Thursday, April 04, 2013

Morality, beauty, talent, and goodness--Part 3

This is the most interesting and new of the three parts of the series, where I actually define mathematically the concepts of beauty, goodness and morality and their precise relations to love and talent. I have sensed (I mentioned it on usenet many years ago) for a decade at least that beauty can be thought of as a geometric sequence, but now that I distinguish both effective love from love and effective morality from morality, things are clearer, hopefully. Much of this I wrote last summer, but I made significant improvements and corrections today.

Beauty, goodness, and morality defined mathematically

As mentioned earlier, I define beauty as having two parts: a concrete part not involving love, which I call talent, and a more abstract part involving love, which I call goodness. Morality I define as love of beauty. As it turns out, there is good reason to believe goodness is the same thing as effective morality, but when making definitions it is useful and necessary by way of avoiding circularity to have separate terms—the concepts are not defined the same, they just happen to be the same, rather as 3 - 1 and 2 are the same even though they are defined differently.

Since the basic concepts are defined in terms of love, it is well that I elaborate on what I mean in this context by "love". Obviously some if not many concepts have to remain undefined, or one must choose between circularity or an infinite descending chain of definitions, neither situation being desirable, but at least I can give a better idea of what I mean. In particular, the expression "love of A", where A is some quality, will denote a desire to increase the amount of A. Even romantic and sexual love can be made to fit the definition since such love basically involves behaviors that tend to increase the progeny and likely descendants of the beloved, thereby increasing the representation of the qualities of the beloved in the world. Love is an unselfish ideal in the sense it involves wanting to increase the amount of A represented in the world and not (say) the amount of A in one's bank vault or in one's own descendants.

Though it is hard to be more precise about what is meant by love, we can be more clear about what we mean if we clarify what we mean for a person to love A n-times as much as B. Clearly what we do not mean is that as a result of love the person tends to increase A by an amount n-times that by which he tends to increase B, i.e., that he effectively loves A n-times as much as he loves B . For the amount a person is able to increase A depends on his skill in increasing A (which might differ from his skill in increasing B), and surely it would be grossly contrary to usage that his love for A should depend on his skill in increasing A. The appropriate definition for loving A r-times more than B is that his desire to increase A and B are such that given a choice between increasing A by a small amount a and increasing B by a small amount b = ra, he will be indifferent as to which choice he chooses, all things else equal. The concepts of effective love and love turn out to be related. If a person loves A r-times as much as B, then it seems entirely reasonable to assume that he loves effective love of A r-times as much as effective love of B; before explaining why, let me first be more clear about the concepts and the difference.

The first clarification to make is that effective love is to be taken as a long-term phenomenon (at least mostly--here might be a good place for further exactness for those willing to do things at a higher level). What matters in judging the effective love of A arising from a characteristic is not so much how effective the characteristic will likely be in the individual possessing it at enabling him to directly increase A, but rather how effective the characteristic tends to be in enabling individuals to directly increase A. For instance, if a moral person is nevertheless very able at deceiving others as to his character, this ability to thus deceive others is very likely a bad trait that tends in most individuals to cause them to behave so as to decrease the beauty in the world, and so effective-love-of-beauty would have a negative value (likely exceeding in magnitude the value of talent there) when evaluated at this deceptive characteristic, even if the person were so moral and hesitant to deceive as to character that the characteristic would not affect his behavior.

Effective love of A by definition is proportional to the amount love tends to be effective in increasing A. So loving effective love of A r-times as much as effective love of B amounts to loving an actual increase a' in A (a change arising because effective love causes change) the same amount as an actual increase ra' in B. But this is the same case with loving A and B directly. If I love A r-times more than B, then if by loving B directly (by say caring unselfishly for someone with much B) I can increase B an amount r-times greater than I can increase A by loving A directly (by say caring unselfishly for someone with much A), then the choice will be a matter of indifference to me. I.e., loving A r-times as much as B effectively means loving an increase a in A the same amount as an increase ra in B. The difference is how the changes a' and a are created. The change a' is caused because loving now people who have effective love of A does over the generations cause A to increase as more and more people with A are unselfishly rewarded by the increased unselfish effective love of A in the population. The change a on the other hand is more immediate, caused merely by rewarding directly with unselfish love someone possessed of much A. I see no reason whatsoever to think otherwise than that if I or anyone else love a direct immediate increase a in A (induced by loving A) the same as a similarly induced direct immediate increase ra in B, then I will love an indirect future increase a' in A (induced by loving effective love of A) the same as a similarly induced indirect future increase ra' in B, and vice versa. I shall assume as much for moral people. To reiterate, it shall be considered an axiom that for any qualities A and B and for all moral persons X, X loving A n-times as much as B is equivalent to X loving effective love of A n-times as much as effective love of B.

As mentioned earlier, as best as I can define it, beauty has a concrete talent component, and another component called goodness comprising the various components involving love. We shall define the components inductively. The talent component of beauty I shall denote by B0. For each n, Bn + 1 will be defined as rn E(Bn), where E is the "effective love operator", and rn is a coefficient that for each n gives an indication of the weight "effective love of Bn" is to have in the definition of beauty. Since beauty is what morality consists in loving (by definition of morality), one can determine how much a moral person loves an aggregate of qualities (e.g., those possessed by a person) by considering all the values of the Bn and summing them; letting B be the (infinite) sum, B gives a numerical indication of how beautiful the aggregate is, i.e., how much the moral person loves what is under consideration. This amounts to it being the case that for any natural numbers m and n, Bm and Bn are loved the same amount. Since in particular Bm + 1 is loved the same as B n + 1, it follows that for each m, n that rn times the amount a moral person loves E(Bm) equals rm times the amount a moral person loves E(Bn); i.e., that a moral person loves E(Bm) an amount that is rm/rn times the amount the same moral person loves E(Bn). But we also know by the remarks ending the last paragraph that, what since Bm and Bn are loved the same amount, E(Bm) and E(Bn) are loved the same amount. It follows that for all m, n, rm/rn = 1, i.e., that for all m, n, rm= rn. In other words, all the coefficients rm have the same value, the effective love ratio with respect to E, which we shall denote r or rE.

Clearly (easy proof by induction), to say that for each natural number n, Bn + 1 = r E(Bn) is the same as to say that for each n, Bn = rnEn(B0).

Note that hitherto, all that I have suggested about the definition of the effective-love operator is that its value on a quantity that corresponds to a kind of beauty B' is proportional to the amount the person possessing the love is able to increase that particular type of beauty; by redefining E by taking a constant multiple, one can make r whatever one wishes. At first glance, the most straightforward way of defining E would be to do so flatly, so that if a person's effective love of B' (where B' has the dimension of beauty) tends to increase B' by δ beauty units in people, the value of E(B') where B' has a value of one beauty unit is δ beauty units; I shall call E defined thus the flat love operator. Then B is the sum, over all natural numbers n (including n=0), of the terms Bn = rn En(B0). The coefficients rn form what is called a geometric sequence with ratio r. I shall call r with respect to an E thus defined flatly the effective-love ratio . In some respects, this is all quite cool, but why not just define effective love as L = rE so that rL = 1? Doing so, if in fact B' is a function that actually gives the beauty of something, L(B') gives the beauty arising from whatever effective love of B' is present, i.e., L(B') is the goodness involved with loving B'. To see this is the case, notice that B' must be a restriction of B (since B is what measures beauty). Furthermore, L(Bn) is nothing other than Bn + 1, and so L applied to the sum of all the terms Bn is just the sum of all the terms Bn except B0. Thus L(B) is just the sum of those components of B involving love, which is what goodness, the part of beauty that is effective love (of beauty), is defined as. This in fact is also what we need to ensure goodness is just effective morality. Indeed, since morality is defined as love of beauty, effective morality is nothing other than effective love of beauty, i.e., L(B). To reiterate, defining effective love as L ensures effective morality and goodness are the same thing. In situations where we are not comparing people with differing definitions of beauty (involving, say, people who define beauty with different effective-love ratios), L is probably the preferable effective love operator, and so from here on the effective love operator shall be defined as L. If I have occasion to consider the flat-love operator, I shall denote it as E.

That goodness is in fact the same as effective morality makes it especially reasonable that people would evolve to find things beautiful more-or-less as I have mathematically defined it. For if goodness (the non-talent part of what makes a moral person love you) is effective morality, in order for a person to be loved the best by a moral person, it behooves the former to weight the various components of love in beauty in the same way that a moral person would, or his love of beauty, i.e., his morality, will not be as effective, causing him to be less good and thus relatively less well-loved by her. Indeed, morality involves loving beauty, i.e., wanting to increase the sum of the beauty terms r n En(B0). If one instead tries to increase the sum of beauty terms involving other coefficients (e.g., those obtained by choosing a different value of r), one will not be as effective in increasing beauty; one instead will be maximizing something else determined by one's own preferences (but of course it would not make a difference if one merely changed the units in which one measured beauty, notwithstanding the numerical value of a beauty measurement and of the corresponding beauty terms depends on the units used), which would reduce the effectiveness of one's morality, i.e., one's goodness would be reduced, making one less loved by moral people. Beauty defined as mentioned causes moral people to possess the advantage of idealism. A moral person will be loved unselfishly by fellow moral people, just the way idealists are loved by those who share their ideals--what enables idealism to prosper to the extent it can be judged and appreciated. Also, the part of beauty that does not involve goodness, i.e., talent, seems among matters not involving unselfishness more-or-less what it is most useful to love. Indeed, love tends to be expressed through mutual children, and it is more rewarding to have children via talented mates, since the success and quantity of one's descendants is positively influenced by the talent of one's mates.

Morality, beauty, talent and goodness--Part 2

This post concerns theories I mostly have had for a good while. For instance, similar ideas may be found in the early part of my book, Exact Morality for Today. Alternatively, for a shorter version, one may go to this post I put on my homepage a decade or so ago. I mainly wrote the contents of this post last summer, as a tie-in between the previous post and the next post (the really interesting one, at least to the mathematically game). Notice that I discriminate here (and in the next post) between morality and effective morality, an important distinction I hadn't observed earlier when trying to define concepts with mathematical exactness, which makes the relations between the concepts as described more coherent.

Morality as idealism

Morality is love of beauty. Beauty I define as part talent and part goodness. Goodness turns out to be the the same as effective morality. Morality is a type of idealism.

As I shall define it, an idealist is someone who wants to make the universe (which practically speaking mostly means the world, since essentially our influences now are mostly limited to Earth) have in the long-term more of certain ideal qualities, i.e., the qualities an ideal world has in abundance. (I don't mean to imply, by using the word "ideal", that there is or could be an ideal, perfect world, since any world would always be more ideal if it had more of the qualities that the idealist loves. Nor do I wish to suggest metaphysical idealism. But other candidate words, like meliorist, have connotations as contrary as those of idealist, so I think I'll stick with idealist.) There can be a great many different kinds of idealists, depending on what qualities the idealist finds ideal. The only requirement I place on what can be an ideal is that it must be something that is not defined in reference to oneself. For instance, if someone wants to increase the extent to which people have genes just like himself, it would be improper to say that this self-love is motivated by idealism arising from his finding himself exceptionally ideal, unless the tendencies causing him to find himself exceptionally ideal are not caused by genetic tendencies to selfishness, but from an inheritable love of qualities not defined in reference to himself that indeed he possesses more than anyone else. An idealist can idealistically love himself if indeed he sees that he is abundantly replete with ideal qualities. For instance, a moral person can love himself greatly because indeed he is abundantly beautiful. But if a person loves himself much more than others just because he has inheritable tendencies coding for self-love, then he is simply, by definition, selfish. And selfishness is not a type of idealism, since one's self obviously is defined in relation to oneself. Similarly, nationalism, love of one's own country because it's one's country, or racism, love of one's own race because it's one's race, though not quite as referential to self as selfishness proper, are still much too referential to one's self to be considered ideals. I think it obvious that much self-love that is justified by the self-lover claiming to love especially the particular more beautiful qualities he or she himself possesses is not self-love really arising from an idealism, but is self-love arising from selfishness that is excused by pretending to an inherent tendency to love unselfishly especially the possessed beautiful qualities (even were the beautiful qualities not possessed); but it's to be excessively cynical to assume that disproportionate love of one's own peculiar beautiful traits is not often idealism, inasmuch as presumably a reason people have peculiar beautiful traits is that their ancestors peculiarly found such traits beautiful enough to especially tend to mate those possessed of the traits, and such predilections, like the beloved traits themselves, may be inherited.

Abstract concepts such as idealism and morality should describe or approximate concepts one may reasonably suppose exist. Thus, let us consider how idealism might evolve. An idealist, to further his ideal, will tend to love unselfishly those he believes support his ideal. For instance, a person who loves beauty will love unselfishly those who also love beauty, because the world being more full of people who unselfishly love beauty causes beauty more to increase. No matter what the ideal an idealist has, an idealist and the other idealists who share the same ideal will tend to love each other unselfishly if they can recognize one another. Idealists, not being selfish, are capable of real unselfish love. There is not the least reason to suppose that people who seek to support an ideal will be less successful than selfish people who merely seek to support themselves. Idealists tend to be loved unselfishly by those sharing or approximately sharing their ideals; the selfish, on the other hand, do not tend to be loved unselfishly by selfish people or others. It's an advantage to be loved unselfishly. Idealism may well be more rewarding than selfishness.

Practically speaking, if an idealist has much doubt as to the extent someone else shares his ideals, his idealism per se is not going to cause him to love that person much. One of the last things an idealist would want would be to love unselfishly someone who fakes an idealism in order to be rewarded by unselfish love from idealists. Sacrificing for people who would prey on a fellow idealist isn't just pointless sacrifice, it's sacrifice made that actually rewards people who prey on those who love your ideal. In other words, practically, idealism can only work to the extent there are situations where the ability in an idealist to detect the idealism in others be stronger than the ability in a deceiver to convincingly fake the idealism. In fact, there is good reason to suppose that idealists often are stronger than deceivers, and the reason doesn't much involve game theory or the other strange explanations popular in the so-called scientific literature regarding altruism, but rather that the important sacrifices involved with love tend to involve mating.

It shouldn't really be surprising that love, and more especially love as artistically and profoundly represented, tends to be associated with mating. Oh sure, a person can love through charitable organizations and the like, and if one is careful about it and possessed of above average sensitivity, one arguably should do so if the sacrifice is not too great, but one seldom sees people profoundly affected emotionally by the thought of donating to these organizations, because such opportunities for love are not the archetypal opportunities. People naturally more tend to love mates than other people, and that is not at all a bad thing. Not infrequently a girl will love one beautiful male (in the sense I define beauty), but because he is poor or taken by another female (say because the latter female is more beautiful), she has a choice between mating the better-loved male anyway or mating some other male she loves less who will better care for her and her children. Not that a female should always mate the better-loved male (it is appropriate, after all, that wealth be used to further the children of good females), but still it is arguably the most significant opportunity for appropriate unselfishness that a female is likely to face. A tendency to choose beautiful sex over resources is probably what most makes a good female good. Similarly, in males. On the one hand, a male can squander much of his youth trying to get as much responsibility-free sex as he can get, making him incapable of caring effectively, or he can try to care greatly for someone he finds special or prepare for the day he finds such a female. On the other hand, a male who doubts whether anyone he loves will mate with him can selfishly use his money to essentially buy a mate he doesn't love, or he can more unselfishly opt to keep his money, using it for some higher purpose or choosing to bestow it upon his relatives, or to give up altogether much concern with making money, allowing him to pursue wisdom less restrainedly than those more constrained by worldly cares. The important quality of love through mating is that such love is expressed through mutual children and descendants. A female who sexually loves unselfishly causes her mate to have mutual children he wouldn't otherwise have; similarly, a male who cares for a mate unselfishly tends to enable his mate to have more mutual descendants than she would have if he were not so unselfish. If a person is tricked into unselfish love for a mate, the deceiver will gain mutual children. However, those children will have a deceived parent, tricked into the inappropriate unselfishness. Since children tend to inherit the traits of their parents, children of parents who deceive in the mating sphere will tend to be not only deceptive, but easily deceived as well. To the extent love is mainly important when it comes to mating, there will be an association between deceit and gullibility when it comes to judging moral character, which leads to a strong indirect test of moral character.

True, one can imagine it might be difficult to judge directly whether an ostensibly moral and appropriately unselfish person is precisely that or just a good deceiver as to his own character; but the association between between deceit and insensitivity that exists with regard to moral character allows one to indirectly judge an apparent moral unselfishness genuine. Moral sensitivity is much easier to judge directly than moral unselfishness. Any at all reflective person has the opportunity to understand his or her own personality better than others; and it is a simple matter to determine whether another understands one's character in a way that corresponds to what makes sense to oneself. By judging sensitivity toward one's own moral character one can in fact by association judge quite easily how unlikely someone else is to be deceptive when it comes to presenting his own moral character. As long as love is mainly toward mates, it should be harder to fake morals than to correctly judge morals in others. People often say that it is inappropriate to judge others, and outside the mating sphere that is mostly true. Outside of the mating sphere, society should rightly be hesitant to punish character without proof, and the whole process ought to be very formal, as in court of law. But with mating, of course, everyone judges though they say they might not; there is nothing typical or desirable about a female sleeping with anybody or about a male dispensing caring with any female who desires it or is willing to have sex with him. If a male is judged not worthy of it, it is appropriate for a female not to have children with him; similarly, if a female is judged not worthy of it, it is appropriate for a male not to care for her or their children. But if the mate is judged worthy of it, the judgment is very appropriate and useful, enabling the sort of love that to the extent it is common makes love difficult to fake, which difficulty is what makes real love possible.

It is reasonable, then, to believe that many people could naturally be idealists. But I haven't said anything about what particular idealism constitutes morality. Obviously, since morality is an interesting, relevant concept to the extent more than a few people are moral or something similar, the ideal that moral people love, which is by definition beauty, ought to be an ideal it would be reasonable to suppose that more than a few people might have evolved to love (to varying degrees, perhaps). Well, since as just explained, the love present in idealism, in order to work, must largely be through mates, it follows that loving an ideal tends to imply a tendency to mate with those sharing the ideal. It is useful and pleasant to mate with talented people, because talented people will tend to be better at helping raise many children well, and because talented people will tend to have talented descendants, and such talent will be useful in descendants. People who find talent beautiful will tend to have more talented children than people who find some other random useless quality important. Thus, it is reasonable to suppose that talent is a part of beauty. But if morality is nothing more than love of making the world more talented, then time, and more particularly the particular time at which one desires that the world be most talented, enters the concept of morality in a fundamental way that could make the concept of beauty impractical or even dangerously wrong. Beauty is not just talent; it is goodness as well.

Practically speaking, when we love, we love people--people who are present right now. So there is arguable reason to understand people who say that they love talent or that their ideal is talent as saying merely that they love people in proportion to how talented they are. This indeed is no real idealism at all. Idealism, especially that involving simply defined ideals, properly is not about the short-term; but about wanting to increase the long-term quantity of something, the ideal, in the universe. Nor, indeed, is it reasonable to suppose this sort of quasi-idealism could evolve in people. If you love unselfishly people merely who are talented, who is especially going to love you for that? You will not be loved for such unselfishness by people who share your "ideals", because people who share your "ideals" will simply love talent, and will be quite indifferent as to whether you unselfishly love talent. In fact, they will probably look at talent as effective love of survival; and you loving people unselfishly somewhat conflicts with you loving survival, and so they will love you the less for your unselfishness. True, moral people might love you somewhat more than they would love totally selfish people; but when it comes to being loved really well, as the most important love tends to do inasmuch as it tends to be associated with a favorite mate, you won't much get that from them since they'd prefer to love people who also love goodness in people; your being unselfish will not be a reward equal to the sacrifices by definition involved with unselfishness. Defining idealism in the short-term, though it might have some practical advantages, can lead to dangerous confusions and belief in implausible ideals.

An impractical and still somewhat dangerous alternative would be to define morality as a desire to make the world in the long run more full of talent. But such a definition willy-nilly leads to an awkward divide between the qualities that one loves in others and the qualities that constitute the ideal. If beauty in theory is just talent, practically, if one considers as one should the long run, then what one finds beautiful in others in the sense that it makes one wants to be unselfish must necessarily be something quite distinct from talent. For if one is interested in increasing the amount of talent present in distant generations, one must appreciate in people not just their talent but also their effective love of talent, effective love of effective love of talent, etc. Indeed, by unselfishly rewarding someone who is unselfish toward talented people, etc., one may well do more toward increasing the amount of talent present in the distant future than if one merely rewarded people according as one perceived their talent. Any sort of idealism, if defined relative to the long-run, leads to a kind of unselfish nature; moreover, being such a real idealist is rewarding in the sense similarly minded idealists love one another unselfishly. And any sort of idealism, say, peacocks loving fancy tail feathers, can lead partly to love of talent, since talented individuals, not tending to die off, can better further an ideal, just as peacocks who are able to survive well can pass on their tail-feathers better than lame peacocks; any sort of idealism can compete with selfishness. It's remarkable and reassuring just how little the particular choice of what one theoretically finds beautiful affects what one practically finds beautiful. Still, practically speaking, more than the presence in the long-term of qualities, one needs to consider in people what particular qualities that exist right now in the short-term are worthy of unselfish love. Though I suppose partly one could argue that the main obstacle to having ideals which lead to differing practical and theoretical notions of beauty might be that our particular language fails in making the necessary distinctions, still, there will always be the mathematical awkwardness of deciding precisely what time in the distant future constitutes the time at which the ideal should be maximized; to get around this, one I suppose would be forced to adopt some sort of limit procedure, assuming, as I suppose is mostly reasonable, that in fact such limits exist. What does seem certain is that if one could define beauty in such a way that what one finds beautiful in people in the short run (the qualities that inspire love) is in fact the same as what one wants to maximize in the distant future (the ideal), then one would need one less notion of beauty, leading to an elegant simplicity in concepts that more corresponds to usage. I would also say one would have an elegant simplicity of concepts that more corresponds to how people naturally consider morality, and if so, then it is fairly dangerous to define two vastly different definitions of beauty, since conflating the two is a dangerous thing that would be all too natural if properly there is indeed one notion of beauty that differs from both. Indeed, I think beauty should be defined so that goodness, i.e., the part of beauty that is associated with effective loving, is also what makes one love beauty effectively, i.e., effective morality. One may just accept that this can be done, but I shall show how this may be done mathematically in my next post.

Morality, beauty, talent and goodness--Part 1

A couple years ago, I decided I was going to make a series of videos concerning morality. I never got beyond the first video (which I never posted), in which I basically described that a moral person is someone who loves beauty, and that beauty has a concrete component, not involving love or unselfishness, and another part that involves love and unselfishness. Most of the the following post (except something I today added at the end) was something I wrote as preparation for the next never produced video.

Let me take as a jumping off point the golden rule, that one should "do unto others as one would have others do unto you". There are a couple moral problems with this. One is that people have different needs. For instance, I'd be quite pleased if girls were lustfully scrambling for my backside—I'd think they were generously into sharing or some such loving thing. But that's no reason to think there would be something benevolent about my lustfully scrambling for girls' backsides. They'd rightfully think I was trying to sodomize them or some such unloving thing.. Girls can't sodomize, which makes the situation not at all analogous. True, a male could ask what would he would want if her were a girl, but that's a philosophically much more complicated question that suggests a more complex definition. Two is that it is just wrong to love bad or evil people as much as good people. The way around that would be to define loving people broadly. For instance, I suppose a strain of Christian could say that ideally loving Hitler would be a good thing, but practically love of homocidal maniacs such as him is impossible because loving him rather than (say) imprisoning, killing or assassinating him when one has the chance is unloving toward others more than it is loving toward him, and what is important is to love people in general the most one can. But practically speaking, making such qualifications basically amounts to saying that one in fact should love good people more than bad people, which can best be expressed clearly and non-circularly by admitting it in the first place, or so it seems to me.

That good people love good people more than bad people explains why people can evolve to be good. Good people love each other unselfishly, bad people don't. Accordingly, good people may get more than bad people, which can cause them to prosper more. Of course, if it worked, a more rewarding strategy would be to pretend to be good, so one is loved unselfishly without having to be unselfish. It's important to see why such a deceitful strategy tends to fail enough that morality is possible and relevant. So-called evolutionary biologists have written a great deal of ridiculous nonsense using game theory and suggestions that morality if not selfishness is some sort of straightforward outgrowth of feelings toward family or the tribe I think the situation is much simpler than represented. The reason moral goodness is fairly easy to judge has to do with the most important love being that toward mates. For instance, a good male loves and cares for his wife more unselfishly than a bad male would be expected to. Similarly, a good female less bases her reproductive decisions on money than a bad female would be expected to. The most important and appropriate love that people possess is toward their mates, and is involved in rewarding the mate with more mutual children than would be expected if the love were not there. Since love tends to be most important in a reproductive context, what a person pretending to unselfishness could obtain is more children with a mate tricked into love. Those children will tend to inherit the insensitivity toward moral goodness that the tricked parent would be expected to have possessed. Naturally deceptive people tending to have inherited their deceit from at least one deceptive parent, it follows that the tendency toward moral deceit would naturally tend to occur together with the tendency toward insensitivity in judging moral character. Because love tends mainly to be in a mating context, one would expect, accordingly, that people who deceive about their moral character would tend to be insensitive. And sensitivity, unlike unselfishness, is fairly easy to judge directly, since one can evaluate sensitivity toward oneself. All one has to do is know oneself, and any one with basic faculties of understanding who bothers is comparatively well positioned to know oneself. As Locke points out, reflection is but perception of what is occurring in one's own brain, a perception not fundamentally different from or less certain than sensation arising from the so-called five senses proper. If the most important love in society were not tied up with mating, it would be much harder to distinguish between the good unselfish people and the bad selfish people pretending to be good unselfish people; and this distinguishing is essential for people to evolve good, unselfish traits.

It shouldn't be surprising really that the most important love is tied up with mating. It doesn't take much observation of Valentine cards to see that people tend to think this is the case, and it makes sense it should be so inasmuch as otherwise goodness would be much harder to judge. Sure, one can and should love people in non-romantic contexts, but it's always somewhat extra dangerous and less than ideal to try to love seemingly good people unselfishly in non-romantic contexts, since if done too generally, it would tend to cause much effective deceit to evolve. Moral judgments that lead to love or punishments are much more dangerous and less appropriate when in non-romantic contexts. It's not that it is wrong to judge others. In fact, it is very important to mate from love, which of course should rely on judgment of whether the other person is worthy of such. It's just that outside the mating sphere, the sort of moral judgements necessary for love or punishment should be made very carefully and rarely.

It's interesting to note that there is a sort of under-appreciated difference involved in the loving associated with mating. Sure, love in males is more tied up with caring for a wife, and thus with marriage (though why and to what extent marriage should be relevant is complicated). But females behave more unselfishly when they choose less caring from the mate. Good males tend to be good because they are willing to be good, caring husbands, but good females tend to be good to the extent they are willing to have sex outside marriage that does not require responsibility of the male. Bad males argue that love is sex. Bad female argue that love is caring. What they agree on is that how males love is the same as how females love (because they all want to encourage real sacrifices toward themselves in their mates), and so that is where the lies of evil are united, and why the difference is under-appreciated. (Actually, there is another complication regarding sexual love. Selfish nasty males tend to argue that screwed-up depravity is a kind of sexual love, whereas unloving females tend to argue that sexual love is a kind of screwed-up depravity, so evil is also united in another conflation, that involving conflating unselfish sexual love with depravity, i.e., sodomy, i.e., semen in the digestive system.) Anyway, because in aggregate most important love is wrapped up with sex directly or with caring consequent to sex, sex is very important to considerations of morality. But before much considering sexual matters, I should define beauty and goodness more carefully.

Of course, any attempt to try to precisely define morality, goodness, beauty, etc., is likely to fall short of what the ideal definitions should be. Ultimately, I shall attempt to define things rather mathematically. This may seem cold and not particularly warm-and-fuzzy. Nevertheless, simplifications are useful ways of gaining understandings of ourselves. Life is too complicated to have a natural moral sentiment suitable to every situation, and at other times one is too tired, crazy, or polluted to have much access to natural moral sentiment.. In practice, it behooves one to try well to understand one's natural moral tendencies to see whether they might fit into a pattern. Why? Because I claim that one of the natural tendencies of people is the indirect tendency to adopt as tendencies those behaviors that would seem to fit into the pattern of one's own direct natural tendencies as best understood; this way one has more tendencies likely to be favored by evolution than merely the numerically insufficient direct natural tendencies. If for instance the golden rule is the best understanding one can have of one's natural moral tendencies, one will tend to adopt the golden rule when one's own natural tendencies don't conflict with it, which to the extent the golden rule describes one's natural tendencies is likely to be adaptive. But one's own natural tendencies may well conflict with the golden rule, because, for instance, as mentioned earlier, bad people just aren't naturally as loveable as good people. It is appropriate to find a better more useful definition of morality that makes the natural tendencies that moral people have more understandable, both in describing the moral tendencies that empirically would seem to exist in oneself and others and also in describing why the most understandable world views, e.g., evolution, would suggest that oneself or a significant number of people, the moral people, might well more or less have the moral tendencies as understood by the definitions.

My best definitions are presumably capable of improvement and worthy of being ignored when direct natural moral tendencies conflict, but realistically, such is likely to be the case of any understanding of morality, and when no direct warm-and-fuzzy feelings are there, my best understanding if a preferable understanding to other understandings may well lead to behaviors that in their consequences indeed are more warm-and-fuzzy than an even simpler understanding. Of course, some hesitance for doing morality more mathematically may be that many people are bitter about math, I suppose from it being a field pedants perhaps don't dislike as much as your typical other field. But hey, math underpins the physical laws of the universe—it's important. And as for feelings, take music. The frequencies of the notes corresponding to the keys on a standardly tuned piano form a geometric sequence with ratio the twelfth-root of 2. I will claim that the components of beauty also form a geometric sequence; indeed, that's where the math mostly lies. Anyway, the same sort of math, the math of geometric sequences, that underlies my approach to morality also underlies music, so if my moral viewpoint seems cold for being mathematical, one might as well view music coldly for the same reason. (For instance, the reason, presumably, that white keys and black keys are arranged on a piano as they are and so that there are twelve keys in an octave is that if one holds one 's thumb and pinky on white keys, with three white keys between, and if one doesn't start on the left on B, one always goes up in frequency seven keys—seven terms in the geometric sequence—leading to a ratio of frequencies equal to 2 to the 7/12 power, which is about 1.4983, a harmonious ratio since it is very nearly 1.5.) A more mathematical understanding of morality, love, beauty, etc., need not lead to inappropriate coldness provided one chooses (mostly warm-and-fuzzy) natural moral sentiments over derived moral sentiment when they conflict; mathematical understanding as a guide to moral behavior is properly mostly for when there is an absence of moral sentiments as to what to do but a presence of sentiment that something should be done. Also, there is the important exception that rational understanding is a better moral guide than moral sentiment when chemical addiction likely has corrupted natural moral sentiment into something unnatural.

Why flowers are like girls

If a pollinator such as a bee is very pleased with a flower he has been to, he will be especially on the prowl for other plants of the same species, because he knows they are likely to have the flowers he most wants. It thus stands to reason that the more his experience with the plant he visited first was pleasant to him, the more he will tend to land on the flowers of other plants of the species immediately after they open, before their nectar, etc., gets taken by another—his prior pleasant experience will cause him to be especially on the prowl for similar flowers. After a very pleasing flower experience, he will preferentially (more often) check out the flowers of the same species, so that he can get them right after they open, lest an interloper gets the treat before he does. Accordingly, the sooner a flower is landed on after opening, the more likely the pollinator came from a flower especially effective at encouraging insects to spread its pollen to other flowers, and thus the more likely the pollinator came from a plant especially effective at spreading its pollen thoroughly and efficiently. Of course, it is in the self-interest of a plant to be pollinated by pollen coding for a plant especially effective at spreading its pollen thoroughly and efficiently. If the female parts of a flower can especially select for pollen especially talented at penetrating freshly opened flowers, that's an advantage to the plant. By a plant having flowers especially delicate and full of the fragile characteristics more typical of flowers freshly opened, the flower can especially select for sperm in (genetically identical to the sperm) pollen tubes especially effective at penetrating youthful stigmas and styles, as serves the interest of the plant—such sperm will tend to code for flowers especially desired by pollinators. Indeed, if a pollen tube is especially effective at fertilizing freshly opened, delicate flowers, likely it is so because it evolved thus because so many of its ancestors had pollen tubes that especially needed to fertilize freshly-opened flowers, likely on account of the same ancestors being so much desired by bees, etc., as to cause the latter to especially be on the prowl for flowers of the same species, so as to be landed on so soon as they open.

On balance, gamete selection is even more important in plants than in animals. Plants have alternation of generations, alternating between a diploid sporophyte generation and a haploid gametophyte generation. In animals the haploid generation is produced directly from meiosis in the diploid generation, and is nothing more than a sperm or an egg, scarcely to be considered an organism. In plants, the product of the diploid organism is not directly eggs or sperms but rather spores—the products of meiosis are spores. These haploid spores are genetically identical to the eggs or sperm they will ultimately produce, but they mitotically grow into something multicellular and rather complex, the gametophyte, before sperms and eggs are produced. In mosses what the spores grow into, the gametophyte, is actually larger than the diploid generation, and is what is commonly recognized as the plant. In ferns, the gametophyte typically looks like a fingernail-sized plant that one can find by scrounging around wet places.

In flowering plants, the male gametophyte is the pollen grain, which contains two cells: a vegetative cell, which becomes the pollen tube that upon pollination burrows into the style to the embryo sac, and a generative cell contained in the vegetative cell that (typically after pollination) splits into two sperm cells (in flowering plants, the sperm cells don't have flagella) that undergo fertilization; all these cells are genetically identical. The female gametophyte is the embryo sac. The embryo sac most frequently contains seven cells. Three cells are located near the micropyle, the opening which the pollen tube breaks into antecedent to releasing its two sperm; one of these cells is the egg, the other two, the synergids, flank the egg like guardians. Three more cells, the antipodals, are located on the opposite end of the embryo sac, decaying without serving any obvious purpose. Finally, in the middle of the embryo sac is a large central cell that has two nuclei, the polar nuclei. What is strange about fertilization in most flowering plants is that it is a double fertilization. One sperm combines with the egg cell, becoming the embryo that grows into an adult plant. The other sperm combines with the cell containing the two polar nuclei to form a primary endosperm cell that is triploid; i.e., it contains three of each chromosome, only one of which is from the father; this cell typically divides mitotically to form the endosperm of the seed, which usually is only important in seed development and germination. Oftentimes the developing embryo obtains nutrient from the endosperm. For instance, in wheat seeds the embryo, which constitutes the wheat germ, develops into a wheat plant, absorbing when in the seed nutrients from the endosperm, which is the material that furnishes white flour and constitutes most of the seed.

Anyway, it is apparently quite clear that many genes of the pollen tubes are expressed haploidly, and so the characteristics of the pollen tube are determined at least in part by which particular genes the pollen grain has obtained from its parent. There presumably arises, therefore, a haploid competition between genes possessed by pollen tubes (which as mentioned are identical to the genes possessed by the genetically identical sperm within them). Genes that code for pollen tubes especially talented at penetrating newly opened flowers are what an insect-pollinated flowering plant most needs to be fertilized by, and so one would expect flowers, or at least the female parts of flowers, to tend especially to be delicate-looking, having physical characteristics similar to a flower that could only be freshly opened.

Haploid competition just in itself isn't necessarily beneficial. First of all, much haploid competition might arise between pollen grains coming from the same plant. To the extent haploid competition is typically of this sort—between haplotypes arising from the same plant—one would expect no direct benefit to a plant fertilized subsequent to this competition. True, a plant fertilized by a strong pollen tube may be more likely to win out in distant generations when pollen more related to it is competing with pollen less related to it. But more immediately, in the next generation, there will be competition between pollen produced by the child which is more related to the child's mother and pollen produced which is more related to the child's father; to succeed more in this latter competition, it is advantageous for the mother to have been fertilized by weak pollen tubes. As in animals, to the extent competition between gametes mainly involves competition between gametes produced by the same individual, there is no direct benefit to being fertilized by gametes having strong haploid chracteristics; indeed, as I have done, one can show mathematically that the two effects cancel out to the extent the differences in pollen haploid characteristics are small.

One advantage of haploid competition is that it reduces meiotic drive; i.e., if characteristics of sperm and eggs are determined by the diploid genome, there might be expected to arise genes which diploidly code for killing or hurting gametes that don't contain the genes, giving the genes advantages (such genes are known to exist in fruit flies) over their competitors. Over time these selfish genetic elements can lead to reduced fertility, and meaningful sperm competition between sperm from different individuals is probably the only way of preventing this sort of thing if indeed sperm development is determined diploidly. (In particular, if sperm development is essentially determined just diploidly in humans, a matter of controversy, this can give females a reason to be promiscuous, i.e., to have sex with several males at the same time to ensure the most fertile one succeeds. But I think sperm development in humans often is haploidly regulated, leading to meaningful intraejaculate sperm competition, and so I'd say female humans are by nature generally very hesitant to be promiscuous in this way.)

To really determine whether haploid competition between male gametes produced by an individual subsequently benefits another individual fertilized by one of these gametes, one must look at what diploid characteristics are likely to be selected for by the competition. Oftentimes one allele of a gene might be more fit than another when coding haploidly and less fit when coding diploidly. In fact, if haploid competition is general and always more or less selective of the same characteristics, one would expect this to be the typical situation because the situation allows for long-term stability in allele frequencies, and so is a situation that can last for a long time. On the other hand, if one allele is more fit than another both when coding haploidly and when coding diploidly, the more fit allele is likely to before long more-or-less completely displace the latter allele in the population (except possibly if the hybrid condition is more fit diploidly than either homozygous state); and of course if an allele is less fit in every way, it will probably die out fairly quickly. Anyway, if haploid competition is something that occurs generally, and if the haploid condition is not akin to the diploid condition (as is especially the case with plants like the flowering plants, which have relatively simple gametophytes), one would expect haploid fitness to be contrary to diploid fitness. The more natural selection selects for, all else equal, the less well it can select for any particular thing. It is no accident, presumably, that the majority of plants have evolved over the last few hundreds of millions of years to have sporophytes more complicated and substantial than the gametophytes; moreover, gametophytes no longer have to have the many characteristics necessary for surviving as an independent plant. In flowering plants, in particular, gametophytes are pampered, the female gametophyte developing in an ovule of its mother plant, and the male gametophyte having only to push its sperm through the style into the receptive ovary once it has landed on the stigma. Still, if the particulars of pollination suggest pollen from a particular plant is a certain way, more is going on than just competition between gametes which during pollination are generally better at fertilizing flowers than its competitors are and gametes which during pollination are generally worse at fertilizing flowers than its competitors are. In particular, if pollen lands on a flower right after it opens, there will be competition between pollen grains especially effective at fertilizing when they land on stigmas of just-opened flowers and pollen grains especially effective at fertilizing flowers when they land on stigmas of long-opened flowers; the former sort of pollen grain is more likely to help code for diploid plants whose flowers encourage pollinators to do what the plants need, and is thus what a plant more needs its egg to be fertilized by.

It is interesting to observe how double fertilization might encourage flowers that select for pollen especially effective at fertilizing newly opened flowers, resulting in a kind of race in plants to have flowers that are the most delicate and freshly-opened looking. As mentioned, if gamete selection wouldn't be expected to positively select at all for some diploid quality, gamete selection in fact will on balance negatively select for it, basically because it is a lot to expect something to code positively for both diploid and general haploid traits. Take having genes that code fitly for fully-developed seed endosperm. There is no immediately obvious reason why a pollinator landing on a certain type of flower is likely to be a pollinator that has come from a flower on a plant that as a seed had unusually fit endosperm. Let us in this paragraph assume that in fact there is no reason. In particular, if a bee lands on a flower that is freshly-opened, we shall assume that it doesn't really say anything whatsoever about whether the plant the bee came from had unusually fit endosperm as a seed. If a flower encourages meaningful haploid competition between the pollen tubes from the pollen grains that land on it, it would accordingly more tend to encourage fertilization by pollen grains that on balance have less fit endosperm. But on account of double fertilization, in most flowering plants the endosperm is only one-third coded for by the paternal genome. A plant doesn't suffer as much by encouraging gamete selection during its fertilization if the deleterious effects such selection is likely to have on the endosperm of its seeds is only 2/3 as important as it would be if endosperm were produced diploidly by cells having equal genetic material from both parents. Since about half the benefit of mating slightly more diploidly fit genetic material occurs from more successful children, and since the other half accrues later from more successful more distant descendants, one would expect on account of endosperm being coded triploidly about a 1/6 reduction in the harm from selecting for less fit endosperm that arises from encouraging gamete competition during fertilization. It's well, though, to look at the exceptions. A few angiosperms (i.e., flowering plants) possess endosperm that is equally coded for by both the maternal and paternal germ line. Most of these exceptions occur among the most basal angiosperms such as water lilies (Nymphaeales) and bay starvine (Austrobaileyales). Strangely, though, the most basal angiosperm, Amborella, has endosperm encoded more typical to how ordinary angiosperms are encoded (the egg sac apparently is 8-celled and 9-nucleate rather than 7-celled and 8-nucleate as is most common). Anyway, those exceptions are more-or-less where one might expect them, occuring very early in angiosperm development. Almost all the other cases where endosperm is encoded equally from both germ lines occur in the Onagraceae, the evening primrose family. This would be quite a blow to the theory, since that family contains many extremely delicate-looking and beautiful flowers like Gaura and Fuchsia. But this is a case where the exception helps to prove by the rule because as it turns out there is a very particular oddity about that family which could easily afford an explanation. Commonly in this family but in no other is the ability to form permanent structural heterozygotes, i.e., hybrids between different species or with a plant with translocated chromosomes in which the hybrids produce only similar hybrid offspring. The best I can understand it from what I have read of the literature available to me, the non-matching chromosomes form two connected rings rather than many pairs, producing organisms where chromosomes rather than pairing off come together in bundles making a pair of rings; with sufficient mismatch there can be no individual pairing but just two paired rings, each ring containing a member of each chromosome pair (I believe this is called a Renner complex), so in many ways the chromosomes behave like there is but one pair of chromosomes. A reasonable inference is that presumably the Onagraceae have some sort of higher approach to translocations, etc., and interspecies gene transfer that most other organisms lack, and a natural explanation for why a triploid endosperm is not present is that this higher approach somehow conflicts with chromosomes tripling up in endosperm, as wouldn't be at all surprising inasmuch as structurally the higher approach involves how the chromosomes line up with each other.

(I hope I haven't given too great an impression of my understanding what is going on with the Onagraceae—I'm a believer that finding the important truths of biology mostly involves understanding accepted biology at a basic level worthy of a smart high school student and then being extremely logical and occupied in making deductions from that, from observed phenomena (including one's own emotions and reflections), and from one's basic understandings of other topics, but I'd say what is going on with the Onagraceae would be an exception that involves much deeper study of biology than I or above average high school biology graduates have undertaken.)

But there is something more glaring that needs explaining. True, the most primitive flowering plant is believed to have had endosperm coded equally by the paternal and maternal genome. However, in non-flowering seed plants, i.e., gymnosperms, endosperm is coded (haploidly) just by the maternal genome. In non-flowering plants, that the haploid selection between male gametes tends to code for endosperm with inferior characteristics is of no signficance to the survival or reproductive fitness of a diploid plant that arises from such a gamete fertilizing an egg. To a plant fertilized by a male gamete coding for inferior endosperm, the disadvantage would be half what it would be if endosperm were coded half maternally and half paternally. Indeed, the immediate disadvantage of a seed with less fit endosperm would disappear entirely, whereas the equally significant belated disadvantage (arising from future generations having seeds with endosperm less fit on average) would be exactly what it otherwise would have been. One could do better than a 1/6 reduction from the harm of male gamete selection encouraging inferior endosperm—one could have a 1/2 reduction as in gymnosperms. If male gamete selection is indeed (as my theory of the significance of the delicacy of flowers suggests) more important in angiosperms than gymnosperms, How could flowering plants manage? Why wouldn't it be the conifers that have delicate flowers rather than cones so tough that sometimes they'll stay on a tree for decades? Is that gymnosperms lack flowers as injurious to my theory of the significance of the delicacy of flowers as getting hit on the head by a not-at-all-delicate 20-pound bunya-bunya cone could be to an unwary Australian?

Why is it the flowering plants that have the delicate flowers rather than the pine trees or some other group of plants that has endosperm coded haploidly by the maternally derived genome of the seed? I admit this question stymied me for about nine months. True, such an endosperm may not be what scientists view as the condition of the most primitive flowering plants, but considering that it's the state of gymnosperms it would be odd to think flowering plants wouldn't have evolved to be that way were it useful for them to be so. A satisfactory answer occurred to me a few weeks ago.

There are various functions to the seed that endosperm can play. It's most notable function is perhaps as a nutrient-storage tissue. But in some plants this storage role is not important; for instance, nutrient storage can occur mainly in a perisperm genetically identical to the mother plant of the seed. Similarly, the nutrients of the endosperm can attract birds, chipmunks, etc., to eat the seed, which could end up being a good thing for the plant because a few seeds might be swallowed whole or stored and then forgotten to sprout later. But in many plants, as in fruit, it is maternal material surrounding the seed which typically gives to animals macronutrients, the seed itself being dispersed (e.g., swallowed) without being digested.. Endosperm tissue can also play a role in regulating dormancy and germination; i.e., in deciding how and when the seed sprouts. This latter function would seem to be a probable cause for why endosperm is not identical to the maternal (diploid) tissue that surrounds the seed; indeed, were the endosperm to contain genetic material that is distinct from any that is contained in the embryo, evolution of proper sprouting behavior would be discouraged. Finally, and most importantly for our purposes, endosperm tissue is believed to be involved in obtaining nutrients from the mother plant. The role of extracting nutrients from the mother plant is important for our purposes because in fact one can easily imagine that an endosperm effective at extracting much rich nutrient from a young ovule may be entirely different from an endosperm better at extracting rich nutrient from an older ovule, e.g., an ovule fertilized when the flower containing it is already old. And if this imagining is true, then something extraordinary would happen. What's clear, on account of endosperm containing genetic material derived paternally from pollen, but not especially spectacular, is that pollen which fertilizes freshly opened flowers would of course tend to also tend to code for a (useful) ability to extract nutrients when in young ovules—organisms tend to evolve what is most useful for them, and if one trait tends to cause another trait to be useful, one would expect an association between them. But similarly, pollen coding for characteristics that tend to cause it to fertilize older flowers would be expected to be especially effective at extracting nutrients from older ovules, and so it is not as though the advantage for one kind of pollen would not be balanced by a different advantage in the pollen with opposite tendencies—at first glance there probably wouldn't seem to be anything spectacular going on. But there is something much more than this going on. A flowering plant typically produces many seeds. The seeds produced in young flowers that gain the right sort of nutrient will tend to have endosperm with DNA that codes for extracting much rich nutrient from the mother plant when in young ovules. And (at least in most flowering plants) two-thirds of this DNA comes from the mother plant. There is a competition among seeds, and the seeds that tend to do best will be those that especially contain the sort of DNA from the mother plant that codes for an ability to extract nutrient especially well when inside young ovules. But as we have seen, this sort of DNA will also tend to be that sort of DNA that codes for an ability to effectively fertilize young flowers, which be exactly the sort of DNA that it is best for a plant to be fertilized by. What's spectacular is that the competition between female gametophytes (in differing ovules) that occurs in the female plant will ensure that viable seeds from young flowers will not only tend to contain the more insect-attracting DNA from the father plant but also the more insect-attracting DNA from the mother plant. By endosperm having both maternally and paternally derived components, the flower characteristics that make insects go on the prowl for flowers of that species--characteristics that plants need in its flowers--are selected for not only by selection that occurs between pollen grains but also by selection that occurs between the embryo sacs. If endosperm were coded for merely from DNA derived maternally, as in gymnosperms, an endosperm especially effective at extracting nutrients when in young ovules would not be directly suggestive of a tendency to cause insects to especially go on the prowl for flowers of the same species—rather it would be suggestive of a tendency to produce flowers that when fertilized are quickly fertilized; the latter tendency does not seem especially impressive if impressive at all; e.g., it could be merely a sign of a plant with flowers that are so weak or vulnerable to being devoured by insect pests or rot as to not last long. By endosperm being coded for by genetic material of both maternal and paternal origin, aggregation of desirous traits causing effective insect pollination is presumably greatly magnified, as is obviously of great benefit to a plant species.

An interesting case is wind-pollinated flowers (which in angiosperms are technically flowers, but which don't tend to resemble flowers, and so often when the context is clear in non-technical discussions people don't consider them flowers). Pollen tube competition in any sort of flower, whether it be typically pollinated by wind or insects, would be expected to greatly increase not only aggregation of traits effective at fertilizing freshly-opened flowers but also aggregation of traits effective at fertilizing long-opened flowers. In wind pollinated flowers, what is likely impressive in a pollen is that it came from a long distance, which suggests the right sort of survival characteristics and impressive kite-like qualities allowing it to travel aloft great distances; it's also more useful from the prospect of obtaining new genetic combinations. And clearly if pollen comes from great distances it is more likely to arrive late. So whereas in insect pollinated flowers, the impressive pollen is that which lands on recently opened flowers, in wind pollinated flowers, the exact opposite probably tends to be the case; i.e., the impressive pollen is that which lands on long-opened flowers. This could explain why wind-pollinated flowers tend to not be delicate-looking or as though they are going to great lengths to be physically comparable to freshly-opened flowers; in fact, I suppose quite the contrary.

I should point out that another very relevant consideration involves seed dispersal. It is rather typical for gymnosperms to be long-lived. Moreover, their seeds mostly do not fall or travel far from the plant, whereas their pollen, being mostly wind-borne, can travel great distances. Such a plant is especially effective at forcing the creatures about it to behave towards its seeds in harmony with its desires. Suppose such a gymnosperm, say, a conifer, arises with a new tendency which tends to destroy the health of those animals who munch on its seeds sufficiently to make them not viable or which tends to give health benefits to those who swallow its seeds such as to be passed along in (nutrient-rich) dung. If long-lived, as typical, the conifer will have time to benefit by benefitting the animals that treat it correctly or harming the animals that tend to treat it incorrectly. Similarly, the descendants of the conifer will benefit as well from the selection of animals undertaken by its ancestor, but clearly the benefit will be greatest when the descent line is more maternal than through pollen. Why? Because seeds don't land as far from the mother tree as pollen lands from the father tree, and so in the former case the animals are more likely to be the same. The interesting point is that if the selective quality of the seed is contained in the endosperm, i.e., if there be a trait in half (the endosperm of) the seeds with the relevant selective quality, then all the progeny of the selective plant which possess seeds with the selective quality will be near the selective plant, the reason being that the endosperm is not coded for paternally. Thus, the extent to which conifers would be able to force animals to live in harmony with its seed-dispersal needs via endosperm characteristics would be less if endosperm were coded for partly paternally, since the effects on the animals would then be somewhat more spread out and hence diluted.

Anyway, considering all the evidence, a likely explanation for why flowers tend to be delicate-looking is that the more a flower physically resembles a freshly-opened flower, the more the flower will select for pollen that codes for flowers that especially tend to have what pollinator want (which makes pollinators spreading pollen from it tend to land on other flowers of the species right after the latter flowers open). It is interesting to observe that this situation would tend to amplify its significance on account of positive feedback. If a plant has very delicate flowers, that will tend to be the sort of plant in which delicacy of flower has helped select for what pollinators want (or else delicacy of flowers wouldn't have evolved). Such a plant tends to genetically aggregate (in fertilization events involving fertilization of freshly-opened flowers) the qualities pollinators most want, which must be expected to increase the speed and effectiveness with which traits desirable to pollinators would evolve in flowers. Accordingly, angiosperms having separated from gymnosperms for about 200 million years now, pollinators would be expected by now to have evolved to especially prefer species with delicate, beautiful flowers reminiscent of evanescence. This would increase further the tendency of delicacy to be involved in flowers. But the preference is actually presumably more than that. A flower could attract a pollinator by emitting something the pollinator wants but doesn't need. E.g., the flower could emit something that makes the pollinator high in a way that is unnaturally pleasant. (Indeed, I rather expect this is what cannibis does because I have heard that the high of cannibis is concentrated in its flower and that growers can get more "high" in their plant by making sure no pollen hits it, as if when the plant gets desperate, the plant emits more "high".) Obviously, this is a situation that isn't going to benefit the pollinator any more than the junkie. But if a flower is beautiful as opposed to some ugly weed appendage (as the marijuana "flower" rather seems to me from what I have seen on television or from photographs), well, the beauty is a sign of meaningful selection of sperm tubes suited to penetrating freshly-opened flowers. And selection of diploid traits indirectly through haploid selection is a kind of resurrecting in freshly-opened flowers the successes of its freshly-fertilized ancestors. Smearing out like so much pollen upon a petal the beneficial consequences upon natural selection of a flower having gotten fertilized at its fragile opening does spread the benefits from one generation to those of distant descendants. The rewards of youthful love of a flower in the here-and-now is but a multifaceted reflection of the pleasures more directly attributed to youthful flowers of generations long-since past.

A plant whose flowers evolve honestly by ever increasing the efficiency of the real rewards it gives its pollinators profits the most from having pretty, girl-like flowers, for then when a pollinator lands on youthful flower, the flower is not just reliving the pleasures freshly fertilized flowers experienced in the distant past. It is also experiencing a pleasure that is even greater now, because those past pleasures, the flower visits of ancient pasts, weren't just what the pollinators wanted, but what the pollinator needed. For a flower to forgo somewhat the extent to which the simple fact of whether it has attracted a pollinator determines its prospects in order to more be able to relive pleasures of past generations from pollinators distributing pollen as pollen was distributed most efficiently in times ago—this is more rewarding when what ago attracted, benefited (in comparison to what could most attract in the here-and-now). Where is the reward in being able to attract what no longer exists because your ancestors cared not for them but to take? Bees, etc., attracted thus suffered. They are dead and without descendants. Their wings but specks of slightest non-nothingness in piles of greater forest detritus. Pretty flowers, on the other hand, are especially likely to be pleasant in the most real sense—they are beautiful partly from being what pollinators need.

But the beauty of a flower transcends its usefulness to pollinators. To humans, pretty flowers are beautiful rather like girls. People tend to forget that they, too, have evolved. The wise observer observes not only perceptions from without, namely sensations, but also perceptions from within, namely reflections. I can't help thinking that if people but would look inside themselves they would see intuitively that, yes, pretty flowers are like girls. Unfortunately, for all the good in science there are but too many practitioners who feel that there is something admirable about ignoring feelings, etc., from being subjective or some such. Let there be no mistake about why people deride one's own subjective. The subjective is not derided because it be more suspect, but because people lie more about it, so there be no test of whether the subjective of an other is real other than tests that suggest the other has an honest character or whether one has a similar subjective. If you feel girls are like flowers, I suggest that is your common sense. If you feel girls are like flowers, it is incumbent upon you to understand why you feel that way, and if you don't bother, you are ignoring data, the data that you feel that way, and the data is the interior evidence that is the most certain data you can have about human nature. Any science that believes in ignoring most certain data is no science worth respecting, and scientists who do otherwise are idiotically unthoughtfully parroting dogma or lying because ambition causes them to excessively praise just those beliefs which they can most easily convince others as being true. Unfortunately, science is full of people who don't care so much about truth as about convincing the elites who distribute rewards that they have new truths they aren't lying about. It's easier to lie from subjective truth. Anyway, subjectively to me flowers are like girls, and I wouldn't be surprised if they are subjectively like that to you as well. I shall explain why in fact they really are like girls.

Sperm selection in flowers is quite analogous to sperm selection in humans. In particular, the sort of competition that occurs in a pollinated flower between pollen tubes all coming from pollen from the same plant is analogous to intraejaculate sperm selection, i.e., to the competition that occurs between the sperm of one ejaculate (as opposed to interejaculae sperm competition, which involves competition between sperm from several males in promiscuous females). The direct effect of a pollinated plant or non-promiscuous girl selecting for sperm that is more talented at fertilizing (during pollination or sex) is that the descendants created by the act of reproduction are more likely to be similarly talented at fertilizing. This selection implies a short-term disadvantage to the fertilized individual, because next-generation sperm from a child created by the fertilization will tend to be more successful if it contains much genetic material from its parental sperm rather than from its parental egg (and the egg unlike the pollen comes from the fertilized individual). But in subsequent generations, there will be an advantage, because in grandchildren and beyond, assuming no inbreeding, genes have alleles such that at most one of the two is descended from an original parent but not both, so there is no competition between the original parents. In fact, because of genetic linkage, a fit allele from the original father will benefit alleles of linked genes that happen to be from the original mother (as can happen if an odd number of crossings-over occurred between the two genes during meiosis occuring in the first generation subsequent to the original generation). The benefit in distant generations to being fertilized by sperm fit in intraejaculate sperm selection more or less exactly cancels the harm in the original generation, just as the case in plants vis-a-vis competition between pollen tubes. Accordingly, just as in plants, whether the haploid competition between male gametes from the same individual is beneficial depends on whether the characteristics of the reproductive act might be supposed to select for male gametes coding for desirous diploidcharacteristics.

When a young female has sex, her body may well select for totally different sperm than an older female would. Could such be an appropriate encouragement for young females to have sex when young, while still just girls, just as inspect pollinated flowers probably tend to benefit from being fertilized early? In girls more than flowers, I'd say it depends. If a male is deceptive, then since girls are easily deceived (compared with women), and since (or else he wouldn't be very much deceptive) he is not likely to be obviously deceptive, any sex he has with a girl is likely merely a result of having deceived her, and it is a strong disadvantage for a girl to have sex with him, and an even stronger disadvantage for her to have sex with him in a way that encourages intraejaculate sperm selection. Indeed, if a male deceives girls into sex, his ancestors who had sex with girls were likely also to have had sex with them by deceiving them. And it is a lame (and bad) trait to have had reproductive success by deception of the most deceivable; were such people what girls need to have sex with, those people wouldn't need to use deception. A girl definitely would not like to select for that sort of sperm. But though deceptions and a tendency to deceive mates are not things that in themselves are easy to judge (or they wouldn't exist), a tendency to be moral is something that is fairly easy to judge—if a moral nature were not something fairly easy to judge, there would be no advantage to being a moral person equal to the disadvantage of the sacrifice it entails and so there wouldn't be moral persons, the advantage of being a moral person being that fellow moral people will tend to love you unselfishly because they (rightly) judge you moral. Moreover, moral people, mainly dealing morally with the fellow moral people they most associate and mate with, do not have much occasion or ability to deceive. A very moral person might indeed be someone even a girl could feel confident in recognizing as a moral person, and accordingly, she could feel confident that he would not deceive her. If a girl wants to have sex with an obviously morally good male at a young age, this is strongly suggestive of her feeling so confident of his worth that she need not take time considering whether she might find one more beautiful or pleasant. He may be less desirable than what she unbiasedly thinks, but then, he not being deceptive, he may with similar expectation be even be more desirable. Moreover, his ancestors, likely sharing to a large degree his moral nature would also not be expected to have deceived girls into sex subsequent to having sex with girls. Accordingly, a girl selecting for that part of a good male's DNA especially effective at fertilizing young girls in all likelihood is selecting for the most beautiful and naturally pleasant part of his genome. Sure, it is disastrous for a girl to have sex and more particularly lustful sperm-selecting sex with a bad male. But this sort of thing, if government really believed in family values rather than forcing their own values on families, can be greatly prevented just by giving parents the power to veto the sexual relationships of their daughters that with parental permission would be permissible (as should be the case with even adolescent girls, in my opinion, but which is not). One of the main driving forces behind the evolution of morality is probably the tendency for girls to want sex with very morally good males, and for instraejaculate sperm selection in such situations to select for his best tendencies. By excessively restricting girls when young from having meaningful sex with good, beautiful males, either by outright prohibition or by ensuring young people are too poor to raise children, society is probably removing a significant fraction of the reward that females can obtain by having sex with virtuous males, as clearly could be very bad for the evolution of moral virtue. Also, society is thwarting tendencies that would speed up evolution in good people by lengthening the time period between generations in good people—again, this couldn't be good for evolution of higher moral traits. The interested reader may find further discussion of this phenomenon in previous blog posts and my online (and getting somewhat old) book, Exact Morality for Today.

Many people would seem to behave as they intuitively see a beautiful reproductive similarity between girls and flowers. At weddings there are flower girls, not flower grandmas. And most women very much want to be thought of as young, not as old, and so men on special occasions give their beloveds flowers. Actually, the symbolism might be a little more direct, since having sex with young females while having sex with an older female could make the male absorb girl-produced lust or even occasion sperm-mixing between the females that could increase the chances that the older female would be fertilized by a sperm especially effective at prospering and fertilizing in young females. Perhaps what at least some women would prefer to a dozen roses would be a dozen girls for their husband to have sex with while having sex with her, an obvious impossibility given our present laws. Oh well, perhaps giving a clear scientific account of all my revolutionary theories about the beautiful relation between girls and flowers could at least make me more worthy of attention than a gift of cut flowers, especially considering it is not good for flowers to get cut.