The Cooperation Game

Thinking about the balance between competition and cooperation in society.

Imagine a world with no competition. No pay differences, no status differences, no sporting competitions, no voting, no choosing. Mates would randomly assigned, public offices would be randomly filled, as would all other jobs. Products would be offered in one type only. All people and all things we use and need would be the same. 

When people ask for social justice, is that what they mean? Probably not. But relief from competition is at the crux of the issue, and to think about it, we have to figure out the role that competition plays and should play in our lives. It is obviously pervasive, and our political divide is fundamentally about just how pervasive it should be. Human nature is no guide. We are intrinsically both cooperative and competitive, and can be led to extremes of either, from the bayonette charge of battle to the self-abnegation and communalism of the monastary. Temperaments vary tremendously as well, making accomodation of them all in one society truly a conundrum.

Consider the other limit case, of no cooperation. There would be no corporations, no states, not even families, which are, after all, the original communistic enterprise. It would be the ultimate war of all against all, one against the world. This scenario is even more devastating then the opposite, immediately extinguishing the human race. That should provide a clue about the relative importance of cooperation and competition.

Indeed, as a rule, competition is largely destructive, and cooperation is constructive. Competition is what destroys civilizations and its control requires all the means we have to "civilize" ourselves, from manners, to sporting etiquette, legal systems, business regulations, diplomacy, etc. It is competition that needs to be rigorously controlled and channelled into a few virtuous avenues, while most of the training we lavish on children begs, pleads with them to cooperate, to get along with others, and to participate in the cooperative institutions of life.

Competition finds its way into the strangest places.

Competition is, in comparison and at best, the spice of these systems. The thrill of victory, the satisfaction of greed, and the earning of love- all are visceral, but only constructive under rigorously controlled conditions such as the institution of marriage, the legal structures of business, and the rules of sport. For example, the common convention of monogamy among non-Arabic cultures is a control over mate competition, which is immensely helpful in keeping social peace and promoting happiness. Even if it lowers the competitive temperature of a society, and may reduce its future fitness, if one takes a eugenic view. For while competition is destructive in the short term, it can be creatively destructive, sweeping away badly run businesses, insufficiently warlike nations, and per natural selection, less fit organisms. Competition is important for long-term discipline and success, for all its short-term costs and dangers.

The political right wing generally wants more competition. It is, as a rule, composed of those who have done well under the current system, and wish to preserve it and allow successful people like themselves more success in their competitive pursuits. If money wins elections, then so be it, and let's equate money with free speech. If whites win over blacks, so be it. If the US wins over communism, no succor should be extended to the vaqnuished. Business should be red in tooth and claw, regulations be damned. Parents should be able to pay for better schools, better colleges, better mates. And should be able to bequeath all their money onwards to create dynasties of wealth and power. What better success than intergenerational success?

On the other hand, the US has traditionally been thought of, and thought of itself, as a land of opportunity, where there is some base of equality- in the law, in voting, and in the opportunity to work hard to achieve a successful life, without the dead weight of nobility and inherited privilege. Some of these ideals were put into concrete form over the last two hundred years by fostering universal, free education through high school, and land-grant and other state colleges and universities. And here is where we get to the crux of social justice- the prospect of equal opportunity and "fair" competition. Is there such a thing as fair competition?

We should take sports as a guide here. While fundamentally competitive, modern sports are all governed by cooperative bodies that set rules, and keep setting new rules whenever some change in technology, social mores, or innovative technique threatens the "fairness" of the competition. So yes, there is such a thing as fair competition, but only where we have the fortitude to put cooperative bodies (i.e. the government) decisively in control of the rules of the game. 

Such cooperative regulation has, for instance, saved the banking industry from its own competitive miasma, transforming the incredibly destructive boom and bust cycles (and bank runs, and bank collapses) of the 1800's into the well-oiled and well-insured system we have today. Contrast that with people like Donald Trump, who in the depths of psychopathic narcissism have no use for rules or committments to an overarching constitutional, legal order. What they think of as "winning" is more like a trampling of our carefully considered and constructed system of cooperative institutions, in favor of short-term and short-sighted corruption.

Fine, so there is a dynamic balance between competition and the cooperative structures that fence in and run "fair" competitions, and also provide a wide variety of public goods that competition can't provide. The point, obviously, is to capitalize on the human diversity that we have in such abundance, and on natural competitive instincts and imperatives, to organize productive systems in government, business, and society at large. 

Where does that leave social justice? It should be obvious that ideologues of the right wing have gone off some kind of deep end of late in their yearing for culture war, white supremacy, and destruction of the state structures that regulate our way to a more civilized and peaceful existence. On the other hand, the Left is also extreme in its fantasies of unfettered immigration, welfare and housing for all, restitution for historical injustices, and enforced diversity in all possible spectra of underprivilege, disability, and oppression. For example, the iconic competitive high school of San Francisco, Lowell High, recently went through a tumultuous elimination of, and then reversion back to, competitive entrance examinations. Clearly the competitive exams were discriminatory in effect against black and latino students. But were they unfair? What is the point of having elite schools, versus having uniform average schools that serve all equally? 

Another example is Native Americans. If we were to be truly just, European descendents would all pack up and leave, providing thorough reparations to the oppressed, in the form of a pristine, vacated continent. Yet, there was a competition, conducted in the ways of its time, which is to say by warfare, disease, organization, numbers, and technology, by which Native Americans lost the competition for the continent. Should all such competitions be ruled unfair, in retrospect? Can we reel back history to such an extent, and do we want to? Are our standards of fairness getting too refined? Are we growing overly allergic to competition? And is equality of opportunity really enough? The history behind us has bequethed blacks with systematic poverty, so we have tried affirmative action to make some small reparation. But even that small amount has fallen afoul of the ideal of equal opportunity, as seem from the white and conservative side, even as they promote obscene intergenerational transfers of wealth and power that will make of our country another feudal and "old" country.

I think that is what the current right-left divide is really about, and involves incredibly complicated questions of history, human nature, and practicality. And of the future- what we as a nation and culture want to be. Neither the far left nor far right paint an attractive picture of that future, and our political system increasingly whipsaws between the more extreme visions. This is due firstly to its own structural failures that were baked in from the start. But it is also due to changed conditions as we come up against growth constraints. When the pie is growing, it is relatively easy to share its pieces. But when the climate apocalypse is looming, when we are clearly overpopulated with respect to planetary carrying capacity, and are unwilling to build physical and social structures of cooperation, then competition naturally heats up.

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What Holds up the Nucleus?

Cell nuclei are consistently sized with respect to cell volume, and pleasingly round. How does that happen?

An interesting question in biology is why things are the size they are. Why are cells so small, and what controls their size? Why are the various organelles within them a particular size and shape, and is that controlled in some biologically significant way, or just left to some automatic homeostatic process? An interesting paper come out recently about the size of the nucleus, home of our DNA and all DNA-related transactions like transcription and replication. (Note to reader/pronouncer: "new clee us", not "new cue lus".) 

The nucleus, with parts labeled. Pores are large structures that control traffic in and out. 

The nucleus is surrounded by a double membrane (the nuclear membrane) studded with structurally complex and interesting pores. These pores are totally permeable to small molecules like ions, water, and very small proteins, but restrict the movement of larger proteins and RNAs, and naturally, DNA. To get out, (or in), these molecules need to have special tags, and cooperate with nuclear transport proteins. But very large complexes can be transported in this way, such as just-transcribed RNAs and half-ribosomes that get assembled in the nucleolus, a small sub-compartment within the nucleus (which has no membrane, just a higher concentration of certain molecules, especially the portion of the genomic DNA that encodes ribosomal RNA). So the nuclear pore is restrictive in some ways, but highly permissive in other ways, accommodating transmitted materials of vastly different sizes.

Nuclear pores are basket-shaped structures that are festooned, particularly inside the channel, with disordered phenylalanine/glycine rich protein strands that act as size, tag, and composition-based filters over what gets through.

The channels of nuclear pores have a peculiar composition, containing waving strands of protein with repetitive glycine/phenylalanine composition, plus interspersed charged segments (FG domains). This unstructured material forms a unique phase, neither oily nor watery, that restricts the passage of immiscible molecules, (i.e., most larger molecules), unless accompanied by partners that bind specifically to these FG strands, and thus melt right through the barrier. This mechanism explains how one channel can, at the same time block all sorts of small to medium sized RNAs and proteins, but let through huge ribosomal components and specifically tagged and spliced mRNAs intended for translation.

But getting back to the overall shape and size of the nucleus, a recent paper made the case in some detail that colloid pressure is all that is required. As noted above, all small molecules equilibrate easily across the nuclear membrane, while larger molecules do not. It is these larger molecules that are proposed to provide a special form of osmotic pressure, called colloid osmotic pressure, which gently inflates the nucleus, against the opposing force of the nuclear membrane's surface tension. No special mechanical receptors are needed, or signaling pathways, or stress responses.

The paper, and an important antecedent paper, make some interesting points. First is that DNA takes up very little of the nuclear volume. Despite being a huge molecule (lengthwise), DNA makes up less than 1% of nuclear volume in typical mammalian cells. Ribosomal RNA, partially constructed ribosomal components, tRNAs, and other materials are far more abundant and make up the bulk of large molecules. This means that nuclear size is not very sensitive to genome copy number, or ploidy in polyploid species. Secondly, they mention that a vanishingly small number of mutants have been found that affect nuclear size specifically. This is what one would expect for a simple- even chemical- homeostatic process, not dependent on the usual signaling pathways of cellular stress, growth regulation, etc., of which there are many.

Where does colloid osmotic pressure come from? That is a bit obscure, but this Wiki site gives a decent explanation. When large molecules exist in solution, they exclude smaller molecules from their immediate vicinity, just by taking up space, including a surface zone of exclusion, a bit like national territorial waters. That means that the effective volume available to the small solutes (which generally control osmotic pressure) is slightly reduced. But when two large molecules collide by random diffusion, the points where they touch represent overlapping exclusion zones, which means that globally, the net exclusion zone from large molecules has decreased, giving small solutes slightly more room to move around. And this increased entropy of the smaller solutes drives the colloid osmotic pressure, which rises quite rapidly as the concentration of large molecules increases. The prior paper argues that overall, cells have quite low colloid osmotic pressure, despite their high concentrions of complex large molecules. They are, in chemical terms, dilute. This helps our biochemistry do its thing with unexpectedly rapid diffusion, and is explained by the fact that much of our molecular machinery is bound up in large complexes that reduce the number of independent colloidal particles, even while increasing their individual size.

So much for theory- what about the experiment? The authors used yeast cells (Schizosaccharomyces pombe), which are a common model system. But they have cell walls, which the researchers digested off before treating them with a variety of osmolytes, mostly sorbitol, to alter their osmotic environment (not to mention adding fluorescent markers for the nuclear and plasma membranes, so they could see what was going on). Isotonic concentration was about 0.4 Molar (M) sorbitol, with treatments going up to 4M sorbitol (hypertonic). The question was.. is the nucleus (and the cell as a whole) a simple osmometer, reacting as physical chemistry would expect to variations in osmotic pressure from outside? Recall that high concentrations of any chemical outside a cell will draw water out of it, to equalize the overall water / osmotic pressure on both sides of the membrane.

Schizosaccharomyces pombe are oblong cells (left) with plasma membrane marked with a green fluorescent marker, and the nuclear membrane marked with a purple fluorescent marker. If one removes the chitin-rich cell wall, the cells turn round, and one can experiment on their size response to osmotic pressure/treatment. Hypertonic (high-sorbitol, top) treatment causes the cell to shrink, and causes the  nucleus to shrink in strictly proportional fashion, indicating that both have simple composition-based responses to osmotic variation.

They found that not only does the outer cell membrane shrink as the cell comes under hypertonic shock, but the nucleus shinks proportionately. A number of other experiments followed, all consistent with the same model. One of the more interesting was treatment with leptomycin B (LMB), which is a nuclear export inhibitor. Some materials build up inside the nucleus, and one would expect that, under this simple model of nuclear volume homeostasis, the nuclei would gradually gain size relative to the surrounding cell, breaking the general observation of strict proportionality of nuclear to cell volumes.

Schizosaccharomyces pombe cells treated with a drug that inhibits nuclear export of certain proteins causes the nuclear volume to blow up a little bit, relative to the rest of the cell.

That is indeed what is seen, not really immediately discernable, but after measuring the volumes from micrographs, evident on the accompanying graph (panel C). So this looks like a solid model of nuclear size control, elegantly explaining a small problem in basic cell biology. While there is plenty of regulation occuring over traffic into and out of the nucleus, that has critical effects on gene expression, translation, replication, division, and other processes, the nucleus can leave its size and shape to simple biophysics and not worry about piling on yet more ornate mechanisms.

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Titrations of Consciousness

In genetics, we have mutation. In biochemistry, we have titration. In neuroscience, we have brain damage.

My theisis advisor had a favorite saying: "When in doubt, titrate!". That is to say, if you think you have your hands on a key biochemical component, its amount should be clearly influential on the reaction you are looking at. Adding more might make its role clearer, or bring out other dynamics, or, at very least, titration might allow you to not waste it by using just the right amount.

Neuroscience has reached that stage in studies of consciousness. While philosophers wring their hands about the "hardness" of the problem, scientists are realizing that it can be broken down like any other, and studied by its various broken states and disorders, and in its myriad levels / types as induced by drugs, damage, and by evolution in other organisms. A decade ago, a paper showed that the thalamus, a region of the brain right on top of the brain stem and the conduit of much of its traffic with the cortex, has a graded (i.e. titratable) relationship between severity of damage and severity of effects on consciousness. This led to an influential hypothesis- the mesocircuit hypothesis, which portrays wide-ranging circuitry from the thalamus that activates cortical regions, and is somewhat inhibited in return by circuits coming back. 

Degree of damage to a central part of the brain, the thalamus, correlates closely with degree of consciousness disability.

A classification of consciousness / cognition / communication deficits, ranging from coma to normal state. LIS = locked in state, MCS = minimally conscious state, VS = vegetative state (now unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, which may be persistent (PVS).

The anatomy is pretty clear, and subsequent work has focused on the dynamics, which naturally are the heart of consciousness. A recent paper, while rather turgid, supports the mesocircuit hypothesis by analyzing the activation dynamics of damaged brains (vegetative state, now called unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS)), and less severe minimally conscious states (MCS). They did unbiased mathematical processing to find the relevant networks and reverberating communication modes. For example, in healthy brains there are several networks of activity that hum along while at rest, such as the default mode network, and visual network. These networks are then replaced or supplemented by other dynamics when activity takes place, like viewing something, doing something, etc. The researchers measured the metastability or "jumpiness" of these networks, and their frequencies (eigenmodes).

Naturally, there is a clear relationship between dynamics and consciousness. The worse off the patient, the less variable the dynamics, and the fewer distinct frequencies are observed. But the data is hardly crystal clear, so it got published in a minor journal. It is clear that these researchers have some more hunting to do to find better correlates of consciousness. This might come from finer anatomical localization, (hard to do with fMRI), or perhaps from more appropriate math that isolates the truly salient aspects of the phenomenon. In studies of other phenomena such as vision, memory, and place-sensing, the analysis of correlates between measurable brain activity and the subjective or mental aspects of that activity have become immensely more sophisticated and sensitive over time, and one can assume that will be true in this field as well.

Severity of injury correlates with metastability (i.e jumpiness) of central brain networks,  and with consciousness. (HC = healthy control)

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The Stories we Tell Ourselves, in Art

Why paint saints, dreams, and theologies?

I am enjoying a lecture course on great churches- a delightful survey of one and a half thousand years (plus) of architecture, painting, sculpture, and general devotion. At the same time, I am reading an amazing, though much shorter, book on Navajo sand art. The conjunction is curious, possibly fertile, and puts the question forthrightly.. why? Why all this art, and such various art, when the truth of the matter is supposedly not in question, and not susceptible to flattery either. People have, in the past at least, clearly put their best efforts towards sacred arts.

Perhaps the question is simpleminded, but it is to me at least as a non-artist as well as non-religionist, continually mystifying. In the current time, art is rarely inspirational. It may be mystifying, difficult, and expensive, but modern artists rarely pander or glorify- that is the province of lower-brow activities, done in velvet. The best artists interrogate, they don't instruct or celebrate.

The interior of Monreale Cathedral in Palermo, Sicily. It is a blend of Norman, Byzantine, and Islamic styles, with acres of mosaic art.

While Navajo sand art is not done on the scale of cathedrals, it is incredible art just the same. Until the tourist trade, it was never durable, but was performed as part of a healing ritual, during which the patient was placed on the finished painting and contact made with the patient to transmit the magical powers of the symbols, guardians, and deities the shaman had depicted, and to draw off the illness. Its abstraction is totally different from Christian art, which uses a variety of symbols (halos, crosses, fish), but is basically realistic, as its historical conceits are realistic and its story a purported truth in not just spiritual but historical and scientific respects. Not so with Navajo art, which hearkens back to all sorts of indigenous art going back to the Australian dreamtime. This art is incredibly modern and evocative- directly archetypal in its intricate symbology and high design sense.

Every character, color, orientation, and symbol of this sand mandala has significance, and according to the story, (larger myths called "ways", such as the shootingway, blessingway, holyway, etc.), healing power.

But what does all this art do? Religion is at core about ligation (ligare / ligio) between people- connecting us socially and spiritually. It is a shared story- a culturally structuring story that is immensely influential on building our sense of place in the world, and of meaning. Given the fundamental meaninglessness of existence, there are no rules given a priori. There are no human rights, no legal systems, no gods, no norms, .. nothing. We make all these up as part of our social system. So while the rich symbols of Christian or Navajo art may seem absurd, dubious, or playful, they are actually extremely serious as expressions of the cultural structure. 

To see how this works, consider Donald Trump's big lie. He also came up with a culturally structuring story. It functions almost as scripture for his believers. It is a badge of honor as well as a test of allegiance to believe in it. It is obviously false, which makes it even more powerful in those roles. No one needs to structure culture around the story of gravitation- that is given and already in the background. Structuring culture involves beliefs that are a bit more costly- which provide novel "explanations" and restructure reality to generate a new social system. The one Trump is building might not be one we want to live in, but it is a well-worn style of both art (garish, tasteless) and society (authoritarian, cynical, corrupt). 

By feeling the overwhelming impact of gothic cathedrals, you get a sense of the power such art has to beat its story into the viewer. Making sure that everyone understands the story and adheres to it is naturally the first job of any coherent social system. Whether by an inquisition or some less forceful means, cohesion relies on sharing this cultural core. 

We in the US are clearly coming apart in these terms. Religion may not have been our guiding story, but rather an enlightenment optimism, redoubled by the grace of "virgin" lands, rich with resources that have powered our rise to greatness. This culminated in World War 2, the space race, and the landing on the moon. What was supposed to be a New Frontier has turned out to be a sterile wasteland. Space is an incredibly harsh place, far worse than our worst visions of Earth under global warming, or even nuclear war. So that whole story of progress, enlightenment, growth, and limitlessness that was structuring American culture and dreams for decades, (while carried on in fine style by Star Trek), has collapsed in practical terms. 

We need something new, and the current culture war is being fought over that story and its structures. Will we turn to planetary stewardship and social justice? Or will we re-establish a frankly racist Christianity as a way to order society, control women, keep out the riffraff, imagine that no change is needed, reap what resources are left, and leave the future for God to sort out?

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