[ExI] [Extropolis] trump

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 11:02 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Keith
>
> I'll comment about your post but first I want to thank you for being kind enough to send me your paper, I read it and found it very interesting.  In your paper you say:
>
> "we need to generate a model from the "viewpoint" of such genes in a typical warrior 50,000 or 100,000 years ago."
>
> But I think to understand what's going on we need to go back a lot further than that, before our ancestors even figured out how to use stones for tools.  In your model you assume that if two tribes go to war then the winning tribe will be the one that is most aggressive, but is that necessarily true?

Take another look at the model.  There was no such assumption, each
tribe had a 50% chance of winning in the model.  Genes have to play
the odds.

> Could it be that the winning tribe is "the one that was more intelligent? Could it even be that the tribe that passed more of its genes to the next generation is the one that was smart enough to tell the difference between when it's a good idea to go to war and when it is not?

That is mentioned in the paper, "This places the detection of looming
starvation under intense selection to get it right.  (This is a
challenging cognitive task and possibly a driver of human
intelligence.)"

Also, as mentioned in the paper, it is a monumentally stupid move
(from the gene's viewpoint) to go to war when not facing something
worse.

> If any of this is the case then it would help explain why the enormous increase in brain size, and presumably intelligence, started to occur about 1.5 million years ago when primitive stone tools started to show up. Of course that alone can't explain why such a massive increase in intelligence does not routinely happen to all species over evolutionary time, but your theory can't explain that either.

It's not intended to.  The model is only about how psychological
traits for war were selected.  The question is do more gene copies
exist after going to war or starving in place?

> But there is another hypothesis that perhaps can, the idea is that for reasons unrelated to war or intelligence our ancestors started to walk upright freeing two limbs that can be used for manipulating objects instead of locomotion. This is important because a zebra with a large brain and great intelligence would not have a greater chance of getting its genes into the next generation because it has no hands and so would have no way of moving a brilliant plan from the theoretical into the actual. In fact a genius zebra would be at a disadvantage compared to a regular zebra because the brain is an energy hog;  the human brain is only 2% of the body weight and yet it uses 20% of the energy.  There are ideas but there is no consensus about why our primate ancestors started to walk upright, but the fossil record makes it very clear that for whatever reason bipedal locomotion, and something that looked a lot closer to a human hand than anything a chimp has, evolved BEFORE the huge increase in brain size started.

Human hands are not that much different from the rest of the primates.
William Calvin proposed that human brain expansion was due to
projectile hunting.  We are much better than chimps at accurate
throwing.  Calvin makes the case that release accuracy involves a lot
of the brain in parallel to get the jitter down.  Calvin's books used
to be open on his website, I don't know if they still are.  I am
highly impressed by his work.
>
> You also talk about "Genes for not fighting when attacked",

The paper says "Genes for not fighting when attacked rapidly disappear
from the population"

"Attacked" in this context implies killed.  That takes the genes of
the attacked person out of the gene pool.

but I don't think genes with anything near that sort of specificity
exist, instead I think there are genes for how much risk you should
take; if you're too brave you're likely to get eaten by a sabertooth
tiger and if you're too cowardly you're likely to starve to death,
there is a sweet spot that all animal species must find and it has
nothing to do with war. The sweet spot will change as environmental
conditions change and in a population there will be individuals with
various levels of bravery, if you happen to run across a individual
who is significantly braver than you it would be wise to start to hang
around with him and let him take most of the risk when the two of you
attack a dangerous Mammoth with stone tools, if he survives he will
get the glory and the most delicious parts but the beast is so big
you'll be able to fill your belly with the scraps, and if he doesn't
survive you probably will.  This may be the source of the  "genetic
selection for supporting authoritarian leaders" that you speak of.

I mentioned this in passing.  Have not put much effort into it.

> On Sun, Aug 20, 2023 at 3:17 PM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> >  I am talking about the last 100,000 years or so.
>
> I think the last 1.5 million years is more important, the time when the brain of our ancestors started to get dramatically larger.

See comments about Calvin above.

>>> >> 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 1968 the conflict in Northern Ireland didn't flare up because one side was starving, the root cause was that protestants and Catholics believed in different forms of idiocy.

I make a case that the bleak future behavior switch is tripped in the
current world by changes or anticipated changes in the income per
capita.  People don't need to be starving, poor economic prospects
will do it.  Improving prospects will turn off population support for
wars or similar social disruption.  I think that's what put the IRA
out of business.  But perhaps you have another theory.

>> >> 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.
>
>
> If true, that would seem to indicate that the maximum size of a social group is not genetically determined because the San people are members of the same species as everybody else, so genetics can't be the only thing that determines the size of groups.

They are a highly divergent branch.  Because of their very low
fertility, the evolutionary pressures on them are more like bonobos.
They don't have wars and I don't think they have been selected for
wars.  You might read into the literature.
>
>>> >> war 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.
>
>
> I don't claim the change was caused by genetics, but something caused nations to become less warlike, and it was a change for the better.

The model indicates that a steady increase in the income per capita
will keep the psychological traits leading to war turned off.

> I think that should give the human race some reason to be optimistic about its future, or at least it would if it wasn't for the recent explosive improvement in AI.

I can't read the future well enough to be optimistic or not.  However,
the cluster of blinking stars around Tabby's star indicates to me that
something got through the difficulties and expanded around 24 stars.
That's good in that it says we have a chance of doing it as well and
bad in that we seem to have close-by competition.

Best wishes,
Keith

> Best wishes
>
> John K Clark
>
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