Survivalism vs hedonism

Survivalism and hedonism are doctrines surrounding fitness maximization and pleasure maximization respectively.

Both schools vary along the individualism / collectivism axis. Survivalism ranges from individualists, who are out for themselves through those who profess to be against the extinction of our species. Similarly, hedonists vary from those out for their own pleasure, to those who think the total pleasure of all sentient beings is what is important.

Hedonists think they are more advanced than survivalists. They are further up in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. They view animal evolution as a transition away from basic survivalist goals towards more advanced optimization targets dictated by nervous systems. In turn, survivalists view hedonists as short-sighted folk prone to drug-taking, masturbation, casual sex, wireheading and other dubious activities oriented towards pleasure and often at the expense of basic survival. See the picture, for more examples.

For a while, I considered these teams' rivalry to be largely misplaced. Hedonists who neglected survival were short-sighted fools likely to end up with nothing. Only hedonists who recognised that hedonism depended on survival really needed to be taken seriously. However, such hedonists would be likely to behave a lot like survivalists until they were pretty certain that they were not going to encounter more advanced alien civilizations in the alien race. That might well be tens of millions of years in the future. If the two tribes behave in much the same way for billions of years, they don't seem too dissimilar.

I'm now a bit less confident of this assessment. Hedonists might think that alien races would also be hedonistic - and so might not be too concerned about the consequences of an alien invasion. I can also imagine a hedonist gambling on extinction vs making everyone three times as happy forever. A survivalist would be unlikely to take such a gamble - but possibly a hedonist might.

It also seems that in practice that the different optimization targets do result in different behavior. For example, they differ regarding treatment of non-human animals. Many hedonists are concerned with animal welfare causes: factory farming, wild animal suffering and so on. However, to survivalists these mostly look like bad causes: non-human animals are probably not going to help make sure that Spaceship Earth completes its journey. This kind of practical difference today does not bode terribly well for the thesis that the behavior of these tribes will converge in the future. Maybe the survivalists and the hedonists will remain at odds.

Pretend to be part of your host

How do parasites avoid destruction at the hands of the host immune systems? Of course there are many ways, but one way is to pretend to be part of your host. Viruses are experts at this. They hide inside host cells, out of the way of the immune system. However the immune system has a window to cell contents the form of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins, which are detectable from outside the cell. Some viruses, for example cytomegaloviruses synthesize families of human-like proteins to fool the immune system into thinking that the host cell is still mostly human.

Is there an equivalent of this in cultural evolution? There's certainly a distinction between self and other and this is used by the memetic immune system when deciding which memes to reject. The components most clearly marked as beiong "self" are those that the host considers to be part of their own identity. So many memes compete for adoption by the identity of their host.

One way you can tell which memes are considered to be part of the identity of an individual is when they say "I am X". Some examples:

• Religion: "I am a Christian"
• Politics: "I am a Republican"
• Jobs: "I am a nurse"
• Sex: "I am transexual"
• Ethnicity: "I am Jewish"
• Disease: "I am disabled"
• Age: "I am old"

One possible defense against unwanted memes masquerading as being part of you is to spring-clean your identity. If you reduce its footprint there will be fewer places for unwanted memes to hide. At any rate, regardless of whether you want to shrink your identity, it is worth looking closely at who you think you are, to make sure that it really is you.

Weaken host immune system by creating a diversion

I have a previous article about cultural immune deficiency disorders. I've also written about cultural opportunistic infections - the cultural version of the well knnown phenomena, opportunistic infections.

I've long recognised the possibility that infections could attack the host immune system to create a hole to penetrate host defenses - and that such a hole could then let in other parasites. Clearly these dynamics apply in cultural evolution as well - as is seen in cultural immune deficiency disorders.

This article is about a related set of strategies involving diverting host immune system resources elsewhere. Rather than directly attacking the immune system parasites may be able to create a diversion. One strategy would be to absorb host immune resources via deliberate immune stimulation using expendible, fake targets. Another strategy might be to liberate suppressed persistent infections already present within the host by making holes in the immune system for them.

The former strategy has some well-studied examples. Some parasites release what are known as superantigens - which act to stimulate the immune system, sapping its resources.

A couple of analogies illustrate the proposed effects. Invaders sometimes liberate prisoners from the territories they are invading. The reason is not always clear - but they may be creating a diversion which saps the resources of the defenders. They may also engage in arson. Causing chaos can help them to achieve their own goals. Another analogy involves the saying that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". It is widely recognised that uniting against a common enemy can result in strength gains. Orwell wrote about this in the book "1984". Unrelated parasites may effectively gang up on their hosts - since they have a shared interest in a weakened host immune system.

I don't have much in the way of concrete evidence or examples in the cultural domain to offer in this post. However the possibility that these dynamics might also apply to cultural evolution seems intriguing.

Why groups form

Why groups form is a basic question in sociobiology.

Biologists recognise a number of common reasons why groups form - which include:

• Raising offspring;
• Safety in numbers;
• Hunting in packs;
• Gathering to mate;

This post will attempt to find general versions of these ideas that cover most of the reasons why groups form in nature.

1. Kin selection - Family groups are some of the most common reasons why groups form in nature. Theres a well-established theory which covers this: kin selection. My main comment here is to say that a symbiosis-aware version of kin selection theory is needed. Groups can form not because their members are kin, but because their members' symbiotic partners are kin. This idea should be taken to cover shared cultural symbionts as well.

2. Combined power - groups are often stronger and more capable than their individual members. They can do things which individuals cannot. For example, 10 ants may be able to transport a leaf which no single ant can lift. Groups are thus biology's multipliers. Groups can build bigger and better nests than individuals can. A pack of animals is can tackle larger prey than a single hunter. Similarly, a herd of animals can often mount a better joint defense against predators than a single animal can manage. Combining power does not require synergy - where the group is stronger than the sum of its component parts. Additivity (or worse) can still be enough. The term "power": is intended to refer to motor power, sensory power, compute power - or some combination of these.

3. Sharing information - groups often form in order to share information between their members. One classical way in which this hapens is the group members share their genes with other group members by having sex with them. This happens on leks for example. This is part of the reason why groups consisting of members of the same species form so frequently. We clearly need a symbiosis-aware version of this idea. Hosts may form groups not so they can have sex with each other, but so their parasites or symbionts can have sex. Indeed, it isn't just sex - groups can form so that individuals can transmit their symbionts to others who don't yet have them, or so individuals can gain symbionts from others. Cultual symbionts also need to be included. For example, when Catholic groups form, one thing that happens is that the Catholic memes get to meet and mate with other Catholic memes. Some other things happen as well - which could be characterized as "collect the full set" and "get the latest upgrades". Those with incomplete sets of Catholic memes can get new synergetic meme partners. Those with out-of-date Catholic memes can upgrade to the latest versions. A good generalized version of these ideas is to say that groups sometimes form in order to share information between group members.

I don't pretend that these ideas explain all group formation in nature. For an example of group formation which they explain poorly, consider the following article from Ed Yong (2013):

Parasites Make Their Hosts Sociable So They Get Eaten

That's a case of sharing genetic information. However, there the information involved is shared across groups, not between individuals within the group.

Group selection is sometimes cited as a force driving group formation. However, the claims of group selection advocates seem to be covered by 1 and 2 above - at least if you use a post-1975 version of kin selection theory. The claim that group selection explains things that the 1960s versions of kin selection theory cannot does not seem to be worth very much.

Though not complete, I think the above principles explain most cases of group formation. The exceptions I am aware of are not far from this framework, but near to the edge of it.

Ed Yong - Parasitic mind control

I've witten a number of articles about parasitic mind control. I have also promoted the symbiont hypothesis of eusociality. I didn't see Ed Yong's 2014 talk until now, though.

There's only a bit in the video about parasite-induced social behavior, but this is turning into a big topic in memetics.

Ed has now written a book relating to this general topic: I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. Here is a video of a book talk by Ed..

Daniel Dennett: Memes as the key to human intelligence

Dennett of the hijacking of the term "meme", the "De-Darwinization" of cultural evolution, memes as "virtual machines" - and various other topics.

I've previously made some critical comments regarding some of this material.

Susan Blackmore: From Memes to Tremes

Memetic dysbiosis

One piece of symbiology terminology that seems to be missing refers to the idea of host fitness being compromised by the lack of important symbionts. Connie Barlow memorably proposed that these be termed "Ghosts" in her book The Ghosts Of Evolution. Anyway, I am not going to address that issue here, but will instead discuss an umbrella category that includes these "ghosts" - dysbiosis.

Wikipedia says that "dysbiosis" is: "a term for a microbial imbalance or maladaptation on or inside the body, such as an impaired microbiota". Since the etymology of "dysbiosis" suggests that it is a symbiology term - like "symbiosis" - it ought to be a general term that can also be applied to human hosts in the context of cultural symbionts. "Maladaptation" should be taken to refer to the effect on host fitness. Of course, the dysbiosis could be adaptive from the perspective of the finess of the smaller symbionts.

From its definition, memetic dysbiosis could be the result of missing memes, bad memes - or some combination of the two. In either case, memetic dysbiosis could be addressed by some sort of meme therapy.

Cairns-Smith: chemical evolution critic

One fairly prominent critic of "chemical evolution" was the late A. G. Cairns-Smith. He devoted a substantial section at the start of his book "Genetic Takeover" to explaining where proponents of chemical evolution got it wrong, arguing that the requirements for Darwinian evolution to get going were quite demanding - and most of the proposed prebiotic chemical systems didn't measure up.

This is contrary to the proposals made by proponents of Universal Darwinism, which suggest that copying with variation and selection are ubiquitous physical and chemical processes which can be used to model a wide variety of systems.

As readers may or may not be aware, I am both a proponent of Universal Darwinism and a fan of Cairns-Smith's ideas about the origin of life, so which side of this argument to support is a kind of dilemma for me.

The first thing to say is that Cairns-Smith got it wrong in detail, that simple physical and chemical systems do evolve and exhibit adaptations in much the way that he argued against. Cairns-Smith gave too much weight to the idea that simple physical and chemical systems lacked high fidelity copying - and would therefore undergo an error catastrophe, or a "mutational meltdown". We now know that with positional inheritance, high fidelity copying in prebiotic systems is ubiquitous.

Other problems besides lack of high fidelity copying mean that these systems typically do not go on to launch systems capable of open-ended evolution. One such problem is having a genome with a "low information ceiling" - and Cairns-Smith did discuss that problem. Another such problem is "local exhaustion". Dissipative systems destroy the energy gradients that they feed off. Unless they can continually find new energy sources, they will exhaust their own energy supply and die out. This happens with lightning strikes, for example. They typically do not last for very long, and the reason for that is because they run out of fuel.

It seems possible to me that prebiotic "chemical evolution" will involve adaptations that are on the pathway towards the origin of life (as Cairns-Smith argued against). However, I don't think negating Cairns-Smith's point about the relevance of ochemical evolution has all that much effect on his other arguments. Clay mineral crystals still seem like attractive candidates for the first living things, for essentially the reasons that Cairns-Smith gives in his books on the topic.

Virtue signalling: pro-social or anti-social?

In 2011, I stressed the positive side of virtue signalling, writing: "Signalling must often be costly to be effective." Costly signalling of virtuousness to an audience of sceptical cheating-detectors often involves actually being virtuous. However, since then it has become fashionable to use "virtue signalling" as a term of abuse.

In standard biological terminology, signalling can be accurate or misleading, costly or cheap, pro-social or anti-social. I recently saw one attempt to argue that virtue signalling was generally positive, and that pointing it out was usually an anti-social means of making yourself look good. The article was titled " The psychological explanation for why we sometimes hate the good guy". Here's what the authors concluded:

Critics often attack the motives of people who protect the environment, seek social justice, donate money or work too hard in organizations. Such good deeds are dismissed as naïve, hypocritical (“champagne liberals”) or as mere “virtue signalling” by those who do not perform those deeds. If left unchecked, this criticism may ultimately reduce how often people do good deeds.

Our research helps us recognize these attacks for what they are: A competitive social strategy, used by low co-operators, to bring others down and stop them from looking better than they do.

The problem with this is is that some people only appear to be virtuous, and pointing that out by saying that they are just virtue signalling can be pro-social - by encouraging more genuine forms of do-gooding.

Others have focused on the negative aspects of virtue signalling, arguing that it is a cheap subsitute for actually doing good employed by those with shallow, selfish motives. I don't think that is right either. Virtue signalling is responsible for a lot of the good that take place in the world. It often doesn't really matter if people do it for selfish motives, to impress prospective partners (or whatever) - since it still results in much good being done. Without virtue signalling the world would surely be a much worse place. Virtue signalling is mostly - but not exclusively - a positive force.