The Wayward Axolotl

I was recently in a debate about the nature of society. My opponent used the analogy of a beehive to claim that altruism exists in nature. This analogy is common in discussions of human society. It is a bad analogy, so I thought I would debunk it. Also, bee biology is fascinating. There is something very unusual about bee genetics and sex determination. The females are diploid and the males are haploid. A female bee has two copies of each chromosome, but a male bee has only one copy of each chromosome. Male bees grow from unfertilized eggs. This arrangement is called “haplodiploidy”. There are three kinds of bees: queens (fertile females), workers (infertile females) and drones (fertile males). Evolution has provided the queen bee with the ability to create infertile offspring to help her out. The queen has control over which eggs to fertilize with sperm stored from mating. Fertilized eggs grow into females. If a female larva is fed royal jelly, it will grow into a queen. Other...

This is a response to Ryan Faulk. In one of his recent videos, he complained that white conservatives do not show racial solidarity. You might as well complain that white conservatives are killing all the unicorns. Racial solidarity doesn’t exist. It never has and it never will. That is an implication of evolutionary theory. First of all, what is race? Race is a categorization scheme for human beings based on phenotypic similarity. Humans evolved differently in different parts of the world, and there are also founder effects due to small populations migrating to new areas and expanding. So, yes, there are meaningful ways to categorize people into racial groups. African blacks are not the same as Amerindians, East Asians are not the same as Europeans. It is valid to inquire into the differences between different human population groups. There are real differences, and that does have implications for social policy. On the other hand, race is somewhat vague and arbitrary. Racial...

Humans have the capacity to form different types of relationships, which are mediated by emotions. We can divide these relationships into two categories: family and social. They create two types of structure: family and society. The family is held together by the pair bond between a man and a woman, parent-child bonds, and (to a lesser extent) sibling bonds. Society is held together by cooperative relationships, and (for large-scale societies) some degree of coercion. Behavior is driven by emotions. Sexual emotions cause us to seek mates and form sexual relationships. Parents bond with children, and are motivated to protect and support them. Social emotions cause us to seek cooperative relationships with others and avoid conflict. Emotions cause us to self-organize into families and societies. The sexual emotions can be divided into attraction and attachment. Attraction can be further subdivided into sexual attraction (aka “lust”) and a more holistic attraction that I call “ado...