9/ Living habits are ugly. Constant growth and increasing complexity means they always appear as an unrefined work-in-progress.

10/ The reward of a ritual is comforting, relived memories of once-profitable habits. These can be passed on for generations.

11/ Rituals are beautiful. Mummification is the process of aestheticizing a behavior to produce comfort instead of profit.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to writing a thorough comment because I feel an obligation to read all the previous comments first, but the quotes from Rao get at an important distinction among the things we might want to protect from Moloch– play vs. ritual.

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Looking forward from 1400, though, we do have better information, and we know that the problem got progressively worse across Western Europe over the next few centuries. It was tied to the development of wet nursing, another Molochian nightmare. Crudely sketched, the system at its dystopian height went like this: The rich would pump out babies as quickly as they could, with relatively good survival rates. This was made possible by immediately farming out their children to closely supervised wet nurses.

The wet nurses themselves were obviously mothers. The result of becoming wet nurses was that their rates of fertility were lower (because they were breastfeeding rich children for long periods), and the survival rates of their own children were worse (because they had to send their own infants out to very poor, poorly supervised wet nurses at the very bottom of the social scale).

The wet nurses at the very bottom often had to abandon their own infants, because they needed wet nursing cash to stay alive themselves and didn’t have anything left over to raise children of their own. At best – as in Florence – their infants at least had a beautiful building to die in.

This stretched across the same time period (1400-1900 at the outside, 1500-1800 on the inside) when art, music and poetry were at their classical heights. Which leads to another question: Was the obsessive focus on beauty in the high art of the period somehow related to the ugliness of the social system? It does seem like a striking contrast, doesn’t it?

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The first major foundling home was commissioned in Florence in 1419, and opened in 1445. First hundreds of children were left there every year, then thousands. In 1640, 22% of all babies born in Florence were left at the Innocenti. Between 1500 and 1700, the number never dropped below 12%. (Later, in the worst years, in the 1840s, that number went up to 43%.)

That’s not the percentage that died; that’s the percentage of all babies born in Florence that were left at foundling homes. In the early years, the 1460s, chances for survival were reasonably good; only 5 in 10 died. By the 1480s, 8 or 9 in 10 died. Mortality rates remained staggering for the next three centuries. If you meet an Esposito – an “exposed one” – you’re meeting the descendant of one of the lucky survivors of an Italian temple to Moloch. And Florence was only the first of many; after Florence, foundling homes spread first across Italy, then Europe. “Millions of children” is not hyperbole, but a fact meticulously recorded in the registers of admittance, baptism, and death.

What happened to the art of Florence during this reign of Moloch? Let’s make a list: Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, Verrocchio. A golden age. Brunelleschi himself designed the Innocenti.

Art has nothing to fear from Moloch.

Nor music, poetry, literature. Vienna’s foundling home opened in 1784, the year that Mozart met Haydn there. Catherine the Great’s reign saw the opening of foundling homes in Moscow and St. Petersburg, along with a flowering of patronage of artists and scientists. Everywhere you look, the same people are patronizing temples to Moloch and beautiful art. They are both symptoms of the same inequality: The grinding down of most of the population alongside the glittering uplifting of a few.

If you want to learn more, information on foundling homes come from “Mother Nature” by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an excellent book if you want to learn about the darkest side of human evolution, and from “Abandoned Children”, edited by Catherine Panter-Brick and Malcolm T. Smith.

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Wasn’t the original Tragedy of the Commons essay in part about the Malthusian scenario, or do I misunderstand you?

The caterpillars have every genetic interest in avoiding parasitation, women do not have such an interest in avoiding bearing lots of children.

If one high-quality offspring will get many mating opportunities, and many low-quality offspring will together get few or none (perhaps by not surviving to adulthood), women (and men) may well have a genetic interest in having fewer offspring. If you see a species where multiple individuals are required to provide the calories needed to raise a child (e.g. humans, many bird species), limitations on family size are often also seen for the same reason.

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These are what you’re most afraid of losing to merciless evolutionary and economic competition, but these are the only things that won’t be lost. In merciless competition, these are what show you who the winners are; these are what show you who you should mate with when competition is fiercest and inequality is highest. Art and music and philosophy and love are the only things that a corrupt aristocracy does right. They won’t go away even when the grinding is at its grindiest, because they’re what show you who is and isn’t ground.

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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1474-9726.2008.00431.x/full

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-008-9053-4/fulltext.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v499/n7458/abs/nature12234.html

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/47/19392.full

http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v15/n8/full/nrg3728.html

Thoughts arising therefrom:

First: Naked mole rats get exceptional cancer protection from an interaction between unusually large hyaluronan molecules and p16, which provides a redundant pathway (in addition to the p27 pathway, which they share with most other mammals) for enforcing a minimum distance between cells. Blind mole rats, by contrast, get their cancer protection from p53 and Rb working with IFN-β to cause necrotic cell death when cells get too close. Eastern grey squirrels use yet another method. Beavers use telomere shortening, which is common among large mammals but not found in any of the long-lived small rodents.

In other words, there are many ways to get cancer protection. Add redundancy to one of any number of pathways, and you’ve multiplied your cancer protection many-fold.

Second: Mice, rats and voles suffer high mortality from starvation, predation and disease. They also have the feeblest cancer protections among rodents. By contrast, naked mole rats, blind mole rats, eastern grey squirrels and beavers have all found ways to ensure a reliable food supply and protect themselves from predators: Burrowing, jumping through the trees, building lodges, keeping food underground or under water. There’s a strong argument to be made that these things came ~before~ they gained additional cancer protections, and were the ultimate cause of the cancer protection.

Why? It’s because avoiding cancer only helps those who die of old age. For mice, rats and voles, the selective signal on an anti-cancer mutations gets lost in the noise of early death from many other causes. It’s only for already long-lived animals, protected from predation and starvation, that cancer prevention leads to more offspring for one individual versus another and allows an anti-cancer mutation to become fixed in a population.

In other words, whales probably avoid cancer ~because~ they live a long time.

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