Comparing the origin of life to complex societal human issues

What do the deep ocean lava pores and hot springs hypotheses have to tell us about human complex societal level issues such as ‘borders?’

Sometimes I daydream about things like comparing the theory of the first origin of life, which I first read in about 2014 in a paper by Eors Szathmáry, that deep ocean lava pores provided the compartmentalisation needed for chemoautotrophic sets to overcome within themselves the thermodynamic law of total entropy increasing, and adaptively stabilised into the first form of life, to human complex societal level problems, such as ‘borders?’.

My take is that a degree of compartmentalisation to efficiently enough stabilise life processes within any complex self-organising system and a degree of openness to the outside world are both needed.

(Just thought of this too: a degree of externalising entropy is also a basic necessity of life at any scale, and that’s quite like what capitalism does by externalising costs outside of the privileged in-group(s), but it stereotypes that into an ideological norm, to such an extent that it’s destroying the ecological basis for its social hosts’ survival, i.e. exceeding the optimal virulence even for a parasitic meme (see Optimal Virulence theory).)

Any evolving complex system which goes too much to either extreme will very soon not be alive anymore. The optimal balance point is also dynamic, and contingent on inside and outside factors.

In the context of digital globalisation and liquifaction of the boundary conditions between formerly stable ‘national’ communities (Habermas’ idea, discussed by Rasmussen, 2014) and the cultural disruption of their social cohesion, asabiyyah عصبيّة, they experience from encountering other and more culturally different communities, more closely intermeshed (‘chiasm’ like Merleau-Ponty said, which is a metaphor drawn from the meshing point of the nerves from the right and left eyes) more globally, including the inter-generational cultural divergence of community structures within all bigger complex communities, people are stereotyping the two opposite strategies how to adaptively re-stablise a complex society — inclusionary vs exclusionary strategies, into hardened ideologies, and then further complicating our problems by making that the political contest, not focus on solving our basic common global problems (global polycrisis problems).

The exclusionary community-forming strategy, or compartmentalising to stabilise what’s then ‘inside’, when stereotyped/ hardened into an ideal shape, tends to mistake rigidity for stabilitiy, but rigid stability is a precursor to death at all levels of complex adaptive systems. Constant flexible appropriate balancing is how life is maintained.

In my opinion, the truth is that we need some of both, and hardening the two logical extremes into stereotyped ideologies and pitting them against each other isn’t helpful (if one’s aim is to maintain and grow a larger complex society, adaptively stable, by mutualistically including new others), and in a digitally globalising liquifying the inter-community boundaries situation I think inclusionary openness and mutualistic interpretation and community-forming communication is not just morally and aesthetically preferable but also the only evolutionary strategy which can ultimately ‘win’ or be efficient enough to stabilise in the competition between groups doing inclusionary vs exclusionary community-forming strategies.

I think it’s probably possible to simulation model this question as a pairwise adaptive fitness dynamics or evolutionary invasion model, possibly also linked dynamically to an Agent-Based Model of the different collective behaviour strategies.

The inclusionary strategy, I expect, ultimately wins, basically because bigger political coalitions can defend themselves and their territory and resources better, and the inclusionary strategy leads to bigger political coalitions. So, however nice or nasty they are, they win. This part is observable in other social animals, especially other primates. Less virulent to outside(rs) and less entropy externalised into the environment, i.e. more inclusionary, is also likely to win long-term over the less inclusionary.

One of the strongly supported hypotheses for why humans evolved reverse-hierarchy or egalitarianism is that matriarchy or female political coalitions within groups could stabilise a local culture in which males cannot get away with infanticide of other males’ infants (p.s. also why female lions prefer bisexual juvenile male coalitions, because they’re more likely to be able to defend their offspring from invading males trying to kill the previous male’s infants), so the groups which had more genetic preadaptations for and cultural inheritance of female political coalition forming within groups tended to become bigger political coalitions, and hence had more adaptive fitness and they ‘win’ in evolutionary invasion models.

Main source where I first read this hypothesis is Chris Boehm (2001), Hierarchy in the Forest: the evolution of egalitarianism.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674006911

I also think it’s interesting to keep in mind that, if Boehm’s hypothesis is correct, and it seems quite well supported by multiple strands of evidence now, ‘egalitarianism’ is not so much an abstract principle originating in books by men in ‘Enlightenment’ era Europe, but basically it’s matriarchal social order, vigilantly enforcing reverse hierarchy (would-be alpha males are subject to vigilante justice by an angry mob of females if they start to bully a baby), originally so that infants and juveniles are protected by their extended family, and male selfish behaviours are socially limited.

How is this ecology or biology, you might ask? Afaiu, social sciences, including political science, are basically just especially complex and socially complicated biology, and biology is basically especially complex chemistry, and chemistry is basically especially complex physics, and physics is basically especially complex maths.

Szathmáry E (2002) Redefining life: an ecological, thermodynamic, and bioinformatic approach. In: Pályi G, Zucchi C, Caglioti L (eds) Fundamentals of life. Elsevier, New York, pp 181–195

Martin, W., Baross, J., Kelley, D., & Russell, M. (2008). Hydrothermal vents and the origin of life. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 29, 1–10.

A related but somewhat different hypothesis for the origin of life which posits that the ‘order for free’ from the environment (Kauffman, 1993, Origins of Order) which allowed the first chemoautotrophic sets to adaptively stabilise processes within themselves which overcome entropy-increasing internally and stably externalise that entropy-increasing by metabolising resources from their (hence) external environment, is that the environment where that first happened might (also?) have been land-based volcanic hot springs.
https://nicheconstruction.com/the-hot-spring-hypothesis-for-the-origin-of-life-and-the-extended-evolutionary-synthesis/

Yesterday while walking my dogs I was wondering what we mean by ‘first origin of life’ — first instance when a chemoautotrophic set adaptively stabilised? or first ecological singular location where that happened? or first kind of ecological situation where it happened? or first kind of emergent process (mathematically defined) where that happened?

If we play the old ‘chicken or egg’ game and retrace it back to the first origin of life, then the lava pores or hot springs hypothesis suggests that the ecological micro-structure, whatever it was, which gave sufficient compartmentalisation, or functionally speaking ‘order for free’, to the first chemoautotrophic set came first, and ‘life’ came second.