FORGIVE ME FOR CONTINUING WITH PETER’S RESPONSE TO MY RESPONSE TO GORDON’S TWO POSTS. I HAVE LEARNED DIRECTLY FROM PETER BUT MORE OFTEN INDIRECTLY—HE HAS FORCED ME TO THINK THROUGH MATTERS AND IDENTIFY EXACTLY WHERE HE IS WRONG. I AM FINISHED WITH THAT NOW. LIFE IS SHORT AND MINE IS GETTING SHORTER BY THE DAY, SO I WILL REPEAT MY PIECE AND PETER’S RESPONSE TO IT (IN YELLOW) AND THEN MY CURRENT RESPONSE—IN CAPITAL LETTERS. I AM ALSO ADDING TWO NAMES TO GORDON’S LIST. DAVID HAIG WHO IS A BRILLIANT EVOLUTIONARY GENETICIST AT HARVARD AND JEFFREY EPSTEIN WHO IS A BRILLIANT FUND AND INVESTMENT MANAGER (PALM BEACH, NYC, US VIRGIN ISLANDS) WITH BROAD SCIENTIFIC INTERESTS. ---- Dear Gruterites Gordon has now brought the argument full circle and given the project a larger meaning. The most powerful nation on earth, with the greatest power to vent harm—or, in theory, confer benefits—is ruled by an organism that fits the definition of a psychopath—of the narcissistic kind—or a malevolent narcissist. This presents serious dangers that need to be addressed. Peter Richerson has made several valuable points: 1—Causality could go entirely in the other direction than the one I suggested—people avoid more psychopathic relatives the more experience they have had due to closer relatedness. And the paper I attached does not allow discrimination. The fact that psychopaths show only a weak and insignificant tendency to migrate further from place of birth is mildly interesting but has nothing to do with who is causing any difference in migration. As far as I can think it through, selection pressures on psychopaths and relatives of psychopaths should be roughly equal and therefore equally likely. Peter is biased toward reaction by others, perhaps because of his bias toward “cultural” explanations. First, psychopaths always have the first move in the co-evolutionary struggle and relatives getting out of the way is the next move. Secondly, it is very easy for a psychopath to simply discriminate against harming his relatives but harder for them to study and react. Peter claims that they are often spotted early in life which I heartily doubt. <> TRUMP IS NOT THE PERFECT MATE BUT IS HE REALLY A ‘LOUSY FATHER’?—ASK HIS CHILDREN, IVANKA, DONALD JR ETC—THEY SURE DON’T ACT LIKE THEY HATE HIM. HOW ABOUT VICTIMS OF HINDU AND MUSLIM HONOR KILLINGS WHO ARE ‘ASSASSINATED’ ‘WITH THE ASSENT OF THEIR FAMILIES’—ARE THE VICTIMS PSYCHOPATHS OR ARE THEIR KILLERS? FOR THE EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS OF HONOR KILLINGS—SEE BELOW. NOTE THAT CULTURAL PEOPLE HAVE OFFERED LITTLE OR NOTHING OF VALUE ON THIS SUBJECT BUT EVOLUTINARY GENETICS AT ONCE SUGGESTS AN INTERESTING AND VERY STRONG EFFECT. 2— His suggestion that chimpanzee dominance hierarchies consist of a version of psychopathy is utterly novel to me and most interesting. I had always thought of dominance hierarchies as being associated with tyranny and despotism—but are these not often associated with psychopathy?! <> “NEAR FIXATION”—SEZ WHO? OH YOU AND YOUR STUDENTS—NOW THAT’S A SURPRISE. Consider the “Butcher of Bagdad” Saddam Hussein or the sadistic Basir Assad. The only thing they didn’t do is specialize in rape, although Saddam’s son Uday did and we can be sure each had greater than average reproductive success but note how sensitive each is to degree of relatedness writ large. Saddam was most biased toward people that came from his place of birth, along the Tigrit River, then people in the surrounding province and then Sunnis over Shia. Since he was willing to kill others on a large scale—200,000 Shia slaughtered when the idiotic first Bush allowed Saddam to retain his Airforce after we had marched to Bagdad after flinging Saddam’s troops out of Kuwait. Or for that matter, Saddam’s attack on Shia Iran which claimed more than a million lives on both sides. <> I FEEL CERTAIN I HAVE HAD FAR MORE EXPERIENCE WITH PSYCHIATRISTS THAN PETER HAS. AM I A “LAY PERSON”? WHO KNOWS? IF ALL NON-PSYCHIATRISTS ARE LAY PEOPLE THEN PSYCHIATRISTS ARE MERELY PUFFING THEMSELVES UP AND ROPING THEMSELVES OFF, SOMETHING THEY HAVE BEEN DOING SINCE THE TIME OF FREUD. “One general definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result.” NOT REALLY—THIS IS A FAMOUS JOKE OF EINSTEIN’S BUT, HEY, WHO’SE COUNTING? TRUMP AS AN ORGANISM—AS SEEN BY A “LAY PERSON” Strongly biased toward close family Strongly biased against distant relatives—a racist of the first rank Extreme Narcissist A strategy of random moves—to fool others? and/or keep attention perpetually focused on him?—incredible how he will go against THE NRA one day and invite in their leaders the following day Lying continuously--very creative and obstinate—producing an entIre alternate universe, permitting him to reverse course and cover tracks at the same time Minor matters: Peter points out that Mealy (1995) was the first reference he knows of on psychopathy being under frequency dependent selection. An earlier paper, cited in the one I attached, developed the same argument—Harpending and Sobus 1987. Peter characterizes sickle cell anemia as a “crude adaptation to malaria”. Crude? In what sense? A single copy of the sickle gene gives you anemia, in which the normal shape of the red blood cell—a flat round pill—changes under low oxygen tension into a sickle shape which crushes the malarial Plasmodium inside it. The low oxygen tension is caused by the parasite itself, since it consumes oxygen in the red blood cell. The cell then quickly flips back into normal shape as the oxygen tension returns to normal levels. A sickle individual without malaria suffers no cost at all, since all red blood cells have oxygen tension well above the level that would cause sickling. Sickle cell DISEASE by contrast refers to an individual with two sickle genes and this is a serious condition since there is extensive sickling in a person who is otherwise normal and lacks, for example, malaria. The survival rate of such individuals in Jamaica (where 10% of the population have a sickle gene and 1% two copies) is 57 years, a good 10+ years below normal—nor is life pleasant or easy. This is the only crudity in the same, the failure to ameliorate the negative effects of two copies. It is correct as Peter says, that relatively recent human invasion by malaria (~10,000 years ago) was probably in response to large population increases due to agriculture and so on. This short time period has also prevented much selection to ameliorate the sickle cell disease. It is not true, however, that “it and many other crude adaptations” result from the “ability of the malarial parasites to outwit the immune system”. First of all, other “adaptations” are no more crude than the sickle trait. For example, the Duffy antigen, a surface protein on red blood cells, is designed to spot Plasmodium and prevent entry. And the parasite does not “outwit the immune system”. It is one of the very few Protozoa (or for that matter bacteria) that live WITHIN cells and thus escape the immune system entirely (except see below). Viruses live inside cells, precisely why we can’t use antibiotics against them. And here is a joke for you. Bacteria, as we know, are rapidly evolving resistance to almost all antibiotics but on many tips of the branches of the bacterial bush, species are evolving that DEPEND on antibiotics for their food—stop treating them with antibiotics and they die of hunger! Plasmodium reproduces within its red blood cell and the offspring are released into the blood as the cell bursts. Now the immune system responds strongly and all hell breaks loose, fever and chills, bed-ridden and sometimes dead. When given a choice, mosquitos preferentially bite sick people, perhaps because they are too weak to swat the mosquitos away. Once in a mosquito, they do nothing to harm it other than congregate in its mouth near the biting organ, the better to arrive new human. <> MY, MY—SO NOW WE ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF TELLING THE WORLD HOW GOD WOULD HAVE HANDLED THE WHOLE MATTER. I BARELY UNDERSTAND MY LITTLE CORNER OF THE WORLD MUCH LESS THE MIND OF THE OMNISCIENT CREATOR. WHO SAYS SHE OR HE IS BIASED TOWARD HUMANS? PERHAPS SHE HAS AN AFFECTION FOR PLASMODIUM, AS IN HALDANE’S FAMOUS JOKETO WHEN ASKED BY A CLERIC WHAT A LIFETIME STUDY OF EVOLUTION HAD TAUGHT HALDANE ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE CREATOR—“AN INORDINATE FONDNESS FOR BEETLES”—AT THAT TIME, 1/3RD OF ALL ANIMAL SPECIES—300,000—WERE BEETLES. I enjoyed Brian Mannix’s comment, most especially “Pseven”. His argument for cooperation is the same as that of Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations. Once a medium of exchange is introduced into a system of barter, itself a reciprocal relationship, it can be vastly extended, with specialization such that one individual no longer produces ten pencils/day, but ten people are specialized to produce a single pencil—and thus a thousand/day. I too share an aversion to cultural/group selection though perhaps for other reasons. But I side with Peter in feeling that male self-domestication is more important in damping male psychopathy than female choice—Richard Wrangham vs Sarah Hrdy among evolutionary anthropologists. <> Peter’s argument on reduction of inter-birth interval in humans again veers off into culture-land when one does not need it—paternal investment, grandmother investment and older sibling investment are all expected on genetic grounds. The authority on the subject is David Haig at Harvard. <> IF THIS IS TRUE—THAT “HUMAN COOPERATION AMONG KIN” and also AMONG “CLOSE ASSOCIATES”—“MAY REQUIRE ENFORCEMENT OF NORMS BY THIRD PARTIES”, THEN I HAVE WASTED 40 YEARS OF MY LIFE ON THESE TOPICS. THE MORE GENERAL PROBLEM WITH PETER’S BIAS IS THAT SO LITTLE OF INTEREST HAS EMERGED FROM CULTURAL ARGUMENTATION. CONTRAST GENETIC. FOR EXAMPLE, WE NOW KNOW THAT WHEN MATERNAL GRANDMOTHERS INVEST IN THEIR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN, BOTH GRANDDAUGHTERS AND GRANDSONS BENEFIT, WHILE WHEN PATERNAL GRANDMOTHERS DO THE INVESTING, GRANDDAUGHTERS BENEFIT WHILE GRANDSONS ARE HARMED. THIS WAS PREDICTED BASED ON THE DIFFERENT WAY IN WHICH THE GRANDMOTHER’S X CHROMOSOME IS INHERITED IN THE TWO SYSTEMS. NO “CULTURAL” ARGUMENTATION HAS COME ANYWHERE CLOSE. OR TAKE THE LOGIC OF SO-CALLED HONOUR KILLINGS, WHICH I HAVE NOW WORKED ON INTENSIVELY FOR TWO YEARS. NOTHING OF USE FROM CULTURAL “THEORY” BUT A POWERFUL ARGUMENT BASED ON THE EFFECTS OF REPEATED FIRST COUSIN MARRIAGES IN MUSLIM SOCIETIES—AND IN HINDU SOCIETIES ENDOGAMOUS CASTES IN COMPETITION WITH EACH OTHER. See my talk in Barcelona, Spain https://youtu.be/F_4Lr13rnx