Competitive Exclusion, Liberals, and the r-strategy

Spoos commented below, pointing out that DRD4 7r doesn’t immediately make an individual r, and I agree. You almost certainly need environmental input in most cases. I thought this reply was enough for a post itself, since it may begin to introduce a complexity which I have avoided approaching before, in the hopes the initial concept of r and K as ideological foundations would sink in first. Once the initial concept internalizes, then the nuances make more sense, instead of confusing the issue as they might otherwise.

Spoos’ comments will be in italics:

I just wanted to note that DRD4 7R doesn’t seem to always be sufficient to cause r-strategy behavior. In particular, if you were to look at previous generations who were reared in more stable environments, I think it’s even money that the association with liberalism, and quite probably promiscuity also, would disappear.

I agree. I too, suspect the 7r didn’t evolve specifically to produce r, so much as to produce adaptability to a variable environment. Even the parenting issue transmitting to the children kind of indicates this. During harsh times, as the population is culled back, and the more r die off, a reservoir of 7r will remain within the K-component, as it is forced to follow a more K strategy. Let resources grow abundant, and times start to run fast however, and dopamine surges. All it would take is a few of those K-raised 7r offspring to go r by chance, in raising their offspring, who would then themselves go r. Suddenly the allele finds itself multiplying exponentially, forming a quickly growing component of the population following the r-strategy.

There is also no guarantee that the K-selective competition won’t follow you to the frontier; I would think r-selected people would have an easier time in a more settled and consequently less lethal environment (post-Neolithic Revolution).

Agreed, but I am looking at our early spread, since that offered a split environment, and this might explain why there was a bifurcation in desires and psychologies in our species. Since we became wedded to the land, there is no doubt, civilization offers advantage to r, at least until resource shortage or disease comes into play and forces competition. However, that is true only if r’s can exploit the security offered by K’s (while continuing to compete with them within the group). That means an anticompetitive social structure, and the free resource availability to lead K’s to allow it.

As for the initial spread, if you have a subset population, with a migrating urge, a hedonistic psychology, reduced disgust/increased toleranceand desire for “unusualness” (in environment, food, and sex), and an aversion to competition/violence, you will have a cohort which will spread like overflowing water into what would previously have been less viable niches. If there was the ability to reproduce rapidly on atypical resource streams, the r’s would spread water-like, around any island-like pockets of K-selected populations of hominids, living off of resources the K hominids wouldn’t touch.

If they then had the time to build up their populations within the niche, and adapt to a gradually more aggressive, K-selecting environment, they would then be able to begin to compete with the indigenous populations, and try to penetrate the niches of those other populations.

With regards to migration, I very much doubt that much of Eurasia was unpopulated by other hominids by the time H. sapiens got there. Neanderthal man in Europe, Denisovan man in Asia, and even a couple hominins in Africa.

True, but those hominids were usually assumed to be less social, existing more spread out in small tribes, and requiring a higher caloric intake with higher protein content, if my read is correct. We did occupy a slightly different niche, at least initially.

It is funny, though. You say that, and the first thing which pops into my head is a principle in ecology/microbiology called (Gause’s law of) Competitive Exclusion. A well known commercial example of an expoit of this would be various Bacillus spore preparations in commercial aquaculture. Fish farmers had a problem, in that pathogenic bacteria would build up in the water of their highly crowded fish tanks, and begin to eat away at their fish, creating massive ulcers on the skin which would grow into the flesh, and this would kill their harvests.

The various pathogens which do this (often Aeromonads and Pseudomonads) are very hardy within that aquatic ecosystem (and competitive), and would almost always be in the water, eating dissolved organics, and just waiting to emerge, and take down a system if water conditions deteriorated or fish got stressed and immuno-compromised. There were other species of harmless bacteria which ate the same food as the pathogens, and which didn’t infect the fish or make them sick. But these grew slowly, and if you added them to a tank, they would be out-competed, and quickly driven from the system by the more capable pathogen.

However, if you culture the harmless bacteria in enormous numbers in isolation, and consistently flood the tanks with huge quantities of it, the flood of less able bacteria will drive the pathogen towards extinction in the system (not completely, but you get the idea). Even though the harmless bacteria are less “fit,” if they are thrown at the system in large enough numbers they will eat the more fit pathogen species’ food, and gradually starve them. If the system was left alone, the pathogens would out-reproduce the harmless microbes and dominate the ecosystem. But if you artificially increase the reproductive rate of the harmless microbes, by culturing them, and adding them in large numbers, then they will win the battle through attrition, and the pathogen’s CFU count in the water will drop to nearly undetectable. Today, there are fish farms which buy the spore preparations, and add them to their tanks at regular intervals, to flood the system with harmless bacteria.

Maybe the 7r allele did the same thing in some circumstances in our evolutionary history, where it created r. The K’s within a population would have made the species hardy and competitive in its unique niche, within its home territory. Meanwhile, the component of the 7r’s which was less capable in childhood, was stressed during their rearing, and went r at adulthood.

These r’s would parasitize the K’s productivity, and constantly proliferate, and migrate outward, like a flood of less competitive hominid spores, drawn from the less fit “waste” of the population. Where they found uninhabited land, they settled, and created new colonies, as per the model here. Where they ran into more K’s they continued the migration, until they found an unpopulated niche. If no other niche was available, they would just keep getting thrown into the breach, and ecologically eroding the neighboring tribes, much as a continuously added spore prep of Bacillus cereus, though less fit, will kill back the pathogenic Aeromonads and Pseudomonads.

An r-component to our species could be why Neanderthals, Denisovians, and others who lacked such a fecund component, were all driven out of existence. The reproductive flexibility it would offer would be an advantage in a competition to dominate an ecosystem.

Now, a thought experiment which may or may not be related to reality. Suppose the r-type 7r’s also evolved to function as a sort of evolved biological/genetic weapon, that was designed to spread a population’s genes further, after the initial migration was over, and there was nowhere else (uninhabited) to migrate to. Jost and other researchers describe among Liberals a tendency to travel, an embrace of foreigners, reduced sexual/mate discrimination, high sex drive, and a drive to sympathize with out-groups while being disloyal to in-group (That is from Jost, a Liberal researcher, not me).

Suppose I am part of a Warrior tribe, with it’s own specific TRIBE genes. This tribe, as a byproduct of it’s normal reproduction and competitive selection, produces a genetic waste stream of r-migrators (among the “loser” component of the DRD4-7r children, in whom stress drives them towards r as adults). This r component is carrying most of our TRIBE genes, while exhibiting the Liberal traits above.

These r-migrators are programmed to leave our (violent/competitive) homeland (maybe just to “travel,” or seek out the novel, even). They end up driven to travel to neighboring tribes, appease and join these neighboring tribes, spread our genes through cuckoldry and promiscuity, infect the tribe with an r-genotype of out-group favoring traitors, and all fo them then betray those tribes in competitions such as war or economics, getting the neighboring tribe’s Warriors killed.

It would benefit my tribe’s genetic drive, especially if we were going to wage war regularly with our out-groups. This diffusion of traitor psychologies, programmed to migrate out, “embrace” neighboring tribes as their own, and then undercut the neighboring tribe’s ability to defend themselves, would sort of set the stage for our domination. If we were the only tribe practicing it, our genes would rapidly permeate all the neighboring K tribes, while also preparing them for defeat.

I don’t say that is the case, per se (though obviously, it could make sense, if you look at things as just a product of Dawkin’s selfish genes). I just raise that speculation, to show that these psychologies could theoretically, be way more complex, and have evolved to serve many more purposes in modern times, than we can see at first glance, or as I present here. I don’t have all the answers, but I think this discussion is an interesting one to have, and just the r/K paradigm alone could lead us in new directions which would explain things we don’t yet understand.

Hopefully Liberals can look at such things, without immediately denying the possibility in an effort to avoid touching upon personal insecurities about their own natures. I think the discussion could be very productive to our understanding of our world, and our understanding of ourselves.

Thank you for the feedback, Spoos.