Although there were multiple authors involved in this work, I am the primary author. It was I who was responsible for the overwhelming majority of the work behind the theory and its conveyance. If there is anyone to blame, I am the primary party responsible. I am choosing to remain anonymous for now as I view this scientific advance as a guerrilla movement, and wish to keep all of my options on the table going forward.
How did all of this come about? I once found myself isolating and identifying microbes in nature. After pulling out a specific microbe, it would get an ID by 16s rRNA barcoding, an antibiotic sensitivity profile, and then a reference culture would be dispersed in glycerin, and put in a deep freeze.
Another culture would be kept alive on a slant for reference and research, periodically being restreaked and reslanted. One thing I noticed was how slow the colonies would often grow when these bugs were first pulled out of their natural environment. As time went on, however, the colonies would grow ever faster, and become ever bigger in ever shorter amounts of time. Even their colony morphology would often change as well.
This was no mystery. In their natural environment, these bugs were complex, finely honed machines, designed to exploit a very narrow niche in a very harsh environment. They spent a lot of effort fighting off a myriad of threats which sought to kill them. Host immune systems would destroy them if possible, and this therefore required that various materials be produced to attenuate this threat. Alterations to the host organism’s biology could improve their environmental conditions (while adversely affecting their competition’s functionality), providing them with additional advantage, and some of these microbes would produce various materials to do this. Some would even construct little protein syringe needles, puncture an epithelial cell from their host organism, and shoot in signals to confuse or fool their host’s cells. The host’s cells would have no idea that the signals guiding its behavior weren’t its own signals. It would thus become like a zombie, subservient to the bacterial cell.
One microbe might find that other species of microbes would take their food, or even eat them, and these threats too, had to be dealt with through expenditures of energy, and the production of still other materials. The food available to them was limited in nature, and thus they would evolve complex machines designed to only digest a specific compound or compounds, to exploit a specific niche. They might even evolve to alter their metabolic processes, extracting energy less efficiently, but producing metabolites which killed their competition.
As a result, these organisms would spend a lot of the energy they consumed doing a myriad of things to survive, and this energy would, as a result, not go into reproducing. In nature, any microbe which did not have all of these adaptations would be quickly killed, and would be a Darwinian dead end. Thus those I isolated were programmed by eons of evolution to expend a lot of energy on a lot of complex efforts to keep themselves alive in their natural environment. As a result of all of this magnificent complexity, they grew quite slowly following their isolation.
On Tryptic Soy Agar, however, millions of cells would each grow freely, absent any selective pressure like that applied by nature. Invariably, a few would lose a gene here or there, which would disable some of these complex adaptations to their natural environment. These cells, now unburdened by these complexities, would channel all of their energy into reproducing their simpler descendents, and they would grow faster. Instead of preparing to fight off the microbial hordes, they would simply focus on converting substrate into new (simplistic) cells, thereby reproducing as quickly as possible. They would out-populate their more complex peers, and eventually become the defacto form of the isolate. As time went on, a population of complex, finely honed microorganisms would become a population of simple cells that reproduced quickly, and possessed none of the finely honed complexity of their ancestors. Under this r-selection of these microbes, survival of the fittest would give way to a reproductive free for all which would be won by the least evolved among them.
As a scientist, I could not help but marvel at the brilliant complexity they had evolved over millions of years, and I could not help but view its loss to the chaos of time as kind of sad, in some strange way. In a state of nature, such poorly evolved specimens would be killed quickly, despite how well they did on agar. Although I cannot possibly explain why, I viewed this devolution of their complex perfection as a loss of some sort. Subconsciously, I think this registered as familiar with me on some level, but I never paid it much mind.
Always fascinated by the marine environment, and a huge fan of saltwater aquariums and reef systems, I sat down one night to watch a PBS show on cephalopods. One segment highlighted the mating rituals of the Australian Giant Cuttlefish. In that segment, large males fought for the right to mate with a female, and father her children. Clearly, this competitive test of male fitness prior to mating was fitness-enhancing for the species. However, periodically, weaker, less honorable males would make themselves look like females, so they could sneak by the manly fighting males, and impregnate a female on the sly.
As I watched this, something in the back of my mind clicked. I had seen this before, somewhere. Manly men, seeking to pit their abilities against each other in rule governed competitions of fitness, and feeble, effete cowards, who would be eaten alive in a state of nature, adopting feminine countenances, and desperately seeking to avoid the terror of getting destroyed by their betters. Bravery and cowardice. Honorable and dishonorable. Honesty, and the lack of honesty. Selfless, for the good of a species, and shameless selfishness, for the good of one’s basest urges, at the expense of one’s species.
Images flowed through my head. Competitive Warrior Cuttlefish and cowardly transvestite cuttlefish. Evolved bacteria that were honed by competition, and devolved colonies of useless microbes dependent upon the state. Dick Marcinko and Barney Frank. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. John Wayne in the Quiet Man, and that mousy guy who was always kissing Victor McLaglen’s ass, saying “Aye Squire Danahur, that be a right fine idea! Nothin’ short of a genius ya be!”
As the images flowed through my brain, I saw one side, brave, strong, and honorable, the other, groveling, weak, and pathetic. The presence of one side enhanced the fitness of the population, while the persistence of the other deteriorated it. One was genuinely good and created magnificence, and one was not. The daring and the cowards. The patriots and the traitors. The Warrior and the Hippie. The Capitalist and the Communist. The stoic NRA member, and the easily frightened and insecure anti-gun pussy. The Marine, and the Womyn’s studies major at UC Berkeley. Republicans and Democrats, Conservatives and Liberals. Complexity in adaptation and a devolved simplistic fecundity. Evolution and Devolution. The production of a great society, and the decline into chaos of a collapsing society. It all made sense. I thought back to the microbes, and the conditions which produced them, thought of r/K theory, and all of this was borne in my mind.
Have no doubt, this is all correct. In fifty, or one hundred years, this would undoubtedly have been described by many others, had I not seen it. The similarities between politics and r/K Theory are just too obvious. However due to the whim of circumstances, you are seeing this all here first.
I don’t know why it hasn’t been written about before, but it is my pleasure and my honor to be among the first to scientifically demonstrate the inferiority and danger that Liberalism poses to our species and our societies. I hope you enjoy being a part of this nascent intellectual movement, and enjoy your stay here.