Were WWI German saboteurs superstitious aligners of killings with incidents of mass death?

So I got to thinking about the below after noticing that (1) NYC Mayor Gaynor was shot 9 August 1910 at German Lloyd docks where 1900 Hoboken docks fire (326 dead) happened, on ship that had been at docks on day of fire, (2) Titanic (1514 dead) hit iceberg on anniversary of Lincoln assassination and sank on ann. of his death, (3) Presidential candidate (and ex-President) Teddy Roosevelt was shot 14 October 1912 by German-American ex-bartender six months to the day after Titanic hit the iceberg and one year to the day before Senghenydd (440 dead) and people speculated at the time assassination attempt was at least partly motivated by loss of his claimed fiancee (who per her brother probably wasn't even a girlfriend) in the 15 June 1904 NYC General Slocum fire (1021 dead, mainly Lutherans from Little Germany, Lower East Side) at Hell's Gate, East River, especially because upon being arrested he had on a note in his pocket the German name of Luther's hymn “A Mighty Fortress is our God”, the song the band was playing aboard Slocum when she last left the dock, (4) Mayor Mitchel was shot at in NYC on 17 April 1914, 1:30 pm, after a tenement fire in Hell's Kitchen near Times Square had killed about a dozen the morning of the same day, and (5)Titanic's rescue ship Carpathia was torpedoed about 10 hours after the last Tsar and his family were murdered, on same day (17 July 1918). It's worth noting too, along the same lines, that the deadliest North Atlantic disaster before Titanic was the loss of SS Norge (at least 635 dead) on 28 June 1904, when it foundered on Hasselwood Rock 200m north of Rockall. Exactly 10 years to the day after this disaster, Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, commonly taken to be the proximate cause of World War I. The assassin, Gavrilo Princip, claimed Bogdan Žerajić as one of his inspirations. In 1910 on the sixth anniversary of the General Slocum disaster, Žerajić had shot five bullets (which all missed) in Sarajevo at the Governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina before killing himself with the sixth. The Norge disaster was only 13 days after the General Slocum disaster.

So let's get right to it and consider the known and deadliest possible acts of sabotage against the Allies during World War I, looking for alignments in the particulars of these acts of killing and destruction with particulars of other incidents of mass deaths (disasters). The pattern is not quite as obvious, but there still are strong suggestions in sufficiently many incidents as to be quite suggestive of Aligner activity.

Known German sabotage in US, WWI:

2 Feb 1915, 1:10am. Vanceboro, ME, international bridge bombing (0 dead) by Werner Horn. Bomber had 50 minute fuse and was delayed due to oncoming trains, and so bomb may have originally been intended to be placed just before midnight on 1 Feb 1915, fourth ann. explosion of dynamite and black powder explosion at Jersey Central Railroad docks, Communipaw, Jersey City, NJ (24 dead)?

30 May 1915, 2am. Barge containing 18 tons dynamite blown up in Seattle, WA, probably by Emil Marksz. Bomb believed placed about 10pm on 29 May 1915, one year ann. of RMS Empress of Ireland disaster near Quebec City (1012 dead). On 22 May 1915, the same day as the Quintinshill Railway disaster (226 dead, to this day still Britain's worst ever), in Tacoma, WA (where bomb was believed bought and where explosives were originally to be loaded on ship bound to Vladivostok), an arsonist had destroyed two armored vehicles and damaged one rail car sitting on the Northern Pacific Dock. Louis J. Smith believed to have bought bomb materials in Tacoma and later arrested for plot to blow up St. Clair tunnel. Bomb believed assembled by Walter L. Scholz. On the morning of July 4, 1915, probably sensing he was under surveillance and about to be interrogated, Marksz committed suicide. On the morning of July 4, 1900, a streetcar wreck in Tacoma killed 43.

21 June 1915, 3am. Peabody overall plant, being used to manufacture army uniforms, bombed in Walkerville, Windsor, ON (0 dead). Tenth ann. sabotage of 20th Century Limited at Mentor, OH, then perhaps worst ever instance of railway sabotage in US (21 dead). Group ran by Karl Kaltschmidt also tried to blow up barracks in Windsor same night (bomb failed to go off), and hoped to sabotage St. Clair Tunnel (between Sarnia and Port Huron) and Detroit Screw Works. His assistants included Walter Scholz, Carl Schmidt and Charles Francis Respa. Weird fact: on October 28, 1915, the ninth anniversary of the Second Great Atlantic City Train Wreck (53 dead), (1) St. John's school fire in Peabody, MA, killed 21 young girls and (2) HMS Sarnia collided with HMS Hythe during Gallipolli offensive, killing 154 aboard Hythe.

30 July 1916, 2:08 am. Black Tom explosion (4 dead), Black Tom Island, Jersey City, NJ. Perhaps most successful WWI German espionage destroys $20 million of munitions destined for allies. Bomb perhaps placed 29 July 1916, same day as Matheson fire, to this day deadliest ever Canadian forest fire (and ann. 1900 assassination of King Umberto I of Italy). On 30 July 1896, twenty years to day before explosion, First Great Atlantic City Train Wreck killed 50 in Atlantic City, NJ. On 29-30 July 1910, Slocum Massacre (cf. paddle steamer General Slocum fire of 1904 mentioned above) of African-Americans occurs in Slocum, TX (5-100 dead).

11 January 1917, Kingsland explosion (0 dead), Kingsland, Lyndhurst, NJ. Buffalo Bill, i.e., William Cody, died preceding day. In 1901, on the day assassin Czolgosz was electrocuted for shooting US President William McKinley in Buffalo, the Buffalo Bill Circus train wrecked in Linwood (between Salisbury and Lexington), NC, seriously injuring Annie Oakley and killing many circus animals. What to this day is the worst ever US interurban train disaster happened at Kingsland, IN, on September 21, 1910, on the Fort Wayne and Wabash Valley Traction Co. line. The company logo, on the car that did the damage but suffered no fatalities, was a swastika inside a circle. Oddly, perhaps the second worst-ever US interurban train disaster happened at Staunton, IL, only 13 days later on October 4, 1910 (cf. 1918 Sayreville explosion below). President Wilson was born in Staunton, VA.

9 July 1917. Mare Island (north of San Francisco) explosion of large barge containing black powder (6 dead). Same day as mysterious explosion of battleship HMS Vanguard near Scapa Flow (843 dead). 9 July 1850 there was a fire in Philadelphia (44 dead—to this day deadliest fire in Phil.) that took off when saltpeter (a constituent of gunpowder) ignited in a warehouse where fire started in hay stores, the same day President Zachary Taylor died, purportedly (some suggest he might have been poisoned by some of those wanting the much more pro-slavery Millard Filmore) from some sort of food poisoning from cherries and iced milk consumed on 4 July 1850, four years to day before Rider's Grove, MD, train wreck (28 dead, still to this day Maryland's deadliest). Great Train Wreck of 1918 also on 9 July, in Nashville, usually considered deadliest ever US train wreck (101 dead). The 4 July 1900 Tacoma steetcar disaster 15 years to the day before Emil Marksz committed suicide was on the 50th anniversary of Taylor consuming the suspect cherries and two years to the day after the SS La Bourgougne (549 dead) sank less than thirty minutes after colliding in heavy fog at 5 am with Cromartyshire 60 nautical miles south of Sable Island, Nova Scotia.

Deadliest other munitions explosions during WWI (sabotage possible but without strong evidence):

2 April 1916. Faversham, Kent, England. 200 tons of TNT explode (115 dead) at TNT plant after empty sacks catch fire.

19 January 1917, 6:52pm. Silvertown, West Ham, Essex (now Newham, Greater London) explosion of 50 long tons of TNT (73 dead) at TNT plant. Tenth ann. gunpowder car exploding (28 dead) when Big Four Passenger Train No. 3 passed it in Sandford, IN, and of collision in fog on Big Four (23 dead) at Fowler, IN, that occurred same day in same state.

10 April 1917. Eddystone, PA explosion. 18 tons of black powder ignite, in “F” building, setting off tons of shrapnel shells (139 dead, mainly women). Ann. of 1912 Titanic leaving Southampton and of 1910 premature dynamite explosion (9 dead) at Dead Man's Cut, Novice, TX, on Santa Fe, RR. (A passenger train wreck at Novice would kill 7 on 13 January 1944.)

6 December 1917. Ammunition ship SS Mont Blanc explodes in Halifax Harbor, NS, Canada, after collision with SS Imo (2000 dead). Tenth ann. Monongah, WV, coal mine explosion, North America's deadliest ever mine disaster.

18 May 1918. Oakdale, PA, TNT explosion at Aetna Chemical munitions plant (200 dead). Was fiftieth and last birthday of last Tsar Nicholas ii. Ann. Goliad tornado of 1902 (114 dead) (followed next day by Fraterville mine disaster (219 dead) near Coal Creek, TN, which was three days before Coal Creek No. 2 mine disaster (128 dead) near Fernie, BC, in Elk River Valley, Canada). Goliad is where over 425 Texan POWs in the Texan War of Independence were massacred in mass murder 27 March 1836 by their Mexican captors per instructions of Santa Anna.

1 July 1918. Chilwell munitions plant explosion (134 dead). Ann. 1906 Salisbury, Wiltshire, train derailment (28 dead) next to Sergei Skripal's drinking club exactly ten years before 1916 first day of Battle of Somme (20,000 British dead) and one hundred before train collision resulting from missing Willow Grove signal (Willow Grove No. 10 mine disaster, Neffs, OH).

2 July 1918. Split Rock, Onondoga, NY, explosion after mixing motor in main TNT building at Semet-Solvay plant allegedly overheated, starting fire (50 dead). Ann. 1881 James Garfield shooting, 1915 US Capitol bombing by German extremist Erich Muenter, and worst day 1917 East St. Louis riots. Day after Chilwell shell-loading plant explosion.

4 October 1918. T. D. Gillespie munitions loading plant explosion, Morgan, Sayreville, NJ. (100 dead). Ann. 1910 interurban disaster at Staunton, IL.

Various other incidents of interest during WWI (inc. rest of deadliest British maritime incidents not caused by enemy shells, torpedoes or mines):

26 November 1914. HMS Bulwark explodes at Sheerness (741 dead), possibly from shells having been temporarily stored against a boiler room bulkhead that grew hot. Ann. 1905 Baker Bridge wreck in Lincoln, MA (17 dead)??? near where Sarah Pryor would be last seen alive in 1984.

27 May 1915. Former ocean liner converted to mine layer HMS Princess Irene internally explodes (342 dead) in Medway for unknown reason considered most likely to be faulty primer on mine she was carrying. Not far from where HMS Bulwark exploded. Ann. 1875 Precious Blood Church fire (78 dead) in Holyoke, MA?? and also of 1896 St. Louis/E. St. Louis tornado (255 dead)?

30 December 1915, 3:25pm. HMS Natal suffers internal explosion, possibly from faulty cordite in shells she was carrying, in Cromarty Firth (390 dead). Ann. 1903 Iroquois Theatre, Chicago, IL, disaster (600 dead) and one year to the day before Rasputin death.

21 February 1917. Troopship Mendi (646 dead), carrying mainly South Africans en route to France, almost cut in half after being struck by SS Darro south of Isle of Wight. Anniversary 1891 Springhill Mine disaster (125 dead), Nova Scotia??

12 January 1918, 9:27pm. HMS Opal and HMS Narborough run aground on Pentland Skerries near Hesta Head, South Ronaldsay, Orkney Islands, UK (188 dead, William Sissons lone survivor). Same day as Minnie Pit Coal Mine disaster, 9:45 am, Halmer End, Staffordshire (156 dead)!

4 March 1918. USS Cyclops from Rio de Janeiro leaves Barbados for Baltimore with full load of manganese ore, never to be seen again along with its 306 crew and passengers. Some speculate that captain, determined by investigators to be a native German with a reputation for being a cruel disciplinarian, agreed to meet German submarine somewhere to destroy his ship. Tenth ann. 1908 Lake View School fire, Collinwood, OH (175 dead) and eighth ann. 1910 Rogers Pass avalanche (62 dead), BC, Canada, and exactly 100 years before Sergei Skripal poisoning in Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK.

26 May 1918, midnight (probably ending day, but possibly beginning day). Delphi, IN. Unknown saboteur pours oil on Wabash RR bridge over Deer Creek and sets it alight. Fire put out before train came, so no fatalities. Ann. 26 May 1917, Mattoon tornado (101 dead) and near ann. tornadoes day after Mattoon tornado (~150 dead) and 27 May 1915, Princess Irene disaster (conf. above). In 1944, infamous “Mad Gasser of Mattoon” flit gun attacks peaked on one year ann. Congressional train wreck (79 dead), on ann. of shooting of President McKinley.

17 July 1918. RMS Carpathia, the ship that rescued the survivors of RMS Titanic, torpedoed and sunk (5 dead) by German sub U-55 about 10 hours after last Tsar and his immediate family were murdered in Ekaterinburg. One year anniversary of King George V proclaiming the renaming his Royal House from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor.

6 October 1918. Troopship HMS Otranto, during heavy storm, collided with Cashmir and then was cast ashore by wind or sea onto Old Women's Reef off Islay and sank (470 dead, mainly British crew and American soldiers).

In late 1915 and early 1916, the German biological weapon espionage program in the United States was set up by Anton Dilger, who was based in Washington, DC. He was born near Front Royal, but at age 9 went to live with his sister Eda in Mannheim, Germany. In September 1915, after losing several German relatives in the war, he returned to America, where he succeeded in killing several thousand horses destined for the Allies by incubating glanders bacteria for distribution to agents to be (for example) covertly injected into horses as they were preparing to be shipped. After NYCPD became on to the horse sabotage campaign, he returned to Germany in January 1916. But his brother continued working in the lab they set up in Chevy Chase, NW Washington, DC, where he and his fellow conspirators may have constructed some of the pencil bombs, etc., used to set off the monumental July 30, 1916, 2:08 am, Black Tom Explosion of two million pounds of ammunition destined for the Allies in Jersey City, NJ (other such infernal devices were built in 1915 on the SS Friederich der Grosse as it was layed up at the Lloyd Hoboken docks on account of the British blockade).

Officially, Anton Dilger died in Spain on 17 October 1918 of the Spanish Flu during the infamous epidemic. But apparently there are doubts and even speculation that he was killed by Germans he was at odds with. Anyway, in Ludwigshafen where the main BASF facilities were located across the Rhine from Mannheim, in 1921 on the anniversary of the 1910 Kingsland wreck, the Oppau explosion killed over 500. On the anniversary of the Mattheson fire (and perhaps of the planting of the infernal device at Black Tom) in 1943, a tank car explosion at the IG Farben plant (BASF had become part of IG Farben) at Ludwigshafen again killed over 500. In 1948, on July 28, the anniversary (according to the standard definition) of the start of World War I, an explosion at the same Ludgwishafen IG Farben plant killed over 200, two days before the Nuremberg trials found 13 IG Farben employees guilty of war crimes.

The German embassy's military attache in the US was Franz von Papen, who early in WWI was a leading figure in planning sabotage and the (never actualized) invasion of Canada by members of the German-American beer-drinking clubs. But he later became Hitler's Vice Chancellor and played a role in persuading von Hindenberg to allow Hitler as Chancellor. H. W. Blood-Ryan, in his 1940 work Franz von Papen: His Life and Times, mentions precisely one act of great courage displayed by von Papen as an officer upon returning to Europe. In June 1917, von Papen once dressed as a British officer to bravely patrol British positions, and was almost shot by his own troops in confusion. This incident occurred near “Mericourt, hard by Lens”. Méricourt, Pas-de-Calais, suffered (404 dead) more casualties from the March 10, 1906, Courrières Mine explosion (1099 dead) one mile east of Lens than any other village or town. James Earl Ray and Osama bin Laden would be born on the anniversary of Courrières, still Europe's deadliest ever mine disaster.

And a prominent saboteur, Kurt Jahnke, later supposedly became basically Rudolf Hess's personal intelligence officer. Rudolf Hess was a very early member of the Thule society which purportedly motivated much of the occultism of the early Nazis, in particular the obsession with the swastika. That the Nazi flag contains a swastika inside a circular-bounded background, could this be at least partly motivated by the emblem of the Fort Wayne and Wabash Valley Traction Company? At any rate, the evidence in its totality is suggestive that the superstitious tendency during World War I to seek alignment of killing with (usually earlier) mass death (if not mere coincidence) was caused not just by Germans or German-Americans but by proto-Nazis.

All these alignments may seem too ancient to be of much current interest, but Aligners may recruit by sodomizing future 'ligners while revealing to them the “wondrous” alignments of murder with mass death, which presumably may seem more profound and less stupid when under the influence of anandamide, the chemical in semen which binds to the same cannabanoid receptors that marijuana's addictive chemicals bind to. Apparently, I have read, marijuana has a way of making things seem more profound than they really are, and I suppose since semen contains anandamide, it's the same way with sodomy. Perhaps sodomy acts done while discussing and pondering 'lignment may seem so profound that the recruits may choose to imitate their abusers, sodomizing others later (maybe much later) while discussing the 'lignment, and of course both murdering so as to increase the number of murders with alignment and also encouraging such murder. Oh yeah, I know, People may well think I am some kooky person still trying to fight World War I (on the allied, non-aligners side), but since there may be a subgroup of those who fought under the banner of the Central Powers, namely the aligners, who perhaps to this day are still fighting for one of their main causes (increasing the number of killings aligned with incidents of mass death), someone needs at least to wave the flag in the right place so the mass of people, namely the alignment-indifferents (who presumably had never conceived of anyone being so bizarre as to intentionally kill to create alignment of the particulars of these killings with past particulars of mass death), who presumably included all or almost all of the adherents of the Allied Powers during World War I, can help fight and overcome the Aligners, a task that may require a group effort. Alignism, for lack of a better word, may be behind much evil violence even today, especially that which otherwise seems pointless and without a motive else. The crime fighting authorities and the dedicated citizen crime fighters should, I suggest, more regularly look for signs of (very dangerous and concerning) 'ligner activity.

I will readily admit that such evidence I have here presented of the existence of Aligners may not seem particularly convincing to others at this point. I shouldn't be surprised if others ask for further evidence of Aligner activity, e.g., in the years since World War I. But it's only been a little over a hundred years since the war. More importantly, it may well be that it is well to be mysterious. No sense in spreading all your peacock feathers all at once. Not only could there be Aligners about, but you don't want to be so obvious that you end up attracting the crazy-about-not-being-crazy people. Baaah. They wouldn't figure out anything but could get in the way or do something imprudent. The first people I want to be intrigued by my Aligner hypothesis are just the wise people. Some publicity is bad publicity. I want not only to not say too much too quickly generally about what I know, but also to not say publicly if I know anything else. Maybe I don't have any other impressive amazing corroborating observations about the Aligners that I could spread before you like so many beautiful feathers, or Maybe I do. If you seem beautiful or someone I could work with, and you are interested, then oh yes I will gladly be the open book if there is a book. But until I am presented with such evidence, then I take liberty to remain at peace with the fog I'm only too glad surrounds and obscures what further evidence of esoteric evil I may or may not have discovered in my researches, cogitations, and reflections. Still, it is necessary to put some stuff out there, just like I am doing here, stuff that may well intrigue the wise more than the foolish.

A sphinx is a mysterious object and it's also a cat. There's a kind of evil that pretends to be the good cat, the cat the girls love so much they end up wanting to hate things just so they can be sure they can still hate something (feelings created by addiction to semen chemicals via sodomy are not likely to be particularly specific, and so being able to hate while feeling love is a sign that the love is real and not just caused by a sordid addiction). Oh it's a primeval tendency, the tendency to want to hate while feeling love, especially useful, no doubt (relative to other defenses against sodomy), in non-mammals like our (cloacal) pre-mammalian ancestors (especially I'd say those that were pelycosaurs*, i.e., the synapsids that aren't therapsids or their descendants) who hadn't evolved reproductive systems more separate from the digestive system, but it's a tendency that may nevertheless exist and have some useful application that would be impertinent for me to indicate whether I believe worth it. Some days nothing matters, some days something does. If a girl were a human sacrifice priestess, and I thought her beautiful, I might allow her to be cruel while being affectionate with me, but that's not really relevant in this discussion now. What is relevant is that I don't really at all like to fantasize about what the really evil people seem to be doing here, i.e., forcing girls to hurt others so they can more easily pretend that the girls can hate others while loving them. This wanting to force others to kill just because one wants the mystique it might give among those who fail to understand is very much a main cause, I mostly think, of the evil I am studying—or at least it is to the extent sodomizing females is similar to sodomizing males (female zombies may be evil and homicidal but they aren't contagious because they can't later imitate their abusers by sodomizing others while trying to encourage them to kill). If zombies don't have enough hate to kill from it, they may yet kill from belief in superstitious nonsense involving (say) a supposed desirability of feeding supposed disaster gods lots of victims whose death particulars are especially aligned with the particulars of mass death, which I suppose is what the zombifiers say is what the disaster gods want for dinner. People say, “Get in the mind of the killer”, but I do not at all believe that. Much better to understand better and fantasize about having sex with female human sacrifice priestesses while they are being cruel and more particularly about what would be the most beautiful and moral way of going about it. If you know what evil is trying to pretend to be that may have some appeal to people who are not morally corrupt (especially in a vastly different society, i.e., in a society in which female human sacrifice priestesses take some of the place of law enforcement in destroying evil), then well, understanding what the evil person is doing will be pretty trivial and yet won't cause you to feel like self-destructing, at least if you are very slow and patiently lazy in arriving at your moral conclusions. And the more the environment of your brain is like the environment encountered ancestrally in possibly good individuals, the more your thoughts are likely to be enlightened if they are good, evil-hating thoughts, that basically have no utility in the bad individual that might—as if!—have caused brains to evolve to create enlightened morally correct thoughts notwithstanding when in a brain environment akin to that of a bad individual. Oh sure it can be a moral struggle whether it is right to think more about having sex with girls who from hate want simultaneously to do cruel things to what they hate. Indeed so much lazy sacredness is required there were that all that be involved, it would be hard to say whether I should be so bold as to think I'm sacred enough to fantasize about it significantly. But Zombie serial killer assassin terrorist child-killing train-wrecking rapists have been wreaking havoc on the world because people don't really get cat behavior at its most moral. It's wrong to ignore that. Apparently sufficiently many people are naturally into cat-like cruelty sufficiently strongly that, on account of their ignorance of their primeval cat-like pelycosauran tendencies, they may well be fooled into thinking zombifying serial killer assassin terrorist child-killing train-wrecking rapists are just fluffy kitties who aren't forcing their zombies to kill but rather are just being loved by their kitties who surely can't be zombies—because they just assume, with excess respect for scientific sounding dogma and insufficient regard to feelings of spookiness and what haunts, that nothing like zombification exists—and so must be like cats when they drop a bird at your door to play pet-me-while-I-kill-it with her (a game I don't play with actual cats, because presumably unlike an actual wise moral cat I haven't any particular insight into the morals of choosing what sort of actual birds deserve death or what constitutes bad behavior on their part). Oh, sacredness is very important all right in understanding cat morals—I can scarcely imagine a truth more importunate. But I can't neglect the discharging of my duty as to protecting society from the extreme evil of the evil zombifying cat impostors. But I don't want to just throw out there to mass publicity the whole of the evil pattern of the serial-killer cat-impostor assassins. There could be a mystique their evil might obtain inadvertently from such light as I cast on them and their superstitious rituals, which my spit might not suffice to defame. No, it's a duty of my life to sacredly teach people the truth about cruel cat behavior and to investigate the matter and associated moral issues thoroughly so I can quench any fires sparked by the evil cat impostors and also so I can more effectively tame any excess enthusiasm in cat girls that my investigations into their clean sexual hate might create.

*Pelycosaurs are believed like humans to be ureotelic, the primitive trait. After uricotelic animals evolved, with their decreased dependence on water, ureotelic animals presumably had a hard time competing in dry environments, as they still do today. In consequence, pelycosaurs where they mainly existed presumably had dependable supplies of fresh water, making being able to suspect having become addicted more advantageous. Indeed, drinking water may cause addictive substances to more easily be metabolized into substances that leave the body through the urine, and so drinking lots of water is something one can do—it might work at least somewhat—about addiction provided one suspects it has occurred (e.g., because hating while feeling love has become worrisomely difficult). Being warm-blooded, on the other hand, like therapsids are believed to have been, though a defense against addiction, is not a defense that depends on recognizing abuse as addictive, it merely is a defense against sexual assault generally (which tends to be addictive), because warm-blooded animals are always at the ready or near-ready to be able to jump and run away or kick back, which is more than one can say for a cold-blooded animal when she is cold and needs to warm up ere she can move well or faster than slow or at all.

Morals as applied to cat-girl female human sacrifice priestesses may seem somewhat alien at first. Cat girls if pandered to may kill quite excessively—a key if there are human sacrifice priestesses is for their lovers to love them better when they kill slowly. The more the sacrifice priestesses get sexual kicks from torturing and terrifying their victims before killing them, the less likely they will kill too fast or too many at once for the kick of killing, and overall the killing will be reduced, as is sacred. Life is sacred—presumably it is only when a person is very evil and devoid of love of sacredness that it could be better and more sacred that the person be killed. There is a danger sex-crazed girls and young women could all of a sudden get too enthusiastic about killing if, say, enjoying hating while having sex becomes the latest thing, like a fad. Fortunately, if females want to have sex with a male while she kills people she hates, he will likely, at least if he is good and has sacredly and lazily thought and fantasized matters through, not be very pleased by her killing too many too quickly of the very hated people that other females likely might want to help kill while having sex with him or by her killing so many people society may well object or worse to what he allowed his lover to do, thereby stopping an activity that makes him especially sexy to females—to be sexy is a potential advantage (in obtaining sexual pleasure). The most sacred thing, I feel, is for the male to love female human sacrifice priestesses better when they kill slowly both because he wants not only what is beautiful but also the sexual pleasure that the slowness could thus give him. If he is loved enough and allowed enough (by the society) to have several female human sacrifice priestesses having sex with him, it definitely seems like it would be especially sacred to love one better for not killing too much because this is beautiful to him and on the other hand to love another better for not killing too much because this is sexually pleasant to him. I have felt for a long time, even before I had hardly any idea what the feeling meant, that it would be especially beautiful if I could understand this beautiful moral point better while being very sacred going about it. So sacred, in fact, that I must say it would be imprudent and reckless of me to say even after many years of thinking about it, that this phenomenon is exactly what I most felt and feel I should want to get at understanding, but if my hypothesis of what I should get at does prove slightly inaccurate I am not especially concerned, since error can be corrected without much bad consequence before one gets the habit of believing it. I have to start somewhere, as everyone does when taking a next step, even if a next step is an important one.

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, B_{n + 1} will be defined as r_n E(B_n), where E is the "effective love operator", and r_n is a coefficient that for each n gives an indication of the weight "effective love of B_n" 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 B_n 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, B_m and B_n are loved the same amount. Since in particular B_{m + 1} is loved the same as B _{n + 1}, it follows that for each m, n that r_n times the amount a moral person loves E(B_m) equals r_m times the amount a moral person loves E(B_n); i.e., that a moral person loves E(B_m) an amount that is r_m/r_n times the amount the same moral person loves E(B_n). But we also know by the remarks ending the last paragraph that, what since B_m and B_n are loved the same amount, E(B_m) and E(B_n) are loved the same amount. It follows that for all m, n, r_m/r_n = 1, i.e., that for all m, n, r_m= r_n. In other words, all the coefficients r_m have the same value, the effective love ratio with respect to E, which we shall denote r or r_E.

Clearly (easy proof by induction), to say that for each natural number n, B_{n + 1} = r E(B_n) is the same as to say that for each n, B_n = 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 B_n = 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 r_L = 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(B_n) is nothing other than B_{n + 1}, and so L applied to the sum of all the terms B_n is just the sum of all the terms B_n 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 insect-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 per son 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.

More about girls being like cats or dogs

Let me first summarize my last post, before making a few additional comments and clarifications. First, girls can be attracted to a male who cleanly controls them merely by not having loving feelings for them unless they do what he demands; in particular, they are very much attracted to males who tend to force girls to be themselves, a very useful trait in males who are naturally desired by girls. Second, girls are very much afraid of being hurt by being controlled in wrong way, i.e., by becoming addicted to depravity. Third, girls, to make sure they are not addicted to a male on account of sexual depravity (which is essentially a love potion), when in love often having the cat-like tendency to feel cruel hateful things toward other males just to make sure the sordid love potion of sexual depravity (semen in the digestive system) hasn't rendered them incapable of hating. Fourth, when girls are controlled, the importance of differentiating whether the control is clean and beautiful or sordid and ugly is so important, girls in that situation are especially likely to test their love with cat-like cruel imaginings. Fifth, it follows that males controlling girls might quite easily force them to do violent things, since just a sense of being controlled in any way might encourage the girls to do the violent things. Sixth, it is a dangerous not very good thing that males should be able to force girls to do violent hateful things to people; this is probably largely why cats tend to be solitary and not much willing to be controlled. Seventh, girls often have the dog-like tendency to enjoy their lover controlling other girls, since skanky females on the contrary want all the addiction to themselves, and so fight over depravity like winos over a bottle of wine. Eighth, girls experiencing this dog-like tendency to enjoy a male cleanly controlling others very much enjoy their lover being merciful to the other girls he controls., especially in his feelings toward them, such feelings affecting everyone (including themselves) in the relationship. Ninth, it follows that girls in dog-mode feel male mercifulness goes along well with male control. But, tenth, a male forcing girls to be mean are being controlling but the opposite of merciful. So, eleventh, girls in dog mode are repulsed by males trying to force girls to be mean. So, twelfth, it is important if girls in cat mode, i.e., girls imagining cruel things to test love, are sufficiently dog-like as to allow themselves to be controlled, that society appreciates girls also being dog in the sense that they enjoy other girls being controlled mercifully; else warlike males could have so much power to dominate girls as to force them to excess violence.

The key point, perhaps, in understanding these observations is that it is possible for a girl to feel hate and love at the same time (for different people), but that it is difficult or impossible to simultaneously feel mercy and its opposite, a feeling of cruel mercilessness. Indeed, this makes sense inasmuch as frequently hated people attack loved people, and in such situations both the hate and the love can together encourage appropriate response, e.g., destruction or disempowering of the hated person to bring cessation of hostilities. But mercy and cruelty tend to be emotions people have when they themselves already have the power (to acquit or hate). It is less the case that there be some third person who will immediately be affected by the decision of which emotion to let hold sway. Anyway, one may look into one's own self to determine whether mercy and cruelty be compatible emotions; looking inside myself they don't much seem compatible in the sense that I can't have both simultaneously. Thus, if a girl enjoying a male's control over others empathetically enjoys his mercy towards those he controls, she couldn't simultaneously empathize with any cruel emotions he might have in forcing girls to be cruel. True, if the cat-like girl really took pleasure in being mean, then, yeah, it would in some sense be merciful of him to allow her to be pleased by her being mean, and so that might be something a dog-like girl could appreciate, but if the cat-like girl didn't naturally enjoy the violence, well, it wouldn't be merciful of him in any way to force her to be violent, which is the big danger. A male can't cleanly force a girl to be violent without risking repulsing observing girls in dog-mode, a very good and important thing insofar as preventing some sort of evil apocalypse. However (in some age where human sacrifice is common), a male could impress dog-like observing girls by restricting the cat-like girls' tendency toward violence sufficiently as to give a powerful impression of his control, while still occasionally allowing the cat-like girl to be violent when she most wants (where his mercy towards her would trump his mercy toward the victim). In societies where human sacrifice is something that happens regularly girls probably naturally have a somewhat greater taste for clean sadism than would be right in itself or what male's tend to have, which actually is not a bad thing since it ensures that girls in dog-mode have the right, moral attitude toward males who control cleanly sadistic girls.

Notice that if a girl is in cat mode, then if there be a female in dog mode enjoying her, well, the girl in cat mode has to be controlled to be much of an enjoyment. So on balance, being in dog mode might be something more expected of a wife or someone not controlled. That may well be counter-intuitive, though, because the male sympathizing with the female in cat mode is so significant.

Another interesting point is that it might be tricky or take a good while for a girl to switch from cat mode to dog mode. If a girl feels cruelty and love simultaneously, then if she later switches and feels mercy and control simultaneously, well, an obvious explanation for that switch is that she has been sodomized. Accordingly, since clean girls don't want emotions sodomized people have, that is not a switch a girl would likely want to do, at least not for a good while since having sex or perhaps even for a good while after seriously fantasizing about sex. I can't see offhand similar problems in switching from dog-mode to cat-mode (beyond the sense it might be awkward to return).

I suppose some readers might think my observations rather creepy or crazy. After all, there is no human sacrifice allowed nowadays, so why would anyone be that concerned about it? Maybe they'll think I want to start a human sacrifice cult or some such. As I have pointed out, human sacrifice is something that is unusually inappropriate nowadays since there is much interaction between genetically diverse people of fairly recent origin. It is important that selection, whether natural, sexual, or whatever (e.g., caused by human sacrifice) be slow, to allow for much mixing of genetic material. There's much beautiful, good genetic material next to ugly, evil genetic material. Selecting strongly against the bad genetic material will destroy much that is good. Human sacrifice is particularly bad nowadays. Even capital punishment of the worst convicted criminals is something one can reasonably argue against as just not worth it. And of course, hardly anybody nowadays is arguing for human sacrifice, etc. Even if a girl were to think human sacrifice the right thing nowadays, she would not be turned on by actually doing that since (as mentioned in last post and earlier), girls if the least bit afraid don't enjoy being sadistic. (And girls killing is dangerous for them in a society that disapproves of it.) Even if they knew they could get away with some violence, they still couldn't enjoy it, because they'd know that being the sort to want violence would make them so creepy-looking, few would feel safe being their friends or co-workers.

But to assume that future ages will be like our own is indeed an assumption. Clearly when there is much recent genetic mixing between genetically diverse ethnicities (as is happening nowadays) this leads to a great deal of genetic heterozygosity between homologous chromosomes in individuals. Clearly in such a situation genetic mixing is appropriate; i.e., crossover rates need to be high for humanity as a whole to prosper or just to do the beautiful thing. Since (another one of my theories) genetic crossover tends to be encouraged by lust, it makes sense that we are entering a lustful age. Eventually, after there has been much mixing, that is when selection should ideally increase. So it makes sense that eventually, after many centuries of high levels of lust, some epigenetic markers or some such left behind by all this lust will encourage in people a desire for rapid selection. This rapid selection could encourage society to become less strictly monogamous and, just maybe, such as to want human sacrifice or something similar. Eventually, the diversity will decrease to the point that people become not lustful, after a long enough time of which people will revert to a more pro-marriage age that almost definitely eschews human sacrifice. Anyway, my guess is that typical human societies nowadays tend to be between the pro-marriage, low selection age and the lustful age. Anyway, we are still probably about an eighth of a cycle before we get above average desires for selection, and about three-eighths of a cycle before we would be at the time where rapid selection and human sacrifice might be most common. (Actually, since what allows the genetic mixing is the non-cyclic sudden advance in human travel technologies, it is somewhat misleading to think of the phenomenon as purely cyclic—clearly a better model would be preferable—but still the cyclic model is useful for getting an idea of what might happen.) I'm not saying that human sacrifice or something similar will necessarily happen. In particular, maybe the mere fact that there are so many more people moving about so easily will have some sort of complex effect. But I really think it is presumptuous to believe that human sacrifice, ritual murders, etc., being common in the distant future is not at least a significant possibility. And ideally, the time is now for humanity to think about the morality of such human sacrifice in these distant ages. For of one thing one may rest assured. If people actually get so they want human sacrifice to an appreciable degree, they certainly are not going to be as devoid of selfish motives that might encourage false morality and bad etiquette than is the case now, when human sacrifice, being essentially something irrelevant to this age, no one has hardly any selfish motives to consider one way as opposed to another.

Another reason to think about girls having cat-like cruelty is that even in societies like ours essentially devoid of human sacrifice, etc., girls may still like to fantasize about being cruel just to make sure they can (because they haven't been rendered incapable of hating on account of being screwed up by sodomy, i.e. (in my definition) addictive semen in the digestive system, or by some other love potion); especially will they tend to do this when feeling controlled. It is quite important that society have some understanding of this. Oh sure, it seems reasonable that if only sodomy could be done away with altogether, then eventually, there would be no advantage to girls having sex while having feelings that sodomized people don't tend to have, and so I suppose eventually cruelty would be sexually dull to them. But good luck with so effectively convincing people that sodomy is evil that sodomy disappears. And I don't know, I'm doubtful that an age of lust sounds like the sort of age where sodomy would most be expected to disappear, so again, good luck.

What I interpret as the wispy older lower-level spiritual influences and the very-real younger higher-level transcendental influences on my person compel me somewhat beyond my own curiosity and the moral considerations discussed to wrap myself into this topic, as I suppose makes sense. I admit, the feelings that might come to me as if from some immanent God very much related to this universe we live in don't seem to be much concerned one way or other. And I'm afraid there's an obvious explanation for this, which I hope is wrong. The universes at a higher level, like those at a lower, are not in time with ours. Whatever wispy or totally real connections exist between our universes and others may be directly to ages that could need my advice. But here, in this place, nothing I say will do any great good unless later in distant age, when what I have considered herein becomes very mportant, my then ancient writings or what they have influenced are lifted off the dusty top shelf of wise persons there and consulted like some mythic magic tale. Whether that will happen has less to do with me than others, and if there is a God of this universe, perhaps he is not optimistic, but he is content to keep his peace, for there is more than what is here. Of course, all of this paragraph is just highly speculative interpretation based on my personal best guess at theology, which guess is likely ridiculously full of errors and holes. Anyway, what I do know is I have religious-like dreamy feelings that what I have considered here be important, and similarly I have occasionally had religious-like feelings of extreme reality (like getting banged up side the head by a feeling) of similar import, but the feelings that remind me of prayer somehow are ghostly silent when I debate whether to consider such things. Interpret it as one will.