Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers

The following is an open letter to Michael White, author of Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers. An entertaining read but incredibly poorly edited. It's as if no one had any idea what commas are for.

“…The fact that, in general, only the best-adapted member of a species will survive to reproductive age.”pg. 118, Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers, Michael White.

Dear Michael,

My son thoughtfully turned me onto your book and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it. I do quibble about the style sheet used to inform your punctuation, but it’s a minor point.

A somewhat larger point is illustrated by the sentence reprinted above, the one about “best-adapted members,” which itself illustrates a common misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. As written, the sentence implies that natural selection is done at the individual level, the same error the social Darwinists make (and, frankly, most people).

The reality is that individual survival has little or nothing to do with natural selection. In general, most members of a species survive until reproductive age as one mounts the evolutionary chain. Those species designed with massive infant-death rates—frogs, say—are designed with the scatter-shot effect in mind: those who survive do so because of sheer luck, the predator didn’t find them; one has enough offspring so that who gets eaten is immaterial. By the time one gets to, say, zebras or people, most offspring are expected to survive.

Natural selection is done at the genomic level. What it says is that, on average, individuals who possess mutation X have a better reproductive rate than those who don’t possess it. It’s concerned about the overall average, not the success of any particular individual. For example, an individual might have a mutation which would allow the possessors, on average, a longer life span; but that individual might have only one offspring before being dispatched by misfortune. Nonetheless, thanks to that one offspring, the mutation could be spread throughout the species, even though it gave no benefit to the individual in whom the mutation occurred.

The confusion appears to be a conflation of pecking order and natural selection. It’s fairly understandable that, observing natural pecking orders, one thinks that the selecting done to achieve that order is the same selecting that determines the direction of evolutionary change or dominance. They are unrelated, but, unfortunately, most people equate the two, as the quoted sentence illustrates.

Pecking orders evolved, not to insure that the best genes get together, but rather to maintain order within the species. Not only did pecking orders evolve, so did infidelity, which insures that, despite pecking orders, the gene pool will continue to be thoroughly mixed. It’s the mixing which is important, not the dominance.

Thanks for your time,

Johan Mathiesen
Portland, OR

Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers

…The fact that, in general, only the best-adapted member of a species will survive to reproductive age.

        pg. 118, Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers, Michael White

[Having no way to contact Mr. White, I thought I'd let this note free on the Internet. Go, little note, fly away.]

Dear Michael,

My son thoughtfully turned me onto your book and I’ve been thoroughly enjoying it. I do quibble about the style sheet used to inform your punctuation, but that’s a minor point.

A somewhat larger point is illustrated by the sentence reprinted above, the one about “best-adapted members,” which itself illustrates a common misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. As written, the sentence implies that natural selection is done at the individual level, the same error the social Darwinists make (and, frankly, most people).

The reality is that individual survival has little or nothing to do with natural selection. In general, most members of a species survive until reproductive age as one mounts the evolutionary chain. Those species designed with massive infant-death rates—frogs, say—are designed with the scatter-shot effect in mind: those who survive do so because of sheer luck, the predator didn’t find them; one has enough offspring that who gets eaten is immaterial. By the time one gets to, say, zebras or people, most offspring are expected to survive.

Natural selection is done at the genomic level. What that says is that, on average, individuals who possess mutation X have a better reproductive rate than those who don’t possess it. It’s concerned about the overall average, not the success of any particular individual. For example, an individual might have a mutation which would allow the possessors, on average, a longer life span; but that individual might have only one offspring before being dispatched by misfortune. Nonetheless, thanks to that one offspring, the mutation could be spread throughout the species, even though it gave no benefit to the individual in whom the mutation occurred.

The confusion appears to be a conflation of pecking order and natural selection. It’s fairly understandable that, observing natural pecking orders, one thinks that the selecting done to achieve that order is the same selecting that determines the direction of evolutionary change or dominance. They are unrelated, but, unfortunately, most people equate the two, as the quoted sentence illustrates.

Pecking orders evolved, not to insure that the best genes get together, but rather to maintain order within the species. Not only did pecking orders evolve, so did infidelity, which insures that, despite pecking orders, the gene pool will continue to be thoroughly mixed. It’s the mixing which is important, not the dominance.

Thanks for your time,

Johan Mathiesen
Portland, OR

It’s Faith that Counts

It’s a matter of faith that people are categorically different from other animals. Not that we have spectacularly extended the skills given to us, but that we have acquired entirely new skills unavailable to the rest of the kingdom. This is not exclusively a religious faith; the social science have been very strict in admonishing people to not be anthropomorphic, to not extend human characteristics to other things, be they living or dead, which may be tautological with inanimate objects, but is much more debatable among living thing.

Free-will is a case in point. Only humans are clearly marked with the burden of free-will, or so we’re told. It is something thought to have developed during the last evolutionary spurt that humans have had (if we’re not going through one, now). Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, it turns out to be a chimera.

The very concept of “free-will” implies—demands, really—at least two kinds of will, free and otherwise. The problem lies in disentangling the two. The closer one looks, the more the two kinds of will appear to be the same thing: the ability to choose. If one has an option to choose, all will is free. If one doesn’t have options, case closed. What the argument for free-will seems to be saying is that only humans are actually given choices; the rest of the kingdom has to follow innate instructions. We, on the other hand, are free, implying that we have no innate instructions, no internal behavior algorithms. In our evolution we have broken the bonds of rigid rules that one would be otherwise doomed to blindly follow because of one’s programming. We, for some reason have developed the possibility of endless choice; we’re free to do whatever we want.

But are we? And what does it mean, free-will? Isn’t the very act of wanting something a determining force and not one of free-will? One can, perhaps, ignore one’s desires, but one can hardly be said to create one’s own desires. And can one ignore a desire unless there’s a stronger desire present?

This is where we have to step back a little bit and look at what people and the other animals really are. We have to take a look at consciousness. A leg of the free-will table suggests that, while all living things might have an awareness of their surroundings, only humans are self-aware, are self-conscious. Since no one has yet devised a way to test this hypothesis, it remains a hypothesis, but it’s firmly planted in the body public. Quite how this self-consciousness would be different from the garden variety of consciousness is left to one’s imagination. A concomitant of that is the belief that only humans are conscious of their own mortality, another untested hypothesis. And, unfortunately, there’s no real reason to suspect that either of those assumptions is true other than pride: we want to think we’re different, that we’re special, that—well—we’re made in the image of god.

Fat chance.

From a scientific standpoint, it’s more accurate to say we’ve been created in the image of bacteria, of which we’re primarily composed and from which our origins, apparently, come. The technical difficulties with that observation is that it’s hard to tease out our uniqueness. Maybe we don’t have any.

There are a million obstacles to understanding everything about evolution. The minimum requirements are eating and reproducing. Obviously, sex was a huge step forward in creating complex creatures, but most of the rules of life were figured out before then. At the very least, one has to have enough consciousness to pick out what’s edible.

Not surprisingly, given the small amount of material to work with and the random, scattered nature of mutations, it took billions of years (literally) for the single-celled original creatures to figure out how to clump together to make multi-celled organisms. They couldn’t do it until they’d evolved methods of communication; they had to make agreements on how to cooperate. As far as we can tell, those methods involve chemical behavior and electronic currents. Communication between cells—and by extension, ever-expanding clumps of cells—is chemical and electrical. And as far as we know, no other methods have been employed. And that’s true no matter how big or complex those clumps of cells become, even if they become human. In other words, all the internal communication in our bodies is done on chemical-electric pathways. All of it, including brain activity, especially brain activity. There is no meta-communications pathway; we all use the same simple methods employed by the original cells. All thought, all memory, is built up of those two elements.

Now, when cells get together to form a larger creature—us, say—do they have little garden parties to set out the rules of communication and responsibility? No, the rules are built into their DNA which packages the basic instructions. A copy of the DNA goes with each cell and directs how it is to perform. It’s all quite rigid and magical at the same time. So, when this clumped-being stumbles upon something edible, the cells don’t have a conference to decide whether or not to eat it. How to deal with something edible is built into its DNA, so when given a choice to eat or not eat something edible, it’s not really a choice at all. It has to eat it. What good would debate do the creature? None, so debate isn’t selected for in evolution.

Which brings us to “natural selection”; it helps to understand how it works. For one thing, it didn’t begin until after the invention of sex. It’s commonly thought that the selecting being talked about is the selecting that two members of a species do when they’re looking for mates. The theory being that the healthier, more successful members of a species will mate and thereby spread their genes to the rest of the population. Seems logical, but, unfortunately, is not the case. The selecting being done is not that done by the individuals but rather that done by the entire species; and the selecting is very simple: if people carrying gene X outlive and out-produce their neighbors, gene X will eventually spread to the entire population. It’s immaterial who those individuals are or their overall competence; what’s important is the success of the gene packages they leave behind.

Which leads us to an understanding of who’s running the show. It’s not us. It’s the successful gene packages. It’s the DNA. Effectively, the individual members of any species are only the hosts by which the DNA reproduces itself. The DNA is immortal, we are transient. Evolution is done at the DNA level, we have nothing to do with it. And it’s random. Those things are true of all species.

Meanwhile, the goals and operational methods remain the same: eat/divide; chemistry/electricity. And they never change; they’re a constant through all living things.

But as the organisms become more complicated, the controlling algorithms become more complicated; new features are periodically added. Empathy, for example. Bacteria probably don’t have much use for empathy, but by the time you get to big animals, empathy starts to become useful to the survival of a species; hence, it gets selected for by the DNA. Ditto love, which is very similar to empathy. Love is empathy with attachment. Many species, evidently, use love to protect and foster themselves. Humans, of course, are reluctant to attribute love to other animals, but it’s hard to see that other animals’ bonding mechanisms could be significantly different than ours. It’s more likely that we’ve employed an existing model rather than having invented the wheel all over again.

It’s the same with any other human characteristic that we don’t think of as DNA controlled: inquisitiveness, say. Obviously, inquisitive people were, in the long run, more successful than those willing to live with whatever showed up. Artists? Somehow as a society we valued them enough that we made sure they were well fed and prospered and hence DNA selected for art. (Where would theater and fiction be without empathy? Do theater and fiction foster empathy and that’s why they get selected?) Those skills, the skills of artist, tinkerer, explorer, weren’t ones people invented out of whole cloth; like everything else, they are an evolutionary adaptation to life. They are, you could say, accidental. Useful, but accidental. They got selected for because of their utility, but that they arose was the result of random mutation.

What’s important here is that no one chose the skills, these attributes. No one chose to be empathetic or in love. Likewise, no one chose to be an artist or a tinkerer, they were selected for by DNA, not the individual. No one chose to be born. No one chose when to take their first breath. No one chose when to utter their first word. And in the end, no one chose to become President of the United States. All those things happened because of evolution and the iron-clad laws of the Universe.

What confuses people, in my estimation, is a poor understanding of consciousness and self, we tend to conflate the two. We fail to see that consciousness is an organizational tool that evolved to allow cell clumps to operate in real time. In other words, the clumps had to find ways to operate as a unit rather than as individual cells, and one of these adaptations was to create a consciousness that unites the entire cluster. The consciousness, of course, wasn’t the cluster but was the tool by which the cluster functioned. Consciousness is a large component of food gathering. It enabled the organism to make rapid decisions when faced with options, which one constantly is. In order for consciousness to function in real time, it has to think, unequivocally, that it is in control, that it is making the decisions. If it truly had to think about the decisions it was making and how it was making those decisions, it would be paralyzed. It would starve. Hence it’s designed to function in real time as a single entity, though it’s nothing of the sort; it’s an agreement between billions of cells and DNA. The conscious self is, in truth, an illusion that enables the individual to function.

But that’s all it is, a tool, it doesn’t actually do anything. It’s merely a data input devise. It controls nothing. Neither your movements nor your thinking. One may think that their consciousness is telling them to run when they see the lion coming towards them; but, in truth, it’s the internal algorithms which are telling the person to run; but they doing it in real time so it looks like the consciousness is actually doing the thinking; but no, all thinking is done at the subconscious level. (Got that? All those “buts”?)

So free-will? Where in this mess of evolution would free-will come from and how would it be different from the existing choice model? What does free-will really mean? Does it mean than no algorithm was applied to make a decision? Or does it mean that a new algorithm was applied? And how was that algorithm created? Does free-will imply that people can create new algorithms out of nothing? And why would they make a new one versus using another if they didn’t have a preference which would override free-will?

This would be all well and good if the algorithms were accessible to the consciousness, but they’re not. There is no free-will in setting up the algorithms of love, empathy, lust, hunger, fear, pride, etc. Each of us is only what our combination of mutable instructions produces. None of us creates or directs those instructions. None of us creates our own algorithms, because the algorithms don’t belong to us, they belong to the DNA. Consciously, we do nothing. Consciousness is only a monitoring devise, it doesn’t have directive capacity, that’s done internally and subliminally; we don’t have access to it.

Therefore, to state that we have free-will ends up being meaningless. Our consciousness, it turns out, has no will of its own and all will is directed by internal algorithms. Who would have imagined? Not the average person, because they cling stubbornly to their self-identity. No one wants to be just R2-D2. No one wants to be Hal.

Yet there it is: how is free-will different from any other kind of will? And, even if you thought decisions were really a conscious act, would it be possible to perform any act that you hadn’t thought about in context of yourself, that you used no criteria to making a decision? Because, if you applied criteria, then the criteria ruled the decision; and if you overruled the decision to express your free-will, then another set of criteria will have been brought into play, no? In the end, either decisions are governed by algorithms (criteria, circumstances, etc.) or they’re random. Then the question becomes, is it really random or does it just look that way? But, seeing as thinking is subliminal, the debate is moot.

Mostly, though, it’s moot because of logical necessity. There is no will outside physical reality. Like the soul, there’s no mysterious force out there separate from the physical universe. Thinking, in the end, is the old communication by chemistry and electricity; there’s no room for any other force. There’s nothing like “will” floating around the Universe.

The trail goes:

Apparently, all intracellular communication is done by chemical-electrical means. This is true, apparently, for all living things, animal or vegetable. At the molecular level, all elements in a living body follow strictly the laws of chemistry and physics. As far as we know, all thought is generated out of the same chemical-electric matrix; meaning, inevitably, that anything that could be considered “will” comes out of it, as well. Any choice made has to be generated out of that matrix, following, strictly the laws of chemistry and physics. There is no provision in physics for a fifth force, that of free-will to be generated.

Free-will is always posited as something, if not unique to humans, then restricted to a very few animals. Presumably, the other animals have predetermined wills. But forming a new type of desire, implies a new force, a deus ex machina. Even though it’s hard to see how there can be two independent types of wills.

One wonders, for example if all choices are either free-will or innate? Could a person have within them both free and non-free will? The innate reaction to duck, for example, would seem mostly innate; although one can, though, stand one’s ground and get clobbered. Exactly when did free-will arise in the evolution of animals? Why was it selected for? How does free-will improve one’s survival rate? All those problems pile up until it becomes clear that there are not two types of will, two strategies for making choices in the world. It becomes clear that human neurophysiology functions the same way all other animals’ neurophysiology operates.

I recently had a long debate about this via Facebook with my son. He is of the free-will school and argued for it vigorously. He’s very bright and articulate, but he could never understand the mystical nature of free-will, its magical appearance on the stage with people. He cleaved to the belief that somehow people had grown, either a second will, or an entirely new one; although the mechanics of and reasoning for and functioning of he was never able to explain. In the end, he exclaimed that I was arguing against free-will, as a way to “excuse humans for their sins”; to which I replied, “But of course.” Sins are an invention of religion as much as free-will; they aren’t real either. I don’t think my son thinks of himself as at all religious even though he holds to those religious beliefs of sin and free-will. It’s hard to escape the reach of Christianity.

Free-will fails because it has no definition; no one knows what it is.

The farming addendum:

A classic example of misunderstanding of the nature of natural selection occurs with the spread of farming, something which has bothered researchers for a long time. As Jared Diamond ably demonstrated, farming was decidedly bad for the individual; so the question has long been posed as to why it was adopted if it was so maladaptive?

Because, of course, it wasn’t maladaptive. It was only maladaptive for the individual, and not across the board, at that. The rich did quite well, thank you. More importantly, the species prospered even if the individuals did not. Farming most likely didn’t spread because people saw its advantages and adopted it; farming spread because it grew so many people and organized them so tightly that they could whomp the shit out of the hunter-gatherers. Think of the Europeans coming to America. Think of the Americans moving west. Both were done, essentially, behind armies. The difference between the Pilgrims and the Huns is who wrote the history.

Why the first group adopted farming will probably be forever debated; but once it got going, it was a juggernaut, and soon the people who were predisposed to a settled agricultural life swamped those who were not. The hunter-gatherers got selected away by the species.

The lesson to take away is that evolution happens to the species, not the individual.

Child of Grace

Original grace, not original sin.

What a twisted concept to believe that children are born into sin and that someone 2000 years ago died on their behalf. That’s a hell of a burden to start someone out with, don’t you think? Where did that bizarre notion originate? I find it much more likely that children are born pure and are shaped by their environment. If they turn out not so good, who ya gonna call? And what are ya gonna do about it? Seems fruitless to blame the kid. Either he/she started out with less than a full basket of eggs or some got cracked along the way.

•••

A species divided against itself is a contradiction of nature; it cannot last. The idea that we are any less than one species is, not only false, but surely temporary.

The human species is remarkable, not for its warfare or destructive capabilities, but for its capacity for cooperation. Aside from ants, termites, and bees, not many animals are capable of organizing thousands of its members for a single task. The world as we see it today is a marvel of human cooperation, voluntary or otherwise.

Which is only to be expected. Any species is, essentially, a DNA stream broken into millions of components. Components, yes, but still integral with the whole and not separate from it. Individual species units are more like detached toes than self-sustaining entities. It is the ultimate goal of any species to further its entire self, not just parts of it. It expects losses, which is part of the reason it divides into so many units, but it doesn’t encourage them. In the main, species devise ways of cooperation and social interaction between members; to do otherwise would be inviting disease into the organism. Species do seem to foster competition between members, but not usually to the death, and usually, apparently, more to keep the species vigorous rather than complacent in the quest for food and staying alive. Competition, apparently, is a way to test the viability of mutations. In the end, the only thing that wins is successful breeding over generations. It’s not who wins the lion’s share that’s important; it’s who remains to have any shares after the dust has settled. The survivors are the winner, no matter how they got there.

The recognition of “oneness” appears to be spreading across the globe. My kids and my kids’ kids are okay with the world. They aren’t worried about being taken over by anyone other than too many people; and I try and convince them that that’s not a problem. (Okay, that’s not entirely true; they are concerned about mega-corporations.) It’s not that they’re oblivious to color, but rather that they can’t see reason to rank sunsets versus sunrises. We’re a family where you can be anything you want except a Republican.

And we’re not unusual, much less unique. Granted, that may not be true if you’re living in Dallas or Indianapolis, but it’s certainly true in this part of the world; and if the polls are correct, it—this wanton permissiveness—seems to be creeping into the young everywhere.

I’m thinking, maybe that overpopulation had something to do with it. Certainly, moving into cities did. Rural divisions break down in the city. Once you hit Portland, we don’t care if you’re from Montana or Iowa. we really don’t. And soon, no one does. It’s a world-wide phenomenon.

•••

It would seem that overpopulation rarely annihilates a species. More often, it decimates it instead. (Okay, worse than decimate, because, technically, that’s only ten percent.) The effects of overpopulation, especially in face of a food-source collapse, can be catastrophic. Usually, though, enough members survive to form a recovery population that can grow with the rebounding food-source. Evolution is a kaleidoscope of change punctuated by periods where the scope is emptied of stones and new ones entered.

That being said, the human race will never knowingly erase itself. By accident, no problem, but willingly, no. The trick is avoiding the accidents.

The good news is that, all things considered, we’ve done a pretty good job of avoiding them so far. Seven billion of us, right? Couldn’t have gotten that big by killing everyone in sight, now could we? However you cut that cake, we’ve been a magnificently successful species. Us and tomatoes and Norway rats.

To a large extent, being a highly social species has been our success. If we weren’t inclined towards getting along with our neighbors, we wouldn’t have figured out how to get so populous. We not only had to figure out how to produce more food, we had to figure out how to distribute it.

•••

Empathy and love.

I was set to thinking when I heard the biologist suppose that the love felt by geese for one another was the same as the love people felt for each other; why invent the same emotion twice? Wasn’t love just an evolutionarily evolved bonding mechanism that increased the success rate for one’s offspring? I think we tend to think that we’ve invented emotions with our minds rather than them being primitive control mechanisms that function as survival aids. I’d vote for the latter.

And what is empathy other than love for our fellow humans? Empathy is more than just feeling another’s pain, it’s caring about that feeling. The torturer is well aware of the damage he or she is inflicting; they don’t care. Empathy goes beyond knowledge, it goes to accepting some of the suffering unto one’s self. It is recognizing the essential oneness of all humanity, that the overriding importance is our unity as a species. It’s not hard to imagine that the more empathy a tribe recognizes, the better off its members are.

It is hard to see empathy as anything that a more generalized form of love, that it, too, is a primitive emotion operating below the radar of awareness.

Love, indeed, makes the world go round. We’d never have made it this far without it and we’ll need a lot more of it to convince everyone to stop killing each other for whatever reason. Once again, it’s time to thank God for evolution. Without evolution, we’d still be boiling in the primordial soup.

•••

Natural selection is what’s causing the world population paradigm shift. It makes no difference what sets up the conditions—moving to the cities, cell phones, whatever—DNA doesn’t care. DNA only cares about what succeeds. Those families more successful in bringing their offspring to fruition are more likely to perpetuate themselves. For millions of years, survival was dependent on producing as many offspring as possible. Large families tended to surpass small families, especially in farming communities. Hence, the human population exploded.

Now, though, it is most often more expensive to have a large versus a small family. Offspring in smaller families where the resources don’t have to be spread so thinly tend to do better than offspring from larger families. Large families are now a burden, not an aid to the parents; hence we’ve automatically stopped having them, irrespective of what government thinks or wishes. Nothing like a ghetto to inspire birth control. Those same economic realities also now tend to play out in rural areas as well as urban so that rural family size is also falling.

A word of caution: capitalism is a large ponzi scheme, it depends on an ever-growing base. Surely you’ve noted that all economic indicators measure market growth, not accomplishment. The market report never tells you what the company did that day, only how well their stocks performed.

Have you heard of the man who makes Wensleydale cheese? He readily sells all the cheese he makes; he doesn’t begin to cover the demand. He’s constantly pressured to increase his capacity, but he steadfastly refuses. His argument is that he makes enough money and has all the work he can handle, so why should he do more? If you want more cheese, go make your own.

Now, what sort of capitalist is that? None at all. He’s happy to be a great cheese-maker making all the money he can comfortably spend. For some reason the god of reason hasn’t touched him and he’s content with his life. He doesn’t want more. It’s unfortunate, but true.

As a consequence, you won’t find his stock on the exchange. His stock is his skill.

What I’m suggesting is that it might be possible to have a society built around creating great things and doing great things but not necessarily on the principles of getting bigger and huger. A society where people can expect their just rewards but not the rewards of their neighbors. I’m also suggesting that, if we reach a population maximum for this planet and our population begins to decline, we might need a different paradigm than capitalism, no matter how successful it is at amassing resources at this time. I’m just saying…

Nor am I saying that I have a replacement. My only advice would be to talk about it before rushing into anything. There doesn’t seem to be a good meta-answer on the horizon; we’ll have to be content with working on the little things, like a universal minimum wage.

Oops, there I go again.

Once More With Feeling

Hear me out; I may be onto something.

Maybe it’s all a matter of semantics, of word choice.

The problem is in the phrase “natural selection”; it implies choice. In people’s minds it implies that the selecting being done is being done by the individual members of the species, and that it’s that selecting which affects the direction of evolution; i.e. successful females get together with successful males (of whatever species), and they breed successful offspring which informs the direction of their evolution.

No. There are two way to make selections: one is by choice; and the other is by attrition. Natural selection is of the second variety: those who are left standing at the end are those who are chosen. We think of natural selection as of the first kind, but in truth, it’s of the second.

Natural selection happens at the species, not the individual, level. Natural selection doesn’t care how successful any individual is; it only cares whether or not the individual’s genes give rise to successful generations. It only cares what the individual contributes to the gene pool, not its individual success. All those pecking orders and strict animal hierarchies have nothing to do with mating the best specimens; they’re simply ways of A) insuring the shuffling of genes, and B) maintaining social order within the species.

It is not in a species’ interest to keep only its best specimens alive; it’s best interests are to keep as many of its members alive as possible.

Ergo, the only natural selection being done is a matter of success: either a mutation has it or it doesn’t. And really, that’s no selection at all; it’s dumb luck.

•

Think of it this way. Igor the cowherd was on the bottom rung of the ladder. He wasn’t the brightest of candles, was prone to disease, and spent a lot of his life alone with his cows in the mountains. This was a very, very long time ago. Before they’d brought those cows to Europe; they were still hanging around the Caucasus. Igor also had a penchant for barley beer and didn’t look much to the future.

Igor hooked up with Priscilla who was, perhaps, a little slow on the uptake and had trouble walking in a straight line, but she was happy enough with the lone cowherd. Their life would not be remarkable; they brought three children into the world before Igor was kicked in the head by a cow and killed. Alas. The only thing unusual was a small mutation in Igor’s constitution. Everyone at the time was lactose intolerant. That’s the usual human condition; it takes living with cows and drinking their milk for millennia before chance provides a lactose-tolerance mutation. Wouldn’t you know it, that mutation happened to Igor.

It didn’t, of course, help Igor—he was kicked to death at a young age—but two of his three children inherited the gene. It didn’t make a big difference in their life, either, though they did tolerate dairy products better than their kin. It wasn’t a huge change, but, considering their livelihood, it would eventually have a big impact on their culture. Those children who inherited the new gene did a little better than their neighbors. It was a useful gene and it slowly got passed around to most everyone in the tribe. Those who had it had a better survival rate than those who didn’t.

The king’s family? They never got the gene and were wiped out some years later in a coup. Alas.

And that’s how natural selection works. No one ever selected Igor’s family to be the hope of the future, other than chance. No one even noticed that it was Igor’s descendants who changed their people forever. Who would have imagined? No one, and no one did.