Consider her ways

99.9 – 95.6 million years ago.

Here is my obituary for Ed Wilson (1929 – 2021) and below some thoughts about ants.

There are some pieces of paleontology that really stand out in the popular imagination. Dinosaurs are so cool that even if they hadn’t existed we would have invented them. (Maybe we did, in the form of dragons. And look ahead (or back) to early April for the dinosaur-griffin connection.) Also, as I suggested in a previous post, transitions from one form of locomotion to another – flightless dinosaurs to birds, fish to tetrapods, land mammals to whales – really grab the imagination (and annoy creationists) because the largest and most distinctive named folk categories of animals (snakes, fish, birds) are built around modes of locomotion.

Evolutionary biologists tend to see things differently. Turning fins into legs, legs into wings, and legs back into flippers is pretty impressive. But the really major evolutionary transitions involve the evolution of whole new levels of organization: the origin of the eukaryotic cell, for example, and the origin of multicellular life. From this perspective, the really huge change in the Mesozoic – sometimes called the Age of Dinosaurs – is the origin of eusociality among insects like ants and bees. An ant nest or a bee hive is something like a single superorganism, with most of its members sterile workers striving – even committing suicide — for the colony’s reproduction, not their own. (100 million years ago – corresponding to March 28 in Logarithmic History — is when we find the first bee and ant fossils, but the transition must have been underway before that time.)

Certainly the statistics on social insects today are impressive.

The twenty thousand known species of eusocial insects, mostly ants, bees, wasps and termites, account for only 2 percent of the approximately one million known species of insects. Yet this tiny minority of species dominate the rest of the insects in their numbers, their weight, and their impact on the environment. As humans are to vertebrate animals, the eusocial insects are to the far vaster world of invertebrate animals. … In one Amazon site, two German researchers … found that ants and termites together compose almost two-thirds of the weight of all the insects. Eusocial bees and wasps added another tenth. Ants alone weighed four times more than all the terrestrial vertebrates – that is, mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined. E. O. Wilson pp 110-113

E. O. Wilson, world’s foremost authority on ants, and one of the founders of sociobiology, thinks that the origin of insect eusociality might have lessons for another major evolutionary transition, the origin of humans (and of human language, technology, culture, and complex social organization). In his book The Social Conquest of Earth he argues that a key step in both sets of transitions was the development of a valuable and defensible home – in the case of humans, a hearth site. Wilson returns to this argument in his recent book Genesis: The Deep Origin of Human Societies. On the same topic, Mark Moffett’s book The Human Swarm: How Human Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall,  asks how it is that we somehow rival the social insects in our scale of organization.

One trait found in both ants and humans is large-scale warfare. Wilson gives an idea of the nature of ant warfare in fictional form in his novel Anthill. It’s an interesting experiment, but also disorienting. Because individual recognition is not important for ants, his story of the destruction of an ant colony reads like the Iliad with all the personal names taken out. But Homer’s heroes fought for “aphthiton kleos,” undying fame (and got some measure of it in Homer’s poem). The moral economy of reputation puts human cooperation in war and peace on a very different footing from insect eusociality. (Here’s my take on “ethnic group selection,” which depends on social enforcement, perhaps via reputation.)

“Consider her ways” is the title of a short story by John Wyndham, about a woman from the present trapped in a future ant-like all-female dystopia. It was made into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The title is from Proverbs 6:6, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.”

Other science fiction authors have taken a cheerier view of a world without men.

People of the Wind

John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine, used to challenge writers with new premises. One of his challenges was to imagine an alien that is to mammals as mammals are to reptiles. Science fiction writer Poul Anderson took up this challenge by inventing the Ythri, flying intelligent aliens of the planet Avalon, for his novel The People of the Wind. The Ythri were able to support the high metabolisms necessary for flight because they had a special system for supercharging their bloodstreams with extra oxygen.

Since Anderson’s time, we’ve learned that birds – and some dinosaurs – are actually somewhat Ythri-like. To begin with, consider non-dinosaur reptiles, like lizards: their sprawling posture means that their legs compress and expand their lungs as they run, so they can’t run and breathe at the same time. (David Carrier, a biologist at the University of Utah, was a main guy to figure this out.) If you had traveled back in time to the Paleozoic, before the dinosaurs took over, and if you had had good endurance training, you would have found the hunting easy, because the sprawling reptiles of the time would not have been able to run away for more than a short sprints. The predators to worry about would have been ambush hunters, not endurance hunters.

Dinosaurs got around these constraints in the first place by running bipedally (although some later reverted to quadrupedalism). And it now looks like at least some of them also had the sort of respiration we find in birds. Lungs are only part of birds’ respiratory systems. Birds also have an extensive network of air sacs running through their bodies, and even air passages in their bones. Air moves in both directions, in and out, like a bellows, through the air sacs, but only one direction through the lungs. This allows for more efficient circulation than mammalian lungs, where air has to move both in and out of the lungs. Just recently (2008), it’s been shown that Allosaurus, only distantly related to birds, had the same system, so it was probably widespread among dinosaurs. This breathing system may have helped dinosaurs to survive low-oxygen crises at the end of the Triassic, and flourish in the low oxygen Jurassic and Cretaceous. It may also have helped one group of dinosaurs to evolve into birds.

Anderson’s book isn’t just about respiratory physiology. It’s also about perennial issues of loyalty and identity. Avalon also has human settlers, who have so absorbed Ythri values — some of them even yearning, impossibly, to be Ythri — that they fight for an independent Avalon against an expanding Terran Empire. (Compare the movie Avatar.)

We’ll have more to say about bipedalism and breathing — and language — when human evolution comes up.

Reuben, Reuben

Reuben, Reuben, I’ve been thinking
What a fine world this would be
If the men were all transported
Far beyond the northern sea.

Oh, my goodness, gracious, Rachel,
What a strange world this would be
If the men were all transported
Far beyond the northern sea.

Reuben, Reuben, I’ve been thinking
What a great life girls would lead
If they had no men about them
None to tease them, none to heed.

Rachel, Rachel, I’ve been thinking
Life would be so easy then
What a lovely world this would be
If you’d leave it to the men.

Reuben, Reuben, stop your teasing
If you’ve any love for me
I was only just a-fooling
As I thought, of course, you’d see.

Rachel, if you’ll not transport us
I will take you for my wife
And I’ll split with you my money
Every pay day of my life!

(Traditional song, many versions)

I once heard William Hamilton, the evolutionary theorist, give a talk where he suggested, among other things, that human beings might give up sexual reproduction in the future. He was building on a familiar evolutionary puzzle: sex, or more exactly the division between female (large, expensive gametes) and male (small, cheap, mobile/motile gametes) is a very expensive proposition. Imagine a sexually reproducing population in which females average two offspring each, one female, one male. On average, each female is replacing herself in the next generation with one daughter. Now imagine a mutant asexual female. She also gives birth to two offspring, but the offspring are both daughters, clones of their mother. The numbers of this mutant lineage will initially double in every generation, and they will eventually replace the sexually reproducing type entirely. 

Unless … There must be some advantage to sexual reproduction to make up for this huge disadvantage. One possibility is that sex somehow makes it easier to avoid the accumulation of deleterious mutations. Another possibility, which Hamilton was pushing, is that sex gives an advantage to host species in their evolutionary arms races with parasites. A species consisting of lots of genetically uniform clones is more vulnerable to pathogens. 

However … (and this is where Hamilton was going) a species that has developed medical technology to the point that it no longer has to worry so much about infectious disease might be able to dispense with sexual reproduction. So Hamilton pondered a germ-free hygienic future in which the clonal offspring of one or more fit, fecund, philoprogenitive females replaced the rest of the human race.

And … minus the evolutionary theorizing, some science fiction writers have imagined futures without a division between men and women. John Wyndham, writing back in the 1950s imagined a world in which a plague had wiped out men, and the surviving women carried on high tech reproduction without men in an ant-like caste society. Wyndham thought this was a bad thing, but for some feminist science fiction writers in the 1970s – Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr. – a world without men was imagined as a utopia.

The most sustained piece of world-building of a society without “men” and “women” comes from Ursula Le Guin. The aliens on the planet Winter are much like humans on Earth, but they are hermaphrodites. Most of the time they are neuter, with underdeveloped male and female organs. But during kemmer (estrus, the breeding season), two individuals will pair off and develop complementary sexual characters and sexual desires. One member of the pair will temporarily develop as a female, the other as a male. They will copulate much as we do, and the female member of the pair will conceive and eventually give birth. The next time kemmer rolls around, the former female may develop as a male, and her former (and formerly male) partner (or another) may develop as a female.

Le Guin, the daughter of two anthropologists, gives us a richly developed thick description of the culture of Winter, not a utopia, but just another world, different from our own in some ways, similar in others. But what’s missing from her story is much consideration of the evolutionary dynamics underlying the exotic (to us) reproductive biology. In Le Guin’s scheme, the female member of a pair is still putting more energy than the male into producing a child. We have to expect that there will be considerable jockeying, both physiological and psychological, over who, in each reproductive episode, takes on the more burdensome role. On Winter, the Battle of the Sexes will still be fought, albeit on different terrain.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Reuben, Reuben is a comic novel about the Battle of the Sexes in 1950s suburban Connecticut. The novel centers on the priapic poet Gowan MacGland, (obviously modeled on Dylan Thomas), who takes advantage of an American tour to enjoy the opportunities available to an alpha small-gamete-producer. Up to a point, anyway: the terrible lesson he learns is never, ever, ever cuckold your dentist.

The limits to growth

Different decades have been obsessed with different doomsdays. From the 1940s to the early 1960s, people worried especially about nuclear war. From the late 1960s on, fears of overpopulation and ecological doom came to the fore. John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) is still one of the best science fictional imaginings of a planet cracking apart under the stress of overpopulation, a richly detailed piece of world-building. Like all visions of the future, it reflects the time it was conceived in, carrying a sense that the cultural revolutions of the 60s were spinning out of control.

For non-fiction there was The Limits to Growth (1972). Here is Scenario 1 from the book, generated by a computer model of the interaction of population, resources, industry, food, and pollution. Fiddling with the model suggested that it would be very hard to avoid a massive collapse in one form or other. If the exhaustion of resources didn’t get you, pollution would do the job.

The idea that overshoot-and-collapse is a fundamental recurring pattern in human history continues to be influential. Jared Diamond’s Collapse is a recent expression. Yet one of Diamond’s case studies, Easter island, now seems fairly shaky. And the most famous decline-and-fall of all – that of the Roman empire – also doesn’t look much like a Malthusian crunch. Here’s my recent take on this: a story of “barbarigenesis,” wealth/power mismatch, rent-seeking, and collapse.

None of this is meant to suggest that we shouldn’t worry about our ecological future. Rather that we should be thankful that we’re now getting to be rich enough that we can worry less about immediate subsistence threats and more about distant dangers.

Sexual Turing test

A footnote to the preceding post, jumping off the Logarithmic History timeline for a bit:

[T]he ‘imitation game” … is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either “X is A and Y is B” or “X is B and Y is A.” The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B … the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten.

Alan Turing Computing machinery and intelligence

Ted Gioia proposes that the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature should have gone to Elena Ferrante. A great choice, but one that also presents a problem: we’re not quite sure who “Elena Ferrante” is. She prefers anonymity and only makes herself available for interviews remotely. 

Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet seems to display a deep knowledge of daily life in Naples from the 1950s on. The fictional narrator is a woman, and a complicated friendship between two women is the great theme of the tetralogy. So it came as something of a shock when an Italian journalist, Claudio Gatti, provided pretty strong evidence, from financial and real estate records, pointing toward Anita Raja, a professional translator, as a likely candidate for Ferrante. Raja’s biography is nothing like “Ferrante”’s: she is the daughter of a Polish Jewish refugee and an Italian magistrate, and only lived in Naples up to age three. But the story may be even more complicated: Anita Raja is married to the Naples-born writer Domenico Starnone. Italian critics have noted stylistic similarities between Ferrante’s work and Starnone’s, and recently several computer stylometric analyses point to Starnone as far and away the most likely author of “Ferrante’s” work. So some combination of Raja and Starnone seems likely.

Maybe somewhat teasingly, as the fictional narrator of the Neapolitan novels establishes herself as a successful author, one of the pieces that makes her reputation is an essay on male novelists (Flaubert, Tolstoy) entering the consciousness of female characters.

A lot of the reaction to the news about the likely identity of Ferrante has been negative: people who have a proprietary feeling about her work haven’t wanted to hear that she may be other than what she seemed. For what it’s worth, the imitation game has sometimes been played in the other direction. For a long time, the identity of “James Tiptree, Jr.”, the author of a number of striking science fiction stories, was uncertain. In the introduction to an anthology of Tiptree stories, Robert Silverberg, an established science fiction writer, wrote:

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.

Robert Silverberg, Introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise

James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon. She took Silverberg’s remarks as a tribute to her writerly abilities. 

Fiction is all about pretending, and some people are very good at it. I recommend both Ferrante and Tiptree. Both are very much concerned with sex and relations between men and women. Both can be intense and disturbing.

The Alteration

A subgenre of science fiction is “alternative history.” What would the world be like if history had taken another path? If the Axis powers had won the Second World War (as in Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, among many others)? If the South had won the American Civil War? If King Oswy of Northumbria had decided differently about the date of Easter at the fateful Synod of Whitby? Or (going waaay back) if the Chicxulub asteroid had missed Earth, or the Cambrian had turned out differently?

Or suppose the Protestant Reformation had never happened? That’s the premise of several novels, including The Alteration by Kingsley Amis. Amis’s novel is set in an alternative 1976, in which Martin Luther long ago became Pope Germanicus, and the Catholic Church dominates most of the world, apart from the Turkish Empire, and some freethinkers in New England. The world is a dystopian theocracy, with a rigid caste system, where “science” is a dirty word. Amis has fun fitting characters from our own timeline into his alternative history. Himmler and Beria are Monsignors from Almaigne and Muscovy. Sartre is a renowned Jesuit theologian. Mozart lived a long life, and wrote a Second Requiem, in memory of a gifted composer, Beethoven, who died young .

The main figure in the novel is an English boy, Hubert Anvil. Hubert is a fan of banned underground science fiction books, like the alternative history novel The Man in the High Castle, by Phillip K. Dick, about an alternative world – not quite our own – in which the Protestant Reformation actually did happen. In that alternative world within Hubert’s alternative world,

Invention has been set free a long time before. Sickness is almost conquered: nobody dies of consumption or the plague. … The inventors are actually called scientists, and they use electricity. … They send messages all over the Earth with it. They use it to light whole cities and even to keep folk warm. There are electric flying machines that move at two hundred miles an hour. [And] there’s a famous book which proves that mankind is descended from a thing like an ape, not from Adam and Eve.

But Hubert also has an angelic boy’s soprano voice, which he will lose in a few years at puberty, unless … Hence the sinister double meaning of the title, The Alteration.

Amis is both a very talented writer, and a science fiction fan, and the book is well worth reading. The latest edition has an introduction by science fiction writer William Gibson.

Philology

1445 – 1477

“Just don’t take any course where you have to read Beowulf.“Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) to Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) in “Annie Hall”

It seems difficult for people nowadays to get a handle on the intellectual side of the Renaissance. The Age of Discovery, sure. The Scientific Revolution, sure. But the Renaissance was in full swing in Italy before Columbus and da Gama, well before Copernicus and Galileo. Even before Gutenberg. So what was the big deal? Or was it such a big deal (apart from the amazing art, of course)?

A lot of the problem is that we’ve lost touch with one of the great intellectual achievements of the last 600 years, the discipline of philology. Below is a Google Ngram showing the fortunes of two academic words, philology and ecology (i.e. their frequencies in English language books).

Most  everyone today has some idea what ecology is, while even educated people are likely to draw a blank on philology. But, as the figure suggests, it wasn’t always that way. In his excellent recent book Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Humanities, James Turner writes (p. x)

It used to be chic, dashing … Philology reigned as king of the sciences, the pride of the first great modern universities. … It meant far more than the study of old texts. Its explorations ranged from the religion of ancient Israel through the lays of medieval troubadours to the tongues of American Indians – and to rampant theorizing about the origin of language itself.

Philology’s golden age was the nineteenth century. This blog has covered just a few of its achievements – the reconstuction of Proto-Indo-European language and culture, and the Higher Criticism of the Bible. Philology flourished especially Germany, and its decline had partly to do with the special path of Germany in the twentieth century. But philology was also at the center of the Italian Renaissance, allowing a much clearer view of the Classical past. Famously, in the 1440s, Lorenzo Valla used a close study of language to demonstrate that the Donation of Constantine, in which the East Roman Emperor supposedly granted the pope authority over the West Roman empire, was a medieval fake.

And philology puts in a good showing in two of the twentieth century’s literary masterworks. In Episode 14, “The Oxen of the Sun,” in Joyce’s Ulysses, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, as the course of a pregnancy is narrated in a historical succession of English prose styles. And The Lord of the Rings might be considered a work of philological science fiction; rather than turn to physics or biology to build his imagined world, ala Poul Anderson or Hal Clement, Tolkien turned to the science of philology. In The Road to Middle Earth, Tom Shippey does justice to this side of Tolkien’s romance. (Tolkien however lost the battle to keep philology at the center of the Oxford English curriculum.)

Talk like a post-human

A followup to Talk Like a Neanderthal Day

Thinking about how Neanderthals might have talked is one way to get at language evolution and how language works. Another way to do this is through science fiction. I’m not thinking so much of constructed languages like Quenya, Klingon, or Dothraki. There are whole communities of people out there – conlangers – busy inventing and learning such languages; some fun introductions are here and here. But mostly these languages are meant to fall within the range of variation of existing human languages. I’m thinking instead of some science fiction stories that imagine more radical alterations of language.

For example,

The Persistence of Vision. John Varley (1979)

A few decades into the future, the United States is falling apart. A drifter stumbles into a community of deaf-and-blind “Kellerites” who are doing pretty well for themselves in the New Mexico desert. They communicate partly by spelling out things in handtalk. “By handtalk I mean the International Manual Alphabet. Anyone can learn it in a few hours or days.” But Varley recognizes that handtalk is not a real language. For a real language the community uses shorthand. “Shorthand was not code for English or any other language; it did not share construction or vocabulary with any other language. … Each word was something I had to learn and memorize separately from the handtalk spelling.”

The Kellerites are fictional, but sign language is not. In Talking Hands, Margalit Fox (who also writes obituaries for the New York Times) writes about a Bedouin community in Israel with a high incidence of congenital deafness. Deaf kids there have spontaneously come up with their own sign language. This is a real language, not derived from Arabic or Hebrew, with soundless “phonemes” that are combined to make signs that are more-or-less arbitrarily paired with meanings to yield words that can be combined into phrases and sentences according to rules of grammar. A nice detail: deaf babies exposed to sign language will start off “babbling” with their hands, just as hearing babies babble by making sounds. The human Language Acquisition Device (Chomsky’s phrase), an “instinct to acquire an art” (Darwin’s phrase), will work with whatever material it can get ahold of.

So Varley gets a lot right; I expect he did some research on sign language for this story. If the deaf-and-blind ever did form their own community, and come up with their own language, it would be a full-blown language a lot like his shorthand.

On the other hand, this bit, with the Kellerites merging verbal intercourse with the other kind of intercourse, is a little over the top:

But talk was talk, and if conversation evolved to the point where you needed to talk to another with your genitals, it was still a part of the conversation.

Or, as Eliza Doolittle said, “How kind of you to let me come.”

Gulf. Robert Heinlein (1949)

A tightly written spy tale, set a century or two in the future, where the United States went through World War III, went communist, and then got over it. It reads like a James Bond story as written by Francis Galton. The protagonist learns that there is a secret community of super-geniuses, who call themselves New Man (an allusion to real-life super-genius John von Neumann? By the way, “Neander” also means “new man”). They work behind the scenes to keep humanity safe from itself. This sometimes involves some antifa vigilantism: “ ‘Two weeks from now there will be a giant pow-wow of the new, rejuvenated, bigger-and-better-than-ever Ku Klux Klan down Carolina way. When the fun is at its height, when they are mouthing obscenities, working each other up to the pogrom spirit, an act of God is going to wipe out the whole kit and caboodle. … Sad.’ ”

And New Men have their own super-language, Speedtalk. Speedtalk more-or-less violates one of the key design features of real languages, the duality of patterning. Real languages have one level of meaningless phonemes combined according to rules to make syllables (so spy fits the sound pattern of English, but psi – if you try to pronounce the p – does not). One or more syllables are then arbitrarily paired with meanings to make words, and then there is a second level where another set of rules determines what combinations of words make grammatical phrases. Even sign languages work this way.

But Speedtalk instead has just one level, approximately, pairing up individual phonemes with meanings. This is quite a stretch. In real languages, the inventory of words is orders of magnitudes greater than the inventory of phonemes. But Heinlein tells us that adding variations in length, stress, and pitch is enough “to establish a one-to-one relationship with Basic English [800+ words] so that one phonetic symbol was equivalent to an entire word in a ‘normal’ language, one Speedtalk word to an entire sentence.”

There’s more to Speedtalk than this. Heinlein was very taken with an intellectual fad of his time, General Semantics. General Semantics hovers somewhere between a serious intellectual endeavor and complete crackpottery. Firmly on the crackpot side of the line was Count Alfred Korzybski, who gets a chapter in a debunking book by Martin Gardner. Korzybski’s magnum opus Science and Sanity is all about how reforming language is the key to creating the first truly rational civilization. This means the verb “to be” has got to go. As Heinlein puts it. “One can think logically in English only by extreme effort, so bad is it as a mental tool. For example, the verb ‘to be’ in English has twenty-one distinct meanings, every one of which is false-to-fact.”

Entertaining, but silly. The score today is: “to be” 1, General Semantics 0. If you want some real semantics, Pinker beats Korzybski.

The Citadel of the Autarch. Gene Wolfe (1982)

This is Book Four of a tetralogy. A million or so years in the future, civilization on Earth has sunk to a medieval level, albeit littered with bits and pieces of advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. Wolfe really, really likes to have you figure things out, instead of telling you, but you can work out that the action takes place in South America. An endless war is going on against the Ascians, a totalitarian state to the north ruled by the Group of Seventeen. An Ascian prisoner of war tells a story, constructed entirely of canned slogans, while another character, Folia, interprets.

It starts off like this

The Ascian began to speak: “In times past, loyalty to the cause of the populace was to be found everywhere. The will of the Group of Seventeen was the will of everyone.”

Folia interpreted: “Once upon a time …”

“Let no one be idle. If one is idle let him band together with others who are idle too, and let them look for idle land. Let everyone they meet direct them.  It is better to walk a thousand leagues than to sit in the House of Starvation.”

“There was a remote farm worked in partnership by people who were not related.”

“One is strong, another beautiful, a third a cunning artificer. Which is best? He who serves the populace.”

“On this farm there lived a good man.”

“Let the work be divided by a wise divider of work. Let the food be divided by a just divider of food. Let the pigs grow fat. Let the rats starve.”

“The others cheated him of his share.”

And so on.

Of course the story and its interpretation are fanciful. A functioning language has to be more than a collection of stock phrases. But the story illustrates something about the way real languages work. People don’t just communicate by encoding and decoding literal meanings, but by inferring one another’s communicative intentions, always thinking “I wonder what he meant by that.” There’s a whole branch of linguistics, linguistic pragmatics, that studies how this works. And pragmatic inference in language is just one instance of a special, powerful human aptitude for creating shared intentions. This aptitude means that there are always ways to subvert official speech, in any language, even Ascian or Newspeak. Or Korean: the news several years ago was that North Korea had banned sarcasm.

Officials told people that sarcastic expressions such as “This is all America’s fault” would constitute unacceptable criticism of the regime.

The late Gene Wolfe was a combat veteran of the Korean War.

Votes for Oysters, or The Murder of the Missing Link

50.2 – 47.6 thousand years ago

Darwin was a liberal but his theories had consequences in some degrees inimical to traditional liberalism. The doctrine that all men are born equal … was incompatible with his emphasis on congenital differences between members of the same species. There is a further consequence of the theory of evolution, which is independent of the particular mechanism suggested by Darwin. … If men developed by such slow stages that there were creatures which we should not know whether to classify as human or not, the question arises: at what stage in evolution did men, or their semi-human ancestors, begin to be all equal? Would [Homo] erectus, if he had been properly educated, have done work as good as Newton’s? Would the Piltdown Man [sic] have written Shakespeare’s poetry if there had been anybody to convict him of poaching? A resolute egalitarian who answers these questions in the affirmative will force himself to regard apes as the equals of human beings. And why stop with apes? I do not see how he is to resist an argument in favour of Votes for Oysters.

Bertrand Russell. A History of Western Philosophy

If our brothers, Australopithecus robustus, had survived for another million years, how would we treat them today? … Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not given a priori; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action. It just worked out that way. A hundred different and plausible scenarios for human history would have yielded other results (and moral dilemmas of enormous magnitude). They didn’t happen.

Steven Jay Gould. Human equality is a contingent fact of history

Whether there are any consequential behavior-genetic differences between living human populations is an unsettled – and unsettling – question. What is firmly settled, though, is that when it comes to behavior, there is a chasm between living Homo sapiens and all other animal species, including our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, that completely dwarfs any differences between human populations. Human language provides a particularly clear demonstration of the point: every human society has a full-blown language, no other creature has anything like it. This makes it workable to extend universal human rights to all living people (with some special provisions for children and the mentally impaired).

However, as the quotations above, from two staunch liberals, indicate, it didn’t have to be that way. Homo floresiensis on Flores island, Indonesia, survived up to about 50,000 years ago. Members of the species stood about 3 feet 6 inches tall (a little over 1 meter), had tiny brains, no chins and receding foreheads. They also made stone tools and hunted dwarf elephants and giant rodents.

In a novel published in 1958 under the title “The Murder of the Missing Link,” (originally in French, also published in English as “You Shall Know Them”), explorers in New Guinea discover a population of “tropis,” diminutive human relatives very much like Homo floresiensis. This makes for a moral dilemma: what rights should tropis have? There are those who would be willing to let them be rounded up and used for forced labor or medical experiments. A scientist who fears for their future makes a desperate decision. He kills an infant tropi with a lethal injection. He is hoping to be convicted of murder, winning legal recognition of the tropis’ humanity at his own expense. After much argumentation, the tropis are deemed to be human. The deciding argument is that they seem to have a form of worship: if they’ve got religion, then they’ve got souls. (Don’t worry, the scientist gets off on a technicality.)

The goodness paradox

205 – 195 thousand years ago

We’re now doing history at ten thousand years a day.

Earth Abides is an early (1949) entry in the genre of post-apocalyptic science fiction, with some haunting reflections on what it takes to keep a civilization going, or just a human community. In this case the apocalypse takes the form of a lethal infectious disease that wipes out well over 99% of Earth’s human population, leaving scattered survivors to try and put things back together.

The drama is low-key. If you want to read about the remnants of civilized humanity defending themselves against zombies, or venomous man-eating walking plants, or a horde of cannibal anti-nuke zealots, you’ll have to look elsewhere. The threat to civilization in Earth Abides is more subtle. The generation born after the die-off has no understanding of what they have lost, of what the collapsing factories and powerlines and machines around them really were, or how they worked, or how to get them back up and running. The older generation, without the institutions of a complex society backing them up, can’t supply enough discipline and punishment to pass on the arts of civilization. The young will grow up as illiterate scavenger-foragers, skilled with bow and arrow, well-adapted in their own way to a rewilding Earth. Ish, the protagonist, will end his days as the Last American (a fictional counterpoint to the real-life Ishi, the last Yahi Indian).

The community is nonetheless capable of reacting decisively when their survival is threatened.

One day a newcomer enters the scene. Charlie is talkative, forceful, charismatic. The kids adore him. It looks like he might even take over as leader of the little group. But it becomes clear that there is something off about him, even sociopathic. He can turn on the charm, but when thwarted he is menacing. He always carries a gun, which he keeps hidden. He is sexually abandoned. And, in a world without antibiotics, he is infected with a slew of venereal diseases.

Something has to be done about Charlie, and the elders of the group meet to decide what. Their options are limited. Keeping him locked up is not a practical possibility for this tiny community. They could banish him. But who is to say he won’t find a gun, and come back, looking for revenge? They could execute him. But what actual harm has he done, so far? They decide to settle the matter with a vote.

Em located four pencils. Ish tore a sheet of paper into four small ballots.

…

This we do, not hastily; this we do, not in passion; this we do, without hatred. …

This is the one who killed his fellow unprovoked; this is the one who stole the child away; this is the one who spat upon the image of our God; this is the one who leagued himself with the Devil to be a witch; this is the one who corrupted our youth; this is the one who told the enemy of our secret places.

We are afraid but we do not talk of fear. … We say, “Justice”; we say, “The Law”; we say “We, the people”; we say, “The State.”

…

Ish sat with his pencil poised … He could not be sure. Yet, at the same time, he knew that The Tribe faced something real and dangerous and even dreadful, in the long run threatening its very existence. … In that final realization, he knew that he could write only the one word there, out of love and responsibility for his children and grandchildren. …

“Give me your slips,” he said.

They passed them in, and he laid them face up before him on the desk. Four times he looked, and he read: “Death … death … death … death.”

Keith Otterbein is an anthropologist who did a study of capital punishment across cultures. He expected to find that capital punishment is limited to complex societies, used to enforce social hierarchy. Instead he found that capital punishment is a universal, present in societies from the simplest to the most complex. It is an option that even the smallest, most easy-going communities – like The Tribe of Earth Abides – may find themselves resorting to. We can infer that for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors have been carrying out group-sanctioned executions of individuals deemed anti-social and a threat to group harmony and survival. This is long enough to have had evolutionary consequences. Long before we domesticated the wolf, the wild sheep and goat, the aurochs, we may have been domesticating ourselves, weeding out the wildest and most dangerous from our midst, replacing the old tyranny of the alpha male with the new tyranny of Custom and The Law.

The idea that human beings are in some ways like domesticated animals is an old one. It has recently returned to the spotlight. The extraordinary long-term experiment in artificial selection for tameness in foxes carried out by Nikolai Belyaev, Lyudmila Trut, and their coworkers in Russia has demonstrated that selection for tameness ends up selecting for a whole suite of anatomical characteristics as byproducts. Strikingly, many of the features that differentiate Homo sapiens hundreds of thousands of years ago from Homo sapiens today are also features that distinguish tame from wild foxes, and dogs from wolves.

Richard Wrangham’s recent book, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution connects the dots, setting out one long argument that an evolutionary history of capital punishment has reduced our disposition for reactive aggression (the hot-blooded, spur-of-the-moment, volatile, antisocial kind), while leaving intact our capacity for calculated, cold-blooded, proactive killing (“not hastily, … not in passion, … without hatred”).

Perhaps this explains a very recent finding in human evolution. Apparently 200,000 years ago, we were about evenly matched with Neanderthals, sometimes replacing them, sometimes being replaced by them. By 40,000 years ago however, Neanderthals lose out decisively to modern humans. It may be that what changed in the interim to give us the edge is that we improved our ability to get along peaceably with insiders (including distant insiders we don’t know personally) without losing our ability to apply lethal aggression to outsiders.