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. Oth...

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...

People are easily confused by money. We tend to think of money as having real value, because it does have real value to us as individuals. To society as a whole, however, money is only a medium of exchange. It is just information. If I have more money, I am better off. But if society has more money, society is not better off. Here’s one way to think about money. You go to work and do some job within this big production system called “the economy”. As a reward for your efforts, you receive an IOU for a portion of the output of the economy. That IOU is your paycheck. You can consume your portion of the economic output immediately, or you can exchange some of your right to consume now for the right to consume later. In other words, you can save some of your money. Saving is an exchange. When you save, you are trading the right to consume now for the right to consume later. Saving is an exchange of consumption rights. You consume less than you produce now, in exchange for being abl...

Eric Orwoll responded to Modern Romance . In his response, he compared me to Spock from Star Trek in being “coldly analytical”. I took that as a compliment. Eric, what you call “coldly analytic” I would call “abstract”. In a way, abstractions are alienating. They distance us from embodied experience: from sensation, emotion and action. There is a zen to being and doing. You don’t want to miss the forest for the trees, but you also don’t want to miss the trees for the forest. Abstract thought cannot help you in a moment of action where milliseconds count. However, that doesn’t mean abstract thought is divorced from embodied experience. Abstractions are just more removed from embodied experience. There are more layers of representation and information processing between an abstraction and the experiences it relates to. Abstract thought is emotional. It is just removed from the physical expression of emotion. Emotions are what motivate us: they set us in motion. Without emotio...

Many people believe that we have transcended evolution, due to modern technology and the welfare state. This belief is false. We have not transcended evolution, and we will never transcend evolution. What is evolution? Evolution is a process that operates on a population of organisms, or (more broadly) on reproducing units. Evolution has three basic components: Reproduction: Organisms can create copies of themselves, or split into new copies. Reproduction implies the capacity for exponential increase. Mutation: Occasionally, heritable information is randomly changed, creating variation within the population. Selection: Organisms need resources to survive and reproduce. There are also environmental hazards, including other organisms. Some forms are better at reproducing than others. Forms that are better at reproducing will become more common. Although selection can be positive or negative, we can think of it as a purely negative force: res...

These days, most of us live in cities with millions of other people. We are always surrounded by members of the opposite sex. Yet, it is difficult for many people to find love. Despite the superabundance of mating possibilities, people now spend more time and energy on the mating game than ever before. Adolescence has become an almost permanent condition. Men and women spend years and years going through a cycle of casual affairs and short-term relationships. To understand this situation, you have to understand human sexuality. Let’s start with the simple observation that men and women are different. Men have stronger feelings of attraction. Women have stronger feelings of attachment. That is because men and women have different reproductive strategies. Men can have more children by having sex with multiple partners. Women cannot. Women, on the other hand, need the protection and support of men to survive and raise children. We evolved different emotions that reflect the costs and...