Life and Reproduction.

If your read almost anything on evolution, or anything that makes a reference to life's (biologic) purpose, they all will say something along the lines of: "The purpose of any form of life is to reproduce itself".

This pisses me off, because it misses something crucial.

Reproduction is a symptom of life. Not it's purpose. Otherwise, the next meal would be the purpose of life. The next drink. The next step toward the next drink, the next tensing of a muscle toward the next step... ad infinitum.

Life in the plural sense, evolution, whatever, are not purposeful things. What's the purpose of a rock tumbling downhill..? To keep moving..? Purpose, and the concept of purpose are perspectives tacked on after the fact by... us. And as such, become all equally valid if not all equally convincing.

Some would say the purpose of life is to discover the nine billion names of God, others would say it is to make as much money as you can and die snorting coke out of a prostitute's navel. Who's right, and how would you know..?

Does there have to be one..? Unless there is a God, and unless he had a plan for us/life, there is no generalized meaning, or purpose to living. Purposes are reserved for things that are constructed by an outside force - I make a hammer. I make it to hit things. I impose a purpose upon it. But that purpose is a function of my use of it, not inherrent to it as a separate object in itself.

I'm sorry, but everyone gets this idea arse-side up. Reproduction is not automatic to 'life' and a 'species' is a symptom of reproduction, or rather of over-reproduction of a single pattern, not life. The conditions of possessing sexual reproductive capabilities require at least two similar patterns to exist, and preferably more.

If you get down to quantum sized tacks, me and the table this computer sits on are the same stuff. The only difference is (a) the gross pattern upon which the table and I are shaped and (b) the opportunities for 'higher' emergent systems these patterns allow to manifest. ie, I'll never play chess with a table, because the pattern that average "tableness" is based upon, does not facillitate the emergence of self-awareness and abstract thinking.

Your muscles are the memory of every push-up you've ever done, just as your lungs bear the imprint of every cigarette you've ever puffed on. Even in the womb, your little foetal self became in part the embodiment of whatever crap your mother might have been eating during your formation. Epigenetics - chemical markers which left their imprints upon your body and metabolism spurred by the events your mother went through as she carried you, stressful, soothing; events that left their tracks however small, in your brain, your mind.

As much as you are flesh and bone, you are also pattern.


Patterns. All (physical) patterns require energy to maintain them with any fidelity over time, some more than others. Generally, the more complex the pattern (or the more improbable), the more energy it requires to persist for any significant period of time. An equilibrium is reached between complexity and energy consumption. However, any energetic system tends to destroy itself over time because fuels are indiscriminately reactive in nature - harmless, inert materials don't burn easily - take oxygen, we need it, but it really fucks us over.

Evolutionists don't often seem to mention that reproduction is only the second way life has of renewing itself. Two weeks or so ago, my skin was completely made of different matter. A couple of years ago, my entire body was composed of different materials. I didn't notice though because - Like the axe-blade and the handle - the only thng persistant over time, is the pattern.

Now, why does the body do that..? If reproduction is the be all and end all..? Why doesn't it just cut to the chase..?

Because life, like anything else from rocks to stars, is just another pattern that possesses the inevitable property of persistance.

Life, or rather the differing patterns that fall under that abstract catagorization, reproduce only because there is a limit to how much a complex pattern can do with a single physical representation of itself - given the balance between energy consumption and damage control - before it breaks down completely.

Reproduction is like reformatting - setting the pattern back to it's original error-free version - its factory settings.

Renewal and reproduction are strategies imposed upon complex patterns by the condition of being 'written' in finite matter. Life is like "Oh bloody hell, I've gotta goddamn well knock this body down again and build another. Jeeze. I liked this place. Bloody crappy construction materials, cheap lousy gas." about reproduction. And as for species, that just makes the whole damn business of being 'life' more bloody complicated. A classic case of 'there goes the neighborhood'.

Y'see what I meant about pragmatics..?

On the metaphysic side - the meaning of life is not reproduction, any fool can do that, it's about making useful, happy human beings from the greasey squalling brats that fall out of your wife's fanny. Or vagina, if you're American, rather than just more apathetic moribund consumer-parasites, as is the norm. 

Conceptual Symbionts, Memes and Football

As you might have guessed by now - I hate the word 'memes' - it kicks up all sorts of images and associations with organicity that it shouldn't, so I came up with something better/less confusing/other. Ta-Da:

Conceptual symbionts.

My new and exciting bit of jargon. These little beasties are classified (a) by having no direct physical components, (b) by being a collection of ideas, or closer to the mark by being a sequence of ideas which both lead to and re-inforce eachother, and finally (c) once adopted, become indespensible on a global scale, at least for a period of time.

It must also be noticed that the initial idea in the sequence is one that is already implicit within whatever system it arises from.

I've searched around for a good illustration and come up with football. Not, alas, the American kind, because I don't know enough about it and lack the will to bother aquiring such knowledge, but the British kind. "Soccer". Blasphemy.

Back in the old days football was played very differently. Okay, so there was still the goalie, and 10 other guys dressed in shorts, and a ball, but the way the game was played. Basically, one guy would get the ball and, avoiding countless tackles by the opposing team, dribble it all the way to within shooting range. Then shoot. GOAL !!! Yay, everyone shout hip-hip-hooray.

Passing was very infrequent, done only under extreme duress, and usually backwards to another player who would attempt once again to get into the penalty box all on his lonesome. Basically, though all the players of any given team were nominally on the same side, they didn't really play together. "Team" was spelt with eleven "I"s.

I don't know who 'invented' the "passing game", I'm pretty dumb concerning football history - I blame growing up in a town where the home team was so pathetic no-one except the real anoraks ever supported them - but I think it was the continental teams when leagues started opening up internationally.

Basically three-men cells would run up the pitch and through strategic passing, circumvent any tackles coming their way, get within range and either blast one in directly, or again, lure the goalie into coming out early and pass around him.

They began to win every damn game, flattening the British teams completely. Outrage, this was our damn game..! How dare they, those foreign upstarts, who did they think they were..!



Of course, next season, many of the English teams were playing a passing game, at least the successful teams anyway. The one's that didn't, got relegated, and sank out of sight. After a while, the only teams left, were the ones which passed.

And this encapsulates the idea of a conceptual symbiont:

The first idea: "Pass the ball before you absolutely have to."
leads to: "Have someone ready to recieve it running nearby. Don't run up alone."
leads to: "Have that player run in a strict formation, so you will always already know roughly where to pass the ball, whenever pasing becomes necessary."
leads to, "Have two players in formation, in case one avenue of passing becomes obstructed."

Each idea leads from, supporting and extending, the former.

Then of course, the ideas begin to gloabally expand their effects, because they allow for specialisation. Whereas before each player had to be: A good runner, a good dribbler, a good tackler, a good striker - now with a three man group you could have one great striker, and two (or more) great dribblers to support him - laying the ball off to him after they had brought it to within range.

Midfielders to pick up loose balls, and double as striker-support, defenders to put down attacks - multiple, clearly defined roles, allowing for mutually supportive specialists.

All stemming from a simple initial idea of "pass the damn ball genius."

This is what I mean when I say "Conceptual Symbiont."

Anyway, since we've already got the football, we may as well run with it. Just imagine the football has a religious symbol on it.

Team size. In football, a team's limited to 11, plus a few subs. In life however, you can field as many players as you can get onto the pitch. There's more to it than that though - it's no good having more players if no-one knows which side they're playing for, or in which direction they should be kicking the ball.

The monkeysphere. I know I go on about this a lot, but it is absolutely foundational to any social theory. A.B.S.O. F.U.C.K.I.N.G. L.U.T.E.L.Y.

We're so blasé about meeting strangers these days. We see a dozen a day, and talk to/interact with a couple of them in the course of work/socializing whatever. We think nothing of it.

The only real predator of man left on the planet is man. So why aren't we scared of these everyday strangers..? I mean, imagine there was no law, no over-reaching systems of mutual co-operation - everything you owned, you made; everything you ate, you grew or raised; your water, you lugged up from the well yourself, from the river. The house you live in, the clothes you wear - all of them came from your hands. You do not need anything from another. And they, if they exist (you haven't seen them) shouldn't really need you for anything either. So why would they approach you..? Simple curiousity..? Imagine there's a mountain range between you and some guy you've only ever heard rumours about anyway, would simple curiousity be enough to get you to cross them..?

The only reasons for utterly self-sufficient groups, living in adequately-resourced areas isolate from each other, with no previous history of interaction, to visit one another, are bad ones.

Let me illustrate the situation:

Welcome to blob-land. I want you to imagine a bunch of blobs. They have two states: Sedentary and passive, mobile and aggresive. During their lifetimes, these blobs grow slowly, absorbing nutrients from the area where they lay until one of two things happens:

*Their size goes over a certain value, let's say around 250-300 units.
*They exhaust the nutrients of their locale.

In the first instance, the bloated mother blob splits, and calves off a new blob which promptly switches into mobile-aggressive mode and disappears over the horizon. This new blob doesn't stop until it finds somewhere with enough nutrients to support its growth, where it settles into sedentary mode. If there are no such places left unnoccupied it will attack and either displace another blob, or assimilate it utterly, unless driven off.

In the second case, the whole blob, whatever it's current size, switches into mobile aggressive mode and goes off on the hunt for somewhere new to live.

I think this, barring a little inter-group female raiding/exchange, adequately describes the general state of primitive mankind.

[Remember Game-theory 101..? Remember the initial winning strategy at low pop. density..? "Always default". ie, always attack, and always attack first. And remember, "Always default" is also responsible for keeping the pop. density low, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.]

Now, we forgot football. Incorporating the above, I want you to imagine that the players in each team are not individuals, but blobs - groups of people about 150-200 - in size. For example - this is a mid-fielder - Hobbes.

He's quite a big lad, isn't he..?

But how is this Hobbesian game played..? Despite the general 'team'ness, there is no team. A player gets the ball, and is tackled. But the player, and the tackler, are largely on their own. It's one-on-one. In fact, the whole global game, despite there being 22 players on the pitch, is only ever one-on-one. In any tackle event, the other 20 players might as well not exist. No-one on either side will help their player/tackler because the target is 'the ball' and personal glory, not so much the overall outcome of the game - and under these conditions - a far better strategy is to wait until either the ball spins free, or to tackle whoever gets the ball, while they are tired from the recent conflict.

Now let's chuck one of the Hobbesian teams off the pitch, and install a passing-game playing continental. The players of this team have decided to sacrifice the personal glory of scoring an individual goal, to the more global joint-glory of 'winning the game'.

Which team wins..? Not a hard calculation. The continentals are playing eleven men against a team of one.

In summary - any conceptual symbiont that increases group cohesion or facillitates trust between unrelated groups - enabling the 'passing game' to be played - will tend to spread via proxy of those who believe. And as a species, we may have undergone coevolution with this emergent function - evolving more developed neurophysiologic 'organs' of belief, and boosting the ability of these beliefs, once formed, toward expression in the kind of consistant behaviour so crucial to mutual trust.

Definitions of life.

Anyone being overly-flexible with the concept of 'life' and 'what is living' really pisses me off.

It's like the word: 'beautiful'. Everyone is beautiful these days. They all have inner beauty or outer beauty or spiritual beauty, or some kind of hidden beauty that no-one can understand etc. etc. etc. It's bull. Some people, in fact a very great many, many people, are just true-blue, butt-awful ugly.

Sorry, but that's just the way it is. And to say it isn't, is to insult poor old Angelina. And no-one insults Ange, not on my watch.


It's the same with people claiming damn near everything is 'alive'. Yeast is 'alive' apparently, and Bacteria are full members of the 'alive' club.

I mean hell - I'm holding two living things hostage - I've got a Glock to the temple of the one, and a bottle of Bleach held over the other.


You can only save one of them Punk. Think fast.

To claim this jumped-up pond-scum 'lives' in any real sense beyond the absolute mundanities of biological dogma is in my opinion a serious insult to every truly living being who has ever wept at the graveside; who has been subject to torture or persecution, or ever loved another more than they do themselves.

So, I'm sorry, but to get into my living club, you have to be able to do a little bit more than wiggle your fucking flagella, or blow bubbles in baking bread.

These days even a chip with a few cultured rat-neurons stuck to it is applying for membership.


Is it alive..? Depends on how flexible your definition is. Can it forage..? Can it reproduce..? Can it go on holiday to Ibiza and pull a cashier-girl..?

As for its body - does it have the wherewithal to feel any sense of connectivity or ownership over this apparatus..? Is this keyboard and this internet we write upon in any way part of our bodies..?

If MEART is 'alive' then at best it is alive in the way a chronic brain-damaged coma-patient is alive, the lowest possible ebb, limbs shifting restlessly in the neuronal breeze.

"But Tab, it, it makes makes slightly different grades of scribble in response to changes in its visual enviroment..."

And that qualifies Mr. "Hi I'm a nerve cell strapped to a bit of silicon" to be put in the same catagory as Picasso..?

"Yeah, Rembrant, yeah - er yes, you're over there next to the debatably 'alive' lump of snot stuck to a circuit board, quickly now - the ceremony's about to start..."


Is the slime-trail coming out of a snail's arse art..? Hmm..? It's certainly laid down in a response to the enviroment on the part of the Artist formally known as Brian.

Current conventions of meaning would propose that MEART is a member of the linguistic catagories 'artist' and 'Lifeform'. But they neglect to stress that MEART is part of the catagory "living artist" in the same way that I am part of the linguistic catagories of 'Martian' - in that I occupy the same solar-system as Mars, and a bit of our planet has visited theirs and wasn't told to go away - and also of the catagory 'flower' - in that I enjoy sunshine and need a shower every now and again.

But, and this is the crucial bit so listen up, I am not a good example of either set. Not prototypic; non-intuitive. If I was in the line to be picked for the Martian football team, I would be picked last; and it is unlikely anyone would want to give me to their girlfriend on Valentine's day.

To compare MEART to a human - C'mon. Joe the plumber drops one too many spanners on his head and goes into a persistant vegetative state. How many more spanners would he have to drop to go into a persistant MEART state..?

And anyway - what do we sometimes do to our poor vegetative relatives..? That's right - we switch them off. Why..? Because in our hearts, philosophic debate aside, we know that what made them really alive, is already gone.

But you know what we don't do..? That's right again - We never ever wire our vegetative relatives up to robotic arms and then claim they are just as alive as you or me because "they draw scribbles on bits of paper..."

If we really considered MEART to be alive in any true sense, we would fall all over ourselves to obliterate the poor bastard, and sue the fuck out of the white-coated monsters that allowed a life to be so tortured.


Okay, let's take this somewhere else. MEART gets credit for 'aliveness' due to its ability to react - in the form of differentiated drawings - to the things it 'sees'. Yes..? And that it has some rat neurons connected up to a chipset.

Neurones are just glorified wires, albeit of organic matter, with a few odds and sods chucked in.

How about we take that bit out, and put in a software substitute, of a purely electronic conventional nature, which produced the same, indeed the exact same output varients for simular changes of visual stimulus.

I'm sure then the question of life would not arise.

Why not..?

Because machines, even our most advanced computers, are not classed as alive.

This seems crazy to me. For example:

I bought a robot hoover the other day. It's nocturnal. It comes out at night, and hoovers the living room floor for me, picking up dust and grit much like a coral polyp sieves the sea for nutrients. It uses complex algorithms to avoid stationary objects like chairlegs and also to avoid going over the same bit of floor twice. It senses proximity by the use of sensors studded along its surface. In its memory it carries a map of the room, and uses that to precisely work out where it is.

After it's done, it returns to its cubby hole and backs itself onto the prongs of its recharger, renewing itself for another day.

What - not organic enough for you..?

How about machine 'feeding' - one machine digs the 'food' out of the ground in its crudest form. Let's call that machine the 'teeth'. Another machine factionates crude into its many refined combustable consituents. Let's call that machine the 'digestive system'. More machines ship the various factions to the areas where they are required. let's call that transport system the 'circulation'. Then finally, engines burn that refined fuel to produce heat and movement. Let's call those machines the 'mitochondria'.

The only difference in principle between this technologic 'body' and our own is that the machine body is a dispersed entity - The various operations of its extended metabolism enacted in different places.

Unrealistic..? Non-organic..? Hah. Did you know I eat grass..? That's right, I use this organic machine as a proxy stomach to convert grass into a form of fuel I can process myself. You might have heard of it - its called a 'cow'. Wonderful invention, dunno what I'd do without it. I'm having sunlight for lunch. Yeah, I invented these green stalky machines as an aid to photon capture and transformation. I'm gonna call them plants. Do you think they will catch on..?

ie. having a dispersed digestion system is nothing new. Machines do it, men do it.

So, what is then, the difference between high-level machines, and low level lifeforms..?


In my book, functionally none. If you're going to insist on classing moulds and lichens and corals as 'alive' and autonomous robots as not, then somewhere, something within the next century or so is going to give.

Organic life, at the moment, has the properties of self-repair - healing - and reproduction, as qualities as yet unduplicated in machine-form. However, if you cannot be critically damaged to the point of immobilisation easily - why bother with complex healing mechanisms..? Why not just carry spares..? I mean, what would you rather do - You have an accident and break your leg. Ouch. Would you rather spend six weeks or so in a plaster cast, losing muscle tone and itching like crazy, or simply snap the leg off, turn it into the shop for repair while you parade happily around on your 'second best' leg..? Or imagine perhaps, the next time your car blows a tyre, that maybe you'd better put your car to bed with a hot water bottle and an aspirin, until it's back on its feet.

Reproduction too, like healing, could be considered as a form of self-renewal. Our bodies, however well we look after them, however many pills amd vitamins we tip down our turkey-necks, wear out. We have a cellular sell-by date stamped onto our telomeres so, every generation, as part of its lifecycle, lifeform X. builds and nurtures or otherwise brings into being a 'replacement' body or bodies.

A machine however - why should it *need* to reproduce..? It's not going to die of natural causes within three score years and ten, at least not all at once. And then you have the "axe-blade/axe handle" form of continuous existance - lending it effective immortality. Reproduction is a symptom of the fraility of organic life, not particularly its dominance or superiority.

Immortality at the price of sterility..? Tough one.

So anyway - If we are going to buy into the idea that "Machines are, or at least will be, functionally comparable to some forms of organic life - and therefore either machines of this sort must be regarded as alive, or organic 'life' of that sort must be regarded as machines." Then really, we should refine our definitions of what we regard as 'living' and 'non-living'.

But if we can no longer use function as a basis for distinction, what are we left with..?

The soul.

Oh yeah. You heard me. The soul.

It's okay, don't take me out of your favourites list, I've not gone over to the dark-side, I'm just borrowing a little of their lingo.


Call me crazy, but last night I took a sledgehammer to my TV, and I'll be dammned if I could find the programmes anywhere inside of it. All I found was just a bunch of stuff. Where were the Baywatch babes..? They'd been *right there* only a few minutes before. Bastards.

It's the same kinda thing that happened to those back-street anatomists back in the day, dissecting corpses 'donated' to science by nice men with dirty shovels. Chop and chop but no soul anywhere.

None of the components of a TV are individually alive. But, together, in orchestra, they support a picture, a story, the content of which has very little to do with the mechanics of the device supporting it.

Do you see..?

The [only] difference between the TV and the brain however is that whereas a TV relies on a signal from outside - beamed from a sattelite or sent down a wire - our brains, and the brains of other animals to a degraded extent, do not, they take the basics from outside and begin to generate their own narratives, their own never-ending recursive soap-operas, with themselves as characters. But these stories have nothing to do with the mechanics that support them, just as back episodes of the Family Guy in no way depend on the resistors, semi-conductors and vaccuum tubes of the TV in question for their plot lines.

One other important thing to remember with a TV is that it's ability to carry a picture is not a smoothly linear progression. You cannot start with a single component projecting a really crap, pixellated image, then add more components, resistor by transistor by capacitor, getting a slightly better picture each time. A TV is an either/or device in that it either works, and you can watch your favourite soap, or it doesn't and you're staring at a blank, dead screen. Below a certain threshold of complexity, a brain cannot support the picture of the self.

I am not a bunch of neurones. Just as Homer Simpson is not a collection of transistors. Homer is more - and I am more. I am the standing wave they carry. I am information turning sporadically into action in the world, and then back into information again - like a snail popping its head out of its shell.

I am the story I tell myself.

And that is what MEART lacks, what bacteria, coral and pondscum lack, what machines lack too. The life intangible.

[This is not an appeal to vitalism btw. As in - "The theory or doctrine that life processes arise from or contain a nonmaterial vital principle and cannot be explained entirely as physical and chemical phenomena." Because I'm not saying that all of life's complexities cannot be reduced back into their relevant constituents, but I am saying that the emergent property of a supported informational 'entity' cannot be seen beyond a certain critical point in said deconstruction.]

Still not convinced..?

So, information doesn't matter, life chugs on happily without huh..? Those neurones just flailing about, linking here, linking there, for fun perhaps..? P-A-R-T-Y..?

Okay, say I take your brain, and, without diminishing the total number of your neurones, nor lessening their functionality and conductivity in any way, I simply randomize their connectivity - remove any coherent information the network stored simply through its structure.

Do you think you'd be okay - Just shrug it off..? The body trotting off happily whistling "Ah don't need no edjoo-kay-shun..."

No, you'd be dead. If not right away, then very soon after. Information is crucial to life, crucial to being in a living state.

But is gross biochemistry, vital to life in the same way..? Could I destroy, with alcohol consumption perhaps, a few million brain cells (not to mention a few million liver cells ) without overly impairing my ability to 'live'..? How far can Alzhiemers progress, without the patient turning up their toes..? Years, decades. Hell, you can fire pool-cues through people's heads, and stick knives into their skulls, and sometimes they'll survive.

"This amazing X-ray shows how a man survived being stabbed in the skull with a five-inch knife."

Seems to me the connectivity, the information of me, is as at least as important to life as the biochemical nuts and bolts.

"But Tab, waddabout those widdle biddie bacteria and their other microscopic mates..? Huh..? Huh..? They gotz no information, dey iz stoopid - but dey are still alivez. O Hellz Yeah..!!!"

Aha. S'pose I, without changing the existant proportions of C,G,A, and T or whatever the RNA equivalent is (??Uracil??) in their genomes, I scramble, randomize the order they are in - erasing that information..?

Would those little sea-monkeys be able to shrug that off..?

How about I lop off a few flagella instead..? Or push them down some stairs and damage their cytoskeletons..? Put those fuckers in a full-cell-plastercast..? I think they might survive.

Information is key. Either purely mundane - biochemical/biomechanical - in the form of DNA/RNA with your lower level 'organic machine' forms - or emergent, intangible in the form of network conectivity/complexity and supported autobiographic narrative in the higher lifeforms. And there is the divide.

ie: To be alive, you gots to have soul.

Oh hell yeah.

...Continued...

The Playdoh of Life.

I think I've been trying for a long time to see where everything is going with Life™, where it must go, where it has always had to go.

Imagine we are watching a game being played by unseen hands. We reckon we understand the basic rules of play, sometimes we can even predict moves before they're made, but because we've never actually seen a game completed, we cannot be sure we know each rule that governs it. Nor can we be absolutely sure of the purpose of the whole business, nor if indeed there is an end or a purpose involved.

So. The game of life.

Life is a game played by one player. The Life-player has pieces of finite existance which can produce copies of themselves, if they can aquire enough resources to do so. The game is played out on a multicoloured board, the enviroment, the universe. The aim of the life player is simply to continue to play for as long as possible.

The handicap is that the life-player's pieces are consumers, not producers - the resources they consume they cannot replenish.

And that is it. Simple. But like any game that is superficially simple, underneath, the strategies of play are infinitely complex. Too complex for us to fathom anyway. But perhaps, rather than attempt vainly to chart each rock in the river of the world, and map the absolute path of each living molecule in it, we can instead just use what little we know, and take a brave guess.

So, what do we know..?

You know those kid's toys - there are different shaped holes - A'a and B's and numbers and stars etc. And blocks to push through..? You remember them. Throw the blocks away. Now - take some child's play-doh, a good irregular fist-sized lump, and push it through a hole. Then take another fistfull, and push it through another, different hole.

The play-doh is undifferentiated-life. The rack of holes is the enviroment/universe and the physical laws that govern it, like gravity, for example. The impetus of your hand pushing the doh through, was time.

You have now two new forms - let's say a star-shaped piece of doh, and a C-shaped piece. They are different, they have different properties - the C-shape rocks naturally in place for example, whereas the starshape stands still. But the important thing to remember is that these traits are only temporal - tomorrow perhaps the doh exhibiting them will be pushed through another hole and be changed completely - and that the play-doh, whatever shape it may be at any particular time is still just play-doh underneath.

I mean to say that - For all our differences, our inter-species fighting and competition, myself and the bacteria that kills me are the same. If the bacteria wins, and fills the universe, we have all won. Because when one form exists, however great or small... When one form exists, we all do. Or can do, in time.

But I don't think it will be bacteria-shaped play-doh that takes over the board. Why..?

The properties that can be aquired in the course of the game are not equally temporary. Not all of them are finite in nature, when some are aquired, they stay. Some forms are better than others.

Pushing play-doh into another shape requires time and energy. Imagine pushing a square block through a hole only a millimeter wide. It would be better if you found another square-shaped hole somewhere else on the rack and pushed it through that instead. This is what life does when faced with enviromental difficulty. It moves.

A method of mobility is a property that stays.

But what if there are no square holes..? Then you find one that is the nearly the same shape - a slight rectangle perhaps, and squeeze yourself through that. Imagine though, a piece of play-doh that could switch between two forms without much effort - square or rectangular, as required..? Let us then say - square=carnivore / rectangle=herbivore / shapechanger=omnivore

Diversity of food-source is a property that stays.

Imagine now a great, lumbering super-lump of play-doh. It is indomitable and terrifies all the other types of play-doh around. All quake in fear beneath its shadow. Tyranno-doh. Then of course, another rack of holes comes along, and unfortunately, none of them are big enough for Tyranno-doh to fit through. In fact, as luck would have it... They are all really, really small. Shit. Tyranno-doh gets stuck. And passes into history.

However, there was another type of play-doh that, rather than press itself into one great ball, kept itself separated, each blob of doh only ever so slightly different from its brothers... And when the holes come, as many of them as possible leap through the same hole one after another, keeping as much as possible of the species alive. Each, though different, works as one. And survives, where a larger form of comparable bio-play-doh-mass, would not.

The ability to form a cohesive society is a property which stays.

Imagine now a type of play-doh which has grown great burrowing teeth, like those huge mole-machine tunnel-diggers from extreme-machines on the Discovery Channel. This time, when the mole-play-doh is faced with a different shaped hole to itself, rather than alter its own dimensions, it digs straight through. It alters the rack to suit itself.

This is us. With our technology. Changing the world to fit our shape.

Being and active shaper of the enviroment, rather than simply a passive conformer, is a property which stays. Technology is a propety which stays.

This is getting way too long.

Basically, I am trying to show that 'natural' evolution, and 'social' evolution are the same. And that though we think we are creating our own path, we are simply being made to obey the same rules on a different level.

Our technology and our hard-wired instinct that human life is innately valuable ensures that as soon as we are able, we begin to prevent natural death. At this point, many 'unfavourable' genetic factors that would have furthered the evolution of our species naturally, are circumvented, compensated for by science.

Natural evolution naturally hits a stumbling block of its own making.

...Continued...

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...

Units of Inheritance.

The classic selfish gene of Dawkin's fame I think, is defunct. As a focus for inheritance it is too small, too narrow. The are of course examples of phenotypic expression that rely on single genes but they are by far in the minority. Genetisists were most puzzled when they conducted experiments that 'knocked out' certain genes, preventing them from expressing, to scrutinize the effects and so ascertain their function. They found out that a lot of the time, nothing happened at all. The body kept on trucking without any major lapses in biochemical function.

Something compensated for these artificially imposed abscences.

If you've ever studied models of internet pathways you get a monstrously bushy, hyper-connected network, something like this, but on a much more massive scale:



The American military pioneered reseach into the robustness of distributed networks - knocking out specific nodes - to see how much loss a network can sustain of physical hardware, before such a network ceases to be of use as a vehicle for communication. The answers they got is that networks are amazingly robust - there of course remain specific nodes that always carry more traffic, are more vital for overall function - but on the whole, a network can sustain massive damage without major impairment of function. There is a critical threshold, which once crossed causes a sudden massive failure, but prior to that functionality remains almost negligibly effected.


The above is an illustration of a "Waddington epigenetic landscape" the nodes below the upper sheet are single genes. The upper sheet itself corresponds to the phenotypic expression - the bodytype - associated with the genes in the network below. You've been to the circus - remember the big-top..? Imagine such a tent but with millions of different interwoven guy-ropes beneath, giving the big-top its distinctive shape, not through singular efforts on the part of any particular gene or rope-stay - but through the whole network of interactions, each new rope, each new connection altering the tension in all the others.

I would offer a new unit of inheritance, a less physical one, a more emergent consequence of evolution improving the robustness of its genotype-phenotype linkages - the network.

...Continued...

The Extended Phenotype.

Notes on Dawkin's "Extended Phenotype"

Prior to chapter eleven the book is mainly concerned with butressing the theories expoused in "The Selfish Gene".

Pg.197/8: A genetisist need not care about the exact pathway between gene and phenotypic effect, simply on the difference between alleles and their effects on end products/outcomes - because 'natural' selection is applied in exactly the same way - taking the existence of a pathway, one even routing through several bodies, for granted.

Say a fish builds a little 'house' out of stones on the river bed. The colour of the stones chosen is dependent on a single allele. Change that, chage the hue of the house. How exactly is that mechanism any different from a gene that governs the colour of skin or hair..? save in extention..?

Same with spider webs. A larger mouth at less energetic cost. Beaver dams, and the lake they form, and the ecology that lake promotes, should be thought of as extentions of the beaver phenotype, as surely as if that lake were enclosed inside their skins.

Note: Convergent evolution // behavioral mimicry of optimal physiology.

A three-jointed human arm has only seven degrees of freedom, which are defined as the types of movements each joint can perform. Your shoulder and wrist each have three degrees of freedoms—each can tilt up and down, turn left and right, and can roll in a circular motion. Your elbow, however, only has one degree of freedom, which is tilting up and down.

Scientists consider each of an octopus' eight arms to possess a virtually infinite number of degrees of freedom, allowing them to bend and twist freely. But when it's time to eat, octopuses use their flexible muscles to form temporary, quasi-articulated joints that work similar to how human joints function.

Researchers recorded muscle activity in octopus limbs, and found that an arm generates two waves of muscle contractions that propagate toward each other. When the waves collide, they form a part-time joint.

This process occurs three times, forming a shoulder where the arm meets the body, a wrist where the suckers have grasped their food, and an "elbow" somewhere in between. The elbow typically exhibits the most movement during food retrieval.

The researchers say this is a remarkably simple and apparently optimal mechanism for adjusting the length of arm segments according to where the food item is grasped along the arm.

The similarity of structural features and control strategies between jointed vertebrate arms and flexible octopus limbs suggests that these configurations evolved separately in octopuses and vertebrates, a result scientists call an example of convergent evolution.

...Continued...

Outside-In Evolution

The conventional view of evolution is an "inside-out" approach concerning the action of internal biochemical mechanisms constructing a vehicle of varying parameters around itself to further its own replication.

If we were to watch this process contained in a bubble in which there was no negative feedback - each individual was inviolate with regard to its fellows and nothing was ever killed and nothing ever died of its own accord - and there were no issues of resource scarcity or competition - then the only seeming 'direction' we ever might be able to observe the total population heading would be one of speed of replication. The highest proportion of the population of such a bubble would always be the phenotype which replicated the fastest.

This would be pure "inside-out" evolution, which has no regard for external enviromental factors.

However, of course, no such thing exists. Death always weilds his scythe. The ultimate critic, The ultimate aesthete, with his own unchanging criteria - "Does it work..?"; "Does it work better..?"

But then, as the vehicles become more complex, and compete, various different fundamental schisms occur. Small - in the form of parasites and bacteria, and viruses at the extreme, does battle with big - in the forms of plants and animals. And this leads, pretty much invariably, to sexual, rather than asexual reproduction.

A society of hermaphrodites - true equals in the sexual game of life - is unstable, invadable by specialists - This battle leads to yet another schism, this time within species themselves, rather than between - and usually the production of two distinct specialised sexual characters - the carrier and the impregnator - the female, and the male.

At this point, inside-out evolution begins to give way to outside-in - As competition shifts from the purely 'speciel phenotype vs. the enviroment' to 'Y vs. X'. Of course the internal component is never lost, but the external factors become ever more numerous.

Death alters his criteria from a simple "Does it work..?" to a more convoluted addition "Is it attractive..?" From there, it moves onto more bio-philosophic ground - From "Is it attractive..?" to "Is it trustworthy in its attractiveness..?"

Which shifts the ground to truth vs. deception played out in flesh.

However, once a species becomes sufficiently cognitively complex, and able to manipulate and mould its enviroment rather than simply be manipulated and moulded by that enviroment... Then the outside truly becomes able to worm its way in.

The question then, after this short introduction - to what degree is it empirically valid to discuss evolution at the scale of not DNA, but of individual, and group behaviour..?

To make my own position clear - I believe that in a sentient species such as ourselves, indeed in any sentient, social and technologied species, evolution curves back on itself, and becomes a loop - we create our own enviroment both physic and metaphysic, and evolve in accord with it - according to the 'suction' caused by the social and cultural topography apparant at any given time.

DNA, our old master, is relegated simply to a means, the ends now co-opted by the very vehicles it created to aid it.

...Continued...

An End to Evolution.

I think quite frankly, that I'm sick of hearing the word "evolution". It's such a fucking hooker of a word - every Tom, Dick and Hitler has co-opted it at some point.

To my mind, Darwin, or at least misunderstandings and misapplications of his ideas both in the social and eugenic arenas, have caused more deaths in the past century than the atom bomb.

At the very least, the term evolution has become so ingrained with anthropomorphic overtones that I think in the grubby little mind of your average secular humanist, it has simply jumped into the hole left by the absence of God. Chop off God's beard, blind him and make him a little more slimy - ét voila - hello Captain Evolution.

Time to flush "evolution" down the lexical pan. And while we are Spring Cleaning our brains - let's bin a few other arbitrary and/or un-definable concepts - like "intelligence", "living/non-living", "progress" and "memes". They just cloud the issue and bog people down in their own definitions. None of them exist.

So what shall we replace them with..?

How about - two very simple things that we actually can understand without a dictionary - probability and persistance.

Complexity stems from simplicity, not so much within the actual percievable forms of any object, or idea, but in the relationships between them and the emergent properties these relationships create. Nothing exists in isolation, everything from a single quark to a supernova rubs up against its fellows, and by proxy of those fellows, rubs up eventually against everything, real or virtual, that is.

We'll start with energy, the fabric of the universe, whatever - it cools into different forms - each form occuring with a frequency concordant with probability. eg. Hydrogen is likely, iron less so.

Anyway - long story short: a progression:

* energy + inherrent physical laws > persistant inert perceivable forms - planets, enviroments etc.

* inert perceivable forms + interaction + time > persistant active perceivable forms - bacteria, pond-scum, Americans. (by inert and active I mean: a mountain does not expend energy trying to maintain a static form amid enviromental change, wheras a tree-shrew or a Liverpuddlian does).

* persistant active perceivable forms + mutation > persistant inferrable forms - thought/ideas. (By percievable and inferrable I mean - stuff you can sense directly - ice-cream and stripppers, and stuff you can't see - thought for example, but can infer from its physical manifestation in behaviour).

* persistant inferrable forms + physical vehicle > behavioural 'technology' > physical/virtual chimera - man.

Which takes us right from the big-bang or whatever, to now, in four easy steps - each step increasing the probabilty of the arisal of the next to the point of certainty.

Anyway - for me, there is not much difference between a gene expressing infromation as a physical form of greater or lesser persistance and an idea expressing information as behaviour facillitating or handicapping the persistance of its host form. Both are at bottom, information, and only the manner of storage and transmission differs.

Once we leave the mundane flesh and enter the mind - Are we fixed, or malleable..?

I want you to design something that will persist and proliferate in a place and under conditions which I will not disclose to you.

What kind of form will you design..? Something specialized..? Or a Jack of all trades..?

Any form of externally driven physical specialization eventually leads to extinction. A Cheetah starves to death when meat on the hoof gets low, but slowpoke Hank the omnivore just changes food-groups.

The Jack of all trades always wins.

This is why humans, physical-prowess-wise, are just a big bag of shit. On the novelty-engine-driven-behavioural variety scale however... We come out tops. (novelty-engine = self-aware-perceptive-brain in my book btw).

Humans adapt behaviourally to anywhere and anything. We are consumate behavioural chameleons - humans even make reasonable wolves for fuck's sake - in the case of feral children - but you don't see many real wolves wearing people clothes with a desk-job and a mortgage.

This is our strength, and also our doom. Read enough history and become convinced that nothing is fixed, what we call our innate selves - manifesting in a semi-rigid set of behavioural parameters - does not exist - it's a fairy story we tell ourselves. One minute we are Greengrocers with a smile for everyone and a bag of sprouts in each hand, then - boom - society changes and suddenly we are grassing up our relations to the gestapo and getting bored whilst shooting naked Jews in a pit.

Jack, in his Jackboots, persists.

...Continued...

The Selfish Pixie.

"Once upon a time there was a junkyard: every type of flotsom and jetsom, thingammyjig and gee-gaw piled teeteringly high on all sides. Open to the elements it was lashed by wind, drowned by rain and lit by lightning. Sometimes completely by accident, something would fall exactly here, and something else would fall exactly there, and a pixie would be born.

Most times the pixie would stagger about and fall to pieces - but one day, a special pixie came into being... Let's call him Danny. Danny was different, when he stood up and looked around, he felt lonely, so he started to make another pixie, just like him. Then another, and another. Then the other pixie started making a copy of himself and that copy made a few more too. It started to get crowded.

One afternoon it was very stormy; lightning began to flash in the sky, approaching fast. One pixie on the top of a junkpile looked up. At that moment a great bolt of electricity struck him on the nose. This random accident scrambled his brains. When he made the next pixie, that pixie was different. This pixie, instead of imediately making a copy of himself, waited awhile, and made himself a little yellow hard-hat. Because he waited, he wasn't quite as fast as the others at copying himself, so they always vastly outnumbered him and his little hard-hatted friends. "Ooh - look at their stupid hats..!" the bare-headed would say, and titter into their little pointy beards.

But one day, their was a terrible hailstorm, with chunks of ice the size of apples whizzing down from the sky like minature meteorites. Within an hour, all the bare-headed pixies lay dead, their poor little heads squished flat. The hard-hat pixies danced and capered with glee "Hah-hah..!" they chanted, and shook their little fingers at their fallen brothers."

Extracts from Tabula's Notebook 1:

It is important to remember that a replicator is a chemical sequence that has only one fundamental trait: to copy itself. It knows, and can know... Absolutely nothing. Imagine a thousand paper boats floating on a river as it winds its way from the mountains to the sea, around rocks, over falls, across rapids. The boat that reached the sea first - if we had had a camera following it, and viewed the playback - we would see that the 'winning' boat, at each and every twist and turn and danger on its journey would seem to have made the 'right' decision, the 'intelligent' decision. But is still just a piece of paper. Replicators achieve what seems like 'minded' choice in hindsight, through simple brute numbers. Any one individual knows nothing. As long as 'winning' was possible - One of the boats was always bound to win. To win the race, all that needed to be done, was to build enough boats, enough designs.

So - Any DNA pixie does not know a 'good' change from a 'bad' change. The qualities of good and bad are imposed only in hindsight, after an enviromental change contextualizes it as such. DNA is not alive, it is only an illusion at the point where natural laws and chemical properties co-incide over time that makes it seem to 'change' in an 'intelligent' fashion. What looks like reaction to changes in the enviroment, is really not reaction at all. It is a serrendipitous pre-emption. The 'invention' always comes before external forces make it suddenly a necessity.

Say we had driven our car past the junkyard a few years ago - we'd have seen only bareheaded pixies, and maybe one or two of the mutant strain. We'd have thought 'Hmm - the bareheaded ones are the most successful..." Why..? - because, like the pixies, we had no way of knowing what was coming.

This 'not knowing' is the major stumbling block for our DNA pixies. Any Pixie that could develop a way to predict the future would instantly become the most successful pixie on the planet. The ability of prediciton is the holy-grail for DNA, though of course, they can't know that.

One way to bullet-proof against an uncertain future is to find ways of being able to pre-empt many many different 'possible' enviromental changes - latant adaptability. How do you enable adaptability..? By encouraging mutation. How do you encourage mutation..? By having a DNA code that is very suceptable to interferrence from external mutagens - hard radiation, sunlight, heavy isotopes, free-radicals etc. This method however has its penalties:

"Over the years in the junkyard, a new type of pixie emerged. The nudist. The nudist pixies wore no clothes except their hardhats and had pale, almost transparent skins. They also liked sunbathing. They stayed out in the sun so long that it often cooked their little brains right out of their skulls. They made copies as fast as the others, but those copies were sometimes wholly bizzare, and died very quickly. Some were pretty bizzare, but still worked - long wriggly arms, rubber wellies, raincoats, aqualungs, you name it, they built it, and kept, from the traditional Hard-hatters' point of view, wasting their energy in doing so.

The normal Hard-hatters were bemused. They went on making faithful copies of themselves, which almost always always worked, and multiplied at a rate massively outpacing the nudists. The odd shower of killer-hailstones was weathered easily, and things continued for a long-long time. Still, the nudists always hung on in there, as a minority. 'If nothing else', thought the hard-hatters, 'they provide a little colour'.

Then some things happened very quickly: After a particularly cold spell, all the old car-batteries in the junkyard froze. Then there was a red-hot heatwave. The Car-batteries cracked, and burst, releasing a flood of nasty acid. Almost all the Hard-hatters died, their little legs burned off at the knee. But the nudists, quite a lot of which had luckily made little wellies, survived. (Some of the Hardhatters, who'd been struck by lightning, had also made wellies by accident - even though their friends had laughed, they survived too.)

Soon later came a monsoon. It rained and rained and rained. The remaining Hardhatters, despite their accidental wellies, soon got waterlogged and rusty and stopped working. The nudists however, also had a group who'd invented raincoats, as well as wellies, and they kept on trucking through the downpoar. It rained so much, that soon the whole junkyard was underwater. But that was okay too - because some of the nudists pixies - the particularly crazy ones - had also made little aqualungs which let them breath, and long wiggly arms that they found were excellent for swimming."

Extract from Tabula's Notebook 2:

Maximizing latent adaptation in readiness for an unknown future with plain mitotic division (cloning) is wasteful, because for one 'useful' mutation, a zillion crappy and sometimes lethal mutations are also produced. This is because the nudist pixies' DNA - being necessarily 'wide open' comparitively to random strikes by mutagens - 99.99999 percent of the time produces unbeneficial effects, at least - unbeneficial at that point in time. This strategy is simply a 'try everything and hope something works.' Imagine studying for the most important exam of your life - but unfortunately, you have no clue as to what the subject will be. You have a choice -

1) Study one subject to its current limits, and pray it comes up. If it does - you hit the jackpot - and become outright leader of the world. If it doesn't, you die.
2) Skim absolutely everything from knitting to particle physics. Whatever comes up, you'll get a point or two, become a toilet-cleaner, but survive.

Now - the 'unknown exam' analogy is good to a point - and logically produces the two strategems I've mentioned. But... Enviromental change isn't like that. If it was a one off exam - with a myriad possibilities of subject, anyone with half a brain would choose option two, and survive. But enviromental change is more a constant set of exams repeated periodically, and as such - the pixies can look at the 'past papers', guess what the subject will be next year, and prepare accordantly.

Then their choice becomes:

1) Traditional - Study last year's topic to its current limits. (esp. if that same subject has come up every year for the last millenia.)
2) Eccentric - Skim everything.
3) Totally insane - Study a completely different topic from last year's to its current limits.

Actually - this is a lie, our pixies cannot yet 'see' the past just as they cannot 'see' the future - but this doesn't matter - just as the paper boat floating down the stream sticks to certain paths dictated by the currents of the water - which in turn obey the forces of gravity, and the lie of the land, so the pixies naturally fall into a set of unknowing and unchosen stategies, dictated by the medium in which they exist... Noticable only over a (verrry-long) period of time by an external observer.


"Covered in water, the pixies went on with the basics: picking up junk, and making copies. For a long-long time every new day was like the last. Because the water shielded them from the hailstones, the hardhats that had been so necessary became not so. So when some of the pixies got their brains fried and stopped making them, they didn't die. And because they saved the time they would have spent making them, and just copied themselves quicker instead - they slowly became the most numerous group. Simularly, the acid-proof wellington boots became less common, as they hampered swimming. And very very slowly, the pixies with the most flippery feet became the norm.

As time went by, and still nothing changed much, the aqua-pixies fell into three groups. The ones who didn't get their brains fried now did best, because they were already pretty well suited to the watery junkyard where they lived, and the copies they made all worked perfectly well without the need for any extras. One day, one of these traditional pixies went for a bask in the sun. 'A little bit won't hurt' he said to himself. But of course - Pow - he got his brain fried. But luckily - the next copy he made was still exactly like him, except for one small difference... It was wearing some real cool sunglasses.

Shades-Pixie was very successful, because the smoked-glass protected him from the nasty hot sunshine, so he hardly ever got his brain fried, and almost every copy he made worked just fine. Suddenly, nearly everybody in the junkyard had sunglasses.

There still remained a smaller number of unshaded-pixies who made mistakes in copying more often and sometimes gave themselves an extra bellybutton by accident, or grew a teapot on their heads - but since these modifications didn't actually mess with their swimming and copying abilities too much - they stayed around, on the fringes, trying to get everyone to believe cranial-teapots were the next big thing.

Of course, every group has its whackos - a tiny group that had had their brains fried once too often and made copies that wasted huge amounts of time and energy building themselves totally useless extras - arms so long they frequently tied themselves in knots - huge titanium hard hats that made them sink under the weight - colourful beach umbrellas the size of football pitches. Most of them died pretty sharpish, but some always seemed to hang on, dragging around whatever crazy extra that had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Time trickled by - each new dawn bringing the same amount of sunshine, the same boring old water, the same great heaps of junk lying around, just waiting for anyone to come along and pick it up - and so the Shades-pixies, the Teapot-heads and the Total-Loonies, even though they swapped groups sometimes, remained in roughly the same ratio to eachother. The total pixie population grew and grew and grew. Peaceful, happy pixies.

Then the junk ran out. And times got... Hard."

Extracts fromTabula's Notebook 3:

If you study any population of bacteria you will find a rough mixture of these three basics types:

A huge population of traditionalist types - very well suited to the enviroment they are in, and multiplying efficiently, perhaps with some means of protecting their DNA from mutagenic influence. These are the ones who have decided that next year's enviromental exam will be exactly the same as last year's. If they change at all, it will be toward a greater specialization in their 'favourite subject'. These types are the backbone of any colony, the ones that spread, carrying the others with them.

A smaller proportion of eccentric types - still well suited to their enviroment, but with additions that are not really necessary to the habitat in question. These guys are the middle management - still hedging their bets against a future change of subject. This group is actually the worst to be in. Remember the "Duck" - not the quack-quack version, but the amphibious vehicle version, prior to the hovercraft. It could travel like an armoured car on land, and like a boat on water. But it had a serious flaw: It was crap. It wallowed like a pig in the river, and drank petrol like there was no tomorrow on land, it was slow and hard to manoever in both elements. Out-competed by racecar and speedboat, the lesson of the Duck - specialize. Be good at one thing or the other. Don't consciously try to be so-so at both. While studying a number of subjects may seem less risky than only one, it really isn't, because unless the subjects they've studied all come up on the exam (a lower chance in combination than the one) they will either be outcompeted by the specialists if the same subject comes up again - Or quickly become outnumbered by the lucky loony who specialized in one of the new subjects that came up, if last years didn't and all the traditionalists died.

A tiny proportion of the totally insane. Mutagens strike regardless, and bad-luck (or good luck from another point of view) will always ensure that there is a small turnover of borderline-none-functional misfits that are 'ready' for any particular new exam subject that may come along in the future. Well, nearly any new exam subject anyway.

No system is ever stable, at least not for very long. Even if the enviroment at large does not change, and whatever life there is a so well adapted to that eviroment it becomes abundant - this very abundance in an arena of finite resource, forces change. We must remember that almost everyone and everything, is from a genetic point of view, a species of one.Every group, however easy it is to think of them as a whole, is a just a mass of competing individuals. And each individual, does not really give a monkies about the genes of the rest. It's "me me me", not "we we we", when push comes to shove, at least at the level our little friends are at currently.

The Pixies Go To War.

"When the going gets tough, the tough are all that remain:

For a while, the pixies just stared around at the big empty places where all their lovely junk had been. One of them got so distraught, he went completely to pieces. Literally. The junk he'd been made of sank slowly, swirling on unseen currents, to settle on the bottom with a forlorn little puff of dust. The pixies eyed eachother in a new light. You could almost hear the new thought rustling through their little noggins. "Really, really-really - there's just me here - All these other guys are just walking bits of junk... Hmmm."

You could have heard a pin drop.

Suddenly, every pixie that could freestyle, flail, jet, rotor or suction-pad, descended on the little pile. There was a pile-up. A bit of accidental pushing. A bit of friendly elbowing in retaliation. A few harsh words. Gloves were taken off. Sleeves were rolled up. A punch. A kick. Someone picked up a broken bottle. A chair. Only a complete lack of chandiliers prevented ariel combat.

War. War's good. War makes a lot of junk.

Those left standing surveyed the carnage, nodded distantly to eachother, and started collecting what they needed to build. They retired with their ill-gotten gains to their respective corners and got to work.

...Continued...