In this (summer fluff?) Macleans article, Andrew Potter repeats a common misunderstanding of genetics:

…Humans are genetic individuals. We are almost all completely unique, sharing at most one half of our DNA with our parents or siblings.

Humans are not special. Humans are not beautiful or unique snowflakes. Humans are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.

All humans have 99.5% of the same DNA, and some of that 0.5% is junk. According to Kyla, the correct interpretation of “siblings share half of their DNA” is as follows:

Don and Betty have two children, Sally and Bobby. For every one of Sally and Bobby’s nucleotide pairs, there is a 50% chance it was copied from Don and a 50% chance it was copied from Betty (except for Bobby’s Y chromosome). So you can say that only half their DNA shares the same origin. But since Don and Betty are 99.5%+ similar (more because they’re both white), Sally and Bobby will end having DNA that is mostly indistinguishable, regardless of its origin.

Selfish gene theory says that your behaviour is controlled by your genes to maximize the survival of identical genes, which is why you’re nicer to your relatives than to people with a different skin colour. Unless you assume that the few genes that differ between siblings are so powerful as to override all the rest, selfish gene theory is not sufficient to explain why people do things in their own interest that are against their relatives’. In fact, selfish gene theory leads to the same slippery slope as utilitarian ethics: you should sacrifice your life to make a bunch of rabbits happy. Potter is wrong that “If we were clones…there would be no need for morality”, because we practically are clones.

On the other hand, Potter is also wrong that twins or clones have identical DNA: genetics isn’t that simple.

I was raised into and trained in reductionism: the ideology that the best way to understand something is to understand its parts. In the 90s, I got interested in systems theory (I’d guess that Jurassic Park’s complexity theory and Kevin Kelly’s writing in Wired magazine were early influences). Systems theory says that when you combine the parts of something, properties emerge that are not obvious (or even knowable) from examining the parts on their own.

One of the key beliefs of systems theory is that evolution tends toward higher complexity. Humans aren’t the end product of evolution, nor has evolution been building towards humans specifically, but something like humans is seen as inevitable.

In fact, biologists will tell you that evolution tends toward diversity. Over time, you’ll end up with organisms that are both more and less complex – both humans and prions. There are far more species of single-celled organisms than multi-celled organisms (although “species” is a fuzzy concept without sex), presumably because many more combinations of single-celled DNA are viable. Natural selection has, in some cases, resulted in lower complexity, like how simians can’t synthesize vitamin C. (This argument is based on Wikipedia’s page on evolution of complexity.)

From a postmodern perspective, systems theory is the modernist metanarrative of progress in a sciency wrapper. But even reductionist science has been infected by the progress metanarrative – scientists frequently give support to things like social Darwinism.

Systems theory is not really criticism of science itself, it’s a criticism of the paradigms governing many scientific disciplines (an overarching paradigm or a metaparadigm?). Like any scientific paradigm shift, it’s more of an evolution of the worldview than the revolution that I originally mistook systems theory for.

It’s commonly believed that organisms are perfectly evolved to their niches (“sharks are perfectly-designed underwater killing machines…”). This pops up all the time in pseudoscience, diet plans, natural-living manifestos and even academic discourse. But evolution is a game of averages: if a modification, on average, works better than a previous version, it’ll be kept, even if it causes pain or occasional death.

For example: A common hypothesis is that female pelvises are a compromise to a tricky problem: narrow hips, like males have, can run fast, but wider hips allow females to birth big-headed babies without dying. Female hips are good at neither, but adequate at both. Women are slow runners and childbirth kills a portion of the mothers and the children. But on average humans survive both lions and childbirth. The fallacy says that childbirth the way our ancestors did should be painless and low-risk. Evolution says it doesn’t care about your pain and death as long as enough women survive to keep the population going.

Evolution is a bitch. Other examples: hernias, sickle-cell anemia, and the blind spot in your vision.

Evolution can only modify existing organisms; it never goes back to the drawing board and every modification is just enough to make it work on average.

Feet are another classic example: Humans went from quadrapedal to bipedal very quickly. Our spines cranked into an s-curve so our hip joints could turn 90 degrees. Our ankle moved down (the “ankle” on your dog or cat is halfway up their leg, and looks more like a knee) and the foot bones hastily moved around to support weight and increase stability. Our feet are now a kluge, which works but is prone to problems. Evolution doesn’t care if your feet hurt at the end of the day if you can still escape from tigers and find a mate; it certainly didn’t bother “perfecting” either sharks or your feet. Hence, wear shoes.

Thermodynamics can be seen as a game where you’re trying to get work done and God, your opponent, is trying to cause the heat death of the universe. Here are the rules:

0. You must play
1. You can’t win
2. You can’t break even
3. You can’t quit

The second rule is usually called “entropy”: eventually every system will run out of the capacity to do work (“free energy” / “negentropy”). The capacity to do work comes from difference in energy: stuff gets done while energy moves around. Entropy is usually interpreted to mean that all systems tend toward lower complexity / less order / homogeneity.

Creationists say that entropy is an argument against naturally-occurring life. But life on earth is mooching off the sun. The sun is dying; the solar system’s total entropy is increasing; life is just a random blip:

Some scientists even figure that life increases entropy faster than a static earth would (“Sooner or later everything turns to shit” – Woody Allen). Eventually the negentropy required to sustain life will be gone and everything will be dead – but we’ve got at least a billion years.

Most people have a typical way of being in relationships, particularly of the romantic variety (e.g., your friend who always gets dumped, your friend who fears commitment, your stalker friend). In psychobabble, this is your attachment style, and it originated in your parents’ treatment of you beginning when you were just an adorable bouncing baby.

There are 3 types of insecure (read: bad) attachment:

Preoccupied: these are your clingers. They fall in love with you almost instantly and you can never love them back hard enough.

Fearful-avoidant: these folks kinda long to be loved, but are terrified of being hurt, so they run run run.

Dismissing-avoidant: much like the fearful folks, but here the terror is so strong that the need for love is completely denied.

Then there is secure (read: good) attachment, which comes from having parents who were warm, caring, and consistently responsive to your needs. (“Just like my parents,” you’re surely thinking). “It is easy for me to become emotionally close to others. I am comfortable depending on others and having others depend on me. I don’t worry about being alone or having others not accept me.” This is how a secure person might describe herself (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991). Sounds fake right? It seems to me that the only people who fit this description are those I don’t know very well.

Both beautifully and tragically, the attachment system has adapted evolutionarily to be highly flexible. This means that parents who are simply “good enough,” despite some lapses in unconditional positive regard, should be sufficient to produce securely attached offspring. Sadly, it also means that there is plenty o’ room for parents (mom usually gets most of the blame) to screw up your chances of ever truly loving or being loved. It’s tricky because to be a “good enough” parent, secure attachment is a prerequisite. Our grandparents likely didn’t have warm, caring, consistently responsive parents, so neither did our parents, so neither did we… And so the intergenerational transmission of insecure attachment continues ad infinitum. (How to break the cycle? Therapy! But I may be slightly biased).

Perhaps this is due to my line of work (nearly-psychologist) or my reasons for becoming such (edited for length), but  I am highly skeptical of the following statistic: approximately 50% of people are securely attached. Come on. Did the “secure” description sound like you or any of your exes? I didn’t think so. So, if 50% are secure, the question is where are they hiding? I don’t know, but if you see one of these mythical beauties, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of his/her childhood, skin glinting like diamonds in the sun, grab this person tightly and hold on for dear life.

Growing and nursing a giant liger is a large investment for a mommy tigress. But the daddy lion is very pleased that his mate invests so much in their offspring. There’s a cool theory that genome imprinting is mostly used to achieve a balance between the paternal goal of investment in his children and the maternal goal of living to have another child (often with another father). Rather than an aggressive growth gene being bred out of the population, a gene evolves that counters it using imprinting.

In humans, the Prader-Willi and Angelman syndromes are caused by defects in a particular gene on the paternal and maternal chromosomes, respectively. Prader-Willi infants avoid breastfeeding and sleep a lot; around the age of weaning, they gain an insatiable appetite and interest in finding food (ie: do their own foraging and aren’t picky). Angelman children act extremely happy, getting greater emotional investment from their parents than their whiny siblings.

By far the biggest investment in growing a human fetus is the brain tissue, so we can assume that genome imprinting will turn out to be the cause of some neurological disorders…

Evolutionary psychologists believe that differences in optimal mating strategies between men and women lead to widespread differences in behavior. These theories have been widely popularized and have a huge impact on folk psychology.

The most cited difference is the energy investment in growing an immature ovum to a baby. This is said to explain, for example, why women are choosier with their sexual partners.

Another difference that might be far more deeply ingrained in our culture, is the reproductive window: babies are optimally produced by young women. This is said to explain, for example, why almost all heterosexual men are ephebophiles.

My entire life plan relies on the fact that I can continue to date women I find attractive: greater than 50% of such women are younger than me at any future point in time. But the NY Times has reviewed a number of studies that find a correlation between father age and child malfunction. The article briefly considers the question: what if these science facts become integrated into our culture and the reproductive window is applied to men?

In highschool you’re taught that DNA is a simple sequence of instructions read by machines in the cell (insert a bunch of useless knowledge about RNA). Depending on signalling chemicals in the cell’s environment, the machines follow the DNA code to build proteins that do stuff. I recently learned it’s way more complicated than that:

Autocrine signalling

A cell transmits chemical signals that attach to its own chemical receivers

Post-translational modification

A cell produces proteins that modify the other completed proteins inside the cell (including prions, which are inheritable via reproductive cells)

Post-transcriptional regulation

A cell produces proteins that modify the way other proteins are assembled in the cell

Chromatin remodeling

A cell produces proteins that control how the machines access the DNA, including making parts of it inaccessible (probably inheritable)

Methylation

A cell produces proteins that make temporary changes to the DNA (by covering in a chemical that blocks the machines, which is totally inheritable)

“Copying errors“

Currently believed to be random mutations, I predict that proteins will be discovered that affect how DNA is copied

Reverse transcription

Proteins (including retrovirii) in the cell write new genes into the DNA (when these get inherited they’re called endogenous retrovirii)

Most of these mechanisms are very poorly understood and the more research that gets done in them, the more significant they appear to be versus vanilla genetics. This is why the Human Genome Project has failed to give us superpowers.

All this reminds me of a long time ago, when computers were really expensive, programmers would write programs that modify themselves while they ran. They are impossible to read (you can’t just look at the code), and only crazy people could write them, so it is now considered extremely bad programming. In other words, if there is a God, I wouldn’t hire Him.

Alex has mentioned a few times how rock-paper-scissors mechanics¹ are key in game design. In a case of life following art, it turns out that side-blotched lizards follow a RPS evolutionary strategy in their mating:

Orange-throated males

Practice serial monogamy; Beat up blue-throated males to take their females; Don’t notice yellow-throated “best friends”

Blue-throated males

Practice long-term monogamy; Can’t beat blue-throated males in a fight but do notice inappropriate attention from yellow-throated males

Yellow-throated males

Coloration and size mimics females so they can mate with the partners of orange-throated males while they’re busy fighting

The genes which determine what kind of mating strategy a lizard will play shift in dominance over time.²

It strikes me that this evolutionary strategy got noticed (and not till 2001) because the lizards conveniently colour themselves according to which strategy they’re born to play. There could be many more cases of this in biology that are more subtle. How much human behaviour has an RPS mechanism?

¹ More formally: a win relation with a functional graph forming an intransitive cycle
² More formally: an unstable, mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium