The First to Fall

Tag: health

  • What Wrangham Gets Wrong About Human Domestication

    (Hint: 900,000 cows are slaughtered daily. They shit where they eat and wouldn’t have a hope in hell at surviving without human care. But they’re nice.)

    In The Goodness Paradox, Richard Wrangham argues that the main selection pressure in human (self-)domestication was the weeding out of reactive aggression. It’s a nice story that makes the net gain of human domestication harder to argue against. But, to me, it’s clear that selection against reactivity in general (or unpredictability) is the bigger, truer story, of which the reduction of “reactive aggression” is simply the most visible (and PR-friendly) chapter. Taken as a whole, and across species, the domestication package is clearly a general downshift in arousal/reactivity with a re-tuning of social expectations…not just the loss of hair-trigger violence.

    Let’s look at domestication again while entertaining this broader (and inconveniently less moralistic (duller, rather than nicer humans) selection pressure.

    For one thing, physiology moves first…and it’s general. In classic domestication lines (e.g. Belyaev’s foxes), selection for tameness blunts the HPA axis and stress hormones overall…fewer and fewer cortisol spikes, calmer baselines. That’s not “anti-aggression” specifically; it’s lower stress reactivity across contexts. Brain monoamines shift too (e.g. higher serotonin). That’s a whole-system calm that would make any behavior less jumpy (including but not limited to aggression).

    Developmental mechanism also points to a broader retune. The “domestication syndrome” is plausibly tied to mild neural-crest hypofunction, a developmental lever that touches pigmentation, craniofacial shape, adrenal medulla, and stress circuitry. In humans, BAZ1B (a neural-crest regulator) is linked to the “modern” face and is part of the self-domestication story. None of that is news…but if you tweak this lever, you clearly soften the whole reactivity profile…not just aggression. And my guess is that whoever’s fucking with the lever has his eye on the “compliance” dial more than any other.

    Comparative signals align, too. Genomic work finds overlaps between human selective sweeps and domestication-candidate genes across species…showing a syndrome-level process rather than some sort of single behavioral knob. Craniofacial “feminization” over time in H. Sapiens fits reduced androgenic/reactive profiles, too.

    Domesticated behavior tracks a “global calm.” Domesticated animals are less fearful, less erratic, and more socially tolerant than their wild counterparts. Your dog’s tendency to “look back” to you in unsolvable tasks is a manifestation of that…when arousal is lower and social cues are trusted, help-seeking beats reactive persistence. That’s a broad predictability play (that has nothing to do with aggression).

    Obviously, Wrangham’s focus still matters. His key point, the decoupling of reactive vs proactive aggression in humans (we got tamer in the heat-of-the-moment sense, but remained capable of planned, coalitionary violence), is real and important to explain. It’s part of the story, but not the whole story. As general reactivity is reduced, strategic (planned) aggression is preserved…because strategic aggression isn’t a startle reflex; it rides on executive control and group coordination. But selection against reactive aggression isn’t the driver in this story. It’s just one behavioral readout of a deeper arousal/volatility downshift. A nice part (maybe) of an otherwise quite shitty story (from life’s vantage point). The beef industry might point out how nice the cows are, but I don’t think even they would try to argue that “nice” is what it’s aiming for. Dull. Compliant. And so it goes with all domestication. There is an objective in the domestication process, and any and all traits that impede progress toward that objective are pruned. (adding “self-” to domestication when it comes to humans, while accurate in the sense that the domesticating agent was of the same species, gives it a voluntary flavor that has no evidence in history…the domestication of humans was driven by systemic enslavement and reproductive control just as it was for all domesticates)

    Why is it so important to me to find the driver of human domestication at all? Why not just start from the broadly-accepted premise that we are a domesticated species and go from there? Because I need to know what’s truly going on in the brain during this domestication process. How do we get to the brain we call “typical” now? What was it selected for? Was it selected for something broadly adaptive? Or is it more like runaway selection? An overfitting?

    To me, cognitively, domestication looks like a down-weighting of volatility and a reallocation of precision (in predictive-coding terms). Brains with lower expected volatility (that have “the world is less jumpy” as a hyperprior…fewer LC-NE-style alarm bursts…a calmer autonomic tone), higher precision on social priors (human signals are treated as the most trustworthy ones…ecological “noise” gets less weight), and policy canalization (high confidence in proximity/compliance/help-seeking policies).

    I think that human self-domestication primarily targeted behavioral and physiological volatility (a population-level reduction in phasic arousal and unpredictability) of which lower reactive aggression is a salient subset. And that the result is down-tuned HPA/LC reactivity, strengthened social priors, and canalized, low-variance action policies. Think of what happened as some sort of reactivity pruning (where reactive aggression was one prominent branch that got lopped off).

    What is the domesticated brain? Zoomed out, it’s clearly an instrument that’s been made dull. One that exhibits blunted responses to non-social unpredictability (startle, sensory oddballs, metabolic stressors), not just to dominance threats. And anti-aggression alone doesn’t suppress those.

    If I’m reading the studies properly, there are signatures of what I’m talking about in stress-regulatory and neuromodulatory pathways (HPA, serotonin, vasopressin) and neural-crest development…not just androgenic or specifically aggression-linked loci. Recent multispecies work pointing at vasopressin receptors and neural-crest regulators certainly seems consistent with this.

    Wrangham’s story doesn’t account for lower intra-individual variance in exploratory/avoidant switches and faster convergence on socially scaffolded policies (like help-seeking) across types of tasks (anti-aggression predicts biggest effects only in conflict contexts). It doesn’t explain the psychotic consensus reality holding everyone in, as it rolls off a cliff.

    (In fact, I question how much of the reactive aggression branch got lopped off…surely, not nearly as much as we think. What self-domestication mostly did was gate when, where, and how the majority of people show reactivity. When accountability and real-world consequences are high, most people keep a lid on it. When consequences drop (anonymity, distance, no eye contact, no immediate cost), the lid starts to rattle…online, in cars, in fan mobs, in comment sections. I don’t think reactive aggression was bred out so much as trained into context…and how well you do in that context will largely determine the story you tell. Harvard professors are clearly doing quite well in the civilizational context and consequently have pretty stories to tell.)

  • Domestication and the Warping of Sexual Dimorphism

    Here’s something we don’t talk about enough: Civilization didn’t just domesticate us. It domesticated us differently, depending on whether we were born male or female.

    In our pre-domesticated state, humans showed moderate sexual dimorphism (differences between the sexes in size, shape, and behavior). Men tended to be larger, stronger, and more prone to take risks, compete, and throw punches over territory or mates. Women carried broader hips for childbirth and bore the energetic costs of gestation, nursing, and food gathering. Nothing too extreme. It was a functional division…not a caste system.

    Then came the leash.

    If you want to understand what happened next, look at what domestication does to animals across the board…the males change more.

    You get smaller bodies, smaller brains, softer jaws, lower testosterone, and a whole lot more docility. You don’t need to fight other males for access anymore…you just need to behave. Domestication tamps down that volatile, high-testosterone edge and replaces it with social compliance. The women change too, but less dramatically. Domestication is hardly an equal-opportunity employer.

    What happens when this process is scaled up across hundreds of generations of humans?

    Let’s take one of my favorite little detours: the Y-chromosome bottleneck…an evolutionary funnel that occurred around 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. Despite the population growing, genetic evidence shows that only a tiny handful of men were passing on their genes (think roughly 5 out of every 100 men). Why? Because systems of coercion (slavery, war, patriarchy) turned reproduction into a rigged game. And those systems selected hard for one thing: control.

    Control doesn’t love testosterone. It doesn’t want unpredictability, brute force, or guys who flip tables when they lose status. It wants compliant, trainable males who can navigate symbolic ladders, defer to hierarchies, and follow rules. Over time, the male phenotype got reshaped: smaller, less aggressive, more socially performative. Instead of fighting for mates, men competed for power within abstract systems (religion, wealth, reputation).

    Women didn’t experience this reproductive bottleneck, and therefore weren’t domesticated in a biological sense, the way men were. At least nowhere near the same degree. But they were domesticated culturally. Their roles were dictated by ideological control…veils, chastity cults, arranged marriages. inheritance laws, and lineage games. Woman as symbol. Woman as vessel. Woman as territory to be defended and exchanged. Arguably, as men become more civilized, women were controlled every more tightly (as was anything men saw as a “resource”).

    And so sexual dimorphism got scrambled…intensified in the weirdest way possible. Physical differences shrank but role differences widened incredibly (differences that we still take for granted and fail to associate with domestication). Men became public actors, enforcers of systems they didn’t design. Women became private property, repositories of symbolic purity and repositories of symbolic purity and reproductive value. Both became performative shells…flattened into scripts civilization could use.

    Now forget the anthropology textbooks for a second. This process we’re talking about…what’s happening on a psychological level? What do these changes mean? How do they feel? How do people begin to experience life differently?

    Testosterone in utero shapes everything from brain lateralization to threat response. A civilizing system selecting against reactivity (for tameness) is selecting against certain kinds of minds…minds that question, that bristle, that break rules when rules break people. And so, over generations, you get men who are more verbal, more deferent, more emotionally masked. And because we live in the end product of that, we call it “progress”…as if there were a master plan to arrive at us, and…here we are! But you first need to acknowledge (at least) that there was no such plan, and that tameness was never anyone’s goal, it was simply something that the system rewarded. If you acknowledge that, we can have a conversation.

    And though women may not have been suppressed biochemically…they were certainly suppressed. Their suppression was the visible one. Mythological. Ideological. Institutional. They don’t need to be reshaped from the inside out when they can be controlled from birth to death by symbols, stories, and ceremonies.

    “Civilization made us peaceful.”

    “Civilization turned brutish men into cooperative citizens.”

    Right. These are nice Matrix-y narratives. Fairy tales. Statements that have just enough truth to squeak by as overarching explanations.

    But what did civilization do? Where was intention? What was it trying to do? (and still trying) It neutered rebellion. It privatized violence. It engineered predictable humans. Manageable ones. And because we are those humans, we call the end product “better,” and the process itself, “progress.” Against all evidence, we insist that life in civilized systems is happier, healthier, safer, and sustainable. Insanity. An insanity made possible by the changes made to us by domestication. By the civilizing process. It bred a species capable of living in complete contradiction to the signals around it.

    Docile males and constrained females. All marching toward a cliff’s edge to the beat of someone else’s drum. Marching peacefully. Unless they’re dropping nuclear bombs on each other. Or gassing each other. Or exterminating every other species. Or poisoning air, water, and food. Nice men and women.

  • The Genome in Chains

    Biomass: the total mass of biological material in a given space.

    I’ve always liked that concept. You hear it in permaculture a lot…this plant produces more biomass, ecosystem edges teem with it, generate biomass to regenerate a landscape, etc.

    Biomass is life, quantified.

    Sometimes I wonder if you could look at human genetic material the same way. Imagine the total weight of the human genome…billions of copies, stretching across continents and centuries…stacked like cordwood. What percentage of that mass, that genetic biomass, came from people who were free? Not politically free…biologically free. Emotionally free. Cognitively free…

    Not much.

    How much of the DNA currently in circulation came through bodies that were coerced, owned, bred, conscripted, suppressed, raped, or systematically tamed?

    My guess? Most of it.

    Let’s talk some bleak history.

    Chattel slavery wasn’t a one-off horror…it was a civilizational feature for thousands of years. From Sumer to Rome to the cotton fields of Georgia…it was a foundation.

    Female reproductive coercion…rape, forced breeding, marriage as transaction…was the norm.

    Serfdom, debt bondage, child labor…also not freak events. These were normal life for most people, for most of human civilization.

    Throw in conscription, arranged marriage, and forced settlement. All designed to control reproduction and to channel genes in service of a system (not the individual).

    And then there’s caste, colonization, and mass incarceration…all of which reshaped survival odds, mating patterns, and the filtering of traits.

    And when I ask, What made it into the gene pool? I’m not just asking about biology…I’m asking about systemic conditioning. Because the traits that made survival possible under the conditions I listed above…obedience, emotional detachment, suppression, tolerance for unreality/contradiction…got passed on. They had to. That traits that didn’t? Coherence. Sensitivity. “Wildness.” Embodied distress in response to insanity. These got culled. Not completely, but enough to shift the signal.

    Civilization is domestication…by volume. It tames populations. It edits the genome the same way it edits forests…selectively…for yield…for compliance.

    We’re left with a species that wears its captivity in its genes. Shaped by submission…adaptation to cages. A genome that might just be a palimpsest of captivity.

  • The Domesticated vs. The Wild

    Let’s have some fun. Imagine you’re an alien scientist, looking at domesticated humans and animals and their wild counterparts. You have no historical context…just the before-and-after. And your objective is to figure out what kind of selective pressure would explain the shift.

    You look at physical changes and note significant brain shrinkage and facial neoteny. You look at behavioral changes and note reduced reactivity (including reactive aggression) and increased compliance. You look at neurological changes and note less vigilance and more dependence. And you look at cognitive changes and note a greater tolerance for contradiction or command. Now you need to reverse-engineer the pressure that accounts for those changes.

    You’d conclude that attenuation was being rewarded not for survival, but for something like a tolerance of constraint. Reduced reactivity to imposed conditions that would normally trigger avoidance, protest, flight, or rupture.

    In domesticated (civilized) animals and people, it’s clear that attenuation is being rewarded for enabling them to do certain things. Namely, remain in proximity to unpredictable others, function under external control, inhibit instinctual responses to pain, crowding, or contradiction, and perform behaviors for social approval or symbolic reward…not direct need fulfillment.

    What if you were pressed to take a shot at describing the environment that produced such a pressure?

    If you had no cultural context and just observed the shift, you’d infer something like the following: a system that imposes artificial constraints, limits autonomy, suppresses immediate feedback, and rewards non-disruption. A system that rewards animals that don’t bolt at loud noises, humans who don’t resist moral contradiction, and minds that prioritize external signals (orders, rules, appearances) over internal ones (intuition, emotion, sensory experience). One that filters out traits that protest, question, disrupt, flee, or grieve.

    Your hypothesis might be something like, “Attenuation was being selected for to enable life inside an imposed system that contradicts natural feedback.” Of course, that’s the very definition of captivity, domestication…civilization.

    Now, you’re handed the conventional narrative. The history and anthropology books. The studies. You’d feel validated somewhat as you read the theory of human self-domestication…a process that “weeded out aggression” in favor of cooperation, social harmony, and prosocial behavior. But you’d also feel something was off. That this framing is deeply incomplete (and dangerously flattening). Because there’s no mention of the actual trade-offs.

    Let’s look at the conventional framing of human (self) domestication and see what it gets right.

    Anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists argue that early humans began to select against reactive aggression, especially in small bands where group (coalitionary) punishment could be used to ostracize or kill bullies. Over time, this likely contributed to facial feminization, reduced sexual dimorphism (differences between the sexes), and more juvenile (neotenous) behavior…hallmarks of “domestication syndrome.” Also, a reduction in testosterone-linked traits, stress-reactivity, and impulsivity…which likely made groups more stable/cohesive.

    What’s this framing missing?

    For one, I think it confuses (or leads people to confuse) submission with peace. Just because someone isn’t fighting back doesn’t mean the system is just. A domesticated animal isn’t peaceful, necessarily, it’s conditioned or selected not to protest. Likewise, a “civilized” human isn’t necessarily cooperative…they’re trained to suppress resistance. In other words, to the extent that we eliminated (reactive) aggression…we eliminated resistance to coercion.

    And it fails to distinguish between types of aggression. Reactive aggression (fight-or-flight, self-defense, boundary enforcement) was suppressed. Moral aggression (anger in response to injustice, betrayal, or cruelty) was pathologized (too sensitive or oppositional). But instrumental aggression (cold, planned, goal-oriented violence) is clearly rewarded in civilization. To the extent that it “succeeds,” it always has been.

    And the conventional explanation for human self-domestication doesn’t seem interested in what was lost. It treats the process as a moral victory. But I don’t think it was “bad behavior” that got weeded out…it was the ability to react honestly to harm. Domestication selected for attenuated perception, emotional buffering, and following symbolic rules…not any kind of inner peace. It reduced reactive violence while it reduced truthful response to violence. And I think the intention (of those driving the domestication process) was in the latter, with the former being largely inadvertent.

    Because we know that selecting for one behavioral trait (like tameness or compliance) cascades into structural, cognitive, sensory, and emotional changes. We know this. Traits aren’t modular. They’re entangled…especially when they involve the neural crest.

    The neural crest hypothesis of domestication (2014, Wilkins, Wrangham, Fitch) suggests that domestication syndrome in mammals is caused by mild deficits in neural crest cell development during embryogenesis.

    The neural crest contributes to all sorts of things…facial morphology (jaw, teeth, skull), adrenal glands (stress response), pigmentation, autonomic nervous system, peripheral nerves and glia, and parts of the limbic system (emotion, reactivity, threat detection).

    If you select for tameness (or, in humans, for docility/compliance), you’re not just changing a particular behavior…you’re reconfiguring the organism’s whole developmental trajectory. And here’s what you get:

    • Smaller brains
    • Flattened faces
    • Lower stress reactivity
    • Blunted sensory input
    • Neoteny (more juvenile traits retained into adulthood)
    • Reduced startle or protest response
    • Delayed or diminished emotional signaling

    Where does that show up in humans? Increased social pliability. Extended childhood dependence. Lower physiological sensitivity. Greater performance tolerance under contradictory or symbolic norms.

    In other words, your “modern human” wasn’t just bred to be nice…it was bred to feel less and to respond less to what would once have been danger, injustice, or disorder. That isn’t a linear trade. It’s a network-wide reorganization of the system (what Bateson would call a change in the system’s pattern of constraints).

  • Feedback Inversion

    The way domesticated humans and animals diverge from their wild counterparts isn’t random…it follows a predictable systems pattern that has analogues in ecology, cybernetics, even thermodynamics.

    What is it? What’s the key transformation?

    The organism shifts away from being regulated by feedback to being regulated despite it.

    That’s what domestication does (in animals or humans). It removes or blunts the organism’s natural ability to respond to environmental signals, and replaces that responsiveness with compliance to an imposed system. And the divergence unfolds along a bunch of predictable dimensions…

    Cognitive Shift (From Adaptation to Control)

    Wild mind: constantly updating based on local, real-time feedback

    Domesticated mind: defers to rules, roles, or authority (even when they contradict experience)

    Behavioral Shift (From Function to Performance)

    Wild behavior: serves a real purpose (find food, avoid danger, bond)

    Domesticated behavior: serves a symbolic or imposed role (obedience, etiquette, branding)

    (In cybernetics, this resembles a loss of negative feedback…the system stops adjusting based on outcome, and instead preserves form through positive feedback, locking in behavior.)

    Sensory Shift (From Vigilance to Tolerance)

    Wild senses: alert, acute, tuned to survival-relevant input

    Domesticated senses: dulled, filtered, or overridden to tolerate noise, confinement, social overload

    Affective Shift (From Co-regulation to Suppression)

    Wild emotions: socially functional, tied to reality

    Domesticated emotions: repressed, misdirected, or disconnected from actual stimuli (chronic anxiety, performative joy)

    Structural Shift (From Efficiency to Excess)

    Wild bodies: lean, efficient, stress-adapted

    Domesticated bodies: neotenous (juvenile traits), prone to disease, dependent on infrastructure)

    So what’s going on in this domestication process? Particularly in human behavior?

    You could call it feedback inversion. A systemic reversal of the role of feedback…from a guide to coherence to a threat to be suppressed, ignored, or distorted.

    And I’d argue that the domesticated (“neurotypical”) human mind is a product of feedback inversion…trained to override bodily, sensory, and ecological signals in favor of symbolic, delayed, or externally enforced rules.

    Let’s track this.

    Control comes first.

    1. A group (or system) seeks to stabilize its environment, secure resources, prevent loss, dominate others, etc. This is an impulse that demands predictability and reduced uncertainty.
    2. And to exert control, you have to ignore certain inconvenient signals. The hunger of others. The pain of subordinates. The ecological damage you’re causing. Your own body’ needs. In other words, you begin inverting feedback. You treat reality’s signals as noise.
    3. Once you have symbolic systems (laws, money, ideologies) in place to maintain control, they begin rewarding those who suppress feedback and punishing those who respond to it. Now we have a positive feedback loop. The more control you assert, the more feedback you need to ignore. And the more feedback you ignore, the more “brittle” your control becomes…so you assert even more.
    4. Over time, the system selects for feedback-insensitive participants. Now control isn’t just enforced…it’s embodied. Now feedback sensitivity looks like deviance.

    Once embedded, feedback inversion maintains control by filtering out any kind of destabilizing truth, prevents course correction, and confers survival advantage on the most disconnected people (until the system crashes). It starts as a tool of control but becomes a systemic pathology.

  • The Double-Empathy Struggle

    So a big part of this book is figuring out how people can do the stupid or terrible things they’ve done (and continue to do).

    The answer to that question has really proven a challenge. Frustating.

    It’s occurred to me that part of the challenge (maybe the biggest part) is that I’m trying to figure out where people diverge from reality in a way that I can understand. I keep looking for reasons I can relate to. Some sort of trap that, when I see it, I say, “I could see myself falling into that, too.” But I can’t find that trap.

    Because if the divergence of reality I see in the people around me happens at a point I would never have chosen…it feels alien, false, deductive. I need it to be human. Comprehensible to me. I want to believe that had I been there, I’d at least have seen how the mistake happened.

    It’s in this line of thought that I had a breakthrough.

    Maybe the difference isn’t in the choice…but in the threshold.

    I and others like me might just have a lower tolerance for unreality (a more sensitive detection system for contradiction). Because I think most people DO feel dissonance, but they just have more social circuitry telling them to ignore it. What is that social circuitry? And isn’t that the deviation from life’s baseline?

    When faced with serious problems, statements like, “This isn’t my place to question,” “It’s probably fine,” Everyone else seems convinced,” “It’s safer not to say anything,” and “It is what it is,” do more than annoy me. They fucking enrage me.

    So maybe the divergence is recognition. One group feels the glitch and names it…the other feels it and smooths it over. Because their nervous systems are somehow tuned to avoid rupture instead of detecting and responding to it.

    Maybe I feel reality differently. That certainly tracks. That would mean a problem of empathy across feedback thresholds. That mystery choice I’ve been looking for? The one I can comprehend as how people mistook fiction for reality? Maybe I’m not missing it at all. Maybe I’m simply seeing that, for me, there was no choice. There’s something that I would have felt that didn’t register with them.

    So let’s look at our fork again.

    Is it a different mix of people in the groups? We’ve ruled out innate cognitive superiority. Could there simply be a different mix of dispositions, thresholds, or nervous system types?

    Probably.

    Let’s say Group A has more people whose nervous systems respond strongly to contradiction, unreality, or unresolved pattern. And Group B has more people whose nervous systems prioritize social cohesion, comfort, and continuity.

    No talk of virtue…just configuration.

    Same species, same environment, different sensory weighting. It seems plausible that a small difference in feedback sensitivity across a few individuals could tip a group’s response to contradiction.

    Or is it really external conditions? Because I think these matter…but not in the way most people think. It’s not about environment determining outcome. It’s about environment shaping when and how feedback arrives. A harsh environment returns frequent, sharp signals (You’re wrong. FIX IT.) A forgiving environment allows more drift before consequences appear.

    So external conditions shape the urgency of model correction, and internal sensitivity shapes the likelihood of correction. Low sensitivity + gentle conditions? Drift compounds. Fast. High sensitivity + harsh conditions? Feedback (reality) stays close.

    Are “low tolerance for unreality” and “need for stable patterns” the same thing? I don’t think so…but they feel close.

    A low tolerance for unreality is detecting and suffering from contradictions between reality and model…it’s affective and stress-inducing. A need for stable patterns is seeking and requiring patterns that hold over time to feel safe…it’s predictive and structural.

    But they’re structurally linked, aren’t they? I need stable patterns because unreality feels intolerable. And I reject unreality because it violates the patterns I need to hold. They both express an orientation…a high-fidelity feedback requirement.

    SO…some groups contain individuals for whom predictive error is viscerally intolerable. Others contain fewer. Whether the group listens to those individuals determines whether the model corrects or compounds. The environment determines how quickly error becomes obvious. The culture determines how early error is acknowledged. And they nervous system determines how strongly error is felt.

  • In Relationship with the World

    These are some rough-draft ideas from Part I (Feedback Sensitivity in Coherent Systems)

    I’ve come to believe that life persists by listening. Not through force, aggression, or even advantage, but through attention to what the world is saying. Everywhere, in every corner of the biosphere, living systems endure by sensing feedback and responding to it. A single-celled microbe navigates chemical gradients; a beaver adjusts the shape of its dam to match the water’s push and pull. Different forms, different scales, same principle: those attuned to feedback persist.

    Feedback sensitivity isn’t a marginal skill. It’s not the biological equivalent of knowing how to fold a fitted sheet (nice, but not a prerequisite for survival). Feedback sensitivity is the baseline requirement for survival.

    When I say “feedback,” I mean the circular flows of information in a system: a change in one part affects another, and eventually returns to affect its original source. Biologists call these feedback loops “negative” when they put the brakes on change, “positive” when they amplify it. Either way, they provide continuous regulatory information—a live stream of signals that allow an organism or ecosystem assess its own behavior and adjust.

    Feedback insensitivity, by contrast, leads to drift: systems that can’t correct, can’t adapt, and eventually disappear. Whether it’s a sparrow or a forest, the more sensitive the system is to these feedback, the more likely it is to maintain integrity, recover from disruption, and thrive in the long term.

    Gregory Bateson, systems theorist and anthropologist, observed that adaptive change—which is survival itself—is impossible without feedback loops, whatever the organism or system. Sometimes that change unfolds slowly, filtered through natural selection. But it also happens in real time, as individuals adjust to experience. When I first encountered this idea in Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, it quietly restructured how I understood learning. Learning, I realized, isn’t something that unfolds in the brain, but in the loop, where it emerges as an effect of feedback. A population adjusting to resource limits, a tree directing its roots toward groundwater—these aren’t acts of isolated intelligence. They’re expressions of relationship: patterns being read, limits encountered, responses being shaped. The adjustment, the learning, isn’t something the organism invents; it emerges through its relationship with the conditions it’s embedded in. Bateson didn’t just theorize this loop; he saw it everywhere: in the way animals communicate, in family dynamics, in evolution, even in his own struggle to reconcile science with meaning.

    This learning loop is a universal experience, but for me, as a feedback-sensitive (autistic) person, it feels more immediate, more intense. Of course, that understanding of myself is relational, something that only makes sense as a comparison to other people. And I’ve learned the hard way that this is a very precarious place to argue from. I risk confusion or outright dismissal the moment I try to explain that a sound, a smell, or a minor change is flooding my body with stress, cutting through my thoughts, setting off a physiological alarm. These responses are swift and refuse to be ignored. “Everyone feels that way,” “Nobody likes those things,” or “That’s just life” aren’t helpful words in those moments.

    As a child, I didn’t have the words to make my case. I barely do now. But at ten years old, I hardly knew I even had a case to make. One of the most underrated challenges of explaining a difference that’s more about degree than kind is how people default to their own experiences. Using our own reference points, we assume everyone experiences the world the same way we do. If you don’t like loud sounds, and I seem overwhelmed by one, your assumption is that I simply haven’t been exposed to enough noise, or that I’m “too sensitive.” That I just need to get used to it. Try harder. Toughen up. As an adult, I can mitigate these dismissive assumptions, but they still follow me and they still piss me off. As a child, however, the enormous gap between what I felt to be true and what I was told was unbearable. It wasn’t just confusion—it was a minute-to-minute hell I had no words for.

    Not every system returns the same kind of feedback. And not every setting collapses the loop. When I was seventeen, and not a little inspired by Thoreau, I spent a summer by a remote lake in eastern Ontario. Not in the off-grid house my grandparents had built, but just across the water, alone in a tent, on a quiet wooded slope that backed onto crown land. I packed everything I needed on my mountain bike and rode the hundred or so kilometers from home in a day. This was my version of Walden Pond. I fished for food, gathered wood for the fire, cleared a small trail. I read. I wrote. I woke with the light, slept with the dark, and moved in rhythm with the weather. There was nothing metaphorical about it—I was in relationship.

    There were no social games to decode, no hidden meanings. No buzzing fluorescent lights humming in the ceiling or televisions playing in the background. No sudden shifts in routine. No need for performance. The world around me responded plainly to what I did: when the rain came, I got wet; when I built a fire, I got warm. The system I was inside gave immediate, proportionate feedback. And I adjusted. Not always well. I’m no Thoreau. But faithfully.

    I didn’t have a name for it then. But I read Bateson that summer, tucked into a sleeping bag with a headlamp or sitting on the raft at sunrise, and something in his writing gave shape to what I was living.

    What I was experiencing was coherence. Not just in the sense of quiet or stability, but in the deeper, systemic sense: pattern integrity. The way things fit together and return information that makes sense. That feedback loop didn’t just regulate me. It affirmed my existence. I wasn’t broken, or too much, or not enough. I was inside a system where responsiveness wasn’t something to suppress; it was a quiet necessity.

    That summer changed me…not because it taught me something I didn’t know, but because it stopped contradicting what I already did. My perception, my sensitivity, my reactions, they finally had function. I could feel a difference.

    Reading Bateson gave words to a pattern I was already living inside. He writes that when we say some particular organism survives, we’ve already taken a misstep. It isn’t the organism that survives. The real unit of survival, he argued, is organism-plus-environment. I knew what it meant to be part of a system I couldn’t separate myself from. My behavior wasn’t just coming from inside me. It was part of a loop. A reaction to something. A response to conditions.

    People like to talk as if we’re separate from our surroundings, as if we’re making decisions in a vacuum. But I’ve never experienced that. When the room shifts, I shift. When the pattern changes, I change. Contrary to what cabin-in-the-woods fantasies would have us believe, life next to a lake is no exception—change is constant, and often requires a response. But those changes didn’t feel like threats or tests. They didn’t throw me into a dysregulated state. I was simply in relationship with what was happening around me. I felt the stability of coherent feedback.

    Bateson helped me recognize the shape of my own experience. Here was a loop that I was a part of, rather than trapped within like a caged, disruptive animal, pacing in circles, desperate to make sense of the world outside. He called it a coupled system…two parts shaping and sustaining each other. Not always well. Not always clearly. But inseparably.

    We separate the two (organism and environment) because it helps us think more clearly. But it’s only a framework. And frameworks can lie if you forget they’re not the thing itself. It becomes easy, maybe even inevitable, to try to save one part of the system by overriding the other. But that isn’t intelligence. It’s the system misreading its own conditions. “The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.”

    Coherence isn’t a solitary achievement. It’s not just mine, or just yours. What makes life possible emerges from relationship, from one part of a living whole responding to the cues and limits of the other, and adjusting behavior in response to this feedback.
    Even at the most fundamental level of physiology, feedback sensitivity is what keeps life stable. Every organism is a dense network of feedback loops, each constantly adjusting temperature, chemistry, and structure to maintain balance, even as the world outside shifts and changes. When my temperature rises, sensors in my brain detect the change, triggering responses like sweating or an increase in blood flow to the skin, cooling me down. A bacterium in a pond does the same, swimming toward nutrients and away from toxins, adjusting in real-time to the environment it encounters. These aren’t metaphors for intelligence—they’re the building blocks of it. Each feedback loop is an expression of life’s most fundamental drive: to stay aligned with the larger pattern.

    Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela coined the term autopoiesis to describe how cells sustain themselves through constant feedback. A living cell isn’t just shaped by its environment; it actively engages with it, adjusting its internal chemistry in response to what it perceives. Life, in this sense, is not a static condition, but a never-ending dialogue—an exchange between inside and outside. Fritjof Capra, in The Web of Life, asks us to rethink cognition, not as something locked away in the brain, but as this very dialogue, an ongoing loop of perceiving, responding, and adjusting. Life is that loop. It isn’t just one side of the equation—organism or environment. We use that distinction to frame our sense of self, but really it’s just an abstraction. The truth is, we are the loop. When you say something is alive, what you’re actually describing is its ongoing participation in a dynamic feedback loop. You are not a fixed thing; you are a living, breathing process. An energy flow. And while it sounds ridiculously abstract, it’s the truest way to describe what we usually think of as you. It also happens to be the best explanation for why, for me as a (more) feedback-sensitive person, this fluid sense of self feels more pronounced, an experience of life where that constant adjustment to the world lives much closer to the surface.