Obama & Physics

[James Brody]

I heard Camille Paglia interviewed by Mark Simone this morning on WABC. She raved that Hillary is a thug, McCain a dinosaur, and Obama the future that she wants. Even though he says so little, he's so magnificent when he says it.

Omigod, bring on the pied piper but howcum?

Resource loss, climatic upset, and threat of invasion make progressivism more likely: shake things up and we swarm. True in emergent networks of particles and true in the populations of a nation. Want to see a Bose-Einstein condensate at normal temperature? Catch a gang of social workers, cut their budget, and notice how they all at 98.6 degrees F become of one opinion and plan!

There's another factor operating.

Rushton (2005) described the similarity that occurs between mates and best friends: the more heritable the feature, the greater the similarity in that feature in marital and social partners.

"In a study of married couples, Russell et al. (1985) found that across thirty-six physical traits, spousal similarity was greater on attributes with higher heritability such as wrist circumference (seventy-one per cent heritable) than it was on attributes with lower heritability such as neck circumference (forty-eight per cent heritable). On fifty-four indices of personality and leisure time pursuits, Rushton and Russell (1985) found that spousal similarity was greater on items such as 'reading' (forty-one per cent heritable) than on items such as 'many hobbies' (twenty per cent heritable). On twenty-six cognitive ability tests, Rushton and Nicholson (1988) found that spousal resemblance was greater on more heritable subtests from the Hawaii Family Study of Cognition and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). When spouses assort on more heritable items, they report greater marital satisfaction. (Russell and Wells, 1991)" (Rushton, 2005, 495)

Similarity operates at a more fundamental level, one that may dictate what genes achieve. Yoshiki Kuramoto derived equations for the synchrony of oscillators - whether one or a thousand of them (Strogatz, 2003). That is, similarity and mutual weak influence lead pendulums to tick and tock at the same moment, even if started at different points in their swing. Sync has been found in the tiny semiconductors known as Josephson junctions, in cricket chirps and firefly flashes, and in cardiac pacemakers. It also occurs as runners or automobiles form clumps. Tit-for-tat is an expression of sync, so are Skinnerian schedules of reinforcement as they pull a critter and its environment into a partnership. My house both responds to my direction and imposes direction on me: so does my cat.

"Similarty and weak influence" may be the unappreciated factors in the current election. If so, expect Obama's supporters to be younger, leaner, narrow-jawed (Check Time cover, 5/8/08!), verbally adept, context-oriented, energetic, well-mannered, and male or female, more feminine in thoughts and deeds. Expect difficulties with independent action, expenditure of resources, and executive problem-solving. (Is genomic competition the reason that so few presidents come by way of the Senate? Or why half the American population wants a president who gets things done and leaves them alone to get things done on their own and the other half of our country wants rules that confine presidents and corporations and makes rules that interfere with effectiveness?)

Expect also Obama to manage his similarities: that is, he must be "black enough" for reasons that Jerry Wright must be "black enough" (Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997). On the other hand, he must also be "white enough" and "female enough" in regard to explanations, sensitivity, conserving and sharing resources, and consulting everyone before making a decision.
He will also face the dilemmas identified by Fred Hayek and shared by many idealists whose impractical schemes must be enforced by thugs (Hayek, 1944/1994). After all, maternal imprints benefit from male attributes and the ladies must sometimes spend a little prenatally in order to get a lot from their sons...

JimB

References:

Brody J (2008) Rebellion: Physics to Personal Will. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. http://www.rebellionphysicstopersonalwill.blogspot.com/
Burt, Austin, & Trivers, Robert (2006) Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements. Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard.
Hayek Friedrich A von (1944/1994) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press.
Rushton JP (2005) Ethnic nationalism, evolutionary psychology, and Genetic Similarity Theory. Nations & Nationalism. 11(4), 489-507.
Strogatz, S. (2003) Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. NY: Hyperion.
Zahavi, A. & Zahavi, A. (1997) The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle. NY: Oxford.