Fight Like An Animal

A dominance hierarchy is a social structure where some people are allowed to hit you, and you're not allowed to hit back. It is defined by a sustained, institutionalized asymmetry of aggressive-submissive interactions. This skewed distribution of aggression enables a skewed distribution of resources and opportunities. Modern history has ostensibly been an epic conflict between different political ideas, but from this biological perspective, it has been awfully monolithic: mostly a conflict between dominance hierarchies that are justified with different language. Moreover, because reasoning is embodied, and subordination generates a distinct embodied state, we often have trouble seeing how coercion pervades our everyday life, or conceiving of other ways of being. 

In this episode, we see how biological parsimony is the most fundamental counter to the justifications of the state that academics and laypeople alike tend to employ: dominance hierarchies do not exist in any other species for the reasons they are claimed to exist in humans. Species occupy a wide despotic-egalitarian continuum, and this continuum is not also one of social complexity or social order. We also sketch how a robust parallelism of social formations capable of exercising violence is necessary to prevent any one of them from gaining despotic power. Relying on the same logic of fluid alliance formation and fission that states have long employed, we describe a society in which each individual is the epicenter of a unique configuration of armed force, each of which must act as a counter-power to every other. 

Dr. Shane Simonsen returns to talk about his new book Taming the Apocalypse, a vision of humanity's potential as “the universal symbiont,” facilitating new pathways for evolution. Ranging from the immediately viable to the highly speculative, the projects described in Taming all eschew the industrial science model in favor of a more participatory, low-tech, and reverential paradigm. Could novel microorganisms someday convert cellulose to starch, allowing humans to eat trees? Ant colonies form a symbiotic association with us to ferment tempeh? Elephants partner with us to create new forms of dispersed agroforestry? Cockroaches someday be involved in constructing shelters? Dr. Simonsen draws on his own experiences, creating a novel staple-producing tree species and many other hybrids, to speculate about futures as radically distant from Star Trek as they are from Mad Max. We also discuss how work done on the margins of a society can suddenly become relevant when that society confronts crisis, converting scientific knowledge to stories which can be told around fires, and his efforts with World Tree to make local languages illegible to authorities.

Is it time to give up? Was it already time to give up in 2020, or 2012, or perhaps even 1999? We usually justify our answers to these questions purely in terms of their rational foundations. But our reasoning is embodied, and variation in the details of our embodiment produce very different relationships to hope, despair, and the place one finds beyond them. In this episode, we examine the disoriented haze that seems to have descended over so many of us, and sketch the preliminary foundations of a new psychological trait: Heart Refuses to Die (HRD). To understand HRD, we explore a dopamine-mediated trait, found in all inventories of individual psychological difference, that affects activity and motivation. Differences in individual dopamine systems imply truly fundamental questions about the relationships between biology, behavior, and social structures. Why do we find the same realms of temperamental variation across species separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution? Why are some humans psychologically more like some octopuses than they are like some other humans? What does it mean to speak of “species-typical behavior” when this is taken into consideration? We conclude by adding a number of other dimensions of individual difference to our very tentative psychometric of Heart Refuses to Die. Somewhere along the way, we examine how different types of people thrive in nomadic vs. sedentary societies, the lack of a major new political tendency in recent history, and how people with larger social networks also tend to end up in the emergency room more often. 

In 2015, Thorstein Grunwald began a mythic undertaking. He sought extreme states of consciousness for the purpose of making scientific discoveries about the earth's carbon cycle that would allow for interventions in runaway climate change. Science already had a very long legacy of progress through the spontaneous visionary experiences of its practitioners, but Grunwald was one of the first people with any real success in deliberately, systematically seeking such visions. A decade after he began this work, Grunwald began to collaborate with the World Tree Center for Evolutionary Politics and Global Survival. As World Tree enters its 100th year of existence, we reflect on the few years of friendship and collaboration we shared with him before he was killed in combat in the 2030s. In the process, we examine how the reassertion of the centrality of the observer in science was essential to the politics of ecological survival that emerged to reshape the world in that decade.

The entire dizzying scope of this episode can be experienced on Patreon. 

You've heard a million times that the history of life on earth is one of systems tending toward ever-increasing complexity, but in this episode, we argue evolutionary history is best conceptualized as one of ever-expanding boundaries of selfhood. In so doing, we apply a unique lens to questions with concrete strategic implications which have vexed environmental politics for generations: is the trend toward increasing scale and complexity in human societies intrinsically bad? Is nature whatever humans aren't doing? Can we exert conscious influence on ecosystems and revere them at the same time? We make a case for a politics in alliance with the broad tendency of life on earth to increase the scale of the “self,” arguing that while people have clearly lost hope in the revolutionary mythologies they invented out of psychological need, this particular mythology of expanding selfhood is real, and therefore durable.

Somewhere along the way, we note how the power exercised in extractive hierarchical societies precisely recapitulates the logic of cancer: when the perceived boundaries of the “self” shrinks, cells (or people) begin treating the systems of which they are a part as “other.” We also see how central nervous systems evolved repeatedly in different animal lineages, complex cell anatomy resulted from organisms failing to digest what they had eaten, octopus arms might be independently conscious, and domestication can be broken down into sub-components by relevant brain system. To top it all off, Arnold cries just a little at the very end. What more could you possible ask for? If your answer is “a video where a bunch of very interesting people who met through Fight Like An Animal talk about some of these same themes,” here's a link to a video called Scientific Animism: The Computational Boundaries of an Octopus.

What does it say about a society if it venerates the image of someone being executed by the state for sedition? In this episode, we trace the improbable evolution of Jesus of Nazareth from fervent revolutionary to apolitical, transcendental being. We situate his trajectory in the cross-cultural tradition of prophetic liberation movements, from southeast Asian hill tribes to North American pan-indigenous movements, and alongside other Jewish messiahs, such as the bandit chief Hezekiah and the mysterious sorcerer known only as “the Egyptian.” What all of these eclectic figures—some with a military orientation, some who primarily relied on miracles—had in common was a singular devotion to national liberation. That these politics came to be repurposed for an ostensibly apolitical mythology—a story of sacred victimhood, in which dying is winning—helps us to understand one of the many feedback loops between culture and biology that characterizes contemporary life. It helps us understand how we have become confined to an increasingly narrow range of our evolved potentials, bereft of any sense of real agency—how we come, in other words, to inhabit the biology of defeat.

We are clearly reaching the end of this phase of human civilization. Does that mean that evolution's broad trend towards increasing complexity, scale, and self-awareness is also dying? Many futures are possible, and in this episode, we speculate about one that continues the evolution of ever-greater complexity. Exiting the fantasy of a “sustainable” extraction-based economy, we instead imagine a human society based solely on life itself, where organisms do what is now done with gas-fired kilns, table saws, and circuit boards. We examine the diversity of the metabolisms which are currently evolving in synthetic biology laboratories, and how a novel organism might alternate between photosynthesizing and devouring toxic waste in the process of, for instance, growing into a house. Careful to delineate near-term possibility from developments which would require a scientific (and likely social) revolution, we look from the strange world of self-healing buildings and robots animated by heart cells which we currently inhabit to a much stranger one, in which houses walk and computing is biological. This episode largely focuses on establishing a realm of possibility, saving more conceptual and ethical issues for its sequel, where we ask: what would it be like to adopt an ethic in which life existed for its own sake, but in which humanity actively intervened to promote life's maximum abundance, diversity, and evolutionary potential?

Rejecting both the empty promise of a future of magically sustainable resource extraction and a return to what has already been, Dr. Shane Simonsen examines possibilities for social and ecological complexity based only on biology and the human imagination. In his Zero Input Agriculture blog, Going to Seed podcast, and Our Vitreous Womb fiction series, Dr. Simonsen explores a set of themes strongly overlapping with those of Fight Like An Animal. He imagines futures in which the human evolutionary trend toward diminished reactive aggression has resulted in a nearly complete loss of the fear of death, hybridizes plants on his experimental farm in an effort to develop subsistence ecologies which will thrive after the age of machines, and looks for ways to condense the bewilderingly complexity of current scientific knowledge into fables or other narratives that can be concisely transmitted when we return to telling stories around fires. In this episode, we talk about the long decline we are currently witnessing as an epoch of amazing opportunity for shaping the trajectory of the future; examine the frontiers of biological innovation, including his incredibly low-cost and low-tech methods of transgenic experimentation; evaluate evolution's propensity for hybridization between totally unrelated species; and much more. 

Fight Like An Animal has engendered a group, and that group has in turn engendered a new podcast called Metanoia: How Worldviews Change.  Metanoia, which means "a transformative change of heart," examines why most people are so utterly unresponsive to witnessing the world die, while a few of us are deeply burdened. Abandoning Enlightenment notions of undifferentiated rationality, Tanner Millen and Arnold Schroder introduce their search for the embodied, experiential variables which shape people's paths to a state of meaningful ecological responsiveness.  In the first episode, Tanner describes his unique path: how the lack of meaningful inquiry into possible human societies in academia disillusioned him; how childhood trauma and the exigencies of survival led him to disengage from broader realities, and concern himself with accumulating income playing poker; how winning a fortune provided the sense of safety necessary for him to begin exploring his perceptions of reality; how remembering his sexual abuse allowed him to come to terms with other unbearable truths. Metanoia #1 is available as a video and the audio only version is here.

Perpetually replenishing his organs by inducing his cells to behave like those of an early embryo, Arnold continues the 100th year of his podcast. In Fight Like An Animal 2120: Vivimancer, we examine the end of the Machine Age and the subsequent Biological Revolution, providing both an introduction for new practitioners and a history of the practice of vivimancy, which translates to “life magic,” a form of synthetic biology in which direct interaction with living systems replaces technology. In this episode, we describe the water carrier, an organism which desalinates the Pacific ocean with the same proteins found in human cell membranes, transports the water through its long cylindrical body to eastern Oregon, and gives birth to a vast forest operating at 100% photosynthetic efficiency, one of many such systems which radically shift the ratio of atmospheric to biological carbon. We examine the means by which vivmancers visualize and affect the status of such organisms, down to the molecular level, via signals which travel through modified neurons and specialized connective tissues, and thus describe the endless meditation by which a vivamancer unifies with another organism, sensations traveling through vast oceans and distant mountains into a human body.  Full episode can be found on Patreon.