by Roman McClay
“I thought you liked direct truth,” MO said.
“I do, I do. But, what I mean -what I was saying was- that I like to say things in an interesting way if that is part of the truth, if the truth includes the charm, the nuance, the double entendre , the poetry of a phrasing or a reference, or the music of language. See, sometimes the truth is 2 plus 2 equals 4 but sometime the truth is more complex, larger, unfolding, growing, see, 4 is static, it’s always 4.
“But, the ideas of Baudelaire or Rimbaud -or even me when I’m speaking with license- are like a bird emerging from its ovum, the asp, the phoenix maybe even, and well, to tell the truth, a truth like that, about that, you must always be growing, burning it down, and being re-born. The truth innately grows and recurs, grows and recurs; it’s endless and to measure it in one spot at one time, to reduce it to an integer, a static integer wouldn’t just be wrong, it seems a crime,” the inmate said.
“A Mandelbrotian mathematics can mimic such a fluid or poetic paradigm,” Isaiah said from the wall.
“You know what Isaiah,” the inmate said, “that is actually genius level shit. You are right, that is the perfect math analogy for what I was saying math could not do. See, nobody else but you would have thought of that.”
“Mandelbrot might have,” MO said without irony.
III. 2024 e.v .
Group selection math is all set; it is true and beyond me , he thought. But what I want is to think it through logically, with words, language, not math. Even if it is less true this way, I want to understand it this way. I want to understand it like music, even if music is math made dumb, I want the music anyway, he thought. He had taken a walk, along the perimeter of his land and was now coming close to center.
The gene is the loci of reproduction, because it is the only thing that reproduces with fidelity, and exact copy. The man is an amalgam, a pastiche , a patch-work quilt. But the gene is exact, from Jesus , to Temujin , to Panzram , all genes within these cities of men are borne with fidelity to their previous locale. It’s the exact same gene in me and in you, as was in our great, great, great grands. But none of us -as complete men- are the exact same as those from whence the genes came, he thought.
The same; he ruminated on the idea of the same .
And this is why group selection seems wrong to Dawkins’ crew , he thought.
But, what if the man, the human, the body in toto copied itself, he asked, exactly now ? What if we cloned? Ah, now we have a stark and obvious reason to think that the group matters.
Why? He asked himself.
Because the gene -when it was the only loci of reproduction- lived inside a body of -that contained- other genes; and even Dawkins admitted that genes had to survive and thrive within that collective. A single gene was no good unless it could get along inside the total body with other genes, to promote sex, reproduction, meiosis and then recapitulation. The body matters, because the body was a society of other genes! he thought with élan . He walked faster now among the downed pinecones and needles that had all turned brown.
Well, if the man is now a perfect reproduction, then guess what his milieu is? It’s -one level up- it is other men; other perfectly reproducing loci of reproduction, he reasoned. Other humans of the city, the county, the forest. He must get along with other men inside the group, like other DNA had to get along with other DNA inside the body. It’s Cartesian logic 101.
Group selection was likely true before, he thought, EO Wilson’s math showed that; but it’s certainly true now . Once the man himself become an exact copy, he is the loci of reproduction; and so his milieu , where he lives, is now corollary to what the body of the organism was to DNA. Society becomes the setting in which all reproduction occurs and thus, it becomes the most important factor in determining what lives or dies for all time.
He took another large gulp of his java java ; and cleared his mind of all straggling thoughts. The deer and elk had bifurcated their vectors; splitting off in the San Isabel forest; he decided to focus on the mule deer now. The elk people had wandered off toward their northern perimeter, the deer were still close to their fence.
The evolution of man and how the post-genetic phenomena that seemed foreign to most when they described it -how it was mere extension of the evolutionary process- was his bête noire now , he thought. He read genomes like tea leaves, chromosomes like thrown stalks. He over-focused on the future by sifting through these things from the ancient past .
Never mind that other eusocial species like ants used technology, tools and 3-stage farming processes -from leaf cutting, fermenting processes that produced a fungus, to feeding domesticated animals, herding aphids which secreted nectar for the ants to finally consume - never mind all that, that most sophisticated of modes of being for mere bugs , he thought. No, what was stuck in his craw was the division of labor ; what he was thinking of was evolution at the level of the replicator .
Dawkins had it figured out and delineated over 60 years ago, the only way evolution was possible is if there is a unit for both change and stasis . It had to be both, he thought. The unit was DNA. It replicated faithfully 99.9% of the time, it even repaired itself to keep it close to perfect.
Consciousness was the same: an error detector.
The lac -operon in its operation between RNA polymerase and CRP at the lacP and crp sites stimulated transcription for this very thing; yes, this is it , he thought. Error detection, that was it, it was not designed to perform the act of creation; the neo-cortex did not exist to create thought, or action, or anything. It was there merely to detect errors. The sub-cortical regions -regions analogous to RNA- produced the stuff of the world, of thought, and it was only through the inhibitory neuro-architecture that the neo-cortex even got involved.
But the neo-cortex, he thought, with its error-detecting raison d’être, had thought itself in charge! What a fool . It was a, it was mere, copy-editor, not the fucking artist. Yes, it was necessary, as each new idea became more and more complex, each sentence hyper constructed, but it was not the well-spring, not the source of new life: new proteins, new ideas, new ideals!
His head sent signals via the parasympathetic system to increase heart rate and he felt that organ boom in his chest and ears. His hands froze up and fingers at the knuckle bent at angles, 33 degrees, 45, then 90. He felt the tears behind the eyes and his teeth were swaddled in saliva, his stomach churned and the bottoms of his feet burned. He pursed his lips and thought of swimming again the pacific with Jadi. Jadi girl , he said as he pet her head in the memory in his head; he asked for her forgiveness and tried to fix memories of all he had done wrong in just 15 minutes of time way out there in the Sandwich Islands 30 years ago.
Ah, the rays swam beneath, the coral reef dissolved away, the sharks sent and received electrical signals from the ampullae, the moon pulled and the waves gave way, and their hearts beat 66 beats a minute toward one billion, likely still -and merely- 50 years away.
And as the last words came to him he cried, there is no way to put it nicely, the man just broke right then and there and the sea came out from the memory through the eyes and down the face and soaked the beard and he felt his whole head an earth dried up and made of dead seas. He felt all head like a watch; the gears ground and seized. He felt heat from the machine rise.
He had taken each fucking loss, each failure with glee, with angry glee. He had just clambered back on horse and saddle, flipped the ATV back over, uprighted the motocross bike and splinted the thumb and wrapped his ribs in compression tape so tight he could not but barely breathe, but this last one, this last with his father at the helm had crushed his heart, the one part that had rallied the troops inside of him with each previous battle loss.
Jesus, he had vowed not to think of any of this again, for the 1-billionth time; he thought of his vows. He rebuked himself for this pain and to each wound that he named. But then he continued on as he always did. It was a tic; he was an automaton. The brain remembered and when -even in one moment between
thoughts on DNA or history or the whale itself- when he had time, it built new constructions and hung out the shingle that said: Memory of Malice; welcome home . He remembered it all. And anything unremembered could easily be manufactured to spec.
Betrayal, he thought, is the thing even tough men cannot overcome without loss of naïveté or grip on sanity . The soul is what? What is it if not some kind of naïveté; some wish for things to still be noble and pure? he asked himself as the tears soaked into the skin below mustache and beard.
What would he do with this General inside him knocked down off his war-horse? He just stumbled around, and around; he had met the malice of loss, not just the wreckage of the thing, and this had laid him low.
He was a romantic, and he had never prepared for the idea that his family hated him so much they’d work to ruin him. And each friend, lover, brother and now father all at once had grasped him with their right hand, their left brain, and he was their prey. He was their prey , he thought.
And as was so like him he thought of all the times he had put a bullet or knife into a prey animal, a deer or elk or bear. He saw himself as no better nor worse than the beasts he had preyed upon. He did not hate what he killed. So, he tried to think maybe his enemies did not hate him at all.
He excused the malice of his tribe and family, giving himself up like the elk people gave their lives to him so that he may -must- eat. But he knew, he knew , he thought, that his family had not needed his flesh to eat up; he was not taken down like the deer of the forest, he was taken down from pique, from hate, from malice . And this was different, as he had laid his hands upon the hearts of each beast he had killed out here on the land; he had joined with them and thanked them for their gift. He had not killed in malice, he had felt a twinge of guilt, even as he pulled the trigger and the 300 Winmag had blew their whole heart up.
Was this different? Did the deer feel a broken heart like he did? Was he as cruel as his killers? Did the deer attribute death to God or malice? he asked.
We are the results of this process , he began the dialectic again -up on his horse- banishing his hurt from his error-detecting mind. But why was it felt , Blax thought, why? why not just processed, logically, rationally, axiomatically, mathematically, why was it felt, why did man need to feel ? Ah, the accelerated pace, there would be an accelerated pace now, a co-determinant with standard evolution.
The new replication was human beings, him first, not him per se, -his Jacks first- but from him first , he thought. And more soon to follow , he thought as well. And now the earth’s apex predator in man had two ways to replicate. The first way, in use since culture first manifested, which in some ways could be traced back to language, and the breakdown of the bicameral mind. He thought, Jaynes’ paradigm of how the modern brain in homo-sapian evolved from a more instinctual and automaton-like device -merely responding to proto-language prodding in the mind not unlike schizophrenia- into a more facile and deliberative organ that while still mechanistic, was capable of more discreet -walled, or bounded- thinking.
Can man keep the snake from the walled garden? Or must he learn to kill -or befriend- the asp? Will these thoughts of malice always be with us? Are they in fact necessary; not enemies? he asked himself.
Language, he focused back on this and thought, language, self-directed -self-conscious language- allowed for the appearance of autonomy -a break from the hallucinatory admonitions of one’s antecedents. When man could ignore mom and dad. But was it mere appearance? Could free will be gleaned? He tried to think these things, but the language broke apart under the strain of concepts he could not yet heave and lift and hold. The elk were far off he felt. He heard no bugling. The air was cold though and he liked that the most.
In some ways, he thought, this was a more faithful replication in that people would reflexively -and without real capacity to question- faithfully exhibit the behavioral cues of their predecessors . Obeying orders: Like DNA, 99.9% fidelity, without all this choice , he surmised.
A facsimile was easily created from one generation to the next, much the way instincts work in the lower orders of birds and beasts. The DNA programmed the behavior and the organism exhibited it inside a limited and relatively simple environs , he decided.
But atavistic man’s domain was becoming too complex. Mainly due to pressures born of socialization and group politics. The brain itself, as Trivers seemed to think, is a series of adaptations designed to navigate the social topography of dissembling and reassembling truth. A pathway, torn up and re-laid; over and over, he thought.
The brain is a lie manufacturing device and detecting device too, he thought after a pause. But there must be room -if one makes room- for truth.
At any rate, he thought, the evolutionary pressure gave advantage to any mutation that would allow for more nuanced thinking in this regard . The capacity and facility for language itself was a tactical advantage not unlike the thrown spear that could extend man’s grasp beyond his previous reach. He could kill, with the spear, at a distance, and he could lie -or tell the truth- at some distance with lance of language in a way never before achieved , he thought.
And if he could think for himself, and not merely hear the rote and discursive and recursive injunctions of his ancestors, he could craft an advantage over his peers. He could lie to them and manipulate them and this could change the entire environment with the same repercussions as the oxygenating expulsion of dying amoebae in a previously hypoxic atmosphere. The air would now be filled with novel lies, and meta-truths, as man woke up to speak new things , he thought. He breathed. The air was cold and the lungs warmed it in swirls it seemed.
He could, he thought, create culture which is peer pressure at a distance too. This could become the regulating force, like the DNA helix squeezed the skin of each beast into shape; constructing its desires and options so as to funnel it into the most adaptive behavior for its milieu. DNA made shapes of the beasts; language made, it shaped, the man. He looked out at the treetops as he began to walk along a rut in the forest and make his way back north and west.
As evolutionary biologists know and are learning more and more all the time, there was a replicator before DNA, and it was likely a form of RNA. Evolution rarely only pursues one model. But, the environment is equally unwilling to be impartial, and it does pick winners. The capacity of DNA for both replication and seemingly advantageous mutation -for rare but important error- was unmatched by earlier replicators that were capable of -and interested in- 100% fidelity , he thought as his brain saw ideas fall into place. He saw a picture both beautiful and ugly appear.
“And it became the dominant paradigm for the blueprint for all life. A replicator that sometimes erred; a truth that sometimes lied,” he said aloud. The ground was soft from the rain. His thighs burned as he walked up the slope.
Early humans had brains not very different from their chimpanzee cousins or their more distant relatives in the mammalian order. They were reflexive and instinctual and this worked just fine for millions of years. But sometimes if the environment is anodyne enough, a small step backward, a tactical retreat, can allow for a giant leap forward. And while the breakdown of the bicameral mind created a huge sense of anomie and fear and the first loss of God that our species experienced -and it clearly created anxiety and confusion and doubtlessly many missteps and mistakes were made as humans tried to implement this new OS- it also gave us sightline to a new, higher peak.
The environment was -must have been- just benign enough to allow for these novel mistakes to be made, errors that would not have been likely when man was more instinctual and not making the feral and tortuous weavings of movement and behaviors; behaviors only possible with his new freedom of thought.
A crawling baby is unlikely to experience much trauma stumbling from that low, prone position. His first wobbly steps however -when finally upright- are much more dangerous as they are more likely to produce his largest drops in elevation and while still the most vulnerable to skin contusions and b
ones fissures and any resulting infection.
But if he survives his first trembling and halting steps into the void, if he has time and space to build muscle and dexterity, then he is 1,000 times more likely to thrive -as an upright species- than if he had stayed safely crawling on the dirt and dust from whence he came , he thought.
And this new operating system was producing, was precursor to, the new replicator. Just like the proteins and RNA that helped to fashion our ubiquitous DNA replicator, man’s earliest proto-thoughts and capacity for language lead to the cobbling together of technologies that would eventually lead to farming and surplus food production.
Animal husbandry was central to this too. Jared Diamond’s book on the expansion of material culture is most salient, he then thought. Diamond described how in certain geographical regions like Asia, Sumeria and Europe, people could move laterally, where weather patterns are more homogenous, compared to north-south migration. He described modes of being -in east-west moves- more conducive to trial, with less harsh judgements by nature and God for error.
North-south migration , he added, that is forced upon African and South American tribes where radical shifts in climate, temperature, rainfall, and pathogens produced too large a lacuna between known and unknown to which primitive people may adapt.
But east to west migration, he thought, made in tandem with endogenous existence of beasts of burden among these climes -cows, oxen, camels and horses- produced the perfect storm -or perfect calm- of ease of environment, tolerance of environment, conducive to the resulting surplus of food.
Ah, the consequence of division of labor, and the resulting creation of a thinking and engineering class of men , he arrived at the thought that had first vexed him.
“Speciation -there- had begun,” he said aloud.
With sequela and web-like threads of novel and seemingly idiopathic phenomena resulting from this complexification of material existence, and division of labor, the new acculturated man was born each day into a more mentally taxing milieu. Unlike his cousin, the tribal subsistence farmer and itinerant hunter in the Americas and Africa and Australia, the new man had a new set of problems and desiderata to navigate as member of the expanding tribe, he thought.
