James Brody
September 15th, 2008, 12:25 PM
There are two hidden players between our ears, players whose scripts repeat Darwinism: first copy what works and then vary it a bit. Keep what works better than what you already had.
Thus, the right frontal lobe tends to be larger in males and most active before we reach our fortieth birthday. The right - the experimenter and organizer - is most active in novel situations - whether verbal, quantitative, musical, or athletic. The left side appears to handle routines.
As measured by scanners, tachistoscopes, and visual-auditory tests, the right side and the frontal lobes become less active and the left rear cortex remains active with age (Goldberg, 2001, 2006). The stasis in a society parallels the number of older people in it and the number of generations that have lived in a particular site and the stability of that site (MacArthur & Wilson, 1967/2001).
The right can be thought of as a pattern-maker, the left as a patter-maker (Brody, 2008) and both of them help us remain in our phase transition, our pond that lies between chaos and rigidity, between vapor and ice (Kauffman, 2000; 1995).
There are political implications.
For example, the "progressive" movement had its day in American politics when newspapers, books, and radios made possible mass synchrony: humans in labor unions swarmed like bees in regard to "fairness" violations (Cosmides and Tooby, 1992; Strogatz, 2003).
Expect to find that in stable environments rules multiply indefinitely and in all domains. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" and there is never a law that is erased (Jones, 2007). Expect government to grow indefinitely (Hayek, 1944/1994; Goldberg, 2007; Sharansky, 2008), in response to female participation (Lott & Kenny, 1999) and income redistribution to be a key function. (If there are differences in achievement by people of the same abilities, then unfairness must be a player.)
Winner-take-all (Frank & Cook, 1995; Gladwell, 2000; Levitt & Dubner, 2005; Barabasi, 2002; Barabasi & Albert, 1999; Csermely, 2006) dominates so long as there is any inequality of ability and resources between competitors. Such is true for religion, political parties, industry, and armies.
A more substantial bias from maternal genomic imprints may be associated with - by whatever means - having fewer children and spending less time with each of them. (Paternal imprints favor not only larger sons but also daughters who are more apt to nest, nurse, and shelter their pups. Burt & Trivers, 2006) Along these lines, expect females and maternally-imprinted males to emphasize verbal argument and rules about fairness. Expect them also to be more timid, more easily depressed, more willing to stand in lines, and more compliant with a complaining female.
Progressives:
Oppose religion.
Favor environmental protection and a back-to-nature philosophy: don't change what we had in Africa 200,000 years ago (Harrington, 1996).
Health...you can't smoke or drink but you can mate with nearly anyone. So believed Hitler (Harrington, 1996), so believe modern Americans who want to save everyone.
Child rearing is the responsibility of the government: day care becomes an all-day requirement.
Conformity enforcers appear: your kids rat you out to their teacher.
Career choices assigned to you in the pursuit of top-down plans for the good-of-all. Government now tells us to burn corn in our automobiles and to watch high definition television.
Sanctions develop for "insensitive" speech.
Progressivism - and modern feminism are consistent with dinichism, the fact that males and females are an important environment for each other and for two million years, females have followed after males turn novel environments into stable ones (Coss & Moore, 1998; Coss & Charles, 2004). Progressivism and conservatism are very apt encoded in our genes, activated by parental genomic imprinting, and responsive to the abundance and predictability of environmental assets. Upton Sinclair and the muckrakers gave America labor protection and progressivism that evolved into Animal Farm. Abba and the rest of us got old, losing our imagination and every passion but indignation.
Irony: a political philosophy that advocates fairness becomes tyranny until the next geological catastrophe or the next invasion by a germ, a religion, or a society with an excess of young males.
There. I've cited every book I ever read!
JimB
References
Barabási, A-L & Albert R (1999) Emergence of scaling in random networks. arxiv:cond-mat/9910332v1, 21 Oct 1999.
Barabási, A-L (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus.
Brody J (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.
Burt, Austin, & Trivers, Robert (2006) Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard.
Cosmides L. & Tooby, J. (1992) The psychological foundations of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. NY: Oxford, 19-136.
Coss, R., & Moore, M. (1998) Preschool girls differ from preschool boys in recognizing the utility of an arboreal refuge site. HBES 10th Annual Meeting, Davis, CA, July 8-12.
Coss, RG. & Charles, EP (2004) The role of evolutionary hypotheses in psychological research: Instincts, affordances, and relic sex differences. Ecological Psychology, 16(3): 199-236.
Csermely, Peter (2006) Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks. NY: Springer.
Frank, R. & Cook, P. (1995) The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us. NY: Free Press.
Gladwell, M. (2000) The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference. NY: Little Brown.
Goldberg E & Costa LD (1981) Hemisphere differences in the acquisition and use of descriptive systems. Brain Lang 14(1): 144–173.
Goldberg E, Podell K, & Lovell M (1994) Lateralization of frontal lobe functions and cognitive novelty. J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci 6:371-378.
Goldberg, E. (2001) The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. NY: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, E. (2006) The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Brain Can Grow Stronger As You Grow Older. NY: Gotham.
Goldberg, E, Harner, Richard, Lovell, Mark, Podell, Kenneth, & Riggio, Silvana (1994) Cognitive bias, functional cortical geometry, and the frontal lobes: laterality, sex, and handedness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 6: 276-296.
Goldberg J (2007) Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. NY: Doubleday.
Harrington, A. (1996) Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hayek Friedrich A (1944/1994) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ of Chicago.
Kauffman, S. (1995) At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self Organization and Complexity. NY: Oxford.
Kauffman, S. (2000) Investigations. NY: Oxford.
Levitt Steven & Dubner Stephen (2005) Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. NY: Morrow.
Lott JR & Kenny L (1999) How Dramatically Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government? (September 1998). Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 107, Number 6, Part 1, pp. 1163-1198. Http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Publications/Working/index.html. The Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection: http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=160530
MacArthur R & Wilson EO (1967/2001) The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sharansky, Natan & Shira Weiss (2008) Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy. Philadelphia: Perseus (Public Affairs).
Strogatz, S. (2003) Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. NY: Hyperion.
Thus, the right frontal lobe tends to be larger in males and most active before we reach our fortieth birthday. The right - the experimenter and organizer - is most active in novel situations - whether verbal, quantitative, musical, or athletic. The left side appears to handle routines.
As measured by scanners, tachistoscopes, and visual-auditory tests, the right side and the frontal lobes become less active and the left rear cortex remains active with age (Goldberg, 2001, 2006). The stasis in a society parallels the number of older people in it and the number of generations that have lived in a particular site and the stability of that site (MacArthur & Wilson, 1967/2001).
The right can be thought of as a pattern-maker, the left as a patter-maker (Brody, 2008) and both of them help us remain in our phase transition, our pond that lies between chaos and rigidity, between vapor and ice (Kauffman, 2000; 1995).
There are political implications.
For example, the "progressive" movement had its day in American politics when newspapers, books, and radios made possible mass synchrony: humans in labor unions swarmed like bees in regard to "fairness" violations (Cosmides and Tooby, 1992; Strogatz, 2003).
Expect to find that in stable environments rules multiply indefinitely and in all domains. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" and there is never a law that is erased (Jones, 2007). Expect government to grow indefinitely (Hayek, 1944/1994; Goldberg, 2007; Sharansky, 2008), in response to female participation (Lott & Kenny, 1999) and income redistribution to be a key function. (If there are differences in achievement by people of the same abilities, then unfairness must be a player.)
Winner-take-all (Frank & Cook, 1995; Gladwell, 2000; Levitt & Dubner, 2005; Barabasi, 2002; Barabasi & Albert, 1999; Csermely, 2006) dominates so long as there is any inequality of ability and resources between competitors. Such is true for religion, political parties, industry, and armies.
A more substantial bias from maternal genomic imprints may be associated with - by whatever means - having fewer children and spending less time with each of them. (Paternal imprints favor not only larger sons but also daughters who are more apt to nest, nurse, and shelter their pups. Burt & Trivers, 2006) Along these lines, expect females and maternally-imprinted males to emphasize verbal argument and rules about fairness. Expect them also to be more timid, more easily depressed, more willing to stand in lines, and more compliant with a complaining female.
Progressives:
Oppose religion.
Favor environmental protection and a back-to-nature philosophy: don't change what we had in Africa 200,000 years ago (Harrington, 1996).
Health...you can't smoke or drink but you can mate with nearly anyone. So believed Hitler (Harrington, 1996), so believe modern Americans who want to save everyone.
Child rearing is the responsibility of the government: day care becomes an all-day requirement.
Conformity enforcers appear: your kids rat you out to their teacher.
Career choices assigned to you in the pursuit of top-down plans for the good-of-all. Government now tells us to burn corn in our automobiles and to watch high definition television.
Sanctions develop for "insensitive" speech.
Progressivism - and modern feminism are consistent with dinichism, the fact that males and females are an important environment for each other and for two million years, females have followed after males turn novel environments into stable ones (Coss & Moore, 1998; Coss & Charles, 2004). Progressivism and conservatism are very apt encoded in our genes, activated by parental genomic imprinting, and responsive to the abundance and predictability of environmental assets. Upton Sinclair and the muckrakers gave America labor protection and progressivism that evolved into Animal Farm. Abba and the rest of us got old, losing our imagination and every passion but indignation.
Irony: a political philosophy that advocates fairness becomes tyranny until the next geological catastrophe or the next invasion by a germ, a religion, or a society with an excess of young males.
There. I've cited every book I ever read!
JimB
References
Barabási, A-L & Albert R (1999) Emergence of scaling in random networks. arxiv:cond-mat/9910332v1, 21 Oct 1999.
Barabási, A-L (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. NY: Perseus.
Brody J (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.
Burt, Austin, & Trivers, Robert (2006) Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard.
Cosmides L. & Tooby, J. (1992) The psychological foundations of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. NY: Oxford, 19-136.
Coss, R., & Moore, M. (1998) Preschool girls differ from preschool boys in recognizing the utility of an arboreal refuge site. HBES 10th Annual Meeting, Davis, CA, July 8-12.
Coss, RG. & Charles, EP (2004) The role of evolutionary hypotheses in psychological research: Instincts, affordances, and relic sex differences. Ecological Psychology, 16(3): 199-236.
Csermely, Peter (2006) Weak Links: Stabilizers of Complex Systems from Proteins to Social Networks. NY: Springer.
Frank, R. & Cook, P. (1995) The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us. NY: Free Press.
Gladwell, M. (2000) The Tipping Point: How Little Things Make a Big Difference. NY: Little Brown.
Goldberg E & Costa LD (1981) Hemisphere differences in the acquisition and use of descriptive systems. Brain Lang 14(1): 144–173.
Goldberg E, Podell K, & Lovell M (1994) Lateralization of frontal lobe functions and cognitive novelty. J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci 6:371-378.
Goldberg, E. (2001) The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. NY: Oxford University Press.
Goldberg, E. (2006) The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Brain Can Grow Stronger As You Grow Older. NY: Gotham.
Goldberg, E, Harner, Richard, Lovell, Mark, Podell, Kenneth, & Riggio, Silvana (1994) Cognitive bias, functional cortical geometry, and the frontal lobes: laterality, sex, and handedness. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 6: 276-296.
Goldberg J (2007) Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. NY: Doubleday.
Harrington, A. (1996) Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hayek Friedrich A (1944/1994) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ of Chicago.
Kauffman, S. (1995) At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self Organization and Complexity. NY: Oxford.
Kauffman, S. (2000) Investigations. NY: Oxford.
Levitt Steven & Dubner Stephen (2005) Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. NY: Morrow.
Lott JR & Kenny L (1999) How Dramatically Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government? (September 1998). Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 107, Number 6, Part 1, pp. 1163-1198. Http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Publications/Working/index.html. The Social Science Research Network Electronic Paper Collection: http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=160530
MacArthur R & Wilson EO (1967/2001) The Theory of Island Biogeography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sharansky, Natan & Shira Weiss (2008) Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy. Philadelphia: Perseus (Public Affairs).
Strogatz, S. (2003) Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. NY: Hyperion.