“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.
Nature is not static. It is dynamic. Grass is abundant, so the rabbit population grows. Rabbits become plentiful, so the wolf population grows. As grass becomes scarce due to over grazing, the rabbit population declines. As the wolf population peaks, they eat too many of a declining number of rabbits, and the rabbit population plummets. Then the wolves starve. Then the grass regrows, and the rabbits start producing more bunnies in the relative absence of wolves.
But if you import alfalfa, the rabbit population never declines. If you prevent the wolves from eating the rabbits, the wolves starve and the rabbit population grows without limits.
Socialist government imports alfalfa and defangs the few wolves it hasn’t killed for sport. After all, rabbits eat grass, so wolves can learn to eat grass, too. (See also Lysenko. See also the New Socialist Man.)
—
In the nature/nurture debate (it’s both, duh!), Leftists insist there is only nurture. Not just nurture, wishful thinking. Anything can be anything it wants to be, just by wanting.
Leftism is defined as the abject denial of the existence of reality.
Or, more likely, the Leftists just starve out the most toublesome rabbits.
But in the process, they make wolves, too.
Profound and full of insight. This one is a “keeper”
Couldn’t have said it better myself. I rarely comment here, but this one was too good to not give thanks to Mr. Wilder!
Thank you!!!!
Thank you, sir!
I presume you are familiar with Anonymous Conservative and his “Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics” ?
That is where I first heard about the r/K spectrum being equivalent to the left-right political spectrum. Fascinating stuff that explains so much.
Yup. I started reading him some time ago. I was familiar, but nobody has done more with the topic than he has.
This will take some pondering. I keep flashing back to an article referenced by one of your commentors where rats in a large housing container (Utopia) all suffered complete colony collapse, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-mouse-utopias-1960s-led-grim-predictions-humans-180954423/.
So we be approaching winter combined with the r/K conflict and the utopia crisis. A hard think on meshing these two conditions might produce interesting results. I bet it predicts some of the observed behavior of politicians that put up high fences and deploy an army around them.
Yup. The Beautiful Ones, who just preened, all by themselves . . . .
“Bacteria multiply by dividing. How silly is that?”
That’s funny I am going to steal that.
Yes global cooling is growing daily. It is hard to fathom as I stated to a friend yesterday. It accelerated my thought process in the last 12 months not that I wasn’t thinking about it for years now. It is strange to tell people that years ago I was joking about buying a plow and a mule.
Finishing a book bought 2 years ago.
Not the name of the book but referenced things of this type. “They will follow orders, just ask Milgram”.
Indeed. Milgram’s work was pretty scary.
Just one thing missing there, JW. Humans have agency. We are capable, in theory at least, of making moral, rational decisions, rather than forever leading with our lusty loins. I came of age in what can best be described as a “target-rich environment”, yet settled on a single mating prospect to whom I promised my everlasting love and fidelity. Through even the most absurdly unlucky of times, that promise has held.
Granted, good economic times and plentiful resources were what made that environment rich with opportunity in the first place. There was no shortage of seats in that game of musical chairs. But the fact remains that under any circumstances, some will mate for life, caring deeply for their young, and others will find themselves incapable of sustained monogamy or dedication to their offspring. And that takes one headfirst into the dark, taboo realm of human biodiversity.
r/K selection as it applies to humankind is not a new concept, but just like critical race theory, it is a hot-button issue in these turbulent times. It is twisting the dragon’s tail to explore it in anything more than the abstract.
Great point – we do, each of us, have choices. But some people (I am convinced) don’t even know they’re making those choices. Some wolves, but even more rabbits.
You can’t have a serious discussion on breeding dynamics and population biology without discussing the Feigenbaum Constant. This 18 minute video is worth every second to watch, and as promised in the title, This Equation Will Change How You See The World.
Great video!
Oh, and in other, probably-somehow-related-to-what-John-is-talking-about news….
https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx
Church membership has never been an accurate measure of devotion or fidelity, the difference today is that the social stigma of not being associated with a church has mostly disappeared.
Aurthur: Agreed. I have regularly attended church for the past 5 years, but have been a member. The last church I belonged to decided to supported leftist policies and candidates again, so had my membership terminated.
I have now found a church that I like. I will be joining it in a couple of weeks. Two friends will continue as non-members although they attend weekly.
Yeoch. More morality is now relative.
“There is a bleak, windswept plane [sic] in Alaska.”
“Every July, peas grow there.“
Fixed. Thank you.
You can fix planes?
Only if they make wood very smooth.
**In** July! And now I know about Orson Welles’ audition.
Wow. Hadn’t even thought about that in forever.
It is interesting how the left is using the dependency class as tools to gradually implement their agenda. Odd thing that is missing from consideration is that there is always a bigger predator out there who will eventually come for the left. The current power elite are always being hunted by another group of like minded people who are willing to manipulate the masses for their own purposes. Happens at present that China is lobbying to move into the top seat of power if they have not already done so all to displace that European based group that has run things in this half of the world for centuries.
Inherent human behavior beyond survival includes greed and lust and in this case lust for power. The rabbits are of little consequence as compared to the lives and behaviors of the power elite. The power elite hold the controls to means of which they can eradicate massive numbers of rabbits if for some reason the rabbits decide to revolt. This is why disarming the rabbits is critical to long term control. No matter how many rabbits are created, as long as the powerful elite control the means of eradicating rabbits the rabbits will always be controlled and will never be free. The self cancelling natural system does not exist in any real sense when you incorporate politics and technology.
In all honesty I believe we are more threatened by the coming self awareness of electronic systems (ala the MATRIX) than we are the rabbits. Our reliance on semiconductors and our use of them to manage our might will be our downfall eventually. The only exception would be if the entire world were subjected to a massive EMP blast that literally fried every silicon junction known to man. Then, when the likes of Bill Gates has to deal with wolves, real ones too, he will find out what happens when you tamper with natural selection. The chances of this happening are probably not any more or less likely than any other major world wide disaster so keep your eyes open for that massive meteor too!
Related, from today’s headlines:
“Removing college testing barriers will increase student diversity”
Hmmm, both our greatest threats come from silicon – being without it, and being mastered by it . . . good thoughts!!!!
Biology, chemistry, racist! There are 57 genders because that is how many strains of chronic we have in the faculty lounge weed spice rack.
The coming nuclear winter won’t be all that cold but that was a crackpot theory from the KGB anyway.
External enemies will wait until the enlightened evolved beings in DC disarm completely before turning Chiquitastan into a PRC/CCP serf colony.
The Dragon will collect on what it is owed with the republic and the most worthless traitorous political class in human history will accept these terms.
Another peaceful religion attack in DC today but it was a black Muslim from flyover deplorable land with a knife who killed one YT cop and another is seriously wounded so you won’t hear about it.
The poleece made him good so there might be some undocumented reparations if the comrades are really as tough as they like to portray on Fakebook.
Hey, that was a mostly peaceful murder in DC.
Boy it is almost like there are some racial parallels to this formula…..
In central Africa, the growing season is every day. You don’t have to plan next year’s crops a year in advance. And with malaria historically being a leading cause of death, life is random and short, so long term planning is rather pointless.
Geography drives history and biology.
Which might beg the question what the latter half of the 21st century might mean, population-wise.
Divorce rate going down during a depression is correlation.
The marriage rate going down during a depression is the causation.
It goes down during a financial depression because women don’t marry poor, broke, unemployed guys, because that would interfere with their ongoing efforts to monkeybranch to a rich sugar daddy.
There are always individual exceptions, but they merely prove the rule.
And women have only themselves to blame, because they never marry across (let alone down), only upwards, and they’ve leveraged the State into being that Sugar Daddy, so with most men being off the market, fewer men are playing the marrying game, since the odds for those who play are worse than roulette. If it weren’t for government transferring men’s wealth to single mothers aggressively and serially, the poverty rate for single moms would be about 70%, and their interest would be in chastity before marriage, and fidelity afterwards, for the long haul.
But society burned that bridge in the mid-60s, then blew up the pilings for good measure, and hasn’t looked back.
Now society gets what it gets, and when government can’t continue the promised wealth transfer, it’s going to get ugly for the rabbits, and their baby bunnies.
Boo frickin’ hoo.
Sew the wind, reap the whirlwind.
It will. And I don’t think one out of a hundred can see the coming end to the long, eternal summer they’ve know all of their lives.
…’sow’ to the wind. reap the whirlwind.
apologies, brother Aesop… old and in the way, I guess, though. I do try to behave. Excellent post, though, John.
Thank you, Grandpa. More to come. And I think you’ll like the next one.
r/K is an excellent analogy to liberal/conservative, some time ago i realized that the number of offspring is one of the greatest factors of wealth concentration, sad the the r´s didn´t got it. On a side note, my mother is a PhD on evolutionary genetics and my wife is a MSc on the same field; sometimes i see myself like a guinea pig or related to something the Freud has said.
Never post while boozing….sigh.
Don’t worry!!!! I know some bloggers who have had a beer or two while writing.
Rabbits gonna rabbit.
And, hey, nice background!!!
IMG_3324.jpeg
Rabbits were created to be food for birds of prey and foxes and coyotes and even wolves, amongst other predators. That may not be straight biology, but that’s my bet. Their bright white cottontail marks them out to sharp-eyed birds of prey, and their scent marks them out to the rest. So if their predators are going to continue to live, the rabbits are going to have to reproduce like crazy, and that’s what they do. And they know they’re being hunted although I doubt they know they’ll end up as lunch. One time I was out with the pack, and we kept seeing these headless rabbits everyplace, and we were wondering what was going on, until we saw an owl swoop down on something on the ground and then fly back up – and there was a newly headless rabbit. So they get hunted for sport, too, apparently. Foxes will feast on the remains, or bald eagles or turkey vultures – nothing goes to waste in nature. Near one of the headless rabbits, there were four or five baby rabbits, and they might make their way back to the den – but more likely end up as a tasty snack. This r/K stuff is interesting, but I’m not sure how it applies to humans, what probably applies more is “that which you subsidize, you will get more of, that which you tax, less”.
Wow – don’t know what I would have done if I had come across a bunch of headless rabbits!
But it does apply. Resources change behavior. And I’d much rather be a wolf than a rabbit.