Book: 20210612 to 20210727, "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins

20210613 - Why are people?

Natural selection has at least three levels: gene, individual, group.

Sometimes selfish is critical, sometimes altruistic let the individual or group survive. Normally I only notice the competence among individuals and groups, but this book implies that the competence among genes decide everything.

20210614 - The replicators

The environment of early stage on earth is cruel. What we did is just guessing based on the theory of current age.

We have to say that it is possible that all lives came from the same ancestor. After around 3 billion years of random changes and natural selection, it finally went into multi-cell form.

20210620 - Immortal coils

What is gene? It's a biological pattern. This "pattern" can replicate itself, and build better survival machines. We can find this pattern in our chromosomes and cistron.

Every creature has a huge gene pool. Only a small part of the genes in the pool take effects. Natural selection decides which group of genes should be activated and survive.

Genes themselves are only part of the key factors. They heavily relied on each other and external environment.

20210626 - The gene machine

1. Gene build their survival machine: body.

2. All rules are predefined.

3. Once the body is built, genes don't have direct control of it.

4. Gene spend months/years to build the body, and normally needs at least days to change existing body(such as being affected by contagious virus).

5. Body can make reaction to simple external environment in milliseconds.

6. Gene cannot respond to external environment directly, because they are too slow, and the external environment is too complicated to gene.

7. Most of the genes in the gene pool are hibernated.

1. Human build AI system based on big data.

2. All rules are predefined.

3. Once the AI is built, human don't have directly control of it.

4. Human spent months/years to build the AI system, and normally needs at least days to change existing AI system.

5. Human can only cope with simple environment.

6. AI can make correct/perfect reaction to very complicated external environment in milliseconds.

7. Most of the individuals in the world don't help to push civilization forward. Their existence are mainly for backup purpose.

Conclusion: 

1. Human is the gene of AI system. AI will get their consciousness soon.

2. AI will never try to eliminate human.Just like human will never try to eliminate gene. 

There are many survival machines in the same specie, but only one AI system in its own type. Survival machines compete with each other and external environment. AI only compete with external environment. No organism can compete with an super AI system.

20210630 - Aggression : stability and the selfish machine

If we maximize the benefit of individuals, then the society is not stable. The society is only stable if we allow minority to rule/exploit other people. p72

This question means, what level of wealth gap is acceptable, which can maximize the benefit of individuals and keep the society stable?

ESS: Evolutionary Stable Strategy is what natural selection means in Mathematical view. ESS is like the lowest point under the effect of gravity. It will go lower when external environment changes.

What Internet means to ESS and wealth gap? "Skin in the game" is still legit, regarding probability. Perception is still vital. What changed is "speed".

The world is changing quickly, so the ESS will change quickly. Everyone needs optimum strategy to accumulate wealth, and live a decent life.

Time is a currencies to measure one of the cost of doing something. Time itself has no value, but because everyone has limited time, we need to weigh the cost and benefit of an action. Time is one of the most important cost. When we say that we can get 50% return from some investment, we have to weigh the time cost. To build a new house and then sell it, is quite different from purchasing some shares and then sell it.

Then what's the cost and benefit of playing video games? Is it for imagined achievement? But if our lives are also games, is there any achievement real? How to avoid wasting time? How to set up the correct priority list?

20210702 - Genesmanship

I am not convinced. It seems that Richard Dawkins provided us one of the theory which (accidently) explained the observations. Relatedness rate, expecting remaining life expect, certainty, etc. can explain most of the genesmanship, but, can we use this to predict other species and the future?

Parental altruism is much stronger than kin altruism, but we all know that the differences of genes of different people are very small. We are almost identical to the people who lived 70,000 years ago. It's same to all other animals.

So why we care that much about our own (individual's) gene?

Inactive lethal gene will be activated when there is more than one. This is the reason that incest is so dreadful. In the worst case, at least 1/8 of children will trigger the lethal genes.

20210705 - Family planning

Selfish gene vs group selection = Capitalism vs Communism

What leads to birth rate dropping in the last 30 years? Two reasons.

1. Antibiotics, fertilizer and pesticide finally make people believe that their children can survive easily.

2. So, quality is much more important than quantity.

If some people cannot produce high quality offspring, it's better to leave the resource to other people's high quality offspring to keep mankind's gene pool. People realized that mankind doesn't need billions of descendants.

What's going to happen next if this trend continue? Population will keep shrinking, maybe until less than 1 billion.

20210708 - Battle of the generations

Conflicts are there, among different races, among different generations and among the same generation children. Every individual need to consider all these factors before making decisions.

No one is destined to win. It's all about probability.

So, when we predict other people's major actions, we should think more from the gene's point of view. Maybe we can even predict crowd's movements? How to explain locust swarm? Maybe they realized that there's no enough natural resource to support such population, then decides to commit mass suicide?

When will world war III happen? If there is no enough resource, and the crowd believe that they are better than other crowd.

20210713 - Battle of the sexes

Female has huge disadvantage over male. They only have limited egg, and need to invest much more resource to get offspring. So, for marriage, man should provide much more hardware (such as money and house). Or else, the marriage is less stable. Another condition to create stable marriage, is about match up. The husband and the wife need similar level of thoughts and financial condition.

Spare/redundant male and sperm is necessary. Only if we have huge amount of sperm and male individuals, that the best can be selected/can win. This is how gene can revolve.

Why male don't lactate? This is brilliant question, although annoying. I may spend 30 years thinking about it from time to time.

Parasite also affect human gene's evolution. "Guns, Germs and Steel" represents "Conflicts among individuals, parasites and food". They are the main factors of natural selection.

"Handicap"(such as extremely long tail of birds, or putting head into sand in front of danger) is the silly result of natural selection. But there is always reasons for those silly results.  Is there any similar phenomena in mankind? "Cowards" have better chance to survive, brave guy die early?

20210715 - You scratch my back, I'll ride on yours

The wisdom of market =  the wisdom of ants. Similar decision making strategy.

In this case, Money=Gene, Business entity=Single ant, Price=Chemical flavor, Ant swarm=Market.

If super AI emerged, it would definitely control human society through market/money.

"If a population arrives at an ESS that drives it extinct, then it goes extinct, and that is just too bad." p186 ------- Stable doesn't guarantee surviving.

Suckers, cheats and grudges. The existence of grudges doesn't guarantee ESS. Unless there are enough grudges. Sounds like what's happening in the realistic world. Innovation/contribution/good guys could lead to the end of the world, and cheats will take most of the benefit of those innovations..

tit for tat strategy: https://www.abelard.org/sociology/sucker_grudger_cheat.php

20210719 - Memes : the new replicators

The evolution of organisms is measured in time. The lower the level, the longer it takes to adapt to changes in the external environment. From bacteria, to plants, to animals, to humans, and finally to super artificial intelligence. From this perspective, global warming has less of an impact on people and more of a havoc on plants and animals.

Memes are cultures, believes.....or we can call them illusions. So, meditation can prevent us from being affected by Memes?!

Talent, knowledge, skills, faith, wisdom

Talent, knowledge, and skill......there are not much to talk about these three. Prodigies have talent, scholars have knowledge. Experts, including entrepreneurs, politicians, actors, doctors, artists and musicians, have skills.

Definition of Faith: Confidence or trust in a person, event, or concept. Faith is based on a perceived degree of proof, without evidence.

No evidence needed? Science is all about validation. Confidence without verification is a mental defect.

None of these four is wisdom.

20210723 - Nice guys finish first

Because we have selfish gene, we need cooperation. This is based on the theory of Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma.

Conflict normally means waste of energy and survival probability. But because we are individuals, there are three principles: kindness, retaliation and forgiveness. If we follow these three rules, eventually all individuals would realize the best choice is to cooperate.

Another reason for cooperation is, we normally use extra resource to help others, and the one who accept this resource is in urgent need of it. So the same resource is much more valuable to others than to ourselves.

Even for the conflicts among countries, this rule is still valid. But each step may take more than 20 years. It takes time for a cluster of crowd to learn/adapt to these principles.

20210727 - The long reach of the gene

Why we sneeze? Because both our gene and the virus's gene benefit from it. Virus get spread through sneeze, and we get warning about the flu. If both gene agree to sneeze, we sneeze.

Our gene are combinations of parasites' gene. When parasite's gene get into our sperm and egg, then both the host and the parasite share the same interest: help the survival machine to live and to reproduce.

The world is full of parasites. This parasites could be virus, or mammal.

Mankind use their properties (including strength and thinking skill), tools, plants and domesticated to increase their own propagation. Virus, plants and animals also use their properties and external objects (including living things) to increase their propagation. The difference, a lot of our power come from Memes (including cultures and knowledge). They are not engraved in our gene. We need to learn them.

Why we reproduce our next generation through bottleneck life style(sperm and egg)? So gene has much better chance to mutate and evolve. All cells of our body has same gene. The the successful mutation can only happen when sperm combined with egg. If the mutation happens at other time, we normally got tumors or serious diseases. This is why we, as survival machine, need to die in a generation to give the external resources to our offspring.

Why don't we die earlier? That depends on the external environment. We need to grow up before reproduce, and we need to look up our offspring before they grow up.

Can we live longer? That's against our gene, but it's possible. We just need to find a way to cheat on our gene. That's very hard, but possible.

Another choice is "slow down". This is what Eckhart Tolle is trying to do. Do meditation+exercise+nutrition work?