Тег: Ethology

How bats solved the free-rider problem without taxes and prisons

Every time you start a conversation with someone about a voluntary society, you inevitably encounter the trump card of any statist: “But what about the free-rider problem? If people aren’t forced to pay under threat of a club or prison, everyone will just enjoy the benefits, and no one will chip in! Everyone will want to be a free-loader, and society will collapse!” It sounds logical. Yet, an interesting thing happens: in nature, the free-ride problem was solved millions of years ago, and completely voluntarily, without a single tax inspector or ministry of coercion.
 
Let’s look at an unexpected example—vampire bats. Life for these creatures is certainly not a walk in the park. They feed exclusively on blood, and night hunting for large animals is a highly unpredictable business. About a third of the colony returns home empty-handed every night. This is where the harsh mathematics of survival comes into play: if a bat does not eat for three consecutive nights, it dies of hunger. Individually, this species would simply have been wiped off the face of the earth. This means they needed an insurance system. And they created one.
 
When a lucky, well-fed bat returns to the cave, it regurgitates part of the obtained blood to feed a hungry neighbor. From the outside, this might look like a socialist’s dream—from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. But there is no need to rush to rejoice for the leftists, because we are talking not about a common pot, but about a system of decentralized mutual aid built on reputation.
 
And here we return to the argument of the fans of the “strong hand.” What stops some cunning bat from simply sitting in the cave, squeaking pitifully, collecting tribute from neighbors, but never sharing its own prey? How will that end for it?
 
Bats are far from stupid. They have a disproportionately large neocortex, an excellent memory, and they recognize each other without fail by voice. They practice strictly targeted cooperation. Bats do not dump resources into an abstract fund; they invest in specific social ties. They remember who shared with them and who withheld their prey.
 
If a bat only takes but does not give, its social rating drops to zero. Neighbors simply stop feeling sympathy toward it. The next night when it is unsuccessful and begs for food, its yesterday’s “friends” will simply turn their backs to the wall. Through its dishonest behavior, this bat will kick the bucket without any coercion, bat courts, or prisons!
 
Now for the most interesting part. How does this mechanism work at the level of neurobiology? Evolutionary selection was not tasked with inventing this form of cooperation from scratch. There was already a powerful, perfectly tuned chemical circuit—maternal bonding (the mother’s attachment to the child), which forces an adult individual to spend colossal resources on a helpless offspring and derive pleasure from it. Selection simply took and extended this mechanism to non-related individuals.
 
When a bat shares blood with a neighbor or grooms its fur, its brain is flooded with the same cocktail of oxytocin and dopamine as a mother’s during contact with a child. Oxytocin forms deep attachment and trust, and dopamine reinforces this feeling with powerful pleasure from the very fact of mutual aid.
 
This is why bats, like you and me, help each other not out of cold calculation, but on emotions, which also serve as a biological detector of cheating. If a partner plays a one-way game, oxytocin simply stops being produced in your brain in their presence. The attachment breaks, and you no longer want to help them.
 
Of course, you might say now: “But we aren’t bats; we have millions of people in our society!” And you would be absolutely right, because our brain has a biological limit on the number of social ties it can maintain. However, today we have the tools (institutions and technologies) to scale this natural mechanism to all of humanity. Though, that is a completely different story, which we can discuss in future publications.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Fight, flight, freeze… or just hack someone else’s brain?

As we know, there are three basic survival strategies in the wild. Encountered danger? In that case, fight, flee (“run”), or play dead (“freeze”/”hide”). But here’s the thing: while we thought this was an exhaustive menu, evolution decided not to stop there. As it turns out, there is a fourth, far more sophisticated path in the wild. Let’s call it “hack your neighbor’s neurobiology.”

Imagine: you are a huge, strong tropical cockroach. An emerald cockroach wasp (which is about three times smaller than you) flies up to you and gives you a quick sting. You are alive, you are conscious, your legs are working. But you… don’t want anything anymore. The wasp delivers a second, surgically precise sting directly into the cockroach’s subesophageal ganglion (the brain). Its venom acts as a perfect blocker of octopamine—the neurotransmitter responsible for initiative and the motivation to move. The cockroach is not paralyzed! It simply completely loses its free will. It is in a state of severe apathy. The wasp takes the giant by its antenna and, like a compliant dog on a leash, leads it to its burrow, where it will lay an egg on it. The larva will eat the cockroach alive, and the cockroach won’t even attempt to escape.

There is also the famous Toxoplasma (Toxoplasma gondii). This single-celled parasite desperately needs to get into a cat’s intestine—that is the only place where it can reproduce. But how do you get there if you are currently inside a mouse? Toxoplasma doesn’t just wait for the mouse to be eaten by chance. It takes control! The parasite forms microscopic cysts in the amygdala of the mouse’s brain, as a result of which the mouse completely loses its innate terror of the smell of cat urine, or even begins to experience slight sexual arousal from it. The mouse goes out into the open on its own, searches for a cat, and predictably becomes its lunch.

Another very cool example: the lancet fluke—a flatworm that needs to get from an ant into the stomach of a sheep or a cow. It penetrates directly into the ant’s subesophageal ganglion and takes the helm like a seasoned truck driver. In the evening, when it gets cold, the parasite forces the ant to separate from the colony, climb to the very tip of a tall blade of grass, and cling to it firmly with its jaws. The ant hangs there and waits to be swallowed by a cow. But do you know what is most amazing? If the cow doesn’t come during the night, and in the morning the sun begins to blaze (which could cause the ant to dry up and die along with the parasite), the worm releases control! It allows the ant to unclench its jaws, descend to the ground, and hide in the shade. The ant spends the whole day living its usual ant life, and in the evening, the parasite presses the button again: “Time to climb the blade of grass!”. And so it goes until they are eaten.

Why is this so cool? When we hear the word “parasite,” we imagine someone who just drinks blood or steals nutrients. But evolution has shown: information and control over behavior are the most valuable resources. These creatures do not control the victim through fear. They use perfect knowledge of neuropharmacology. They synthesize analogues of dopamine, serotonin, various alkaloids and proteins that “hack” the neural circuits of other species. This is not a random system glitch, but the result of millions of years of harsh evolutionary selection. Those who learned to change the host’s behavior in their favor survived and reproduced much more effectively than those who just sat and waited for a miracle. And nature didn’t give a damn about philosophical concepts like “free will”!

What does this mean for us, humans? Acting upon the neurobiology of an opponent who threatens us with harm—for the sake of bio-enhancing morality or as a violence inhibitor—is also not some “madman’s rambling,” but a fully successful strategy supported by millions of years of evolution, which is becoming technologically more accessible to us every day. If you don’t like such an approach at all, then look at yourself and propose full recognition of the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) and the impermissibility of violence in exchange for the limitation of biotech weapons that affect behavior.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Man to man, wolf? Why we were wrong in assessing the wolf’s nature.

Sometimes circumstances develop such that superficial and inaccurate representations of something become deeply ingrained in people’s minds. Thus we obtain expressions like “one person to another is a wolf,” which implies that the wolf is supposedly a creature extremely selfish, hostile, and aggressive towards its own kind, and people are similarly no different from wolves. Wolves are compared to many bad things in general. For example, someone even might call authoritarian political leaders wolves for their lies, sinister nature, bullying other people and psychopathic indifference to their pain. However, reality is sometimes far from what is commonly believed.

In fact, if you carefully study the behavior of wolves in natural conditions, you can understand that their social organization is more cooperative than hierarchical. The organizational structure of wolf societies is more like a circle than a pyramid. Games and mutual support bond them together, but not hostility and competition for dominance within the pack. Wolves cannot actually be called merciless and antisocial creatures.

We were all told that there is some “alpha male” in wolf society who does not occupy his position to the last degree due to aggressive domination. However, in fact the display of aggression by leaders of packs towards their subordinates is very rare. And generally, violent hierarchies of dominance in wolf societies arise only when unfamiliar individuals are placed together in one closed enclosure, while observations of wolves in their natural environment completely disprove the myth of a single, most aggressive “alpha male.”

We can also recall the work of ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who in his works, especially in his article “Morality and Weaponry,” found that wolves have an inhibitor of violence that is activated in one of the fighting wolves when demonstrating to another wolf submissive postures or vulnerable parts of the body such as the neck or abdomen. Observing this, the stunned aggressor loses the ability to continue the attack. And another ethologist, Jason Badger, once managed to infiltrate a wolf pack and observe their lives very closely. Among other things, he noted that overly aggressive individuals were simply expelled from the pack.

As we see, in natural conditions aggression among wolves is not encouraged. A wolf who is merciless to his relatives and ready to harm them for his dominance may only expect success in the conditions of a cell from which one simply cannot escape. And the cruelty and violent hierarchy that exist in human society are likely possible only because it has also been driven into “state cells.” Of course, the natural state of affairs should not be like this, and the expression “man is man’s wolf” should mean friendship and cooperation, not enmity and violence.

The Psychology of *Homo Sapiens*: Why Your Brain Is Stronger Than Your “Want”

There is one thing that really irritates our skeptics: they accuse us of “biological determinism” when we say that violence and aggression can be effectively contained by influencing the mechanism of inhibition of violence. They are outraged: “How is that possible? If a person wants to commit violence, it’s profitable, carries no risks, and nothing prevents it, do you really believe that some neurobiology will stop him?” Of course, it will stop him! Because this isn’t “some neurobiology,” it’s the genuine biological barrier that even the most iron willpower cannot breach.

Let us immediately note: ethology – it’s not just about animals. *Homo sapiens*, man, is as much an animal as any other. Yes, we are proud that we can build rockets and write philosophical treatises. But under the hood, the same “animal firmware” sits there. Although, due to highly developed neocortexes, we are capable of building extremely complex representations of the world, our behavior is often governed by deeply hidden neurobiological mechanisms to which consciousness reaches with enormous difficulty. Or doesn’t reach at all.

Let’s provide a short list of what controls your inner “biology,” or a kind of “ethological stack”:
– Violence and its inhibition
– Depression, anxiety, and fears
– Attachment to children and partners
– Food behaviour and thirst
– Sexual attraction
– Sleep, wakefulness, and biological clocks
– Body temperature
– Tendency towards risk and adventure
– Motivation and apathy.

And now let’s conduct a thought experiment. Imagine that a man really wants physical intimacy with a woman, but his body “doesn’t want it.” Well, this happens. And the question arises: can he, using only the force of thought, make himself want it? As they say, “let’s not name a specific brand,” but everyone knows that in such a situation special medications are indispensable. Why? Because consciousness doesn’t directly control neurobiology. And its influence on actual reactions and behavior goes through that very animal “firmware.”

Let us now offer an open challenge to the skeptics: when you can lower your body temperature by a couple of degrees solely with willpower – come, let’s discuss it and consider a scenario in which the neurobiological inhibitor of violence suddenly “doesn’t work” on a mentally healthy and non-psychopathic person who is inherently programmed to experience strong internal rejection of inflicting harm on people. And until then, let us acknowledge: biology often proves stronger than reason. This isn’t fatalism, but a sober assessment of what we actually are. It’s understanding our natural limits and possibilities, as well as seeking ways to influence them. And ultimately, awareness of one’s biology is the true path to freedom!

P.S. I’ll admit honestly – interest in ethology appeared in me long before the launch of our project on violence inhibitor and it was connected with a personal history of my childhood friend, who got a serious illness because of “wrong design” of one neurobiological mechanism mentioned above in the list (it has nothing to do with violence at all). It’s necessary to understand and accept that evolution produces traits (mechanisms) always with compromises and “workarounds,” which, unfortunately, can be inevitable and unavoidable. Probably there is something similar in our violence inhibitor too. However one must always look at the ratio of benefit/harm and not reject a mechanism giving huge benefit for suppressing most people’s non-violent cooperation between them, but possibly negatively influencing the fate of one person out of a million. This also applies to other mechanisms mentioned above. It’s easy to criticize, but try to develop from scratch the same violence inhibitor or something else from “ethological stack” on other principles, without compromises that natural selection took? Too complicated? Let’s appreciate what nature gave us, because even with compromises it is better than nothing at all!

Voluntarist, Bitarch