Random Thought Depository

"i just don't think i can bring a child into this world" said person in a developed country whose child would have a greater life expectancy and more resources than 99% of humans throughout history

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the implicit argument here feels very "life always takes the side of life." Yes, we're all here because most of our ancestors reproduced in conditions materially much worse than modern First World countries, but that's likely because choosing to reproduce even under quite miserable conditions was selected for in human evolution. "The people who choose reproduction are the ones who have descendants and pass on any congenital biases toward choosing reproduction" is pretty detached from considerations of the well-being of the people being produced this way.

Also, worth pointing out that it's questionable to what degree it was "our ancestors chose to reproduce" vs. "a lot our ancestors were heavily incentivized or outright coerced into reproduction." Pregnancy-avoidance was more costly in quality of life terms before modern birth control. Younger adult near-relatives were often the primary caretakers for the elderly, creating a massive selfish incentive to make children (I mean, yeah, the same thing is still happening less directly, it's an inevitable consequence of having to constantly refill the holes senescence-related deaths are ripping in our social fabric, but the "less directly" part is potentially significant to how much people weight their own well-being in old age vs. the potential well-being of their hypothetical direct descendants). If you're reading this probably most of your ancestors in the last few millennia were born under patriarchy, i.e. a massive apparatus of reproductive coercion, and likely many of them were born to slaves who were involuntarily impregnated by their masters or women in other situations of similarly severe reproductive coercion. The fact that there's a massive negative correlation between how rich and free a society is and how high its fertility rate is seems potentially suggestive here.

I think it's probably basically a good thing that a lot of modern parents have much higher standards for what sort of life they think is worth bringing kids into than their nineteenth century great-great-grandparents did; I suspect it reflects a shift away from reproductive decision-making being dominated by considerations like "I need to make kids so they'll take care of me when I'm old, I need to make sons to perpetuate my patrilineage, I need to make daughters so I can use them as basically transactional goods in marital politics with other patriarchal families" and toward reproductive decision-making in which the potential well-being of the potential child is given more weight.

Also, insofar as below replacement rate fertility is actually a poverty/dissatisfaction issue, it strikes me as a modern variant of the same kind of diffuse passive resistance James C. Scott talks about in The Art of Not Being Governed and Against the Grain, i.e. as a diffuse implicit demand for better conditions backed up by the implicit threat of slow long-term shrinking of the state's tax and labor base, i.e. as good and cool.

obsessed with this photo. the face of a slurper

The ability of mammals to create vacuum chambers in their mouth -- universal due to the necessity of sucking milk during infancy -- is a very useful, and very unappreciated one. Something as simple as sipping water from a cup would be impossible if not for all the layers of soft, wriggly flesh built on top of our jaws.

I recall some book recounting how mammals turned their face inside-out during our evolution in the latest Paleozoic -- reptiles and bird mostly have their head and jaw muscle inside their skulls, mammals mostly have them outside. This also allows us to have complex facial expressions, which are vital for mammalian communication, and only exist because of milk.

ftr I am forever going to be bitter that the post I wanted to be "let's talk about extinct ecosystems and how cool they are!" got derailed into yet another post just talking about a single taxon like the millions of other posts on palaeoblr

Please tell me more about these extinct ecosystems. Why did they go extinct? Could an ecosystem like that return?

When I say "extinct ecosystem", I mean those ecosystems that have existed in the past, with extinct animals and plants etc. inhabiting them

by their very definition, they are gone forever

there are ones that were truly unique, like Polar Tropical Forests and Fern Prairies, that we just could not have today

but there were ones that have equivalents to today, as well, like the first savannahs and steppes of the Miocene - they just have earlier versions of the plants and animals

there were so many because there are so many today, and each one had its own flora and fauna and was glorious

There's the wetlands and forests of Hell Creek in the Latest Cretaceous

the bizarre Volcanic Lake Forests of the Jehol Biota

whatever the hell the Ediacaran Reefs were

the Scale Tree Swamp Forests of the Carboniferous

"Mesozoic 2" aka pre-human Aotearoa

the Western Interior Seaway dominated by Mosasaurs

and so many other things, I couldn't possibly list them all. Every time period had its own biosphere and biomes, and they were all unique.

#i wanna see the Aurora Borealis over a tropical forest#BC Canada has a Boreal Rainforest so you can definitely get that

that isn't what I mean by "Polar Tropical Forest"

I mean a tropical forest

at the poles

ie, the ecosystems present during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

we have fossils of plants that showcase how different tropical plant lifestyles had to be up at the poles because of the light weirdness

the important part is "tropical", not "wet/rainforest". those are two different things

Temperate and Boreal Rainforests are wonderful and some of my favorite living biomes, but they aren't what I was talking about

May I ask about the fern prairies? That sounds really cool!

Grass is a relatively recent thing

it first evolved in the latest Cretaceous, but it didn't actually take over everywhere until the Miocene, when grasses that process light differently (look up C3 vs C4 photosynthesis) evolved and just took the fuck over the planet

before then, other plants formed the low ground cover over the earth, and in many places those plants were ferns - spread all over the ground and covering it, much like grass, but significantly less dense. Dirt would have been much more common everywhere.

This is why I am begging every single game developer to remember that grass is not a neutral ground cover

My favorite extinct ecosystem, if it counts while being as physically tiny as it was, is the floating logs that existed in the ocean between the first appearance of woody trees and the first appearance of organisms that could break down wood - floating reefs of a sort, trailing enormous filter-feeding crinoids below them. The baleen whales of their time

yeah that counts! And how bizarre those must have been!!!

Speaking of reefs, we're so used to rocky or coral reefs in the moderns world but there have been so many different reefs throughout prehistory that were made of things that straight up don't exist any more!

Like the reefs of the late Devonian, which were made of stromatoporoids, which may have resembled corals but were actually a highly diverse extinct group of sponges!

This is one of my own reconstructions of a stromatoporoid reef off the coast of Devonian Australia (plus anachronistic underwater baited camera):

The Cretaceous also had some wild extinct reefs which are known as carbonate reefs and were dominated by a group of bivalve molluscs called rudists!

Scale tree swamps are the only one of these I know anything about and they were SO WEIRD. There's definitely some controversy about how they functioned cause these things are hard to work out from fossils, but the current thinking is that these trees shot up to around 100 feet tall in 10-15 years, grew more tightly packed together than basically any modern forest, produced spores one time and then promptly keeled over and died. Forests just do not work like this anymore! It's not just different types of trees, it's a whole *different type of forest* that has gone extinct! Different nutrient cycling, different natural rhythms, different everything!

Even today there are all kinds of niche hyperlocal ecosystems that function in their own distinct ways - shale barrens, waxcap grasslands, cataract bogs. What else have we just never seen??

Anxiety over all the prehistoric organisms we’ll never know, meet your big sibling: anxiety over all the prehistoric ECOSYSTEMS we’ll never know

I've seen bracken fern meadows up north, where grass doesn't grow too well. I would imagine that fern prairies were vast versions of those.

That's actually something I've been wondering about for a while! Grasslands are actually a pretty new type of ecosystem (compared to how long land plants have been around), but the Earth of the Permian, Mesozoic, and early Tertiary must have had areas with the kind of climate that results in grasslands today, what did the vegetation there look like? Would it have looked grass-like cause convergent evolution, or...? I guess that kind of vegetation probably fossilizes a lot less often than woodier plants growing in wetter and muddier environments, so would we have any way of knowing?

Looking it up on Google, apparently fern meadows look like this. So I guess the ground cover of the Mesozoic equivalent of the Serengeti might have looked a lot like that?

Also, this reminds me of this and my speculations here and here.

imagine what a terrible world it would be if all the dinosaurs had died and not just the non-avian ones

thank you birds for surviving

I think probably in that world mammals would have filled the ecological space that OTL was filled by birds.

Looks like the oldest known bat fossil is from the Eocene, but the fossil record of bats is fragmentary enough that it's a toss-up whether bats existed before the KT extinction. If bats were already around before the KT extinction, my guess is in a birdless post-KT world bats would have a bigger adaptive radiation than they did OTL, including some bat species moving into diurnal flyer niches, and bats would become birdless world's equivalent of birds. By the present day that world would probably have a diversity of bats similar to our world's diversity of birds + bats.

If bats weren't around yet at the point of divergence, my guess is some other mammals would probably have moved into flyer niches and become that world's bird-equivalents. Result visible in the present day would probably be similar to bat world: a world with a diversity of flying mammals similar to our world's diversity of birds and bats.

i recently found out the funniest thing about big horses recently which is that for centuries humans have sworn that the feathering on big horse’s legs has been bred in there for a reason, and the reason given is usually something to do with how it helps keep the joints warm and safe when the big horse is doing hauling work in fields.

the thing is: it doesn’t appreciably do that, because the feathers wick up water and mud, which cancels out any insulation advantage they might hypothetically confer, and also it wasn’t even put there on purpose.

the Leg Get More Hair gene is just linked to the Bones Get More Big gene. when you breed any lineage of horses to have bigger bones–not just taller, but chunkier–the leg hair just happens anyway. so every single breed of draft horse has feathered legs, and even carriage horses like friesians get feathers once they hit a certain threshold of lorge.

when you supersize your horse, mother nature throws in a free pair of booties. how cool is that?

Ahhh, what a great example of linked traits! And also shows why evolution gets so complicated

I wonder if some human traits are like this, like the way our top of the head hair and facial hair grows continuously and gets super-long if we don't regularly cut it. That just seems like a really random trait with no obvious advantages and a really obvious disadvantage, and other apes don't have it, so I wonder if we have that just because the "continuously growing slow-shedding head hair" gene just happens to also be a "less body hair" gene or a "make the brain bigger" gene.

The other possible explanation that occurred to me is that long hair and beards can be styled, which might be adaptive as a way of signaling intelligence, creativity, cultural complexity, and factional affiliation.

Tangential vagueblogging (about somebody I generally respect, and I don't want to add to the pile-on they're getting), but I'm going to note that I really don't like when people present "predators control the population of prey species and kill off their sickest and weakest individuals" as if this is some kind of favor to the prey species, a merciful euthanasia of beings that are literally better off dead.

It's impossible to know how deer feel about the merits of slowly starving to death vs. being ripped up by wolves, but we can look at human emotions and behavior in comparable situations.

"Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it." - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

I think humans show a strong revealed preference along those lines. Suicide seems to be a minority choice even in the most miserable conditions in the historical record. Take, for instance, slavery in North America circa 1500-1850 or so; pretty awful. Some slaves did commit suicide. But most of them did not. This is just one many examples in the historical record of humans enduring appalling conditions and apparently mostly not choosing suicide (Irish potato famine, Nazi death camps, gulags, classical era Greco-Roman slavery, etc.). This is actually kind of remarkable if you stop taking it for granted. Of course, it makes perfect sense if you think about it in terms of evolutionary theory; for a species intelligent enough to imagine suicide, choosing to live is a selection pressure, potentially a quite powerful one. We're all descended from the people who chose survival, because those who chose death left no descendants. For a species intelligent enough for long-term planning and suicide, an attitude of "my life, though it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it" is an adaptive trait, and it is no surprise that it seems to have approached fixation before the beginning of recorded history.

The predators alive now mostly do not attack humans because they follow mother's wisdom. The conservatism inherent in the mother's wisdom strategy may keep humans safe for a while, but big predators in most of the world have had tens of thousands to millions of years to eat a human (or proto-human), discover we are quite edible, and add us to the mother's wisdom food list that they transmit to their offspring. Why hasn't this happened? Well, what happens to a predator that kills and eats a human? Other humans follow the people-eater back to its den and kill it! The only predators that survived were the ones that did not habitually eat humans, either as a matter of blind luck or because they were smart enough to learn that we're more dangerous than we look. I suspect the saber-tooth cat, the marsupial lion, etc. are not around anymore because they were unable to make this adjustment. Point is, it sure looks like when humans got smart one of the first things they did was give themselves the same circumstances as deer that have no predators to control their numbers!

You'll often find references to early agriculture actually being a step down from hunting and gathering; primitive farmers are not well-nourished, have a lot of diseases, etc.. To me, preindustrial agricultural humans look a lot like those overpopulated deer; there aren't any predators left to control their numbers (a circumstance they arranged for themselves!), so now what caps their population is malnutrition and infectious disease (and the synergy between the two; malnourished animals and humans get sick and die more easily), so they mostly live on the edge of starvation, so they're hungry and sickly and riddled with diseases (and they are a great burden upon the wider ecology). Being an ancient or Medieval peasant sounds miserable in a similar way to how being a deer in an overpopulated park or a city pigeon sounds miserable. And yet, I think most people would agree that ancient Mesopotamia or Medieval Europe would not be improved by adding Blindsight vampires with the crucifix glitch fixed, even if the survivors the vampires don't eat might have better diets and fewer parasites as a result (because the vampires would kill a lot of the people they'd otherwise have to share their food and other resources with).

It's also pretty suggestive that an often repeated theme of human stories is "what if there was something that related to you in the way a wolf relates to a deer?" and the intended and default reaction to that idea is horror. From dragons, vampires, and Grendel to the "xenomorph" from Alien, the human imagination is persistently haunted by the fear that something may target us for predation; even the ostensibly human killers of e.g. slasher horror are in a sense just another kind of predator. Predation is also a favorite metaphor for human exploitation and abuse of other humans; we speak of rapacious rich people and manipulative abusers as "predatory" even though, of course, they (usually) don't literally eat us.

Humans were a prey species once and, gee, it sure looks like we hated it, like it was a trauma that still haunts us hundreds of thousands years later (probably burned into our genes; predator avoidance would have been a selection pressure), and like as soon as we got smart enough one of the first things we did was to give ourselves the circumstances of those overpopulated deer, choosing chronic food insecurity and high disease load as the lesser evil.

How would you feel about your grandma and your disabled son being dragged away and devoured by wolves? How would you feel about somebody who suggested that such predation was a sort of favor to your species?

How would you feel if you were hungry and sick and in pain and had a broken and infected leg and the wolves came for you? I think I would say, "my life, though it may be only an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it!"

Like, my first articulated objection to "predators are actually good for prey species" thinking is "imagine how ghoulish it would be if somebody applied the same logic to humans!"

I'm not an expert on animal behavior, but it seems to me that the behavior of most animals suggests a similar revealed preference. When the wolves come for an injured deer, I would guess the deer will likely try to hobble away. The city pigeons that occasionally walk by my window are likely malnourished and riddled with parasites and some of them have pretty gruesome foot injuries (I remember reading a post about this once), but they continue to go about the business of survival and even reproduction (I occasionally see them doing what I think are courtship behaviors).

And sure, that's dubious reasoning from analogy. Notably, humans are probably pretty unusual in being intelligent enough to imagine suicide (and also having hands and being smart enough to make weapons, which makes suicide much easier), and therefore present humans are probably the product of a very unusually strong selection pressure for wanting to live. Probably most animals lack the cognitive capacity for suicide, even the passive suicide of suicide by starvation or suicide by predator. I wonder if the point where humans became intelligent enough to imagine suicide is marked by a genetic bottleneck... Deer likely don't have the cognitive capacity to imagine their own death, and if they did they might be more at peace with the idea than we are, because they've experienced no selection pressure for conscious avoidance of death qua death; the injured deer likely tries to hobble away from the wolves because of some combination of pre-programmed reflexive instinct and fear of the pain of the bite, or something like that. If you magically gave a deer human intelligence, it might be much more at peace with the reality of its eventual death than we are.

I guess my truest objection to "the wolves are really good for the deer" thinking is that it feels like another manifestation of Just World thinking and therefore deeply conservative - not in the sense of conventional political conservatism, but I think it's a manifestation of a sort of thinking that's one of the wellsprings of political conservatism; I talked about it here. @aksemmi, I'm wondering if maybe you meant something like that.

You seem to be assigning moral value to the actions of animals that have no concept of right and wrong the way humans do, and I find that deeply unsettling. You can acknowledge that deer feel fear and pain when they die without vilifying wolves for doing what they have to to survive.

Predators are necessary for the health and long term survival of prey species because they coevolved together. Without predation certain plants and areas get severely overgrazed, which in turn has detrimental impacts on other animals and insects that are dependent on those plant species. All ecosystems evolved as complex interconnected webs, and eliminating even one species from that can have catastrophic consequences. Humans using controlled hunting to keep the deer population in check in certain areas is necessary only because we drove out all of their natural predators. It is righting a wrong that we caused that is having a negative impact on every plant and animal species in those areas. Reintroduction of predators is a better long term solution, but it takes time and money and is much harder to get people on board with.

And as a chronically ill/disabled person, please stop comparing us to animals. It's insulting and dehumanizing.

If you read my post carefully, you'll notice I never say that wolves are, like, evil or something. My point is not to suggest that predators deserve some kind of moral blame, my point is that being a prey species probably sucks. When we consider wolves we should be able to see them as organisms instead of villains, but we should be able to do that without sugar-coating what it means to be part of their food supply.

I don't think deer overpopulate in the absence of wolves because they co-evolved with wolves; I think even if wolves and other predators were never around, deer would still tend to breed up to the limit of their food supply in the absence of predators, because deer that do that would produce more offspring than deer that limited their reproduction to maintain a "good" deer population size. Natural selection promotes genes that are good at getting more copies of themselves into the next generation, it does not promote genes that make the species happier or healthier except insofar as that is congruent with making more offspring. The population size of a species is inevitably constrained by something, that constraint is often predation, but this doesn't mean that predators are necessarily good for a prey species, it just means there's trophic space for a predator species to occupy and some animal has evolved to follow that life strategy. I think a not bad analogy for how this works is viruses and parasites; it's probably pretty common for a species and its parasites to co-evolve, and parasites are another constraint on population size, but this doesn't mean the parasites are good for the host, it just means there is trophic space for parasites and something that has evolved to inhabit that niche. Again, this is not a moral judgment on predators, it's just how nature works; a lion isn't evil, but then a malaria-causing plasmodium parasite isn't evil either. Removing predator species may have undesirable consequences, but I think it's important to remember that nature fundamentally does not care about things like the well-being of organisms or harmonious ecosystems.

I don't see how it's insulting to disabled and chronically ill people to point out that "wolves really do deer a favor by weeding out the sick and weak," if you apply it to humans, is fascist/eugenicist logic. People seem to take offense to such comparisons because they see drawing parallels between human and animal experiences as implicitly lowering the moral status of the human, but I raise the comparison in the exact opposite spirit: the question I ask when I raise those comparisons is "what conclusions might we draw if we viewed animals more like the way we view humans?"

And, like... Not to play the standpoint epistemology card, but I'm not exactly super-healthy myself, and one of the reasons I don't like the "wolves are really good for the deer" argument is that one of the possible implications I read in it is that, actually, it was great that a million years ago somebody like me would likely have been dragged away and ripped up by lions, my life isn't really worth living anyway and it would have freed up ecological space for my healthier, more genetically fit fellows to thrive. I am probably only alive today because I have the incredible species privilege to belong to a species where most individuals live to old age, and I am very conscious of how incredibly lucky this makes me compared to what's normal for animals (or even what was normal for humans before 1900 or so), and I'm very much coming from that perspective here.

tired: urban instant-gratification pod living and polyamorous mongrelising “found family” degeneracy will devolve us into a race of small-souled termite bugmen

wired: given that it meets the crucial preconditions of monogamy, relatively high levels of mate relatedness, large single-family territories guarding precious resources, low success rates due to an adverse environment, and strong family bonds, the true threat of emerging eusociality would come from traditionalist homesteading

I think much of the “pod-dwelling bugmen” impulse stems on a visceral level from seeing both of these and being struck by a consilient sense of interspecific spiritual kinship

But in fact the similarity is superficial. Termites do not live in those “towers” they are a mostly uninhabited cooling system

This is not actually a political argument so much as a shewing-the-fly-from-the-fly-bottle gesture at a bad metaphors limits but like. It does affect the emotional response doesn’t it?

Gonna say, when I was writing this it was very much on my mind that all the examples of human reproductive hierarchies I could think of were what could be broadly described as trad.

I don't think that's an accident; I think if there is a single unifying theme of right-wing vs. left-wing political conflicts it's that the left-wing is an expression of impulses toward social equality while the right-wing wants society to follow the logic of the pecking order, i.e. the right-wing likes hierarchy, and if I'm right about that it's only natural that this trend would hold for reproductive hierarchies too.

periodic surge of Special Interest type enthusiasm for How Hymenoptera Work

I’m assuming you are referring to Hamiltons haplodiploidy theory of the origins of eusociality. (If not, please correct my uncharity) This is widely discredited in contemporary literature, and even contemporary sympathetic arguments only posit a partial explanatory role for haplodiploidy

The main problems are two:

The evolution of eusociality remains something of a mystery, and while haplodiploid genetics in Hymenoptera might well play some part in their own eusocial history it cannot be the full picture. More recent research has taken particular note of “artificial” behavioural contributors to eusociality—such as the forced quasi-castration of nonreproductives—as a cue beyond pure genetics plus inclusive fitness to understanding eusocial evolution both in Hymenoptera and elsewhere

Source: the textbook source (with several references) that originally sparked my brief interest in this topic was chapter 5 of Biology of Termites: a Modern Synthesis (available here for pirating). Worth checking out!!

“The evolution of eusociality remains something of a mystery...”

On this subject, I think it’s suggestive that you see reproductive hierarchies that seem to work in a kind of similar way in species that aren’t eusocial.

I’m thinking of that old argument about how pop culture misunderstands what an alpha wolf is. I don’t know much about wolf social organization so my understanding of how it works might be wrong, but IIRC wolf packs are often basically extended families in which there is a reproductive hierarchy where only some of the adult wolves breed. Suggestively regarding the origins of eusociality, IIRC this does not happen just because the non-breeding wolves go along with it, it’s enforced by the breeding wolves killing pups produced by the non-breeding wolf females in their pack. I’d guess the purpose of this behavior is to redirect the labor of the non-breeding wolves toward supporting the reproductive success of the breeding wolves instead of their own (and it works because the breeding wolves are often relatives of the non-breeding wolves so the non-breeding wolves often still get to pass on some their genes indirectly this way, thus going along with this arrangement is selected for over just leaving the pack and trying to start you own). Which is... a lot like how eusocial insects work, but on a much smaller scale and with a more fluid reproductive hierarchy (probably because the wolf system is much more rudimentary).

Or, you know what other species I see behavior like that in? Humans. Specifically, humans in pre-industrial agricultural societies. IIRC, in a lot of preindustrial agricultural societies marriage was expensive because of dowry or bride price or something along those lines and there was a substantial population of people who never got married. Preindustrial agricultural societies also often had polygyny but not polyandry, which would have resulted in a substantial class of men who couldn’t find wives (I expect this class was usually mostly made up of the poorest and lowest-status males). I imagine a lot of the time these involuntary life-long spinsters and bachelors would have stayed with their birth families and supported the children of the one brother the family got a wife for so their patrilineage could continue, or something along those lines. Or when these life-long spinsters and bachelors didn’t contribute to the reproductive success of their relatives, they might have been servants for richer people instead; I’m reminded of the old time practice of noble families using wet nurses, and of anecdotes from black women in societies like Apartheid South Africa and the Jim Crow South about how as domestic servants, nannies, etc. they’d have to do a lot of child-care labor for affluent white families with small children only to have the children they’d taken care of then raised to be racist against them and discriminate against them; when I think about this in this context it looks a lot like high-status humans leveraging their privilege to implement a kind of brood parasitism reproductive strategy (you know, kind of like a cuckoo). And lots of pre-modern societies had some sort of class of castrated males, e.g. Chinese and Middle Eastern eunuchs who were valued because they could perform certain kinds of sensitive jobs for the ruler without being a threat to the reproductive success of the ruler, and because as people who could make no children and were often separated from their families early in life they would be loyal to the futurity of the empire and the dynasty instead of the futurity of their own families.

Eusociality seems like maybe just what happens when such smaller-scale, patchier, more fluid, more rudimentary reproductive hierarchies get taken to their ultimate logical conclusion.

@loki-zen: "Look this was interesting but on rationalist grounds I have to discount everything that comes after ‘I imagine’"

Would it be better if I said "Based on intergenerational households being common in pre-industrial societies, e.g. China and Russian peasants, I make the logical inference that life-long bachelors and spinsters would often have remained within and supported the household of their birth family, because that's the parsimonious way life-long bachelorhood and spinsterstood would fit into a family system like that"? Because that's what I meant but didn't write because of laziness and desire for brevity.

Maybe not the greatest sources, I know, but I don't think "Chinese and Russian peasants lived in multi-generational patrilineal households" is controversial and they communicate the point.

Generally, when I say "I imagine" in a context like this it means I'm speculating but based on some information, not that I'm completely making stuff up. But "I'm basically just making this up" is also a reasonable interpretation of the word, so this miscommunication was my fault, and I should try to remember this in the future.

periodic surge of Special Interest type enthusiasm for How Hymenoptera Work

I’m assuming you are referring to Hamiltons haplodiploidy theory of the origins of eusociality. (If not, please correct my uncharity) This is widely discredited in contemporary literature, and even contemporary sympathetic arguments only posit a partial explanatory role for haplodiploidy

The main problems are two:

The evolution of eusociality remains something of a mystery, and while haplodiploid genetics in Hymenoptera might well play some part in their own eusocial history it cannot be the full picture. More recent research has taken particular note of “artificial” behavioural contributors to eusociality—such as the forced quasi-castration of nonreproductives—as a cue beyond pure genetics plus inclusive fitness to understanding eusocial evolution both in Hymenoptera and elsewhere

Source: the textbook source (with several references) that originally sparked my brief interest in this topic was chapter 5 of Biology of Termites: a Modern Synthesis (available here for pirating). Worth checking out!!

“The evolution of eusociality remains something of a mystery...”

On this subject, I think it’s suggestive that you see reproductive hierarchies that seem to work in a kind of similar way in species that aren’t eusocial.

I’m thinking of that old argument about how pop culture misunderstands what an alpha wolf is. I don’t know much about wolf social organization so my understanding of how it works might be wrong, but IIRC wolf packs are often basically extended families in which there is a reproductive hierarchy where only some of the adult wolves breed. Suggestively regarding the origins of eusociality, IIRC this does not happen just because the non-breeding wolves go along with it, it’s enforced by the breeding wolves killing pups produced by the non-breeding wolf females in their pack. I’d guess the purpose of this behavior is to redirect the labor of the non-breeding wolves toward supporting the reproductive success of the breeding wolves instead of their own (and it works because the breeding wolves are often relatives of the non-breeding wolves so the non-breeding wolves often still get to pass on some their genes indirectly this way, thus going along with this arrangement is selected for over just leaving the pack and trying to start you own). Which is... a lot like how eusocial insects work, but on a much smaller scale and with a more fluid reproductive hierarchy (probably because the wolf system is much more rudimentary).

Or, you know what other species I see behavior like that in? Humans. Specifically, humans in pre-industrial agricultural societies. IIRC, in a lot of preindustrial agricultural societies marriage was expensive because of dowry or bride price or something along those lines and there was a substantial population of people who never got married. Preindustrial agricultural societies also often had polygyny but not polyandry, which would have resulted in a substantial class of men who couldn’t find wives (I expect this class was usually mostly made up of the poorest and lowest-status males). I imagine a lot of the time these involuntary life-long spinsters and bachelors would have stayed with their birth families and supported the children of the one brother the family got a wife for so their patrilineage could continue, or something along those lines. Or when these life-long spinsters and bachelors didn’t contribute to the reproductive success of their relatives, they might have been servants for richer people instead; I’m reminded of the old time practice of noble families using wet nurses, and of anecdotes from black women in societies like Apartheid South Africa and the Jim Crow South about how as domestic servants, nannies, etc. they’d have to do a lot of child-care labor for affluent white families with small children only to have the children they’d taken care of then raised to be racist against them and discriminate against them; when I think about this in this context it looks a lot like high-status humans leveraging their privilege to implement a kind of brood parasitism reproductive strategy (you know, kind of like a cuckoo). And lots of pre-modern societies had some sort of class of castrated males, e.g. Chinese and Middle Eastern eunuchs who were valued because they could perform certain kinds of sensitive jobs for the ruler without being a threat to the reproductive success of the ruler, and because as people who could make no children and were often separated from their families early in life they would be loyal to the futurity of the empire and the dynasty instead of the futurity of their own families.

Eusociality seems like maybe just what happens when such smaller-scale, patchier, more fluid, more rudimentary reproductive hierarchies get taken to their ultimate logical conclusion.

When I first started reading about baboons, for some reason I imagined a greater homogeneity among them than among humans. Derpy humans who aren’t very good at getting laid exist, I knew, but somehow I thought derpy baboons who aren’t very good at getting laid would have left the gene pool long ago. I imagined a species of quite optimized individuals. (After all, how hard can it be to be a baboon?)

But there are baboons who drop their babies a lot, baboons who are so nervous about mating they flee when it’s time to act, baboons who panic in the middle of a fight and rather than grabbing the rival’s probable infant to dissuade them from attacking grab a high ranking female adult who then slaps them, baboons who get petulant about being beaten in social interactions and go bounce up and down in branches until they snap, baboons who are big and strong and (repeatedly!) get in the exact right place to win a fight but then panic and vanish, bedraggled baboons, baboons with weird health problems, baboons who can’t figure out social dynamics and keep getting trod on –

there are a lot of weird, incompetent baboons – and this was the most striking thing to me, probably, and the most endearing. These are not optimal animals. It’s wonderful how you think a trait would be so reproductively maladaptive that it would get bred out in a snap, but it seems like you can be an anxious, awkward mess of a baboon and your genes can still keep boxing in the ring or swimming in the pool. The optimal baboons haven’t kept the species ticking along for millions of years – the functional ones have. And it shows.

I suspect this has something to do with the average individual and the average parent being two potentially very different things.

Most living things (at least on the macroscopic scale) die long before they get a chance to reproduce. If you’ve ever watched a documentary about sea turtles, you probably know a lot of them get eaten while trying to crawl from the egg they hatched from to the sea; I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what the modal sea turtle’s life looks like; it lives for something like three minutes and dies on the beach it hatched on; the ones that even live long enough to feel the ocean on their flippers are a fortunate minority. That sort of pattern holds for any species that’s closer to the r-selected end; the vast majority of individuals never reproduce, the ones that manage to reproduce are a tiny minority, nature’s 1%.

On the other end of the spectrum, humans are possibly the most K-selected animal species on this planet, and until the last century or so even humans had a rate of survival to adulthood hovering somewhere not very far above 50% (though IIRC those figures are mostly for agricultural societies, hunter-gatherers may have done better cause less crowding and less close contact with animals would have meant less transmission of infectious diseases, which were the main cause of death early in life). The most K-selected animal on the planet may have for the vast majority of its existence just barely managed to get above the “odds of living long enough to reproduce are better than a coin flip” line! And then consider people who lived long lives but didn’t reproduce for one reason or another, and a lot of human societies might have been below that 50% mark. Given that, I think it’s safe to presume that in almost all animal species the individuals who manage to reproduce are a lucky minority.  That is to say, for almost all animal species, the mean number of offspring is around replacement rate, but the modal number of offspring is zero.

And this is just considering surviving long enough to reproduce, when there are often huge filters after that; for example, in a lot of animal species even within the males that manage to live to reproductive age a hugely disproportionate amount of the reproduction is done by a small minority of highly sexually/reproductively successful males. Probably a lot of species have a lot of variation in reproductive success even within the minority that manages to live to reproductive age.

Even in modern human society, where modern medicine and sanitation has given us a situation where the reproductively successful are a solid majority (what tremendous species privilege we now enjoy!), I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a significant “the average person doesn’t have average parents” effect similar to the “the average person doesn’t live in an average country” effect. The average parent may be closer to my mother (1 child), but a lot of people may have at least one parent who’s closer to my biological father (who had something like three or five kids with multiple women - the fact I don’t know the actual number offhand says a lot about my relationship to him and his family lol).

And now consider that in a species that reproduces exclusively by sexual reproduction like humans or baboons each individual is the result of a unique or nearly unique (in the case of identical twins) reshuffling of genes; each individual is an experiment. And these genes get reshuffled and interact with each other in complex ways. A tall parent and a short parent won’t necessarily have kids who are roughly half-way between their height; sometimes the kid might get all the short genes of the short parent and all the short genes of the tall parent and end up shorter than either of them. A person with sickle cell anemia is probably descended from two healthy parents who each have mild sickle cell trait.

It’s very plausible that the average individual is less reproductively fit than their parents. Baboons might look more optimized if you look at the average baboon’s parents instead of the average baboon.

Ever notice how predatory animals in a lot of fantasy and sci fi have much bigger claws, fangs, and so on than their real world counterparts? Tigers, wolverines, komodo dragons, they don’t really have giant, jutting teeth that are obvious even with their mouths closed. Even great white sharks’ aren’t that noticeable unless you’re looking up into their mouth.

Anyway, I’ve decided to call this phenomenon “carnivore bimboification.”

My theory on this is that it’s a side effect of “shrink-wrapping” in paleontology. Tyrannosaurus rex was portrayed without lips for a long time, and the image of T. rex as a scary beast with jutting teeth got firmly lodged in the public psyche. It seems intuitive enough that dinosaurs have been a source of inspiration for dragon designs in the past.

I think “carnivore bimboification” is still a valid phenomenon in other ways though—one of which is the tendency to make predatory animals in scifi and fantasy as big as or bigger than any land carnivore on earth.

Most people don’t deal with the danger of predatory animals on a day to day basis, or really any wildlife at all, so people have a very warped idea of how large an animal needs to be to be threatening. There’s just something unintuitive about a creature the size of a dog being a lethal threat to your heroes, but a regular dog can easily kill a person.

Not only that, but an animal the size of a dog very much could see humans as prey. Wolves can take down moose.

Related to this, in fantasy and sci-fi, it’s always the carnivores that are dangerous, when herbivorous animals are often significantly more dangerous to humans.

City people have little respect for the power of cattle. It’s like people intuitively expect that an herbivorous animal is peaceful and won’t harm them. No! This is not the Dodo! Get down from that fence!

Influence from paleo-art trends could be a factor, but I think “carnivore bimboification” in this sense mostly has to do with big teeth and claws being an easy and dramatic visual shorthand for “this creature is predatory and dangerous.” Real predators are shaped by real evolutionary pressures, fictional predators tend to be optimized for looking intimidating to humans.

If it’s influence from dinosaur portrayals that would imply visual depictions of fictional or mythological monsters from before 1800 or so would be less likely to have “carnivore bimboification.” It would be interesting to take a look at that.

You’re right about herbivores and relatively small predators being underrated as dangers. This is definitely going in my folder of posts to draw inspiration from for my own fiction. This also reminds me of some thoughts on Dune sandworms I had.

Notably, big prominent natural weapons are actually a more common feature of herbivores. Elephants have tusks. Lots of herbivores have horns. I think this may have to do with herbivores having more surplus energy to invest in non-essential things like big weapons because there’s more energy available farther down the food chain; you know the old simplification of it takes ten pounds of grass to support a pound of antelope and it takes ten pounds of antelope to support a pound of lion. Real predators usually don’t have “bimboified” teeth and claws because such large weapons would be heavy and metabolically expensive and carnivores live in energy precarity so conserving energy is important for them (when you think about in these terms, it’s no surprise that cats have a reputation for laziness!). Herbivores have relatively dependable energy supplies and can more easily afford to invest in large weapons. As I touched on in my sandworm post, herbivore weapons are also more likely to be designed as straight-up weapons instead of doing double duty as part of the digestive system; herbivore horns or tusks or tail clubs can have fewer design compromises away from being effective weapons than carnivore teeth (though herbivore weapons often function more as fitness signaling than as actual weapons).

The best weapon is one you never have to use. 

IMO It’s like the difference between a murderer with a knife and a shopkeeper with a baseball bat. One of those weapons is good for killing in a surprise attack(and preparing food), one of them is good for winning fights without really caring if you do it by killing, wounding or scaring off the attacker(and ritualized intraspecific competition). Same with a lion’s teeth and claws versus a buffaloes horns and hooves. 

That’s an insightful thought! Yeah, I suspect herbivore weapons are often partly there to be seen by predators and serve a deterrence function; if you’re a herbivore one of the best case scenarios is a predator doesn’t attack you because you look too dangerous. Same reason poison arrow frogs are brightly colored. Whereas if you’re a predator you’re probably better off being easily mistaken for something harmless (real predators tend to use the “be easily mistaken for part of the grass or shrubbery, or a rock, etc.” version of that strategy).

Ever notice how predatory animals in a lot of fantasy and sci fi have much bigger claws, fangs, and so on than their real world counterparts? Tigers, wolverines, komodo dragons, they don’t really have giant, jutting teeth that are obvious even with their mouths closed. Even great white sharks’ aren’t that noticeable unless you’re looking up into their mouth.

Anyway, I’ve decided to call this phenomenon “carnivore bimboification.”

My theory on this is that it’s a side effect of “shrink-wrapping” in paleontology. Tyrannosaurus rex was portrayed without lips for a long time, and the image of T. rex as a scary beast with jutting teeth got firmly lodged in the public psyche. It seems intuitive enough that dinosaurs have been a source of inspiration for dragon designs in the past.

I think “carnivore bimboification” is still a valid phenomenon in other ways though—one of which is the tendency to make predatory animals in scifi and fantasy as big as or bigger than any land carnivore on earth.

Most people don’t deal with the danger of predatory animals on a day to day basis, or really any wildlife at all, so people have a very warped idea of how large an animal needs to be to be threatening. There’s just something unintuitive about a creature the size of a dog being a lethal threat to your heroes, but a regular dog can easily kill a person.

Not only that, but an animal the size of a dog very much could see humans as prey. Wolves can take down moose.

Related to this, in fantasy and sci-fi, it’s always the carnivores that are dangerous, when herbivorous animals are often significantly more dangerous to humans.

City people have little respect for the power of cattle. It’s like people intuitively expect that an herbivorous animal is peaceful and won’t harm them. No! This is not the Dodo! Get down from that fence!

Influence from paleo-art trends could be a factor, but I think “carnivore bimboification” in this sense mostly has to do with big teeth and claws being an easy and dramatic visual shorthand for “this creature is predatory and dangerous.” Real predators are shaped by real evolutionary pressures, fictional predators tend to be optimized for looking intimidating to humans.

If it’s influence from dinosaur portrayals that would imply visual depictions of fictional or mythological monsters from before 1800 or so would be less likely to have “carnivore bimboification.” It would be interesting to take a look at that.

You’re right about herbivores and relatively small predators being underrated as dangers. This is definitely going in my folder of posts to draw inspiration from for my own fiction. This also reminds me of some thoughts on Dune sandworms I had.

Notably, big prominent natural weapons are actually a more common feature of herbivores. Elephants have tusks. Lots of herbivores have horns. I think this may have to do with herbivores having more surplus energy to invest in non-essential things like big weapons because there’s more energy available farther down the food chain; you know the old simplification of it takes ten pounds of grass to support a pound of antelope and it takes ten pounds of antelope to support a pound of lion. Real predators usually don’t have “bimboified” teeth and claws because such large weapons would be heavy and metabolically expensive and carnivores live in energy precarity so conserving energy is important for them (when you think about in these terms, it’s no surprise that cats have a reputation for laziness!). Herbivores have relatively dependable energy supplies and can more easily afford to invest in large weapons. As I touched on in my sandworm post, herbivore weapons are also more likely to be designed as straight-up weapons instead of doing double duty as part of the digestive system; herbivore horns or tusks or tail clubs can have fewer design compromises away from being effective weapons than carnivore teeth (though herbivore weapons often function more as fitness signaling than as actual weapons).

Video by PBS Eons: The Triassic Reptile With “Two Faces”:

Figuring out what this creature’s face actually looked like would take paleontologists years. But understanding this weird animal can help us shine a light on at least one way for ecosystems to bounce back from even the worst mass extinction.

I’m brainstorming an Andorian mafia family for the Star Trek Adventures tabletop campaign that I’m going to GM. Some of the things that came to me…Culture develops from physiology and necessity. I’m going with one of the presently most popular interpretations of Andorian culture/biology (4 sexes etc), in my general gamer and fanfic writer worlds, and of course that could end up getting obliterated in an instant with whatever the upcoming Trek canon decides to portray. What strikes me in developing the temperament of my crime family that’s rooted in oldschool feudalism and some Game of Thrones action:Think about how much more incest you could get away with, with 3 sex chromosomes. But also think about the kind of social organizations that would flow from the different types of complex family arrangements that are possible.   But what’s  more… because your species could tolerate so much more incest, you could totally have a species that is almost genetically predisposed toward feudalism, especially if livable space is at a premium. That’s a lot of conjecture and headcanon on my part, but hey, I’m building a mafia from the ground up, and want it to actually be interesting. Anyway I’m just spitballing.

How are you envisioning ‘genetically predisposed to feudalism’? Biological castes like hive-dwelling bees/ants? How does your envisioned version of feudalism enhance the genetic potential of individuals such that it benefits them to become adapted towards it?

That’s something to consider for my own OC worldbuilding, and really interesting to think about! One of the limitations I’m working with here is that there is plenty of info out there on Andorians. So what I’m writing is largely stuff I headcanon, or stuff I read between the lines.

What i imagine is that a species with three sex chromosomes (implied by fanon/soft canon that three of the four sexes provide gametes and one carries the zygote)… may have more insulation from the more harmful effects of inbreeding. Which may contribute to an even greater proliferation of incest dynasties that keep land and resources locked within bloodlines for centuries to millennia, than we have on Earth, that may be harder to shake off.

Granted, this is probably not true of Andorians as of being Federation members, maybe not even true of them by the time of Enterprise. It’s also based on a popular interpretation of them as a four sex species instead of a two sex species.

But it adds to the backstory for me to headcanon this, and my made up Andorian Mafia org definitely has some “Game of Thrones” action going on.

I’m always dubious of the notion of a 3+ sex species where one of the sexes incubates the offspring but doesn’t contribute to the offspring genetically. Such a species seems very likely to evolve to extinction. The incubator sex doesn’t contribute to the genes of the next generation, so a gene that biases individuals away from producing offspring of the incubator sex will be strongly selected for. This will happen no matter how rare incubator sex individuals get; you will always be more likely to get your genes into the generation after next by producing offspring who will produce gametes, no matter how hard a time your offspring will have finding an incubator sex partner to carry your grandkids. So I suspect long-term the incubator sex will get rarer and rarer until the species goes extinct. If you want the situation to be stable, you probably want all the sexes to contribute genes to the next generation.

Now, it’s true that sometimes not directly getting your genes into the next generation can be a viable reproductive strategy, e.g. the sterile workers of social insects. But notably, in those cases the reproductive strategy is to help your relatives instead of reproducing yourself (evolution works at the level of the gene, the individual, and the lineage, not the species). Hmm, connecting that to what you’re talking about...

... An incubator sex that doesn’t contribute genetic material to the offspring might work if it incubates the offspring of its siblings and other close relatives. Sort of a worker ant type reproductive strategy extended to surrogacy. In such cases “incest” might be not just common but mandatory. Being “impregnated” by a non-relative would be something akin to being cuckolded. The incubators of such a species would likely evolve mechanisms to reject any non-relative embryo. And if they’re intelligent beings and the automatic rejection mechanisms aren’t 100% reliable they might instinctively find the idea of carrying a non-relative’s offspring horrifying. Squickiness to human readers in that case is probably going to depend a lot on how sex-like the embryo transfer is. It isn’t actually sex, and there’s no reason an intelligent species with this reproductive strategy would necessarily experience the process as erotic ... but on the other hand, it would have a structural similarity to sex, and evolution tends to re-use stuff. If you don’t want to deal with this, I suggest making it so all four sexes contribute to the offspring genetically is the best idea.

Moving on from that...

I suspect in a 3+ sex species the sexes that didn’t gestate the offspring would probably basically look male to us. So for a humanoid species like Andorians it’d basically look like a culture with normative MMMF polyamory plus some finickiness about matching up the right kinds of male. Details would depend on the details of the reproductive process; is it mechanically/structurally similar to human reproduction but you need three different kinds of sperm, or are there extra steps?

Having each individual be the product of fusion of four gametes instead of two would allow a species to get away with more inbreeding, in that, e.g. if two of the parents are siblings but the other two parents are non-relatives that’ll be maybe roughly equivalent to human first cousin marriage in terms of how inbred the offspring will be. If all the parents are relatives the offspring will be just as inbred as an inbred human, but having four parents instead of two builds in more room for mixtures of inbreeding and outbreeding. Like, you could imagine a royal family that does generation after generation of sibling marriage like the Ptolemies but the other two parents are always non-relative harem concubines or favorites of the king or whatever so the inbreeding never gets that bad. This would probably imply weaker selection pressure for incest avoidance, with possible downstream effects on culture.