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> And yet, industrialized countries fall below replacement level and world population plateaus. Yes. Reproductive rates vary over time and due to environmenta

> And yet, industrialized countries fall below replacement level and world population plateaus. Yes. Reproductive rates vary over time and due to environmental conditions. See Calhoun's Mouse Utopia Experiments for an extreme example of this. (Though simplistic applicability of this to human society, in the ways that have been done in the past, should probably be discouraged.) > Also your quote is blatantly false. Consider bees. The queen produces offspring literally to build her hive and feed her young. Other animals act in collective ways. Yes. But it's not talking of collectivism in terms of bees, ants, or wolf packs. So far as I understand the quote, or the sentiment, it refers to the seeming fact that bees, ants, wolfs, etc, reproduce as a series of drives that function to that end without them needing to be cognizant of that end. Whereas humans, in addition to the compulsive drives of pleasure, etc, require justification. A queen bee does not concern itself (so far as we understand the mental processes of other animals) with prospects a billion years from now. A queen bee doesn't have to justify that more bees are good. Eggs are just cared for, fertilized, hatched in relation to the functioning of the hive and the processes which occur to regulate such. The seeming distinction with human beings is that the course of evolution has perhaps instilled them/us with a sort of, if not a 'meta drive', then a drive to override other aspects of our evolved intelligence which might undermine reproduction. In short, humans don't just 'get horny', they/we also have to 'get religion[1]'. Other animals (again, so far as we are aware, which is admittedly not very far sometimes) don't seem to require any justification on top of 'the mating dance makes me horny', they just 'do it'. [1] This, of course, should be considered in terms of ideology broadly, rather than just religion specifically. (In addition, I would also contend here that ideology is not an external addition, but a fundamental of human psychology, and to paraphrase Zizek 'the most thoroughly ideological environment is the post-ideological one.'

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
> A queen bee does not concern itself (so far as we understand the mental processes of other animals) with prospects a billion years from now. Of course it does! Bees gather honey literally to survive through winters.
- apocalypstyx 5y ago
  Does a bee think about winter? Does a tree? Or do they react in response to stimuli with evolved, complex behaviors? Does a bear go out and gorge itself to gain weight because it thinks that's the best way to get through winter or does it do so because changes in weather/seasons signal a set of immediate compulsions which have broader survival advantages? We can even grant that honey bees, for instance, do appear to have some type of awareness of time and space, as indicated by their communicative 'dances'. However, there is a vast gap between encoding approximate seconds to kilometers (in human terms) and the time relations of the heat death of the universe. Intelligence, self-awareness, these are all things that have developed in various species to varying degrees. And new data generally keep showing that we have previously underestimated just to what degree that is the case. However, it has yet to be shown that bees (or any other animal) are compelled to instantiate and perpetuate social interactions with the point of advancing propositions such as "people who live in the future matter morally just as much as those of us who are alive today." > billions of years ... survive through the winter That's G.R.R Martin levels of winter. EDIT: I don't want to make it seem as if am I discounting the ability for the deployment of forethought by other animals. There is, however, the issue of any 'horizon of time'. Bees can work to restore a hive in the middle of winter because it is potentially conceptualized, in some fashion, to be necessary. A crow can interface with multiple interlocking scenarios in order to achieve an outcome (usually food). We have cooperative behavior: one monkey distracts the tourist, the other steals the food, etc. However, there seems to be little evidence for any other species having such a notion of time as to extend much more beyond immediate concerns in an active sense. Longer phenomena, such as the reproductive cycles of cicadas, is more linked to environmental factors and internal molecule clocks than it is to what could be defined as conscious relations. This is not also to say that some species may also have (or in the future have) undergone convergent evolution with regards to this type of mental processing, just that it doesn't generally seem to be the case.
shkkmo 5y ago
> See Calhoun's Mouse Utopia Experiments for an extreme example of this. Calhoun's experiments are kinda sketchy and likely are not reproducible. [0] They were extensively promoted as PopSci, especially by Calhoun, but only limited papers where actually published, never the full results, and attempts at reproduction have called into question many of the findings. [0] https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia Until we have good reproductions, it's probably good to write this experiment off.
- apocalypstyx 5y ago
  Which is in part why I stated: Though simplistic applicability of this to human society, in the ways that have been done in the past, should probably be discouraged. But you are likely correct; I should have been stronger in my warnings. Unfortunately, however, it could be taken that I was indicating the wholesale applicability of a possibly one-off event as explanation to broader and seemingly repeated phenomena (leveling and/or declining population rates in so-called developed countries), rather that just as a possible single extreme instance of population and reproductive instability as generalized example. My interest is confined strictly to the rat populations themselves. The particulars of the designs involved and for the issues that were introduced by them, I think that to be the more interesting part. Any applicability to human sociology I would regard as ridiculously erroneous at this stage. (Or perhaps any stage. We tend to cross-associate species too much sometimes.) Though, I wonder if reproducibility may not, here, be as useful as we think. It is of course necessary for such to scientific, or at least scientifically studied. Repeatability, however, is not a prerequisite of existence. It is a question of how high a degree of variability exists within the flow and inter-relation and outcomes of population-wide phenomena among social species.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    > It is of course necessary for such to scientific, or at least scientifically studied. Repeatability, however, is not a prerequisite of existence. It is a question of how high a degree of variability exists within the flow and inter-relation and outcomes of population-wide phenomena among social species. Except Calhoun didn't do the basic stuff to rule out the obvious non-social causes for population breakdown. He didn't take offspring from the colony and test to make sure they still could reproduce healthily in a new setting. Calhoun doesn't clearly specify all the starting conditions, but at least one run started from 4 breeding pairs which introduces the possibility of inbreeding as a close call. There are also diseases that cause sterility and odd behaviors in rats. So basically until someone can reproduce the experiment properly, there is pretty much zero epistemic content that can be drawn from the Calhoun experiments except as a cautionary tale about taking self promoting scientists at their word rather than demanding their data as well.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

> A queen bee does not concern itself (so far as we understand the mental processes of other animals) with prospects a billion years from now. Of course it does! Bees gather honey literally to survive through winters.

apocalypstyx 5y ago
Does a bee think about winter? Does a tree? Or do they react in response to stimuli with evolved, complex behaviors? Does a bear go out and gorge itself to gain weight because it thinks that's the best way to get through winter or does it do so because changes in weather/seasons signal a set of immediate compulsions which have broader survival advantages? We can even grant that honey bees, for instance, do appear to have some type of awareness of time and space, as indicated by their communicative 'dances'. However, there is a vast gap between encoding approximate seconds to kilometers (in human terms) and the time relations of the heat death of the universe. Intelligence, self-awareness, these are all things that have developed in various species to varying degrees. And new data generally keep showing that we have previously underestimated just to what degree that is the case. However, it has yet to be shown that bees (or any other animal) are compelled to instantiate and perpetuate social interactions with the point of advancing propositions such as "people who live in the future matter morally just as much as those of us who are alive today." > billions of years ... survive through the winter That's G.R.R Martin levels of winter. EDIT: I don't want to make it seem as if am I discounting the ability for the deployment of forethought by other animals. There is, however, the issue of any 'horizon of time'. Bees can work to restore a hive in the middle of winter because it is potentially conceptualized, in some fashion, to be necessary. A crow can interface with multiple interlocking scenarios in order to achieve an outcome (usually food). We have cooperative behavior: one monkey distracts the tourist, the other steals the food, etc. However, there seems to be little evidence for any other species having such a notion of time as to extend much more beyond immediate concerns in an active sense. Longer phenomena, such as the reproductive cycles of cicadas, is more linked to environmental factors and internal molecule clocks than it is to what could be defined as conscious relations. This is not also to say that some species may also have (or in the future have) undergone convergent evolution with regards to this type of mental processing, just that it doesn't generally seem to be the case.

shkkmo 5y ago

> See Calhoun's Mouse Utopia Experiments for an extreme example of this. Calhoun's experiments are kinda sketchy and likely are not reproducible. [0] They were extensively promoted as PopSci, especially by Calhoun, but only limited papers where actually published, never the full results, and attempts at reproduction have called into question many of the findings. [0] https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia Until we have good reproductions, it's probably good to write this experiment off.

apocalypstyx 5y ago
Which is in part why I stated: Though simplistic applicability of this to human society, in the ways that have been done in the past, should probably be discouraged. But you are likely correct; I should have been stronger in my warnings. Unfortunately, however, it could be taken that I was indicating the wholesale applicability of a possibly one-off event as explanation to broader and seemingly repeated phenomena (leveling and/or declining population rates in so-called developed countries), rather that just as a possible single extreme instance of population and reproductive instability as generalized example. My interest is confined strictly to the rat populations themselves. The particulars of the designs involved and for the issues that were introduced by them, I think that to be the more interesting part. Any applicability to human sociology I would regard as ridiculously erroneous at this stage. (Or perhaps any stage. We tend to cross-associate species too much sometimes.) Though, I wonder if reproducibility may not, here, be as useful as we think. It is of course necessary for such to scientific, or at least scientifically studied. Repeatability, however, is not a prerequisite of existence. It is a question of how high a degree of variability exists within the flow and inter-relation and outcomes of population-wide phenomena among social species.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  > It is of course necessary for such to scientific, or at least scientifically studied. Repeatability, however, is not a prerequisite of existence. It is a question of how high a degree of variability exists within the flow and inter-relation and outcomes of population-wide phenomena among social species. Except Calhoun didn't do the basic stuff to rule out the obvious non-social causes for population breakdown. He didn't take offspring from the colony and test to make sure they still could reproduce healthily in a new setting. Calhoun doesn't clearly specify all the starting conditions, but at least one run started from 4 breeding pairs which introduces the possibility of inbreeding as a close call. There are also diseases that cause sterility and odd behaviors in rats. So basically until someone can reproduce the experiment properly, there is pretty much zero epistemic content that can be drawn from the Calhoun experiments except as a cautionary tale about taking self promoting scientists at their word rather than demanding their data as well.