SPATIALS V TEMPORALS

MARRIAGE OF INNIS AND DAWKINS

This is another of those nomenclature posts. Often, in the past, I’ve introduced new terms for ease of reference and composition. Earlier, though, I slipped them into posts primarily on other topics. So, when I wanted to refer readers back to them, they were stuck with having to wade through longer posts mostly aside of the key interest that had taken the readers there. Consequently, I’ve come to appreciate the good sense in taking a timeout from any ongoing line of exploration to dedicate a post to the introduction of some new bit of nomenclature that I’d like to use going forward. This is one of those.

The ease of composition of course is in the ability to express a complex idea in as least bulky or clumsy terms as possible. Of course, there’s the criticism that such an approach erects a barrier of inaccessible rhetoric, which hinders people’s access to the relevant ideas. That’s true. But the alternative is to write in such large chunks of expansive prose that clarity is not especially improved, and the mere volume of text becomes its own barrier to entry. So, this creation of a specialized vocabulary seems to me to be the lesser evil on that account.

As you’ll have gathered from the title, the terms I want to introduce are: spatials and temporals. And, as the subtitle informs: these terms marry the ideas of Harold Innis and Richard Dawkins. An extended version of these handier terms would be thus:

Spatials = space biased extended phenotypes

And obviously,

Temporals = time biased extended phenotypes

As you case see, using the text on the right-hand side of the equal signs would be considerably clumsier than that on the left-hand side. However, even that clumsier phrasing probably isn’t going to be especially explanatory to a lot of (maybe, most?) new readers (and possibly some number of veterans of this blog). For most people I’d still have to explain what the text on the right-hand side means. So, let’s have a go at that.

In past posts I’ve address both Innis’ idea of space and time bias (see here) and intermittently the concept of the phenotype (e.g., see here). Though I don’t believe I’ve ever gone into the concept of the extended phenotype. To understand more deeply that latter concept and how it ties into my larger worldview, I’d suggest reading my (other must read!) book, Biological Realism. But I’ll do my best to give a useful shorthand, here.

As discussed in the earlier post, 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 that earlier post:

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 media like papyrus or paper sustained the Roman 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.

I’m not claiming that Innis’ framing is perfect, but I do think it is a valuable heuristic. Even if it requires some tweaking. However, in one regard I do dissent from Innis; he tended toward a kind of technological determinism (with geographic deterministic aspects). While I’m something of a determinist, too, I’m a biological determinist. That is to say, ultimate explanations of everything human has to be rooted in evolutionary selection. I won’t try to defend that position, here. If you’d like to understand it better, again, see my (other must read!) book, Biological Realism, where arguments and evidence are provided.

So, while Innis seems to be saying that people’s values and dispositions are molded by the biases of their media, I’d argue 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. Furthermore, since some people are phenotypically more inclined to one bias or the other, social struggles are often (usually?) precisely over which media and institutions will be operationalized for the goal of which kind of society will result – even if the driving forces of these pursuits are not part of the actors’ conscious awareness. Here though I’m getting ahead of myself. To understand the foundation for those last couple sentences, we need to bring the other newlywed into the story.

Dawkins is one of the more interesting, though in some ways most tragic, figures of recent intellectual history. Truth be told, he didn’t contribute all that much to the knowledge of evolutionary biology. Though, it can’t be denied that he was probably the single greatest expositor of that discipline. He has a remarkable gift for explaining the complex processes involved in evolution. And, in fairness, he always (far as I can tell) gave full credit to those who were the real geniuses that he built his narratives upon. His most famous book, The Selfish Gene (one of those books maybe condemned more than read), is openly an intellectual history of the discipline.

Sadly, and at times infuriatingly, though, Dawkins has muddied his legacy by failure to apply the lessons of evolutionary biology – which he so brilliantly explained to so many of us – to the facts of the human condition. His proposal that religion was a “mind virus” was only the most obvious and cringe-worthy of these failures. Still, for all that, Dawkins did make at least one extremely important contribution to the science of evolutionary biology.¹ And he has himself frequently declared that his best and most important book was The Extended Phenotype.²

First then let’s identify what is a phenotype. While there is much debate over whether humans are more formed by genetic heritability or “environment” (nature or nurture as they used to say) the concept of the phenotype shunts such debates aside. Whatever the mix, proportion, interaction of heritability and “environment,” the phenotype is its outcome. The evidence, to my eye, indicates an important influence from both sources.³ However, what people get confused by is the mistaken idea that something ontogenetic, which is a product of the “environment,” is not genetic.

Indeed, I find it necessary to put ontogenetic “environment” in quotation marks because it is a deeply misleading term. It means nothing like the same word does in the context of evolutionary selection. To integrate information from the “environment” in the ontogenetic process in fact requires the evolved genes necessary for building cognitive mechanisms to perceive, compute, and integrate such information into the phenotype’s ontogenesis. Again, though, these are topics that – if you want to understand them more fully – you should see my (other must read!) book, Biological Realism.

For now, we can simply acknowledge that such phenotypes are produced. However, as we know not only from humans, but from many other species, the same species can produce different kinds of phenotypes. These are conceptually located in what is called the reaction norm: the range of phenotypic possibility for that species. Such phenotypic differences mean that different members of the species may find different circumstances more advantageous to their own fitness.

In the famous case of the moths in England during the industrial revolution, the black moths (a different phenotype) gained fitness advantage over the white phenotypes when soot spread across regions of the country, produced by the new coal burning factories.⁴ So, different phenotypes within the same species can be advantaged, or disadvantaged, from changes in the environment (here, using that latter word in the correct, Darwinian selection way). This is all clear and straightforward.

Dawkins’ brilliant next step was to recognize that what may well be core to the fitness of a specific phenotype is the evolved disposition to alter that environment to better serve its own specific fitness interests. Famously, he cited 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 build its lodge. This extension of the beaver’s phenotype into the manipulation of the exogenous world will of course have impacts on other species. Some may benefit, others may suffer; the beaver is only calibrated by its phenotype to engage in such manipulation in the interest of its fitness: a fitness wired (we need not debate heritability and ontogenesis) into the beaver’s evolved phenotype.

But if such dynamics are true of phenotypes across species, why shouldn’t they be true of phenotypes within species? The same evolutionary and fitness dynamics are at work. Such different phenotypes, by definition, must have genetic differences subject to selective pressures. And it’s a matter of fact that humans can be phenotypically divided along a wide range of traits. For instance, humans have different reproductive strategies. Some are more disposed to faster strategies, involving lower parental investment and higher mating investment. Others, with slower strategies, exhibit the opposite tendencies. A great book by Weeden and Kurzban illustrate how these two kinds of human phenotypes manifest their different fitness interests in the pursuit of molding public opinion and government policy in directions more conducive to their fitness interests than that of the other reproductive strategy phenotype.⁵

We also know from personality psychology research that there are distinctive Big Five Trait profiles for those generally considered on the left and right. At the simplest level, those on the left are higher in openness and lower in conscientiousness, while those on the right are the opposite.⁶ So, we should expect to see Dawkins’ extended phenotypes at work over this conflict of fitness interests, too. And of course, we do. Indeed, as might be coming clear by now, the phenotypes I’m distinguishing can be divided into the left-right spectrum, especially as I’ve refined it through the insights of Michéa.

The reason though that I prefer to use these less vernacularly comfortable terms – spatials and temporals – is that, first: those more familiar terms are loaded with so much unconscious baggage that it’s just more trouble to have to explain each time that I use “left” or “right” that I may not (probably don’t) mean exactly what the reader assumes I do. Secondly, the “left-right” metaphor doesn’t make much sense for currents of thought and action preceding the French Revolution, yet such currents run through our history. And I want to be able to reference them both, pre- and post-French Revolution currents, with the same term. I believe those personality profile phenotypes are part of the human reaction norm across history.  

At this point, then, I’m hoping you’re getting where I’m going. Leaving aside what specific factors of heritability or ontogenesis gave rise to them, I’m proposing that there are distinct human phenotypes whose fitness interests are better served by social arrangements that more resemble what Innis has described as either space or time biased societies. And, following Dawkins’ insights, these are extended phenotypes.

A central part of their phenotypic disposition is precisely an evolved wiring to mold their world in ways that enhance their own phenotypically specific fitness interests. It is not then the media and institutions strictly speaking that create those dispositions or interests – though undoubtedly, they can play an ontogenetic role – but rather it is the phenotypes who pursue their preferences for the kinds of media and institutions that form the societies that complement their fitness interests. (And, of course, being evolutionarily wired for such phenotypic social action, they are usually unconscious of why they prefer certain biases in their media and institutions.) Such extended phenotypes are naturally then in conflict with each other’s pursuit of their own fitness interests.

So, unlike Innis, who saw the changing nature of ancient Egyptian society being a product of the shift from stone to papyrus as medium. My model would hypothesize that there was a shift in the balance of temporal and spatial phenotypes, allowing the latter to more successfully pursue their interests and realize their values, with the resulting social impacts, as Innis would correctly note, baked into the cake of the newly privileged media.⁷ How such a shift takes place is too involved a discussion for this post, but those interested might want to look at Part 2 of this video series I put together a while back. It explains how the shift in balance between phenotypes can occur within populations, though you’d have to watch the full series to appreciate the application within human societies.⁸

I just want to add one more quick qualification to all this. While Innis seems to use “space” as a geographic referent; in my model it refers to a rationalizing reach, into any space, aiming to objectify – for purposes of engineering, administrating, or commodifying, etc. – any aspect of the natural world. So, this would include James Scott’s legibility imposed through standardized weights and measures; the splitting of the atom; the high density, computational power of the smartphone; or the rise of limbic exploitation⁹ (e.g., leveraging behavioural psychology), for purposes of social engineering or commercial colonization in the spirit of the culture industry. Indeed, the inclination of spatials is to turn anything or place into a manipulable space.

So, that’s it; that’s the explanation and justification of this new bit of nomenclature that I want to add to our vocabulary going forward. It obviously entails a model, and only time will tell how well that model does as an explanatory framework for the stuff of history and the world. We’ll see. In any event, I’m soon launching a new series; and this bit of handy nomenclature certainly is going to make those posts a little simpler to write, and maybe even read! So, if you haven’t yet, please…

And if you know anyone who might enjoy the crazy stuff I get up to over here, please…

1. There’s a good argument that he also made an important contribution in his work with Krebs on animal communication – particularly deceptive communication: Richard Dawkins and John R. Krebs, “Animal Signals: Information or Manipulation?,” in Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, ed. J. R. Krebs and N. B. Davies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1978), 282–309; John R. Krebs and Richard Dawkins, “Animal Signals: Mind-Reading and Manipulation,” in Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, ed. J. R. Krebs and N. B. Davies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1984), 380–402.

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

3. For those looking to better understand the various angles involved here, a good set of books for an introduction into some of the different perspectives are: Sean B. Carroll, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution, Reprint edition (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007); Robert Plomin, Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2018); Steven C. Hertler, Aurelio José Figueredo, and Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre, Multilevel Selection: Theoretical Foundations, Historical Examples, and Empirical Evidence, 1st ed. 2020 edition (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

4. 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. This is an interesting story as it turns out to involve multiple paths of selection: genetic and phenotypic.

5. 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).

6. Dana R. Carney et al., “The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind,” Political Psychology 29, no. 6 (2008): 807–40, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2008.00668.x; Jacob B. Hirsh et al., “Compassionate Liberals and Polite Conservatives: Associations of Agreeableness With Political Ideology and Moral Values,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36, no. 5 (May 1, 2010): 655–64, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167210366854; Christopher A. Cooper, Lauren Golden, and Alan Socha, “The Big Five Personality Factors and Mass Politics,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 43, no. 1 (2013): 68–82, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2012.00982.x; Xiaowen Xu, Jason E. Plaks, and Jordan B. Peterson, “From Dispositions to Goals to Ideology: Toward a Synthesis of Personality and Social Psychological Approaches to Political Orientation,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 10, no. 5 (2016): 267–80, https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12248.

7. And, of course, to say that papyrus wasn’t available to use simply isn’t true. The interesting question is what happened that allowed its benefits to be recognized and leveraged?

8. Operating without the insights accumulated in the production of this substack, I called the phenotypes “conservative” and “progressive,” which in a certain literal definition of each aren’t terribly bad nomenclature. However, in reality, both terms are so overladen with multiple, diverse, even contradictory, meanings that they really aren’t very helpful. Spatials and temporals are better!

9. I’ve only just recently encountered this brilliant formulation of “limbic capitalism,” in which our limbic system — exploiting behavioral and evolutionary psychology knowledge — is hacked to manipulate and control our consumer choices. This development creates interesting challenges for free market libertarians who argue that any exchange which isn’t coercive is therefore voluntary. Is it really voluntary when one party has the means to play the other’s limbic system like pulling the strings of a puppet? But of course this limbic exploitation is not restricted to capitalism. The state does it too, as we experienced during COVID (see here). This is a major challenge in the new age of biopolitics (see here).