Carnal Reason

Edward Wilson:

You write that ants often share food among themselves. Why, and how did you find out?

Back in the fifties Tom Eisner, a colleague of mine, and I did I believe the first experiments tracing radio-active label­led sugar-water through colonies of ants. We were able to estimate the rate at which the food was exchanged, and the volume that was exchan­ged. Not only do many colonies exchange food with fanatic dedication, but in the colonies of many antspecies the workers regurgitate food back and forth at an extraordinarily high rate. Now we understand that the result of this is that at any given time, all the workers have roughly the same food-content in their stomach. It is sort of a social stomach. So that an ant is informed of the status of a colony by the content of its own stomach. It therefore knows what it should be doing for the colony. If you only had a small number of extremely well-fed ants and the rest were hungry, the workers would go out hunting for more food, whereas in fact it might be a bad time to hunt for food.

Why doesn’t this sort of communism exist among humans?

What I like to say is that Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species. Why doesn’t it work in humans? Because we have repro­ductive independence, and we get maximum Darwinian fitness by looking after our own survival and having our own offspring. The great success of the social insects is that the success of the indivi­dual genes are invested in the success of the colony as a whole, and especially in the reproduction of the queen, and thus through her the reproduction of new colonies.

This was I think one of the main contributions of the idea of kin-selection. We now understand quite well why most species of social insects have sterile workers, and therefore can have communist-like systems. In which the colony is all, the individu­al is only a part of the colony, and the success of the whole community is what counts far above the success of the individual. The behavior of the individual social insect evolved with refe­rence to what it contributes to the community, whereas the genetic fitness of a human being depends on how well it can individually use the society. We have become insect-like only by extreme contrac­tual arrangements.

Posted on October 5th, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: politics, science | No Comments »

David Foster Wallace:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

“Pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive”. The consequences of our choices are relentless and inescapable. The worship of our own pretty selves is natural enough, and pleasant for a while. The advantage of such a practice is that the eventual consequences fall largely on the individual. To create a truly disastrous idolatry, we must worship a man, and put him in a position of power.

It is ironic, but no surprise, that the people who railed against the wholly imaginary Bush-imposed theocracy have come to this. Chesterton long ago observed that the man who believes in nothing will believe in anything.

Posted on October 4th, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: politics, religion | 1 Comment »

Posted on September 30th, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: politics | 4 Comments »

A note to my esteemed readers: CR is going on summer vacation. I have a lot going on, and not enough time and desire to blog. I’ll keep the site online, and return when circumstance permits. Thank you.

Posted on June 22nd, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: blogging, books | 9 Comments »

Today I branch out into the advice column game. The Times Online columnist Eco Worrier tried to answer this question:

How can I persuade my husband to use a push mower?

The Times suggest that she manipulate him.

Target his weakness. Is he a touch sensitive about his growing tummy? Point out that according to Which? magazine, cutting a lawn with a push mower allows a 60kg person to burn 360 calories an hour. If your husband counts the pennies, emphasise that it costs an average of 20p every 100ml of fuel for a mower with a petrol tank and about 4p for every 20 minutes that you use a 1700W electric mower.

Thank you for playing, but that is not correct. Mr Answers says if you think a push mower is worth pushing, remove ass from chair and push it your own damn self.

Posted on June 15th, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: General | 2 Comments »

I’d side with Buffet on this one.

Posted on June 9th, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: General | Comments Off