Atomic Nerds

It was as if even the most intelligent person had this little blank spot in their heads where someone had written: “Kings. What a good idea.” Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. — Terry Pratchett, from “Feet of Clay”

One of the counter-intuitive things about evolution is that when the average person tries to conceptualize “fitness”, the value biologists use to describe how well a trait or organism will be favored by natural selection, the mind jumps immediately to our usual definition of “fit”: we think of strength, speed, intelligence, physical and mental superiority. It is this basic fallacy that led to eugenics, the idea that we should weed out the slow and stupid and prioritize humans with “superior” qualities and thus accelerate man’s evolution into supermen. (This also contains one other extremely common fallacy in thinking about evolution, which is assuming it is progressive by nature at all, but this is beside the current point.) In fact, fitness is determined by one thing, and one thing only: how much of your DNA keeps on trucking through the generations. Depending on which level you’re thinking about it, this can mean how many children you have, or how many grandchildren- it is important that your children must themselves reproduce successfully, after all- or even how healthy and fecund your entire family, that share your genes, is. Technically speaking, one infertile and unexceptional individual that devotes his or her life to helping their brothers and sisters raise massive packs of healthy, well-adjusted children is more fit than one brilliant, athletic, and marvelously healthy billionaire that has few or no children.

Back before he decided to take time out from his successful career as a popular science writer and devote himself more fully to cultivating a militant brand of atheism, Richard Dawkins came up with a concept of ideas as individual replicators- like genes- which acted much as organisms do under the influence of natural selection. He called these proposed replicators memes, and observed that they really do act quite a lot like genes do; ideas that benefit their hosts tend to get passed around, ideas that are spectacularly bad tend not to, and an idea that contains features that allow it to spread very quickly or make their hosts very reluctant to let go of will spread and persist regardless of whether it is good or bad. Dawkins himself used this comparison- ideas behaving like viruses- to explain the persistence of religion (which of course all seems lunatic to him), although he tended to miss the bits where religion really does tend to be a beneficial meme overall.

The problem with memetics as a science closely mirroring genetics and being modeled by a process functionally identical to natural selection is that memes don’t share a feature of genes that makes the entire system possible- particulate inheritance. Genes are discrete physical objects that obey strict patterns of inheritance depending on the available parent material and the random elements of cellular meiosis and occasional mutation; memes are completely abstract entities that can and do randomly blend, mutate at an astonishing rate, lose bits while barely suffering, or get completely run through the chop together with four or five others. For the most part, it barely even matters if they work or not, as people tend to discard or ignore ideas the moment they become inconvenient; a bad meme is only a serious disadvantage to the host if it leads to some more traditionally Darwinian end, like standing in front of an Israeli bulldozer and expecting it to stop for the righteousness of your cause. Seen through the prism of history, really bad memes seem to be much more reliably fatal for everyone else. Stalin, after all, lived to 74.

It is far more likely that memetics is not a science but an extremely good lie; it breaks down utterly when you examine any of the particulars and tug a bit at the logic, but it does provide a set of ideas that make for a very useful way to think about cultural evolution. (In fairness to Dawkins, I think this was what he really had in mind- he has since backed prudently away from memetics, and it’s been characters like Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett that have carried on trying to insist that it’s really a naturalistic model of the mind and culture.) In particular, the comparison to biological evolution leads to an important revelation about memes- if natural selection gives us such a huge variety of parasitic creatures whose existence depends on replicating themselves at the expense of their hosts, we can also expect to see parasitic ideas that benefit a few but cost the “host” species, humanity, as a whole.

Particularly, remembering that what makes something fit is not its quality but its ability to reproduce itself is a very good thing to have in mind when wondering about cultural evolution. Some ideas are transparently designed in this self-serving way- memes offered with riders attached like “you’re going to act according to this or I’m going to start chopping pieces off you until you do”. This is crude but extremely effective, as history once again bears out, but it’s also rather obvious.

We expect ideas to go away when they are proven to be bad, much as we tend to expect that the pinnacle of human evolution is really someone that resembles Doc Savage. We can understand why an idea spreads under force of threat, but we scratch our heads when the same thing that failed spectacularly before keeps getting picked up, brushed off, and tried again by purely persuasive and even democratic means. We usually explain this by deciding that some bad ideas won’t die because of their pure emotional appeal, but this isn’t quite adequate either after a certain scale of failure. Breatharianism, the cutely wacky cult that alleges that all you truly need to survive is light and air, is a very emotionally appealing idea; just think of what you could save on groceries, you’d never have to worry about obesity again, and you’d completely eliminate all tiresome moral dilemmas about killing to survive and the energy costs inherent in the food you eat. As a meme, however, breatharianism has been so spectacularly unsuccessful that I’m betting most of you haven’t even heard of it until now. While it has managed to claim some victims (and probably a few more miserable chronic cheaters), we don’t wonder about why and the tally remains very small relative to other destructive memes; deciding to give up food and water is transparently a bad idea.

Meanwhile, more than a hundred million deaths are credited to the destructive meme of communism- which are probably very much underestimated, as we only tend to get figures from relatively well-organized regimes- and god alone knows how much lost productivity and wealth can be credited to its milder cousins. The various strains of collectivism in practice have ranged from merely a dubious idea that results in countries with chronically sclerotic and declining economies, to a truly catastrophic one that kills off half a population. And it remains an extremely successful meme that seems to require no threat at all to perpetuate itself; well-educated people around the world who have read all that history persist in insisting it’s a brilliant idea that has always been somehow poorly implemented. As memes go, it is incredibly robust and fit. No matter how many people it impoverishes or kills, it still seems like a good idea to so many people that it not only keeps being tried, but winds up as fashionable iconography for t-shirts and political campaigns. How?

I’m going to step away from that question for a moment to explain another quirk of biological evolution and how it relates to cultural evolution, which is that biological evolution suffers from a number of design constraints that cultural evolution doesn’t. All cultural evolution needs is material and energy; this is why, given the necessary initial building blocks, we can get massive and incredibly speedy jumps. This is how we go from radio plays to podcasts within the space of one generation, and from an isolationist industrial/agrarian society to a technologically-driven superpower within a global economy in the same span.

Biological evolution is limited by the pace imposed on it by the generation time of the organism; we have the same model of human, occasionally even some of the same individuals, fighting World War II and blogging on the wireless network in a coffee shop. This is humans as humans have physically been since the Neolithic, for the most part. Besides this limitation, there are all sorts of other constraints imposed on genetic evolution by the limits of physics and the effects of other traits; our brains probably aren’t going to get any bigger after the first size explosion of hominid evolution, because human babies have to pass through the vagina, which goes through an opening in the pelvis, which can’t itself get much larger without seriously impairing the ability of women to walk and run. The babies can’t be born very much less developed than they already are, the opening isn’t going to get much bigger, so our brains aren’t going to get too much bigger in the future, either.

Nothing too radical can be “tried” without dooming the organism; this is why certain critical features, like the development of the fetus, remain highly conserved and very similar among otherwise very disparate and diverse groups of vertebrates. There COULD be better ways to do it, but changing the development of the fetus is so likely to result in failure that evolutionary change can only happen very slowly, and tends to happen in a much more linear fashion that retains more of the old features for longer. (This is why people believed for so long that a developing human fetus passes through all the “stages” of evolution in primate history from fish to modern hominid- “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”.)

Cultural evolution suffers from no such problems. Memes do have something like the baggage genes carry due to being developed out of previous strains of human thought- and their creators carrying unknown biases due to their own unquestioned cultural assumption- but unlike the birth canal that leads through the pelvis, once the design problem is identified, it can usually be redesigned. Any idea, no matter how radical, can and probably eventually WILL be tried. So why don’t we get a much bigger variety and many more ideas that are truly original, and why do so many old ones get a fresh coat of paint slapped on before they’re passed around as new?

One answer is that humans simply aren’t nearly as creative as they like to think they are. Another is that older ideas slightly modified are usually more likely to work, and that there is simply a much smaller subset of ideas that aren’t blatantly ridiculous than there is of ideas that could be thought of at all. This still isn’t enough to explain things like the wild success of certain memes that are discredited over and over again but still catch like brushfire wherever they spread, like “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”, or “it would be totally awesome to have one really powerful guy in charge as long as we picked the right guy”, or “all our social problems would go away if we could just come up with a system based on love instead of greed”. This is because cultural evolution, while radically flexible and powerful compared next to biological evolution, still has design constraints that aren’t readily apparent at first.

If we can borrow the computers from Moore’s Law as an example, cultural evolution is rather like software- it can be written on the fly, and its major limitations are human creativity and the limits of the physically possible. Biological evolution is more like hardware- it changes more slowly and defines some of the limits of the software, and is limited by the pace of engineering technology and cost. The situation humanity is in is much like the one we would have if software had advanced at the rate we’re used to, but computer hardware itself had not changed since the first personal computers; Homo sapiens ipod is trying to run Windows Vista on an Altair, but he is mostly unaware of it.

One concept that has gained recent web popularity, though not under its original name, is Dunbar’s Number. Coined by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the Number is the theorized number of other humans that we can possibly cram into our brains as social contacts. Primatologists had long noted how important grooming and other social interactions were to keeping a group of primates happy and connected to each other as a troupe; they had also noted that the number of other monkeys a given species was able to keep track of- and thus the upper limits of possible stable troupe size- seemed to be defined and limited pretty mathematically closely by the size of the neocortex, which as the name suggests is the most recently evolved brain structure. It’s where conscious thought, reason, and language live, too. As you might expect, humans have huge, disproportionately sized neocortexes- for us, just over three-quarters of the brain’s total volume. Dunbar, observing this, used regression analysis from 38 primate genera to predict the average stable group size for humans: around 150 group members. This is huge for a monkey, but compared to the average size of human societies now, after thousands of years of cultural evolution, it’s incredibly dinky.

David Wong popularized the concept for the web in an article about Dunbar’s Number (redubbed the “monkeysphere”) and why it means that we are so much less moral when dealing with people we don’t know. Once above a certain number of friends, family, and individuals that we interact with on a regular basis, we are dealing with people that are far less real to us because they’re “outside the monkeysphere”; our neocortexes are simply not capable of processing more. One death is a tragedy and one million is a statistic not because the majority of humans don’t care about other people, but because we have a hardware bottleneck at work, every bit as severe as a program reaching for computer memory or storage space that simply isn’t there. We stop being able to empathize with them or think of them as fully three-dimensional other people the way we would a neighbor, friend, or family member, so a number of our built-in monkeysphere constraints against bad behavior (that don’t even require much conscious operation) simply vanish- poof. Can’t use that process anymore- out of RAM.

This is why Dunbar’s Number/the monkeysphere is used to predict the size of a group of humans that can exist without an explicit system of laws, regulations, and enforcement; basically, the size of a possible anarchic society. Monkeys don’t need a government because they never developed the capacity to get around the monkeysphere in any fashion; meanwhile, humans have gone through several flavors trying to solve the monkeysphere-exceeded problems of crime and corruption.

One of the patterns that keeps cropping up over and over again in human cultures that are still at the band-and-tribe level- populations that aren’t yet much bigger than their monkeyspheres- is the practice of a successful hunters distributing the meat from their kills throughout the band. A good hunter becomes king for a day; his reputation and good will are enhanced, and everybody is happy, especially if he can pull this off on a regular basis. There isn’t much hoarding of meat among nomads- one big animal is too much for just one small family, there’s no way to preserve and store it, and besides, everybody needs it. This common sharing behavior is probably one of the reasons we were able to get enough nutrition, and organize well enough to start getting other good ideas, to grow great big expensive neocortexes in the first place. In other words, it made populations of hominids that were willing to share the meat around generously more fit- possibly dramatically so. Such generosity is not generally seen among wild primates, except close kin and good friends. It was a step forward for hominids.

This pattern is repeated at the village level, where the most primitive form of government seems to be the “big man” or chief; chiefdoms are considered the next “level” of human social organization up from band-and-tribe. The big man or chief has the right to demand more goods and services, but in return is expected to be generally responsible for the welfare of the group- and one way a big man gets to be the big man, other than being kin to the previous big man, is to collect wealth- food, mainly, now storeable and therefore hoardable because agriculture has come along and given rise to the concept of a shelf life- and distribute it. Chiefdoms are big on feasts. They’re also not considered to be very stable, because the big man’s authority rests on his ability to provide and protect- and if he doesn’t, well, we’re still at a close enough population size to our monkeysphere for everyone in the village to hold the bastard personally responsible for it. There is no spreading of blame around to the “system”: l’etat, c’est moi has a meaning much closer to the bone.

Still, what we have here is the two most primitive levels of government resting on the idea of distribution of wealth- which has a very limited meaning at this level of society- being in fact a very good idea, seemingly the only good idea at that population size. It’s close enough to the monkeysphere to work, and more than that, it’s the only idea that really works when all your wealth is in the form of a limited supply of tangible goods. It makes perfect sense that we get jealous when we see another human with tons and tons of stuff- for all of our history as animals and the vast majority of our history as humans, someone with tons of stuff almost has to be shorting us and everyone else on stuff, because there is only so much stuff. Supplies of clothes and food, for a monkeysphere’s worth of people and for quite a bit beyond that size, are inherently limited by farmland, storage space, agricultural success, and other things. More specialized goods, such as metal tools, are even more valuable because they’re so much harder for a band of a few hundred farmers to make. In that setting, capitalism really IS a zero-sum game.

Hardware problem: when we consider Bill Gates, we are considering him with a brain that is actively evolved and then conditioned by the first several thousand years of cultural evolution to think of all “wealth” as a limited amount of fresh fruit, meat, and sexy mates, with more modern innovations like supplies of precious metals fitting easily into that model. We know better, because we’ve advanced far enough to start noticing how wealth behaves at large enough accumulations of humans and that, in the right market conditions, the rich getting rich tends to make everyone else richer along with them- but we need to work around our own brains to do it, and we tend not to even be very well aware of the design constraints we’re living with. This is why economics is not only a very difficult field for humans, but why its world keeps getting saddled with economists lapsing into economic models that are proven failures, and trying to make them work all over again. And if they don’t? Nothing could be more natural than to do another thing that we’re wired on a very basic level to do- try to identify the cheaters and punish them. This is such an important social-primate thing that we have an identifiable brain model for it. We almost can’t help thinking of the rich as cheating bastards, and this gives us the desire to to another very traditional primate thing- bash them with a rock and take the wealth. Then we are surprised to see how fast it runs out, because we were unaware (and partially unable to even process) of the way it was growing itself in the hands of the rich bastards.

This is why Breatharianism is a proven bad idea that only perpetuates itself among a handful of the seriously gullible and communism is one of the most successful parasite memes of all time: there is absolutely nothing in our monkey brains or human history to suggest that giving up eating is a good idea, but a tremendous amount in our hominid brains and earlier history to strongly suggest that redistributing wealth from the most powerful to the least is a VERY good idea. We wouldn’t have civilization at all if we hadn’t begun with powerful men given the authority to demand and distribute wealth. Unfortunately, it fails utterly as soon as we get much beyond the monkeysphere, because all the natural checks and urges that accompany monkeysphere-sized groups vanish- there is no more local knowledge of conditions, no more driving sense of responsibility to the population from the leaders and no more driving sense of accountability of the leaders from the population, no more natural urge not to cheat in some fashion because the people being hurt have vanished utterly from our monkeysphere-sized moral hardware. All that’s left is the software, and it doesn’t work very well, not least because it ignores the design constraints of the hardware. But the hardware IS designed to continue thinking it’s a good idea, because it was so vital to our success as humans for so long.

It even explains why libertarianism is always such a minority political theory in nearly any given society: if there is any concept that is completely and utterly alien to the original primate, it is “mind your own business”. Show me a monkey that does THAT.

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