I usually think it's ugly and unfair to bring someone's personal appearance into the analysis of their writing and public statements and persona, but then again, sometimes it's hard not to. (The Italian poet Leopardi was a misanthropic hunchback and back then they just said, "Of course he's miserable, take a look at him!")
Take a gander at the NYT's resident anti-Jewish Jew (well, one of many), the they/them hormonal concoction that calls itself "M" Gessen:
But regardless of which side they're on, I think we all meet people who seem unhappy, unbalanced, somewhat unkempt and misshapen, while also obsessive about the news and the evil of their political opponents and who pour their hearts and souls into "politics"—but it's obvious denial and and displacement.
Taking a cold hard look at yourself in the mirror, in all ways, is the hardest task of all; blaming "society" is the easiest.
Also, how much booze would you need for a Frankfurt School orgy!?! Maybe a gallon of vodka and a blindfold to start....
If “.. lactase persistence is a particularly easy mutation to evolve as it merely requires breaking an instruction to change the digestive response to lactose, and there are various ways to break that instruction.”
Then the theory of random mutation and selection works fine. Any mutation delaying the intolerance to lactose is rewarded in pastoralists, thus spreading over generations.
I enjoy your essays so much. I can't think of anything I've read in a long long time that has enchanted me as much as this: "This suggested that it is not just some process of random mutations, that there is a mechanism of search for opportunities, of strategy-gene feedback, that is more directional than selection on random mutation...Perhaps the most striking feature of living organisms—things that use information and resources to maintain themselves, what I call their directedness—is that they are anti-entropic. Right down to the cellular level, they act to reduce entropy; to incorporate what maintains or increases order within themselves and to expel what reduces it." So much joy in these ideas - thank for sharing them in such an accessible way.
Thank you. My discovery of serious evolutionary reasoning was such an intellectual joy for me. Especially given that evolution operates at so many levels. It hits my original intellectual love, which is history (well, military history, but that led to history in general). It has also adjusted my next love, which was Economics.
My pleasure and fascinating. The reply to the tweet that mentioned the effect of offering the point that pregnancy was very effective at treating PMS gave me a chuckle.
I thought I will bring a couple of current examples on how selection operates on the tails of polygenic distribution - resulting in phenotypic outliers in both adaptive and counter-adaptive direction. Quite similar plots were pondered about a decade ago (including by me, in computer simulations). But now sufficient real-human data is available to produce convincing statistical analysis that elucidate how speciation may be occurring. Unlike many things Darwin thought about, in his times there was no basis to even think about such. Essentially, the standing polygenic distributions when adding up to extreme ends of distribution, promote selection of rare mutations that enhance their direction of adaptation beyond that achievable by the present polygenic background (or statistically more likely when incorporating a rare mutation rather than waiting for 1/1,000,000,000 chance of polygenic combination alone producing this in random, and sometimes chances of it being 0). It also resolves the argument-from-incredulity, as it is a good pathway to speciation by accumulating genotypes differing from common ancestor populations - particularly when adapting to new niches or changing environment.
Thus, it is consilient with your general thinking! And of course in Humans it is more complex due to gene-culture evolution. But this is an excellent case of doing the reverse - developing better understanding of how evolution works by doing analysis on humans - because no one has resources or interest collecting genotypes and such granularity of disease and other phenotypes of millions of animal individuals of geographically established species. Because, of course, the conclusion is applicable to animal species who do not have cultural evolutionary solutions to environmental challenges even more than to humans, who would additionally evolve cognitive adaptations for cultural learning (beyond daily survival requirements, for example, as follow up cognitive modules for abstract reasoning, that now may become an evolutionary mismatch - as these modules were adaptive for simpler applications, and not for Talmudic poppycock produced by Frankfurt school, among many).
What if a salamander had different subspecies forming a ring around a mountain range, and every so often the individuals differed enough to be considered a subspecies. At some point the subspecies cannot interbreed to produce viable offspring, therefore they are no longer a single species. https://ecology.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Species-2.jpg
Since a species is defined as a population of individuals that can interbreed to produce fertile viable offspring, at some point do you no longer have a species? This is called a “ring of races”. And where do the races cease being a single species?
Elite overproduction is too many people want the easy life. As it happens the corrections on the way.
Spiteful mutants a mistake of Christianity. Fortunately the mutants themselves did Christendom in, thankfully. Really there must be housecleaning from time to time.
In humans there are at least three processes at work, which as a coupled system seems to act something like a form of emergent utility (my own speculative framing, not a scientific term). First, their is evolutionary capacitance; the inheritance of past mutations and segmental duplications which are usually redundant and inactive within our genome, but may be awakened by environmental factors or niches. The key thing to understand about evolutionary capacitance is that it substantially increases evolvability when humans find themselves encountering new and difficult to survive externalities. Second, polygenic shift; comparative advantage played out over the generations. Third, the epigenetic world. Recent research has shown methylation in homo sapiens not present in our close relatives; a specific set of epigenetic triggers altered to make changes to our vocal chords (and facial structures) and allow us to make a wider and more expressive range of sounds.
Of all the mechanisms, the epigenetic layer is the most interesting. It suggests something akin to a murmuration in the directedness of human evolution.
I usually think it's ugly and unfair to bring someone's personal appearance into the analysis of their writing and public statements and persona, but then again, sometimes it's hard not to. (The Italian poet Leopardi was a misanthropic hunchback and back then they just said, "Of course he's miserable, take a look at him!")
Take a gander at the NYT's resident anti-Jewish Jew (well, one of many), the they/them hormonal concoction that calls itself "M" Gessen:
https://www.nytimes.com/by/m-gessen
Then there's the famous feminist Andrea Dworkin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dworkin
But regardless of which side they're on, I think we all meet people who seem unhappy, unbalanced, somewhat unkempt and misshapen, while also obsessive about the news and the evil of their political opponents and who pour their hearts and souls into "politics"—but it's obvious denial and and displacement.
Taking a cold hard look at yourself in the mirror, in all ways, is the hardest task of all; blaming "society" is the easiest.
Also, how much booze would you need for a Frankfurt School orgy!?! Maybe a gallon of vodka and a blindfold to start....
Thanks!
If “.. lactase persistence is a particularly easy mutation to evolve as it merely requires breaking an instruction to change the digestive response to lactose, and there are various ways to break that instruction.”
Then the theory of random mutation and selection works fine. Any mutation delaying the intolerance to lactose is rewarded in pastoralists, thus spreading over generations.
Yes. What I had thought was a bit of a counter-example isn’t.
I enjoy your essays so much. I can't think of anything I've read in a long long time that has enchanted me as much as this: "This suggested that it is not just some process of random mutations, that there is a mechanism of search for opportunities, of strategy-gene feedback, that is more directional than selection on random mutation...Perhaps the most striking feature of living organisms—things that use information and resources to maintain themselves, what I call their directedness—is that they are anti-entropic. Right down to the cellular level, they act to reduce entropy; to incorporate what maintains or increases order within themselves and to expel what reduces it." So much joy in these ideas - thank for sharing them in such an accessible way.
Thank you. My discovery of serious evolutionary reasoning was such an intellectual joy for me. Especially given that evolution operates at so many levels. It hits my original intellectual love, which is history (well, military history, but that led to history in general). It has also adjusted my next love, which was Economics.
Great post Lorenzo, thanks!
Here is another evolutionary adaptation possibility - perhaps women's PMS is also one of them: https://x.com/SteveStuWill/status/2058611487396999654?s=20
My pleasure and fascinating. The reply to the tweet that mentioned the effect of offering the point that pregnancy was very effective at treating PMS gave me a chuckle.
I thought I will bring a couple of current examples on how selection operates on the tails of polygenic distribution - resulting in phenotypic outliers in both adaptive and counter-adaptive direction. Quite similar plots were pondered about a decade ago (including by me, in computer simulations). But now sufficient real-human data is available to produce convincing statistical analysis that elucidate how speciation may be occurring. Unlike many things Darwin thought about, in his times there was no basis to even think about such. Essentially, the standing polygenic distributions when adding up to extreme ends of distribution, promote selection of rare mutations that enhance their direction of adaptation beyond that achievable by the present polygenic background (or statistically more likely when incorporating a rare mutation rather than waiting for 1/1,000,000,000 chance of polygenic combination alone producing this in random, and sometimes chances of it being 0). It also resolves the argument-from-incredulity, as it is a good pathway to speciation by accumulating genotypes differing from common ancestor populations - particularly when adapting to new niches or changing environment.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10516-5
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.12.612687v2
Thus, it is consilient with your general thinking! And of course in Humans it is more complex due to gene-culture evolution. But this is an excellent case of doing the reverse - developing better understanding of how evolution works by doing analysis on humans - because no one has resources or interest collecting genotypes and such granularity of disease and other phenotypes of millions of animal individuals of geographically established species. Because, of course, the conclusion is applicable to animal species who do not have cultural evolutionary solutions to environmental challenges even more than to humans, who would additionally evolve cognitive adaptations for cultural learning (beyond daily survival requirements, for example, as follow up cognitive modules for abstract reasoning, that now may become an evolutionary mismatch - as these modules were adaptive for simpler applications, and not for Talmudic poppycock produced by Frankfurt school, among many).
What if a salamander had different subspecies forming a ring around a mountain range, and every so often the individuals differed enough to be considered a subspecies. At some point the subspecies cannot interbreed to produce viable offspring, therefore they are no longer a single species. https://ecology.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Species-2.jpg
Since a species is defined as a population of individuals that can interbreed to produce fertile viable offspring, at some point do you no longer have a species? This is called a “ring of races”. And where do the races cease being a single species?
Sorry to nerd out, but it’s one of the most fascinating aspects of speciation. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2405789
Nerd out all you like. We approve of nerding out around here.
....so, the Frankenfurter school then?
Well, they are unfortunate looking, the "Frankfurters," are they not?
Poor things.
Elite overproduction is too many people want the easy life. As it happens the corrections on the way.
Spiteful mutants a mistake of Christianity. Fortunately the mutants themselves did Christendom in, thankfully. Really there must be housecleaning from time to time.
In humans there are at least three processes at work, which as a coupled system seems to act something like a form of emergent utility (my own speculative framing, not a scientific term). First, their is evolutionary capacitance; the inheritance of past mutations and segmental duplications which are usually redundant and inactive within our genome, but may be awakened by environmental factors or niches. The key thing to understand about evolutionary capacitance is that it substantially increases evolvability when humans find themselves encountering new and difficult to survive externalities. Second, polygenic shift; comparative advantage played out over the generations. Third, the epigenetic world. Recent research has shown methylation in homo sapiens not present in our close relatives; a specific set of epigenetic triggers altered to make changes to our vocal chords (and facial structures) and allow us to make a wider and more expressive range of sounds.
Of all the mechanisms, the epigenetic layer is the most interesting. It suggests something akin to a murmuration in the directedness of human evolution.
Under what conditions or circumstances do lions and tigers cross-breed?
Zoos and nature parks. Hence ligers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger
And tigons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigon