The impact of warrior groups

Summary

War & Peace & War

• Russian
• US is the United States of America.   of America
  
• Roman
• Islamic
  
• Carolingian
• Chinese
  
• English

• Population per acre of land - changes rapidly due to the geometric growth of population when there is ample food, and the collapse of population growth if Malthusian, Thomas Robert Malthus was an English cleric and scholar.  He described the geometrical expansion of populations supported by sufficient resources and the population's subsequent collapse as the land used to grow the resources became fully deployed. 
  limits are reached. 
  
• Distribution of wealth within the population becomes rapidly unequal with positive returns, W Brian Arthur's conception of how high tech products have positive economic feedback as they deploy.  Classical products such as foods have negative returns to scale since they take increasing amounts of land, and distribution infrastructure to support getting them to market.  High tech products typically become easier to produce or gain from network effects of being connected together overcoming the negative effects of scale.   to wealth.  As the wealth gap expands various subgroups become morally provides rules for identifying right from wrong.  It develops in stages with children using play to work out rules of appropriate behavior.  Kohlberg's 1950s experiments using children led him to conclude moral judgement is a cognitive process that develops in three stages.  Sapolsky raises issues with the framework: Its a model, It does not apply to other cultures, Intuition & emotion are as significant as cognition, Moral reasoning doesn't predict moral actions; and notes the capacity of the frontal cortex to regulate emotions and behavior is far more predictive.  The marshmallow test, performed on three to six year olds, actually predicted their subsequent SAT scores at high school, social success and lack of aggression, and forty years on more PFC activation during a frontal task and a lower BMI!  Jonathan Haidt argues people's moral decisions are rationalizations rather than using reasoning. 
  outraged at the unfairness. 
  
• Separation of the society into small super-rich ruling elite, rest of the warrior aristocracy, well off and poor. 
  
• Separate warrior and religious leaders becoming integrated into a single leader representing a coherent culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal.  CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism.  Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering.  Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling.  Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset.  He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised.  Culture:
  • Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation.  Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain.  Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes.  Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach.  And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations!  PMS symptoms vary by culture. 
    
  • Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play.  So parents try to control their children's peer group.  
  • Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc. 
    
  • Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate. 
    
  • Can transform dominance into honor.  There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures.  Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian. 
    
  • Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.  
  • Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire. 
    
  • Can provide varying levels of support for innovation.  
  • Produces consciousness according to Dennet. 
    
  . 
  
• Over three generations knowledge of high risk traps are lost and so the third generation tends to repeat the mistakes of their grandparents. 
  

• If there is expansion the frontiers may move away from the core group that sustains the collective solidarity.  Slowly the empire will lose its coherence.  
• The geometric nature of population growth will eventually result in more people than the land can sustain.  However, because of the positive returns to wealth some families will have lots of land and resources.  They will not immediately become impacted.  Indeed they will likely find it easier to gain more wealth as the poor become first landless and then compete for salaried work driving down wages. 
  
• Eventually however, the rich will also become affected.  Since they were also affected by within group population growth as the poor become destitute they will not be available for the aristocracy to leverage.  While the super-rich continue to get richer the rest of the aristocracy become stressed is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels.  Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight.  As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate.  A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance.  The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. 
  
  • The short term response to the stressor
    
  • activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response.  The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated.  The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail.  But when the stressor is
    
  • long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues.  Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in.  Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status.  It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition.  Sustained stress:
    
  • Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment! 
    
  • Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala. 
    
  • Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful. 
    
  • BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning. 
    
  • Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory.  Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala.  And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces.  Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers.  A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand.  The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds. 
    
  • Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression. 
    
  • Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive.  It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention. 
    
  • During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling. 
    
  • Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness. 
    
  .  But they are warriors and as such they react by forming up into bands lead by war lords who fight to gain access to the limited resources of the land and patronage of the rulers.  This will result in weakening of the empire.  If there are external warrior groups they may attack and replace the ruling aristocracy.  If not civil strife will eventually reduce the effectiveness of the society until the population of warriors falls to sustainable levels once more. 
  

• 20th century credentialing crisis - ever increasing numbers of school graduates went to college.  By the end of the century having a degree was insufficient to get a job.  Ph.Ds started to increase and the length of study required expanded.  
• 14th century Paris - expansion in the time to get a doctorate over the 13th century
• 16th century France - Cost of education expanded much faster than inflation
• 17th century great revolution - Enrollments in Oxford & Cambridge peaked, and then declined in the 18th century
  

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