TeledyN

I'm not a biologist, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it does seem to me that the creatures on this planet live in a sort of symbiotic relationship with the planet and each other, and I know that's not news to the Gaia fans, but bear with me a bit ... to start with, let's consider an ant colony if only because we're often comparing ourselves to the social structure of the ants, and lets consider the tight coupling between the ant and its aphids:

Ants and aphids have a symbiotic relationship. The aphids provide the ants with a food-source (honeydew) and, in return, the ants protect the aphids ... Ants communicate with each other using a large repertoire of chemical signals, which are actively secreted onto surfaces from exocrine glands on the legs. These signals can recruit nest-mates to food sources, and are also used to mark a colony's territory. Ants secrete chemicals passively too - as an ant moves, hydrocarbons are shed from the cuticle (the waterproof outer lining of the exoskeleton), leaving a chemical trail.

Ants use behavioural signals called semiochemicals to manipulate aphids' nervous systems. (Ant's own behaviour can be manipulated too, by parasitic fungi.)

[ Neurophilosophy : Ants secrete aphid tranquilizer from their feet ]

So the ants and the aphids have this lock-step arrangement between them and they have achieved an ecological balance that serves the purposes of both parties, and as we see with the fungi, it's not just a two-party system, its all part of a delicate web.

Now, considering ourselves, there's this item in yesterday's news:

This study provides the first evidence that toxins from Bt corn may travel long distances in streams and may harm stream insects that serve as food for fish. These results compound concerns about the ecological impacts of Bt corn raised by previous studies showing that corn-grown toxins harm beneficial insects living in the soil.

Licensed for use in 1996, Bt corn is engineered to produce a toxin that protects against pests, particularly the European corn borer. Bt corn now accounts for approximately 35 percent of corn acreage in the U.S., and its use is increasing.

[ Genetically modified corn may harm ecosystem ]

Dig: Individuals of our species spend considerable effort charging ahead completely irresponsibly creating newly imagined 'inventions' that we really haven't a clue what consequence will arise, but, at the same time, others of us are also engaged in behaviours double-checking those maverick actions to confirm and catalog the damage they do!

The Selfless Gene

How many of us even have that as some sort of occupation? Our 9-5 pre-occupation being the ever more refined specialist technique of uncovering damage done by others of our species? And then, of course, others have the resultant task of bridging the two and correcting that damage. In that latter category we clearly have all the so-called "alternative medicine" who will eagerly cite how their clientèle arise from the mistakes and over-boastings of the mainstream, but they are not alone, we have environmental cleaners, financial cleaners, law enforcement and corrections, social workers, dietary consultants, people who detox contaminated buildings ...

Where other social creatures specialize their individual tasks each to the outside ecology wherein the colony resides, we have a unique pastime of expending a great deal of our human social resources specifically to uncover and undo what others of our species have irresponsibly (ie un-ecologically) done!

Do any other animals exhibit this sort of social-corrective community indemnity? Seems to me you can go from Washington to the Cargo Cult islands and see it in action in humans everywhere.

Now here's the really interesting thing: recent neuroscience tells us it could well be that the individuals of our species are designed to breakdown and run amok, literally out of control. Its true. Regardless what the right-wing tough-love hardliners say about criminal justice, regardless how self-disciplined you may imagine yourself to be (and especially so there) we have considerable and very real and very hard data to say that at least some of our actions are going to spring forth completely unchecked by our usual cognitive inhibitions systems, thereby causing all that extra work that must be sponged up by others in our human colony:

"all acts of control draw from one source. So when using this resource in one domain, such as dieting, we're more likely to run out of it in another domain, like studying hard.

"Once these resources run out, our self-control ability is diminished"
[ When our vices get the better of us ]

Our brain will dream up stuff to do on its own and we all know every day we have and do exercise the option to overrule the urges. What has become apparent is not the choice to do the overide, but the mechanism by which we can effect it. Like lifting a finger, it is only possible where the body provides the means.

But whatever it is that goes on in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), it appears to require some sort of reservoired resources. Having flexed it (or tapped it) during the emotional movie, we are subsequently less able to pass the Stroop (word/color) test, less able to check our social balance -- similarly, in our aging population, this resource stuff can become dwindled, and in geriatrics we can and do see marked episodes of behavioural control lapses, blurted opinions, racist remarks, stuff like that (which maybe doesn't bode well for those senior-favouring systems of government!) and what we're learning here is how it's not their fault because it is one thing to be socialized in the abstract, and quite another to actually have the 'juice' that your socialization needs so as to do that job of self-limiting.

That's a deep point in itself, but my point here being, in the end, because of actual physical control-juice depletion, the Ape Who Imagines is going to win out over the Ape Who Contains Themselves, and that much is inevitable by design.

Those unchecked flights of our raw fancy are going to occur, like it or not. It's not a matter of better yogic training or more stringent criminal justice or even better psychiatric drugs -- those may actually make matters worse! -- this is just the way we were built.

This is how Nature intends for us to operate. We run out of the control juice, if only for a moment, and we can do lots of things we will regret later. Criminal action is, of course, only the extreme case of a far more common normal case where we simply and conservatively apply too little of the juice, we drive two blocks because ___ (fill in the blanks) knowing full well it's not a 'smart' thing to do, ecology wise. We take a job mowing down ecosystems because ___ or we practice some art of shattering ecosystems or families or any of ten thousand things that we just don't want to expend the Discipline Stuff upon for any of a thousand made-up reasons.

But here's the thing: this is no flaw in our species, it is only an example of Nature being frugal!

The Harmolodic Ascension

Fortunately, we (as a species) appear eminently well suited for harbouring these aberrant behaviours from individuals -- look around, there seems always to be some of us who 'feel' compelled to track down those wavering other humans, still others compelled to deal with the aftermath! They can't explain it, neither can the Freudians. These folks are just simply born to it. They dream of doing just this, often from a very young age. They make up their minds, then devote the whole of their conscious effort, often decades of in-advance study specifically to provide our collective hive with specific skills for precisely that ACC-like attenuating feedback service needed to control the overall eco-impact of those seeming flawed moments in our individual self-controlling nature!

Doesn't this show the colony behaving in extension as an identical 'onto' macro-scale model of the individual brain itself? Those automatons who choose those roles, they call it their 'calling', which is a personal statement that surely would be familiar to the ant and aphid.

You see, it is a whole system, a cohesive whole organism. If I (as one autonomous cerebral unit) momentarily lack sufficient Control Juice, the same biologic substance-mechanism in someone else will spontaneously seek to leap the synaptic gap of our separated entities to provide it to me ... by force if they must, compelled as it were.

Is it maybe fair to suppose the reason we each, individually, seem unable to live within Nature in any ecologically intelligent sense is really an asking of the wrong question: we cannot consider any human in isolation as a complete representative animal because we can already demonstrate how the brain-organ in one head must depend on mediation by the brain-organs in the heads of other humans in order to achieve any usefully correct ecologically valid environmental function.

We Are One In The Spirit...

it's interesting. or at least, it seemed so when I started out to write this :) The by-product of this sort of reasoning is not so much to decry that group as wrong and this other as right but a real dawning awareness that the I-self is a biologically meaningless term that should rightly be replaced by a spontaneous We-sense (I&I) before we-the-people can really make any meaningful progress as a species -- so its OK to be maverick-at-large, just as much as it is OK to have outside thoughts, just so long as we accept that the external 'controls' we encounter are natural and organic, and no less part of our brain than was the ACC in our own local amygdala, and these called to action external-ACC agents are all together in reality just as much a part of The Maverick. They are both living components of the same organism. Unified, indivisible.

Move 'er over Dickie Dawkins, because we have us here a tangible natural-science handle on the God Perception, for it was written:

For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.
[ Matthew 18:20; ]

The key here is not in the illusion we get of the madness of crowds, but how in our post-renaissance modern mass Me Delusional crowd, our natural hive dynamic gets tainted: t'ain't yours, t'ain't mine -- here the selfish meme/gene gets amplified, and quickly exhausts the collective ACC, running out of control collectively chanting I, Me, Mine instead of tuning in the equilibrius One-I Love omni-reflecting on its whole self.

Clearly pathological. What madness must erupt when any single neural circuit, say the amygdala or the pre-frontal lobes, decides to go it alone cutting all lines to the whole-system inhibitory messages from all other realms. I think we call that a 'brain cancer' but I'm not sure.

So the operative principle in Matthew's anecdote is the 'in My name' part, the capital 'M', the uber-mensch I, Hofstader's emergent all-together binding I of the Hive.

Think of the change in our practice from this result! In relationship therapy, in process management, in corporate law, in industrial development, even in music and the arts, if we spontaneously sought to identify, accommodate and even welcome our externalized ACC! So too our own indignation were to spontaneously recognize the essential role of the boundary-test that triggers it! Thing is, this interpersonal dynamics is going to happen anyway, because you can't fool with Mother Nature, we are going to aphid-herd each other like it or not, spontaneously, symbiotically. It is just the way we are, it is the way we were built -- I think there's maybe even good evidence to say that our cultures almost universally already approached life this way up until the great proclamation of the insular 'self' that heralded the end of the Middle-Ages, the dawn of the many self-conscious puritanisms, and about the time we all stopped having fun.

There's also this unresolved loose thread about the unseen pull of that environmental fungi, but I'll leave that for another day, change-work done one step at a time, as they say.

And there's a corollary result, too, which may also be uniquely human due to our inner-I imaginings, and maybe thus it would be more properly a recursive result: Meanwhile, back at our aphids, or more to the point, back at the little gears and wheels at work inside the minds of our scientist friends who are watching those ant/aphid dealings ...

Oliver and his colleagues suggest that the aphids might use the chemical footprints to stay inside the area within which they are protected. They also note that their findings might be useful in developing methods for controlling the dispersal of blackfly, which are considered as pests and sometimes carry diseases.
[ Ants secrete aphid tranquilizer from their feet ]

Which, if I'm not mistaken, is a field-effect call for a watch watching the watchers, and brings us right back to our problem of the Bt Corn and sticking our fingers in to fiddle where we have only the foggiest notion what's going on but undauntedly charging ahead anyway because, well, just because.

It's what we do.

Submitted by mrG on Sun, 2007-10-14 00:59

For 500 years, the Zen garden at Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto has enigmatically captivated our gaze. In a new paper published in Nature, Neuroscience may explain why: Tour guides bringing visitors to the 'best' spot to view the garden stop exactly where the symmetry lines converge.

Curiously reminiscent of other studies on entoptic effects in shamanic and prehistoric art. There's also a resonance with both these ideas to the directional harmonics at work in our biology. We may be one in the Spirit, but we are one in the Body too.

Submitted by mrG on Thu, 2002-09-26 10:08