[ExI] [Extropolis] trump

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Aug 20, 2023 at 4:24 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Aug 19, 2023 at 6:26 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >I note that humans in war mode can be ferocious on a scale that I don't think chimps can match.
>
> If you're talking about the absolute number of individuals killed in war then that is true, but if you count the percentage of the species that have been killed in war it's not.

I am thinking about Rwanda and Cambodia.

> This has been especially true for the last 75 years which has been the most peaceful time in all of human history.

If you can state why it has been a peaceful time, you will have a
handle on my thinking and modeling of the subject.  But I am talking
about the last 100,000 years or so.
>
>> > gene copies are absorbed into the winner's tribe through the young women of the losers.  It turns out that from the gene's viewpoint, going to war is about 40% better than starving in place.
>
> Sure, if starving to death or going to war were the only two alternatives then I'm sure that's true, but I don't think such a clear-cut binary choice occurs very often in the real world.

It does not need to happen very often to have selection effects on
human genes.  1000 centuries is around 4000 generations.  I guess that
a weather event that caused the food supply to collapse happened about
once a generation (this could be estimated by tree rings, and was in a
Chinese study I have referenced> ).  20 generations of selection can
dramatically change the psychological traits of foxes, there is no
reason to expect it would have less effect on humans.

> The historical record backs me up on this, wars have produced starvation but none of the major wars during the last 400 years (and probably further back than that but the records are less clear) have been caused because one side was starving, and huge famines have occurred that have killed millions but have caused no wars.

"The causality analysis of climate change and large-scale human crisis"
David D. Zhanga,b,c,1, Harry F. Leea,b, Cong Wangd, Baosheng Lie, Qing
Peia,b, Jane Zhangf, and Yulun Anc
aDepartment of Geography and bThe International Centre of China
Development Studies, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong; cSchool of
Geographic and
Environmental Sciences, Guizhou Normal University, Guizhou 550001,
China; dDepartment of Finance, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632,
China;
eDepartment of Geography, South China Normal University, Guangzhou
510631, China; and fSouth China Morning Post, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong

Recent studies have shown strong temporal correlations between
past climate changes and societal crises. However, the specific causal
mechanisms underlying this relation have not been addressed. We
explored quantitative responses of 14 fine-grained agro-ecological,
socioeconomic, and demographic variables to climate fluctuations
from A.D. 1500–1800 in Europe. Results show that cooling from A.D.
1560–1660 caused successive agro-ecological, socioeconomic, and
demographic catastrophes, leading to the General Crisis of the Seventeenth
Century. We identified a set of causal linkages between
climate change and human crisis. Using temperature data and climate-
driven economic variables, we simulated the alternation of
defined “golden” and “dark” ages in Europe and the Northern Hemisphere
during the past millennium. Our findings indicate that climate
change was the ultimate cause, and climate-driven economic
downturn was the direct cause, of large-scale human crises in preindustrial
Europe and the Northern Hemisphere.
climate-driven economy | Granger Causality Analysis | grain price
Debate about the relation between climate and human crisis
has lasted over a century. With recent advances in paleotemperature
reconstruction, scholars note that massive social disturbance,
societal collapse, and population collapse often coincided
with great climate change in America, the Middle East,
China, and many other countries in preindustrial times (1–5). Although
most of these scientists believe that climate change could
cause human catastrophe, their arguments are backed simply by
qualitative scrutiny of narrow historic examples. More recent
breakthroughs came from research adopting quantitative approaches
to all known cases of social crisis.

These studies show that,
in recent history, climate change was responsible for the outbreak
of war,

dynastic transition, and population decline in China,
Europe, and around the world because of climate-induced shrinkage
of agricultural production (6–15). However, the underlying
causal linkages from climate change to agricultural production and
various human catastrophes in history have not been addressed
scientifically. Hence, this climate–crisis relationship remains obscure.
Incomplete knowledge of the topic has led to criticism that
the notion of climate-induced human crisis neglects historical
complexities or relies on weak evidence of causality (16, 17).

> The major cause of war has been religion, Protestants fighting Catholics, Christians fighting Jews,  Muslims fighting Christians, Muslims fighting Jews, Muslims fighting Hindus, Muslims fighting Buddhists, Buddhists fighting Hindus, Sunni Muslims fighting Shia Muslims...

I think you are conflating the xenophobic meme step in the progress to
war with the root cause.  In any case, humans did not have religions
(as we know them) over most of the 100,000 years I am talking about.

>>> >> If in times of stress your genes give you a personality such that your tendency to cooperate with your fellow beings increases then you may very well end up with more descendants than somebody who becomes more aggressive in such a situation.
>>
>>
>> > The model does not show this.
>
> I don't know what you mean by "the model". I can make a model of a dragon but that doesn't mean it exists.

I will email you the paper.

>> > I contend that the group size before splitting was largely set by food.  If you could not collect enough food within a day's walk, it was time to split.
>
> Humans have had groups far larger than that for many thousands of years,

I am talking about hunter-gatherers, pre agriculture.

>  and it has become the norm not the exception. So if humans have genes for splitting they can't be very strong and they can be easily overcome by other factors.
>>>
>>> >>  If you put 4 million chimpanzees on Manhattan Island they would start killing each other even if the food supply was infinite, but humans would not.
>>
>>
>> > Neither would bonobos who are closely related to chimps.
>
>
> True. We are as closely related to Bonobos as we are to Chimpanzees because they split from each other after they split from the line that produced us.
>
>> > The difference is chimps are intensely territorial
>
> Yes, physically there is very little difference between Chimps and Bonobos, the big difference between the species is behavioral. There must be advantages and disadvantages in both aggression and cooperation, but overall which has been shown to be a more effective strategy? Chimps took the aggressive path, humans and Bonobos took the cooperative path, and today humans outnumber Chimps and Bonobos combined by about 10 million to one; so the evidence seems to indicate that cooperation is the better strategy.  I also believe that if a species has a tendency towards cooperation and likes to form large social groups then there would be increased environmental pressure placed on it to evolve more intelligence because there would be more ways to make use of smart new ideas in a large group then there would be if you were just a solitary individual.

Not all human groups took the large group path.  The San did not, they
lived in small encampments for perhaps 200,000 years.
>
>> > Bonobos evolved in an environment with a huge difference.  They can easily spread out into resource-rich adjacent territories,
>
> That doesn't sound radically different from the environment humans are currently living in.

Right.  That is entirely due to science and engineering.  But it is fragile.

>> > Going to war is a widespread, almost universal, trait.
>
> But it has become far less universal ever since the nuclear bomb was invented.

We are talking about a couple of generations and no particular
selection pressure.  Whatever genetic traits people have for wars have
not changed.

Keith

>  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
> 666
>
>>
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