is done by princes.). Of course the Only One Wife ‘decision’ will be rationalized, as you describe. BFD.
What you wave away is the pure historical fact that across 6000 years, male humans corralled together female mates in (nonlinear) proportion to their wealth, status and power. It did just happen anecdotally. It happened ALWAYS. And let me repeat that word. Always. And in case you missed it, I’ll repeat it one more time.
Always.
All the blather about testosterone evades the fact the human males are generally VISUALLY STIMULATED to lust for copulation with females who – by the variable standards of their culture – are deemed likely to be fecund recipients. Testosterone affects the power and intensity of that reaction, but the fact THAT there are visual triggers is very, very, very clearly genetic...
…and finding ways to help mature male members of society to control such proclivities has been a major goal and partial accomplishment of our society. It’s incomplete and a teensy, consensual collapse of self-control ruined the reputation of the fellow I deem one of the best US presidents in history.
“This isn’t some hippie-dippy hand waving”. No, sorry, that is exactly what it is.
===
Alfred, when a correlation is almost perfect across 6000 years... and very likely at least 10,000... there's a real burden of proof that there's not causation involved.
In any event, I continue to assert that PC declarations are foolish and counter productive when declaring that human males are fundamentally different from all other mammalian males, despite behaviors that are CONSISTENT with male mammal behavior. This is NOT helpful.
What we need is clear-eyed understanding of the hand we were dealt... PLUS an image of what we want to become. Only then can we begin to map a practical path from point A to point B.
@Dr. Brin: Convention VII of the Hague Conventions of 1907 contains language renouncing privateering as a means of warfare. The United States has never been a party to Convention VII for this reason. Ukraine acceded to the protocol in 2015.
Since strengthening the rules-based international order is a grand strategic priority for the Ukranian government, this decision is unlikely to be revisited except in extreme circumstances.
Counterargument: I don't think it would take a terribly large vessel to serve as a drone platform to attack Russian-bound shipping, and Russia's ability to deny naval access to Ukraine is severely degraded. The major challenge to Ukraine's drone-carrier capabilities would probably be diplomatic, i.e., the passage of the Dardanelles.
Dr. Brin,
You continue to stick to your assumption set here. I have never given a rodent's equine about whether something is PC or not. The hippie days are long gone, and PC is still nothing more than anti-liberal propaganda without any nuance or basis in fact. Your argument that because it happened a lot is no more solid than theists who claim that the existence of the universe is proof of the Creator. Your assumption that it's genetic is still only an assumption. It shows that your comprehension of genetics is far, far behind the experts in the field.
It's also an assumption that has been used to support the agenda of bigots since long before anyone even knew what a gene is. Do you remember Trump praising the Racehorse Theory back in 2020? The claim that human behavior, intelligence, promiscuity - whatever it is that the elites use to claim their superiority to everyone else - has been used to cut out competition for top positions likely since the beginning of civilization. It is also quite often self-fulfilling. Like the claim that violence is "natural" which gives men permission to choose violence. If you tell men that they "naturally" harem makers, many of them will believe it and decide that they need a harem to prove that they are "real men."
A realistic understanding of human nature is not in any way a claim that humans are angelic by any stretch. John Locke's tabula rasa isn't 100% true, but it isn't 100% wrong either. You are denying the very thing that makes humans human, behavioral flexibility.
If there is ever going to be some kind of "cure" for this behavior, it's not likely to come from genetic engineering. Endocrinology and neurology are vastly complex. If you tweak levels of one hormone to affect one thing, it will have huge effects on other things, many of which we have no way to predict. As long as the opportunity exists, the behavior will be performed by some.
Stubbornness is only a good quality when you are right, but in science, few things are right for very long.
Paul SB
Catfish, good point. Though Ukraine could spread fear to RF shipping just by withdrawing from that treater. In any event, Ukraine could create a formal task force of ships that are formally part of the Ukrainian Navy. Those ships would have considerable leeway under the laws of war. This could include launching (from the Baltic) a mega drone storm on Kaliningrad and or other RF assets.
Done with the topic, Paul. It is bizarre to ignore the universality of human male visual lust stimulation and the utter universality of opportunistic polygyny by aristocrats across both recorded and genetically traceable history. I have asserted possble motives for your denying those hugely blatant facts. Perhaps those motives are wrong. But not the facts themselves.
Electoral vote.com, as of today, says Harris has the necessary number of votes.
That, plus Arizona, Indiana*, Georgia, and North Carolina being within reach.
*Can someone explain that to me? I always thought it was a ruby-red state.
I never denied the facts, it's the explanation for those facts that is outdated and counter-productive. And what does it matter whether visual stimulation, auditory stimulation, or pheromonal stimulation acts as a trigger?
Paul SB
You used the word "opportunistic" yourself, which is exactly what I said.
Paul SB
Catfish,
I like your idea of a drone carrier. How about a submarine drone carrier?
Paul SB
Der Oger:
Electoral vote.com, as of today, says Harris has the necessary number of votes.
That, plus Arizona, Indiana*, Georgia, and North Carolina being within reach.
I'm an avid follower of that site, and often quote it here. That said, it's not a good idea to be too happy-clappy about what the poling looks like this far in advance. The totals will change many times 'twixt now and Guy Fawkes Day. Also, their polling results only indicate how the electorate says they will vote, not whether people actually show up or how much Republican mischief is done to suppress / ignore the vote in assigning their electors.
Still, after months of looking as if Biden had no path to victory, it is indeed pleasing to see Harris currently ahead in enough states to win outright without including any of the ones you mention above. Especially since both Arizona and Georgia have stacked their officials with election deniers who might purposely foul up the certification. It would be nice to not need them.
*Can someone explain that to me? I always thought it was a ruby-red state.
Indiana has been solidly Republican in presidential races lately, though that is a bit mystifying to me living next door in solidly Democratic Illinois. Part of the difference is the lack of a Chicago-sized metro area in Indiana, although they do have cities. Part of it is cultural. For some reason, the northern state of Indiana was a big Ku Klux Klan stronghold in the 1920s.
And yet, I believe they did go for Obama in 2008.
Dr. Brin, I was thinking about the "harem" idea, and I wonder if that Y bottleneck might not have been so much about mating restricted by force but instead about founding higher population cities which gave women a higher density of mates to choose from. Thus, expanded female choice might have driven the Y chromosome bottleneck.
Today, we see only about 20% of males getting all the action on hookup aps. Could something similar have happened when humans started farming and thus enabled humans to live in dense population centers unprecedented before farming?
With more available men within a short distance, female promiscuity could have increased and they start playing the "pick a husband to secure a protector/provider then cheat to capture better genes" strategy.
Perhaps the male counter strategy was social mores about marriage (stoning cheating females to death like we see in the Old Testament) plus developing sperm competition (ability of sperm to ward off the sperm of other males).
For Historical electoral vote maps, I find this site fascinating:
https://www.270towin.com/historical-presidential-elections/
I notice is that despite both Illinois and California being as blue as it gets these days, that has only been the case since 1992. If you look at all of the elections in the 20th Century, Illinois gave its votes to Republicans 14 times and Democrats only 11 times.
And in every presidential election since 1920, Illinois and California voted the same way except one time--in 1960 when Nixon won his home state of California while Chicago's Mayor Daley helped bring in the vote for Catholic JFK. Other than that, they're lock-step. And except for a mere 3 earlier exceptions, that pattern holds back to California's first election in 1852.
Btw, the blunt fact that Harris has boosted in the polls vs. Biden's performance screams that many people were worried about Joe's mental faculties.
Well, one reason u guys havent seen much of me lately is I got to watch a WHOLE LOT OF HIGH LEVEL JUDO during the Olympics. Now that we get 4 channels of coverage, well, I could watch days and days of Judo. Whereas back in the old days, you'd rarely get Judo as a priority.
Wow, the sport is very different from when I competed. Matches are now down to 4 minutes vs. 6, with referees tolerating far less stalling tactics. They don't let you have much time to work ground techniques as well. I guess it has a lot to do with trying distinguish Judo from Brazilian Ju Jitsu, on the theory that standing throwing techniques are more exciting than mat work.
Sigh and triple sigh. Paul: “I never denied the facts, it's the explanation for those facts that is outdated and counter-productive.”
You have asserted that these things which are nearly universal among human males have no appreciable genetically programmed drivers. They are universal across all continents and cultures, yet no genetic component?
While similar drives among a million other mammal species ARE propelled by genes? I say you are the one – making that claim – who bears a very very steep burden of proof, Paul.
“And what does it matter whether visual stimulation, auditory stimulation, or pheromonal stimulation acts as a trigger?”
Jeepers I keep trying to give up. Maybe this time I will succeed. Still, I like you so: In some species it’s smell that drives males mad, in others it’s estrus colors. For us it is visual representations of youthful fecundity… and one of our top qualities is an ability that our wives want from us, to pretend those cues are merely esthetic to us and are NOT driving us mad.
“And what does it matter whether visual stimulation, auditory stimulation, or pheromonal stimulation acts as a trigger?”
IT MATTERS! Because that universality (DETAILS of visual triggers vary among cultures, but all of them feature most males triggered by visual cues of youthful fecundity) utterly demolishes the preposterous assertion that human males have no instinctive programmed lust responses. If it were all cultural, it’d vary across continents FAR more than it does and sometimes be this and sometimes that.
But again… ALL of them feature most males triggered by visual cues of youthful fecundity. All of them.
Indiana’s great g-parents who fought in Union blue are now powering the state with the spinning in their graves.
Am I alone in saying Biden woulda handily beat Trump? And that Kamala’s boost is at least partly from lefties shamed into finally answering opinion polls honestly.
It wasn’t his mental capacity. It was frippy preening lefties refusing to admit they would vote for an old white guy.
John Viril (he of ironic last name, in this topic!) makes a great point: “Thus, expanded female choice might have driven the Y chromosome bottleneck.”
Yes! In that it is the fundamental answer to making humanity better. Continue with the 1.3 ‘harem size’ for a while, since it ALWAYS happens. (today in America it is SOBs abandoning their first wives.) But make it about polygyny BY and FOR women and children. Supposedly the Cherokee and Iroquois were like that. A great chief might qualify for a 2nd wife. But the first wife was the chooser of some younger woman SHE likes and could get along with. He could at-most veto a choice.
But sorry, no. When only one male in 17 got to breed, 8000years ago, that wasn’t gonna happen peacefully. It coincides with the arrival of beer… and kings.
Whoever is reporting on Indiana over there isn't being realistic. Look for Indiana polling data by clicking on the state. It isn't there or is ancient.
Indiana is usually more red than Ohio, so polling there usually isn't worth the money until some down-ballot race gets interesting.
Look at the blue wall states and then NC, GA, NV, and AZ. Keep an eye on MN too as they aren't as blue as Walz's presence would suggest.
Some of the boost Harris is receiving appears to be coming at the expense of RFK Jr. His numbers are evaporating in the polls. Not super fast, but they are moving.
when a correlation is almost perfect across 6000 years...there's a real burden of proof that there's not causation involved
Okay. Then I think a reasonable question we can ask is what evidence you would accept to undermine the causation link.
I'm with you on the PC assertion being foolish and even harmful, but I think your POV might actually be un-falsifiable in the Popperian sense. Rather than claim it is, I'm asking what you might consider as supportive of breaking causation. Correlation would remain, though, because it is painfully obvious.
Dr Brin:
Am I alone in saying Biden woulda handily beat Trump?
Well, I was the one describing the current president's accomplishments by way of Jesus's soliloquy in Superstar. In a fair fight, Biden should be clobbering Trump.
But since that horrible debate performance, there's been a kind of snowball effect of even his fervent supporters doubting that he could actually win over our fellow voters, led by the likes of the New York Times telling us over and over that Biden was not fit to lead for another four years, and then that despair showing up as supporters giving up in the polls, and the falling poll numbers feeding the narrative.
The jiu-jitsu move to Harris as the front runner and the miraculous ("How much longer can I go on being an atheist?") congealing of the Democratic Party behind her has rolled the snowball in the other direction. Dem voters are getting excited about her youthful energy and starting to feel like we can win after all, and that's showing up in the polls, feeding the narrative of an energized Democratic campaign and so on and so on.
And picking Walz as her running mate gives those who only trust old white men permission to vote for the ticket. And with his "weird" meme, he completely deflated the Republican strongman image as much as the kid who points out that the proverbial emperor has no clothes.
Plus, with Biden out of the race, suddenly Trump is the one obviously appearing too old and feeble to be trusted with the car keys. Some Trump supporters seem to be quietly backing away toward the exits, going, "Don't make eye contact."
It was frippy preening lefties refusing to admit they would vote for an old white guy.
Maybe, although the ones who were going to vote for RFK Jr hardly had that excuse.
President Biden was being blamed for circumstances beyond his control, from inflation to Gaza to Ukraine. Many voters were abandoning him personally because of things they didn't like in the world, regardless of the fact that those things would be happening no matter who was president at the time. Now that they can refuse to vote for Biden and still not help Trump replace him, I think they're paying more attention to the fact that even for their own pet issue, Trump would be much worse.
John,
Re: y-bottleneck,
if 7000-5000 bc is the period for this in Eurasia, then actual, decent-sized city-building came later.
On the other hand, the increasing prevalence of agricultural sedentism is probably linked, and I should note something here - HG tribes would fight, sometimes brutally, but it was possible to avoid each other and flee from the strongest tribes. You can't do that if you have a granary and there's a rival village over the hill. It's a trap; fight or starve. Casualties in these early battles tended to be light until one side broke and fled - then it would be a massacre, and 'vae victis' the rule. It would be easy to lose entire male bloodlines right there, with the Sabine women as an example of the spoils of war.
II sestertii worth,
Pappenheimer
Re: harems,
Some of the potentates I've read about had far bigger harems than they could actually meet on a semi-regular basis, let alone fertilize. At that point it's not nature, it's keeping up appearances. Temujin must be praised for his ability to delegate the expansion and upkeep of empire to well-chosen subordinates alone, because otherwise where he have found the TIME.
Pappenheimer
correction - "where could he have found the TIME."
Pappenheimer
Catfish;
The Confederate traitors used warships built in Europe and converted privateers to raid US shipping, but that had the primary purpose of diverting USN ships from a very effective coastal blockade. If Ukraine had the will they could do something similar, but I don't really see the military necessity - leaving alone the legal tangle mentioned above and possible loss of image as a country playing by the rules.
Pappenheimer
I wanted to believe that the folks not answering polls would vote for Biden when it came to the moment, but I no longer too. Some would have, but I think too many would have stayed home and the blue wall would have fractured.
If this hopey-changey stuff can work a second time, I'm all for it. I don't believe it, but I was going to vote blue anyway. Even moldy/oldy blue cheese.
John,
Your idea about female mate choice reminded me of a guest speaker in one of my graduate seminars. He gave us a quick run-down of his recent research, then ran use through a role-play. The research he was doing was an ethno-archaeological study of settlement pattern changes in the Amazon, specifically migration from small villages to larger towns. Most of the native cultures of the Amazon are horticulturalists. The typical settlement pattern would be a small village with multiple nearby clearings for their gardens, then a large buffer zone of forrest between villages where a small amount of hunting takes place. Jungle soils are notoriously poor, so the yields from horticulture are small but adequate with low population growth. Towns are a phenomenon of modernization. They grow at transportation hubs, like crossroads or the confluence of two rivers. The towns are not agriculturally self-sufficient, but depend on specialization and trade for food. The archaeologist spoke to many people who were migrating to towns, and the primary reason they did had nothing to do with the economy. Basically it amounted to when you live in a small village, your only choices of marriage partners are Ugh and her sister Li. People move to larger settlements because humans are fundamentally social animals. Most are happier when they have access to a fairly sizable pool of possible friends, coworkers, and, of course, mates.
Now Amazonian tribes - and horticulturalists generally - are a mixed bag where it comes to marriage patterns. Some are monogamous, others polygamous. There is one tribe I have heard of that has both polygyny and polyandry at the same time (called the Zo’é). This is a good example of how human behavior is both restrained and given opportunities by the environments in which they exist - including the social environments. Scale is one of the biggest factors.
If we stick with Elman Service’s taxonomy, the smallest human groups are bands, which are almost universally hunter/gatherers and almost universally monogamous (though commonly it’s serial monogamy, like so many people in state-level societies today). In fact, H/G cultures tend to look on polygamous neighbors with contempt. Compared to us, they have higher rates of violence, largely because their enforcement mechanisms are not as effective as having armies of police, lawyers and judges.
You get to larger groups - tribes - and they can either be horticulturalists supplemented by some hunting/gathering, or pastoralists. Violence tends to be higher at this level, but a whole lot higher for pastoralists (cattle pastoralists, particularly), and polygamy is more common at this level as well. At the next level of population density you have chiefdoms, which are nascent states. Here you see more permanent hierarchy, more polygamy, and more violence. They are still a mixed bag, though, with monogamy still common, but a minority pattern. At the state level, hierarchy is both permanent and rigid, polygamy is commonplace for the upper crust. Violence seems to have been high in early states, but drops as you get closer to today, when government has had to play an increasing role, to include legal systems to curtail violence. Thus opportunities for violence are curtailed compared to smaller-scale societies. Opportunities for polygamy, however, increase as society grows to the point of rigidity. Monogamy is still pretty common for the lower classes, and for all classes in many state-level societies.
to be con.t
con.t
Now polyandry is a pattern that often reduces male reproductive success. As an explanation for the Y-Chromosome bottle neck, I wouldn’t put money on it based on what we know currently. However, what we know currently about polyandry is pretty little. The fact is that anthropology, like all the other sciences and most academic fields, has been dominated by white guys for a very long time. To give credit where credit is due, anthropology started attracting some very talented women, and not all white, a century ago, with such notables as Zora Neal Hurston, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, all of whom studied on Franz Boas, the Father of American Anthropology (ironically, since he was German). Astronomy started picking up women scholars even earlier, for reasons that would be familiar to anyone who has seen “Hidden Figures” (I keep hoping someone will write a good bio of Annie Jump Cannon).
Until about 60 years ago, polyandry was widely seen as a myth by male-dominated Western scholars. As an archaeologist, I have to take seriously the possibility that an institution that no longer exists or is now very small could have been much more significant in the past. Maybe future studies will show that polyandry played a much larger role, but at the moment we just can’t say.
Paul SB
Dr. Brin,
"You have asserted that these things which are nearly universal among human males have no appreciable genetically programmed drivers. They are universal across all continents and cultures, yet no genetic component?"
- Well here you go again putting words into my mouth. When did I ever say that humans have no sex drive? Absolutely never. I don't come here to browbeat anyone, but it gets pretty irritating when you keep changing my story.
What I said is that harem building in and of itself is not an instinct. Humans are variable and complex, and DNA is only part of the picture. Sex is an instinct, and it likely has more to do with dopamine than testosterone, as it is dopamine that produces the feeling of orgasm. The conventional belief that testosterone creates libido may only be a false correlation, given what neuroscientists now know about how it operates.
Harem building is something that you could expect some people to take advantage of if the opportunity exists, but not all people will. For one, libido is normally distributed, so there are always some people who have virtually none (the LGBTQ community now has a name for them - Ace, short for asexual), while roughly the same percentage have so much libido that they literally develop mental disorders if they are prevented from satisfying it. On both extremes we are looking at deviations from the mean.
That does not mean that a very small number of people, given a level of social power and authority that the world had never seen before, could not have had a significant impact on the reproductive success of a great many more. Having armies and gods to push people around with is very powerful, but also a feature humans never had until the rise of civilization.
The point is that humans are not that simple, diverse, and simple explanations for complex phenomenon rarely do more than obscure the picture. Pappenheimer's point is likely at least as significant as yours, if not more. Geographic circumscription made the world a very different place after the last ice age and its rising sea levels.
Paul SB
Paul, your first two postings this time were cogent, then you did it again!
“Well here you go again putting words into my mouth. When did I ever say that humans have no sex drive?”
Absolute drivel! You redefine everything. I never said that detailed harem-building was instinctive but an inevitable result of very instinctive things, when gangs of males can enforce the will of their top leader. But you wriggle andf squirm. And while I like you, and appreciate the riff you shared with us, I am utterly done discussing this with you. This is just hopeless.
------
Often one can draw interesting interpretations from visuals of the Ukraine War. For example, we see that Ukrainian tanks wear add-on ‘cope cages’, as do Russian ones, but with a telling difference. RF cages are bulky, massive sheets of metal, sometimes encompassing (and hampering) the whole vehicle. AFU ones are elegant canopies of wire mesh. This difference isn’t just esthetic. Both armies need protection from FPV and kamikaze drones. The mesh barriers can (presumably) keep such drones far enough away to protect a tank’s upper armor, when they explode. Mesh is absolutely no good against the fierce downward-penetrating power of the warhead of a Javelin missile. What this suggests is that both sides have drones but only one side has Javelin equivalent anti-armor weapons.
There are other interpretations one can gain from maps in the news. E.g. that the phase of blitz penetration raids by AFU teams has halted, but bypass maneuvers continue. Seldom mentioned is the shutdown of RF railways in the region, a vital strategic goal. I also see signs AFU is rolling up the prior-established RF defense lines – perhaps in order to take them over, themselves.
Zelensky talks about ‘an exchange bank’ for prisoner swaps. Ukraine already has a lot more prisoners. And Putin has done exchanges very slowly/reluctantly. Because many RF POWs hate to leave their Club Med camps, only to return to the lethal battle front. And those who do get leave at home talk to family and neighbors about horrible conditions at the front. Putin gets nothing by swapping prisoners.
What is spectacularly silly is the narrative pushed by Putin and some pundits, that this Ukrainian offensive is about gathering land to trade in negotiations. There will be no such negotiations while Putin is in power. The aim (I believe) is to shatter any notion among RF soldiers that their immense and gruesome sacrifices were accomplishing anything. Vlad often – like a mesmerized bird staring at a snake – refers to the 1917 Soldier’s Revolt that toppled the czarist regime. That fed-up Russian soldiers might do the same is the one thing that terrifies Vlad, above all else.
Here is an interview that seems more cogent than most. Especially the Georgetown professor who seems very smart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg0QNZM7slc
Sorry for not being around. I've been crushed with work over at the IRS. Politics is too aggravating for me now. I avoid it because the stupidity of it makes my blood pressure spike.
I am off to Appeals Officer Basic Training in Oakland, CA in a few weeks. Then a week of annual training with my reserve unit.
I can't talk about the cases I am working on, but it feels good to apply basic principles of tax law to make certain very wealthy people pay more in taxes.
"Letters of marque" from Ukraine. Ahhh...one of my favorite Stan Rogers songs:
Oh the year was 1778, how I wish I was in Sherbrook now.
A letter of marque came from the king, to the scummiest vessel I'd ever seen, GODDAMN THEM ALL!
We were told we'd sail the seas for American gold we'd fire no guns, shed no tears.
Now I'm, a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett's Privateers.
https://youtu.be/ZIwzRkjn86w?si=Tcv9nkG_86PlMG-8
"We were 91 days to Montego bay,
Pumpin' like madmen all the way"
If you're going to go privateering, choose a ship less likely to sink on its own.
Pappenheimer
Re: taxing the fat cats: go for it. Make their tax attys earn their pay
GMT -5,
Stan Rogers, wow. Never thought I'd hear that name here.
"Ah, for just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage..."
Dr Brin:
For us it is visual representations of youthful fecundity… and one of our top qualities is an ability that our wives want from us, to pretend those cues are merely esthetic to us and are NOT driving us mad.
"Driving us mad" seems a little harsh. If true, it validates the fundamentalists' blaming women for wearing outfits that provoke rape, with the provoked male being helpless to resist biology. Yes, men are turned on visually, but not (typically) beyond the capacity for rational thought. We can also appreciate the feeling we get from a wonderful aesthetic moment* without frothing at the mouth over it.
Also, and this is no surprise to my wife, I am and always have been a leg man. And the fact that such a term exists indicates I'm not the only one. And I'm unclear how a woman's shapely legs corresponds to the concept of fecundity.
* Meant to explain "Aesthetic moment".
I came across the term in (no surprise) one of Dave Sim's text pieces. As soon as he mentioned the term, I knew and appreciated what he meant. There are times--across a crowded restaurant for instance--when a woman you have no chance of ever getting personal with nonetheless strikes a particular pose or makes some motion that just leaves you sighing contentedly at the simple pleasure of seeing it. He contends that it is counterproductive to worry about taking such moments any further or regretting the impossibility of doing so. Such moments are meant to be enjoyed simply for what they are.
For some reason, the northern state of Indiana was a big Ku Klux Klan stronghold in the 1920s.
Oookay. Professor Catfish history lesson time. Subject: North American Volkerwanderung settlement patterns.
It's often brushed over in high school, but the land-hunger of the Thirteen Colonies (a release valve for wealth inequality) was a major cause of the Revolution. Ohio was the focus of many colonies' ambitions, but the driving force of who went where was water transport routes. There are a number of different watersheds in Ohio, some running to Lake Erie, others N-S and NW-SE to the Ohio River -- which had origins in Pennsylvania and (then) Virginia. Once you made it through or around the continental divide, it was fairly easy to reach some part of Ohio regardless of which colony you started from. (This made it ideal for federal military pension land-grants, for instance.)
Illinois had super-easy portages from the Great Lakes to the tributaries of the Illinois River. Once the easy pickings of Ohio were claimed, Michigan was nowhere near as desirable as Illinois -- colder, less fertile. (Illinois joined the union in 1818, but Michigan didn't even reach the required population until 1833.) So, like Ohio, Illinois had a northern and a southern settlement front.
Nearly *all* of Indiana is covered by the Wabash rivershed - and the Wabash runs NW/SE. The Kankakee and St. Joseph valleys blocked any chance of portage from Lake Michigan; South Bend and Fort Wayne mark the edge of meaningful water transport from Lake Michigan and Lake Erie respectively. Thus Indiana was overwhelmingly settled by Kentuckians and Virginians -- specifically by smallholders willing to literally go the extra mile. Plantation-builders passed on Indiana lands as the relative inaccessibility ate into profit margins.
Indiana therefore was *politically* anti-slavery but *culturally* Southern from the very beginning, as opposed to originally-balanced Illinois and Ohio and the pure-Northern uppermost tier. All because of geography.
@Alfred: RFK's collapse is indicative of the larger movement invisible to polls, but discernable in registration patterns: the shift of the "double-haters" who were dissatisfied with choosing between two white men with declining faculties. Even a blank-slate analysis taking no account of policy, history, personality, etc. favors Harris-Walz over Trump-Vance. One ticket contains two proven competent figures, the other consists of a man charitably described as in decline and a n00b who has no executive experience whatsoever, and who held no political office until two years ago.
These facts alone are enough to explain the last month's movement (which is itself extraordinary, as usually no significant shifts occur in August in a presidential election year). However, that effect is only enough to make the Democratic ticket a very slight favorite. The rest is up to the efforts of Team Blue (GOTV, fundraising, et cetera) and capitalizing on the unforced errors of Team Red (lack of GOTV, fundraising diverted to legal bills, lack of message focus).
" men are turned on visually, but not (typically) beyond the capacity for rational thought."
Larry,
OK, you were 15 once too, weren't you? If we didn't have much capacity for rational thought to begin with...I remember going completely brain dead in the presence of one beauteous bikini-clad Raisa, not that I went mad or exhibited looney tunes smashing-myself-over-the-head behavior. Or even asked her out.
Pappenheimer, just my luck to have the watch with nothing left to do....
Have to say I have been pleasantly surprised by recent political news. Seem like the old republic might have some ruin left in it yet.
Pappenheimer
Pappenheimer:
OK, you were 15 once too, weren't you? If we didn't have much capacity for rational thought to begin with...I remember going completely brain dead in the presence of one beauteous bikini-clad Raisa,
Sigh. My favorite pre-marriage memories are from the school year I turned 16 and the two surrounding summers. I would have been 15 at the time I met Stacey, the girl who babysat many of the neighborhood kids that summer and whose typical outfit was a halter top and short shorts.
*Sigh*
not that I went mad or exhibited looney tunes smashing-myself-over-the-head behavior. Or even asked her out.
See, that was my point. I guess I might be misinterpreting what OGH means by "drive mad", but to me, that suggests a state of mind where one is compelled to single-mindedly pursue consummation* the same way a starving man would pursue food.
As a nerd before nerds were trendy, I learned pretty early on not to expect my desires to be requited. Maybe learned that too well for my own good. But as a result, I did appreciate and even lust after girls and women without expectation of it going any further.**
* In fifth grade, I had a neighborhood friend who matured way early. He was at least six feet tall at age 10, and proportional to that size. So it stands to reason his libido also matured early. Looking at some lady with kids at the playground, he suddenly asserted, "I've got to fuck her!". I had barely just learned what "fuck" meant at that point, but the way-too-adult thought occurred to me, "If you won't be satisfied with less than that, you're going to be disappointed."
** It helped to be a Cubs fan in the late 1960s. One learns quickly that desire does not necessarily lead to satisfaction.
Yeah, the Usaians may get to keep it yet.
Another interesting signal re: the Ukraine War. Some soldiers of the 'thinly stretched to the point of exhaustion' defenders... are getting leave.
Oh, and the Ukr air force has reappeared...
A year in space:
https://www.popsci.com/science/frank-rubio-year-in-space/
Heh. Love it.
Anyone who visits non-urban Indiana can see this. I spent a few weeks at Cummins HQ doing contract work and the presence of H1-B contractors was a visibly painful strain to watch. Beside the fact that Cummins made a strategic error in how they operated their business, they also made a cultural error that rippled into the community.
No one was wearing white hoods and setting crosses on fire, but there was a kind of shunning underway. Made life hellish for isolated spouses.
And now for something completely different: a man with ... No, not that.
Yesterday's episode of On Point was about Surveillance Pricing, a new way for the rich and powerful to screw the rest of us. Back in the Age of the Robber Barons, price fixing was a huge scandal. After the soft-spoken fellow with the big stick got anti-trust legislation on the table, the connivers had to adapt. They discovered that they didn't actually have to meet in a smoky back room to collude. All they had to do was keep tabs on each other. Say you have three companies manufacturing thingamabobs. If one month Bob's Thingamabobs raises the price 5%, John's Thingamabobs and ThingamaRoberts, Inc. all raise their prices the same amount, because they can. Now we have AI technology to add a new twist.
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/08/14/surveillance-pricing-harm-consumers-ftc-data
Paul SB
What should we call this new from of robbery?
Flash fleecing?
Today's XKCD explains so much...
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/helium_synthesis.png
Pappenheimer
P.S. hard to listen to this one without feeling something....I listened to it the night I got back home from my first deployment
Harris my old friend, good to see your face again
More welcome though, yon trap and that old mare
". . . Some of those that work forces,
Are the same that burn crosses . . ."
Tony,
How about iCheat? In the episode someone suggests that companies could us it to raise prices for wealthy people and use the money to offset the prices for poor people. It was a good laugh line.
Paul SB
Alan Brooks:
A year in space:
Today's Chicago Tribune has an editorial cartoon with the capsule labeled "USS Minnow", and the caption, "A three hour tour."
Roy Hinkley, the professor on the show, was a HS science teacher.
(if we can mention Butch & woim here, then why not the professor on GI)
For a while I used to tell people the helium they were breathing in to do Donald Duck imitations was a byproduct of radioactive decay of heavy metals from deep inside the Earth. Our primordial He is long gone, but U-238 doesn't become lead without slowly leaving a fun gas with which we can amuse each other. 8)
GMT-5… may our (mostly) wonderful civil servants be empowered to do ever better work with ever-improving laws, with their civil service protections… protected from spoils-seeking betrayer-oligarchs.
And when I said 'driven mad' I was - of course - speaking of a madness that is both necessary and rather satisfying to control.
Speaking of Ukraine, a friend of mine at work said he was looking for videos from the war the other night and came across suicide videos from the war. :(
Basically, the Ukrainians had drone videos of Russians soldiers killing themselves to keep from being blown up. They see the drones hovering overhead, and rather than wait for the attack, they'd do the job themselves to make it less painful.
I don't have any links (and I'm not going to look for them), but I'm trying to imagine what the morale must be like for soldiers who are desperately trying to stay alive in battle to kill themselves in the trenches. The Russian troops must have such low expectations of making it out alive that, when they see it coming, they embrace it. This is not the actions of an army believing it will succeed.
I think the Ukrainians have a very good chance of winning this conflict.
Though might some of the 'suicides' be theater trying to convince the drone operator not to waste a grenade? I won't look. Just blather.
The northern tip of Scotland is mysterious, made more so by the discovery that Stonehenge's altar stone probably came from there thousands of years ago. I wish I had listened more attentively to family tales when I was wee. Anyone who could answer my questions is now gone. When I'm gone, even my questions will disappear. I envy and respect those cultures that have a detailed, unbroken recorded history.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07652-1
Between some anecdotes from my father (stationed in Berlin immediately post-war: witnessed a wounded Russian simply written off and shot by his CO.) and John Sweeney's account of the early stages of the Ukrainian war ("an army that leaves its own dead behind doesn't deserve to win"), I don't think the long term expectations of Russian troops have ever been high.
@scidata When dredging Port Phillip Bay for shipping channels to Melbourne Ports, local aboriginal elders were able to describe the course of the Yarra during the last ice age, when sea levels were lower. Similarly, Attenborough was given an account of when the sea flooded the coastal plains that now comprise the Great Barrier Reef. Properly maintained songlines can keep records for an impressively long time.
Several thousand years ago there was a thriving national trade in milling stones.
I daresay the ancient Brits were also more connected than we give them credit for.
Dr Brin:
And when I said 'driven mad' I was - of course - speaking of a madness that is both necessary and rather satisfying to control.
Well, that's very different. Nevermind.
I was just taking issue because it seems there are two kinds of men in the world: those who think that sexual arousal is an imposition unless it actually results in sex, and those who find sexual arousal to be a pleasure in and of itself. I'm obviously in the latter camp.
Tony Fisk,
A few acquaintances scoff at my obsession with computational psychohistory (as opposed to Asimov's future-telling version). But I see it as a potentially spectacular archaeology/anthropology tool. Perhaps the only one that can crack things like Linear A, stone age astronomy, and a local investigation of the Great Filter. An example might be to model the civ that built almost-pre-historic Australian aquaculture.
Oh my
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/15/politics/russ-vought-project-2025-trump-secret-recording-invs/index.html
Be warned that fanatical cults often eat their own, as in the Nazis Night of the Long Knives...
...or what the GOP oligarchy masters did to the infamous "neocons' or neoconservatives. Ever wonder why you never hear of them anymore? Wolfowitz, Nitze, Adelman and the rest? (Frum converted to moderate reason along with a few others.). All were flushed away without so much as a thank you - along with their "We're now an empire!" jibber jabber, in the wake of public disappointment in the Iraq/Afghanistan misadventures -- as US conservatism shrugged off imperial dreams and reverted to type.
Meaning isolationism, of the sort that Trump expressed in pissing in the faces of all of our allies. In fact, it's rather surprising neocons happened at all, let alone blazing spectacularly, before burn-out. A burnout that is still unrecognized by most pundits, who often assume imperialism is still part of MAGA. It most definitely is not. (To Trumpists, it is just fine that Russia do the empire thing.)
"Drumph!" devotees may miss some of the benefits of united States foreign policy if he gets the opportunity to destroy it. It is imperfect, but I'd prefer to see imperfections tweaked than the entire enterprise destroyed (Just a National tradition, I suppose.).
Tony,
I have no idea whether there are comparative rates available, but suicide in the trenches is not new or, I suspect, uncommon. Check with Siegfried Sassoon. I could easily believe suicide when faced with certain death; that was pretty much 1916-1918.
Pappenheimer
On a slightly happier note:
"My name is Frances Tolliver, I come from Liverpool,
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school..."
If you can listen to that song without misting up, I'll need proof of species, please.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJi41RWaTCs
Pappenheimer
Love that thorium clock result. That has got a lot of potential in the coming decades.
The Rude Pundit reflects my observation:
https://www.threads.net/@rudepundit
Apparently we're living through a nightmare right now, according to Donald Trump. I'll think about that while I'm drinking outside with friends.
I mean, according to Republicans, we're so much worse off than we were four years ago. Personally, I'm better off than I was four years ago when my daughter's senior prom and high school graduation were preempted by COVID. I'm better off than I was eight years ago when I was being laid off, and I'm better off than I was twelve years ago when I would have been laid off except that I took the job of outsourcing my own job. I'm better off than I was twenty-one years ago when my wife needed emergency gall bladder surgery while we had a one-year-old at home. Or thirty-three years ago when my penultimate girlfriend surprised me by breaking up on July 4. Or fifty years ago when I was a bullied nerd at school.
This might actually be the best time of my life. Thank you, Joe Biden.
It is a nightmare, there’s a specter haunting America—the specter of Trump himself.
If he loses the election, he’ll still be around to torment us. But he’s mortal, and will be gone someday. One way or another.
Well, if he lasts long enough he could become a Futurama-style head in a jar. I suppose he and Nixon's head could have a giant robot duel for the presidency.
At some point, we may need to amend the constitution to add an upper limit to offices*.
*Assumes an existing, enforced constitution in an actually United States.
Pappenheimer
You could do a screenplay.
Nothing personal against Nixon or Trump; and Pelosi said she feels sorry for Trump. Told MAGAs that he’s amusing, but they replied he is to be admired and for the reasons they admire him. That’s a new twist, to me.
Does one have to like Don Rickles for the exact same reasons his fans do?
Will say how he is tougher than he seemed.
Heard on Hal Sparks's radio show:
"I've always been a procrastinator. My parents threw me out of the house for procrastinating. I told them, 'Just you wait!'"
Kind of similar to the post I saw a few weeks back, supposedly attributed to the "Laugh-In" comedienne Ruth Buzzy:
"They all laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now!"
Could they possibly have been this sneaky and self-controlled? Yes, they slowly backpedaled for months, seeming to be pushed backward while inflicting massive Russian losses, while husbanding strike forces for the Kursk counter-offensive. But might there be enough left over for a 2nd punch?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMwdeTjgrEk
I thought it might come in winter fog, using a type of machine that's been almost completely absent, so far. My eyes keep glancing at the Dnipro.
Just remember what Vlad Putin himself worries about most - and says so, publicly. A repeat of the 1917 Soldiers' Revolt. If the legendary ability of Russians to endure suffering reaches its limit. It is the only possible true victory for civilization. But when he has his back fully against the open window, Vlad can be counted on to spasm.
...as a person, Trump is nothing: Nixon possessed far more substance; even Dan Quayle did.
It’s Trump’s followers who are to be feared—no matter who wins the election.
'Spasm' as in nuclear? But remember, we've been reliably informed by Elon in a recent interview that teh nukes aren't much. Why, Hiroshima and Nagasaki went right back to being functioning cities! It is known!
Which reminds me, 26 Sep is coming up. I celebrate it as Stanislav Petrov day.
Let him be a role model to nuclear launch commanders in all nations.
Pappenheimer
Dr. Brin,
Even if you have complete air superiority, it would be madness to attempt an airmobile assault intended to keep and hold territory unless you can be assured of swift reinforcement, and even that relies on the cooperation of the weather and the enemy. The Russians pulled their own Market-Garden Charlie Foxtrot early in the war. Pretty sure the Ukrainians noticed that.
Pappenheimer
P.S. One of the many, many, MANY stupidities Goering pulled in WWII was promising his Luftwaffe would be able to supply Stalingrad by air after VI army was encircled. Luckily for the world, but unluckily for Paulus' men, Hitler believed him. Military history doesn't repeat itself or rhyme, but there are assonances.
Pappenheimer There are sites along the Dnipro that appear to be undefended or poorly so to a remarkable degree. To my (ill-informed) eye, it certainly looks like an opportunity for an opportunistic incursion. There is a town 40km further with huge fortifications that are now virtually unmanned and that could then hold out (if taken swiftly) even without resupply, wrecking any chance of holding onto any of Kherson Oblast. Note, I do not expect any but you dozen guys are reading this, or I would not mention this.
On today's episode of Freakonomics Radio they examined "time banking" which is one of those ideas that sounds really simple, but when you think about it for a bit you realize that implementation could get pretty complicated, even with today's technology.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-worlds-most-valuable-unused-resource/
Paul SB
Tony,
Mrs Pappenheimer, biology major, says that the frozen hamsters suffered severe organ damage, though they did survive, and at least 60% of their brains had not crystallized. I think this is only goes to show just how hard it is to kill a hamster. Also, I don't want to think about what 40% destruction of brain cells would do. Did anyone administer an IQ test to the hamsters before and after?
Pappenheimer
onward
onward
Post a Comment