Institutions are Fauceirs

This actually is a comment on a Peter Turchin post on institutions.

First of all I want to mention the new look of his social evolution forum. Looks great though I miss a little bit the sobriety of a scientific publication. Looks rather like a glossy newspaper.

Anyway, remarkable is his scientific thoughts slowly approach Fauceir Theory. Institutions are mere fauceirs, and comparing them with software, another typical fauceir, is just abstracting those analogies that make a fauceir a fauceir. Fauceirs are essential to describe evolution scientifically.

While in the realm of biological evolution it is still possible to get the big picture of evolution without fauceir because
(1) there are only a few fauceirs and you can name them personally,
(2) clades, biotopes and environments are relative stable and comparable in their influences on evolution.
This, however, is no longer true in the realm of social evolution. The main actors, such as laws, education, institutions, economic enterprises, change rapidly and so does their impact on evolution. They do so as pieces of software—the analogy is striking—which grow into one or several new projects. That dynamic process requires these fauceirs to be frequently re-evaluated.

In the majority of scientific literature, those evaluations of actors are made from the perspective of the government. Peter Turchin’s blog is no exception, and this comes as no surprise because most scientists are paid by the government. They work in governmentally supported institutions after all, but that makes those scientists dependable and ideologically imprinted and their work tainted.

In my recent post I demonstrated that a government is but an other actor in social evolution, so evaluating and defining social fauceirs from a state’s perspective only can lead to inconsistencies and even dangerous ideological flaws as we’ve seen with the propagation of war, for instance.

Hope this post helps a little bit further to open eyes.

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This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.

Democracy – What is that anyway?

I know, many people would be up in arms when reading this headline. For them democracy is so precious, even bears a state holiness, that they feel provoked, even personally offended, by simply question its usefulness. But those are people deeply imbued by governmental ideology. Any ideology hampers scientific analysis. (The most prominent example is the denial of the helocentric system by the catholic ideology for centuries.) Scientific endeavor has to free itself from any ideology—as far as possible—including its fervent proponents, so I don’t care.

For starters, a good collection of arguments why democracy fails can be obtained from this video:

It finally convincingly illustrates why a democratically elected government is constitutionally bound to increase the income gap. Despite all rhetoric to the contrary and despite of all the gullible people with good intentions who want to improve government to close the gap.

There is another misconception about democracy. Ideology states that democracy constitutes a collective decision and is therefore always the best one. (Condorcet developed a theorem that supports). Mato Nagel recently showed that this is not the case. On the contrary, given the Dunning-Kruger effect, the results of such a collective decision is rather mediocre at best. Now, he is confronted with a lot of hatred for his paper.

From an evolutionary point of view democracy is just camouflaged parasitism. Parasites use to evolve camouflage to evade a host’s defense system. That’s the same with a people (host) and the pack of thieves (parasites) who use government (camouflage/evading system) to protect themselves from the people’s defense.

Figure 1. The upper panel shows a flu virus that can invade an individual that has no antibodies neither against the blue nor the red antigen, shown in the lower part of this panel. The panel in the middle illustrated a body that effectively developed blue antibodies. That body can be infected by viruses coated with red antigens only. The lower panel shows the opposite case. In all cases the virus adapts to the immune system to improve its chances to cause an epidemic infection.

Even the mechanisms to break a host’s defense are similar to the flu virus. Every year a flu virus generates new strains and by invading the people the one that experiences the least counter attacks by the human bodies becomes epidemic. Every year an other strain. And after a couple of years, when the immune system’s memory has declined enough, an old strain can become epidemic again.

Figure 2. The adaptation of social parasites works similarly. Instead of coating antigens, they hide themselves by the shield of government from their hosts defense system. The upper panel shows a population that is not yet immune against any kind of social theft, so their defense systems symbolized by fists in the lower panel are not activated yet. The middle and the lower panel illustate how the shield changes according the accumulation of hatred in the population. Same as with flu viruses, the shield that shows the least counter attack is employed to cause the epidemic.

That sound quite similar to democratic elections, and the US American elections in particular. In primaries the most sympathetic candidate is forged and finally chosen to become epidemic for 4-8 years. After that period the people become resistant to that strain (party) and usually elect the other strain (party).

Against flu, vaccination is effective. There does not exist vaccination against government. Most people aren’t even aware of its role. It can be depressing to realize that we all live in a state of chronic social disease, and many people don’t even have an idea how it feels to be free and uncompromised.

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This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.

Misconceptions in Social Evolution Theory

This is actually a reply to a post on the Social Evolution Forum website which regrettably is closed.

The author reports an incident at Newark airport’s terminal that he terribly felt an insufficiency and that he asks for social evolution to improve and wonders why it never happens.

It is a typical mistake made by many when studying evolution. I did it myself when I was a boy. I tried a mouse to evolve gills by adapting it to underwater living. After I drowned a bunch of them, I finally realized that it is impossible. Actually I was more successful with insects. They survived significantly longer, but also died eventually.

At that time, I found myself in good, even academic, company. Only a few decades before a Russian academic claimed to evolve temperature resistant corn by simply exposing it to the cold. He also failed eventually.

Well, what I learned from that is embodied in Fauceir Theory. The rule simply states that a fauceir doesn’t evolve by itself but in a context of a master fauceir, a container that embraces it. Applying that rule one can easily conclude that Newark Airport will never evolve by itself. It is just an individual of the species airport.

Thus improvement can be expected by (1) natural selection in the population of airports and (2) horizontal gene (information) transfer.

Interestingly enough in the comments both these ways are illustrated.

1. (ad 1) The monopoly prevents natural selection at the moment. That’s unfortunately how states often act on social evolution.
2. (ad 2) Still improvement is possible by an other technology. An app, in particular, is mentioned that circumvents failure in the airport’s departure display.

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This work by Paul Netman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Fauceir theory is developed and © by Mato Nagel and available at www.fauceir.org.