cobblehillbilly

I'm not an evolutionary biologist, so maybe naively I ascribe to Richard Wrangham's notion from his book "Catching Fire," that man's relationship to flame is integral to our genome, that we could not have become who we are without it. We domesticated fire, inadvertently at first, but to our own purpose and set ourselves on a co-evolutionary path with technology while creating, through a conscious relationship to things, an exponentially broader cultural sphere than that of any other species. Many other animals require deliberate knowledge transfers between generations for collective survival, mirror neurons in their brains, like those in ours, combine with "kin selection's" genetic impulses to form the facilitating substrate. But when hominids began to cook, they applied Morris' notion of energy capture, the import of power, to their own organism and captured the heat applied to food in the form of metabolically supercharged calories. In the process we evolved smaller guts and much larger brains and an ever expanding cultural/technological artifice constructed over and eventually changing nature itself.

With our hypertrophied brain came the explosion of culture resultant from energy capture: cooking is a technology, a cultural artifact with which we co-evolved, there's no gene for it and yet a hundred thousand years latter, here it is and we can't really do without it: this energy capture is the substrate that actually fed all our subsequent cultural efforts. Like Language, cooking is simultaneously a culture and technology that appears to have evolved as a sort of intellectual arms race for mating advantage: smarter, better sounding, better cooking, better looking and better making individuals had better reproductive prospects and proliferating technologies provided multiplying divergent avenues along which to compete in ever larger groups. All in a race of cultural evolution leaving traces in our genes only for intellectual capabilities like speed, invention and cleverness and for perceptual signals like beauty, voice, symmetry, skin, hair and eye color, but not for the manifest cultural behaviors themselves even as they have all been conserved over millennia. As we became smarter and our technologies more complex, culture co-evolved to support, integrate and conserve the results.

Our propensity to technology and the culture to support it is integral to our genetic break with our genomic relatives, and the defining technology was that of power. Power embodied both in the internal metabolic energy from cooking (external energy capture embodied), that from fire to forge to factory which makes our things, and in the language of power which commands demographically scaling, coordinated action. So power in the dual forms of material force and social coordination at scale, the two are related, is in our genome. Any understanding of human nature that leaves it out is missing the essential, and in "UltraSociety" Turchin is clear on this. Power has been at the center of culture from the start and has bequeathed us genetic artifacts beyond our large brain, particularly in the context of trust and warfare on which "UltraSociety" focuses, power has bequeathed us approximately one in one hundred people with genes that may express as psychopathy, an identification with a particular cultural form rather than our fellow humans, an identification with power.

From a genetic point of view, like rape, psychopathy has obvious selective advantages, but only as an outlier parasitic to a larger sociable community, either as a residual gene expression from less social primates or as a new mutation within our species. This gene thrives at the margins as a free rider on the evolving growth of collective goods, or public goods, the culturally selective advantage of sociability. The absence of empathy characteristic of the pathology gives individuals having it a huge power advantage: in situations short of force, they will be uniquely uninhibited in material dealings with others; once dominant, with access to institutional force, they will have an entirely different attitude to violence, that of Turchin's God King. These genes and their expression are still with us. Psychotic abuse of trust in the pursuit of power is the fissile isotope civilization can never free itself from as it forms an irreducible fraction of or genetic inheritance.

...

The Cooperator's Dilemma, Chapter 3 of "UltraSociety", clouds its argument with a reliance on fictional narratives of contemporary business malfeasance. Business is a recent, and one hopes transient, manifestation of human socio-material relations. In its modern form, it's the result of a deliberate instrumentalization of people, a sociopathic process rooted in the caste structure of pre-modern Great Britain: in the creation of a market based social system, enormous human dislocations were conceptualized and imposed despite monumental human misery to facilitate at the expense of the lower castes what would

cobblehillbilly

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Links

Thursday, October 20, 2016

Samizdat

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Samizdat

Monday, October 10, 2016

Samizdat

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Links

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Samizdat

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Samizdat

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Links

Friday, September 9, 2016

Links

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Samizdat

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Links

Friday, August 26, 2016

Links

Saturday, August 20, 2016

Samizdat

Links

ULTRASOCIETY: The Neo-Liberal Locus of Trust

Pages

About Me

Blog Archive

My Blog List