“But thanks to recent advances in stem cell research and the fine work of Doctors Krinski and Altschuler, Clevon should regain full reproductive function.” – Idiocracy
I saw my math teacher using graph paper. I’m suspicious. I’m sure he was plotting something.
In the United States, winter is near. And it all has to do with biology . . .
I didn’t like high school biology – the class. The dating was just fine. Not that I didn’t have a good teacher, I had a great teacher. She was obviously passionate about biology.
I love science, but biology seemed so . . . pointless. It was a lot of learning the proper names for things (stamen and pistil are two vaguely naughty flower parts that I recall) and learning how a flower worked was so much less interesting to me than learning about the floating fusion reactor that powers our solar system.
High school me decided that biology wasn’t a real science because math wasn’t involved. Bacteria multiply by dividing. How silly is that?
No, biology was just endless classification of things into groups. It was like Rainman developed a class.: “Yeah, definitely Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. Definitely.” Besides,
For me, the most interesting part of the biology class was that my lab partners were two cheerleaders. They gleefully did the frog dissection with a morbid fascination that was almost creepy. I just sat back and watched and made bad sketches in my lab book while a basketball cheerleader wielded the scalpel like a bobby-socks wearing samurai in a short skirt and school-color saddle shoes.
Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you kill both of them in the process. But . . . to use the word “dissecting” means the frog (or joke) in question is already dead. The right word choice would be “vivisecting,” which is the equivalent of dissecting, but with the animal (or joke) still very alive. With this in mind, I probably should say, ” Explaining a joke is like vivisecting a frog: you kill both of them in the process.” See what I did there? I took the common phrase: ” Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: you kill both of them in the process,” and I vivisected it.
As I’ve gotten older, I realize that there are interesting aspects to almost any subject, even cheerleaders. As I said earlier, when I was younger, my biology interests mainly involved attempts at field experimentation with cheerleaders. Decades later biology came back up in my intellectual wanderings in settings that didn’t involve double features at the drive-in.
This time my study of the convergence of biology and economics explained to me why half of the US population can’t talk to the other half – and can’t even understand the other half.
It starts with a wolf.
There is a bleak, windswept plain in Alaska. Off in the distance, the wolf pack follows a caribou herd, as it has for the better part of a week. The pack acts as one. A lone wolf in the deep winter in the north is a dead wolf.
The female wolves – smaller, quicker – herd and harass the caribou on the sides, keeping the caribou moving to the west, away from the cover of the trees. The older males push through the center, finally selecting the small group of caribou that they will take.
This also describes a grandpa when he sees a man-bun.
The older males use their superior muscle to attack. The young wolves and pups follow along, sometimes play-fighting among each other, but more often imitating the adults. The play will turn to hunting as they watch, learn, and get older.
As the caribou comes down, the males feed first. Eventually, the pups feed. It’s been a week, and they’re hungry, and a wolf after a kill will sometimes eat twenty percent of its body weight in meat. The alpha male and alpha female of this pack are mated for life and will stay mated until the male dies in three years from an infection due to a broken tooth, but today they have food.
A significant amount of effort is put into raising the pups, who, when they get older will split off and join other packs.
Wolves follow what a biologist calls “K” selection.
Based on their environment, wolves face significant pressure for resources every day. They live in environments at the sheer edge of habitability and have to cooperate to fight those environments daily in order to survive.
Their young have significant parental involvement and training. Due to the scarcity inherent in the environment, they must work together to live. They only have a few offspring, but they invest heavily in them. And a mother wolf will fight to the death to save a pup – the pack works together and is loyal to individual members.
Oh, yeah, Happy Easter!
Rabbits follow “r” selection. The “K” and the “r” originate as variables in an equation that you’ll never use, but here’s the link (LINK) if you want to stare at it. See, the biologists finally figured out a way to wedge some math in there!
r selection is the opposite of K selection in many ways. r selection depends upon having significant amounts of resources available. These resources make life easy, so strategies change.
Part of winning biologically in a resource-rich environment revolves around having the most number of offspring. So, have as many as you want. Really, r selection requires the rabbits to reproduce as quickly as they can so their genes spread far and wide.
Since resources are abundant, mating for life is silly. Mate with . . . whoever.
Whenever.
However.
As long as they have babies.
Two rabbits were being chased by a pack of wolves. They hid in a forest. One rabbit asked the other, “So, you want to keep running, or wait a few days until we outnumber them?”
Since a rabbit has lots of babies, each gets little attention, and the idea of a rabbit protecting offspring is unknown – rabbits run away, hoping the predator will eat their offspring and leave them alone.
Resources are plentiful, so there’s no real reason to work together. Not that the rabbits won’t hang out together and chill, it’s just that no rabbit that will ever inconvenience itself to help another rabbit.
Biologically, the rabbits avoid competition for resources – there’s no need.
The wolves focus on mating for life, but promiscuity is required for rabbits – rabbits are single parents. Rabbits are single parents who come to early sexual maturity early and have children young.
Wolves have to take part in competition, delay sex and are (mainly) monogamous in the wild. They have dual parents for raising their pups, a much longer time to sexual maturity and independence, and will fight to the death (if needed) for each other.
We see echoes of r/K selection in our society today. When the economy tanks? Divorce rate plummets.
As social spending goes up providing free resources? Sexual promiscuity in youth goes up. Single parenthood increases.
The number of children born to unwed mothers went from 3.8% in 1940 (before welfare) to 5.3% in 1960 to over 40% by 2008. The numbers stayed small as long as resources were limited, but once resources were free? Boom, many women become r-selected rabbits, which is paralleled only with the behaviors seen at the beginning of the decay of empires.
Which I covered back in 2017:
But at least a remnant of society remains K selected. K selection was the societal norm prior to the 1960s and the mass rollout of welfare. So, blue state/red state? Republican/Democrat? Left/Right?
Or r/K?
That’s where we find ourselves today. Our political divisions are so deep that they are expressed in differing biological strategies. When the biological strategy is rooted so deeply because it is supported by society, it becomes part of the definition of self, not something abstract.
What do you call a can that gets a college degree? A graduated cylinder.
How deeply does this go? Attacking a Christian’s religious beliefs is just fine. Attacking someone’s gender identification?
Heresy!
Only someone bad would question someone’s sexual choices! Time to pull out cancel culture! And if you don’t agree with the effect polygamy, bigamy, furries, and any other arrangement that people can devise to express their sexuality might have on society, you’re a fascist!
I imagine an unwed mother with eight children from seven fathers living on public support cannot understand (and may even look down upon) the married parents with 1.2 children and a perfect lawn. It’s a division that’s not rich/poor, but deeper.
What happens when the resources dry up, when the fields full of rabbity grass give way to the cold steppes of wolf-friendly tundra? Society changes – the ability to use surplus goods for r-selected people goes away. Societal attitudes change, too.
Watch conflicts around the world and think about . . . how many of them are simply due to a difference in r/K reproduction strategy? These conflicts inevitably move a society from abundance to scarcity.
The rabbits rule the spring, the wolves rule the winter.
And it’s getting chilly.
I told you that the podcast would keep getting better, and it is. I’m betting that by summertime we’ll have reached a singularity of funny that might swallow YouTube whole. In addition to our normal batch of helpful stories and hilarious banter, we have:
