As Below, So above.

Back in the eighties, when I was young, and dumb, and dressed in black, not to mention still a virgin, I studied the occult - mainly with the extremely optimistic aim of majicking some poor cow's undies down.

Needless to say, though I learned the tetragrammaton, and all the sephiroth, and all the meanings of the Aleister Crowley tarot deck, it didn't work. Then I discovered that five pints of lager and a good song and dance in a night club worked much better. And I forgot all the esoteric knowledge of the Golden dawn. Save for one thing:

As above, so below.

The ultimate alchemical soundbyte.

This has haunted me all through my life, not so much as it stands, but in its reversal:

As below, so above.

And it is this that is the theme of what I write now. This idea that however far something goes, it retains something of what has gone before, something of what underlies it. And so we turn to evolution.

However, before I try to extend the ideas of this essay, or simply give them a more detailed foundation, I'd like to recap very quickly the core assumptions, and give some definitions of the context in which I use certain phrases.

* The sex-drive is the foremost of human drives, effecting almost all forms of behaviour.
* This drive cannot be ignored, it must be expressed, but the way in which it is expressed has a social component, and to a lesser extent, a conscious component.
* There is no innate (DNA encoded) knowledge on the part of the conscious individual that sex leads to offspring. The two are essentially separate concepts.
* Sexual behaviour, being a 'given', necessarily lacks an intrinsic moral component, however, it automatically aquires one in humans contextualized by an equal 'given' - Concurrent social conditions.
* From a social evolutionary POV. the selective force for human behaviour is one of social cohesion.
* From a social evolutionary POV. the unit of inheritance is a particular behaviour, or a 'suite' of complementary behaviours.
* Not all of the factors affecting behaviour are products of conscious choice, some are the effects of an assimilted, 'true' genetic, or epigenetic nature.

Definitions:

* Cohesion: I use cohesion in the sense of the social bonds between members of a group of individuals. An increase in group cohesion raises the likelyhood of harmonious cooperation between any two or more individuals of that group. It also increases the maximum group size. A decrease in cohesion raises the likelyhood of exploitative, selfish, encounters between individuals or outright agressive conflict. It also decreases the maximum group size, and increases factionism and schism.
* Social evolution: The changes over time, of a given society
* Behaviour: An action, or chosen inaction, of an individual, or group.
* Selective force: Something which acts to remove, or cause to proliferate a given unit of evolution. In the case of this discussion - behaviour.
* Unit of [social] inheritance: behaviour which is passed down generations via passive imitation, spoken, demonstrative or written means.
* A 'given': Something unavoidable, a constant factor, a consequence of being. For example, that a cube has six faces is a given.


Everyone knows about Darwin and DNA, and gradual tiny changes over time turning fish into frogs and monkeys into men - but there is more to it than that.

Epigenetics. Methods of transmitting chemical and structural information both down the generations and crosswise across them, methods that do not involve DNA. There are (so far discovered) four types:

*Self-sustaining loops - basically auto-catalyic networks of selective genomic expression.
*Structural templating - creating and stabilizing different cell types, and prionic lineages.
*RNA mediated interferrence - the reactive siliencing of selected genes.
*Chromatin marks - a highlighter pen for genetic code.

Going into the nitty-gritty of each would take a book. I suggest you read "Evolution in Four Dimensions" if you're interested, and simply believe me, however temporarily, if you aren't.

The important point to remember is that epigenetic inheritance systems are an evolutionary halfway house. If or when enviromental conditions change, and stress a lifeform living under them, it is the more flexible (and reversable) epigenetic inheritance systems which react to modify the lifeform's molecular biology to compensate first.

If the changes in the enviroment beocome the new norm, these epigenetic variations gradually are assimilated into true genetic inheritance systems - and become permanent features of the creatures genome. If the enviromental conditions change again, or change back to the way they were, the epigenetic systems shift again to compensate or revert back to 'normal', without the long and drawn out process of classic Darwinist genetics.

Simply put, epigenetic systems 'interpret' the genome of a given species to better suit the world in which any particular generation or generations of that species lives.

Think of an orchestra. Say they have no conducter, but have become very good at playing the same bit of music, in exactly the same way every time. One day they become famous, and are asked to tour the world. It is a disaster. It is a disaster exactly because they play the same bit of music the same way every time. Because what sounded sublime with the acoustics of the auditorium in which they used to play, sounds only so-so, and sometimes downright horrendous, with the acoustics of another auditorium.

And so they hire a conducter, who among other things fine-tunes their arrangements to suit each new venue, and sometimes teaches them to let go, and extemporize on the musical themes they always play.

The conducter is of course, the epigenetic inheritance systems.

Enough of the DNA already.

Now let's talk about behaviour. We all (hopefully) know about 'enviromental niches' - small sets of enviromental conditions and resource availability - that different creatures occupy and exploit. Over time the creatures evolve genetically to perfect a phenotype to fit the niche they find themselves in better. But sometimes life gets hectic, and things move fast, too fast for even epigenetic adaptaion to cope, let alone clunky old DNA.

The easiest example is given by a common creature - a rabbit, or protorabbit if you like. Let's call him, for tradition's sake, Bugs.

Now Bugs used to live in the forest up a tree, until he got booted out for being a fucking smartarse. He left his nice comfortable niche, and headed for the open grassland. Unfortunately a lot of his mates who came with him got scoffed by the eagles who patroled the skies above. But Bugs was smart, and whenever he felt afraid, squatted in any nearby hollow in the ground, until the eagles passed. His kids and some of his comrades saw him, and started to do the same. As he aged, Bugs even started to improvise when hollows were in short supply, and began to scrape one out new ones if none could be found. Then he began to dig holes to store his carrots and hide his Misses when she was preggers, and the kids grew up feeling very at home in holes, and learnt quickly how to dig them.

And so, Bugs found he could survive where no protorabbits had ever survived before. He carved a new niche through behaviour, where none had existed.

Then of course, genetics kicked in, and he grew thick claws for digging, and big stupid teeth for gnawing. The rest is history.

When times are hard, behaviour can bridge the gap until traditional evolutionary mechanisms catch up.

I want you to imagine a hand. Your hand perhaps. I want you to imagine you are climbing. You reach up to find a hold, and your fingers brush the lip of a protrusion above. You feel around a little, settling your fingers more firmly, then finally lock on and pull up with your full strength.

You have done three things - the reaching up, and the finding of a hold - that is behavioural adaptation. The settling of your fingers into that hold - that is epigenetic adaptation. The full strength final lock on - that is classic genetic adaptation.

Of course, your hold may slip, at which point you first feel for another. You first alter your behaviour. You don't sit there, dangling above an abyss by one finger, waiting for your hand to evolve into a piton.

Well, you could, but you'd die.

But we are forgetting something. How did you ever learn to climb in the first place..?

That's right, you remember now, your Dad taught you, and when he'd taught you everything he knew, you went to the library and bought a book on the subject of knots and rope and climb-routes for the most difficult of mountains.

And this is the final method of transmitting information across generations - one available pretty much only to Humans, because Bugs can't speak much, and never learned to read or write. Symbolic inheritance. NOT MEMES btw. MEMES ARE BULLSHIT. DID I SAY "NOT MEMES"..? I did..? Good. Symbolic inheritance is not memetic, because memes do not exist.

I'll tell you the difference if you like, but you'll have to ask me.

Moving on.

So what has all this got to do with "As below, so above" ..?

Aha.

I want to draw a few parallels between the essentially separate systems of internal Genetic and epigenetic adaptation, and the external adaptive systems of behaviour and symbols.

Very roughly, the DNA in the genome of a species is a compilation of everything that has been proven to have worked for a species living in a certain place, under certain conditions for a long, long time. This information is rigorously conserved and gets copied faithfully down through each successive generation, changing very, very little. This genome produces bodies, vehicles of specific types - phenotypes - which differ from the physiologies of other competing species.

The epigenetic systems constantly fluctuate, leaning first one way then the other, following the fashions set by the conditions of the day. If a particular day turns out to be very long indeed, then the alterations made to the expression of the DNA genome by the epigenetic systems tend, over time, to become effectively embedded into the genetic dogma of DNA.

Hold that passage in your mind. I will write another now, similar to it.

Very roughly, the bedrock culture of any particular race of men is a compilation of everything that has been proven to have worked for a group of people living in a certain place, under certain conditions for a long, long time. This cultural heritage is rigorously conserved and gets passed down faithfully through each successive generation, changing very, very little. This culture produces a people who believe in a set of values which alters their behaviour in contrast with the peoples of other competing cultures.

The symbolic systems of contemporary media constantly fluctuate, creating beliefs and behaviours that lean first one way then the other, following the fashions set by the conditions of the day. If a particular day turns out to be very long indeed, then the temporary alterations made to the beliefs and values of the central cultural dogma of that society, over time, become a permanent part of it.
As below, so above.

...Continued...