Random Thoughts
Stinging Bees, Suicide Bombers
and Epidemiological Solutions
A generally
lesser known fact is that every time a bee stings us, it dies in the act.
This suicidal behavior and its altruistic care of its siblings had been a
puzzle for evolutionists until the brilliant work of the British scientist
Hamilton. We humans get one set of chromosomes from our father’s sperm and
another set from our mother’s ovum. We are thus all diploid meaning having
two sets of chromosomes. In the social insects Hymenoptera to which bees
belong, the females who are predominantly sterile have two sets and are
diploid. The male drones are haploid and have only one set of chromosomes.
The only reproductive female is the queen bee, who on her nuptial flight
mates with one or more males and stores the sperm in her body separately,
deciding for each individual egg whether it should be fertilized and grow
up as a female worker or unfertilized and grow up as a fertile male drone.
For the queen, every egg male or female shares half her chromosomes and
thus her genetic strategy is non-preferential for egg sex ratios, even
though the male drone share genes 100 % with his mother, because he arises
from a non-fertilized egg with only a maternal chromosome complement. The
female workers are diploid and if they have the same father, will share
all the haploid single set of genes from him as his sperms with only one
set of chromosomes are unaltered by crossover during meiosis. The queen’s
ova are different due to crossover during meiosis and thus two sister
workers will share only a quarter of maternal genes amongst them but half
with their mother. Thus two sisters will often share three quarters of
genes with each other. They are sterile, but even if they could reproduce
they would only share half their genes with their own daughters and sons,
just as they currently share with their mother. Thus they are more closely
related to their sisters than to their mother, brothers or potential
progeny.
This, more than anything else and since they are sterile, makes them
devoted and partial to their potential sisters by rearing female
fertilized eggs preferentially to alter the natural male female hive ratio
from one to one to one to three. This is also why they commit kamikaze to
defend the hive of their sisters, mother and brothers who are their
passports to immortality. Finally their barren status and potentiality to
become fertile queens is modulated by chemical suppression by the queen.
They thus become devout nursemaids willing to die for their genes.
Similarly verbal provocation of the manipulative queen like radical Imams
and the passive approval of the Ummah co- workers make suicide bombers
willing to die for their Ummah and ideals.
Human beings with their more evolved cortex are susceptible to ideas and
their willingness to indulge in self-sacrificing behaviors to promote a
particular ideology irrespective of annihilation of their genes, as long
as their ideology survives. Soldiers and Kamikaze pilots in war and
religious zealots in crusades and jihad are examples of this. In its most
benign and nonviolent to innocents, this philosophy explains the messianic
zeal of Christ. It is only a few steps from there to the indiscriminately
violent behavior of suicide bombers. They are motivated by an extreme brew
of this ideology turned virulent by humiliation, frustration and impotence
due to the military and economic strength of manipulating exploiter
persons or nations. Once the Darwinian philosophy is twisted into a tirade
from personal survival of an individual’s genes to a "zimbesh" of survival
of ideology, the Pandora’s box is open and every philosophical fanatic can
justify any atrocity for a desire for proselytization and redressing a
genuine or perceived wrong. Seemingly rational justifications abound. The
problem while affecting Islamic radicals is not unique to them. The whole
premise of the Hindu Bhagwad Gita and the dilemma of Arjuna whether to
persecute the just war at the cost of demise of the clan for reasons of
pecuniary benefit and power, is a beautiful example of the same. The
solution of Krishna is widely accepted but has weak underpinnings like
Marbury vs. Madison in American legal parlance.
The evolution of the cortex and its obsession with classification,
justification and rational explanation of chance events led to the
invention of god, culture and ideology. Thus the cultural conundrum has
changed the evolution of the human mind from genes to ideas or memes.
Unlike bees willing to commit kamikaze for the good of the hive, we have
indoctrinated Islamic radicals with justifiable grievances willing to
challenge the status quo. In any fight the short term benefit is to those
with better firepower and technology, but the long-term advantage both
historically and analytically has always been to those willing to die for
their cause. The economical success of western nations, historically and
philosophically precludes this self-sacrifice for genetic and cultural
reasons in affluent and evolved societies. The less self-centered and less
literate societies are drugged by the hormones of fanaticism, but as
America proves such influences are equally present in affluent literate
societies. The deprived, oppressed and under-developed nations and their
peoples bereft of hope with nothing to live for and smarting under
humiliation, are easily intoxicated by the nostalgia of past glory. This
is also seen in advanced nations that have lost their empires like Britain
and Russia. The ignorant fanatics are easy prey to the vile instigation of
manipulating demagogues.
The behavior of the reed warbler in raising the cuckoo’s eggs and feeding
the baby bigger than itself may sem idiotic and the antithesis of selfish
gene behavior, but the host is programmed to assume that a nestling is its
own. The cuckoo lays its egg in the reed warbler’s nest. Its egg is the
same color and hatches first. The baby cuckoo is genetically programmed to
throw the warbler’s eggs out of the nest or kill its nest-mates if they
hatch. This is how terrorists infiltrate our societies and form sleeper
cells that we nourish. They are memetically programmed to kill their
fellow citizens with whom they do not identify as happened in Bombay,
Madrid and London. The foolish behavior of the booby bird in ignoring its
own egg progeny that transgresses beyond its own nest gives it its name.
Its limited repertoire does not allow it such subtle distinctions. There
is an arrogant hubris in us human beings, that makes us superciliously
contemptuous of such lesser creatures. We are not immune from such
irrational self-destructive behavior, as the works of Kahnemann, Cosmides,
Tooby and other evolutionary psychologists prove. Our enchantment with
free will blinds us to the determinism of Bell’s theorem and writings,
just as our being enamored with the golden rule based Rawl’s theory of
justice, blinds us to the perverse desperation to seek revenge by those
denied it. Despite our highly evolved cortex, it is to our peril that we
ignore its evolutionary constraints and indulge in foolish propaganda by
seeking solutions in public relations campaigns by inane strategies of the
unthinking Karen Hughes clones.
As Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor has proposed, memes (ideas) often
propagate through a cultural species like humans and establish themselves
in equally great frequencies as genes. There is a basic desire in all
human beings to be famous and go out in a blaze of glory. Its benign form
is a Messiah complex and borderline manifestation are wars of patriotic or
religious fervor, while terrorism is its perverse form. Many of us feel
entranced reading about self-sacrifice and Tennyson’s words from The
Charge of The Light Brigade–
Their’s not to
make reply
Their’s not to reason why
Their’s but to do and die.
Japanese
Kamikaze pilots were honored and glorified for their suicide missions in
defense of country and emperor and the old English adage makes a lot of
hoopla for king and country. The Sanskrit adages promote "Vasudhaiv
Kutumbakam" meaning the whole world is my fanmily and "Janani
janmabhoomischa swargad api gariasti" or the mother and motherland are
superior to heaven. Then can one blame the Palestinians or Iraqis for
their terror tactics. From the Indian standpoint, the Pakistani jihadis do
not have the same justification. I don’t condone any of these behaviors,
but it is only a small leap from patriotic fervor to fanatic terrorism,
once you concede justification to dying for a cause, while inflicting
violence on the innocents. The dilemma then becomes how one defines
innocents.
Unlike many other religions that eschew violence, Islam has a tradition of
resorting to it, especially when it comes to infidels and apostates. It
also has a history of a unified Ummah and Caliphate. Thus memes or
ideology sharing is supposed to be one hundred percent between Muslims to
convert them into a monoclonal homogeneous unquestioning society of Islam,
meaning submission and to place higher loyalty to this ideology than
nation states, family or even one’s self. If one takes this combustive
thought and adds to it the inflammatory mixture of personal alienation and
discrimination in western societies with a long history of humiliation and
subjugation in their ancestral or prior homelands, one obtains a phalanx
of angry, violent and dangerous suicide bombers without a sense of
fairness, gratitude, obligation or belonging.
The behavior is reminiscent of the genie released from the bottle by the
fisherman in the Arabian Nights. The genie threatens to kill his savior
and explains that his benevolence has melted to ubiquitous malice towards
all, like a good wine in a bottle turning to acid vinegar over time with
repeated reminiscences of his humiliation and defeat by Solomon. It is
this identification with the community’s tribulations, a potentially
benign compassion that leads to the malign consequence of terrorism.
Fisher and Haldane’s genetic statistics for sacrificing one’s life for the
good of an equal or greater quantity of one’s genes like those in three
sibs, becomes applicable to memes. It turns into a desire to punish and
hurt the perpetrators of the oppression and their supporters, electors and
those who connive, not sparing even opponents. Better if they are
ethnically and religiously different but as Iraq shows us, none are to be
spared this malice, violence and terror as long as they resist the goals
of the fanatics.
It is imperative to combat this epidemic before it threatens to become a
pandemic. The means available are to redress, reprogram, contain and
eliminate the virus. The first requires genuinely and sincerely addressing
its root causes and not monotonously mouthing false mantras like they hate
our freedoms and lifestyles. The corrupt kleptocracies and the oppression
of Palestinians need genuine redress. In the short run anti-western
theocracies like Iran may come into being temporarily, but their
inevitable failings will disillusion the Islamic masses and make them
immune to the extremist scourge. The attenuation can be done just as
Jenner’s cowpox did with smallpox. Inclusion of the European Muslim
populations with hopes of economic success, will deprive the virus of the
critical mass of a susceptible population and prevent its spread. Another
lesson of evolution is that the cholera and diphtheria bacilli do not make
their lethal toxins till the respective genes are turned on by another
viral bacteriophage and such inciting Imams and mosques need to be denied
the advantage of inducing the toxin making genes. Thus Britain’s banning
the return of a radical Imam is a step in the right direction, while the
American gulags in Guantanamo, Iraq and Bagram will only feed the flaming
fire of the insurgency. The mixing of potable water and sewage must be
studiously avoided by cavalier and foolhardy cowboy tinkering in
pipeline-lands.
As the British police have successfully shown barring their singular
dastardly mistake in the case of the Brazilian victim, the best response
is good intelligence work. Searches at subways like the American way are a
definite deterrent, but typically blunderbuss or shotgun approaches with
poor returns for time and effort expended and inconvenience imposed on the
police and the public. Equally detrimental is the indiscriminate and
overwhelming counter-violence used by America, as in Fallujah, Afghanistan
and Abu Ghraib. But as Churchill (no friend of mine) said, America will do
the right thing only after it has exhausted all other alternatives. Its
current policies are like the Anteus problem for Hercules. Every fall to
his mother earth made Anteus ten times stronger. Every drop of innocent
blood spilt, only makes new demons spring up from the Muslim earth. A
targeted strike against terrorists and their havens is needed and not
winking at the despots of Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Gulf States, Azerbaijan, Pakistan etc. America needs to be lauded for its
inclusiveness towards Muslims and its prevention of their ethnic ghettoes.
It knows that if you avoid a critical mass of uranium from coming
together, there will be no nuclear chain reaction. Britain and the
Europeans need to learn that lesson. Lastly, a sensible energy policy, not
a Christmas tree one, and curbing profligate waste of natural resources
should be a top priority for the whole world, but particularly for
wasteful America. India’s policies have been more inclusive of minorities
but both major parties have been appeasing minorities to capture vote
banks and have refused to combat alien infiltration for political
purposes. Appeasement is India’s national motto and alienation is
America’s natural inclination. Both need to learn that virtue lies in the
middle as expounded by Buddha and Socrates.
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