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Common Magical Metaphors: Evolution

  
 
Seth
00:28 / 13.04.05
I thought it’d be interesting to look at some of the metaphors we frequently use when we talk about and use magic. Many of these are taken from other disciplines and used as a rough theoretical model onto which we graft our own ideas and practises. It occurs to me that we too often declare premature understanding of the source material that we draw upon when we create our magical or psychological theories, and that the full breadth of what we touch upon as enthusiastic amateurs is far stranger and more inspirational than we realise it to be.

We can easily assume that we know it all and settle for a shallow or inaccurate level of comprehension. The idea is to approach a subject as freshly as we can, with curiosity and a willingness to be corrected if we muddle our facts and thinking.

There are often allusions to these ideas in other threads, but the idea here is to explore the source of the metaphor in depth. Hopefully by doing this we can get a sense of how our ideas match or diverge from the disciplines from which they took their inspiration. It’d be good to be aware of how far the analogies can be stretched, where the strengths and weaknesses are. Hopefully some headz from outside the Temple forum can chip in if they happen to be particularly clued up in any specific area. If the idea works then it’d be cool to have similar threads on quantum physics, complexity theory, AI and computer programming and systems thinking.

To begin with, evolution. I’ve noticed a great many books, posts and interviews in which the subject is of central importance to people’s worldviews. I understand it to mean adaptation to one’s environment, a context which colours how I see Dawkins’ and Blackmore’s ideas about memes and tropes. Because I understand evolution from this perspective, I find myself disagreeing with commentators who refer to “the end goal of evolution” as though there were some hypothetical highest final stage, or indeed refer to some organisms as “higher” and others as “lower.”

One thing that’s fascinated me since I first had a conversation with Cass on the subject is Hsp90 (more information here, although much of the link is pitched above my level). Please excuse me if I get my science wrong, I make no claims to be anything other than casually interested in this stuff. Apparently it’s a chemical within DNA that suppresses mutation. Latent mutation constantly continues to occur, but is prevented from being manifest until there is some kind of environmental threat to the species. The usual victims of this kind of research are the poor old drosophila: when levels of Hsp90 were artificially reduced under laboratory conditions the next generation of fruit flies emerged fucked into a cocked hat. Different wing structures, eyes on stalks, some having so little resemblance to the parent organism that they seemed to be a completely new species. Modern evolutionary theory suggests that adaptation occurs in rapid jumps: this research would seem to back that up.

This got me thinking about psychological stress and relating the idea to memes. There’s often a point that people reach when they realise that they have to either “change their life or die,” sometimes in a figurative sense, sometimes in a very literal sense. I’ve experienced this several times myself, none more so than when I made the decision to leave my wife. In the week in which I made the decision I knew that I would change significantly as a result, but I wasn’t quite aware of exactly how much. Using the Hsp90/evolution metaphor, I had been mutating at a latent level on all fronts, learning valuable lessons about my choice of vocation, spirituality and religion, beliefs, personality, goals. This had all stacked up out of sight, and the decision to seek my own happiness outside my marriage when I realised that my current situation could never fulfil me opened the floodgate. Over the following eighteen months I changed in a rapid manner that alarmed many of my close friends, because every new characteristic had a chance to manifest and reintegrate in the new life I’d allowed myself to have.

I’m now at the beginning stages of thinking how to use this as a model for creating some change techniques. One of the ideas involves accelerating the feedback loop between the individual’s current lifestyle and the consequences of the lifestyle, potentially by using timeline therapy as popularised by NLP. For example, many people feel immune to the health consequences of smoking (myself included, I’m considering ways of kicking the habit) because the feedback loop is too long in duration (in this case the consequences to their health being defined in terms of “feedback” on their actions). Any decent psychology of managing people will insist on the necessity of timely feedback shortly, it’s how people learn and change best. To shorten the loop could potentially increase the individuals awareness that change has to come, or to increase the immanence of the environmental threat to use the language of the Hsp90 metaphor.

These are unfinished thoughts, and I’m hoping that there’ll be some New Scientist types who can offer a better and ore complete ideas for us to play with. I’d also be really interested in a thorough critique of that awesome Charlie Kaufman movie Adaptation, as I suspect it contains a huge amount that’s relevant.

Thoughts?
 
 
Seth
00:20 / 14.04.05
Furthering the thinking of using Hsp90 as a springboard, I’m considering the device of the reductio ad absurdum: taking any train of thought or manifestation of behaviour to its extreme conclusion in order to highlight its flaws. Again, the feedback loop is shortened, the crisis point is reached ahead of time in order to give the individual time to plan contingencies.

The same seems to be true of many initiation rituals. It seems in many cultures these consist of the artificial manufacturing of an ordeal, be it physical pain, deprivation or food or sleep, positioning oneself in an unsafe environment. Such rituals accompany important developmental stages, for example the change into adulthood or the taking up of shamanic office. Creating such a trial through suffering increases the level of stress and therefore encourages the “change or die” reaction. New ways of thinking and being are generated as a survival response, which are then integrated after the ritual and become staples in the repertoire (consider the accounts of shamanic initiation in which the individuals magical tutelage is imparted at these crisis points).

Last year a my friend J ran a gestalt technique with me with the intention of helping me to come to terms with my anger, something which seems to fuel a great deal of my personality but which I’d previously been frightened to express. He did this by creating a no-win scenario in which we both took similar and opposing roles (Kobayashi Maru), and once it had escalated he pushed me.

So we ended up getting into a fight. Beating the tar out of each other, rolling around in headlocks and pummelling each other. I totally underestimated him too, he’s a well built little fucker.

I reckon the gestalt line was bullshit. He just fancied a scrap.

Had him in the third round, though.

Again, this scenario engineered a crisis point: an event in which all my previous experience still left me unprepared, and the only recourse was to try something new, in a pressurised scenario.

One of the ways in which this thinking appeals to me is that it provides a different understanding of stress. It’s so often seen in purely a negative light, it’s viewed as a sign of dysfunction when it seems to me that there’s a certain amount of legitimate strain that it’s appropriate to feel. I’ve heard it said that the five most common causes of large-scale stress in life are getting a new job, moving house, marriage, children and bereavement. Over the last couple of years I’ve checked every item in on that list anything from one to three times: the stress caused wasn’t always pleasant, although sometimes I enjoyed the state of being pushed past my previous limits.
 
 
Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown
05:54 / 14.04.05
Seth, if I may boil down and oversimplify, you're basically reitering, through a genetic metaphor, that through strife, suffering, and stress we achieve a greater chance of advancing ourselves? That about right? Sorry for horribly oversimplifying. Loved your post stuff, BTW, I saved that lecture on Hsp90 for later use. It sounds like neat stuff.

While I don't see evolution as nessecarily having a given "end", I think that there will come a point where evolution will reach a stage where the next forseeable leap forwards cannot be comprehended until the step before it is achieved. That is to say, we cannot claim to know what will occur when we ascend/transcend/achieve Nirvana/become starstuff/convert ourself into psychmorphic gestalt-beings/whatever. Evolution, thus, is unknowable and only predictable up to a certain point.
 
 
Seth
08:43 / 14.04.05
That's the premise in a nutshell, yeah. My main point of consideration is that through knowing this, and by using the specific metaphor, how is it possible to create practical applications?

That is to say, we cannot claim to know what will occur when we ascend/transcend/achieve Nirvana/become starstuff/convert ourself into psychmorphic gestalt-beings/whatever.

Is this the same idea as the Akira/2001/Evangelion evolution? I'm interested in where this idea comes from due to its wide prevalence. Is this the occultist's version of the Christian hope of heaven?

I'm slightly suspicious of the convenience of an idea of an evolutionary step that strips away our physical bodies. It seems to me as though it's based on preference rather than on fact (and indeed that preference being rooted in that old buddy Cartesian dualism). Would anyone mind reassuring me on that front?T
 
 
--
10:45 / 14.04.05
I think a fifth-dimensional entity would have some type of physical form, just on a much vaster scale then the forms we're accustomed to.
 
 
Unconditional Love
11:31 / 14.04.05
perhaps further evolution/heaven are just based on hope, something ahead of us to keep moving towards to keep trying accomplish. goals, motivations.

a carrot on a stick. if we keep looking forwards,we can if were not careful blind ourselves to where we are, and miss the oppertunity to change in relation to all the present pain and suffering within us in these moments, rather than transform through the utter inhumanity we are living in at present,we can instead bury our heads in the shifting sands of conceptualisation.

wearing blindfolds pinning donkey tails to words.

future evolution is in a sense a very good comparrisson to the idea of heaven, just as the apple falls on newton so eve picks the fruit from the tree. scientific illuminism borrows and remolds the prior christian system very heavily in order to allow an easy transition, they tuck into each other very comfortably.

is there an ongoing linear evolution? or is the earth spinning in dizzy cycles,rotating the events, lives, has this all happened before?
 
 
illmatic
11:46 / 14.04.05
Is this the occultists version of heaven

Seth, you are exactly on the money. I personally feel all these bold claims about 2012, post-human consciousness, the “singularity” and so, are just simply the same mechanism in a shiny new fractal form, and just as unreal. There’s no getting away from being human, much as we might like to. True, our society is undergoing rapid changes but the idea that we’re all going to ascend to the cyber-ether/5th dimesion is just a fantasy, and one that’s eaten up uncritically by most occultists.

Personally I do have some time for some formulations of the idea – Nema’s for instance, not because I think it’s “true”, but because she’s an intelligent and lucid writer, with an awareness of the subjectivity of her visions, with many, many other good things to say.

As to “evolution” – I don’t think any hardcore Darwinian would actually recognise the uses to which the word “evolution” is put – not that all these uses are without benefit, it’s just they don’t fit the “actual facts” as science understands them, to the best our current knowledge . One of the main things about “evolution” in scientific terms is that it’s a completely random process – it’s driven by random mutation, with some of these mutations bestowing privileging survival traits on individuals who as a result live longer and have more offspring than their rivals. Their offspring survive in turn, and so the mutation spreads. There’s no higher purpose driving it, higher consciousness isn’t leading us on to the garden path to the eschaton. All that’s happening is the inevitable flaws in any copying process are being “pressure
tested” by their environment.

Now, I’m not saying this is the fixed truth and no one should ever dare to differ. Science is subject to half truths and fashions as much as any other area of human endeavour (perhaps a bit less) i.e. look at the way in which Darwinism has rose to it’s current ascendancy – I’m sure our knowledge will change, hugely. In addition, I think there may be some benefit in describing say, changes in society under the rubric of evolution. Perhaps we can argue that Western society has “evolved” in some way, or has evolutionary tendencies within it. But I still think it’s good to be aware of these areas before we start chucking metaphors around. As in any communication we should be thoroughly aware of the metaphors we’re using and their limitations. The map is not the territory, the menu is not the meal etc etc.

Off topic - I’m actually reading a book at the moment called “Sparks of Life” by James Strick which is about the controversies around “spontaneous generation” in Victorian times. Spontaneous generation being the belief that life can and does arise spontaneously out of decaying matter, minerals etc under the right conditions and didn’t just occur way back in the primordial soup. Obviously, these matters were of concern to the early Victorian evolutionists such as TH Huxley, Darwin etc and the book details all the alliances and arguments s that went on, all the background contests before an “orthodoxy” was formed. I can’t recommend the book unreservedly as it’s a bit dry, but I thought it was worth mentioning as the actual history of behind evolution itself is as fascinating – if not more so – than any occult (mis) use of the metaphor.
 
 
jeed
12:53 / 14.04.05
Bit of an essay this i'm afraid...

You can think of hsp90 as a molecular handbrake.

DNA codes for proteins, nothing else, there's all kinds of groovy machinery to make sure everything gets copied correctly through a couple of systems until it gets made into protein. Once the building blocks of the protein are assembled in the right order (primary structure), they've got to then fold on themselves into 3-d (secondary structure), and interact with other block-chains (tertiary structure) to form the working protein.

The primary structure/sequence of blocks is pretty key to how they fold, but there's an element of chance, of trial and error folding, based on non-linear dynamics (chaos . Stuff like hsp90/70 (called chaperones) increases the probability that they'll fold correctly, and not get stuck down a dead end, misfold, and stick together (which'll kill the cell). Some hold proteins at a particular point til the chaperone's activated, and then they allow their helpee protein to fold and activate. They're all about timing basically, think of them as counterbalances and springs in an old clock.

During times when the cell/organism is stressed (that's where they got their name 'Heat Shock Protein - HSP), hsps are in short supply. Other key proteins start unfolding as proteins misfold if there's loads of salt/heat/cold around and hsp90 starts to leave some of it's regular proteins and go and help out elsewhere, leaving it's regular, possibly mutated proteins to activate weird and wonderful pathways. HSP's also a protein itself, and as it's concerned with cell division, and acting as a relay for x-hundred other things that communicate with hundreds of other things in the cell and outside the cell. So it's really feckin complicated.

There's a bit of work that's been done in plants, with pretty much the same results as the fruit fly you mentioned...lots of physical changes occur when you block the copying of hsp90 from DNA to protein, or when you stress the plants with heat.

So, all this is showing is that Hsp90 might be able to soak up the effects of different genes and mutations when everything in the environment's as normal, whilst allowing the variation/mutation/evolution to kick in when stress occurs. Basically you could see it as a panic button "we're fucked if we don't change soon", press the hsp90 button - mutate away, and hopefully one or more 'll work.

So, as far as I understand what you're saying, I reckon it's applicable to what you're talking about, mutations (in gene, meme, or whatever) are stored until the brakes (hsp, circumstances, ideas) are removed by stressful conditions, (or meditation, or psychedelics, what have you), is that about it? The thing about doing the work in flies, is that their life cycles are so short you can see the effects, if you can run with the thoughts or behaviour, and shorten your own loop, then yep, good system

Lucky, yep, you're right, evolution as we understand it (which may or may not be true) is totally random, and ask a Darwinian about the idea that something's driving us to some ideal form or supercontextualwooyayintegration, hopefully in the next 7 years, and they'll laugh in your face. There are genetic changes, some of these are great, give us an advantage, and we call that evolution. Some of them fuck us over, and you couldn't call that evolution (in the linear, aiming for something sense), even though it's the same process. I mean it's possible we'll all become energy-beings, forever mooching around the universe like an incandescent fart, but it's just as possible that we'll all become blue tiger-person-ninjas with whirring nunchaku tails of death. Which'll be nice.
 
 
grant
21:56 / 14.04.05
I don't think there are "energy-person" genes, are there?

To reach an endpoint of evolution, you'd have to express every possible combination of every gene... in every possible environment. Right?

And even genes express themselves differently depending on where they are on a chromosome or what their neighbors are doing. So the number of potential outcomes is huge (and so is the number of possible environments).

-----

I've read The Orchid Thief, the book Adaptation failed to adapt to the screen, and there's an interesting stretch of metaphor going on in there that seems related. Susan Orlean draws a link between swamp ecosystems (lots of organisms writhing and struggling and stacking up on top of each other) and the development of South Florida urban areas. There's an implication that the process even extends into sociology, if I remember right, although she's really just talking about construction & architecture & sprawl.

But that idea sort of crystallized a lot of thoughts I'd had about this area where I live -- how miasmal weirdness seems to come out of it. Variety appears to beget variety in this eco-/ideo-system.
 
 
Seth
23:52 / 14.04.05
Excellent posts from toast and Illmatic.

I can understand a lot of the thinking that goes with the idea of either evolving beyond the need for a physical body, or evolving a new "perfect" body. A life without pain, death, illness, disability, acne and porky pie around the waist, without looking at yourself in the mirror and crying (if you're so disposed).

I guess when these things are an issue then the idea that we are our bodies is no comfort at all.
 
 
--
00:12 / 15.04.05
In regards to the human body I think there's always room for improvement.

Theoretically, the universe could "end" at any second, so perhaps a mass evolution on a quantum scale isn't that hard to imagine. I wouldn't liken it to belief in Heaven (in which one would still resemble one's prebious self) as no one can imagine what such an existence might be like, being as abstract as it is.
 
 
--
00:16 / 15.04.05
Sometime ago I experienced what can only be considered to be an atavistic resurgence in that I remembered all my past incarnations at the same time, all the way back to the first cells. What I saw was a progression of gradually evolving forms and some of the things I saw beyond the human state were, to say the least, very eye-opening. Certainly I don't think there's an end point to evolution, as I'm sure a 5D entity could evolve into a 6D entity, and so on and so on. But I think that, whatever source I was receiving these images from knew my limited human perspective wouldn't be able to comprehend some of these more abstract forms so all I can remember up to are the ones who are... a little less abstract, I guess. I'm not saying this is how the universe works, but it's my working model and it informs most of my magical thought and system.
 
 
grant
01:23 / 15.04.05
What I've been trying to say is that I don't think that's evolution in the same sense as the process to which a biologist refers. That's some other kind of sudden break -- probably more akin to an electron changing valences or a quark squidging into different kinds of space.

Evolution is just about recombination of simple elements into new things. In a lot of ways, evolution resembles computing -- it's all about crunching large numbers (of genes, of individuals). But the hardware doesn't really change. Cytoplasm is cytoplasm. My blood cells are a lot more like a cell from spirulina blue-green algae than they are like a flame, or a light bulb, or a sun.

The metaphor, for me, is really about how simple things express themselves in complicated ways (when reacting to environmental pressure). I suppose that's adaptation for you. It also involves continuity over generations -- little changes adding up to huge leaps over millions of years.

I think the continuity of organisms in a population over time (ancestors and descendants) is analogous to the continuity of cells in a body. Small, simple elements that add up to a complex whole.
 
 
Seth
16:53 / 15.04.05
Is it true that any physical feature of an organism is held in DNA regardless of whether it is useful in the current environment? I’ve heard accounts of humans who are born with tails, for example. I guess the usefulness of these latent genetic features is that should the environment alter these are already in our repertoire, and are kept by for their future utility regardless of whether they’re currently redundant.

This makes me think of the usefulness of all our experience. We learn so many skills throughout our lives, are capable of being so many different people when the situation requires. My ability to plan projects and analyse statistics is not something that I need to use at all times, but it’s there for me to draw upon when required.

One potential technique could be to catalogue all our past our experience when we feel short of options or stuck. Is there a previous manifestation of the being I call “me” that would be better suited to the current challenges I’m facing?
 
 
Unconditional Love
18:32 / 15.04.05
my past catalogue of selves became very useful when i gave up smoking, i turned to the child in me to help me give up, i was smoking as a game, a pretense to being an adult, it also helped me stop drinking, for very similar reasons.

a child can easily pick up and adopt new games to play then get bored and find another game to play. it tends to be when thinking in an approved adult like manner that identity becomes stuck in a mould.

ie you have to grow up and become something now, like one of your parents or an adult you have learnt to mimic.

instead of playing at being somebody or a behaviour. you are that behaviour, adults confusing behaviours for themselves.

i try to stay in that place, but find it more and more difficult as i play the game of getting older and am expected to grow up, and stop playing around at things.

because i need to learn to play more at being responsible, and exclusively rule bound.

ive found its when i mistake these things for reality that i am most unhappy, when on the other hand i am just playing around and adapting to what ever i find, happiness just seems to be a by product of an attitude.

employing old selves in this way keeps me from becoming too entrenched in one identity and allows me to shuffle myself around a bit when needed.

consciousness as formless and void in a sense allows for it to fit into any container. or put another way by becoming nothing you can be anything you want to be.

its not as easy to do as it is to express.
 
 
Bard: One-Man Humaton Hoedown
23:32 / 17.04.05
Wow. I'd totally forgotten I posted here, lol.

Anyway, I feel the vague need to defend my post above, if only so that I'm not seen as some salvation-happy nutcase.

I'm not real big on the 2012 theory. If we were supposed to reach a certain point by that time, I somehow doubt 7 years is going to be enough time to reach it. If its supposed to be some point where everything changes, right down the physical/spiritual level...why, and how? Just not really something I buy into.

I do, however, think that we can reach that transcendent/ascension state which moves us along to another state of being. Maybe its not physical. Maybe its a spiritual evolution (to use the term loosley, as has been argued earlier), I don't know. My point is that, if it exists, I don't think we can fully conceive or guess at what it is or what it means, for the same reason that the apes that evolved into homo erectus probably couldn't conceive of the change that would occur over the generations in their lineage.
 
 
grant
19:27 / 18.04.05
Is it true that any physical feature of an organism is held in DNA regardless of whether it is useful in the current environment?

You mean Haeckel's "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" theory?

I love Haeckel as an artist, but this observation doesn't count as a scientific fact... more like a rule of thumb that has since been disproved in the details.

I think it's true that any physical feature seen in a given species can potentially express itself in subsequent generations, but that's not exactly the same thing.

The tails-on-humans thing is also a little strange, since "tails" isn't really a human quality. I mean, obviously it is, since it occasionally happens, but I don't think you're using it that way -- you're assuming that we have a tailed simian ancestor, some traits from whom can be expressed in modern humans, right?

I don't know enough about human evolution to know if any of that is actually true. I'm 95% sure that if a critter has a tail, it's not only not a standard Homo sapiens, but not even that close to a Homo sapiens. Not a Homo at all. That is, not only of a different species, but also a different genus. None of the great apes have tails. I'm pretty sure "Toumai" (Sahelanthropus tchadensis), the oldest hominid on record didn't have one either.

We may have genes for tails because they're left over from some point more than 10 million years ago when our ancestors had tails, but that'd be "we" in the biggest sense -- out of the whole population of human beings, some will have the recessive gene. Not all of us. You probably don't.

And we'd really only start noticing tailed folks if there was some environmental pressure making tails useful for reproduction over a series of generations (that is, more than 100 years at least, and more like more than 1,000 years). It's a population thing moreso than an individual thing.

At least, that's my (unqualified) understanding.
 
 
jeed
09:07 / 21.04.05
As far as 'DNA memory' goes...

Some genes can be temporarily switched off / blocked by something in the cell, and some can be totally removed by mutation. I'm not entirely sure whether something like a tail in humans would be caused by a removal of a repressor on the 'tail gene' , or a mutation of a 'no-tail gene' that usually leaves us all with only the tiny vestigial 'tail' at the base of the spine. So there'll be an area of the genome that's given over to the development of the base of your spine, but whether a blocked tail gene or an active no-tail gene sits on that area, i'm not sure.

This is a really good webpage that i found a year or so ago to throw at a creationist, it's got an excellent rundown on a few mechanisms and features of evolution as we understand it.

Evolution lecture

I'd agree that evolution's a population thing, in that it's difficult to call the emergence of a trait 'evolution' until the quality is expressed across enough individuals to become significant. Anyway, if a particular mutation/step really gives the individual a serious evolutionary advantage, it should grow to be a trait of a hefty part of the population within a few generations.

My own understanding would be that we might have reached the point of physical evolution where we can't go much further, as it's unlikely we'll be put under the physical stresses as a population that 'll kick mechanisms such as hsp90 into play, for example (unless that nuclear winter/smallpox thing happens). There's always the possibility that we'll work out how to harness biophotons/orgone/quantum vibration of course, which as grant says, would probably be more of a paradigm shift/quantum leap/what have you. My point is that I now see evolution in a mental/memetic sense, and it probably has been for the past x-thousand years since Homo Sapiens arrived. Unless another species arrives that supersedes us in the same way Homo Sapiens superseded the neanderthals (I'm looking at you, x-men) I think we're stuck with what we've got.

I think it'd be difficult for anyone to argue that the invention of gunpowder or the microchip wasn't as significant an evolutionary step as when the apes started to walk upright, or farm their land. I suppose the debate would be whether the fact that knowledge isn't incorporated into our DNA stops this process being termed evolution. Saying that, we're 60% or so silent or 'junk' DNA anyway, maybe that's where we store the knowledge (or not).
 
 
Seth
12:13 / 21.04.05
Thanks for clarifying that, grant and toast.

toast: what's your background? I like your writing on the subject.
 
 
jeed
12:26 / 21.04.05
I'm doing a PhD at the minute into how psychotropics and antidepressants work, and my backgrounds in biochem/biomolecular science, I'm also doing a PPE degree on the side with the OU. I kinda feel I should, ever since one of my biochem coursemates found me reading a bioethics textbook and asked "what you reading that for?" , I'm taking up the slack.

Just as an aside, I'm nowt but a novice at a lot of the stuff that gets chatted about in here, but I'm learning shedloads, so thanks.
 
  
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