Dern Matters

Table of contents

Preparatory Grovelling
Launching
The boxes next door
Mutual attraction
Just suppose. . .
To but some buts
If so, so what?

Preparatory Grovelling

If we knew what it was we were doing,
it would not be called research, would it?
Albert Einstein

Many of my articles rely on a good helping of handwaving, and for the most part, without apology: pioneering is too valuable an activity for me to discourage it seriously, and if pioneering does not begin with handwaving, how can we call it pioneering?

This essay however is different: not only is it practically all handwaving: I am not even sure whether it is meaningful.

What is worse, I cannot be sure to what extent it is pioneering: I have seen nothing of the kind elsewhere, but there has been so much speculation in the field that I find it hard to believe that the complex of ideas is novel.

That marks the end of my apology — if you don’t like it, goodbye; but in any case don’t say you haven’t been warned.

 

Launching

Another thing I must point out is that
you cannot prove a vague theory wrong.
Richard Feynman

I happen not to be much attracted by theories of multiple universes — in particular, indefinitely large numbers of splitting universes. All the same, something like parallel universes is at the foundation of the concept of my speculation here.

The available evidence for Dark matter in our universe, though confusing, is very strong at present, but any form of explanation or description for it is tentative, to put the matter charitably. Anyone who has no clear idea of what it all is about, I refer to Wikipedia articles such as “Dark matter”, and “Dark energy” — and those are just the start. Suffice to say here, that firstly, space in our observable universe seems to be expanding at a continuously increasing rate.

Secondly, and in my opinion more troublesomely, most of our observable galaxies, if not all, seem to have too little observable mass near their cores, to account for their high rate of rotation.

My first impression was that the likeliest explanation would be a sort of naïve Cold Dark Matter idea: in rapidly spinning galaxies there must be a lot of cool common matter among the stars. That is to say: matter either in the form of meteoroids and rogue planets (meteoroids not in orbit round stars, and massive enough to maintain a roughly spheroidal shape through their own gravitation) or even minor rogue black holes.

But our various astronomic and cosmological professionals seem to be united in rejecting anything of that type. Part of the problem is that any such scattered garbage would have to be present in unrealistically huge amounts — dwarfing the mass of visible stars for one thing. The idea of Dark matter seems to demand something like 20 times as much Dark mass-energy equivalent, as observable ordinary matter could explain.

Never mind how trivial our own little planet might seem: we, together with all our visible cosmic fireworks, seem to amount to an afterthought in our own universe.

At the very suggestion of anything of that type, the catholic hegemony of the middle ages would have had a collective conniption fit, and arranged an auto-da-fé of unique proportions. Look at what they did to Bruno for a far milder suggestion!

But never mind them — they missed that chance long ago.

Now, apart from our too rapidly spinning galaxies, it seems that the idea of limiting our universe’s mass-equivalent to what is visible, leaves us in difficulties in trying to explain how galaxies formed in the first place: if the density is too low, it denies the most obvious attractive forces for gathering diffuse matter from space into concentrations that can collapse into galaxies.

Is it time, I ask, to think beyond the walls of the conceptual box?

 

The boxes next door

Skepticism is a useful tool of the inquisitive mind,
but it is scarcely a method of investigation.
James Thurber

Now, I repeat: I am not a parallel universe fan; I lack the imagination, or insight, and anyway, I am not in a position to calculate the nature or implications of parallel universes. So, however adventurous my suggestions here, they lack conviction. None the less, let’s explore the line of thought.

Possibly, just possibly, in the event that those suggestions do evoke a meaningful and novel line of thought they might stimulate someone into some more useful ideas.

To our pedestrian selves, we seemed to be living in a universe of three space dimensions and one time dimension, until Einstein showed that the distinction between the different dimensions is at best dependent on our respective relative velocities and masses and the like.

All right, call it four space-time dimensions and forgive me for loose terminology.

Since then physicists have come up with so many alternative multidimensional accounts that I never kept track of all the ideas, especially as some of them appeared to involved dimensions curled up inside atoms and so on.

As long as their ideas work, more strength to the theoreticians’ elbows, but I seem to have heard or read of ten-dimensional or thirty-dimensional proposals without either accepting or denying them. Their main interest from my current point of view is that some such ideas are not seen as intrinsically nonsensical.

And that is without even invoking the indefinite multiverses that some theoreticians support, such as Everett did in his day.

Well, for my current purpose, the details do not matter. Let us consider what you could regard as just a few universes, each with at least four space-time dimensions all to itself. Anyone in any such a private universe would not share any of the dimensions of that universe with any other private universe, and accordingly nothing internal to any private universe would cause, detect, or experience any events or forces in any other private universes.

With one class of exception that I shall introduce shortly. . .

As an illustrative analogy, imagine a stack of simple, parallel planes that all share all their XY‑coordinates, but have no points in common. For a material illustration, imagine them as a stack of parallel, barely separated, glass plates. Call such a plate an XY‑universe. Imagine that all that any inhabitant of such an XY‑universe could observe, is separated from parallel XY‑universes by perfect refraction.

But also imagine that there is at least one of a different class of dimension, shared among at least some of the XY‑dimensions. Call these the Z‑dimensions. Call universes that share some of each other’s Z‑dimensions, clusters. To anyone in any one set of associated dimensions, such a cluster, it would seem that we exist only in say, our local cluster of four (or ten etc) dimensions, and that would be all there is to it. And to observers within each dimension in a local universe in a cluster, effects that can pass in the Z‑dimensions give no indication of affecting, or emanating from, other universes. Possibly we might call such effects Dark effects: Dark mass, Dark energy, Dark gravity, etc.

Now, each 2‑dimensional glass plate represents a local universe. The hyperverse is a stack or frame holding the entire cluster. A hyperuniversal observer above our stack can look down from above, through the stack of glass plates, and see everything that happens in every plane, the light passing perpendicularly through the stack, and generally invisible within any plate. Because the plate are parallel, the Z observer will use the same coordinates for all the planes, except that, to specify any particular plane at least one other dimension (Z‑dimension) is required, a dimension unintelligible to any denizens of any of the planes. (Compare the idea with the novel “Flatland”, described in Wikipedia).

For all I know, there might be more than one such Z‑dimension in certain clusters of universes, but for our purposes I assume just one, at least until I can think of more than one. And the XY‑dimensions might be more than just two; our glass plates are just an analogy to a 4-dimensional spacetime, much as a tesseract is an analogy to a four-dimensional cube.

So there could be any number of XY‑coordinates in any number of dimensions: in referring to all those dimensions that are not shared between any of the parallel universes, I just speak of XY, as if there were just two, as in glass plates, but there might be any reasonable number of them in any one universe. For us in our universe for example, there might be four space‑time XY‑dimensions. And that is what I assume here for the sake of convenience. Similarly, the assumption that all the points in any XY‑dimensions exactly match those in every other universe in the cluster, is simply for convenience — I cannot imagine its accuracy being relevant in the current topic; our glass plates might not be internally uniform.

Just remember that to speak of XY‑dimensions and coordinates does not imply two dimensions; it is no more than a convenient analogy. In principle there could be any number of dimensions internal to each universe for all we know.

Not only would none of the denizens of any one such universe in a cluster, be able to observe anything about XY‑dimensions in neighbouring universes; he could not be affected by them either, except via forces that can be transmitted across the Z‑dimension.

But in our local, notional cluster the dimension that I consider here, as common to the otherwise independent universes, would be the Z‑dimension that supports gravitational effects. And perhaps it would be a unique dimension; I do not insist.

From the point of view of some sort of God’s Eye View (GEV), all the clusters could have the same coordinates, except within Z‑dimension. In the analogy of the parallel panes of glass, the GEV would be represented by an eye looking through all the panes at right angles to their planes. The whole structure of the hyperverse would occupy what we might call the XYZ‑dimensions.

In the model that I present, the GEV could be looking along the Z‑dimension that accommodates or transmits gravity, as perhaps the most fundamental force or influence, or whatever it might be that is common to all the parallel universes.

The only direct influence that we could feel from any universes in our cluster would be the gravitational effects of masses with more or less matching coordinates in nearby universes within cluster the cluster. For the rest we simply would have no effect on our neighbours, whether we were walking through each other or sitting in each other’s laps or fires or not. Coinciding in such a way would mean that from the God’s Eye point of view our coordinates in the XY‑dimensions are all the same, and only the Z‑dimension separates them.

The meaning of the distance separating universes along the Z‑dimension, is not clear; if the hyperverse only accommodates one or two local universes, the concept would be be vague — it would amount to saying that they were close enough to account for whatever effects we deduce. However, if there were many, it might well be the case that some universes were closer together than others and that closer universes would affect each other more intensely than distant universes.

Notice that the concept of separate flat glass plates is neither exclusive, nor strictly necessary; a single, folded plate could work very similarly. Suppose that our universe (our notional glass plate) were the only one, but that it is crumpled instead of flat, and its folds were beyond our red-shift horizon. That could have much the same effect, and arguably be less unwelcome in terms of Ockham’s razor.

Take your pick.

Mutual attraction

A bit beyond perception's reach
I sometimes believe I see
that Life is two locked boxes, each
containing the other's key.
Piet Hein

Now, in such parallel universes, or folds, no phenomenon that acts only within the XY‑dimensions of any universe could directly affect anything in any other universe. From that point of view within any universe, no such parallel universe has existence at all, where, by “existence” we mean “making any difference to some state or the course of some events”. So, if I bump my nose on a closed door I can assume that it exists, because if it did not my nose would not have been affected like that. And if a magnetic field had not existed, it could not have affected the behaviour of a compass needle.

But, if the universes’ influences were all internal to themselves (as if we were working inside just one of the parallel panes or folds of glass) and our current interpretation of our observations and theories, then we could be at a loss for any explanation adequate for the formation of galaxies, possibly even for the formation of the stars we see so plentifully about us.

Horrors! Would that be conceivable? In science?

Certainly it would. Worse has happened in the past and worse will happen in the future. Science is not religion, not the works or word of the divine. Science is a class of discipline and practice aimed at making the most of our evidence and logic, concerning what we seem to see in the world around us. We could no more guarantee that any of our theories is beyond doubt or criticism or error, than we could squat down, and raise ourselves into the air by mental power alone. That sort of action lies in the province of faith, not science.

The difference between science on one hand and delusion and dishonesty on the other, is that no competent, honest procedure in science relies on claims of anything of the kind.

So, if our explanation and prediction of the nature of our world fails, then our job is, and long has been, to find observations within our world and determine adequate reasons for them, and if that fails, then seek beyond our world (or our box), or something of both.

Or to reject the failing ideas uncompromisingly, and look for new ones.

I do not say which principles might explain our observations that suggest Dark Matter or Dark Energy — I simply do not know. This essay is no better than an abductive, not very coherent, guess.

But many a theory now in good repute, started out no better. Abduction, either in observation or speculation, is no substitute for science, but by the very nature of our world, it remains one of the scientists’ most fundamental tools.

So enough hedging: I have a guess, and my guess is as follows.

 

Just suppose. . .

Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.
Robert A. Heinlein

Suppose that to our universe there exists one, or a modest number, of mutually parallel universes (whatever that means, but I do not wish, irrelevantly to our topic, to exclude possibilities such as A having an influence on B, but B having none on A).

Suppose that gravity is the only effect that the Z‑dimension transmits.

That is not necessarily nonsensical in all views of gravity, such as that gravity could amount to, or be manifested by, the distortion of space.

Now, if so, a gravitational mass in one of the universes could affect masses in some of the others.

Let us also assume that the matter/energy density of all the relevant universes to be reasonably similar to ours: possibly something like the equivalent of one proton per litre.

Give or take a small number of orders of magnitude, but in any case, pretty diffuse.

Right; so:

As long as there is a fairly constant distribution of matter in the universes, this would suggest an indefinitely stable situation, with no major gravitational events.

More interestingly however, if there is anything like a big bang, such as we largely assume for our universe, or even some type of consistently developing or steady-state universe with sufficient turbulence and density, we could expect the clumping to lead to star formation, and on larger scales, to galaxies and clusters.

Well, we do observe the galaxies and clusters to some extent, but we are nonplussed by some aspects of their behaviour: their gravity seems to be too strong for their apparent masses.

There are several possible explanations for this, but none of them is as yet particularly persuasive.

So, while not-particularly-persuasive explanations are in vogue, one more (if it is one more — I do not promise that it is new) is unlikely to do much harm, and it might even stimulate some lines of thought.

So let us assume that we, as I write this and you read it, have some parallel universes of constitution roughly similar to that of our universe, somewhere out there along one or more Z‑dimensions. Along the Z‑dimensions, each universe that is sufficiently close to have any effect on us, may have started out similarly turbulent, but, like ours, generally too diffuse to produce a clumpiness similar what we observe.

But assume that gravity, perhaps alone among physical influences, can penetrate along what I have been calling the Z‑dimension: the one that penetrates across universes. Then what happens to affect the momenta and distribution of masses in one universe, would have gravitational effects in parallel universes.

But then, you object, why don’t we see any of this effect — we might be passing a neutron star in a neighbouring universe: why are we not being smeared out? Why do we not see G-type stars suddenly turning into impossible supernovas as their gravitational fields suddenly increase? Why do our oceans not suddenly develop tides that sweep kilometres-deep over all our continents within a day?

And so on.

Yes, but such questions ignore certain facts. People think in terms of the pictures that we see of night skies, of star fields, nebulae, and galaxies, and overlook the fact that such images enormously exaggerate the density of matter in space. Those crowded galaxies are mostly empty space, even pretty close to their central black holes. Consider our own nearest neighbour in our moderately dense volume of local space: roughly four light years away. That sounds very close — in interstellar terms, practically claustrophobic — but quite a large rapidly-moving star could pass between us without causing dramatic physical disturbance to the planets of either system.

More dramatically, Andromeda spiral galaxy is forecast to collide with our Milky Way in some 2 billion to 5 billion years. The prospect seems alarming, but actually, dense as the galaxies seem, the stars in their arms are so far apart that there is a very good chance that our solar system might not be disturbed at all. At a rough thumbsuck, the density of space containing our sun for about 4 light years in all directions, would be something like 1 in ten million million. For two stars to miss each other in such a dilution would not be a dead cert in a galactic collision, but it would a reasonable expectation as long as we did not pass too close to the central black hole.

In general, we should be far more concerned by the behaviour of our own sun in the mean time: it should be looking much like a red giant by then.

And more to the point for our current speculation, if the parallel universes were of similar density, then the chances of multiple universes close to each other in their Z‑dimension, and sharing masses close together in their in their XY‑dimensions, would be poor.

Poor, but not negligible. Each of the XY‑universes would have its own big bang, or equivalent, whether at the same time as each other or not. (Whatever “at the same time” might mean in connection with such scales!) The turbulent expansion would mean that at various coordinates, clots of higher density would coincide in different “adjacent” XY‑universes, and if gravity could be shared through the Z‑dimension, then if each clot alone were barely massive enough to maintain its matter, the two together would possess twice the strength of cohesion for as long as they stayed together.

Whether they would in fact stay together, is another question — they might not for long, because the should be no friction to hold them in place, so that if their mutual velocities along their respective XY‑dimensions were too high, they soon would separate. It could take multiple bodies in at least one of the XY‑universes if any one mass with components in more than one universe were to stay in the same gravitational well.

And yet, once the well were too deep for any mass in any of the universes to climb out of, those masses would stay together. And if the mass in one such universe were a galaxy, it would look superficially like its own visible mass, but would behave as though it had the mass in both universes at those coordinates.

To the inhabitants of that universe, the difference between observed and effective mass and observed mass would look like dark mass.

 

To but some buts

The gazelle I was feeding . . . though it took the piece of bread I was holding out
obviously did not like me. It nibbled rapidly at the bread, then lowered its head
and tried to butt me, then took another nibble and then butted again.
Probably its idea was that if it could drive me away the
bread would somehow remain hanging in mid-air.
George Orwell

 

There is room for many objections to such ideas, of course.

Why do we not see such effects more clearly? How about seeing gravitational lensing in clear space, with no visible mass to explain it as masses in neighbouring universes, that are not gravitationally yoked to visible masses move through clear space? Why do we not see more small accumulations of visible mass with no explanation of what bound them together? Or squashed together into diamond-like crystals by the gravity of passing invisible stars or even black holes? Why do we not see more smeared-out galaxies torn apart by invisible gravitational masses? Or smaller masses, which should be far more frequent? Are there any examples of visible effects in the early universe, that reflect the presence of gravitational influences where there are insufficient observable mass-energy concentrations to cause such consequences?

Make no mistake, I am not suggesting that I can point to any such effects as material evidence in favour of the hypothesis. There is no hard evidence for what is at best a speculation, and a speculation which is not even clearly characterised. However, not only is it often impossible to prove a negative, but the very nature of the hypothesis makes it difficult to decide when to stop looking. For one thing, we do not know how efficient the transmission of gravitation between universes could be: the very fact of gravitation being diluted by being shared across a lossy medium could explain why gravitation as a force is so weak in our universe.

Possibly in some weird way, the leakage of gravitation into inter-universal Z‑dimensional space could have created a sort of “tired gravitation” that explains the increasing expansion of space within our universe. Or the folds in our universe beyond our red-shift horizon could be exerting tension on our space and stretching it. As it happens, recent observations suggest the possibility of a slowing down of the acceleration of our universe’s red-shifting.

And the major clumping effects during or after our big bang might have been in the earlier stages of the big bang expansion towards the end of the “dark ages” when matter was more crowded and baryonic matter began to emerge. It would be quite possible for neighbouring universes’ gravitational effects at that time already to be influencing our future history.

Later encounters across the Z‑dimension would become progressively less frequent as masses drew further apart.

And galaxies in neighbouring XY‑universes that, as it were, had mated gravitationally across XY boundaries in those early times, would stick together indefinitely. It would be particularly likely that several galaxies at a time, in their own universes, would mate together in one unit, thereby explaining why the visible mass, not only would seem too small to explain its excessive gravity, but several times too small.

As for the non-appearance of smaller accumulations, say of the equivalence of rocky rogue planets, wandering through space without parent stars to explain their accretion: firstly, they are not easy to discover. Even the smallest star is much larger than any rogue planet, and even brown dwarfs are hard enough to spot, never mind rocky little rogues. What could be harder to explain would be why there are any such bodies at all.

Well, there are in fact quite a few ways in which orphan rogues could form. Colliding stars could splash, creating droplets of planetary mass on escape trajectories, that would wander indefinitely. Planets on interfering high-speed trajectories could easily find themselves sling-shotted out of their own stars’ gravitational systems. Current studies suggest that rogue planets are wildly commoner than stars, so to exclude trans-universe gravitation from the possible causes of rogue bodies could be a challenging exercise.

If so, so what?

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion
(either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself)
draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be
a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side,
yet these it either neglects and despises, or else by some distinction
sets aside and rejects, in order that by this great and pernicious
predetermination the authority of its former conclusions
may remain inviolate.
Francis Bacon

What these ideas suggest or imply, I am unsure; the fact is that I am out of my depth. That might sound ignominious, but I am undismayed — I reflect yet again on the words of an anonymous columnist in a Scientific American of 1964:

“Knowledge is growing and changing,
the world is large and Man is small, and
except in matters of faith, there is no pope.”

When you come down to it, if things were otherwise, this would be a far poorer world. It is in fact unclear whether there would be a world at all; it is conceivable on the one hand that this is the simplest possible world, and that the very nature of nothingness is such that it is self-contradictory and that if there were nothing, that very fact would imply this simplest of all worlds.

“Ahah”, I hear the cry “but what created the nothing?”

“Same thing that created the creator...”

Old story: An engineer and a lawyer and a communist were bickering about whose profession was the oldest:
“Engineering: one had to have an engineer to build the universe in the first place.”
“Nonsense; before the engineer could get started, one needed a lawyer to bring order to the chaos.”
“Ahah! But who do you think created the chaos?”

That was a better question than it might seem at first. Try to imagine something that has no start. Or ending. Whether it is an intellectual shortcoming or not, one tends to boggle. Is that because of our mental limitations, or is it because the state of NOTHING is itself fundamentally self-inconsistent?

Well, don’t bother to ask me where I get my stack of parallel universes from; I don't even know where to get this one, possibly folded, universe from. But if, before I leave you to think about it without assistance, you would like to read some discussion of the point, you might go to another essay at:

https://fullduplexjonrichfield.blogspot.com/2023/04/no-point_19.html

There I point out that for a position in a space to be fully empty, or even for it to have no size, would imply that the content and coordinate would have to be zero. This would require infinite precision 0.0000. . ., which is not possible in any universe, empty or not. That alone would explain why “empty space” is full of “vacuum fluctuations”. What exactly such space would have to be, is another question, but for it not to be is just as demanding for objectors to define, as for nothing to be.

Thinking about nothing can be confusing. . .

But one way or another, it would be a marvel if it turned out that the search to detect the mysterious and elusive Dark matter and Dark energy particles turned out to be futile because they are not even in this universe.

And it would be an eerie thought to see ourselves as part of the Dark matter and Dark energy for a different universe not too far away. If there were living beings in that universe, we would be equally hard for them to detect. But we might think kindly thoughts about each other.

 

 

 Genotype Fair

Pilgrimage towards less reproduction,
but more fun trying...

Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!
Wolfgang Pauli

Eugenics as a Four-letter Word

Hitler never could manage eugenics, partly because of his politics, but mainly because he just did not understand that in biology saying it’s so don’t make it so.

Not that I say he was wrong, mind you — biologically meaningless ideas cannot meaningfully be called wrong: if something meaningful is wrong, its negation is in some sense right, even if trivial; on the other hand, if I conclude that it is untrue that “Solid vortices do corrode dynamic esurient dispersion”, I then find myself in difficulty when trying to confirm instances where “Solid vortices do not corrode dynamic esurient dispersion”. When both assertions neither can be right nor wrong, they are meaningless. This commonly happens with non-issues arising from confused ideas and delusions. 

And in its fact-denial and issue-evasion, Hitler’s ignorant Aryanism made about as much biological sense as any tooth fairy assertion; he would have fitted perfectly into the politics of plenty of our modern fascistic demagoguery, except that he had too much style to wear a gimme cap.

In fairness, few eugenic practices in history have made more practical sense than Hitler’s, except maybe the Spartans’ leaving newborns out for a night. Why Spartans wanted to select for neonatal brown fat and unattractiveness to foxes, I cannot think, but it probably was more effective than shrieking about Aryans or whining about lost elections, or similar lunacy.

No Time Like the Present,
                      Unless it is the Past

The only thing to prevent what's past is to put a stop to it before it happens
Boyle Roche

But, back on planet Earth, we humans could hardly ask for a more constructive time than now, ripe for some realistic, compassionate, biologically valid, socially responsible, eugenics; our planet has been peaceful for centuries, except for a few inter-tribal squabbles and pandemics, none of which has substantially threatened global population growth, and we are not yet so poor that we can’t afford biometricians, population trend tracking, pop stars, and tobacco companies. Our current population is perhaps twice what our planetary welfare can constructively bear, but not yet so great that we are destroying anything but planetary clutter, such as whales, frogs, and rain-forests.

Of course humanity needs a more efficient and stringent thinning mechanism than war, say a more lethal and universal brand of football hooliganism or political sloganeering, but some violent factions nowadays disapprove of violence, and they cite their politics and other forms of religions in support of killing people to prove it. So let’s consider alternatives.

China made a militant gesture with the one-child-per-family law; it was grossly ill-conceived, but it did at least show that population control could be possible, whether unconditionally desirable or not; all we need in the light of that demonstration is a practical, efficient and constructive way to manage it. To achieve all that without gross rejection, compassion and equitability will be necessary, as well as incentives. 

Humanity’s long suit at present is our planetary population. We currently are numerous enough and varied enough to give us plenty of genetic material to select from. As long as selection is equitable and self-regulating, everyone must surely approve (though many would squeal like pigs in an abattoir, for sheer social prejudice, blank ignorance, and demand for personal gratification; we see similar reactions to vaccination, and women's freedom of choice to reproduce or not). 

But what, I ask, is fairer than permitting everyone in the world one live-born child (implying two children for a contracted couple, for example)? Anyone illicitly having more, we reasonably might treat very, very counter-selectively! A scheme along such lines would reduce the population gently, but quite quickly, because many people want no children, and some die anyway before reproducing. We might halve our population in say, ten generations.

“So we can under-propagate ourselves to extinction, but wouldn’t nukes be faster?” I hear you cry. But a population control scheme on such lines as personal self discipline, or public discipline, would cause less collateral suffering and destruction of assets than we could expect from war, in particular nuclear war (consider say the thirty-years war, or Hamburg, Hiroshima, or Tokyo) and the associated discipline also would serve higher objectives than just being limited to population reduction.  

Negativity and Nihilism

No species before man could select its evolutionary destiny. Armed with knowledge, man can do so.
He can steer evolution in the direction he regards good and desirable.
Or he may elect to drift on the evolutionary current oblivious of consequences.
One thing he probably cannot do is to have evolution stand still.
  Theodore  Dobzhansky

Population reduction in itself after all, is at best a nihilistic negativism; intelligent population control would be a powerful tool for selection without genetic impoverishment. It permits propagation of cystic fibrosis, thalassaemia, dystrophy, spina bifida, Ringo’s nose, groupies’ tone-deafness, and other contributors to the richness of our gene pool.

Conversely, we need not specify the biological parents of anyone’s child ration; let them make their own choices how they go about equitable reproduction. All those not planning properly, with appropriate free assistance from the state, would thereby decrease their own evolutionary fitness: such a person would be likelier not to reproduce as successfully, and the children would have a higher frequency of genetic or birth defects. 

All that without the slightest compulsion from the powers that be. Except perhaps that after any attempt at reproduction that failed in the face of formal warning, permission for another attempt might be withheld.

And in my opinion such rules probably  would tend to increase parents' sense of responsibility and commitment to their children, in comparison to current (and past) generations, in which the prevalence and variety of child neglect and abuse is endlessly nauseating. And all that at the same time as people are making horrified noises about anything as blasphemous as family planning or population-wide vaccination. 

A thought for the unthinking fundamentalists among readers: read your bible! God said: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion  over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth..."

He did not suggest that mindless multiplication was fruitful, nor that wanton, selfish destruction or extermination of His creations by greed and cruelty, was compatible with dominion, much less implied by it. 

And of course, if we were to put any sort of constraint onto any person’s right to reproduction, it would be no more than reasonable, practical, and compassionate to assist in their production of the best possible offspring of their loins. 

Fruitfulness, right? Meaningful fruitfulness.

If someone is known to carry any seriously deleterious genes, the state should support and pay for genetic selection or correction of the gametes or embryos, to produce the most desirable offspring that could practically result, as the parent sees it. It would be better of course, to consult in advance the preferences of the child instead, but that is not foreseeably possible, so we can at best recommend the best practical options of health, social compatibility, functionality, and capability.

The Horror of Engineered
                      Populations and Racism

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer

One hoary bogeyman is the fear that fashion or politics would skew the population into disastrous trends; however, that is nonsense. The only constraint in this context, should be to forbid any preference for either male or female children — and even that could be open to approval and negotiation in a given community, say within a city or county or the like, where it might be desirable to negotiate babies’ gender on parental request, to maintain a healthy gender ratio, but beyond that, there could be direct proscription of gender choice or determination. 

And it is so important to understand the reason for such a prohibition, or at least, constraint. It would be far better to leave the choice to the parent or parents, but the practical reality is that there is such a preference for male offspring, that the resultant skewing caused by free choice simply is not tolerable. Certain exceptions could be allowed for, say, when a would-be parent requests a child of the locally lower frequency, or a couple contracts to have one child of each gender.

But those are details, open to adjustment according to common humanity and practicality.  

Again, there is a dread of skewing the emergent population composition according to prejudice, power, fashion, or traits. That is an impotent bogeyman of far less significance than gender choice: it would not matter a scrap to the community if some insane billionaire were to pay a thousand families to propagate his genes, or even his clones, as their own children, instead of their own genetic material, on a basis of “willing buyer, willing seller”. The rest of his project would be legally subject to everyone’s health. In a population of billions, a few thousands of one genotype would be too trivial a factor to be excited about. The children either could be inviable, in which case they would rapidly breed out of the population, or they could be highly viable, in which case everyone should be happy.

Or those children could on average be within one or two standard deviations of the population mean for most practical purposes in which case there would be nothing for most people to complain about, including the foster families. (Biometricians call that sort of damping effect reversion to the mean)

The only legal constraint that the authorities might insist on, could be to register each child's parentage and genotype, to avoid inbreeding or related problems.

Individual prospective parents could be encouraged to use information from the Human Genome Project to negotiate genetic engineering or adoption or conception by outsiders, as long as the rigid rule for routine cases remains in force: single children for single parents and six-packs for contracted menages-a-sixe or other variations on polyamory, and no monkeying with the gender ratio.

A rule of this type would favour desirable genomes without special compulsion or prejudice, because the incompetent, inviable, and apathetic would propagate poorly. If they chose to offer their breeding licenses to rich folk for binge money, instead of burdening themselves with expensive children instead of lottery tickets, that would be their personal choices. No problem, and none of the community's concern. 

Furthermore, it should in practice reduce the persistence of harmful, in fact tragic, recessives such as Tay-Sachs disease and thalassaemia, as well as genetic accidents such as Down’s syndrome or haemophilia.

Something for Everyone

Loose systems last longer and function better.
John Gall

Once population numbers were suitably optimised, demographers could exploit the slack to breed actively for desired biological quality — nothing Hitlerian: suppose the demographers decided that a surplus of thirty thousand were desired for a given county some year.

I suggest say, a three-way allocation of those thirty thousand spare reproductive slots:

• one third of the slots could be allocated by government invitation based on certified, publicly audited, desirable and willing performers, according to recommendation by medical councils and the like;

• one third could be invited by public vote for extra child tickets for popular heroes who had expressed their support, and they could be chosen irrespective of whether they were pop stars or sports champions or other major achievers. In this connection the public choice would be subject only to willingness of the chosen.

• The remaining third of the slots would be for the nobodies like the rest of us, allocated by public lottery, together with cash prizes. Purchases of multiple tickets and auction of unwanted winnings would be encouraged, always on a willing-buyer-willing-seller basis. The lottery funds could go to suitable benefits such as the upbringing of some proportion of the children.

A reasonable slice of the lottery profits could be allocated to cash prizes for casual gamblers, as well as support for winning parents. And why not? The most successful systems are the ones that are designed to run downhill; if you want spontaneous virtue, you must organise it. No one need enter such a lottery if they wish not to, but with many cash prizes and a few reproduction tickets, no one need be pressured to do anything undesired with his winnings. It even could be arranged to pay back most of the ticket purchase prices, or to offer a free ticket for the next round, to losers who have bought more than one ticket...

Such selection of parents among lottery winners and according to popularity and audited medical assessments would support rapid evolutionary progress without reducing diversity. Genes sufficiently unfit would lose ground to beneficial “extended phenotypes”.

Objectors fear that fads would doom us to a uniform population of Michael Jacksons, or fashionably engineered designer genotypes, or something equally nauseating. But our gene pool has the size and resiliency to outlast fashions and even to benefit from them. Ideals of beauty or of non-functional excellence change several times per generation and usually correlate significantly with above-average fitness anyway. 

After all, just think: suppose a Schwarzenegger or a Woody Allen or a Madonna did sell a couple of million somatic cells for cloning, or gametes for zygotes for implanting, before the fashion changed in favour of some other caricature: those would be a drop in the bucket, and probably a generally beneficial drop at that; even superficial notoriety generally is associated with some above-average genetic attributes.

Suppose too that someone actively wanted a genetically engineered child from their own genetic material instead of from haphazard mating?

As long as the engineers in question could certify the practice and the genetic quality of the output, whether by cloning or otherwise, why should there be any objection, except possibly to a choice of gender? Such a child generally could be expected to be socially desirable anyway.

Again, no matter what the apparent stupidity or nastiness of prominent sportsmen and public figures might be, such figures tend to have a better genotype than the average groupie. And even if notoriety does boost the reproductive success of publicity-plumed cuckoos, I suspect that when the novelty wears off the predominant tendency among rabble eager to improve their own line would be towards a surprisingly sensible selection of gametes.

Possibly even their own.

Religious objections? The only religious objections relevant to one’s own choices, could be to that of limiting one’s own reproduction. 

Tough if that is the way anyone feels about it; if your religion compels you to go out and kill people, the laws in most countries forbid it as being anti-social, no matter what your ecclesiastics demand. The same applies to reproduction: people who wish to propagate ad libitum at the expense of society cannot expect society to support or even tolerate their preferences or selfish demands, any more than a healthy society would support child abuse. Any moral or religious objections to other people’s approved choices are socially as irrelevant as other people’s religious choices, and are not subject to anyone else’s personal judgement.

Sex and Reproduction

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results,
but that’s not why we do it.
Richard Feynman

Sex. . .???

Oh, that!

Why, sex could at last assume its proper functions of fun and bonding instead of listening to idiots who irrelevantly confuse the issue with rights to reproduction. What a selection pressure that will apply!

By all means let anyone who wishes to reproduce by sexual activity do so, whether with a contracted mate or otherwise; that would be largely irrelevant. It only would have to be subject to the same restrictions as any other means of reproduction: one parent, one child at a maximum; ten parents, ten children, even if only one of the ten is a (willing!) woman. If you use up your ticket, do not expect any favours, unless you want to buy a lottery ticket.

Unfair? How could that be unfair? Certainly someone rich enough to buy other people’s reproduction tickets could do so, but only on a willing seller/willing buyer basis. That is not effectively different from rich people at present being able to buy more and better cars than I can afford, even for that matter my favourite car. 

Or lottery ticket holders winning prizes that I failed to win.

Once the Dog Has Caught the Car,
        What is it to DO With it?

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw

What about a lottery winner who lacks the money to support the pregnancy and parturition, and raise the child?

That is a separate question: every birth should be state-supported, including food, health care, education, and general welfare. And what happens after the child grows to majority is a still different question, but not a novel question.

I realise that some people will oppose the very principles of population restriction or population improvement as blasphemous, but I decline to consider such objections before they have been supported in meaningful terms.

I refuse to grant the least toleration, let alone respect, to anyone who would think of opposing population control in favour of supporting a healthy, educated upbringing for every child, both now, and for foreseeable generations.

Meanwhile think about it all, but tread gently in your thoughts; you tread on our future.

Evil's Existence

Evil Existence?

 

A sting to a tale

 

I cannot remember how much of the following text is my own, or how much of it I based on a lying claim that has become an online cliché, so, if I am plagiarising anything non-trivial, I apologise in advance. In contrast to the liars, I do not claim that my version of the confrontation is literally true.

And what point am I making...?

If that is what you ask as you reach the end, you have answered your own question; and I hope that you have done so to your own gratification.

A professor asked the students : “Did God create everything?”

One said: "Yes, he did!"

“According to the bible, and to various religious sects, yes, God was the only creator; to suggest that anyone else, angel, devil, or human, created anything else, directly or indirectly, would be blasphemy” the professor continued. "If so, then God created evil, since we see evil everywhere, and since God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, it follows that the creation was deliberate, making nonsense of the myriad of mutually contradictory Abrahamic faiths that extol the antipathy of God to evil".

The student subsided.

Ignoring his friends’ snickers as calmly as he ignored the authority of the professor, another student asked, "Professor, does cold exist?"

"In what sense of existence? "

"My point professor, is that cold does not exist. What we consider cold is in reality the absence of heat. Absolute zero is the total absence of heat; all matter becomes inert and incapable of reaction at that temperature. We have created this word to describe how we feel if we have no heat."

“Well done for independent thought,” said the professor “though your understanding of absolute zero, and accordingly of cold, is deficient. According to physics and ignoring certain technicalities, absolute zero is not attainable even in principle, and however cold you can make something, it always is possible to make it colder, though the temperature is asymptotic to what we call zero Kelvin. And even at zero Kelvin, matter is not fully inert; this follows from the basic concepts of quantum theory and information, which as it happens are beyond the scope of this module. 

"But your point does not follow; cold is relative, a difference in levels of heat, not an absence. And, in physical terms, relationships are in themselves real, so your claim is suspect at the very least.

“Whenever something is a lot less hot than something else we may elect to say, in relative terms, that it is cold. Or cooler at least.  For instance if I dip a rod of ice, cold enough to cause frostbite, into liquid air, it is hot enough to cause that liquid to boil. If I dip a thick red-hot iron rod at say, 700K, into molten iron at say 1812K and pull it out again soon enough, it will come out white hot with extra iron welded onto its outside because it is cold enough to freeze the molten iron. So you need first to clarify what you mean by freezing cold; it is not the simple absence of heat, or if it were nothing but that, there never would be any cold anywhere.

“Furthermore, if you dip one hand into ice-cold water and another into hot water at say 50 Celsius, then after a minute take them out again and put both hands simultaneously into another basin of water at a comfortable room temperature, then the one hand feels as if it is in hot water, and the other as cold. Hot and cold are relationships, and not necessarily in every sense symmetrical relationships.

“Apart from any idea of cold though, your question ignores the nature of the concept of existence itself, which, semantically, is a treacherous topic; in fact, to save you unnecessary searching, I warn you that existence is not cogently definable except in terms of what effect any item of existence or non-existence may have on relationships within the light cones of the relevant locally existing entities. 

It follows that cold definitely does exist by many measures in many contexts. By all means come back and contradict me once you have investigated the subject adequately.”

The student persisted, "Well then Professor, does darkness exist?"

The professor responded, "Much as the concept of cold is relative and context-dependent, so the concepts of light and dark are relative and context-dependent. Darkness is not to be defined absolutely in terms of how much light, but also what form of light (whether at visible or invisible frequencies, collimated, polarised, or diffuse for example) may be present at given coordinates; arguably the question is even more troubled than that of the existence of cold. What is dark to a bee in red light, which it cannot see, might be quite clear to me, because I can see in red light. The bee in turn can see in near ultra-violet, which would look like darkness to me. If I come out of dazzling sunlight into a room that looks brightly lit to someone coming out of a darkroom, it might look dark to me until my eyes accommodated to the ambient illumination. 

It is perfectly possible to argue in proper contexts that cold and dark may exist as relationships, but not as absolutes. For one thing, you cannot have absolute darkness except at absolute zero, and, as I already have noted, you cannot get to absolute zero. You could save much of your effort and my time if you prepared your thoughts and questions more carefully in advance."

"Professor, I think you are being unfair; you have had longer to prepare these points than I did, but in the context of your original question, does evil exist?"

"You still have not said what you mean by existence. I never mentioned existence in any such context at all; the term as applied to cold or to dark, or to trees falling unheard in forests, or to clouds, or to the stool over which you trip, or the hole into which you fall, means different things. As I already have said of course, God, having created the world and all that is in it, including all the relationships within it, would be responsible for everything happening in it, or existing in it, including man's inhumanity to man, or beasts' beastliness to beasts. Whether or not nature might be evil, it seems evil as God created it full of suffering and pain — suggesting a malicious creator. You may have read Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Khayyam:

‘...For all the sin wherewith the face of man
    Is blackened, Man’s forgiveness give — and take. "

The student replied, "Evil does not exist professor, or at least not unto itself. Evil is just the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, that you affirm do exist, a word man created for the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is unlike faith or love; those exist just as light and heat exist. Evil is the effect of the absence of God's love when man excludes God from his heart. In that way it's like the cold that comes where there is no heat or the darkness that comes where there is no light."

“Your passion does you more credit than your sense, but on the principle of ‘''nullius in verba''’, we need not accept your unsupported assurance that cold or dark do not exist, either more or less than faith or love or hatred or treachery do or do not exist, or in what forms and circumstances they are in themselves evil; the unsuitable intensity of either too little or too much heat, is harmful when it is more than we can bear. Similarly, faithfulness or love are good only in the right intensity at the right time and in the right application; you would not regard faith in or faithfulness to the devil, or love of evil, as good, I hope? Atrocities and tragic absurdities throughout history and in everyday family and community life have been justified in the name of faith and love, and it still happens all around us.

"Consider first for example what you mean by existence: existence is a challenging thing to define, and you do not seem to have taken sufficient care in defining it, even in your own terms. First of all, you need to consider the concept of 'entity', what we might call a 'thing';  to exist in any defensible sense, the presence and absence of an entity must in some ways affect events differently. That is one basis for definition of existence itself. And relationships between entities, such as cold or evil, accordingly are themselves entities as real, and with as definite existence, as any other entity: whenever they mean anything at all, they make differences.

“And evil too, is a relationship between a deed and its intent, and the entities affected by it. Love and faith, like cold and anger, when in a favoured cause or directed to a favoured object, do good from some points of view at least, but when not, they do harm, and may be seen as evil, or seen as evil to one, but good to another. The fatted calf could not have shared the joy at the return of the prodigal, any more than the faithful brother did. When one man in a war dies for his country, the man who killed him, whom he would have killed to die for his country was evil from his point of view, but a hero for the other country.

"Two heroes for the price of one, and two villains into the bargain.

“Nor are faith or love, as relationships, in any way either more or less existent than evil; certainly the so-called holy scriptures say nothing of the kind, so what is your authority for such claims?

“Furthermore, in spite of your assurance, the Word of God does not say that evil is the absence of God; in fact the bible does explicitly say that God is omnipresent, even if you take the wings of the morning; remember? So, how is God to be excluded from the evil or its source? And who are you to assert that it does not exist when god is absent, if he ever could be? There are plenty of biblical texts that speak of evil as something existing in itself; consider the like of: 'I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some evil take me', or 'Wherefore have ye rewarded evil for good?', or 'Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil'.

“Let’s not blaspheme by making unsupported assumptions about a human’s paltry ability to exclude him in contradiction to scripture, contradiction to God's word, shall we?

“As Stephen Fry said: ‘You can't just say there is a god because the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children’; whose exclusion of God from whose heart causes that cancer, or other evils, would you say?

“Now meanwhile, what are the rest of you laughing at? You lacked the sense to ask, and the nerve to argue; you should be ashamed. If you must laugh, laugh at yourselves.”

 

Any reader might object that this professor seemed to be unfairly well prepared with arguments, positively glib in fact, but no professor would be worth his salt if he presumed to raise such a topic in class, without being properly prepared.

Incidentally, in contradiction to the claim that prompted this account, this rebellious young man, whatever his name might have been, had nothing to do with the more famous Albert Einstein; neither Einstein's views nor his parentage match those asserted in the original version of the story. Even if the details had matched, that would have added nothing to the merits of the parable.  However, the urge to add puffery to the account is characteristic of the ethics, honesty, and dignity of the sources of such trite religious homilies.

One wonders what sort of person they should impress, and in which direction...