Part 2: Sex and Violence in Suburbia - The Drive Toward Real Consciousness.
When do you feel best..? After a shag, or after a fight. (Well, okay, it depends on a few other factors - Like: "Was I in bed with Angelina Jolie or in a prison shower with a gay Serial-killer..?" and "Did I win..?" But you get the gist.)
The real question, however, is "If we are in some way akin to pleasure-seeking robots - Why don't we spend more time banging eachothers' brains out..?" Why, on the way to work on a rainey Monday morning, do I not actually stop the car and attempt to get seriously jiggy with that blonde picking up her oranges by the side of the road, rather than just thinking about it..?
Why, when my skinny, pissant boss dumps me with yet another load of work that he should be doing on a Friday night, don't I pick him up and break his wretched spine across my knee..?
It's a longer story than you might think.
Let's just quickly trot through the way life's developed over the eons.
*First replicators, naked chemical chains in the sea. Copying themselves blindly over and over before they fall apart, or are destroyed by random collision.
*First single cells. Shieded. Differentiated. Some specialized. Others less so.
*First combinations. Cells of different nature, different speciality combine. Mitochondria are co-opted to serve as energy generators for ATP, as are spirochaete to serve as cyto-skeletons, lending strength and form to the cell-wall. The extraneous genetic code from both is supressed, as the genomes combine into one, to prevent duplications of functional components. After all, one of everything is quite enough.
*Colonies develop. The first bio-films. Safety in numbers. Cohesion preserved by genetic simularity.
*Colonies segmentate. Parts of the biomass perform one function, digestion for example, other parts different functions - Propulsion perhaps - process governed by special genes that control genomic expression/supression. Cohesion again preserved by genetic simularity. All the cells, though individual, are exactly the same genetically. One goes rogue - the genetic fitness of the whole group suffers, including its own.
*Sexual reproduction. Adaptive rocket-fuel. Randominity preserved for true originality of adaptation, but the chances of lethal mutation is lowered by the controlled nature of selection. Cohesion preserved by each cells gene's equal chance of being selected for transmission into the next generation.
*Increase in physical size of individual colonies. In a tough neighborhood - Being the biggest is best. Dinosaurs rule.
*Limits on individual size reached. Gravity impinges.
I must say it kills me to write so briefly about such complex topics but each of the above is a book in itself. Let us instead simply notice a few consistant themes.
The Body Politic.
I say 'colonies' rather than 'lifeforms' because essentially you, me, and the dog that's pissing against the wall over there are colonies cloned from a single cell. The streptococci that cover your skin, the bacteria in your gut, and the cells which actually make up what you would count as 'your body' are not very much different. It is only the fact that the genetic material present in these symbiotic adherents is markedly different that we count them as 'not-your-body'.
[They must be free agents actually, as the war of adaptation and counter-adaptation in the bacterial world is carried on at a furious rate - Even if our DNA and their's were to merge, the resultant endogenous 'bacteria' - self-grown from birth, would always be lagging behind the exogenous strains, and hence be of no real use as protection from skin and bowel diseases.
Our symbiotic bacteria also has more invested in keeping us alive, rather than trying to kill us. We are their territory, as well as food-source, so they selfishly protect us from invaders. Bless their little hearts. Mind you - Should we be near to death, they will actually try to deliver the final blow - All the better to eat us (almost) alive. Vicious bastards. Never trust anything you can't see.]
These colonies began as actual disparate elements grouping together to take advantage of eachothers' specialities. The eventual combination of the different genomes into one large one came about as 'anti-theft' device - To prevent rival groups sequestering elements of any particular colony during its (prior to genomic combination) non-sequential division. Think of a rival building firm kidnapping your brick-layers while they stand around idle waiting for the scaffolders to arrive.
In short - We are colonies of 'human' bacteria, acting in concert. The colony's cohesion of purpose is provided by the fact that each separate cell contains exactly the same genes, and each of those genes has an equal chance of being selected for the next generation. Each cell thusly has an equal investment in the whole - And any selfish cancer-like behavior would penalize the instigator to exactly the same degree as the rest of its less troublesome fellows. Mutual interest. 'All for one', in other words.
It is hard to visulize simply because the microscopic scale involved - Let us hit the zoom button.
Imagine if we only had 7 huge cells: Right leg, left leg, right arm, left arm, head, torso, and balls, all containing the exact same genome, though the individual genes of each are expressed and supressed in a slightly different manner to produce the relevant properties specific to each part.
Each body 'cell' works together in harmony to support the 'balls' to eventually produce a child with exactly the same genetic relatedness to each 'cell' - 50% if they reproduce sexually, a 100% if they simply clone. Each does exactly 1/7th of the work involved.
Now - Let us imagine a cell goes rogue. While the rest are sleeping, the left arm strangles the body and knuckles off into the blue. Then it grows some balls and finds a mate. Almost certainly a pity-shag. Produces a child. What has it done..? It has achieved exactly the same result as it would have if it had just been a good little arm and stayed attached, but - For a vastly increased expenditure of energy. It did all the work, rather than only 1/7th.
Duh. Was it a good idea..?
The co-operation of all the cells in our bodies, is not altruistic. They aren't doing eachother a favour. They are saving energy. Selfish little bastards.
So - basically the rule is: However many members you have in your body-colony, as long as all are 100% genetically related to the others, and each gene within that genome has an equal chance of being transmitted into the next generation, there will be no problems with cohesion of purpose.
You can grow as big as you can, it doesn't matter. The biggest 'wins'.
Hercules and the Hydra.
But now the question is: How can you grow an even bigger colony once you've reached the limit on individual size..? How to get around physics..?
Aha. You need a distributed body. Your genes in many baskets. A many-headed Hydra to defeat the individual Hercules.
Remember Mickey Mouse, and the magic broomstick..? He chopped and chopped and each splinter grew into another broomstick..? Until there was an army of broomsticks, all working in unison toward a single end..?
That's the theory. Many smaller bodies beat one big body.
However, there's a problem. Cohesion of purpose. In reality - Mickey's magic broomsticks would have spent most of their time beating the shit out of eachother to get to the water-trough, and the rest of the time trying to steal eachothers' buckets.
Why..? Because, although - Handle for handle - There remains the same or a greater amount of 'Broomstick-genes', distributed now, among a multitude of broomsticks - Mutation/reproduction ensures each of those broomsticks are slightly different. Genetic equality is lost. The individuals of this distributed body, however closely related to their fellows, are always 100% related to themselves, and so are driven to compete. Fight. Fuck eachother over. Make war.
In the human genome there are around 3 billion base-pairs. Between any two individual humans, very roughly, about one base-pair in thousand is different. The fingers that write this and the eyes that read it are, genetically, 0.999 the same. But even that small difference is enough to destroy any hope of large-scale genetically-led cohesion.
Let's have an example. Mother, Father, and child. You can't get much closer than that genetically speaking, and yet, even in this loving circle, there is conflict. The father is not genetically related to the mother - hopefully anyway - So it is in his interests to have a big, strong, sturdy son, even if this may threaten the life of the mother in childbirth. Surprise, surprise - Marked (the gene-equivalent of an emphatic command 'do this!!!') genes on the Father's Y-chromosome encourage foetal growth, by up to 40% above normal.
Poor Mommy. Can't have that. Think of the amount of abdominal crunches she'd have to do to get back in shape after birthing that monster. So marked genes on the mother's X-chromosome have the opposite effect, supressing foetal growth, by up to 16% below normal. Surprisingly enough the mother's X also carries marked genes for aggression, which are supressed by the father's X, but not by the Y - Which is why boys are more aggressive than girls. Blame the mothers...
And baby - don't forget baby - Okay, so they're 50% related to Mommy, but 100% related to themselves, so who gets the shitty end of the stick..? Mom. The placenta releases hormones to hijack an increasing volume of the maternal blood-supply throughout the pregnancy, while the mother's system releases factors to counter, rather than encourage, its growth. The placenta and the foetus also release immuno-supressants to decrease the chances of rejection and miscarriage. Mommy and baby are chemically at war.
Genetic difference between individuals, however slight, inevitably pits them against eachother.
So the cauldron never gets filled. And the Wizard doesn't come home to find his house flooded. But Mickey still probably gets a clip round the ear.
The genetic-led cohesion that bound the colony in a single Herculean form, is near impossible to achieve in a distributed form without a major sacrifice of the individuality/independence of its units - Eusociality - Ants, termites and bees for example - manage to retain genetic-led cohesion by having a single fertile queen, capable of reproducing, haploid drones to fertillize her and a distributed body of sterile workers. This sterility ensures that they work and die for the queen, to which, due to their quirky genetics, they are more related (75%) than to any of their fellow workers (50%). Go on - Look it up.
A Eusociality, although it looks like a distributed body - Is technically still an 'individual' - and as such, vunerable - Kill the Queen and the kingdom falls.
And Hercules beat the Hydra... But what if the Hydra, instead of a paltry ten heads, had had a hundred..? A thousand..? A billion..? Each fertile - Cut one down and watch an army rise in its place..?
Perhaps the story would have ended differently.
Whereas Hercules is limited chiefly by gravity, and the associated energy loss/gain ratios, a distributed body/Hydra is limited only by the number of bodies/heads that can be mutually-coerced into acting in concert to a commonality of purpose. Social, rather than genetic cohesion.
Signalling systems - Bridging the gaps in the distributed body.
The human face has 43 muscles, capable of generating around 3000 meaningful expressions. These expressions are consistantly decipherable by any society of humans on the earth, regardless of cultural differences.
We assume two things about our expressions - one that we have full control over them, should we choose to assume it, and that the sequence of 'feeling something' leading to 'expressing it' is strictly one-way. Both are wrong.
People taped in situations of interaction, verbal communication, to the casual eye, rarely express very much that isn't in line with what they say. But if you slow down the tape, you begin to see fleeting 'micro-expressions' of a duration too short to be picked up consciously without training. Facial ticks and tells that can jog our subconscious as we speak to people, making us instinctively feel drawn to someone, or repelled. Our faces are more transparant than we think.
If I am happy, full of the joys of Spring, I smile. Strangely though, if I force a smile, a real shit-eating grin that cracks my face like a clamshell and puckers my dimples like a child's, I feel better. Actual physiological changes in my brain chemistry. A natural mini-high. Same with a frown; willed frowning brings your mood down.
So, all well and good, as long as I'm the one doing the smiling.
(Sorry - I gave up here).
...Continued...
When do you feel best..? After a shag, or after a fight. (Well, okay, it depends on a few other factors - Like: "Was I in bed with Angelina Jolie or in a prison shower with a gay Serial-killer..?" and "Did I win..?" But you get the gist.)
The real question, however, is "If we are in some way akin to pleasure-seeking robots - Why don't we spend more time banging eachothers' brains out..?" Why, on the way to work on a rainey Monday morning, do I not actually stop the car and attempt to get seriously jiggy with that blonde picking up her oranges by the side of the road, rather than just thinking about it..?
Why, when my skinny, pissant boss dumps me with yet another load of work that he should be doing on a Friday night, don't I pick him up and break his wretched spine across my knee..?
It's a longer story than you might think.
Let's just quickly trot through the way life's developed over the eons.
*First replicators, naked chemical chains in the sea. Copying themselves blindly over and over before they fall apart, or are destroyed by random collision.
*First single cells. Shieded. Differentiated. Some specialized. Others less so.
*First combinations. Cells of different nature, different speciality combine. Mitochondria are co-opted to serve as energy generators for ATP, as are spirochaete to serve as cyto-skeletons, lending strength and form to the cell-wall. The extraneous genetic code from both is supressed, as the genomes combine into one, to prevent duplications of functional components. After all, one of everything is quite enough.
*Colonies develop. The first bio-films. Safety in numbers. Cohesion preserved by genetic simularity.
*Colonies segmentate. Parts of the biomass perform one function, digestion for example, other parts different functions - Propulsion perhaps - process governed by special genes that control genomic expression/supression. Cohesion again preserved by genetic simularity. All the cells, though individual, are exactly the same genetically. One goes rogue - the genetic fitness of the whole group suffers, including its own.
*Sexual reproduction. Adaptive rocket-fuel. Randominity preserved for true originality of adaptation, but the chances of lethal mutation is lowered by the controlled nature of selection. Cohesion preserved by each cells gene's equal chance of being selected for transmission into the next generation.
*Increase in physical size of individual colonies. In a tough neighborhood - Being the biggest is best. Dinosaurs rule.
*Limits on individual size reached. Gravity impinges.
I must say it kills me to write so briefly about such complex topics but each of the above is a book in itself. Let us instead simply notice a few consistant themes.
The Body Politic.
I say 'colonies' rather than 'lifeforms' because essentially you, me, and the dog that's pissing against the wall over there are colonies cloned from a single cell. The streptococci that cover your skin, the bacteria in your gut, and the cells which actually make up what you would count as 'your body' are not very much different. It is only the fact that the genetic material present in these symbiotic adherents is markedly different that we count them as 'not-your-body'.
[They must be free agents actually, as the war of adaptation and counter-adaptation in the bacterial world is carried on at a furious rate - Even if our DNA and their's were to merge, the resultant endogenous 'bacteria' - self-grown from birth, would always be lagging behind the exogenous strains, and hence be of no real use as protection from skin and bowel diseases.
Our symbiotic bacteria also has more invested in keeping us alive, rather than trying to kill us. We are their territory, as well as food-source, so they selfishly protect us from invaders. Bless their little hearts. Mind you - Should we be near to death, they will actually try to deliver the final blow - All the better to eat us (almost) alive. Vicious bastards. Never trust anything you can't see.]
These colonies began as actual disparate elements grouping together to take advantage of eachothers' specialities. The eventual combination of the different genomes into one large one came about as 'anti-theft' device - To prevent rival groups sequestering elements of any particular colony during its (prior to genomic combination) non-sequential division. Think of a rival building firm kidnapping your brick-layers while they stand around idle waiting for the scaffolders to arrive.
In short - We are colonies of 'human' bacteria, acting in concert. The colony's cohesion of purpose is provided by the fact that each separate cell contains exactly the same genes, and each of those genes has an equal chance of being selected for the next generation. Each cell thusly has an equal investment in the whole - And any selfish cancer-like behavior would penalize the instigator to exactly the same degree as the rest of its less troublesome fellows. Mutual interest. 'All for one', in other words.
It is hard to visulize simply because the microscopic scale involved - Let us hit the zoom button.
Imagine if we only had 7 huge cells: Right leg, left leg, right arm, left arm, head, torso, and balls, all containing the exact same genome, though the individual genes of each are expressed and supressed in a slightly different manner to produce the relevant properties specific to each part.
Each body 'cell' works together in harmony to support the 'balls' to eventually produce a child with exactly the same genetic relatedness to each 'cell' - 50% if they reproduce sexually, a 100% if they simply clone. Each does exactly 1/7th of the work involved.
Now - Let us imagine a cell goes rogue. While the rest are sleeping, the left arm strangles the body and knuckles off into the blue. Then it grows some balls and finds a mate. Almost certainly a pity-shag. Produces a child. What has it done..? It has achieved exactly the same result as it would have if it had just been a good little arm and stayed attached, but - For a vastly increased expenditure of energy. It did all the work, rather than only 1/7th.
Duh. Was it a good idea..?
The co-operation of all the cells in our bodies, is not altruistic. They aren't doing eachother a favour. They are saving energy. Selfish little bastards.
So - basically the rule is: However many members you have in your body-colony, as long as all are 100% genetically related to the others, and each gene within that genome has an equal chance of being transmitted into the next generation, there will be no problems with cohesion of purpose.
You can grow as big as you can, it doesn't matter. The biggest 'wins'.
Hercules and the Hydra.
But now the question is: How can you grow an even bigger colony once you've reached the limit on individual size..? How to get around physics..?
Aha. You need a distributed body. Your genes in many baskets. A many-headed Hydra to defeat the individual Hercules.
Remember Mickey Mouse, and the magic broomstick..? He chopped and chopped and each splinter grew into another broomstick..? Until there was an army of broomsticks, all working in unison toward a single end..?
That's the theory. Many smaller bodies beat one big body.
However, there's a problem. Cohesion of purpose. In reality - Mickey's magic broomsticks would have spent most of their time beating the shit out of eachother to get to the water-trough, and the rest of the time trying to steal eachothers' buckets.
Why..? Because, although - Handle for handle - There remains the same or a greater amount of 'Broomstick-genes', distributed now, among a multitude of broomsticks - Mutation/reproduction ensures each of those broomsticks are slightly different. Genetic equality is lost. The individuals of this distributed body, however closely related to their fellows, are always 100% related to themselves, and so are driven to compete. Fight. Fuck eachother over. Make war.
In the human genome there are around 3 billion base-pairs. Between any two individual humans, very roughly, about one base-pair in thousand is different. The fingers that write this and the eyes that read it are, genetically, 0.999 the same. But even that small difference is enough to destroy any hope of large-scale genetically-led cohesion.
Let's have an example. Mother, Father, and child. You can't get much closer than that genetically speaking, and yet, even in this loving circle, there is conflict. The father is not genetically related to the mother - hopefully anyway - So it is in his interests to have a big, strong, sturdy son, even if this may threaten the life of the mother in childbirth. Surprise, surprise - Marked (the gene-equivalent of an emphatic command 'do this!!!') genes on the Father's Y-chromosome encourage foetal growth, by up to 40% above normal.
Poor Mommy. Can't have that. Think of the amount of abdominal crunches she'd have to do to get back in shape after birthing that monster. So marked genes on the mother's X-chromosome have the opposite effect, supressing foetal growth, by up to 16% below normal. Surprisingly enough the mother's X also carries marked genes for aggression, which are supressed by the father's X, but not by the Y - Which is why boys are more aggressive than girls. Blame the mothers...
And baby - don't forget baby - Okay, so they're 50% related to Mommy, but 100% related to themselves, so who gets the shitty end of the stick..? Mom. The placenta releases hormones to hijack an increasing volume of the maternal blood-supply throughout the pregnancy, while the mother's system releases factors to counter, rather than encourage, its growth. The placenta and the foetus also release immuno-supressants to decrease the chances of rejection and miscarriage. Mommy and baby are chemically at war.
Genetic difference between individuals, however slight, inevitably pits them against eachother.
So the cauldron never gets filled. And the Wizard doesn't come home to find his house flooded. But Mickey still probably gets a clip round the ear.
The genetic-led cohesion that bound the colony in a single Herculean form, is near impossible to achieve in a distributed form without a major sacrifice of the individuality/independence of its units - Eusociality - Ants, termites and bees for example - manage to retain genetic-led cohesion by having a single fertile queen, capable of reproducing, haploid drones to fertillize her and a distributed body of sterile workers. This sterility ensures that they work and die for the queen, to which, due to their quirky genetics, they are more related (75%) than to any of their fellow workers (50%). Go on - Look it up.
A Eusociality, although it looks like a distributed body - Is technically still an 'individual' - and as such, vunerable - Kill the Queen and the kingdom falls.
And Hercules beat the Hydra... But what if the Hydra, instead of a paltry ten heads, had had a hundred..? A thousand..? A billion..? Each fertile - Cut one down and watch an army rise in its place..?
Perhaps the story would have ended differently.
Whereas Hercules is limited chiefly by gravity, and the associated energy loss/gain ratios, a distributed body/Hydra is limited only by the number of bodies/heads that can be mutually-coerced into acting in concert to a commonality of purpose. Social, rather than genetic cohesion.
Signalling systems - Bridging the gaps in the distributed body.
The human face has 43 muscles, capable of generating around 3000 meaningful expressions. These expressions are consistantly decipherable by any society of humans on the earth, regardless of cultural differences.
We assume two things about our expressions - one that we have full control over them, should we choose to assume it, and that the sequence of 'feeling something' leading to 'expressing it' is strictly one-way. Both are wrong.
People taped in situations of interaction, verbal communication, to the casual eye, rarely express very much that isn't in line with what they say. But if you slow down the tape, you begin to see fleeting 'micro-expressions' of a duration too short to be picked up consciously without training. Facial ticks and tells that can jog our subconscious as we speak to people, making us instinctively feel drawn to someone, or repelled. Our faces are more transparant than we think.
If I am happy, full of the joys of Spring, I smile. Strangely though, if I force a smile, a real shit-eating grin that cracks my face like a clamshell and puckers my dimples like a child's, I feel better. Actual physiological changes in my brain chemistry. A natural mini-high. Same with a frown; willed frowning brings your mood down.
So, all well and good, as long as I'm the one doing the smiling.
(Sorry - I gave up here).
