It is natural to speak figuratively of complex processes outside common experience using homely terms. Natural Scientists may speak of 'sacrifice' or suicide to describe organisms far too simple to have any such notion. This may be helpful. What is harmful is to reimport a metaphor used in the Natural Science and pretend that it reflects some fundamental aspect of everyday reality.
David Napier, Professor of Medical Anthropology, at UCL writes in Aeon-
Many of us will recall Petri dishes from our first biology class – those shallow glass vessels containing a nutrient gel into which a microbe sample is injected. In this sea of nutrients, the cells grow and multiply, allowing the colony to flourish, its cells dividing again and again. But just as interesting is how these cells die. Cell death in a colony occurs in two ways, essentially. One is through an active process of programmed elimination; in this so-called ‘apoptotic’ death, cells die across the colony, ‘sacrificing’ themselves in an apparent attempt to keep the colony going.
This is a pretty controversial claim. A recent Journal article says-
Absence of apoptosis in cell culture
As some of us have repeatedly addressed before [37, 49, 50, 55], for several reasons an authentic apoptosis as above defined never occurs in cell lines cultured in Petri dishes. First, cell lines are all immortalized, established by reprogramming the death program of the parental cells [57], whereas study of apoptosis is for the purpose of determining the original, unchanged death program. Actually, in our opinion, all immortal cells, including all tumor cells, do not have a death program because they do not have a lifespan, according to the definition of “immortality”, and thus cannot die from a programmed procedure with suicide as its essence. Even if, as described in so many publications, immortal cells still have a death program established by reprogramming the normal cells’ death program, studies using these cells with an already-changed death program can only provide us with already-altered mechanisms. More complicatedly, different cell lines, no matter whether they are derived from spontaneous tumors or are manmade in the lab using such as viruses, are immortalized via different mechanisms, as summarized before by one of us [57]. Therefore, different cell lines will have differently-reprogrammed death programs and will likely provide us with different mechanisms or pathways of cell death. This is one of the reasons why so many demise mechanisms have been identified, and likely many more are waiting for us to identify them, although in our opinion most of these mechanisms are actually ad hoc variants of SICD that will be described later. Second, a genuine apoptosis is initiated for a twofold purpose, i.e. clearance of useless and thus redundant cells under a condition of preserving the host tissue in an intact status. However, cell lines are autonomous and thus no longer allegiant to the host tissue and animal and, in a culture dish, have no reason to care about whether their environment is polluted or not by their cellular shreds. In short, cell lines in Petri dishes have no motivation to keep their environment undisturbed. Third, most cell culture systems used for apoptosis studies involve only one single cell line in the Petri dish, thus lacking scavenger cells and in turn lacking complex communications among different cell types. These missing communications include those between apoptoting cells and scavengers via such as “find-me” and “eat-me” signals, between apoptoting cells and their healthy sibling cells and even cells in distant organs to “discuss” which and how many cells are really redundant and need to be eliminated, and between the non-apoptoting cells and scavengers via such as “don’t eat me” signals to protect useful siblings from being mistakenly predated by scavengers [50]. Fourth, apoptosis consists of two parallel procedures, one occurring in the suicidal cell and the other in the scavenger [50]. The mid and later parts of apoptosis occur inside the scavenger and involve its enzymes to dispose of the prey. These two procedures, each in a different cell but in parallel with the other, are highly coordinated via the aforementioned cell–cell communications even before the suicidal cell is wolfed down by the scavenger. In those studies with only one single cell line as the only player in the culture dish, one procedure is lacking, making impossible the coordination between the two. Because of these reasons and some others that have been mentioned before [50], even if a programmed cell death occurs in vitro as described in so many publications, it occurs in an unusual situation, study of which can only provide us with unusual mechanisms and pathways that do not actually occur in an animal’s body [50]. At least, in our body there normally is no any single immortal and autonomous cell, and thus the mechanisms identified in cell lines have no relevance to normal persons, while we should keep it in mind that apoptosis is evolutionarily developed, and thus is a mechanism for the normal.
Though the mechanisms underlying apoptotic death are not well understood,
Indeed, it is disputed whether the term can be usefully applied in a Petri dish context. However, as a matter of convention, induced cell death absent necrotic consequences, are referred to as apoptotic though the process is triggered and not autonomous at all.
it’s clear that some cells benefit from the local nutrient deposits of dying cells in their midst, while others seek nutrition at the colony’s edges. The other kind of colony cell death is the result of nutrient depletion – a death induced by the impact of decreased resources on the structure of the waning colony.
It appears that necrosis is not that different from apoptosis. Vide
For a long time, necrosis has been considered an uncontrolled form of cell death, but accumulating evidence shows that necrotic cell death is carried out by complex signal transduction pathways and execution mechanisms.3, 4 In vitro, necrosis is morphologically characterized by rounding of the cell, cytoplasmic swelling (oncosis), presence of dilated organelles and absence of chromatin condensation.1, 4Both kinds of cell death have social parallels in the human world,
Is this really true? Are some people programmed for suicide of an altruistic type? The classic example of apoptosis is the cells that are programmed to die as our toes are formed so that we don't end up with webbed feet. Is there anything similar in the Social World? Do some Professors die after they have done something useful but before they can start babbling paranoid nonsense about Neo-Liberalism? Perhaps, in better ordered Societies that is exactly what happens.
but the second type is less often studied,
Actually, human Societies do very very fucking intensively study famine and epidemics and other threats to our population. Some people may also study why Bruce Lees are 'programmed' to die after they give away the secrets of Kung Fu but, if they are Professors, they keep this under their tin foil hat.
because any colony’s focus is on sustainable development; and because a colony is disarmed in a crisis by suddenly having to focus on hoarding resources.
I don't understand this. Cannibalism isn't a form of hoarding nor is 'altruistic suicide'. If half the people on a life-boat jump overboard so the other half has enough food and water to reach the shore, we don't say that there was a 'focus on hoarding resources'.
At such times, the cells in a colony huddle together at the centre to preserve energy (they even develop protective spores to conserve heat).
Stem cells huddle together anyway. However, like penguin huddles, it appears there is movement of a redistributive type within the huddle.
While individual cells at the centre slow down, become less mobile and eventually die
this is either accidental cell death or non apoptotic regulated cell death. There are are no specific effects or caspases for either extrinsic and intrinsic apoptosis which could be said to correspond to 'dynamic decline'.
– not from any outside threat, but from their own dynamic decline – life at the edges of such colonies remains, by contrast, dynamic.
This is a chicken and egg argument. Obviously, there will be more autophagy at the core rather than the periphery.
But what has that to do with humans? We don't cannibalize each other.
I suppose there may be some contorted way to make sense of Napier's ad captum vulgi 'poetry'. But, it goes against the grain of the 'popular science' shibboleths of the layman. Arguably, humans are more like stem cells in that we are less specialized- at least in social roles. Anyone can serve on a jury or get elected to office- at least, that is our pious hope.
Are such peripheral cells seeking nourishment, or perhaps, in desperation, an alternative means to live?
Or an alternative means to achieve a Nano-Buddhist satori by proper instruction in post-Kristevan Feminist theory as well a principled participation in the BLM & BDS campaigns on campus.
But how far can we really push this metaphor: are human societies the same?
Metaphors must never be taken for facts. Other metaphors must not be constructed on their basis- or you end up with an ex falso quodlibet explosion of nonsense.
As they age under confinement, do they become less resilient?
Confinement aint a good thing. Our confinement to this planet makes us less resilient to all sorts of extinction events.
Do they slow down as resources dwindle, and develop their own kinds of protective ‘spores’?
They may turn into simpler 'Spiegelman monsters' if predators and parasites have been artificially excluded.
And do these patterns of dying occur because we’ve built our social networks – like cells growing together with sufficient nutrients – on the naive notion that resources are guaranteed and infinite?
Have you built your social networks on the notion that you have a gazillion dollars and will always have at least that much? Is that why Kardashians are constantly liking your Tik Tok twerking videos? Does Biden begin his day by texting you asking for money to pay off the US National Debt?
Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not.
Finally, do human colonies on the wane also become increasingly less capable of differentiation? We know that, when human societies feel threatened, they protect themselves: they zero in on short-term gains, even at the cost of their long-term futures.
I genuinely didn't know that. Shame I studied Econ rather than Medical Anthropology. What Econometric evidence shows is that Consumption falls in proportion to threat perception.
And they scale up their ‘inclusion criteria’. They value sameness over difference; stasis over change; and they privilege selfish advantage over civic sacrifice.
Actually, where there is a clear and present danger, you are delighted to see all sorts of foreigners turn up to defend your country. How did British and French peasants react to the presence of 'colored' troops on their soil during the two World Wars? Strangely, they were delighted to see them. If an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, we want to see Putin and Xi and the Ayatollah all promising to unleash their own patented brand of whuppass on that fucking chunk of rock. We will cheer as jihadi astronauts suicide-bomb it. The Japs will have sent Godzilla and we'll raise a glass of sake to him. Putin will definitely try to novichok that asteroid- which will do no good- but the Great Russian People will figure out some complicated mathematical way to get it to implode if only our Luke Skywalker can target his proton bomb correctly.
Viewed this way, the comparison seems compelling. In crisis, the colony introverts; collapsing inwards as inequalities escalate and there’s not enough to go around.
Rich cells should share resources with poor cells. Also they should stop being mean to gay cells of color with obesity or addiction issues and a tendency to get confused and vote Republican.
In a crisis, as we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, people define ‘culture’ more aggressively, looking for alliances in the very places where they can invest their threatened social trust; for the centre is threatened and perhaps ‘cannot hold’.
During a pandemic or a war scare, irresponsible behavior is more heavily penalized. This may be associated with 'cultural stereotyping'- i.e. 'us guys follow the rules. Them guys don't. I hear they crack the shell of their boiled eggs in a perverse and contumacious manner. This proves they are evil'.
On the other hand, it may involve the reverse- 'them guys wear face masks. They don't shake hands. This proves...fuck! I just saw they have lower transmission! We've got to imitate them. Face masks for everyone! White gloves like they wear in Japan! Bow to each other instead of shaking hands!'
Societies, and the people in them, can either do stupid shit or they can imitate what smart people do. Doing stupid shit means you end up as a shitty loser. That sucks, so you either adapt and get with the program or simply drink yourself to death.
Human culture, like cell cultures, is not a steady state.
Both could be a steady state under certain conditions. But who gives a fuck about 'culture'? Why mourn the plumage and forget the dying bird? All we want is robustness for what is reproduced, not culturally, but biologically. That just means error-correction and, maybe Baldwinian 'damming up' of 'capacitance diversity'.
Mathematically, the entire subject has become radically more simple over the last few decades. Screw 'in vitro', we can do amazing things 'in silico' even if we be as stoooopid as shit. Consider 'the ten Martini problem'. You can actually run stuff on your computer while drinking ten Martinis and seeing all these cute, trippy, graphs on the screen and, at the end of it you can say 'Yup! For sure! Hall effects arise out of holes in topological decision or information spaces. A Quantum Hall effect is bound to involve a self-adjoint 'almost Mathieu operator' whose spectrum, suitably constrained, is a Cantor set- coz if it weren't Neo-Liberalism wins. Is that what you really want? To go out and tell the kids that Neo-Liberalism isn't beating and sodomizing trillions of Black and Blue Peeps and subjecting them to aggravated acts of fellatio and cunnilingus? That's your big idea? Well, go ahead, Adolph!- proclaim your fucking Third Reich already!'
It can have split purposes as its expanding and contracting concepts of insiders and outsiders shifts, depending on levels of trust,
Either 'Trust' is an 'operationalizable' concept- in which case there can be quick and cheap 'Aumann agreement' about it- or else its 'anything goes'. But, if so, then 'insiders' and 'outsiders aren't 'intensional'- they are not concepts at all- they are extensional. Nothing escapes Category theory- except that 'synoida' which Socrates described. Everything else is but 'using oars when the wind fails the sails'.
and on the relationship between available resources and how many people need them.
This is naive. If there are people who need 'available resources', there is always- by the folk theorem of repeated games- a non-coercive mechanism which does essentially the same thing... as Harvey Weinstein.
Sadly, the various women I have offered up my virginity to- in return for food and shelter and being taken for regular walks- remain stonily indifferent to my plight. Fuck you Beyonce! Fuck you Rihanna! Fuck all youse Kardashians very very much!
Trust, in other words, is not only related to moral engagement, or the health of a moral economy. It’s also dependent on the dynamics of sharing, and the relationship of sharing practices to group size – this last being a subject that fascinates anthropologists.
How come I trust peeps in China to send me the stuff I order on Ebay or Ali Baba or whatever? The answer is that E-commerce has evolved some very simple protocols which work well and internalize externalities such that economies of scope and scale become available. Trust is high if transactions are insured and retaliation is built in. Networks can grow without limit under these circumstances. By contrast even small groups will remain as poor as shit because it is difficult to grow Trust in the absence of risk-pooling and assured retaliation.
In recent years, there’s been growing attention
which so far has yielded nothing useful
to what drives group size – and what the implications are for how we build alliances, how we see ourselves and others, and who ‘belongs’ and who doesn’t. Of course, with the advent of social media, our understanding of what a group is has fundamentally changed.
The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar popularised the question of group size in his book How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (2010). In that study, he took on the challenge of relating the question of group size to our understanding of social relationships. His interest was based on his early studies of group behaviour in animal primates, and his comparison of group sizes among tribal clans. Dunbar realised that, in groups of more than 150 people, clans tend to split.
Unless there is a good reason for them not to. Some of the most successful 'clans', from the economic point of view, are recently formed and number in the thousands. They are often more univocal than the families within those clans- as predicted by the Condorcet Jury theorem. History shows us that clans can quickly become Nations. Anthropology can't reverse a rule which applies to the vast majority of the world's population by selectively looking at those lineages which we have replaced where it was worthwhile to do so.
My own research with the indigenous people of Kilburn focused on those who were drunk off their heads and sleeping under the railway arches. I discovered
1) They were all Anthropologists
2) They would not accept me as an Anthropologist but rather as a fitting object for their study.
Averaging sizes of some 20 clan groups, he arrived at 153 members as their generalised limit.
That's the number of people who still think Dunbar is smart.
However, as we all know, ‘sympathy groups’ (those built on meaningful relationships and emotional connections) are much smaller. Studies of grieving, for example, show that our number of deep relationships (as measured by extended grieving following the death of a sympathy group member) reach their upward limit at around 15 people, though others see that number as even smaller at 10, while others, still, focus on close support groups that average around five people.
This is true. Tell people your Granny died and you can get a day of work. Say it was the Cousin of your Granny's hairdresser and people become very unsympathetic. To be on the safe side, say you kitty cat died and then burst into tears. Nobody wants to be around a morbidly obese South Indian gentleman who weeps profusely while trying to show you videos of his kitty cat. You know he accidentally sat on it and killed it and only discovered his mistake when he went down the chippy and the local yobs said 'Oi! That fat bastard has got a dead pussy stuck to his tushy! Thank you i-phone for recording this!'
For Dunbar, 150 is the optimal size of a personal network
For me, sadly, even 15 would be too much to ask for- more especially after the sitting on kitty incident.
(even if Facebook thinks we have more like 500 ‘friends’), while management specialists think that this number represents the higher limits of cooperation.
Which is how come Amazon and Google and so forth are doomed to fail. On the other hand, the local knitting circle is bound to take market share from both because it hasn't reached the 'higher limit of cooperation'.
In tribal contexts, where agrarian or hunting skills might be distributed across a small population, the limiting number is taken to indicate the point after which hierarchy and specialisation emerge. Indeed, military units, small egalitarian companies and innovative think-tanks seem to top out somewhere between 150 and 200 people, depending on the strength of shared conventional understandings.
But those 'shared conventional understandings' tend to be shit. Thus what you really have are isolates occupying niches and extracting a rent of an increasingly obnoxious kind. The number of Theosophists or Brahmo Samajis or Fabians still operating might be about 150. Yet, in their heyday, they numbered in the thousands and influenced millions.
Though it’s tempting to think that 150 represents both the limits of what our brains can accommodate in assuring common purpose, and the place where complexity emerges, the truth is different; for the actual size of a group successfully working together is, it turns out, less important than our being aware of what those around us are doing. In other words, 150 might be an artefact of social agreement and trust,
it is merely nonsense
rather than a biologically determined structural management goal, as Dunbar and so many others think. We know this because it’s the limit after which hierarchy develops in already well-ordered contexts.
No. If a focal solution to the underlying coordination problem becomes more accessible, hierarchy decreases. Moreover, where hedging on a discoordination game is worthwhile for regret-minimizing reasons, you have less specialization. Arbitrageurs switch between roles. Mimetic effects get amplified and work both ways across Tardean gradients.
But we also know this because of the way that group size shrinks radically in the absence of social trust.
Social trust may be zero or infinite. This won't change the fact that increased Knightian Uncertainty militates for a 'regret-minimizing' shrinking of joint utility functions. Even in the military, a wholly unprecedented type of attack can render sauve qui peut an optimal tactic.
When people aren’t confident about what proximate others are mutually engaged in,
mimetic effects are suppressed
the relevant question quickly turns from numbers of people in a functioning network to numbers of potential relationships in a group. So, while 153 people might constitute a maximum ideal clan size, based on brain capacity, 153 relationships exist in a much smaller group – in fact, 153 relationships exist exactly among only 18 people.
By Yoneda's lemma, we can show this is true also of just 2 people. Thus observing a married couple's interactions closely enough we could get all the information present in the larger group- but only if it really is a group. That's the problem with this sort of shite. It looks mathsey, but isn't actual maths. It's just ultracrepidarian shitting higher than yer arsehole.
Dunbar’s number should actually be 18,
What was Monica's number? More than 18 even though she had a late start coz she was a fattie in High School. Whatever it was, it made Richard's moustache curl.
Is our distinguished author dissing Dunbar for his number? Perhaps. I am more and more convinced that Aeon articles by eggheads are a subtle sort of Revenge Porn. Everything passes away, save Revenge Porn.
since, under stress, the quality of your relationships matters much more than the number of people in your network. The real question is not how many friends a person can have, but how many people with unknown ideas can be put together and manage themselves in creating a common purpose, bolstered by social rules or cultures of practice (such as the need to live or work together). Once considered this way, anyone can understand why certain small elite groups devoted to creative thinking are sized so similarly.
But those elite groups stop thinking and start shitting into their hands and flinging their feces about. What happened to the Cambridge Apostles? How about the Straussian Neo-Con Elite? Who knows? Who cares? Ideas have a half life. Elites, in obedience to a generalized Rothbard's Law, specialize in what they are shite at. Their half-life has declined precipitously as Information has become cheaper and more ubiquitous. Macron, it seems, is dismantling ENA. BoJo would do us all a favor by getting PPE out of Oxbridge. Let those donkeys stick with Dead Languages when not trying to resurrect Monty Python.
Take small North American colleges. Increasingly, they vie with big-name universities such as Harvard and Stanford not only because they’re considered safer environments by worried parents,
Hilarious! My precious must be protected from Thought!
but because their smaller size facilitates growing trust among strangers,
Okay, now I know this is a joke. No one yet has suggested that American undergraduates need to be told not to accept sweets from strangers and never to get into the back of their van so as to see the nice kitty cat that lives there.
making for better educational experiences.
Research shows that College students who are not raped and decapitated by serial killers in the back of vans tend to have higher Grade Point Averages. This is because of Dunbar's Number as applied to Serial Killers.
Their smaller size matters. Plus, it’s no accident that the best of these colleges on average have about 150 teaching staff (Dunbar’s number) and that (as any teacher will know) a seminar in which you expect everyone to talk tops out at around 18 people.
The same is true of the worst colleges and the most useless seminars.
But what do we learn from these facts?
That those who believe these are facts are cretins.
Well, we can learn quite a bit. While charismatic speakers can wow a crowd, even the most gifted seminar leader will tell you that his or her ability to involve everyone starts to come undone as you approach 20 people. And if any of those people require special attention (or can’t tolerate ideological uncertainty) that number will quickly shrink.
Fuck is a 'gifted Seminar leader'? Apparently it is some superior sort of child-minder or functionary tasked with the care of the very differently abled.
What the author says may be true, but only if the Seminars are shite and only exist to pass the time or tick some box for Grant Renewal.
In the end, therefore, what matters much more than group size is social integration and social trust.
Then why the detour through nonsense which doesn't matter at all?
As for Facebook’s or Dunbar’s question of how many ‘friends’ we can manage, the real question ought to be: how healthy is the Petri dish? To determine this, we need to assess not how strong are the dish’s bastions (an indicator of what it fears) but its ability, as with the small North American college, to engage productively and creatively in extroverted risk.
I suppose, if a Petri dish is full of really smart cells which are 'engaging productively and creatively in extroverted risk' while completing a PhD in Medical Anthropology, then, sure, it will be easy to assess the extent this is happening by setting the cells a simple multiple choice test.
And that’s a question that some other cultures have embraced much better than even North American colleges.
The author's tender regard for the very special young snowflakes educated in North American Colleges is truly inspiring.
On the Indonesian island of Bali,
there are Hindus very similar to Hindus like me
a village isn’t a community unless it has three temples: one for the dead ancestors and things past (pura dalem); a community temple that manages social life (pura desa); and a temple of origin (pura puseh).
We have this too. So what? Bali is ahead of us because it doesn't have Untouchability. On the other hand, it doesn't have institutionalized anti-Brahmanism- which us Tamils regard as a sign of 'backwardnes'. Chase away your Iyers or at least make fun of their stupidity and morbid obesity.
This last temple is what literally ties an individual self to a particular place. For the word puseh means ‘navel’.
Actually, the pura puseh or kuladaivam is notional and changeable. The learned Brahmins keep a note of these things- though they may not tell Anthropologists about this because the Anthropologist will turn out to be your idiot cousin or M.K Srinivasan or some such joker.
Also White female anthropologists rape native informants. About 50 years ago, an American woman raped an elderly Papuan chieftain whom she claimed to have married according to some traditional ritual which she probably invented on the spot. The Indonesian Army had to drag her off him and repatriate her to America. Believe me, Obama's Mum was a model of decorum compared to the usual run of those hags.
To this last temple every Balinese is connected by a spiritual umbilicus, and every 210 days (that is, every Balinese year) a person thus tied is obliged to return physically to honour that connectedness, becoming again a metaphorical stem cell: returning to their place of origin, examining their patterns of growth, and using their ‘stem’ in the interests of restructuring a healthier future.
I recall reading in Joseph Campbell, that my people decapitate their eldest son's at their Kuladaivam shrine. The poor fellow thought 'mundan'- ritual head shaving- meant the actual chopping off of heads. Campbell's account of his first Indian trip is hilarious.
The people of Bali are beautiful, it is true, but their Religious knowledge and Sacred Music is not different in any essential or soteriological respect from that of the Iyers or Nambudris or whatever. Exoteric obligations are known to be merely 'samskar' and are defeasible by reason of the superior soteriological efficacy of Yoga or Darshan Gyan or just plain old fashioned Bhakti.
The stem cell, of course, is the recursive place where embryologists gather cells to regrow us more healthily;
No x can be 'the recursive place where' any operation on an x occurs. I suppose this is poetic speech.
and, in Bali, extroversion is health-enhancing only once we bring back what we learn to where we began.
Are Balinese Hindus different from me? No. They may be better looking. They may show greater orthopraxy. But they are not more 'primitive' in their thinking. They are smarter- though, admittedly, a lot of that smartness gets used up in being nice rather than being a fucking smartass pain in the backside- but their religion is as quintessentially Vedic and founded on Vedanta as that of any Hindu Sect to be found in India.
Neglecting this originary connection can cause grave harm, and being far removed, or abroad for an extended period, risks snapping that cord if stretched too far, severing the very lifeline to one’s own past, present and future.
In my novel, Samlee's daughter, I have described how, the substitution of the sacred thread for this umbilical cord greatly increased productivity and thus permitted the Iron Age expansion of Vedic Religion.
But why stretch your umbilicus at all if potential outcomes might be dire?
Napier, it now becomes clear, is a sublime comedian. He asks us why we cruelly cut off the cord that ties a Mum to her baby. Why do we not allow this cord to stretch across a few thousand miles so that Mummy can be in London while baby is working at Caltech?
Because boundary exploration helps us define who we are; because the unfamiliar makes us conscious of what’s central; because we need to approach things that are unusual if we’re to diversify and grow.
This is the 'Marginal Revolution' which broke with 'Classical', Aristotelian, Econ in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.
But, as Robert Aumann has shown, Game Theoretic ideas of a superior type are encoded in Talmud. My own assertion that Nalophkyanam means any 'Principal' must use Statistical Decision Theory, not Deontics, to 'rule Justly', has not been seconded by any Hindu. This is because Hindu 'inert game theorists' be shite. Also, not smart at all. Binmore should have told them, as he told me, to become Accountants.
It’s the idea behind the avant-garde (literally, the advance guard) – the original French term referred to a small group of soldiers dispatched to explore the terrain ahead so as to test the enemy. You could stay put and remain ignorant, or go too far and get killed. Alternatively, you might go just far enough to learn something and come back to describe what you’d witnessed. It’s a simple idea, part of every vision quest, and filled with deep uncertainty.
Is the author a Hindu? Is he Confucian? Is he from some remote tribe long isolated from missionaries of the Abrahamic Religions?
No. He is the product of and an ornament to the elite Paideia of a Great Christian Nation. As a Hindu, I can testify that the author's own environs have grown in Christ decade after decade.
What does the Bible say about the 'avant garde'? Ten is a Minyan- because Ten Spies lied.
In Binmore- the self proclaimed 'Whig'- and in Napier- by reason of my subaltern status and great stupidity- I discern something fundamentally gauche; ardent but Philistine; something resistant to Paideia.
Aristotle- who wasn't, as I thought, a teenage mutant Ninja turtle- pointed out that 'Akribia', an artificial precision, where the subject matter won't stand for it, or the pretense of forensic analysis, where no structural causal model obtains, is a fault in Rhetoric. The Hindus, of course, were more merciless in their ridicule of this Brahminical fault. Thus India exported Pyrhhonism to the West.
Napier wants to saddle the well nourished and smart Hindus of Bali with umbilical cords! Like Binmore telling me to fuck off and become an Accountant like the rest of my greedy, money grabbing, ilk; Napier is wholly innocent of any Racist intention.
That's why I write this. This is unconscious Racism- albeit of a Romantic type. But it is just as mischievous as the xenophobic type.
Don't fuck up your own people by shitting higher than your arsehole. Recall what William Blake said. Concentrate on 'Minute Particulars'. Who speak of the 'General Good' are liars or fraudsters. Napier, you are better than this. So are your students. Sufflaminandus erat!
Indeed, the very uncertainty of exploration is critical to adaptation and growth.
No. Exploration can be outsourced. Uncertainty is critical to evolvability. Adaptation and growth can be wholly intensional.
What is the point of telling stupid lies? Either peeps read your shite and think you are a stupid liar or they fuck up their won life-chances.
Napier- you are better than this. The only reason gobshites like me paid good money to study for a couple of years in 'Blighty' was coz there were some Working Class teachers who'd tell us not to write stupid lies. Stick to the truth. If you can't say anything interesting, try to be funny. Better yet, shut the fuck up. England loves the reticent. But so too does India and Nigeria and every other country gobshites have fucked up Economically.
Our shared values (the ‘cultures’ we think we know at the centre of the Petri dish) are always explicitly defined at the peripheries, where we become more aware of our assumptions.
Nonsense! Nothing is 'defined' at the margin. That's why it is the barzakh, antarabhava, Swedenborgian limbo, or other imaginal liminal state.
Napier, you are going to contradict yourself pretty soon.
And if there’s no wall or Petri dish to contain us, we need to have that umbilicus:
Fuck off! Are you in fact a High Anglican who sees the Delphic 'omphalos' in the uterine font? If so, cool. But, in that case you need to babble about Oikonomia Mysterion, not indulge in pseudo-scientistic 'Akribia' of a type anyone with a fucking smartphone can easily see is wholly mendacious or entirely meretricious.
because we need a device to measure how far is too far.
This is actually something which Graciella Chichlinisky & Geoffrey Heard could help you guys at UCL with. They discovered that only local arbitrage matters. Measure theory is otiose when a cellular automaton type Oikeiosis gives rise to expanding circles of spontaneous order. Conway's Game of Life gives a simple way to simulate this. A similar approach can get rid of problems with Austrian 'roundaboutness' or other theories of Capital & Growth. This aspect of Econ has been exorcised of those hungry ghosts.
My 'ten Martini' solution is that mimesis is a Cantor set. Its effects aint. Robustness is like that only. What to do? India pherry hot.
This being the case, it follows that curiosity is critical to rethinking what we take for granted.
Fuck off! Being slapped in the face by peeps we took for granted is critical to our rethinking shit. There are 'epigenetic effects' but- as far as I know- they are limited to three generations. After that, you have to have mechanisms with screening or signaling functions. I can't see how any species on an uncertain fitness landscape can have 'umbilical cords' stretching much farther. But then, I'm only aware of the in silico constraints. In the end, like Econ, evolutionary biology must be ergodic not hysteresis ridden. Otherwise, all you have is Just So stories.
These are good questions that once again might be illuminated by a biological example. The human immune system is the best one I know.
Fuck off! We know some must die because, from the phenotype's perspective, immune systems, being concerned with the genotype, suck ass big time. They follow a Statistical 'De Maistrean' Law or Hannan Consistent strategy. The reason that Paideia is 'ontologically dysphoric' and that it can give rise to mechanisms of a casteist, pathogen avoidance, type such that 'separating equilibria' are established on the basis of 'costly signals', is because there is no sustainable Effective Demand for worthless Virtue Signaling Bullshit.
For a long time,
On a Planet far, far, away
science told us that
tech talks, bullshit walks
immunity was about defending ourselves from foreign invaders.
Fuck off! Science began by thinking these things endogenous. Lots of smart Doctors thought the 'germ theory' was for shit. Gandhi's anti-vac obsession arose from his friendship with the brightest scholarship winning Gujju Doctor of his cohort- Pranjivan Mehta.
Incidentally, has Napier never heard of cancer? Or does he simply assume we are too stupid to have heard of it?
This model explains the way we resist becoming host to lots of foreign things that could destroy us – it’s how the body resists becoming a toxic dump site. It also animates the way we teach schoolchildren about washing hands and, today, donning masks and remaining socially distant.
Fuck is wrong with Napier? Did his Mummy- like my Mummy- not get him into playdates so he'd get Measles and so forth? Maybe. I was born in Germany. They were poorer then. Thus they had to be smarter.
Setting aside its inherent xenophobia (keep out all things foreign),
Like food? Are you fucking kidding me? Why use a value laden term like 'xenophobia' in this context? Why not simply say that good cells are really nice to refugee cells whereas nasty cells say mean things about them and cause them to cry copiously into their coco-pops?
the defence model works well enough. But there’s a big problem with this simple idea:
Only if you are a massive fuckwit.
because we need knowledge of the foreign landscape and its inhabitants in order to adapt.
But you also need knowledge of your arse in order to wipe it properly. Otherwise, even if you aint trailing your umbilical cord around, a large turd will be protruding from you backside so everybody will easily be able to track you and capture you and return you to your cage in the freak show.
Indeed, we build immunity on the back of dendritic (presentation) cells that, like the military advance guard, bring back to our bodies specific information that we assess and respond to.
No. We don't build this type of immunity. It may build us- in a manner of speaking. What we do is vaccination and pathogen avoidance and nutritional and medical boosting of immune systems as well as spending a little money on Napier level shitheads writing worthless, witless, crap in Aeon so we can get our own back on the eggheads by laughing at his stupidity.
While it’s true that, in this sense, we’re reacting ‘defensively’
because an offensive doctrine is part of a good Defensive plan
when we adapt, that’s pretty much where the utility of the military metaphor ends – and where modern immunity begins to challenge what immunologists have defined for decades as the ‘recognition and elimination of nonself’.
Immunology did try to hold back Scientific progress. But then anything which is Academo-Bureaucratic is bound to do so.
The metaphor fails because viruses are not living invaders.
Defense has to do with fucking over Fifth Columns as much as 'invader'. The 'non-self' aint our problem. It is the anti-self.
They are just information that can sit around like books in our genetic library until someone reads them, revising what they mean through some editorial updating, and then bringing the information they offer to life once again, in a new form.
We expect mathesis, not metaphors, from Professors of Sciencey subjects. Moreover, what is causing us to shit ourselves currently is 'gain of function' research- i.e. deliberate changes in viruses in labs so as to get the jump on the next big threat- which is that same virus if it escapes the lab.
Moreover, like books in a lending library, some viruses remain unread,
This is a bad analogy. There is more knowledge than books. Even the Bible says of the last 40 days of the risen Christ, that chronicling them would yield a tome larger than the world. 'Gain of function' could occur anywhere.
while others are widely used. Some are dusty, some dog-eared. That’s because viruses proliferate only when
the conditions for them to do so are fulfilled. Why is this soi disant man of Science pretending otherwise?
people congregate in reading groups and animate them; where what those groups attend to is socially, not biologically, driven.
No. The clear and present danger is pro-active 'gain of function' research.
Like those books, viruses are just bits of data that our bodies interpret and share with others, for better or worse. This is a process that happens every day, and mostly for the better, especially when viral intelligence helps us to adapt, and prevents us (like isolated tribes) from dying of the common cold every time cruise ships or truckers from abroad show up at our ferries and ports.
Isolated tribes, like the Sentinele, who made a point of killing strangers, can survive. However, a tribe could end isolation without demographic collapse by a planned system of pathogen exposure for kiddies with selective quarantines for breeding pairs etc. What militates against this, is elders getting drunk off their heads and learning to use novel types of livestock which are the vectors of old world diseases and thus dangerous to a dispersed population with no previous exposure to them.
But there’s another reason that invasive images fail to explain the science. In 1994, the immunologist Polly Matzinger introduced an immune system model in which our antibodies don’t respond solely as a matter of defence. They respond, in her view, because antigen-presenting (dendritic) cells stimulate immunologic responses. Although the immune system remains defensive in this view, Matzinger’s argument shifted the debate ever so slightly from levels of self-preservation to information-presentation – from excluding outsiders to understanding them.
In the epistemic background was Lyn Margulis's use of Temin's notion of proviruses- which is what actually challenged the 'Central Dogma of Molecular Biology' when Napier was still in short pants- as linking up the bio-sphere in accordance with something like an 'Extended Phenotype' theory. But Margulis & Matzinger & c have fallen by the wayside. Science is cruel.
Still, if my memory serves, this project brought back Baldwinian notions- at least hermeneutically. Bodies, though the site of Pateresque 'forces dividing on their ways', do matter. Oikos matters. Oikeiosis matters. Economia matters.
Pedants talking shite- though they may use terms appropriated from Scientific 'Akribia'- don't matter at all.
The idea was radical in immunologic science, but mundane in anthropology.
because anthropology was worthless shit. There was a time when you could write shite about the Iyers of Tanjore or the Maroons of Jamaica. Then Kamala Harris became Veep. Fuck you anthropologists! Some of us make more money than you. One or two live in tonier neighborhoods. Go fuck a duck and turn into ethologists. Tinbergen showed you how. Just do it already you worthless losers.
Countless anthropological arguments saying much the same thing about self, awareness of ‘the other’ had been around for more than a century (and obvious to other cultures for millennia), but the assault on self-preservation through extroverted risk finally entered bench science with Matzinger, appearing not only as ‘new’, but in a form familiar enough to bench scientists to sound plausible.
Fuck off. Margulis & Matzinger & so on are stoopid and backward. But, they iz women. So this could pass for virtue signaling. But Bench Scientists are stoopid and backward. But some aint women. Thus all you have is an availability cascade for the poorly cognitively endowed which will keep them warm at nights only if they don't got air-con.
The immune system is your biological intelligence.
No. Your intelligence is your biological intelligence. Tell this cunt to shove his spinal cord up his arse if he tries to give you medical advise.
It needs the ‘infection’ of foreign bodies to help you survive
Just as he needs the 'defection' of sovereign turds in his body to survive
What is the point of writing high falutin' shite of this sort? 12 year old kids can parody you.
Now, if belatedly, immunology was
so shit as not to do anything worthwhile except be
poised to question both Darwinian preservation and selfishness in one go, as well as its own otherwise unexamined assumptions about the social and biological exclusion of ‘nonself’.
Why does Napier not know that Temin's getting the Nobel- at round the time Napier himself was starting to get high as an Anthropology maven- was what drove the fucking 'revolution' in such backwaters of Immunology as Anthropologists might wade in?
Furthermore, the sort of peeps from Tanjore or Bali or Nigeria or whatever who read Aeon articles are- just like White peeps wot do. Either we already know the Science, or are one Google search away from it. Moreover, we object to Racism- even of a Romantic type. When I was young, I could tell girls I'd get my big Black Man dick after enough intercourse but, at my age, what's the point?
Matzinger’s idea got traction,
Fuck off! She worked in a 'ghost lab' which got shut down. Why? 'Cell-mediated immunity' is hippy-dippy shit. Let Oprah finance it. We want Government funded Labs to find antibodies or macromolecules or whatever so as to take COVID into a corner and fucking KICK THE SHIT OUT OF IT. Then kill it and burn down its house and post really mean things on its fucking Facebook page.
Matzinger's ideas got traction like Deepak Chopra's ideas got traction- except they didn't at all. Chopra's net worth is 150 million dollars.
its shift from defence to curiosity calling attention to the immune system’s role in assessing the unknown (as opposed to shunning the outside).
'Preservation' is not 'selfishness'. Working class Londoners know that Mum must put on the oxygen mask first before putting it on her kid, when the plane nose-dives.
Matzinger and Margulis and so forth may have been nice ladies, but just coz they didn't got no knobs is no reason to gas on about their Delphic qualities.
On the other hand Matzinger listed her dog as a co-author of a paper. How cute is that? Me likey!
Still, the argument would in any case be revised by three key realities. The first, which didn’t take root among theoretical immunologists
who were very actively shite- as I vividly recall
until regenerative medicine emerged at the end of the 1990s, is that viruses are less invaders than informants.
I wrote a novella in the early Nineties which was ahead of those fucking retards. It is included in my collection 'Tigers of Wrath'. Check it out on Google Books. Search 'Temin pro-virus'.
I’d picked up this idea from the Balinese whom I worked with during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.
The Balinese, like other Hindus, use a simple heuristic for 'error checking'. Informants may be deceptive and do the work of defenders or invaders.
But it wasn’t limited to them. Other, less ‘Cartesian’ Indigenous groups, such as the Navajo, share this understanding.
Balinese & Navajo- so random!- as the kids used to say.
The second truth, which came from the same cross-cultural experience, was that immunology was stuck in self-interest: it couldn’t fathom why a self would reach out in an extroverted and potentially dangerous manner instead of only selfishly defending its identity.
Something similar could be said about Arrow-Debreu models. If Knightian Uncertainty exists, then volatility is needed to maintain screening and signaling mechanisms. But, Evolution only arises where there is Uncertainty. Thus the discipline should have been looking at regret minimizing 'multiplicative weighting update algorithms'. These have become much more tractable to compute and thus we keep getting results showing Evolution shows 'Hannan Consistency' of some type.
Scientists were slowly awakening to a fact well known in many non-Darwinian settings: namely, that externality (extroversion) matters.
Only if Uncertainty exists. Otherwise you can use intensional types and stay away from 'external' signals.
So does reciprocity – as anthropologists well know.
Why speak of exchange as 'reciprocal'? It may be anything but. What matters is the terms of trade.
External information has to resonate with ‘self’ –
it merely needs to trigger a useful action
in this case, with cells that your body already makes – in order to bind, transcribe and replicate. That’s the key function of our immune cells, which are made mostly in the thymus (T cells) and bone marrow (B cells). Our bodies make millions of novel cells in these mutation factories, so many in fact that we can’t even count them. Like experimental radio beams sent into outer space, these cells send out signals, functioning as much as search engines as systems of defence.
But they aren't actually search engines- because a 'hit' does not lead to massive investment in more such 'hits'- or 'systems of defence'- because defense involves an offensive doctrine- are they?
The point here is that thinking of the immune system only as a defensive fortress-builder seriously misses what it’s actually doing.
It is sacrificing bodies it inhabits as part of a discovery process. This is called 'Regret Minimization'. Hannan consistency was taken up by Machine Learning long ago. But there are better discovery processes which involve massive investment in research programs and also 'offensive doctrines' of a military type.
Because the immune system is also, and quite literally, your biological intelligence.
Unless you are smart and went to Med School.
It needs the ‘infection’ of foreign bodies to help you develop and survive.
But, surely, nothing is a truly 'foreign' body- isn't that the point of this screed?
This same need also explains how vaccines protect us from biological meltdown.
We all undergo 'biological meltdown'- i.e we die.
Extroversion is therefore not only needed as a defence strategy, as Matzinger would have it, but as a means of engaging with and also creating environmental adaptations, even if these encounters prove life-threatening for some. We see this need manifest itself graphically in the present COVID-19 crisis – less by what is happening scientifically, than by what is happening socially.
Extroversion is a condition of life- for those not created and maintained in vitro- i.e everybody.
A recent report on wellbeing and mental health by the Brookings Institution attempts to deconstruct the apparent paradox of reported feelings of hope among otherwise disadvantaged and openly disenfranchised populations in the United States during the pandemic.
But, Amartya Sen and other shitheads at the Indian Statistics Institute or DSE or whatever established that reported morbidity was always less among those who were well and truly fucked. Why? Morbidity is worth having if remedies are available.
‘Predominantly Black counties have COVID-19 infection rates that are nearly three times higher than that of predominantly white counties,’ the report says, ‘and are 3.5 times more likely to die from the disease compared to white populations.’
Yet those same communities also express much higher levels of optimism and hope.
If their immune systems are under greater stress, it makes sense for them to invest in optimism and hope. I suppose those fighting this disease at risk to their own lives, have found ways to maintain morale and esprit de corps.
Why does the author highlight the color of one such group? Is it 'virtue signaling' or is it 'racism'? To answer this question, I will look a the rest of Napier's essay in my next post.
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