Amerika

The biggest game in town now and any other time is civilization collapse. Every human group self destructs through class warfare of the have-nots versus the haves; it is never the other way around because the haves need nothing the have-nots have.

The example of Mouse Utopia shows us the true horror of civilization design: civilizations fail by success, because once they succeed, people stop trying for anything more than the minimum.

This is the problem to beat for all of humanity because our civilizations keep dying and, within them, groups and even musical movements perish by the same method. When procedure matters more than holistic goals, means-over-ends thinking wipes out aspiration toward results.

As creatures in a complex world, we navigate between chaos and repetition, looking for the sweet spot where our existence cycles according to non-arbitrary but not fully predictable cycles.

Without that, we fall into repetition. Standardization, means-over-ends thinking like dualistic morality and jobs, genetic reversion to the mean, and a lack of any holistic and transcendent goal beyond our means-over-ends function, consumerism, and tax-paying all enforce repetition.

Extremes of repetition, like in cloning, create so much sameness that nature’s urge to throw in chaos for balance goes into overdrive:

After two decades of continuous work, researchers in Japan have discovered a genetic ‘dead end’ to mammal cloning.

The study began in 2005, when researchers, led by scientists at the University of Yamanashi in Japan, cloned a single female mouse.

Two decades later, the team was on their 58th generation, and the re-cloned mice had accumulated so many genetic mutations that they died the day after they were born.

Perhaps Mouse Utopia died out because there was no point doing anything because all options led to the same outcome, a type of heat-death on both an existential and genetic level.

Even more, it possibly reduced the thinking of its mice into so much similarity that the process of thinking itself became irrelevant. At that point, thoughts themselves become irrelevant, since they are all the same.

It turns out that population crashes result from too much uniformity leading to assimilation by other groups:

The new study indicates that one localized group had survived the harsh conditions by retreating to a climate refuge some 75,000 years ago in what is now southwestern France—and that the descendants of these survivors spread across Europe after 65,000 years ago. Genetically, almost all Late Neanderthals descended from this one lineage.

Posth and his team also found that these Neanderthals later suffered a sharp decline in population around 45,000 years ago. This fall in numbers was rapid, reaching a minimum around 42,000 years ago — shortly before the Neanderthals became extinct altogether.

The Neanderthals experienced an extreme bottleneck, which means that all but a few died off, which left a population which became rapidly uniform. This happens even if the group is of multiple races because over a few generations they revert to the mean through admixture.

After this bottleneck, they had lost so much internal variation that the species was less capable of competing, leading to it being assimilated by modern humans. They died out through admixture more than actually being killed.

In the same way, populations in nature crash when they get below a certain number of individuals because gene drift cannot maintain enough variety to avoid a sort of genetic entropy. They become uniform, and from this comes chaos, ironically enough.

This is why species require environments that are not arbitrary nor too varied, but varied enough that gene drift occurs and the competent are selected under different circumstances, renewing the cycle of the population.

These cyclic renewals maintain variety without destroying the group through arbitrary influences like admixture:

But when the researchers modeled how phytoplankton species fare under fluctuating temperatures, something remarkable happened.

As the annual swings between warm and cold intensified, the amount of biomass some phytoplankton species produced — a measure of their ability to function — declined. But collectively, the productivity of the community went up.

In other words, in the aggregate, phytoplankton species didn’t just withstand the temperature roller coaster, they harnessed the ups and downs and flourished.

Variety stimulates response which in turn keeps the species alive. Without that variety, it will have more biomass but less internal variation, which leads to it being assimilated by other groups because it cannot maintain itself.

Tags: entropy, genetic entropy, genetics, heat death, mouse utopia, neanderthals, tasmanian devil