Heterosity As Brain Damage

By necessity, I’ve coined the neologism ”heterosity” as a counter to the subversion of the definition of “diversity” so that we may discuss “novel local diversity” as contrasted with the ecological diversity emerging from the slow process of natural selection. The terms used by vectorists (promoters of heterosity) to describe the features of heterosity include “rich”, “vibrant”, “inclusive”, “tolerant” and, of course, that travesty of linguistics “diverse”.

And, as I’ve described before there are many, quite predictably, negative consequences observed in heterose systems, not the least of which is the evolution of virulence over mutualism in ecological relations. These phenomena are so critical to understanding why “extremist” positions are not only understandable, but necessary, that they deserve their own neologisms: vectorism cum parasity.

In terms of laboratory experiments regarding high complexity social ecologies, it seems there has been a virtual collapse of empiricism since the early 1960s when John B. Calhoun, funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, conducted the last of his experiments letting rodents reproduce within confined spaces under varying conditions—ultimately showing that populations can not only stabilize at uncomfortable levels with on-going social pathology—but that populations can, seemingly mysteriously (if one ignores the potential of parasity in such environs) collapse to their utter extermination! Nowadays it is easy to imagine proposals for such research being tabled for political reasons at odds with stated explanations. Most probably the stated explanations for tabling such research proposals have to do with the ethics of NIMH imposing such suffering on animals, despite the fact that civilization is already imposing such suffering on billions of humans without any vigorous, experimentally validated, testing of beliefs that such conditions are “humane”. The myth of the HBO series “Sex In the City”—where pushing-middle-aged women in female-saturated New York City face the dilemma of choosing between the marriage proposals from wealthy handsome business executives and wealthy handsome famous artists—is virtually a religious dogma enforced by the State and any laboratory work testing it is simply and “mysteriously” absent.

However, there was a 1987 paper titled ”The Rat Populations of NIMH: Density, Reproduction, and the Neocortex” by one James L. Hill describing the experimental comparison between brain damaged rats and rats subjected to “social complexity” (you know… rich, vibrant, etc. environments). It was found that the cognitive function of the rats subjected to such social complexity declined to the level of the brain damaged rats (specifically, pin-headed or micrencephalic rats).

Against such forces, there may be little one can do to reform civilization, which may help explain the inexorable dumbing down of our population.

Posted by James Bowery on Wednesday, March 7, 2007 at 08:43 PM in
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Comments:

Posted by Søren Renner on March 07, 2007, 09:56 PM | #

The family welcomes donations to the NIMH Frisbee fund in lieu of flowers for Algernon.

Posted by Daniel J on March 07, 2007, 10:03 PM | #

All I can say is wow! That certainly does explain a lot, and fits in with what we know to be experientially true.

Posted by stari_momak on March 08, 2007, 01:02 AM | #

This sounds like it could be consilial (consilient) with Putnam’s paper on the withdrawal from the public sphere (decline in social capital) in conditions of heterosity.

BTW what does JB mean by ‘male-saturated’ and ‘female-saturated’—what are the measures, what are the implications.

Posted by James Bowery on March 08, 2007, 02:25 AM | #

In a monogamous ecology, mating is an inelastic “market”. This means slight imbalances in gender ratio at the critical ages can cause a run-away price for the gender in most demand and a collapse in the price for the majority gender.

Of course, in a monogamous ecology where even a minority polygynous subspecies is introduced, you won’t get the runaway inelasticity when there are more women than mean, because the minority polygynists will take up the slack within reasonable limits.