On Winning An Election

People seem to think that once an election is won, that everything is over.  But it's more like having a baby:  Not just birthing part, that's waiting for the votes to come in -- it's what happens afterwards; after the baby is born.  But this baby is 16-years old, and you have just handed him or her your car keys and credit card, and he or she can reach the gas pedal and knows how to sign your name.  If you decide that the birthing was enough and that you can ignore who his friends are and whether she knows how to drive, then you deserve whatever happens afterwards.

Selfish Allele, Selfish Gene, Selfish Genome, Selfish Person, Selfish Group

We think with words in the sense that words constrain or focus or guide our thinking.  Words create classes, create fences around a group of things, designate one thing as not like another thing; bestows on one thing qualities, capacities, rights that are not the province of another thing.

In this sense, the term "selfish gene" is unfortunate because it bestows upon the gene properties that it does not have.  Dawkins claims that he uses the term "selfish" in a technical or jargonistic sense, but that does not absolve the term from  being supremely misleading and confusing.  This is so because the term "selfish" is so embedded in Western culture as implying individual consciousness and agency as to overwhelm any other supposed connotation in its definition.  Part of the reason the term may have caught on is the surprising juxtaposition of "selfish" with a non-person noun.  Do we often think of a "selfish pineapple" or a "selfish river" a "selfish cloud" a "selfish book"?  We might consider a "selfish worm" or a "selfish fish", but the term is so loaded with anthropomorphic individualism that a "selfish ant" or a "selfish bee" seems inappropriate.

The problem with the term "selfish gene" is that it continues to insert individualism into a group or class phenomenon, that is into the theory of evolution.  To put it simplistically, individuals do not evolve, groups evolve.  An individual may be considered the product or outcome of evolution, but they cannot be said to be evolving; it would be like calling one link in a chain, the chain itself. 

That evolution is a group phenomena starts with the fact that all living things die. For life to continue requires that the living thing reproduce itself.  In reproducing itself, the thing-as-a-class evolves.  But  reproduction means at least two.  A population of single cell individuals would evolve slowly because a change in its genome is left to chance mutation, whereas sexual reproduction doubles, in a sense, the rate of evolutionary change.

But evolution is not simply a product or quality of the population, rather it is a quality of the ecosystem or environment.  If we conceptually separate a group from its environment, then we might say that the group responds to or is adapted to its environment.  And if the environment changes in some way fundamental to the group's survival -- the average temperature goes up or down, certain plants die off -- then the group must either adapt to that change, or itself die off.

Suppose that the atmosphere changes and only one individual in the group has the capability to breathe this new atmosphere.  Even if that individual might have had the ability to reproduce, if they did not, and every other member of the group dies, the eventual outcome for the group is that it would become extinct because that one adapted individual would eventually die, thus leaving no members of the group.  Further evolution of the group stops because there is no reproduction:  Evolution requires at least two. 

Even two is barely adequate for continued reproduction, and this may be "recognized" by evolution itself as expressed in the incest taboo and the tendency of people of small tribes to seek mates outside the tribe.  There is also the example of "pure breed" animals -- Dalmatians' deafness, Siamese cats' poor night vision -- where certain genetic "defects" are preserved, these "defects" being so severe that the breed would probably become extinct if it were not supported by humans and left to itself in the natural world.

So a more complete picture of evolution is that life adapts to its environment and the environment is changed by life, which results in life having to evolve to adapt to the changed environment that adaptation in turn changing the environment....

Facebook Should Not Worry About the First Amendment.

Why is Facebook worrying about restricting the speech of its users?  Isn't it a private company?  A company can prohibit union organizers from organizing on its premises.  A newspaper can censor letters to its editor, or the articles of its reporters, or even the content of paid advertising.  Why can't Facebook censor the content of anything happening on its platform?

Facebook could simply state that it has the right  to prohibit anything on its platform which it deems objectionable, just as a bakery can deny service to a gay couple wanting a wedding cake, or Hobby Lobby can deny birth control coverage to its employees.

They may lose a few million users who will leave out of "principle", but what is a few million out of two billion?  If Facebook is as useful and as integrated into the fabric of society and the capitalist system as they claim, they will eventually regain their lost users who will return because of the usefulness of Facebook to their lives; principle has little to offer in exchange for the loss of a Facebook account.

By simply and brutally cutting people off from Facebook if they do not comply with its rules, whatever those rules might be, people will learn that they must either follow those rules without question, or be cut out of the social network.

This is the time to do it because Facebook is in such a dominant position that other smaller networks would follow Facebook's example out of fear of similar government attacks.  This may drive bad actors underground or into specialized networks.  But that in itself is something of a solution since it isolates and identifies the bad actors -- which was Facebook's problem in that on its site, the bad actors were masquerading as good actors.

It is probably the case that the vast majority, the overwhelming majority, of Facebook users would not be aware that the site was being censored.  In fact, Facebook could simply prohibit political speech, as some families do at Thanksgiving, and simply tell those people that if they want to talk politics, to go elsewhere.

By the way, Facebook's problems of enabling hate speech and promoting genocide is a logical outcome of its motto, “Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.”  What are these outcomes if not the result of a more open and connected world?  A more open and connected world is what these outcomes thrive on.  The current Facebook and its effects is an example of the result of a free market. In more human scale societies there is lots of censorship.  People self-censor or are told to watch what they say; and people comply because they will have to deal with the people whom they may insult another day.  In a human-scale society -- a group of friends, a small town, an office -- there are consequences for bad behavior that cannot be escaped by simply unfriending someone. 

Values: Common and Unifying

We are basically a species that lives in the present, like all other species.  We respond to and value only things in our immediate environment.  Our understanding of the world is limited or determined by our customary geography.  We tend to interpret what we are not familiar with through a lens of paranoia.

People say that we are a divided society:  A society of the elites and the real people, of the 1 % and the 99 %, of liberals and conservatives, of warring tribes ....  We are no longer thought of, we seem no longer to think of ourselves, as "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

We seem to think of ourselves as "one nation" only in regards to thinking of a place with physical borders.   That nation is "indivisible" only in a physical sense.  "Liberty" is conflated with unbridled license to do what one wants in spite of how it affects others.  "Justice" is only justice if I approve of its outcome, it is a personal preference rather than the Golden Rule, it is what benefits me rather than what is moral.

For the sake of profit, the mass of people have been put in a place in which it is easier to give up our values than to strive to exemplify them.  It is easier, more convenient, cheaper, tastier, social, fun to eat at McDonald's than it is to prepare a nutritious meal.  Thus the values of convenience and the rest replace the value of health.  It is not surprising that they do since they are so much more immediate, apparent, obvious and material than the health.  Health is a long-term, basal state that is difficult to perceive since it constitutes the background of life rather than its immediate pleasures.

Justice is also a background condition:  It is the unbiased application of the rules, tempered with wisdom; wisdom being an understanding of a moral society.

But a moral society is one in which all of its members know that they share the same fate.  Knowing that they share the same fate means that any individual would not take advantage of another to the other's detriment since that individual will know that being disadvantaged will also be his fate.

But this is seldom how people think or feel or believe.  Partly because they are not taught to believe this, but also because the evidence of their senses shows them that they can "get away with it", escape sharing the fate of others -- at least in the short run, which evolution has built us to prioritize.

Does this mean that in the long run we will share the fate of bacteria in a petri dish?  The earth is vastly larger than a laboratory petri dish, but in the long run it is still basically a petri dish.  Contrary to Cassius in Julius Caesar, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Indeed, the fault is in our stars.

Felons and Cruel and Unusual Punishment

In the 2018 mid-term elections, Floridians voted for an amendment to their Constitution returning the right to vote to felons who have served their sentence. I do not recall the argument proposed to allow felons to regain their right.

 I suspect, though, that an argument could be advanced that depriving a felon who had served their sentence was a form of cruel and unusual punishment, because to do so would be a continuation of their punishment after their sentence has been completed, or perhaps an infliction of a punishment that is not part of the penal code.

Taking away a person's right to vote has somehow been made part of the punishment for committing a felony, and while a person who has served time for that felony has had some their rights restored -- prohibition from owning a gun may be another lost right -- their right to vote has not been restored, then in that respect, they are serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Losing the right to vote, of course, means that that person no longer has a say about the laws that govern and affect their life and the lives of others. If the passage of a law hangs on that person's one vote, and if that law would deprive that person of their life, liberty, property or dignity, then the person not having that vote would be deprived the of these rights without the due process of first voting for or against that law.