by John Cryan

Chaonic physics drives every force and process in the Universe. This includes all forms of biological Convolution. And human cultures – which form wherever people come together, then interact, accrete through compound compositing, and decay through many interwoven processes linked to free chaonic action – are subject to the same principles of Convolution as run the rest of the Biosphere.

Old (i. e., Darwinian) evolution posited an ever-dividing and diversifying ‘Tree of Life,’ beginning as a single ‘acorn,’ the biological equivalent of the ‘Singularity’ of cosmologists. That conception of ‘natural selection’ causing ‘adaptive radiation’ via ‘common descent’ from life’s original kernel leaned heavily on the intertwined negative notions of difference enforced by isolation. Not only isolation in spacetime (maintained by so-called ‘geotemporal’ isolating mechanisms like habitat or seasonality), but also isolation by other means, especially ‘reproductive’ isolating mechanisms. These latter reached their fullest flowering and expression in sexually-reproducing organisms, developing continua of elaborate forms such as ritualized mating behaviors, ‘courtship,’ display, and ‘sexual selection,’ the last of which operates almost exclusively at the level of individual organisms, as opposed to entire populations.

The new form of evolution, Convolution, subsumes everything about the old theory, much of which has been verified by science over the past century and a half. But Convolution then takes this earlier core conception, which had been hamstrung by its narrow focus on fitness, and extends and completes it. It does this balancing of the yin-yang of evolution by bringing in stronger connection to counter the original over-emphasis on isolation. This helps discern what is conserved, changed, and lost, and why.

Convolution posits that evolution, like ecology, with which it is intertwined and in which it operates, is a web in spacetime, not a tree, and that Darwin was fooled into taking the more simplistic tree view by extinction gaps, all those widening invisible spaces among the ‘branches’ of the evolutionary ‘tree’ left behind by the semispecies whose lineages ended in failures of both fitness and metamorphic amplitude, without leaving behind any immediate descendants to keep on evolving and filling those gaps with new branches. As a result, the so-called ‘Tree of Life’ is an eternal winter tree, just bare branches forever bereft of ‘leaves,’ and missing even whole ‘twigs.’ This effect was leavened and enhanced in Darwin’s exposition of his original theory by the bringing in of fossil evidence, biased and further attenuated as it was by chaonic erasure, scale (mostly larger organisms), and the random exigencies of discovery.

In Convolution, the basic template elements of biology, the genes, flow mostly through the tree’s branching superstructure, generation by generation, due to the isolating mechanisms described above. This temporarily preserves semispecies integrity – form, function and behavior – long enough that we humans can distinguish and name them as Platonic ‘species,’ or biological Forms. ‘Stabilizing’ selection pressure tends to favor this conservative approach of Nature, so long as conditions affecting fitness do not change too much. In other words, so long as the ecological role, or niche, occupied (and often initially created) by any particular semispecies lineage retains its niche dimensions, or characteristic role and place in Nature, without changing too fast for the semispecies to change, or evolve, with it.

It is when change (including time inflation) gets ahead of semispecies’ ability to adapt that Convolution effects become visible. Convolution feeds genes into organisms across branches, and sometimes across the entire tree. It does this in multiple ways, broadly split into Backdoor and Frontdoor Convolution. Backdoor Convolution can feed anything from single genes to whole genomes from simpler organisms (mostly single-celled) into each other and also into more complex (multicellular) ones. It is Frontdoor Convolution, however, that can create the biggest leaps, by allowing more com-

plex, sexually reproducing organisms of different semispecies lineages to combine their full genomes.

Most of these continuously occurring random Convolution events are failures. The genetic changes are deleterious to the individuals that receive them, and they fail to survive or reproduce. Or they have no additional adaptive value; i. e., they do not confer additional layers of adaptation to the changed environment, so the transferred genes are lost or sidelined in subsequent generations. But once in a blue moon, they succeed. In the intervening settlement period, or extended genetic fluxus of Frontdoor Convolution especially, the new genes become integrated into the new genomic template in such a way or ways that one or more new semispecies are formed, which can survive, prosper and spread in the altered environmental conditions they encounter by meeting the new challenges with newly added layered adaptations on top of the older ones brought to the fluxus by the parental semispecies.

Human Cultural Convolution utilizes analogs of all the elements described above to create Cultural Amplitude. It also reflects the biologic and geographic elements (especially the uniqueness of place) themselves, to a varying degree. It’s uncertain to what extent in any given situation, complicated again by chaonic erasure, or the deficits of evidence of the past left behind for us to find and interpret.

That is because, using the taxonomic system created by Linnaeus, humans have defined themselves as a single Platonic species, Homo sapiens. This is undoubtedly correct under the existing system, but if that arrangement is altered to make malleable, ever-changing semispecies the base standard for kinds, or what appear at present to be Platonic Forms, the question of how far back in time the situation of the existence of only one base taxon of ‘humans’ prevailed is immediately raised. We know this through fossils of many diverse human-like ancestors preceding us in recent geologic time. We are also beginning to see, through long-lasting genetic fragments, that those likely ancestors came together in various Frontdoor Convolution events to build up, or compound composite, what we now call our modern human qualities, the transcendent things that distinguish us from the rest of Life.

Putting aside that knotty and loaded question, which will take enormous and delicately nuanced efforts to satisfactorily answer, even in part, let’s look at a few major similarities, and differences, between biological and cultural Convolution which we can discern now, a far simpler task.

The first and most obvious one is pace. It seems natural to us in our hyper-energized state that human cultures rise, evolve, merge, layer, fade and fall far faster than even semispecies do in the rest of Nature. In the time it took the post-glacial migratory Buck Moths to produce at most a handful of new semispecies, we humans have gone through hundreds, or even thousands, of identifiable iterations of cultural production, assimilation and extinction verified through such means as oral and written accounts, preserved and recovered artifacts, other surviving arts, and linguistic patterns. And the rate of those changes has accelerated, exponentially, to the point where we feel on the verge of an emerging global uniculture composed of exploding nested subcultures and microcultures swirling beneath.

It wasn’t always this way.

There was a time when small bands of hunter-gatherers lived in complete harmony with Nature. These groups were either extended families or, at most, loose nomadic aggregations of compatible families cooperating, not competing, for common resources that were plentiful enough to sustain them together. Most of their time was spent obtaining sustenance, water, hides and other materials with which to cover themselves, making tools and later, weapons and temporary shelters. These activities all happened at the paces dictated by Nature. In other words, they were autosynchronous with their surroundings. From the cave-dwelling Denisovians and Neanderthals, to the tiny tropical island ‘hobbits’ (a proto-human analogue of the dwarf African prehistoric Mediterranean island megafauna), to the final stages of Convolutionary consolidation into us, our ancestors lived inside the redolent rhythms of Old Nature.

‘Cultures’ began when neighboring groups began to diverge in language, symbolic displays or ‘styles,’

tools, techniques, and most importantly, individual and group behaviors. Conflict also began, fanned by those new differences, whether or not resource availability or abundance was at issue. Sometimes these effects of diversification appeared after previously isolated groups came together. Suspicions arose, created by newly-evolved ‘cultural,’ and sometimes physical, differences. Most animals are territorial to some degree; it is a primitive instinct and an early evolutionary adaptation that confers many survival advantages, including the basic one of promoting spreading out, or range expansion.

Cultural Convolution began almost at the same time. Even as the loose aggregations of disparate families with common interests tightened, especially in the presence of other such groups, into tribes, there was communication and trading, not just warfare and stealing, among them. If cultures are looked upon as collections of artists and their manifold arts, they have always been in dynamic relations with one another, sharing both members and everything they produced to greater or lesser extents, while at the same time maintaining their separate identities mostly through physical distance, and sometimes by violence. The ‘leaky species’ concept, writ by growing cultural artifice far larger than it ever was by Nature, as we humans are wont to do in all our flamboyant and disruptive affairs.

By the time this isolation-contact continuum had been established, early humans had already broken with exclusively Nature-set life pacing. Things had already begun to speed up in the presence, or even mere awareness, of ‘other’ humans, very much as modern highway traffic densifies and speeds up as it approaches cities. As developing humans ‘progressed’ through the arts-enabled, population explosion-fueled, compound-compositing civilizational evolutionary stages previously outlined in the Chaons and Politics implications paper, the pace of human life rapidly pulled away from that of Nature. It is now several thousand times faster than most natural processes, and continues to accelerate. The recent invention of the internet has metastasized the acceleration, to the point where this new, artificial web’s paradoxically immersive qualities alone threaten human life itself, and indeed, all life on Earth.

The most important prisms with which to examine the Convolutionary interplay of cultures are the technological arts, or, more broadly, tools. Tools are art that produce all other art save language, song and sexual expression. One of the defining qualities of humans is their lifelong inventing and bearing of tools, even at their naked, or earliest, stages (cf. the Eidolon Maia in the frontispiece of Moths of the Past). If genes form the templates for determining the nature of not only living things, but the interactions that cause them to compound-composite layered adaptations and therefore evolve, then tools serve the same function in the creation and evolution of human cultures. A reductionist definition of culture is that which tools produce, or in the case of language, song, and sex, enhance. Of course, all those tools are created, borne, and wielded by humans, often now in mind only, sequenced by ever-increasing layers of other tools doing more and more parts of our complex modern acts of creating.

The web of cultural history, because it developed and runs so much faster than the biospheric web that undergirds it, is literally limitless. It is endless intertwined stories of tools creating, diversifying, and speeding up our economy, the life of culture. Try to run a single thread of Convolutionary progress through it, as I did in brief with aircraft. You will end up, no matter which continuum you start with, intersecting an infinite number of other continua, in a feast of perpetual discoveries of connections.

By doing this exercise, you will also get deeply in touch with true Conservatism. The conservative spirit, manifest in such derivative words as ‘Conservationist’ and ‘Conservator,’ springs from the desire to cherish, save and protect our entire home biosphere and its history. And that includes the entire span of humanity and our history. If we can learn to cultivate that pure, original, Platonic spirit, casting aside reactionary revanchism, or ‘backward longing,’ we surely will save our planet, and ourselves.