2024 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue Cover

One of the things I spend far too much time pondering is the old “nature vs. nurture” question. Why wander about such well-trod ground? If you read my stuff, you can easily translate this to “genetics vs. memetics” and then start pulling apart the dark matter that is the latter, and has also been wholly neglected. We’ve left half the conceptual space blank when we want to understand information flows in society. Mores the pity.

But “nature vs. nurture” is really only the time invariant version of the question. The bigger question which is (to my knowledge) almost NEVER asked is “nurture => nature?” And importantly, how long? We have some evidence with epigenetics that trauma can modify neural codes, through the influence of cortisol and other stress hormones. But it’s still largely an undiscovered country out there.

My muse in pondering this question is my borzoi, Boo Boo. Boo Boo (formal name Thorondor, King of the Eagles from the Tolkien Legendarium) is a giant hunting sighthound. That’s Boo Boo below.

A pleasant day in the park with Boo Boo

Borzoi are notoriously difficult to train. They were bred to hunt in packs in front of horses, with the dominant prey being wolves, deer and Russian hares (they’re big.) Upon catching a wolf, they pin him to the ground and wait for the horses to catch up. And though they are a training challenge (I’ve actually trained Boo Boo) they are also quite polite and well-mannered on their own. Most are excellent and loving with children, puppies and other small dogs. But Boo Boo, if he encounters a dog that tries to dominate or attack him, well, that’s another story. He’s a wolfhound, and he’ll jump over it (he has to be provoked) grab it by the trachea and slam it to the ground. Needless to say, I was pretty surprised the first time this happened. Boo Boo had previously taken to running away at 35 mph, which then had me running for my car to chase him. You cannot chase an unwilling borzoi on foot.

What’s interesting about Boo Boo’s hardware/software combo is that the breed is approximately 600 years old — a cross between a greyhound and some guarding shepherd breed. Boo Boo has been with us from his puppyhood, and while I knew I was buying a giant hunting sighthound, and unlike many folks, had no illusions that he would hunt, it has been amazing watching his prey selection. I originally feared he would come into our quiet neighborhood, for example, and clean out the cats. But that has not happened. Boo Boo has only marginal interest in cats. But he catches squirrels regularly, and when his historic prey — deer — show up in the cul-de-sac, it’s all the control he can muster not to jump out of the window.

And when wolf hybrids show up in the dog park, Boo Boo immediately goes into a stalk. I clip him right up, of course. But it’s pretty wild. I have trained Boo Boo in the field for a strong retrieve, and he will come running from almost a mile away. And he will sit and lay down. But that’s about it. I never trained him to hunt wolves. Yet when one simulacra shows up, it’s game on. And so there is the question: how long did it take to go from nurture to nature?

Boo Boo and Ghillie on a long recall

It was with great interest that I tuned in last week to my X pal, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of public health at Stanford, for his podcast on obesity and root causes. He hosted one of his colleagues, Dr. Joseph Fraiman, who had done some elaborate data mining on the root causes of obesity. You can listen here. His controversial conclusion? That most obese women died during pregnancy and childbirth until the advent of modern obstetric practice, which basically in the process, allowed the explosion of genes that are part and parcel of the obesity crisis. My own take is that these things are multifactorial, and I’ve written a ton on this in the past. Listening to the podcast, I started out really skeptical, but I became convinced by the end that there was a “there” there. In only four generations, we’ve watched this flip from nurture to nature. Wild.

What is particularly interesting about this to me, though, is now we are being bombarded with photo after photo of obese women being promoted as sexy and healthy. I can understand this, and have some level of conscious sympathy. There are so many more obese people now than even 20 years ago. Obese people need love and touch, like we all do. And so on. The argument has been made over and over, and need not be made more here.

But the conscious mind is not what controls both emergence and convergence in the Matrix. What is also coincident to the obesity crisis is our current crisis of fatherlessness, as well as overproduction of elites. These two subjects are covered in detail — the first by Rob K. Henderson in his book Troubled, and the second by Peter Turchin in his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. There are many takeaways from both books, and I highly recommend both of them. Troubled is Henderson’s personal story of how he traversed the foster care system, attended Yale, and ended up with a Ph.D. from Cambridge in England. One of his main points, after seeing the world from both sides of the tracks, is that elites speak in code that is often duplicitous and two-faced — they brandish luxury beliefs that convey social status to the person spouting such beliefs, but in reality they would never practice themselves. The canonical example he uses is “defund the police.” It’s easy if you’re rich and live in a gated community to tell other people you don’t need police. But if you’re poor and you don’t have adequate policing, you’re likely to be victimized by criminals.

Turchin’s book is a bit more complicated, with many points about large scale societal trends. But his main point is that when societies have too many elites, they move into crisis . And these elites wage some version of war on each other, as well as the general population until the herd is culled. What I’ve been pondering is this: What does this likely memetic war look like, and how is it prosecuted?

Henderson gives some excellent examples on how elites wage war on each other. He observed, during his time at Yale, students would be out protesting international investment banking one day, while clamoring to sign up for interviews at Goldman Sachs the next. He posited that maybe they were consciously or unconsciously attempting to limit the size of the pool before interviews, because they all wanted the high paying jobs at Goldman Sachs to stay in the financial elite. So they used these luxury beliefs against each other in order to cull the herd. Since this information and behavior that flows from that information, it is obvious that at least, on the surface, this is classic psychopathic memetic warfare.

But there might be more to it. The question that this behavior led me to is, with regarding obesity, that the conscious interpretation — care and promotion of obesity as a positive lifestyle choice — is a great example of a luxury belief. No elite man wants to marry an obese wife, and the elites have better diets, more access to information about lifestyle choices to counteract the larger societal forces heaping destructive diets on the poor. Stated choice — that obese women are sexy — vs. elected choice — marry a skinny wife — couldn’t be more stark.

But after listening to Dr. Fraiman, maybe it’s more sinister than that. If the obesity epidemic is buried in our genes, as he maintains, maybe in the larger subconscious overmind, elites are promoting obesity as normal to get rid of the competition. It may be that only four generations of genetic transfer were all that is needed to sow this root cause delivered by modern obstetric care into the general population. But genetic recognition of sexual fitness is not so easily rooted out. We know hot when we see it. And what we’re really seeing with this shaming campaign against people that would select for genetic fitness is an attempt to overwhelm our natural senses, once again, with a displaced memetic notion of fitness (fat women are hot) because in the elite mind, those that bought that particular t-shirt would then self-eliminate. The genetic overmind is not so easily persuaded that fat women won’t die during childbirth, though, because that’s what has been coded over a million years. That’s a lot shorter than the 600 years needed to teach a dog to hunt wolves.

But it’s back in the meme-sphere to rewrite this code for this turning of elite overproduction. And being attached to fundamental needs and drives, like the need for sex and touch, is actually diabolical. It’s in the same category in the memetic ungrounding that the transgender and trans humanist movements are based on. Do what we say, dammit. Or else we’re going to do unto you. And it ain’t gonna be pretty. Just like the kids at Yale playing each other as fools for the jobs at Goldman Sachs, we have a much broader campaign to eliminate the competition.

Still more thinking to do, of course. But this is a start. And the conclusion is macabre — if we can just get the unwashed to eliminate themselves, that would save a lot of trouble.

A good piece that might need a little updating, but is still useful, on my views on diet, is at this link.