1: Introduction/ Evolutionary Psychology and Selfish Genes
In The Extended Phenotype, Dr. Richard Dawkins makes the statement, “Suppose a male canary wanted to bring a female into reproductive condition, what could he do?… The particular pattern of sounds that he makes enters the female’s head through her ears, is translated into nerve impulses, and bores insidiously into her pituitary… He stimulates her pituitary by means of nerve impulses. They are not ‘his’ nerve impulses, in the sense that they all occur within the female’s own nerve cells. But they are his in another sense. It is his particular sounds which are subtly fashioned to make the female’s nerves work on her pituitary. Where a physiologist might inject gonadotropins into her breast muscle, or electric currents into her brain, the male canary pours song into her ear. And the results are the same.”
Dr. Dawkins then goes on to devote the rest of that chapter, various other parts of that book, and various parts of other books to showing how animals manipulate other animals psychologically to act against the manipulated animals’ survival and reproductive interests, and in the favor of the manipulating animal’s survival and reproduction.
Another example is that of anglerfish, which have evolved a worm-like lure above their mouths, and which hide in the mud of riverbeds dangling their small, wriggling, worm-looking lures above the mud, and thereby bait other fish into trying to eat the worm. Instead of evolving powerful muscles to out-swim the other fish, the anglerfish has evolved a way to trick other fish into using their own muscles to bring them close enough for the anglerfish to eat.
Another example is the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in the nests of other birds and leaves its young to other parent birds to raise. The young cuckoo bird is larger than the adult birds of other species, with a big mouth. Young cuckoo birds have evolved to be so adept at psychologically manipulating parent birds into feeding them, that other parent birds have been observed carrying food to their own children in their own nests, passing by nests with young cuckoos living in them, stopping to give their food to the cuckoos.
Theatre is a 25-century old study of how humans manipulate each other psychologically. It is a fundamental rule of theatre that in any interpersonal communication situation, each character is trying to manipulate the other. The first character is trying to get the second character to act in a way that will benefit the first character’s interests. Simultaneously, the second character is trying to do likewise to the first character.
Either or both character could’ve been manipulated ahead of time by one or more other characters, and each of those characters could’ve been manipulated by one or more other characters. Human interaction can be a very tangled web of manipulation.
This is not to say that all human interaction is psychological manipulation in the sense that people usually think of psychological manipulation. The common usage of the term implies conscious and malicious intent. As I am using the term here, all human behavior is psychological manipulation in the sense that the sender’s goal for expending the effort to communicate is to get the receiver of the communication to act differently than he would’ve acted otherwise. The sender’s goals may or may not be detrimental to the receiver’s interests. The manipulation may or may not be done consciously. It is always done subconsciously.
As a theatre artist who possesses the necessary talents, I’ve learned to perceive human behavior as what I can best describe here as mathematical entities. That is, things that are similar to numbers and that function as numbers, but are not numbers in the traditional sense.
It would be appropriate to say that these mathematical entities I perceive can be regarded as coordinates in multidimensional mathematical space. They are not linear numbers, but numbers that can move in many directions at the same time.
Everyone perceives human behavior this way. I and other theatre artists are just consciously aware of it. By figuring out how to dissect these multidimensional mathematical values, theatre artists have turned human behavior into the medium of a fine art.
For people who are not theatre artists, human perceptions, emotions, and interactions still create tangible objects in mathematical space. These are not physical objects but they are patterns of cause and effect whose existences are so reliable people refer to them as physical objects. A person needs to look no further than the English language to see this. People talk about “the love we share”, “we had an agreement between us”, “under-standing”, “economic over-head”, or “that idea is beside the point”.
People’s emotions make them perceive subconsciously complex interactions of cause and effect that affected people while our brains were evolving. Theatre artists turn human behavior into a fine art by figuring out how subconscious motivations produce physical output.
This is not to say that theatre artists figured out scientifically how subconscious motivations produce human behavior. But it is to say that they’ve discovered consistent patterns of cause and effect.
In the same basic way that an organism is made up of many genes that interact with each other to create an organism that can survive and replicate 50% of the genes at a time, human behavior is made up of many factors that interact with each other to produce a single observable result. The factors that interact to create human behavior were themselves created by genes and the interactions of genes. We have those genes because they were the ones that survived over the course of our evolution. For all intents and purposes, the field of evolutionary psychology is the Selfish Gene Theory applied to human behavior.
The consistent pattern of cause and effect that theatre artists have discovered is essentially a gigantic framework floating in space, because theatre artists have never had any way to anchor it to our biological origins. Most artistic geniuses are not also scientific geniuses. On the other hand, I must say that I’m amazed that Dr. Dawkins never figured out how to apply his own theory of the evolutionary origins of psychological manipulation to human behavior and theatre, considering that he’s married to an actress!
To borrow Dan Dennett’s terminology from Consciousness Explained, theatre artists have figured out how to break human behavior up into components that have allowed them to assemble a Universal Turing Machine. They feed it hypothetical values for the theoretical numbers I’ve described as input, and it produces realistic human behavior as output.
Every example of human behavior I make in this book is a run of the theatrical Turing Machine. It can be scaled up or down by any amount. By feeding it input at the beginning of a situation, and adjusting values if they change by outside factors during a situation, it predicts everything from communication tactics used by telephone salespeople to how individuals’ decisions created the political history of the 20th century.
Before I can run the machine, I have to show you what its components consist of and how the values of its theoretical numbers are determined. Then I’ll make several test runs of it to show how it has been used to produce various movies. Then I’ll turn it loose on the real world to show how it predicts real life given various sets of initial conditions. Finally, I’ll show how it’s being used by various people in real life right now in the attempt to create different—and conflicting—versions of the future of the world.
I’m only referring to it here as a theatrical Turing Machine to establish the idea that theatre artists have created a self-contained thing that turns accurate input into accurate output. Henceforth it is not useful for me to refer to it as a Turing Machine because calling it a machine implies that someone created it intentionally for its purpose. Since people have an intuitive awareness of psychology, if a sufficient number of people tried sufficiently hard for a sufficient length of time, they could develop a mental model of human behavior that functions as a human behavior Turing Machine, without realizing they’d done it. That’s precisely what has happened. My purpose for writing this book is to show how the operation of the machine can be defined by a single theory.