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What do Airplanes, Some Nuclear Reactors, Peacock Tails, Whale Testicles, Human Brains, Cozy Economic Relationships; bloated executive salaries, and the illegal Drug trade have in common?

A SHORT LESSON IN SOCIOLOGY USING DARWINIAN EXAMPLES

Karl H. Puechl

January 28, 1996

The answer is positive feedback: Positive feedback that is counteracted by negative feedback: through design for mechanical devices; through physical limitations for biological systems, and through free competition for social entities. However, for the social examples listed, unrestrained positive feedback, continues to flourish; the reasons for this will be presented. (While I am giving this talk, I suggest that you look at the diagram every so often.)

While a control engineer requires no further elaboration in order to understand what I just said, let me make things clear to everyone by describing the examples one-by-one and then drawing some conclusions. But first let me say that the "positive" in "positive feedback" does not make a value judgment. "Positive feedback" simply means that if something begins to pull in one direction, either for the good or the bad, a force is immediately set up which tends to further pull in the same direction; thereby, "positive" means "reinforcing" rather than "good". It's somewhat like a fire feeding upon itself; therefore, if left to go on for some time it can be called a "conflagration". Now let's get on with the examples.

AIRPLANES. An airplane, by its very nature, is an unstable entity. If ever an air current should begin to twirl the plane, once the wing goes beyond a certain angle from the horizontal, positive feedback generated by a force on the wing will accelerate the rate of twirl which will cause the plane to spin out of control. This can be countered by the pilot applying a restoring force through manual manipulation of the stabilizers, or by automatic actuation of a control system that does the same in much quicker fashion since it does not have to rely on the pilot's reaction time. To generalize, one can say that an intelligent engineer designs planes, and most mechanical gadgets, so that they do what they are designed to do; namely, within limits, to stay in a stable or equilibrium condition.

SOME NUCLEAR REACTORS. Nuclear reactors are generally considered to be so potentially hazardous that designers do not wish to rely on human operators or even electronically activated control systems to provide negative feedback or a restoring force that might be needed to counter any "runaway". For example, the water-cooled and -moderated reactors that are used in this country to generate roughly 20 percent of our electricity have what is called a "negative temperature coefficient of reactivity". This means, that if the power generation increases for some unknown reason, which causes the water temperature to rise, the water naturally expands, and this expansion causes less water to be in the reactor core; which in turn allows more neutrons to pass through the less-dense water and to leak out of the core; which in turn makes them unavailable for capture by the uranium fuel; which then tends to reduce the amount of fissioning and thereby the amount of power generation; which, in turn, reduces the water temperature. It is seen that these reactor systems are designed to be "self-stabilizing". This self-stabilization does not exist in some graphite-moderated reactors, such as the ones at Chernobyl. In these reactors, the coolant is a gas, which is already of such low density that a further decrease in density due to a temperature increase does little to affect neutronic behavior; in fact, an increase in the graphite temperature, because of nuclear peculiarities, will actually result in a "positive temperature coefficient" meaning that the power will tend to increase at an ever-increasing rate if the temperature should rise. Therefore, to prevent inordinately large power or temperature increases that may be initiated by minor fluctuations, a control system must monitor neutron levels and/or coolant /or graphite temperature, and then these sensors must activate "control rods" so as to stabilize or to shut down the system. In other words, these reactors, like airplanes, inherently have the potential for positive feedback, and this must be countered by control-system-design in order to give the system stability or equilibrium. The Chernobyl disaster illustrates what can happen when a control system fails and when positive feedback is left rampant until underlying conditions change to provide the negative feedback necessary for stability. In this case, the negative feedback was eventually provided by the fuel that melted at the extremely high temperatures which were attained; the problem was that this also led to a release of tremendous amounts of gaseous radioactivity that had been built-up and contained within the normally solid fuel.

PEACOCK TAILS. Before, specifically discussing peacock tails, I think that it will be worthwhile to present some generalities that certainly apply to all biological systems and which can probably be extended to cover social systems as well.

It must be understood that evolution by natural selection strives for stability or equilibrium, and that it works only when upsets, be they environmental or genetic, cause relatively minor effects; effects that can be readily countered to again achieve stability or equilibrium. For example, mutations that have a large effect are, almost always, so detrimental that the biological entity cannot survive for long and/or cannot readily reproduce; thereby, these types of mutations are soon, quite naturally, washed out of the gene pool. Also, major environmental upsets cannot be readily accommodated by natural selection; as a consequence there is always the possibility of massive extinctions such as have occurred repeatedly over the past 600 million years. For example, the extinction that occurred at the Permian-Triassic boundary some 250 million years ago wiped out at least 90 percent of all species; most species just couldn't accommodate to the rapid environmental change. Another major extinction occurred at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, about 65 million years ago, and this one wiped out the dinosaurs plus many other species.

Another generalization that can be made is that upsets that tend to disrupt the prevailing equilibrium (which is why they are called "upsets") usually come about rather arbitrarily; i.e., they are unpredictable. As a consequence, some of the arguments or presentations that I am giving may seem "circular". Which came first "the chicken or the egg?" It really doesn't matter. Before peacocks had such outrageous tails, did some male, because of a mutation, have one that was a bit larger than normal and thereby attracted many females, or did some prolific female, because of a genetic change, suddenly find larger and elaborate tails attractive? No matter what the original upset, since the genes that caused the upset apparently were survivors, primarily due to sexual selection, the result was positive feedback that resulted in the tendency for peacock's tails to become larger and larger and more and more elaborate.

One can also look at this as an upset in the usual female/male relationship which is primarily exploitive, but is also cooperative when cooperation serves to satisfy the need for the "selfish" genes to survive and reproduce. When cooperation tends to dominate, a "cozy" relationship develops and this can lead to uncontrolled positive feedback. In this peacock example, such feedback results from the female wanting to mate with males that have larger and more elaborate tails, and the male accommodating this desire by, through the female's selection, continually being destined to grow larger and more elaborate tails. Eventually, however, the male's tails became so large that males with even larger tails became so handicapped that they could not escape their predators; hence, negative feedback or a restoring force eventually stopped the further growth of tails, but this did not occur until the tails became almost grotesque.

WHALE TESTICLES. It is now known that whales and dolphins have enormous testicles. A particular species of whale has testicles that weigh in excess of a ton and thereby the testicles constitute more than two percent of this whale's total body weight. Somewhere along the line, female whales and dolphins, due to some genetic change, began to copulate, in rapid succession with many males; accordingly, the male genes that survived tended to be those from males who introduced into the female an inordinate amount of sperm, which could only be produced by males who had inordinately large testicles. Sexually selection, again, produced a "cozy" relationship. Obviously, what then happened was a rapid growth (in evolutionary or geological time-spans) in the average testicle size due to positive feedback. As with peacock tails, this growth was eventually terminated by negative feedback; in this case because these aquatic animals simply couldn't afford to swim around with any larger weight that was superfluous for much of the time; however, again, the negative feedback did not kick in until the situation became rather bizarre.

HUMAN BRAINS. Fossil records tell us that the human brain doubled in size in about 2 million years, and then almost doubled again in the next million years (very short time-spans in evolutionary terms). During these 3 million years, brain-size increased from about 400 cubic centimeters (somewhat larger than for a modern chimpanzee and somewhat smaller than for a modern orangutan) to reach the 1400 cubic centimeters, which is average for modern Homo sapiens. What started this rapid expansion? No one knows, but perhaps it was because females or males, or both, found sexual partners with slightly larger brains more interesting because of out-of-the-ordinary wit, virtuosity, or inventiveness; or simply because individuality turned other people on. This sexual selection then could result in the positive feedback necessary for creation of the tendency for rapid brain growth. No matter what the initial upset and impetus, the positive feedback, was eventually countered by negative feedback: the female pelvis could not accommodate a still larger brain-size and fetuses could not be born any more prematurely in order to allow the brain to further develop outside of the womb. While students of animal anatomy might consider our large brain size bizarre; as they similarly consider the size of male peacock tails, and whale or dolphin testicles; we consider our large brains to be necessary and attractive and I suspect that the other creatures, to the extent that they can think, similarly rate their over-grown appendages.

COZY ECONOMIC RELATIONSHIPS (or Symbiotic Alliances). I introduced the word "cozy" in the two previous descriptions in order to simplify the transition from, and to highlight the similarities between, biology and sociology. Before discussing cozy economic or cozy adversarial relationships in any great detail, let us first make sure that we understand who is competing with whom. Almost everyone who has heard about the prey and the predator immediately assumes that the competition is between these two. But is it? The antelope and the lion each have a simple agenda: stay alive, and for each this is a rational goal but it is in direct opposition to that of its adversary; therefore, they have different agendas. However, the primary competition is not between the lions and the antelopes, it is among the antelopes themselves, and among the lions themselves. (Great problems arise when philosophers lose sight of this fact.) The faster an individual antelope can run relative to the average antelope, the greater his or her chances of survival. The more aggressive an individual lion is relative to the average lion, the more likely that he will eat; or be able to spend less time in hunting and more time in copulating. The relationship between the antelope and the lion is not too dissimilar to the relationship between male and female previously described; it is basically adversarial because they have different agendas, but, of necessity, it is also cooperative. If the lions eat too many antelopes, so that the antelopes become extinct, the lions, also, will become extinct; and if it were not for the lions, the antelope population would probably increase beyond the level that could be supported by the local food supply. Now, if these two types of animals were "smart" enough to form a "cozy" relationship, the population of both could increase rapidly due to positive feedback and this increase would eventually be controlled only by the limited availability of some necessary ingredient, perhaps, water. In other words, outside or environmental factors would eventually provide the negative feedback or restoring force to cause stability.

Now, after this introduction, let's get into sociology and my definition of a "cozy economic" or a "cozy adversarial relationship". By my definition, such a relationship exists when the population at large believes that the relationship is adversarial; i. e., that it inherently contains checks and balances that one would normally associate with an adversarial relationship, but when, in fact, the parties have concluded that more can be gained through silent cooperation than through strife, or, perhaps simply, there is an "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" attitude. These relationships develop quite naturally: when the competition from entities outside of the relationship are relatively weak; when such outside entities are subject to the same internal pressures to cooperate; or when these entities are non-existent. . Under all these conditions, the negative feedback which is necessary for stability does not come into play. Since this was quite a mouthful, let me again try to make things clear by providing some examples.

Such symbiotic alliances form whenever there are no similar entities to compete with, or whenever the competition among similar entities is eliminated by each being forced to behave in the same way; for example, regulation applies to all entities, therefore, any act of regulation tends to reduce or entirely eliminate competition.

Automobile Insurance Companies and Body Shops. The natural competitor to a particular insurance company is another insurance company. However, in our society, this is not really true since insurance companies are heavily regulated; which, generally, means that their profits are regulated, usually, as a percentage over their costs. As a consequence, there is competition among insurance companies to gain more customers, and thereby to increase income, overall costs and profits; but there is no incentive to compete by reducing their costs. On a unit cost basis, an insurance company, because of the way in which it is regulated, generates a higher profit if it allows its costs to rise; and this is acceptable since every other insurance company sees things the same way. This lack of incentive to reduce costs is, in essence, a lack of competition, and therefore is the driving force for the continuing cozy relationship between the automobile insurance companies and the body shops. The insurance companies allow the body shops to charge higher and higher prices since this increases the insurance companies' costs and therefore profits; and the body shops are certainly willing to keep raising prices. At the same time, such higher repair costs, which are widely advertised by the insurance companies to make sure that every purchaser of insurance is aware of them, makes the insured feel good about paying the exorbitant, and ever higher, premiums. Further, in States where it is possible, even people who are inclined not to purchase insurance coverage, make such purchases because they become scared of the potentially high cost of repairs; they conclude that they simply cannot afford to drive without insurance. Positive feedback from insurance companies to body shops to insurance companies, etc. is still uncontrolled; a good topic for future discussion might be exploring various avenues which, conceivably, could introduce the negative feedback required for stabilization. I'm sure that many of you have already seen the similarity between this example and the goings on in the medical arena. How do we keep the costs from spiraling?

Management and Labor Within U.S. Steel and Auto Companies. The natural competitor for a particular steel company is another steel company; or for a particular auto company, another auto company. However, true across-the-board competition went out the window when the concept of "industry-wide" labor settlements arrived on the scene. As a consequence, labor costs for all American companies in these industries then escalated at about the same rate. Since this aspect of costs was taken out of the realm of competition, it did not take management long to realize that whatever benefits were given to the union would almost immediately be passed on to all managerial personnel. What a beautiful cozy relationship for all parties; positive feedback that sent wages and fringe benefits skyrocketing. At least it was beautiful until steel products and autos could be imported from other countries, especially from Japan. Then the positive feedback was finally terminated by the negative feedback caused by the then free competition among the companies involved. But it is to be noted that this happened only with major disruption of the American companies involved; once positive feedback gets a foothold it, generally, cannot be counter-acted until it is almost too late.

The American Military/Industrial Complex and the Soviet Military/Industrial Complex. Again, if one thinks about it, it readily becomes apparent that there was a cozy relationship between these entities. There was no similar or comparable combination in the rest of the world to give the relationship any competition. If both campaigned to cut expenditures, who would benefit? Certainly, not either of the complexes involved. Accordingly, each was happy to see the other one develop new weapons or new deterrents, or simply to advertise that they had such. Clearly, both enjoyed the benefits of positive feedback. One side developed, or at least intimated that it had developed, a new weapon, and the other then had to develop, or at least intimate that it was developing, an appropriate counter-measure; which inevitably led to the ever-escalating arms race. (Who in his right mind could ever contemplate the need for an arsenal containing more than 30,000 nuclear warheads, including the appropriate delivery systems? I should add that this escalation was not only due to the "cozy" relationship between the USSR and the US complexes, but it was also augmented by similar "cozy" relationships among all branches of our armed forces.) Whatever the multiplicity of factors, the arms race nourished by positive feedback continued until the high cost of military equipment, relative to other expenditures, simply could not be sustained by the economy of the USSR. The negative feedback, once it developed, was massive and eventually caused the economic and political collapse of the USSR. It should be noted, that the U.S was also in potential danger of a similar collapse; this was prevented only because the percentage of GNP that we spent on the military was far less than for the Soviets; they collapsed first, because the arms-race was not a well-balanced relationship to begin with. But is to be noted, that we are also suffering because of the high National debt that was a consequence of this arms-race.

The CIA and the KGB. I list this relationship only because the factors that enter into it are identical to those that nourished the military-industry complexes. If someone doubts the validity of my arguments relative to the one, they must also doubt the validity relative to the other. Neither side belongs to a community within which they compete; consequently, they have nothing to prove; hence, they need not compete with each other. Therefore, a "cozy" relationship, or better yet, a symbiotic alliance develops between the two parties; an alliance that has built-in positive feedback; positive feedback that insures an ever-increasing scope of activities and an ever-increasing size for these bureaucracies.

Government Regulators and Those That They Regulate. Since regulations are applied across the board in any regulated industry, such regulation is outside of the realm where competition operates and has effect. The more regulations that a regulator develops, the more people all regulated companies must hire in order to understand and obey the rules; the more regulators must be hired to administer the rules, etc.: obvious positive feedback.

Bloated Executive Salaries. When one company does it and gets away with it, perhaps because it has a large market-share and therefore little effective competition, other CEO's in similar large companies say "why not": and the conflagration feeds on itself. In this case, the positive feedback results simply because other CEO's see that their salaries can be continually increased without losing to the competition since the CEO's in the competitive companies will, most likely, also raise their own salaries in similar fashion. Besides, they recognize that the salaries paid to a few individuals in a large company have little effect on overall company cost and profits and, hence, have little affect on competitive status within the industry.

Illegal Drug Pushers and Law Enforcement Agencies. This is another example of a "cozy adversarial relationship"; I bring it up as a special topic only because it deserves special emphasis. I ask: Do either the drug pushers or the law enforcement agencies advocate the legalization of drugs? The answer is obvious. Both support the present system because of the monetary benefits that they derive from it. The pushers can sell their product at exorbitant prices and therefore make tremendous profit; and the law enforcement agencies can keep adding to their staffs because of the ever-increasing public concern. Since this is a current and ever-growing problem, this topic, also merits a follow-up detailed discussion; namely, what are the pros and cons relative to legalization? We've already had one such discussion, but we should keep giving this topic serious consideration.

That ends my presentation, now on to the discussion.

Even though this drug problem is timely, let's not limit our discussion to this topic; let's try to be more general; let's try to present more examples that illustrate how positive feedback causes undesirable effects; and, in such situations, how negative feedback might be interjected in order to bring about stability?

PERTINENT INFORMATION NOT USED FOR THE ABOVE TALK

Are Washington lobbyists, with apparently different viewpoints, really in opposition or is their primary purpose to keep whatever they are advocating unresolved so that there is continuing need for their respective lobbying organizations? I also wonder: To what extent are there adversarial relationships between management and labor, between our two major political parties, between our Congress and the Executive Branch, between one country's military and another's; and to what extent do both, supposed, antagonists really want the same thing?

I contend that when there is true competition, when the competitors are about equally matched and have opposing agendas, there is a tendency towards "fairness" and stability.

Whenever one side is so dominant that it can ride roughshod over the other, instability also results; like in the late 1900s when management could ride rough-shod over the individual laborer. There really was no competition, no adversarial relationship, until labor could organize, which it did with the help of government, which it may not have been able to do on its own for sometime later.

Our discussion today, I hope, will be concerned primarily with situations that exist in our economy and, perhaps more generally, in our society as a whole. More specifically, I want you to help me dig out situations whose nature, on the surface, appears to be one thing while more penetrating observation will indicate that interactions behave quite differently. As I'll go on to explain in this Introduction, I believe strongly that the interaction of "opposites" or, more precisely, "complementary opposites", or "adversarial relationships", is extremely important in keeping our society and our economy going on the right track. We seem to get into deep trouble whenever the public has the general impression that an adversarial relationship exists; while, in fact, the relationship is what I call a "cozy" one, where both parties are, in reality, striving for the same results. Whenever this happens, the public assumes that checks and balances will prevent severe excesses from developing; but since both parties are really "pulling in the same direction", it is inevitable for excesses to develop, and these excesses, usually, are a detriment to the public. To give you a better feel for what I want to talk about, I'll hint at some examples now; then I'll give greater detail at the end of this Introduction. I ask: Are Washington lobbyists, with apparently different viewpoints, really in opposition or is their primary purpose to keep whatever they are advocating unresolved so that there is continuing need for their respective lobbying organizations? I also wonder: To what extent are there adversarial relationships between management and labor, between our two major political parties, between our Congress and the Executive Branch, between one country's military and another's; and to what extent do both, supposed, antagonists really want the same thing?

Individuals compete with individuals, consumers with consumers, companies with companies, societies with societies, cultures with cultures, etc. Only alikes can compete; mixtures can compete only to a limited extent, primarily they must cooperate. Management needs labor. Manufacturers need customers,

Society is composed of competing individuals as surely as markets are composed of competing merchants; the focus of economic and social theory is, and must be, the individual. Just as genes are the only things that replicate, so individuals, not societies, are the vehicles for genes. And the most formidable threats to reproductive destiny that a human individual faces come from other human individuals. It is one of the remarkable things about the human race that no two people are identical. Every idiot can be father or mother to a genius --- and vice versa. In behavior, as in appearance, every human individual is unique. How can this be? How can there be a universal, species-specific human nature when every human being is unique? The solution to this paradox lies in the process known as sex. For it is sex that mixes together the genes of two people and discards half of the mixture, thereby ensuring that no child is exactly like either of its parents. And it is also sex that causes all genes to be contributed eventually to the pool of the whole species by such mixing. Sex causes the differences between individuals but ensures that those differences never diverge far from a golden mean for the whole species. Are management and labor; companies and their customers; etc. like male and female?

I contend that when there is true competition, when the competitors are about equally matched and have opposing agendas, there is a tendency towards "fairness" and stability.

Problems arise when environmental conditions change or when there are mutations, in the extreme, when it becomes possible for the agendas to merge, to become identical. Then there is reinforcement, positive feedback, and hence exaggeration of not only the magnitude of change but also the rate of change; the rate changes geometrically rather than linearly.

Nature, or evolution by natural selection, works to maintain, or at least to work towards, stability whenever conditions change.

The only generalization that we can draw is that whenever there is positive feedback, government must intervene or get out of the way in order to allow negative feedback to come back into the picture. This is beginning to sound a lot like game theory. I should read John von Neumann's book.

In more modern times, in the early 1800s, the German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said it much more broadly: "Every idea, every force, irrepressibly breeds its opposite, and the two merge into a "unity" that in turn produces its own contradiction. And history is nothing but the expression of this flux of conflicting and resolving ideas and forces. Change---dialectical change---is immanent in human affairs." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels elaborated on this by saying that all thoughts and ideas, which have dialectic content as proffered by Hegel, are really the product of the environment in which they originate; hence the concept of "dialectic materialism". This concept is essentially what I have tried to say by going back to cosmology; namely, it is in the nature of the universe to have these opposites, dialectics, dichotomies, or adversarial relationships; whatever you wish to call them. They are inherent, not just concepts dreamed up by philosophers, or physicists, or economists.

Before I get to the economics part, I should add one more thing about physics. In the early 1900s, when quantum mechanics was first invented to describe the behavior of the sub-microsopic world, Neils Bohr, the great Danish physicist who tried to interpret the meaning of this new way of looking at things, proposed what he called, "The Principle of Complementarity". This principle states that for sub-microscopic entities, like electrons, their wave behavior and their particle behavior (which common sense says are completely different and mutually exclusive characteristics) are, in fact, complementary. These are distinct characteristics that can never be observed simultaneously, but nevertheless they are complementary; or, one might say that both are necessary to define the entity. In a simpler example, heads and tails, two opposing characteristics, define a coin. We cannot have a coin that does not have both a heads and a tails! Or we cannot define sex without a male and a female, without the Yin and the Yang. Perhaps, one cannot define personality without the left-brain and the right-brain influences; intuition and feeling versus reason and knowledge. Perhaps, we can't discuss much of anything important in our lives without calling upon complementary opposites, or dialectics.

Okay, now, with the physics out of the way, I can talk about economics and sociology. Perhaps, the clearest example of how the dialectic works is illustrated by the workings of the stock market. We have the Bulls and the Bears; two opposing sides; one believes that the market will go up, the other believes that it will go down. These two factions are in a constant tug of war, sort of balanced out, until some new pertinent information becomes available which makes the market move in one direction or another until a new equilibrium point is reached when, again, neither the Bulls nor the Bears dominate. I believe that a free-market economy, in general, is capable of survival because nearly-balanced adversarial, and I might add complementary, relationships tend to exist. Suppliers, wanting higher prices, are forced to modify their desires because of the reluctance of consumers (their adversaries) to pay; or because their competitors (also adversaries in a slightly different sense) are willing to supply the same product at a lower price. Generally, an economy gets into trouble when adversarial relationships disappear. This can happen if one side becomes inordinately strong; for example, because of the awarding of exclusive territorial rights by government; or because of the creation of a monopoly. Such demises of adversarial relationships are usually quite obvious and subject to reconstitution by appropriate government action.

Somewhat more subtle is the relationship between government, especially Federal, regulators and the institutions that they regulate. Based on my personal experience, regulators are very conscientious and perform their jobs very well when a regulatory agency is first established; however, with time, both sides begin to see the mutual benefit of increasing the burdens of regulation. Increasing the number of regulations, obviously, allows increase in the size of the regulating agency, which means greater responsibility for the supervisors, hence higher salaries. Also this forces increase in the staffs of the regulated institutions, and since the associated costs can be passed on to their customers (since all such organizations are similarly regulated and affected), this means increased revenues, which result in increased profits since target profits (whether regulated or not) are usually determined as being a percent of the revenues, or some combination of percent of revenues and percent of investments. But since some regulations, covering pollution control for example, may require additional investments, we need not get that specific about accounting principles.

Another relationship, this time in the private sector, that changes with time is that between labor and management. In owner-managed companies, there usually exists a true adversarial and complementary relationship between management and labor. However, as companies become larger, the managers at all levels eventually come to recognize the fact that an increase in their salaries is more meaningful to them, personally, than the profitability of the overall company. To attest to this devastation, witness the near-demise of U. S. Steel, Sears, General Motors and IBM; and consider the consequences to their laid-off employees who have not yet built up adequate pension benefits.

Now before asking for examples of "cozy" adversarial relationships that are familiar to you, let me close my, as usual, much too lengthy introduction, by giving cursory mention of our mess relative to medical coverage. Where in the entire system is there any sign of an adversarial relationship? Based on what I mentioned before, the insurance companies certainly are not much interested in maintaining reasonable costs; the regulators are looking to build empires; the drug suppliers, hospitals and doctors are looking to maximize their profits; the high-tech outfits are interested in devising more-and-more tests so that they can sell more-and-more equipment; and the public wants the best medical treatment that is available regardless of cost. Where is the other side to this coin?

"Human intelligence has yet to design a society where free competition among the members works for the good of the whole." --- Egbert Leith, a biologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

"Individual rational behavior leads to a collectively irrational outcome." --- Matt Ridley in his book entitled, The Red Queen.

Positive feed-back always tends towards the point where the bubble bursts, but often the feedback turns negative long before the breaking point. The peacock's tail and the whale's testicles, and maybe the human brain growths are eventually stymied by other factors than the reasons that made growth attractive.

Reproduction is the sole goal for which human beings are designed; everything else is a means to that end. Human beings inherit tendencies to survive, to eat, to think, to speak, and so on. But above all they inherit a tendency to reproduce. We can confidently assert that there is nothing in our natures that was not carefully "chosen" in this way for its ability to contribute to eventual reproductive success. Everything can be inherited except sterility. None of your direct ancestors died childless. Hence I am going to argue that there are very few features of the human psyche and nature that can be understood without reference to reproduction.

In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier. This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her. The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less you make progress. In the world of the Red Queen, any evolutionary progress will be relative as long as your foe is animate and depends heavily on you or suffers heavily if you thrive, like the seals and the bears. Thus the Red Queen will be especially hard at work among predators and their prey, parasites and their hosts, and males and females of the same species. Every creature on earth is in a Red Queen chess tournament with its parasites (or hosts), its predators (or prey), an, above all, with its mate. But the Red Queen never appears without another theme being sounded: the theme of intermingled cooperation and conflict. What is the relationship between a woman and her husband? It is cooperation in the sense that both want the best for the other. But why? In order to exploit each other. A man uses his wife to produce children for him. A woman uses her husband to make and help rear her children. Marriage teeters on the line between a cooperative venture and a form of mutual exploitation. This is one of the great recurring themes of human history, the balance between cooperation and conflict. It is the obsession of governments and families, of lovers and rivals. It is the key to economics. It is, as we shall see, one of the oldest themes in the history of life, for it is repeated right down to the level of the gene itself. And the principal cause of it is sex. Sex, like marriage, is a cooperative venture between two rival sets of genes. Your body is the scene of this uneasy coexistence.

The principal goal of an animal is not just to survive but to breed. Where breeding and survival come into conflict, it is breeding that takes precedence. Simply put, anything that increases reproductive success will spread at the expense of anything that does not --- even if it threatens survival

When the fittest are struggling to survive, with whom are they competing? With other members of their species or with members of other species? What matters to the gazelle is being faster than other gazelles, not being faster than cheetahs. (There is an old story of a philosopher who runs when a bear charges him and his friend. "It's no good, you'll never outrun a bear," says the logical friend. "I don't have to, " replies the philosopher. "I only have to outrun you.") So what matters is not how clever and crafty you are but how much more clever and craftier you are than other people.

If you want your son to become pope, the best way to achieve this is not to have lots of identical sons but to have lots of different sons in the hope that one is good, clever, and religious enough. This is where sex comes into the picture; also, passing the sperm around into lots of females. When conditions are favorable and predictable, it pays to reproduce as fast as possible --- which can be done best asexually. When the little world comes to an end and the next generation of aphid or rotifer faces the uncertainty of finding a new home or waits for the old one to reappear, then it pays to produce a variety of different young in the hope that one proves to be ideal. Sex gives variety, so sex makes a few of your offspring exceptional and a few abysmal, whereas asex makes them all average.

But, as Williams put it, there is no evidence yet found that any creature ever does anything other than try to keep its mutation rate as low as possible. It strives for a mutation rate of zero. Evolution depends on the fact that it fails. Tangled banks work mathematically only if there is a sufficient advantage in being odd. The gamble is that what paid off in one generation will not pay off in the next and that the longer the generation, the more this is so --- which implies that conditions keep changing. Formerly, it was decided that evolution is good for species, and so they strive to make it go faster. Yet it is stasis, not change, that is the hallmark of evolution. Sex and gene repair and the sophisticated screening mechanisms of higher animals to ensure that only defect-free eggs and sperm contribute to the net generation --- all these are ways of preventing change. The coelancanth, not the human, is the triumph of genetic systems because it has remained faithfully true to type for millions of generations despite endless assaults on the chemicals that carry its heredity.

Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race. Sisyphus was the king of Corinth who, in Hades, was made to roll a stone up a hill but as soon as he got it to the top it rolled back down so that he had to do it all over again; progress is imaginary.

THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME. For its size, midway between a chimpanzee and an orangutan, the upright ape, known to science now as Australopithicus afarensis and to the world as "Lucy", had a "normal" brain size; about 400 cc --- bigger than the modern chimp, smaller than the modern orangutan. Its posture was peculiarly humanlike, undoubtedly, but its head was not. Yet over the next 3 million years the heads of its descendants exploded in size. Brain capacity doubled in the first 2 million years and almost doubled again in the next million, to reach the 14 hundred cc of modern people. The heads of chimps, gorillas, and orangutans stayed roughly the same. What can account for the astonishing speed and the accelerating speed of the change? The answer may lie with sex. If new theories are right, the evolution of man's big head was the result of a Red Queen sexual contest between individuals of the same gender. But the intriguing thing is what made the big-brained people likely to have more children than the small-brained ones. After all, clever people are not noticeably more prolific breeders than stupid people. Emil Durkheim, was the founder of sociology.

It was logic like this that led Richard Alexander to propose that the key feature of the human environment that rewarded intelligence was the presence of other human beings. Generation after generation, if your lineage is getting more intelligent, so is theirs. However fast you run, you stay in the same place relative to them. Humans became ecologically dominant by virtue of their technical skills, and that made humans the only enemy of humans apart from parasites). "Only humans themselves could provide the necessary challenge to explain their own evolution," wrote Alexander. Nicholas Humphrey began an essay on the topic with the story of how Henry Ford once asked his representatives to find out which parts of the Model-T never went wrong. They came back with the answer that the kingpin had never gone wrong; so Ford ordered it made to an inferior specification to save money. "Nature," wrote Humphrey, "is surely at least as careful an economist as Henry Ford."

Geoffrey Miller suggests that the only way that sufficient evolutionary pressure could suddenly and capriciously be sustained in one species to enlarge an organ far beyond its normal size is sexual selection. "Just as the peahen is satisfied with nothing less than a visually brilliant display of peacock plumage, I postulate that hominid males and females became satisfied with nothing less than psychologically brilliant, fascination, articulate, entertaining companion." Society is composed of competing individuals as surely as markets are composed of competing merchants; the focus of economic and social theory is, and must be, the individual. Just as genes are the only things that replicate, so individuals, not societies, are the vehicles for genes. And the most formidable threats to reproductive destiny that a human individual faces come from other human individuals. It is one of the remarkable things about the human race that no two people are identical. Every idiot can be father or mother to a genius --- and vice versa. In behavior, as in appearance, every human individual is unique. How can this be? How can there be a universal, species-specific human nature when every human being is unique? The solution to this paradox lies in the process known as sex. For it is sex that mixes together the genes of two people and discards half of the mixture, thereby ensuring that no child is exactly like either of its parents. And it is also sex that causes all genes to be contributed eventually to the pool of the whole species by such mixing. Sex causes the differences between individuals but ensures that those differences never diverge far from a golden mean for the whole species.

It is a disquieting thought that our heads contain a neurological version of a peacock's tail --- an ornament designed for sexual display whose virtuosity at everything from calculus to sculpture is perhaps just a side effect of the ability to charm. Disquieting and yet not altogether convincing. And I end with one of the strangest of the consequences of sex; that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expansion for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness, and individuality turn other people on. It is a somewhat less uplifting perspective on the purpose of humanity than the religious one, but it is also rather liberating. Be different.

Mass Extinctions have occurred repeatedly over the past 600 million years. Major events occurred at the Permian-Triassic boundary, some 250 million years before the present (myr), and at the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT), 65 myr. Lesser extinctions include the late Cambrian, 510 myr to 520 myr; the Frasnian-Famennian at 365 myr; the Triassic-Jurassic, 210 myr; the late Cenomanian at 91 myr; and the late Eocene, 34 myr. It is not clear how many have been due to asteroid or comet impacts. The Permian-Triassic event, for example, was the most severe. It wiped out 90 percent or more of all species, including half the families of marine invertebrates. However, very little is known about this mass extinction. Alvarez, studying the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary has postulated that the bolide struck near the town of Chixulub in northern Yucatan and formed the 300-kilometer-diameter crater, which he calculates was made by an object 10 kilometers in diameter, traveling at tens of km/sec, which would give it an energy of 10⁸ megatons, some 10,000 times greater than that in the world's nuclear arsenal.

THE THEORY OF OPPOSING AGENDAS

(or in "Control Theory" the relationship between negative and positive feed-back)