Portable Can

There was a Tumblr post going around last year that I rather liked.  It was tongue in cheek, a joke about applying the Gaia hypothesis to human evolution and concluding that humanity was Gaia’s way of clearing its buildup of subsurface hydrocarbons.  Just a fun bit of climate change gallows humor, but it sorta stuck with me.

The Gaia hypothesis as such is more ‘fun story’ than solid science, but in a weaker and more rigorous form it can sometimes get taken fairly seriously.  Less “the Earth is a giant organism” and more “feedback mechanisms in a complex biosphere seem to stabilize the system more often than they destabilize it.”  Probably you could rephrase the statement in statistical mechanics terms and show how it’s necessary or obvious?  But anyway, I started to think about human intelligence in those terms and I think actually it’s somewhat true in an interesting way.

Many of the tools to which we owe civilization (wood, coal, oil) basically come down to a proficiency in finding big reservoirs of complex organic molecules and exploiting the energy gradient.  And those reservoirs in turn tend to get big because brains are better at finding those particular reservoirs than is ‘mere’ natural selection.  Consider coal.  We had a big potential energy source literally just lying around for several hundred million years, which is biology’s favorite thing ever, but it turns out that the easiest way to turn that in to more biology was through the intermediary of intelligence, rather than (as one might naively expect) a super fancy microbe or something.

The other thing that wood, coal, and oil have in common is that they’re biogenic.  That is, they have their origin in a biological system.  It’s rather fascinating, actually: biogenic, but not bioavailable.  There’s an analogy to encryption.  It seems that for any given biological process, there’s a nonzero chance that it moves carbon from an ‘accessible’ state to an ‘encrypted’ state that can’t be readily processed back into the larger dynamic ecosystem.  Maybe permanently, maybe just a really long wait on evolutionary timescales.

Add these together, and you get the observation that life tends to hide energy from itself on geologic time, creating barriers that are (in some fraction of cases) far more tractable to cognition than they are to natural selection.  What’s more, it seems pretty likely that this is a fully general situation.  In the spirit of wildly overconfident aristocrat-scholars from the Enlightenment, I’m going to declare this an immutable law of nature and name it after myself.  Toggle’s Law may be stated thusly: In a mature biosphere, the marginal utility of intelligence must increase with time.

As usual, all bets are off once civilization kicks in; I kept trying to think of how to incorporate humans into this, but I think it’s worth giving up the generality for the sake of pith.  I’m also phrasing it for maximum optimism, emphasizing the ways in which this trend creates pressures towards minds and advanced thinking.  The pessimistic version would be more entropic, something like “in a closed biosphere, the fraction of bioavailable nutrients will tend towards zero.”  But even in the total absence of higher intelligence, probably that’s slow enough that something else will sterilize your planet first (e.g. the death of your star).

#WEAPONIZEDCANCER

My expectations for this date’s viability were starting to sink. She was saying intelligent things, and saying them with remarkable confidence and self-possession for somebody who thought she was talking to the Masculine Mongoose himself. It was impressing me and more than slightly turning me on. But the conversation had taken a turn I’d been down before, and not a promising one. “I don’t want to get into a relationship under false pretenses,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Like if I slept with you under the impression that you were just an ordinary playboy millionaire, instead of a superhero.” She sipped from her champagne glass, visibly trying not to smile.

“Look,” I said, trying to make my voice as persuasive as I could. “Just like you say, everyone knows that Bruce Kent is the Masculine Mongoose. People have believed that for eight years. And in all that time, nobody has ever managed to prove anything - never mind suggestive evidence, nobody has ever shown it for certain. Shouldn’t that give you pause?”

unless you live in a big city, american high schools tend towards the small side; american primary schools even more so. if you’re going to a high school that only has maybe 400 students (and you’re mostly in classes with people in the same age, cutting that number down even more), there’s not gonna be that much competition for the role of ‘the smart kid’ to begin with.

then you count out the kids that do not want to be in school, the kids that have no real interest in academic subjects, the kids that don’t want to seem smart because that means they have high expectations, and so on.

and then you factor in that a disproportionate amount of tumblr users aren’t exactly neurotypical- and factor in that, often, autism makes kids look like “little professors” when they’re very young, and autistic kids are much more book-smart than their peers til they hit late adolescence and everyone else catches up.

And lo, the Department of Education backs me up:

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2001/overview/table05.asp

and you’re just?????? but what?????????? is the point of dating someone if you don’t like them?????????????? 

No | rather not | I dunno | I guess | Sure | Yes | FUCK yes | Oh god you don’t even know