PHENOTYPE WARS, REDUX

A DOWN AND DIRTY SUMMARY

As mentioned in a recent post, I’m working on putting into a new book the scholarly exploration of pluralism conducted over the last year of this Substack. Insofar, though, as that effort was a natural outgrowth of my most recent book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars – and since I couldn’t assume every potential reader of the forthcoming book will have read that one – it seemed imperative to provide the pluralism book a manageable summary of the phenotype wars thesis. Naturally, there's no room here to replicate the evidence for, and defense of, arguments fleshed out over nearly five hundred pages. For that depth, of course, one would have to read the book. A mere description of those arguments can be provided here. Considering how many moving parts there are to that book’s thesis, the dialectical dynamism by which different forces drive each other forward, a manageable description was indeed a challenge. I think though, at least as a first pass, I’ve put together a decent summary. You can let me know what you think. In any event, for those interested, below is my down and dirty summary of the model of the phenotype wars.

I find there’s always an element of arbitrariness in attempting to identify how some particular eureka moment set one off along a certain intellectual path. But there’s a plausible case to be made that the foundation of my phenotype war’s model was initially launched when I attempted to synthesize Harold Innis’ theory of civilization bias with findings in personality psychology. At first blush, it certainly didn’t seem like an obvious marriage, but the more I looked into it, the more sense it made. The archaeological theory of empire cycles wasn’t initially a part of the model (Innis had tended to conceive empire change as pendulation), but I’d previously considered how spiral/cycle history might be influenced by personality phenotypes. Once both ideas were worked out, they seemed to fit like a warm glove on a frigid winter’s day. The notion of the extended phenotype then neatly tied a big bow on top.

So, for those who haven’t read A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars¹ a brief recap may be helpful. Needless to say, those who want a full fleshing out of all the arguments, with their evidentiary foundations, should read the original book. Only the most cursory, descriptive summary can be provided here. But, roughly, starting with Innis, applying what came to be called the staple thesis in his earlier Canadian historiography², he eventually turned this method to the study of civilizations or empires, ancient and modern.

Innis argued that communication media (though closer reading reveals that his use of that term was more widely applied than many would apply it today) always have built into them a bias toward either time or space. To reprise a quotation from Innis used in the book:

A medium of communication has an important influence on the dissemination of knowledge over space and over time and it becomes necessary to study its characteristics in order to appraise its influence in its cultural setting. According to its characteristics it may be better suited to the dissemination of knowledge over time than over space, particularly if the medium is heavy and durable and not suited to transportation, or to the dissemination of knowledge over space than over time, particularly if the medium is light and easily transported. The relative emphasis on time or space will imply a bias of significance to the culture in which it is imbedded.

Space biased media, institutions, and related societies, tended to emphasize expansion through commercial, administrative, or military means. Time biased examples of the same emphasized durability through a focus on religion, tradition, and history. For Innis, examples would be how space biased communication media like papyrus or paper sustained the Egyptian and English empires, respectively. Just as time biased media like clay or stone tablets and parchment sustained the societies of Mesopotamia and Medieval Europe, respectively.³

Innis, in this area of research, was something of an amateur and autodidact, and it couldn’t be claimed that his broad theory was beyond the reach of the determined fault-finder. For all that though it does provide a powerful heuristic. However, it is worth noting here that in one important regard I did dissent from Innis; he tended toward a kind of technological determinism (with geographical deterministic aspects). That is to say, for instance, that it was papyrus as a communications technology which gave rise to the space biased society of the early Egyptian empire. While I’m something of a determinist, as well, I’m a biological determinist. That is to say, ultimate explanations of everything human, for me, must be rooted in evolutionary biology. I won’t presume to defend that position, here. If you’d like to better understand it, see my earlier book, Biological Realism⁴, where arguments and evidence are provided.

Illustrative of the problem with Innis’ technological determinism is the fact that the first phase of the Egyptian empire, the Early Dynastic Period, is widely considered to have begun about 3150 BC. Papyrus though is only considered to have become a high resonance communication medium between 3000 and 2500 BC. If these calculations are correct, the expansionary tendencies of the empire preceded the widespread use of papyrus by at least a couple centuries – possibly many centuries. And, if that wasn’t enough, consider that migrants had inhabited the Nile River region since around 6000 to 5000 BC, and during that period used papyrus to build baskets and mats and boats and houses. So, there was no absence of opportunity to develop the plant as a communication medium.⁵

My point is that, within the pre-imperial time biased society, there simply was insufficient demand for such a medium. It was not papyrus that drove imperial expansion but imperial expansion that created a demand for papyrus as a light weight, easily transported, medium of communication. So, Innis’ technological determinist position (so influential upon his most famous acolyte, Marshall McLuhan), that people’s values and dispositions are molded by the biases of their communication media, doesn’t seem to be supported by basic chronological evidence.

My claim from the perspective of a biological realist is that rather it is the values and dispositions phenotypically manifest in people that leads them to embrace media and institutions which are either time or space biased. I based that position on the work done in personality psychology – particularly as related to the big five traits.⁶ For those unfamiliar with the big five literature, here are a few valuable considerations. The big five personality traits correlate with enduring psychological orientations, influencing individuals’ actions and decisions.⁷ They have been reliably validated across national and cultural contexts.⁸ They develop early in life⁹ and remain relatively stable throughout adulthood.¹⁰ And, as might be expected, therefore, such traits appear to be significantly heritable.¹¹

That doesn’t mean there’s no across-lifespan change in personality structure, nor that traumatic events might cause a change in personality structure, but on average such personality traits are less likely to be easily or thoroughly molded by environmental factors than that they are likely to mold such environmental factors. This understanding then draws our attention to the fact that there is a socially significant, inherent conflict between the values and interests of personality phenotypes with higher openness (and lower conscientiousness) and those with higher conscientiousness (and lower openness).¹² Indeed scholars working in this field have written books about how this personality-based conflict of values between phenotypes has driven our politics and history.¹³

Viewed through an Innisian lens, we can describe the high openness (low conscientiousness) phenotypes as more prone to drive space biased society, given their propensity for novelty-seeking and transgressive attitudes toward rules and borders. They are more inclined to travel greater distances, piercing unfamiliar cultural boundaries, in search of insight, profit, or conquest, and generating the systems of transportation and administration which facilitate such ventures.

In contrast, those personality phenotypes with higher conscientiousness (and lower openness) tend toward risk-aversion and rule-adherence. They’re less inclined to engage novelty and put greater investment into the well established and reliable. In Innisian terms, they value tradition and ritual, and the history that ties them to a particular place, set of practices, and shared norms. The former are wanderers and innovators, while the latter are more deeply rooted in places and ways.

Following Innis’ lead, then, I characterized these two phenotypes as spatials and temporals – those likely to drive and inhabit a space biased society and those likely to drive and inhabit a time biased society, respectively. This, I claim, is what we see unfolding in the earlier history of ancient Egypt. The earlier settlers along the Nile, for thousands of years, were primarily temporals, who were not highly motivated to engage in imperial expansion – even if drought conditions had initially motivated them to move to the Nile river area.

It was only with the emergence of the Early Dynastic Period – when we’d have found (I’d speculate) a critical section of the population had changed over from being temporals to being spatials – that a need for, and inclination toward, innovating a mobile, space biased, communication medium became imperative. Again, the papyrus plant had always been there, growing along the shores of the Nile. And, again, it had been used for many other purposes meeting the daily needs of the inhabitants for thousands of years. It was only when certain spatially expansive inclinations took root in the increasingly space biased society, providing sufficient motivation to find space biased communicative mediation capacities, that incentives gave rise to discovery of this potential in the plant.

However speculative – we obviously don’t have personality research data from ancient Egypt – that explanation certainly would explain the delay between the initial emergence of the Early Dynastic Period’s imperial expansion and the eventual discovery of the communications medium that could sustain and enhance such expansion, administratively and logistically. What that explanation doesn’t explain is how it came to be that a critical fraction of the ancient Egyptian population should change from being temporals to being spatials. Nor, how it all came to an end with the first “intermediate” period, when Egypt returned to being a more time biased, more pluralist society for – sources vary, but likely – nearly two centuries.¹⁴ To explain all that, it is necessary to leverage other insights, from both biology and sociology.

The pivotal insight from biology is that of the extended phenotype. A phenotype of course is the actual manifestation of the combined effects of genetic heritability and genetically assimilated environmental information. Among the resulting suite of traits often will be found those evolved for molding the environment in ways that enhance the genomes’ fitness.¹⁵ This notion flows into niche construction theory – though the latter possibly makes more out of the insight than is justified.¹⁶ Richard Dawkins, who introduced the extended phenotype theory¹⁷, cited species-focused examples: famously the evolved disposition of the beaver, motivated by its reproductive needs, to build dams to rivers, giving rise to ponds that facilitate the beaver’s ability to construct its lodge.

This extension of the beaver’s phenotype to manipulate the exogenous world of course affected other species. Some (say, the local frog) may benefit, while others (say, the local squirrel, whose buried nuts are now underwater) may suffer. From the beaver’s perspective, those inter-species outcomes are irrelevant: the beaver is not motivated by love of frogs or disdain of squirrels; it is only calibrated through its evolved phenotype to engage in such environmental manipulation in the interest of its own fitness. But we also know that there are cases of intra-species phenotype competition. Probably the most famous example of this was the shifting fitness conditions of the Peppered Moth color phenotypes amid industrial revolution era England (an example which included both genetic and phenotypic selection processes).¹⁸

This model of phenotype competition then I’ve proposed as the best way to understand the shift from time biased to space biased society: i.e., the controlling social influence of temporals is (relatively) displaced by that of spatials. Just as during the industrial revolution the black Peppered moths (relatively) displaced the white ones – and eventually the reverse. That then left us with the question of why and how such displacement occurs.

The first step toward an answer is to acknowledge that all species must be resource optimizers: the amount of energy or calories exerted to find food or other relevant resources must be less than the amount which can be accumulated through that exertion.¹⁹ (Optimal foraging theory provides a fascinating illustration of these tradeoffs at work.²⁰) Failure to meet this basic optimization standard would result in death. This may be reflected in the failure of some conspecifics – such as the injured, orphaned, or elderly – to survive without assistance.

While this optimization capacity should be expected to be universal among sustainable species, given the remarkable human cognitive capacity – which has been characterized by some evolutionary theorists as our entry into a cognitive niche²¹ – it turns out that our species has a remarkable ability to accumulate wealth. Once such accumulation reaches certain levels, a more complex society, with increasing levels of specialized division of labor, becomes possible. These developments contribute in a couple of ways to increased fitness opportunities for spatials.

Again, as with all explanations here, the summary of this position has to be extremely cursory, but: harsh Darwinian conditions initially select for temporal phenotypes. They have a fitness advantage under such conditions. Their risk-aversion, suspicion of novelty, and concern for rules and borders result in strong group identity, high communal trust, and culturally cohesive societies. The degree to which such social trust and cohesion is achieved, those societies have a competitive advantage in achieving social prosperity.²² Spatials, disposed to far lower levels of risk avoidance and respect for rules or borders, tend to be non-conformist social outcasts within time biased societies. They are subject to suspicion, neglect, hostility, and ostracism, reducing their fitness prospects.²³

An irony, or paradox, of misdirected niche construction now enters the story. That very prosperity resulting from humans’ highly intelligent optimization of resources, over enough time, relaxes Darwinian conditions, and creates an increasingly viable fitness niche for spatials. This viability is partially due to the fact that their phenotypic traits, once a source of suspicion, ostracism, and contempt, become socially valuable. Under the more specialized division of labor operative amid a more complex and prosperous society, the spatials’ novelty-seeking and transgressive attitudes toward borders and rules allows them to make innovative and valuable contributions to both the arts and sciences.

This then is how temporals, if they become sufficiently prosperous, inadvertently construct a fitness niche which ultimately privileges their emergent intra-species phenotype competitor. Though, of course, this niche construction is simply an inevitable and unconscious unfolding of an immanent human condition. Likewise, though, following similar dynamics intrinsic to the human condition, spatials eventually construct a niche which privileges the fitness of temporals. Again, such construction is not intended or consciously enacted by spatials; it’s simply the intrinsic dynamics of the human condition unfolding. Understanding such dynamics in the latter case brings us to the aforementioned insights from sociology.

Again, there’s way more to be said about the contributions of sociology to the phenotype wars model; I’ve only room here to address a few key dimensions of that contribution, mostly derived from Max Weber. As a space biased society emerges, the increased fitness advantages of spatials lies not only in the arts and sciences, but also in government, and especially bureaucracy – especially as the latter aspires to being scientific. While early bureaucracies were likely created by temporals – particularly the systemic, meticulous, regimented types – as bureaucracy increasingly expands, both in relation to (formally or informally) colonized (literal or figurative) territory, the skills of the spatials become more valuable to the bureaucracy. New methods of intervention, control, and administration, profit from the border transgressing and novelty inclined disposition of the spatials.

The story that Weber tells in this regard is bureaucracy’s capacity to leverage rationality for progressive human prosperity. Though, as we’ll see, he also recognizes a fatal flaw in the ostensible progressive story which might be told about these processes. The formalized bureaucracy leveraged technical knowledge and skill to optimize delivery on the human need for security and well-being in the face of a challenging natural world (i.e., still relatively harsh Darwinian conditions). The bureaucracy provided an efficiency in resource optimization that made it a powerful force in meeting human needs, allowing humans to collectively get the most out of their individually limited caloric budgets.

To this extent, Weber was unambiguously positive about the contribution of rationalization and bureaucracy to human life. Parents didn’t want to see their children die in infancy. None of us wanted to be continually subject to the vagaries of exposure, famine, drought, or pestilence. As ever-increasing rationalization provided more and more complex systems, from agriculture, through urbanity, to industrialization, the risk of human existence was reduced to our resounding benefit. At the same time though, Weber recognized the inevitability of tradeoffs in such developments, and realized that such rationalization ultimately was a double-edged sword. I’ll briefly itemize four such tradeoff effects.

First, there was the principal-agent dilemma. With time, the bureaucracy becomes a power unto itself. Application of its technical knowledge to resource management can be, and often so becomes, more focused on the benefits achieved for the bureaucracy itself, or its members, rather than those of the societies or empires which are supposed to be their formal responsibility. Such self-dealing is enabled by the highly specialized knowledge about their own institution which the bureaucrats accumulated, making oversight somewhere between difficult and impossible. As such, the initial promise of rationalization is thereby compromised.

Second, there is Weber’s famous iron cage of rationality. Central to bureaucratic success was the necessity of individuals under this rational authority to submit themselves to its dictates. The rationalizing, and so resource optimizing, power of such a bureaucratic system was dependent upon the subordinates submitting to the logic of the regime and its rules. So, the benefits of security and even prosperity provided by bureaucratic rationality entailed a requirement of increasing human surrender of personal freedom and independent judgment. The more a human society bureaucratically pursued the freedom from want and privation associated to a more naked exposure to harsh Darwinian conditions, likewise the more human freedom was sacrificed in the demand to submit to the rational bureaucratic machine, to become but a cog in its effective operation. The more firmly locked we became into rationality’s iron cage.

Third, there is the process Weber called the disenchantment of nature (or the world). On this point, I may be getting a little creative in my interpretation of Weber, but however accurately it reflects Weber’s view, it’s still an important part of the story. While his emphasis tends to be upon the loss of the spiritual and mystical, emphasizing the traditional and ritual, it is plausible that it is these very time biased institutions and sensibilities which root human imagination in empirical experience of the world.²⁴

Entailed in such “enchantment” then is a tighter coupling to the negative feedback loop for reality’s regulation of human ambition. While a time biased society must stay closely coupled to nature’s negative feedback loop, given its marginal survival prospect, the greater prosperity of a space biased society (both as cause and effect) entails greatly expanded insulation against harsh Darwinian conditions, unleashing the openness to novelty and indifference to limits characteristic of spatials. In this way, the uncoupling from nature’s negative feedback loop can give rise to a positive feedback loop which increasingly drives a society away from the reality of natural limits.

And, to be clear, from the perspective of late-spatials²⁵, such disenchantment, such decoupling from nature’s negative feedback loop, is a virtue. From their perspective, it is not enough to be freed from the suffocating constraints of family and social obligations; true freedom from, or transcending of, constraints and limits requires liberation from the (false!) imperatives of biology. (Think transgenderism and transhumanism.) Poststructuralism and postmodernism, precursors of late-spatial maximalism, are emblematic of such radical, limitless freedom. Initially those projects described the “postmodern condition” – e.g., death of the author; deconstruction of the text; subjective position as shifting signifier; deterritorialization and nomadism²⁶ – but eventually the ostensibly descriptive project was co-opted into an unambiguous advocacy project which has permeated much of the university world.²⁷

Finally, fourth, there is the role played by the law of diminishing returns. As societies become more prosperous, and so more specialized, they likewise become more complex. That complexity gives rise to dynamics, such as “arms races,” in which costs escalate merely to maintain equilibrium. Likewise, a tendency toward path dependency makes it difficult to impossible for societies to reverse course. Taxes increase more often than they decrease. Information processing needs tend to move in only one direction. Numbers of specialists or standing armies rarely decline. Welfare costs, once established, can only be reduced at the cost of social upheaval. And literal arms races with potential military rivals endlessly increase weapons production cost on each side, as little more that a precarious security parity can be maintained. “When there is growth in complexity, the entailed costs tend to grow exponentially, always increasing by some fraction of an already inflated size.”²⁸

All four of these processes, then, arising from increased prosperity, complexity, and bureaucratic rationality combine to lay the ground for a space biased society ultimately doomed to collapse under the weight of its own costs, contradictions, and increasing irrationality. From the beginning of human society our evolved disposition for the optimization of energy, calories, and resources – undoubtedly moderated by exogenous conditions, such as climate, competition, and topography – pushes us progressively up a hill.

To slightly overstretch the metaphor, some way up that hill the altitude change provides an environment more conducive to certain (spatial) phenotypes flourishing, who drive the uphill progress even harder. That’s not to deny that there can’t be “slips” back down the hill. In terms of political history we might call those restorations – such as was widely seen across 19^th century Europe.²⁹ They can happen, and can last for quite a while: even decades. Over the long term though, the progress is inexorably uphill.

However, due to the sociological insights reviewed above, inevitably the top of the hill provides only a decline. It may be a precipitous cliff or a more gradual slope, but once a spatial regime becomes sufficiently disconnected from reality in its decoupling from the negative feedback loop of nature’s regulation – locked into the iron cage of rationality and its related diminishing returns – some kind of collapse becomes inevitable. And, it’s in that way that – just as we saw how the logic of temporals’ values and dispositions give rise to the renaissance of the ecological niche I’ve called space biased society, so too – the logic of spatials’ values and dispositions eventually give rise to the renaissance of the ecological niche I’ve called time biased society.

As I address in the book, this is a dynamic well noted in the archaeological scholarship. While there is a well-taken warning in that scholarship against considering temporal societies as the product of collapse or decline – insofar as it implies a lower, somehow less worthy, condition of existence – the tendencies for such waves or cycles is acknowledged. Sometimes their phases are posed as more or less complex societies, but however the difference is to be parsed – I’m happy with time and space biased – the archaeological literature acknowledges these shifts as intrinsic to the longee durée of human history and civilization.

In this literature, the remnant of a temporalist world still exists within a full fledged space biased society. It is though the periphery of such a society, or empire – which is what space biased society is inclined toward. Such a periphery may be expressed not only in geographic or hinterland terms, but importantly also in terms of clan, class, or cultural or economic remnants. Norman Yoffee identifies the elements of such a periphery thus: “traditional aristocracies, kin-based units, peasants, specialized economic groups, such as crafts people and merchants.”³⁰ As we’ll see in this book, such a description of the temporal remnant of space biased society invokes the pillars of the lost pluralist constitution.

Space biased societies grow precisely as they expand their reach out over more temporalist, traditional, likely gemeinschaft-based³¹ regions of the periphery. And, so the archaeological literature goes: they “collapse,” insofar as that’s a valid description, when they lapse into overreach, extending their material and ideological hegemony beyond that which can be maintained by the capacities of spatialist bureaucracy. And I’d say that the loss of the “reality check” of the negative feedback loop of nature’s regulation will inevitably, eventually, lead to such material and ideological overreach.

From the perspective of niche construction theory then we find the kernel of the above mentioned irony, or paradox, at work in this ongoing struggle between the temporal and spatial phenotypes. As temporals construct the niche conducive to their fitness (which often entails active suppression of spatials in their midst, think witches), a kind of runaway effect occurs in that, inadvertently, they gradually produce a niche which is also (eventually, more) conducive to the fitness of the spatial phenotype. And thereafter, as the spatials increasingly take over control of the society (which often entails active suppression of temporals in their midst, think rednecks), inevitably molding it into a niche conducive to their fitness, eventually they push it over the edge of the cliff (or at least the decline), leading to a postlapsarian niche now once again more conducive to the fitness of temporals.

So, all of human history may be conceived as an endless set of phenotype wars in which the short term victor, winds up socially manifesting its victory in an ecological niche which eventually, inevitably, facilitates the later triumph of its competitor. Something interesting to observe about this dynamic is that, whereas the relative fitness advantage of the competing phenotypes of the Peppered Moth had been a result of a changing environmental niche over which neither phenotype had any control, in the case of the human phenotype wars, it is each phenotype pursuing its own fitness that eventually – however inadvertently and unconsciously – give rise to the niche that allows for the renaissance of the other phenotype’s hegemony. The moths’ historical cycle was exogenously driven, while the humans’ has been endogenously driven.³²

That’s the gist of the empirical argument from my book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars. However, as the first part of that title implies, there was a second set of ideas being fleshed out. I’ll only briefly mention those in passing. Building upon several different authors – working at different times, in different disciplines, using different methodologies³³ – the book acknowledges that there is a real danger that the collapse of the current space biased society might be more imminent than many imagine. If such urgency is justified as an empirical fact, there is a valid question as to whether something might be done to – not avoid, long term that’s impossible, but – mitigate the most dire consequences of such a collapse: such as we associate with the Romans or the Mayans.

Emerging from my research on these topics was the prospect that a kind of underground, guerrilla, alternative, parallel set of pluralist practices, institutions, communities, and cultures might be generated that provided the social cushion of a softer landing in the face of such an encroaching collapse – at least for those regenerating such pluralism and maybe for the larger society as a whole. Much of this sort of thing already exists in loose, isolated strands: e.g., most dramatically in intentional communities, consumer and producer cooperatives, religious congregations, local currency networks, farmer supporting buyers groups, mutual aid or fraternal societies, home schooling communities, regenerated neighborhood associations, health research and support circles; even down to the granular level of the PTA, local markets, book clubs, and (for those who get the insider reference) bowling leagues.³⁴

But part of my argument was that the thriving of those initiatives and projects – and any means they might present for a regenerative synthesis – could be enhanced by the creation of a sheltering political zone that insulated those initiatives and projects from the social engineering of the managerial class’ space biased, insatiable hunger for monist sovereignty. I long have, as in this book, warned about the deceptive allure and false promise of mass electoralism. That doesn’t mean though that there are no political paths which may prove justified and fruitful. It was with such considerations in mind that I concluded the last book with reflections upon how pluralist federalism might play into these processes. A similar focus will be revisited toward the end of this book as well. All of this was what was invoked with the phrase “a plea for time” in the last book’s title.

Finally, one last point is that the book (I hope) did not portray either phenotype as right, virtuous, moral, whatever. White and black Peppered Moths were not separated by their righteousness, virtuousness, morality, or triumphant alignment with the right side history. I see the two relevant human phenotypes³⁵ in just the same way. It’s perfectly understandable that hardcore advocates of each would consider (or disingenuously frame) members of the other phenotype as evil, unhinged, irrational, uninformed, low intelligence, immoral, or at the most extreme even inhuman. That is the stuff of the Schmittian concept of the political. And nowhere is the friend-enemy distinction more pressing than when one phenotype in these endless cycles of war threatens the existence of the other.

For a scholar interested in understanding the human condition, these phenotypes are simply acting out their subset of human nature. That’s how I tried to approach the topic in the book. That doesn’t prevent me though from recognizing that we do live in a hyper space biased society, a recognition that comes with understanding of the long term inevitable outcome of such a fact, and pondering whether an exploration of the pluralist constitution can provide some insight into how we might brace ourselves for that outcome. Or even mitigate its worst dangers.

In any event, to whatever extent readers took from the book a call for normative action or an empirical description of historical forces, as mentioned at the start of this book, I became aware that either appeal to the concept of pluralism still needed to be fleshed out far further than I was able to do there. And so that finally brings us to this book, where at least a good initial few steps in the direction of fleshing out pluralism – its history, nature, and implications for creating a social cushion against possible collapse – are provided. But now, the foundation of the phenotype wars model, which is frequently referenced below, has been sketched out, hopefully with sufficient clarity to keep us on track as we proceed with the theory and history of the pluralist constitution.

That though is for the book; for this Substack the approaching focus will be a differently directed elaboration of the phenotype wars thesis: exploring the spatial revolution. And, while I don’t expect to get going on that in a voluminous way until the New Year, you should look out for one or two little teasers before we hit the holiday season. So, if you don’t want to miss that, and haven’t yet, please…

And, of course, if you haven’t read the book at the center of all this, and want the full explanation and evidentiary case for the phenotype wars model, the recent publication of the ebook edition is a great opportunity to check it out: A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.

And, as ever, if you know of someone else who you think might appreciate joining in the exploration of ideas animating this Substack, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!

1. Michael McConkey, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars (Vancouver, B.C.: Biological Realist Publications, 2023).

2. Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1956); Harold A. Innis, Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (University of Toronto Press, 1978); Harold A. Innis and Daniel Drache, Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change: Selected Essays, First Edition (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995).

3. For Innis’ key works in this area of study, see: Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Toronto: Dundurn, 2007); Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964); Harold Innis, Changing Concepts of Time (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004).

4. Michael McConkey, Biological Realism: Foundations and Applications (Vancouver, B.C.: Biological Realist Publications, 2020).

5. Among the sources consulted were John Gaudet, Papyrus: The Plant That Changed the World, From Ancient Egypt to Today’s Water Wars, First Edition (New York, NY: Pegasus Books, 2014); Wendy Christensen, Empire of Ancient Egypt, Revised edition (New York: Chelsea House Pub, 2009); Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of Ancient Egypt, 2nd Edition, 2nd edition (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021).

6. In the book I provide an assessment of the admittedly real challenges in using personality psychology as I do. However, as concluded there, notwithstanding those challenges, if done with care to the nuances involved, it can be used to analytically powerful effect. See McConkey, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.

7. Matthew V. Hibbing, Melinda Ritchie, and Mary R. Anderson, “Personality and Political Discussion,” Political Behavior 33, no. 4 (December 1, 2011): 601–24, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9147-4; David G. Winter, “Personality and Political Behavior,” in Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press, 2003), 110–45.

8. Jüri Allik and Robert R. McCrae, “Toward a Geography of Personality Traits: Patterns of Profiles across 36 Cultures,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 35, no. 1 (January 1, 2004): 13–28, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022103260382; Steven J. Heine and Emma E. Buchtel, “Personality: The Universal and the Culturally Specific,” Annual Review of Psychology 60, no. 1 (2009): 369–94, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163655; David P. Schmitt et al., “The Geographic Distribution of Big Five Personality Traits: Patterns and Profiles of Human Self-Description Across 56 Nations,” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 38, no. 2 (March 1, 2007): 173–212, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022106297299.

9. Carolyn L. Funk et al., “Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Political Orientations,” Political Psychology 34, no. 6 (2013): 805–19, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00915.x.

10. Jack Block and Jeanne H. Block, “Nursery School Personality and Political Orientation Two Decades Later,” Journal of Research in Personality 40, no. 5 (October 1, 2006): 734–49, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.09.005; Andrew J. Bloeser et al., “The Temporal Consistency of Personality Effects: Evidence from the British Household Panel Survey,” Political Psychology 36, no. 3 (2015): 331–40, https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12067; Antonio Terracciano, Robert R. McCrae, and Paul T. Costa, “Intra-Individual Change in Personality Stability and Age,” Journal of Research in Personality 44, no. 1 (February 1, 2010): 31–37, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2009.09.006.

11. Kerry L. Jang, W. John Livesley, and Philip A. Vemon, “Heritability of the Big Five Personality Dimensions and Their Facets: A Twin Study,” Journal of Personality 64, no. 3 (September 1996): 577–92; Tinca J. C. Polderman et al., “Meta-Analysis of the Heritability of Human Traits Based on Fifty Years of Twin Studies,” Nature Genetics 47, no. 7 (July 2015): 702–9, https://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3285.

12. It’s worth noting here that a personality structure such as that of your faithful author, both high openness and high conscientiousness (with the other three traits being much lower), is an entirely different phenotype. That is likely why I can appreciate the perspective of both, what I call here, spatials and temporals, without feeling a strong inclination to denigrate either on purely personality or values-orientation grounds. Though, I suppose how high is such a person’s agreeableness will no doubt have something to say about such a disposition.

13. John R. Hibbing, Kevin B. Smith, and John R. Alford, Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences, 1st edition (New York: Routledge, 2013); Christopher D. Johnston, Howard G. Lavine, and Christopher M. Federico, Open versus Closed: Personality, Identity, and the Politics of Redistribution (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Though slightly different in orientation, one can certainly read phenotype conflict into the intriguing book, Jason Weeden and Robert Kurzban, The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).

14. Incidentally, for those interested, the once widely held view that the first intermediate period was one of turbulence, violence, and chaos is now considered to have been overly influenced by sources (members of what we’d today call the managerial class) who personally suffered most from the collapse of the space biased society of the First Dynastic and the Old Kingdom. That is no longer assumed to be an accurate depiction of life for the majority of the peasant and craft population.

15. In biology, contrary to some colloquial confusion, fitness simply refers to the capacity of an individual (i.e., a suite of evolved traits) to successfully manifest its own genes into future generations. While direct sexual reproduction is the most salient route for such fitness, it is not the only one.

16. F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Lala, and Marcus Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Kevin N. Laland and Michael J. O’Brien, “Niche Construction Theory and Archaeology,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 17, no. 4 (December 1, 2010): 303–22, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-010-9096-6.

17. Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene, New edition edition (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

18. Arjen E. van’t Hof et al., “The Industrial Melanism Mutation in British Peppered Moths Is a Transposable Element,” Nature 534, no. 7605 (June 2016): 102–5, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17951. See also my discussion: McConkey, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.

19. Not only must a store of nutritional energy be available for times of heightened resource scarcity, but endogenous processes, not directly related to food searching (e.g., metabolism, cell regeneration), must be funded from the same nutritional intake budget.

20. Eric L. Charnov, “Optimal Foraging, the Marginal Value Theorem,” Theoretical Population Biology 9, no. 2 (April 1, 1976): 129–36, https://doi.org/10.1016/0040-5809(76)90040-X; David W. Stephens and John R. Krebs, Foraging Theory (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1987).

21. H. Clark Barrett, Leda Cosmides, and Tooby, “The Hominid Entry into the Cognitive Niche,” in The Evolution of Mind: Fundamental Questions and Controversies, ed. Steven W. Gangestad and Jeffery A. Simpson, 1 edition (New York: The Guilford Press, 2007); Steven Pinker, “The Cognitive Niche: Coevolution of Intelligence, Sociality, and Language,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. Supplement 2 (2010): 8993–99, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914630107; Andrew Whiten and David Erdal, “The Human Socio-Cognitive Niche and Its Evolutionary Origins,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 367, no. 1599 (2012): 2119–29, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2012.0114.

22. John Glubb, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1976); Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, Reprint edition (New York, N.Y: Plume, 2007); Peter Turchin, Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall, Reprint edition (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2018).

23. Though I think they’ve missed the most important variable in the story – the reaction norm dynamic between temporals and spatials – I’ve profited from the broad theoretical framing of societies oscillating between harsh and relaxed Darwin conditions, and how this could drive civilizational cycles, provided by Edward Dutton, At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future, 1st edition (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2018); Michael A. Woodley of Menie et al., “Social Epistasis Amplifies the Fitness Costs of Deleterious Mutations, Engendering Rapid Fitness Decline Among Modernized Populations,” Evolutionary Psychological Science 3, no. 2 (June 1, 2017): 181–91, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-017-0084-x; Matthew Alexandar Sarraf, Michael Anthony Woodley of Menie, and Colin Feltham, Modernity and Cultural Decline: A Biobehavioral Perspective, 1st ed. 2019 edition (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Edward Dutton and J. O. A. Rayner-Hilles, The Past Is a Future Country: The Coming Conservative Demographic Revolution (Exeter, UK: Societas, 2022).

24. We’ll see the implications of this important point fleshed out below in Paolo Grossi’s examination of the reicentrism of the medieval legal pluralist constitution.

25. Those spatials living in the most elaborated space biased society, a niche capable of accommodating – at least in the short term – the most radical expression of such disenchantment and disengagement from the rest of nature.

26. I'm generally sympathetic to the concern animating so much of this literature over imposed identities of individuality. I agree that such individuality involves a form of social control. (And of course I agree with the warnings against the captured territorialization of mass movements of political opposition.) Though, naturally, I reject the anti-biology assumptions underlying much of it. Neither identity or subjectivity are mere social constructs. Claiming otherwise gives rise to an ontology of infinite regress. More to the point of the current context, though: yes, mass individualism has been imposed on the population through spatialist hegemony and via managerial class bureaucratic paternalism and social engineering, but the solution is a restoration of pluralism, not a hyper abstraction of dehumanized, ahistorical metaphysics. That path would lead to an even further, more remorseless entanglement in the web of managerial class ventriloquism. Nomadism's triumphal autogenic subjectivity is not a repeal, but rather an ecstatic embrace, of disenchantment, as I've interpreted it here. For those who know the nomenclature, consider the characterization from the original source: “If the nomad can be called the Deterritorialised par excellence, it is precisely because there is no reterritorialisation afterward as with the migrant, or upon something else as with the sedentary […] With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorialisation that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad reterritorialises on deterritorialisation itself.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, First Edition (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

27. Also, I'm hardly the first to point out that postmodernism is the very logic of modernism. The one follows the other as the butterfly does the caterpillar. Rationalism never had a chance against its own withering self-flagellation. As modernism required the destruction of pluralism to flourish, built into its DNA was the liquefying of whatever residues of denuded temporal remnants modernity had continued to rely upon: e.g., social trust, belief in a coherent world, standards of competence, reliance upon an objective reality, social and familial obligation.

28. On this fourth consideration, I was particularly influenced by the work of Tainter: Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1 edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

29. Volker Sellin, European Monarchies from 1814 to 1906: A Century of Restorations, 1st edition (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2017).

30. Yoffee has a lot of great interest to say on these topics. For a couple of concise sources, which provide a window into the larger discussion and other important, more detailed sources, see: Norman Yoffee, “Orienting Collapse,” in The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations, ed. Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, Reprint edition (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1991); Norman Yoffee, “Notes on Regeneration,” in After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, ed. Glenn M. Schwartz and John J. Nichols, Reprint edition (Tucson, Ariz: University of Arizona Press, 2010).

31. The book provides a lengthy unpacking of the concept of gemeinschaft in the work of both Weber and Tönnies. But, again, I’m trying to keep this summary as brief as practical.

32. Which explains why the historical cycle for the Peppered Moths was an isolated event, while for humans it is the engineer of our history.

33. Glubb, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival; William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny, Reprint edition (New York: Crown, 1997); Peter Turchin, “Political Instability May Be a Contributor in the Coming Decade,” Nature 463, no. 7281 (February 2010): 608–608, https://doi.org/10.1038/463608a; Turchin, Historical Dynamics; Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (New York: Penguin Press, 2023).

34. And for those who don’t: Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Revised, Updated ed. edition (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).

35. There are of course very many other kinds of phenotypes that can be identified among the diverse mix of human big five personality traits. The point here is that those I’ve called temporals and spatials are the ones that tend to drive politics and political history, as I’ll elaborate further below. Other personality phenotypes, say, characterized by dominance of trait neuroticism, extroversion, or agreeableness are probably more likely to align themselves with either temporals or spatials, depending upon which is wielding more social and political power at any given historical moment. This is probably a point I should have worked into the main text.