Right Reason

Pestilence and the Course of Evolution in Civilization

 

 

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, Come and see. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

Revelations 6:7-8

Tomorrow, Paradox Interactive shall release a new expansion to Crusader Kings II, a magnificent grand-strategy game. The expansion is called The Reaper’s Due and it focuses on the effects of pestilence, especially the Black Death, in the Medieval world. The very theme brings to mind the effects that pestilence has had on the human species since the dawn of civilization.

 

Among students of human evolution, one of the questions that comes to mind when one is first thinking about that great epic of natural history is whether human evolution has stopped. Although evolutionary biologists will be quick to chime in that evolution never really stops, the question is still one that piques curiosity. After all, has civilization not prevented the culling of the human population that would be necessary for evolution to occur? However, as The Reaper’s Due makes all too apparent, such culling has actually occurred over the course of civilization, and one of the principal reasons has been pestilence.

The human species is now living in a geological era all its own. Yes, Homo sapiens may have attained anatomical modernity in the Middle Paleolithic, or thereabouts, but the species today lives in the Anthropocene. Both the rapid destruction of ecosystems, which happened even during the era of hunter-gatherers, and global warming warrant the creation of a new geological era. However, those two are not the aspects of the Anthropocene that I wish to focus on, that aspect is civilization, the complex network of social interaction by which man has accomplished the challenge of Genesis 1:28 to subdue and have dominion over the earth.

Civilization and the problems associated with living in close coordination with other people, introduce evolutionary pressures that have changed the human species over the past twelve thousand years. It has done so principally because civilization radically changes the ecosystems in which the human species evolves. That change in ecosystem has introduced new challenges in the struggle for existence our species has faced that has affected the human genome. We only need look as far as what happened to much of the indigenous population in America upon European contact to know that some populations have a resistance to some infectious diseases and that resistance probably has a genetic

 

One of the deadliest among those evolutionary pressures in the threat of disease. The existence of even thousands of human beings living right next to each other changes the very biotic system they are living in. That people tend to often lived on top of their own refuse in densely populated areas creates an ever more hospitable ecosystem for the flourishing of bacteria. Even worse, malnutrition is prevalent in civilizations across the world because of the difficulties that agricultural societies have in supplying all of the necessary nutrients. As a result of malnutrition, people are less likely to be able to fend off the pathogens afflicting them, to the benefit of the population of those pathogens.

Overall, civilization changes the ecosystem that human beings find themselves in. Although most of those changes may be said to be for the better, the threat of disease is certainly magnified. As a result, human beings have to struggle against disease to a much greater degree than they did. That struggle for existence has exerted an evolutionary pressure on the human population. Pestilence has been one of the pressures driving human evolution. Moreover, it is an evolutionary pressure generated by human civilization itself.

The Atavism of Bernie Sanders

So I recently (last week) had an opinion piece published in Real Clear Policy titled "The Atavism of Bernie Sanders." In the piece, I take a view of Senator Sanders' policies and immense popularity from the side of evolutionary biology.

It's certainly a touchy subject, but it should not be controversial that our emotions and urges have evolutionary origins. As Edward O. Wilson's career testifies, though, it is very controversial, even on atheistic campuses, when one suggests that there is such a thing as human nature and that it can be investigated just like any other biological adaptation.

I quote the conclusion below: 

A specter is still haunting commercial society. That specter is not socialism, but the people's romance. Bernie Sanders is now at the forefront of exploiting that bias in our emotions inherited from our distant ancestors. Our modern civilization cannot be expected to satisfy the primordial urges that spring from those instincts. Unlike the bands of our ancestors, it is the product of learned rules. If the people's romance were to triumph in politics, the operation of those abstract rules would be correspondingly subverted, and our lives impoverished.

 

The Ternate Essay

 

 

Today in 1858, Charles Darwin received a manuscript in the mail  from the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who was at that time exploring the Malay Archipelago, outlining a theory of evolution. Titled "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type," but widely known as the Ternate essay for the island Wallace wrote the piece on, the essay was certainly a startle to Darwin, who had been carefully accumulating evidence for a large work on evolution.

In the essay, Wallace describes evolution as the progress, always checked by external circumstances, from an original type:

We believe we have now shown that there is a tendency in nature to the continued progression of certain classes of varieties further and further from the original type--a progression to which there appears no reason to assign any definite limits--and that the same principle which produces this result in a state of nature will also explain why domestic varieties have a tendency to revert to the original type. This progression, by minute steps, in various directions, but always checked and balanced by the necessary conditions, subject to which alone existence can be preserved, may, it is believed, be followed out so as to agree with all the phenomena presented by organized beings, their extinction and succession in past ages, and all the extraordinary modifications of form, instinct, and habits which they exhibit.

Of note in the Ternate essay is Wallace's discussion of the struggle for existence:

The life of wild animals is a struggle for existence. The full exertion of all their faculties and all their energies is required to preserve their own existence and provide for that of their infant offspring. The possibility of procuring food during the least favourable seasons, and of escaping the attacks of their most dangerous enemies, are the primary conditions which determine the existence both of individuals and of entire species. These conditions will also determine the population of a species; and by a careful consideration of all the circumstances we may be enabled to comprehend, and in some degree to explain, what at first sight appears so inexplicable--the excessive abundance of some species, while others closely allied to them are very rare.

I don't know whether Charles Darwin adopted Wallace's language or whether he came to it independently, but Darwin puts great emphasis on the struggle for existence in The Origin of Species, dedicating an entire chapter to the topic. Like Darwin, Wallace correctly emphasizes that the struggle for existence is strongest between similar organisms in similar niches in an ecosystem.

Where the two drastically disagree is in the relationship of domestic animals to the theory of evolution. Whereas Wallace rejects the existence of an analogy between the varieties of domestic animals and the varieties of animals in a state of nature, Darwin cleverly exploits that analogy in the first couple of chapters in The Origin of Species. Indeed, Darwin opens the book with a elucidation of the principles of artificial selection. Only after establishing those principles does he move onto establishing that the struggle for existence can produce similar selective pressures on animals in a state of nature. 

On Dextrous Hands

 

 

Charles Darwin never wrote of a theory of evolution; rather he wrote of a “theory of descent with modification; by variation and Natural Selection”. Although certainly cumbersome, I do like Darwin’s formulation better, since it emphasizes the process by which species have evolved by piecemeal variations on forms that existed before. ‘Descent with modification’ immediately brings to mind the historically contingent process that has lead to each species being what it is. Evolution is fundamentally a process of tinkering. 

 

BBC Earth highlights that process of modification today with “15 Tweaks That Made Us Human”. The article discusses 15 variations that have led to the unfolding of man’s natural history. One of the variations that the article highlights is our dextrous hands: 

Our hands are unusually dextrous, allowing us to make beautiful stone tools and write words. That might be partly down to a bit of DNA calledHACNS1, which has evolved rapidly since our ancestors split from the ancestors of chimps. We don't know what HACNS1 does, but it is active in our arms and hands as they develop. 

Immanuel Kant makes a similar point about the importance of human beings' hands, in his Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view:

The characterization of the human being as a rational animal is already present in the form and organization of his hand, his fingers, and fingertips; partly through their sensitive feeling.  By this means nature has made the human being not suited for one way of manipulating things but undetermined for each way, consequently suited for the use of reason; and thereby has indicated the technical predisposition, or the predisposition of skill, of his species as a rational animal. (Kant 7:323)

Historically, it is curious that Kant would place such weight on the structure and dexterity of the human hand. By the time Kant wrote the Lectures, the anatomy of the orangutan and chimpanzee had been published. In 1699, Edward Tyson first published a book on the anatomy of a chimpanzee, complete with a grasping hand. During the 1770s, the Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper demonstrated that the orangutan was incapable of both speech and an upright gait. 

 

Although a dextrous hand does point to humanity’s rational nature, it doesn’t constitute such a discrete advancement as Kant suggests. As the anatomy of Tyson and Camper suggests, the dexterous hand is a part of nature, it is not beyond it. 

The dexterous hand shows the clinal variation that has led to the evolution of the human being. However impressive human beings’ capabilities may be above that of other animals, the journey to those capabilities has been one of small variations. “15 Tweaks That Made Us Human” helps make that biological odyssey manifest to us all. 

Laws Are the Products of Convention

 

From Antiphon’s On Truth as quoted in the introduction of Thucydides’ The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians (edited by Jeremy Myrott):

Justice, therefore, consists in not violating the customary laws of the city in which one is a citizen. So a person takes most advantage for himself from ‘justice’ if he respects the important of the laws when witnesses are present, but follows nature in their absence. For the requirements of the law are discretionary but the requirements of nature are necessary; and the requirements of the law are by agreement and not natural, whereas the requirements of nature are natural and not by agreement. 

 

From Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France:

If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory power are its creatures. They can have no being in any other state of things; and how can any man claim, under the conventions of civil society, rights which do not so much suppose its existence? Rights which are absolutely repugnant to it?

 

The greatest political superstition of the modern era is the belief that laws are the creations of reason rather than of, as G.K. Chesterton called it, the democracy of the dead. Just as the creationist needs to postulate the existence of a creator transcendent to the world in order to make sense of its creative processes, so too does the modernist need to postulate the existence of minds transcendent to society in order to explain law. Both are happy stories about how the world isn’t run by chance or folly, but by intelligent beings able to think through what they’ve created, and both are wrong superstitions. 

 

Just as species are the haphazard creations of natural selection, so too are laws the product of selective forces operating beyond the understanding of the human mind. Furthermore, just like species, laws lack any special τέλος. It is very easy to think that a law against murder as existing to prevent people from murdering one another, but that’s like saying that a large ground finch has a robust beak for cracking nuts. 

It’s a statement which assumes the existence of a teleological goal which isn’t really there. Both statements don’t do much harm at the superficial level; however, as one examines the phenomena closer in depth, the assumption of teleology will be misleading. Just like the large ground finch’s beak, laws against killing have come about because they provide selective benefits to the societies that harbor those laws, which brings us to a very important point about law: that it’s focal.

 

Edmund Burke recognizes that when he talks about the conventional nature of society. The conventions are the focal standards of behavior which people observe, and their observation of those conventions creates a specific type of society depending on the constitution of that given convention. Laws are then the most sacred of those conventions which have worked their way into the very fabric of a society through generations facing the particular problems they are faced with, hence the democracy of the dead part. There is a democracy to tradition; unlike voting for representatives, though, tradition’s democracy demands much more of its voters than simply arriving to the booths, it demands people to vote for traditions by adopting ways of life. 

Those ways of life eventually become focal for people coordinating their behavior with one another. In essence, laws are nothing but long-standing customs. They are not, as the moderns would have us believe, the product of a spiritual force - reason, little more than a ghost in the machine - otherwise unconnected to the particular historical circumstances each society is faced with. 

 

On the Origins of the Chin

 

When humans fight hand-to-hand the face is usually the primary target and the bones that suffer the highest rates of fracture are the parts of the skull that exhibit the greatest increase in robusticity during the evolution of basal hominins. These bones are also the most sexually dimorphic parts of the skull in both australopiths and humans. In this review, we suggest that many of the facial features that characterize early hominins evolved to protect the face from injury during fighting with fists. Specifically, the trend towards a more orthognathic face; the bunodont form and expansion of the postcanine teeth; the increased robusticity of the orbit; the increased robusticity of the masticatory system, including the mandibular corpus and condyle, zygoma, and anterior pillars of the maxilla; and the enlarged jaw adductor musculature are traits that may represent protective buttressing of the face.

Source.

Contrivances and Understanding Institutional Change

 

From Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species:

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing of the labor, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history (1859, 485-486).

What Darwin says about studying the pylogeny of organisms is as important for the study of human institutions. Just as species change based on piecemeal modifications made across generations, so are institutions. When we look at, say, the American Federal government, to really understand it, we have to understand how the Federal government has been used across different generations to solve different problems, and how it has, as a result, been modified across those generations. Just as the problem of paying for war debt after the American War of Independence left a mark on  the form Federal government, so did Prohibition and so will the Affordable Care Act.

Understanding the evolution of the Federal government is thus very much a matter of understanding the many histories of the "many contrivances, each useful to the possessor" which have changed its form. 

Institutional Design: The Coevolution of Institutions and Preferences

 

 

From “The Good-Luck Charm That Solved a Public-Health Problem” by Eleanor Smith:

In 2008, Christopher Charles was living in Cambodia and researching anemia… 

Charles, a Canadian epidemiologist, knew that iron-rich foods and supplements were too expensive for most rural Cambodians. Even cast-iron pots, which safely transmit iron to food as it cooks, were out of reach. But he wondered whether a small piece of iron placed in a standard aluminum pot would have a similar iron-releasing effect. To test his hypothesis, Charles distributed blocks of iron to local women, telling them to place the blocks in their cooking pots before making soup or boiling drinking water. The women promptly put them to use as doorstops.

After talking with village elders, Charles learned of a fish known as try kantrop, which the locals ate frequently and considered a symbol of good luck. When he handed out smiling iron replicas of this fish, women started cooking with them. “People associated it with luck, health, and happiness,” he says. Within 12 months, Charles reports, anemia in villages where the fish was distributed virtually disappeared.

The genius of the Lucky Iron Fish is that it does not have to be shaped like a fish. “If we were to go to sub-Saharan Africa,” says Charles, “or a dry area where fish is not an important part of the diet, we could very easily change it to a different symbol of luck.”

 

Preferences matter, and that is displayed in Christopher Charles’ interventions in Cambodian cooking culture, and his design for better ways of cooking. Charles’ actions in Cambodia are certainly a top-down intervention with an epidemiologist using his technical knowledge in order to change the institutions of a society in this case the rules of the game of cooking. His iron bars are institutional design, seeking to enhance human flourishing, but they failed at first because Charles’ failed to take the preferences of those he was trying to help. 

When Charles tried his first intervention, his attempts to change the way that Cambodians cooked their food were unsuccessful because they did not mesh with the Cambodians’ culture and habits, all of which are subsumed under the concept of preferences. The reaction that the women had to the iron, either in block of piscine form, would be categorized as preferences by economists, and those reactions determined whether the women would either use the iron as a doorstop or as a complement to their diet. When Charles’ intervention did not elicit the desired response from the Cambodian women, it was because his intervention did not work along with their preferences, and elicit the right response. However, once Charles’ intervention worked with their preferences, and elicited the desired response, then it worked, and the Cambodian women used the iron supplements in their cooking. 

 

 

For better and for worse, economics identifies all of the reasons for behavior that motivate people in their lives under the category of preferences. For better because preferences enables economics a simple category to think about human action in a teleological manner. What made Jim go to the grocery store? His preferences! They are, after all, his reasons for action. For worse because preferences blind economists to the fact that human beings general act in a program-like, and habitual manner compared to the lighten-rod calculator comprised of preferences. Nevertheless, the concept of preferences does its job well because economics is more concerned with the conscious action than with the psychological intricacies of all of human nature.  

Economists are naturally interested in how institutions form human behaviors. From David Hume wondering about what institutions would form the best outcomes even if all men were knaves to Elinor Ostrom writing about how informal institutions are able to maintain human cooperation despite the lack of formal institutions, the question of what kinds of institutions enable human flourishing has been one of the most important research programs running through the mainline of economic thought. Putting preferences into a black box hurts this research program because it conceals the way that individuals and institutions have evolved through history.

Institutions do not exist within a vacuum; rather, they have evolved through time changed by the different circumstances they have faced, and by the people within them. In addition, endogenous preferences, the replication of preferences across a shared institutional context, are common across the world. In that light, preferences can be looked at like accents. Human beings can consciously try to attain certain preferences, but for the most part - especially if we live an life unreflected on - we are unconscious to the manner we have come to attain our preferences, and so many of them we have simply acquired from our environment. Since the preferences of a population have exerted a crucial influence upon the evolution of their institutions, we need to understand the preferences of a population if we are to understand the success, or failure of its institutions. More tersely, culture matters. 

 

Overall, the failure of Christopher Charles’ first attempt to improve the iron within Cambodians’ diet is an illustration of the importance of preferences to the study of human society, and to the success of institutions. Institutional design is of interest to any student of human institutions because it can shed light onto the functioning of institutions within a complex world. For Charles’ design, it sheds light upon the necessity for institutions to work alongside preferences if they are to lead to desired outcomes. 

 

 

Chickens and Dinosaurs

 

 

 

We all know that birds and dinosaurs are related, but how much can we know about dinosaurs from the study of modern birds? From The Business Insider:

Studying dinosaur bones and physiology can only teach us so much about how dinosaurs actually walked the Earth. Because dinosaurs called theropods are related to modern birds, a few researchers thought they could study how they walk using chickens.

...

To make chickens change their gait, the researchers added a tail, which looks surprisingly like a toilet plunger, to their butts. This changed their center of gravity, and made them walk differently.

...

The finding?

"Our results support the hypothesis that gradual changes in the location of the centre of mass resulted in more crouched hindlimb postures and a shift from hip-driven to knee-driven limb movements through theropod evolution," the researchers write in the study, published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

 

New Genetic Evidence on the Mutation for Blue Eyes in Europe

A new study shows that hunter-gatherers in Spain had blue eyes, from National Geographic's "Blue-Eyed Hunter-Gatherers Roamed Prehistoric Europe, Gene Map Revealed":

Apologies to Frank Sinatra, but the real Ol' Blue Eyes has been found—a 7,000-year-old Spaniard whose fossil genes reveal that early Europeans sported blue eyes and dark skin.

Mapping the blue-eyed boy's genes is part of ongoing effort to uncover the DNA of ancient humans. The new study in the journal Nature, led by Inigo Olalde of Spain's Institut de Biología Evolutiva in Barcelona, reports the genetic map of a skeleton found in a Spanish cave. (See also: "Modern Europe's Genetic History Starts in Stone Age.")

Why It Matters

Scholars had suspected that blue eyes arrived as an import into Europe, brought by late-arriving farmers who invaded the continent more than 5,000 years ago. Contrary to the conventional picture of a blue-eyed, fair-haired northern European, the study suggests that blue eyes were already common among the continent's early hunter-gatherers, along with darker skin.

But those aren't the only results that matter from the study. The researchers also discovered that a number of disease-resistance genes seen in modern Europeans were active in the ancient Spaniard's gene map. And the study adds genetic support to archaeological findings that hint that a widespread hunter-gatherer culture cut continuously across Europe in prehistory.