The Dogs of War

There is reason to think that early Indo-Europeans had adolescent war-bands, bands identified with dogs or wolves. It seems likely that they were composed of boys about the same age , came from the wealthier families,  wore animal skins, and were sent off into border areas, where they caused trouble.  After a few years they rejoined  regular society.

Passages in the Vedas suggest that there was a midwinter initiation ritual in which these JDs died and were reborn as dogs of war. There are lots of references to this sort of thing in Celtic, Germanic, and Indo-Aryan legend and  mythology.

Dorcas Brown and David Anthony report on the excavation of an late Bronze Age settlement near Samara, Russia.  They found evidence of a winter-season sacrifice of many (> 50) dogs and wolves – not usually eaten in these cultures.  They were chopped into little, tiny pieces., especially the heads.

The animals were mostly over six years old and had been well treated: Brown and Anthony suggest that they were pets, and that the boys had to kill their own dogs as part of the initiation rite. That’s disgusting.

 

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Shoot to Kill

Some people claim that it is really, really difficult for humans to psych themselves up to kill another human.  They often cite a claim by S. L. A. Marshall that only a small fraction  – less than 25% – of WWII American combat infantrymen fired their weapons in battle.

Other people (Dave Grossman in particular) have built major theoretical structures on this observation,  saying that humans have a built-in mental module than inhibits us from killing conspecifics (presumably for the good of the species).  Grossman parlayed this line of thought into a stint as a professor of psychology at West Point.

Which is pretty impressive, especially when you consider that it’s all bullshit.  S.L.A Marshall’s ‘data’ is vapor; there was and is nothing to it.  He made shit up, not just on this topic.   There’s every to reason to think that the vast majority  of infantrymen throughout history did their level best to kill those on the other side –  and there’s a certain satisfaction in doing so, not least because it beats them killing you.

You have to wonder about a universal human instinct that apparently misfired in every battle in recorded history.

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The Inexorable Progress of Science: Psychology

If psychology had high validity, people versed in its mysteries would be able to predict behavior and control it some extent. They’d be scary: they could understand things that the man on the street couldn’t, manipulate people in ways that Alcibiades never dreamed of.  They’d beat you at poker, and steal your girl. There would be psychological equivalents of the experiment where you place a tennis ball on top of a basketball, and a ping-pong ball on top of the tennis ball: when you drop the assembly, the ping-pong ball ends up on your roof – an anti-intuitive and dramatic result.

Once upon a time, psychologists were scary, at least in science fiction.  Preem Palver was more frightening than the Mule, if you ask me. Today, psychologists don’t get much respect.  What went wrong?  Or, considering the risk of domination by our very own Second Foundation, what went right?  I think we need to look at the history of psychology in the 20th century.

The better sort of psychologist, circa 1930, would have said that mental illness often ran in families, which it does (Kraepelin). Some cases were caused by tertiary syphilis, cause understood, and some progress had been made on treatment (salvarsan and Wagner-Jauregg’s  malariotherapy). Sometimes a brain tumor was the cause, and once in a while it was benign and easy to get at (meningiomas) Our hypothetical old-time psychologist also would say that there was a strong suspicion that most cases of mental illness had some kind of biological cause, exact nature unknown. They had a few drugs that were occasionally useful, like bromides.  These guys didn’t have all the answers, but they were making progress, and they weren’t crazy.

In the US, such men were largely replaced by Freudian types, for something like 40 years: 1935-1975. They were nuts.  I could go on and on about just how nuts they were – Medawar called psychoanalytic theory “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century” – but there’s not much point in a detailed analysis of a load of crap.

Anyhow, the rise of psychoanalysis surely got in the way of real progress in understanding the human mind.   To be fair, its decline doesn’t seem to have generated fantastic progress, at least not yet.   Evolutionary psychology has promise, but I have to say that a lot of the work there looks silly to me – not because it has to be, not because there’s something wrong with the idea that evolution has shaped human behavior, more that it attracts the wrong sort of people, a general problem in the social sciences.

One of the nice things about reading literature from before 1880 is that you never, ever hear a single Freudian  concept referenced. It’s wonderful, like breathing fresh mountain air.

Psychoanalysis does have one practical payoff, however – it serves as a sensitive detector of a hunger for nonsense.  Think about all the people who were significantly inspired or  influenced by Freud’s ideas.  They were loons. Are loons. It’s not just that they made a mistake – they’re the kind of people who make such mistakes, and they’ll do it again, first chance they get.

There is a a straightforward implication : if the human race is ever to get anywhere, we need a better way of  hiring intellectuals.

 

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Books

Randall Parker proposed (to me and also to Razib Khan) recommending books that might do for Christmas gifts.  Here are my suggestions -

    The Princeton Companion to Mathematics

 

From Alexander to Actium:

 

     Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege

 

The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody:

 

The Conquest of New Spain

 

 

The Anubis Gates:  

 

The Sleepwalkers

 

Coup D’Etat: A Practical Handbook :

 

The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History

 

The Great Siege

 

  Song of the Sky

 

How to Solve It: 

 

The Double-Cross System

 

In Search of the Indo-Europeans :  

 

The Washing of the Spears

 

Eagle Against the Sun

 

The Steel Bonnets

 

Kim 

 

Rats, Lice, and History

 

The Great Impostor

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Instinctive Fears

It is easier to develop a phobia about snakes than electricity or carbon monoxide, probably because we have built in neurological mechanism that confer that propensity.

Likely most animals have a similar propensity to develop a fear of fire: or it might come automatically.   If there was such a fear-of-fire mechanism, we have lost it: and dogs have as well.  If this is correct, one could learn about this hypothetical mechanism by comparing dogs and wolves.

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World Without Stars

Some recent work suggests that most galaxies have too many gamma-ray bursters, such that most planets get hosed every so often, making complex life practically impossible – as if it wasn’t already.  It seems that low levels of heavy elements (heavier than helium: “metallicity”) make this more likely, so that conditions were unfavorable in almost all galaxies for the first few billion years.

On the other hand, another recent paper suggests that there are many rogue stars outside of galaxies, flung there by gravitational interactions with giant black holes in galactic cores.  That and spindizzies.

Seems to me that forming in a galaxy might give a solar system enough heavy elements, while being flung into the intergalactic deeps would protect you from cosmic catastrophes like gamma-ray bursts.   Such stars might be good homes for complex life, especially a few billion years ago.

Interstellar travel is hard enough for us, but for these guys, it would be a bitch. That first step is a doozy.

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Inferior Faunas

I mentioned South American paleontologists defending the honor of their extinct animals, and pointed  out how stupid that is. There are many similar cases: Jefferson vs Buffon on the wimpiness of North American mammals (as a reader pointed out),  biologists defending the prowess of marsupials in Australia (a losing proposition) , etc.

So, we need to establish the relative competitive abilities of different faunas and settle this, once and for all.

Basically, the smaller and more isolated, the less competitive.  Pretty much true for both plants and animals.

Islands do poorly. Not just dodos: Hawaiian species, for example, are generally losers: everything from outside is a threat.

Next up from islands is Australia: still losers. The only invasive species I can think of that originated in Australia is the brushtail possum – and it invaded New Zealand. That’s like  a dwarf beating up a midget.  Birds can be an exception – they aren’t really isolated, if they have good powers of flight.  Some say that crows originated in Australia. By the way, there is a chance that penguins originated in New Zealand.  I suspect that NZ’s faunal backwardness might have aided penguin evolution, for reasons that I leave as an exercise for my readers.

South America: not as embarrassing as Australia, where the local predators are out-competed by house cats, but South America’s only competitive mammal export is the nutria, as far as I know.  The locals did poorly in the big interchange with North America, after the formation of Panama.

North America has had lots of contact with Eurasia, is fairly big, hasn’t really been isolated. Important lineages like horses and camels originated in North America.  That said, some elements of the North American biome seem uncompetitive – seems like freshwater fish are pretty vulnerable to invaders.  And Eurasian steppe imports do pretty well – things like tumbleweed and cheatgrass.

Africa was an island continent for a long time: although some of the Afrotheria have done well, particularly elephants,  most have not. As far as I know, there was only the one mammalian lineage in old Africa, which may have limited  local competition.

Eurasia: if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.  the two biggest placental clades, Euarchontoglires and Lauriasiatheria apparently originated in Lauriasia (Eurasia plus North America) .  Between them, they account for more than 95% of placental mammal species.

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