The Niesen Tradition, Part II
The interdisciplinary study of human behavior began with what Dr. E. O. Wilson called sociobiology, which is now more commonly known as evolutionary psychology. In 1987, Dr. Ervin Laszlo founded the Club of Budapest, which was intended to use the interdisciplinary study of human behavior as the foundation for the peace movement equivalent of the Manhattan Project.
In my family, the interdisciplinary study of human behavior began three generations ago. My grandmother, who was not a scientist, but a philosopher, came within one logical step of discovering the first principle of evolutionary psychology on her own: Everyone always does the best they can to try to provide for their needs. The one thing she didn’t figure out was that everyone’s needs are always the preservation of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them.
From the philosophical point my grandmother reached, the one logical step remaining to turn her discovery into the first principle of a branch of science was an aesthetic formality. Once you recognize that everyone in the world is equal to yourself, that everyone always makes what they believe at the time to be the best decisions they can, and that everyone always believes, on some level or another, that every decision they make is right at the time they make the decision, the only thing that leaves to be determined is the origin of everyone’s perceptions. Discovering that is the fundamental goal of evolutionary psychology.
My grandfather, as I said, was an airplane engineer. But despite his and my grandmother’s diametrically opposed view points on the world, they were happily married for 67 years.
We are a large family of exceptionally talented people. We are engineers, architects, biologists, forest rangers, philosophers, writers, dancers, painters, musicians, teachers, trades people, activists, and adventurers, from a wide range of racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. This has made the interdisciplinary study of human behavior inseparable from everyday life in my family.
From this foundation of perceiving and interacting with the world, and our de facto interdisciplinary study of human behavior, it should come as no surprise that in my family, people don’t have opinions. We have collections of observable evidence that indicate patterns of cause and effect that are universal, self-consistent, and reproducible, and that better be debatable—because they will be debated. This is true for some of my family members more than others, but in effect, in my family, if a particular thought process doesn’t function as a scientific hypothesis, it doesn’t even qualify as an idea. If it doesn’t account for all related observable evidence, it’s either incomplete or erroneous.
Once you understand the logic behind the biochemistry that makes evolution happen, what evolution makes happen is simply the biggest engineering puzzle in the world. All of evolution is simply a balance of costs, benefits, uses, adaptations, improvements, trade-offs, solutions to problems, margins of error, and so on. If you grow up in a family where men have been mathematicians, architects, and engineers for four generations, you learn how all those things work from conversations around the supper table. After that, conceptually there’s nothing left to evolution that you can’t learn by reading books on your own.
My eight years of post secondary education were in four seemingly unrelated fields. I have half a bachelor’s degree in acting and technical theatre, dual associate’s degrees in building construction and automotive technology, and I’m a commercial helicopter pilot and certified flight instructor. At first glance that might seem like the resume of someone who can’t figure out what he wants to do for a living. But on closer examination it can be seen that my eight years of post secondary education have revolved around human behavior and various ways simple parts of systems interact to create wholes that seem to be greater than the sums of their parts, which can be seen by anyone in America in the course of their day to day lives. All told, I have now written over 2 million words on the products of my education. In order to study what interested me, I had to pioneer my own field of study, which meant there was no one waiting at the end of it to award me a Ph.D. for my work.
Outside of my academic life I’ve taught myself how to write novels, I’ve helped set up two punk community theatre companies, I’ve been homeless on the streets of a major U.S. city, I’ve belonged to a street gang, I’ve known numerous convicted felons personally, and I’ve been engaged to a convicted murderer for three years. You just might say that I’ve witnessed a lot of human behavior that typical ivory tower academics are never exposed to.
1968 was a pivotal year in my life. That was the year Dr. Aurelio Pecci founded the Club of Rome, which was intended as the Manhattan Project of the environmental movement. It was also the year Dr. King was assassinated. My dad could’ve been one of the scientists involved in the Club of Rome easily enough, as could his own father if he’d chosen a different career. On the one hand, some of the greatest scientific minds in the world had discovered that if humanity, or at least civilization, is going to survive the 21st century, radical social change will be necessary. On the other hand, the greatest American activist of the 20th century had figured out how to make radical social change happen. My dad realized that radical social change happens in the streets, and it happens because someone figures out how to explain to a lot of people—and ideally, a majority of people—why the old way of doing things doesn’t work anymore, how things are going to have to be done differently, and why doing them differently is going to benefit everyone. So instead of becoming just another ivory tower academic, he set out on a life of adventure—which is to say he carried on the tradition his own parents began—kept up with advances that were made in science over the years, and raised my brother and me the same way.
From the time I first learned to talk, I was raised on physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, statistics, mathematics, and systems theory. I don’t work as a scientist, because by the time I graduated from high school at the age of 16, I already had 14 years of scientific background. So I set out into the world to learn about things I didn’t already know how to do.
I should point out here that a big reason I don’t talk about science the way official scientists talk about it is because I learned how science works at a different time of my life, and I don’t pursue it now as my occupation. First I learned how to think like a scientist, and now I’ve had to backtrack and try to figure out how to talk enough like a scientist that the rest of you can understand me. In my family, the concept of a pattern of cause and effect that’s observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable, is usually what we refer to as, “It’s obvious.” Then we discuss it and refine the point, and sometimes the idea gets thrown out altogether.
That might seem like a sloppy approach to science, but then, sloppy is as sloppy does. In reading books by leading scientists of the world, it never ceases to amaze me how often they fail to put their own science to use in their own lives. Why did Dr. Lovelock, the greatest environmental scientist in the world, have four children? (Dr. Erlich only had one. Charles Darwin had 10, but he does seem to have been putting his science to work, because there was no global environmental crisis back then.) At the end of A Devil’s Chaplin, why is Dr. Dawkins’ open letter to his ten-year-old daughter only 10 pages long? My dad taught me most of that stuff when I was five. The next day he taught me about aerodynamics. The next day he taught me about astronomy. With every action they take, every person and Muppet on Sesame Street is exhibiting phenotypic behavior in the attempt to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them, simply because it isn’t possible for actors (or anyone else) to imagine and then take any action that they don’t perceive to be the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA. When your kid asks you why old people look so funny when they eat, you can teach him about biology and systems theory at the same time, just by telling him that it’s caused by the interaction of the old person’s deteriorating control of their facial muscles and their deteriorating hand-eye coordination, which leads them to hold their mouth and the rest of their face in strange-looking ways for unusually long periods of time because they have to optimize their chances of getting their food in their mouths, and it takes them longer to get their fork from their plate to their mouth. Is this an answer to a four-year-old’s awkward question, or is it college-level bioengineering? In family, it’s called “figuring out how the world works, as efficiently as possible”.
Here’s my favorite example. In The Hobbit, when Gollum and Bilbo are dueling with riddles, Gollum tells one that goes:
This thing, all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers,
Gnaws iron, bites steel,
Grinds hard stone to meal,
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down!
Bilbo answers the riddle correctly when he says, “Time”.
When my dad read me the book, he had to interrupt the story right there momentarily and tell me that actually the answer was the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Those are just a few of examples that spring to mind. The entire realm of human knowledge is available all around us; it’s just a question of knowing where and how to look.
To me, science isn’t a system of thought and body of evidence that Atheism applies to everyday life; science is just a specialized application of Atheism. When you learn to perceive the world in terms of patterns of cause and effect and observability, universality, self-consistency, reproducibility, and debatability, you learn how to be an Atheist by default. (That’s the easiest way to describe it, anyway. Technically it would be better described as Post-theism, which is to say, supernatural entities don’t need to exist or not exist, but we better not depend on them existing either.)
Working in theatre has given me some other advantages that official scientists evidently haven’t thought of yet. The simplest is that, as every scientist who studies human evolution knows, jewelry, sculpture, music, and eventually painting were invented by Cro-Magnons. There is considerable evidence to suggest they probably invented dance, poetry, singing, and a rudimentary form of theatre also, but those wouldn’t show up in the archeological record. As every artist knows, art is the expression of emotion. The biggest difference between amateur artists and professional artists is that amateur artists figure out how to turn their own feelings into art, while professional artists figure out how to turn other people’s feelings into art. And as every human evolutionary scientist knows, emotion is a more powerful motivator by far than intellect. That means I’ve spent most of my adult life working among people who are the heirs to a 60,000 year old tradition of figuring out how to communicate effectively with other Homo sapiens.
From their own direction, theatre artists have developed a dual first principle for replicating human behavior, which are only two logical steps removed from the first principle of evolutionary psychology. They are: No one ever does anything for no reason (which psychologists phrase as: All human behavior has meaning); and: people always expend their energy in the most effective way they can think of.
With one logical step this dual first principle can be rephrased as: People always pursue the most favorable ratio of perceivable benefit to effort required. At that point, theatre artists have discovered artistically what my grandmother discovered philosophically, and what Dr. Diamond used as his first principle to show why calories of energy expended to calories of energy produced led people to make the agricultural choices they made.
By defining benefit as the effective preservation of DNA, we arrive at the first principle of evolutionary psychology: All human behavior is the product of the attempt by the individual to preserve the survival of his or her DNA by the most effective means perceivable to him or her.
The dual first principle of theatrical human behavior has an advantage over the first principle of evolutionary psychology in that it neatly divides human behavior between a universal brain structure and the effects of sensory input on the universal brain structure. The “no one ever does anything for no reason” first principle led me directly to the Systems Theory of Human Evolutionary Behavior, by defining what people’s reasons are. The “everyone always expends their energy as efficiently as possible” first principle led me directly to the Theory of Evolutionary Relativity, by defining how people perceive the efficiency of the energy expenditure for the choices they make.
By relating evolutionary psychology to movies, I’ve made evo-psych seem so obvious to high school dropouts that they’ve wondered why nobody thought of it before. Indeed, I’ve heard from a lot of high school drop outs, in essence, that if someone could’ve taught them an all-encompassing perspective of human behavior, and simultaneously put it to use in their education, their education would’ve made a lot more sense to them, and they wouldn’t’ve dropped out of high school.