Plots Hatched in the Rec Room

Back in the run up to the Second Iraqi War, the loudest voices raised in opposition to our invasion were the usual radicals. ANSWER, et. al., however, were hardly representative of the bulk of the people I met at rallies and marches last year. The really angry people were the moderates. Unlike the eternal left, which has long since grown comfortable playing the algae to the right-wing fungus in the lichen of symbolic politics, we wanted something to actually happen, which is to say, we weren’t calling for an impossible revolution or expecting perpetual peace on Earth. We just wanted our country to act responsibly in world affairs or, if honorable behavior were out of the question, at least to promote our own self-interest in a rational way by avoiding wars we can neither win nor afford. Ideology didn’t have anything to do with it, and the idealism most in play was not very different than what used to be called prudence.

I challenge anybody to question the impurity of my motives. My skin is white, but O my heart is black. For example, like decent Americans everywhere, I have no principled objection to using military force as an instrument of national policy. Indeed, I think it is a very good idea for the United States to maintain its military preponderance for as long as possible. Unfortunately, to manage this trick, which is not going to be easy in any case in view of the inevitable decline in our economic strength relative to the rest of the world, we should be avoiding everything we’re doing now. If we really want to stay strong, we should be keeping our national finances in order instead of running up a huge debt. We should be avoiding operational military expenditures in order to pay for continual technical research and capital military expenditures. Instead of alienating the world, we should be figuring out how to get our allies to foot a large part of the bill for international activities. We should be spending our money on what’s effective and relatively cheap—an unchallengeable navy and air force—and spending as little as possible on what’s ineffective and hugely expensive—large land armies bogged down fighting insurgencies and science fiction fantasies like that golden dildo, missile defense.

Confessions of a Test Particle

Maybe a lot of people buy lottery tickets in the expectation of winning, but I suspect a fair number bet merely as an aid to daydreaming. Once you’ve bet, you don’t need to imagine a separate chain of circumstances that leads to waking up rich. Winning the lottery on a given occasion is much less likely than having a stroke during the same period of time, but at least it’s definitely on the sunny side of possibility and that fact economizes on the energy needed to fantasize. Writing a blog has a rather similar rationale. I don’t expect to be read very often or by very many, but the fact that any given message might find a reader is meaningful to me. The hobby does have a downside, however. Indeed, it can be extremely corrupting.

Writing is a blind trade where seller and buyer do not normally meet. But that doesn’t preclude an element of negotiation. Over reasonable stretch of time, the message maker learns what the message receiver is willing or able to hear. It turns out that the market for surprising ideas is exceedingly small, though the universal resistance to anything substantively new is masked by an insatiable desire for superficial variety. It would be quite unjust for a writer to think badly of his audience because of this fact. The writer, after all, shares with his readers the same reluctance to hear when it is his turn to listen. Unwillingness to hearken is an ineluctable aspect of the primal stupidity (Urdummheit) that rules the human condition. Besides, in this instance, it is the writer who displays the most blameworthy sloth. Just writing down something simply because it is true, profound, and apropos is a very self-indulgent practice. All the art and, lord knows, the effort, lies in mudding the message and flattering the readers as necessary. In this respect, a virtuous writer is like a moral politician, who isn’t really moral at all unless he compromises his principles enough to give them effect.

Calculations

The Roman army of Trajan’s time was more powerful than the forces of the Parthians with which it contended for the province of Mesopotamia. Even so, the emperor was only able to secure the region for three years, probably because the area was far more important to the nearby Persians than it was to the distant Latins. Where the price of victory is greater than the prize, every victory is a defeat, which is why the analysts who claim that the Tet Offensive was an American victory are both quite correct and utterly wrong and also why we’ll probably show ourselves to the door in Iraq even more quickly than Trajan did.

The Persian Gulf is just about as far away from the United States as you can get on this planet. By the same rule that every suspicious mole will be located on the center of your back, fate seems determined to locate the center of gravity of world politics in the most inconvenient spot. But what is most relevant strategically is not linear distance but a more complicated interval that takes into account cultural as well as geographical remoteness. It costs a lot to ship men and material to the Middle East. It costs even more to figure out who's who and what’s what in the Iraqi world.

As it is, we’re like some rube who horns in on a conversation in a bar, a conversation about things we don’t understand conducted in a language we don’t speak. True, the fact that we’re packing a gun and distributing bribes gets us noticed, but that doesn’t change the fact that our childishly simple view of the world is quite incommensurate with the concerns and values of the patrons. Shooting some of them for looking at us funny turns out to have only a marginal and temporary benefit.

You have to be a fanatical ideologue or a cynical opportunist to believe that this sort of thing is really justifiable as a rational strategy. Imposing your will by main force on other people surely implies that you know what is best for them, unless, of course, it just means you don’t give a damn about them at all. But does anybody think that Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the inevitability of democracy is any better as a justification for imperialism than earlier enthusiasms for Romanitas, the conversion of the Indians, or the classless society? Theories of historical rationality inevitably turn into exercises of collective will. Just as those who believed in the eventual triumph of the proletariat quickly concluded that the dialectic helps those who help themselves, those who insist on the irresistible advance of the American Way have discovered that cluster bombs are the necessary secondary causes of the victory of the Good. It finally comes back to a question of will and power, and we just don’t have enough of either.

The Bubble Boy

As part of the set up of several Star Trek episodes, an alien intelligence maintains a earth-like conditions inside a small bubble on an otherwise inhospitable planet. The protected zone serves as a stage setting for the delicate dramas of the fragile humans. Now I don’t think the habitable part of the Earth was laid out by any intelligence whatsoever—I’m on the record that Tom Fool Nature did it—but our actual situation is strikingly similar except that the playground we inhabit is not a symmetrical volume in the midst of a wilderness, but an exceedingly complicated network of intersecting passageways that from very far off or very close in looks like a continuous space. I may think I can wander freely in these parts but a random excursion to the middle of Gerry Avenue or even a trip out of my clothes and then down the hall will disabuse me of this theory.

Spinoza famously suggested that a conscious stone would believe it was acting freely as it tumbled down a hill. I think we are more like a counter on an abacus that somehow manages to ignore the rod upon which it slides. I do not point out the fact to provide an occasion for existential anguish, however. It is part of a general explanation of how beings of limited power and intellect can function at all.

There is also a thermodynamic way of making this point. An individual, thinking human is a very high peak of negative entropy, but the exception we all represent to the usual law of ruin is only possible because we are located in a region already maintained at low entropy, indeed at the center of a concentric set of such regions: the brain in the body, the body in the city, the city in the human world, the human world in the biosphere, each shell excreting its disorder to the next.

Democracy Again

I’m a believer in the iron law of oligarchy. States are governed by minorities and always will be. Authoritarian regimes do not differ from democracies because elites are in charge but because the rulers in such polities are not loyal to the peoples they serve or feel any obligation to consult their wishes or promote their interests. Elections are only meaningful when the power structure of a nation allows them to be, where the holders of power wager some of their power on an outcome that is genuinely in doubt. Absent that willingness, elections are a way of asserting control, not of seeking consent, much as public opinion polls, supposedly a means for finding out what people are thinking, are merely the means by which commercial and political interests impose an agenda on a passive and thoughtless population.

Where politically effective people lack the will to maintain a government with a popular element, no constitutional or legal mechanism will prevent abuses. We have laws against political corruption, but they are simply not enforced. We have congressional elections, but they are rigged by gerrymandering to the benefit of incumbents so that very few districts are actually up for grabs in any given year. We have de jure freedom of the Press, but a de facto monopoly of what counts, the means of propaganda.

There is nothing remarkable about any of this. Functioning democracy is a rare and fragile condition that can only be maintained by continuous effort while a corporatist state is a more or less natural endpoint, especially for an Imperial state in decline. Indeed, at the present, populism is more likely to make things worse than better since the right is far better than the left at flattering and frightening the just plain folks.

The Rest of the Phrase

I was just perusing Richard Clarke’s book when I suddenly recognized the implication of its title, “Against All Enemies.” I’m sure everybody else got the point right off the bat, i.e. that the whole phrase in the oath reads “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

The Other Shoe

The fall of the Soviet Union left the United States as the sole superpoweron the planet. It also left only one ideology standing, a quasi-theological version of economic liberalism that is every bit as dogmatic as Marxist-Leninism. The Cold War era will not really be over until this relic also passes from the scene, replaced, so we hope, by a more pragmatic political economics that can learn from experience.

The Contents of Our Character

My last piece about Central Asia was not calculated to promote tourism to Tashkent, but I note that ads for hotels in Uzbekistan mysteriously appeared on this site after I posted it. For that matter, the Republican Party regularly visits this page after I accuse it of all sorts of crimes and misdemeanors. One would like to believe that evil partisans are carefully reading my words and vainly attempting to counteract them with their own propaganda—not for nothing do delusions of grandeur commonly accompany delusions of persecution—but obviously the Google folks are using some sort of keyword search to identify the right markets for various advertisers. Amazon does something similar. Vainly trying to identify the buying habits of the world’s most desultory reader, they always suggest exactly the wrong thing by proposing the items most similar to my last purchase. That’s pretty harmless, although the Amazon computer apparently believed I was a seminary student for most of last year, which was a bit spooky. Similar technology can be truly scary, however, if the government agencies read your email and qualify you as a person of interest on the basis of content analysis—I assume that’s what the NSA does with all those computers.

Many people have likened the evolving Internet to an enormous brain. It would be more accurate to liken it to a set of ganglia, however, since it has only rudimentary pattern recognition capability, no ability to understand or generate true language, and therefore operates with a crude, associational psychology. In this respect, it is well suited to interface with the American people, who are evolving or devolving convergently towards a similar mode of functioning. Note that the ‘logic’ of the Internet and public opinion have many formal similarities, in particular the inability to process negation. From a content point of view, “it is not the case that x” and “x” are both count as x, just as all publicity is good publicity. I used to call this phenomena the “hold the onions” effect because I discovered that asking a waitress to hold the onions resulted in no onions or a tremendous number of onions because what mostly got registered was just onions. The communication was subpropositional. Whether I got lots of onions or not probably depended upon how much she liked ‘em herself.

I look on the bright side. Understanding the world through an instrument organized like an invertebrate’s nervous system seems appropriate to our political condition, which, after all, has a lot of similarities to life in a tide pool. Anyhow the built-in stupidities make using the Internet rather like playing Madlibs. In the spirit of that game, let’s see what ads come up in response to this:

A twisted young fellow named Wallace
Once had an affair with a mollusk,
But that’s not as odd
As the brachiopod
Who buggered an ostrich for solace.

The Great Game

My friend Iris from Osh tells me that the Ferghana Valley resembles the Big Valley of California. Those central Asian place names—Tashkent, Samarkand, Bishkek—may conjure more exotic associations than Modesto; but their unfamiliarity is just a consequence of our ignorance. A lot of history has taken place in the various Stans, which, if you bother to look, are the geographical and cultural center of the Eastern hemisphere and mediated the interchanges between the great civilizations for thousands of years. All the great religions and diseases staged through these oases and bazaars; and now, following the Persians, Greeks, Hindus, Arabs, Chinese, Turks, Mongols, Russians, and Britons, we’ve arrived to place a piece or two on the venerable chess board. Central Asia, however, is distinctly different than Hades. Getting there isn’t easy; staying there is very hard indeed. In this respect, though I don’t know if the terrorist attacks and public riots in Uzbekistan last week are a real threat to the regime of Islam Karimov or the American garrison at Khanabad, the disturbances should serve to remind us that taking on Imperial responsibilities in this part of the world is far easier than living with them over the long run.

The Demon of Nonanalogy

I’ve been reading Henry Kamen’s sweeping history Empire: How Spain Became a World Power with the reverb on, even though I’m aware that the echoes of the present I detects in the adventures of the Prudent King are largely a literary effect. Agreeing with Hegel that no nation ever learned a thing from the past, I don’t buy the idea that history is philosophy teaching by example. Mostly we discover similarities between one situation and other because the historian has hidden them there like Easter eggs. The Spaniards had an empire once, and we’ve got one now; but the meaning, indeed, the reality of empire is totally different 400 years later. On the other hand, if positive metaphors such as “America is like Hapsburg Spain” are literally false, negative metaphors such as “America is not like Hapsburg Spain” are literally true; and the reasons America is not like Hapsburg Spain can be highly illuminating and perhaps even useful in thinking about current policy issues. One example:

Although the Hapsburg’s pioneered many of the techniques of modern administration—whatever else he was, Philip II was a tireless bureaucrat—the Spanish empire of the 16th and 17th Centuries was an astonishingly ramshackle structure that exerted only the most tenuous control over its immense domain. After absorbing Portugal and its dominions, the empire comprised all of the Iberian peninsula; the southern Netherlands; various principalities in what is now eastern France; many parts of Italy, including Milan, Naples, Sardinia, and Sicily; various enclaves on the North African shore; forts and trading stations in West Africa, the Azores and Canary Islands, all of the New World south of Florida, the Philippines; the Spice Islands; Malacca; Ceylon; and bits and pieces of India—a list comparable in scope and heterogeneity to the foreign deployment of American military personnel charted in Chalmers Johnson’s Sorrows of Empire. But we’ve got spy satellites, computers, cell phones, and drone surveillance aircraft armed with rockets to keep our imperium under the thumb. They had memos written in long hand, warships propelled by oars, and Jesuits. Moral issues aside—and I’m far more inclined to buy into the Black Legend version of Spanish history than Kamen—Philip’s empire just didn’t have the technical means to dominate its subjects on a modern scale. An empire with Xerox machines and security cameras is potentially a far worse threat to human freedom.

Braille Billboards

I hold no brief against advertising. In fact, I’ve written many, many ads myself over the years and much enjoyed the process. Of course, I was mostly advertising technical products. When you’re flogging linear programming software, the whole point is to efficiently inform the potential buyer of exactly what the product does. That doesn’t necessarily preclude humor or flash; and a suspicious number of subtly sexy biologists appear in journal ads for DNA sequencers; but the object is normally to sell your product rather than to increase the demand for a class of products. Contrast that situation with mass-market advertising. Ads for cars sell SUVs as well as Fords or BMWs. Ads for fast food promote gluttony as well as Big Macs.

In an old fantasy of mine, an advertising expert persuades Coke to buy advertising space on the bottom of coffin lids, “It’s a cheap buy; and you know if the dead really do rise at the Last Judgment, they’re going to be thirsty.” I don’t know if final victory over Pepsi would be worth this expense, but it doesn’t really matter. Winning a commercial contest is not as important to the bottom line as increasing the overall consumption of carbonated sugar water. In this respect, commercial competition is really a form of collusion.

The Arnold Rimmer Institute of International Relations

Debates about foreign policy are often represented as a fight between realists and idealists, but this way of posing the issues is deeply wrong headed. Attention to Real Politik and respect for international law are not alternatives. They aren’t on the same level. No sensible political figure can ignore the collisions of will and interest that structure world politics just because they are unpleasant. And nobody who ignores the need for legitimacy in the world can properly be said to be realistic. History, indeed, has a name for those who run roughshod over the sensibilities of other nations and their people in the name of manly cynicism. They are called losers.

It seems to me that there is an awful lot of little-boys-playing-with-tin-soldiers about the various tough guys who have surfaced in American public life while I’ve been watching the show. The Neo-con defense intellectuals are only the latest batch for whom it is not enough to win if you don’t crush somebody’s will or produce a satisfactory series of explosions. From a real Real Politik point of view, if you’ll allow the expression, the United States was actually better off with Saddam Hussein in power. A powerless, increasingly ridiculous, but completely secular tyrant would have kept the terrorists out of Iraq while giving us an excuse to maintain a presence in the region that didn’t seem to the locals to be part of a culture war. But waiting out the old monster wouldn’t have been any fun—or personal profit—to Richard Perle and the gang. The kids were itching to play war, having recently been denied that adolescent satisfaction by the celebrated quiet ending of the Soviet Union. It’s absurd to call their policies realistic: they are essentially recreational despite all the scowls and heavy breathing that are part of the fun.

Figures of Merit

It would certainly save time and bother if economics were really the physics of money instead of a branch of sociology that deals with how certain cultures organize their material life. In particular, people are very reluctant to give up the dream that wealth has an unambiguous standard—gold, food, labor, energy, or whatever—so that whatever policy maximizes that value would be economically best. In fact, at times successive theories of value have provided more or less adequate indices of prosperity, but only for particular purposes and specific groups. Bullion really was crucial in the Age of Mercantilism, at least for governments whose effective power depended on ready money and credit, just as labor power was critical in the Industrial Revolution. For that matter, one could make a case in 1850 that the wealthiest nations were those that produced the most pollution. Where there’s muck, there’s brass. But reeking rivers and lakes of coal tar are at best signs of economic activity. In themselves, they are anything but wealth. Similarly, though per capita energy use correlated with other measures of wealth in the 20th Century, no company every increased its profits by using more energy to produce the same output. Measures of wealth are like the figures of merit that engineers use to rate refrigerators or electric motors. They sometimes help the designer to improve a product, but if the better freezer has the worse figure of merit, you junk the figure of merit, not the freezer. With this characteristically elaborate preface, may I suggest that it’s about time we recognize that statistical measures such as the GDP, which apparently show growth, are actually masking the gradual impoverishment of the United States?

So What’s the Matter with Vengeance?

It is said to be virtuous to eschew political bickering in the 9/11 debate. To very slightly paraphrase Aaron Brown, the ventriloquist dummy of Sweet Reason, let us stop assigning blame and try to be constructive. And so forth. May I suggest that nothing in the current situation would be half as constructive as an accurate identification of who is to blame?

As quite a few people have noticed lately—it isn’t just me—the on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand bit automatically rewards those shrewd and ruthless enough to break the rules with maximum cynicism. It can make sense to remind everybody that there are failings on both sides, but if and only if the failings of both sides are equivalent in scale and character. In the case of the run up to 9/11, they pretty clearly are not. The Clinton administration sweated bullets over Bin Laden and his crew. The Bush administration simply ignored the threat, botched the response, and then changed the subject. Berger, Albright, and Cohen obviously failed to destroy Al-Qaeda and can and should be second-guessed for tactical and strategic mistakes; but they didn’t lie to the public, reflexively pass the buck, relentlessly vilify their critics, and stonewall investigations as Rice, Powell, and Rumsfeld did and continue to do. And despite 10,000 Xeroxed op ed pieces, it wasn't Clinton who wagged the dog: it was Bush. He’s the one who used a national tragedy for selfish political gain, and he and his gang deserve to pay the penalty for their failures and duplicities.

Indirect Vindication

On being advised never to eat anything bigger than my head, I took immediate steps to have my head enlarged. The administration has often followed analogous strategies. When Paul O’Neill published unclassified documents that revealed the ignorance and sloth of the President, Mr. Bush’s aides immediately tightened the rules for classifying documents.

Affirmative Action

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. For example, the unwillingness of the administration to respond to criticism with any acknowledgement of error amounts to guaranteed job security for obviously incompetent public officials like Condi Rice. Removing her would be an inadmissible acknowledgement of failure or error so she stays on no matter how big a fool she makes of herself on the Sunday news shows. You can be forced out of the administration if you thwart some powerful insider. Crossing Rumsfeld cost Thomas White his job as Secretary of the Army—it sure wasn’t his significant role in the Enron scandal—but letting terrorists fly airplanes into large buildings is OK.

This Republican version of affirmative action is not intrinsically racial, but it is probably true that mediocre African-Americans have benefited from it disproportionately, correctly recognizing that their lack of talent will be overlooked in consideration of their political utility and dog-like loyalty. And negritude has other uses in this White House. For example, it allows Colin Powell to claim that his nose was brown before he took the job.

A Character Trait

Shortly after 9/11 it became clear that the administration had dropped the ball on anti-terrorism in the first months of its term. If you’ll recall, what seemed to be in the offing in the spring of that year was a confrontation with China; and that, rather than Ben Laden or the Israeli-Palestine problem, took up most of their energy and attention. This emphasis was an obvious error, but I wasn’t initially inclined to blame the Bush people too harshly. In foreign policy, administrations usually begin badly; and mistakes aren’t automatically criminal, even when they have terrible consequences. What already bothered me then, however, and strikes me as the most damning fact now is the utter refusal of anybody in the Bush administration to take any responsibility for what happened or to acknowledge any shortcomings whatsoever. In this respect, you have to admit they are consistent. This administration never, ever admits error about anything. I expect they have circulated a memo about it. It seems to be part of their premeditated general contempt for everyone else in the country and, indeed, the planet.

Unremarked Graves

After 9/11, a violent American reaction was inevitable. Mahatma Gandhi would have bombed Afghanistan. It was no more surprising that the enemies of the Taliban automatically became our friends, regardless of their own questionable behavior. We don’t criticize the dictators-for-life of Egypt or Pakistan either. In fact, we didn’t have anything but praise for the Taliban and Ben Laden when they were on our side in the Cold War. None of this bothers or at least surprises me since Real Politik makes for peculiar alliances, even discounting the ideology affinity, bordering on envy, that the current administration has consistently shown for authoritarian regimes. We should be clear headed about whom we’re supporting, however; and that’s yet another reason to bewail the absence of a free press in the United States.

The Northern Alliance did most of the fighting for us during the initial Afghanistan operation. In the process, they are now reported to have massacred something on the order of 3,000 prisoners and buried them in a mass grave. Story. Of course the story may turn out to be false or exaggerated. It may just as easily be understated. My point is that in the United States, it is simply unreported.

Doing the Time Warp Again

I moved to Connecticut just after the summer of love and experienced there for a second time and in the same sequence the fads, enthusiasms, and disappointments I had lived through in California. Like a golf tournament on television, the Cultural Revolution aired in New Haven with a tape delay. Two years later I spend a couple of days in Jonesboro, Arkansas where tie-die tee shirts were just appearing after an even longer lag. And for all I know, the Jefferson Airplane is finally touching down in Burkina-Faso even as I write this note.

News can’t travel faster the speed of light, but it can certainly travel slower. Most of human history has taken place in eras before the telegraph and radio allowed the events of war and diplomacy to take place more or less contemporaneously—the well-known instance of the Battle of New Orleans, fought weeks after the combatants had made peace, was no anomaly. But the time warp still applies to the spread of political facts among the general population, because such information travels through the retarding medium of the popular media and it’s transmission is slowed still more by the time it takes bemused, preoccupied, and poorly informed people to register it and pass it on—flatworms can learn a Y-maze in fewer reps than it takes the average American to notice that George Bush is a liar.

It sure isn’t September 1967, but deja vous has set in again for those of us who’ve been paying attention. It is quite startling to encounter media accounts that are just now taking notice of the extraordinary failures and deceptions of the Bush administration when the facts were in evidence years ago. It was often enough to read past the leads in newspaper articles or simply to apply commonsense to big, obvious facts. Richard Clarke’s “revelations,” for example, offer very little that wasn’t easily accessible in the public record back in 2001 and 2002. Similarly, the world press knew that the alarmist stories about the aluminum tubes, the mobile bioterror lab, and the Niger yellowcake were sheer propaganda the same week the administration put them out. I certainly did and I wasn’t trying that hard. And how can anybody possibly be surprised that the Bush policies are driving the deficit to historic levels? The man ran on an economic platform that asserted that 2 + 2 = 5. Although you don’t need to know how to calculate a hypergeometric distribution to detect the teensy error in that mathematics, the arduous journey from the premises to the conclusion is still under way for many Americans.

Finding Your Niche

Evolutionary theory continues to develop far from the noise of irrelevant public controversies about intelligent design. Recent thinking not only departs from the so-called Neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 40s and 50s, but has already gone beyond more recent, but already long-in-the-tooth enthusiasms such as punctuated equilibrium, selfish genes, and sociobiology. Much of what’s new is largely inaudible, not because it is impossibly complicated but simply because it has yet to find its Huxley, Gould, or Dawkins. Nobody has figured out how to glamorize what may turn out to be a slow revolution in how we think about evolution. I don’t know if I can solve this public relation’s problem, but perhaps I can provide a useful oversimplification of what’s going on. After all, though I was inspired to write this little piece by a recent book, Niche Construction: the Neglected Process in Evolution by F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman, I’ve been thinking down these lines myself for decades and can perhaps offer, if not new ideas, at least some new ways of explaining the new ideas.

The usual account maintains that the environment of organisms guides their evolution by establishing the rules of the game. Natural selection tends to favor individuals better suited to existing conditions, and these better-adapted organisms produce more offspring. What the organisms themselves do or experience is irrelevant to the process because acquired characteristics are not passed on to the next generation. What’s becoming obvious is that this very general picture is quite misleading, not because Lamarck was right and Weismann wrong, but because the activities of living things change their environment and therefore change the selection pressures that govern subsequent natural selection. To paraphrase Marx, and not accidentally, environments make organisms; but organisms make environments. Or, to quote Odling-Smee, et. al, “Rather than acting as an ‘enforcer’ of natural selection through the standard physically static elements of, for example, temperature, humidity, or salinity, because of the actions of organisms, the environment [can be] viewed as changing and coevolving with the organisms on which it acts selectively.”

Let’s begin simply. Many organisms move purposively; even bacteria can and do choose their environments to some degree. The planktonic species that rise and sink in the water column on a daily basis are not adapted to the ocean in general. They’re adapted to a narrow spatial and temporal zone inside the ocean. Many simple organisms pick their poison in more active ways. The bacteria that rot your teeth are not adapted to your mouth. They cultivate a much narrower plantation whose chemical and mechanical properties are maintained by their own collective activities. On a larger scale, innumerable species of animals burrow and have accordingly developed physiological and behavioral characteristics that make sense in a protected subterranean world but not outside of it. Or consider us. Distinctly human characters such as extended infancy and jumbo brains only make adaptive sense in a human world where vulnerable babies can be protected for many years and surpluses of food make it possible to maintain an energetically expensive nervous system.

It would be exceedingly easy to multiple examples. Indeed, once the principle is recognized, the relevant database is essentially coextensive with natural history. Charts in the Niche Construction list page after page of examples from every kingdom and phylum. What’s involved is not so much a discovery as a gestalt switch, seeing vases instead of faces. That sort of mutation has happened before in the history of the sciences. Thus the equations in Einstein’s 1905 relativity paper would have seemed quite familiar to many of the physicists of his time because the originality of the work did not lie in the discovery of any novel physical phenomena but in a reversal of perspective that suddenly made sense of a whole series of earlier results. Einstein didn’t invent the Lorentz transformations, which already, among many other things, implied that e = mc2 to anybody who passed Intermediate Algebra. Einstein looked at something old in a new way. But the Einsteinian eureka moment wasn’t just edifying: new science, including new discoveries flowed from it. Even granting the conceptual validity of the perspective, does rethinking evolution with an emphasis on the initiative of the organism and the evolution of environments change anything? In particular, will it allow biologists to solve existing puzzles in evolution and ecology; manage the environment; improve public health; or, crucially, attract grant money, the crankshaft and sine qua non of the scientific juggernaut?

Let me suggest two areas where the notion of niche construction seems to me to have immediate explanatory value: explaining the pace of evolution and explaining the evolution of complicated nervous systems:

1. Niche construction can result in positive feedback, thus drastically accelerating genotypic as well as phenotypic change. It’s likely that the practice of herding cattle greatly increased the adaptive value of tolerance to milk sugars for pastoral people, for example; but as a larger percentage of the population became lactose tolerant, dairy farming became more valuable. Or consider what may be the most sumptuous niche construction project on the planet, human language—The House of Being, according to Martin Heidegger. Absent language and the ability to accumulate knowledge that it makes possible, it’s hard to see how the enormous energetic cost of the human brain could have been amortized, not to mention the many physiological and behavioral alterations required by an oversized head and an interminable childhood. A smart animal without words is very like the proverbial Michelangelo without hands. The appearance of even rudimentary language surely had a significant multiplier effect on the adaptive value of intelligence.

I expect that evolution as a whole has been accelerated—if not simply made possible, period—by the niche construction mechanism. Over and beyond what specific adaptations become feasible in a partly controlled environment, the activities of living things make their surroundings generally more predictable and thus focus natural selection in much the same way a judge makes a trial manageable by narrowing down what is at issue in each case. In a safer world, the right ones are more likely to die without reproducing, the trap door spider who isn’t good making a trap rather than the spider who just happened to get stepped on. There are relatively few truly random deaths in the human world, for example, so that the deaths that do occur are likely to have biological significance while in a postulated state of nature, the signal provided by differential mortality would be largely swamped by the background noise. Civilization may indeed allow some of the weak and sick to survive and even reproduce, but it also spares many healthy and strong individuals who would otherwise have died of irresistible illnesses or accidents.

Odling-Smee, et. al. point out that niche construction can also retard evolutionary change. The Galapagos woodpecker finch has adopted a life style similar to woodpeckers, for example, but without the developing a similarly sharp, pointed bill or long tongue. The culturally transmitted use of a cactus spine as a tool to peck for insects has apparently rendered these anatomical adaptations unnecessary much as knives, forks, and fire allow people to eat meat without fangs or claws.

2. The learning that organisms do in their lifetimes can have an effect on subsequent generations by providing offspring with a better environment or by the cultural transmission of useful information. The value of learning, however, depends crucially on the regularity of the environment. In a chaotic world, drawing conclusions is risky or pointless since there is literally nothing to learn. Where fine-grained knowledge of the world doesn’t avail, the most adaptive strategy may be learn to slowly so that only the big, coarse lessons are absorbed after many trials. In a world that makes sense, the fastest learners have a huge advantage. One of the general consequences of niche construction, therefore, may be to make greater intelligence more adaptive by ensuring that animals grow up in a simplified, if not positively dumbed-down world.