How Minor Strategies Can Emerge Within the r/K Paradigm (Where Libertarianism Fits In)

Anonymous Conservative Website ^ | January 20th, 2013 | Anonymous Conservative

[AnonymousConservative]

It is well accepted that r/K Theory will not always yield an ideal strategy for every environment. Subtle nuances of an environment can make certain mixtures of r and K-strategies advantageous in that particular case, and produce slightly different psychological qualities. This is why after r/K is taught in college, those who go further into the discipline are taught to further subdivide strategies into life history traits, specific to a species. One of the most well characterized examples of deviation from r/K is the fact that r/K is density dependent.

If you have a lot of individuals, crammed together in an environment which can support a high density, these individuals will interact, and you will get r or K, depending upon the need to compete for those resources, and exhibit practical fitness relative to peers, or the need to avoid such practical competition and demonstrate a simple ability to attract more mates.

If however, the population exists in very low density, and the land cannot support a high density population, things will change, since individuals will spread out and interact less. Since resources will be limited, individuals will need to be able to fight, and be aggressive/competitive. However, One will need to travel over a large territory to find sufficient food. So even though resources are limited most of the time, and such individuals will be aggressive when necessary, they will never be able to mass into a group, because the group would not have enough resources in their territory to support all of them. This will produce a more individualistic, less group-centric psychology, which seeks to be left alone, but will still be willing to fight with others, when necessary.

In such a model, mating can also become less competitive, since a potential parent may not have an enormous number of potential suitors to select among. This will make mating more promiscuous, and less selective. Carried to an extreme, parenting may even tend to shift in the direction of a single parenting model, simply because a mother and father would require too much food. A single mom may have enough food left over in the territory she covers to also provision her offspring, whereas if the offspring are raised in a territory which is already supporting two parents, she may not. Disgust reflexes might also diminish in this environment, since a spread-out population would suffer disease transmission less than a densely packed population.

If you look at this minor strategy you will notice two things. First, it would only be present in a small number of individuals in the human population, relative to r and K, since r and K would rapidly explode anywhere the environment provided lots of resources, with this cohort probably existing at the margins, colonizing harsh areas with little resource availability. Second, this model would seem to describe the modern Libertarian.

HBD Chick runs a brilliant site examining how in-breeding may have produced the modern Libertarian. The idea she is promoting is that if you inbreed enormously, people tend to become very tribal, supporting relatives, while being wholly untrusting of outsiders, since their inbred group ends up sharing a lot of genes. As a result, an individual favoring the members of their in-group, would be favoring the continuance of many genes they themselves carry – just they would be favoring them in closely related, inbred relatives. It tends to produce tribalism. But if you moderate the inbreeding effect, you may get an individual who just doesn’t trust outsiders, and wants to go their own way, but in whom there is less tribalism. If you follow her work, you will find yourself agreeing with her premise again and again, and blown away by the clever ways she shows how the data supports her premise.

However although she explains how such a trait would arise, unless it is adaptive, it will not remain, since it will be culled. Here, I suspect the Libertarian psychology may have persisted once moderate inbreeding produced it because it was adaptive to harsh environments, which would not support large numbers of humans. There may have been a feed forward effect as well, whereby a harsh environment, which could only support a limited number of people, created a moderate inbreeding effect, which enhanced the Libertarian psychology.

I view the spread of human populations like a dammed stream, filling a mountain valley with water. As we spread out, r’s (Liberals) probably headed into areas of rich resource availability. They avoided fighting and killing each other, mated freely, and raised children quickly in single parented families. As populations increased rapidly in those areas and resources became exhausted, K’s (Conservatives) began to predominate, competing with each other, mating carefully, and rearing high-quality offspring carefully in two parent families, and the r’s moved on. This was akin to how the water from the stream would first spread into all low-lying areas of the valley, here akin to resource-rich, easily survivable, and uninhabited areas of the world.

As time went on, K’s remained put with their groups, and slugged it out competitively, while some individuals began to spread laterally, into harsher areas with sparse resources, which as a result, did not favor r. These individuals ended up akin to the water which moved up the valley walls, after the stream filled all the low-lying areas. They reached areas which were more difficult to survive in, and lived there in smaller densities, where individuals were free from group-centric social constraints, since groups were either small or non-existent – and relatively unnecessary to survive.

Today, Libertarians can’t grasp why r’s want to control K’s with government, or why K’s oppose things like indecency in media, or single parenting, promiscuity in others. The Libertarians are just designed to focus on their own survival, and leave others alone, and they can’t understand why everyone else doesn’t do the same. To their psychology, it is illogical, and the root of a lot of problems which don’t need to exist.

Nevertheless, since people periodically ask me how this relates to Libertarianism, I just want to point out the flowing. If you look at r/K in nature, among wild animals, you will see descriptions of minor variants of strategy, and some of them could be construed as being an individualistic psychology, designed to leave others alone. It would be less reliant on urges to control others, or to produce group functionality by punishing deviations from group-centric, pro-sociality-producing social mores and values. It would probably include diminished disgust, more sexual liberation (or at least tolerance of it), and less of a desire to interact with (and control) others.

Although all of this almost certainly has some sort of genetic root, I get the impression from my readings that a lot of ideology is also adaptation to environmental cues. In short, although we humans have genetic political predispositions, we have also evolved genetically to be highly adaptable to environmental conditions. Perhaps suddenly fluctuating resource availabilities, sudden periods of war and peace, and sudden shifts in population characteristics culled our populations over the eons, only leaving behind those who had adapted effectively on the fly. Libertarians do tend to exist in areas with few other people and low population densities, which does not surprise me.

I suspect I get the question so much because Libertarians are extraordinarily mechanistic and logical in their mindsets. This may be due to their freedom from r/K and their strategy’s history of having to understand and solve difficult problems alone, in order to survive their harsh environments. As a result, they see the r/K material innately, and understanding it, immediately wonder why they are different. I know that the reason I have seen this is probably my deeply imbued Libertarian/hyper-logical instincts.

The short answer for those who wonder why they are Libertarian is that they are just the Grizzly Bears of the political world, as opposed to the K-type wolves, and the r-type bunny rabbits. Libertarians want to go their own way and do their own thing, and if someone pushes them around, they are willing to kill them for their freedom. There is probably even a lesson there, in the origins of the American ideal embodied at our founding.

[AnonymousConservative]

I have a blog dedicated to understanding how political psychologies evolved, their purposes, and how to debate with them. The fundamental premise is here, and it is that Liberalism and Conservatism are outgrowths of more primitive strategies known in Evolutionary Biology as r and K-selected psychologies.

These psychologies are designed to adapt an organism to the r and K-selective environments, namely an environment of free resource availability, and an environment of limited resource availability. In short, r's (Liberals) are designed to operate in an environment where they (and their offspring) don't need to compete for resources, due to the free availability. They don't need to produce highly fit offspring, so they avoid fighting, mate promiscuously with whoever, parent singly, sexualize children, and have no loyalty to in-group.

K's (Conservatives) are designed for an environment where those resources are less common, and they are designed to produce fit offspring, capable of competing. They are aggressive/competitive, mate competitively (through careful selection and monopolizing mates through monogamy) rear children intensively, in two parent families, delay mating of offspring until maximally fit and mature, and have high loyalty to in-group to promote group success in competition.

There is more on all of this on the parent page here, which is where this page is from, here.

This graphic also describes the theory quite well.

I know, this all seems to not be important, but I think this understanding offers insights into how to defeat Liberals in the rhetorical domain, as I discussed in yesterday's post, here.

Thank you.

[Sherman Logan]

I get your parallelism between evolutionary strategies and human lifestyles.

But I don’t think it works out in fact. Any evolutionary or genetic issue based on differential reproductive success would take at minimum many, many generations to show up in a population.

Our present socio/economic/political environment is at most only a few generations old.

I find it extremely odd that you seem to be proposing that the historical expansion into new territories and other risk-taking was primarily by those we would today call liberals. The opposite seems a lot more likely to me.

Finally, “survival of the fittest,” which of course really means survival of the genes of the fittest, is totally turned on its head in modern societies. In every “advanced” society those who are most likely to pass on their genes are those who are least socially and economically successful by the terms of that society. There is a direct inverse relationship between economic success and reproduction. See the movie Idiocracy.

[AnonymousConservative]

Hi Sherman,

My biggest problem in putting this stuff forward is in getting people to look at the whole body of work, which is what addresses all of this.

Let me go point by point.

“Any evolutionary or genetic issue based on differential reproductive success would take at minimum many, many generations to show up in a population.”

Actually, what I propose is a little more complex. There is a genetic foundation. Overlaid over this is an environmental effect. The neurochemical aspect of this, which molds the strategies, is dopamine sensitivity. This variation in dopamine sensitivity can vary in strength, based on use, allowing an individual to change their strategy (or more accurately see it changed for them by the enironment they face). In other words, make resources freely available, and you will flood your brain with pleasurable dopamine. Your brain, sensing the high dopamine signaling will downregulate dopamine receptor density, to bring signaling back in line, making you need more dopamine to feel normal, and become more hedonistic (and more Liberal). (It’s like how you need more and more steroids, once you start using them).

I show where the research describes how dopamine controls every facet of r/K in the paper at the site. A dopamine mutation is responsible for ideological predisposition. There is post at my site describing all of this, from a while back. Look in the sidebar at Fleshing out Dopamine’s Role. It links to Dennis Mangan’s brilliant speech on that, as well, if I recall.

By contrast, be put in a less resource rich environment, and dopamine is released less commonly, and you brain will up-regulate receptor transcription, and you will become more sesnitive to dopamine, making you more driven, focused, competitive, and task oriented, and this will even be seen on brain scans as you perform tasks.

So note, in humans, r/K is variable even in individuals over short periods, though there is also evidence for an epigentic effect based on maternal rearing, as well as genetic underpinnings as well. Think about today’s dopamine saturated enironment, and how we would go more K-Conservative, if all the reosurces and wealth dried up suddenly.

“Our present socio/economic/political environment is at most only a few generations old.”

Note, I am pointing out r and K are strategies for dealing with resource availability in nature. We have two psychologies in our political world which match identically. My case is that these ideologies are modern out-growths of these primitive strategies. That is it. I do NOT maintain these strategies are well adapted to our modern circumstance, or that this is all genetic. Only that one can see where these psychologies came from in our primitive history, if we look. We are still adapting.

“I find it extremely odd that you seem to be proposing that the historical expansion into new territories and other risk-taking was primarily by those we would today call liberals. The opposite seems a lot more likely to me.”

Again, this expansion initially was a choice between an overpopulated home territory with exhausted food supplies, where people were killing each other violently, and a similar territory nearby where there were no people, and greater amounts of food, since it was unpopulated. It wasn’t a choice between modern agriculture-based civilization, with all it’s legal protections, and a violent natural world where there was no “Whole Foods.” It was a choice between being in an environment where gangs Conservaties were free to kill you for being defective (and would), or heading to an empty area identical to the one you were in, but without the violence.

“Finally, “survival of the fittest,” which of course really means survival of the genes of the fittest, is totally turned on its head in modern societies. In every “advanced” society those who are most likely to pass on their genes are those who are least socially and economically successful by the terms of that society. There is a direct inverse relationship between economic success and reproduction. See the movie Idiocracy.”

Yes, again, free resource availability, and limited reosurce availability. r vs K. I maintain the Idiocracy is a result of the difference of an r-selected environment. In r-selection, once resources are freely available, it is all about producing “quantity over quality” in offspring, since every offspring can get resources, and doesn’t need to be fit, beyond being able to breed. We produce enough resources today to allow for generous welfare, EBT, Obama phones, etc. Free resources means the only selective pressure is how many kids you pop out. Idiocracy. r-selection.

Cut the resources (as will happen – these things are cyclic), and once welfare is gone, K-selection will return, favoring all the traits of Conservatism. Those who can function in groups, address threat, and compete in whatever competitions are going on for resources will succeed, and the welfarites, will gradually get killed back, no matter how many offspring they spawn.

The dude in Idiocracy, by getting the plants to grow using water, is what kept the whole Idiocracy alive. Had he not done that, competition would have ensued, favoring the more able, and those who won, would have been intelligent, capable individuals focused on producing a few offspring who were highly fit.

Of course, in reality, when everyone is having twenty kids, at some point, there would not have been enough resources, K-selection would have returned, and most of those idiots would have been killed, as they were gradually culled back by having to compete. It is inevitable.

[AnonymousConservative]

Oh, I just understood one criticism you are making. It went over my head before.

I’m not saying we just evolved Conservatism and Liberalism in the last few hundred years. That would be impossible.

I’m saying millions of years ago, we evolved the genetic foundations of our r/K psychologies (and their adaptable natures), which became deeply entrenched in our psyches and guided our behaviors back then, before language, philosophy, even before we were human - when we were just monkeys in the bush.

As we developed intellects, and political theories, and governments, our r’s began to apply their intellects to promulgating the r-selective environment they were designed for (and most comfortable in), and the K-intellects began with suppositions that competition was OK, losers needed to accept responsibility for bad decisions, and high-investment families were good. They were designed for a K-environment, and liked it, and felt everyone should like it as well.

Yeah, I can see how this would have looked like a mightly stupid idea, without that little nugget.

[Sherman Logan]

The problem here is that, at least in the history of this country, expansion into new territory was not "risk-free" because unpopulated. In fact, I know of no case anywhere in recent millenia, with exception of the expansion of the Polynesians across the Pacific, where a group expanded into "unpopulated" territory. With that exception, every group was expanding into territory already populated, although often thinly. And their expansion was almost always resisted, though often not particularly effectively.

In this country, those who were on the bleeding (literally!) edge of the frontier were certainly not risk-averse. They were at much greater risk, and knew it, than those even a few miles back, much less those in the well-settled (and theoretically less resource-rich) areas.

[AnonymousConservative]

I think we are on different pages. I am not looking at how Homo sapiens evolved r/K. It was there from way back before they were even monkeys, and is there in every other species. When I mention the migration, there is no written history about it.

When I say the migration, I am looking at how a primitive monkey-like creature, which had evolved r/K millions of years back, would carry the r and K-mindsets as a few members first evolved into Homo Sapiens, lost body hair, began running down prey in the daylight, and exploded in number. From there, once fully migrated, I am looking at how these mindsets would be evolved to find and exploit resource availability, and flee from risk and violence.

“In fact, I know of no case anywhere in recent millenia, with exception of the expansion of the Polynesians across the Pacific, where a group expanded into “unpopulated” territory. “

Yes, that is what this post is about, actually. Spreads occur in two directions, from an ecological perspective. Forward, into similar areas - unpopulated, but with similar or greater resource availability (again, this is back before history entered the picture). Think invasive species. Or laterally, into a new niche - a new environment, not as hosptiable for some reason, and probably requiring some adptation. Obviously we have not moved forward in a long time, but we did at one point, and it would have favored r way back then, and that is probably where the ball started rolling.

I am not saying r has functioned as pure r for a long time, or that is has been related to the migration for a long time, especially once everywhere was populated, and the only migration was lateral, which as you note, will not favor r. r does still have the migratory urge, though it will depend on resource availability, and competition avoidance. Combined, (ie violence and limited resources at home, free resources, foreign lands, and no violence abroad), I think Libs would almost universally migrate out.

My case is, r likely began in Africa as r, when we first began to spread. Probably functioned that way after the bottleneck as well. It may have offered some advantage when we met Neanderthals, since in addition to free resources, it seems to crop up in other mammals epigenetically, due to stressful early rearing experiences. A model where the less capable as children, grew up to be highly fecund, prone to migrate, less sexually selective, open to out-groups, and prone to get kicked out of the group, would produce a steady flood of r’s being thrown up against the more K Neanderthal, constantly. Competitive Exclusion would indicate a less capable model, thrown against a more capable specimen, in sufficient numbers constantly, would wear them down over time. Might even have something to do with the interbreeding, since r is associated with diminished sexual selectiveness (read the two posts in my sidebar on homosexuality and Liberalism).

Oer time, it likely adapted to persist in groups through social manuevering, and be expressed variably in response to resource variability.

Once agriculture hit, you have free resource availability, not associated with migration. It would have adapted. As groups grew, it became more of a socially manipulative psychology which would emerge orgnaically when resources grew plentiful. From there, r was a strategy designed to exploit resource availability, and avoid competition.

“In this country, those who were on the bleeding (literally!) edge of the frontier were certainly not risk-averse. “

As this post ended, I made a point that our nation’s founding, by colonists spreading into a land with very spread out, low resource availability, would favor the strategy which goes with that, which is more Libertarian, and which is more in line with the American Ideal.

Again, r’s will spread and migrate, if doing so will score them free resource availability, which is what they are really after. If not, this post makes the case you will get a more Libertarian, live and let live psychology. Our Republic was built by men who sought out this environment, and that is why it appeared as it did.

[raybbr]

A word or advice: When using an abbreviation (r/K) you should at least clarify what it means at least the first time you use it. I have no idea what it means and hence, no compunction to read past it’s first use.

[AnonymousConservative]

Check the picture I posted in my comment, or read the comment under the article for the definition.

I’m not an expert on FR rules, but I beleive I am not supposed to change the article or title when posting it to FR. I don’t put the explaination in every article I write, since my blog followers would find that repetitive, and boring.

I did post a detailed summary of it in the first comment after the article.

Thank you for the advice though.

[ansel12]

The left/libertarians and their abortion and homosexualizing the military, open borders and the homosexual agenda, their anti-conservatism seems pretty backwards to me.

[aquila48]

Bookmark for later

[AZLiberty]

Fortunately, the Liberal bunnies found birth control, though they make up for it with proselytizing, incentivizing, and immigrating.

Islamists seem to combine the fertility of bunnies with the aggression of wolves.

[AnonymousConservative]

Agreed on the Liberal Bunnies. Though it is worth noting, r is always adapting. Those who reproduce today in greatest numbers are less conscientious, and less motivated to greatenss, and probably lower in IQ. Today’s Liberal may seem reasonable and intelligent compared to what they will evolve towards - at least until Darwin returns and culls the popualtion.

On Islamists, HBD Chick’s blog linked above has interesting stuff on that. Her work is all based around the subject of inbreeding, and the effects on behavior.

The concept is, if we are cousins in a very inbred clan, you and I will have very similar genetic profiles, since inbreeding involes genes getting standardized in the population, so to speak. (There are strains of lab mice in which individuals can be used almost as clones, because they are so genetically similar from the in-breeding.)

Anyway, even if I die in the process, I can benefit (in a Darwinian sense) from seeing you succeed, because my genes will go forward in you. Over time, this will produce a drive in inbreds to support kin, as a way of passing hteir own genes forward as much as possible. It is bad for things like democracy, because it tends to produce corruption and nepotism in government, like in the middle east.

The Church, by encouraging out-breeding may have caused people to become less kin-oriented, and this may have favored a more democracy/freedom prone strain of human.

Her blog is very technical, but fascinating in the way she looks at the data.

[AnonymousConservative]

“The left/libertarians and their abortion and homosexualizing the military, open borders and the homosexual agenda, their anti-conservatism seems pretty backwards to me.”

Nothing a little natural selection couldn’t fix. Historically, it is coming.

[ansel12]

The problem is that America is becoming more libertarian and left wing, I don’t think that it is going to birth itself back to conservatism.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

-— The problem is that America is becoming more libertarian and left wing, I don’t think that it is going to birth itself back to conservatism. ——

With the exception of abortion, generally speaking, people would not be protected from the consequences of their vices. So the system would self correct, to some degree.

For example, a drug addict would starve, or have to go to work to support his habit, rather than be supported by welfare.

[ansel12]

Nonsense, the opposite is true.

In a democratic nation where each vote is equal, then the more broken souls and communities, the farther distancing from social conservatism and towards libertarianism, then the more they will vote themselves better benefits and lifestyle support, we have a 60 year history showing that pattern.

We see that today, the people who support the libertarian agenda of homosexuality, drugs, porn, prostitution, abortion, open borders and such, are overwhelmingly voting for more and larger social programs, while the people against all that libertarian stuff, are the most conservative voters in America.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

The wild west was effectively libertarian. Certainly all drugs were legal, and prostitution was a fact of life. It wasn’t a socialist utopia.

I’m not a libertarian, but libertarianism is different from socialism.

[x]

First, you should probably explain your terms right off. I still don't know what r and K stand for and why those letters were chosen. I didn't know until I started writing this that r and K weren't something that you came up with.

Secondly, I'm not at all sure that, say, the Republican states represent a truly more competitive environment than the Democrat states. Surely New York is more competitive, more K than Montana.

Third, you fudge things by associating female aggressiveness with r environments and fatherly abandonment, when others would simply give women the credit for pursuing the same competitive strategies that men do.

Fourth, it's pretty clear that larger smarter animals might have a greater potential for fellow feeling (at least with their own kind). If you have a small brain and a short-lifespan you're not going to be able to form complex relationships. But the human world is more complex than that. Nature doesn't constrain us as much as it does a rabbit or hamster (but are our human wolves and sharks really as capable of loyalty or fellow feeling as less aggressive humans?)

Fifth, it's clear from everything I can see that more competitive environments (New Jersey, Connecticut) do put off breeding until the young are more able to compete and do invest more in education (at least for the chosen few). The problem with the theory is that those environments are politically liberal.

The conservative states are the ones where more people marry and have children earlier even when it may get in the way of education. So it looks to me like there isn't the kind of clean fit between your environmental theories and the political lessons you want to draw from them.

Of course, the problem is that there are different populations within a given environment who follow different strategies, say wealthy suburbanites and poorer urban or rural populations. But the differences here aren't always ideological. Scarsdale and the South Bronx follow very different strategies but vote the same way (and maybe you could find parallels in the conservative parts of the country as well). There isn't one "liberal" evolutionary strategy. There are two (at least if we judge by how people actually vote).

Theories like yours might have fit politics better some years ago, when wealthier areas of the country were more conservative. Nowadays, though, some of the richest people are very liberal. Contraceptives also throw off your theory. Promiscuity isn't necessarily associated with many offspring. I also have to wonder, comparing the two halves of the country where people really start having sex earlier or whether there is really that much difference between liberal and conservative areas (leaving aside a few areas that really are distinctive).

I haven't gone through all the ins and outs of your theory and didn't want to be very confrontational, but now I have to wonder. This explains all of politics? The people you approve of resemble the larger, smarter mammals we ascribe positive qualities to and those you disapprove of resemble the smaller, stupider, swarming creatures? Isn't there something reductive and creepy about your theory? Or maybe it's just a reworking of the ant and the grasshopper or the tortoise and the hare.

[ansel12]

Don’t confuse something not having become an issue yet or even having been invented, or created, with having been made legal.

Besides, what does that have to do with anything, you think that more of what turns people into liberals and into pro-welfare voting democrats, will somehow turn them into economic conservatives?

[AnonymousConservative]

If my read is right, leftism will increase, grow government to unsustainable levels, collapse the system, and Conservatism will return.

I view it like mice given a sudden bloom of wheat. THey explode in number, grow to the point they all eat all of the wheat, and then the population dies back, and/or is eaten.

I think Libertarianism probably contributes to the problem by not enforcing group-cohesive and pro-K behaviors. (And I say that knowing the urges from the inside.) I want to go my own way, and not shame girls who get knocked up, or punish people who are obnoxious. But society needs that. Without it, r’s thrive, and bring the whole thing down. Libertarians just weren’t made to live and function optimally in a big group - they were meant to be really spread out.

The real problem, which actually does the taking down, is Leftism, and the uniform provisioning of resources to everyone, regardless of productivty or contribution. Freeloaders enjoy advantage, producers endure the detriment of work - that is the origin of the disaster. r’s explode like mice with free wheat.

Remove that, and we will naturally go K, and Conservatism rises. So we won’t birth ourselves back to Conservatism, so much as Darwin will kill Leftoids back, allowing Conservatives to continue as they were.